The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  “What memories do you have of Suceava, what is the purpose of your visit?” the reporter-poet asks. I lean into the microphone, and I hear a voice that sounds like mine, but the words are those of a stranger.

  “In 1941,” I hear myself saying, “I left Bukovina for the first time. After the war, I became a two-bit juvenile actor in the drama of the Red utopia, whose theatrical character was bound to interest a child. In 1959 I was a junior engineer. I left Suceava again in 1961, after a poignant love affair.” It all sounds false, as though I am reciting something I learned by heart. The two-bit actor, the Red farce — all these adolescent revolutionary sins, meant to baffle the former servants of the Communist myth, who now compete with each other in denouncing the dictatorship whose accomplices they were.

  We are back in the center of town, not far from my parents’ last home. The hardworking reporter goes off in search of a camera, reappears, and tells me that somebody, a woman architect, wants to talk to me. A woman of about fifty comes running out from the building on our left where her firm has offices. She has an attractive appearance and seems flustered by the occasion. She is at a loss for words, and simply keeps saying that she used to go for a weekly cup of coffee at a neighbor of my parents. She is nervously searching for words. She mentions my mother’s intelligence, her intensity, especially the way she used to speak about her son. “She adored you, simply adored you. You must know this, of course. She would have done anything for you.” Her pleasant, deep voice comes to a halt. I mutter something, we shake hands and go our separate ways.

  I am now about to make another foray into the past and I tell Golden Brain about the man we are soon to see. Dinu was a high-school classmate at the time the dictatorship of the proletariat was consolidating its power and class struggle became more acute and the weakened enemy increasingly aggressive, as Joseph Stalin taught us. Any deviation from the accepted Party line, whether to the right or to the left, was not to be tolerated, and the remnants of the old society were to be isolated. As Secretary of the school’s Union of Working Youth, I was charged with the task of routing out the three ideological deviants in our midst. The last was Dinu, son of a former liberal solicitor who had done time in Communist prisons. Dinu was majestic in his indifference. “I, an enemy of the people?” he seemed to be saying, as he slowly advanced to the Red podium for his punishment. His dark, sleek hair was parted in the middle, like that of an Argentinian tango dancer. His face was pale, his gaze self-assured. He was looking straight at me, and I could read in his eyes the miserable duplicity of the proceedings over which I was presiding. Or so I remembered. In fact, Dinu returned his Party membership card without looking at, or seeing, anybody.

  “I was no longer the innocent celebrity, and very soon I would cease to be a celebrity altogether, cured as I was of the illusions of the stage on which I was performing and of the subtlety of the masquerade,” I said, as we were walking toward Dinu’s small apartment. After that high-school event, Dinu and I met again, during one of my visits back to Suceava. Neither of us was happy with the arid profession of engineering that we had chosen to escape the confusion of the times. Dinu soon dropped out of the race after only two years of study and ended up as an obscure petty functionary. He managed to preserve his aristocratic aura by becoming a professional failure. In so doing, he avoided having to wear the equalizing uniforms and bureaucratic masks, nor did he have to worry about the mediocre trophies coveted by the parvenus.

  In 1959, as a newly graduated engineer, I visited him at his old home in Suceava, at no. 17 Armenian Street. His father was now dead and Dinu lived there with his stepmother, my former history teacher. She remembered me as a pupil and overwhelmed me with praise, which, I suspect, was partly for the benefit of the stepson, who did not complete his studies and settled for a modest job in his hometown. The unflappable Dinu seemed untroubled, he was happy managing his life in his own discreet way. We shared a taste for the same books and records and, probably, a girlfriend or two. It was an easygoing camaraderie, without intimate confessions.

