The Physics of Sorrow
Page 7
I walked around the yellow house on that Sunday evening, the gloomy corridors of that howl sucking me in ever deeper. I was afraid to enter it, whatever was inside was not fit for the human eye and ear. But my body continued to move mechanically in a circle, I sensed that I was beginning to slip away from myself. Just a bit more and I’ll enter the corridors of the scream, I’ll crawl along the furrows, I’ll embed myself in the body of the screamer.
Just then a hand grabs me firmly by the shoulder; startled, I return to myself like a snail withdrawing into its shell. My father.
Neither of us can hide our surprise at seeing the other in this place. Neither of us has any business being here. And neither of us asks the other what brings him here at this hour. We turn toward the city without a word and sink into the November evening, far from that cry.
I knew that I would never again free myself from the tunnel of that Oooooooohhh. The howl would pursue me throughout the years with varying degrees of doggedness. Appearing and dying away in unexpected situations. Sometimes it would quiet down, I would lose it in my happiest moments, in joyful gatherings with people amid their deafening chatter . . . But in the next moment of silence it would inevitably appear. And ten years later, when I came down with that constant ringing in my ear, I knew that that howling-bellowing-crying thing was now settled in there for good. In the very center, in the cave of the skull, from there to the tympanic membrane, the hammer and the anvil, in the very labyrinth of the inner ear, as the doctors put it.
THE DIAGNOSIS
Much later, already in my student years, I got up the courage to tell an older doctor friend of mine about the “embedding” that had seized me in childhood. The doctor thought for a long time and finally offered a rare diagnosis, perhaps made up on the spot, which went more or less like this: pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome. According to him, the illness was exceedingly rare and incurable, but it peaked in childhood. Over the years the attacks became easier to control and lost their most acute manifestations, without disappearing entirely. Just as in epilepsy, he said, we never know where the person wanders when he is in such a fit.
In my case, there were no fits per se, my body remained completely calm, if slightly stiff, like a person lost in thought or deeply absorbed in some story. When I fell into such a state, I didn’t blink, my pupils stopped moving, my mouth hung half-open, my breathing switched to some automatic regime, while I (part of me) shifted into someone else’s story and someone else’s body.
I accepted this with a mixture of fear, a vague sense of guilt, and satisfaction. I had put quite a lot of effort into hiding this ability or illness as much as I could. Only my grandmother could always recognize it: “Eh, he’s gone off again.” It often happened against my will. As if right where another felt pain, in that cut, that wound, that point of inflammation, a corridor would open that sucked me inside. In stories, especially those told by loved ones, there was always some blind spot, a momentary gap, a weak point, incomprehensible sorrow, longing for something lost or that had never taken place, which pulled me inside, into the dark galleries of the unspoken. There were such secret galleries and corridors in every story.
For his own peace of mind, the doctor sent me for an MRI, into that enormous white capsule where they cut your brain into thin slices and peer at all its secrets. Relax and think pleasant thoughts, the nurse said . . .
Two hours later I entered the office of the doctors who would analyze the image, but I could sense from afar their poorly disguised consternation. The picture hadn’t come out. Maybe it was due to the machine, it was old, after all. Actually, this was the first time something like this had happened to them, absolutely nothing could be seen, just a dark-black plate. This didn’t come as a surprise to me. I know nothing can be seen, because inside is darkness, an unilluminable, centuries-deep darkness. My skull is a cave. I didn’t tell them that, of course.
Sometimes—at the same time—I am a dinosaur, a fish, a bat, a bird, a single-celled organism swimming in the primordial soup, or the embryo of a mammal, sometimes I’m in a cave, sometimes in a womb, which is basically the same thing—a place protected (against time).
SIDE CORRIDOR
The tendency toward empathy is strongest between the ages of seven and twelve.
The most recent research is focused on the so-called mirror neurons, localized in the anterior portion of the insular cortex (insula). To put it simply, they react in a similar fashion when a person feels pain, sorrow, or happiness, or when one observes these emotions in another person. Some animals also experience empathy. The connection between shared emotional experiences and mirror neurons has not been well studied; experiments are in the works. Researchers believe that the conscious cultivation of empathy, including through the reading of novels (see S. Keen), will make communication far easier and will save us from future world cataclysms.
