Party Headquarters

by Georgi Tenev

  >>>

  I began to entertain the thought of saying “to hell with all this” and going out and having fun with his money. Whatever his means is a different story, but now isn’t the time for that, not tonight.

  Right then, that night, at 8 P.M. as I left the Hotel Hamburg, I was sure that this long day would end by midnight at the latest and with a girl, paid for with cash. Or better yet, with two hired girls. And I would pay them more than I had to, because it would be his money. The booth with the red ceiling and the neon lights was merely a rehearsal. So that I would later be able to last longer with real girls, with prostitutes—I’m not going to come fast, I told myself. And so on.

  Those were my plans at eight.

  >>>

  It is worth noting that this city, with one foot in the sea and the other in the river, has strange pigeons. At first, you mistake them for northern seagulls, but they are actually pigeons, they have a white or dark gray ring around the neck. A sign of something familiar, native, like back home. Here’s the other thing that made an impression on me: As I was wandering around at night, next to the manicured green lawns on either side of the navigation canal, I saw light shadows jumping on the grass. Because of their size, I first thought they were rabbits. But then I saw that they were rats, nonchalantly passing by on some path of their own. Hamburg—a river town, a sea town, northern and very rich. Rats, prostitutes, and the Reeperbahn: they didn’t give the impression of seediness, but quite the opposite, the feeling of stable Saxon comfort, which made it almost fitting to pay for pleasure with his money.

  Of course, when I think about that money, the pleasure can only fade, nothing more.

  I couldn’t give in that easily, however. I tried to find somebody to blame: the mechanized environment, the change machine, the video player that projected the films on the screen, those monotonous doors, too, and the neon light, the apathetic or overexcited faces, the silhouettes lingering by the windows—the whole disturbing yet quintessentially German erotic system, from which you expect at least a little more chaos, but no. All of these tiny elements pile up like obstacles, speed bumps against accelerating sensitivity, and instead of awakening more excitement, they arouse thought above all. And in the end, maybe even some pangs of conscience, and a little fear.

  >>>

  Hamburg, early or late. Love is already laid out on the autopsy table. I’m becoming more and more alarmed. Am I ruining my life? Just a month ago, even a week ago I still could’ve turned back. But now I’ve made my move, I’ve rolled the dice. I think some parts of my body are rolling around with them, my head definitely is. Somebody else is calling the shots and making decisions instead of me, someone who looks like me, but in a different form and a different phase, somewhere in the past. That’s why I’ve started to trust that somebody more. But if it turns out that the path from here on out leads me to some final abyss, the figure of that somebody won’t be solid enough; it will disintegrate, leaving me disagreeably alone. Whom will I blame then, who will be the guilty one?

  I turn back the clock, then quickly wind it forward, and then back again. I take one of the bundles: new, smooth bills, all hundreds, a hundred times a hundred in a light-blue wrapper. I fan through the stack, the paper passes quickly under my fingers and the identical edges repeat themselves. No motion at all, suspended animation. The silhouette of a bridge reflected in water smacks into the reflections on the bills above it. There are no pedestrians on the bridge, the map in the lower corner is too general, too empty. Where is Hamburg on that map, where am I on Seewartenstrasse, in a gray concrete citadel-hotel on the shore, wrapped in night and glass? The thought of going down to the lobby gives me the chills, but the dangerous thing is that I don’t even know why. I got mixed up in something I had no right to mess with; touching this money, I smell the scent of the leather coffin it was put into, ready for burial. In fact, I was this close to throwing it into the dark waters of the harbor. To the rats. To the girls in the bluish outfits, leaning on eighteenth century façades up there on the street called Reeperbahn. A strange slice of the city’s history, where the rope makers used to spread out bales of hemp to braid kilometers of rope, reaching as far as the city gates. It would be a naïve lie, however, one you wouldn’t believe, if I told you that I blame some other noose, and not the noose I’m tightening within myself. How did I end up here? Not accidentally, of course. Even if there were coincidences and chaotic stabs into the flesh of fate, I nevertheless said “yes.”

