Party Headquarters

by Georgi Tenev

  “See,” says the doctor, trying to speak in a fairytale voice and failing miserably, “you’ll just pass through this little tunnel and that’s it. It’ll just take a minute, long enough for us to measure something, and then you’ll come out the other side. There’s nothing to be afraid of, it won’t hurt a bit, I promise.”

  It must weigh a ton, it must weigh two or ten or a hundred tons even, that mountain, that pyramid. What is it and what’s going on?—no one tells her, no one can explain it to her. There’s no way to quickly and easily explain the function and principle behind the workings of the gamma spectrometer with lead shields, the electro-radiation scanner, the isotope identifier . . .

  Just a year or two later the girl would become dangerous. Because children ask questions when they grow up.

  >>>

  I know she has memories she doesn’t share with me. That’s where she’s hidden the hate, along with the cause and the reason. I still haven’t asked her, I haven’t even hinted at his money, I pretend that it would never even cross my mind. I’m interested in her body alone, it’s the only thing I’m possessive of.

  Today they want to condemn K-shev, as if he were an illness—the charges have been brought under an article from the Health Act. They try him in absentia, of course, because he’s not there. I’m also absent, even though I’m a potential witness.

  Do you remember that rain, that radioactive rain?, they could ask me.

  The rain? Yes, I remember it, but look, I’d feel like telling them, by a twist of fate he’s now dying of cancer. What’s the point? The judgment has already been pronounced on some symbolic level.

  I could find more and more dull topics to hush up the main one, to keep my hidden goal and secret safe. But no one hears me, because I don’t actually talk, I’m silent. I haven’t been summoned. She orders me to get dressed, to finally get up. Maybe she wants—in a fit of hatred toward her father—dreams of going to the courtroom, of supporting the prosecutor’s accusations. But I don’t get up, I stubbornly resist. And why, you ask? I’ve got plans of my own, heh heh!

  There’s no use trying to convince me, I’m sure there are memories she hasn’t shared with me. The longer sincerity is put off, the more vicious the use of the lips becomes—not for speaking, but for biting. The descent into speechlessness deepens. I hope that we’ll finally start talking, at least before we definitively and fatally harm ourselves.

  The radio is on, the prosecutor’s accusations continue. Willing and unwilling semi-guilty semi-idiots, witnesses and participants line up. They dump onto K-shev the remnants of their memories, along with the remnants of their responsibility. The primary defendant’s absence is just so convenient, he has no way to speak for himself. The experts pedantically rehash the chronology. They point to data, numbers in tables. The Party crumbles into pieces, disintegrates into atoms—just as it did then.

  April-May 1986

  In the party headquarters of the reactor, in the reactor of the party headquarters—foreign gazes invade the pried-off lid. The whole world already knows everything, only we remain in the dark. Malaysia returns shipments of milk imported from Poland. Sparks and telegrams fly between capital cities around the world. Moscow finally, grudgingly confesses. Kiev is in mourning, albeit unofficially. But Sofia stays silent, the spring unfolds panic-free.

  Is there anyone else out there who still gets heated up by these decades-old memories? Is it only the two of us, me and her? While decomposing, we leave naked bodies behind—during brief collapses they quiver from the scalding stray sparks.

  A hand—impossible to tell whose, mine or hers—hits upon the island of the nightstand. In the first second I don’t know what for: gauze, cotton, or a Band-Aid, or a canister of ethyl chloride, because there are times when the skin itself can’t take anymore, so it has to be numbed. With the scent of evaporating gas from the glass balloon, all the questions come out. What prevented Comrade K-shev from informing the population on time? What, for God’s sake?

  But I don’t care. I’m radiating rays, I’m lit up. Glittering nucleotides bursting from my body in all directions. The water tastes unbelievably bitter in my mouth, the stinging air envelops my hands, all the hairs standing on end in my skin shoot out arrows. Butterflies fall all around me, along with stunned spring sparrows, the frogs in the marshes don’t finish their jet-propelled jumps. The water fleas, legs splayed on the surface of the pond scum, lose their electrical footing. The miracle of walking on translucency has broken down.

