The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  It’s obvious that that’s where Scheherazade got the idea from. You set off down the corridor of one story, which sends you off toward another, which leads you toward a third and so on . . . She has moved the labyrinth of stories into Shahryar’s bedroom. And—now here’s the secret—upon going inside, she has brought along her own executioner, she has sneaked him inside without him suspecting a thing. The two of them are there, but she holds the thread of the story, its thin opium leads Shahryar through the galleries and corridors. If the thread snaps, this mass murderer of women—because that’s what he is—will wake up, realize where he is, and all will be lost.

  Where does the storyteller’s strength come from, even if it is the strength of the weaker one? Is it from his power over that which he tells? To hold in your hands, or rather, on the tip of your tongue, a world in which you can dole out death and put it off whenever you wish. A world that can be so real or so fabricated as to duplicate the real one, to become its double. If in one, death’s sword is hanging over you, you can escape down the redeeming corridors of the other.

  Almost no one remembers or pays attention to how One Thousand and One Nights begins. In the exact same way as the myth of the Minotaur starts. With an infidelity. Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife, betrays him with a bull (Poseidon is peeking out from behind it). For their part, all the 1,001 stories begin thanks to the unfaithful wife of Shah Zaman, Shahryar’s younger brother, ruler of the Persian city of Samarkand. He sets out on a journey, realizes he has forgotten something, goes back and catches his wife embracing a slave. In one case, the lover is a bull, in the other a slave—always taboo bodies. For now, this infidelity costs only the couple involved their lives. Then the younger brother sets out to where he had been going—to visit his elder brother, Shahryar. There his brother’s wife’s infidelity is indeed on a mass scale, involving ten concubines and as many slaves. Shahryar decides to avenge his brother, himself, and the whole male world. Then the serial killing of women begins, along with the series of fairytales.

  Night. Everything happens at night from here on out. In the eternal night of the Labyrinth, where the Minotaur lives, or in those thousand and one nights in Shahryar’s royal palace. Night is the time for stories. Day is another world, which has no inkling of night’s world. The two worlds should not be mixed.

  A PLACE TO STOP

  Some books need to be equipped with Ariadne’s thread. The corridors are constantly intertwining, crisscrossing one another. Sometimes I can see my grandfather going into the Esprit store on Friedrichstrasse with me, touching the cotton shirts distrustfully and muttering that he wouldn’t for the life of him buy anything that thin, which the wind could leapfrog through. Another time, when crossing the Doctor’s Garden with my daughter, a man wrapped up to his eyeballs in a scarf with his collar turned up high, nods at me as we pass. An episode I would have ignored if Aya hadn’t tugged at my sleeve and pointed out his strange two-horned shadow on the snow. The Minotaur had gone out for a walk in the labyrinth of the winter garden.

  VII.

  GLOBAL AUTUMN

  HOWL

  Elenaa, Elenaaa, child of the wild desert, Amooour . . . A drunken song wafting through the night from the panel-block apartment building next door. We sang it as school kids at summer camps, but to this day I still don’t know which Elena and what desert it’s talking about. The obligatory kitsch that each and every one of us needed, some sort of romantic exoticism, an oasis amid the only possible desert here, in which the sand has been turned to concrete. The same song now, thirty years later, at three in the morning, drifting over with drunken longing from a group of friends celebrating nearby. This is the alternative Bulgarian song in the cosmos. Youth has passed away, socialism has passed away, yet the demons of erstwhile desires have remained, drowned in the alcohol of that which never happened. Those erstwhile school kids have grown old, they’ve gotten beer bellies, they’ve married themselves an Elena a piece, but something has gone wrong, something just isn’t what it should be . . . Meaninglessness has entered the uncertain Troy of the body via a wooden horse. That’s what all this howling in the night is about . . . I hate them and feel close to them in all their helpless sorrow and absurdity. Sometimes I feel like I want to add my howl to theirs. If I had a small, loyal pack of friends, I’d surely howl with them, happy and disconsolate amid the city’s eternal concrete fields. Amid its wild desert, Amooour . . . But I don’t have that pack. So I howl quietly, oh so quietly, and ostensibly with such subtle irony that I can barely hear myself.

  THE SADDEST PLACE IN THE WORLD

  To the Angel of Inexplicable Nighttime Noises,

  who watches over those crying in the bathroom,

  those cutting themselves in the kitchen

  and those smoking on balconies at three in the morning.

