by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
While I was putting on my gasmask during our military training drills in school—which took me a whole seventeen seconds—the major kept shouting: “That’s it! You’re dead . . .” And he shoved the stopwatch in my face.
It’s not easy living thirty years after your death.
The end of our training coincided with the end of that for which we had been trained.
THE SEXUAL QUESTION
Was there sex in socialism? And socialism in sex? At the start of our erotic Bildungsroman stood Man and Woman, Intimately, translated from the German, the secret bestseller of that time, always well hidden on the highest shelf way in the back. Once the book disappeared.
Did anybody touch that book?
Which book?
You know which one.
We all read it behind one another’s backs. It was at once a practical handbook, an intimate physician, and erotic literature.
And so we first discovered sex through medical discourse. Masturbation (or so it said there) was harmful to one’s health, as was sex without love . . . But actually, for us, love without sex was no less torturous.
From a Catalogue of Important Erotic Scenes
Now as she ran up the steps toward Sonny a tremendous flash of desire went through her body. On the landing Sonny grabbed her hand and pulled her down the hall into an empty bedroom. Her legs went weak as the door closed behind them. She felt Sonny’s mouth on hers, his lips tasting of burnt tobacco, bitter. She opened her mouth. At that moment she felt his hand come up beneath her bridesmaid’s gown, heard the rustle of material giving way, felt his large warm hand between her legs, ripping aside the satin panties to caress her vulva. She put her arms around his neck and hung there as he opened his trousers. Then he placed both hands beneath her bare buttocks and lifted her. She gave a little hop in the air so that both her legs were wrapped around his upper thighs. His tongue was in her mouth and she sucked on it. He gave a savage thrust that banged her head against the door. She felt something burning pass between her thighs. She let her right hand drop from his neck and reached down to guide him, her hand closed around an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle. It pulsated in her hand like an animal and, almost weeping with grateful ecstasy . . .
The mythical page 28 from Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was a revelation, a baptism-by-fire for a whole generation. I had copied it out longhand, just like most of my classmates, while some braver souls sliced it right out of the book with a razor blade.
Sex appeared to be a complicated acrobatic routine with hops, holds, lifts, thrusts, first with one hand, tongue, then with the other . . . I would never learn. But in any case, the very knowledge of that figural composition gave me the confidence of the initiated. At least in theory I knew what I had to do to reach that “grateful ecstasy” . . .
The other novel was French. Unlike the mute scene in The Godfather, now there was an abundance of words, sighs, ellipses . . . From here we learned that you can talk during sex, too. Bel Ami by Maupassant. “I adore you, my little Made . . .” Please don’t, I beg you . . . a quick thrill . . . wild and clumsy copulation . . .
Let’s add the secret erotic stories that were distributed in mimeographed copies and attributed to Balzac, about intercourse (that was the word used) between a woman and an animal (something like Pasiphaë with the bull), only in this case it was a dog or a bear, I don’t remember anymore.
. . .
In all that scarcity, we found sources of erotica in unexpected places.
In classical painting, for example. An inexhaustible reservoir of naked female bodies, of course chubbier and more Baroque than we would have liked, but it was still something. We gazed at the cheap reproductions . . . Goya’s “The Naked Maja,” Botticelli’s “Venus,” Rubens’s “Three Graces,” Courbet’s “Bather” . . . But Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” from our history textbook, with all the revolutionary zeal of her breast surging up out of her dress, became part of our own sexual revolution.
Underwear ads in old Neckermann catalogues.
The “golden girls” of Bulgarian rhythmic gymnastics.
All figure skating competitions.
Sculptures of the nude goddess Diana with her bow. The whole town of D., the erstwhile Dianopolis, was scattered with them. One afternoon, for a split second I caught a glimpse of a classmate of mine naked through the window of the house across the street; her name was also Diana. I already knew the myth and was afraid that the curse would catch up with me, that I would be turned into a stag that very minute, I felt my feet growing hooves, while enormous antlers would sprout out of my head any moment. A dog in the yard next door started barking at me right then, a sure sign that he’d sniffed out the stag in me . . .
