The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  I ask minimal questions. The woman admits that she and her husband had been Party members. This was common practice, nobody believed in those slogans, it was all a lie. Not that things are perfect now. Although there have been free elections, young people don’t care about morality anymore, all they know are American movies with their violence and sex. We’re lucky to have the people from the mountain regions — the people she meets in her work. They’re the only guardians of faith and decency, they’re the only ones to have preserved their beliefs, they are the future. Once more she expresses her surprise at my perfect Romanian. And what are the impressions of my visit home? I remain silent for a while, finding it difficult to come up with an adequate answer. I have a friend in Bucharest, I say at last, my friend George. One spring morning, “the morning of the most beautiful spring,” as the story puts it, George, a man with many amusing nicknames, finally decided to finish a letter he had started writing to his old friend who, many years before, had escaped to a faraway land, where he was “toiling to no avail among strangers.”

  The lady engineer is listening to the story, wide-eyed. My friend George, I go on, continued to stay where he was. His letter, therefore, was all the more important. That Sunday morning, “the morning of the most beautiful spring,” seemed the right time to finish the letter he had begun a long time before. He was wondering what he should say to his friend, living in a real exile.

  My listener grows more intrigued. I continue, pretending not to notice her growing bewilderment. So, George is wondering what he should say to his exiled friend. Should he advise him to return home, to take up his old life, re-establish the old connections, including their old friendship? Should he tell him, indirectly to be sure, that the experiment has failed and he should consider coming home? But if he did so, he wouldn’t understand his old motherland, if he ever did. If he returned, he would remain a foreigner, as he was everywhere and always. Therefore, having lost his friends, his family, his language, he would be better off staying where he was, “among foreign people,” as the story puts it.

  There follows a profound silence, the lady engineer is obviously at a loss for words. She must be wondering why I answered her perfectly ordinary question in such a bizarre way.

  “Why did you keep repeating ‘as the story puts it’?” she asks, fidgeting nervously in her seat.

  I allow myself another long silence.

  “I read this story somewhere, I think it was a book of children’s tales. It was called ‘The Judgment,’ if I’m not mistaken.”

  By now, the woman is staring at me, and it is clear that our chat is finished. For the rest of the flight, she doesn’t even move in her seat for fear we might touch. As the plane lands, she rushes to the exit without saying goodbye.

  The Balada restaurant, on the seventeenth floor of the Intercontinental, is decorated in red and gold, with red leather chairs, red tablemats with a rustic motif. The waiters wear red jackets and the waitresses, red skirts. The band is also decked out in red, each member sitting behind a little red stand with a gold emblem. It is nine in the evening, and I am the only customer. Undiscouraged, the band plays for my benefit. There is a female vocalist, also in red, singing in Italian, mimicking the passion of our Latin cousins. The dark-haired, mustachioed waiter greets me in English and brings me a massive red leather folder containing the menu and drinks list in Romanian and English. I order in English, not only to get better service, but to give the silent, morose-looking waiter the illusion that at least one customer this evening is a tourist.

  Everything is pure kitsch. The waiters without diners, the band, the Italian singer, the second vocalist, singing rock and blues, the twenty-three empty tables add a Gothic touch to the scene. The food itself seems fake. The stuffed cabbage that Leon and Ken had so fancied I find tasteless. My palate fails to detect the old flavors; stuffed cabbage belongs to posterity, I should have explained to my American friends. Is my palate at fault? as Proust put it. Only a year before, after learning that I was about to go to Budapest for an academic conference, a Romanian reporter asked me why I did not go on from Budapest to Bucharest, only an hour’s flight away. For me, Budapest is as far away as Sydney, I told him, while Bucharest … No, it was the fault not of my palate but of posterity.

  The band has stopped playing, the waiters are frozen, like mummies, in the night’s red vaults. Nobody pays any attention to the placid customer now wiping his glasses with a red napkin. More visions … the ghost walking slowly up Amsterdam Avenue. “There is a Führer in every mother, and a mother in every Führer,” the Flying Elephant used to quip.

