The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  Afterward, I had to pay for the window.

  I’d better get out of here quick. I’d better be someone else. Someone else, somewhere else.

  EMPTY SPACE

  If you turn to the back pages of the European newspaper you’re reading, there, on the map showing the weather forecast, you’ll see an empty space—between Istanbul, Vienna and Budapest.

  The saddest place in the world, as the Economist called it in 2010 (I clipped out the article), as if there is truly a geography of happiness.

  I wrote about this for a newspaper. An innocent piece, which stirred up a backlash on the Internet, and I received threats—the first since I had started publishing. (No one wants to be told he doesn’t exist . . .) I didn’t take the hint. I wrote a few more pieces, more ironic than anything else, about the fact that 1968 never happened here. About how we don’t exist, how we’re so nonexistent that we have to do something really over-the-top to be noticed, like Georgi Markov being jabbed with a poisoned umbrella on a bridge in London. To get mixed up in hazy dealings with Turkish terrorists, an assassination attempt on the Pope that later, proof or no proof, will be called “the Bulgarian connection.” To steal Charlie Chaplin’s dead body, to hold his corpse hostage. The Internet forum was already abuzz with threats, the mildest of which was that I’d be trailing my guts out behind me like a beat-up dog. I still didn’t pay much attention, dismissing them as the work of anonymous nutcases with inferiority complexes. One night the telephone rang, the message was brief, but it was no longer just about me, they knew exactly what to do. That was the final straw, I decided to drop everything, take my daughter and leave.

  Somewhere else, somewhere else . . .

  ADVICE FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

  Your bile is stagnant, you see sorrow in everything, you are drenched in melancholy, my friend the doctor said.

  Isn’t melancholy something from previous centuries? Isn’t there some vaccine against it yet, hasn’t medicine taken care of it yet? I ask.

  There’s never been as much melancholy as there is today, the doctor said with a throaty laugh. They just don’t advertise it. It’s not marketable, melancholy doesn’t sell. Imagine an ad for a slow, melancholic Mercedes, S-class. But getting back to the point, I’ll recommend something to you that you’ll say is straight out of the nineteenth century: travel, stir up your blood, give your eyes new sights, go south . . .

  That sounds pretty Chekhovian, doctor.

  Well, Chekhov knew what to do, after all he wasn’t just some ignorant writer, but a doctor, the doctor laughed.

  He’s right, of course. I had exhausted my personal reserves of meaning. The doctor read a lot, I’m sure that he secretly writes stories similar to those of his mentor, Chekhov. What I really love him for is the fact that he has never taken advantage of the opportunity to foist them on me.

  I’d better travel, I’d better travel . . .

  AS A BEGINNING AND END: BERLIN

  Eighty percent of Bulgarians had not

  left their native country before 1989.

  . . .

  Being abroad is like being in space, a woman I know said as I was preparing to leave, you don’t age as quickly there. When you get back, we’ll already be little old ladies, while you’ll still be forty-something. How awful, I thought to myself then, to still be young, when the women you thought were hot have grown old.

  What was in the beginning? Not the chicken, not the egg, nor the darkness upon the face of the deep . . . Now, in the middle of my empty and unorganized room, I look for something to write in. There’s that damn notebook. Seen from the outside, the moment is solemn, a new life in a new and unknown city. Which words are fitting, the first words for such a moment? I hurry so as not to forget them.

  Bread, apples, toothbrush, honey, mouse, corkscrew . . .

  In the beginning was the list.

  The first night under the oppressively high ceilings of a Berlin apartment. I lay there, remembering all the ceilings and all the rooms of my life.

  The St. Matthias Cemetery in Schöneberg, near the Turkish market. On the one side the vendors’ shouts—kilo-euro, kilo-euro . . . Buyurunuz! Here you are. On the other side, a few yards away, the absolute silence of the walkways and the dead under the grass.

  My father, whom I took with me for a few months, never managed to get used to the size of the apartment and asked to sleep in the kitchen, the smallest room. He never managed to get used to the size of Berlin, either. The only place he wanted me to take him was that Turkish market and the cemetery next to it.

  There he could always exchange a few “Bulgarian” words like arkadaş (friend), çok selam (many greetings), aferim (bravo), mashallah (bravo), evallah (bravo again) . . . and to buy himself some “Bulgarian” cheese and a roll. Afterward, he would sit on a bench in the cemetery across the way, where the dead didn’t speak German anymore, so he could chat with them a bit and throw crumbs to the pigeons. I would leave him there in the morning and go pick him up in the evening.

  I would bike around the afternoons of Grunewald. Huge, heavy houses. Another time, another Germany. A monolith that has weathered catastrophes.

