The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  Not far from my old apartment is Antim Street, Saul S.’s old place. During the months prior to my trip, he kept saying that he would like to accompany me. He thought he was too frail to make his perpetually postponed return on his own, but if we went together, it might help to alleviate the trauma we had both suffered, in very different ways.

  Seven American years had passed since our first meeting. I had been recommended to him as a fellow Romanian, to arouse his sympathy, but this only evoked the opposite effect. This didn’t surprise me, but neither was I deterred. He reminded me of the great Romanian poet Arghezi, not only because of his silences and economy of speech, his mustache and balding head, but also because of the quick verbal snap with which he greeted the unknown as well as the too familiar. He was like a watchful feline, slow in appearance, but easily aroused to anger if necessary. He was what could be called a grumpy old man; he had certainly been a grumpy young man.

  Our closeness became evident one day when he phoned to ask me how I was doing, and I gave the conventional answer to what I thought was a conventional question. “No, you can’t be doing well, anything but well. I know this. We are under a curse, it’s the place we come from. We carry it in ourselves, and this cannot heal easily. Maybe never.”

  Despite having lived happily for half a century in America, where he had found his life’s work and his fame, Saul had never been able to heal his Romanian wound. “Have you read that book about Romania in the 1940s, Athénée Palace, I think it’s called. The author is a countess, an American countess, if such a thing is possible. We are anti-Semites here, lady, the countess reports one of the local excellencies telling her, but we cannot give up our Jews, not only for economic reasons, but because Romanians do not trust other Romanians. They can only confide their dirty secrets to a Jew.”

  He was waiting for my comments, but I offered only a smile.

  “But if they are anti-Semites,” Saul persisted, “how come they can trust Jews? If they trust them and they think they are intelligent and good people, why are they anti-Semitic?”

  My answer was a continuing smile.

  “The charm of the place! You see, this is the magic of our native land!”

  He regarded his pre-exilic past as some kind of incurable disease, a viscous mud penetrating all his pores, infecting not only the profiteers but also the victims, who were well trained to adjust to the surrounding hatred and complicities, in a continuing bargaining that had deformed their character. He would speak with embittered, venomous vehemence about that grotesque suburban metabolism that fed on minor domestic pleasures and a persistent brew of hypocrisy. Here and now, I think, standing on this Bucharest street in 1997, I could do with his energetic sarcasm, a mix of compassion and mercilessness.

  His unique drawings were a concentrate of his vision of the world, which I shared. Dadaland had become an obsession with him over the last few years, not just as the “Black Country” or “Exileland,” as he called it, but also as “Childhood’s Land of No Return.” The artist was constantly drawn to his remembered landscape, with its magical decor and buffoonery, its ecstatic fragrances. With the frenetic imagination of youth, he would abandon himself even now, past eighty, to the memories of all those past aromas — the smells of the shoe shops and spice shops, the dust and the sweat of the nearby railway station, the pickles and pies and spicy sausages, the scents of the hairdressers.

  “Having placed ourselves in the immigrant’s uncomfortable position, we are like children again,” he wrote. Childhood is exile, too, but it is miraculous, filled with visions and magic. His famous maps, which began life in Manhattan, on his desk, never failed to include the magic circle of Palas Street and environs in Bucharest. “I am one of the few who continue to perfect the sketches we used to draw in our childhood,” he confided.

  I can hear him on the phone and I can see him, here and now, asking anybody who happens to be around what he used to ask me: “Cacialma, what do you think? It’s a Turkish word, like mahala, like sarma, nargilé, ciulama, no? What about cică and … cicălelă?. They’re all Turkish. Jobs are German, flowers are French, but rastel comes from the Italian rastello. And rău from the Latin. Zid is Slavic, and so is zîmbet. Dijmă seems Slavic, like diac and diacon. What’s this diac, a church copyist or a church singer?” He discovered strange words, their exotic phonetics would suddenly recapture the time and place that had formed and deformed us and had thrown us out into the world. “We cannot be Americans,” this long-time resident of America declared, consolingly, despite being considered a national treasure of the New World. He had every reason to accompany me to Romania and every reason to avoid going back.