Pantyhose packages showing long female legs.
Later we heard the rumor that sperm was very beneficial for female skin, and one of the older kids from our neighborhood bragged that he was often called upon to make “deliveries.” It’s the Bulgarian Nivea, he liked to say.
I’ve kept a whole bag full of love letters from that time. Should I add them here? It’s unbelievable how many letters were written back then. For a moment I wondered what would happen if I sent them back to the girls who wrote them? If I scrounged up their addresses and started dropping them in the mail one by one? I think V., the writer of the longest and most amorous missives, is happily married in Mexico.
V. wrote on both sides of the sheet, there was never enough room, so she would keep writing on the envelope, on the inside. One time I received a whole seven letters from her at once. She had mailed one, then wanted to add something more, and so on. She went to the post office every half-hour. I was in the army when I got them. The soldier who went to pick up the mail from the nearby village waved the seven letters over his head from afar. Everyone from the base came outside, each expecting a letter in that abundance. He started reading off the names on the envelope; actually, it was only a single, solitary name, seven times. I felt so guilty looking at the others’ faces after each letter—sorrow, which quickly changed to quiet hatred. Because of all the injustice in the world. Seven letters can’t arrive and be all for the same person.
Now I see that some of their opening lines were literally taken from the little tome Love Letters of Great Men. An innocent deception that I only now have discovered. This explains the lofty style—“My love, I believe that fate is sheltering us . . .”—after which it launches without transition into everyday life: “Most of the lectures are lame, and some of the professors couldn’t care less . . .” “Do you remember Petya, whom I introduced you to? . . . She’s snagged herself an Italian, if you can believe it . . .”
Or this: “I want us to be as happy again as we were on March 8 and 9!!!” With three exclamation marks.
What I wouldn’t give to remember what happened on March 8 and 9.
Overheard on a train: “During socialism, we made lots of love, because there wasn’t anything else to do.”
THE COOK BOOK OF SILENCES
To the “List of Unwritten (and Impossible) Stories from the 1980s,” I’ll add yet another: A Short History of Keeping Mum.
From her silence, my mother made wonderful fried zucchini, baked lamb, banitsi . . .
Everything can be said with a few dishes. Only now do I realize why my mother and grandmother were such good cooks. It wasn’t cooking, but storytelling.
The labyrinths of their banitsi were as delicious and winding as Scheherazade’s fairytales. Here is the missing Bulgarian epos, the Banitsi Epos.
. . .
Our next-door neighbors at the time enjoyed pleasant but slightly strange marital relations. They argued every Saturday afternoon. It had become a ritual, part of the weekend spectacle. I remember once how, when their Saturday fight didn’t take place, we were honestly worried. My mother in full seriousness urged my father to go over and make sure nothing had happened to them. My father replied that he couldn’t go and ask: “Why aren’t you fighting?” Especially sin
ce no one had ever asked them why they fought in the first place. He went over there in the end, of course. My mother always emerged the victor. No one answered the door. It turned out they were out of town.
In fact, all of their arguments followed one and the same script. The husband would grab his suitcase, a splendid hard-sided brown suitcase, hollering that this time he was leaving for good. He would step out the front door, set his suitcase on the ground, sit down next to it and light up a cigarette. The woman would start cooking and after an hour or so the anesthetizing scent of Saturday dinner—chicken with potatoes, beef stew, or lamb with green onions, depending on the season—would start wafting through the yard, it would smell so nice and homey that the man would slowly pick up his suitcase and simply step over the threshold back into the house, returning from the brink of his latest Saturday flight. Resigned and hungry.
RETURNING TO THE TOWN OF T.
