by Norman Manea
He observed me from the top of the stairs. Before we shook hands, I also took a good look at him — dark face, distinguished, handsome features, well groomed, altogether an elegant appearance. He waited for me to sink into the huge leather armchair, then sat in its twin, both set in front of a massive, wood-carved desk. The room looked more as if it should belong to an old Italian palazzo rather than a modern embassy in the New World.
Now he is here, in room 1515 of the Bucharest Intercontinental, regarding me with the same intense gaze, the same calm, concentrated expression that he displayed eight years ago. From the folds of the curtains, he is scrutinizing me with the same courteous curiosity as before.
What if I tried to remind him of who I was and what I have asked for, as I had done in 1989 over the phone, before meeting him? He would probably cut me off with the same words. “I know about you. I’ve heard a thing or two,” he had said then. How, from whom? In 1989, in Washington, nobody knew about me, absolutely nobody. I was living in an obscure suburb, which I didn’t leave for months on end, and here, in Bucharest, I have avoided meetings and am staying in a hotel accessible only to foreign tourists. Has he obtained his information from his French counterpart, the diplomat who had interviewed me in Berlin, or perhaps from the literary Interpol?
The diplomat is waiting, as he did eight years ago, for me to continue. Then, I had no intention whatsoever to associate this man with my dubious French interlocutor. I had to be brief and precise and make a rapid summary of my naïve request. This is why I had gone to see him. I wanted to go back to Europe before it was too late. I did not wish to settle in the New World, but equally, I also could not return to socialist Jormania. A grant for a few months’ stay in Italy might give me the hoped-for breather that I needed.
This was what I was hoping for in 1989—breathing space, lots of breathing spaces. “Decision-making is a moment of madness,” Kierkegaard had whispered to me, but indecision, too, seemed like complete madness, as I had had occasion to find out. I had experimented for years with the madness of indecision, I had become an expert in procrastination. I was still hoping for breathing spaces.
Time, however, had lost its patience and no longer tolerated me. That was what I had to make the Italian gentleman in Washington understand. Back in Berlin, when my grant had run out, I was looking for breathing spaces, the delay of exile. In Paris, on my short investigative visit, I had searched for another opportunity for delay. I had failed, however, to mollify the gods of the old European heaven, as well as the younger gods of America, where indecisiveness is illegal, an intolerable defiance, the mark of depravity and failure, a suspicious infirmity.
But in 1989 I formulated this plea only in my mind. I offered the diplomat a brief presentation, followed by a heavy silence.
“Have you visited America before? Do you know America?” he asked me, breaking the silence.
In one single instant, my hesitant request showed itself for what it was — a ridiculous query
“Have you visited other places here, apart from Washington and New York?” he asked me again. His restrained cordiality was winning me over. He sensed it, too.
“No,” I replied, “I haven’t visited America before, I have no tourist inclinations, nor the money or the curiosity to do so.”
“Maybe you should wander around America a bit,” he said. But that advice was followed, thank God, not by a list of places to visit but by another prolonged silence.
“You can’t have any better lessons in solitude anywhere else.” His words echoed in my mind.
Yes, solitude, a familiar subject I was always ready to consider, not only in an embassy palazzo but also here and now, in a hotel tomb. “Finding your own self again in the tomb of a hotel room,” this is what Kafka said. The impersonality of hotel rooms has always been a tonic for me, I was a good student in solitude. In the eight years since I last saw Mr. Bezzetti, I have learned many new things about solitude. So, I am certain, has Mr. Bezzetti, in the tomb of the silence of death after death, for he died not long after our meeting.
“I’ve served in this embassy for eighteen years,” he told me, “an unusually long time, as you can imagine. I’ve always enjoyed good relations with the ambassadors. You are Latin yourself, so you know what this means, to stay in one place, for eighteen years, a lifetime.”
I looked at him more carefully now, to assess how large had been the margin of error in the age I had attributed to him.