  Now, after Leon’s departure, we could have wandered around the places where, once, the Palas paradise of his childhood had existed. However, in the end, he decided to go back to Milan, the city of his youth, a “safer” substitute for his more remote past and a place with fewer surprises. As a bon voyage gift, he sent me a copy of a page from a book about Bucharest, with a map where he highlighted his enchanted domain. “Dear Norman,” he wrote, “here is my magic circle: Palas Street, off Antim, and Justipei Street crossing Calea Rahovei. Nothing is still standing of all this? Have a look, if you’ve got some time.”

  After Leon’s departure, I have plenty of time. The site of the magic circle was not far from where I am. It had been swept away by the dictator’s bulldozers and is now in New York, living on only in the memory of the old artist residing on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I can hear his melodious voice as he recites the archaic names: “Palas Street, Antim, Rinocerului, Labirint, Gentilă Street. Concordiei, and right next to it, Discordiei! Here we have Trofeelor, Olimpului, Emancipata. Listen to this, Emancipata! Isn’t it wonderful? And Rinocerului, Labirint, Gentila, Gentle Street! And Cuţitul de Argint, Puţul cu aă and Cuţitul de Argint — the Water Well and the Silver Knife!”

  The magic circle has disappeared, but I can buy in the bookshop near the hotel old postcards for Saul’s collection, as he had asked me to do. There were also old picture postcards of Suceava and Fălticeni; here was a treasure to take back to New York.

  On his first visit to us, Saul did not bring the customary bottle of wine, or the even more customary several bottles, as he did later on, but an old colored postcard of Buzău, the home of his grandparents and parents and his early childhood. He offered it to us, watching carefully to see if Cella and I were worthy of such a gift. This was the calling card of the exile who could not stand to hear the name of Romania being mentioned, but could not extract himself from the past, even after half a century of absence from the native places. “I cannot make my peace with the language,” he said.

  I am now standing in front of the Intercontinental, in full spring sunlight. My protective ghost has returned. I recognize the silhouette, the gait, the shopping bag on her arm. Am I following her again, as I did, not long before in New York, up Amsterdam Avenue? She is smiling, her eyes filled with joy and that intelligent gentleness I had been yearning for. Reality had made enemies of us and had divided us so many times, but then again reunited us. Her smile follows me for a fraction of a second into room 1515. I return quickly to the street, to be in the midst of the daily din, and to be on my own, completely on my own, as I deserve to be.

  In the evening, I dine at the Café de Paris, a new and expensive restaurant not far from the hotel. Also in the party are the counselor and the chargé d’affaires of the American Embassy, with their wives. The atmosphere is cordial. I confirm that the week I have spent in Bucharest has been peaceful, busy but peaceful. At the official luncheon in honor of Leon and myself, we had agreed that I would report anything of a dubious nature. There was nothing to report.

  Indeed, nothing that I have encountered here so far has helped me to unravel any better than I had done in New York the Chagall image of the martyr tortured on the pyre of the East European pogrom. There was nothing here that could have helped me better understand whether the postcard contained a message of hosti
lity or sympathy. The conversation in the restaurant focuses on post-Communist Eastern Europe. The diplomats offer cautious assessments of today’s Romania; question me about Mircea Eliade, the assassination of Professor Culianu in Chicago in 1991. “Soon, even here, in the East, the intellectuals’ nationalist nonsense will become irrelevant,” says the young chargé d’affaires. “The intellectuals here will become as irrelevant as they are in the West. The debate on nationalism will be marginalized, too. All intellectual debates end up like this, don’t they?” I give up trying to inquire about the diplomatic ramifications of his missions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. I accept, serenely, the pleasant young man’s optimistic pragmatism, the friendly atmosphere of the dinner table, comforting in the very limitations it presupposed.

