Compulsory Happiness

COMPSITE BIOGRAPHY

FOR A LONG TIME NOW WE’VE BECOME UNABLE TO UNDER- stand ourselves except in relation to others. Only this approach, apparently, can lead us to any meaningful conclusions. In the same way, we cannot look to the future before learning who we are.

Perhaps what the eager originator of the project had in mind, essentially, was a portrait of his time. Individualization, or what would remain of it, would once again result only from comparison with a frame of reference. Anyone bothering to consider in this light the personal data sheet (to be handed in the following day at the designated political department) would have no difficulty understanding that he is participating, willy-nilly, in this summation, or synthesis, and that his life, as singular as it may seem to him — a somewhat elusive and astonishing mystery, in his own eyes — would be discernible, if only as an extravagant detail, within a range of collective data.

So it’s easy to understand why the new Director of the Institute of Futurology would prefer to diversify the pool of participants in the study rather than adopt new techniques. As a result, not only the usual mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, doctors, and lawyers will be invited to the first of those lively Thursday conferences, but others as well, strange categories outside the norm.

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.

I.2.

Comrade scarlat had gotten up once more and was heading for the telephone on Geta’s desk. Carmen had signaled to Chickadee to keep an eye on the Turkish coffee pot. The brown-haired young woman, lifting her delicate face from the black circle of the open pot, had intercepted, in some confusion, the fed-up-to-the-back-teeth signal from Auntie Carmen, nicknamed Lots More Fish in the Sea. Chickadee remained on the receiving end of this private message for a moment or two, not having the nerve to look away or ignore it. Volens nolens, she’d duly watched Mr. Victor — proof of consent — as he approached Geta’s desk and leaned once more, as he’d already done twice before in the last half hour, over the telephone. Catastrophe! The coffee boiled over. Chickadee the Geisha, as her girlfriends called her, blushed and became too flustered to think of instantly removing the pot from the hot plate, so the coffee spilled all over it in a sizzling black mess. Carmen, in her role as the boss driven up a wall by the incompetence of youth, which she herself had long outgrown, flung up her hands in irritation and then simply turned her back on the whole situation. Luckily, Viorica, always ready to help, arrived in no time with a cloth she’d just happened to have in her drawer, and wiped off the edge of the chair. The hot plate was finally unplugged and left to cool …

The flurry of activity over the accident hadn’t bothered Comrade Scarlat in the least. He’d given the same number and used the same words, pronounced in a serious and even tone, as he had for the two preceding calls: “Hello, Scarlat calling. Is he there?” He’d evidently received the same answer. Without another word, Mr. Victor slammed the phone down once again. He returned to his desk, treading heavily, looking straight ahead of him. Ina, his closest neighbor, smiled as she polished her glasses …

Comrade Scarlat hardly ever used the telephone. For the last few days, therefore, his colleagues had been understandably amazed by his repeated phone calls, during which he always asked the same question and apparently met with the same disappointment. The identical scenario had been played out the previous day, and the day before that.

As she was settling her big red glasses on her pale, thin little nose, Ina noticed that Geta was winking at her and holding up three fingers. Yes, Mr. Victor had called for the third time, just like yesterday morning, just like the morning before. Three calls, at relatively short intervals, early in the morning … Then, nothing, basta, no more calls for the rest of the day. Sure enough, Comrade Scarlat was once again bent over his long columns of figures, just as on the other mornings. No one would ever have believed that, barely a few moments before, he’d been so irritable and impatient. That meant things were going to follow the same pattern as before: he wouldn’t touch the phone for the rest of the day! Mr. Victor had never called up a friend, or made any business calls, or even called anyone at home, just to ask his wife or mother-in-law or daughter or God-knows-who about whatever, like everyone else, to see if there were errands to be done on the way home, if the elevator was fixed yet, you know, the whole daily pain-in-the-ass grind of every honest and multilaterally put-upon citizen.* No, Comrade Victor Scarlat had never telephoned anyone, and what’s more, no one had ever telephoned him, either …

So it was no wonder this business of the three morning phone calls had intrigued them: the old so-and-so was actually asking for an extension number, how about that! Which meant he was trying to talk to someone in the same building, a colleague, so to speak, a comrade working in a different department there, where, frankly, the girls know everyone, whereas Comrade Scarlat neither knows nor has ever shown any desire to know anyone, aside from his poor, chatty, perfumed, amusing co-workers, among whom — that’s his bad luck — he has landed again this year to spend the autumnal season of balance sheets and pickled vegetables.

I.3.

The soothing sunshine of a bucharestian fall day had reached, in its expansive course, the large windows of branch 46 …

“Pass me a Kent, puh-lease,” mumbled Ina sleepily.

Shading her glasses from the light that had suddenly flooded her desk, she’d leaned down to finish the last of her coffee. The red-polished nail of her index finger traced the cup’s contour. A fond little mannerism, that’s what it looked like … Ultra-thin Ina sometimes had these sleek, feline moments, as though to ward off the fatigue of her working day, or who knows what annoyance she could sense well before it actually turned up. She was bending over the yellow cup, she was smiling. Her finger caressed the outline of the cup, which still contained a swallow of coffee. She was leaning forward, languidly. She savored the fortifying beverage. Her scented, downy nape, the delicate curve of her neck, this charming scene of Chinese refinement … Comrade Scarlat, who had a view of the tableau, had timidly bent his thick glasses over his accounts.

“Haven’t got any more,” Viorica had snapped belatedly. “Everyone’s been helping themselves all day long …”

“I’ve got zome,” murmured Geta Sugar Candy, close by. “The guy with the zavingz bond at eight hundred zlipped them to me, about two hourz ago. Lord knowz, he zure zurprized me. Juzt when I waz about to write down hiz name and ID number, he handz over the pack … A zolid-gold zmile, from here to there! I’m telling you! … To get a bond, can you imagine! I mean, it waz the lazt thing I expected.”*

And Sugar Candy smiled — radiantly, revealing the golden disaster areas of her lousy teeth — to indicate how tickled she still was. She delivered a Kent, clamped between two fingers, to her colleague, but her face was turned in the opposite direction.

“Can’t you turn that zdupid thing off? I really don’t zee how you can zdand it.”

The blaring transistor fell silent, and Auntie Carmen didn’t seem offended by her subordinate’s impertinence.

Ina adjusted her blond chignon. She sat up straight in her chair. She lighted her cigarette, pushed her big red glasses up on her little white Oriental nose. She stared off into the distance, looking as though her thoughts were miles away. And was defenseless against the whispers flitting from one desk to another. Unfortunately, she identified them immediately, in a sort of uncontrollable reflex. Uncontrollable, yes, a sensitive receptor reacting to stimuli, so just try to keep your mind on something else — if you can.

“He said he’d had it. That he was sick and tired of the pregnancy and ready to give up. ‘Do whatever you want, abortion, whatever,’ he told me, ‘I’ll be back when you’ve figured out a solution …’ So much for using the calendar. Proof that it’s not very reliable! It doesn’t work every time. Ever since the other two, I’ve done everything absolutely right. It drives you crazy, you can just imagine … And the business with the rabbit, that’s not a hundred percent certain either. Without protection, nothing is certain. That’s the thing that screwed me up the most. The test had been negative. I thought I had who knows what other problem wrong with me! So I’m waiting. My mother-in-law tells me she knows someone …”

So it was the angelic Chickadee, with her torrid, husky voice. Flat as a board — wherever did she get that voice of hers? When she wasn’t speaking, nobody noticed her. All she had to do was say a few words and everybody’s eyes started to boggle. Then they’d really see her for the first time: what a fetching walk, she’s quite a darling, how demure she is, all that stuff. Unusual, yes, what a babe. She turned everyone’s head. You couldn’t catch her, but she wasn’t exactly running away, either. Soft as silk, the things she said, and all those pauses … so you could think whatever you liked.

“Last year, when Banu had to go with everyone else in his office to help with the potato harvest, he brought back two sacks. They didn’t do a lick of real work, they just screwed around playing games. It was the farmers out there who told them to take some home, can you believe it … Now, when it’s time to go back there, he’s stuck doing military service. I called up my old aunt, I asked her to help us out with some food, until we get a chance to drive out to the country one of these Sundays to fill up the car, because we just can’t go on like this.”

Viorica, the fluffy little cloud, was softly pouring out her heart while she scribbled away and signed her name at the speed of light. A fast worker, Viorica, faster than all the rest, but she couldn’t resist backbiting and telling tales out of school. She wrote, added, signed, stamped in the twinkling of an eye. Which was what she was up to at that moment, and she’d yakkety-yakked about this and that until Geta finally got up to get herself another glass of water from the sink.

“You know, I told you zis zummer that I had zome pillz. But you didn’t want them at the time. Zo I zlipped them to a neighbor, a young engineer. She livez in our building on the ground floor, she’z zingle. She getz oodles of pack-agez from her brother, who landed up in Canada.”

That was Geta, with her sweetly sibilant s’s, so sweet they’d put you to sleep. Easy to recognize her. So it was Geta, not Viorica, to whom Chickadee was talking, with those long pauses between words and that look she’d give you from time to time — astonished or mischievous, an irresistible look that would melt all resistance. Men, poor things, such easy marks.

A metallic rustle nearby: the Lady Carmen, obviously! Ina didn’t bother opening her eyes, she knew who it was, she knew what was coming, and she didn’t feel in the slightest bit like getting ready for it… If Milady Carmen was busy using that horribly provincial aluminum comb on the tangles in her thick black hair, that meant she was treating herself to her oh-so-familiar break. Soon she’d bring her chair over to Ina’s desk. Then she’d trot out the usual opener: “Well, what’s new, my little Inouchka from Sevastopol?” And she’d begin to caress her hand gently: “What pretty hands and eyes you have, my sweetheart of the steppes!”

Comrade Carmen Petroianu, who was in charge of this group, clearly preferred Ina to all the others. She showed her that protective friendliness reserved for tourists, when one points out to them the location of such-and-such a street or hotel or museum, tells them when a shipment of shoes is expected, and suggests they try looking for a certain item in this or that part of town. Ina had been living in Romania now for many years, a good ten of which she’d spent working in the bank; moreover, she was better than Comrade Carmen at all the chicanery necessary to survive daily life, but she accepted her assigned role. A warm welcome, no rebuffs …

No, she’d keep her eyes closed, she wouldn’t open them even when she smelled the hovering odor of Comrade Carmen’s huge body, soon to be seated on her right.

