The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  DE

  OX

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  Deoxyribonucleic acid. Deoxy . . . An ox plods through the primordial soup of the world. I write it out over and over again until I lose myself in the labyrinth of that name.

  Except that there’s some mistake there, some bug, some hitch. Which automatically turns me into a Minotaur. I walk through the whole labyrinth of my own deoxyribonucleic acid to find that mistake. I am locked up in one, the other is locked up inside me. The labyrinth in the Minotaur.

  Things that resemble a labyrinth

  The human brain. The cranial folds of all mammals.

  A body’s nervous system or a nerve taken individually with all of its branches, nerve fibers, axons, and so on.

  The serpentine of the small intestine and the internal organs.

  DNA

  Banitsi, burek, saralias. All the winding, phyllo-dough sweets of the Orient.

  The flight of bees, the language they use to communicate with one another, the interwoven figures. The language of bees is a labyrinth.

  A forest.

  The root systems of annual and perennial plants.

  The structure of the inner ear with its membranous and bony labyrinth.

  A city without a river that you find yourself in for the first time. The absence of a river is important. Otherwise the Ariadne’s thread of its course easily shows you the way.

  Secret routes taken on a walk with a mistress you are keeping hidden.

  Doodles on a scrap of paper while having a boring phone conversation.

  The pubis of a young woman. Here the labyrinth comes before the cave.

  A ball of yarn.

  The labyrinth sketched out by the reader’s eyes.

  If you look closely at a rose for a long time, you will see the labyrinth within it. And the horns of a beetle-Minotaur.

  Good thing this darkness is here, this basement, so I can stay here, turning back time, running through its corridors, shouting, mooing. The darkness helps me get used to it. When the one who is coming comes, I’ll be ready. The transition will be truly smooth, from one darkness to another.

  I remember, or I imagine that I remember, strange things. I remember afternoon, towns baking in the sun, deserted streets that grow crowded toward evening. I remember, and this is my earliest memory, my mother hiding behind a curtain and waving to me, I’m laughing, because I get the game, I head toward the curtain, I’ve just learned to walk, but she’s not there. Sometimes I see rooms with high ceilings, a girl from behind, a cart disappearing into a field, an injured man in a strange city, a book in which I read my own story, full of mistakes.

  I remember that I was once happy. It lasted about six minutes. It happened in the Kensington Gardens in West London, early in the morning. I can’t find a reason for that happiness, which is proof positive of its authenticity. Any other kind of happiness is a conditioned reflex, like in Pavlov’s dog. The stimulus comes and happiness is secreted, like gastric juices.

  I was walking down the pathway, breathing deeply and sensing things with the body of a child. That is the key. With the body of a child.

  I haven’t gone out to the street in eighty-four days. I only slip out late in the evening to get the newspapers out of the mailbox, they’re how I count the days. I don’t want to meet anybody. I’ve stopped shaving, my jaw has gone stiff, probably because I haven’t talked to anyone. Can your mouth atrophy?

  I stop eating for some time. In any case, my supply of tin cans and provisions has been drastically diminished. I consider reducing my weight as part of going back in time. Children do not weigh 180 lbs. I feel better in this thinning skin. I’m looking more and more like that child-Minotaur. I don’t know whether I’m a boy, the sickly thin person has no gender or age.

  When Theseus came out of the cave, he was leading a child by his left hand. The myth has erased that child from its memory. Myths don’t like children. Just imagine how incredibly awkward it would be. The hero Theseus with his short sword, Theseus who had defeated the giant Periphetes, the bloodthirsty bandit Sinis, the wild Crommyonian Sow, the hulking Cercyon, the cruel Procrustes, the Marathonian Bull, and so on, in the end sees a frightened child. Theseus tosses his short sword on the ground and leads the child out of the labyrinth.

  That night he tells Ariadne: you know what, there was no monster there, just a little boy with a bull’s head. And that boy somehow reminded me of myself.

  (Theseus and I really do look alike, yet at the same time he is handsome. Perhaps he sensed that one and the same divine father was peeking out from behind both of us—at once god and bull. My brother begotten by a god, I by a bull.)

  Ariadne doesn’t pay attention to his words, but only hugs and kisses him, telling him that they have to get out of there right away.