The Metaphysics of Dust
I’ve fallen asleep on the windowsill. I wake up from the sun shining through the dirty glass, a warm afternoon sun. Still in that no man’s land between sleep and afternoon, before I return to myself, I sense that soaring and lightness, the whole weightlessness of a child’s body. Waking up, I age within seconds. Crippling pain seizes my lower back, my leg is stiff. The light in early September, the first fallen leaves outside, the worry that someone may have passed by on the street and seen me.
I climb down from the window carefully, unfolding my body, instead of simply jumping down. The room, lit up by the autumn sun, has come alive. One ray passes right through the massive glass ashtray on the table, breaking the light down into its constituent colors. Even the long-dead, mummified fly next to it looks exquisite and sparkles like a forgotten earring. The Brownian motion of the dust specks in the ray of light . . . The first mundane proof of atomism and quantum physics, we are made of specks of dust. And perhaps the whole room, the afternoon and my very self, with my awkward three-dimensionality are being merely projected. The beam of light from the old whirring film projector at the local movie theater was similar.
I recalled the darkness, the scent of Pine-Sol, the whirring of the machine. Everything in the movie theater was made from that darkness and a single beam of light. The headless horseman arrived along the beam, as did the great Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon; horses and Indians, whooping Sioux tribes, geometrical Roman legions, and ragged Gypsy caravans headed for the heavens kicked up dust along it, Lollobrigida and Loren came down that beam, along with Bardot, Alain Delon and his eternal rival Belmondo, oof, what an ugly mug . . . I remember how, when the movie was boring—less fighting, more talking—I would turn my back on the screen and peer into the beam coming from the little window at the back of the theater. It swarmed with chaotically dancing particles. But this wasn’t your average, ordinary dust wiped off the furniture in every home. This magical dust made up the faces and bodies of the most attractive men and women in the world, as well as horses, swords, bows and arrows, kisses, love, absolutely everything . . . I watched the specks of dust and tried to guess which would turn into lips, an eye, a horse’s hoof or Lollobrigida’s breasts, which flashed by for an instant in one scene . . .
I pass my hand through the beam of light in the room, stir up the specks of dust, and quickly close my fist, as if trying to catch them, that’s what I did as a child . . . I would wave my arms, charging into battle against them . . . From today’s point of view, the battle was lost, they’ve won. My one small consolation is that soon I, too, will be with them. Dust to dust . . .
The House
I’m here incognito. The ironic thing is that I’m not making any particular effort. The surest refuge, if you want to remain unnoticed, is to go back to your hometown. I nevertheless try to keep up the conspiracy to some extent, going out only rarely. Before coming, I let it slip here and there that I was leaving the country for a good long while, I made up some writers’ fellowship in Latin America. I got my regular dose of snarky comments on two or three literary websites, to the effect that the number of trips I’ve taken has significantly outstripped the number of sentences I’ve published in recent years. Completely justified accusations. I grabbed my bags and took off. Or rather, I came back. I don’t know which verb is more accurate in this case.
The house we’d once rented rooms in had stood empty for years. The old owners had passed away, their descendants were scattered all over the world. I managed to get in touch with the caretaker. I paid him for three months, although I didn’t count on staying for more than two or three weeks. I planned on returning to Sofia incognito, where all those boxes and my gloomy birthright of a basement awaited me.
Still, the caretaker couldn’t help but ask what had brought me here and why I wanted to rent this particular house. I had an alibi ready, of course. If nothing else, in this line of work I could always come up with a story that sounded believable. I put my money on the tried-and-true spiel about a scholar who had chosen an isolated place to finish up an important study.
But still, what made you choose these parts, of all places? The locals run away from here as fast as their legs can carry them.
