Party Headquarters

by Georgi Tenev

  Saturday, a requiem in the church. The voice of the priest and the cantor, singing deeply, as if in a well. Up above on the roof tiles, where the awning butts up against the monastery gates, drops are pelting down, the rain doesn’t stop. My eyes are closing—in the oats, I tell myself, in the sacks of hay is the best hiding place. I can’t let myself fall asleep, yet my eyes are closing on their own, I hear them whispering inside, with the cross, with the censer. The cantor is singing or reading something, undoubtedly from the Epistles. Then the priest: Leave, he says, the dead to bury their dead. Traitor, I say to myself, and fall asleep just like that. It’s only then that I see the donkey—munching oats in silence, his back is wet, sticking out from under the overhang, the rain pouring down on him from above.

  >>>

  And there really was an office there, I saw it, ratty with a broken-down door, in the center of the hallway, in the center of the central wing, where with watering yet curious eyes I went down the smoke-filled corridors. In order to realize that it was burning of its own accord—the Party Headquarters, lit up like a Christmas tree from the tension of memory-laden holiday electricity. Self-ignition, self-immolation, intended to illuminate—or to make futile all illumination of—the interior of the secret.

  And from deep inside I saw his skull—there really was a person there, either real or an actor. Some extra, an impostor, left to stroll in the lamplight, to throw shadows on the curtains, in the windows glowing in the night like eyes.

  In the end the bonfire collapsed in on itself, the last dying spark of the five-pointed star fell into the ashes. In the morning, after nights like this one, there remains only cold, clumped dust, like black talcum powder on a photographic negative. And the sense of something unfinished.

  The path to justice somehow turned out to be long and painful. Contempt grew during the long stretch before its realization—but not contempt for K-shev, but for all the others who delayed the decision. Rather deep contempt.

  >>>

  When I leave the stone atrium of the burning and hissing Party Headquarters, I find myself in the Empty Space, where just moments ago there had been a crowd in the mood for revolution. There were still people there—after all, I wasn’t alone in rushing inside, weren’t they rushing in right alongside me? But now I come down the steps, look around with wide-open, sleepy eyes—and there is no one on the yellow-paved square. No one.

  That’s what I really hate, their running away. K-shev didn’t run away anywhere, he didn’t scamper off to save himself from uncomfortable questions. He is not anonymous, in fact, he is the focus. He really is a construct, yet his name still does the trick, as a necessity or a threat.

  And they got scared all right, they jumped right out of their skins when he began to flare up—from the inside, from his idolatrous, hollow womb. Because they didn’t have any fire of their own to fight him with, they turned their backs and hid in the darkened streets, to avoid being melted down. Lugging stolen things—cups, food, chairs and televisions, bottles of sunflower oil. Even in the night’s fake flames, reeking like burning rubber and gasoline, even then some yellow suns managed to turn their wheels. The people ran, saving themselves from the overwhelming heat. The sun was shining from another place. The isolation of the darkness stretched between it and the square, yet it was as if we suddenly sensed its breathing. The other side of the sun. The dark side of things. It gaped for a second and blinked like the eyelid of an unknown colossus. So as not to process what they had seen, everyone simply gasped. And since most of them were drunk on top of everything, they simply swallowed their tongues.

  I remember. I hate. I despise them. If I had the chance, I’d punish them over and over again, every time with the same thing: fear that transforms into horror. But I don’t think even that would be enough. Those two guys should have raped her in that crappy apartment, without a second thought. They should’ve kicked my ass—who knows, maybe even killed me. I should’ve burned up in that building, released by someone like a rat into a maze, along with all the rest of them. The firemen who kept not showing up. The victims who became perpetrators—without necessarily wanting to, without wanting to at all—simply out of curiosity. I don’t remember very well: was I, too, carrying a blazing torch made of rolled-up Party newspapers? If they wanted to, they could probably convince me of it. For my part, I would admit it—not for their, but rather for my own personal, satisfaction. I would confirm every act of participation and non-participation, of aggression or passivity, with which or without which the revolution took place. Because the revolution itself is also a fabrication: there was no revolution. No change was brought about, K-shev simply changed his country. Meaning that he packed his bags to go on vacation, to go take a cure abroad. Now I am familiarizing myself visually with his destination—on the way to the clinic, running.

  On the way to the clinic, in a sprint, which finally makes me vomit.

  Vomiting

  This is the fifteenth kilometer, the physical limit, the barrier. The stomach erupts, the diaphragm sucks air downward and purges everything. I didn’t stop in time, I didn’t cut short my sprint, maybe I even wanted it to happen like that, to fall to the pavement, trampled by the athletes who move through Hamburg’s morning haze in deer-like bounds. But I don’t fall, training is training, after all: my palms slam onto my thighs of their own accord for support, my kneecaps rasp over the joints. On the ground between my shoes—a splotch of stomach acid and wetness; sweat drips from my face. I haven’t eaten since last night, there’s the little dead ball of airplane food, swallowed up and tossed back out gain.