  Money frightens, that’s another one of its characteristics: it arouses fear. It’s as if its very origins evoke crime, despite the bank’s guarantee of cleanliness. The more money, the more suspicion.

  I sit up, get to my feet, put on my sunglasses, and pause in front of the mirror hanging on the wallpapered wall of room 308, Hotel Hamburg. Who do you look like now? Am I sufficiently suspicious looking? Obviously not to the girls lounging in their usual places on Davidstrasse, who readily toss invitations my way:

  “Komm schon, Blondy!”

  “Komm schon, wir machen es französisch!”

  >>>

  The docks of Hamburg, on the banks of the Elba, the largest pontoon structure in Europe. St. Michael’s Tower with its four clocks—the tallest clock tower in Europe. I don’t dare fix my gaze there for long, on the home of the Archangel, so instead my eyes follow the smaller mast of light, the white clock faces. They shine straight at me: the harbor tower. Where should I sail away to?

  I get dressed. I don’t have the right clothes or storm gear to stand proudly on the deck. I have nowhere to sail to now, so it wouldn’t make any sense. I know what I have to do this morning, at dawn: run.

  Running is a forgotten pleasure, but that’s not the point now; we’re talking about survival. About escape—running usually turns out to be the path to it. The only difference is the starting and ending points—from what or from whom, and to where and why am I running?—everything is still unclear.

  I don’t care if I look ridiculous in my hiking boots and too-short shorts verging on Speedos. I don’t glance at the professional maniacs who start while it’s still dark, I pass them by as if they’re shadows stuck inside fancy three-ply runner’s gear made of revolutionary fibers. I’m hopelessly sweaty, dark wet stains appear in my armpits and on my back. I don’t have a hat or a visor or earphones to sway to some rhythm like those sports zombies on the paths. They pass, meet, and go around me because I don’t swerve, I run in a straight line. A tall German with his two-meter-long strides tries to pass me—I don’t think so, my friend. You may not realize it, but I can tolerate pain. My heels are burning, my socks are twisting around my shins. My gait is aggressive, ugly, but I keep an enviable distance—see ya’ later, sucker!—and he turns off, as if he’d been planning to go that way all along, to avoid defeat. Because he can’t pass me. Now that I’ve gone into sprint mode, there’s no turning back. Full speed ahead. Sweat pours down, gluing my eyelids shut, drenching my eyebrows—I can’t see and have no idea where I’m going, but the running continues, I run and run.

  >>>

  From control point CP-9 to control point CP-8

  I had this dream with my eyes wide open: wilderness orientation.

  Pioneer camp. A Spec Ops orienteering race through the woods, the thick grass in the rain. Xenon, the camp dog, a big, black German shepherd, zigzags left and right, but—thanks to his border-guard genes—doesn’t bark.

  We run around using compasses to search for invisible lines, azimuths, hidden among the trees. Once we guess the direction, we discover orientation signs, concealed by pine boughs. A cardboard sign reading “CP-8”—there is a small map and a symbol, our goal is marked with a colorful arrow. Around my waist, under my T-shirt, our team’s flag is twisted and tied into a knot. We pass it around, taking turns carrying it. The fake silk soaks up the childish salt of our sweat. Now, in my memory I notice that despite the sweat and grime, my body gave off no scent. And so . . .

  . . . woods, pines, firs. Cedars.
Sharp green needles and wide leaves. We run over the silent moss, in step, our knees and shins scratched from the still-soft milk teeth of wild roses, of blackberry bushes. Our elbows and shoulders stinging from the little whips of jutting branches, the thick hazel trees. And all of a sudden amid the bottomless green: a dark blue spot, movement with a persistent color.

  Strange white shoes, hair swinging in a ponytail. One moving spot, and another one right next to it. I saw her.

  Wilderness orientation—from CP-7 to CP-6

  I lost sight of the vision. The ghost born of entangled, blinking eyelashes flew away quickly, like a bird amid the branches. At least that’s how it seemed to me. It’s just a game, there’s no real danger here. Pioneer camp, a children’s war, the running continues.