  Revoltingly lonely. That’s how I had been feeling over the last few years, that’s the most precise definition. A while back I saw it written in black marker on a telephone booth: “I love people and that makes me revoltingly lonely.” I added it to the collection of persistent phrases that I run through my head during fits of . . . revolting loneliness.

  I went to take a walk around the neighborhood during autumn’s late, joyless afternoon. The scent of rot. The scent of overripe, falling plums, inebriating, with a whiff of mash. The brandy that will never be. Scattered watermelon rind, already drained by an army of wasps, then sucked dry by a procession of ants. I was breathing it in, no, I was swilling it down, with the doggedness of a man who has decided to get sloshed in some grimy neighborhood dive.

  I was looking at the beat-up, rusting, wrought-iron casings of the glassed-in balconies. The poor man’s pathetic trick for enclosing your only balcony, putting up windows and curtains, turning it into an aquarium, reclaiming a few more square feet, adding another room to your panel-block apartment, putting your stove, hot plate and pepper roaster out there, planting dill, parsley, onion, and even a tomato plant in square plastic pots, turning it into a kitchen and a winter garden all at once. Frying peppers in the evening in that shop window onto your miserable life or smoking in your wife-beater in the inexplicable sorrow of the wee hours.

  I cut through a schoolyard, with battered basketball backboards, their hoops missing, overgrown with weeds. Grass was sprouting up through the cracked asphalt where a few kids were fervently kicking around a ball, dude, you’re a fucking faggot, one of the kids, not more than ten, yelled, then the “faggot” told him to go fuck himself and the game continued. It wasn’t so much the words themselves, but more the doctoring of the voices, the rasping, the straining of throats to produce something growling and threatening that made me get the hell out of there. Smashed water bottles, a scrap of newspaper that read: “Sozopol has become a second Jerusalem. Miracle-working relics of St. John the Baptist were discovered there yesterday: three knucklebones from the right hand, a heel, and a molar belonging to Christ’s cousin . . .” The pseudo-mystical kitsch of Bulgaria’s backwaters.

  It has turned into a ghetto. Or maybe it always was. Nothing has changed—except for the creeping rust everywhere; the panel-block apartments are thirty years older, irreparable. Back in the day, everybody was always saying: it’s too late for us, but let’s hope that at least the kids will live a different life. The mantra of late socialism. I now realize that it was my turn to utter that same line.

  The boxes have to contain a little of everything. Most of all something of those whispered, buried, hidden things. Something of that which didn’t make it into the shot, which didn’t last, but vanished, dried up like an autumn leaf, which started stinking like fish on a hot afternoon, went sour like milk, wilted like a pissed-on geranium, rotted like a pear . . .

  I passed by a power substation. They needed to be recorded, photographed, documented: the rusty sign reading “Warning: High Voltage” and the death notices with pictures of the deceased hung all around it. As if all those people from the death notices had illegally rummaged around in the power substation (o
f life?) and the electric shock had swept them away. Death notices and want ads. From these want ads, pasted up on the crumbling plaster, you could reconstruct the entire unwritten history of the last twenty years. Of supply and demand. I took out my notebook and started copying them down.

  A company is looking for elite dancers to work abroad. Young women needed to work for Italian families. Apartment for rent for two female students, non-smokers. Learn English in three weeks. I break curses, cast spells to improve your love and professional life. A cure for hemorrhoids and hair loss. Lost dog. We buy hair.

  What’s up, douchebag, someone clapped me on the shoulder. The phrase dated back twenty years ago, the gesture, too. Let’s put it down in the catalogue of vanished words and gestures, I instantly filed it away. I turned around, a vaguely familiar face, most likely a schoolmate: Ooh, Señor Schlong . . . My own answer surprised me, I had never used that form of address, but now the situation somehow naturally called for it. From that point on, the conversation shifted into the genre of “two old acquaintances chat, while asking themselves ‘who the hell is this guy?’” A rhetoric of flanking maneuvers. A feast of general and diluted speech. Skillful avoidance of the minefields of concrete facts and names. You can’t think of his name, you have no idea what he does for a living, you don’t even know whether he’s mistaken you for someone else, thus causing you to rummage around in the bottomed-out sack of your memory in vain. At that moment the omnipresent question “How are you?” comes to the rescue. And everything falls into place—the army of adages about the unrelenting passage of time, the kids are growing up, we’re getting older, you haven’t changed a bit, you’re exactly the same (who the hell are you, for Christ’s sake), well, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it, okay, I’ve gotta run, okay, let’s get together some time . . .

