New York Times, August 28, 2003
SHADOWS AND FOG
by LARISSA MACFARQUHAR
The unquiet times of Norman Manea.
Issue of 2003-09-01, Posted 2003-08-25
The Jewish Romanian writer Norman Manea made his first, abortive attempt at
emigration at the age of four, when he ran away from home. He was disgusted, he
writes, by “the alluvial, alluring, endless boredom, the comedy played out by
the grown-ups, their daily grind of worries, their hypocritical chattering,
their marionettes’ gestures,” and so he set out to look for somewhere to live
that was more to his liking. He believed then that the problems of boredom and
hypocrisy could be solved by movement: somewhere else there was a place where
life was different—he had only to find it.
At the time, the early years of the Second World War, Romania was ruled by the
Fascist Ion Antonescu and was not a particularly hospitable place for Jews, but
Manea’s family lived comfortably enough. His laconic father, fastidious about
his clothing and his rectitude, worked as an accountant in a sugar factory; his
mother’s parents, secular and uninterested in politics, owned a bookstore. In
1941, however, their luck changed: the family was sent to a labor camp. Though
he was only five at the time, Manea remembers the deportation—the instructions
to take only food and clothing and to deposit housekeys, jewelry, and precious
metals with the authorities. His family was taken to Moghilev, in the Ukraine,
where they and thousands of others lived outdoors in the rain and cold and were
stripped of their possessions. Many people went mad or committed suicide, and
many others died of exposure. In the camp, Manea’s father was concerned above
all with moral dignity, refusing to be servile, to participate in the “black
market in sentiment” that prevailed there, but Manea’s mother was bent on
surviving, and Manea was still young enough to agree with her. “What I
understood then was that crying and hunger, cold and fear belonged to life, not
to death,” Manea writes of the period after his grandparents both died in the
space of three weeks. “Nothing was more important than survival.” The Russians
liberated the camp in 1944 but sent Manea’s father to fight at the front; he
deserted and, miraculously, found his wife and son again in the middle of
Bessarabia.
When the family returned to Romania after the war, the country had been taken
over by Communism. Manea’s father was fired from his job when falsely accused of
giving away a bicycle, and was later thrown into prison for buying meat on
credit; his mother was forced to work long hours in a canning factory. The adult
Manea was also miserable—spied upon, his books censored, anti-Semitism adding
menace to the emaciation of Communist life. “More than once I was reminded of
Bergman’s film ‘The Serpent’s Egg,’ of the stultifying atmosphere of the last
years of the Weimar Republic,” he wrote in a 1988 essay, “Romania”:
Of the mixture of paranoia and disorientation, of the ways in which
discouragement turns into resignation, then submission. . . . Life as a series
of postponements, a tumorlike growth of mistrust and fear, an all-encompassing
schizophrenia. A step-by-step reduction of private life, and finally its
abolition, as time itself becomes subject to ever-increasing taxation and
eventually total expropriation by the state: the hours sacrificed to standing in
lines, to ritual political meetings and to rallies, on top of the hours of work
and the hours of helpless exposure to the inferno of public transportation . . .
and when you were finally home in your birdcage, you found yourself lost, mute,
staring into an emptiness that could be defined as infinite despair.
Over the years, there were many opportunities for the family to emigrate to
Israel: Romania, pursuing the trifecta of money, international approval, and
ethnic purging, allowed the Israeli government to pay for Jews to move there.
Manea’s parents wanted to emigrate, but Manea himself resisted until he was
fifty years old and, for his mother at least, it was too late to go. For much of
his life, and especially now that he has written a memoir, “The Hooligan’s
Return” (translated from the Romanian by Angela Jianu; Farrar, Straus & Giroux;
$30), he has asked himself the question, pressed upon him by his conscience and
his parents: why didn’t he leave?
The most obvious answer was language. He could imagine living outside Romania
but not outside Romanian. Because he was a writer, Romanian was his country, and
without it he would have no place to work. “Exile from this ultimate place of
refuge,” he writes, “would have been the most brutal form of extirpation, would
have touched the very fiber of my being.” But Romanian was only part of the
story—he didn’t feel an uncomplicated love for the language until he was in his
forties. After a short-lived conversion to Communist enthusiasm in his teens,
toward the end of which time he presided, mortified, over the expulsion of three
classmates from the Party, he became aware of the political tricks that words
could play—the way in which the language of the regime was at once numbingly
bland and full of deceptions. “Comradely,” “mutual esteem,” “full agreement and
cooperation”—who could decipher what such insipid phrases were meant to reveal
and hide about Romania’s relation to the world? When it came time to go to
university, Manea, acting grotesquely against character, signed up to study
hydroelectric engineering. He thought that a life without words could protect
him from insidious ambiguities, in himself as much as in politics, but it
failed. After twenty years of lines and numbers, he broke down and was confined
briefly to a mental institution. “Had engineering, at least, cured my
uncertainties and anxieties, my inclination to sloth and the scattering of my
energies?” he writes. “Did it help me conquer my vice of hair-splitting and
excessive nuance? . . . Such hope remained unfulfilled. Engineering had not
cured me, thank God, of myself.”
