The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  Now I know. I don’t want to relive any of the so-called events from my own life—not that first event of being born, nor the last one which lies ahead, both are uncozy. Just as every arrival and departure can be uncozy. Nor do I want to relive my first day of school, my first time having fumbling sex with a girl, nor my joining the army, nor my first job, nor that ostentatious wedding reception, nothing . . . none of that would bring me joy. I would trade them all, along with a heap of photos of them, for that afternoon when I’m sitting on the warm steps in front of our house, having just woken up from my afternoon nap, I’m listening to the buzzing of the flies, I’ve dreamed about that girl again who never turns around. My grandfather moves the hose in the garden and the heavy scent of late summer flowers rises. Nothing is determined, nothing has happened to me yet. I’ve got all the time in the world ahead of me.

  In the small and the insignificant—that’s where life hides, that’s where it builds its nest. Funny what things are left to twinkle in the end, the last glimmer before darkness. Not the most important things, nor . . . there’s no way for them even to be written down or told. The sky of memory opens for that minute as dusk falls on that winter day in a distant city, when I am eighteen and have miraculously been left alone for a minute or two, crossing the army base’s enormous parade grounds. A parenthetical note for those who have never been soldiers: you’re never left with a free minute, that’s the way it’s set up. A soldier with free time on his hands is nothing but trouble, that’s what they say. I’ve trimmed the grass around the parade grounds all day with a nail clipper—those were my orders. I’ve carried stones from one pile to another. In the morning. Then in the afternoon I’ve returned the stones to their original place. At first you don’t get it, you think the world has gone mad, you don’t find that even in Kafka. But the majors don’t read Kafka, to say nothing of the sergeants. You’ve come here directly from literature, you’re carrying Proust in your gasmask bag. Hey, Proust, get over here double-quick! Hit the ground! Twenty push-ups!

  Anyway, that moment when I was left alone on the enormous parade grounds under an empty sky, amid the cold air saturated with the first scent of winter, of wood and coal smoke sneaking in from the nearby village, the falling dusk and anticipations, alone for the first time, somewhere else for the first time, slight cold fear, cold clouds. And precisely that meeting of hopelessness and anticipation (my year in the army had only just begun), mixed with an endless sky, strange and beautiful, beautiful in a strange way, made that minute eternal. I knew that it couldn’t be retold.

  Of course, I could list off several other golden camels in the endless caravan of minutes, three or four, not more, but I’ll try to retell only one of them. Late summer, I’m standing in front of the house, the sunset is endless in those flat places, I’m six, the cows are coming down the road, first you hear their slow bells, the shepherd’s calls, the mooing to announce their return to their calves, the calves’ bellowed response . . . this is crying, I know it even then. Like the bawling cry that always escapes from me the minute my mother comes back from the city at the end of the week to see me. Relief and accusation are never closer together than in that crying. As close as the crying of a calf and the crying of a child when they have been abandoned for a day or weeks. I missed you so much, I’m so mad at you. I’ll never forgive you, cows and mothers . . .

  In that minute, the memory is so clear even now, in that minute so densely packed with sounds, cows, and scents, suddenly everything disappears, a strip slices the horizon at its most distant point, time draws aside and there, at the very back of the sunset, there is a white room with high ceilings, one I’ve never seen before, with a chandelier and a piano. A girl my age is sitting at the piano with her back to me. Her light hair is tied in a pony tail, she is getting ready to play, she has raised her hands slightly, I see her pointy elbows . . . And that’s it.

  I have never been happier, more whole and peaceful than in that minute, on the warm stone at the end of my sixth summer. As the years passed, I started counting the winters, as my father and grandfather did, they knew it was right for a person to go back home in the winter, during the summer there is too much work to bother with dying. I promised myself then that I would find that girl. I kept looking for her in all those places and years I passed through. No one turned to me with her face. I can feel myself giving up over time. Getting used to it. Old age is getting used to things.