  The truth is, while looking for loopholes for the Minotaur in the story, I keep dreaming ever more frequently of my death in a basement, run through by a short, double-edged sword. The hand and the sword come out of the darkness of another time, they have travelled for so long that my human-faced killer is completely worn down from the journey, his arm is weak, and I myself have to help him with my own execution. To make a door with a sword in my very own body. My whole life I’ve been trying to lead the Minotaur out of myself.

  But what if my killer (that which will kill me) doesn’t notice me in the darkness and passes me by? What if I hide, like way back on that summer night when we were playing hide-and-seek and they forgot me . . . And I stand there hidden for a long time, while death goes about its business for years, a century. And what if outside there are now other people, a few generations have passed, and I won’t be able to share the apple of a single memory with anyone? If that’s the price . . . I hear myself yelling, howling, mooing like a bull in the corridors of that basement, because I no longer know which language is mine. I’m here, don’t pass me by, here I am. Moooooo . . .

  IX.

  ENDINGS

  THE STORYTELLER AND HIS KILLER

  Had the Minotaur perhaps thought to use Scheherazade’s strategy? I see him with Theseus, the two of them walking together through the endless corridors of the labyrinth, with the Minotaur spinning endless tales. But what can someone who has been locked up in the darkness of a basement his whole life tell stories about? About a dream, in which he has a human face, about his mother’s face, which never turns around, about his memories from an old bomb shelter where he lived amid piles of boxes and newspapers on the eve of some ending, which never came about in any case, about being trotted out at village fairs, about murders in bullfights and slaughterhouses, about the labyrinths of cities, where he “wandered lonely as a cloud,” about all the books he has gotten lost in . . . Theseus walks beside him, the ball of string in his hand unwinding, Ariadne’s thread mixes with the thread of the stories . . . Some things he doesn’t understand, other things strike him as so unbelievable that his own feats and adventures pale in comparison. In the middle of one of the stories in which some ancient hero was wandering the corridors of a labyrinth to kill the monster, the Minotaur stops and says to Theseus: your ball of string has run out. But Theseus was so entranced by the thread of the story that he didn’t even understand what ball of string he was talking about. You’re here to kill me, the Minotaur reminds him. Now we’ve arrived at precisely that corridor of the story. If we continue on, you won’t be able to go back, because your thread won’t go any farther. But I don’t want to kill you, Theseus answers. Someone forced me into this story. While you were telling me tales, I visited more places than all the ancient heroes combined. I want you to continue on with the story.

  It passes through my own death, the Minotaur replies, but it’s all the same whether you’ll kill me for real or in the story you’ll hear.

  I see them walking along together through the corridors of cities an
d cellars, weaving parallel labyrinths from the threads of their stories, themselves entangled in them. And nothing can ever separate them again, the storyteller and his killer.

  POLICE REPORT

  (. . .)

  A short, double-edged sword was found, in all likelihood an unusually valuable object from antiquity. An expert appraisal has been ordered to determine the precise period of its production, its value and provenance. There are no traces of blood on the sword.

  Description of items found in the basement. Boxes filled with contents whose organizational logic is difficult to establish. Seven of them—filled primarily with clippings from newspapers and magazines. An old halvah box. Eight notebooks of varying thickness and with different sorts of bindings, almost entirely filled, have been found. Four large trunks filled with books in various languages. A gas mask. A computer and a dinosaur, which will be requisitioned for the needs of the investigation. (The dinosaur is a rubber children’s toy). Fingerprints have been taken from all suitable surfaces. A literary expert must be appointed to examine the content of the notebooks. With an eye above all to what possible clues or leads could be derived from that material.

  I am the appointed expert. As far as I know, the neighbors repeatedly called the police to complain of strange, random noises and howling (mooing—according to others) coming from the basement of the apartment building. Then for a week, no sounds were heard, the building manager went downstairs and found the heavy door to one of the storage units (part of a former bomb shelter) wide open. A sword was lying on the floor.

  They asked me whether I had anything against working in the basement itself, since it would be a Herculean task to remove everything, besides the police had no free space. I agreed. I felt a strange sort of excitement, I had a complicated relationship with that writer, without having known him. I have always felt personally robbed while reading him.

  I entered the basement on March 17 at 10 A.M. A strange feeling in the beginning that there was someone else there, watching me. I’m not afraid, the gaze is well-intentioned, if I can put it like that. I again peered into all the corners and niches, even though the police had done so before me. Nothing. Just a slug slowly crawling across the tin halvah box. I started reading. I stop, go back, go down a corridor that seems familiar to me, get lost, continue on. During the first month, I went out only once. Then never again.