—The Journal of Community and Cortex
MY BROTHER, THE MINOTAUR
Still, what was my father doing that night near the yellow house? Okay, so it was part of his job—going wherever they called him. Almost all the town’s residents kept animals in their yards. But what would a veterinarian be doing at a home for the mentally ill? He must have been coming from there, where else would he have appeared from in that wasteland?
Suddenly the whole picture came together in my head with staggering clarity. I say “suddenly,” but in fact the separate pieces of that puzzle had been elaborated carefully and at length with the fastidiousness intrinsic to a child’s imagination. Now everything came together so easily, frighteningly easily within me.
That inhuman howl really was inhuman, and it wasn’t Ooooh, but Moooo. And it came from a half-man, half-bull locked up in there. (I’d already seen one such boy in my grandfather’s hidden memory.) The human doctor hadn’t been able to do anything for the human, so they had decided to treat the bull. Of course, they called the best (and only, incidentally) veterinarian in town: my father.
There was another, darker version of the story, also fine-tuned at length during those lonely childhood afternoons. That half-human-half-bull boy was not just anybody, but my “stillborn brother,” whom I’d heard them whispering about. Actually, he’d been born alive, but with a bull’s head and they’d put him in the home. They had abandoned him. With the best of intentions. So he wouldn’t disturb his healthy brother. I remember that I wrote all that down in my most clandestine (read: secretly illegible) handwriting, rolled the sheet of notebook paper into a scroll and shoved it in my secret box under the bed.
Or maybe I wasn’t even their son at all, instead they had adopted me, despairing of giving birth only to kids with bull-heads?
This was one of the basic fears of my childhood. If this were true, then I could easily be abandoned again. We could be abandoned again, my Minotaur brother and me.
I remember that I devoted the next few days to finding some crack, some door left slightly ajar, through which I could enter into the cave of this secret. I asked my father—ostensibly off-the-cuff and cautiously—what kinds of diseases cows came down with. Had he ever seen Siamese twin calves and what would he do in such a case? Would they kill one to save the other? My father gave absentminded replies. Once, however, he nevertheless let his guard down and launched into some story about a cow who was in labor for fourteen hours right on New Year’s Eve when he had been a kid and . . . I didn’t hear any more of the story, I simply slipped down the corridor the story had opened up to me. I stopped at the entrance . . . It definitely wasn’t right to sneak into a father’s secrets. There was something indecent and unnatural about it, you could see things you’d rather not see. I could still hear his voice, he was carried away with his story, I could still turn back. I told myself, I’ll do it only this one time. I pushed on ahead, then quickly ducked into a side corridor of his story, I was no longer interested in it, his voice died away. I wandered aimlessly through my father’s childhood, look how alike we are, skinny, in bagg
y clothes, probably hand-me-downs, look, there he’s stealing eggs out from under the chicken, they’re still warm, I can feel them, my grandma, his mother (now mine, too), sees me, I run with the eggs toward the general store, if I manage to sell them to Grandpa Angel the shopkeeper, I’ll get a candy bar for each one. I run and run, go into the store, thank God there are no other customers. Grandpa Angel, here are three eggs for candy bars, I wheeze breathlessly, he looks at me, does your mother know, yes, she sent me, he takes the eggs, holds them up to the sunlight, well now, these eggs here are stolen, heeey, how did you know, he gives them back to me, at that moment my mother is coming up the street, I grab the eggs, stuff them in my pocket and dash out, but I trip on the crumbling steps and fall. Careful with those eggs, Grandpa Angel laughs. I feel the yoke seeping over my crotch.