  MIGRATION OF SORROW

  Empathy is unlocked in some people through pain, for me it happens more often through sorrow.

  The physics of sorrow—initially the classical physics thereof—was the subject of my pursuits for several years. Sorrow, like gases and vapors, does not have its own shape or volume, but rather takes on the shape and volume of the container or space it occupies. Does it resemble the noble gases? Most likely not, as much as we may like the name. The noble gases are homogeneous and pure, monatomic, besides they have no color or odor. No, sorrow is not helium, krypton, argon, xenon, radon . . . It has an odor and a color. Some kind of chameleonic gas, that can take on all the colors and scents in the world, while certain colors and scents easily activate it.

  The more important thing is that its gravitational field is negligibly small, to continue the analogy with the gases. From this it follows that invisible fronts, cyclones, and anti-cyclones of sorrow hover around us. Their migration, their movement from one place to another is a remarkable fact. The blindness that causes us to pass over this fact is astonishing. Sometimes I’m overcome by a vague sense of sorrow, which doesn’t seem to be mine. Sorrow from Northern Africa, let’s say. Not local, strange, faded by the sun, yellow with grains of sand from the desert, like that yellow rain that fell last year, leaving opaque blotches on the window. I could sketch out a geographical map of the migration of sorrows. Some places are sad in one century, others in another.

  What little success I’ve had with these experiments lies in the fact that for very short slices of time I’ve been able to attract a stray cloud of sorrow from some past afternoon, mine or someone else’s, to walk alongside it, and sink into its nicotine. Like a smoker, who, even after many years without cigarettes, will always recognize the trace of smoke.

  QUANTA OF AGING

  I’m not talking about old age. I’m talking about the first signs. Not about night, but about dusk. About its irresistible incursions and the first fallen fortresses.

  Once, when Aya was three, she came home from kindergarten in tears, because a boy had told her that fathers get old. Fathers get old, she said, sobbing. She glanced at me for a second, fully expecting to hear me disavow this and since I couldn’t think of anything—I’m terribly slow-witted when I have to lie—she burst into tears again, even more hopelessly.

  There is some sort of grammar of aging.

  Childhood and youth are full of verbs. You can’t sit still. Everything in you is growing, gushing forth, developing. Later the verbs are gradually replaced by the nouns of middle age. Kids, cars, work, family—the substantial things of the substantives.

  Growing old is an adjective. We enter into the adjectives of old age—slow, boundless, hazy, cold, or transparent like glass.

  There is also a mathematics of aging, a simple set theory.

  We change the world’s proportions over the years. Those younger than we are grow ever more numerous, while the number of those older than we are declines menacingly.

  Aging requires a certain audacity. It may not be audacity, but resignation.

  At eleven, I started a secret notebook in which I wrote down the first signs of aging and death. Death and children is an unjustly neglected topic, I’ve never been as close to death as I was then. Over the years, we’ve grown a bit distant and cold, although I’ve always kept my eye on it, just as it has on me, of course. Here are the things, from different years and in no particular order, puttering around in that box.

  Cardiac exam. Sooner or later, everyone ends up lying here, the nurse says soothing
ly, as she attaches wires and clamps to my whole body. The noises, which I hear amplified in that way for the first time, are revolting. The discovery that the heart is a frog, judging by its croaking. My death will come like a stork, I write down upon leaving.

  (41 y.o.)

  I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  I love these lines by Eliot and I am afraid of them. That devil-may-care whistled tune of old age, which actually hides nothing. So humbly humiliated, so unheroic, rolling up the pant legs hiding the sagging white skin and the telltale blue veins. Just the ankles.

  My left ankle is a frightful sight, shattered and stitched, with the years the scars will only deepen.

