By Lida Prypchan
After waiting so long, living the life of a recluse, insipid and pointless, Mr. H. had reached the moment of wisdom. He could understand the feelings of his wife, the wise decision not to waste energy in advance, and most importantly, the moment in which a man knows who he is. In other words, he sees his destiny clearly, with no room for doubt; in this crucial moment, there is an intuition that instinctively directs actions, but never resembles the clarity, the immense light that brings the moment of revelation. Our character, Mr. H., was in such a situation, too content to be able to believe that he had been worthy of knowing his true worth much before his death. More often it happens that, just at the point of death, a man knows the meaning of his life. Sadder still is the situation of others who die without knowing why they were here. Although on second thought, perhaps most painful of all is experiencing the revelation just at the moment of saying farewell.
Mr. H. was happy and, at fifty-five years of age, now remembered his childhood marked by the absence of loved ones and a sense of security. There were multiple paths that he had to travel alone and that defined the remaining stages of his life. During his teenage years, he hid in music and books, looking for far-away, literary happiness because his surroundings were not joyful, and even when there was joy, it was embedded in a painful background, like the painful and cracked streets of his childhood and adolescence. Yet, the foreign lands he sought in books had nothing to do with his memories and the things he felt he lacked. In foreign lands men also suffered, he was like the people in a photograph: happy, smiling, reading for a while, studying music for a while. He did not feel lonely, how could he make comparisons if he had never had company. There are thousands of insignificant jobs, colorless jobs, available for the idle and for hungry youth like him. After more than twenty-five years studying, singing alone, showing his creations, receiving negative responses, working at anything, one Saturday, he found a big job and accepted it, one which showed his talent as never before, as it was concentrated in his being. That night was wonderful. During his performance he sang beautiful songs, all slow because slow is sadness, slow had been pain throughout his life. The songs were slow, but very heartfelt, and his melodious voice traveled to the thousands of corners in the expansive venue and seemed to enter the soul of each one of his listeners; they could feel his concentrated pain becoming tenderness and the room filled up. In a place that had never seen so much emotion, there was joy, joy that comes without preparation and everything that Mr. H. could not sing during his long years of training and failure, he sang that night. His eyes could shed tears, but they only misted over with melancholy. Thus passed several nights, almost five, in which he could share his loneliness with the loneliness of the other men in the world. Then, on the fifth night, not used to so much joy, Mr. H. died with a smile on his lips, his eyes glassy with joy mixed with sadness, while he hummed one of his favorite songs: “Happy Days.”
