Party Headquarters

by Georgi Tenev

  And what happened? The temperature rose highly strangely and strangely high, somehow quite perceptibly. The reactor, of course, was itself a Party member, it didn’t want to explode and humiliate the great country, its scientists and academics, who shouted all the livelong day that the Soviet atom was the safest atom on the planet—the reactor resisted, wringing its hands, trying desperately to keep itself together. But here the masters of that deadly sport had already put it in a headlock that no one could escape from—not even Reactor Four of the world’s third-largest atomic power plant (both in terms of size and capacity), which is even described in the Apocalypse.

  And the control system, the control system designed precisely for such cases, was frozen up in any case—on top of everything the leaders of the experiment themselves, engineers, scientists, physicists, had turned it off earlier so that it wouldn’t get in the way of their plans. And so, with its back against the wall, with access to all emergency generators cut off—the two diesel generators as well as the two electrical transformers—the block, the reactor was stranded above the abyss without any energy except atomic energy. Without energy to stop, that is.

  And finally—sometime around 1:20 in the morning—finally when their hair began to stand on end because they realized that they were pulling the levers of a fuse measuring fourteen meters in diameter and seven meters tall, filled with toasty, warm uranium—funny, hadn’t they realized it before?—no, apparently not, alas—then they just threw up their hands and cried “Mommy!” But Mommy was nowhere to be found, so they pulled the fatal lever labeled ES: “Emergency Shield.”

  Which allowed the incompetence of the reactor’s constructors and builders to come into play. Because some of the control rods had somehow been designed incorrectly, but who bothered about that, anyway? And who would’ve thought that those rods would ever need to enter the heart of the reactor with a crash, in such a state of wild panic—according to the regulations, they should never have even been taken out at all! And so on and so forth—an endless stream of mutual accusations and justifications between the builders, users, enemies, and friends of peaceful nuclear power for Soviet aims.

  I know there are no longer birches, poplars, a city, houses, Lenin Street, the school; the 50,000 inhabitants have disappeared somewhere. But my dear little Soviet comrade, I still keep your address, I write you letters that never arrive—just so you know that I am eternally grateful to your father and to all those fathers who, despite the efforts of the control system, managed to blow the reactor sky-high. To blow me sky-high.

  >>>

  I, unlike everyone else, do not blame K-shev for not warning us. I don’t care—I have unique personal memories, historical ones. For me, Chernobyl is a flash of a moment that surpasses all moments worthy of the name “epic.” Like the eureka light bulb going off in Edison’s skull: the day you understand everything without needing to think.

  I already know—now, later, after reading all those books, all those declassified documents. I, as they say, bless the right hand of the creators of those uranium-graphite reactors, with all of their thoughtlessness. The greatness of scientists is not measured by some abstract perfection—on the contrary, it is measured by their talent to make a predicted mistake. To hide it in a system of complicated formulas and terminology so as to remain invisible to small-minded Party leaders.

  My brothers, may it be strong as ore,

  that blessed right hand of yours—

  with the valiant Reactor Four

  you lit up a star!

  >>>

  “We trusted the experts’ evaluations,” they whisper on the upper floors, hidden in offices behind oak doors, huddled in corners near the trashcans. “All for the good of the people and the working class”—nodding, the participants in the Party schools explain this to one another, smoking during breaks, and come to an agreement with insulting ease. Comrade K-shev is somewhere among them, a guest in the great Soviet nation, sent by a small tomato republic, with his pompadour and hand-knit sweater vest. Sent on business from a quiet little country poised to soon become yet another car in the bullet-train—right after the end of lessons in mastering solidarity.

  “We . . .” a slightly guilty and listless voice begins a summary over a radio loudspeaker that is somewhat sagging, yet well-slathered with paint just like the wallpaper and doorframe in the yellowish-dusky color of the era.

  Now I realize why the hallways are so empty as she and I creep through them—the stairways, the corners, the railings, the mirrors without reflections in them, the crimson curtains and the empty pedestals. They are all at a meeting. They are making important decisions.

  “We trusted the scientists,” they sniffle into the loudspeaker, passing around the responsibility like lice in a kindergarten. They squint an eye, pick at the ugly guts of this wart—an imaginary one, of course, yet still dangerous, even twice as dangerous for its imaginariness. What did you inadvertently touch in the pandemonium? Why are you still wiping your fingers on the curtains—to get rid of the invisible contagion of fear—could it be that something has happened? That something has finally happened to you.

  “We carried out our orders. We met the deadlines.”

  “The bosses, the Party . . . the Congress . . .”

  K-shev remains silent, however; he doesn’t justify himself to anyone. There’s something I like about the guy, something that excites me to a particularly strange, radioactive degree, especially at the moment when I bury my fingers in the milky-blue, fleshy-cloth combination of the pleated skirt and naked thighs of his daughter.

  He revolves around the axis of his own unshakable foundation, built over the void. It’ll only take a bit more to convince me, just a bit more. Just some extra gesture, accidental, seemingly trivial, that will let me know that he is not simply a Party flunky, but divine. He doesn’t need to run from responsibility because he is in a completely different relationship to responsibility itself. He himself is the creator of responsibilities.