  We reached the river—we crossed without fording, with quick steps across the stones. Under the thin rubber soles of your tennis shoes you can feel the edges of the rocks, splashes of water cool you off momentarily. And again running, quickened breath—where is the mirage, the blue spot on green infinity? The bouncing braid, the white heels of the odd shoes, which still had their strange treads—look, there they are here—leaving unfamiliar tracks.

  We reach a long curve, encircling the slope bristling with trees. The dank shade raises goose bumps on our bare arms. Who is waiting for us around the corner?

  An April rain begins to fall.

  >>>

  Raindrops glistened through the sunshine, fluff floated from the poplars, crossing into the rain’s line of fire.

  My eyes swim from so much blonde hair, girls in blue blouses. My head starts to spin. A strange taste invades my lungs, the scent of ozone—what does ozone smell like anyway?—at least that’s what I tell myself now as I try to grasp something more, a greater meaning and importance held in those last few moments.

  And the question I add to all this today: why didn’t anybody call out to us, tell us to come back? So many secrets in such a short time, in the seconds before I fainted for no good reason.

  “From exhaustion and too much running,” as the Pioneer camp doctor dryly declared afterward. Okay—before I dropped from exhaustion into the soft blades of the tall grass. Before the kaleidoscopic reflections of the girls’ ghostly silhouettes accumulated into a single body.

  The sky above my head widened, filled my eyes, and I fell into it, fell into the rain, into something huge and blue, not black like they usually say the color of collapse is.

  “From exhaustion and too much running,” repeats the doctor and gives me an injection in the arm.

  “No!”—I feel like shouting—but my voice slips into weightlessness at the edge of my throat.

  “You didn’t see anything,” the comforting voices repeat, the needle pulls out of my skin.

  “It was nothing, nobody, you’re imagining it,” I hear, or rather dream, that they’re speaking to me.

  “Shh, shh, go to sleep”—the last thing I can make out is the voice of the scout leader: “Go to sleep, dream”—the warmth of a hand on my chest. The warmth of the sun still at its zenith, while I fall asleep too early, exceptionally early. A cotton ball with a drop of rubbing alcohol on it raises a silent toast to the tiny puncture where the mixture of beneficent poison and healing sleep has entered. Time passes, the minute and hour hands can’t hold me. The clocks on all sides of the tower spin. Now I can see in all four cardinal directions, too, but I can’t seem to move in a single one of them.

  Uranus

  The control point is the smallest possible space that can contain the ultimate goal—or just the temporary goal—of this leg of the race, the searching and finding, the blazing of a trail in this thick impenetrable forest. So what’s the function of the meadow, then? A place to rest and to play or a ruse, a trap set by strange forces? Clever bait to draw you out of the forest and into the open, so that the eyes of spy satellites can see you from invisible heights? Or so the radioactive rain can fall on you?

  We had no way of knowing, it wasn’t marked on the map and no dosimetric lines were drawn on the orienteering stencil—a few days earlier, a thousand kilometers to the north and east, Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl had exploded, under the watch of the Fifth Shift.

  The pioneer camp commander later summed it up with his favorite saying: “Shit happens.”

  Letter to an Unknown Comrade

  I know, my dear, little, unknown Soviet and Ukrainian comrade, I know, but please—don’t finish yet, tell me again. Tell me how it happened once more, tell me, even if it means repeating yourself and wasting yet another whole page of graph paper. For me it’s important, it’s so important, you can’t even begin to imagine.

  I want to hear about the banks of the Pripyat River—I can see its water boiling, I understand. But more about that later, it’s still too early, April hasn’t arrived yet, nor the beginning of May, the water is calm. Longer ago and further back, before spring and before winter. Tell me about the summer, the past, as if there never was and never will be one like it again, as if it were the last. As if we are running for the last time with pounding carefree steps toward the banks, toward the water, and it flows smoothly from the tributaries and empties out into the Dnieper. Show me around the flat terrain, across those 106,000 square kilometers, geographically, like a straight-A student. There, where the water-drainage basin stretches past the nuclear power plant. Scribble on the map, all along the river’s 748 kilometers with a black marker. Give me a little more time. I’m playing here in the grass, it’s raining, my dear little unknown comrade from the Pale between Ukraine and Belarus—I’m not even exactly sure where you are, on the map in my textbook that little corner is too small, between two holes of the spiral binding that hold the pages together. So tell me about it now, give me time to stand here a little longer, in the rain.

