The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  But in the winter things change, you can’t stay outside all day. The room grows ever dimmer, the stove smells like gas, while scary things peek out from under the bed or creak inside the worm-eaten wardrobe. The only salvation then is the window. He would climb up to it in the morning and get down only to eat his slice of bread at lunchtime and to pee.

  A PLACE TO STOP

  I’m thinking about the first person, which easily recedes into the third, before returning again to the first. But who can say for certain that that boy there forty years ago was me, that that body is the same as the one here? Even the ants from 1975 are not the same. I don’t find any similarities between the body of a six-year-old, with that thin, pale-pink skin and invisible blond fuzz on his legs. No preserved sign of identification, no trace, except the vaccination scar with which our whole generation is marked. That nearly invisible scar on the shoulder, which over the years has treacherously grown and begun to creep downward.

  A detour within a detour. A friend of mine told me a story about how after an amorous night, when she was lying exhausted on the floor with her younger lover, he suddenly asked her (with certain sympathy) what that scar on her arm was from (it had already left her shoulder). She then realized with horror that he didn’t have that vaccination brand anywhere on his shoulders. Those who came after us are no longer marked in that way, she said, he seemed like an alien to me, like a clone. She got up, got dressed, and they never saw each other again.

  ANT-GOD

  Most likely all dreams, when being retold, should begin with the opening statement, revealing and startling in its simplicity, which I heard from Aya, who was then four: I dreamed that I was awake.

  And so, I dreamed that I was awake. I was standing in front of huge curtains with nameless colors that flowed into one another—like I said, huge, but light and ephemeral. It was made clear to me in the dream that concealed behind them was “the beautiful face of God,” in those exact words. I draw aside the first curtain. (It seems that between curiosity and fear, curiosity always takes the upper hand, or at least that’s how it is in dreams.)

  Behind it there was a second one. I draw it aside.

  A third.

  A fourth.

  I notice that every subsequent curtain becomes ever smaller and smaller. Hence whatever it was hiding is ever smaller as well. I keep drawing them aside until finally only one is left, the size of a child’s handkerchief. I stop myself. Should I really draw this curtain? Could God possibly be so small? Perhaps the Antichrist is tempting me in my dreams?

  I draw it aside. Behind it stands a big black ant. And I somehow know that this is God. But he has no face. The discovery is terrifying. How can you pray to and trust in someone who has no face? Someone who is that small? The revelation that the Ant-God gave me in the moment of awakening, without opening its jaws, went more or less like this: God is an insect who watches us. Only small things can be everywhere.

  CRUMBLING LANGUAGE

  I learned the alphabet from the cemetery in that town languishing in the sun. I could put it this way, too—death was my first primer. The dead taught me to read. This statement should be taken absolutely literally. We went there every Thursday and Saturday. I stood reverentially before the hot stone crosses. I was as tall as they were. With a certain dread, I dragged my finger along the grooves, reading more through my skin, I memorized the half-moon of C, the door of H, and the hut of A. Language seemed warm and hard. It had a crumbling body. Only a bit of dust and fine sand remained on my fingers from the stone. The first words I learned were:

  rest

  eternal

  here

  memory

  born – died

  God

  And names, so many names, cemeteries are teeming with names.

  Atanas H. Grozdanov

  Dimitar Hadzhinaumov

  Marincho – 5 years old

  Dimo Korabov

  Georgi Gospodinov

  Egur Sarkissian (Granny Sarkistsa’s son)

  Calla Georgieva

  . . .

  What happened to the names after their owners died? Were they set free? Did the names continue to mean something, or did they disintegrate like the bodies beneath them, leaving only the bones of consonants?

  Words are our first teachers in death. The first sign of the parting between bodies and their names. The strangest thing about that cemetery was that the names repeated themselves. I stood for a long time in front of a headstone with my name, freed up by someone who had used it for only three years.

