One of the most unpleasant things for those who had grown unaccustomed to Soc were the newspapers and television from that time. Reading that officious blather was truly agonizing. The television programming ended at ten-thirty in the evening with the news, followed only by the national anthem and white snowflakes on the empty screen.
To the delight of smokers, you could now light up freely everywhere. Unfortunately for them, however, only the old brands of cigarettes were available. Stewardess was every bit as sharp as before, as was BT hard pack, the ladies’ slims Phoenix and Femina Menthol had that same slightly nasty sweet aftertaste. While Arda, with or without filters, tore up the lungs of those who had been mollycoddled by Western blends.
Most people, as has always been the case, began adapting unexpectedly quickly, as if they had been patiently waiting for thirty years for those times to return. Old habits turned out to be alive and well. As for those who couldn’t get used to it . . . soon disbelieving citizens who were still living under some democratic inertia (including the young) quickly started to fill up the holding cells. The basement at Moscow 5, which my friend Professor K. and I had discussed, started working again at full steam, and not as a museum, of course.
The old jokes were funny once more. And frightening.
*During the April Uprising of 1876, Bulgarian rebels rose up against the Ottoman authorities. Although the uprising ultimately failed, it remained as a key event in the Bulgarian national memory and mythology.
†Georgi Benkovski (1843–1876) was a leading figure in the ultimately unsuccessful April Uprising of 1876 against Ottoman Rule in Bulgaria; he was the head of “The Flying Band” or Hvarkovata cheta of horsemen.
‡Reference to the poem by Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912) in which the Ottomans repeatedly ask Yovo from the Balkan Mountains to give up his beautiful sister Yana. After each refusal, they punish him.
§A classic trickster character from Bulgarian folktales.
¶Nikephoros I, the Byzantine emperor, was killed in battle in 811 by the Bulgarian Khan Krum, who is said to have made a chalice out of his skull.
#In Balkan folklore, hajduks were Robin Hood–style outlaws during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries who were also guerrilla fighters against the Ottoman authorities.
**Khan Kubrat established Old Great Bulgaria circa AD 632 in what is now southern Ukraine and southwest Russia; all Bulgarian schoolchildren are taught the legend that Khan Kubrat tried to convince his sons to remain united after his death by the demonstration with the sticks. His son Asparuh later founded the First Bulgarian Kingdom in present-day Bulgaria.
IV
REFERENDUM ON THE PAST
And upon turning back, they saw what was to come . . .
1.
From the airport in Zurich I took a train straight to a monastery half an hour away where I could afford a cell with Wi-Fi (what more could you ask for?) in the guest wing. The Franciscans had been taking in pilgrims for years at rock-bottom prices and I availed myself of their benevolence. I wanted to be alone for a time in peace and quiet to follow online what was happening with the referendum in other countries. And I wanted to finish up these notes, which had initially seemed to me to precede and presage what had happened, but which—as was becoming ever clearer—were actually describing and running alongside recent events. Sooner or later all utopias turn into historical novels.
I saw everything through the computer screen, shut up in this souped-up cell in the ascetic Franciscan monastery with a bell, doors, and windows that were several centuries old. The glass was a true revelation. We’ve gotten used to buildings and rocks lasting, but for something so fragile to have survived since the seventeenth century is a miracle, no matter how you look at it. Grainy, uneven glass poured by human hands, in which the sand it was made from could be seen. Close to the monastery there was a little farm with a dozen cows, and the cows, too, were no different from those during the seventeenth century. Animals eat up the sense of time. I dutifully wrote everything down in my notebook.
I called Gaustine and let it ring and ring. Afterward, I realized that if he’d gone down to the ’60s rooms somewhere, cell phones didn’t exist yet. I had to tell him what I’d seen so far. The short version was: a disaster. His darkest fears had come to pass, our darkest fears.
2.
Happy countries are all alike; each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, as has been written.
Everything was going wrong in the family of Europe . . . All was confusion in the European house.
Indeed, the Continent was turned upside down, and every member was unhappy in its own unique way. Incidentally the very word “unique” has multiplied in recent years like the Old Testament flies or Moroccan locusts, such that it has blacked out all other verbal beasts. Everything was “unique.” Most of all unhappiness. No nation wanted to give up its unhappiness. It was raw material for everything, an excuse, an alibi, grounds for pretensions . . .
Why part with unhappiness, when it’s the only wealth some nations have—the crude oil of sorrow is their only inexhaustible resource. And they know that the deeper you dig into it, the more you can excavate. The limitless deposits of national unhappiness.
The idea that nations and homelands seek happiness is an enormous illusion and self-deception. Happiness, besides being unattainable, is also unbearable. What will you do with its volatile matter, that feather-light phantom, a soap bubble that bursts in front of your nose, leaving a bit of stinging foam in your eyes?
Happiness, you say? Happiness is as perishable as milk left out in the sun, as a fly in winter and a crocus in early spring. Its backbone is as fragile as a seahorse’s. It’s not a sturdy mare you can jump onto and gallop far away. It’s not the cornerstone you can build your church or state upon. Happiness doesn’t make it into the history textbooks (there only battles, pogroms, betrayals, and bloody murders of some archduke make the cut), nor does it make it into the chronicles and annals. Happiness is only for primers and foreign phrase books, and for beginners, at that. Perhaps because it is the easiest grammatically, it’s always in the present tense. Only there is everyone happy, the sun is shining, the flowers smell lovely, we’re going to the seaside, we’re coming back from a trip, pardon me, is there a nice restaurant nearby . . .
Swords are not forged from happiness, its stuff is fragile, its stuff is brittle. It does not lend itself to grand novels or songs or epics. There are no chains of slaves, no besieged Troys, no betrayals, no Roland bleeding on a hill, his sword jagged and his horn cracked, nor any fatally wounded, aging Beowulf . . .
You can’t summon legions under the banner of happiness . . .
Indeed, no country wanted to part with its unhappiness, this wine that had been aging nicely in the cellar, where it was always on hand if needed. The strategic national stockpile of unhappiness. But now (for the first time) the moment had come to choose happiness.
3.
It was almost certain that France would choose its own happy and renowned Les trente glorieses, when the economy and prosperity were growing, everyone was in love with French cinema, Resnais, Truffaut, Trintignant, Delon, Belmondo, Anouk Aimée, Girardot, everyone was humming Joe Dassin’s “Et si tu n’existais pas” and talking about Sartre, Camus, Perec . . . And behind all of that stood a well-oiled economic machine. The glorious and happy thirty, between 1945 and 1975. Clearly everything in France after the Sun King had to last a long time, their happy periods were thirty years long, as were their wars . . .