  In return, let me admit that you are now extending this moment in Paradise—she is blonde, my little Soviet comrade from Ukraine, from Belarus, she is a blue T-shirt and blonde hair in braids and shoes with a strange design on the heels. Tell me whatever you want, don’t make me ask, my lips are busy, my words are busy. I put a lot of effort into my Russian, see how beautifully I write to you with loops and hooks, correctly using the instrumental case and the backward “e,” right?

  While here with her, we can’t utter a single word, so we just move, we move and breathe.

  Don’t ask me why or what for, just close your eyes and tell me, like you used to write me. Tell me again about the Pripyat River, about its waters. I know they’re brown because those waters flow from Geography, from peat-bogs. And if you want to swim, you’d better be strong because the current will sweep you away. After swimming, a coating like chocolate covers your skin, it tightens, dries out, and bakes in the air—if you pick at it with your fingers it squeaks. Like a festive Misha the Olympian, one of those marzipan bears sold as an Olympic souvenir. Of course, you know that it’s because of the swamp acids, which must be good for you—even fish swim in and breathe them. But after the disaster they will turn into coagulating agents, as the nuclear physicists call them, since they are excellent conveyors of radioactive particles, the leftovers from the breakdown of the spilled nuclear fuel, God damn it, as the nuclear physicists, or “nukies,” swore through their teeth. You are probably the child of a nukie, my dear little unknown comrade—otherwise what would you be doing in that city built in the middle of nowhere? In the middle of the Pale, there and where else in that emptiness would you be born, at that unremarkable age, the same age as the fourth reactor, the pride of the golden five-year-plans for energy construction.

  You are probably a nukie’s child, because you know, your daddy told you—when he didn’t prefer to stay silent, when he said that he was just coming home for a bit and then would have to go back—that the whole power plant was leaking. It was leaking like crazy, God damn it, the nukies cursed, it was leaking, the whole thing was just one leak after another, somewhere in the ballpark of fifty cubic meters an hour through the faltering reinforcement, through
the drains. Fifty cubic meters of radioactive water an hour, my boy, my dear little Soviet boy—even I know that’s a lot. The vaporizers can hardly process it. Radioactive oversaturation, as they say, and they very often send your dad on radioactive business trips, all the way to the great country’s capital, to that special Sixth Moscow Clinic. God damn it—but there’s no cure for this exhaustion, he’s always falling asleep at the table, head on the tablecloth, facedown amid the cherry jam and slices of bread. That’s a gift from our native fields—so I’m there in the picture, too. You don’t know it, my dear little comrade, but I was on the work brigade at the jam factory. That very jar, cherry jam, with a pit.

  It’s very easy for them to blame him, to call him an idiot, a drunk or an ideological freak, depending on the audience and the depth of the argument required. But, my dear little comrade, I know—daddies never do anything without thinking about their children. Or even without asking them. The disguised Father Christmas makes every child’s dreams come true.

  So let them write, let them compile lists that pedantically point out oversights, let them count off at length the failures to conform to labor standards and operating procedures, to the Energy Code, to the material and moral principles for acting in zones of elevated radioactive risk—oversights, mistakes, and unimplemented security measures of primary importance. And in brief, including only the gravest errors, for example, the following: that the workers on the fifth shift shut down the emergency system, they stopped and started the machine however they saw fit, doing the same with the automatic regulation system. And what’s this talk of cooling turbines, given that for the purposes of this strange experiment all the backup energy sources were cut off and even sealed off in advance—let’s see what’ll happen, those sharp minds said, let’s just see.