  (53)

  Today in front of the mirror I noticed that my left half is aging more quickly than my right half. I haven’t shaved in a few days (I don’t have anyone to shave for anymore, as my father used to say) and can clearly see how the left half of my beard is almost completely gray, while the right side has only a few gray hairs. Besides that, my left eye has starting visibly drooping in the outside corner, the eyelid muscles can’t hold out like they used to, when I gaze at something for a bit longer I notice some traitorous involuntary twitches. I wonder if such a difference is visible in my body as well. I look it over carefully, but can’t seem to find a visible difference between the left and right sides. OK, that’s if we don’t count that shattered left ankle, which is quite different and swollen, as is my broken left wrist. And one ear that’s ever more hard-of-hearing, precisely the left one.

  I’m not even aging evenly.

  (49)

  They say that as we grow older, our dead start talking to us ever more often. We lose the sounds of the world, so that we can hear other sounds and other voices more clearly and without interference. For now, I’m still only hearing noises.

  (38)

  How would you describe the noise in your ear, my doctor friend asks.

  I don’t know . . . it’s not that simple . . .

  Come on, now, aren’t you a writer?

  Well, I’m the most uncertain of them (even though this, too, is uncertain) . . .

  Is it like the sound of the sea? The doctor tries to prompt me.

  I guess you could say that, but sometimes it is wild and sounds like crashing surf, other times it’s more like wind in the late October woods, what I mean is, the leaves are dry enough and some of them have fallen, which affects the frequency of the noise. Sometimes, when there are high frequencies, it sounds like a washing machine on spin cycle two floors away, a thin howl . . . Sometimes it’s like moooooo, but the calf is young and hoarse . . .

  While I list off these sounds, my doctor’s face grows ever more bewildered, rather than clearing up. What can I do, things are never so simple and unambiguous. Once I almost read a nurse the riot act when she made me describe the color of my urine. “Is it the color of beer?” she asked. There are so many different kinds of beer, for Christ’s sake, there’s light beer, dark beer, red ale, white ale, live-culture beer, non-alcoholic . . . You can’t just roll them all together like that . . .

  I can’t stand categorical people.

  (29)

  It hurts right here, something down on the left, maybe it’s my appendix.

  Stop with the self-diagnoses, if you please. The appendix is on the right. There’s nothing that could be hurting there on the left.

  What do you mean nothing?

  Just that. There’s nothing there.

  Well, it’s precisely that nothing that’s hurting me.

  (64)

  The hope that if you start telling your life story backward toward childhood, it will set some mechanism into motion and fool the direction [of time] . . .

  Funny version. A guy decides to quit smoking using regressive hypnotherapy. He starts going backward toward the time before he started smoking, to awaken the memory of his clean lungs. The hypnotherapy is so successful and the regression goes so far back that he not only quits smoking, but also starts wetting his bed and not being able to say “R.”

  (43)

  In her Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon gives two lists—Things that inspire sorrow and Things that drive away sorrow. The things that drive away sorrow in the early eleventh century, the Heian Period, include old tales and the sweet chatter of three-to-four-year-old children. I copy it down several times: old tales and the sweet chatter of three-to-four-year-old children, old tales and the sweet chatter . . .

  (990)

  I remember clearly how we read back then. The whole ecstasy of that youthful reading, it wasn’t reading, but galloping, racing through books. We sought out the racehorse of action, direct speech, short, muscular expressions. We hated the ritardandos, the descriptions of nature, who needed them . . .

  Now I feel the need to stop, like an old man winded by climbing up a slope he used to take in three bounds. The hidden pleasures of slowness. I love to linger long over some “It was a pleasant May morning, the birds were shouting with song, the dew glowed beneath the sun’s soft rays . . .”

  (69)

  Our lifelong, round-the-clock jabbering seems to have a single, solitary goal, which we never say out loud. To bamboozle death, to send it off on a wild goose chase, to make a feint at the last moment. But death isn’t moved by words. It is most probably deaf (like me). This is the source of its supreme impartiality.

  (85)

  The years are a rushing river, flowing day by day

  In its currents youth and childhood are swept clean away . . .

  The years they are like song birds, flying south in fall

  But unlike birds the years will never return to us at all.

  (9)

  We grew old before we grew up . . .