“Don’t forget, you’re assigned to the art brigade, Chickadee! This afternoon. For the patriotic festival… Perhaps we’ll get to see you on TV, who knows?”

Carmen’s voice definitely had carrying power. She was probably putting her barrettes back in, before getting up to go visit her attractive colleague. She called her Ina Chatova, even though for a long time now everyone else had been calling her Murgule, naturally, as the wife of ex-Comrade Murgule, formerly an important corporate director and university professor.

“An art brigade — juzt what every pregnant woman needz,” groaned Geta from her desk.

Chickadee didn’t say anything for the moment, only for the moment, of course.

As might have been expected, there was the sound of a chair being moved. One sensed the approach, the breathing of the matronly Carmen’s massive bulk. Ina waited another moment. Then she finally opened her eyes …

“What’s the matter, Inouchka, you’re tired?”

The sweetheart of Sevastopol had barely had enough time to recognize the beauty mark beneath her supervisor’s thick and scarlet lower lip.

“A bit tired. Last night, uncle of Micha came and stayed long time. But he gave me pair errinks of, how you say, of the pearl. Very pretty, very very pretty …”

Carmen could just have eaten her up! Much amused, she lighted a Kent, placing the pack on Ina’s desk so that she could help herself. Comrade Petroianu didn’t need to depend on the baksheesh of savings-bank customers trying to open special accounts, or the retired people all clumped together in lines on the fifteenth of every month, waiting to get their hands on their meager due, or lottery winners exhilarated by the good fortune that’s come to them out of nowhere … Obviously, she wouldn’t have refused a pack of imported cigarettes, or a bar of Western soap, or her fair share from what was given to her girls, who passed her quota on to her from time to time … It wasn’t much, of course; they didn’t work in a clinic or a gas station, for example.

“Girlz, I’ve got newz for you. They’ve ztarted zmoking king-zize even in the bookztorez: zomething’z going on, they muzt have reduced the zize of their printing runz,” Sugar Candy had announced at one point. Comrade Petroianu couldn’t have cared less. As for the boxes of cookies and packets of sweets, they were a pain in the neck. She couldn’t stand confectionery. Sweet things revolted her, she gave them away on the spot, without even opening them. And she wasn’t putting on an act, either, because she really wouldn’t have touched them for the world. It made you wonder how she hadn’t managed to lose any weight. Actually, she didn’t even try to diet, she hadn’t the patience to deal with all those half-assed low-calorie recipes. Who cares about fashion? Why should she worry about her figure? She felt fine, she had no reason to get all balled up in that complicated weight-loss stuff. But she really and truly did not like sweets. She wouldn’t have anything to do with them, period.

“Forget about your ‘earrinks,’ or whatever you call them, let’s talk about boots. Won’t be any this year, not a single pair. Everyone’s going to find themselves with their fingers up their … Wha? I heard it from someone at the top who knows, believe me. If you want, I can get you some in our special store. For eight hundred, Italian, with heels. And I asked Bebe to put down Chanel on the list, too. Only a hundred bottles are supposed to come in this year. We ought to be able to get two of them.”

Ina had grown used to these periodic favors, she didn’t even say thank you anymore. She waited patiently for her loot, as instructed.

“You don’t have to thank me,” Lady Carmen had once stated firmly. “Me, when I do a favor, it’s ‘cause I like the person. After all, what’s the big deal? If you knew how much others take … I asked him, too: Do you think it’s the same in the afterlife? Now he’s off to Brazil, my sweetheart. And me, I’m stuck at my desk, like an idiot. But he absolutely promised me a vacation in Italy, my dear Party member. As it happens, he’s already busy pulling strings for that one.”

Comrade Carmen’s husband held a mid-level but useful position: he traveled, had lots of connections. His wife had jealously clung, not only to her mistakes in grammar and spelling, but also to a certain good sense that kept her from turning her nose up at the often-aired problems of her modest fellow workers, while preventing her from getting involved in petty intrigues or inappropriate gossip. She listened, didn’t dodge the bittersweet stories or the constant grumbling, never interrupted, even chimed in occasionally with a snippet of information or an example, but maintained a consistent outlook: “I won’t spit in the soup I eat. If I eat it, then that’s what I eat, and that’s that.” Her unique and secret revenge, so to speak, against the privileges she enjoyed — privileges that were welcome but also faintly despised, and properly so — seemed to be precisely this fondness for Ina, a pleasant enough colleague and one who never caused any trouble, but who was treated with noticeable coldness by her superiors, for her Russian name. Of course, Milady Carmen didn’t have any children … However, Ina wasn’t all that young anymore, either. Be that as it may, Carmen made no effort to hide her affection for Chatova-Murgule., yet she didn’t favor her in any way in office affairs, treating her exactly like the others. Personal gestures, though, were saved just for her. A kind of affectionate mentor relationship, geared to making life easier for Ina and obtaining certain things for her outside of work. The most astonishing part was that they didn’t visit each other: neither had introduced the other to her family, or invited her home, the way most people do. They didn’t even call each other on Sundays. The sweetheart of Sevastopol acknowledged the special nature of their relations only on the occasion of Comrade Petroianu’s birthday. Her fellow workers had long stopped being impressed by the lavish presents she inevitably bestowed on their supervisor. Still, the gift represented the barest minimum in the way of a return gesture, and was far from equaling the advantages accumulated throughout the year thanks to the wife of Bebe Petroianu, an official who managed very nicely in his job at the Ministry of Foreign Trade.

“Sooner or later, everybody winds up giving in to temptation. Who knows where my husband will be posted tomorrow, so why shouldn’t we take advantage and pick up a few trifles in the meantime?”

Just when Carmen was about to make it clear that “we” meant herself and her friends, she heard Geta Sugar Candy twittering, “ ‘Rade Carmen, telephone!”

Hefty but light on her feet, Carmen Petroianu was in no time reaching for the receiver, signaling to Ina that she would be back shortly.

The conversation was brief, as was the explanation offered to Ina. “The bosses want to see me. With any luck, it won’t take too long.”

Comrade Scarlat looked up abruptly from his accounts. After Auntie Petroianu had left the room, he hurried over to the phone. It was after noon; the lines became very busy as the day wore on. So Mr. Victor, sir, was going to try again — for the fourth time! Well, how about that: little Scarlat was just full of surprises today.

“Hello, Scarlat speaking. Is he there?” He didn’t slam down the receiver this time, but replaced it carefully in its cradle. Now Mr. Victor was really ticked off. He returned slowly to his desk, looking most annoyed.

It will become harder and harder to determine whether the young protagonist of the Thursday conferences has been a constant influence during these weeks of preliminary discussions. Because of this uncertainty, no one will be able to state positively that the young man’s remarks have indeed determined the direction matters will take. And nobody will say how young this ageless old-young man was.

Imperceptibly at first, then more and more clearly, these discussions will begin to focus less on the future than on the present and the past — a surprising development, given the nature of the institute in question.

One could maintain that this unforeseen reorientation is due to the young man’s interventions. The initial criticism of certain conjectures and approaches bearing no firm connection to the “working data,” namely, the “human element,” that is to say, “the constituent factors” or “the collective biography” or the “meaningful coefficients”—this critique might, of course, have been made by him. It might just as well have been offered by some other speaker, or represent a synthesis of several viewpoints. The temptation to attribute such a major revision of the investigative process to this seemingly youthful participant would stem from the interest aroused by both his startling appearance and his unexpected, cogent, and always convincing remarks.

In the end, it won’t much matter who set this course for the group’s future research, and how it was done. Not many weeks would pass before the collaboration of the participants would foster a receptive familiarity, a frank exchange of opinions, reconciled by the conclusion that before seeking to envisage the future, one must know who will help to shape it. Only then can one attempt to define this impact … The future would thus belong to the present, and to the recent past that has formed us. There will be unanimous agreement on this point, for only on this basis will the necessary controversies be free to flourish.

Many of these meetings will be spent trying to define the requisite terminology. The audience will frequently linger late into the night, wandering through the nebula of those peripheral sequences called parables — a psychological test, sociological statistic, criminal trial, or case history offered for consideration by one or another of the participants.

One might mention, for example, that July evening when the subject under discussion (“The Pleasure and Quality of Work”) will be illustrated by a vignette presenting the image of a world mired in a syndrome of generalized renunciation, referred to by the speaker as “the fed-up syndrome.” Offered as proof will be whole groups of people who retire at an early age — a psychosis of mysterious evolution affecting quite diversified professional categories: construction workers, airline pilots, circus acrobats … Early retirement, motivated by the most unpredictable reasons, will spread slowly but surely to the bureaucracy and the military, finally paralyzing the health sector itself and leading to catastrophic peacetime annihilation. Sudden outbreaks of violence, rapidly subsiding without outside intervention into tacit lulls, will reappear periodically — new and paradoxical explosions of seemingly extinguished but still smoldering despair. Simulated behavior, the discrimination of values, sexual oppression, parochialism, duplicity, data distortions, the half-truth as slogan and motivational factor — these are only a few of the topics that will mobilize strongly divergent opinions.

On September 26, for example, the Thursday session will be held at a psychiatric hospital, where the participants will be astonished at the good sense often displayed by the patients in their remarks. This challenge to any strict demarcation between mental health and insanity will suggest that illness be viewed as a more profound, subtle, authentic way to perceive reality. Would the afflicted actually be more adept at coping with unforeseen circumstances? Would so-called healthy minds be the cynical and indifferent mechanisms of a self-regulating routinism?

On other evenings, the subject of debate will be the quality of life; namely, the quality of shoes, bread, printing ink, books, movies, buses, hotels, prisons, tobacco, wine, perfume, the daily life of the average citizen., Other topics — not necessarily the most important — will be broached as well, such as suspicion and surveillance, sports as therapy and diversion, the lottery and ideology, the management and manipulation of discontent, the loss of quality in food and its increasing scarcity, heart attacks and the oil crisis, communal apartments, the manager-typist-chauffeur relationship, heart attacks and the oil crisis. On October 9, the Thursday speaker will read a paper entitled “The Synopsis of Captive Happiness: A Day in the Life of a Working Woman.”

This excessive emphasis on details and preliminary activities that would delay work on the project itself will finally be abruptly brought under control by the comrade director, who will probably have to report to his superiors who initiated this strange trap.

The participants will therefore proceed to individual briefings, the setting up of schedules, work groups, and inter-group meetings.

And only then will they realize that nothing was left to chance in the selection of their fellow workers. The plenary sessions will prove all the more interesting, since the delegates’ diversity of background and interests will be reflected in their wide range of remarks and confessions.

