Norman Manea - Compulsory Happiness

“Sooner or later, everybody winds up giving in to temptation. Who knows where my husband will be posted tomorrow, so why shouldn’t we take advantage and pick up a few trifles in the meantime?”

Just when Carmen was about to make it clear that “we” meant herself and her friends, she heard Geta Sugar Candy twittering, “ ‘Rade Carmen, telephone!”

Hefty but light on her feet, Carmen Petroianu was in no time reaching for the receiver, signaling to Ina that she would be back shortly.

The conversation was brief, as was the explanation offered to Ina. “The bosses want to see me. With any luck, it won’t take too long.”

Comrade Scarlat looked up abruptly from his accounts. After Auntie Petroianu had left the room, he hurried over to the phone. It was after noon; the lines became very busy as the day wore on. So Mr. Victor, sir, was going to try again — for the fourth time! Well, how about that: little Scarlat was just full of surprises today.

“Hello, Scarlat speaking. Is he there?” He didn’t slam down the receiver this time, but replaced it carefully in its cradle. Now Mr. Victor was really ticked off. He returned slowly to his desk, looking most annoyed.

It will become harder and harder to determine whether the young protagonist of the Thursday conferences has been a constant influence during these weeks of preliminary discussions. Because of this uncertainty, no one will be able to state positively that the young man’s remarks have indeed determined the direction matters will take. And nobody will say how young this ageless old-young man was.

Imperceptibly at first, then more and more clearly, these discussions will begin to focus less on the future than on the present and the past — a surprising development, given the nature of the institute in question.

One could maintain that this unforeseen reorientation is due to the young man’s interventions. The initial criticism of certain conjectures and approaches bearing no firm connection to the “working data,” namely, the “human element,” that is to say, “the constituent factors” or “the collective biography” or the “meaningful coefficients”—this critique might, of course, have been made by him. It might just as well have been offered by some other speaker, or represent a synthesis of several viewpoints. The temptation to attribute such a major revision of the investigative process to this seemingly youthful participant would stem from the interest aroused by both his startling appearance and his unexpected, cogent, and always convincing remarks.

In the end, it won’t much matter who set this course for the group’s future research, and how it was done. Not many weeks would pass before the collaboration of the participants would foster a receptive familiarity, a frank exchange of opinions, reconciled by the conclusion that before seeking to envisage the future, one must know who will help to shape it. Only then can one attempt to define this impact … The future would thus belong to the present, and to the recent past that has formed us. There will be unanimous agreement on this point, for only on this basis will the necessary controversies be free to flourish.

Many of these meetings will be spent trying to define the requisite terminology. The audience will frequently linger late into the night, wandering through the nebula of those peripheral sequences called parables — a psychological test, sociological statistic, criminal trial, or case history offered for consideration by one or another of the participants.

One might mention, for example, that July evening when the subject under discussion (“The Pleasure and Quality of Work”) will be illustrated by a vignette presenting the image of a world mired in a syndrome of generalized renunciation, referred to by the speaker as “the fed-up syndrome.” Offered as proof will be whole groups of people who retire at an early age — a psychosis of mysterious evolution affecting quite diversified professional categories: construction workers, airline pilots, circus acrobats … Early retirement, motivated by the most unpredictable reasons, will spread slowly but surely to the bureaucracy and the military, finally paralyzing the health sector itself and leading to catastrophic peacetime annihilation. Sudden outbreaks of violence, rapidly subsiding without outside intervention into tacit lulls, will reappear periodically — new and paradoxical explosions of seemingly extinguished but still smoldering despair. Simulated behavior, the discrimination of values, sexual oppression, parochialism, duplicity, data distortions, the half-truth as slogan and motivational factor — these are only a few of the topics that will mobilize strongly divergent opinions.

On September 26, for example, the Thursday session will be held at a psychiatric hospital, where the participants will be astonished at the good sense often displayed by the patients in their remarks. This challenge to any strict demarcation between mental health and insanity will suggest that illness be viewed as a more profound, subtle, authentic way to perceive reality. Would the afflicted actually be more adept at coping with unforeseen circumstances? Would so-called healthy minds be the cynical and indifferent mechanisms of a self-regulating routinism?

On other evenings, the subject of debate will be the quality of life; namely, the quality of shoes, bread, printing ink, books, movies, buses, hotels, prisons, tobacco, wine, perfume, the daily life of the average citizen., Other topics — not necessarily the most important — will be broached as well, such as suspicion and surveillance, sports as therapy and diversion, the lottery and ideology, the management and manipulation of discontent, the loss of quality in food and its increasing scarcity, heart attacks and the oil crisis, communal apartments, the manager-typist-chauffeur relationship, heart attacks and the oil crisis. On October 9, the Thursday speaker will read a paper entitled “The Synopsis of Captive Happiness: A Day in the Life of a Working Woman.”

This excessive emphasis on details and preliminary activities that would delay work on the project itself will finally be abruptly brought under control by the comrade director, who will probably have to report to his superiors who initiated this strange trap.

The participants will therefore proceed to individual briefings, the setting up of schedules, work groups, and inter-group meetings.

And only then will they realize that nothing was left to chance in the selection of their fellow workers. The plenary sessions will prove all the more interesting, since the delegates’ diversity of background and interests will be reflected in their wide range of remarks and confessions.

II.1.

In september of 1945, a skinny, nearsighted young man set out for the big city, determined never to return to the drab provincial town where he was born. He intended to join the Foreign Legion …

The train to Bucharest left at noon. The young man had forbidden his parents to accompany him to the station. Which meant, quite obviously, his elderly mother, since it would never have occurred to his father to be so foolish as to leave work in the middle of the day. His mother, however, seemed truly crushed by the absolute intransigence of her taciturn only son, who had obstinately refused to listen to her tirades and supplications and wouldn’t even let her go with him to the station. How could God have done this to her? She’d never see her boy again. That was all she could understand of the laconic explanations her darling condescended to grumble now and then. The Evil One had turned his head! Why did it have to be this way, why didn’t she have the right to show how she was suffering? Poor woman, it was all quite beyond her.