by Norman Manea
A coherence? A wholeness? In my exotic language, Romanian, which gets lost in translation? Do I write in an easily translatable language, with a vocabulary that travels effortlessly across international borders? In the silence of that smart restaurant, I was again assaulted by a battery of questions, as I had been on that day when I went out to buy a copy of The New York Times on Amsterdam Avenue. One stroke and I was transfixed: the words had found their captive again, and had regained their meaning.
I stood there, suddenly transfixed in that unlikely moment. A century passed. My hand continued to reach out for The New York Times. I bent to pick up the newspaper. Yes, a Romanian newspaper! But now I was back in Bucharest. On a morning that felt as improbable as the one on Amsterdam Avenue in New York. I was standing at a news kiosk in Bucharest and saw the headline THE POSTHUMOUS JOURNAL OF MI-HAIL SEBASTIAN.
Whatever Monsieur Derrida might claim about the ambiguity of language, limpid words have a limpid, unequivocal meaning. No ambiguity there. Yes, Louis was right. Nobody could take away my coherence and my wholeness. Nobody and nothing, not even that dream that had suddenly turned into reality.
Day Six: Saturday, April 26, 1997
Today I am having lunch with my friends Bebe and Silvia. The street where they live is no longer called Fucik — in honor of the famous Czech Communist journalist and author of Notes from the Gallows—but Masaryk, a more optimistic designation. Because of neglect, the building has lost some of the prestige of its privileged location. The apartment, once comfortable and elegant, now looks shabby and modest. But my friends do not appear to have aged, they have maintained their composure despite their environment. Bebe edits an excellent cultural magazine, Silvia helps with editing the manuscripts. The conversation runs smoothly. We talk about the post-Communist transition and about nationalism, about New York and Bard College, about the visiting American conductor, about Eliade and Sebastian’s Journal. Bebe, a former student of Sebastian’s during the war, talks about the postwar life of the actress Leny Caler, Sebastian’s former mistress, a central character in the Journal’s first part. The actress kept a diary herself — Bebe owns the manuscript — which turned out to be less interesting than her tempestuous life would lead one to expect. Her sister’s life, however, was truly sensational. A refugee in Berlin, like Leny Caler herself, she formed inscrutable relations with the secret police of at least one country, or even more, whose names Bebe reels off with the rapture of an old collector of dubious narratives. It is a lengthy, Oriental-style conversation, lasting over five hours, and it seems almost to come from a previous life.
My next visit is with Donna Alba. When I rang her up to arrange the visit, the telephone instantly recaptured the voice of a decade before, but her talk now was no longer about books, a subject on which she had held forth at length and with verve.
Donna Alba, as I had nicknamed her, was, in her youth, a starry apparition. Beautiful, delicate, intelligent, she dominated literature seminars with her chimerical presence, intimidating her fellow students. They would never have dared address her in — what seemed, compared to her elegant locutions — their crass, plebeian jargon. After graduation, she survived for only a few months as an editor at a publishing house before being fired for her cosmopolitan style of dress and her silences. But the firing was not a disaster. This fragile offspring of the middle classes acquired in the meantime a new name and a new family — she got married. The godlike creature abandoned Mount Olympus and descended on terra firma as the spouse of a famous critic and feared ideologue of the new Communist elite. The apparatchik needed no permission from officialdom in his choice of spouse, and serenely accepted the incompatibility between his socalist aesthetic criteria and those of his own wife.
The famous critic, lame, myopic, sarcastic, had once been an underground Communist, tortured and condemned to death under the dictatorship of Marshal Antonescu. He bore the double scar of an invalid and of a rebel. For this admirer of Proust and Tolstoy, whom he reread every summer, the class struggle must have simply meant revenge against a corrupt Romanian society, a society that would remain corrupt under socialism, as he was to discover, himself overtaken by the speed of the turncoat disguises.
