by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
None of us made fun of Chingachook afterward; on the contrary, we admired his courage in a world that didn’t give a shit about you. Especially if you’re a kid in third grade.
The epilogue to this story is far more depressing. Strolling around the town of T. now, years later, I came across a carnival shooting gallery. I could have sworn that it was the same trailer from my childhood, faded and rusted out. Even the rifles were the same, the butts were just more worn than ever. This had once been the most magical place for us. Only here could we see all the foreign treasures that were otherwise locked away (I now know that they came from Yugoslavia). It was an Ali Baba’s cave with candy cigarettes, color postcards of Gojko Mitić, Claudia Cardinale, Brigitte Bardot, pocket calendars of naked women, decks of cards, pictures of a woman who would wink at you, depending on which angle you looked at her from, pens with a boat floating inside it, scented Chinese erasers, pistol-shaped cigarette lighters, cap guns, leather belts with huge metal buckles, Elvis Presley pins, Eiffel Tower key chains, old calendars with the whole Levski soccer team, glass canes full of colorful candy, sparklers, leather cowboy hats, plastic holsters, glass balls of every size and color, Bakelite ballerinas, porcelain Little Red Riding Hoods complete with a wolf . . . This whole porcelain-plastic kitsch emporium, which, I repeat, was once priceless to us, now looked run down and defeated. In every store, you could now see far greater treasures (and far greater kitsch). Right in front stood those brown, poorly molded Indians with their tomahawks, bows, spears, horses, and so on, which we would have given our right arms for back then. I went over to the trailer and suddenly recognized in the man behind the counter the once-proud Chingachook, aged and paunchy, calling out to a group of kids who were passing by unimpressed. The film was over.
I didn’t say anything to him, I stepped back into the shadows of the chestnuts across the way and stayed there, watching. A short while later, a boy of around fifteen, most likely his son, came up to the trailer; they exchanged a few words and Chingachook left. I waited a bit, then went over to the boy. I paid for ten shots, picked one of the two rifles, and started shooting at the walnuts. With the first shot it became clear that the rifle’s aim was off a few centimeters to the left. That old trick used in all shooting galleries, it downright warmed my heart.
“This rifle’s aim is off,” I said.
“Well uh, no, it shouldn’t be,” the boy blushed. “Try the other one.”
“No, no, I’ve already figured out how far this one is off,” I laughed. I broke a few walnuts, then took aim at the wolf that was hot on the rabbit’s trail, then at the prince, who bowed and kissed the princess.
“Pick a prize, sir,” the boy said, after I’d put the rifle back in its place.
I asked how much the Indians cost, I picked up a squatting brave shooting a bow and arrow, another on horseback, I caressed their edges, looking them over like a connoisseur. The boy stood there, staring in disbelief. I was surely the first one who had shown any interest in them. When I said that I wanted to buy all the Indians, he looked frightened. He didn’t know what his dad would say, he was really attached to them. But they are for sale, aren’t they, I asked more sharply. Yes, of course, they’re for sale, the boy replied, looking around helplessly for his father. How much? The price, of course, was laughable. Look, here’s what we’ll do, I said, I’ll pay for all of them, but only take half. I’ll leave the others for your dad. And tell him not to give them away so cheap. They’ve got added value from the past. I’m not sure he understood me.
“Are you a collector?” The boy asked, while handing me the cheap plastic bag full of Indians.
“You could say that.”
“Leave me a name or stop by again, I’m sure my dad would be happy to meet you. Nobody around here cares about Indians.”
“Tell your father ‘hello,’” I replied, walking away.
“What’s your name?” The boy called after me.
I took a few more steps, I was under no obligation to answer, I could pretend that I hadn’t heard him. Yet I turned around.
“Swift-Footed Stag is my Indian name.” I waved and disappeared around the corner.
