The Hooligan's Return Read online

  Jormania

  The figure of Officer Portofino came back to me as soon as I left Barney Greengrass’s. The wide face, languid gaze, neatly combed hair, small hands, small feet, amiable smile. A short, frail man in a dark blue suit and blue tie.

  He hastened to tell me, almost as soon as we met, that he had been a chemistry teacher in a high school before he switched to his current profession. His square-cut clothes reminded me of the Romanian Securitate officers, yet his manner was affable, respectful, with no trace of the socialist policeman’s slyness or rudeness. He seemed to want to protect you rather than intimidate you or recruit you with the devious manipulations of a socialist cop.

  In fact, he did not offer me protection, no bulletproof vest or plainclothes man, not even the instantly blinding spray recommended to unaccompanied ladies. Instead, he gave me moderate and friendly advice, as sensible as a grandmother’s. I should try to identify faces that looked familiar in the street, constantly change my walking routes and the time I went out to buy my newspaper; I should not open suspicious-looking letters. He did not even recommend that I should “lie low,” the customary advice in such situations. He did give me his card with his home phone number for emergencies. My self-absorption and carelessness in social situations remained the same, however, in spite of the talisman with which he had endowed me. But my nervousness and anxiety increased.

  The reason for my meeting with Officer Jimmy Portofino was my New Republic essay. Discussing Eliade’s so-called felix culpa, his “happy guilt”—that is, his relations in the 1930s with the fascistic Iron Guard, which has sympathizers even today in both Romania and America — the article touched on a dangerous topic. The administration of Bard College, where I was teaching, had asked for FBI protection for its own Romanian professor.

  About a year after the cessation of the FBI protection, I received an anonymous letter from Canada. The handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar, but graphology is not my specialty. Inside, I found a picture postcard with no message. I discarded the envelope but kept the postcard — a reproduction of Marc Chagall’s The Martyr, in the collection of the Kunsthaus in Zurich, a Judaic variant of the Crucifixion, it would seem. Instead of being nailed to a cross, the martyr’s arms and feet are bound to a stake, in the center of a burned-out market town, with the supporting players in the drama — the mother, the fiddler, the rabbi, and his disciples — in the foreground. The face of the young Jewish Christ, with beard and side curls, bespeaks the image of a pogrom — not the Holocaust, whose unspeakable horrors are fast being turned into cliché. The East European pogroms had their own terrors. I did not know how to decode the message. I kept the postcard on my desk.

  Six years went by. I had not been threatened or assassinated, but I saw a continuity rather than a contradiction between the invectives—“anti-party,” “extraterritorial,” “cosmopolitan”—with which the Romanian Communist press had honored me prior to 1989 and the post-Communist epithets—“traitor,” “the dwarf from Jerusalem,” “American agent.” Could this be the reason I did not deem myself capable of returning to the motherland, even for a visit?

  After saying goodbye to Philip, I returned to the bench in front of Ottomanelli’s where, one hour earlier, the past had come for me. Would it have been easier to explain things to the American policeman? At least he would not have had difficulties with the Culianu story: the bullet fired at close range from the adjacent toilet stall; the gun, a small Beretta.25, held in the gloveless left hand of the killer, probably not an American. The lethal wound, “occipital area of the head, four and a half inches below the top of the head and one-half of an inch to the right of the external occipital tubical.” Professional killer, execution-style killing; location, toilet stall; time, the Eastern Orthodox feast of Saints Constantine and Helena, the name day of loan Petru Culianu’s mother. Would Jimmy Portofino remember the murdered man’s face, instantly rendered older, as if death had suddenly added twenty years to his actual age? The American police were familiar with the Chicago-based Romanian sympathizers of the notorious Iron Guard. They knew that the granddaughter of its charismatic leader, “Captain” Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, had sought refuge there at some point and that the old Alexander Ronett, Eliade’s doctor and a fervent Legionnaire, also lived there. Suspicions had focused on the Romanian Securitate and its connections with the Chicago Legionnaires. The police were equally familiar with Culianu’s biography. His dossier probably also contained the letter in which he expressed his regret that his veneration for Mircea Eliade had turned him into an uncritical disciple. Was Culianu the novice ready to commit parricide? He had admitted that the mentor “was closer to the Iron Guard than I liked to think.” His appearance by the side of the former King Michael had certainly not endeared him to the Romanian agents of the Securitate, nor did his plans for marrying a Jewish woman and converting to Judaism. In the year before his death, Culianu had condemned the “terrorist fundamentalism” of the Iron Guard, as well as vilifying the Communist secret police, Romanian Communism in general, and the nationalistic trends in Romanian culture.