  I’ve got a small, pocket-sized dosimeter, I keep it on me at all times now. I’m holding it in my hand, checking the area around here. And even before I’m touched, I know what that stretched-out hand is planning to do.

  She searches for my lips with hers, she presses down on my chest, which is heated up from running, from the search for Control Point 6. She probably wants to save me, to correct, if possible, her father’s mistake. But it’s not a question of a mistake, don’t you get it?—there’s no point in telling her this.

  I now control the world, for a moment I’ve received the power that otherwise only birth and death bestow. All clocks have stopped, the drifting away of that childish love has stopped as well, the fading of her pale image. The agony ceases: of seeing her as always the same, of seeing her in the bright full-color comics of memory, frame by frame—how she slips out of your hands like a lifeline.

  The dosimeter shudders in my hand. You lying old fart, I think. Liar and traitor—but whatever, live and let live. What’s with this trial, these accusations—it’s all bullshit, I don’t blame anybody for anything. All you need are just a few such unique, exceptional moments, let the blows land, let the grasses sway, the sheets of rain, with me among them.

  The great, the interesting, the notable—the miraculous, the fairytale—may they never fade away. May the sensors’ arrows never quiet down, may iodine-131 continue to hang in the air amid the rain, a freeze-frame of magnetized droplets, may the half-life never end.

  “Squeak-squeak”—like a little mouse with its toothy pliers cutting through the wires of a time bomb hidden in my groin—this is how the dosimeter starts to make noise. It lightly passes the indicator needle over the magnetic pad, crawling across the cliff—“squeak-squeak.” Her hand slides across me, loaded like a weapon, to finish the unfinished business. I hope that finally the right moment will come, at least before we definitively and fatally harm ourselves.

  My head is buzzing. It’s like my brain itself is growing. This is it, radiation sickness, I tell myself.

  Her hand searches for a way through my pants, under my T-shirt, toward my stomach, but the flag is wound around my waist, the color of blood, with a crest in the corner.

  “Don’t touch it!” yells the Pioneer on guard, the small sentry at the door to the dangerous void.

  Now I have to stop, right here. I snatch up the bottle with the diagonal blue label Ethyl chloride and press down on the nozzle. A cold stream flows across my stomach. Then the freezing follows. “Me, too . . . spray me, too!” she whispers, her voice like embers. I turn my back to her, hiding the toy.

  “No!”

  “I want some, too!”

  How beautiful she is, with wet hair stuck to her cheeks, her eyes deeper than ever. She knows what I’ve seen in them and immediately takes advantage of this, quickly repeating:

  “I want some, too!”

  Sometimes hitting or kissing is absolutely one and the same thing. But I don’t do it. It’s simply that I’m already numb, with winter skin, impervious to influence.

  >>>

  Now, after everything, she seems impossibly young, babyish, and this is the only thing that stops me—the infantile memory awakened by the invisible shaved hairs crushes me into dust, melts me, I release my grip. This probably disappoints her, the pain drains out of her body. But she also realizes: it’s better to stop, better for both of us.

  The clutching at each other ceases, falls away with a creak, she releases me from the bite of her gri
p and I remove my fingers from the wounds I had thrust my fingernails into. Blood quickly seals up the emptiness. The blue flesh of my elongated body emerges from conquered orifices. I fall onto my back, she drops onto one side, water flows out of both of us, through both of us.

  Do I love her or hate her? No one has ever asked me anything more relative.

  I hope that finally the right moment will come. The moment when we split up, the moment before the moment in which we definitively and in all seriousness really could harm ourselves.

  I know there are theories that radiation striking the earth from the cosmos plays an important evolutionary role. Radiation, arriving from galaxies, in pulsars and quasars, exploding supernovas. A magic wand in the hand of God, with which He creates the primordial state.

  In our original and final pose, we are always naked.

  >>>

  There’s a sober-minded square inside me who puts up barriers—I hate him. He is what hinders me. He binds me with the hemp noose of the rope makers who unwound their wares along the endless Reeperbahn. I take empty steps, while in front of me something is waiting. Something and someone, the stuff of nightmares—but I wonder whether it isn’t the stuff of perfect images as well? Such as prostitutes in tracksuits. Plain and simple, but I like their smiles:

  “Komm schon, Blondy!”

