The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  LIVE MEDICINE

  The slugs slowly drag themselves across the newspaper, without letting go of it. Several are timidly clinging together, body to body. My grandfather grabs one with two fingers, closes his eyes, opens his mouth and slowly places the slug inside, close to his throat. He swallows. My stomach turns. I’m afraid for Grandpa. And I want to be able to do as he does. My grandfather has an ulcer. The slugs are his living medicine. They go in, make their way through the esophagus and stop in the soft cave of the stomach, leaving their slimy trail there, which forms something like a protective film on top, a thin medicinal layer that seals off the wound. He learned this recipe on the front. Whether the slugs come out the other end alive and well afterward, or die as volunteers, plugging up the embrasure of the stomach lining . . .

  A huge hand lifts me up and sets me at the opening of a red, warm and moist cave. It is not unpleasant, even if a bit frightening. The red thing I have been placed on constantly twitches, slightly bucking and rising, which forces me to crawl farther in toward the only available corridor. At the entrance there is a soft barrier, it isn’t difficult to overcome. It’s as if it opens on its own, in any case it reacts when I touch it. Now there’s the tunnel, dark and soft, which I sink into, horns forward, like a slow bull. I leave a trail behind me to mark the way back. I feel safer with it. The path down is easy, short in any case. The tunnel soon broadens and ends in a wider space, a rather soft cave different from the first one I passed through. At one end I notice a brighter spot, sore and radiating warmth. I pass over it slowly, leaving a little slime. I don’t like this place at all, though. It’s cramped, dark, and musty, claustrophobic, as if the walls of the cave are shrinking and pressing in on me. But the scariest part is some strange liquid that the walls themselves are pouring over me and which is starting to sting. I don’t have the strength to budge, as in a nightmare where you keep moving more slowly and slowly and slow . . .

  To feel for everything, to be simultaneously the swallowed snail and the snail swallower, the eaten and the eater . . . How could you forget those few short years when you could do so?

  Sometimes, while writing, he feels like a slug, which is crawling in an unknown direction (in fact, the direction is known—there where everything goes), leaving behind itself a trail of words. It’s doubtful whether he’ll ever follow it back, but along the way, without even meaning to, the trail may turn out to be healing for some ulcer. Rarely for his own.

  HAVE A GOOD TRIP

  And yet, my grandfather did have his secret from the war. On that January night, when he wanted the two of us to be left alone, the door to the unspoken opened just a crack . . . He called me in, the eldest of his grandsons, the one who bore his name, I was 27. We were standing in his room, low-ceilinged, with a little window, where he had grown up with his seven sisters, where I had spent all my summer vacations as a child. He could hardly speak due to the recent stroke. It was just the two of us, he went over to the wooden sideboard, rummaged at length in one of the drawers, and there, from beneath the newspaper lining the drawer’s bottom, he pulled out an ordinary sheet of notebook paper, folded into four, quite rumpled, and yellowed. Without opening it, he pressed it into my hand and signaled to me to hide it. Then we sat there, embracing, as we had when I was a child. We heard my father’s footsteps in front of the house and let go. Two days later, my grandfather passed away. It was the end of January.

  Lots of people came to see him off. He probably would’ve been anxious if he had seen them. The sons and daughters of his seven sisters arrived from all over, laid some meager winter flower by his head and placed their order for the beyond. The dead man is something like express mail in these parts. Okay now, Uncle, give Mom our best wishes when you see her. Tell her we’re fine, that little Dana is graduated this year, everything is tip-top. Oh, and also tell her that her other granddaughter left for Italy. For now she’s just washing dishes, but she’s got high hopes. Well, okay then, Uncle, have a good trip. Afterward the nephew giving these instructions kisses the dead man’s hand and moves away. He returns again shortly, apologizing, he’d forgotten to say that they’d sold the house in the village, but it was bought by good people, all the way from England. Well okay, goodbye again and have a good trip. Have a good trip. In these southeastern regions people don’t say “rest in peace” . . . they just wish you a good trip. Have a good trip.