Side Corridor
Blind Man’s Bluff. The easiest way to make a labyrinth—you just put on a blindfold and start walking. Suddenly the world is turned upside-down, the room you knew so well is different. A true labyrinth in which you stumble into things, get hurt, move about with moans and groans. It now occurs to me that this would be the Minotaur’s favorite game.
When we were kids, my female cousins and I made a pact that no matter how old we got and how much we changed, even if we had kids of our own and become bigwigs or total losers, we would get together on one particular day every year to play Blind Man’s Bluff. Until we really do go blind, they laughed. Those accidental brushes while trying to catch someone in the dark, the drawn-out process of recognition through touch were part of the innocent eroticism of that game. We played for the last time sometime toward the end of college. I only remember that I stumbled into the giant cactus in the living room and was pulling out needles for the next two days.
Juliet in Front of the Movie Theater
This is probably my third outing at most since I’ve been here.
I’m walking slowly down the dusky streets, meeting people whose faces mean nothing to me. Sullen, tired, expressionless. The early October twilight falls quickly, the scent of roasted peppers hangs in the air, everyone has gone home for dinner, I can hear lines from (one and the same) television show. I pass by the town movie theater, which has long since forgotten the scent of film reels. And suddenly behind me, a female voice spits out in a single breath: “Hi, hi . . . what are you up to? I’m leaving . . . Okay, goodbye . . . I won’t be back anytime soon . . .”
A tongue-twister, followed by strange, soundless laughter. It was so unexpected that it really did make me jump. By the time I had summoned up a reply, even though there was clearly no need to do so, the woman had already passed me by. Juliet, crazy Juliet! I recognized her from behind, slightly stooped and always rushing. The same old-fashioned pink suit she’d worn for as long as I could remember, with big cloth buttons and a drooping hat like the Queen of England’s.
Juliet from my childhood, Alain Delon’s fiancée, who was always hanging around the local movie theater, they let her in for free, and she knew all the films by heart.
Once as a child, when I still possessed that ability in spades, I sensed the whole cacophony inside her. As if she herself were made of movie scenes, slightly blurred and changing at breakneck speed. Runaway trains swooped down on me, along with horses, amorous shivers, a few merciless kicks to the gut, faces, lines, a punch in the nose, low-flying planes, off-the-cuff remarks, sorrow, and euphoria . . . I slipped back out exhausted and dazed.
Blissful over her “romance” with Alain Delon, she was always explaining how he would come get her from T. to take her directly to Paris, par avion. She was illiterate and was constantly looking for someone to help her write letters to her beloved. Since I, too, was often hanging around the movie theater and was one of the few who didn’t mock her, I became her go-to letter-writer, a local Cyrano de Bergerac. They all began with “To my heart’s true love, Alain,” then obligatorily moved on to a short critique of his latest film, with a detailed explanation of how she had deciphered all the signs he was sending her from the screen. Sometimes, she would allow herself brief, jealous admonitions, for example to watch out for that young Anne Parillaud, as well as for that ditzy M. D. (I silently replaced “ditzy” with “ritzy”) . . . The letters always ended with assurances that she, Juliet, was ready, she didn’t have much luggage and was waiting for him, so why didn’t he drop her a line or two to let her know when he would be coming to get her? He could find her every afternoon in front of the movie theater. I would put the letter in an envelope, write “Alain Delon, Paris” on it, and she herself would drop it into the yellow mailbox. The return address was invariably “The Town of T., Jul
iet, in front of the movie theater.” Clearly, these addresses only underscored the fame of both correspondents. Known to the world and to their town.
One day, however, the miracle of miracles occurred and Juliet received a letter from Alain Delon. Someone had left it at the box office of the movie theater. The fact that the postmark on the envelope bore the name of the neighboring city and that the letter was written in Bulgarian were negligible details. I had the honor of being its first reader. Juliet no longer trusted anyone else.