The “thaw” of the 1960s meant more for him than the loss of his official function, and the Communist fell into a delirium. It was not, however, a fear of democracy — which he considered a game for retarded children — but the nightmare of resurgent Fascism that triggered his crisis. He literally hid under his bed, terrified of imminent execution. Committed to a psychiatric clinic, he could think only of Fascism and execution. He seemed to have lost even his ability to read and write. A renowned psychiatrist, a writer himself and a friend of the patient’s, finally found a way to reach him, by reciting to him famous selections from familiar literary masterpieces. It worked, and the patient’s memory gradually started to regurgitate the words, the lines, the pages, helping him to regain his reading and writing abilities.
By the time I met him, the former militant had become obese and sedentary. His only link with politics now was gossip and sarcastic asides. He had not lost his literary fervor, however, and was writing excellent novels and short stories. What remained in his revolutionary arsenal were barbed shafts aimed at American imperialistic capitalism, socialism turned National Socialism, and the games of the literary world. His ailments multiplied, but his tenacity endured. Moving from one chair to another became a physical feat. When questioned about the state of his health, he invariably answered, “I’m happy, sir. Happiness is the only thing I’ve got left.” Those were hard times for Donna Alba, too. Her incongruous fur coat could be glimpsed in the long lines waiting to buy cheese, lemons, or medicine. This woman, who had never even made a cup of tea for herself, was now heroically doing her duty in looking after her ailing spouse. Formerly aloof, never replying to people greeting her in the street, she now chatted with the elderly pensioners standing in line for hours on end to buy a bag of potatoes.
The real survival test in the unheated rooms in the old apartment building next to Cişmigiu Park where they lived was the winters. Like the besieged population of Leningrad during the blockade of World War II, the frozen couple resisted by reading. The ailing critic and his wife became partners in a bookish dialogue, her austere beauty complementing the sick man’s pathos, her aesthetic detachment a foil for his frustrated militancy.
By now, however, the couple’s biography had become history, and the woman I was on my way to see was, like so many others, a mere survivor, living at a different address. I decided to bring flowers, and in the flower shop the florist addressed me in English. The price of a small bouquet of roses was the same as in New York, a staggering sum for Bucharest. I did not even bother to protest that the flowers weren’t fresh enough.
The street was in the cold belly of a cloud, the passersby unnaturally alive. The only thing I perceived was the fear of touching them or of being touched in turn. I suddenly felt shy, as I followed the meandering twists of the street. Donna Alba’s new home was somewhere nearby. I had been walking for quite a while, uncertain of ever arriving at my destination.
The elevator creaked its way up to the top floor. The door was flung open even before the doorbell stopped ringing.
“Oh, you are finally here, dear man.”
Her voice was unchanged, I knew that from the telephone. I would have liked to embrace her, but such gestures of intimacy had never been her way and she always seemed to discourage them. I kissed her hand formally, as in former times. She took the bouquet, which I was holding awkwardly, as usual.
Ten years had passed since our last meeting. In the meantime, her mother had died, and so had her husband, and she herself had attempted suicide. The post-Communist nightmare had succeeded the nightmare of the dictatorship. She could no longer afford a hairdresser, or maybe she no longer paid attention to such details. She had lost her feminine allure, her mystery, her ostentatiously cerebral manner. Her hair was now white and she was wearing an e
veryday sweater. Neither the early-afternoon hour nor, as it were, the time of her own heart allowed for more fashionable dress, as in the past. Before me was the pale face, the sunken Semitic eyes of old Leah Riemer, my grandfather’s sister, the face that, as a child, I thought was biblical. I instantly felt older myself. She motioned for me to sit in the armchair. She did not offer to show me the apartment. The small hallway was divided by a glass door, beyond which I could see a table covered with papers and a straight chair. Somewhere at the back, probably, were the bedroom and a small kitchen. It all reeked of poverty and solitude. I did not recognize the worn furniture. Gone was the literary salon of Sfîntul Pavel Street, along with the red velvet coverings and the red silk gowns.
