Norman Manea - Compulsory Happiness

It wasn’t the aging of a single body or mind, in fact, but the disastrous process ripening in everyone. Not so much a specific age as a general state, a surrender, a slow shriveling … A diabolical encroachment, the incarnation of evil with myriad invisible mouths and arms, spying on our idiotic daily lives, robbing us of courage and hope.

It was a bright rosy afternoon, but all these thoughts, tangled in his skull, left him no peace. Barely two weeks had passed since his wife’s departure abroad. Now it was dusk, a pale, sweetish, trembling light, and he was alone. He’d turned on the TV without thinking about it, program followed program, he’d remained motionless before the familiar face of the hated clown,* in silence, for he hadn’t turned up the sound. Laziness, mimicry, jokes, tears, pervasive lethargy, lies, the house and the bed … He woke up mumbling things and punched the TV power button so hard to turn it off that it popped out onto the carpet.

As the image of the ugly, retarded fellow vanished, darkness engulfed the room. The perspiring man unbuttoned his shirt collar. He went down on his hands and knees to find the telephone, no, the light switch, no, he changed his mind, wound up in front of the bathroom. He shoved his bristly head under the sink tap.

He didn’t feel able to remain alone in the house, he had to get out at any price, forget this stupid afternoon.

He no longer remembered if it was that very evening he’d been to visit his former comrade, who’d been pressing him with invitations for a while now. He didn’t have the slightest desire, actually, to be warmly greeted, with that gleam of joy in the eyes of a man whom — he had to admit it — he’d once wronged, or whom he hadn’t protected, rather, from this wrong, even though, if one really thought about it, there hadn’t been much he could have done … Never the tiniest sign of reproach, from this generous comrade, not even an understandable uneasiness, nor the slightest stiffness in his attitude — nothing at all! Only affection and friendly chatter … Senility, really! Injustice doesn’t always make someone more combative. After all, he’d been intelligent and steadfast and worthy before he was rehabilitated. That’s what did him in, lobotomized him— being restored to his rights, getting back his Party palace and his seniority and his pension. How else could one interpret the fact that Comrade Whosis, formerly a great orator and dialectician, was working as a puppet these days? As an extra! That’s right, as an extra in a historical movie, along with a whole bunch of hags, oldsters, whores, and bums …

“What do you want? It’s a way of killing time,” the wretch had explained, relating how he’d rounded up one of his ex-subordinates for the film, and going on about how this would have made an interesting (ha!) study of progressive change in relationships.

“Of course everything changes — Aurel plays a general, while me, I’m just a major. You should see him on the breaks, when we go off for a smoke or a beer, he hardly talks to me, I can barely get him to spit out two or three words in a tight-assed, dried-up voice, because that’s what happens with a uniform, it changes a man.” And the old combatant had blathered out more such nonsense.

11.5.

On a bitter, nasty evening, perhaps the same day he’d almost broken the TV, he wound up ringing the doorbell of a comfortable house in the northern section of town. Immediately seated in an armchair by his host, he stiffened beneath the onslaught of sticky logorrhea, like a fly in a bucket of glue. Then he gave up, allowing himself to-be carried along by the rumbling wave. Which is to say that he held his own, which is to say that no, he was simply overwhelmed, exasperated. He had to think of something he could talk about, something else, something different that would put a stop to his host’s affected drivel, his plaintive lowing. At that point Sonny Boy made his entrance — the offspring-manager, the young boss before whom one had to bow and scrape and smile timidly, in a harmless, elderly way, like an employee afraid of losing his job. As though he hadn’t known him when he was still in diapers, pissing himself in his baby carriage, spotty with measles, sent home from school after being caught in the girls’ bathroom, hospitalized for an entire semester after a fight with hockey sticks … Ugh! Now here he was, clapping you grandly on the shoulder, how are you, how’re you feeling, Uncle Sile, so what’s new, it seems you’re a whiz with the account books, hey, Mr. Victor, that’s what your charming colleagues say. Interesting, very interesting, that business I heard about, you’d have been better off coming to me about it rather than Papa, I’m really interested in it, seriously, you’ve got something there, a great idea, you’ve really got something … Sometimes Sile, sometimes Vasile, sometimes Mr. Victor, just to show he’d known him before he’d legally changed his name to his former pseudonym.

He really had something there, true enough! Whatever had gotten into him on the fatal night when he’d come up with that wild idea? So he ran through it again, that strange inspiration he’d had, giving it lots of conviction, cutting no corners. A bombshell, sure! Control over chance, yes! A bombshell! He’d put it into writing. In writing, come on … just so this young twit and others like him could take a squint at it and curl their fat lips, well, well, quite a genius, this Mr. Victor, who would’ve believed it, this Sile, Vasile, he’s really something, the geezer racks his brains and look what happens! Still in there swinging, these old guys, I tell you …

A bizarre, twisted, distorted evening, a nest of vipers in an infirm and damaged heart, a demented impulse born of anger … As though the thought had always been quietly holed up in there, waiting to emerge, slender, sinuous, an incandescent red thread.

A toxic moment, a dizzying rebellion, shunting the flood of anger so that it burst out elsewhere. To astound the audience and leave them openmouthed, as before an apparition of the Virgin in a hamlet of hayseeds. Myohmyohmyohmy, well I never, imagine that, what an idea, yes, worthy of interest, yes, yes, serious interest!

Worthy, absolutely, and of tons of interest, even if it was only an unforeseeable transference, a gloomy mood becoming a provocative idea … Go figure how long it had been lying around there, that stagnant, putrid dynamite, which could still fuel whole years of rancor and guerrilla warfare, so that no one would ever have enough time to grow bored, ever again! Actually, it wasn’t even all that gratuitous and scandalous, this brouhaha, this little farce… No, actually, not at all! Because they deserved a bigger one, all those crooks and fakes! Should’ve gone at them with heavy artillery, not like that, with just a gentle adjustment, a simple regulating valve on a measly secondary tube, far from the main pipeline of juicy swindles and royal payoffs! After all, it was only a small contrivance, much too localized, a simple filter, a mini-attempt at rationalization, something like “why don’t we tidy up just a smidgen of this chaos, by rewarding merit, by applying the principles we used to believe in and which we still trot out for parades, these principles we still spout from rusty balconies” …

And so tonight’s guest is raring to go, and will now show off his idea at top speed. This idea he’d sniffed out by accident, when he was pissed off or hung over, or that he’d unwittingly cherished through years of waiting, of disgust and smoldering rage … Now he was whipping it up into a real froth! A rainbow of bubbles, so that the manager was practically in a trance, he’d even forgotten to wear his jolly smile, he was so overcome by the bottomless pit of possibilities opening up endlessly before him.