  Years later, I make a point of visiting the cemeteries in the cities where I am staying. After paying my respects to the central streets, the cathedral on the square, and solemnly passing by the memorial to the relevant king on horseback (will today’s presidents jut out above granite limousines tomorrow?), I hasten to inquire after the city cemetery and sink down the walkways of that parallel city-and-park rolled into one. Death is a good gardener. I understood this even back then, at age six, amid the furiously blooming roses, lilies, aromatic bushes, the plums, wild apples, tiny cherries, and rotting pears of the village cemetery.

  The crematorium at Père Lachaise resembles a cathedral with a chimney. Adorno says that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. But can you have crematoriums at all, even in cemeteries?

  The dead taught me to read. I write this sentence again and realize that it says more and different things than I had intended. The people who taught me to read are no longer with us. The things which I have read since then were written primarily by the dead. That which I am writing out now are the words of a person who has set off . . . I did not know that so much death dozed beneath language.

  G

  After the primer of the graveyard I ran up against the real primer for first grade and felt simultaneously enlightened and confused. Every letter was connected to a word and a picture.

  What word starts with the letter G?

  God—I hastily called out, what an easy question. But something wasn’t right, the teacher blanched, she was no longer so smiley. She came over to me as if afraid I might say something more. Where did you learn that word? Uh, in the graveyard. Then one of the girls in the front rows said: “Government, Comrade.” That was the right answer. And the teacher latched on to that lifeline, excellent, my girl. While I felt so lonely with my God. Strange that you can’t have two words with one and the same letter, as if G’s curving back was too slippery to hold two such truly grandiose words.

  The word “government” begins with G. There is no God in our government! That’s just gobbledygook, the teacher accented every G, we’ll learn about that later in the upper grades. Are we clear on this?

  But he’s there in the graveyard . . .

  This here is a school, not a . . .

  Geez, all these problems just from a single word, I’m going to start hating school before long.

  That evening, my mother and father had a serious talk with me. The comrade teacher had told them everything. Well, okay, but there is a God, right? It was as if I had asked them the most difficult question in the world. Look here, my mother started in (she was a lawyer), you know that there is, but you don’t need to go throwing his name around left and right, he gets angry if you mention him for no reason in front of strangers.

  And as a rule, just keep your mouth shut, my father added.

  God was the first secret. The first of the forbidden things that you could only talk about at home.

  There’s no God in Bulgaria, Grandma, I blurted out as soon as we got home and I caught sight of her pouring oil into the icon lamp on the wall. My grandmother crossed herself quickly and invisibly. She surely would’ve snapped at me for such talk, but she saw my father in the doorway and merely said: Well, what is there in Bulgaria anyway, there’s no paprika, no oil . . . Only she could combine the country’s physical and metaphysical deficit like that. God, oil, and paprika.

  She would read the Bible furtively, she had wrapped it in a newspaper
so it wouldn’t show. She would read at random, dragging her arthritis-gnarled index finger along the lines and moving her lips. Thus, I heard the whole Apocalypse in whispers, in the late afternoons of my childhood, under the quiet Jericho trumpets of the flies buzzing around the room.

  My grandmother knew she shouldn’t talk about such things in front of people, so as to protect my father, who could get into trouble. My father knew that he shouldn’t talk about other things and locked himself up with the radio in the kitchen, so as not to screw up my life (that’s what my mother said). I knew that I shouldn’t talk about anything I’d heard at home, so the police wouldn’t come and screw up my parents’ lives. A long chain of secrets and lies that made us a normal family. Like all the others. That was the greatest trick of the whole conspiracy—being like the others.

  INVISIBLE INK

  At five I learned to read, by six it was already an illness. The indiscriminate guzzling of books. Some kind of literary bulimia. I would read whatever I found and soon reached my mother’s bookshelf and that purple volume with a hard cover and a large title reading “Criminology.” The first chapter began with the sentence that before the socialist revolution of September 9th, criminology did not exist. While the following one, already having forgotten this, stated that the study of bourgeois criminology was necessary for two reasons: first, to denounce its reactionary essence, and second, to recover everything of value within it . . .