Once released from the mental hospital, Manea began writing fiction. He became
part of the Romanian literary world, and developed a peculiarly literary need
for the Communist privations that he had loathed before. There was, until the
overthrow of Ceaus¸escu, almost no direct political resistance in Romania, and
so the artist who managed to preserve his moral and aesthetic integrity, as
Manea did, was a necessary political hero. The insularity of the regime, sealing
off the country from the West’s postwar currents, preserved there a prewar
literary modernism in nearly pristine condition, and under those circumstances
misery had its uses. “Most of the East European writers, myself included, were
experiencing provincial frustration and were also subject to a kind of
megalomania,” he writes. “Our Western colleagues, sheltered from socialist
suffering and dilemmas, were incapable—so we chose to believe—of producing work
that was in any way comparable to our grand, complicated, tragic, obscure
writings, which had remained faithful to what we supposed was genuine
literature.” Even the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, safely ensconced in Paris
since the mid-seventies, was producing novels in which political critique was no
more important, or less important, than a private, placeless eroticism.
But this chauvinism of suffering did not make Manea a patriot. It accounted in
part, perhaps, for his reluctance to leave the country himself, but not for his
disgust at others who chose to do so. Another Jewish Romanian writer of the
postwar years, Nicu Steinhardt, was appalled by Jewish migration for patriotic
reasons: he felt it a base abandonment—a deplorable instance, presumably, of
Semitic rootlessness. “The simple gesture of taking one’s passport out of one’s
pocket seems like a sleight of hand, it has something of a cheap trickster’s
magic about it,” Steinhardt wrote. “Or it seems like something that an odious
mama’s boy might do: I’m not playing anymore, I’m going back to Mama. . . . Any
man in his right mind cannot help but be disgusted.” Steinhardt was later
arrested, his property was confiscated, and he was sent to prison for twelve
years, where he responded by converting ecstatically to Christianity (he became
a Greek Orthodox monk) and embracing the doctrines of the anti-Semitic, Fascist
Legionnaires who had governed the country before the Communists. Manea, however,
was never susceptible to patriotism of that self-eviscerating variety. He was
not interested in the romance of Romania, or of Jewishness, or, for that matter,
in political thinking of any sort. He was moved by books, by love affairs, by
the sea. “When all was said and done, I simply didn’t give a damn about
anything,” he writes. “World history bored me, my own history was running
according to its own beat. . . . I did not wish to be drawn into the world’s
unhappiness.” He shared Steinhardt’s contempt for the migrants, but for more
complicated, private reasons.
In 1958, a close friend of Manea’s decided to emigrate to Israel. He had good
grounds for leaving, as good as Manea’s own—his father had been murdered for
being a Jew, possibly by the government—but Manea felt only irritated scorn for
this sort of rationale. “My cynicism had reached such depths that I regarded
those horrors”—the wartime camps, and the killings that came afterward—“as a
mere step toward the great, ubiquitous, universal crime, Death, the premise of
all our lives,” he writes. “Premature death, violent death, was just the same
old, plain, unfair death, and it did not matter how and where it hunted us
down—such was my insensitive logic on the matter.” Manea no longer believed, as
he had when he was four, that history mattered; that people behaved
differently—better—under different circumstances. To believe that, he felt,
amounted to a stupid misunderstanding of the human condition. “Escape to the
capitalist paradise beyond the Iron Curtain, with its trappings of well-being
and illusions of freedom, now seemed a vulgar notion,” he writes. “I was
skeptical of any childish attempts to alter destiny. . . . I did not believe
that changing the place from which I observed the game-play of the world . . .
would improve my chances for happiness. In any case, I was suspicious of such
changes, and even viewed them with contempt. The ‘common people,’ I thought, can
continue sucking on their dumb lollipop of hope, they can keep on believing in
instant rewards.” Communist life was arbitrary and cruel, but life everywhere is
arbitrary and cruel. There is nothing else to aspire to.