II.1.

In september of 1945, a skinny, nearsighted young man set out for the big city, determined never to return to the drab provincial town where he was born. He intended to join the Foreign Legion …

The train to Bucharest left at noon. The young man had forbidden his parents to accompany him to the station. Which meant, quite obviously, his elderly mother, since it would never have occurred to his father to be so foolish as to leave work in the middle of the day. His mother, however, seemed truly crushed by the absolute intransigence of her taciturn only son, who had obstinately refused to listen to her tirades and supplications and wouldn’t even let her go with him to the station. How could God have done this to her? She’d never see her boy again. That was all she could understand of the laconic explanations her darling condescended to grumble now and then. The Evil One had turned his head! Why did it have to be this way, why didn’t she have the right to show how she was suffering? Poor woman, it was all quite beyond her.

On the morning of her son’s departure, the unhappy woman found out that the impatient fruit of her womb didn’t even want the food parcel she’d so lovingly prepared for him. The wretch removed carefully folded garments from his suitcase, tossing all over the room ties, gloves, slippers, everything that his mother had secretly gathered together for him. By the time he was finished, he was down to one pair of trousers, a sweater, two pairs of shoes, a towel, a shirt, some underwear, and a beret.

The young man’s farewell to his mother was brief. He made her swear she wasn’t going to start crying, or be silly enough to discuss his departure with the women of the neighborhood, lamenting what was definitely over and done with. He promised to write her regularly, not very often, but regularly all the same. He wanted her to have confidence in him, just as he was confident that the bereft woman would keep her word and neither show nor read to anyone the letters she might receive from him. He hugged her tightly and kissed her damp and mussy hair, refusing the sentimental gush traditionally displayed on such occasions.

The woman stayed obediently at her window, gazing after the scrawny, myopic lad going out into the wide wild world, never to return. She watched him cross the long courtyard with his quick little step, slamming the wooden door behind him. Gone, the child she’d raised so devotedly, for whom she’d struggled so stubbornly… Petrified, she imagined him climbing aboard the train, jammed into one of those dirty, overcrowded, postwar cars. She saw him huddled on the wooden seat, glowering fiercely in a corner, oblivious to those around him. Night was falling. She remembered his bout with pneumonia, and the time he ran away from boarding school many years before, a sickly, surly brat, roaming around like a madman from morning till night. And she remembered the day she’d taken him to see the oculist. It was getting late; her husband would be home soon. An empty house, in the failing light. The woman turned away from the window, withdrawing deeper into herself.

The kitchen: the kerosene lamp, the matches, the wick. A gentle, timid light filled the room. Near the lamp, the open Gospel. So he hadn’t taken it with him, after all. Even though she’d buried it all the way down in the bottom of the suitcase, he’d removed it and left it behind. He’d refused to let her have even this small satisfaction. It would’ve been better if he’d thrown it out somewhere along the way — God knows he was capable of it — instead of leaving it there, like a sneer, rubbing her face in the fact that she hadn’t the slightest chance of affecting his decision.

The woman picked up the book, which smelled of old, much-thumbed paper, and went to slip it back into its usual spot in the cupboard. A photograph fluttered out.

She knew what it was, and the blow was too much for what little strength she had left. A picture of herself and her husband, a picture she’d given their son to take with him and which he hadn’t refused. He hadn’t been able to speak a word in protest, and yet he hadn’t wanted even that, he hadn’t wanted anything at all. The lamp still burned, shedding a calm, flickering, useless light. Later her husband came home from work and never once mentioned what had happened only a few hours before. The next day, things returned silently, monotonously, to normal.

III.1.

Comrade vasile cotig, born January 26,* 1925, to a poor family. Attends elementary school and trade school, despite occasional interruptions. During vacations, finds a job unloading wagons and also works at a nearby brickyard. Does fairly well in school. Twice he is almost held back a year because of poor grades in mathematics. Sent home from school two or three times for fighting or for talking back to his teachers. Even as a student, his combativeness is already apparent, although poor health leaves him somewhat at a disadvantage. Turns out to be a natural leader, and organizes student opinion in opposition to the excessive harshness of some of the teachers. During penultimate year of school, undergoes a spiritual crisis. Temporarily abandoning his studies, he takes refuge for a number of months in a local church, where he works as a handyman. In the opinion of some, including his father, this behavior reflects, not a deep religious conviction, but a desire to alleviate his family’s financial difficulties. Interpretation supported by the fact that despite his zealous show of devotion at the Church of Saint John, on the outskirts of the city, he abruptly stops attending services when he loses his job there and must seek other kinds of employment; some turn out to be unsuitable for anyone of a religious temperament, working as a night watchman in the town’s red-light district, etc., etc.

One of Comrade Vasile Cotig’s jobs while he is still in school is that of printer’s assistant. Starts off by filling in at night for a sick apprentice. Ends up staying at the printing plant for a whole year, then goes back to school. When he returns to the printing plant, takes part in protest meetings and attempts to become a union delegate, but falls ill and must be hospitalized for several months.

In addition to work as a printer’s assistant, becomes liaison between workers and staff of local newspaper, The Bugle. Demands and obtains a permanent column for the workers who publish the newspaper; contributes regularly for several months, initially signing as “Staff Printer,” although eventually using his own name, Vasile Cotig.

In 1944, promoted to assistant proofreader on the newspaper. He gives up his column, but occasionally publishes articles on current political issues and even a few poems, which he signs with a pseudonym. During this period, apparently, he also meets Valentina Vrînceanu, a student and the daughter of a well-to-do local forestry engineer.

From the political point of view, Comrade Cotig expresses revolutionary leanings rather early, although in a somewhat confused manner. Spends a long time wavering between extremes, going from the far right to the far left and back again. As the country’s political situation evolves and he himself matures, Comrade Cotig chooses the only truly revolutionary path — that of the Party. Toward the end of 1944, he participates in left-wing activities on the local level. It is also around this time that Comrade Valentina Vrînceanu officially joins the Young Communist League, despite the opposition of her bourgeois family.

In early 1945, Comrade Cotig holds first positions of real responsibility. Valued for his intransigence and in-dustriousness, he works day and night, never shirking the most difficult tasks. At the same time, he strives to bring The Bugle into line with revolutionary objectives. Due to the presence of certain reactionary elements on the newspaper staff and even among the workers in the printing plant, the paper continues on its so-called neutral course regarding current events. The Political Opinions Page, a forum offered twice weekly by the newspaper to the major parties, is finally opened to the Communists. At that time, the Communists had few members in the city and surrounding region, unlike the reactionary “historic parties,” as they were then called.

This political-opinion page is at the root of a dispute that arises between certain comrades on the editorial staff and Comrade Cotig, who wants to be put in sole charge of this feature. Not much is known about this incident; the little information available is too vague. The conflict is resolved by the establishment of a collective committee that includes Comrade Cotig, who collaborates on the political-opinion page during the following months without neglecting his other duties.

We do not know why Comrade Cotig decides to leave his native city. No definite proof that his departure is due to the dispute at the newspaper over the political-opinion page.

Comrade Cotig turns up later in the port of Constantsa, working first as a longshoreman, then at an office job. We have in our possession the articles he wrote during this period — as well as a poem, all published under a pseudonym in a small local newspaper. They refer to a kind of fellowship among “loners”—the seafaring men of the port. Nothing political about these articles, which may even seem naïve. The poem is a call to never-ending struggle against “barbarous good manners” and the “self-satisfied hypocrites” of the whole world.

All available information about Comrade Cotig’s brief stay in Constantsa confirms his upright character and capacity for work. Close-mouthed, extremely punctual, he despises comfort and has only modest needs. He refuses to go out drinking, and wears plain, clean clothing. Has few friends and is not well liked by his companions. Some even claim to be afraid of Comrade Cotig, because of his incommunicability; others say it’s “impossible to figure out what his game is.” There is no record of any immoral or reprehensible conduct on the part of Comrade Cotig.

In June 1946, Comrade Cotig arrives in Bucharest. First known address is 38A Buzeti Street. He works at the Bucharest Streetcar Company (BSC) for a month before moving to a job in the printing plant of the newspaper Justice; then hired as a proofreader on a magazine.

At the end of 1946, he becomes a proofreader, then a staff writer in the agricultural department of the Party newspaper, thanks to a recommendation from a former employee of The Port Gazette in Constantsa who is now an important official in the Arts Council. Comrade Cotig enthusiastically carries out all tasks assigned to him, touring the countryside to counter the effects of reactionary propaganda. He is disciplined, hardworking, and combative in the campaign for the collectivization of agriculture. During this period he lodges at 27 Mihai-Vod Street, a public-housing project, where he rents space in the kitchen of an elderly woman. The neighbors’ reports indicate that he is often out of town for weeks at a time, generally comes in late at night and leaves again at dawn. He does not own many clothes: a single spare outfit, which he keeps in his suitcase. He sleeps in the kitchen on a camp bed he sets up at night and puts away before leaving in the morning.

Does not speak to his neighbors, and talks hardly at all with his landlady. He pays the rent regularly, with the exception of March 1947, when he refuses to pay more than half the sum due, citing the fact that he had not spent a single night in the apartment that month. The landlady’s testimony is confused and unreliable, since it includes ill-considered political remarks and gossip about other lodgers.

In November 1946, Comrade Cotig returns to his home town on official business. He refuses to stay in a hotel with the other comrades, preferring his extremely modest family home: a single room in which live his mother, his father (bedridden as the result of losing his left leg in an accident), and a niece from the country who is living there while attending school.

Comrade Cotig stays busy in the surrounding villages in the struggle for collectivization. Although he originally planned to remain in the city for only four days, he stays for two weeks. During this time the house of the Vrînceanu family is searched; the engineer Mihai Vrînceanu is arrested and made the object of an investigation. Comrade Valentina Vrînceanu, summoned from Iai, where she is a student at the medical school, confirms the accusations brought against her father and reveals the hiding place of the family’s valuables. In January 1948, Comrade Vrînceanu moves from Iai to the medical school in Bucharest. Comrade Cotig, who had been promoted deputy director of the agricultural department, informs his superiors of his intention to marry Comrade Vrînceanu; he furnishes a detailed description of the Vrînceanu family’s bourgeois origins and education, as well as the reactionary ideas and contemptuous “kulak” attitude displayed by the engineer Vrînceanu, who has been sent to prison. In support of his request, Comrade Cotig points out that the behavior of his future wife, Valentina, has been worthy of a true revolutionary. They are married in June 1948.