  Strangely, his illness now seems at first glance like a failure, a tumble from the altar I was prepared to place him on. But perhaps this is only at first glance—for this reason I’m not rushing to pity him so easily; I’ve seen many falls. Could the illness be the final proof I need to deify him once and for all? A strange sort of god, ready to die even—from an illness no less, one we ourselves all feared becoming infected with. Is he capable of such an act purely and solely to win our faith?

  >>>

  There, there, my dear little Soviet comrade: don’t cry, don’t be sad, don’t change your surname, don’t be ashamed of your name. Take flowers to your daddy’s grave, even though only a blue suit with metal buttons is buried there. After the hydrogen-oxygen explosion at the reactor, fueled by uranium dioxide UO2 on a bed of zirconium, under the skeleton of niobium—nothing was left of the bodies.

  “But we did everything just as we were supposed to”—only evaporated ghosts repeat these words now.

  “We did everything correctly, following the established plan approved by the management!” Just as under socialism—we do and did everything correctly, yet life, the world, continues to collapse beneath our feet like a reactor that has entered a runaway state of nuclear meltdown. Is there any need to explain what those two great liberating words mean: chain reaction?

  A reaction that breaks chains. Indeed, freedom is equal in strength to the truth. But first the opposite had to happen.

  And I had to come across his daughter, of course.

  >>>

  K-shev watches me from the framed black-and-white photograph. Only in the meaning of that gaze, in the subsections of the ideological tract can I search for the true foundations. The sick passion that firmly grips and envelops both our bodies—mine and his daughter’s. It changes from tenderness into exertion, from exertion into force, into tension to the point of pain: power.

  At the end, as usual, the tempo should speed up, just a bit more and everything is over. The moment of the happy ending, t
he verge of that thirsting absurdity. But that is precisely the moment when I can throw a wrench in the spokes of natural progression, of desire: I slow the beating of my heart, the throbbing of blood in the basement of my organism, the boiling of seething lava. All internal muscles push and jerk, hopelessly trying to overcome the built-up ballast—but I resist, working against them.

  I’m pretty vile, that’s clear—I’m obviously depraved. Because I keep a dark and repulsive memory like a worn-out old photograph in my hand. And at the decisive moment, under cover of a final cherished kiss, of a free fusion of lips—I paste it onto her face.

  The whole horror of experiencing communism, or socialism—call it what you will—hangs gaping in all its absurdity if you don’t manage to do the most important thing: reach the body of the daughter. And best of all—the daughter of K-shev himself.

  The Year 2000, a Morning at the End of the Century

  “I had a really weird dream,” I tell her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she responds. She’s doing her hair.

  “I dreamed I was running.”

  “You don’t have time to jog this morning.” She doesn’t turn around; she’s completely absorbed in winding and twisting something around her hair.

  “I was running really fast, faster than ever before.”

  “Well, it’s not gonna happen. You’ll have to skip your run today. Come on, get up, get dressed.”

  I keep silent. I could tell her everything, I feel like I could tell her absolutely everything. And she wouldn’t turn away, she’d hear me out, and at the end she’d rest her head on my forehead, I’m sure of it. She’d run her fingers through my hair, like she loves to, she would start doing my hair with the same concentration she gives her own.

  They love me—I’m not sure why that is, what I’m made of—but they fall very easily and deeply in love with me, and afterward I practically have to pry them off with a crowbar. As a result, love becomes my primary enemy. I’m not saying it’s normal, I’m not normal at all. I’m not proud of this, I’m probably a freak—but they get used to that, too. They ask you questions, hammering away at you, yelling, in the end they accept it and just ask out of inertia without expecting a concrete answer, “Just tell me what you want. I don’t get it.”

  What they count on most is the complexity of male desires. It’s hard to answer the general question: what do you want? So I answer very concretely, using names, weights and colors: “I want coffee and doughnuts”—this snaps the passive listener out of her stupor. “What?” is the following logical and slightly astonished question.

  “Coffee and doughnuts, but with that taste of the good old days.”

  The effect of sincerity is short-lived. They soon turn their back on you again, somehow accusingly, but now with a certain contempt. Women are at first endlessly curious, they start to love me. Then they begin to despise me to my very core, because I turn out to be boring, the living picture of their dissatisfaction. Should I ask them what they wanted from me or whether I’ve promised anything? I don’t think there’s any point.

  >>>

  “Come on, get up, wake up! How can you even feel like sleeping, I could hardly sleep a wink from anxiety.”

  What anxiety, I could reply, but I don’t want to. Some breath of the dream is caught between my lips, a warm sip with a strange aftertaste, slightly bitter, slightly sweet, the slightly rotten taste of waking that spurs you to brush your teeth—so as to forget that gloomy little ghost, that telltale memory, trace, souvenir and hint that in your dreams you embraced something dead.

  “You haven’t shown me anything of your father’s,” I say after swallowing that chunk of mummified dream.