  Finally, I was alone and free, as I lay there, on the edge of the sidewalk, gripping her hand and trying to stop her from falling back, once more, into the abyss of no return, into the bottomless pit. My teeth were still grinding with the effort of hanging on to that familiar touch. Her hand had stiffened round mine, and I was screaming, but nobody could hear me in the red, empty vault of the restaurant. The claw was gripping me tightly, piercing my chest. The pain was all the wealth I inherited for my wanderings in the wilderness.

  The Longest Day: Wednesday, April 30, 1997

  The secretary of the Jewish community in Suceava, an old friend of my parents, assured me on the phone that even though the cemetery is closed because of the Passover holiday, an exception will be made for me, “since you’ve come all the way from America,” he says. “Jewish law allows for exceptional situations.”

  The cemetery in question is the one on the hill, just past the little woods known as the Pădurice, not the one in town. That cemetery, not far from our old home at no. 18 Vasile Bumbac Street, was closed a long time ago. In the early 1960s, when a new highway was being built whose route would cut through the cemetery, the workers, local peasants, refused to disturb the rabbis’ graves where, for as long as one could remember, they had been leaving petitions addressed to the Almighty. I knew the old cemetery well, with its eerie stillness, far removed from the bustle of the town. I had never been to the cemetery on the hill.

  The flight to Suceava makes a stop in Iaşi. My friend Naum, Golden Brain, is accompanying me. While we are waiting to board the plane again, I tell him about my experiences in Cluj, and he rewards me with juicy gossip from the literary scene. This is the kind of “Oriental” talk that I know so well, with its concealed narratives and inside jokes.

  In Suceava, as we come out of the airport, we are greeted by a tall man with a camera slung over his shoulder, unknown to both of us. It turns out that he is a local reporter and a poet, sent by bank director Cucu to meet us and bring us to the headquarters of the Commercial Bank, where I am to receive the Bukovina Foundation Award. I tell him that first I must go to the cemetery. We get into his car.

  Looking somewhat shrunken since I last saw him, but wearing the same hat and the same short winter coat, the Secretary of the Jewish community is waiting for me, as arranged, in front of the Tarom travel agency. We drive past the old Austrian town hall, turn left toward the power station and the Pădurice, scene of my adolescent adventures. We go down, then up, turn left again, toward the hill. We catch a glimpse of Stephen the Great’s old citadel in the distance, turn right, and reach our destination.

  I see the grave for the first time. In the top right-hand corner of the headstone, set in a gilded oval, is her picture. Underneath is the Hebrew text and the Romanian translation, four lines: JANETA MANEA / DEVOTED WIFE AND MOTHER / born 27 MAY 1904 / died 16 JULY 1988. This is my father’s terse style, an expression of the tired tone of their last years together. Had my father died first, my mother would surely have composed a more generous inscription.

  The grave is surrounded by a low iron railing. I see a lamp holding a flickering candle and a glass jar containing a few wildflowers. Obviously the caretaker has been alerted to my arrival. I place my hand on the cold railing and look at the gray stone. “I want you to promise me that you will come back for my funeral,” she had said. The stone feels rough and cold, but not unfriendl
y. “You can’t leave me here alone. Promise you’ll come back, it’s important to me.” Someone nearby is murmuring the ancient words of the Kaddish: Tisgadal veyiskadash shemei rabbo. The words of the prayer for the dead drift in the air. I recognize the voice of that friend of my parents, now feebler with age. He is reciting the memorial prayer in their son’s name. I listen to the mournful chant, without joining in and without understanding: Be-olmo divro chirmei veyamlich malchusei.

  The blind woman had knocked on the door and entered the room, hesitating. She was wearing a bathrobe over her nightgown and she seemed cold. “This time, you’re not coming back, I can feel it. You’re leaving me here alone.” I knew nothing of the future. Unlike her, I was incapable of reading the invisible. “I want you to promise me that if I die and you’re not here, you’ll come back for my funeral. You must promise me.” I had not promised, fearing the binding burden of promises. Now I am free, nobody promises me anything, nor do I have anyone left to make promises to. The God who gave birth to Augustus the Fool was a woman. I could not bear her adoring love and her crushing anxieties, and now there is nothing I can replace them with. She descended into the depths and then ascended into the ephemeral stems of the flowers and the trees and toward the opaque heavens. She is nowhere to be found now, not even in the indifferent, cold stone that I keep touching absent-mindedly.