  What did the American police know about the murdered professor’s delvings into magic, premonition, ecstatic experiences, parapsychology? What did they know of the reaction to his assassination among the nationalists in Romania? “The worst crime, in the case of that refugee in the gangster megalopolis of Chicago, was the nauseating apologia dedicated to that piece of excrement over whom not enough water was flushed in the fatal toilet prepared for him as if by destiny,” wrote Romania Mare. This was a weekly paper that had not hesitated to heap abuse on me after 1989, but also before, under the Communist regime, when, under the name Sãptãmína, it had acted as a kind of cultural mouthpiece of the Securitate. Was Officer Portofino aware that unsolicited issues of Romania Mare carrying praise for Culianu’s murder had been received by most American institutions and organizations dealing with Eastern Europe? Sent by the same Securitate, perhaps?

  Should I describe for Officer Portofino, now, before returning to the motherland, the postcard with Chagall’s Martyr, that son of the ghetto, his body wrapped in the devotional prayer shawl, white with black stripes? Neither the arms nor the feet were bound with rope, as I had initially thought, but rather with the thin straps of the phylacteries. Outlined against the sky of smoke and fire were the purple goat and the golden cock; by the side of the pyre stood the mother or the betrothed, the fiddler, the old man with the book. Was the postcard a threat or a sign of solidarity? I am no renegade, Mr. Portofino, nor a convert, and therefore, I cannot disappoint those who, in any case, expect nothing from someone like me.

  Would Officer Portofino be interested in the fears Culianu and I shared about returning to the motherland? Yes, Culianu had apprehensions over the idea of returning to the country that had become his homeland two hundred and fifty years earlier, when his Greek ancestors had found refuge there from Ottoman persecution. The Romania he had loved, in whose language he had been educated, had gradually become Jormania. He had described it thus in two quasi-fantastic short tales vaguely influenced by Borges. In the first tale, the Maculist Empire of the Soviet Union collaborated with the spies of Jormania to assassinate the local dictator and his wife, Comrade Mortu — Comrade Death — thus founding a banana republic-style “democracy” of pornography and execution squads.

  The second tale was a reading of post-1989 realities disguised as a fictional review of a fictional book of memoirs by a fictional author, which described the false revolution, followed by the false transition to a false democracy, the get-rich-quick schemes of the former Securitate agents, the shady murders, the corruption, the demagoguery, the alliance of the former Communists with the Wooden Guard, the new extreme-right movement. The fictional memoirs of the fictional witness also describe the false trial and rapid execution of the dictator and of Madame Mortu, the coup d’état, the funerals of the false martyrs, the “cheating” of the people. The new ruler, Mister President, the murderer of his predecess
or, Comrade President, commented on the situation with the traditional native sense of humor: “Well, isn’t this the essential role of the people?” To be cheated, that is.

  Yes, Officer Portofino. You are right. It was not any supernatural force but Jormania — the one in the Balkans or the one in Chicago — that had prevented Culianu from ever seeing his native land again. But what about friends, and books, and love; what about the shared jokes and songs, what is their place and who can afford to ignore them? And what about the mothers who gave birth to us, our real motherlands? Can all this become one day, purely and simply, the land of the Legionnaires, or Communist Jormania? Anywhere and at any time, can’t they, Jimmy, can’t they?

  Like Culianu himself, I had grown tired of scrutinizing the homeland’s contradictions. My past was different, and it was not the gun from Bucharest that I feared. I was afraid of the knot of entanglements from which I had not yet extricated myself.

  None of the pedestrians passing in front of Ottomanelli’s looked like my guardian angel from the FBI, and I did not miss him. No, Officer Portofino would certainly not be able to interpret Chagall’s pyre for me. In fact, Officer Portofino was not the person I was waiting for on that bench where I had been sitting, petrified, for a long time.

  The woman I was waiting for, my would-be interlocutor, knew more about me than I did. She would not need any explanations. Would she remember the slim volume from my grandfather’s bookstore of sixty-two years ago?

  Her cousin, the young Ariel, the bohemian rebel, with his hair dyed red and his jet-black gaze, would read to those assembled around the counter from that booklet, with its pink covers, How I Became a Hooligan, as if it were a handbook for hypnosis. His cousin, the bookseller’s daughter, was turning the pages feverishly. The same comment recurred, a single word: Departure! Insistent, vehement, firmly articulated, it sounded like Revolution, or Salvation, or Rebirth. “Now, immediately, while we can: Departure!” From time to time, Ariel turned the book over, staring with a mocking expression at the author’s name on the cover: “Sebastian! Mr. Hechter, alias Sebastian!” No, the premise of my journey was not Culianu but another dead man, another friend of Mircea Eliade, from a different period: Mihail Sebastian, the writer I mentioned over breakfast at Barney Greengrass’s, whose Journal: 1935–1944, written more than half a century earlier, had just been published in Bucharest. But this posthumous book could not be placed alongside the former ones on those bookshelves of the past. The bookstore was no longer there, and neither was my grandfather or his nephew Ariel. But my mother, no longer there either, would surely remember the “Sebastian Affair.” My mother had a perfect memory; she must have it still wherever she is now, I have no doubt about that.

  That old, boring, and everlasting anti-Semitism, of which pre-fascist Jormania was a textbook case, seemed to Sebastian to be located merely “on the periphery of suffering.” He condescended to register “outer adversity” as rudimentary and minor, compared to the ardent “inner adversity” that, so he said, assails a Jew’s soul. “No people has more ruthlessly confessed to its real or imagined sins; no one has kept stricter watch on himself more severely. The biblical prophets are the fieriest voices on earth.” These words were written in 1935, when outer adversities had already begun to announce the devastation to follow. “The periphery of our suffering!” Ariel, my mother’s cousin and my grandfather’s nephew, shouted indignantly, in that small bookstore in Jormania in 1935, the year before my birth. “Is this Mr. Sebastian’s teaching? The periphery of our suffering? He should speak for himself! He’ll soon see what this ‘periphery’ is about!”

  One year earlier in 1934, Sebastian had had to face the scandal that followed the publication of his novel De doua mit de ani (Two Thousand Tears), with a preface written by Nae Ionescu, his tutor and friend, who had become the ideologue of the Iron Guard. The author of the preface regarded the Jew as the irreducible enemy of the Christian world and, as such, one that had to be eliminated.

  Attacked from all sides by Christians, Jews, liberals, and extremists alike, Sebastian had responded with a sparkling essay, How I Became a Hooligan. In a sober and precise tone, he candidly reaffirmed the “spiritual autonomy” of Jewish suffering, its “tragic nerve,” the dispute between a “tumultuous sensibility” and a “merciless critical spirit,” between “intelligence at its coolest and passion at its most unbridled.” A hooligan? Did that mean marginal, nonaligned, excluded? “A Jew from the Danube,” as he called himself with some delight. He defined himself clearly: “I am not a partisan, I am always a dissident. I can trust only the individual man, but my trust in him is complete.” What does being a “dissident” mean? Someone dissenting even from dissidents?

  As my mother knew only too well, such childish mind games were part of my nature. It was the same when I indulged in the urgent need to leave the ghetto. Did I expect to find on the other side friends with extended arms rather than the comedy of more ghettos? One becomes tired of oneself, as Sebastian said. My mother felt no need to define her “belonging.” She lived it purely and simply, with that fatalistic faith that does not exclude anguish or depression. “We are we and they are they,” she would say. “We have no reason to feel enmity toward them, or to expect gifts from them. Neither can we forget their horrors, can we?”