  But I still can’t breathe, the ellipses just outside my field of vision are still quavering. I’ve still got half a minute to go, within thirty seconds my ribcage should have recovered from its collapse. The muscles that expand and contract the ribs—let them come back into action. “Let breathing commence,” commands the national sports medicine doctor, Comrade K-shev, who, despite being in a coma, continues to wait for me. And for that reason I don’t want to faint here, ironically, on this path, which runs into the first street next to the coastal road and where a sign hangs right above my head:

  A. S. MAKARENKO-STRASSE

  Go to hell, Anton Semyonovich!

  2

  DEEDS & DOCUMENTS

  Lexicon

  of one boy’s personal aversions to K-shev

  1) He wasn’t handsome, he didn’t look like a good guy, not even like a bad guy—in short, he just wasn’t handsome. He wasn’t ugly, either. He didn’t possess that certain something that inspires love/fear in the heart of a child.

  2) He never smiled; instead, he snickered frequently.

  3) He wasn’t tall enough to be a giant. He wasn’t short enough to be a dwarf.

  4) He clucked his tongue like he was trying to remove something stuck between his teeth. What?

  5) They say he loved pork and tripe and garlic. Why?

  6a) He liked having people listen to him sing, but it was unbearable. He sang in the shower. His voice gurgled through the pipes.

  6b) So why didn’t he ever arrange for the repair of the drainage and sewer systems? The city reeks, especially during the summer.

  7) He didn’t send his daughter to the same school where they sent me.

  8) He hid her from everyone.

  9) He beat her.

  9) Maybe he did something else to her?

  10) What?

  >>>

  The first time we did it absolutely unintentionally.

  We were driving through the foothills of the mountains. It was early, she was driving, I was flopped back on the passenger’s seat, dozing. She drove steadily and beautifully, as always, and I drifted off. She was breathing quietly, almost noiselessly, there was only the noise of the motor. As if I were going down the road all by myself, savoring memories of the night.

  Some sudden movement startled me, the car veered to the side. Then I saw the guardrail and the frozen stones wrapped in snow and spattered with mud. I s
aw a pile of gravel, quite close. With painful effort the windshield wipers dragged themselves to the right, trembling, then to the left, and in the cleaned-off embrasure we saw once more the gaping edge of the ravine. I saw her hands turning the wheel. We spun around once more and the wheels locked back into the tracks.

  There was some big sedan, black as a bull, in the rearview mirror. It was riding our bumper, trying to muscle past us on the narrow, slippery road. I didn’t shout, I didn’t say a single word, and better still—I left her to deal with it on her own.

  Again, a horn—she glanced at me for a second, then looked straight ahead. There was nowhere to pull over, to the left was the ravine, to the right a wall of snow. At the next bend the black coffin-like silhouette once again jumped into the mirror and passed us, flashing its headlights. It almost scraped our door, but she kept the car steady and didn’t hit the brakes. “Pig!” she shouted in a shaking voice and wrapped her fingers tighter around the wheel, helpless. I got a look at the guy: driving alone, a dark silhouette behind dark windows. The glass and the black shiny body of the car were freshly washed, you could even see the license plate—special issue with sixes at the beginning and end like all the gangsters.

  A heavy truck appeared from around the bend, sanding the highway. The black car was blocking the road, driving straight down the middle without budging. The truck began to honk hoarsely, from the bed a guy in a hat with earflaps angrily waved a shovel. At the last second the car swerved to the side, its right tires jumping onto the icy embankment. Then it plowed through a piled-up snow bank where the top of a wooden bus stop sign was jutting out. The driver of the black car laid on the horn, as if he had had the right to do all that, and then disappeared into the falling blanket of snow.

  The truck had stopped, its driver was cursing. She slowed down; I told her to pull over and stop, too. We pulled over where there was a small shoulder and just sat there, without getting out. Directly in front of us I could see the battered sign that the guy had mowed down along with the snow bank. We each smoked a cigarette. We drove on.

  We saw him a few miles further on. He had stopped, again smack in the middle of the highway. He was pissing, but he hadn’t waded into the fresh snow between the trees. It only now occurred to me that he might be drunk. But I couldn’t tell, he was standing still. He was simply a silhouette in a black leather jacket against the silhouette of a black car.

  I saw it all clearly, I realized that we would pass him and in a little while he’d be riding our ass again. But what I did at that moment wasn’t premeditated. What I’m trying to say is that I did it as knee-jerk hooliganism, not as a way to get rid of him in the following miles. Whatever it was, something just came over me and I quickly rolled down the window. The sound of the motor came in along with the white snowy air, but somehow it was still quiet. She was also silent; she just looked at me. I picked up the bottle of water that had been rolling around at my feet. It was heavy and full of ice, having frozen underneath the seats overnight.

  I stuck my arm out the window and swung—so hard that my elbow smacked into the doorframe. The bottle went flying and, without my having taken precise aim, hit the windshield of the man’s car. It shattered and turned white, crumbling into pieces. “Drive,” I said in a small voice, rolling up the window as fast as I could. She hit the gas.