He continued: “I rarely go to Rome, just for short holidays. I can no longer stand Italy.”
Did he mean by this to discourage my hoped-for escape to Italy? He hastened to explain.
“The intimacy is what I cannot stand anymore, all those questions and embraces, the chatter, the familiarity, the friends, relatives, acquaintances, always ready to suffocate you with their affection. I am exhausted after only a few days. I have to leave.”
The avalanche of words continued. I was being honored with a confession. “You’ve seen how Americans keep their distance, between cities, between houses, between people. Have you noticed how they keep their distance in a line at the cinema, in a shop? That’s fine, really fine.”
I kept silent. Was he in dialogue with the impertinence of my visit?
“Should I die tomorrow, in my small apartment, nobody will know And that’s fine, too,” Mr. Bezzetti said.
I must hope that the circumstances of Mr. Giuseppe Bezzetti’s death in his small apartment in the American capital were up to his standards. I can only guess that the vast realms of solitude after death have not disappointed him.
His advice to me was to get to know America, to accustom myself to a different perception of distances, to inhabit solitude. No eccentricity is totally useless, and likewise, no despair, I told myself on that winter afternoon in 1989, after I had learned that Italy did not offer governmental grants to East European writers. Solitude is our only homeland, I repeated to myself as I left the handsome Italian Embassy. The words are worth repeating even now, in the tomb of the hotel room in Bucharest.
At the end of our interview, Mr. Giuseppe Bezzetti did not suggest any further meetings, as had his French counterpart back in Berlin. But he, too, gave me his business card with the address and telephone number of the small apartment where he was awaiting his liberation. I did not seek him out. Now here he is in Bucharest, risen from his intangible faraway realm, returning my visit.
Mr. Bezzetti vanishes into the mists of Bucharest’s spring. I am left there, holding a piece of pale yellow paper in my hand. I recognize my own handwriting. “Should you miss your native place …”I know those words, transcribed, childishly, in a moment of senile jubilation. “Should you miss your native place, you will find in exile more and more reasons to miss it; but if you manage to forget it and come to love your new residence, you will be sent back home, where, uprooted once more, you will start a new exile.” These are the words of Maurice Blanchot, but it is not he now standing before me. It is another, albeit a lesser, Frenchman, though of a more complex variety. It is Emile Cioran, the man from Sibiu, from Bucharest, and a long-time exile in Paris, quoting Blanchot.
He is small, fragile, with a penetrating gaze and unruly hair. He is kneeling before me, in front of the window, staring into space.
“Forgive me,” he is whispering, staring into nowhere. “Forgive me, God.” Is that what he is saying? Of course not, he is a heretic and would not invoke the deity. “Forgive me,” the curtains keep echoing. He looks into the emptiness, at the ceiling, at the heavens. He peers into immortality. “Forgive me, pătlăgică, I hear, at last. Pătlăgică, pickled tomato, a good name for divinity! “Forgive me, pătlăgică forgive me for being born a Romanian,” the nihilist implores. I know this little drama, offered from time to time to his fellow Romanians, the privileged audience to a farce that was no farce.
Leaving the motherland was by far the most intelligent thing he had ever done, he had once told me. But he had not managed to heal. “Romanians” goes one
of his posthumous aphorisms. “Everyone who comes into contact with them becomes shallow, even our Jews.” Ah, la nostalgie de la boue, the sweet delights of the mud! This country has given birth not to saints but to poets…
“You are not Cioran,” I tell myself. “A Jew cannot say that he is wiping his ass with the motherland, as Cioran’s beloved Iron Legion did in 1940. Nor that the Romanian’s heart is an asshole, as one of his disciples recently declared. Nor that the history of the Romanians is the history of Romanian public lavatories. You haven’t been granted that sort of legitimacy. You don’t have the impudence, the therapeutic impudence. It’s difficult for you to give up shame. You are ashamed for their sake, for your own sake, aren’t you?”