I remembered that autumn evening when, intrigued by the voice of the woman who had called me two weeks before, I was at her door and rang the bell. She appeared in the doorway, then as she did now, and for a moment I again beheld the romantic vision of yore. The woman came straight out of a period portrait. She had a small white porcelain face, with black eyes, her forehead encircled by a white headband. She wore a sumptuous red gown and moved with restrained, refined slowness. She had a slender waist and ample, Oriental hips under the velvet folds. Only her hands displayed something sad, unfinished. Her fingers were as thin as a child’s, her elbows brittle, unlikely to bear touching. She gave off an aura of inviting, anachronistic adventure, amid all that socialist vulgarity.
“Well, you shouldn’t look around too closely,” she said. “Better tell me about America, but not the America we see in the movies, with all that moronic gun fighting.”
I was silent, not knowing where to start.
“I heard you came with a conductor, or something like that, someone who is also a historian and speaks German, too. So, it’s not all barbarians, sex, and money in America.”
The prejudiced views of America do not seem too different from images that foreigners have of Romania. I responded by painting a flattering portrait of the conductor.
“So, a European, then, I see.”
“Yes, American and European.”
I looked at the cake on the plate in front of me. At Donna Alba’s literary soirées the refreshments consisted of only light sweet drinks, liqueurs, vermouth, and a piece of cake, usually a rich chocolate cake, heavy and sweet. Each forkful would release a mass of cream and sugar. Later, when there was a shortage of basic foodstuffs, such gastronomic torture became impossible, and the lack of heating finally spelled the end of those extravagant soirées. This time, the cake was not too sweet, and I was spared the torture of the past. What I was eating was a decentenough cake, bought from a trustworthy pastry shop in town.
Unable to ask her about the last months of her mother and husband, or to discuss old age and poverty, I gazed in bewilderment at the table covered with books, papers, and notebooks, trying to identify the dusty, dilapidated ledger that I remembered. I almost asked her about it. I was looking at the clock, not knowing what to say and secretly hoping for the miracle that often occurs when you feign indifference, that I would catch a glimpse of the mystery ledger lying somewhere about, a survivor of all the calamities.
This had been one of my accidental discoveries, during one of my visits to the great litterateur, Donna Alba’s husband. I had arrived at two o’clock, as usual. The novelist went to bed at dawn and woke up late, so meetings took place after lunch. I had rung the bell and the door was opened, as usual, by the mother-in-law, an old Russian lady. She spoke only a bare minimum of words, but I knew she liked me, because she called me ruskii pisateli, russkaia intelligentsia, the Russian writer, the Russian intellectual. I was flattered by the error. She invited me into what she called the salyon, the living room. I sat in the usual chair, at the table covered in red velvet, which held a framed portrait of Donna Alba and a copy of À la recherche du temps perdu. I gazed at the photograph, mindful of the noises coming from the adjacent room, shuffling steps, panting breath.
Finally, the Flying Elephant emerged, limping along and supporting himself against the walls. To get from the door to the table, not too great a distance, he would grab the rope fastened to the wall for the purpose of aiding his movements. Having reached his destination, he would collapse, exhausted, into his chair.
“Hey, liberal, any news from Atlantis?”
The litterateur and retired Communist seemed, however, more interested in the latest local gossip than in any news from the North Atlantic inferno. So we chatted about books, adulterous affairs, literary conspiracies. After about a quarter of an hour, the salyon was honored, according to the customary protocol, by the old Russian mother-in-law bringing the cake and a glass of water. I thanked her, as usual, for the alimentary torture I was about to endure, but Matushka did not withdraw immediately.
“Paul, Paul, here is Kafika,” I heard her mutter. “Brought Kafika,” she repeated in her inimitable accent, with the stress on the first syllable.
“Kafka?” I asked, once alone with the maestro, and after allowing the Slavic sonorities to disperse. The old lady had left a great, thick ledger on the table, now keeping conspicuous watch. It had thick, old, black covers, with a stained school-notebook label on the front.
“Ah, the register, with all the addresses and telephone numbers. Yes, Kafka, that’s the name I’ve given it. See here it is, written on the label, ‘Kafka.’ Like the writer, this register is full of mysteries,” he said in an offhand manner.