  Min kol birchoso veshiroso, the dirge continues. The chanter is bent with age, and he is swaying back and forth, as custom requires, in memory of the woman who was a friend and whom he accompanied to her grave. He is now invoking her memory on behalf of the son who has come back for the funeral, nine years too late. The prayer is over. We observe a moment of silence — I, Golden Brain, the Kaddish sayer, the poet-reporter, the peasant who tends to the graves, all of us, our heads covered by white skullcaps.

  I go on ahead alone, up the hill, and am met by my mother’s new neighbors — David Strominger, Max Sternberg, Ego Saldinger, Frederica Lechner, Gerson Mihailovici, Lazăr Meerovici, Jacob Kaufmann, Abraham Isaac Eiferman, Rachel Schiller, Mitzi Wagner, David Herşcovici, Leo Hörer, Leah Lerner, Leo Kinsbrunner, Sumer Ciubotaru, Lazăr Rauch, Joseph Likornik. I know them all, and she knows them even better, sociable as she was and eager to share in their gossip, rumors, and praises. This is her ideal home, I tell myself. Here there is peace, amid the trees and the stones and the neighbors. This idyllic hilltop in Buko-vina should bring rest at last to my anxious, neurotic God.

  On the last day, before we said goodbye, she had stopped her laments and requests. “You’re right, we must not think of what lies ahead. Nobody can predict anything, and at this age, nothing really matters anymore. I may be old and ailing and feeble, but even at this point, I would be happy to leave Romania anytime you want me to, don’t forget.” It was not to be. She had stayed behind, among her own kin, but far from the one dearest to her. Now she resides on a hilltop in Suceava, and her husband is dying in Jerusalem. A grave for their son awaits him in the non-denominational cemetery of Bard College, where Hannah Arendt and her husband, Hans Blücher, a Bard colleague, both also escapees from the nightmares of twentieth-century Europe, lie buried.

  Ever since our return from Transnistria, where she had saved us all by her resilience and devotion, Mother kept repeating that the best thing to do was for all the family to leave the motherland forever. I knew very well the reason why she and my father themselves never left — she would not leave me behind — and I know equally well that she has forgiven me. It was I who finally left her, she would never have abandoned me, but now she is ready to forgive me, even for this betrayal. “It doesn’t matter where I’ll be. Wherever I am, I’ll be here, too,” I had tried to reassure her. And so, here I am, at long last, and nothing else matters. All that matters is the grave and the woman who lies buried in it. That pretentious home called the motherland was only a transient residence, as transient as the traps it had laid for us.

  I don’t remember going down from the top of the hill, but there I was, next to the now extinguished candle at the side of the grave. The Secretary of the Jewish community was waiting for me.

  “You know,” he said, “the railing is getting a bit rusty. It should be cleaned and repainted. The gravestone, too, is chipped and should be repaired.”

  “Of course, I’ll leave some money with the caretaker,” I replied.

  I inquire about the cost of the repairs. The money from the Bukovina Foundation Award should cover the cost nicely, and the arrangements are worked out on the spot. I ask for the address of the community office and promise to stop by later with the necessary sum. No. 8 Armenian Street is the address, and I remember it all. That’s the street where, just a few houses away, my parents’ friends Dr. Albert and his beautiful wife used to live, to say nothing of their beautiful daughter, my erstwhile partner in romantic adventures. Dr. Albert is dead now and Mrs. Albert, that vision from Hollywood, is agonizing somewhere in the Holy Land, while their spectacular daughter must by now be resigned to the routine of middle age. Farther up the hill is the Armenian cemetery, where, at night, the ghosts of Romeo and Juliet still wander. Number 17 was the house of my high-school classmate Dinu Moga, whom I am hoping to see. The Kaddish chanter gave me his telephone number and told me that my old friend is unchanged, he meets him often in the street. Armenian Street, I know it well.