Impudence as identity, the hidden shame, swelling with infected wounds, yes, I knew all about that, the shame of not having left on time, and then of having finally left, and the shame of being brought back to square one. “I have consecrated too many thoughts, too much chagrin, to my tribe,” Cioran cries out, unheard by anybody, as he kneels by the window staring at the invisible, derisory authority.
The hidden thorn, twisted in the flesh, would not allow itself to be extracted. Kafka would probably understand. “In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world,” he had advised me. But how could one, when under siege, distinguish among the hostile faces? It is all one face, the same illegible grimace. How can you be on their side if you cannot distinguish their faces, and how can you distinguish their hostility from the enemy within, with whom you spontaneously fraternize? “Too much chagrin,” Cioran mutters, his head between his knees. They could have been my own words, too many thoughts, too much chagrin. The old century is tired, this is the endgame. We are all making our own beds, to hide somewhere from the monsters of tomorrow. Pajamas are not the most appropriate costume for this. “The night’s circus requires magic,” the ghost whispers, “and you have never been any good at magic.” That’s true. I have failed again. Magic would solve everything, would turn everything upside down, inside out.
Cioran disintegrates, leaving me in the night of nothingness with the echo of his whimper in my ears. “My country,” he cries out wildly, as he disappears. “I wanted to cling to it at any cost, and there was nothing I could cling to.” At any cost? I could no longer afford that. I was bankrupt, not the first or the last to be so. One cannot lose what one does not possess, and there is no return. “No return, either good or bad,” Cioran had repeated, as had so many others, from time immemorial. What privilege can compete with this impossibility? To belong to nobody, to be a stone, with no other legitimacy than the present moment. Nothingness, and no revenge apart from transience.
I was suddenly looking forward, impatiently, to my return to America, to be back among my fellow citizens, the exiles, the lodgers with equal rights in the motherland of all the exiles, freed from the excesses of involvement and the aspirations to ownership, reconciled to the nomad’s tent and the present moment. “You have come to the right place” was how Philip welcomed me, the East European Augustus the Fool, in the spring of 1989, upon my arrival in the New World. Nothing in the wanderer’s face showed that there might be any place in the world he could call his own. Stuttering, with his hand pointing to the wheel of fortune — is this what I looked like? My American interlocutor looked at me with moderate curiosity, from behind gold-rimmed glasses, and smiled encouragingly. He was leaning back in his comfortable armchair. He had put up his long feet, American-style, on the table. I could see the Italian-made shoes, soft as gloves, in which his bare feet luxuriated.
“I don’t think so. America doesn’t suit me,” I muttered. “I did not mean to end up here, and now I can’t find a hole in which to hide.”
He continued to smile his encouraging smile. “Everything will be fine,” he murmured, with a kind of parental resignation. “Gradually, you’re going to start writing again, you will be published. You will even have your own circle of fans. Not many, naturally, but in America everything comes out well in the end. You will gradually get to understand how great this country is.”
“How many generations ago did your family settle here?” I asked, just for the sake of asking something, to forget my self.
“Three,” he answered.
“My family buried five generations in Romania. Then something happened, as in Germany, or in medieval Spain. My mother’s parents are buried, not in Romania, but in a forest in the Ukraine, in that ethnic dumping ground called Transnistria, in an unmarked grave. My mother always wanted to leave Romania after the war, but that is where she will be buried, she is old and ill. Only my father might yet make it to the Holy Land. He will get his own privileged grave, close to his God.”
Philip listened politely to my little speech. I was aware of how boring the sound of East European self-pity can be.
“In America these things cannot happen. The Constitution will not allow it, and neither will the country’s diversity. There are immigrants here from all over the world.”
