by Norman Manea
It is only a few minutes’ walk to University Square and my hotel. It is twilight and few people are in the streets. I enter the underpass at the university and emerge on the other side, where street vendors display their newspapers and books. I am close to the wall with the black painted message MONARHIA SALVEAZĂ ROMNIA. Across the street is the Intercontinental Hotel, where, on a table in room 1515, lies the traveler’s logbook, ready to confirm that the day and the hours that have passed were indeed real and belonged to me.
The underpass joins the four corners of the intersection of Boulevard Magheru and the boulevard that used to be named Gheorghe Gheorgiu-Dej. In my previous life, streetcars used to run along the boulevards and there were the usual pedestrian crossings. Here, on this very spot, thirty years ago, destiny had crossed from one side of the street to the other and was coming toward me.
I was watching, hidden from view, on the university corner of the intersection, standing on the narrow street leading to the Institute of Architecture, in that privileged space occupied by the one who can see without being seen. Time had stopped, as it has now. I am waiting for the traffic light to change. She is waiting, too, on the opposite side. I am as invisible as if I were on the moon. She cannot see me. She does not see anyone. She is alone, ethereal, supreme lady of the moment. The traffic light blinks from red to green. Another fraction of a second passes and then she steps into the street. She is wearing a black fur coat and high-heeled ankle boots. Her face is unseen, lit by a nimbus. It is Cella, my wife-to-be. I gaze at her graceful walk, her slender figure. Her face is limpid, like lunar light. This Nordic princess, disguised as a student at the university, was walking straight into my watchful gaze. I was surprised, on that cold afternoon, to see her crossing from the shore of the opposite pavement straight toward the university clock and toward me, a secret, solitary revelation. We were married not too long after.
I am now standing, thirty years later, at that same astral spot, at the fateful intersection, a place that belongs only to me.
I decide to go over to the news stalls. Once again, I descend into the underpass and emerge facing the hotel, a pile of newspapers under my arm. Back in my room, I look at the headlines. Of course, today is the eve of the Orthodox Easter. Curierul National announces, in bold red letters, CHRIST IS RISEN. Ziua proclaims, LUAŢT LUMINĂ, receive the light, above a half-page image of the Saviour, surrounded by saints and disciples. România Liberă carries the greeting SĂRBĂTORI FERICITE, CU HRISTOS INVIAT DIN MORTI, a happy Easter with the risen Christ, accompanied by the image of Christ and a message from His Beatitude, Father Teoctist, Patriarch of Romania. Cotidianul also displays Christ’s image, as well as a photo of King Michael I, who is celebrating this Easter in Romania and to whom the paper extends greeting. Adevărul, above its name, runs a box reading: “On this holy night of rebirth in hope and love, let us all rejoice, CHRIST IS RISEN.”
I spend a longer time with Adevărul, the Truth, a name not easy to find in the West. Le Monde, The New York Times, Corriere della Serra, The (London) Times, Die Zeit, El País, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung—none of these have the certainty of Adevãrul, the Truth. In interwar Romania, Adevãrul was a respected daily. Immediately after the war, the proletarian dictatorship suspended its publication. The Communists in Moscow had their own Pravda, another Truth, the inspiration for the daily Sctnteia, meaning “spark,” the organ of the Romanian Communist Party, its title borrowed from Lenin’s sparkling Iskra. After 1989, Adevãrul was resuscitated as an “independent newspaper.”
Five years ago, in its issue of March 7, 1992, Adevãrul, listed me as subhuman. The author of this information, a former journalist from Scînteia, had exchanged the usual Communist revolutionary rhetoric for a new jargon, recycled to meet the debased tastes of the current readership. His article “The Romanianism of a Complete Romanian,” devoted to Mircea Eliade, cited me among those “fractions, halves, quarters, of a human being” who stood in the way of the motherland’s path to a better future. Half a man, a quarter of a man? It was not necessarily an insult. My friend, the poet Mugur, had made a point of calling himself Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare. So much for “hope and love,” as proclaimed by Adevãrul, five years later, this holy eve of April 26, 1997.
