by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
Along with dust and the scent of cat urine, the wind blew a scrap of an old newspaper through the window. And even though it was in Hungarian, he could still make out Hitler Kaput and see the photo of the Russian soldier raising a flag over the Reichstag.
He understood everything. He battered down the door and went up the stairs with his carbine. The light stung his eyes, and he hung on to the furniture as he walked. The woman was standing in front of him. She told him that he could shoot her or stay with her. She told him that she loved him and that they could live together, she also told him that he wouldn’t get very far with that rifle and his military uniform, that the world was no longer the same a whole month after the end of the war. Yes, it turned out that it was already June. She spoke softly, mixing Hungarian and German. He, mixing German and Bulgarian, replied that she was his savior and without her he would now be rotting on the Hungarian steppe. He also said that he would like to live with her until the end of his days (that was in Bulgarian), but that he had to go back to his son, who by now must be more than six months old, but that even if he tried, he would never be able to forget her. And both of them knew that once they parted, they would never see each other again. And that if they embraced now, they would never let each other go. Fortunately for his son, who was nine months old, each of them swallowed back their desires. In the end, they just said awkwardly: well, okay then, farewell. She filled him a backpack with whatever there was to eat and burst into tears only when the bell above the front gate jingled behind him.
The town of H. and his village in Bulgaria were separated by exactly 965 kilometers and two borders. He walked only at night, first, so as not to meet people, and second, because during the day his eyes continued to ache terribly from the light. He walked back along the same route he had trod with his regiment half a year earlier. He hid in abandoned shacks, burned out villages, he slept by day in old foxholes, trenches, and pits dug by bombs. In the end he had decided to leave his weapon and uniform with the Hungarian woman, so as not to attract attention. She had given him a real knitted sweater—this June happened to be cold and rainy—and a good hunting jacket with lots of pockets, left over from her late husband. And so, without a weapon, without epaulets or ID papers, he retraced the path of the war, always heading east, hiding from everyone. On the thirty-fourth day, in the middle of July, he reached his village. He waited until midnight and slipped like a thief into his own home. His parents were sleeping on the second floor, his wife and son were most likely downstairs, in the room next to the shed. This scene of recognition is clear. Fear, horror, and joy all in one. The dead husband returns. Here he was already proclaimed a fallen hero, awarded some small medal, his name had even been chiseled into the hastily erected memorial on the village square, alongside the names of his fellow villagers who had died to liberate the homeland. His reappearance, like all resurrections, only upset the normal course of life.
What now? Bulgarian joy is quickly replaced by fretting. They woke up the parents and they all started asking the risen one how it had all happened and what are we going to do now? That he’s safe and sound is all very well and good, but it creates some mighty big headaches as well. The resurrected soldier was so exhausted that he couldn’t explain a thing. As the third rooster crowed and day began to break, the family council made the only possible decision—to stick him in the cellar, both so he could sleep and so that no one would see him. Thus the returning Bulgarian soldier spent his first night at home—as well as all the following days and nights over the course of several months. He simply exchanged one basement for another.
Those were troubled times. The communists were roaming the country, killing for the slightest infraction. The soldier’s family was in any case on the list of village high-rollers, thanks to their three cows, herd of sheep, and nice old-fashioned cart with the rooster painted on the back. But what sin could the soldier possibly have committed? I’ll tell you what. First of all, he lied to the authorities about his heroic death, for which he had been crowned with a medal and glorified on the village memorial. The other thing that would earn him a bullet straight away was separation or desertion from his army unit. To disappear from your regiment for four months, without death as an alibi, and then to return a month after the end of the war without the weapon and uniform issued to you likely goes beyond the imagination of even the most merciful political commissar. What could the soldier possibly say in his own defense? The truth? Admit that he had spent four months in a Hungarian town with a lonely young widow, hiding in a basement long after the town had been liberated by his countrymen? Who, in fact, were you hiding from, comrade corporal?
The resurrected man’s wife continued to wear black. To her, he told almost the whole truth. He simply added thirty or so years to the compassionate Hungarian lady’s age and everything fell into place. The elderly Hungarian woman had lied to him about the continuation of the war and a German siege, because her motherly heart had wanted him, the Bulgarian soldier, to replace the son of the same age that she had lost.
His wife was a decent and reasonable woman, she was glad that her husband had returned alive and did not wish to know more. Even when she carelessly opened that envelope which the postman, her brother’s son, had furtively pressed into her hands, with only a baby’s handprint and an unreadable address, she didn’t say anything, but painstakingly sealed it up again, gave it to her husband and continued wearing her widow’s weeds.