  The denunciation was the most interesting part. Only there, between the lines and the distorted quotations, could you understand what was going on in the world after all.

  Bourgeois criminology had nevertheless discovered several “minor” things, such as the lie detector, forensic psychology, dactyloscopy. I liked the title Finger Prints (1897) by some Francis Galton or other, a bourgeois criminologist.

  At the root of revolutionary criminology, of course, stood Lenin. It was obvious that the criminal was in his blood. At the same time, he had laid the foundations of all the other sciences and all textbooks confirmed this ab-so-lute-ly (to use one of his favorite words). “Language is the most important means of human communication” was written above the blackboard in the classroom. That genius of the banal.

  But the most interesting things in that purple textbook on criminology were the parts on forensic photography, weapons and . . . invisible ink. “Invisible inks are solutions of organic or inorganic substances: fruit juices, onion, sugar solutions, urine, saliva, quinine . . .”

  This repulsed and attracted me at the same time. I had never imagined spies as bedwetters writing with urine, syrup, and spit. Scribbling your secret messages in various secretions? Ugh. On the other hand, though, the very accessibility of invisible ink was a welcome discovery. I had everything I needed at hand. For starters, I decided to forgo urine, I went down to the cellar, grabbed a jar of canned peaches, opened it and with the end of a matchstick slowly wrote out the two most secret pages in my diary.

  Here I will show part of what was written with invisible fruit ink:

  What, so you don’t see anything? That means it really is invisible. If only I could write a whole novel in such ink.

  SIDE CORRIDOR

  After all the evidence that the history of the past four billion years is written in the DNA of living creatures, the saying that “the universe is a library” has long since ceased to be a metaphor. But now we will need a new literacy. We’ve got a lot of reading ahead of us. When Mr. Jorge said that he imagined heaven as a library without beginning or end, he most likely, without suspecting it, was thinking about the endless shelves of deoxyribonucleic acid.

  I am books.

  DAD, WHAT’S A MINOTAUR?

  We bang around like Minotaurs in these basements, to heck with their . . . friggin’ housing fund and lists. My father made heroic attempts not to curse in front of my mother and me, not unlike his attempts to quit smoking. I was sure that he secretly made up for it, smoking up all those skipped cigarettes and cursing out all those unsaid curses. My father’s line following his stumble over the nozzle of our Rocket vacuum cleaner would have important consequences for me. I knew what “friggin” and “housing fund” were, just as I knew about “extremely indigent,” “Pershing,” and so on, but I didn’t know what a Minotaur was. Nor whether it was one of the good guys (our guys) or the bad guys. At that time, I divided everything into those two categories. I discovered with surprise that adults did, too. The world was divided in two—good vs. bad, ours vs. yours. We, as luck would have it, had ended up our side, hence that of “the good guys.” However, I had heard my father say in the evenings after the news: “Come on now, how is that idiot Jimmy Carter to blame for the fact that I live in a basement and that there’s no lids for the canning jars?!” My mother, who was always more sensible, would shush him. Did they think I would let something slip in front of the local cop who lived two doors down? And they really did draw Jimmy Carter like an idiot in caricatures, with huge teeth, a star-spangled top hat clapped over his eyes, chomping on a winged rocket rather than a cigar.

  I’ve gone down other corridors again, I keep getting mixed up when I turn back. Past time is distinguishable from the present due to one essential feature—it never runs in one direction. Where did I start? Good thing I’m writing this down, otherwise I’d never find the thread again . . .

  We bang around like Minotaurs in these basements . . . That was the line . . . and it immediately entered my as-of-yet unassembled catalogue of epiphanies, of all those revelations, which as a rule appeared in the most unexpected and even inconvenient of moments. My father tripped over the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner because he didn’t see it, because it was cramped, we lived underground, the afternoon was overcast, the window was low, and the sun failed to reach down there.

