Party Headquarters

by Georgi Tenev

  But such a finding isn’t enough, the Nobel Prize is not awarded for a diagnosis alone—despite sympathetic leanings, despite the fact that the nomination committee knows that Hamburg was where Alfred Nobel founded his Dynamit AG, Alfred Nobel & Co—the oldest factory for explosives in the world.

  No, a breakthrough is needed, an explosion—the prize rewards overcoming. The explosion clears away obstructions, so afterward you can pass by freely. However, I’m not sure whether certain postwar-German complexes would allow the doctors here to catch sight of such a solution. But I know, it’s all clear to me.

  So—in his arm, in the crook of his elbow, there’s a shunt. A transparent tube leads to the IV drip from its other end. I pull it out—the needle is way too thick, I guess I should’ve expected that. It might hurt, but I don’t have a choice now, there’s no time. I press the tip into my skin, right above the vein. Quiet! Quietly and slowly. Pain, just as I expected. But whatever, it’s nothing to cry about. I’ve waited so long, I’ve retraced this path so many times, now we’re only separated by a few feet of medical grade rubber, the sterile tubing, like a weapon. It guarantees the attack—a pure-blooded memory, without the interference of impurities, without the presence of outsiders—just Comrade K-shev and I, just you and I.

  His eyes open somehow in slow motion—has he recognized me? I thought he was sleeping, I thought he would leave his interior only with difficulty. Does he remember me?

  Pumping my fist provides the initial, necessary surges. The red ribbon crawls into the transparent corridor. The blood reaches his vein. Expecting the end, he could hardly have hoped for such a final self-sacrifice. Well, Comrade K-shev, obviously there are moments when even your fabricated ideology bears fully ripened fruit, full-blooded, that is. Now it’s my turn, now the hemoglobin in me will do the rest—disease added to disease doesn’t always mean twice the disease—you only live once. Perhaps it means a cure, perhaps survival. Perhaps going back over the boundary, beyond which responsibility loses its meaning. Life, in one of its strange forms, is suffering—I give it back to you now, Comrade K-shev. I, one little Pioneer, the only one who did not turn traitor and consign you to oblivion. You can live, breathing oxygen through the radioactive cells that we now share. By your gaze I can tell that you weren’t expecting it. Yes, coming out of a coma is painful, no doubt about it. Why does it always work out such that happiness can’t be had without just a little more suffering? And not without you: not without you also means not without your definitive destruction—you understand what I’m getting at. Revenge has to play out its endgame. I’m listening, I’m waiting for the whole truth, my ears are sizzling with impatience. Comrade K-shev?

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  The Boss’s circulatory system envelops us, every one of us. The queen bee attracts her drones. The sun rises and sets, the goal is visible during the daylight hours, but once night falls, we stagger around in the numbing darkness, flapping our arms like wings, but without the elevating power. A slow falling, my body grows pale, emptiness frosts over my veins.

  My blood is no longer inside me, it has crept out, yet it’s pleasant somehow—like an obligation being lifted. I can’t feel myself.

  But what do I sense in this case, whom do I feel?

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  He’s dreaming now, the exhaustion before death is lapping at his body and every muscle. The magnified blossoms of the pumpkins, a bright, egg-yolk yellow—they jut out to the side above the splashes of green along the trellis. They’re licking their viney chops, they’ll drink him up with their mouths. And every drop of blood as well. I get off the motorcycle, kill the motor—I don’t want him to hear me. He’s dazed, I know—perhaps he’s injured, but at the very least he’s probably deathly tired after an all-night chase, in the rain. I left the gendarmerie, the dogs, the posse behind me, I’m going on alone, I’m going first.

  There he is—it isn’t easy for him to hide. I catch sight of droplets on the rocks, red drops of fear, red drops of death. Not his—killers always leave traces behind them in the blood of their victims. In just a short while I myself will rise like the sun, after taking the shot. I take out the pistol. I know there’s at least one bullet left, I’m sure of it. The blue cartridge glints in the hole of the chamber, like the gap from a pulled tooth, and the hammer glows whitish-silver from up above.