I skim through the papers looking for reviews of Mihail Sebastian’s Journal, the literary event of that Romanian spring, competing in importance with the debates about Romania’s being accepted into NATO. Published half a century after the author’s death, the volume focuses on the “rhinocerization” of the leading interwar Romanian intellectuals, Eliade, Cioran, Nae Ionescu, and so many others. “Lengthy discussion on political topics with Mircea, at his place. Impossible to summarize. He was in turn lyrical, nebulous, brimming with exclamations, interjections, apostrophes. Out of this, all I wish to select is his — finally loyal — declaration that he loves the Guard, places his hopes in it, and looks forward to its triumph,” Sebastian wrote in January 1941.
The Iron Guard, the ultranationalist movement, “wiped its ass” with Romania, Cioran had declared. Indeed, even as Sebastian was writing, some Legionnaires were believed to proceed, on January 22, 1941, with the ritual killing of Jews, at the slaughterhouse in Bucharest, to the ecstatic accompaniment of Christian hymns.
Late that night, I watch on TV the church celebration of the Resurrection. I go back to the pile of newspapers. Reactions to Sebastian’s Journal are varied. They run the gamut from emotional to bewildered to irritated. Why should I care? After all, I wasn’t present when an overheated Ariel harangued his audience, in those Hooligan Years before my birth, in Grandfather Avram’s bookstore in Burdujeni, nor did Sebastian have anything to do with either Transnistria or Periprava. It is true, he, too, had wanted to leave the ghetto, and he, too, had been welcomed not with flowers but, predictably, with the prospect of more ghettos. He, too, under siege, had remained a captive of inner adversity. These are similarities that cannot be easily ignored but that do not, however, annul the radical differences between us. He had lived in the world of the old codes, at a moment when they were ready to implode. I lived after the codes had already imploded. No, I am no Sebastian, but if I were to write about his Journal, would I be once more covered in abuse? Would I again be called “traitor,” “extraterritorial,” “White House agent”? I could read the future in the past, or in today’s newspapers: “Augustus the Fool has come back for more! Augustus the Fool will write about that hooligan Sebastian’s Journal and will, once more, become a hooligan himself! He has insulted the Romanian people and has prevented Romania from joining NATO!” And more. Again, I would have provoked the ire of Bucharest’s intellectual elite over the Jewish “monopoly on suffering” and the Jewish “monitoring” of Romania.
It is late, I have no strength left to tackle the future’s charades. I have been hard hit by an item in the newspapers, the death of the writer and scholar Petru Creţia, a religious Christian. Only days before he died, the journal Realitatea Evreiască (Jewish Reality) had published an essay of his on anti-Semitism in which he excoriated the new stars of the intellectual elite—”figures who in public display flawless morality, an impeccable democratic conduct, a wise moderation, accompanied, in some cases, by a pompous solemnity, yet are capable of, privately and sometimes not so privately, foaming at the mouth against the Jews.” Just as in Sebastian’s Hooligan Years. Creÿia’s voice suddenly fills the room: “I have seen the irrefutable proof of the fury triggered by Sebastian’s Journal and of the feeling that lofty national values are being besmirched by the disclosures made, so calmly and with such forgiving pain, by this fair-minded, often angelic witness.” Petru Creÿia’s words resound: “The most monstrous thing after the Holocaust is the persistence of even a minimal anti-Semitism.”
The traveler that I am can now go to sleep with these words in his ears, here in the motherland he had not wanted to leave and to which he did not want to return and where he was racked by ambiguities. A tardy therapy, sl
eep. One can take into the healing night everything that one has lost, as well as everything that one might lose, things one doesn’t even know about yet. I think of the hooligan Sebastian, and the hooligan Jesus, mocked by the Pharisees and resurrected in thousands of faces and burned alive, under thousands of faces, in the crematoria of the hooligan century. I can no longer fight my fatigue, I am like an old child who has finally been given the anesthetic he has been asking for.
Day Seven: Sunday, April 27, 1997
The narrow streets of the old quarter are, for the most part, demolished. I am walking, cautiously, along Sfînta Vineri Street, toward the Choral Synagogue, the headquarters of the Jewish community. It is almost ten o’clock in the morning, but the street is deserted. After the long night of the Resurrection, the population of Bucharest is enjoying a late-morning sleep. The synagogue’s courtyard, too, is empty. Only the Christian porter is at his post.