  WHAT IS LEFT AT THE END

  I’m back on that warm stone, six again, I step closer to the girl from the vision who is sitting in front of the piano with her hands raised, I’ve opened the door to the room, I’m leaning against the frame in my shorts, what’s that ugly scar doing where my left leg was broken, a single beam of light passes through the heavy curtains, slicing the whole room in two, we are in two different halves. And then the miracle happens, the picture starts moving, the girl turns around . . .

  At that moment, the Minotaur finds his mother in the crowd at the bullfight, my three-year-old grandfather sees his mother running back toward the mill,

  a woman in Harkany receives a letter,

  a man steps out of a poster, goes over to Juliet in front of the movie theater and the two of them set off arm-in-arm down the main street of T.,

  Gaustine installs the biggest projector in the world and a night rain that doesn’t get anything wet falls over the whole northern hemisphere,

  my father and mother are watching from the balcony of a lit-up apartment on the top floor . . .

  the girl and I are now on the same side of the beam of light, I see the edge of her face, she turns around . . .

  Hi, Daddy.

  EPILOGUE

  I died (left for Hungary) in late January 1995 as an eighty-two-year-old human being of the male sex. I don’t know the exact date. It’s best to die in the winter, when there’s not much work, so you don’t cause too much trouble.

  I died as a fruit fly, at dusk. The sunset of the day (of my life) was beautiful.

  I died on December 7, 2058, as a human being of the male sex. I don’t remember anything from that year. That’s why I recalled the year I was born, 1968, day by day.

  I have always been dead. And it’s always been dark. If death is darkness and the absence of others . . .

  I haven’t died yet. I’m forthcoming. I am minus three months old. I don’t know how to count that negative time in the womb. It’s dark and cozy here, I’m tied to something that moves. In three months, I’ll pass beyond to the outside. Some call that death birth.

  I died on February 1, 2026, as a human being of the male sex. My father was always telling me that it was best to die in winter, I listened to him. I was a veterinarian my whole life. I once went to Finland . . .

  I remember dying as a slug, as a rose bush, a partridge, as Ginkgo biloba, a cloud in June (that memory is brief), a purple autumnal crocus near Halensee, an early-blooming cherry frozen by a late April snow, as snow freezing a hoodwinked cherry tree . . .

  We was.

  BEGINNING

  My father and the dinosaurs died out at the same time . . .

  Acknowledgements

  This book was written in various places. It began near the Wannsee at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, where I had all the tranquility and sunsets in the world at my disposal; it continued on the banks of the Danube in Krems (Literaturhaus NÖ), the Wachau Valley in Lower Austria, between the river and the strictest Austrian prison; the final I’s were dotted and T’s crossed on the Adriatic, in Split (thanks to an invitation from KURS), in the labyrinth of Diocletian’s Palace. I am grateful to the benevolent geography and my hosts in these places.

  Thanks to Ani Burova, Nadezhda Radulova, Boyko Penchev, Miglena Nikolchina, Bozhana Apostolova, and Silvia Choleva for their valuable advice.

  I thank Ivan Teofilov for his encouragement and shared faith in the wonder of language.

  Thanks to Bilyana, who read and edited before there was even a book, and to four-year-old Raya for her patience and willingness to offer a story about cats and dinosaurs whenever she sensed that I was stuck.

  Thanks to everyone who secured me the solitude necessary for a novel.

  Georgi Gospodinov (1968) is a poet, writer, and playwright, and one of the most translated Bulgarian authors after 1989. His Natural Novel is published in twenty-three languages (in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive) and was praised by the New Yorker, New York Times, Guardian, Believer, and Village Voice, among others. A collection of his short stories, And Other Stories, was published by Northwestern University Press. The Physics of Sorrow, his second novel, is a finalist for four International European Prizes in Italy and Germany, among them Premio Strega Europeo and Haus der Kulturen der Welt Preis.

  Angela Rodel earned an MA in linguistics from UCLA and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and learn Bulgarian. In 2010, she won a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev’s short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today and received an NEA Fellowship for her translation of Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow.

  Open Letter—the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press—is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers. Publishing ten titles in translation each year, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow.

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