The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  After ten years of separation, I would also be reunited with my friend Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare. “Love is not just an abstract term … A man is someone who leaves behind a vacuum greater than the space he previously occupied,” he had written me before he died. The poet had turned Ohm’s Law into a Law of Humanity. “I think of you with great love and lonely longing. I can hear kids playing in the streets. Shall we ever play together again?” After 1986, we continued our play, albeit from a distance, and we are still playing now.

  I set out for the cemetery, again accompanied by Golden Brain. The gatekeeper is the same old man of years before. We pay the entrance fee and make a “contribution” for the community. We look in the register of burials and find the location of the graves we want.

  Just inside the entrance is a sculpture in the shape of a tree trunk with broken-off limbs. A plaque, with white lettering in the style of the early postwar years, reads: “During the Second World War, the Fascist armies invaded and devastated the Jewish cemeteries in the U.S.S.R., using the forced labor of the Jewish detainees. Tens of thousands of granite gravestones, genuine works of art, were destroyed or transported by the Fascists to their own countries. The gravestones on display here were saved from that destruction.” The granite slabs rise from a pedestal to form a tree trunk from which emerges a body with amputated arms. On one of the slabs is inscribed in Russian: “Journalist Julia Osipovich Shakhovalev.” Next to it; “Sophia Moiseeva Gold. Mir tvoemu, dorogaia mato”—Peace unto you, beloved mother. A marble monument, dated 1947, bears the inscription: “To the memory of the holy martyrs from Romania who perished for the Sanctification of the Holy Name, in the waters of the Black Sea, on the ship Struma.”—commemorating the 769 fugitives from Romania seeking haven in Palestine, who met a watery death when their boat was sunk by a Soviet torpedo in the Black Sea on February 24, 1942. Their names are inscribed on three sides of the marble.

  I am silent, lost in the past. I see a tall, slim man, slightly bent, moving with a kind of quick determination and totally engrossed in his tasks. I also see a neat, elegant woman, with a serene air of distinction about her. And I see another woman, lost in the fog of old age, enjoying a secret sip of cherry liqueur. They have finally found their roots here; nobody can accuse them anymore of being “rootless aliens,” foreigners. Now they are all dust, the nation’s soil, property of the motherland. Once they were strangers, now nobody cares. They are dust of planet Earth, which does not belong to anyone. I lay my palms on the white slab marking the grave of Cella’s father, Jack, and on the stone of the grave shared by Evelyne and Toni, Cella’s mother and grandmother. I place a pebble on each gravestone, as is the custom of the ancestors, now all turned to stone, to dust. I see the cemetery in Suceava and the small cemetery awaiting me at Bard College. We look for the grave of the poet Half-Man-Riding/Half-Dead-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare/Half-One-Legged-Dead-Hare.

  “Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, encore un moment”—one moment, please, Mr. Executioner, my friend had pleaded uselessly, still riding a half-lame illusion. “The fire is weaker than the book it is consuming,” he is saying, as he hobbles around, frightened and sweating. “You may ruin yourself, if you wish, but you must do it with enthusiasm,” the tireless one tirelessly repeats, shaking with fear at each syllable, as though it were a sword. “Where are you, student of fear? Where are your Bibles?” he asks me as he hops around on one leg, together with his lame black dog. Then he again whispers his secret into my ear, with brotherly tenderness: “Poetry, the lie detector prone to burst into tears.” The shadows and the clowns take off their masks, their prostheses, leave aside their crutches, and line up into a neat row of phosphorescent letters: “Florin Mugur — Poet—1932–1991.” I am alive, still alive, for yet another living moment, leaning against the gravestone of Florin Mugur, and against that other gravestone, in the cemetery of Suceava. “I hope to be the first to die,” she had said. “Without Marcu, I’d be a burden for you. I’m difficult, not easy to live with. I’ve always been nervous, prone to exaggeration. It would be too hard on you.”

