Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

And what about his favored black Labrador? Born in England as Sir Gladstone and renamed, for the circus, Comrade Corbul (Raven), eating royally, nourished with British dog biscuits sent weekly by the circus ambassador in London — whose main diplomatic task, in fact, this is. The dog enjoys the rank of the highest officer in the circus hierarchy, but his importance is much greater than that of any general, admiral, or spymaster in the circus army and police. 5

“White Clowns have always competed amongst themselves in the magnificence of their costumes,” says Fellini. There was a very famous clown, Theodore, who “appeared in a new costume every day.” So does our national clown, but vanity alone does not explain the tremendous effort this takes: fear plays a part in it. The outfit for dinner, the outfit for a working visit to the provinces, the one for important meetings, and the one for secret negotiations — each and every one of the clown’s costumes is a matter of national importance. A special detachment of the Securitate is responsible for the clown’s daily sartorial and nutritional needs, for a complete daily change of clothes, from socks and handkerchief to shoes and headgear. Daily, all this is delivered from a special outfitter’s; every day, a special laboratory analyzes food ingredients and compiles the perfect menu, while also examining the excretions of the most beloved’s alimentary tract. Special commandos check his office, his bedroom, his fountain pen, and his toilet for radiation, just in case some subversive agent, bent on saving the tyrant’s subjects, has managed to contaminate a suit, a dish, a chair. At the end of the day, the articles of clothing are stamped with red and green ink (the colors of the Romanian extreme left and right) and taken to be incinerated in the presidential crematorium, which, like the special outfitter and the special laboratory for nutrition and excretion analysis, is part of the gigantic, multifaceted security organization of the great circus.

“The White Clown,” says Fellini, “likes to slap people in the face.” Our sadistic national clown has proscribed food, light, heat, and travel. He has destroyed churches and archives.

Father, mother, schoolmaster? The White Clown as an embodiment of the Ideal, a Knight of Utopia? An implacable visionary of the future, indifferent to the horrors of the transient present, focused only on what must be done? “Icily authoritarian, like certain nuns in charge of kindergartens”?

Some fifteen years ago I made the acquaintance of a doctor who had, in the days when the Communist Party was outlawed (1923–44), shared a prison cell with our great clown. I was curious to hear an opinion of him from a man who had been in a position to observe him close up, and daily, as just another cog in the isolated and doom-laden machinery of prison. This was it: “I judged these people according to the simplest possible criterion: I tried to imagine what tasks I would give them in my clinic. There was one I might use as an administrator, another who’d do as a driver, cashier, or night watchman. A few could have acquired the skills of a laboratory technician or equipment monitor. But this one … no, he couldn’t have managed any practical task. He had never done any real work, did not have a craft, would never be able to learn anything. All he could do was make speeches. And boss others around. I couldn’t have used him, not even as a night watchman.” What the doctor could not explain was why these people, as he called his former comrades, now the “new class,” were once his soulmates, and why he allowed this one to be his political instructor with such crass disregard of the criterion of normality one would have expected from an intelligent, honest, and courageous physician.

Elementary school children in uniforms with lapel pins. The Pioneer salute. The anthem. The Leader …. Families crammed Families crammed into block housing under the control of a “block guard” installed by the “organs of order and surveillance.” Entire city blocks of magnificent villas and one-family houses bulldozed to make room for standardized boxes in which the inhabitants can more efficiently be ordered about and watched. A gigantic program designed to destroy villages in order to transform agriculture into “agro-industrial complexes” and to “eliminate the distinctions between city and country” to turn farmers into wage slaves, their families boxed into human hives, above, below, and next to each other.

And all women, in both city and country, obliged to submit to regular gynecological examinations to make sure no pregnant woman dares try to deprive the all-owning state of a future subject. And the old ones sent to special reservations where they have to grow vegetables and clean out stables. And the extermination of dogs and cats, to ensure the uninterrupted sleep of the “working population.” And in the earpiece of every telephone a tiny electronic cockroach, to enable the state to document and scientifically “care for” its victims.

Order, as much as possible, and the greatest possible degree of discipline. Maximal surveillance (a genuine world record: one fully employed police officer for every fifteen citizens and, for every police officer, fifteen “volunteer” informers). All this to make sure no undeserving member of the remainder of the populace can fall through the mesh of this gigantic net and divulge some secret of the state: the name of his factory, the measurement of pickle jars, the formula for the atomic bomb, the number of public urinals per city district, the clown’s nickname, the holding capacity of the loony bins, the map of the country, the technology for the manufacture of sewing thread. And to make sure that no foreigner can discover the secrets of our paradisiacal circus: it is one’s honorable duty to avoid all contact with them.

Everything has to do with him, and his favorite word is everything. We shall do everything, everything, everything, he barks in a hoarse monotone. To ensure the continuous growth of the leading role … the uninterrupted growth of the leading role … ever more highly developed discipline … and relentless continuous growth of the leading role of the Leader.

Years ago, a friend of mine who’d been living on the outskirts of the city wanted to move to the center. She had found a small apartment for sale on the Calea Victoriei. When it was time to do the paperwork, she found she needed a special permit because her windows faced the street and the Calea Victoriei was one of the main arteries the nation’s clown chose for the morning drive to his office in the Central Committee Building, where he would work hard at governing from eight sharp in the morning until eight sharp at night, then return via another artery to the presidential villa. These were sacred streets.

Order, as much order as possible, and vigilance, uninterrupted vigilance, so that nothing could spoil his mood, cause him to become ill, or, above all, bring about the long-anticipated, fatal, liberating accident.

The most valuable resource is the human being, that is: he. A specimen like him, according to the calculations of the presidential astrologers, occurs only once in five hundred years. This justifies the pains taken over his nutrition, his excretions, his weaponry, the 365 pairs of pants and underpants, socks, pajamas, and nightcaps, the 365 pairs of shoes and slippers.

Then there is the photographer, the barber, the masseur, the cosmetician. There are the bodyguards and the stand-ins, and the interpreters for the 364 languages of the globe, of which he doesn’t know a single one. The information and disinformation, radiation and counter-radiation. The portable toilet, the invisible shower. The noiseless pistol. All in the service of the country’s only productive institution: the cult of the clown. And there is, of course, his Pussycat.