Comrade Cotig continues his energetic political activity. With even greater frequency, he writes articles espousing the official Party line and scathing critiques of those who oppose our ideology or hesitate to step to the forefront of revolutionary activity. His devotion, vigilance, and ideological correctness are valued by those in leading circles of the Party, with whom he has close dealings, given his responsibility for the creation of the new socialist agriculture. All reports from this period praise his fearless service to the cause. The tone of his newspaper articles is staunch and rousing, while their language is simple and accessible to all. After 1948, his articles achieve considerable fame, and his name — the pseudonym under which he published his first poems — becomes an important byline in the Party newspaper. It is at this time that he permanently adopts the name with which he signed his first literary efforts, the name already written on the birth certificate of his daughter Dolores, born on April 23, 1949. The family’s address during this period is a furnished room at 25 Transylvania Street.

II.2.

The woman had been waiting by the phone for several hours. She wasn’t really sure what she was expecting to happen. Her mind was emptied of all thought as she watched the glowing minute hand of the clock coursing by, number after number. The hours ticked away: a hard day, a decisive night in those decisive years of the early 1950s.

“I’m sure he’ll do the honest thing and side with me,” said Petru, the family’s friend. “He just can’t do otherwise, we’re old comrades. You’ve got to speak to him, convince him. There’s something inside him I can’t ever be sure of. You can imagine the consequences if he were to …”

But that conversation was from a long time ago, yesterday or the day before …

The evening had slipped into freezing night. A huge living room, stylish furniture: the woman sitting motionless in the depths of the armchair was almost invisible. From time to time she simply looked up at the clock. The telephone was next to her, close at hand to the leather nest where she dozed, waiting for her husband.

“Comrade Petru isn’t here. Comrade Petru has no more meetings. Comrade Petru doesn’t live here. Comrade Petru doesn’t exist. He doesn’t exist — and now what?”

That, that was yesterday. Suzana’s voice, the wife, hysterical, whimpering, unforgiving. So Petru already knew everything yesterday … Perhaps he’d even left home by then. But that was yesterday, before the verdict. Now it was nighttime, the meeting must be over. One, two o’clock in the morning, in a silent, ice-cold, shadowy city where rats scurry and the wind grates against the stores …

“It’s not a question of individuals. It’s not men who count, but principles. There’s no room for emotions here. What’s important is not explanations or excuses or regrets, but standing firm. The only thing that matters is what course we choose to take.”

That was this morning, in front of the bathroom door. Her husband’s face distorted by fear and fatigue, a stubborn phantom in sagging underpants, with tousled hair and empty eyes.

Dead of night; the luminous hand sailed around the cape of two o’clock. In the little alcove on the left burned a bulb on a dimmer switch, shedding only a tiny oval of light. Long, very long shadows flickered uncertainly in the far corners of the room.

The woman wandered listlessly among the armchairs and slender vases, skirting the huge desk, oblivious to the statuettes of bronze and ivory. She went toward the door, toward the bedroom, walking as though she were blind.

“Comrade Director! They phoned you about an evaluation meeting. You also had calls from the ministry, the airport, the institute, your country place, and the foreign-press subscription department.”

That was at noon — no, in the afternoon, around four o’clock.

“I just don’t feel like practicing now. Really, piano is absolutely the last thing I feel like doing. Je regrette, but I’m off to basketball, so ciao!”

It was her daughter, around five or six o’clock … Then the secretary, the long-distance call, her mother’s usual complaints and insults aimed at the son-in-law and his comrades.

And now the squealing of car brakes, yes, an unmistakable sound, at just past three in the morning. She got a grip on herself, hurried toward the bedroom. No, their daughter’s room instead. He’d never look for her there, that was better, he’d never think to check in there. Tomorrow, not now, it was better to forget for the time being, simply sinking down into the comfortable sofa, so welcoming, as though no one, as though no one had ever, no one had ever gone through this ordeal. It was better, like that, collapsed on the sofa, no one, not the slightest idea, nothing, no one would ever awaken her again.

During one lively Thursday afternoon session, someone (no one remembers who, and in any case it’s no longer important) seems to have suggested, doubtless as a kind of extravagant gesture, this little trap: a discussion of purgatory and hell. In other words, Dante, obviously. Without whom, get this, we’d have no frame of reference from which to evaluate different perspectives …

Such a farfetched idea to provoke debates, when so many ears are listening. Someone will happen along who can tie the whole question into some sort of structuralist analysis of biography. Eager to broaden such an approach, this someone will finally focus all commentary on a single point: the identity of those who inhabit purgatory or hell. As for paradise, it will clearly be wise to say nothing about it.

The consensus will be that purgatory doesn’t matter, since the whole thing will wind up in a shabby mess of details so entangled they’ll never be sorted out: vain hopes, weeping and wailing, ersatz. Because of its vague and transitory nature — a kind of indeterminate continuum—such an existence could not be confined within any clear, succinct definition. Since this viscous and heterogeneous matter would hardly lend itself to tragedy, it would spoil all attempts to give it the epic treatment, dribbling along as a minor perpetuum. Stupid suffering and anxious expectation, reduced to the same average level, canceling out all individuality. Just an inexpressive, immature mediocrity. As a result, expression itself would be impossible in this type of life, as would all potential spirituality. Some of the participants, moreover, will be quick to point out the connection: of course, tragedy is impossible in purgatory, since expressiveness has been nullified from the outset … And, at that juncture, someone will inevitably assert that the devil, who signifies mediocrity (“The devil signifies mediocrity!” several participants will shout excitedly), actually rules over purgatory. Hell would thus be only his secondary residence. A pseudo-home. A diversion! A kind of noisy cabaret serving to mask the true, wide-ranging, and incomparable activities in his real property, purgatory.

What about the collective biography in hell? Rich though it might be in spectacular events, it would in the end boil down to monotonous banalities, largely similar tales burdened with commonplace incidents. Violent and caricatural idiocy, recycled paper, dizzying cacophony! A rudimentary, mechanized product. A bestial joy nourished on blood, rictus, and rhinestone. An automated floorshow: pop a coin in the slot, and hurry hurry hurry — freaks on parade!

The controversy will finally be resolved with the suggestion that within the next two months each participant should bring in his or her autobiography on a few typewritten pages. This biography, real or invented, might also be the life story of the author’s bed, fountain pen, or favorite tie, to be enriched with a succinct curriculum vitae of the author’s parents, goals, and dreams. An epic, a collection of story lines that will meander off on their own or converge in patterns of the author’s choosing. This text will be read and discussed in the light of what has been said regarding the Dantean versions of purgatory and hell.

“We are here to envision the future — in other words, something that does not exist, at least for the moment. So what we are concerned with here is paradise, and that is why the minimum biography must deal with purgatory and hell.” With these words, the debate will be closed.

Words that a rather shy and starry-eyed ageless interloper would repeat to himself for nights on end. Unhappy at not being able to write his biography clearly and concisely, humiliated by the lack of imagination that hampers his attempts to set down the story of the armchair where he so often daydreams, or the story of the suspenders that hold up his pants. Too scrupulous to borrow the biography of some cousin or aunt, whose real lives, he feels, are hidden from him, leaving only innocuous banality on view. Keeping eyes and ears wide open in his tireless, frenzied search for something — anything — worthy of consideration, constantly taking notes on some new trifle that will seem like a good point of departure, only to prove dissatisfying when he takes another look at it, later in the day … This ageless adolescent would be absent a good long while from the Thursday meetings where he had once figured so brilliantly.

I.4.

On the stroke of noon, when the woman had burst into tears, everyone else in the office had gathered around the chair by the window.

“No, really, can you believe it, she’z been calling an ambulance for two hourz, and they don’t give a hoot. They zay they’re out of gaz. They’ve uzed up their daily quota! The old lady’z got azzma. Maybe she’z even dying …”

Geta had wailed on and on, pouring out her sorrows in front of everyone, and the girls had listened to her sympathetically. The same old story: bribes and connections, under-the-counter deals and the black market. Naturally … Can’t find any paper clips? Bingo! A pack of Kents! Nobody takes an old woman to the hospital these days. Only with bribes, only with baksheesh. I’m telling you, we’re going to wind up using Kents to wangle even a lousy handful of toothpicks … Everywhere you go, people say one thing and do another, they’re all on the take. A golden age for every petty crook willing to sell any old junk! No matter what you want, they’ll get it for you, if you can grease the right palms! Every attendant and caretaker, porters in fancy hotels, obviously! Same thing in the hospitals: nurses, doctors, all of them! Plumbers, of course, and dentists and taxi drivers and restaurant waiters, they’re the ones in power … The flashier the façade, the more rot there is to cover up. Take a good look at them, you don’t hear a peep from them, they know, all right, but they keep their traps shut or parrot the usual drivel. So once again the wheeler-dealers wheel and deal, while the rest of us get left out in the cold like fools, struggling with the first of the month and the long lines and the health problems and the mindless jargon …

The girls had listened to her indulgently; it was only natural for Geta to be upset, she was very fond of her aunt, who’d raised her since she was tiny.

All people think about is getting their hands on as much as possible of anything at all as fast as they can, and they don’t care if there’s none left for tomorrow … The setup’s just perfect, have you noticed? Charlatans of every stripe, all the thugs and crooks — the trash can of the universe! You can look high and low for an ounce of honesty, but you won’t find it. They’re all thieves, every last one of them!

Sugar Candy was off and running on her favorite subject; she’d turned as red as a beet. She waved her plump little arms around like crazy, so pissed off that her rather low-slung rear end seemed even more droopy than usual.

“Try calling again,” Chickadee had murmured.

“Vy don’t chou go out to your aunt’s place?” had been the contribution of Tovaritsna Murgule.

“Here, you can take the afternoon off, if you want,” added Boss Lady Carmen. Like talking to a wall!

“But what am I zuppozed to do, where can I go?”

“Get a taxi and take her to the emergency room,” urged Comrade Petroianu.

“Come on, the emergenzy room? Zo they can let me wait around for hourz or tell me Comrade Zo-and-zo izn’t in today or haz already left or maybe that I need permission from my neighborhood committee or zomething? You know perfectly well what they’re like,” said Geta, brushing aside every suggestion.