  Indeed, it would not have been easy. She panicked easily, she was difficult, she certainly had a tendency to exaggerate — yes, it would have been hard. “Someone you love is someone whose absence in the space he or she previously filled is greater than their presence there.” Her prayer was fulfilled; she was the first to die, leaving behind a vacuum even greater than her overflowing presence had been. Yes, she fulfilled the criteria of Ohm’s Law, as reformulated by the poet Florin Mugur. Her presence could be unnerving, possessive, unbearable, but the vacuum she left was even greater, even more unbearable. “You and Cella, look after Father,” she had said. “He’s not like me, he would never ask for anything. He’s silent, unsociable, you know him. He’s remote and fragile, easy to hurt.” Destiny had looked after him. The widower was extricated from his native land and sent to the Holy Land, into the loneliness where, in fact, he had always lived. Recently, he had been transferred to the desert of Alzheimer’s disease.

  The day before, at the cemetery, we had not had a chance to speak about Father, or about Cella. Our reunion had been brief, the dead woman’s questions concerned only with her son and her father. These, it would seem, had been the only important men in her life, the son now living in the Babylon of New York and the bookseller Avram lying in a nameless forest in Ukraine. Now, as I was leaving the graveyard of the past, I must speak to her of her husband.

  I visit him at least once a year, I tell her. His eyes brighten whenever he sees me. He smiles happily, an even, unchanging smile on a serene face. I tell her of my last meeting with him.

  It was a Sunday in June. I had arrived earlier than planned at the Beit Reuven Nursing Home in Jerusalem. I went up to the second floor. This time Father was not among the phantoms in the dining room. I went to seek him in his room. I opened the door and stood on the threshold, without making any attempt either to advance or to retreat. I looked at him. He was standing, naked, in front of the window. A tall blond young man, a towel in each hand, was cleaning him up. The young man saw me and smiled. We knew each other from previous visits and had chatted a few times. He was a young German volunteer, working at that old people’s home in Jerusalem. Thin, delicate, he behaved with untiring courtesy, both in his work and outside it. He switched easily from German to French and English, as well as improvising sentences in Yiddish, to make himself understood by the old people in that Babel of senility. We had chatted in German, the language he now used to soothe my father. What I saw confirmed what I had learned from the nurses who sang his praises. He devoted himself, like no one else, to the daily tasks that made the other attendants collapse with exhaustion. He was carefully cleaning each part of Father’s feces-smeared body — the bony arms, the waxen thighs, the flabby buttocks, the glassy knees. The young German was carefully wiping the old Jew clean of the dirt that the Nazi posters had once heaped on him. I looked on, motionless, then left, closing the door behind me. I returned to the dining room. Father arrived half an hour later, smiling. “You’re late today,” I said. “I’ve been sleeping late,” he answered, with the same absentminded smile. He had forgotten all about the young man who had just finished cleaning him, brought him fresh clothes, dressed him, and taken him to the dining room where I was waiting.

  I had to give her this last bit of important information before leaving the graveyard of the past, that Father, freed at last from solitude, was now, without any thoughts or worries, in the tender care of a young German seeking to redeem his country’s honor. At last, nine years too late, I had finally showed up for my mother’s funeral, and my motherland’s, too.

  The Last Day: Friday, May 2, 1997

  The shadow is tiptoeing around the room, careful not to wake me, impatient to wake me, so that she can see me and get some meaning back into her meaningless world. No, I am not going to move, I am not going to wake up. She withdraws at last, and I get up, mindful not to look around, eager to b
e fully awake and start my preparations for departure.

  Marta calls from Cluj to wish me a safe journey and to give me the bad news: her request to the Soros Foundation for a subsidy to publish the books I had finally agreed to let her bring out had been turned down, despite her best efforts. “I don’t know how they could reject this application,” she says mournfully. “I used the American promotional method: The future Nobel Prize for Romania! The Laureate’s Reconciliation with his motherland! I even believe these statements, you know.” I am reminded of the reporter-poet from Suceava, who had boasted of the financial support he had received from the same foundation for one of his books of poetry to be published in England. Marta’s news seems like an affectionate prank, a farcical ending to my journey.

