industrial landscapes, biographies

Informative Note: Code-Name “Slaughterhouse- Modern Times”

Radu Cosaşu

Sixty years have passed – the time, so Malraux would claim, necessary for becoming a real man- since I was downgraded to the “lower echelons” as an unskilled worker for the factory Modern Times ; I had been an editor of the Youth’s Spark, I had to pay for an uncle, a dancer from Vienna (though I cannot ask you to believe me: this is what I wrote in one of my short-stories) whom our services exposed as a spy; they told me that an ordeal, a test would be necessary in order to prove my allegiance to the cause; I did not flinch; I was 20 years old, I had passed an exam in Vulgar Latin with a fabulous specialist, I. Fischer, who had advised me to continue my studies because, he said, I might have a call; but I wanted to prove my commitment, so I would put on some worn-out (though not torn) trousers, I would take tram no. 1 on which “Slaughterhouse-Modern Times Route” was written and get off at the last station; I would enter the factory carefully punching my card at the gate so that I would end in the hands and care of a rather stern, severe foreman, master Dinu (this is how I called him in one of my short-stories, but you don’t have to believe me: he could have had another name). He wasn’t at all old, or wise, or a great teacher in this “school of life” as the literature of the period demanded – even less so “politically just”, he wasn’t supporting the powers that be, nor ignoring them, he did not insist on any ideological education, he wouldn’t play any Hegemonic or Working Class stuff with anyone; the essential thing was that he had no trust, and for quite a good reason, in my qualities as an apprentice, he wouldn’t entrust me any piece of work, he kept me around him, in complete silence and from time to time he would send me to the garage to fetch some tool or another; which I joyfully did: as there, at the desk, I would always meet a vigorous, luscious girl and one could tell from our glances that we were fond of each other ; but take heed– as one of my aunts told me, a decisive advice – I do not brag, I tell a story.

In this short-story that I’m telling you of and which was about my life at Modern Times – life? what life? six months only, from the spring of 1950 till the autumn of the same year when I left for the army, singing down the streets “Other fate we do keep in our hearts” – I invented an entire conflict with master Dinu, a very intricate conflict, which wasn’t particularly asked for by anyone, making out of him a shrewd but intrepid worker, a “reactionary” but dignified person, a conflict to which the 1973 censorship had no objections, but which Paul Georgescu, with his devastating irony, dismissed as a piece worthy of a socialist Cuore.

I am telling you all this not because I want to fool you into reading my short-stories- I never asked this favour from anyone, cross my heart …- but because I want to announce, in case you didn’t know already, that these days the factory Modern Times has been demolished. This is the only news item which distracted me from rereading once again Dostoyevsky’s (or Dosto’s, as our youngsters now call him) Notes from the Underground. A piece of news which did not appear on the telly, or on any of our front pages, but nevertheless I found it here, somewhere at page 9 of The Sunday Truth, under the title “The Modern Times Factory: a goldmine for metal scrappers”. Two sentences may provide the whole picture: “Children, grandfathers, parents, all of them are rummaging through the mud and the remains of the building searching for the smallest pieces of metal they can find. Because they cannot carry everything on their backs, they call their friends or relatives to come with their carts and cars”. At the end, an old employee of the factory confesses to the reporter: “And now they tell me that everything was wrong. Everything? I feel like bursting into tears”. Though, as a former employee of the Modern Times Factory, I don’t feel like crying. Once again I do not flinch, I do not sob: as if in front of some unsearched-for Phantasmagoria that crosses our lives … I do not demolish it. This is what I wanted to let you know, this morning when it’s snowing with that particular intensity which might spur you into asking you lover to teach you philosophy. Tomorrow morning, if the snowing stops I’ll fetch a cab and see that place which is now empty.

(any clumsiness in style or expression is part of the translator’s contribution)

~ prin mihaicirjan pe aprilie 7, 2011.