A year later, half-blind from staying in the dark, the man came out of the cellar and went to give himself up. He gave them the scare of their lives. His beard and hair had gone white during that year, they could hardly recognize him. Where did you come from, the mayor asked him. From the other world, the soldier said and that was the most precise answer. He quickly told some poorly patched together story about how he fell prisoner to the Germans during the attack on H., how he was sent to work in the salt mines behind German lines, how they worked there, slept there—in the end the Germans were forced to beat a hasty retreat and dynamited the entrance to the mine. Of the thirty prisoners, he was the only survivor and found a hole to crawl out of. But from that long stay in the dark he had badly damaged his eyes and so, half-blind, he had traveled for months before reaching his home village. The mayor listened, his fellow villagers who had gathered around in the meantime listened. The women bawled, the men blew their noses noisily so as not to bawl themselves, while the mayor grimly crumpled his cap. Whether the people really swallowed that story or whether they wanted to save him is unclear, but in any case they all decided to believe it, and the mayor helped arrange things with the higher-ups in the city. They quietly reissued the dead man’s passport, cut off his wife’s widow’s pension, only his name remained on the memorial. And so as to do away with any lingering doubts, the mayor ordered the local bard to make up a song about the soldier who happily returned home a year and some after the end of the war. The song was a heroic one, according to all the rules of the time, telling at great length and breadth about “his dark suffering in the mine so deep” and how Georgi the Talashmaner (from the name of the village) “tossed the boulder to make his way, to see the sun” with Herculean strength. This was followed by his almost Odyssey-length return and the blind hero’s miraculous orientation toward his beloved homeland and the village of his birth.
Risen Georgi (that’s what they called him in the village) lived a long life, he saw well in the evenings, but by day was blind as a mole. He came out of the basement, yet the basement stayed inside him. During that year and a half, several lives had happened to him and it became ever harder for him to remember which of them was the real one.
Perhaps he had perished in that little Hungarian town after all? Was that Hungarian woman who changed the course of the war to keep him really young, or was she an old woman who had lost her son? How did he manage to escape from the German mine? And that which gave him no peace until the very end—the child’s hand, traced on an ordinary white sheet of notebook paper and
sent in a postal envelope.
(Both versions end with the same small child’s hand, traced on a piece of paper. But stories always end in one of two ways—with a child or with death.)
A PLACE TO STOP
Let’s wait here for the souls of distracted readers. Somebody could have gotten lost in the corridors of these different times. Did everyone come back from the war? How about from the fair in 1925? Let’s hope we didn’t forget anyone at the mill. So where shall we set out for now? Writers shouldn’t ask such questions, but as the most hesitant and unsure among them, I’ll take that liberty. Shall we turn toward the story of the father, or continue on ahead, which in this case is backward, toward the Minotaur of childhood . . . I can’t offer a linear story, because no labyrinth and no story is ever linear. Are we all here? Off we go again.
A SHORT CATALOGUE OF ABANDONMENTS
The history of the family can be described through the abandonment of several children. The history of the world, too.
The abandoned child with the bull’s head, thrown into Minos’s labyrinth . . .
The abandoned Oedipus, the little boy with the pierced ankles, tossed on the mountainside in a basket, who would be adopted first by King Polybus, later by Sophocles, and in the end by his later father, Sigmund Freud.
The abandoned Hansel and Gretel, the Ugly Duckling, the Little Match Girl, and the grown-up Jesus, she wants to go to her grandmother’s house, he to his father’s . . .
In this line come—even without legends to back them up—all those abandoned now or in the past, and all those who shall be abandoned. Having fallen from the manger of myth, let us take them in, in this inn of words, spread beneath them the clean sheets of history, tuck in their frostbitten souls. And leave them in hands, which, as they turn these pages, shall stroke their frightened backs and heads.
How many readers here have not felt abandoned at least once? How many would admit that at least once they have been locked in a room, a closet, or a basement, for edification? And how many would dare say that they have not done the locking up?
In the beginning, I said, there is a child tossed into a cellar.
THE BASEMENT
For a long time, I used to watch the world through a window at sidewalk level. The apartments changed, but every one of them had one such low window. We always lived in the basement, the rooms were cheapest there. My mother, father, and I had just moved into yet another basement. Actually, into another “former basement,” as the landlord said. There’s no such thing as a former basement, my father replied sharply, and the landlord, not knowing how to take this, just laughed. In these parts, when somebody feels uncomfortable, he starts laughing, who knows why.
It’s temporary, my father said, as we carried in the table. It was the mid-70s, I knew that we were defined as “extremely indigent,” I knew that the extremely indigent were those who inhabited a space of less than five square meters per person, and we were waiting our turn for an apartment on some list. Clearly, the list was quite long or someone was cutting in line, because we continued to live in that basement room for several years. On the “ground floor” (which was, in fact, underground), there was a long corridor and just one other room, always locked. I didn’t ask why we didn’t rent it as well, I knew the answer, we’re saving money for an apartment. Plus, we had to maintain that cramped five square meters per person so as not to slip from the category of the extremely indigent. The long corridor played the role of entrance hall and kitchen, but it was so narrow that it had room for only two chairs, a hotplate, and something like a little table. When my mom and dad fought, my dad would go out there to sleep, on the table. He also listened to Radio Free Europe there, secretly, on an old taped-up Selena. I was very proud that my father listened to that station, because I knew it was forbidden. Actually, I was proud that I was part of the conspiracy. When you share a single room, you can’t keep too many secrets.
