by Georgi Tenev
It’s clear to me—nothing should remain of him. In the sense that this very nothing should be buried and destroyed, this emptiness in which his image drowns time as if in a black hole.
Arranged in a square, fifty thousand one-hundred-euro bills—a million and a half—take up an area of one hundred and eighty square meters. Its symbolic, three-dimensional significance, however, can be far more electrifying.
He probably thinks he’s pulled a fast one, shoving that much money into my hands. He hopes my heart will soften up, made extra-mushy by the anesthesia of wealth so I’ll relent and release a respectable funerary sum. If for no other reason than to prevent him from appearing in my dreams. To leave him alone with the ground, consigned to eternity in a foreign city, as it were.
No, Comrade K-shev, that’s not going to happen. I know your plans, I know them deep down. And I know, like I said before, I understand very well why you’ve chosen the cemetery in Hamburg.
Because:
The Elba, deep down, invisibly erodes the slippery abutments along its banks. Down at the foundations, near the concrete, underwater capitals that support the docks’ pontoon skeleton—the longest pontoon structure in Europe—there the water finds cracks, twisting into eddies. It sucks down the dust of bodies from the ever-replenished supply of dead buried nearby in the four hundred hectares of the Ohlsdorf Cemetery, the largest burial park on the planet.
He dreams of lying there now, beneath a slab reading K-shev, comforted by the reassurances of gravediggers with traditions that he has found peace for all eternity, and in good company: Elise Brahms, and the great composer’s sister; the Africanist Hans Schomburgk; and Karl Hein, the 1936 Olympic gold medalist in the hammer throw.
Like every one else, K-shev, too, will set off along the surges of the river, he’ll head north. At Cuxhaven, the continent’s exit, he’ll take a turn. He’ll flow out into the North Sea, along the Island of Neuwerk, frozen at its mouth, plunging deep under the sea’s waters in the fairway of the local currents.
Particles of sand, dead epidermal cells, stones from a bladder clogged from years of sedentary living, from kidneys. Deficient red blood globules, the overly enlarged cancer cells of a leukemic circulatory system—the dead, sick man is travelling, swept out in an unknown direction. He slips away from me, away from my revenge—if such a goal still even exists.
Of course it exists!
If I’m not suspicious of K-shev even in death, that means I haven’t learned anything. And then the whole path up to this point would have been pointless, wasted effort.
The dead man’s bones embrace the mournful dust of opera singers and conductors, seafaring merchants and circus owners. Invisible and again omnipotent, he puts the final touch on his plans. He reaches out his hands, spreads his fingers. He takes a hostage, he takes in his death the life and work of the most important Nobel laureate buried in Ohlsdorf Cemetery: Gustav Hertz. Now I’m starting to understand, it’s all clear.
Tombstone
Gustav Ludwig Hertz
(* 22. Juli 1887; † 30. Oktober 1975)
Born in Hamburg, buried in Hamburg.
The father and pioneer of quantum mechanics, winner of the Nobel Prize. The most important German trophy scientist, exiled by the Red Army to Sukhumi, on the Black Sea coast.
Leader of the Institute for Separation of Uranium Isotopes.
Winner of the Stalin Prize, member of the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences.
“Damn,” I say to myself—damn!
Only here, only now, do I begin to understand.
The Atomic Alliance
The sun peeks out, having slipped away from the labyrinth of the horizon, wet and radioactive, above the water of the rivers and the northern bays. The Atomic Alliance—a plot, a conspiracy. The enormous single atom, the sun above my head, which recycles its own light in disconsolate timelessness. A sun, displayed so as to signify absolute infinity. And the internal, invisible atoms that have entered into a secret pact with it. The particles that make up the whole, with scrupulous pedantry and sparing no details—the particles that I am made of. The structures in the construction of my body, the parts of the whole. I myself, along with thought, which remains without physical support, am located between them, stretched along the axis between the sun and my body.