  His head—resting against the wall, leaning back and to the side, his cheek propped against a sack. The hemp rope encircles its edges like a pillow under a corpse’s skull. Should I fire point-blank, from a few feet away? In the chest or neck? The last cartridge, the last bullet, the last drop of my blood. A lone fugitive, the only one left. Not quite killed off yet, the last guerrilla.

  The tube shifts—the transparent piping that connects the still-breathing chunks of flesh in some strange way—the blood in his blood, the blood in my blood. This is the end, which means that the long chase is coming to a close.

  Like twins of an evened-out age, the bodies hooked up to the IV find their center, the golden mean.

  As I’m killing you

  I might resemble, too

  a star that is

  finishing its flight.

  As I’m killing you

  I might be dying, too—

  but death is also

  a form of life.

  I can’t deny it, Blondy, I can’t help but admit after everything that’s happened, that I, too, used to sing along with the Argirovi Brothers.

  In the golden mean, the silver of my blood, like electrolysis, welds together the twins in me and in him.

  >>>

  In Hamburg the lioness at the Hagenbeck Zoo startles, pricks up her ears. Victim, prey or carcass? K-shev is sick, far too unwell for his bodily remains to be fed to the king of predators. As for the crocodiles—why not? Those prehistoric reptiles can digest everything, evolution itself passes through their stomach and intestines.

  He knows, of course, that in the end his corpse will have to be buried. Now I understand why he picked Hamburg of all places—not because of the quality of the medical care. And not because of the Reeperbahn. The reason lies in the uniqueness of the Ohlsdorf Cemetery: the largest graveyard in Europe, covering 400 hectares, and the largest in the world. Here you can really get lost, be nobody. However, he’ll be of no use to me anonymous.

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  Only a short while remains until morning, only a short while until sunrise, washed in a radioactive haze. Just the physical luminary that spews life and under which life crackles as if electrified. We’re standing in long rows in front of the granite pedestal. Music blares through the loudspeakers, and our shoulders touch—mine and the shoulder beneath the white blouse of the girl next to me. I don’t know her name, but if we were alone right now, even right here out of the open, under all that music and those lights, with the convenient untying of our Pioneer neckerchiefs that is even prescribed in the manual for the ceremony . . . And if our shirts went as well . . . And if after that . . .

  But then the drape covering the monument is pulled away, terribly slowly and irreversibly. You aren’t ready—no matter how much you’ve prepared, and despite the fact that you’re expecting it, can you really be ready?—the cover slips off, falling like a sheet revealing the body of a dead man for his loved ones to identify. It’s him all right, no doubt about it, the sculptor has captured a striking resemblance. With the help of characteristic details. By means of perspective. K-shev, cast in metal—it’s terrible.

  To tell you the truth, I know that in the end his death will rob me of everything. It will leave me only the monuments, from which you can’t demand accountability, not for anything.

  >>>

  Since his corpse really does need to be buried, for hygienic reasons at the very least—I’m forced to make a decision. However, on the other hand, due to certain personal, historical reasons of my own, it’s important that we wait until she is convinced that it’s true. To that end, even if only temporarily, the most convenient solution is the mausoleum.
r />   The Mausoleum

  Everyone else goes to visit loved ones in some normal way—to the neighboring street, to the country or to a near or a faraway city. Even abroad, if they’ve managed to maximally distance themselves from familial circles.

  We, however, visit “Daddy”—my father-in-law, in fact—in the heart of the nation, at the foot of the very citadel of power.

  “Let’s go see Daddy again,” she’ll say.

  “Fine, let’s go,” I’ll reply.

  And shove my fist into my pocket.

  I don’t have a father, she had told me. Now, when the dream is on the way to becoming a reality, she cries absolutely unexpectedly, at every entering. I don’t like it, but whatever—I’m the last one, who. What can I say?