  Dad, what’s a Minotaur? I asked. My father pretended not to hear me. Dad, is the Minotaur on our side? I think this question irked him all the more. The next day he brought me that old complete edition of Ancient Greek myths from somewhere. I never set the book down again. I entered into the Minotaur then and don’t recall ever coming out. He was me. A boy who spent long days and nights in the basement of the palace, while his parents worked as kings or slept with bulls.

  Never mind that the book makes him out to be a monster. I was inside him and I know the whole story. A huge mistake and calumny lie hidden there, exceptional injustice. I am the Minotaur and I am not bloodthirsty, I don’t want to eat seven youths and seven maidens, I don’t know why I’ve been locked up, it’s not my fault . . . And I am terribly afraid of the dark.

  II.

  AGAINST AN ABANDONMENT: THE CASE OF M.

  In the basement of the palace in Crete, Daedalus built a labyrinth of such confounding galleries that once you went inside it you could never find the exit again. Minos locked up his family’s shame, his wife Pasiphaë’s son, in this underground labyrinth. She conceived this son by a bull sent by the god Poseidon. The Minotaur—a monster with a human body and a bull’s head. Every nine years the Athenians were forced to send seven maidens and seven youths to be devoured by him. Then the hero Theseus appeared, who decided to kill the Minotaur. Without her father’s knowledge, Ariadne gave Theseus a sharp sword and a ball of string. He tied the string to the entrance and set off down the endless corridors to hunt the Minotaur. He walked and walked until he suddenly heard a terrible roar—the monster was rushing toward him with its enormous horns. A frightful battle ensued. Finally, Theseus grabbed the Minotaur by the horns and plunged his sharp sword into his chest. The monster slumped to the ground and Theseus dragged him all the way back to the entrance.

  —Ancient Greek Myths and Legends

  DOSSIER

  Most honorable members of the jury, living and dead, from all times and geographies, ladies and gentlemen collectors and tellers of myths, and you, most honorable Mr. Minos, the present judge from the underworld.

  Over the course of 37 years I have been preparing this case, “The Case of M.,” and writing argu
ments in his defense. I began at nine, with my grandfather’s indelible pencil in his old soldier’s notebook, which he had long since ceased using. (This does not, however, justify my unauthorized appropriation of the notebook. As we see, in the beginning there is always a crime.)

  The first version reads as follows:

  The Minotaur is not guilty. He is a boy locked up in a basement. He is frightened. They have abandoned him.

  I, the Minotaur.

  That was the whole text. Written in large capital letters on two pages from the notebook. I include it with the other materials related to the case. In broad terms, that is the basic thesis. Over the years I have merely added further evidence. And I have collected the signs which have come to me on their own.

  It is striking that I have not found any compassion for the Minotaur in the whole of the classics. No departure from the established facts, from the monstrous mask once placed on him. Monster is the tamest word bandied about when it comes to the Minotaur in ancient writings. Doesn’t Ovid in Metamorphoses call him a “double-natured shame” and “disgrace from his abode” . . . Nothing but a disgrace and a freak. Didn’t he suspect that only a few months later he himself would be sent to the Pontus—the depths of the subcelestial Roman labyrinth, from which he would never find his way back. Not all roads lead to Rome when you are in the labyrinth of the provinces, my dear Ovid.

  The funny thing is that he is much kindlier toward the Minotaur in one of his earlier books, Heroides or Epistulae Heroidum. I prefer the translated title “Heroines,” as it best captures the heroin of despair. There, the abandoned Ariadne writes to Theseus, who is already sailing for Athens. And there, for the first time, this accessory to the Minotaur’s murder, motivated by love, seems to regret what she has done: you would have died in the winding labyrinth unless guided by the thread I gave you, Theseus. You said that as long as we both shall live, you’ll be mine. Well, look, we’re alive, and if you’re alive, too, that means you’re nothing more than a lowdown despicable liar. I never should’ve given you that damn thread, and so on. But the important thing for our case is that in the next line she calls the Minotaur her brother for the first time: “Club that killed my brother, the Minotaur, condemn me too!” Let me note for this honorable court that the monster has been recognized as a brother by another human being.