  After I moved out of Suceava, I used to see him when I came to Bukovina to spend holidays. By then, he had moved into his own place, furnished with items he had brought from his family home — a pull-out couch, which served as his bed, two armchairs, a small table, two or three pictures, and an old carpet. The Soviet portable radio must have been purchased on his last trip to Riga or Kiev and shared space with the Czech-made tape recorder from Prague and his collection of records, acquired on his summer trips to various socialist destinations. In each of his holiday photos, he was pictured with a different girlfriend. Most of his books were not on display; they were probably in storage somewhere. The only books visible, in the old glass-fronted bookcase, were a set of the red leather-bound Classics of World Literature and a set of the brown leather-bound Classics of Romanian Literature. On top of the bookcase there was an array of wine, vodka, liqueur, and whiskey bottles. Each time I saw him, nothing seemed to have changed, while my own life underwent change after change. I abandoned engineering, got married, published books, entered new stages of exhaustion or exasperation. All these seemed emptied of meaning, as if annulled by the ultimate triviality of any change. Dinu’s lack of ambition and zeal, the austere harmony of his provincial life, seemed proof of a lofty indolence compared with my own milieu, as well as with my anxieties and illusions.

  As we continue walking, I tell Golden Brain the anecdote about the two Romanians, former high-school classmates, who bump into each other on a flight from New York to Paris and proceed to run through their class roll. Mihai? He practices gynecology in Milan, now on his third wife. Costea? Oil refinery in Venezuela, unmarried. Mircea? He died, poor guy, of a strange infection, in Algeria. Andrei? In Israel, a bank director. Horia? Engineering, in Basel, five children. And Gogu? Gogu Vaida? Gogu stayed home in Suceava. Are you surprised? Not at all. Gogu was always an adventurer.

  We climb the stairs to the third floor and ring the bell. Within seconds, Dinu appears at the door, smiling. We go in, sit in the two armchairs, and are offered a sweetish wine he bought on a recent trip to Cyprus. But for the wear and tear, the decor seems unchanged: the same carpet, furniture, drab walls. The leather-bound red and brown volumes are in their familiar places, as are the rows of bottles. My schoolmate seems unchanged, too, apart from one or two extra wrinkles. Otherwise, the recently retired Dinu — he immediately informs me of his change in status — seems only a slightly retouched version of his old self. He tells us that no one in his family is left, they are all dead, including his brother, an engineer in Hunedoara. The brother’s wife was Jewish and she and her son later left for Israel. These two, his sister-in-law and nephew, are his only living relatives. What else? He has sold the family house and has just sold off a valuable collection of old silverware for a laughable price. It was hard to find buyers because of the economic crisis and he didn’t want to deal with nouveau riche former Securitate agents. He should have sold it in Germany, as advised by another of our former schoolmates, Ştefi, now a photographer in Bremen, but he had no time for the complications involved. Without extra sources of income, however meagre, he would not make it; the pension is an insult.

  I ask about Liviu Obreja, “the tormented blond guy,” as I used to call him, on account of all his allergies and obscure anxieties, as well as his unnaturally fair, almost white, hair, invisible eyebrows, and albino skin, so delicate and sensitive that even the air irritated it. His pale forehead was always scarred, and he was scarred, too, by the imbecilic political atmosphere and his equally imbecilic engineering job. He withdrew into books, music, and art, and had married a very blond, very shy student. They lived in Bucharest, and I might have run into them last week at the Dalles bookstore or at Leon’s concert, or as I walked by the library.

  “Obreja!” Dinu says, with some irritation; he had never liked him. “That sissy! His father, the prosecutor, is dead; his uncle, too. Do you remember him, the director of our high school? His old mothe
r lives alone here in Suceava. Instead of living with her, he prefers to move from one rented room to another, in Bucharest. He and his wife now have two dogs. How can they look after two dogs when they are incapable of looking after themselves?”