  “A small, modest house,” the Secretary adds. “It doesn’t look like a headquarters. And there’s no sign, either, you see what I mean …”

  No, I don’t. The Kaddish sayer, who has known me since I was a child, realizes from my puzzled expression that I don’t understand.

  “Well, they broke the windows a few times … It’s better not to have a sign.”

  I look at my watch. It is eleven o’clock on this splendid spring day, time to go see bank director Cucu, who is waiting to present me with Bukovina’s proof of its love.

  We leave the cemetery. I know what I’ve always known, and what these silent stones have confirmed: that nothing lasts, that this day accommodating my past is going to end soon.

  In town, we stop at the Gah synagogue, where we are met by two elderly members, neatly dressed in the old Austrian fashion, who must have been notified of my visit. They approach and introduce themselves. The names do not mean much, but they tell me they were friends of my parents. I inquire about Dr. Rauch. Yes, he is still alive, over ninety years old, and said he would like to see me. Dr. Rauch lives in one of the apartment buildings nearby. He has known me from childhood and looked after my mother in the years of her illness and old age. It was he who checked her dead pulse just before lunchtime on her last Saturday. We ring the bell, wait, ring again, knock on the door, until somebody finally appears and tells us that the old man has been taken to the hospital during the night with a urinary infection.

  At the Commercial Bank, the jovial Mr. Cucu welcomes us with whiskey and anecdotes about Jews. He is a big, voluble man, dressed in a dark blue suit, who speaks with a heavy Moldavian accent. We are treated to stories about the small market town of Săveni, near Dorohoi, where he was an apprentice at the shop of Moses and Sarah, from whom he learned about business and life. These affectionate memories have obviously been enhanced for tourist visits such as this. Finally, he hands me the certificate and the envelope, and apologizes for not being able to join us at lunch, as he has to go out of town.

  We walk along the main street, past the old Austrian town hall, the last headquarters of the local Communist Party. The bell in the tower of the Catholic cathedral across the street announces the noon hour, to the tune of “Awake, Romanians,” the new national anthem. A gentleman comes toward us and the reporter-poet stops him. We make the acquaintance of the director of the Agricultural Bank, a massive man with a steady gaze. He and the reporter engage in huddled whispers. When he leaves, I learn that the Agricultural Bank is sponsoring our lunch, at a recently opened restaurant, and that the bank’s car is waiting to take us to our feast. We enter the establishment. American music is boom
ing from two loudspeakers affixed to the wall, which is also decorated with a clutter of posters and advertisements. There are about ten small tables in the tiny room. I open the door to the toilet, only to close it immediately and rush away. I return to the table, and the reporter asks for an interview, his tape recorder at the ready. Why not, I think, after all I let myself be filmed by Cluj television, and I’m not in Bucharest but in my native town, where I have always felt at home, and still do. But first, I tell the reporter, I want to settle accounts for the repairs to my mother’s grave.

  On the way to the Jewish community office the driver asks, with pride in his voice, for my opinion of the restaurant. “You can eat as much as you like, this is what Mr. Director said,” he assures me. “Mr. Director is paying for lunch, he told me. Eat as much as you like,” he repeats.

  At no. 8 Armenian Street, I enter the small room, made even smaller by the tangle of desks and tables. The office staff seems to be expecting me. Near the door an old gentleman looks at me with affection; an elderly, pale lady looks on shyly. We transact our business and I am given a receipt. We exchange thank yous and smiles. I do not know them, but they seem to know me. We shake hands. Everything is over quickly, too quickly. It has all been so decent, friendly, courteous.

  I sit down in the courtyard. A few doors away is the Albert house, with its fateful bedroom. Also the Moga house, and the Armenian church, and the cemetery, and the road to the citadel of Zamca, with its pretty little houses with windows like telescopes, Juliet’s house … The comedy of errors cannot reclaim me. I rise from the nebulas of legends, the driver waves to me, and we return to the restaurant. I give my fellow diners the message I received earlier: We can eat whatever we like. That means grilled pork and roast potatoes, the only items on the menu.