  In the following moments I thought I would die. My arms and legs shook wildly, but my brain worked like a machine. The broken glass and the oncoming snow, the wind—there’s no way he’d be able to drive with all that whipping in his face. He wouldn’t be able to, or so I hoped. She passed a semi that was spewing fine icy ash out from under its tires, mixed with salt and sand. No, without a windshield he wouldn’t be going anywhere, the snowstorm was our ally. Just like the sheet of ice covering the car that also hid our license plate number. I looked at my phone, no reception. So there’s no way he could call and have somebody lie in wait for us. Besides, he was alone—hadn’t I seen him through those tinted windows?

  It wasn’t easy to calm down, and I failed to do so in any case. My heart was pounding painfully, but at least I refused to be scared of what would happen. I felt a pleasant warmth wash over my whole body. It seemed like the car’s feeble heater was roaring, I took off my jacket. She looked at me from time to time, smiling.

  I think she drove more recklessly than she ever had. That morning on those icy curves even sixty miles per hour was too fast, but she somehow managed to get us to the city in less than an hour.

  Like I said, that was the first time. But no matter what we tried after that, she painstakingly guarded me from the thought of K-shev, from the transformation of the game into reality. That meant sacrificing herself constantly, coming between me and him when he got in the way, if only as an image. That is, him as an image, not her. Her as a body, absolutely real. From the very beginning.

  >>>

  We pushed our way through the swarm of cars in front of the underground garage. Above us the ventilation pipes were spewing out steam, the melting snow was dripping, the hoods of the cars were smoking. Early risers were coming out of the garage, only we were going in, underground. The lowest level was the cheapest, we followed the ramps downward for a long time. Most of the spots in the checkered space gaped empty between the dirty-white lines. She parked, turned off the engine and the lights. The automated light on the cement ceiling went out, leaving only the faint bulbs above the exit and the illuminated arrow pointing to the stairs. She leaned back against the seat and turned her head toward me.

  “Take off your clothes,” she said and closed her eyes.

  I hadn’t moved, I was just sitting there when she leaned in and looked at me up close:

  “So you think you’re really brave, huh?”

  “No,” I answered in a voice that I myself could barely hear.

  “Shut up!” she said and grabbed my chin between her fingers. “Do you know what could’ve happened? They could’ve beaten you like a dog. Cut you up into little pieces and dumped you somewhere. And me, too. Me, too!” She wrestled out of her jacket, pulled up her shirt, and squeezed her breasts in her hands, right in front of me, in front of my face.

  Before, when we were on the highway, and afterward, I clearly realized what could happen. But in that split second, which remained the most real moment of the whole incident—in the darkness underground, in that darkened, hollow crypt with a flat ceiling—there the horror of it all suddenly came together in one place. It thickened up as if in a syringe and gushed into all the corners of my body, right down to the core of my bones. Instead of fear and panic, however, I felt something impossible. It couldn’t be stopped, at that second I wasn’t afraid that I was crushing her violently in my arms. And she pulled my hair so hard I could hear the roots creaking inside my skull as if they were being torn out of the skin. I think that no matter how hard she bit my neck and shoulders, even if she had done it harder, I still wouldn’t have felt pain, only the dizzying rocking we were locked into. She slapped me across the face, for an instant her nails scratched me—and between every slap she kissed me. She whispered in fits and starts, barely pausing for breath: “My darling! . . . My darling!” And her teeth bit into lips, mine or hers.

  >>>

  “He also made off with a lot of money, right?” The question was posed voicelessly, but she had heard it before, from my very self, from inside. She shuddered, but the jerk with which her body suddenly pushed me away didn’t let on to what she had felt.

  New gangsters had now seized K-shev’s cars, they had taken control of the entire black automotive fleet. Today they enjoy the luxuries we all railed against in unison on the cold nights of the protests. With a husky blow of its horn, a somber sedan passes by the frost-covered cars of the fugitive wretches, the secret lovers who have snuck out of the city, incognito.

  I won’t deny that the thought of K-shev sometimes also transformed into the idea of money. But that wasn’t the main thing. Truth be told, there was no main thing. If you’re
expecting me—and rightfully so—to talk about a crime, it’s still very difficult to clarify the basic motive.

  Interrogation/Lexicon

  1.) What’s your favorite color?

  Red.

  2.) Whom do you love?

  Blood.

  3.) Not what, but whom.

  Don’t you get it?—I love, down to the blood.

  >>>

  I toss a few more scraps of paper into the fire, pages torn out of lined notebooks. The light blazes on her face, like a smile.

  I tell her: “We’ve had a fun, easy time lately, haven’t we?”

  She nods. That smile on her lips. I really could swear that she is the most ordinary girl in the world, simply sitting there, motionless, enjoying the sun made of flames. We’re out basking in the sunshine.

  I tell her: “The only thing I have any regrets about is that there’s no way for us to reach the very end, there, together.”

  “Where? The sea?”

  “Not the sea, the sky,” I reply after a short pause.

  This isn’t love, I know, and words have begun to take on far too much significance.

  “You know what?” she says, “I want to go home.”

  Fine. I stand up. I pick up the backpack and sling it onto my back. I’ve got a long descent ahead of me. “Don’t leave me now,” she says, “don’t go.”