Where Everyone Wears a Trench Coat : COMPULSORY HAPPINESS, <i> By Norman Manea Translated by Linda Coverdale (from a French Translation of the original Romanian) (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $22; 259 pp.)</i>

Years ago, when Tito and Ceausescu were both alive, it was an odd border experience to travel by rail from Belgrade to Bucharest. On the Yugoslav side, the train sped past stations that were gray and unkempt, with weeds and dogs and scraps of lumber and always a knot of five or six idlers, discoursing. Once you crossed into Romania, the little stations were whitewashed and immaculate, with geraniums in the windows and carefully tended shrubbery. There was nobody in sight, though. It was as pretty and motionless as Sleeping Beauty’s chamber; even the bees were in trance.

Romania was the most tightly repressed of all the Iron Curtain countries but there was a quality that set it off additionally. In Hungary or Czechoslovakia there was the public bustle and the public language and after a while, and with tact and persistence, the private dissonance. In Romania there was a silence. Even in the 40-watt-lit corridors of those ministries theoretically accessible to a foreign journalist, words of any kind were hard to come by and seemed uttered in sleep. Bucharest’s lovely tree-lined streets were narcoleptic.

Norman Manea’s four novellas, written during the later Ceausescu years, offer a comparable contrast to other Eastern European dissident writing. Instead of the energetic irony, the ebullient absurdism, the sharp-eyed wit, we find a dreamy disconnection, a voice that shock has lowered, an air of sweetness driven mad.

In “The Interrogation,” a woman political prisoner suddenly finds her harsh regimen lightened in anticipation of the visit of a high-level interrogator. She gets a larger cell, she is given hot tea and instead of the morning beating there is the morning shower. Unremarkable, except for the Manea touch. Her latrine bucket is replaced by a flowered ceramic chamber pot; a small tube of Nivea is placed beside her cot. These inlays of kitsch cast a sickly glow through the Kafka-like abyss that opens up; they are the sprig of parsley on the Death Row prisoner’s last steak.

“The Interrogator” is hypnotically creepy. The prisoner is prepared for her visitor by a woman interrogator who has her strip to make sure that she bears no visible signs of mistreatment. The visitor can’t stand signs of violence, she tells her; he insists on a pleasant encounter. Thus, the good treatment; thus, the day the prisoner spends in a big office eating fine food and drinking fine wine.

At the appointed hour a nervous little man peers in. An attendant, she assumes; until apologetically he takes a seat at the desk. He speaks with sympathy of her ordeals but notes that at least she was not raped. “That counts for something,” he says confidingly. “Believe me, it counts.” He refers to the authorities as “they,” and admits that his aversion to seeing pain stems from the possibility that some day he could be in her place.

He is often in trouble, he tells her. His usefulness comes from the fact that he resembles those he interrogates, and this infuriates his masters. They bluster and threaten but they need him. And bit by bit we see just how. Manea has not created a Grand Inquisitor, sympathetic despite his role. He has not created a brute who puts on gentleness in order to disarm his victims. He has created the total, monstrous totalitarian; one who from the position of oppressor usurps the position of victim. Only a stifled shriek, a violent gesture betray him; that and the terror with which the woman interrogator--her clothes torn and hair disheveled--comes in after he is gone and thanks the prisoner for not provoking him.

“The Interrogator” is a horror story, but it is told with an odd beauty. There is a tentative, dreamy trailing off at the end; Manea uses his stories not to add to the reality of the world but to explore its unreality. His protagonists come upon absolute evil but they do not banalize it by an act of possession. They open a window, breathe the night air, change the subject, go to sleep.

“A Window on the Working Class” begins as a wryly amusing vignette about a workman who goes around doing odd jobs. It ends as a dream. The narrator, a writer, and his wife are fretting about a broken window-blind. With a touch of the magical, Valentin shows up. Repairs are the most precious service in a command economy--particularly a ruined command economy such as Romania’s--but Valentin charges modestly. Besides, he needs the narrator to write to a local television host to get him to air his grievances. After being fired from his boilermaker’s job, he has made a formal appeal, received partial compensation, appealed its insufficiency, received a little more and fought that. All on principle. “Because otherwise, listen to what I am saying here, the world has gone all to hell.”

The man who fights for his rights in Romania: to the writer, Valentin can only be a dream figure, and soon he begins to dream of him. He sees him with wings addressing a crowd. He sees him endlessly scooping muck out of a sewer pipe. Finally he sees him in his longed-for righteous society: managing a cemetery where everyone is well and fairly treated.

“Composite Biography,” the least interesting of the four, begins with the more or less realistic account of a Communist true believer who rises, falls, holds on and never stops believing. It too ends in a dreamlike narrative disintegration. An equivalent move takes place in the joyfully and mysteriously wild “The Trenchcoat.”

Here Manea has used some of the obsessive comic acceleration of Gogol--as in “The Overcoat” and “The Nose”--but he makes it weirdly his own. Two sophisticated couples, both members of the intelligentsia, are invited to the home of a friend who is a high-ranking nouveau riche apparatchik. Vasile and his wife Dina are the epitome of showy vulgarity. The dinner is lavish and hilariously embarrassing, the talk includes permissible jokes and complaints about shortages, censorship, the Securitate (secret police).

Permissible at these privileged levels, that is, and in private. Or is it? In the next few days Dina begins to make obsessive telephone calls to the two couples. Who has left the trench coat on her coatrack? It is long, cheap, pale; it is, in fact, the kind of coat used by Securitate agents.

The obsession mounts and spreads wildly. Is someone accusing Dina and her husband of being police agents? Has the Securitate, as someone suggests, begun using people’s private residences to meet their informants? The couples suspect their hosts, they suspect each other, they suspect themselves. They talk hysterically, surreally and with a cloudiness that mounts with their mounting vehemence. Dina has a nervous breakdown; everywhere she goes she wears the trench coat, ugly and flapping grotesquely over her expensive and elegant outfits. “It is the color of wind, fog, our bleached-out boredom,” she cries.

The husband of one of the couples, who is Dina’s old schoolmate, takes pity on her. He gets himself a trench coat, and the two of them wander the city together, flapping and raving. It is a supreme gesture of sympathy. Or is it? A supreme mockery of the system. Or is it? Nobody in Romania is entirely unconnected with its minders; everyone has a trench coat. So Manea tells us in this rich and powerful story that makes its fiery points and goes beyond them. At the end, after all, remain these abused one-time children--Dina and her friend--who wander, mutually succoring and mutually ridiculous, through Bucharest’s tree-lined and narcoleptic streets.