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  The mausoleum is cold. Cold and always empty when I go with her to see Daddy. Special visiting hours, a sliver of space arranged by the authorities for the intimate seclusion of family members, direct descendents. Despite this luxury, they don’t allow me to bring flowers—even relatives are forbidden from doing so. Such a gesture on my part is self-serving, of course, as it would allow me to stick my nose in the filter of roses and distance myself a bit from the oppressive smell spilling out around us. Posthumous aftershave, a sweet perfume, wafting out from under his armpits.

  “Your daddy is a corpse,” I feel like telling her, “your daddy died a long time ago and stinks,” I feel like screaming at her. “If we’d left him to rot like all the others, there’d be nothing left of him by now. Just a few bones and a skull for you to keep your pencils in. Just take a whiff, don’t you smell that stench? His skin has been rotting for years, they shine it up and steam it, they polish it, but it rots and thins out. So that it doesn’t tear, they cover it with talcum powder, which mixes together with the putrefaction, the talcum powder decays along with the skin.”

  They’ve taken out his intestines, his lungs and his whole brain through his nose—but the skin remains. Beneath his eyelids there are glass balls, translucent, greenish and translucent, they didn’t even bother drawing fake eyes on them—the skin remains, however, it’s real and it stinks. And even though they keep sticking hairs into his scalp over and over again—they keep falling out.

  In the darkness the guards whisper in a strained voice, startling the paralyzed visitors: “Move along!”—move along, they say, so that no one will see the hair slowly falling from his head. And afterward they’ll spend the whole night putting it back on. He has no right to sleep, your father.

  I’m going to be sick, I say, I’m going to be sick, I want to leave.

  >>>

  Truth be told, he looks a little like a cosmonaut under that oval orb placed over his head. His skull is covered with stretched skin, strained, yellowed like parchment. He steals even in death—but you’re not going to take away my final dream, too, I tell him, you’re not going to snatch it away!

  Yes, I was little at the time, and I didn’t understand. But I sensed it clearly, only the lack of suitable words prevented me from creating a strong argument for Comrade Todorov during our class on morals or ethics or law, whatever it was. Because now I know that he would’ve understood me.

  “And what is the point of going into the cosmos?” He had asked me, peering through the thick lenses of his glasses.

  “The cosmos is infinite.” That’s how I should’ve answered him, maybe I even really said it.

  But I didn’t know how to continue. I couldn’t see how simple the ending was:

  “Yes, infinite. And after every happy event gapes the end of happiness. Lonely people are lonely only in restricted space, but in infinity—no loneliness exists there, either. There, horror reigns.”

  >>>

  I understand why she’s crying like that, why she doesn’t leave. They turn out the lights, night slithers across the marble. But she continues standing there, not moving. She must be remembering something, the two of them have their memories—here’s one historical fact, the only one that cannot be changed. I admit, after everything that’s happened, that fate in all its stubbornness always manages to place me—sometimes even on my knees holding a bouquet of flowers—in front of some incredibly trifling yet incorrigible detail, such as this one: she is nevertheless his daughter.

  Nostalgia

  She remembered how during the storm, the somersaulting waves would surge over the bridge, pouring onto the shore. On such days she wasn’t allowed to go near the sea. The sand, wet not from rain, but from drops of flying foam. She had gotten used to it, there were always lots of guards around. The men often changed and she persistently asked them:

  “What’s your name?”

  The man shifts his startled gaze from the girl in the red or white dress with white or red polka-dots. The unknown man looks at the other man, whom she knows. Her father, the man whom she knows, nods. The stranger smiles awkwardly, but takes the gesture as an order. For what’s probably the first time since he’s started the job, he has to say his first name:

  “Svilen.”

  “Dimitar.” (Or perhaps Mitko, if it occurs to him to answer her in the way people usually talk to little girls.)

  “Asen.”

  “Atanas.”