  I note this encounter as well (everything is important). Saying farewell to someone whose name you can’t even remember, someone you’ll write down as Señor X, that eternal X of the unknown perpetrator. No matter how hard you wrack your brain all day, you won’t come up with his real name, but paradoxically, this is precisely what keeps him alive in your mind for some time. We cannot run away from the ones we’ve forgotten.

  Farewell, Señor X, farewell to all those I’ve forgotten, and to all those who have forgotten me. May your memory live on forever.

  DESCRIPTION OF A PHOBIA (SIDE CORRIDOR)

  A friend of mine was terrified by dolls’ gazes. She would fall into an actual stupor if she ever met their glassy eyes. They certainly did have creepy stares, those dolls from back in the day. It turn out that this fear has been described and has a name, it’s called pediophobia.

  My fear is even more terrible, because the threat can be anywhere. I’ve never found it in any nomenclature of phobias, so that’s why I’ll duly add its description here. Let this be my humble scientific contribution to the endless List of Fears.

  I have a phobia of a certain question. A nightmarish question that can literally jump out at you from around the corner, hidden in the toothless mouth of the neighbor lady or mumbled by the clerk at the newspaper stand. Every telephone call is charged with this question. Yes, it most often lurks in telephone receivers:

  How are you?

  I stopped going out, stopped answering my phone, I started shopping at different stores so as to not fall into the trivial acquaintances of everyday life. I wracked my brain trying to hammer out defensive responses. I needed a new Shield of Achilles against bullshit. How to come up with an answer that doesn’t multiply the banality, that doesn’t get bogged down in clichés? An answer that doesn’t force you to use ready-made phrases, an answer that doesn’t lie, but which also doesn’t reveal things you’d rather not reveal. An answer that does not predispose you to entanglement in a long and pointless conversation.

  What spurious tradition of etiquette has given rise to it, how has it slipped through the centuries, that hypocritical question. “How are you?”—that is the question. (The sublime “To be or not to be” has been replaced by that pitiful inquiry, now there’s proof positive of degradation.)

  How are you?

  How are you?

  How are you?

  How are you supposed to answer that?

  Look, the English have pulled a fast one and made it into a greeting. They’ve defanged it, taken away its interrogative sting: Howdoyoudo.

  “How are you?” is the banana peel so courteously placed beneath your feet, the cheese that lures you toward the mousetrap of cliché.

  How are you—the weak, enfeebling poison of the everyday. There is no above-board answer to this question. There isn’t. I know the possible answers, but they repulse me, understand? They truly repulse me . . . I don’t want to be that predictable, to answer “fine, thanks,” or “hanging in there.” or “getting by.” or . . .

  I don’t know how I am. I can’t give a categorical answer. To give you a fitting reply, I’d have to spend nights, months, years, I’d have to read through a literary Tower of Babel, and to write, write, write . . . The answer is an entire novel.

  How am I?

  I’m not. End of story.

  Let that be the first line. And from there, the real answer begins.

  LIST OF AVAILABLE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTION HOW ARE YOU

  So-so.

  The most common answer in these parts. “So-so” means things are not so good but not so bad, either. Around here, you never say you’re doing well, so as not to call down some huge calamity on yourself.

  Still alive and kicking.

  In other words, I’m not doing well at all, but I’m not going to sit down and bore you with complaints, ’cause complaining is for sissies. This is the manly answer.

  Let this be as bad as it gets!

  This is said around the table, when you’ve gathered the whole gang together and you’re drinking toasts, munching on your salad, and sipping your brandy . . . I’ve always wondered what “as good as it gets” would look like. I don’t mean to be harsh, but I would guess it hardly looks any different.

  We’re fine, but it’ll pass.

  A waggish answer from the socialist era, someone clearly got fed up with the absurdity of the question and the system, in which complaining openly would only bring you grief. Hence the popular joke from that time:

  “How are you, how are you?” The general secretary of the Communist Party jokingly asked.

  “We’re fine, we’re fine,” the workers jokingly replied.

  A l’il sick t’day, dead as a doornail t’morrow.

  The whole phony concern of the question “How are you?” collapses.

  Any better would be criminal.