>>>
He, the old man, makes love with the body of the motherland. This love gives birth to thousands of children and he organizes them into Pioneer battalions—attention! about-face!—he gives orders to the skittering legs of the surges, the Comsomol, and they all obey his every command. They live on his words and his voice, they hunger to resemble him, to imitate him in everything. But most of all his vices and weaknesses, the negative characteristics from his Party evaluations—it is these very things, the vices and weaknesses, which make the individual unique. Yet the leader’s shortcomings, infinitely multiplied, turn the separate faces into a faceless mass. For this reason, he has the effect of an invisible illness, quasi-disintegration—I recognize him precisely because of this scattering.
Okay, it’s clear, like we said: truly nothing should remain of him.
The Hamburg Crematorium
Part of the publicly traded company Hamburg Cemeteries
Fullsbütlerstrasse 756
22337 Hamburg
Price list and general information (valid as of January 1).
Built in 1965 and equipped with five cremation chambers with filtering systems for smoke collection according to the requirements in Regulation 27 on Gas Emissions in the Atmosphere. Open five days a week, with a twenty-four-hour cycle. Duration of a single cremation: sixty minutes at a temperature of 800-1,000°C. Capacity: 18,000 deceased annually. With subsequent storage in urns. Casketless cremations are not permitted. Package price, incl. urn and urn storage (for a maximum of 28 days)—281 euro.
Preparatory chamber—97 euro.
Medical examination in accordance with administrative requirements—51 euro.
Delivery of urn for burial in the neighboring cemetery (Hamburg region)—46 euro.
Total: 475, even though I feel like that’s too much for him.
That leaves me with 1,499,525, plus or minus hotel expenses. Not bad, I figure.
>>>
I’m travelling, flying without layovers, resisting the temptation to sit in first class. By the way, I’m not raising all these financial questions out of self-interest—I’m not a cheapskate, I simply have to budget very carefully if I want things to end well.
But let’s put that aside for now, at least for a bit—now there’s the motherland, we’re flying above the pale border that expresses her autonomy upon the earth.
This country, The Motherland, as seen from above, resembles a lion, a compact little creature with sturdy if rather short legs and neck, taken away due to the unsuccessful diplomacy and military policies of past regimes. Almost headless, the little lion races forward, as if wanting to flop into the waves of the sea that splashes its chest.
This humble territory’s outlines don’t hint at the silhouette of a serious nation. Nevertheless, besides a certain naïve charm, there is also dignity in them. Or perhaps I’m biased—I’ve known that map for far too long, from childhood, from the school blackboard, to be able to evaluate it objectively. I think I even hear K-shev’s voice, calling from the luggage compartment:
My love for you is enough,
my love for you is everything.
I touch you through her, I embrace you,
even if you don’t love me.
Land like a volcano-woman—
But I don’t need you any colder!
I’m happy that your blood is southern,
and your chastity belt forged from iron.
I have no idea what he’s talking about, I’ve already learned to tune out his jabber.
“After all is said and done, my boy,” he continues, from the urn, “you still don’t know anything. And to be perfectly honest, I, for my part, don’t know anything anymore
either, that’s what it looks like to me. Okay, for example: you fly back and forth, travel around. But in the end you still have to go back home, hrrrr,” K-shev sneezes and coughs hoarsely.
I know it’s cold in the luggage compartment.
“Yes, and there we’ll meet again. You’ll pay for your bad behavior. Yes, because we’ll meet up. I’ve laid out all the paths, my boy. Look: especially now, when I’m becoming nothing, shadow and smoke, like the shadows of the trees along the highway. Look, you can see it clearly from here, the asphalt encircles the homeland, its blue bandoliers crisscross the gardens’ fruitful breasts. I’m beyond the sunflowers, I abide in the branches’ shadow, I glow eternally at the curve in the road. The future that I’m shining from never becomes the past because:
We are at every kilometer,
and on and on—until the end of the world!
“Yes, you’re right, you’re absolutely right,” I tell him to get him to shut up. I wrap myself up in the blanket. The vodka warms me pleasantly because it’s pure and good, made by our brothers—these are former Soviet airlines, after all. Arrival in Kazakhstan: on time.