  “Komm schon, wir machen es atomisch!”

  There’s a very small room where the sober-minded square has peevishly entrenched himself. He stuffs wet towels under the door and breathes through a gasmask, he slips a hopcalite aspirator over the anteater-like snout. However, even this last bastion of resistance will fall. He deserves to meet the other in me. And the other in me deserves it, too.

  My numb legs and feet in their crude shoes pound the banks along an arm of the Elba. The running continues.

  Attempts to Replace the Comsomol with Sports

  The running, the transformation into pain, doesn’t lead me any farther from or closer to the goal, for now. But it’s the only effective reality I have at my disposal.

  The only thing I knew about adults was that adults, unlike children, go to work. But I didn’t get what this meant.

  Parents worked, neighbors did, too. The day was divided into work time and free time, with a lunch break and the hygienic half-day off, into the five-day work week plus that disputed slice of Saturday.

  I took me a lot of time to grow up. It took me even more time to figure out what the point of that everyday motion was: so mechanistic and ingrained that it even turned vacations into work. An activity with regulated parameters, innocent and naïve, just like those men and women with their rounded shoulders who went to their offices every morning as if going on vacation.

  I couldn’t read yet. The only understandable things in the newspaper for me were the red splotches of the medals—the only colored elements, placed next to the masthead and surrounded with wreaths. I saw the determined profiles of nameless men—I had never seen in adults anything like the movement in those slanted brows, the tension captured in the portrait, as if caught mid-jump.

  Most adults tended toward chubbiness and on top of that often, even regularly, got sick. Pharmacies were a favorite meeting place, while the delivery of imported medicines for myriad and ever-more-threatening illnesses was a sign of elevated social status.

  The newspapers watched me with their portraits, but then perhaps it was still too early to look for K-shev’s face in the line-up. And perhaps it was still too early for him to step so far forward, to appear on the front page.

  The newspapers showed traces of sausage and other cold cuts, along with dried tomato seeds, sometimes a spot of mustard, after the workers or clerks had finished their lunch break. There were brick-layers in paper hats, on which you could read the major headlines. The white village eggs, which were something entirely different, with their milky hue, arrived wrapped in small torn-up squares of newspaper.

  I couldn’t wait to grow up and be able to read: then I’d be able to understand the messages everyone else failed to notice, even though they were broadcast with such fat, black-scented letters. Or worse yet, they purposely pretended not to see them.

  Instead, the adults became even heavier, they drooped, they began dragging their exhausted legs—surely from the pointlessness of it all. I never figured it out in any case, and in my failure to understand I simply despised them. I begged them to sign me up for more and more new sports, and to leave me to my own devices. I strained my sinews, but despite this effort I didn’t feel like I had achieved anything. “Bravo,” they told me, “you’re improving yourself.” But I knew: if I continue on like this, I’ll just end up as an average athlete, most probably a gym teacher. Then I joined the army. Then I was discharged. In the interim between these two events nothing happened. Nothing except getting close to K-shev from a rather strange angle, getting dangerously close alongside him and dangerously near.

  >>>

  Was I hoping for something more? Of course. My secret weapon was Hope—one of the socialist-era concrete jungles on Sofia’s outskirts. By the way, I always knew that a white rabbit could pop out of the concrete top-hat of that neighborhood and cut across my life with joyful hops. Not expecting anything in particular doesn’t mean that you don’t have hopes. So I wasn’t waiting for anything, on the contrary, I had even thoroughly given myself over to the general despair. And then it happened all of its own accord. I just had to get far enough away from home, to find myself in no-man’s-land. What better place than the Hope neighborhood?

  Late one evening I went into a store, the only one I would find open from here to downtown. I could feel my stomach growling, my head was practically spinning. But I didn’t even ask myself why I was so hungry.

  I bought bread and canned meat, chocolate and generic beer. Between the metal grating of the bread rack I saw a girl in a jean jacket near the alcohol display. Short, light-brown hair, curly. Her face made me stop and stare. She was about four or five meters away, she didn’t see me. I was struck by how clean her skin seemed, if that means anything from such a distance, under the whitish sheen of the fluorescent lights. She seemed somehow self-assured, a badass. I wasn’t surprised when I saw her head toward the checkout with a bottle of vodka. I hurried over there, too—not that I had anything in mind, I simply didn’t want to let her out of my sight. So I could see her face, I got into the other checkout line. However, my line moved faster, so I went outside.