They finally caught on. Even Viorica had figured it out, because she didn’t say a word. She scribbled/signed/stamped at top speed. All sorts of papers, figures, clearings of accounts, but in absolute silence — Viorica, who would have kept chattering even in the electric chair … She was silent, that’s all there was to it. Everybody knew: Amazing! Viorica had a brother-in-law who was a doctor. Some time ago she’d asked him to help out Comrade Petroianu and Chickadee and Ina Nikolayevna. Even Geta, too, of course, before Viorica fell out with her because Sugar Candy Geta let the cat out of the bag. It was when Viorica, the betrayed wife, had told Sugar Candy in confidence about her husband. Sugar Candy Geta, in turn, had gone and told Comrade Carmen. How could you keep this one under your hat! Then it had been Kamaradnaya Inouchka’s turn to be brought up to date on the country weekends of Comrade Captain Voicil, Viorica’s husband. Which meant that Chickadee was then let in on the secret, and Chickadee wouldn’t have breathed a word; she knows how to keep things to herself, that one, the kind that would rather have the goods on you than betray you, but she’d burst out laughing. She’d had a fit, pure and simple! Viorica had realized what was going on, obviously, how could she have failed to understand, it was the only thing that could possibly have made Chickadee laugh, that shtick, with her rumbling underground voice, taking everyone by surprise, making them turn around in astonishment to meet her wide-eyed, candid gaze, and I mean candid, guaranteed one hundred percent… Besides, who on earth could keep from laughing? Even a statue would have cracked up! So: Comrade Husband Don Giovanni goes off on a business trip, so he tells his wife, of course, with a suitcase and everything he needs — to shack up, in fact, with the little neighbor on the ground floor! He’s holed up in there the whole time he’s supposed to be away on this trip. He’s got all the essentials: grub, mood music, a comfy pad, and coochy-coochy. I’m going to take out the garbage, announces Coralia, the mistress, one fine evening. It’s like the North Pole out there, I’ll go instead, the boyfriend, Don Juan, pipes up gallantly. What do you mean you’ll go instead, chirps the floozy in surprise. It’s late, no one’ll see me, answers the poor bastard, picking up the garbage can. He tiptoes out. Complete silence, not a spy in sight. So our guerrilla, Casanova, in pajamas and slippers sneaks down to the trash bins without being spotted. He raises the cover and empties the garbage can, which he carries back to the elevator, this idiot, where he presses the call button. He takes the elevator … up to the fourth floor, where he lives! His apartment is right next to the elevator. Then the ass rings his own doorbell! As usual, to be let back in. There’s the rub: instead of the adulterous ground floor, he’s on the conjugal fourth! Memory can play these tricks on you, just when you least expect it. So the poor guy is standing there in his pajamas holding the garbage can, face to face with his own wife, our Viorica! I mean really, how can you not laugh? Even that goody-goody Chickadee, obviously! How could you not laugh, and how could you ever forgive the person who’d made you such a laughingstock?

That’s why Sugar Candy had started blubbering when she’d seen that Viorica wasn’t paying the slightest attention to all her complaining. Those tears were supposed to be her last resort, but even this final effort wasn’t doing the trick: Viorica couldn’t have cared less. She hadn’t said a word; in fact, she was deaf and dumb to the moaning of her ex-confidante, now simply her fellow office worker Geta Muuroi, whom she had no particular reason to help.

All the others were clustered around Geta when Comrade Scarlat returned from the manager’s office. Ever since October, Mr. Victor had been summoned to the manager’s office about twice a week. He never mentioned why, not one word. Even Comrade Pia, the manager’s secretary, didn’t know what was going on, because if she had, it would have gotten around. All of a sudden, sometime around September, Comrade Scarlat had started to use the telephone, like everyone else. Whereas, before, he wouldn’t even have called home … Mind you, no one had ever called him, either. Then, in the same way, out of the blue, just like that, he’d started these little visits to the management, so who knows what he was up to …

This time Comrade Victor Scarlat didn’t stick his nose right back in his papers the way he usually did. He’d been transfixed by the sight of the chorus of mourners. Impossible to tell whether he actually saw them or not. Behind the huge dark lenses of his glasses, it wasn’t all that easy to tell what he was actually looking at. He seemed to be listening to the disconsolate mumblings of the women when Chickadee came over to his desk and leaned down, enveloping him in her musky, May-apple perfume …

That little hussy Chickadee had never done anything like that before. She never left her lair — she was always on guard, never springing to attack. If she was now launching an assault on Mr. Victor, it was because she’d carefully considered her chances and the possible consequences.

It didn’t last long; in fact, it was all over very quickly. Comrade Scarlat got up from his chair. He dialed a number on Comrade Carmen’s phone and spoke briefly, apparently unintimidated by the pouty lips, batting eyelashes, and soft cooings that formed the triple threat of Comrade Chickadee Moga, who was already modestly making her way back to her sanctum. Mr. Victor, sir, hadn’t blushed, or blanched, or stammered.

There was quite a lot of activity around Comrade Muuroi, plus the constant jabbering of her colleagues, as they tried to calm her down. Branch 46 wasn’t much frequented by the public. At this hour, with the weather so variable and rainy, there wasn’t a soul. Which meant that the voice of Comrade Scarlat, who was normally so closemouthed and only rarely used the phone, had registered immediately on all ears, despite the persistent noise. All ears pricked up, on alert, at the first words; by the second sentence, silence had fallen; at the third, the first chair had swung around. And so … well, in short, it was obvious, after all!

Comrade Scarlat had a wife who was a nurse, or a bookkeeper, or a doctor, or a switchboard operator — in a hospital, which wife had a friend: “your former colleague,” that’s how Comrade Scarlat had referred to Comrade Doctor Bretan at the hospital where the emergency room was ready to receive Comrade Brbulescu, our Comrade Muuroi’s aunt, who had been suffering a severe attack of asthma for several hours, to the despair of branch 46 … “Oh, I see, directly to Spineanu. Fine, on your say-so, right,” had been the conclusion of the miracle. Not even a trace of a smile had appeared on the face of Comrade Chickadee Moga, while Comrades Petroianu, Murgule, and Voicil, and even Comrade Muuroi, were still open-mouthed, as though hypnotized by astonishment.

So then … you had, or rather, your wife had … but really, once again, it’s that dear little chickabiddy, quietly slaving away, she’s really the one who got us all out of this fix … That adorable chickling who comes to our rescue when we’re in need, as we so often are. We forget what our Comrade Chickadee can do, but she’s always ready to remind us generously, including you, Sugar Candy, who are a mite too inclined to be careless and snooty about things, and you, peppery Viorica, always full of resentments and venom, and even you, Comrade Carmen, our fine matron, who’ve become rather high and mighty ever since your smooth operator managed to land himself such a cushy job at our Circus Cemetery.

They’d all come rushing over, except for Geta, who’d shot out of the office like a rocket. They’d crowded around the hero of the hour, who’d vainly tried to play down the whole thing, but it was no use. They showered him with questions and with thanks, in the hope of finally establishing — and it had taken long enough — the complicity they’d been expecting for ages, and which he’d always stubbornly and sullenly withheld. Now here he was surrounded in a flash, an object of unbridled interest, whatever you do don’t let him escape this time, he’ll have to listen to their stories, their complaints, their opinions on movies and children and recipes and America and condoms and horoscopes and washing machines … No, he was trapped good and tight, this time they’d really got him! One little emotional slipup had triggered an avalanche: now he’d have to listen day after day as one after another besieged him with her personal problems and hysterical crises and quotations from her favorite authors, until he was beaten, softened up, until he finally unlocked his own word-mill and started churning out stuff about his brother and his daughter and his mother and the comrade manager, whom he’d known ever since childhood, and the comrade manager’s father, things like that, which he’d slip smoothly, discreetly, into future conversations, yes, they’d find out in the end what all those visits to the manager’s office meant, what was going on in there, because there was something fishy about it all, they’d known something was up ever since those September phone calls, those pseudo-conversations, Comrade-Scarlat-speaking-is-he-there-he’s-not-there wham goes the receiver …

For the moment, Comrade Scarlat was holding up fairly well. He’d exchanged only a few words with the noisy invaders, who’d relayed each other constantly around his desk, chatting among themselves — but for his ears — about this and that, about the same old daily grind. He hadn’t started to frown or hunker down over his papers the way he always did. He’d listened to them, smiled two or three times, fidgeted a bit, cleaned his glasses perfunctorily, blown his nose, straightened his tie. But he really had listened — benevolently and politely, if somewhat vaguely — to the voice of the people, gushing impetuously and tirelessly from all these mouths full of warmth and lipstick as they whispered, whirred, and cranked out, stitch by stitch, the soiled and rumpled material of the moment.

The day was approaching its soft, translucent edge, becoming flabby, sluggish, ready to fall apart.

Two hours had quickly passed since Sugar Candy’s departure and the shift in the current of office gossip. The conversational waltz was still going strong in the Scarlat orbit.

None of the women had deigned to glance, even obliquely, toward the one who’d made all this possible.

Their quiet colleague, sly Chickadee with the heart of gold, this hypocrite, was busy working, calmly, unobtrusively as always, aloof from the bustle of activity she’d set in motion.

III.2.

In the early and mid-1950S, with our party plagued by deviationism on the left and right wings, Comrade Cotig remains steadfastly devoted to revolutionary principles. He distinguishes himself at meetings by harshly rejecting all criticism of the Party line, all indulgence toward the serious failings of comrades who may have once been examples of self-sacrifice and revolutionary fervor, but who are now plotters practicing splinter tactics. He leads an energetic campaign against decadent conciliatory policies, liberalism, and the petit-bourgeois tolerance of inefficiency. Doesn’t hesitate to attack the reactionary tendencies of former comrades, denouncing their past political waverings as evidence of corrupt foreign ideas (c.f. the case of Petre Petru, his former friend, expelled with Comrade Cotig’s consent).

He is promoted to head of the industrial department at the Party newspaper, a key position in the organizational and ideological structure. In constant contact with important ministers, directors of the nation’s large industrial concerns, authorities in charge of planning and statistics, and even members of the Politburo, whose decisions he implements and whom he keeps informed of developments.

Works steadily and selflessly from seven in the morning until ten in the evening, sometimes after midnight. Information from this period in his life emphasizes his punctuality, energy, peerless dedication, and strict discipline— qualities he demands from his subordinates, participants in a vital military campaign that must be carried out day after day. Failure to reach a determined goal is always severely punished. His colleagues fear his devotion to duty, his extraordinary capacity for work, his honesty, and his steadiness of purpose. They call him “the corporal.”