  The group insists on seeing me back to my hotel. They accompany me, all four of them, into the lobby, where we spend ten minutes chatting. Were they observing the obsolete rules of the Cold War? Was this little drama destined, as in the old days, to signal to the receptionists and their superiors that I had been in the company and under the protection of American officials?

  Once in my room, I open the blue notebook. I hold the pen in my hand, but a shadow seems to envelop the room, taking possession of it. I shut my eyes and close the Bard notebook, and conclude a pact with the shades haunting me.

  The Home of Being

  Ken’s perception that my face lit up at the sound of Romanian, even a casual exchange on Tuesday with the hotel desk clerk, was probably correct. For that one instant, the native language had become my true home. It had happened before. In Zürich, the hotel porter, having heard us speak Romanian, had addressed Cella, all smiles, “Buna dimineaţa,” good morning, and then continued on with some small talk, in which I happily joined.

  Waking up was a joke. Once one had done that, one had no choice but to go out and earn one’s living, with words. The days follow in succession, one on the heels of another, step by step, in the nomad’s labyrinth. Then, there was the day not long ago, in New York. I had woken up without actually waking up, after a night as short as a second. My American friend, an early riser as usual, was on the phone.

  The voice, the bantering tone, were the same, but the words themselves, the sound, the accent… this was a strange substitute, a Balkan doppelgänger. Still half asleep, on my way to the bathroom, I heard voices in the living room. Who had invaded our apartment at such an early hour?

  On her way out to work, Cella had left the TV on. It was the O. J. Simpson trial, playing out in California but suddenly transmuted into another vocabulary, other phonetics. Clutching the remote control, I switched to a different channel, then another, through all the 75 channels on New York television. On each — there was no mistake — everybody spoke Romanian! I switched off the TV and went to the bathroom. The mirror told me I was in a state of jubilation; I had an idiotic smile pasted on my face. That mask of happiness contradicted what I thought I had been feeling in the minutes after the telephone rang. I lowered my eyes into the white shell of the sink, to avoid looking into a stranger’s face. My hands were trembling, the soap slipped into the sink, but in spite of the anxiety, my face still wore an emblem of triumph.

  I managed to get out of the bathroom without another look in the mirror, got dressed, went out into the hallway, and proceeded cautiously to the elevator. I was going to get the newspaper, as I do most mornings. At any moment, the door might open on yet another hallucination. On the ground floor, Pedro was at his accustomed place, behind the marble desk, smiling with his usual affability. “Good morning, sir,” he would greet me every day, in his Spanish-accented English. This morning, nodding his head in the usual way, he said, “Bună dimineaţa, domnule!” The simple “Good morning,” which was my usual response, didn’t seem right this time. The cretinous smile of enchantment continued to light up my face. Pedro, too, was speaking Romanian. And not only Pedro but also O. J. Simpson and Johnnie Cochran and Marsha Clark and President Clinton and Magic Johnson, all of whom I had seen, only a few minutes before, on TV, along with Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, and Ray Charles, all singing, if such a thing could be imagined, in Romanian. “Doamne Dumnezeule” I found myself muttering, convinced that God spoke Romanian, too, and could understand me. The young Asian at the newsstand stared at me, stupefied, not because he could not comprehend the strange language in which I addressed the divinity, but because, actually, he, too, understood the code. Of this I was certain. I left the change on the counter and bent over to pick up a copy of The New Tork Times.