  You don’t come to Berlin for fun. In February 1918, the Bulgarian poet Geo Milev came here to patch up his shattered head and stayed a whole year. Auden arrived in Berlin in 1928, driven here by despair. Eliot came here to lick his wounds, after his first book had been rejected. Russian emigrants, fleeing the revolution, settled here in Charlottenburg. When the elderly writer Angelika Schrobsdorff was asked why she left her cozy home in Israel at such an advanced age to come live in Berlin, her withering answer was: “Who said I was coming here to live?” And to be maximally clear, she added: “Berlin is a more comfortable place to die.”

  One day, while we were poking around the Olympic Stadium, two German officers in Nazi uniforms suddenly jumped out in front of us. We were startled, then we spotted the camera behind them. They were shooting a film. One of the assistant directors signaled to us to quietly slip away, but Aya started bawling at the top of her lungs and the stadium resounded with her screams. Cut! Cinema’s whole machinery fell silent. For a few minutes, World War II was subject to a compulsory lull.

  And since things happen simultaneously, I imagined how precisely in those two minutes during that battle in Hungary, a woman took advantage of the inexplicable lull in military operations to go out onto the street and drag a wounded soldier into her home.

  What remains in the end—a wintry Berlin day in a high-ceilinged room, almost empty, on the edge of Charlottenburg, a sense of emptiness, monumentalism and minimalism. Here, where Arvo Pärt lived for a year, I’m now listening to his “Für Alina,” every note breaks away, circles around the empty room, you can hold it in your hand before it disappears. Aya will take her first steps in this room, here she’ll say her first word: Nein.

  What else. The sky above Berlin, the saddest bakery in the world at the very end of Kurfürstendamm with wedding cakes that nobody buys, Savignyplatz’s autumn with its leaves falling endlessly over the pizzeria, the lakes of Grunewald, the glass dome of the Reichstag set ablaze by the sunset, the early dusk of November, the widows of Wilmersdorf who survived the air raids, exhausted from the peacetime they must die in, the late autumnal crocuses along Halensee, the Chinese women selling tulips in the subway, Christmas Eve, when we leave the table uncleared following some custom, so that our dead can come and eat their fill. Anxiousness over whether they’ll find the way, and consolation in the fact that even if the place is different, the heavens are not.

  I did everything possible to make a life for us there, but my melancholy, instead of scattering, only deepened. I grew ever gloomier and more withdrawn. In such moments I wanted to spare others my presence—my daughter most of all. I started accepting all sorts of literary invitations, even for second-rate festivals and residencies in other countries and cities . . . Before I left, she gave me her favorite dinosaur. I’ve always kept it with me.

  I imagin
e how some day in the future, when she is telling stories to her own children, she’ll start with the line: “My father and the dinosaurs disappeared at the same time . . .” which is a good beginning, or rather, end.

  GLOBAL AUTUMN

  Now here I am. Following an autumn all over Europe. In the beginning a chestnut tree in Berlin fell just a few feet from me, then several fall leaves slowly fluttered down in Warsaw, enough to set fire to all of Europe, I watched it landing over Normandy, I walked beneath the seemingly ablaze (or rusting) chestnuts of Sibiu, stood stunned before a burning blackberry bush in Wrocław, walked in the buffeting wind in Gent and watched the endless November rains through the windows of an attic room in Graz.

  Cities that look empty at three in the afternoon

  Graz

  Turin

  Dresden

  Bamberg

  Topolovgrad

  Edirne

  Mantua

  Helsinki

  Cabourg

  Rouen

  The wounded Jesus from Caen, Normandy, in the church knocked askew by the bombings in 1944. All that’s left of him is his head with the crown of thorns, his wooden torso is scorched, his arms blown off by shells. He has no legs.

  The marble Jesus with a shattered right hand in the half-destroyed church on Ku’Damm.

  Europe’s maimed Jesuses.

  The small towns of Normandy gasping under the historical shell of their own past, of fortresses and cathedrals. A dozen centuries ago, they were grand; now they are provincial. There’s a cause for historical melancholy for you. The only thing left for them is to nobly bear both their fame and their oblivion. Falaise is a town of 8,000 with an enormous chateau and fortress wall. The birthplace of the man known as William the Conqueror to some and William the Bastard to others. After seven o’ clock the town is deserted, I almost said “devastated.” It smells of hay and herbs. No fortress wall can stop the merciless cavalry of the hours.

  Rouen. First scents. Of lilies . . . strong and devout along the city’s abbey. And immediately a memory of my grandma’s house, the lilies at the back of the yard, on the way to the outhouse. Everything seen is projected somewhere there, in the lost country of childhood. The ideal city lies there, the heavenly city, which has already happened to us, and in all of our later wanderings, we can only note its likenesses—sometimes more felicitous, sometimes not. The second scent I add to the catalogue is that of urine, again here by the cathedral. The homeless people who sleep nearby are already gathering up their cardboard bedding.

  Alone, I stroll through the Saturdays and Sundays of the world, which is always very family-oriented on those days. And everyone is laughing, they’re laughing, it’s unbelievable. With the lightness of laughter that takes pleasure in life. Laughter for no visible reason. Not throaty, obliterating, sardonic or hysterical laughter. Rather the laughter of lightness that you’re enjoying a nice day, rolling around in the meadows of the world with other people rolling around carefree.