That’s exactly the reason, I’m looking for peace and quiet. I passed by here some years back, treated my broken leg at the Baths. This is a wonderful place you’ve got here, just wonderful, I repeated. His suspicions melted away. If you praise the place where someone lives, it’s like he personally deserves the credit for it, and you’re already one of the gang, you’re in. I again stressed that I would have lots of work to do and would like to remain undisturbed. The caretaker assured me that I had picked the right place. My neighbor to the left was an old deaf woman, while the house to the right had been empty for many years and rats and hobgoblins had the run of the place. They say, he went on, that you can catch sight of a faint light flickering through the rooms from time to time. That’s the soul of Blind Mariyka, who was the last one to live there. The man fell silent, perhaps afraid I would back out of the deal, before adding that he, of course, didn’t believe in such nonsense.
I remember that neighboring house very well. Back then, Blind Mariyka was alive and Lord knows why we were so terrified of her. During the day she would stay hidden inside her room, only in the evenings would she come out into the yard and wander amid the trees with her arms stretched out wide. Some said she saw better at night than during the day, since the darkness within her and the darkness outside got along. Just like with moles. Folks in these parts don’t mince words.
Otherwise, everything was the same. The street still bore its old name, that of a Soviet commander, the room was the same, with a table, a bed, and an old oil stove. Even the now-faded orchids on the wallpaper hadn’t changed.
A family of swallows had built a nest under the eaves of the house. They had three little ones. In the evening I would deliberately leave the light on outside. It lured flies and moths, which the swallows would catch. Soon I found myself wondering if what I was doing was right. I was helping one species kill another more easily. Yes, the swallows had babies that needed more food. Children are a bulletproof alibi. But most likely those flies and moths I was victimizing had children, too. Why should the little swallows be more precious than flies’ larvae? Are not the murder of a fly and the murder of an elephant both murders equally?
I had come back to that house in T. for a specific reason. I pull up the floorboard to the right of the window. That’s where the bed had been. As a child, I had hidden a secret stash box there. Afterward we had moved quickly and I hadn’t been able to take the box. I told myself that one day, I would come back for it. That box gave rise to all those later boxes and crates, they all stemmed from it and at the end of the day, without it my collection would never be complete.
The End of the Indians
Let’s have a moment of silence for the dead Indians and those of us from their tribe. I need to add them to that catalogue of disappeared things. Along with those extinct pagers, videotapes, and Tamagotchis. When we w
atched Winnetou, we all become Winnetou. After Osceola, the neighborhood was filled with Osceolas. It was the same thing all over again with Tecumseh, Tokei-ihto, Severino, and Chingachook, the Great Snake . . . I know that now these names mean nothing to those who were born later. Batman, Spider-Man, and the Ninja Turtles have managed to get the upper hand over the Indians and their whole mythology, dishonestly at that, never once going directly into battle against them. They finished up what the pale faces had begun two centuries ago.
The story I want to tell takes place after the showing of one of these old East German cowboy films. I remember that we always came out of the movie theater dazed, as if after a battle with the Whites. For at least an hour afterward, we always had one foot still in the film, half-Indians, half-third-graders. It was almost a physical sensation. And so, after one of these films, we went to a bakery near the movie theater to get our usual boza and tulumbichka. We needed quite some time to pull ourselves together after the battles, to climb down off our horses and reenter the dull Bulgarian world. We got in line at the bakery. Finally, it was time for the first of our gang, let’s call him our “chief,” to order, and he ordered his boza and tulumbichka with dignity. The woman at the counter, however, was chatting with someone and didn’t hear him. Our chief stood in front of the display case with a stony expression on his ten-year-old face. When the woman finally looked at him and somewhat rudely snapped, “Come on, squirt, tell me what ya want, I don’t have all day,” he spat out coldly: “Chingachook does not like to repeat himself.” No one had expected this. It definitely took guts to spout off such a line and the long pause, during which only the ceiling fan could be heard, underscored the magnificence of the moment. A second later, however, the woman and several of the regular customers burst out laughing as if on cue. That was really low (super-duper low, as we would have said back then), worse than if they’d smacked us around or thrown us out. Chingachook couldn’t take it and dashed outside. We also “spurred our horses.”