Have I ever told you my own theory about the inverted perspective on happiness? It’s simple, and sounds eccentric only at first hearing. People my age, I suppose, are well acquainted with the empirical side of the matter, even if perhaps less inclined to generalise as generously as I do. Different people – different viewpoints, of course.

So, the basic (and so far only) law of my theory goes like this: “the worse, the better.” Which in practice means that the harder and more unbearable the trials life throws at us seem, the more beneficial they turn out to be in the end (provided, of course, one hasn’t given up in the meantime). Illnesses, divorces, loss of prestige and jobs, loves gone wrong, children who do whatever they want, a boundless world that seems to shower us every day with yet another catastrophe… Everything is not just for the good, but for the much better – one only needs to wait long enough to see through the murk. Of course, the world never, or almost never, gives us what we wish for; but if we have the patience and endurance to live to the moment when things fall into place, it always turns out that it has sent us exactly what we needed.

Empty talk? The ravings of someone without a care in the world? Theatre, monkey bait? Well, that’s up to you – judge as you will. I will still tell you how things go more or less in my own life and why I so stubbornly insist on seeing it as a continuous and steady ascent toward more and more happiness, more and more meaning, and more and more satisfaction (though the latter, I admit, comes to me only in moments like this one – quieter, later in the evening; otherwise, everyday life is running against the conveyor belt, like for everyone else, so usually there’s not much time left for satisfaction).

Now, let’s get to specifics. I won’t hide from you that the ability to see clearly – that is, to grasp this hopelessly optimistic theory – is connected to another ability that is rather rare; rare not because it is complex or highly intellectual, but simply because it involves the constant swallowing of the disheartening truth that the person you are is not exactly the person you wish to be – and that there’s nothing wrong, shameful, or painful about that. Our grandmothers knew it best of all: to be happy, a person must also be a little simple. Without that it won’t work – cleverness and ambition are twin sisters that cannot take a single step without each other, and once you let ambition off the leash, happiness is over, gone for good. That’s why the basic ability to accept your own simplicity, your own limitations and foolishness, is an absolutely unavoidable precondition for achieving happiness. You may have known this already – I’m saying it here only to explain the what and how.

But let’s finally get to the actual facts, the actual stories, which are the lifeblood of what I want to tell you (theories, however necessary and useful, start to bore me more and more as the years go by; I myself no longer need so much proof – perhaps because I still believe in free will, despite all the hopelessness of science). So – my wife left me seven years ago. A medium-scale catastrophe; I can’t compare it for a moment with the feeling that drove me headfirst into the ground when I learned – quite a few years earlier – that my daughter had a severe mental disability and would most likely remain a little child for life. On the other hand, the divorce was no walk in the park either: it took me three or four years to recover my sense of lightness and happiness, which – ahem, ahem – I seem to have lost much earlier, somewhere in the murky years of the slowly developing family crisis that… But that’s clear enough – no need to go into it, right?

The pain, the despair, the problem as a whole, turned out, as always, to be linked to something very simple and very obvious, seen from the vantage point of my present life: the determined refusal to accept as inevitable the facts my new situation confronted me with. (It’s always like that, by the way; at least I’ve never known an exception: you suffer only until you finally learn to open your eyes and make a real distinction between black and white, good and bad; until then – as long as you squirm like a worm and foam over the empty “No way! No! No! No!” – life hammers you like hail and won’t leave you alone until you learn… or until you kick the bucket, whichever comes first.)

First, it suddenly turned out that my ex-wife was a much more adaptable and resourceful human being than me. While I was writhing in the sewers of that oh-so-terrible single fatherhood (the children stayed with me, as the result of an agreement that was itself the result of a small miracle I won’t go into now; the point is that the death sentence – just like in Dostoevsky, heh-heh – was at the last moment commuted to something that at the time seemed like long exile; today I’m so grateful for it I have no words…) – ah yes, while I was suffering and dragging my little yoke (without alcohol! For me that friend exists only as a friend; if he tries to strangle me, I send him packing at once), she, in no time, found a new partner, started living visibly happily, got into business, began earning much more than me almost immediately, lost weight, became more attractive, and, in general, started looking like the embodiment of happiness – which, of course, only increased my own unhappiness (envy, folks; if anyone could teach us how to pull envy’s teeth, all our lives would be a thousand times easier – but that’s something we all know already, right?).