  In one edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, I saw a picture of the already elderly Horkheimer at some celebration at Frankfurt University in distant 1952. A round face, grinning awkwardly, holding a carnival stick with a paper ball hanging from its end. As if the aging philosopher was feeling slight guilt at having been swept up in the festivities and some fear that, at any moment, his friend Adorno would appear and give him a stern and judgmental look. Hey, I’m not even enjoying myself, the grinning Horkheimer from the photo seems to be saying in his defense. And please let that be taken as an extenuating circumstance mitigating my guilt.

  The best thing about provincial European museums of fine arts is that they do not show us the high points—despite the fact that they all have a Renoir or two, a Monet, and, of course, a Picasso, who keeps the whole museum industry afloat—but they do show us the intensity of a life without geniuses. The art of good, second-string paint-slingers, who, to be frank, are more interesting to me now. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were swarming with artists who didn’t stand much of a chance.

  I stood for a long time, disconsolate, in front of a painting by Tilborch, “Banquet Villageois.” Feasting peasants, captured at the very end of the celebration, breaking up into groups. Such sorrow, coming up from below . . . the deep sorrow of the belly. The stomach is sated, yet joy has not come in any case, or has already departed. Sorrow from the seventeenth century.

  Directional signs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen

  ROMANTISME

  IMPRESSIONISME

  NATURALISME

  CUBISME

  TOILETTES

  As I make the rounds of the world’s museums, I seem to meet one and the same group of old men shuffling stiffly and fragile old women with white hair, curious in their late meeting with the world’s art. At first, I used to think how tragically late this group is. Then I slowly began to realize, drawing nearer to their stiffness and fragility, that the meeting was right on time. From the eternity of the old masters toward another eternity—such a smooth transition.

  I’m standing on a square in Pisa, looking at faces. I’ll never get tired of it. After the hunger for faces which I experienced in those basements and ground-floor apartments and lonely afternoons, I find the human face our creator’s greatest accomplishment.

  People have gotten more beautiful. No, it’s not just another sign that I’m getting old. Or at least, it’s not only that. People really have gotten more beautiful. The women in particular, of course. Especially the women.

  Rome—an abandoned city. Sunday.

  I will add these to the list of cities’ first scents: asphalt melted by the sun in the late afternoon (a scent from childhood), the heavy scent of roses and a hint of rot. If something in nature can be pushed to the point of kitsch (since culture has done its fair share on that front), it’s the rose. The city is full of roses. Is it to cover up all the death that has accumulated throughout the centuries? All graveyards smell like roses.

  The sunset on this day will catch me on a hill, in the garden of a monastery founded by the Knights of Malta, with oranges rotting on the grass and ravens pecking at the fruit’s flesh. Momentary epiphanies, which will disintegrate in the next instant. Which raises their value a hundredfold. For a few minutes, the sunset of the Roman Empire and the sunset over the Roman Empire mean one and the same thing. The nocturnal barbarians can be heard, racing along on their Vespas and Piaggios.

  You don’t quite connect with some cities, just like you don’t quite connect with certain women. You meet them either too early or too late. Everything is set for your meeting, but some random whim makes you suddenly turn down some other street.

  And Sunday again, all the Sundays in the world, in the morning, somewhere in Europe . . .

  The bells wake me up and, half-asleep, I try to guess exactly where I am. I recall all the mornings in the world, starting like this, chanting the rosary of cities and towns—Graz, Prague, Regensburg, Vienna, Zagreb . . .

  Every place has a small square, a cathedral and a hotel behind it, just one bell’s ring away. I look around the room. It’s Ljubljana, as the thick green folder of Hotel Union confirms, with its gold Secession-style inscription reading “1907”—the year it opened. The bells are ringing, some gentle, bright force hurries me to get dressed and go down to the street. Bells and the body likely have some very old conversation of their own tied to all the joys and sorrows, weddings and deaths, fires and uprisings, floods and parades that bells announced over centuries past. Run out onto the street as soon as you hear them. I mingle with the crowd, trying to dissolve into it, obliterating my own identity. Now, I tell myself, I am only here, in this city, on this square, with these people, on this Saturday or Sunday. I want to be a part of all this, to enter the cathedral humbly, to cross myself at the entrance, sometimes I do it Orthodox-style, sometimes Catholic-style, I don’t know which one is more proper, forgive me, O Lord, I pick up the hymnal, open it up to some page, I don’t understand the words, I listen to the
singers’ voices, the organ’s response, is that what God’s voice would sound like, full, warm and stern all at the same time. I feel protected and calm, a part of everything. Except with a slight feeling of sinfulness that I’ve tasted only one day, not even a full day, but only a single morning of a life that doesn’t belong to me.