“My dear Juliet,” the local wags had written, with all of their small-town cruelty, “I get your letters regularly and I was forced to learn Bulgarian so I would be able to write back to you. I don’t always manage to reply, because I’m swamped with work and women, but I don’t pay any attention to the women due to my eternal devotion to you, my dearest child, my darling fiancée. Never stop waiting for me, gather up your dowry, be sure to throw in a swimsuit, I’ll swing by T. to take you directly to Sardinia. Your ever-loving, Delon.”
They had reeled her in like a sardine, but she was darting around in such joy that I didn’t have the heart to insist that the letter was a forgery. She snatched the envelope out of my hands and stuffed her nose into it, as if trying to catch a whiff of Delon’s cologne, then she hugged me, tucked the letter in her bosom and set off to make the rounds of the city, mad with happiness, spreading the good news and saying her goodbyes.
Now nothing could shake her certainty that Delon would come, and she spent all her afternoons in front of the movie theater with a shabby little bag holding her dowry and swimsuit. Years passed, the movie theater closed down in the ’90s, Delon himself grew mercilessly old, but Juliet never missed an afternoon, hanging around the agreed-upon place. I’ve rummaged through my personal archives and old newspapers from those days, I can’t find any pictures or any sign of her, the town’s sole aristocrat. Her brother, Downtown Gosho, had wrested the title of town madman from her, what inequality in madness as well! Gosho himself, good-natured and harmless, was found drowned, entangled in the reeds of the Tundzha River. From the surviving picture of him, which I include here, we can reconstruct a bit of his sister Juliet’s luminous face as well.
Let me add Juliet’s story to the time capsule that is this book. One day, Delon, old and forgotten, will learn that every afternoon in the town of T. for forty years (here Penelope shrinks in shame), a woman has been waiting for him in front of the long-defunct local movie theater with all her luggage in a small bag.
AN OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE 1980S
In 1981, Bulgaria turned 1,300 years old. For two years running, we watched herds of galloping proto-Bulgarians and hordes of barbaric Slavs hidden in the bogs, breathing through hollow reeds like snorkels. Everybody had a friend or relative who was an extra in the crowd scenes in those historic epic films. Rumors flew about proto-Bulgarians with digital watches that carelessly appeared in some of the shots. At that time, digital watches were a big hit, to the delight of the Vietnamese wheeler-dealers we bought them from on the black market; you couldn’t just take them off and leave them lying around somewhere. In a certain sense, the 1,300th anniversary passed like a film premiere. The true events of 1981, the ones we hadn’t prepared for, were something else entirely.
Mehmet Ali Ağca shot the pope. Bulgaria was mixed up in it somehow and we all stood glued to our TV sets. Nothing brings a small nation together like the feeling that everyone is against it.
Bulgaria was not directly involved in the other important event. In December, we heard about AIDS for the first time. Which, in 1981, officially put an end to the ’60s. All sexual revolutions were called off for health reasons. Since they had never really started here in Bulgaria, we didn’t take their end as anything particularly tragic.
Brezhnev died the very next year. Did this have anything to do with the AIDS epidemic? I doubt it. It was a November day, cheerless and dreary, it was raining. They announced the news at school, the teachers looked more scared than sad. Yes, fear was stronger than grief. Who will protect us now? Classes were cancelled for the day. The next day, they brought the television set from the teachers’ lounge out into the corridor and made us line up at attention to watch the funeral, in all of its dismal detail: the massive coffin heaped with flowers, the slow marches that echoed throughout the whole school. They had cranked up the volume to the max. The youngest kids, who were right in front of the television, looked on in bewilderment—it was most likely the first time they had seen a dead person. And so we confronted death head-on, in a cold school corridor, forcing ourselves to sniffle a bit for a person who had meant nothing to us. I was twelve and had kissed a girl for the first time the day before, albeit it in the dark during a game of spin-the-bottle at a birthday party. First kiss, first death.