I leave that incident before retribution comes, I turn down another corridor, change direction. I tell myself that I’m not going to lend an ear to things that don’t concern me. At the last minute, I veer away from a girl my father is kissing, I’m kissing, behind the stone wall of the house. She’s attractive, but she won’t become my mother. He’s attractive, too. I’m attractive as well, as long as I’m him. Tall, with curly hair, I feel women’s eyes on me as we pass. That one looks foreign. That one is familiar from somewhere. That one . . . Wait, now there’s my mother. The answer to the riddle that brought me here should be somewhere around here. I need to turn down some corridor and look on from there, but I can’t move. She’s in pain. The pain is terrible and I can’t stand aside, it sucks me in. Something alive is being torn apart . . . I’m tearing her apart . . . Finally, a baby’s cry, that cry comes from me, I am myself, that wrinkly, wet, bluish hunk of meat. Tossed out, choking, shaking all over.
Something gives me a good hard shake and pulls me back down those dark corridors—light, words, my father’s face . . . What’s wrong . . . What’s wrong . . . I’ve been trying to wake you for ten minutes now . . .
I feel bruised from the journey . . . Everything’s fine, Dad, I’m here . . . I was born to my own mother, what a miracle.
My father dragged me out, before I managed to see whether there was someone else there, if someone else came out after me. I was left with the uncertain feeling that I wasn’t alone in that cave.
I was born to my own mother and father, but that doesn’t make me any less a Minotaur. I continued spending long days alone, at the window, paging through a book.
NIPPERS
Just as in antiquity, the children of socialism were also invisible. Little nippers hanging around at the grown ups’ feet. Prepared for life, without entirely being a part of it.
Run down to the cellar for some pickles! Go and play in the other room, we’re talking to our guests! Hightail it out of here, I’ve got work to do! Don’t make me start up the spanking factory . . . Patriarchy and industrialization rolled into one.
Three months at the village every summer, with their grandmothers, in the fresh air and sunshine, to get toughened up, drink milk straight from the sheep, and eat raw eggs. You take a warm egg out from under the chicken, your grandma wipes it on her apron, pokes a hole in it with a thick needle, sprinkles a little salt inside and you suck it up through the hole with all your might under her fond gaze. Drink up, drink up, an egg is equal to a shot, she would say. That’s what some famous doctor who had passed through the village thirty years ago and had spent the night had said. One egg, he said, is equal to a shot, take it from me.
I would find out much later that this pedagogical regimen of “fresh air and sunshine” was also crucial for German children of the 1930s, so they would grow up healthy, energetic and in fine fighting form. I wonder if they stuffed them full of raw eggs, too?
While rereading ancient Greek myths from that already dog-eared book on those endless summer afternoons, I made the following discovery. Zeus turned out to be exactly like us from the late 1970s. A child sent deep into the countryside, to be looked after by his grandmother Gaia (and kept far from his father), to drink goat’s milk (his goat was divine, of course), and to grow up hale and hearty.
I will always remember milk from an ordinary mortal sheep, straight from the udder and still warm, with a few shiny turds floating in it, to be blown off to the side with the foam. Only in childhood is immortality possible. Perhaps because of that milk and the raw eggs.
But there’s a very slow, creeping fear, too. I’ve been abandoned. They’ve left me here, they’ve gone back to the city, they’re gone.
MOTHER BEAN
Mother Bean had a green body and two little beans for eyes. We were really afraid of her. Don’t go into the bean patch, my grandma would holler when she saw us in the garden, or Mother Bean will come after you! We never did see her, but she was always in the back of our minds as we carefully skirted the rows planted with beans.
In the vineyard, on the other hand, lived Mother Vine, guarding her children. For that reason we didn’t dare trample through the rows, snitching grapes left and right.
Once my grandma caught us committing true genocide on a colony of red ants that was crawling across the paving stones in front of the house. Then we heard about Mother Ant for the first time, huge and with sharp claws yea big.
Everything had a mother, only we didn’t. We had grandmothers.
THE MINOTAUR SYNDROME
The 1970s. Our mothers were young, studying—first, second, third year, working—first, second, third shift. We were there in the empty apartments, ground floors, basements, lost in boredom and fear, roaming amid the vague anxieties of the one left on his own. Is there a Minotaur Syndrome?
I didn’t have fish, a cat, a turtle, or a parrot, because that was the last thing we needed, as my mother wisely noted. In any case, we were constantly moving to new rental apartments, awaiting the great day when we would receive an apartment of our own. The only thing I had was Laika, the dog, whose homeless soul was howling through the cosmos. And my brother, the Minotaur. They lived illegally in my five square meters of living space, invisible to my mother and father, and to the landlords.