In addition to working at the newspaper, teaches courses on topics of revolutionary interest, does propaganda work as well, speaking at political-awareness and self-criticism meetings.

Comrade Valentina Cotig heads an important health agency in the capital; she also serves on numerous work committees, competently fulfilling the duties assigned to her.

During this period, the Cotigs travel, as members of official delegations that often go abroad for conferences, congresses, missions of cooperation, or fraternal visits of friendship.

In 1959, during a campaign to fortify and purge the Party ranks of suspects and undesirables, Valentina Vrînceanu is expelled because of her unhealthy social background, which is discovered to have tainted her career. When called to account for her actions, Dr. Vrînceanu is unable to explain satisfactorily why she has allowed her reactionary mother to live with her for several years; above all, why she has allowed her — the wife of the engineer Vrînceanu, incarcerated as a known reactionary and rumormonger who ridiculed our socialist achievements — to supervise the education of Dr. Vrînceanu’s only daughter, Dolores, ten years old at that time, an exemplary Young Pioneer in a special school for children of Party officials who should have been spared all contact with obsolete elements of the former social order. When asked if she knows about the packages her mother sends to Mihai Vrînceanu in prison, or if she has read the postcards her mother writes to this criminal, Dr. Valentina Vrînceanu does not provide clear answers. Ex-director Vrînceanu is also unable to justify the hospitalization for two months of the ailing Rodica Vrînceanu, her mother, who had no right — although gravely ill at the time — to avail herself of medical facilities not available to the general public.

In October 1959, the organization discusses the case of Dr. Vrînceanu’s husband, the former head of the industrial department of the Party newspaper. Demoted to a lowly editorial position, Comrade Cotig is reprimanded for his unworthy conduct toward his subordinates, for sectarianism, authoritarianism, and individualism. Moreover, he is condemned for the influences of his unwholesome family situation, discernible in the contempt with which he treated his fellow workers, and in the “kulak” arrogance he showed by making all decisions on his own and requiring that they be implemented without the slightest opposition, just as in the army of the discredited former regime. On this occasion, a letter of recommendation is read aloud, written by a certain Stamate, once an influential cultural representative of the Party. Comrade Cotig had been hired by the newspaper in 1946 on the strength of said recommendation. The file on the man named Geo Stamate shows that this second-rate journalist, a well-known black marketeer in the port of Constantsa, turned out to be a clever impostor, an undesirable element of society, and a demagogue who had hoodwinked Party authorities for many years. He succeeded in attaining positions of great responsibility before his past was revealed. He was unmasked as a hateful agent of the interests of our formerly class-ridden society, and of enemy forces abroad.

Between November 1959 and February 1960, Comrade Cotig is treated in a sanatorium. In April 1960, he is transferred to the Committee for the Defense of Peace, as head of the accounting department. His superiors have no complaints about his performance. In October 1960, he is promoted to assistant editor-in-chief on the Peace Committee newspaper. All reports indicate that he continues to provide satisfaction in this new capacity, just as he had in his previous position. He is conscientious and punctual. He keeps his relationships at work strictly businesslike. He does not drink. He is serious and disciplined. He works long hours without hesitation, often remaining in the office until late in the evening. He introduces measures intended to popularize the newspaper. He does not make his voice heard within the Party organization, however, preferring to keep a low profile, as though he’d never been a high-ranking Party executive.

Beginning with the academic year 1960-61, Comrade Cotig takes correspondence courses in economics to complete his education. He passes all his exams, receives average marks. His diploma, like the rest of his personal papers, carries the name Victor Scarlat, the pseudonym adopted for his first literary efforts.

In 1963, at his mother’s funeral, Comrade Cotig meets Mr. John Lama, Smaranda Cotig’s brother, who left Romania in 1936 and became a Canadian citizen. Comrade Cotig states that he was not previously aware of the existence of this uncle, which is why he never mentioned him on his personal data sheet. What is certain is that, beginning in 1965, Comrade Cotig and especially his wife, the former Valentina Vrînceanu, correspond intermittently with the said John Lama of Toronto. Likewise, beginning in 1966, through letters sent via an intermediary, Valentina renews ties with the family of Marius Vrînceanu, who left the country in 1945 to settle in Milan, Italy.

In 1964, Comrade Cotig petitions the relevant authorities to be reinstated at the Party newspaper, in the industrial or agricultural department, where he formerly worked. Receives no answer. Remains in his position at the newspaper of the Committee for Peace. When the newspaper reduces its staff, he loses his job as assistant editor-in-chief to become head of the public-relations department. When the newspaper ceases publication, Comrade Cotig manages to find a position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1971 he leaves this post, which is incompatible with his family ties abroad and with the fact that his daughter, Dolores Scarlat, foolishly succumbed to the siren call of capitalist decadence while on an organized tour in Turkey, and defected to Belgium, where she still lives in Antwerp.

On the basis of a recommendation from Comrade Petre Petru, whom he has known since his early years in the Party, and who has become, after his rehabilitation, a director at the Department of Public Worship, Comrade Cotig obtains a position on a religious publication put out by the Romanian Orthodox Church (exactly which one remains unclear); he is quickly promoted to the protocol department. All reports state that Comrade Cotig fulfills his obligations in this position, which he holds until 1973, as conscientiously as always. His colleagues are favorably impressed with him. There are indications that in addition to his duties in the protocol/public relations department, Comrade Cotig is sometimes consulted, in view of his long experience, by the Most Reverend Metropolitan whenever the prelate is confronted with a particularly delicate political matter.

II.3.

The girl had been sprawled for some time in the rocking chair, in front of the mirror; she was staring at her reflection, without really seeing it. She needed the calm of perfect concentration — at least that’s the impression she gave, absentmindedly rocking for hours … In fact, she was more interested in simply staying right where she was, lolling in that red chair. Apparently she created this atmosphere of peaceful isolation, in which she’d been beginning her mornings over the last few weeks, in a highly original way, by starting a frenetic uproar with the radio, the tape deck, added to the constant ringing of the telephone — an uproar she then ignored …

She wouldn’t make the slightest move to stop the noise, as though she couldn’t hear a thing. Every once in a while, she tried to continue writing the letter she held in her lap, but the words wouldn’t come to her, or else they vanished before she could grasp them.

The lovely spring morning was far away. The locked windows and thick curtains kept out the fresh air of the new season.

She was naked to the waist, wearing jeans, with her bare feet propped up on the huge bureau. Hair cut boyishly short, circles under her big, heavily made-up eyes, and ripe breasts, as mature as the rest of her solid, confident body. Her parents said she was a shy girl; her teachers at the Polytechnic described her as an excellent student; according to her friends, she was laid back and an easy lay.

A tape of Ray Charles, a children’s program on the radio, and on the telephone, Sorin, who called her in a frenzy for hours on end every morning. She was writing to him, actually, to Sorin — one or two lines a day, tiny stories intended to make him understand, when he got them, the how and the why … It wasn’t just a simple explanation of these past two weeks of absence and silence; she wanted to present him with a motive she’d discovered hidden away in the Technicolor folds of a privileged childhood, one that had given her, she had to admit, very precious advantages.

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 …”

Because of the cold and the lateness of the hour, but also because of this provocation, the witnesses will be pushing and shoving as they leave the hall, so it will be impossible later on for them to remember who was there and who was not.

III.3.

After the death of the most reverend metropolitan, Vasile Cotig’s situation becomes uncertain. Leaves his job and finds employment for several months at a philatelic publication.

Two months after the earthquake in 1977, Vasile Cotig undergoes an operation to correct a detached retina. Spends ten days in a ward at the Military Hospital, where he makes the acquaintance of both an employee of Tarom, the Romanian national airline, and a little-known writer, the author of several novels. Reports indicate that this writer and Vasile Cotig engage in lively discussions. After learning that his fellow patient has until recently been on the staff of the Most Reverend Metropolitan, the writer questions Cotig about the prelate. Cotig’s description is that of a leader, not a saint. A resourceful man: intelligent, determined, concerned about his own interests as well as those of the church. Authoritarian and practical: his subordinates were careful to avoid making personal comments in front of him. A zealous manager, a good organizer, a hard and tireless worker, used to making all decisions — whether important or minor ones — on his own. A leader who stood out from his fellows through his energy and imagination, but who knew how to compromise opportunely with other leaders, and was willing to do certain favors for those in a position to shield him from various difficulties. This brief portrait devoid of personal details, sketched on a sultry night when the patients were unable to sleep, leads to a discussion that lasts several days. The writer, intrigued by what he learns, demands more information about the nature and values of religious work. Cotig answers his questions with precision, without making any personal comments, which exasperates the self-proclaimed writer, whose name means nothing to Cotig and the Tarom employee, since neither of them has ever heard of him before.

“You bother me, in a way,” the writer confesses, “simply because I’m trying to see in you I don’t know which uncle, or cousin, or perhaps someone I went to school with … unless you reflect a part of myself, some impossible, unsuspected face I’m just not able to recognize as my own! I’m looking for the faces of our time, by which I mean that I’m trying to understand what I’ve lived and what I’m living and what I’ll live in the future, unless I can get rid of this clumsy need — and I don’t think I ever will — to understand, to have standards of judgment.”

The writer spews out such nonsense, probably in an effort to rattle Cotig, who calmly replies that he feels it’s important to do one’s work well, whatever it is, and that’s all. Reports mention the inappropriate attitude of the writer, who raises his voice; Cotig answers him in a poised and good-natured manner. On the following day, or perhaps even that first night, the little scribbler, who is restless and suffers from insomnia, sets the following problem for his listeners.

“Let’s suppose I know a young painter of genius. A kind of Picasso. Or else an exceptional poet, Lautréamont, for example, off living in a garret. Poor, ill, no resources. Let’s also suppose that this person, without realizing it, is a perfect example of what a good Christian should be. He doesn’t steal, or lie; in short, he doesn’t do anything bad at all, a sort of angel. Rather difficult for an artist to pull off, and even harder for a genius, but let’s just say it’s true. Now, imagine me going to see your High Holiness guy to tell him the whole story, you know, the great man suffering in a garret and so on, a really gifted soul, also a political suspect, also a very lonely man who doesn’t go to church, who never prays to anyone about anything, who bows down neither before the powerful of this world nor before the Guy Upstairs, a good Christian without knowing it. So, fine, he paints pictures nobody much understands, but myself and a few others who know what’s good when it comes to this stuff, we guarantee that these works are outstanding and that one day they’ll be worth outrageous sums. Okay, is your guy, the Most Reverend — that’s right? — is he going to ask me if the kid paints pictures of the Resurrection? Or is he going to require that the artist insert a little cross, or something like that, somewhere in all his pictures?” “Of course,” replies Cotig.

