Norman Manea - Compulsory Happiness

“That’s absurd, it’s impossible to live like that.”

“No more absurd than the absurdity of all these misfortunes. They’re real, concrete, even though they’re absurd. Not even absurd. Mysterious. Incomprehensible. For the moment. Because we don’t know what’s behind all this. Perhaps one day we’ll find out, one day. And then everything will seem logical, only too logical. .”

“I live a fairly quiet life. I don’t see what else I could do to protect myself.”

“Your friend, he led a quiet life, too.”

“Not entirely. He wasn’t married, so that implies connections, affairs. . But what can we do? No longer allow ourselves the most simple, the most natural actions? We might as well accept or even scoff at danger. . In any case, you only die once. It’s easier than dying a thousand times a day. .”

“You see, that’s it. . You — you can live in despair. It even goads you on. Me, I just can’t. I need stability. And a bare minimum of hope. .”

She lights a cigarette, only to extinguish it almost immediately. She unbuttons her silk blouse. Her long, beautiful fingers gleam against the indigo silk, which casts a metallic reflection across her neck. She looks down; the tired blue grows dull, fades away.

“I admit, I’m nervous these days. But that guy, ‘the worker Valentin Nanu,’ as you call him, he irritates me. He’s bad luck, if you want my opinion.”

“Bad luck! But he fixed our blind. . and by sheer good luck. Otherwise, it would’ve stayed broken for I don’t know how long. That would have aggravated you a lot more than his turning up like that. . which was bizarre, I admit.”

“I’ve nothing against him. I just told you how I feel. . He’s got too many troubles. It’s as though he were a magnet for disaster.”

“So we distrust everyone? Fear everything? Everything that smacks of the unknown? We need to take risks as well. To reopen the wound every once in a while. To come into contact with unhealthy things. With dust, brutality, raw simplicity. We need antibodies acquired through contamination, believe me. From microbes and filth. We have to regenerate ourselves! Despite everything. Or else. .”

“Perhaps, but some of us aren’t up to it. Me, he gives me the creeps. And that’s putting it mildly.”

A long silence. They’re too close to the dangerous terrain of truth, within an inch of turning aggressive. He’s disturbed once again by her. The noble enigma of an unshakable pride? A strict and honorable code? But their neuroses are incompatible; his demands the stimulation of a break in routine, the speedy relief that comes from upsetting an equilibrium.

“He intrigues me more and more each time I see him, in spite of all his worries and pigheadedness. I don’t have much contact with people like him. But there’s still something lukewarm in me, something purulent, petty, resigned, something painful and rebellious that feels solidarity with guys like him. Even if only for a moment. .”

“You’re not going to start in on me again about my inability to relate to other people! Reproaching me for loathing confessions, hating to humiliate myself, brooding over suffering instead of rushing to offer sympathy! I refuse to indulge in compassion as long as I’m unable to make myself useful. Which is simply beyond me, because I can barely manage to keep going myself. Frightened by my own vulnerability. .”

The husband goes off to his books; much later, around midnight, he goes out on the balcony. He gazes up at the night sky. He goes back inside. Distractedly, he studies the ceiling, the walls, the darkness. His thoughts become disjointed, chaotic. Blurred images on a phosphorescent screen of fuzzy cotton.

The second hand, tick-tock, swallows up sleep, digests insomnia. Insatiable, implacable toad. Tick-tock, tick-croak, croak-croak. . and now it’s climbing the wall. Fragile green feet. Huge, moist pop eyes, blinking rapidly, with only croak-what, croak-what for their viaticum. Jaws clamped shut, a steady rhythm, tick-hush, tock-shush. There are so many of them, they’ve multiplied, the wall is disappearing beneath their viscous, teeming mass. A wall of luminescent cotton wool, dozens of nosy periscopes beating out the same marshy, hellish cadence.

Little heads, all lined up next to one another. Identical faces, jeering, leering. He’s sticking out his tongue — whoa! That’s too much. . What do you think you’re doing, how did you get in among. .? Just a second, tick-tock, then he was gone. A frowning, ashen face. Sticking his tongue out, talk about gall! The deceitful toads couldn’t have cared less, they’d disappeared, what did you expect. . They didn’t give a damn.

The screen is murky, greenish. Random flashes of lightning, white bubbles, red, bulbous shapes. The clock faces have vanished. So has the unexpected visitor. A seething, swampy wasteland from which rises a thick, glaucous fog.

Just a single second, tick, it’s becoming an obsession, he’s back again. Suddenly face to face once more with the strange visitor. .

All dressed up. A navy-blue suit, good material, Chinese style, the Mao collar buttoned right up to the chin. A clean shave, hair en brosse. Getting ready, one would have thought, to attend some fancy ceremony. . except that his hands — and they’re large ones — are streaked with the stinking slime he’s busy dredging from the sewer.

He bends low, plunging his arms deep into what looks like a dark pit. Each time he straightens up, he hauls out a fresh batch of excrement, which he carefully drops into the gutter, without staining his impeccable suit. He seems unperturbed by the astonished gaze of the passerby who’s just appeared out of nowhere at his side. A gesture of bored resignation. . which means that he still has a bit more to do, and he can’t take care of anything else at the moment.

So he goes on leaning down, practically burying himself in his pit. Then he sits up and holds another double handful out for inspection — by no one — before tossing it neatly into the gutter. Another time, ten times, so many times. To the same rhythm. A robot, with great, dark, tranquil eyes.

Precise, perfectly executed movements that leave not a single wrinkle on the elegant party clothes or the fresh-shaven face, as ready as could be for the festivities. Again and once again and yet again, until the spectator feels dizzy, feels faint and nauseated out in the middle of this bog of a nightmare. Concentration is fading away, sapping his strength. . A loss of contact, a slippery descent into cottony fog, collapse.

Then the voice of the worker Valentin Nanu: “Speak, say what you have to say. Get it all out, I’m listening.”

A timid order, an expectant pause; now a kind of ironic indulgence, a staccato delivery: “Speak up, come on, say what you have to say, get it all out, I’m listening.”

Despite this urging, he can’t make the slightest sound. Not a syllable, zero, although the words are banging around somewhere, deep down, struggling to rise up and make themselves heard. Sounds strangled at birth. . and yet they’d made a beginning, it seems, of some kind, enough for Valentin Nanu to notice, and he was even repeating snatches of sentences left unspoken.

The face was no longer visible, only the voice could be heard, falling in with his thoughts, only the large hands could be seen, emptying the cesspool, only the voice could be heard, translating the words of the man whose voice remained stilled.

“And so this poet, this gentleman, your friend, was found dead in his room. Stretched out on the couch, naked. Yes, yes, completely naked, I got that. I understood, you don’t have to keep repeating it. Naked and dead, on the couch. Two glasses and a bottle of red wine on the table. All right, I heard you, it’s not that hard to understand. Keep going, we’ll see, come on, say what you have to say, I’m listening, I want to hear everything. . Go on, I’m listening.”