  “Valyo.”

  “Svilen.” (Svilen again—strangely enough, there are two Svilens.)

  Most of them don’t have children yet, most sergeants from the security forces are quite young, “unattached,” as is written in their official documents. More like soldiers than employees. With a small red card containing all the important information, in a holder with square flaps, like a pleather butterfly, kept in an inside pocket. From the wing’s crease dangles a thin, sturdy string with a small safety pin at the end, which is used to attach the officer’s ID to the lining of his jacket.

  Once, a little piece of shell gets stuck under her fingernail. The girl is crying. Dimitar or Valentin or Svilen pulls out his ID card, with “Safety and Security” emblazoned across the top. He unfastens the pin and with its tip extracts the painful chip of mica. His fingers tremble slightly, afraid of hurting her. This fear for her envelops her. The painful particle releases her, returns to the other harmless grains of sand.

  She remembers, her childhood is a string of points, of childish joys and pains. Childhood is an invisible projection in the rearview mirror. No big jolts, no out-of-the-ordinary pain, there was always someone to look after her. A breakfast of watermelon, soft feta cheese. The gate blocking the road at the end of the residence, beyond which entrance was forbidden. In the big, convex, circular mirror mounted on a post in the corner, both ends of the road were visible, crescent wings. No one came or went. No one arrived, besides the little girl in the polka-dot dress.

  In her memory, there are dark and light shadows, spots of sun. She digs in with her fingers and lifts them up like a piece of cloth, flat carpets, under which there is nothing. Yet something did happen, something important. Something more than just a jab, more than a prick to the skin, a sliver in the tip of her finger. She places her hand in her palm, lies down for a while, tries to remember. But can’t. In such moments she says come here and I enter, but she can’t remember what, she can’t discover it.

  Now the residence is closed, empty, sealed up. The traces of its previous owner have evaporated, but the walls are still standing, the stones with the imprints of shells and the fossilized bodies of shrimp. She arrives here again, this time in cut-off shorts and with a backpack on her back, sandals on her dusty feet. She goes beyond, into the interior. The gate is rusty and probably doesn’t work anymore. Of the guardhouse, all that remains is a shapely silhouette, windows boarded up, wire on the posts alongside it that at one time fenced off the road. Barbed wire on the grass, piled up in a rusty heap, a dog barking hoarsely. There is no guard, or at least there’s none in sight. Yet going in is dangerous, as well as pointless—now the walls guard themselves, the stones easily give way underfoot. What a landslide the sandy cactus garden has become. Above the wings of the terraces with a
view of the sea, rusty bedsprings jut out, the unfinished frame of a support wall, abandoned in mid-construction. Foul-smelling water, colorless, streams beneath the cement slabs. The round mirror at the curve hangs broken, with only a single surviving triangle, like part of the imaginary face of a watch that at some point felt the light between dawn and dusk creep across it. An image remained there, somewhere between four and six o’clock, strewn with specks. From behind, from the reflection itself, little brownish flowers have dripped down like the legs of birds living in the bottom of the picture, in a mirror-image world. Somewhere there the foam has been swallowed up, the waves have been drained away, somersaulting over the quay—she seemed to catch a glimpse of dolphins’ bellies in the water—the past itself preserved in the craziest hours, between four and six in the afternoon. And one polka-dotted little girl with a dress of light and shadow—but her feet aren’t visible, standing on the other side of the reflection—nothing is visible except the tears clouding up her eyes.

  Oh, how sad that wonderful past has turned out to be. Because there is nothing in it that you can grasp onto, nothing for you to keep.

  She feels like creating life, having a child, a daughter or a boy, better a little girl—but why, what for? To repeat everything, to rehash it? Why would she do it, for whom? For herself, or . . . For herself, right?

  This simple discovery stops the very drops in her eyes. It’s so empty inside that above such an abyss it’s even useless to cry—there’s simply nowhere for the tears to fall. There’s no bottom.

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