by Georgi Tenev
Copyright © 2006 by Georgi Tenev
Translation copyright © 2016 by Angela Rodel
Originally published in Bulgaria as Partien dom
First edition, 2016
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-27-4
This book is published within the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s program for Support of Contemporary Bulgarian Writers and in collaboration with the America for Bulgaria Foundation.
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
Contents
1. His Daughter
2. Deeds & Documents
3. