The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  Those people are most likely gone now. Only the coffee grounds remain. The new realism—new Noah’s arks from the already-old twentieth century . . .

  It was in the air. They all had a premonition of apocalypse in the late ’60s and ’70s, these new realists. Sometime around then, Christo started wrapping the world. As if getting ready to leave. Everything has to be packed up. We gather up our luggage, we take off. From the little wrapped rocking horse (his saddest work, in my opinion), to the bridge at Point Neuf. Come onnn, we’re moving ouuut . . . They’re going to knock down the house.

  MEMORIES OF MOVES

  I’ve known it ever since my childhood, because of our frequent moves from apartment to apartment, that strange feeling when objects are removed from everyday use, the chair is no longer a chair, the table is not a table, the bed has been taken apart. The dresser is nothing but drawers and wooden shelves. The books are stuffed into white plastic bags stamped “crystallized sea salt,” as if they were fish needing to be salted. I wonder if it will sting afterward when I page through them.

  You stand amid all that chaos, mooning about, you don’t know where to turn, the adults don’t either, they’re stressed out, waiting for the truck and smoking. Then everything is loaded up, but all of you are still fussing around, you don’t want to shut the door, your mother goes to check for the twentieth time to make sure you haven’t accidentally forgotten anything, your father has wandered off somewhere in the yard to water the two cherry trees and the rose bush, because who knows whether the new tenant will take care of them at all. I hug one of the cats, the other is hiding somewhere.

  Farewell.

  A new apartment.

  New farewells.

  The moves of my student years.

  Moving out after divorce.

  Moving to other countries.

  Coming back.

  A new apartment.

  A whole life can be told as a catalogue of moves.

  THE MOTHER CAPSULE

  After that exhibit, I go back home to my boxes and bags.

  At every moment (including this one), somebody is burying a time capsule somewhere. The trend peaked in 1999. Then there was a certain drop in interest. The apocalypse of 2000 didn’t come about. People were disappointed, which is understandable after all that waiting. In the meantime, Facebook cropped up, a new time capsule. Now you’re a half-human/half-avatar, a strange sort of Minotaur, no a Min-avatar. I got distracted there, that’s what Facebook does, it distracts.

  What I wanted to say was that of the tens of thousands of capsules being buried in the ground annually, over ninety percent will be lost forever. The people who have buried them forget, die, move. A mother-capsule needs to be created, which would contain the coordinates of all the capsules buried around the world. And so that its coordinates wouldn’t be forgotten, a special person needs to be hired whose only job is just that—to remember them.

  BUNDLE AND BOTTLE

  The unlikeliest things can turn out to be time capsules. The largest is surely the city of Pompeii, which was preserved under ash. I prefer the smaller ones, myself. Like the bottle of brandy my grandfather set aside the day I was born. That bottle must be forty-four years old now. If I find it and open it, I’ll have distilled the whole of 1968, at least for southeastern Bulgaria. The number of sunny days that summer, the early autumn rains, the humidity in the air, the quality of the soil, the vine diseases, the year’s whole history written inside a glass bottle.

  Or that bundle of clothes my grandma kept for “the end.” A kerchief, an apron, a cherry-red vest, wool socks for winter, or pantyhose—in case it’s summer—a pair of patent-leather shoes . . . A bundle to be opened on the day of her death. Even though she would open it every other day, to make sure moths hadn’t chewed holes in the clothes or simply to look at them. That’s a way of getting used to the idea of death, too. Once a month, she would put them on. She would replace her old black kerchief with the new one with its big, dark-red roses, her everyday brown woolen vest with the unworn red one, which had been given to her for some birthday. She would look at herself in the narrow rectangular mirror, bemoaning how pretty she had been back in the day, what a slender waist she had had. How can I show up there like this, she would cry. Only death awakened her vanity. More people were waiting for her there than here.

  . . . AND HEXAMETER

  The unlikeliest things can turn out to be . . . Hexameter, for example. If something is said in hexameter, then historically and practically speaking, it has an infinite expiration date. The whole of the Trojan War is preserved in the capsule of hexameter. If that story had been stuffed into any other form whatsoever, it would have given out, gone sour, gotten torn up, crumbled . . . Hexameter turned out to be the longest-lasting material.

  Hesiod, in his Works and Days, has left behind a true survival kit with instructions. If something happens to the world and people come who don’t know anything, thanks to this book they will learn which month is good for sowing, which for plowing, when a boar or a bellowing bullock or a hardworking donkey should be castrated.

  It also includes these favorite instructions:

  One should not urinate facing the sun while standing erect, but

  One should remember always to do it at sunset and sunrise.

  Nor should you piss on the path or next to the path when out walking;

  Nor should you do it when naked; nighttime belongs to the blessed.

  For everything, there should be a good book giving instructions. I add it to the box, too.

  BEES AND BATS

  At the end of every year I open up the boxes, carefully look through all the publications from January to December, sometimes that is precisely what fills up my days until New Year’s Eve, and I set aside only the most important things that need to be preserved . . .

  I have my own system for sorting.

  Often, the most important bits of news turn up on the pages of thin, irregular periodicals printed on cheap paper, such as Modern Beekeeper, Gardening Time, Houseplant Diseases, Taking Care of a Small Farm, Bull and Cow: Newspaper for the Novice Farmer, Home Veterinarian, All About Cats, and so on.

  Sometimes those five lines from the “Strange News from around the World” column can turn out to be important, especially when they’re describing the strange behavior of several colonies of bees in some remote North American town. The bees flew out of the hives in the morning and never came back. Now that’s what I call a sign and a revelation, even though nobody noticed it at the time. People don’t make the effort to read signs. They chalked up the bees’ mysterious disappearance to the Varroa destructor, the Varroa mite to be precise, also called the “vampire worm,” a tiny red tick that sinks its little hooks into the bee’s body. I wrote a letter to the newspaper, explaining that this was something else entirely, that this was only the beginning, I even quoted Einstein, people are impressed when they hear Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”

  They weren’t impressed.

  It seems to me that the year was 2004, the winter of 2004, yes. A whole two years had to pass before people figured out that this wasn’t some one-off case and that something strange was happening to all the bees around the world. Only in 2006 would those few lines from my beekeeping newspaper become front-page headlines in the New York Times, the Guardian and so on. And only then would they dub this strange disappearance of the most responsible and disciplined part of our holy family here on earth “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD). Hives are being deserted. One of the most domestic of creatures has lost its ability to find its way home, it gets lost and dies. Remember that diagnosis. Colony Collapse Disorder. The disintegration of the apian family . . . If this is happening to them, what is left for man and his unstable family? There’s more apocalypse in that than in all the other hocus-pocus. The bees are the first sign. The buzzing angels of the apocalypse. We’re expecting the trumpets of Jericho, but the only th
ing that can be heard is bzzzz . . . bzzzz . . . bzzzz . . . growing quieter and fading away. That’s the signal. Don’t you hear it? Just take out your iPod earbuds for a minute.

  And what do we know about White Nose Syndrome? White Nose Syndrome in bats. We haven’t even heard? No one counts dead bats. Look, if they were pigs or cows, everybody’d be worried. In 2006, ninety percent of the bat population in the caves around New York and San Francisco suddenly and somewhat inexplicably died . . . They stopped eating and hung comatose before finally flying out of the caves and falling to the ground outside with white noses . . . Small flying mice with white noses, miniature dead Batmans. I add this information to the box as well, it may turn out to be important.

  I gather for the sake of the one who is to come. For the post-apocalyptic reader, if we may agree to call him that. It’s not a bad idea to have a basic archive from the previous era. Today’s newspapers will then be historical chronicles. Which is a good future for them. And a fitting testimonial to an epoch quickly yellowing and fading in its final days.