  I looked at the headlines. What was I looking for? A wish, a promise, a message from an oracle? Such a message had indeed arrived the year before, from a town with the romantic name of New Rochelle. It came in the form of a handwritten card from Cynthia and again I recalled her words: “I wish for you, that one morning we will all wake up speaking, reading, and writing Romanian; and that Romanian will be declared the American national language (with the world doing the strange things it is doing today, there is no reason for this NOT to happen).” Words, mere words, there was no power of predestination in the way they were put together. Should I have been suspicious of the parenthesis? I am not among the fans of Jacques Derrida and of “textual ambiguity.” Cynthia’s words were naturally affectionate, playful, innocent, well-meaning. Had I passed too quickly over the “NOT” that Cynthia herself set in capital letters? Should I have reminded myself of the old Chinese curse about not wishing for anything too much, lest the wish come true? The wish had come true, and indeed, it had brought me not felicity or healing but total bewilderment. I felt as though I were a puppet in one of those TV children’s shows, which, to my horror, suddenly began speaking in Romanian. Does a foreigner win his linguistic citizenship, like an outlaw bursting in? When the motherland orders you out, do you take the language and run? What does the “Home of Being” really mean, Herr Professor Heidegger? Is it language, disabled alienated language, insomniac language, the Greek hypocrinoï Is language simulation, dissimulation, lies? Is it theatricality, the retarded playing at imitation? Is it masque and masquerade? All of a sudden, everything was fake, falsified. President Clinton in Romanian, Ray Charles in Romanian, Magic Johnson in Romanian — an absurdity; Romanian turned into a global language, with nobody having any difficulty understanding and speaking it. Had exile become universal exile? Was everybody now a performer in Hypocrino’s circus?

  The toad-turned-prince was smiling idiotically, but was feeling quite uncomfortable talking in Romanian to Pedro the Mexican and to the Asian newspaper vendor, or even to Philip. What Cynthia had in mind, when she played with the words, was something altogether different. Like so many writers, and nonwriters as well, she was oblivious to the dangers hidden in words.

  My lunatic smile, my apoplectic seizure of happiness — everything had become simple, natural. Had I suddenly been cured of the hesitancy with which, in old age, I was trying to interpret my childhood, in a different vocabulary? That bewildering farce had not set things right but had just twisted them into caricature instead. Monsieur Derrida would have had reason to be pleased: language cannot pretend to be nonam-biguous, this is what he claims, isn’t it?

  Too late, Cynthia, too late! If the miracle had happened on March 9, 1988, when I landed, as innocent as an infant, at the Washington airport, coming straight from the moon, then yes, I would have been happy to talk in Romanian to Cynthia and Philip, to Roger and Ken, to Leon, Saul B., Saul S., and so many others. Had that been the case, I would have joyfully conversed in Romanian even with Dan Quayle or George Bush. But now, everything had got mixed up. I was no longer the infant who is just learning, through gestures and babbling, its way into language. The new language to which I had exiled myself had, in the meantime, infiltrated itself into the interstices of the old. I had become hypocrino, a hybrid. Nothing in me remained pure or whole.

  I now understood a conversation I had had, a short while before, with Louis. We talked about the bizarre similarities and differen
ces of our personal histories, not only our traumatic childhoods, but also what happened to us subsequently. I could have imagined for myself an American destiny comparable to his — studies at a reputable university, work as a lawyer and writer — had my parents, like his, immigrated immediately after the war to the United States, and had they had the mean to finance their son’s tuition. Conversely, I could see Louis — a name, I guess, as unusual in Poland as Norman was in Romania — having stayed on in his native country and following, who knows, a course of life not too different from mine, through the meanderings of Polish socialism.

  There were few diners in the smart East Side restaurant where the famous lawyer and writer seemed to be a regular, judging from the attentiveness of the waiters.

  “Yes, you could be right,” he said. “We are very much alike without even realizing it. The only difference is that you, at least, have a language.”

  The quiet of the restaurant was immediately shattered, as if some one had dropped a tray full of dishes on the floor. No, the clatter was only in my mind. Louis’s remark did not make me jump from my chair, but I froze. What did he mean? I had just lost a language and no other loss could equal it. What was he saying, he, an American writer, perfectly at ease in his country and language.

  As if reading my thoughts, he continued: “I live comfortably in the language of my American milieu. It’s a language I handle, if I may say so, to perfection. The difference is that you have your own language. This is quite obvious, believe me, even in those translations you complain about. My language, perfect as it is, may be merely a tool. Sure, I can do with it whatever I wish. But you are one with your own language; you have a coherence, a wholeness, even in exile, especially in exile.”