I wondered under which code name I had been inscribed, but that mattered less than the fact that I had been admitted into the charmed circle. The salyon, over time, underwent changes, but always I was certain that somewhere, not too far away, Kafka was keeping watch.
I kept looking at the clock on Donna Alba’s table, its metronomic ticking rhythmically marking time to the words that now invaded my mind.
“I am watching the clock. It was given to me by my mother, my omnipotent, immortal mother, who has been lying in the earth for an eternity, for a day, for a minute.” These were words that Donna Alba had recently published. “With an effort, I watch the second clock on the chest of drawers, a solid high-quality clock, which my omnipotent, immortal father joyfully bought for himself just a few days, not more than seven, before he died.”
I did not forget those mournful words.
On the bedframe — made of rosewood, blackened and stained with time — is another watch, the wristwatch of my youth, belonging to my double. It has stopped running long ago and now shows the same time in perpetuity. I am not looking at it, but I know it is there. My father gave it to me, so that I can make a gift of it to my double — an extraordinary Swiss watch, imported from Geneva. They say a gift made of a gift makes heaven, but I think it can also make a Gehenna, because now my omnipotent, immortal father is lying in his grave. And my double, my soulmate, vulnerable, strong, and immortal, is also lying in a hole dug deep in the earth and covered over with dirt, the hole in which I myself repose.
I hear the echo of those words, their metallic ring resounding in my ears, and I see again the smoky day much like this, twenty-five years ago, or maybe centuries, when the telephone brought me the voice of the woman now calling to me from the grave.
I answered Donna Alba’s questions about America, but my words were mere conventional noises, not only because my return to Romania, too, seemed conventional, but because I knew how shocked she had been in 1986 when she heard of my departure, and later, when her beloved husband began to heap abuse on me. Would she be able to speak of her husband’s anger?
“I am rich in losses,” she says. “How shall I put it, I am an expert in this field. So I know what I am talking about. Don’t ever forget what I’m telling you now: you haven’t lost a thing by leaving. On the contrary.”
Donna Alba also seemed to be speaking on behalf of the dead man. Was this a commutation of my sentence? She did not mean loss of language, for she knew, better than many, about the value and worth of words. She had other losses in mind that were, in fact, gains.
Was she thus passing judgment on her own remaining in place? I did not have the strength to explain to her what I had learned myself, in the meantime, about gain and loss. All I could hear was the repeated refrain: “You haven’t lost a thing, not a thing, dear Norman. On the contrary.” To escape the obsessive metronome, I asked where the bathroom was. She showed me the way, and even accompanied me for a few steps down a narrow corridor. I switched on the light, and the minuscule bulb shed an uncertain illumination on what looked like some sort of storage room — worn-out suitcases, brooms, brushes, dusty chairs, old clothes, pockmarked basins, old hats, fur collars, old-fashioned shoes. I thought for a second that I caught a glimpse of stuffed birds perched next to chipped busts and disabled umbrellas.
There was a small sink in the corner, next to the toilet. Without looking in the mottled mirror, I turned off the tap, but no use, the thin trickle of rusty water kept on dripping. I took one last look at the cracked toilet bowl with its broken lid, at the dull gray floor and gray walls, the old window frame, the bucket and the mops. I switched off the light, and remained for a second, motionless, in the midst of eternity, among that pile of rubbish unable to summon the courage to resume the visit.
Back in the room, I listened to her tell of Securitate agents who had gotten rich and of suicidal pensioners, about vagabond children and stray dogs. Did she also say something about the Italian shoes one could buy at the corner shop, if one had the money?
After a few more minutes, I was out on the street, but I could still hear her voice. “Who am I? Who am I? I close my eyes and I can still see, but I am not allowed to see. I chase away the ghosts, I try to empty my skull, wet with the salty trickle of sweat. I wonder: Who am I now?” The metallic, slightly tired voice was familiar, the words came from the eternal void. “I thought we knew each other well, my ego and I. Now I wonder, What’s left of me now? In fact, who am I?” My ego and I also know each other well, but as I walked away, I kept repeating that question in which I had lost interest a long time before.