I ask for Mr. Blumenfeld, the secretary. The short man in a leather jacket, standing next to the porter, turns to me. “I could take you there in the car, I’m the community’s driver.” “You have to get authorization,” says the porter, pointing to the building at the back of the courtyard and pronouncing a name I can’t catch. “You have to talk to the gentleman over there, at the office.”
Mr. Isaacson, or Jacobson, or Abramson, keeps his eyes glued to some file. I explain who I am, where I come from, and why I am here. I need the address or telephone number of Mr. Blumenfeld. Silence. I add that Mr. Blumenfeld knows me. The official does not lift his eyes. Head still lowered, he barks, “What do you want?”
I will not respond until he emerges from those important papers.
Finally, he looks up. “Who are you and what do you want? Mr. Blumenfeld has a fracture or something. He’s in bed, on sick leave. And I’m busy.”
I bang the door shut and manage to suppress a curse, but I am silently boiling over with rage. I walk past the porter’s lodge and then continue down Bălcescu Boulevard, back to my hotel. I think Sebastian mentions, somewhere in his Journal, the need one feels, in difficult times, to be with one’s fellow believers, as well as the ensuing disappointment.
The city is deserted, except for the occasional pedestrian or stray dog, first one dog, then two, then three, then four. I have been told that hundreds, thousands, of starving dogs are loose on the streets, menacing the citizens. I hadn’t encountered any packs, but then, I haven’t been out that much. Now I can imagine, having seen these quartets, what it would be like to meet a whole, snarling pack.
The streets are still empty, the doors are locked, there are no signs of life at the windows, on the balconies, the terraces. There is nothing moving. Yet, after a few more steps, in front of the paint shop, there she is — the ghost. There are only the two of us on that narrow sidewalk. The old woman is familiar with the street to which I had often accompanied her. Yes, there is no doubt about who it is. I recognize the thin, pale legs, the white, short-cropped hair, the bony, bent shoulders, the sleeveless, shapeless dress, the shopping bag in one hand, the sweater in the other. She is walking slowly while I hurry on, and yet we are walking together, shoulder to shoulder. In front of the hotel, I am alone again, and the narrow, crooked streets are also behind me, in the void.
Back in my room, I manage to obtain Mr. Blumenfeld’s telephone number and I call him. The convalescent man speaks in a weakened, aged voice. Yes, I can come and visit anytime. I set off again toward the Amzei market. On the way I stop at a post office — happily open — to buy postcards for my American friends. The woman at the counter scrutinizes me intently. Is she someone I know? I don’t recognize her pleasant, open face. She keeps on smiling at me while I choose my cards. I admire her large, moist eyes, full lips, perfect teeth. From the very first moment, I liked her calm, pleasant manner. She recalls similar, forgotten images, the domesticity of an inhabitable past, a time when one did not need many words.
“Do you happen to speak German?” she asks.
“Yes,” I reply, cheered by her friendly voice.
“Oh, you are my salvation, really.”
She hands me a note with instructions in German, directions on how to use a powder for coloring Easter eggs. I translate; the lady nods in understanding and writes down the information, smiling all the while. At one time, the young man I once was would not have remained unresponsive to the hidden promise of that smile.
I go to the shop in the Amzei market where, in Communist days, one might find the rare allocation of meat. Now the shoppers are mostly Romanians from abroad, come to celebrate Easter as they used to. I buy a few bottles of expensive Romanian wine for my friend Golden Brain, and also two bottles of whiskey, one for him, the other for my planned trip to Suceava.
The apartment house where the Blumenfelds live stands in the middle of a vacant lot, the result of all the demolition work that has been going on in the neighborhood. The lady of the house opens the door and I recognize her, the petite, beautiful woman who was a striking presence at all the community festivities, usually accompanied by her tall, handsome, distinguished husband. Mr. Blumenfeld looks visibly aged and has lost his once-imposing posture. I am offered a cup of coffee, which I decline, and Mrs. Blumenfeld brings a glass of water on a small crystal saucer. Time has deposited its thin layers of rust over this old-fashioned, comfortable home.