A PRIVATE HISTORY OF THE 1980S
And then . . .
A History of Boredom in the 1980s needs to be written. This is the decade that produced the most boredom. The afternoon of the century.
When I heard the word “boredom” for the first time, I was six and felt anxious because I didn’t know what it was. You must be bored being alone all day, one of the neighbors, Auntie Pepa, said to me. I imagined it as a slight illness, some sort of malaise, like a stuffy nose, a cold, or an allergy to poplar fluff. That’s why I answered evasively: uh no, nothing’s wrong, I’m fine. Where I came from, boredom was unheard of, they never used the word. There was always something that needed doing, the animals would never let it take root, they would mow it down as soon as it cropped up. But here, in the town of T., it thrived everywhere. It shimmered like a haze above the hot asphalt, chipped away at the houses’ fading ochre, lulled the sunflower-seed hawker to sleep in the shade of the park, purred like a cat or brought on one of the deafening sneezing fits of Uncle Kosta from across the street.
Catalogue of Collections
Napkins
Empty packs of cigarettes
Matchboxes
Pins and stamps
Pocket calendars
Winking postcards
Wrappers from imported candies, paper and tinfoil
Wrappers from chocolate bars, paper and tinfoil
Gum wrappers (minus the gum)
Empty bottles of whiskey, cognac, Campari . . .
Clearly, the things in this collection are abandoned, empty, used up. Somebody has smoked Marlboro Reds and Rothmans Blues, eaten imported chocolate candies, chewed some gum, and downed a Metaxa brandy. Only a few bottles, boxes, and wrappers are left for us. The collectors of emptinesses and abandonments.
There’s my first cassette tape player, a Hitachi mono, we bought it from some Vietnamese people in exchange for my grandfather’s old
donkey. To the very end, my grandpa thought it was a bit like trading a horse for a chicken, as the saying goes. The horse being the donkey, and the chicken—the tape player.
Our history and literature textbooks—we got a kick out of adding finishing touches to the painfully familiar photographs inside. A moustache and a pirate’s skull cap on top of the general secretary of the communist party’s head, which was a round and bald as an egg. And on the poet-revolutionary Hristo Botev’s heroic face—may the gods of literature forgive me!—I drew round, John Lennon-style glasses. The glasses completely transformed the fearsome Botev into a slightly bewildered, bearded hippie of Bulgarian revolutions, which are as a rule unsuccessful.
The world was simple and ordered, simply ordered. On Wednesday—fish, on Friday—Russian TV.
In East German cowboy movies, the redskins were the good guys, the proletariat of sorts, since they were the reds.
The television listing for Monday, November 18, 1973 or 1983 (it’s not clear from the scrap of newspaper):
17:30 – Discussion of decisions made by the July Plenum of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party. 18:00 – News. 18:10 – For Pioneers: “The Little Drum.” 18:30 – “Children of the Circus,” a film. 19:00 – “Beautiful and Comfortable,” a program about economics. 19:20 – For the People’s Army: “At Attention with a Song,” concert. 19:40 – Advertisements. 19:45 – Melody of the Month. 19:50 – Good night, children! 20:00 – Around the World and At Home. 20:20 – Sports Screen. 20:30 – Televised theater: “Wedding Anniversary” by Jerzy Krasnicki. 21:40 – Winners of International Concerts. 22:00 – News.
I can’t explain why, but this listing always plunges me into melancholy. The last news at 10 P.M. and that’s it. Only sssssssssssssss and snowflakes after the national anthem.
Here’s the green canvas bag from the gasmask, filled with the exhausting fear of the atomic and neutron bombs, of air raid sirens being tested. I remember the bomb shelter under the school gym, where once a month we hid “on alert.” Ragged breathing in the dark, the back-up lighting generator that didn’t work anyway, the chaos, the scent of sweat and fear, the subsequent boasts of one fellow student who claimed to have “bombed,” i.e. grabbed the tits (in the jargon of the day, may it rest in peace) of our chemistry teacher in the dark—by accident, he had been aiming for a different target.