Norman Manea - Compulsory Happiness

So the first part of their festivities was spoiled, insipid, spent waiting for the team to return to full strength. They kept checking their watches; Carmen still hadn’t reappeared. And when she did, it was just to pop her head into the room.

“Let’s go, girls, I’ve opened up again, back to work! We’ll continue the party later.”

It was past two-thirty, in fact, time for the employees to return to their desks. One by one, they headed reluctantly into the office. Scarlat was gone. Carmen replied to everyone’s curiosity with an explanation considered much too laconic: “Still got the same bee in his bonnet.”

Which clearly served only to arouse further interest and suspicion.

Later, however, after they’d closed the office and gathered once more — with a little less energy, of course — in the hidden back room) the subject hadn’t come up again. They spent the evening gabbing about the quality of the wine, how it wasn’t right to make people ill by selling them this vinegary slop, how the peas were musty, and as for the salad, the mayonnaise smells bad because they make it with rancid oil, and have you seen the sick chickens they expect you to buy, what are we coming to, girls. And so on. Basically, all they did was complain, because they were drinking and “their mouths had run away with them,” which is how the office manager of branch 46 put it as they arrived at the bus stop, rather late at night and frozen stiff.

III.4.

The comrade proposes that the winners of the national Savings Bank Lottery, as well as the winners of the State Lottery, Sports Lotto, and the State Insurance Lottery, should no longer be selected by lot. Instead, they should be chosen from deserving citizens. In this way, we would avoid the injustices caused by chance, which could result in choosing those who are not in financial need or those who may be truly needy but do not deserve to win. Many times, unexpected winnings enrich certain outcast elements, for example, drug dealers and criminals whose pockets are already full of dirty money. Or else this windfall ends up under the mattress of some stingy old woman who has one foot in the grave. The money or prizes offered at these drawings should reward the most honest and conscientious workers, farm laborers, and intellectuals. Therefore, State and Party would provide a new means of stimulating effort in industrial production, agriculture, and technological and scientific research, to raise the qualitative level in the present phase of the multilateral revolution. This proposal is also ideologically consistent with the concepts of dialectical materialism regarding the world, life, and the active role of man, who is not subject to fate, but is the master and creator of events.

III.5.

The comrade believes that the drawing of winning numbers, for the Savings Bank or other institutional lotteries, should remain to all appearances unchanged in terms of frequency, operation, and monies awarded. Winners will have to be secretly selected in advance, but not too long before the drawing, by a highly secret committee of qualified experts. There should be a preliminary study to determine ways of keeping the names of the designated winners from becoming known to the public, so that no one could have the slightest suspicion about this new strategy. The comrade proposes that a careful analysis be undertaken so that the rewarded persons might be led to feel, in one way or another, that their success is due to their exemplary behavior. Only comrades of irreproachable moral character, whose devotion to the cause shall have been amply displayed over a long period of time, would be able to understand the justification of such a measure and keep this state secret in strictest confidence, for it is a secret that could be entrusted only to the best and the brightest.

11.4.

The insomnia had lasted for several weeks now, torturing him night after night. When dawn sputtered into action, it found him huddled in his bedroom, prostrate with fatigue.

The pills weren’t working; they barely enabled him to drowse for an hour or so. He would lie there, staring at the whitish mark that throbbed on the ceiling and at times spread out to cover its entire surface and all four corners. He’d close his eyes, open them again, toss and turn from one side to the other, then lie on his stomach, and nothing made any difference. When the first light of dawn appeared, a faint violet bruise trembling at the window, he’d curl up into a ball at the edge of the bed, chilled to the bone, unable to move a muscle, and wait for day to wash over him in limpid silence.

It wasn’t just the solitude of age, increased by his wife’s trip abroad to be with their daughter, who was expecting a child. On the contrary, he’d quickly become accustomed to living alone; indeed, he felt closer to reality, having been alienated before by domestic routine. He went into stores, wandered through parks, got on streetcars to go see some stupid whodunit in a crummy movie theater on the outskirts of the city. Every day he discovered new things that were literally suffocating him. He couldn’t make sense of these impressions, assemble them into a whole, but he felt something heavy, viscous, and diffuse coming from all directions. Like an invasion of invisible poisonous crickets weighing on the minds and shoulders of everyone he saw. They were already panting with exhaustion on their way to work, they glared at each other in bitter irritation, wanting nothing but to be left alone. What was happening? What was going on? The only words he found had some-how lost their strength … It wasn’t like that … in our time … So it was old age, because that kind of whining is the leavening that puffs old folks up with helpless, windy nostalgia. Impossible to say when and how it had happened, that’s how time goes by, that’s how the perfidious, venomous dust accumulates, imperceptibly, clogging your lungs and the sky. Because the sky itself seemed darker, and it wasn’t just his own lungs, his own vitality that had suffered some irrational and inevitable loss, but everyone else’s, too. The energy and intelligence of the rabble had grown; those hooligans were livelier, indispensable, full of fun and enterprise, they’d multiplied, covering wider and wider areas, they were circulating at high speed underground, in passageways, on the roofs. But he thought once more about others like him; it made him want to puke to hear his former friends rant about how they’d believed in this or that and the questions they’d asked themselves, come on! Big deal, yes, big nothing … Just like him, they’d been ordinary young people, swept along by the tide, a little learning, a little foolishness, a little enthusiasm, a little ambition, that’s all it was and nothing more. Average people, but they’d tried, yes, they’d tried, there hadn’t been this pathetic, desperate lethargy he found everywhere he went, in the whispering and the prematurely bowed shoulders, this fed-up syndrome, as somebody said.

As though nothing depended on them anymore! As though they could no longer make anything that belonged to them — it was someone else who decided things for them or twisted their intentions, preventing them from wanting and from undertaking anything, someone who neutralized them, denied them, relieved them of their responsibilities and their personalities. A syndrome, yes, a generalized tiredness, a sickness, yes. All they did was inhabit predetermined, presliced slabs of life. It didn’t matter how these lives were parceled out, it wouldn’t make any difference … it was a generalized syndrome, yes.

They’d need a fanatical faith or the fear of punishment; they’d go nuts! They just don’t care about anything, all they do is store up disgust, spitefulness, apathy …