  The newspaper is dated June 4, 2022. The headline is written in fat letters across the top: Strange Epidemic of Amnesia. And as a subtitle, in a smaller font: Colony Collapse Disorder in humans? The article reads more or less as follows:

  Rules and habits established over centuries are ceasing to work. We are seeing ever more cases in which people leave their homes in the morning to go to work, yet are in no state to find their way home in the evening.

  C. S. (39) had a normal morning, just like thousands of others before it. Toast, eggs and bacon, the big mug of coffee, joking around with the kids, kisses at the door, promises of the traditional family Monopoly game that evening . . . That evening, however, he didn’t come home. He never even reached his office. They found him by chance on the other side of the city, lost, his pant legs rolled up boyishly, walking down the street and kicking stones aimlessly. He didn’t remember having a wife and kids. He didn’t know his address. He claimed to be twelve.

  Even more inexplicable is the story of D. P. (33), a single mother, who, like every day, brought her kids to kindergarten. She dropped them off, kissed them, and promised to pick them up early that afternoon. A half-hour before the appointed time, the kids were already standing by the fence, dressed and ready to go, but their mother was late. The other parents started arriving. Finally only the two children and the teachers were left. It started getting dark, but no one came. They called the mother, but she didn’t answer her phone. The kids had to spend the night at the kindergarten. They found the mother three days later in a distant northern city. She was acting bizarre, according to the authorities, she resisted arrest, scratched one police officer’s face and taunted him with insults that had been popular twenty years ago, but which no one used anymore. This last detail is important, since to the question of how old she was, the woman, who was past 30, replied that she was in seventh grade. To the question of what she was doing in that city, she replied that she was on a class field trip. Of course, she couldn’t recall her kids or family. The newspaper’s own investigation revealed that the middle school where the mother had gone really had taken a field trip to that city twenty-nine years earlier.

  They forcibly returned the woman to her city and took her home, expecting that the familiar surroundings would immediately bring back her memory. She acted as if she were in some stranger’s home. She didn’t touch anything. She asked where the bathroom was. She didn’t recognize any of the clothes in her closet. When brought face-to-face with her own children, the psychologists could not detect any sign of recognition.

  For now there is no clear explanation for what is happening. Scholars are working on several parallel hypotheses. One of the most intriguing suggests that this is a case of sudden reactivation of past events for inexplicable reasons and the opening of personal parallel time corridors. A powerful invasion of the past. They suspect it may be due to misuse of “regression therapy” which has become fashionable recently and which is being practiced illicitly by an ever-growing number of self-declared therapists.

  SIGNS

  More than 2,000 dead blackbirds fall from the sky over a small town in Arkansas on January 1, 2011. The reasons for these mysterious deaths are unknown. The report is from January 3.

  Over the following days, reports of mysterious bird deaths start rolling in from various parts of the world—Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Hypotheses include a bird plague, secret experiments with chemical weapons by the American military and so on. The man who announced that he would uncover the truth, a former U.S. army general, is found dead in a garbage truck. More and more people believe that the dead birds falling from the sky are a clear sign of the Apocalypse.

  And on the coast of England, 40,000 dead crabs are discovered.

  V.

  THE GREEN BOX

  THE EAR OF THE LABYRINTH

  It hadn’t happened to me in a long time . . . I was looking through newspapers from 2010 and I ran across a short report, probably forgotten and buried by the incoming news from the following day. But for me it turned out to be one of those exceptional events that launched me back into that forgotten “embedding” . . . Something I haven’t experienced in years.

  BULL LEAPS INTO CROWD, INJURING 40

  AT A BULLFIGHT, THE ANIMAL IS KILLED.