  SIDE CORRIDOR

  A friend told me how as a child she was convinced that Hungary was up in the sky. Her grandmother was Hungarian and every summer she came to visit her daughter and her beloved granddaughter in Sofia. They always met her at the airport. They would arrive quite early, craning their heads upward like chicks until their necks grew sore, her mother would tell her: your grandma will show up any minute now. The grandmother from Hungary who came out of the sky. I like this story, I immediately tuck it away in the warehouse. I suspect that when the Hungarian grandmother passed away she simply stayed up there in heavenly Hungary, waving from some cloud—except that now she no longer lands.

  THE CHIFFONIER OF MEMORIES

  Four months later, in the middle of May, I was driving to Hungary in an old Opel. I had suggested to the newspaper I was working for that I write a story about Bulgarian military cemeteries from the World War II. The largest one is in Harkány in southern Hungary.

  The boss agreed and here I am on the road through Serbia. Harkány, once a village, now a small town, is close to the site of the Battles of Drava. I soon left the highway and chose a more varied route through Stracin, Kumanovo, Prishtina, then I turned toward Kriva Palanka, through Niš, Novi Sad . . . I wanted to take all the roads my grandfather had trudged on foot through the mud in the winter of 1944. I had carefully studied the available military maps for the movements of the 11th Sliven Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, First Army. I drove, and in my pocket sat that folded sheet of paper. A Hungarian address was written on it.

  I reached Harkány. There would be time for the military cemetery. Before that I wanted to find a house. I wandered for a while before I found the street written on the paper. Thank God the street name hadn’t been changed during those fifty years. I parked the car at the very end of the street and set out to find the house. It was only now that I stopped to think that, in fact, I had no idea what I was expecting from this late visit. My grandfather had lived here, billeted during those couple of calm weeks before the battles. Happy and worried at the same time. There’s the house, built before the war. It’s larger than my grandfather’s, I note with a certain envy, more Central European. It has a big garden with blooming spring flowers, but my grandma’s tulip’s are prettier, I tell myself in passing. At the far end of the garden there is an arbor, sitting inside it is a woman my grandfather’s age, with white, well-groomed hair, with no kerchief. I realize there’s no telling who she may be. Over fifty years, houses change their inhabitants, people move, they die. I push open the front gate, a bell above it announces my arrival. A man in his 50s comes out of the house. I greet him in English—I could’ve done it in Hungarian, thanks to my grandfather’s lessons, but I keep that to myself for now. Thank God, he speaks English, too. I explain that I am a journalist from Bulgaria, I even show him my press badge from the newspaper and say that I’m writing an article about Bulgarian soldiers who fought in this region during World War II. Have you been to the cemetery? The man asks me. I say that I haven’t been there yet. I’m interested in what the people living here know, what they remember. He finally invites me into the arbor with the elderly woman.

  This is my mother, he says. We hold out our hands. A light, distrustful handshake. Her memory is failing, he explains. She can’t remember what she ate for dinner last night, but she remembers the war, there were Bulgarian soldiers here, I think they were even quartered here in the house. Then he turns to her and obviously tells her who I am and where I’ve come from. She only now notices me. Her memory is a chiffonier, I can sense her opening the long locked-up drawers. A long minute
, she has to wade back through more than fifty years, after all. The man seems ill at ease with this silence. He asks her something. She turns her head slightly, without taking her eyes off me. It could pass as a tick, a negative response, or part of her own internal monologue. The man turns to me and says that at the end of January she suffered a brain hemorrhage and now her memory is no longer quite all there.

  The end of January, you say?

  Yes, the man says, slightly puzzled. What difference could that make to a foreigner?

  My grandfather fought in this region, I say.

  The man translates. I can’t explain how, but I’m sure she recognizes me. I’m the exact age now that my grandfather had been back then. My grandma also said that I am the spitting image of him—the same bulging Adam’s apple, lanky and slightly hunched, with the same distracted gait and slightly crooked nose. The old woman says something to her son, he jumps up, apologizing that he hasn’t offered me anything to drink and suggests cherry cake and coffee. I accept, since I want to stay here longer and he darts into the house. We are finally alone, sitting across from each other at the rough-hewn table in the arbor. The table is quite old—I wonder if my grandfather sat in this very arbor? Spring has gone berserk, bees are buzzing, nameless scents waft through the air, as if the world has just been created, without a past, without a future, a world in all its innocence, before chronology.

