Norman Manea - Compulsory Happiness

“Aha! Fine. He asked you to stop by and then you went over.”

“Why, what do you mean? What exactly are you insinuating? You keep questioning me, what is it you don’t understand?”

“Nothing. Everything. I’m repeating what you tell me. You went there, you picked up the text, you took it to the paper.”

“Yes, I stopped by for a few moments. But that’s not the problem, dammit!”

“Then what is the problem?”

“That’s not the problem. It’s got nothing to do with it, nothing to do with anything, Kid, that’s not the problem.” “And the trenchcoat?” “What trenchcoat?”

“The raincoat! The raincoat in the hall, where was it?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Ali screamed. “I’ve never seen the damn thing! I haven’t laid eyes on it, and that’s not the problem, I’ve already told you!”

The Learned One’s mild, skeptical gaze wavered beneath the furious glare of the tall, lanky man.

“When I went over to their house,” continued Ali, trotting out the same alibi, “I didn’t see any raincoat. I didn’t even look to see if there was, yes or no, a raincoat. There wasn’t one, evidently. I had no reason to stay and look around. Besides, I don’t even remember if there was one or not, I haven’t the slightest idea! But damn it all, that’s not the problem!”

“But then what is the problem? The problem, that’s what you keep repeating, the problem. That’s what you say. So there must be one, some problem, somewhere …”

Ali stared at him, flabbergasted. The Learned One gave him a long, suspicious, guilty look before turning away, and Ali gave him a long, suspicious, furious look before turning away. Neither spoke for a while.

The Kid looked up at a confused mass of clouds in the sky, then down at Terra incognita, conjusa, and his step slowed even more.

“The coat, the overcoat then …” sighed the Guileless One.

Ali was a few paces ahead of him. His stride was long and swift, his bearing imperious, angry, awkward.

“What overcoat?” Ali turned around, raising his arms to heaven, becoming even taller, one might have said, reaching his long arms up to grab hold of the sky, of something, anything.

“Well, the trenchcoat. The coat, you know,” repeated the Guileless One. “The overcoat! You’ve read his stuff? The madman? The one with the big nose …”

“What madman? What big nose?”

“Well, the inspector. The inspector! The inspector with the big nose. The nose! The madman. The diary of a madman … The little devil with the big nose! Nikolai Vas-ilievich, who wrapped us all up in his Overcoat.”

Every now and then, the Guileless One mumbled, in time with his dragging footsteps, “The overcoat, right, naturally, the overcoat …”

Ali smiled indulgently. He’d slowed down, stopped taking those long, hurried strides that the shorter man at his side could not, it seemed, match, since he refused to alter his own moderate, calm, composed tread. Ali ran a hand through his kinky black hair. He rubbed his forehead and temples impatiently.

“Well, Dina must have figured out things, all these years. Perhaps she knew quite a lot, or maybe she didn’t want to know. Marriage is marriage. People who live together live together, after all. Bazil isn’t a thug, but he isn’t an angel, either. When you go up a ladder, you push a little bit here and there, you knock a few guys down some rungs, you do a few things in the darkness too, when nobody’s watching … Maybe it took her this long to crack. The straw that breaks the camel’s back. The drop that makes the whole glass overflow. A harmless drop, like so many others, but suddenly it turns red, blood-red, and it changes … What’s that stuff called … Right, litmus paper. It changes the color of the litmus paper …”

He fell silent. He didn’t think his explanations were sufficient, or clear enough, for the complex and childish mind of the Learned One, who still clung to his guileless expression and insistent, naïve questions, questions that were suspiciously insistent and naïve. As though he’d known for a long time all that anyone could tell him, and even a great deal more, and as though he asked questions like that to conform to a script, because he didn’t trust friend Ali or anyone else. He felt friendly only toward the truth, you see, just the truth, or because he wanted to avoid arousing friend Ali’s suspicions by continuing to play the same ethereal, guileless role, incognito, experimental, far removed from all those mundane imbroglios he found it so fascinating to toy with.

“The drop isn’t special in any way, any way at all,” continued Ali the pedagogue, on his second wind. “It’s not blood, if you want my opinion, it’s not blood anymore. Even those creeps who keep an eye on us all, even they’ve become apathetic. That’s right, apathetic! They plod through their jobs with their eyes on their paychecks at the end of the month. They write reports to look busy; otherwise, there’d be layoffs in the ranks, and they’d lose their perks. Careless, quick work, with no point to it. It’s not just the hammer and the sickle that swing away in a vacuum! Even that institution … the institution, that is, you know the one I mean, obviously. The Fundamental Institution! Ineffective, just like all its subcontractors. All sorts of resources at its command, of course, and yet it’s humming along in a vacuum, my dear Scholar! In a vacuum, believe me. Just think about it… They’re constantly filling files and cabinets. Reports, nuggets of information, boxes and boxes of it. And then? Zip! Big zero, Kid … It turns out they can’t make use of all this stuff they endlessly compile and sift and hoard. Gone are the days of the guy from Soviet Georgia with the walrus mustache … When I listen to those characters on the other side, over there in the consumer’s paradise, nattering away about Utopia and Terror! What utopia — that idea fell by the wayside some time ago … As though they and their pragmatism had come up with a solution! Go check them out, Simpleton, if you want to see consumer paradise, what the absence of utopia looks like. And take a little look around right here to see the absence of everything, utopia included. But they don’t arrest thousands of people in the middle of the night anymore … even though the means, the motivation are still in readiness, the machine is there, obviously whirring away. In a vacuum! Rooms full of stuff. Files, files, and more files, hardly ever used. It’s the same thing with them, minimum results, believe me. Minimal performance. Minimum results, Kid.”

Ali seemed tired, lacking the patience required to spell out, for the umpteenth time, things that were self-evident, things that he’d understood in good time, quite a while ago, obviously.

“And so this drop that overflows a glass that’s already been running over for a long time — this drop is not a drop of blood. A simple extra drop, like so many others. Poor Dina, she got scared over nothing. There’s no reason to be scared or conscience-stricken. It’s not unheard-of, nothing to get hysterical about, believe me. Routine and boredom, as you used to say. Our little devil, boredom. You can get rid of the devil just as well by boring him to death. Because he gets rid of himself, obviously. A sleepy society! Deprived of the epic elements. Unspeakable boredom, that’s what you used to say. Our little devil, he swallows everything, screws up everything, falls apart and gets swallowed down himself. No, you mustn’t hit him, confront him, provoke him, or he’ll rev up and destroy us. But if you simply accept him, you destroy him bit by bit. No acts of heroism, please, that’s the rule: nothing epic. Here’s our epic poem: hot air. Boredom! How right you were, obviously. Boredom!”