For someone who believes that history doesn’t matter, that the circumstances of
a life are unimportant in the search for happiness, the writing of a memoir is a
strange business. Manea seems nauseated by it. He knows that his story could be
taken to be that of a victim, and so he continually heaps contempt upon himself
and his opinions, neurotically forestalling at every juncture the possibility of
pity. “I am an embarrassed inhabitant of my own biography,” he says. He loathes
the thought of producing another Eastern European tale of woe, and postpones
describing his experience of the camp until so late in the book that one begins
to wonder whether he has decided, because of the risk of clich?, to avoid it
altogether. “Suffering does not make us better people or heroes,” he writes.
“Suffering, like all things human, corrupts, and suffering peddled publicly
corrupts absolutely.” But in spite of, or because of, his nausea, the
memoir—evasive, conflicted, harrowed, tortuously elegiac—is an extraordinary
book.
Manea has retreated some distance from the cynical fatalism of his middle years:
an emigrant himself, a professor at Bard, he no longer despises, or no longer
easily despises, the aspiration to life outside Communism. But while he knows
that there are real differences between places, it seems that for him, even now,
place itself is unreal. When he was an engineer, he was waiting, he says, “for
the revelation that reality was real, and that I was real,” and it seems that he
is still waiting. He calls America, sarcastically, “Paradise.” He simply cannot
bring himself to take seriously the whims and currents of the external world. It
is in the context of this extreme hermeticism, however, that his stories—all
mood and no circumstance—begin to make sense.
There is throughout Manea’s fiction (four strange, alluring novellas, a murky
novel, and a book of dazzling, spectral stories have been translated into
English) a pervasive sense of unreality. It’s often difficult to figure out
what’s going on. Characters are only vaguely identified and emerge from
indistinct situations (the test, the fear, the failure, the disaster). Speeches
lack speakers, and strong emotions—suspicion, despair, disgust—seem to circulate
by themselves. His characters are frail, thin-sapped creatures who move about
their indefinite world like somnambulists—so tired as to be nearly unconscious,
or dreaming bewildering dreams (there is perhaps no other writer whose
protagonists spend so much time asleep), or else subsisting in a confused,
hypnagogic state between sleeping and waking. They seem not to walk through air
so much as to be pushed by the movements of some viscous, miasmic substance
that’s difficult to travel through and more difficult to see through. The
atmosphere is denser than bodies.
The protagonist of one of Manea’s most beautifully mooded stories, “The Turning
Point,” is a man whose only vivid experience is an infatuation with the sea. His
love turns morbid after he nearly drowns one August afternoon in a polluted,
oily ocean cluttered with rubbish. After a period of sickness, the man returns
outwardly to normal, but he feels stultified. Sour and detached, he watches the
trite world revolve:
Rejuvenated retirees come back from their trips with senile smiles. . . . The
powers of the apartment complex manager increase, and the tenants flatter him.
The price of videocassettes goes up, and people are growing Teutonic mustaches
and long Viking hair. Female students reject the bra. . . . Women’s and men’s
Wellington boots are standardized, toilets on trains are abolished because of
environmental concerns. Restaurants only take group bookings.
Unable to settle on a purpose—unable, even, to realize that he lacks one—he
becomes a polite, obedient employee. He submits to the slow poison of routine,
the “brutish stammerings” of the crowded morning bus:
His seemingly indifferent and apathetic eyes take in more than before. The days
and nights bleached out by boredom and diminution are more visible on the faces
of others—in their measured gestures, in their silly and furtive little jokes. .
. . Just as before, he neglects to notice the minute changes in products,
prices, jargon—the mute subtexts of everyday life, the gray fog into which more
and more of them are vanishing. . . . In short, he accommodates himself to his
generation, rejects the tragic, trivializes everything. The hours are accounted
for conscientiously, the rare moments of idleness open up into a chaotic void in
which he feels stupid and finds it difficult to make any move at all.
The sensation of uncertainty and groundlessness in Manea’s stories is not unlike
that in W. G. Sebald’s novels, except that in Sebald’s fiction the general
uncertainty is offset by a sharp foreground: places, persons, dress, time of
day, movement from one place to another, all are precisely specified; every inch
of fictional space and every minute of fictional time are accounted for. But in
Manea’s stories the vagueness and bewilderment permeate throughout—there is no
distinction between foreground and background. Usually in fiction a partial
description implies a complete world: if we’re told that a room contains a sofa
and a fireplace, we assume a floor and walls, a few pictures, a table,
whatever’s needed to make the room complete; and we assume, too, that the room
is connected by the usual hallways, doors, and roads to other places in the
story. But Manea’s fiction discourages this—there is no sense in it of a
complete world. Places are glanced at and quickly abandoned; characters appear
and disappear without explanation; events swim into the field of attention and
then vanish; and the connections between these things are rarely made explicit.
When objects snap into focus, they only add an antic surrealism—a cup of tea! a
gray raincoat! a lump of sugar!—to the general blur. Many postwar writers in
Eastern Europe, partly in an effort to evade censorship, departed from their
present reality to write historical allegories (such as the Polish writer Jerzy
Andrzejewski’s “The Inquisitors,” ostensibly an indictment of the Spanish
Inquisition) or fantasies of the future and the occult (Mircea Eliade, the late
Romanian scholar of myth and religion, also wrote several short stories about
the supernatural). Manea does neither, and yet it is as though he were doing
both at once: his present, his reality, is so uncanny, so imagined, that it
seems like an allegory of itself.
“Tolea is awake, has drifted off, asleep again, who knows,” Manea writes in his
novel “The Black Envelope”:
The city was in darkness. . . . Just some dim yellow blots in the distance. Sick
orbs of a sick city sunk in nightmares. . . .
Riotous, chaotic groans, a short green flame, cursing and alcohol. And again the
unlit silence and the hobnail boots rhythmically striking the asphalt. The
darkness grinds its teeth as rays of light suddenly spring up. Metal plate,
wheels, and screws are banged; there is a massive sickly noise of something
starting up. The monster moves off: its headlights sway in the thick black
ocean. The crippled truck lurches about and noisily fills the desert—a gigantic
deformed savage moving unsteadily forward, breaking up the darkness bit by bit.
The edge of a rusty roof. Thickets of rubbish. The handlebar of a bicycle.
The sense one gets is less of a real world than of a theatre set, in which a
single bed on a bare stage might signify a bedroom, or a tray of apples
indicates a market.
Manea is, in fact, obsessed with theatre—it is his metaphor of choice, in both
his stories and his essays, for the pretense and hypocrisy of life under
Communism. He is perpetually describing situations as performances or parodies
or masquerades, and people as masked, or as clowns. He refers continually to the
absurd, but the word sounds odd because there is only a desiccated, sarcastic
sort of humor in his writing—certainly none of the looniness of Ionesco’s
absurdist plays, or even the earthier comedy of Havel’s. Manea is not by nature
a satirist: he’s too moral, too despairing. It’s as though he had inherited the
trope—Communism is absurd—from other writers, but can’t summon up the confident
recklessness, or the joy, to make it work. Manea often calls himself a clown,
but he’s not convincing in the role. After he published a book titled “Auguste
the Fool’s Apprenticeship Years,” a friend said to him, “You are much too
serious. You are too ethical, and you are not playful enough. The image of . . .
the Fool doesn’t fit you at all.”
Shortly before Manea visited Romania, in 1997, for the first time since his
emigration—the “Hooligan’s Return” referred to in his memoir’s title—he had a
nightmare, one of many, about his mother. He dreamed that he and she were
walking together in Bucharest when suddenly she fell, grasping his arm, into an
open sewage pit in the road. “I could feel myself slipping,” he writes. “I
couldn’t hold on to the burden of her body swinging desperately above the void,
her thin, pale legs thrashing helplessly in the air. . . . I was being pulled
down by the bony clasp of the old hand into the black void.”
Benignly interpreted, the dream could be said to refer to his mother’s death,
nine years earlier. A little while before Manea emigrated, he went to see his
parents to say goodbye. He didn’t admit that he was leaving the country for
good, but his mother guessed, and she tried to extract from him a promise that
he would return to attend her funeral. Manea, always honest, said that he
couldn’t promise. She died two years later and, indeed, he did not return to see
her buried (his father didn’t tell him of her death until a month later, knowing
that if he came back he wouldn’t be allowed to leave). But such a simple sort of
guilt would not be in character. Manea refers to his mother in his memoir as
Mater Dolorosa and the velvet claw. Turbulent, adoring, manipulative, and
miserable, she exercised over him “the tyranny of affection, the unbearable
malady of the ghetto.” His mother, unlike the world, was always horribly real,
and she forced upon him all the repellent, clich?d, vulgar ghetto identities
that, in his work and his life, he took such pains to obscure.
Near the end of the book, Manea describes a recent visit to his father, now
senile and living in a nursing home in Jerusalem: entering his room, Manea sees
him standing, naked, at the window, staring vacantly while a young German
hospital volunteer washes feces off his body. But the scene is a short one
compared with the pages he spends describing his belated visit to his mother’s
grave in Romania. His father was, it seems, too reserved, too decent, too
genuinely detached from the world, to grip him. Precious unreality had to be
wrested from his mother. “Exile begins as soon as we leave the womb,” Manea
concludes, after he discovers, anticlimactically, that his return to Romania,
which he dreaded and avoided for years, has neither crippled nor freed him.
“Only death finally frees us from this final belonging,” he writes. “The return
to the homeland is but a return to the mother’s grave.”
August 28, 2003 | home
SHADOWS AND FOG
by LARISSA MACFARQUHAR
The unquiet times of Norman Manea.
Issue of 2003-09-01
Posted 2003-08-25
The Jewish Romanian writer Norman Manea made his first, abortive attempt at
emigration at the age of four, when he ran away from home. He was disgusted, he
writes, by “the alluvial, alluring, endless boredom, the comedy played out by
the grown-ups, their daily grind of worries, their hypocritical chattering,
their marionettes’ gestures,” and so he set out to look for somewhere to live
that was more to his liking. He believed then that the problems of boredom and
hypocrisy could be solved by movement: somewhere else there was a place where
life was different—he had only to find it.
At the time, the early years of the Second World War, Romania was ruled by the
Fascist Ion Antonescu and was not a particularly hospitable place for Jews, but
Manea’s family lived comfortably enough. His laconic father, fastidious about
his clothing and his rectitude, worked as an accountant in a sugar factory; his
mother’s parents, secular and uninterested in politics, owned a bookstore. In
1941, however, their luck changed: the family was sent to a labor camp. Though
he was only five at the time, Manea remembers the deportation—the instructions
to take only food and clothing and to deposit housekeys, jewelry, and precious
metals with the authorities. His family was taken to Moghilev, in the Ukraine,
where they and thousands of others lived outdoors in the rain and cold and were
stripped of their possessions. Many people went mad or committed suicide, and
many others died of exposure. In the camp, Manea’s father was concerned above
all with moral dignity, refusing to be servile, to participate in the “black
market in sentiment” that prevailed there, but Manea’s mother was bent on
surviving, and Manea was still young enough to agree with her. “What I
understood then was that crying and hunger, cold and fear belonged to life, not
to death,” Manea writes of the period after his grandparents both died in the
space of three weeks. “Nothing was more important than survival.” The Russians
liberated the camp in 1944 but sent Manea’s father to fight at the front; he
deserted and, miraculously, found his wife and son again in the middle of
Bessarabia.
When the family returned to Romania after the war, the country had been taken
over by Communism. Manea’s father was fired from his job when falsely accused of
giving away a bicycle, and was later thrown into prison for buying meat on
credit; his mother was forced to work long hours in a canning factory. The adult
Manea was also miserable—spied upon, his books censored, anti-Semitism adding
menace to the emaciation of Communist life. “More than once I was reminded of
Bergman’s film ‘The Serpent’s Egg,’ of the stultifying atmosphere of the last
years of the Weimar Republic,” he wrote in a 1988 essay, “Romania”:
Of the mixture of paranoia and disorientation, of the ways in which
discouragement turns into resignation, then submission. . . . Life as a series
of postponements, a tumorlike growth of mistrust and fear, an all-encompassing
schizophrenia. A step-by-step reduction of private life, and finally its
abolition, as time itself becomes subject to ever-increasing taxation and
eventually total expropriation by the state: the hours sacrificed to standing in
lines, to ritual political meetings and to rallies, on top of the hours of work
and the hours of helpless exposure to the inferno of public transportation . . .
and when you were finally home in your birdcage, you found yourself lost, mute,
staring into an emptiness that could be defined as infinite despair.
Over the years, there were many opportunities for the family to emigrate to
Israel: Romania, pursuing the trifecta of money, international approval, and
ethnic purging, allowed the Israeli government to pay for Jews to move there.
Manea’s parents wanted to emigrate, but Manea himself resisted until he was
fifty years old and, for his mother at least, it was too late to go. For much of
his life, and especially now that he has written a memoir, “The Hooligan’s
Return” (translated from the Romanian by Angela Jianu; Farrar, Straus & Giroux;
$30), he has asked himself the question, pressed upon him by his conscience and
his parents: why didn’t he leave?
The most obvious answer was language. He could imagine living outside Romania
but not outside Romanian. Because he was a writer, Romanian was his country, and
without it he would have no place to work. “Exile from this ultimate place of
refuge,” he writes, “would have been the most brutal form of extirpation, would
have touched the very fiber of my being.” But Romanian was only part of the
story—he didn’t feel an uncomplicated love for the language until he was in his
forties. After a short-lived conversion to Communist enthusiasm in his teens,
toward the end of which time he presided, mortified, over the expulsion of three
classmates from the Party, he became aware of the political tricks that words
could play—the way in which the language of the regime was at once numbingly
bland and full of deceptions. “Comradely,” “mutual esteem,” “full agreement and
cooperation”—who could decipher what such insipid phrases were meant to reveal
and hide about Romania’s relation to the world? When it came time to go to
university, Manea, acting grotesquely against character, signed up to study
hydroelectric engineering. He thought that a life without words could protect
him from insidious ambiguities, in himself as much as in politics, but it
failed. After twenty years of lines and numbers, he broke down and was confined
briefly to a mental institution. “Had engineering, at least, cured my
uncertainties and anxieties, my inclination to sloth and the scattering of my
energies?” he writes. “Did it help me conquer my vice of hair-splitting and
excessive nuance? . . . Such hope remained unfulfilled. Engineering had not
cured me, thank God, of myself.”
Once released from the mental hospital, Manea began writing fiction. He became
part of the Romanian literary world, and developed a peculiarly literary need
for the Communist privations that he had loathed before. There was, until the
overthrow of Ceaus¸escu, almost no direct political resistance in Romania, and
so the artist who managed to preserve his moral and aesthetic integrity, as
Manea did, was a necessary political hero. The insularity of the regime, sealing
off the country from the West’s postwar currents, preserved there a prewar
literary modernism in nearly pristine condition, and under those circumstances
misery had its uses. “Most of the East European writers, myself included, were
experiencing provincial frustration and were also subject to a kind of
megalomania,” he writes. “Our Western colleagues, sheltered from socialist
suffering and dilemmas, were incapable—so we chose to believe—of producing work
that was in any way comparable to our grand, complicated, tragic, obscure
writings, which had remained faithful to what we supposed was genuine
literature.” Even the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, safely ensconced in Paris
since the mid-seventies, was producing novels in which political critique was no
more important, or less important, than a private, placeless eroticism.
But this chauvinism of suffering did not make Manea a patriot. It accounted in
part, perhaps, for his reluctance to leave the country himself, but not for his
disgust at others who chose to do so. Another Jewish Romanian writer of the
postwar years, Nicu Steinhardt, was appalled by Jewish migration for patriotic
reasons: he felt it a base abandonment—a deplorable instance, presumably, of
Semitic rootlessness. “The simple gesture of taking one’s passport out of one’s
pocket seems like a sleight of hand, it has something of a cheap trickster’s
magic about it,” Steinhardt wrote. “Or it seems like something that an odious
mama’s boy might do: I’m not playing anymore, I’m going back to Mama. . . . Any
man in his right mind cannot help but be disgusted.” Steinhardt was later
arrested, his property was confiscated, and he was sent to prison for twelve
years, where he responded by converting ecstatically to Christianity (he became
a Greek Orthodox monk) and embracing the doctrines of the anti-Semitic, Fascist
Legionnaires who had governed the country before the Communists. Manea, however,
was never susceptible to patriotism of that self-eviscerating variety. He was
not interested in the romance of Romania, or of Jewishness, or, for that matter,
in political thinking of any sort. He was moved by books, by love affairs, by
the sea. “When all was said and done, I simply didn’t give a damn about
anything,” he writes. “World history bored me, my own history was running
according to its own beat. . . . I did not wish to be drawn into the world’s
unhappiness.” He shared Steinhardt’s contempt for the migrants, but for more
complicated, private reasons.
In 1958, a close friend of Manea’s decided to emigrate to Israel. He had good
grounds for leaving, as good as Manea’s own—his father had been murdered for
being a Jew, possibly by the government—but Manea felt only irritated scorn for
this sort of rationale. “My cynicism had reached such depths that I regarded
those horrors”—the wartime camps, and the killings that came afterward—“as a
mere step toward the great, ubiquitous, universal crime, Death, the premise of
all our lives,” he writes. “Premature death, violent death, was just the same
old, plain, unfair death, and it did not matter how and where it hunted us
down—such was my insensitive logic on the matter.” Manea no longer believed, as
he had when he was four, that history mattered; that people behaved
differently—better—under different circumstances. To believe that, he felt,
amounted to a stupid misunderstanding of the human condition. “Escape to the
capitalist paradise beyond the Iron Curtain, with its trappings of well-being
and illusions of freedom, now seemed a vulgar notion,” he writes. “I was
skeptical of any childish attempts to alter destiny. . . . I did not believe
that changing the place from which I observed the game-play of the world . . .
would improve my chances for happiness. In any case, I was suspicious of such
changes, and even viewed them with contempt. The ‘common people,’ I thought, can
continue sucking on their dumb lollipop of hope, they can keep on believing in
instant rewards.” Communist life was arbitrary and cruel, but life everywhere is
arbitrary and cruel. There is nothing else to aspire to.
For someone who believes that history doesn’t matter, that the circumstances of
a life are unimportant in the search for happiness, the writing of a memoir is a
strange business. Manea seems nauseated by it. He knows that his story could be
taken to be that of a victim, and so he continually heaps contempt upon himself
and his opinions, neurotically forestalling at every juncture the possibility of
pity. “I am an embarrassed inhabitant of my own biography,” he says. He loathes
the thought of producing another Eastern European tale of woe, and postpones
describing his experience of the camp until so late in the book that one begins
to wonder whether he has decided, because of the risk of clich?, to avoid it
altogether. “Suffering does not make us better people or heroes,” he writes.
“Suffering, like all things human, corrupts, and suffering peddled publicly
corrupts absolutely.” But in spite of, or because of, his nausea, the
memoir—evasive, conflicted, harrowed, tortuously elegiac—is an extraordinary
book.
Manea has retreated some distance from the cynical fatalism of his middle years:
an emigrant himself, a professor at Bard, he no longer despises, or no longer
easily despises, the aspiration to life outside Communism. But while he knows
that there are real differences between places, it seems that for him, even now,
place itself is unreal. When he was an engineer, he was waiting, he says, “for
the revelation that reality was real, and that I was real,” and it seems that he
is still waiting. He calls America, sarcastically, “Paradise.” He simply cannot
bring himself to take seriously the whims and currents of the external world. It
is in the context of this extreme hermeticism, however, that his stories—all
mood and no circumstance—begin to make sense.
There is throughout Manea’s fiction (four strange, alluring novellas, a murky
novel, and a book of dazzling, spectral stories have been translated into
English) a pervasive sense of unreality. It’s often difficult to figure out
what’s going on. Characters are only vaguely identified and emerge from
indistinct situations (the test, the fear, the failure, the disaster). Speeches
lack speakers, and strong emotions—suspicion, despair, disgust—seem to circulate
by themselves. His characters are frail, thin-sapped creatures who move about
their indefinite world like somnambulists—so tired as to be nearly unconscious,
or dreaming bewildering dreams (there is perhaps no other writer whose
protagonists spend so much time asleep), or else subsisting in a confused,
hypnagogic state between sleeping and waking. They seem not to walk through air
so much as to be pushed by the movements of some viscous, miasmic substance
that’s difficult to travel through and more difficult to see through. The
atmosphere is denser than bodies.
The protagonist of one of Manea’s most beautifully mooded stories, “The Turning
Point,” is a man whose only vivid experience is an infatuation with the sea. His
love turns morbid after he nearly drowns one August afternoon in a polluted,
oily ocean cluttered with rubbish. After a period of sickness, the man returns
outwardly to normal, but he feels stultified. Sour and detached, he watches the
trite world revolve:
Rejuvenated retirees come back from their trips with senile smiles. . . . The
powers of the apartment complex manager increase, and the tenants flatter him.
The price of videocassettes goes up, and people are growing Teutonic mustaches
and long Viking hair. Female students reject the bra. . . . Women’s and men’s
Wellington boots are standardized, toilets on trains are abolished because of
environmental concerns. Restaurants only take group bookings.
Unable to settle on a purpose—unable, even, to realize that he lacks one—he
becomes a polite, obedient employee. He submits to the slow poison of routine,
the “brutish stammerings” of the crowded morning bus:
His seemingly indifferent and apathetic eyes take in more than before. The days
and nights bleached out by boredom and diminution are more visible on the faces
of others—in their measured gestures, in their silly and furtive little jokes. .
. . Just as before, he neglects to notice the minute changes in products,
prices, jargon—the mute subtexts of everyday life, the gray fog into which more
and more of them are vanishing. . . . In short, he accommodates himself to his
generation, rejects the tragic, trivializes everything. The hours are accounted
for conscientiously, the rare moments of idleness open up into a chaotic void in
which he feels stupid and finds it difficult to make any move at all.
The sensation of uncertainty and groundlessness in Manea’s stories is not unlike
that in W. G. Sebald’s novels, except that in Sebald’s fiction the general
uncertainty is offset by a sharp foreground: places, persons, dress, time of
day, movement from one place to another, all are precisely specified; every inch
of fictional space and every minute of fictional time are accounted for. But in
Manea’s stories the vagueness and bewilderment permeate throughout—there is no
distinction between foreground and background. Usually in fiction a partial
description implies a complete world: if we’re told that a room contains a sofa
and a fireplace, we assume a floor and walls, a few pictures, a table,
whatever’s needed to make the room complete; and we assume, too, that the room
is connected by the usual hallways, doors, and roads to other places in the
story. But Manea’s fiction discourages this—there is no sense in it of a
complete world. Places are glanced at and quickly abandoned; characters appear
and disappear without explanation; events swim into the field of attention and
then vanish; and the connections between these things are rarely made explicit.
When objects snap into focus, they only add an antic surrealism—a cup of tea! a
gray raincoat! a lump of sugar!—to the general blur. Many postwar writers in
Eastern Europe, partly in an effort to evade censorship, departed from their
present reality to write historical allegories (such as the Polish writer Jerzy
Andrzejewski’s “The Inquisitors,” ostensibly an indictment of the Spanish
Inquisition) or fantasies of the future and the occult (Mircea Eliade, the late
Romanian scholar of myth and religion, also wrote several short stories about
the supernatural). Manea does neither, and yet it is as though he were doing
both at once: his present, his reality, is so uncanny, so imagined, that it
seems like an allegory of itself.
“Tolea is awake, has drifted off, asleep again, who knows,” Manea writes in his
novel “The Black Envelope”:
The city was in darkness. . . . Just some dim yellow blots in the distance. Sick
orbs of a sick city sunk in nightmares. . . .
Riotous, chaotic groans, a short green flame, cursing and alcohol. And again the
unlit silence and the hobnail boots rhythmically striking the asphalt. The
darkness grinds its teeth as rays of light suddenly spring up. Metal plate,
wheels, and screws are banged; there is a massive sickly noise of something
starting up. The monster moves off: its headlights sway in the thick black
ocean. The crippled truck lurches about and noisily fills the desert—a gigantic
deformed savage moving unsteadily forward, breaking up the darkness bit by bit.
The edge of a rusty roof. Thickets of rubbish. The handlebar of a bicycle.
The sense one gets is less of a real world than of a theatre set, in which a
single bed on a bare stage might signify a bedroom, or a tray of apples
indicates a market.
Manea is, in fact, obsessed with theatre—it is his metaphor of choice, in both
his stories and his essays, for the pretense and hypocrisy of life under
Communism. He is perpetually describing situations as performances or parodies
or masquerades, and people as masked, or as clowns. He refers continually to the
absurd, but the word sounds odd because there is only a desiccated, sarcastic
sort of humor in his writing—certainly none of the looniness of Ionesco’s
absurdist plays, or even the earthier comedy of Havel’s. Manea is not by nature
a satirist: he’s too moral, too despairing. It’s as though he had inherited the
trope—Communism is absurd—from other writers, but can’t summon up the confident
recklessness, or the joy, to make it work. Manea often calls himself a clown,
but he’s not convincing in the role. After he published a book titled “Auguste
the Fool’s Apprenticeship Years,” a friend said to him, “You are much too
serious. You are too ethical, and you are not playful enough. The image of . . .
the Fool doesn’t fit you at all.”
Shortly before Manea visited Romania, in 1997, for the first time since his
emigration—the “Hooligan’s Return” referred to in his memoir’s title—he had a
nightmare, one of many, about his mother. He dreamed that he and she were
walking together in Bucharest when suddenly she fell, grasping his arm, into an
open sewage pit in the road. “I could feel myself slipping,” he writes. “I
couldn’t hold on to the burden of her body swinging desperately above the void,
her thin, pale legs thrashing helplessly in the air. . . . I was being pulled
down by the bony clasp of the old hand into the black void.”
Benignly interpreted, the dream could be said to refer to his mother’s death,
nine years earlier. A little while before Manea emigrated, he went to see his
parents to say goodbye. He didn’t admit that he was leaving the country for
good, but his mother guessed, and she tried to extract from him a promise that
he would return to attend her funeral. Manea, always honest, said that he
couldn’t promise. She died two years later and, indeed, he did not return to see
her buried (his father didn’t tell him of her death until a month later, knowing
that if he came back he wouldn’t be allowed to leave). But such a simple sort of
guilt would not be in character. Manea refers to his mother in his memoir as
Mater Dolorosa and the velvet claw. Turbulent, adoring, manipulative, and
miserable, she exercised over him “the tyranny of affection, the unbearable
malady of the ghetto.” His mother, unlike the world, was always horribly real,
and she forced upon him all the repellent, clich?d, vulgar ghetto identities
that, in his work and his life, he took such pains to obscure.
Near the end of the book, Manea describes a recent visit to his father, now
senile and living in a nursing home in Jerusalem: entering his room, Manea sees
him standing, naked, at the window, staring vacantly while a young German
hospital volunteer washes feces off his body. But the scene is a short one
compared with the pages he spends describing his belated visit to his mother’s
grave in Romania. His father was, it seems, too reserved, too decent, too
genuinely detached from the world, to grip him. Precious unreality had to be
wrested from his mother. “Exile begins as soon as we leave the womb,” Manea
concludes, after he discovers, anticlimactically, that his return to Romania,
which he dreaded and avoided for years, has neither crippled nor freed him.
“Only death finally frees us from this final belonging,” he writes. “The return
to the homeland is but a return to the mother’s grave.”