  We look at each other. Between us lie almost sixty years and a man whom she remembers at twenty-five, and whom I saw off a few months ago at eighty-two. And no language in which we can say everything.

  She had been a beautiful woman. I try to see her with my grandfather’s eyes from January of 1945. Amid all the ugliness, mud and death of the war you enter (I enter) the European home of a girl of twenty-something, blonde, with lovely skin and large eyes. Inside there is a gramophone, something you have never seen, music unlike any you’ve ever heard is playing. She is wearing a long, urban dress. It is calm and bright throughout the whole house, a sunbeam passes through the curtains, falling precisely on the porcelain bowl on the table. As if the war had never been. She is reading in a chair by the window. Some sound draws me out of the picture. Her glasses have fallen to the ground, I hand them to her. Crossing over half a century instantaneously is frightening. That beautiful face suddenly wrinkles and ages in seconds. First I thought of showing her the paper from my grandfather. Then I decided that I shouldn’t. We’ve had these few minutes alone (how clever of her to send her son away).

  In front of her stands the grandson of that man. So everything has worked out as it should. Finally, here is the living letter, sent with such delay. So he survived. He returned to his wife and his infant son, the son grew up and had a son . . . And now here is the grandson, sitting in front of her. Life had taken a turn, she had been forgotten, gotten over, everything worked out as it should . . . A long-deferred tear trickles from her eye and gets lost in the endless labyrinth of wrinkles on her palm.

  She grasps my hand, without taking her eyes from mine, saying slowly in impeccable Bulgarian: hello, thank you, bread, wine . . . I continue in Hungarian: szép (beautiful). I said it as if passing on a secret message from my dead grandfather and she understood. She squeezed my hand and let it go. The last two Bulgarian words I heard from her were “farewell” and “Georgi.” My grandfather and I had the same name. Her son reappears with the coffee, he immediately notices that his mother has cried, but doesn’t dare ask. We drink coffee, I ask him what he does, it turns out he’s a veterinarian (like my father, I was about to say, but take a sip of my coffee instead).

  Is your grandfather still alive, he asks politely. He passed away in January, I reply. I’m really sorry to hear that, my condolences . . . I could clearly see that he did not suspect anything. She had decided to spare him that. Or perhaps I have imagined everything. I’ve avoided looking at him the whole time, so as not to discover too much of a likeness. After all, the world is full of men with crooked noses and bulging Adam’s apples. I got up to leave and kissed the woman’s hand. At the front gate he shook my hand just a second too long and for an instant I thought he must know everything. I quickly let go and headed around the corner to the car. I opened up the sheet of paper from my grandfather. A baby’s hand from 1945 had been traced in pencil above the address. Who could say whether it was the same one I had just shaken goodbye?

  THE GOOD MAN FLEES WHEN ONE PURSUES

  A few years ago I had to get a new passport and take care of a few formalities at the town hall. I filled in my personal data—divorced, tall, college-educated . . . I turned in the form at the window, the woman compared it to the information she had in the computer, looked at me, and said coldly: “Why are you hiding a child?” This statement echoed loudly enough, I could sense how everyone filling out forms around me suddenly looked up, it even seemed that they drew back slightly. I myself stood there like someone caught at the scene of a crime. I’ve noticed that I can more easily make excuses for things I have done, but when I am accused of something that has never even crossed my mind, I freeze up, guilty. As the saying goes, the wicked man flees though no one pursues. However, for me the opposite was always truer: the good man flees when one pursues.

