I was only half listening to this meaningful anecdote. The noble sadness of his face, which I had seen in one of destiny’s moments, was haunting me. I can’t get used to life. Inside myself and from all around I could hear Berenger’s voice reading the author’s unforgettable face.
Translated by Liviu Bleoca, 2000
MADE IN ROMANIA
The last time I saw Saul Steinberg was a year ago, in February. I had invited him and his friend Prudence to dinner, along with two women friends of mine from Milan, a city to which he felt close. A few days later, to thank us, he sent my wife, Cella, and me a copy of a map of interwar Bucharest that Prudence had found in the New York Public Library.
The communication, as so often before, bore his unmistakable mark: the large white rectangular envelope had been folded in half, into a square; at the top left, the sender’s name, street, city, state, and zip code had been stamped in blue ink; at the top right, beneath a row of six 32-cent stamps showing the American flag, a label had been improvised out of what looked like sand-colored wrapping paper. On it the artist had drawn a box and written FIRST CLASS. In fact, the label had come from a roll of masking tape and matched two similar scraps at the bottom and the right of the square. The bottom half of the envelope was covered with six black lines of calligraphic handwriting, indicating the person and the address to which it was to be sent. It seemed a typical Steinberg collage.
The large-scale map folded inside the envelope was a black-andwhite photocopy. The gift was accompanied by a note: “Dragii mei, A map of Bucure
sti (NY Public Library) the center — enlarged. The map has no date, but from some signs, I can guess, it is 1924 ca. I’ve marked my Strada Palas, Liceul Matei Basarab, Circul Sidoli, etc. We both enjoyed the evening. Cu drag, Saul.” As usual, the body of the text was in English, but the salutation (“Dragii mei”—“My dear friends”) and the sign-off (“Cu drag”—“Affectionately”) were in Romanian. With a red pencil, he had drawn an arrow from his Strada Palas to Strada Rinocerului (Rhinoceros Street).
He also spoke to me on the phone about that map, in which he had located the magical Palas district of his childhood. He seemed deeply affected by the past — by the sonority of the old street names, to which his rumbling voice and wonder-filled annotations indeed restored a degree of exoticism and fascination. His voice took on musical inflections as he kept repeating the name Gentil 
, Gentil , a street close to the market that we both remembered well. Then more street names: Fetitelor (Young Girls), Gîndului (Thought), Gratioasa (Gracious), Zefirului (Zephyr), Visinelor (Sour Cherries), Parfumului (Perfume), Trifoiului (Clover). He said Gra
ioasa several times and continued with Dimineii (Morning), Stupinei (Apiary), Turturelelor (Turtle Doves).
He kept returning to the Palas district and wandering off to names he discovered with delight to be still in his memory or that he saw hypnotically for the first time. “Concordiei and right next to it, look, Discordiei. So … Concord and Discord! And here we have Trofeelor [Trophies], Oielor [Little Sheep], Olimpului [Olympus], Emancipata [Emancipated]. Listen, Emancipata! Isn’t it wonderful?” Emancipata. We were speaking English: he did not seem comfortable conversing in Romanian, but he liked to throw in a Romanian word here and there and savor it. Our discussions about Romania always confirmed an affectionate complicity of minds, but for me they were also a constant challenge to rethink the past with the fierceness and seriousness of despair that the past deserves.
Saul had wanted to accompany me on my 1997 trip to Romania. He thought himself too frail to undertake his long-postponed journey into the past alone and wanted the companionship of a much more recent émigré. Before I set off, he had sent me a copy of a map of Bucharest on which he had drawn a circle around the AntimJustitiei neighborhood. There were a few lines of explanation: “Apr 12, 97. Dear Norman, Here is my magic circle: Strada Palas off Antim — Strada Justitei crossing Calea Rahovei (now George Georgescu!). Cella had told me that nothing remains — but have a look if you have the time. Bon voyage. Cu drag, Saul.”
Saul told me that he went instead to Milan, the city of his youth, which he thought would serve as a “safer” and less overwhelming substitute for present-day Romania. He did not return, it seemed, any happier than I did from Bucharest. He had found not the city of his youth but a vulgar and noisy place that not even his small, expensive, and well-situated hotel could render more appealing.
In the spring of 1999, weighed down by the difficulties of writing A Hooligan’s Return, about my trip to Romania, I thought that Saul’s memories, with their inimitable blend of the sardonic and the emotional, might help me find the right tone for an over-complicated subject. Even at the time of my trip I sometimes saw him as an essential figure in the exile’s dilemma, helped in his difficult adaptation to new places and codes by the resentments that his native land had bred in him, yet constantly troubled by the memory of his magical initiation into existence in the old place, in childhood.
Our first real conversation had taken place some seven years previously. It was more of a conflict, in fact. New to America at the time, I was invited — and even went — to a number of parties in luxurious houses where the artistic elite of the city of my shipwreck gathered. We had already been introduced to each other a few times on such occasions, but we had never done more than exchange a conventional word or two. The short gentleman with a bald patch, glasses, and a mustache was simply dressed yet with a touch of eccentricity, whether in the color of his muffler or the shape of his hat. My hosts presented me to him as a “Romanian,” thinking that this would make me more to his liking, but not surprisingly it appeared to have the opposite effect. He reminded me of Tudor Arghezi, a prominent Romanian poet of the interwar period, who had had an enviably long creative life. It was not just Steinberg’s morose air, chary of words, but the boredom he displayed so readily at the approach of strangers — and, more than once, in the face of people familiar to him.
The sardonic Arghezi would probably have liked Saul’s drawings of crocodiles: not only the type that stays alive by feeding on itself and digesting its own tail, but also another type — or the same — placed in the service of the symbolic as well. That crocodile bites with sawteeth into the cry “HELP,” inscribed on an abstract baguette loaf. The despairing man’s cry is the link with the assailant who has seized him as prey. “The vulnerable part of the man in danger,” Saul writes, “is the cry for help, which is the part by which the crocodile holds him and which has the function of an appetizer. What do I want to say? That he who cries his terror becomes the victim of his statement.” Skeptical and sometimes cynical to an extent that intrigued conversational partners, Saul guarded his vulnerability, avoiding confession and complaint alike.