The Third Bulgarian Cosmonaut
To buy a trip to the cosmos, to pay a million and then some for it—I’m proud of this idea. But I need to be completely prepared, physically as well as financially. Medical exams, yes, and all those procedures.
The leader of the pre-launch cycle—Shatrov, Valentin Ivanovich—arrives on his bicycle, which is about twenty years old, Ukraine brand. The chain is always well greased. He carries the folders and training charts in a lovingly preserved plastic bag with the West Cigarettes logo on it and handles that have worn thin. There’s no longer any need for me to be amazed, it would be terribly impolite in any case—not by the state of his bag or his shirt or his ratty jacket with its frayed sleeves. The glasses sitting on his nose—plastic frames, a unisex model with bifocal lenses—are held together on one side by a Band-Aid wrapped around the broken rivet.
In this unchanging form, Shatrov sits behind mountains of equipment that can conquer gravity or that, under different circumstances, could set off a fatal intercontinental war. He spins in the chair, covered in plaid upholstery that sticks up here and there at the edges of the back rest. He observes the censors, fills in the charts with a cheap pen, and in that unmistakable, soft Russian way gives me directions over the microphone, which is as gray as an antique cartridge. The microphone hangs at the end of an even grayer cord—that gray left in the past along with Bakelite and tube televisions. Insulation material made fragile by time, sclerotic arteries that have lost their elasticity—they are no longer manufactured in any chemical factory anywhere in the world. They’ve been replaced by modern rubber, ultra-flexible, which doesn’t slide between your fingers even when it’s sweaty.
But I, in a jumpsuit under the spacesuit, am sweating buckets. The inside of the uniform isn’t padded, there are no ventilation holes along the seams or in the underarms or thighs. The humbleness of it all, the old-fashionedness, the wear-and-tear—it doesn’t worry me, on the contrary—it inspires me. I know, I’m convinced it’ll launch me into those dark heights over our heads with sufficient safety. And there will be so many stars up there that everything brought along from earth will lose its significance.
The old emblems haven’t even been torn off the jumpsuits. Gold letters over the blue silky image: a round planet embroidered between wreaths of wheat, with the inscription “USSR.” This reminds me of how, during the 1950s, K-shev had tried to unite us with the Soviet republics on the sly. Now, Mr. First Secretary, we can try again together.
>>>
I received a full set of clothing taken out of storage, still in rustling cellophane wrappers. I have underwear with strong seams that gives off some old smell, maybe camphor. Pure cotton, cream-colored, like ivory. Also T-shirts, with three-quarter-length sleeves. Shoes, socks without heels, and a pair for running that go all the way to the knee. The pants have little slits for attaching the small galvanized hooks at the end of the belts, which connect at the lower back to something like a seat—almost like a diaper of soft cloth, but green instead of white and as furry as an astrakhan. Thus wrapped, I sit in the hollowed-out shell of the training chair. Then in the catapult. The gray jacket is short in the waist, while its collar is rubbery, somehow alive from the tension of the elastic sewn inside. Muscles of natural caoutchouc, I catch a whiff of its stinging scent around my face. The same smell inside the space suit with the round glass helmet that my head disappears into. My body comfortably hides in the hermetic cocoon with its big, soft paws—inside I move my hands, enjoying the slow movements. My thumbs, magnified ten times over, wiggle impossibly far away from me. I’m ready to go out into the open cosmos, or at least I’m technically ready.
The pre-launch program has been reduced to a minimum. Shatrov isn’t happy about it, but what can you do? I suspect that he soothes his conscience at night with vodka. Poor guy—he probably has to buy the bottle with his own money, taken from his miserable salary. He even unscrews the cap, but only lets me sniff it—Kosmicheskaya, with three red stars skewered above a blue rocket, like a drawing out of a children’s book.