  He hasn’t asked me any questions and I don’t know what to tell him about myself. Should I mention the teenage sweetheart who “lured” me to Bucharest, as he used to say? She has been living in England since the early 1970s. I describe the photograph of herself, with her husband and children, that she once sent me; I also inform him of her recent divorce. The subject doesn’t seem to engage him, and he simply remarks that he has kept in touch with the Londoner’s younger sister. Should I ask him about the political situation? His reply is prompt: “Swine, all of them.” He is not referring to the present government but to their predecessors, the coalition led by the ex-Communist Iliescu. He offers us more wine, and I notice that Golden Brain has dozed off in his armchair. I rise to go to the bathroom — the decisive moment, the condition of the lavatory. The room is tiny, the ancient paint is peeling off the walls, the pipes are rusty, likewise the chain of the toilet. The razor is old, the towel crumpled. The room isn’t dirty or untidy, just impoverished, the loneliness of the bachelor. I return to the room. Dinu is holding a photograph. “Do you remember the class of 1953? Here you are, in the middle.”

  I recognize all the faces, but can remember the names of only a few. Lăzăreanu and his accordion; Fatty Hetzel who played the violin; the butcher’s son who, in the years of the left-right deviations, was called an “enemy of the people” and who later became a veterinarian in Israel. There is Shury, grown rich in Caracas. And there is Dinu Moga himself, in a white suit and checked shirt. Behind him, withdrawn and modest, the absolute prize winner, Mircea Manolovici. I spot myself in the center of the second row, with my hand on the shoulder of — I can’t believe it — Fatty Hetzel, whom I had expelled from the Union of Working Youth the year before. I stand there in my checked shirt, sleeves rolled up, with my thick hair and that stupid smile of adolescence. To the right, partly obscured, is the banner with its lengthy slogan: “The great Stalin has educated us … serving with devotion … the people’s interests … a holy cause.”

  “Let me take the photo to New York,” I say. “I want to have an enlargement made. I’ll send you back the original.”

  He agrees, and then says, “I have all your books. I think this would be a good time for you to inscribe them.”

  Surprise! He has never told me before that he has any of my books. But there they are, eight copies in good condition, which he retrieves from some niche hidden to view.

  He seems less impassive than before, his disgust and bitterness are on the point of bursting. Is this the accumulated effect of all those socialist decades, or the realization that a new beginning is impossible?

  In the old bookcase, the books are still displayed in the familiar order. The bottles stand in orderly rows, as always; the old carpet is the same. It would seem that the incomprehensible entity called biography is looking for an appropriate epitaph. This is an ordinary visit, as in the time when I used to come for a few days to see my parents and my hometown. We say goodbye with few words, as usual, as though I were not going back to New York and as though we were not aware of something called death.

  “Quite a character, your friend,” Golden Brain says as we go down the dark staircase, “a mummy, all embalmed arrogance.”

  Not far from the park entrance we are met by the reporter-poet, this time accompanied by another poet. We go for a short walk in the direction of Zamca, the thirteenth-century citadel whose remains are among the city’s chief tourist attractions. The hill, the forest, and the ancient walls, marking some old border, are now a no-man’s-land from which one recedes into one’s self before venturing forth again into the city.

  On both sides of the sloping street are small, neat houses, which I remember from the old days. On the right, at number 8, is the unmarked headquarters of the Jewish community. Next to it, the three-story apartment building where my cousin, the teacher Riemer, with his wife and four kids, used to live. Now they are all in Jerusalem. At number 20 is the white house with a colonnaded porch, the former home of Dr. Albert and his family. To the left, the small, elegant house of the Moga family, which Dinu has sold to who knows which inhabitant of the future century.

  We are now at the top of the slope, facing the Armenian belfry and cemetery. We turn left, walking side by side, and reach the walls of the citadel and church, where the reporter takes our picture.

  We return to town along a parallel street, the route, I now remember, that my Juliet and I, intoxicated by our heady words, used to take, under the hostile eyes peeping from behind the curtains. We stop in front of a rustic-style house, displaying a pink sign with yellow letters: LA MIHAI, BAR-CAFÉ. Another sign touts Pepsi-Cola. We continue down the slope. From behind a window, a skeptical-looking white cat, with the pointed nose of a gossip, stares out at us. Not far from the end of the street, just before the high school, is a massive one-story house, with elaborate ornamentation. Finally, we come to the severe Austrian lycée where I was once a student, with its heavy wooden front door, the playground, the gym, the basketball court.