  I kept silent longer than was probably acceptable before managing to utter that I have only one daughter. In that time—how unsure one is of his own innocence!—I calculated all my past relationships. I recalled one girlfriend who claimed to be pregnant every time we were on the verge of breaking up. You have a twelve-year-old son, the woman at the window announced unceremoniously. I stood there thunderstruck. All that was missing was for her to add “congratulations.” Can I see? I asked. She turned the monitor toward me and, thank God, it wasn’t me, just a case of identical names. The woman didn’t even apologize, turning around angrily in her chair, disappointed that I’d gotten away so easily. If she had known that I would spend the rest of the day going over in my mind all the women I had been with twelve years ago, even listing them by initials on a piece of paper, rating on a scale from 1 to 10 the potential risk of having a child I didn’t know about with each of them . . . If she had only known that, she would have been somewhat satisfied.

  THE CELLAR OF THE STORY

  But perhaps the story went like this.

  March 1945. The war is coming to an end. A battle for a small Hungarian town, ferocious, the upper hand constantly changing, street by street. A Bulgarian soldier is seriously wounded and loses consciousness. His regiment is pushed back, the city remains temporarily (for a few days) in German hands. The soldier comes to in a cellar, lying on an old bed, above him stands the woman who has bandaged him up. She had managed to drag his body from the sidewalk straight through the little basement window, which is at street level.

  She signals to him not to move, but he couldn’t even if he wanted to, he’s lost a lot of blood. In very bad German, the enemy’s language, he manages to exchange a few words with the Hungarian woman. Days go by, weeks, a month. Sometimes he loses consciousness, then wakes up again, still on the cusp between life and death. She continues bringing him food every day, applying compresses, changing his bandages . . . By the second month he has visibly improved, it’s clear that he’ll survive. The woman tells him that the little town is still in German hands and that the war has dragged on.

  She lives alone, a widow, childless, she’s the same age as the soldier, around twenty-five. She falls in love with the wounded man. And because of him, she decides to change the entire course of the war. The Germans have not surrendered, they’ve come up with a secret weapon that has slowed everything down, the front has been pushed back east. Once she even fakes a search of the house. The man in the cellar only hears someone stomping the floor above him with roughshod boots and hurling the chairs to the ground, some containers fall, the sound of a broken dish . . . He grips his machine gun, ready to shoot the first ones to enter the cellar, but he remains undiscovered, thank God.

  The closed space of that little room starts
driving him mad. The sole small window has been boarded up with sheet metal. Through a single thin crack—good thing the sheet metal is bent—a bit of light gets in, just enough to distinguish day from night. He can’t stop tormenting himself with the question of how a practically finished, a practically won war could so suddenly change its course. And how long he will remain unnoticed by the Germans in this basement.

  We should note that he, too, has secretly fallen in love with the woman taking care of him, but he does not yet want to admit it to himself. There, in his home country, he has a wife and child, who certainly think him dead. One night his rescuer stays with him, she merely touches his face and that is enough.

  It was unexpected, as always happens after a long wait, they embraced, their breaths quickened, they uttered some fragmented words, passionate, tired, amorous, each in his own language. He didn’t understand any of that crazy Hungarian, she didn’t understand any of that crazy Bulgarian. Afterward silence fell, in which the two of them lay side by side. Languor and happiness on her part. Languor, happiness, and some unclear alarm (but clear guilt) on his. He tells her, in Bulgarian, that he has a wife and little boy, whom he left when the child was only a week old. Both to salve his conscience that he said it, yet also for her not to understand because it was in Bulgarian. He didn’t know that when it comes to understanding things they shouldn’t, women have another literacy altogether. The Hungarian woman got up suddenly and went upstairs. For several days he did not see her at all.

  One afternoon a sudden blow smashed through the window of the cellar. The man leapt up—he always slept with his weapon by his side—and hid in the corner. The light pouring in stung his eyes. Soon a boy’s tousled head poked through the window. The man crouched behind a huge barrel. Only then did he see the heavy rag ball a meter away from him. The boy muttered something, crawled like a lizard through the narrow window and slipped inside. The man held his breath. The boy was so close that he could feel the warmth of his sweaty body. The boy grabbed the ball, tossed it through the window, pulled himself up on the ledge and wriggled out.