  I take a seat near the window in the café off the lobby, one last hour in the bosom of the motherland. I am looking through the quotations I have jotted down on the first page of my blue notebook, to guide me on this trip — Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, all of them with something to say about language as motherland. I needed other people’s words, after having talked to myself for too long. I am seeing and unseeing at the same time. I can, however, make out the silhouettes from the past and I am sure I see them — miraculous apparitions — Liviu Obreja, my former albino classmate, and his blond wife. They are walking past the carpet store on Batiştei Street, with two big shaggy brown dogs pulling at their leashes and dragging Liviu along.

  Liviu has a lot of gray hair now. He looks, and doesn’t look, older, like those of us who, not having had the time or the strength to grow up, have extended adolescence into old age. He is the same as he was fifty years ago, the same ghost I have bumped into over the past fifty years in bookstores and record shops. He is the permanent symbol of this place, of any place. In a thousand years’ time, I would probably find him here, unchanged.

  I had been waiting for this inevitable meeting since the first day of my return. Here he was at last, on that May afternoon, dragged by his two large shaggy dogs. Here they were, the four of them — father, mother, and two huge, fretful babies. I look at them through the glass wall of the aquarium where I am having my farewell cup of coffee. I would like to get up, go out into the street, and catch up with Liviu, but time has already blinked and the moment is gone.

  Dinu was right, I concede in my perplexity, about the two dogs Lache and Mache, they really exist. I saw them with my own eyes, only a moment ago, on Batiştei Street, at the corner of Magheru Boulevard, not far from the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest. Was that the route we had started on forty years before, the three of us — Liviu, Dinu, and myself — in the purple days of Stalinism, from which we had tried to escape, with the help of books, music, and other teenage tricks? No, at that time none of us would have guessed what purgatory lay ahead.

  Augustus the Fool had been oversensitive, awkward, and remote throughout his tour of posterity. But now, at last, he has found a suitable audience. In an enlightened moment I open my blue notebook and start an epistle to Lache and Mache: “The departure did not liberate me, the return did not restore me. I am an embarrassed inhabitant of my own biography.” Lache and Mache, being genuine cosmopolitans able to adapt anywhere, would understand how enriching the experience of exile has been, how intense and instructive. I have no reason to feel ashamed before such an appreciative audience, so I write feverishly, in scrambled, hurried words, all the unanswerable questions that come to my mind: Was my journey irrelevant? Did this very irrelevance justify it? Were the past and the future only good-humored winks of the great void? Is our biography located within ourselves and nowhere else? Is the nomadic motherland also within ourselves? Had I freed myself of the burden of trying to be something, anything? Was I finally free? Does the scapegoat, driven into the wilderness, really carry away with it everyone else’s sins? Had I taken the side of the world in my confrontation with it?

  I have finally found my audience. All those delayed thoughts now find expression, as I scribble away furiously in the hotel café and in the taxi taking me to the airport. The impossible return was not an experiment to be ignored lightly, dear Lache and Mache. Its irrelevance is part of our greater irrelevance, and therefore I bear no one a grudge. As I wait to check in at Otopeni Airport, I write down the ending of a story that, I am certain, the recipients of my epistle will understand: I will not disappear, like Kafka’s cockroach, by burying my head in the earth. I will simply continue my wanderings, a snail serenely accepting its destiny.

  I board the plane for the flight from nowhere to nowhere. Only graveyards are permanent. The permanence of passage, the comedy of substitution, the magic trick of the finale — Augustus the Fool could have experienced such banal revelations without ever submitting to the parody of the return from which he is now returning. Now I am certain: America offered the best possible route of transit. At the very least, I now have confirmation of this truth. I climb the stairs to the plane, to the rhythm of the prayer I had learned from the Polish poet, step by step, word by word: “In Paradise one is better off than in whatever country. The social system is stable and the rulers are wise. In Paradise one is better off than anywhere else.” I mutter that refrain of the aliens as I settle into the womb of the Bird of Paradise. The emptiness increases, and so does the dizziness. Takeoff — an uncertain suspension, the privilege of feeling dispossessed of one’s own self, the gliding, the void, the absorption into the void. I use the stopover in Frankfurt before my transatlantic flight to complete my letter to Lache and Mache — details from my last morning in Bucharest, the swirling vortex of the thoughts in the passenger’s mind, the scapegoat, the cockroach, the snail’s shell, the prayer of Paradise’s aliens. My blue notebook has been good company at the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, on the train to Cluj, and on the flight to Frankfurt. Over the twelve days of the journey, it filled up with nervous, twisted letters, arrows, coded questions.