  Back in town, we pass the bookstore, the park, the travel agency. There is a bus at the stop waiting for its passengers. I should go back to the cemetery, to the one keeping watch over me. She would have approved of how I spent the day. Yes, I did well to seek out Dr. Rauch, a very kind man. I did well to take a bottle of whiskey to the Secretary of the Jewish community, who had arranged for me to visit the cemetery and who will oversee the repairs to the grave’s iron fence. It was a good thing, too, to have given an interview to the local paper; after all, this was our hometown, and you saw, didn’t you, how that woman architect hasn’t forgotten you, hasn’t forgotten us. People don’t forget, we mustn’t bear grudges against anyone. The gentle, old words of the past …

  Has today been a calm day in her anxiety-laden life? I wanted to believe so, a peaceful day of conciliation with the world. She would have listened avidly to my stories about Dinu and the director of the Agricultural Bank and my former sweetheart, who moved to London. She would have wanted to hear about Leon’s success at the Atheneum in Bucharest and about my nightmare on the train from Bucharest to Cluj. She would have repeated all the old words of forgiveness and acceptance. Then she would have asked for news of her husband, now resettled in Jerusalem, and of my dear wife, who shares my life in New York.

  But I cannot go back to the cemetery. It has receded, locked up in the darkness, its residents have withdrawn into their well-earned night. At the airport, I wait for takeoff. I look out the glass wall and see the field, the forest, on the distant horizon. A loudspeaker plays Romanian folk music, the same tunes that were played ten, twenty, thirty years ago.

  Two hours later, I am back on the seventeenth floor of the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest. Tonight, the Balada restaurant is offering an evening of folk music, instead of the Italian and American popular songs. This time I am not the only customer, I share the golden and red space with a pilot from British Airways.

  Back in my room, my eyes glued to the ceiling, I try to regain possession of the day I had left behind. The wall behind the bed is cold in the blackness of the night.

  The Penultimate Day: Thursday, May I, 1997

  May I, International Workers’ Day, is no longer celebrated in post-Communist Romania. The tiny group who have rallied in front of the hotel are a joke compared to the mass rallies of socialism’s early decades. The modest, straggling assembly, the improvised banners, the cheeky rebelliousness, all belong to the country’s impoverished present, not to its equally impoverished past. The Tyrant himself, in the last decade of his reign, had canceled all “internationalist” festivities. Those that remained acquired a pronounced nationalist character, focusing on the figure of the Incomparable One.

  More than half a century ago, on May I, 1945, having but rece
ntly returned from the labor camp in Transnistria, I participated, at age nine, in the celebrations of the “first May Day in freedom.” After the Nazi nightmare, that spring promised resurrection and liberty. In my pocket was the Provisional Certificate that guaranteed my “repatriation” to the motherland. The Iaşi police had taken us under their wing as soon as we had crossed the border, and had endowed us with official proof: “Mr. Marcu Manea, together with his family, comprising Janeta, Norman, and Ruti, is hereby repatriated from the U.S.S.R. through the customs point at Ungheni-Iaşi, on April 14, 1945. His destination is the commune Fălticeni, county of Baia, Cuza Vodă Street.” No mention, of course, of why we were “expatriated” and then “repatriated,” or by whom. Two weeks after our return, I was marching with my father on the streets of Fălticeni, to honor the promises of the repatriation.

  Now, more than half a century later, I have made a new return and am witness to another May Day in freedom, this time, however, after the fall of Communism and not, as then, before its imminent advent. The quartet named in the 1945 document has, in the meantime, disbanded, and estrangement from the motherland has become our new state of belonging. Only the resident of the grave in Suceava has stayed behind, and that against her will. Today, I will be observing May Day with a visit to another cemetery, not the one in Străuleşti, where I might have a short chat with the Flying Elephant, or Bellu, for a reunion with Maria. I have little time, as both the dead and the living well know. I am going to the cemetery in the Giurgiu section, to visit the graves of Cella’s parents and grandparents and to pass on to them her incommunicable messages.