I pull up my chair next to the convalescent’s armchair and inform him of the reason for my visit. A few months ago, I had applied for a certificate showing that my family was deported in 1941 to Transnistria. The certificate is for my father, who emigrated to Israel in 1989, at the age of eighty-one, and who now lives in an old people’s home in Jerusalem, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Mr. Blumenfeld takes notes, confirms that the files of the deportees are now in the community’s archives, and yes, a certificate will be issued, so that Father can receive the reparations due him — not from the Romanians, of course. He does not ask lengthy questions, his infirmity makes him irritable. The situation in post-Communist Romania, like his advanced age, is not conducive to cheerfulness.
A deputy minister for transportation in the Communist government, Mr. Blumenfeld, upon retirement, like other Jewish Communist officials, became a leader in the Jewish community, with which he had interrupted contact in the postwar years. He was always seeking to avoid harming anybody, and to offer help, if at all possible. Used to the whims of authority, he proved useful in his new position as Secretary of the Jewish community. The end of the Communist dictatorship found him, however, not among the system’s adversaries, as might be expected. Now, in old age, he found adaptation to the capitalist chaos a humiliating experience.
I am expected for lunch at Naum’s, my old friend Golden Brain. His destiny has not been too different from that of Mr. Blumenfeld, and as a talented writer, he has found additional career options. Then there is his wife, Felicia, the heroine who has ensured their conjugal sanity for the last thirty years. During my last decade in Bucharest, I used to celebrate all the festivities — Christmas and Easter, as well as Jewish holidays and profane observances — in their spacious home, where now the only novelty is their big, black, jumpy dog.
Lunch will be a lengthy affair, I know, a carefully planned gastronomic gradation. Tarama salata and spiced, chopped lamb begin the procession of dishes to stimulate the appetite, accompanied by homemade plum brandy and red and white wines to intensify the flavors. Foreigners, invited into a Romanian home in the years of the Communist dictatorship, were amazed by the culinary abundance, which contrasted so sharply with the prevailing deprivations. When I was visited by relatives or acquaintances from abroad, I always avoided any explanation regarding the ingenious tricks needed for such shows of hospitality.
We clink the first glasses. Golden Brain and Felicia toast each other with the traditional “Christ is risen.” We talk about New York and Bard, about the American conductor’s concerts. We pay tribute to the salads, the borscht, the roast lamb and pork, the pickles, the white and red wines.
The conversation moves from Donna Alba to her husband, who died shortly before the demise of Communism, on which he had wasted so much intelligent effort. We talk about former friends who, in the meantime, had relocated to the cemetery, and about those relocated to Paris, New York, and Tel Aviv. We gossip about friends and acquaintances still active here, in the free-market post-Communist world, as they were, until recently, in the Communist netherworld.
At seven, I go back to my hotel, accompanied by my host, who wants to walk his dog. Along the way, we meet people we know, an actress, an actor, a professor. The street is tranquil, the sun is setting. It feels like the old life. We talk about the confusion and the dangers of the last days of the Communist regime, when rumors flew, changing hourly, fed not just by the omnipresent Securitate but also by obscure forces poised to gain from the people’s resentments.
At eleven, I am at the Gara de Nord, the main railway station, to board the night express to Cluj. The flight that I wanted to take was canceled at the last minute because of the small number of passengers, as well as the Easter celebrations. There are only two other passengers in the sleeping car and two young attendants, who look like college students. I miss the old, colorful conductor. When I was a student, I used to travel by train several times a year, making the seven-hour night trip between Bucharest and Suceava. Later, in the Juliet years, I would travel between Ploieşti and Bucharest. It was also a train that took me to the labor camp of Periprava to visit my father, and another train that carried me on my farewell journey, in 1986, to say goodbye to my parents and to Bukovina.
I am now traveling in the train of the past. My fellow passengers are the ghosts accompanying the ghost I have been and have become. The compartment seems clean enough, but there is a persistent smell of disinfectant, and the sheets, when I make up the berth, have suspicious-looking stains. The pillow, located directly over the carriage wheels, gives little promise of soothing away the exhaustion that has accumulated over the week in Bucharest. I spread the blanket over the sheets, take off my clothes, and, feeling cold, climb into bed. I draw the curtains. The darkness is shot through with moving shafts of light. The wheels are clanging under my head, and I try to cover my ears against the night’s din. The iron horse, snorting and bellowing, is racing through the darkness.