  I leaned against the empty crates and broke off a hunk of bread. I started chewing, but that just made my stomach hurt even more. I sat down on a crate and leaned against the wall, I didn’t care if I got dirty. I thought it would be best to catch a cab and go home.

  The door opened and I saw her coming down the stairs. She wound the plastic bag around her hand and spit the gum out of her mouth.

  Then something almost unbelievable happened: the spit-out gum somehow swerved and spun, it flew up and before I could duck, it hit me in the face, right on the cheek. She burst out laughing with her hand over her mouth. Then she stepped toward me and leaned over:

  “Sorry!”

  I lifted my hand, touched my cheek—I could feel the moist trace of her spit on my skin.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she said, her gaze guilty, but not overly so. As if she were waiting for a cue from me to smile.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “No harm done.” I put the bread back in the bag and stood up.

  She then suggested taking me to some party, that’s where she was headed. It was nearby, at her friend’s. She showed me the bottle.

  She had no reason to be worried, because I was already smiling back at her. For a split second I thought: had she noticed that I’d been watching her in the store? Then I just looked into her eyes—bluish, with long lashes.

  So I agreed to go, even though it was out of character for me: an unknown neighborhood, a strange evening, somehow gloomy and desolate. Or maybe precisely because of that.

  >>>

&n
bsp; She struck me as a rather ordinary and not particularly interesting girl, at least at first glance. I’m sure if the whole thing hadn’t been so ordinary, I never would have gone with her. What could we talk about, what could I expect from a girl in jeans who buys vodka and spits out her gum on the street? And what talking in any case—I preferred staying silent, especially after the army. There I’d learned the skill of shutting up instantly and staying that way for days. Just like during those endless rounds, alone on patrol in the heat, in the dead calm among the poplars. Everything repeated day after day, or every other day, it doesn’t matter. The drills lose meaning and value—endless weeks of summer sentry duty, the ranks thin out, the shifts get longer. You get the feeling that in the end you’ll be the only one left on the whole base—the buildings and barracks are empty, the armories are jam-packed with black machine guns like ancient bones, but besides the skeletons there’s no one around. What is there to talk about, who is there to talk to?

  I came back with that habit and it was convenient, I carefully preserved it until times changed. In the dark days of pointlessness, on those cold winter evenings without electricity, among people whose faces seemed smeared with ashes, scowling and wrinkled. People whose gazes were not so much despairing as devoid of any active thought—my silence was in harmony with that inert world fixated on itself. Just some phrase here and there, a single word said on the street, when passing a stranger’s silhouette on the stairs.

  Now, when I’m running and again silent, when the whistling of air in my lungs resembles a sharp internal shout meant to further inspire me. Now I’d like to know: what exactly I was thinking about during that time, during all those mute months and years? I can’t have forgotten, that’s impossible. It would be terrible to think that I was waiting only for that: getting out, the elementary freedom of movement, and, of course—communication with girls’ bodies, which is the only thing that saves you from the need to be constantly moving, running, patrolling your post all night. Otherwise you’ll have to wallow in forgetfulness and nonchalance like all the others, to fatten up. The youths with whom only a year ago I had first stood at attention had changed, they were no longer boys, which meant they had filled out—with thickened necks, rounded out with flab—even when they were fairly muscular. Even when they were healthy village boys used to physical labor, boys for whom—unlike us urbanites—physical strength was a natural condition instead of scrawniness, weakness, the inexplicable infirmity of glasses perched on one’s nose. They all grew heavy, weighing down their own bodies, and began dragging their feet in exhaustion. Was it the pointlessness that was poisoning them—did they do it to spite the army, stubbornly withholding the gift of their fresh physique? There wasn’t much point for such a physique to exist here anyway, arrested in inactivity. Just as I felt I was being wasted, unneeded. I deserved other epaulettes, other clothing, I knew which ones.