The Hooligan's Return (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Norman Manea

Author:Norman Manea
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

The Night Shift

In the early 1960s, I was busy building apartment blocks in the center of Ploiesti. I suppose the nine-story edifice, the so-called Pergola Block, next to the covered market, is still standing, one of the mitigations for my sin of not having had children or for having written ephemeral books.

The quick pace of Ploieşti came as a shock to the slow-moving Buko-vinan that I was, even after my years in Bucharest as a student. A more senior engineer had warned me to “keep a close eye” on people’s movements at the building site. “You can wake up one morning and find that there are fifty bags of cement missing, or that you’ve signed for twenty loads of concrete more than you actually received, or that you’ve been supplied with only half the amount of brick mentioned in the invoice.” What he hadn’t told me, though, was how I could become a good policeman, when I was not even sure if I was a good engineer.

Before working on the Pergola Block, then the tallest building in the new town center, I had done my apprenticeship with the L-Block, which stood on the opposite side of the market and was only four stories high. As the youngest of the site’s engineers, I had been assigned to the night shift. So, from six in the evening till dawn, I worked not only with the regular construction crew but also with a group of prisoners. The contract with the local penitentiary, regarding the number of workers, the skills required, the working hours and days, and the payment due by the Building Trust, had been signed by the prison’s commanding officer, Major Drăghici, brother of the feared Minister of the Interior and member of the Politbureau.

If, in my early days at the university in 1954, I had practically fainted at my first encounter with the eggplant and the cucumber concoctions in the student canteen, what was I supposed to do at the sight of prisoners and guards? In fact, nothing happened. I did not faint as I saw the prisoners, in their drab uniforms, being brought in by the guards, just as I had not fainted at Periprava in 1958, seeing my father, in his dun-colored prison garb, being watched by guards. I turned pale and speechless, as I had done before, but I did not faint. In any case, contact with the inmates was to be kept to a strict minimum, and I was only allowed to deal, in the guard’s presence, with their foreman, himself a former construction worker. Moreover, the inmates and their guards were restricted to specific areas of the building site. I had asked the boss if there were any political detainees among the prisoners and was assured that the crew contained only “common criminals.” I knew very well, from my own family history, that this designation was as little to be believed as any other in the farcical socialist lexicon.

The inmates were given a chance to reduce

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