  (35)

  He started traveling, in fact, fleeing from old age, but ironically it was precisely there, in other places, where his first signs of aging appeared.

  One morning at age thirty-five he saw his body in the large, mirror-laden bathroom of a Greek hotel. He had never examined it so closely before. He had a good, healthy, normal body. Not counting the broken arm, whose white plaster cast was starting to look weather-beaten. That morning, he saw the first signs of aging. Extremely faint, yet nevertheless clear. It had started years earlier, why hadn’t he paid attention until then? He told himself that he would remember the day. That he would remember that hotel in Thessaloniki. His body, white and soft, had started to go slack, the skin had started growing thin, becoming translucent with thin blue veins. It’s old age, he said to himself, just as a year or two earlier he would say to himself: it’s love. That’s how age happens sometimes, in just a few minutes one morning, at some foreign hotel. After that he would keep tabs on his body in hotel mirrors, that’s precisely where old age would be waiting to ambush him.

  (34)

  My grandfather had no time to notice that he was getting old. He had too much work to do . . .

  (27)

  I went to a writer’s funeral. While alive, he had hay fever. Now he was lying there, piled with flowers, looking as if he would start sneezing any minute. An orchid was sticking its tip right up his nose. But clearly he was already cured. I noticed, and I think the others noticed as well, the unfamiliar elderly women with blue hair and chrysanthemums at the other end of the funeral parlor who were truly upset. His former mistresses. The deceased had had a weakness for women. Now they were getting their fifteen minutes of fame. Invisible their whole lives, veterans of secret love affairs. From the army of the anonymous, unlike his official wife and his official mistress. In the end, old age has made everyone equal.

  (50)

  Little Red Riding Hood and Old Age

  The fairytale can be told this way as well:

  The little girl went to her grandmother and started asking:

  Grandma, why do you have such big (and sagging) ears? The grandmother kept silent.

  Grandma, why do you have such big (and faded) eyes? The grandmother
said nothing.

  Grandmother, why do you have such a big (and wrinkled) mouth?

  The grandmother started sniffling softly.

  Oh, how cruel Little Red Riding Hood was! And the grandmother—because this time it really was her—took off her glasses, wiped away the two telltale tears and managed to rasp out an answer that exhausted all the questions asked thus far: It’s old age, my Little Red Riding Hood.

  And opened her toothless mouth in a frightful laugh.

  (60)

  The old hostel near the train station in Leipzig, overflowing with high school students brought here for the book fair. The elevator, which stops with a creak on my floor, the opening of the door and the bright light from inside (the lamp on my floor was out). A group of girls, juniors and seniors, laughing, pretty, Lolitas, without having read Lolita.

  “Going up?” they ask through their laughter.

  “Going down,” I reply softly. It sounds so tragicomic that a new volley of laughter follows. A full four seconds before the doors close, parting me forever from that lovely company. Four seconds in which they and I share a common floor. An awkward and beautiful pause, given to me thanks to someone’s benevolence, a pause that I parsimoniously hide away in my notebook.

  (51)

  That repeatability of life . . . That sticky, exhausting, murderous, revolting, yet inevitable and sometimes marvelous repeatability of life.

  (65,103,039)

  While climbing the hill in this city, intoxicated by the colors and scents, I feel my strength slowly leaving me, my body going soft, the muscles in my thighs traitorously trembling (is it visible through my pants?). Not wanting to admit I’ve been beaten, I simply stop and examine a burning-red blackberry bush up close. Then I see an elderly man, did I say elderly, actually, he is my age, embracing a young woman in an innocent summer dress. He is wearing a nice light-blue sweater, old age piles on the clothes, but still it is autumn after all and he is absolutely in season. She is young and is still in summer. Their meeting is the meeting of two seasons. She—generously reaching out her hand from one season, he—standing unsteadily on the edge of the other. A difficult balance, possible only for a short while, a month or two. A few years ago I would have laughed at the man, now he receives my full understanding and a few pangs of envy.