In fact, the house where that basement apartment was located was downright beautiful. Three stories with big, light windows looming up above. Thousands of shards of glass from beer bottles, green and brown, had been stuck into the deliberately rough plaster, following the fashion of the times, and they sparkled like diamonds in the sun. And the third floor formed a slight semi-circle, almost like a castle. What would it be like to live there, in that round room, with its round windows and curved balcony? A room without edges. From up above you could probably see the whole city and the river. You could see everyone who passes by on the street, and full-length at that, not just as strange creatures made solely of legs and shoes. At school, I never failed to mention that I lived in that house with the rounded tower. Which was the truth. Of course, I didn’t specify which floor.
At the same time, my father dreamed of an apartment with a living room, fully furnished with a drawing-room suite, he could see himself sitting in the large, square armchair with his paper, legs propped on the footstool. He had seen this in a Neckermann catalogue, which some family friends had briefly lent us. My mother dreamed of a real kitchen with cupboards, where she could line up the little white porcelain jars of spices she would some day purchase. I would suspect that same West German Neckermann was responsible for that dream as well.
. . .
Feet and cats. Indolent, slow, cat-length afternoons. I would spend the whole day glued to the window, because it was the lightest place. I would count the passing feet and put together the people above them.
Men’s feet, women’s feet, children’s feet . . . I watched the seasons change through the change of shoes. Sandals, which gradually closed up, transforming into fall shoes, which later crept up the leg, exquisite ladies’ boots, the stylish ones made of pleated patent leather, the workers’ coarse rubber boots that took out the trashcans, the villagers’ galoshes, arriving for the market on Thursday, the blue or red kids’ boots, the only colorful splotches amid the overwhelming brown and black. And again the gradual spring easing, the undressing of shoes down to the bare summer soles, ankles and toes, shod only in sandals and flip-flops. The flip-flops were something like swimsuits for feet.
During autumn, the window became piled with yellowish-brown fallen leaves from the sidewalk, making the light in the room soft and yellow. Then the late autumn wind would scatter them. The rains would come—and the eternal puddle out front. I could sit and watch the drops falling into it for hours, forming fleeting bubbles, whole armadas of ships, which the drops would then smash. How many historic sea battles unfolded in that puddle! Then the snow would bury the little window and the room would become a den. I would curl up into a ball like a rabbit under the snow. It is so light, yet you are hidden, invisible to the others, whose footsteps crunch in the snow only inches away from you. What could be lovelier than that?
THE GOD OF THE ANTS
He was six when they started leaving him home alone. In the morning his mother and father would light the gas heater, constantly telling him to keep an eye on the flow of gas inside the little tube. Two gas heaters on their street had exploded. They left him food in the refrigerator and went out. A typical 1970s childhood. Left on his own all day, with that early unnamed feeling of abandonment. The half-dark room frightened him. He would spend the warm autumn days outside. He would sit on a rock by the gate, on the sidewalk, like a little old man, counting the people passing by, the cars, the makes of the cars. He’d try to guess them from the humming before they appeared from around the curve. Moskvitch, Moskvitch, Zhiguli, Trabant, Polski Fiat, Zhiguli, Moskvitch, Moskvitch . . . When he got tired of that, he would rest his head on his knees and stare at the stone slabs of the sidewalk. Each slab was crisscrossed uniformly by vertical and horizontal lines, and in the furrows they created ants would run, meet and pass one another. This was a whole other, quasi-visible world. It looked like the labyrinth from that book with the illustrations. He would sit like that for hours, thinking up stories for every ant. He observed them with the skill of a naturalist, without knowing the word, of course. He would study them,
devoting to them hours of the time he was so generously allotted. Each ant was different from the others.
Sometimes he would imagine that he was the God of the Ants.
Most often he was a kind God, helping them, dropping crumbs or a dead fly down to them, nudging it with a stick toward their home so they wouldn’t have to struggle to carry it.
But sometimes he grew wrathful without reason, like the real God, or he simply felt like playing and so would pour a pitcher of water into the corridors of the labyrinth. He made a flood for them.
Other times he would pour salt at the ends of the flagstone, he had discovered by chance that they detested salt, and they would stagger through the corridors of that temporary prison, frightened senseless. When they met, they would quickly press their feelers together, as if passing on some very important secret.
His other discovery, divine and scientific, was that ants hate the scent of humans. If you trace a circle around an ant with your finger, it will run up against that invisible border as if you had built a wall.
He had already noticed this ability of his, he considered it a terrible defect to be able to experience that which happened to others. To embed himself—the word would come later—into their bodies. To be them.
One night he dreamed that he, his mother, and his father were walking down the street and suddenly a giant finger, whose nail alone was as big as a cliff, thumped down and began circling around them. And as if it wasn’t terrifying enough that this finger could crush them at any second, just like that, out of carelessness, it also reeked toxically to boot. A stench you could ram into and crack your skull on.