That marked the beginning of the end. Soviet general secretaries started dying off every year or two, like an epidemic. The ritual was already worked out. School would be called off for a day. The next day, we would watch the funeral in the school hallway and the class presidents would cry, while those of us in the back rows would peg each other with rice launched from pens-turned-blow-darts. After so much repetition, death no longer made such an impression on us.
In fact, the whole period I was in puberty can be briefly described through the prism of the complex political context of the ’80s.
First kiss (with a girl).
Brezhnev dies.
Second kiss (different girl).
Chernenko dies.
Third kiss . . .
Andropov dies.
Am I killing them?
First fumbling sex in the park.
Chernobyl.
A long half-life of exponential decay ensues.
YELLOW SUBMARINE
After numerous, careful listens to “Yellow Submarine,” recorded in 1968, you can discover an encoded call to revolution, a conspiratorial message from the Beatles to the youth of Bulgaria. In the middle of the song (precisely one minute and 35 seconds from the beginning) in the background noise you can clearly hear the phrase “pusni mi verigata” or “let go of my chain,” with the accent on the “u,” uttered very quickly in impeccable Bulgarian. Just like that: pusnimiverigata. Unfortunately, we decoded it far too late, in the mid ’80s, when all was already lost.
We all live in a . . . tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm . . . tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm . . . tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm
We all live in a . . . tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm . . . tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm . . . tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm
But no Yellow Submarine ever passed by the Yellow House.
FOUR SECONDS FROM THE ’90S
I saw myself in a three-minute video from November 3, 1989, the only surviving one as far as I know, despite all the cameras that were there. For four seconds, I was twenty years old. Four long seconds, which gave me time to remember everything. God, how skinny and ridiculous I was, with my bulging Adam’s apple, hair hanging in my eyes, my jacket, as cheap as only a student’s could be. And there’s Gaustine, too, the only shots of him, he never let himself be photographed. We’re constantly looking around, curiosity and fear. It was the first protest rally in Bulgaria in forty years. Seen from today, the protest was completely harmless in its demands: stop some hydro-project from polluting the Rila Mountains. But the Wall hadn’t fallen yet, nor had the regime in Bulgaria. I noticed the plainclothes people with cameras, who definitely weren’t from the news station. Secret service agents use a different filming technique, they zoom in on individual faces so that they can be identified. Thanks to that I can be seen up-close for a whole four seconds. The cameraman overdid it a bit. Here and there I catch sight of familiar faces, a few people from the university, a poet. Their faces are anxious, their bodies tense, ill-at-ease, our clothes are almost identical, badly cut, mass-produced. Yes, unlike the ’60s, which were truly sexy, colorful, they knew how to dress, the ’80s, like communism as a whole, came to an ugly end.
Look, now on the recording you can see the plainclothes agents bursting in,
driving a wedge in the rally to cause chaos. We spot them, my friend and I exchange a few words, then I turn my head to the right, directly toward the camera that is filming me. That happens during the third second. I try to enlarge the frame, but the recording is too grainy. By the fourth second, I’m already gone.
So I don’t forget . . .
From a bookstore on Vitosha Boulevard, I stole the book What to Cook During a Crisis, so I could give it to the girl I was living with at the time. We didn’t have anything to eat in our apartment besides two cans of beans, food aid from the Swiss Army’s supplies, already past their expiration date. We would sit down in the evenings with the stolen cookbook.
What should we whip up for dessert?
Well, what do you say to pear cake?
We would open up to page 146, where the cake recipe was, and would start to read slowly, savoring the taste of every word. We would add half a cup of honey to the butter melted in a pan. We would carefully separate the egg yolks from the whites. We would then mix the yolks with half of the sugar, plus the oil, milk, flour, and baking powder. We would stir the ingredients very well with a wire hand mixer and pour them into the greased pan. We would put the pan in the oven and bake it until golden-brown. We didn’t have any of the abovementioned things, except the pan, the oven, and the wire hand mixer. But we got so into it that afterward, you could see traces of flour on our hands.