The whole relatively banal story has a prehistory that is probably even more banal, but without telling it, you can’t grasp the scale of the change I had to go through (mmmm, the marvellous Bulgarian language: precisely “go through” – in all the double meaning of that verb, which gives quite a sensory idea of the effort, both emotional and physical, it all cost me; you get that when I tell you how “easy” it was, I’m smiling in my moustache, right?). In short, our family – although mid-European, supposedly based on equality and so on – was quite typical for the late 20th century: everyone works, only the wife works at home too, while the husband “helps.” We’d long since left behind the tedious clarifications of powers and positions from the beginning; most of the really unpleasant housework had been delegated either to machines (washing, dishwashing, vacuuming) or – where that was impossible – to people with less education (the house was cleaned by a very decent and conscientious Polish woman – straight out of the biggest German cliché, but what can I do, I won’t lie to you now). And yet our life was a war – a tedious, trench war with many wounds but no fatalities; daily gains and losses of various lowlands, heights, and whatever was in between; silent tallying of victories and defeats… the normal mess we all live in until we lose it and slap our foreheads: now what?

That turned out to be the most unbearable question: now what? Not only did my wife suddenly leave me staring at her taillights; my own jalopy unexpectedly turned out to be mired in some deep swamp from which there was no sign of an exit. My male pride, like a dried-out cocoon from which perhaps a graceful butterfly had flown out but which itself remained an ugly, shrivelled, collapsing thing, was dwindling fast; the children, thank God, didn’t leave me much time to chew on my own nose or whatever, but overall the situation looked more and more barren.

I can’t even remember when something like a turning point began to take shape; in fact, I’m not sure I even felt it at the time. Oh yes – the most important change was that at some point my anger at Doreen began to fade. If you follow what I write, you may already know I’m a highly irascible but non-malicious creature. I rage often and not too rarely, but it almost never lasts (except when it does, of course – but even then there’s no malice, I just turn into a thin blade of ice, shut all the doors and windows, erase the memory as far as possible – and push on, because there’s no time; “forward” is basically the only direction I know in life; for better or worse, I’m a machine without reverse gear).

And here the first serious miracle began to take shape: somehow, against my will, I began to realise that life with my partner (okay, okay – ex-partner) had, in some incomprehensible way, become much easier and more pleasant after the divorce than before. The thing is, we cannot completely detach from each other – there’s no way – because neither of us can look after the little one without the other’s help; I’ll just mention in passing that for sixteen years now both of us have been wiping Lea’s soiled bottom several times a day (when she’s not at school, where other people do it), and we wipe it with love and genuine gratitude, because if there’s nothing to wipe, we have to take her to the hospital (has anyone told you that many autistics hold back the bowel movement until there’s absolutely no possibility of resistance, resulting in their insides sometimes being loaded with whole kilograms of faecal mass… Ah yes, the piquant flavour of realism; how I love it!). After a year or two, when the little one was with me most of the time, it became clear she needed her mother much more than me (unlike her brother, for whom it was exactly the opposite – every child needs a role model of their own gender, of course). Now she’s with me only on weekends, but that too has a long and complicated story I’ll skip so as not to bore you.

