Norman Manea - Compulsory Happiness

Ioana Stoian couldn’t control herself any longer. She fled to the kitchen, from which came confused noises, the sound of a chair being knocked over perhaps, and the clank of silverware, and then she took refuge in the bathroom. She stayed quite a while in the bathroom. Finally, she reappeared, rubbing her forehead with her right hand, holding a glass of water in her left. She drank it all in a single draught and went on holding the empty glass.

“Suddenly I realized that they were actually… together. He’d gone off to buy cigarettes, and she, when I first spotted her, she’d been waiting there alone, standing listlessly on the sidewalk. That strange apparition … out of nowhere, in front of me.”

Alexandru I. Stoian remained silent. He was no longer looking at the carpet. He was no longer looking at anything.

“So he asked me, politely, how I was, and then he gently took her arm. He said goodbye to me and … they left. It’s just too much for one day! After hours and hours of pushing and shoving on line, in the noise and cold and dirt, I was feeling faint and I’d finally managed to leave triumphantly with that disgusting package of rancid sausage in my hand. I run into her, and a few moments later … the Martian lands, right in front of us. You would’ve sworn they were from the same family, or else husband and wife, or lovers, or missionaries, or cellmates, escaped from the same prison or asylum or freak show. The two of us, and then him … The Child! The Learned One! the Researcher! There was some kind of complicity, I don’t know … something strange. I was stunned, confounded. And those raincoats! The same, the same … I was going mad. As though they’d arrived from another galaxy, or were on their way there … I don’t know, who knows, I give up.”

Alexandru I. Stoian remained silent. He neither looked at nor saw anything, but he heard everything, every word, even if he’d lost the power of speech, and he’d lost that a good while ago.

“A nightmare! Then I stood around for an hour at the bus stop. Hundreds of people with their string shopping bags, numb, frazzled, frustrated, ready to scratch one another’s eyes out. I was thrust into the bus, there’s no other way of putting it, swept along by the crowd. I couldn’t see a thing anymore, squeezed in like that. So there I was, in the bus, squashed by all those sweaty bodies. A nightmare. Paralyzed, held there stiff as a stick, pitching from side to side whenever that whole heavy mass of tired bodies swung right or left each time we took a curve. But I couldn’t feel a thing, I just couldn’t feel a single thing anymore. I was still back there, in fact, on the sidewalk, in front of the butcher shop, between the two Martians. All I could see was the both of them. I couldn’t get over it … A nightmare.”

“Hmm, yes …” Alexandru I. Stoian seemed to mumble, after another long pause.

“And … that … raincoat? What, what the … what the hell is it with that raincoat?” burst out Ioana Stoian in renewed fury.

“Well … it was left at their house. You see … it would have … it would have disappeared. It would have disappeared, obviously, eventually, just the way it turned up. The same way, just like that, the way … it showed up. You see … the same person, or someone else, or … anyway, it would have gone, it would have been picked up.”

“What? What, the same person or someone else, what is this? No, really, this is too much. Too much! No way! Why, since it would have disappeared in any case … why … no, who should have picked it up and why wasn’t it picked up, and so then how … no, it’s too much!”

“Hmm, yes … It would have disappeared, except that there was this problem. Her illness, I mean, the breakdown. The trenchcoat … Well, you saw. That’s why it couldn’t be picked up again. It turned into something else. Anthropomorphized, as they say.”

“As who says? Who, why, what anthropo, what morpho, you’ve got me talking nonsense again, so, what does that mean, now we’re theorizing here, is that what we’re doing? Anthro, phormo, morpho, that’s it, that’s the problem? You’re trying to make me think you’re insane, and that I’m insane too, everyone, we’re all insane? You mean, and … and, and … the husband, I mean? What’s he doing, this Mr. Fixit? Unless he doesn’t even know what’s going on … Of course, the husbands are always the last to know.”

“No, it’s not what you think. The poor guy knows, he knows everything, he told me all about it. The other one — the Researcher, whatever you call him — has been very touched by what’s happened …”

“Touched?” shouted the madwoman to the madman. “Touched, that’s the word? He’s been touched by Comrade Vasile’s distress, that’s what you’re saying? Who’s touched in the head here, who? Me, you, all of us, who? You mean, anyone, anything, is that what you mean?”

The lunatic turned sharply on her heel, speechless with anger, and stopped in precisely the right spot to glare with phosphorescent, venomous, suspicious green eyes at the lunatic husband gaping in astonishment.

“Anyone, anything, that’s it, that’s the explanation? Anyone can do anything, feel anything, any time, toward anyone, that’s the idea? Who, the Child, or whatever you call him? The prize pupil, the distinguished student who considered his classmate Vasile a prize moron? … The Brat, who was reading Marx and Rimbaud at thirteen while the other one, the dunce, was kicking a ball around with the neighborhood kids? And the mathematics, the physics, the fancy degrees? The crisis, the downfall? And — and his book, and its brief, bizarre period of marginal success? He’s marginal, that’s what he is, the Simpleton, off on the sidelines, with himself, with others, far from the crap, the general masquerade — isolated, peripheral, on the fringe, while the class jerk rises higher and higher, piling up the privileges while he’s got the chance, for a rainy day, then whoa, all of a sudden, the Learned One is touched by suffering, he’s touched by sin and mystery and the mud little piggies have to wallow in? Touched by the snobbery of parvenus who’re dying to have them— the losers, the fringe-dwellers, the outcasts — at their table, to protect them and show them that their hosts are human beings, you see, poor, polite, hospitable, educated little piggies, full of fun and good manners, even liberal piggy-wiggies, you’d never know they were perfectly capable of kissing the devil’s ass any old time at all, ready for any shit and all possible lies and treachery and cruelty and, and, and … touched by that? You mean, anything, anyone, we’re all alike, no exceptions, that’s it, that’s the theory you’re hiding behind? In the slender hope of getting out of this, if everything and everyone’s the same so that nothing matters?”

“I said he was touched by what’s happened, not sympathetic to Bazil, I didn’t say that. But you’re really not listening anymore. You’re busy having your tantrum.”

“By what’s happened, that’s it, exactly! That’s just what I said, the husband’s the very last to know.”

“It’s not what you think,” Al. I. Stoian repeated softly. “It seems she’s not well. You never know, with these episodes … with this kind of illness. It’s a complicated situation. Sometimes she looks sick, sometimes she seems normal … It’s not as simple as all that. You never can tell, these illnesses are tricky. He was calling up day after day to see how she was doing, and then they started discussing the problem. On the phone first, and then they got together to talk about it. They meet regularly. They seem to help her, these meetings. What do you want, after all … Afterward, she comes home calm and relaxed, that’s what Bazil told me. She comes home quite serene, as though nothing were wrong.”