  I lie back on the pillow. She has stopped moving her hand, right as it was passing through the roots of her hair. I love watching women stop moving their hands, especially when executing one of the most primitive female movements.

  “What?”

  “It just occurred to me all of a sudden, I don’t know why, that you almost never say anything about your father.”

  “My father’s been gone for years, you know that.”

  “He died.”

  I say this without a questioning intonation, yet not exactly as a statement, either. More like an opinion open to argument, proof, verification or refutation.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Her nervous liveliness has suddenly dried up. After that I again hear in her voice those notes of annoyance and stubbornness. The feeling that she’s being attacked—by none other than me. “Did something happen? Are you trying to tell me something?”

  I keep silent. She reaches out her hand toward mine:

  “Come on, get up.”

  But I don’t move.

  >>>

  How did I meet her? Our whole shared path has passed under the banner of tension. I can’t understand why, I can’t even recognize myself.

  “Get up, get dressed.”

  I remain silent in response.

  She leans over me threateningly:

  “I’m not going to let you do this.”

  “You go ahead, leave me alone.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “I said leave me alone!”

  We fall easily into a childish squabble. Only I can’t remember what we’re fighting about, as usual. There was some theme, some attempt to outwit each other. A childish war always flares up over some formal reason, but the symbolism of the toy, the object under dispute, is usually deeper, much deeper. Like an unconscious motif, for example, a lack of parental love, more precisely a father’s love. I strike again while I know the wound has not yet healed:

  “Tell me about your father and I promise to get up right away.”

  The glass alarm clock in its see-through case rings near my head—I don’t have time to close my eyes, to protect myself, she hurls it at me from very close range. She didn’t even pick it up in her hand, just swatted at it with her open palm and it smashed against the wall, shattering into pieces.

  With eyes now closed, as I overcome the fear of a potential new blow, I continue. So cold and calm that I am amazed at my own voice:

  “Tell me about him and you’ll feel better. We’ll both feel better. We’ll make peace. You’ll make peace with yourself.”

  A much-needed pause. Silence.

  “I’m not going to let you do this,” she speaks the words very quietly, but very clearly, right over my head.

  I open my eyes. I see her directly above me. She’s looking at me vertically, her gaze like a plumb line, in its lower part her irises are hidden under the edges of her lower eyelids.

  >>>

  How did I find her? I don’t think it was a matter of choice. Every moment of my communication with her is actually movement toward the very moment when she will strip herself naked, like a steel blade unsheathed, and the true reasons will blaze forth. The more I resist, the longer and more cruelly the blade will be sharpened, raised like a scorpion’s tail, ready to strike.

  “I had a really weird dream,” I tell her, to soften her up, at least to start.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she replies and makes the first move, just like every other time.

  Just like every other time, first a drop of childish blood is shed, in the sense that she makes me suffer through all my childish scorching-enchanting memories all over again. We reach this stage easily—we need only to start the familiar game. In the game, she is never his daughter, as it were. Total disguise, total relief, total flight from the reality of whose daughter she actually is.

  His

  They only make such an effort for the children of the Party elites. Black cars, no motorcade. They bring the boys and girls there as inconspicuously as possible, at dawn. The children are sleepy, they don’t resist. The medical checkup has to take place in a semi-dream state.

  The building is surrounded by woods, you can hear the birds. The stone path leads up to the entrance, now is a convenient time, Sunday, the whole complex is empty. At the e
ntrance: only the guard.

  They lead her into a changing room and point to the hook. She takes off her skirt, her shoes, her T-shirt cut low under the arms—they all wear those, both boys and girls. She’s left only in her panties.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the doctor with the horn-rimmed glasses tells her, a professor of something or other, and the woman has her lie down on a metal stretcher in front of a strange machine. She isn’t actually a woman, but rather a pudgy man; below the elbow his arms have the same meaty, twisted flab as on the arms of the cleaning lady whom she sees every morning at home with her mop and bucket in the hallway in front of her father’s office. This strange man-woman’s hair is hidden under a white cap, just like the lady who gives out rolls and pours warm milk from a teapot later in the morning at school.

  They don’t have school for a few days, so they don’t have snacks during recess. They brought different food and milk in a jar, frothy and very sour—this is the way it has to be, they told her, you mustn’t eat anything else. The wild plums of springtime, the wild cherries in the courtyard of the residence—everything was forbidden. Vacation, they told her, but not at the seaside—you can’t go to the seaside, now isn’t a good time for the seaside.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the doctor of something or other tells her, “we’re just going to measure something, we’ll check something, it won’t hurt.” The steel frame of the stretcher and its brown leather hammock start moving slowly. She slides along, lying on top of it, she slides toward a towering lead pyramid in the center of the room, the walls are painted a very light blue, it’s enough to make your head spin and your eyes ache. The pyramid is made up of fat gray rectangles. Her legs are swallowed up with a hissing sound from the electric motor, her body slowly slides forward. She wants to close her eyes, but she can’t, not before reaching the mountain of lead.