  The hysterical reaction with which I responded to such clichés, at the ages of thirteen, twenty-three, thirty-three, and ever since, never moderated her tenacity. Character is fate, the ancient Greeks said, and I was witness to this daily, in the neurotic matriarchy of my immediate surroundings, as well as in the collective “identity.”

  The departure, yes, Ariel had been right. Time would eventually convince me as well. This is what you kept repeating, Mother, time would force me to admit my error and pack up to leave, but that would not be until much later. “It will be late and it will be evening,” as the poet said, “and you will leave this place, you’ll see.”

  Are poets more prescient than prophets? Sebastian’s Journal, published in 1997, half a century after its author’s death, describes the “adversities” that come from friends turned foes. “An anguished evening … obscure threats: as if the door isn’t shut properly, as if the walls themselves are becoming translucent. Everywhere, at any moment, it is possible that some unspecified dangers will pounce from outside.”

  I had finally left, feeling guilty for not having done so earlier, feeling guilty for having finally done it. In 1934, Sebastian’s alter ego declared: “I would like to know what anti-Semitic laws could cancel the fact that I was born on the Danube and love this land … Against my Jewish taste for inner catastrophe, the river asserted the example of its regal indifference.” In 1943, the writer wondered: “Will I ever come back among these people? Will the war have passed without breaking anything, without bringing about anything irrevocable, anything irreducible?” At the end of the war, Hechter-Sebastian was finally getting ready to leave “eternal Romania, where nothing ever changes.” The Judaic taste for catastrophe seemed easier to cure on the shores of the Hudson than on the banks of the Danube.

  Death had prevented Culianu from returning to Romania and Sebastian from leaving it. With me, death, that nymphomaniac, had adopted a different game: she offered me the privilege of a voyage to my own posterity.

  It was not only the Danube that provided the setting for the biography that had to be left behind; Bukovina, my native province, could serve equally well. Language, landscapes, stages of life are not automatically annulled by outer adversities. The love for Bukovina, however, does not annul Jormania. Where exactly was the borderline that united and divided Jormania and Romania? “Nothing is serious, nothing grave, nothing is true in this culture of smiling lampoonists. Above all, nothing is incompatible”—these are Sebastian’s statements to which loan Petru Culianu himself would have subscribed. “Here is a concept that is totally absent in our public life at all levels: incompatibility,” Ariel, my mother’s young and fervent cousin, used to say a long time ago
. “Incompatibility is unknown in the lands of the Danube.” I could have said this myself, entrapped as I was, like so many others, by the dilemmas of the old-new impasses. Outer adversities? I had received my initiation into such banalities at a very early age. As for the hostile campaigns of more recent years, when one is under siege, it is not easy to avoid narcissistic suspicions, or pathetic masochism. Again, a victim? The idea exasperated me, I must admit. Oh, not again, the whinings and jeremiads of the victim, especially now, when all and sundry are claiming their own threadbare badge of victimhood — men, women, bisexuals, Buddhists, the obese, cyclists …

  But the mask was now glued to my face — the classic public enemy, the Other. I had always been an “other,” consciously or not, unmasked or not, even when I could not identify with my mother’s ghetto or any other ghetto of identity. Outer adversities can overlap with inner adversities, and with the fatigue of being oneself. Without shadow or identity, should I go out only after dark? If I did that, it would be easier to engage in the dialogue with the dead who are claiming me.

  The Circus Arena of Augustus the Fool

  What is the loneliness of the poet?” the young Paul Celan, my fellow Bukovinan, was asked more than a century ago, just after the war. “A circus routine that has not yet been announced,” he answered.

  Circus clowns — this is how I saw myself and my writer friends, as we engaged in the skirmishes of daily existence. Our situation could be described as that of Augustus the Fool, as old Hartung nicknamed his painter son Hans. He was alluding to the inner nature of the artist, ill equipped for everyday life, a bungler who dreams of other rules and rewards, and looks for solitary compensations for the role he has been saddled with whether he likes it or not. Inevitably, Augustus the Fool comes up against his opposite, the White Clown, the representative of power and authority. These two prototypes in the history of the circus may personify the two sides of History; all human tragedy may be seen in this encounter in the history of the circus as History.