  An answer again along the same lines, the brainchild of someone displeased with the essence of the question.

  Not very how.

  A classic, Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh. But it, too, is now threadbare from use.

  Putting one foot in front of the other.

  Nothing happens, I’m not looking forward to anything, I somehow get by, I keep pushing on through. Whom and what keeps getting pushed on through and gotten by isn’t quite clear, the day, or life, most likely. The day is hard to push on through, like a donkey that’s dug in its heels on a bridge and won’t move an inch, like a hefty buffalo that has settled down for his noontime nap and refuses to budge.

  One thing I’ll never forget from my childhood are the old men sitting in front of their houses or gathered in front of the general store on the little square in the late afternoon, puffing on cheap cigarettes and digging around in the dirt at their feet with sticks, the day’s unknown and unlettered philosophers. In those parts, life is short, but the day is endless.

  Still breathing, but that might change.

  A sly variant version on the preceding answer, but its meaning or meaninglessness is more or less the same.

  Losing brain cells . . .

  The sincere and merciless response given by my nephew and his high school classmates in a sleepy, backwater town.<
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  HOW ARE YOU

  Somewhere, a brilliant idea pops into your head, the words come of their own accord, you can hardly take them all in, you immediately look for a pen and paper, you always carry at least three pens with you, you dig around in your pockets, can’t find a single one . . . You try to remember the phrases, you use tried-and-true mnemonic devices, taking the first letters or syllables from every word to forge a new keyword. You hurry home, dropping everything, chanting this word over the rosary of your mind. Right in front of your building, a neighbor stops you with that awful question “How are you?” and starts telling you some story, you open your mouth to say you’re in a terrible rush and at that moment the keyword flits out of your mouth like a fly and disappears into space as if it had never existed.

  HERE’S HOW

  I’d been feeling more and more foreign in this place over the past few years. I started going out only at night. As if at night the city regained something of its style, its legend. Perhaps late at night the shades of those who had lived here during the 1910s, ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s would come out. They would wander through their old haunts, banging into the newly built glass office buildings like sparrows that have accidentally flown into a room, looking for peace and quiet in the park in front of St. Sedmochislenitsi Church, strolling around the Pépinière, or hustling down Tsar Liberator Boulevard, passing by the other shades. I wanted to walk through that old Sofia like a shade among shades. At first I seemed to be succeeding. When I would stop by Yavorov’s house, sometimes I could hear a couple arguing from behind the dark windows.1 Once a window was lit up.

  Lately the shades have left this city as well. This is a forsaken city, a city without a legend. And the more people pour into it during the day, the emptier it seems. Its own dead have abandoned it. And that is truly irreparable.

  One evening, as I was wandering through this dark, beat-up, deserted city, I stumbled across a fight. I had never seen one so close up before. They were wailing away on one another as only people in these parts can, crudely, with no sense of style. They were thrashing away, that’s the word for it, pummeling faces, about seven or eight young guys around twenty years old. I now realize that my only experience with fights is from movies and literature. And how different the picture actually is. It had nothing in common with the battle between Achilles and Hector. Nor with Rocky Balboa, nor with Jackie Chan, nor with De Niro in Raging Bull . . . Ugly stuff. Then one of them pulled out a knife. I knew I had to intervene, but I didn’t know how. I stepped out into the open and yelled something. Someone shouted at me to get the hell out of there and they kept fighting. Yes, I was scared, there were lots of them, they were young, strong, ferocious. Where are those snoozing cops when you need them? Then an idea occurred to me. I picked up a broken paving tile from the sidewalk and hurled it through the nearest shop window on the street. It was a cell phone store. The alarm started howling. The fight stopped instantly. They looked at me stunned that some dweeb had dared to interfere. I could read their minds, as if their bloodied heads were made of glass. Suddenly all of them were ready to jump on me. But they realized what I had actually just done, the alarm was shrieking and in less than a minute the strapping private security guards would show up, who, unlike the police, wouldn’t just sit back on their heels. They hadn’t totally lost their grip on reason, so both gangs quickly got out of there. Nevertheless, the guy with the knife made sure to jab me, just like that in passing, as he made his getaway. I managed to raise my arm to protect myself, so the knife struck a little below the elbow. Nothing serious. I sat there bleeding meekly in the warm June night, sitting on the sidewalk amid pools of other people’s blood, waiting for the security guards.