NORMAN MANEA
Berenger at Bard
I
N
THE
FALL
of
I9 89,
at Bard College, I started a course entitled
"Eastern European Writers." I had selected mostly authors who,
like me, were exiles: Milosz, Koestler, Kundera, Danilo Kis, Ionesco.
I was thus trying to liberate myself from the confusion of the oriental–
communist degeneracy (whose imminent implosion I, in fact, did not
foresee) and still remain connected to my distant homeland.
THE BESIEGED
MAN
had finally escaped from the Colony of Rhino. He
had finally got tired of shouting by himself, crouched in the cell of his
room and deafened by the trampling of the street guards:
"I will resist,
I will not surrender! It's my duty! I will stay that way to the end, no
matter what, to the very end!"
He had finally run from the black wind of disaster, he had not
resisted. The big words had fled too, as guilty as he. The prisoner did
not prove to be a "superior" man, as he had dreamt of being. He was
just a poor lost man, too attached to petty survival.
The passage from the state of contraction in Rhinoromania of the
ninth decade to the state of expansion on the great stage of the free Car–
nival had not been easy. The liberating shipwreck had also been a siege
fraught with doubts and anguish.
In
I989,
the transitional passage suddenly unfolded into bracing sun–
shine, under a clear and fresh sky.
July
9, I989
was a glorious day in the wanderer's calendar. The small
brown Honda, battered and tenacious, drove heroically through the
gate of the American college-a paradisal enclave of trees and flowers
and small houses in which teachers and students were practicing the tra–
ditional didactic Glass Bead game.
Editor's Note: This text first appeared in
Transilvanian Review
(Cluj,
Romania) for the ninetieth anniversary of Ionesco's birth.