I ought to buy him a few rounds, I say to myself, I should come up with some kind of present for him once everything’s finished. Because, I assume that I’ll see him again at the end. I haven’t been completely informed regarding that question, but Shatrov has been with me continually since the very beginning, eighteen hours a day. It would seem impossible for him not to be the first one to greet me when the capsule with the landing apparatus hits the soft black earth, the wheat fields of Kazakhstan.
>>>
Traveling in space has many wonderful aspects and one terrible one—which is the further away you get from the earth, the more visible the distance between you and your earthly life becomes. And it becomes that much sadder and harder for you to accept the magnitude of the time needed to return. This feeling grows and keeps growing, except if you decide not to return at all.
But the most important thing is to scatter K-shev’s ashes completely, with no leftovers, in the airless, non-orbital cosmos.
>>>
The rocket is beautiful, beautiful and proud. Where is Comrade Todorov, my morals and law teacher, if only he could see me now. Look, Comrade Todorov—and you thought I was joking. Do you see me?—that’s me in one of the reclining seats in the cockpit surrounded by all these machines. Metal, uniformly spaced rivets. I don’t know which one holds more significance for my life—Chernobyl or Baikonur? Perhaps both things had to happen to me, in precisely the right order. Because I now possess a body of cells that have been irradiated deep down. A body that sits calmly and decisively in the transport cabin. The cosmos calls to me. The very same cosmos promised by those reprinted Russian popular science books from my childhood. School bulletin boards and pictures from Pioneers and Rockets magazine, strangely mixing into the general brownish-blue mass. The rocket now is beautiful and majestic.
The rocket, Energia, a thousand-ton giant. The terror of seeing the enormous mechanism, which was created to start up only once. I see a square of its light hull through the cockpit’s side window. The reusable space shuttle Buran—pride of the erstwhile Soviet space and aeronautical industry—attached to the launch rocket with three hydraulic and three mechanical suction cups. Tucked beneath them are the pyrotechnical systems, stuck on with a gray gum, the glue that guards against an undesirable premature explosion. Later, in orbit, this final stage will also become unnecessary. And then the soft explosions will pry them apart: the Energia from the Buran on its side, and the Buran from the Energia, until recently hitched together. They will reach that cherished altitude and afterward never meet again. Except perhaps in the ions of the glittering atmosphere, on its grating upper edges. There, where the corona of earthly air comes up against the cosmic nothingness. There, when the shuttle returns through the sizzling layers, breaking them like chains. In the flames washing over its hull,
the Buran will again caress the slender rocket. The Energy, broken up, shattered into basic pieces, will once again embrace the shuttle.
In this vortex of ions, under the rasping of the file with which the universe crafts the galvanic globe of the stratosphere and sands away the calluses from the cosmos’ feet as if with a galactic pumice stone—amid the physique of the cosmic bodies, nothing will remain of K-shev’s body (nor even his ashes, I hope).
“And that’s why, Comrade Todorov, astronautics hides more symbolism than can be seen on the surface of its realistic principles. That’s why flying is so beautiful.”
I hope that he understands me, finally.
>>>
The desire for freedom, that is at the root of everything. As long as there’s a law, it doesn’t matter what law, freedom does not yet truly exist. Lawlessness is the only absolutely free territory, there rules are created at every individual moment and only last that long.
In that sense I believe, Comrade Todorov, that the first of all natural laws best summarizes this tension: the law of gravity versus the freedom to overcome it.
Leaving, becoming distant from yourself, that’s at the basis of weightlessness. When you break away from your earthly stance, when you leave your orbit as well, the planets shrink in the portholes. Your individual body becomes the center of all attraction. You spin in the vacuum-womb like a stellar baby, who is the beginning and end of everything, just as it is its very self.
But I am nevertheless the product of the pedagogical and educational system in which I was raised. For that reason, even at the moment when I can already imagine that I myself have turned out to be the great and supernatural Prime Mover, the omnipresent factor behind the Big Bang, the Great Attractor from physics textbooks—even then, I still keep thinking about him, worrying about K-shev. What more could he possibly want with us? Hasn’t all his power over me been toppled, along with the repeal of the principle of the Party’s supremacy?