  Thursday, August 19, 2010, Tafalla

  Forty people were injured in an unusual incident in Spain. The accident took place during a bullfight. The bull, which had just been led into the arena, looked around, then swiftly leapt over the barrier and began attacking the crowd. The unfortunate incident occurred in the city of Tafalla. The panic-stricken spectators tried to run away, but were hampered by the amphitheater seating. The infuriated animal lunged at various groups of terrified spectators. The toreador tried to hold the bull back by pulling its tail. It took a whole fifteen minutes to get the situation under control. In the end, they were forced to shoot the bull.

  An amphitheater, of course, is a labyrinth. One of the most commonly found circular labyrinths, made of concentric circles intersected by transverse corridors. The bull lifted its gaze and recognized the Labyrinth—the ancestral home of his great-grandfather, the Minotaur. And since animals have no sense of time (just as children do not), the Bull saw his ancestral home and recognized the Minotaur within himself. He remembered all the days and nights . . . no, wait, that’s human language, there were no days there, he recalled only that endless night, a sum of all the nights in the world. Once again, he remembered the only two faces he had ever known. His mother’s face, as she held him in her lap. The most beautiful face he had ever seen. The face he had come closest to. And the second face—that of his killer. Also beautiful. Human faces.

  Now his killer (likely a distant relative of Theseus) was standing down in the arena, in the center of the labyrinth. It wasn’t the fact that the scene would repeat itself and he would once again experience the softness and vulnerability of his body, that sacred softness and vulnerability that only proved his essential humanity, no, it wasn’t that that caused him to do what he did. There was something else. The sudden realization that if his killer was standing before him, then his mother’s face must be somewhere nearby as well. Up there in the audience. Those two faces went together. The scene repeats itself. The labyrinth twists and turns back not only space. Time has coiled up, swallowed its own tail and if something can happen, can be changed, now is the moment.

  I turn my back on the killer, clench all my muscles, and clear the barrier. Like a lost child, I see my mother in the crowd and race toward her, nothing can stop me now. If only I could press my face against hers again. If only I could snuggle up to her. I’m three. And I’m looking for my mother. Some other people are screaming and falling at my feet, but they’re not my mother. I’ll recognize her. I just hope I don’t miss her, that she hasn’t already left. Just a little farther, just a little farther. Now there’s one who looks like her, but it’s not her. What about that one? No
. No. The howl that escapes from the cave of my throat is terrifying. The only word that in all languages—those of humans, animals and monsters—is one and the same:

  Moooooooooom . . .

  The labyrinth of the amphitheater catches that cry, ricochets it between the walls of its corridors, diverts it toward the dead-ends, cuts it off, and sends it back slightly distorted to the labyrinth of the human ear like an endless

  Mooooooooo . . .

  And there’s the switch. The tiniest of switches. The labyrinth has turned that short “o” into a long “ooh.” If man had only known that it was the same word, that very same “Mooooom” . . . the history of the world and history of the death (I wouldn’t be surprised if they turned out to be one and the same story) would be different.

  A terrified creature is looking for its mother. Human or animal—the word is the same.

  But the myth is repeatable and the death of the Minotaur has to happen again. Before finding his mother, before snuggling up in her lap, before returning to her womb, that most primordial, soft, and pulsating of caves. Because that would already be another (unacceptable) myth.

  Death catches up with him right when he seems to have caught sight of a familiar shoulder and locks of hair hurrying away. It’s the first time they kill him that way. From a distance. Without a sword or a spear. Without seeing his killer’s face.

  WITHOUT A FACE

  Without seeing his killer’s face. If a General History of Murder exists, which includes not only historical events, but also murders in mythology, as well as in all legends, rumors, and novels, it would be clear what a warm and human act it is—to be face-to-face with the one who will kill you. Cruel, yes, but cruel on a human scale. Death comes from another person, with a specific body, hand, face. A face we can only appreciate today, when murder has become dehumanized, if we allow ourselves to borrow that notion. This is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps dating back several centuries to the invention of gunpowder, a trifling span of time.