“Otherwise, he won’t be interested? He’s not inclined to help him out, just out of, you know, Christian charity?”

“Of course not,” Cotig replies again, “he’s only interested in matters he’s responsible for. Otherwise, it’s none of his business …”

“Oh, right, so His Holiness is just your basic state employee … Give and ye shall receive, you fit the profile, you don’t, first pay up, then we’ll see … No difference, in other words …”

He goes on in the same idiotic vein, along the lines of: if you work for us, no problem, we’ll let you play around at challenging authority, you’ll even be able to tell the truth once in a while, what’s important is that you remember which side you’re on. Cotig ignores these provocations. The other man isn’t discouraged; he keeps mouthing off, a torrent of foul language, protests, ridiculous ideas. Finally, the two men become friends! There is proof that this hot-air artist stays in touch with Cotig; he even visits him in his home.

When he leaves the hospital, Cotig refuses to follow the suggestion that he retire. He spends several months looking for a new job. The report claiming that he is hired at the National Insurance Agency thanks to the influence of the writer he met in the hospital turns out to be false. The position of insurance investigator Cotig obtains there, from which he will later be transferred to the accounting department of branch 46 of the National Savings Bank, is due, once again, to Comrade Petre Petru, his editorial colleague in the 1950s, now retired, whose son, Vladimir Petru, holds a managerial position in this same banking organization.

I.5.

“I really don’t know what to do about that school anymore,” Viorica had complained while settling the fate of a pile of printed forms. “They’ve gone completely crazy. The children have to sweep and mop the floors! They haven’t got a janitor, imagine! But let me tell you the latest thing they’ve come up with: each child has to bring in, every month, five corks and I don’t know how many kilos of recyclable paper! And bottles. Four bottles or jars, plus some medicinal plants! Where do they think we’re going to find medicinal plants in Bucharest? No, I mean, come on! I asked the head teacher yesterday at the class meeting.

She was smiling like a total idiot! You’ll have to buy some, she said … Buy some, can you believe it! We have to give them all this stuff so that the school can turn around and sell what we’ve bought … Just once, I’d really like to see teachers that would refuse to go along with this crap! Whatever they’re told to do, they can’t wait to say yes, we’ll follow orders, no sweat. They’re scared of losing their jobs, of getting booted out on their butts!”

Geta wasn’t really listening, but she genuinely agreed with Viorica. She had a daughter, too; she knew what the other woman was talking about. Bundled up in her big woolen cardigan — there was no heat in the room and it was as cold as a refrigerator — she yawned, paying a bit of attention now and then, thinking mostly about the fact that there was only one more hour to go until their little treat. Just what they needed to liven up this cold, gray day! The plates, serving dishes, bottles, and glasses had been carefully stashed behind the cupboard. She’d made friends again with Viorica; the girls weren’t really bad-tempered, these things happen, that’s all. She’d simply gone to see Viorica one morning to talk to her, heart to heart.

“Come on, what do you zay, shall we make up? I’ve been quite upzet that you’re not talking to me … Thingz just zlip out, you know how it iz. Onze it waz zaid, that waz it, I couldn’t do anything about it. It’z true I should have kept my mouth shut, but you’ve got to admit, you’re the one who told everyone about that buzinezz with the minkz. The ztory that I had a mink hutch in my garden and waz going to get rich. And then the fib around three yearz ago that I waz growing mushroomz in my zellar.

You know perfectly well it’z not true! Happenz to everyone, talking too much. Look, I’ve brought you a prezent, zo let’z kizz and be friendz again!”

And she’d unwrapped a bracelet Made in China that she’d slipped around the other woman’s wrist. Viorica’d had tears in her eyes. Because she wasn’t a bad sort, Viorica, just a bit touchy, always ready to fly off the handle, but if you knew how to manage her, she’d soon be herself again, sweet and attentive … Today, for Viorica’s birthday, her next-desk neighbor and gossiping companion had prepared stuffed cabbage and a jellied meat dish. In other words, the main course. You have to wait weeks and then stay in line hours and hours to get some meat, but she did it! So, in comparison with Chickadee’s deviled eggs and Ina’s pastries and even Comrade Carmen’s cake, Sugar Candy had definitely proved she deserved her place next to chatty Viorica, once more her friend and confidante. Nothing, not even the worst blunder, would ever come between them again! After all, that was truly something, that item about the husband accidentally coming home unexpectedly in his pajamas from his out-of-town business trip that was actually just downstairs in the same building; and those stories about the minks and the mushrooms hadn’t been easy to brush off, either … Well, all that was behind them now, friendship had triumphed! And here was Viorica, fresh from the hairdresser’s, impeccably turned out in a brand-new green dress, waiting to be feted by her office chums.

They celebrated everyone’s birthday, and their saint’s day, too: Saint George for Geta and Saint Gabriel for Gabriela aka Chickadee and Saint John for Ioana Carmen Petroianu. But Viorica’s pig-out was even grander than Carmen’s, because her birthday fell on December 25, so she was treated to the traditional Christmas dishes of stuffed cabbage leaves and jellied meat, with more wine and stronger brandy than they usually had.

Barely a week had gone by since they’d had their party for Comrade Boss Lady Carmen, who was also born in December. Here at branch 46, they had a special way of doing things: it wasn’t the birthday person who gave the party — which was how it was done elsewhere — but everyone else in the office. The idea was that the star of the day should feel pampered, coddled, and enjoy being the center of attention without having to worry about waiting on line and slaving in the kitchen. Almost all of them lived in newer, outlying neighborhoods, far from the downtown area where they did their shopping, endlessly on line. Sweating, lugging heavy bags, they stood around for hours at bus stops waiting for broken-down vehicles to lurch into view, buses already stuffed to bursting with desperate commuters, more of whom still managed to shove their way on at every stop.

At branch 46, the birthday person truly was the star. All she had to do was visit her dressmaker and her hairdresser, as Viorica had done to get her new perm and that striped green dress.

On Wednesday, Ina had returned to the office after a bout of flu, so the gang was all there. The week before, Carmen’s pet had been absent and had missed Auntie’s birthday, so the girls hadn’t had a chance to admire the extravagant gift with which, year after year, Ina Murgule made up for her relatively apathetic response to the office manager’s daily show of affection. Naturally, they hadn’t been able to resist quizzing Comrade Petroianu about it, and once again it was that little motor-mouth Viorica who’d dared pop the question they were all dying to ask.

“And Ina, what did she give you this year? Since she isn’t here, we’ve no way of knowing …”

Carmen had replied without hesitation and with definite satisfaction. “As you know, girls, Ina never stints on my birthday present. She’s just adorable, I’m telling you. Sweet, intelligent, discreet, doesn’t shoot her mouth off all over the place. Which she’s proved more than once … She called me the afternoon before my birthday. She could barely talk, because she was running a fever. After she’d wished me a happy birthday — she was quite upset that she wouldn’t be able to be with all of us — she told me that in an hour she’d be sending me her present, something special, and that her son would drop it off. Because, besides her daughter, she’s also got a boy who’s still in school. Real cute he is, too. He was supposed to arrive with a van. A van! I couldn’t imagine what she was giving me, my little sweetheart of Sevastopol — you know I call her that, she’s just so adorable! I mean, it couldn’t be a refrigerator or a washing machine, after all! Well, what do you think it was? A samovar! A real collector’s item! Silver-plated, with loads of ornamentation, a superb piece!”

Comrade Carmen seemed truly pleased, and she really did love Ina like a sister, there was nothing suspect at all about her affection. She’d been very jovial at her own party and had joked around a lot; she was already a trifle tight, La Carmencita, when they started in on the traditional droll stories about the eminently subversive Bulâ, that foolish trickster and sexual maniac of Romanian folklore. That’s when she’d taken a swipe at Chickadee.

“Well, girls, I had the feeling that cold fish they’ve been shoving down our throats for three months every year wasn’t going to turn up today. He doesn’t like this sort of thing. But he always used to come anyhow, when it was my birthday …”

True, Comrade Victor Scarlat had never gotten used to these office parties, and preferred to avoid them. In previous years, he’d come up with excuses to be absent, and over the last trimester he’d skipped September 18, when Sugar Candy had celebrated her daughter’s birthday, and September 29, Chickadee’s anniversary, and November 14, when Carmen had bought her Skoda. Of course, Comrade Scarlat would have been welcome to join in the regular or improvised parties of the last three months, even if he was only a temporary colleague instead of a permanent employee. He’d never shown up in past years for Viorica’s birthday on December 25, which was an ordinary working day under our atheistic calendar, and sometimes he’d even found a pretext to slip away for a few hours on December 31, to avoid having to toast the New Year. But he’d always come into the office on Comrade Petroianu’s birthday, even though he never stayed until the end of the festivities.

This December 18, however, Papa Victor hadn’t shown up. Nor had he appeared the next day, or any of the following days. There was no reason to expect him now.

Inspector Scarlat’s affront had not passed unnoticed by Carmen. She probably wouldn’t have attached too much importance to it, however, if the alcohol hadn’t gone to her head, prompting her to start talking about him.

“Hey, Chickadee, you always seem to know what’s going on, whatever’s happened to our little accounting expert these last few weeks?”

“I don’t know much about it,” Chickadee had replied evasively, to no one’s surprise.

“Well, what I heard on the grapevine,” Milady Carmen had continued as she set down her cracker spread with taramosaláta and turned to her audience (which was all agog at the idea that the Matron was going to break her long-standing rule of never gossiping about anything overheard at business meetings or in the manager’s office), “what I heard from Pia is that our Comrade Scarlat submitted a proposal or a report to management, some idea that he’s argued for a million times before the manager, Comrade Petru. Something really unusual! A bombshell!”

Carmen had glanced meaningfully at Chickadee, as though that was her cue to continue the story with a barrage of thrilling details, but the other woman didn’t say a word and went on listening closely, pretending she was just as much in the dark as everyone else.

“I have to tell you, girls, because it’s absolutely outrageous,” Comrade Petroianu had continued, draining her glass of Bulgarian cabernet to give herself strength for the task ahead.

They were all in a good mood, although a bit tired. It was late. The news hadn’t bothered them. A boring story, not very interesting, too serious, really twisted, something for loonies and crackpots running after heaven knows what lousy privileges, or nuts obsessed with some weird idea— so, big deal, everyone’s a little strange about something, right? Comrade Petroianu hadn’t been satisfied with these offhand dismissals, however, and had expressed personal dismay at the paltry level of the conversation.