  The return flight is very different without Leon’s cheering presence. The young Chinese man sitting next to me seems to divide his time equally between watching the in-flight movie and sleeping, with spasmodic fits of snoring and facial grimaces. I had bought The New York Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine, and I had a book as well. I scribbled occasionally in my notebook, but time passed slowly. I would have liked to land in a bed as quickly as possible and sleep for a decade, suspended in emptiness. DEPRESSION IS A FLAW IN CHEMISTRY NOT IN CHARACTER was written in the phosphorescent sky. These seemed appropriate words of welcome as I approached my destination. I repeat the message gratefully, the password of my re-entry, as I continue to glide through the sky.

  “I just wanted to know if you’re safely back yet. We had a great time together in Bucharest.” It is Leon’s voice calling from the car taking him to Bard. Next Saul S., wearing a big white cap, swims into view. He is holding a map in his large, bony hands. His bushy white mustache has grown into a brush above his mouth. “Strada Gentilă,” he reads, smiling with delight, seduced by the names. Gentle Street, Concord Street, Rhinoceros Street … Yes, I am on my way back, rocked in the armchair of the heavens.

  Leon’s voice is still floating upward. I see his long black car speeding up the Taconic Parkway. “We had a great time in Bucharest. Great time.” Suddenly the plane begins to swerve, people are startled out of their sleep, I hear moaning. I am too dazed and exhausted to try to re-establish contact with Earth. The flight resumes its motionless gliding. Leon’s voice comes back, crackling with static. “We had a great time in Romania. The best things that happened to you there were the bad things.” Is it Leon talking, or Saul? I am no longer certain. It might very well be Saul, who knows all about the East European child hiding in a corner of the room, listening to his father talking to the other men, looking at his mother, dressed in traveling clothes, and at his sister, with her beautiful hair … all of them, soon, fleeing to America.

  “You’re coming home, don’t you forget that. Home is here. Here, not there. This is your lu
ck, born out of your bad luck.” It is Leon’s voice this time, I’m sure, and I am ready to acknowledge, yes, I am returning home, in the snail’s shell, ready to talk about the graveyard in Suceava, about the new course I am preparing for the fall semester, Exile and Estrangement, but he doesn’t listen anymore, he never has time for long chats. I close the blue notebook with its stories about the Flying Elephant and Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare. I put my notebook away, at the back of my seat, so that I can feel it. The plane is bouncing again and I am dizzy and shaken.

  The flight attendant comes over. “Would you like a drink?”

  I am offered wine, beer, soft drinks, and whiskey. I ask for a glass of mineral water. Evian, Perrier, Apollinaris, Pellegrino? I opt for Pelle-grino, the pilgrim’s drink.

  The plane lands and I rush to the exit. The luggage comes down quickly, the Asian taxi driver speeds away, and soon we arrive back in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side. Dazed after the long trip and the lingering confusions, I have difficulty finding my way around the house. There is no place like the paradise of home.

  Later that evening, after nine, my inner alarm goes off. I rush to the travel bag, unzip the first compartment, then the second, and start ransacking, in despair. I have a sinister foreboding, but refuse to accept the reality of the disaster. The notebook! The notebook is missing!

  Suddenly it all comes back to me. Augustus the Fool had fallen into a fitful, delirious sleep, than drank his Pellegrino, then rushed to the exit door, eager to forget everything, to get home as quickly as possible. The blue notebook had stayed behind on the plane, nestled in my empty seat.

  In a frenzy I call the airport, then Lufthansa, and learn that the plane will be flying back to Frankfurt that same evening. I am given polite assurances: whatever was found when cleaning the plane will be collected and classified during the night. The next morning, around ten, I should call back and they’ll know whether the precious object has been found. Among the pile of newspapers, bags, and other assorted items left behind on the plane? Germans will be Germans, I said to myself, they’re orderly and thorough. The notebook would be found. After all, I was traveling first class, and class privilege must mean something. I had reason to be confident.