The silence that followed confirmed that the wanderer’s pathetic recital had not been to the taste of his host, a master of irony and sarcasm. I was on the point of supplying this last ingredient, but in the meantime, the conversation turned to other topics. I managed to do that years later, when we had become closer, and after I had started to make sense of America’s triumphs and disasters. So free within the freedom of the country he loved and represented, he was by now himself under public siege. Under siege, one can no longer distinguish the faces on the merry-go-round. I had had similar experiences in socialist Jormania, and I was now reliving them in the messages that reached me from the post-Communist motherland. I now had the exile’s advantage of being able to contemplate the meaning of my “belonging” from a distance, even though no one can ever claim they are far enough from themselves.
Philip believed that my visit to the motherland was absolutely necessary to my healing process. Now, having arrived in the place that, until the other day, had been “home,” I was thinking of those I had left behind, in America. “I have no prejudices. I can stand any society,” the American Mark Twain declaimed from beyond the ocean. “All that I care to know is that a man is a human being, that is enough for me. He can’t be any worse.” Céline and Cioran could not compete with such sarcasm. “A man is a human being… He can’t be any worse.” Supreme toleration, supreme skepticism, that’s the way to go, as the Americans say.
I continue to receive nocturnal messages from beyond, and by day, requests to confirm that everything is okay. But the fax machine at the hotel in Bucharest is not working. An American, even one endowed with a fine sense of humor, would hardly get a joke like this. Still, we had telepathy. Through the long night, the guest in room 1515 of the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest is transmitting, over oceans and countries and time zones, the news that the earth continues to rotate and that its insomniac passenger is okay. There is nothing suspicious lurking behind the night’s curtains. Everything’s okay.
Day Five: Friday, April 25, 1997
Today we are to visit the imperial compound, the White Palace of the White Clown, Jormania’s Versailles. We pass through a long avenue of apartment buildings, each with a slightly different façade, designed as residences for the Party bourgeoisie. On the top of the hill, dominating the cityscape, is the White Palace, an eclectic mix of East and West, not unlike some prewar villas but grotesquely “modernized,” with a strong North Korean imprint. This is the first time that I see this monument of the Byzantine Communist dictatorship, and I am reminded of the epic destruction of the old neighboring areas following the “working” visits of our President and his beloved wife to the building site not far from my last home in Bucharest. I would stop my ears to keep out the sound of the sirens heralding the cortège of black limousines bringing the imperial pair. At night, the cranes stood out against the night sky, lit by the welders’ flames. By day, the sidewalk trembled under the rumble of the cement mixers. I can still hear the wail of
the police sirens, the mechanical cadences of the construction workers.
Leon is intrigued by the palace; for him it is one of the much anticipated highlights of the trip. “In twenty years’ time,” he says, “when the political context is forgotten, this building will be studied in architecture departments. Such a project would now be impossible anywhere in the world. Only a tyrant can afford to demolish and build on such a large scale.”
I am not in a conciliatory frame of mind and do not share Leon’s enthusiasm, although I am aware of the American fascination with the pre-modern world, which America has left behind and from which it continues to distance itself. In spite of its own difficulties and sufferings, America remains ready to offer its support to this old world, as if hoping that it might in this way pay for its own sins of privilege.
We have lunch nearby, at the historic Manuc Inn. It is Good Friday, a day for semi-fasting, and all the waiter can offer is salad and beer.
Before leaving for the airport to board his plane for Scotland, where he has a date for a recording session with the Royal Scottish Philharmonic, Leon tells me that he has really enjoyed this exotic adventure. He has bought an Oriental rug for his office at Bard College and enjoyed haggling, in English with the merchant, a former diplomat. As for me, I benefited from his company and the American efficiency he generated, which prevented me from staying too long in communication with my ghosts. We had come to Romania with different objectives, but the counterpoint proved to our mutual advantage.
Just two streets over is no. 2 Calea Victoriei, where I used to live. In a few minutes I could be standing at the door of apartment 15, under the sign of another time, paying tribute to the Communist siesta of a decade ago. Would the old rhythms return, would I change back into the one I could no longer be? Only if time annulled all that had happened in the meantime.