The Old Man and The Bureaucrats by Mircea Eliade In the original: Pe Strada Mantuleasa

 The Old Man and The Bureaucrats by Mircea Eliade

In the original: Pe Strada Mantuleasa

 

This is an outlandish work, which has reminded me of Big Fish and Once Upon A Time in America, which are oddly enough, two American movies. Like in Big Fish, we have magic, a giant; even if in Mantuleasa the giant is a woman, extraordinary tales and an intriguing blend of surreal and (perhaps) real events.

The premise of the book is rather plain, somewhat like you are taken into a spaceship, but you start on a backstreet, with someone walking a dog.

Someone is moving into a new house and a professor happens to be nearby. He learns that the one who is about to change address is a former pupil. The professor tries to get in contact with this old acquaintance and to talk to him. At a different stage, this brought to my mind images from Once upon a Time In America, with Robert de Niro in his good old days. First of all, there are suggestions which make us think that the stories are just part of a dream, both in Mantuleasa and Once Upon a Time… then, the number of stories is impressive- much bigger in Mantuleasa, but even the movie had a long thread, lasting more than three hours, if I remember well.

The major is not happy with the meeting. In fact, he claims he is not the pupil in question, has no idea who the teacher is and…

-           What do you want from me, I am a comrade not mister, get out of here!

The rude man is getting us into the atmosphere of a post war country, occupied by the Soviets, who have brought with their tanks a plague that will be remembered for a long time and even worse, will make its effects felt for decades, maybe even more than a century.

At that time one was afraid of any stranger who might compromise one’s “dossier”. Even worse if it was someone from the past, who could reveal damaging information, that could send an innocent or guilty party to a communist jail.

Mircea Eliade was an authority on religions. He introduces magic stories, folk tales and myths. There is a giant woman called Oana, a magician, a man who had disappeared in Russia, only to come back later (perhaps), fortune tellers predict…the future.

The authorities get interested in the professor and his recollections. The weird and to me unbelievable side is that some of the communist leaders begin to like the sagas and want to hear them for their own sake…

I understood when they had interrogated the teacher to learn about the fate of some people who could be in key positions, leading the country, but to see them romanticize and enjoy the narrative for the literary pleasures seems a bit farfetched. For me, communists are ruthless brutes, maniacs who deserve punishment or treatment at the very least. Another perspective can indeed insist upon the fact that they too are human beings.

My life has been irremediably affected by communists and I have very little empathy for any of them, stupid believers in what they call “noble ideas” or plain crooks.

This on personal note, but if we think of the tens of millions of people killed by the soviets and then the Chinese, we get the picture.

Coming back to the Mantuleasa story, I must admit that it is a puzzle for me.

I am not even sure what to rate it- three, or maybe four stars?

On one hand, there are a multitude of interesting pieces- the giant woman, the man who learns Hebrew, trying to understand where the arrow went, then the disappearance of Darvari and Lixandru, the return of some of the personages in key positions in the communist hierarchy.

But on the other hand, communist characters have always turned me off. Then the many interesting tales turn into a disadvantage: the whole seems patched up of too many pieces, with too little to hold them together- from where I look at it.

In the adaptation for Romanian Radio, George Constantin plays a small part, and that kept me interested to the very end.