In fact, there’s perfect logic to it. Each of us can overlook the flaws of those close to us – but only when they’re not constantly in our face and mind. Almost any woman in the world can accept that there’s no man who can flawlessly remember a simple shopping list (or not lose the one she’s written him) – but only if it’s not happening every day and is, more or less, his own business. Likewise, a man sooner or later learns not to hold it against her that she prefers crime series to Bergman or Buñuel (not that he watches them every other day, but principle is principle) – but, again, only insofar as it’s not part of his life but her own choice, with which he has nothing or almost nothing to do. Which is not to say women are purely practical and men purely abstract, or, even more falsely, purely “spiritual” beings. Nonsense, of course. We all combine both, but, by some cosmic evil fate, most often in ways that seem physiologically incompatible – at least once the enchantment of sex and romantic lyricism wears off and the time comes to wipe bottoms and count differences… Oh, what a muddled world.

So, at some point we began to get along almost “wonderfully.” I won’t tell you the ice between us has melted, nor will I feed the ladies any hopes for a cheap happy ending: the marital part of this story is over, even if the two protagonists remain joined to each other for life like Siamese twins – as it seems for now. But hardly anyone would doubt the claim that this new life turned out far happier than the old one and in the end brought the participants, almost by force, to where they actually belonged: separated, but much happier. Do you now see what I was talking about at the beginning?

So far so good, but only a little after this unexpectedly happy turn, life-the-trickster was quick to send me another (paper) dragon: this time I lost my job. Friends in Bulgaria, especially the ladies, often tell me stories about people of my generation who’ve been sunk by such or similar life mishaps. Well, what can I say? If you don’t know the theory…

Again everything turned upside down, again I didn’t know which way was up; I thought I was old enough not to give in to panic, but no, brother – when you’ve lived a solid twenty years as a member of the solid German middle class, losing that cherished status turns out to be a hard morsel to swallow. Once more, grit your teeth; once more, don’t swear in front of the kid, who of course knows only that much Bulgarian; once more, suck hope out of your fingers; once more, believe in cosmic reason; once more, this and that… At one point I had truly thrown in the towel, no point in twisting it (but – I repeat – without alcohol! In that respect, I am, so to speak, somewhat blessed).

And here I’ll skip the details of the previous section, because I’m getting tired – I don’t feel like recounting it all so exhaustively. In short: the more desperate the financial situation became, the more lushly the creative one blossomed; I don’t know if the correlation is necessarily like that, but while I was at rock bottom, I suddenly finished the novel I had written off years ago. Then, little by little, people began to hear about the magazine I run… And would you believe that, when at one point, without believing it for a second, I turned to you for help, you most unexpectedly gave it to me? Go figure out the Bulgarian man/woman: cursing you, slandering you, and yet, when they see you’re not fooling around but working in earnest, suddenly reaching into their pocket and pulling out a few lev. Only one in many thousands, of course, but still enough when you’re not greedy.

And then – but you expected this, didn’t you? – again I saw clearly, most unexpectedly. Once the fear passed, I suddenly realised that I had actually rather hated my well-paid and not especially boring job. And that without it – ha-ha-ha – not only was I not worse off, but I was actually much better, right in line with the theory. Money comes and goes, that’s clear, but every month I manage to scrape through, and my heart is now free, winged. A song, a song of a life – if you have the strength and patience to wait for it, of course.

My son is growing and gladdening me, bless him, but again according to the theory – that is, his father doesn’t interfere in anything. No advice, no fatherly counsel, no musing over his future or career, no interest in his grades, no control, nothing. That is, there is friendship, as far as possible between a son and a father with a thirty-plus-year age gap, of course. I’ve told him clearly and unambiguously that it is not I but he who will live his life, that I will always support him in his choices, but in principle he will have to handle everything himself. From me, no money – except for what his mother and I saved for him in good time, enough for a reasonable start in this country – and no advice unless he asks for it himself. Oh yes, except for three small rules that may not be broken: “Alcohol – in moderation; no cigarettes; no drugs.” The rest is his business.

So this, then, is my story today. I hope it has been of some use to you, or at least hasn’t bored you excessively.

Awaiting the next blow, which will have to be turned into happiness, willy-nilly!

Berlin, 2012
Zlatko Enev