Norman Manea - Compulsory Happiness

Thursday, six o’clock; the serene light of a late afternoon in July in the 1970s. In the gleaming auditorium of Orlando Street, the guests will include a typist, a taxi driver, a restaurant manager, a kindergarten nurse, a novelist, a personnel director, a gym teacher, a customs officer, and a National Savings Bank employee.

The introduction of these new guests to their colleagues will form the sole agenda of this first session.

Without rising to address his audience, omitting the usual “Silence, please” or “Dear comrades,” the director will begin with someone he will have, let’s say, noticed by chance, in the third row, near the window. A nondescript young man, a taxi driver, smiling patiently in the peaceful light of the room …

“Comrade Voinea belongs to the taxi drivers’ union and works in the capital. A young man, as you can see: only twenty-one years old. An excellent driver, I’m told. And what’s more, I’ve had occasion to learn this firsthand before asking him to join us here today. In school, he showed promise in mathematics, although he eventually decided to study ballet, taking courses at the Conservatory of Choreography. I trust I’m not being indiscreet, nor overdoing this introduction, my dear Cristian …”

Cristian Voinea will merely bob his head in acknowledgment. A blond, with a pale forehead and a strong torso, he will wear a checked shirt of a sheer material. The future participant will listen impassively to the resume-spiel, as though the director were speaking about someone else.

“An unfortunate accident led him to abandon his ballet studies. Cristian was too old to return to mathematics — a vocation that demands, like the piano, both precocity and serious groundwork at the earliest possible age, as he likes to say. But I wouldn’t like to reveal all the surprises in store for us from Comrade Voinea, who comes to us from the taxi garage on Rosetti Place in Bucharest.”

The silent audience will then learn that the typist, a youthful fifty-year-old lady, is not just any typist, although that is her profession, but the daughter of our ambassador to Great Britain during the inter-war years, and a recognized expert on the decorative arts. Before her biography was distorted for political reasons, she was an important consultant on antique Oriental ornaments. The gym teacher, a former military man and famous jockey, was involved, unfortunately, with mystical sects. He is well versed in heraldry, a fact attested to by the many diplomas he has received, while the affable aristocrat with the white thatch of hair and imposing double chin, presently employed as a restaurant manager, has unique experience in the pre-war world of finance, but has also won numerous prizes for the experimental varieties of grapes he grew and the wine he used to produce on his small but no less exemplary estate.

These intriguing characters will have what it takes to arouse the interest of the listeners, who don’t often get a chance to meet such exotic fauna.

One may therefore conjecture that at a certain point the participants begin wondering vaguely about a stranger whom the director does not seem eager to introduce to them.

Sure enough, when this first meeting comes to a close, the elegant master of ceremonies will have passed over in silence the adolescent who seems completely out of place in this distinguished company and who follows the proceedings intermittently, sitting in the first row, engrossed in a magazine from which he now and then looks up nearsightedly, as though awakening from a deep sleep.

The sixteen- or seventeen-year-old young man doesn’t seem to belong in this weighty atmosphere of projects, research, surveys, and studies of the future. What is also puzzling is his own seeming confusion, as though he were frankly uneasy surrounded by all these serious and hyperspeculative scholars. A plump boy, with thinning hair, even a few gray hairs. Little wire-rimmed glasses. Relatively short, relatively shy. In brief, in a word, relatively …

It isn’t until the next week, on a rainy Thursday, that the discussions will continue almost until midnight. All sorts of rumors will begin to circulate about the stranger’s identity. A young mathematician of genius, an incredibly gifted although as yet unknown poet, discovered by the comrade director himself! Such hypotheses would be at least compatible with the intruder’s age and appearance. As for suggesting that he might be an engineer who’d studied in the United States or a former escapee from a Nazi camp, or, as someone will insist, the lover of Madame, the singer, the comrade director’s wife, or even an important political personage — these speculations will seem like pure aberrations, given the youth’s age, for one thing. An uncertain age, it must be said, only a mask, as many are thinking. Be that as it may, these rumors will naturally arouse curiosity, since they will jar with the youth’s comments from the floor, delivered in a hesitant and slightly feminine voice, comments that might best be described as a series of dots on i’s.

In any case, everyone will agree that the adolescent brings a welcome stimulus to the polemic. Such ideas as “The future is in the present,” or “Hazard is the enemy of Authority,” or “Time subsists only in writing,” or “Gas is the blood of the future,” or “The typical day contains an entire biography of an age,” or “Our biography means our political dossier,” will be ascribed to that strange and seductive child, even though, according to some participants, they were actually proposed by other speakers. Nevertheless, these ideas will appear to be “provoked” by his fresh impetus, which is, moreover, the reason why they will be attributed to him in the end.

Many of the questions and mysteries swirling around the young man will probably be swept away in time, perhaps along with much of the admiring interest that greeted his first appearance. But it will no longer be possible purely and simply to forget him, to omit his name from the ranks of those collaborating on the final, future synthesis.

I.1.

Several years earlier, a thin little man had Appeared at a branch of the National Savings Bank. The young employees there had gradually grown used to seeing the auditor, Comrade Scarlat, turn up every year shortly after the summer holidays, in September or October, wearing his glasses with Coke-bottle lenses. The desk he had chosen for his own was right in the middle of the floor, in the center of all the conversations circulating freely among the other employees.

Comrade Scarlat had never stuck his nose into anything — no complaints on that score — but it wasn’t very reassuring to have that extra pair of ears in the neighborhood, not to mention those enormous glasses, dark glasses, which meant you could never tell if you were being observed from within their smoky depths. A typical bank inspector, a dull creature of routine, sent by management to take one last look at the year’s transactions. He showed none of the easy friendliness of a fellow worker who was an old hand at everything involving figures and accounts, and none of the snotty superiority of a wimpy pencil-pusher promoted to supervisor.

Mr. Victor, sir, as the girls called him, had remained barricaded behind his stiff manner. A loner, he was always buried in his papers. He listened to the employees’ chatter with a certain contempt. At least, that’s how it seemed to them at first, but now they never noticed anymore. The man they’d grown used to having as their neighbor every final trimester never meddled in their affairs. About once a week, he’d bring them some chocolates … And the time Viorica was in a jam, he’d intervened entirely on his own, lending her the money she’d needed. He’d given Geta the name and address of an excellent lung specialist, and he’d arranged to get Ina’s little girl into a nursery school. As for Chickadee, his favorite, apparently he hadn’t dared do a single favor for her. He limited himself to watching her sashay around the office, and he was particularly captivated by her phone conversations, when he could listen to her surprisingly deep voice. Comrade Scarlat invariably looked up from his account books during these phone calls. And then looked down again in embarrassment. It was obvious that he listened very closely, intrigued by the slightest word, or rather hopelessly seduced by the charming young woman’s husky voice. Sometimes he ran his ballpoint pen repeatedly through his thick hair, quite unconsciously twisting and ruffling his white locks throughout the entire phone conversation, until he was completely tousled. He often wound up looking like a snowy-haired fuzzy-wuzzy. It would take him more than a moment or two to recover his composure. He would nervously pull out his comb and practically scalp himself trying to get his hair looking neat again.