Norman Manea - Compulsory Happiness

It wasn’t exactly a sudden impulse, since the employee had agreed to set out his proposal in writing. How could he have known that Sonny Boy, the comrade manager, was hoping to get the comrade general manager embroiled in this business, and get him to sign his own death warrant and get the minister embroiled, and so on, up to the very top? So the author of the proposal had agreed to present his ideas in person again, if desired! Yet Mr. Victor hadn’t pressed anything beyond providing additional details and clarifications when asked to do so. He had no idea how unprincipled these new young wolves were nowadays, the type that would sell their own mothers — the first crook works himself into a good position edges out the second crook sucks up to the third crook slips lands on his ass, that sort of thing, constantly, you can go crazy. Poor bastard, with his ideas and his lofty ideological concerns! … No, not even a whim, just something twisted and inexplicable, from out of nowhere, the depths of the unknown, the way it is for everything that seems strange to you, until you notice that the stranger is you, having discovered yourself going around and around in your drunken rat’s cage one winter evening, a mess, a disaster area, and that TV, and the ugly National Instructor, and the boredom … You needed something else, anything at all, and so you showed them how to get revenge … By stirring the dog packs to even greater frenzy … By letting them struggle and foam pink at the mouth, while you watched over their rations … There you are, order and discipline! That’s all they deserve, let’s keep on the alert, there’ll be no more jokers left to slip through the net, no more slipups, no more breathing space, no more muddle, no more wild, spontaneous joy! We’re going to screen everything, we’re going to drive them bananas, we’re going to howl, lashed at from all directions, the way they laughed and sneered at me that night when I’d left the house in the north side of town to go home, in a grinding rush of energy and cruelty. I was coming back to life, excited, vigorous, inspired, inventing more and more systems of filters and gears and shut-off valves, while the snow crunched underfoot, white and icy. The streets were cold, rough, I fell asleep quickly, the way I hadn’t done for a long time, I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see that face of the stammering National Speaker anymore, the one on the TV screen and in the window and on the ceiling and everywhere. I opened my eyes again, and the ghost face was still there. I closed them once more and fell asleep like a baby being rewarded after a long day of games and tantrums.

And night went on spinning out sleep, compact, gray sleep, skein after skein, thick and rancid. Nothing else in the world existed anymore but dense, black sleep; thought was dead, had vanished along with anxiety and the earth itself, which stirred up sticky waves of sleep and oblivion, shaken by rumblings, a red foam, incomprehensible words, the growling and wheezing of a sick wild animal, dragged over the coals, through the slough of despond: What if cars ran on blood? If we could find another fuel for automobiles, dear Comrade Sile, Vasile, what about this? When will they replace gas with blood, Victor old boy? Gas with blood! Blood, the new fuel of our century, whispered and belched the exhausted night, a seething soup of lumpy tar. A nightmare of nattered words, at long-drawn-out intervals … Heart attack, oil crisis, blood crisis. A brand-new fuel, brand-new. His chest heaved, crushed beneath the weight, cynical rhythms, punishment, just imagine, blood — a brand-new fuel, think about it, motors running and the slaughter begins, the inevitable torment, the tower would start to tremble, blood, blood, tarantula thunder tavern, blood, blood, chickens, cats, sparrows and horses and pigs and people, yes, yes, my dear fellow, dismemberment, no question about it, this business of chance and winning numbers and manipulating prizes, a human being’s merit quantified by another human being, one winter night, fucking mess fucking disaster fucking TV fucking boredom, something was missing, the real thing, the blood of chickens, whales, then human blood, obviously the mirror’s our next stop. First criminals, madmen, cripples, the incurably ill, then the elderly, adversaries, repeat offenders, then the uncle, the lady next door, then then then, oh yes, my dear fellow, controlling luck, manipulating chance, selecting rewards, surprises … Big nothing, waste of time, a retiree’s pipe dream! The deal of the century, energy, the Middle East, petrodollars, Islam, the sacred precincts, the most terrible of all discoveries! The fuel of the future! And the control of chance! You’ll see just how far we can go with discipline and fear, humiliation, submission, the schizophrenia lurking within the most highly developed computer-mammal … And we all contribute to it with our fuel and we’ll eventually wind up with this collective portrait, the composite that will enable us to recall the time, the place, the individual.

And so it will be a black, freezing night. Frail Chickadee, bruised by the blows of the child-monster swelling her belly, will writhe in her sweat-soaked sheets, terrified, flinging out her arms in search of rescue; alone in a mountain chalet, startled awake by a bad dream, the traveler with the face and speech of an ageless adolescent will rush to the window and fling it open, blinded by the chilly torch of the moon, motionless and mute; somewhere the political police archive containing the biography files will screech, grating on the walls of a shabby office; at the streetcar stop over by the Abattoirs, the poor distraught and shivering employee will hang his head in horror, frightened by the huge scope of the Project, a project that tortured and terrorized him, a virile and impotent exaltation that illuminated him, as though he’d instantaneously recovered the madness of his crazed childhood. To control chance, to become real masters now as long as we still have time, until the slaughter starts, the massacre of chickens and horses and cats and fools and aunts and kids and bureaucrats, the new fuel, the brand-new fuel!

And only the rippling violet light, just before the dawn of a modest day, will connect us once more to the maniacal spirit of fellowship, our share of hope, constantly deferred, forever postponed, our poor forgotten personal contribution to the happy future. The confusion of the incessant, robotized, and out-of-sync pulsation that sums up our punctual rout, fluttering impulse of an instant, shattering din of silence.

IV.

Rejuvenated bya brief convalescence in the mountains, the stranger will go back down into the big, flat patchwork of the city, groping his way for a while through the dawn darkness, in the shadowy streets riddled with potholes. He’ll walk from the station to the outskirts of the city, stepping over puddles of waste water, looking among the new concrete boxes for the house where, it seems, he once lived.

The morning will be mild and sunny by the time he stops, at a noisy intersection crowded with buses and streetcars, before what used to be a slum-street stall and is now a branch of the National Savings Bank. He’ll shrug off his worn backpack and loop the strap around his arm. He’ll grasp the doorknob and gently push open the door, alerted in an instant by the ringing of the little bell overhead signaling that his strange wanderings are over. These ladies in the savings bank must have been amused at first by this noise, but they probably haven’t noticed it for a long time now.

An ordinary ageless gentleman, polite, somewhat head-in-the-clouds, watching the people around him with a pleasantly curious expression: that’s what he looked like, this stranger with the face of a teenager. The high-school kid, the college student, the scholar of indeterminate age, the recluse, the mountain climber — God knows who he was — sat down in a chair and put his backpack on the one next to him. He contemplated, overheard, memorized … the dance, the words of the foursome gathered around a pale, elegant young woman whom the others called Chickadee and who was speaking in a soft, composed voice.