“Come on, girls, we’re not complete birdbrains here, you know, this is important! It’s a question of principle! I spent an entire evening talking it over with my companion Comrade Bebe, and he opened my eyes on this, I have to admit. I mean, what is it with Scarlat and others like him, who have a certain way of looking at things — where does that come from, what does it mean?”

So the girls had realized they’d have to rise to this occasion. They’d show that they weren’t airheads, idle windbags, interested only in foolish frivolities, no way, these girls had a lot between their ears.

“Obviously, it would seem like a fair solution, to do it like that. But that’s where all the confusion comes in— Bebe explained it to me, Bebe knows it too well, he’s been working for years with those guys.”

Carmen had more or less led the discussion, which wound up confirming that yes indeed, this problem they’d been tempted to brush off as a minor one was actually quite important.

“Where he got this idea from I can’t imagine.”

Well, the others had seemed slightly overwhelmed, until Ina intervened. Briefly, with an unexpected pessimism that appeared deep and well founded.

“No, mustn’t. Mistake, big mistake. They still getting to decide, always they decide. That words, just words. Mustn’t let happen.”

Ina Nikolayevna’s replies always tickled Sugar Candy, who’d smiled and almost burst into giggles, so that a bite of pastry started to go down the wrong way, but she’d managed to recover and had wiped her little mouth quite properly before chiming in earnestly.

“But all that could be verified. There could be zupervizion! Perzonally, I don’t think that idea’z zo ztupid. Viorica’z right. In my building there’z a guy who runz a kind of cafeteria. He had hiz certificate in metal ztamping. Then he huztled to get thiz job. Eight hundred lei per day. Eight hundred lei, can you juzt imagine, when the average zalary’z about two thouzand five hundred! Zo he became a cook. He’z got more money than he knowz what to do with! You should just zee hiz apartment. Porzelain and rugz and a family-zize refrigerator and all thiz zdereo zduff. Whenever I run into him, he’z won zomething elze. Zometimez at lotto, zometimez zportz lotto, zometimez the horzez at Ploiezti. Lazt year he won a car in a National Zavingz Bank drawing. With the dough he’z got, not zurprizing he feelz he can play. And zo he winz. Zo what’z juztice got to do with thiz? Luck’z alwayz on the zide of thoze who take life eazy.”

Comrade Petroianu had spoken up here, of course. She’d related everything that Bebe, who was back from Brazil, had told her about the terrible danger represented by ideas like Scarlat’s. Ones that “stopped up the last air vent,” as he’d put it. Meaning, you shouldn’t try to eliminate all traces of chance from life. Meaning, also, his chance, of course.

“If you try to control everything, then nothing will work,” Comrade Carmen had declared, repeating word for word the speech her husband had made to her after his trip to Rio.

Then Chickadee had asked timidly, in a low voice, as though speaking just for herself, “Do you think that Scarlat really pushed this idea of his?”

Everyone had turned to look attentively at her delicate and impenetrable face, urging her to tell what she knew, because she’d given herself away there, she certainly knew something. But once again the little china doll simply said a few soft and hesitant words that could be interpreted any old way.

“I mean, it seems a little strange; at his age, you’d think he’d just be interested in his salary and his pension …”

They’d continued drinking and chattering for a while, but they simply weren’t interested in taking the question any further, despite Carmen’s prodding. Darkness had fallen … They usually held their celebrations during the noon break, but on Comrade Carmen’s birthday, they celebrated after work. No matter how enjoyable it was to gossip and nibble goodies, the day was drawing to a close. The women couldn’t face dealing with the evening buses, which were even worse than the daytime service, so they’d finally packed up plates, pastries, cakes, bottles, all the leftovers, wrapping them in plastic bags they’d carefully set out on a chilly window ledge until snack time the next day.

And now the birthday party for Viorica on Christmas Day had been planned for two stages, the first one being the lunch break from one-thirty to two-thirty. Promptly at twelve-thirty, they began on the appetizers. A general cry of admiration greeted the appearance of bottles and tasty-looking dishes, which were artfully arranged on two tables in the back room.

They started sampling bits of panettone and savoring tiny forkfuls of salad, sausage, and jellied meat. Then, a knock at the door. Intrigued by this unexpected disturbance, Viorica tore herself away from the delicious opening course and went to see who the killjoy was.

She was gone for an unexpectedly long time, returning slightly agitated and agreeably surprised.

“Girls, he wished me a happy birthday! He even brought me flowers. Unbelievable! He apologized for not being able to stay. He’d like to speak to Carmen. He’s waiting for you in the other room, Comrade Petroianu. He has something particular to tell you.”

It wasn’t until a nervous Carmen had disappeared, without having understood from Viorica’s hermetic summons who this intruder was, that the secret was revealed.

“Girls, it’s Scarlat! He seemed rather depressed. He asked me to get Carmen for him.”

Then they hesitated a long time, unable to decide whether they should invite him to join them or not. Since Carmen still hadn’t returned, they finally gave up the whole idea. Even Viorica figured that there was no point, and she restrained Geta, who was insisting that each of them should take turns frowning through the half-open door to make the unwanted guest take the hint and leave.

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 …

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.

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.

“I really didn’t feel well last night, I was all alone in the house. I was scared when the phone rang, it was right before dawn. He was very upset, he told me that the idea had been his, but he didn’t think it was going to work out. The idea came to him just like that, and he’d thought it was something worth looking into, something new. He wouldn’t have taken it any further if the boss hadn’t shown any interest, but then he’d gotten stubborn about it when he’d seen that the boss wanted to take over the idea for himself. And he’d known him for a long time, ever since the boss was little. But he got scared when he realized that he was being asked to defend his proposal one more time. He didn’t want to give up without a fight, but there wasn’t anything they could do to him anymore. There’s nothing more they can do to him … But he couldn’t stand the fact that the boss seemed to be making fun of him, once he’d realized he wouldn’t let him use his idea for his own schemes. At first the boss had been enthusiastic, making him come up with further details to prove his points and fancy quotations from the classics of Marxism-Leninism, but he wasn’t sure this wasn’t some kind of ploy to discourage him for a while so that the boss could appropriate the idea later, at a more favorable time, but me, there I was, nauseated and everything, sick all night long, and I didn’t understand any of what he was telling me. He was all alone at home, he seemed a bit unwell. I felt sorry for him and let him talk until he was finished. He’d spent hours in a streetcar stop, somewhere over by the Abattoirs. He’d just gotten home. But I was feeling so awful, I could hardly hear him.”

Her colleagues seemed more astonished at the sick young woman’s talkativeness than at what she had to say, so they soon drifted back to their seats when she’d finished. There weren’t many people in the office. The place seemed very familiar to the stranger. The bell over the door reminded him of something, of some old story … The employees didn’t bother him, letting him rest a bit, slumped on the seat near the door. He had all the time in the world to reflect on the fact that a survivor fresh from the still smoking ovens of the war, without any other piece of identification except his membership card in the Association of Former Prisoners, had to locate a distant uncle or some vague cousin or other of the occupant of the house next door to the one where they’d come for him so long ago, it seemed like an eternity … Then he might have been able to understand what had happened all these years since to the minds and bowed shoulders of the average citizen, the journey the paths the very narrow paths rising falling, how did this bizarre Idea take root, what connections were there between a hypothetical neighbor or uncle and the child-man who was supposed to give a speech this afternoon at the Institute of Futurology on “The Conditional Reflected in the Biography,” a rather pompous title for a longtime member like himself, an ordinary child-witness, himself inflammable, fuel of the blood-century, which the little futurologist director wanted to see expressed in “octane numbers.” That telegenic star, that charming, sly informer, polyglot, constantly cooking up paradoxes and hooey: the ultimate composite picture! Publicity for a secret establishment, a trap for derelicts and rebels.

Lolling on that chair near the front door of the bank, I realized that I would have to include — on the personal data sheet that’s supposed to accompany the description of the symptoms of being fed-up that have plagued me these last hundred years — the barbed remarks of the gossiping employees, and the policemen, police files, police speeches, and the fight that broke out at the store across the way, where the waiting line for cheese had poured out into the street in a general melee, and the crematoria and the astronauts, and the streetcars immobilized at the intersection by a power failure due to the energy shortage, everything. Everything. Finally, the new fuel capable of modifying mobilizing massacring everything, absolutely everything … Please take note and work out the obvious correspondences! Stratified, diversified, hundreds of pages of autobiographies and reports, and I was going to go into all that in detail in my lecture, mentioning the sources that lay the foundations of such a scholarly descriptive undertaking, such a delicate analytical experiment … The ambiguity of any “solution of continuity,” as the experts say. A gap, a break …?

There is no other solution of continuity besides the clear and ordinary morning, and so I will display the absentminded expression and dithering gestures of a brilliant student in some obscure field. I will stand up, confidently, to collect my prize forgotten long ago, before the war, before the crisis. I don’t even know what a savings-bank book looks like anymore.

But there won’t be any surprise, or resentment, perhaps just a misunderstanding, a small oversight, because the thin blond employee didn’t speak Romanian very well. She noticed the mistake, though. She had to admit that my address was out-of-date, my old, forgotten address, the card absolutely had to be renewed, my new permanent address had to be on it, plus the required stamps.

She had a sense of humor, however, and was very gracious, just like the soft, pleasant winter morning. She didn’t see any reason why it couldn’t be taken care of right away, we could simply make out an affidavit for the record. A record, of course, a recording, recited by the two of us, each in turn, whispering each word before writing it down again … A preliminary exercise that we were going to carry out, consecrate, perfect, together, in writing, in the present. It was the only possible way to possess some kind of proof to preserve, to prolong the present … As a result, we were going to tackle the retranscription with a cautious hand, stopping after each word, trying to make sure we’d chosen the right one, every stratum of the morning had to be in there, the history of the event, the person, the day, if you like, something that would become day, week, or century, still present, because recorded in writing: “We certify that today, so-and-so, on such-and-such a date, presented a claim at this agency, in support of which claim the aforementioned, to whom by rights …” Which could amount to this: on a chilly, mediocre, and conciliating morning, we press forward, with our bag and baggage, calendar, certificates, cartograms, risks, chitchat, prattling, the cold childish expectation of dawn, our punishment, and joy and pain, all the troubles each one of us packs up in that old kit bag.