Norman Manea - Compulsory Happiness

The words were accumulating rather slowly, just a few lines a day. And now she’d finally managed to fill two pages in a notebook, which she reread frequently, without enthusiasm.

“I was still in school when I got to invite my Swiss friend, Yvonne, daughter of a comrade, of course, to visit me over the holidays — one of the many special favors I enjoyed, thanks to Comrade Dad. I was all starry-eyed, as you can imagine, with shyness and admiration for the frail Yvonne … To me she seemed magical, like a fairytale princess, from that paradise in the West, spirited and gay … Plus all her clothes, her naughty little secrets, so important at that age! She had no doubts, no hang-ups, no apprehension. She knew what she was going to do, where she was going to travel, she was perfectly sure of herself and all that … and then I finally figured out she was a jerk, my dear Sorin … I mean, no, she wasn’t a jerk, but I was simply smarter, prettier, more cultured, but timid and hesitant. I couldn’t outshine her in anything specific, but I was better than she was, that’s all. I say this quite objectively. But I knew perfectly well that if we were to meet again in twenty years this pert little bitch would have it all over me with her chic clothes and her fancy cosmetics and her trips abroad and her confidence in her ‘personality.’ Sure of everything she said and did, because, you see, ‘each individual has something unique and worthwhile’ to offer — that’s the message she sent with every move she made. I’ve never stopped thinking about that, but at the time Comrade Dad didn’t even bother to listen to what I had to say.”

All this barely filled the first page. She was well aware that there was nothing special about any of it, but she didn’t feel able to explain why, in her particular case, this commonplace quality shouldn’t be scorned; the fact that her reflections were as banal as the daydreams of a beauty-school student didn’t make them any the less true, after all. Because that’s it, kiddo, that’s what the truth is, she would have liked to shout at Sorin, and there’s no point in trying to see anything good in failure and helplessness and so many useless complications.

She no longer had any desire to reread the second page, to slog through another batch of worn-out platitudes. She could imagine Sorin’s reaction and his grimace of contempt: “Well, well, so that’s where the little darling’s been hanging out, writing mushy women’s-magazine stuff— the intellectual who couldn’t be dragged away from her Einstein and Kierkegaard!” How could she explain to him that a woman feels things that her lover, who’s still too young to have acquired an instinct for reality, won’t understand for another twenty years?

Clack, the tape was over. So now here’s our philoso-phizeress, yes, hopping over on one foot to flip the tape. The young woman glimpsed the curved nudity of her reflection in the mirror, and looked at herself. She saw her large, pale breasts, held them in her hand to examine them, first one, then the other … A year, five years, that’s all you’ve got left, that’s how long your short life lasts, her weary smile seemed to say as she reinserted the tape with practiced ease.

As she pressed the play button to restart the hurricane, the phone began ringing again. Sorin hadn’t given up, poor guy. Our adventuress seemed to bow to the vague absurdity of the whole thing; she’d grabbed the receiver and was still holding it in the air, still making up her mind … It was, quite obviously, Sorin, that adorable Billy the Kid, that young scholar who wore his brooding expression as though it were a halo.

“Yes, it’s really me, Dolores. Nothing, why would anything be the matter? Strange? My voice? … Nothing’s gotten into me! No, I’m not pregnant. Sure I’m sure! It’s just my period, that’s all … Yes, you know, what that dumb author of yours claims makes it impossible for women to be judges in a court of law, or some shit like that. Not fit to be entrusted with the fate of men on those particular bloody days. Perhaps on other days as well, who knows? So that’s it, pal, I’m on the rag, that’s all there is to it!”

She replaced the receiver in its cradle, then buried her head in her hands. She seemed to doze, listening at the same time to the Beatles on the tape recorder, the farm report on the radio, and the phone. Because the phone was ringing again, ringing endlessly, for all the good it would do him! The Beatles, milk production, the phone, not her problem!

Interesting results for the synthesis will be obtained from a period of observation in a restaurant, a sports club, a taxi, a child-care center, a savings-bank branch office, a courtroom, an airport, or among streetcar conductors, newspaper vendors, traffic policemen, or in a hospital emergency room, a state manpower allocation office, a national housing agency, in a library or a hairdressing salon. These investigations will serve as preliminaries to the regularly scheduled work sessions. The singular young man who had so stimulated the participants’ imaginations and speculative appetites during the initial conferences will not be on the list of drafting committees and work groups. The ageless youth will probably be quite forgotten. Regrettable as it may seem, the others will have lost him in some sort of nebulous borderline reality; one day, they may well wonder who this whirlwind was — if in fact he ever existed — who carried them all away at those first meetings in a brief flurry of surprise and free-ranging speculation … Sitting in their assigned places, they’ll barely remember their own youthful faces, thirsting for knowledge and aflame with curiosity, at the moment when they recognized themselves, so long ago, in the impatient eagerness of an unusual and unknown young man. They will be all the more diligent and methodical, persevering, step by step, in the competent and laborious completion of their assignments.

They’ll be unable to say whether the stranger remained among them long enough to listen to those bold theories about the “Crisis of Energy and Character in the World Today,” or “Destructive Intervention of Authority as a Denial of Chance,” or many other similar topics.

They’ll be even less sure whether he was present for the very informative movie to be shown by the director just before vacation.

A great film by a great film genius on the moral and economic crises in Germany during the 1920s. Poverty, police, surveillance, suspicion, growing discontent; the pressures exerted on the individual worried about losing his job, terrorized by increasingly restrictive policies, dazed by the din of propaganda, dogged at every step, constantly obliged to fill out information forms about his life and his beliefs and his family, weighed down by fear, curled up in a bed that grows more and more rickety as the film progresses. The viewer will see how humor and art are punished with a growing severity that leaves no room for doubt and irony, how a Terror of martial enthusiasm and relentless unanimity springs up, how the public begins to hound strangers, foreigners, scientists, revolutionaries, prostitutes, artists, theorists, how demagogues don pitiless uniforms, how useless failures, sadists, informers, and fanatics are promoted to positions of power.

“The victory of these diversionary tactics is the fostering of aggression in human relations,” the professor will say, turning the lights back on. “Suspicion is so easy to manipulate,” he will say, as if not knowing how many strange ears are in the room. “I think it’s instructive to situate such deviationary factors between the real cause and its disastrous effect. The scientist studies cause and effect, but also these filters of deflection. I thought that a meaningful work of art would excite your imaginations before this well-earned vacation …”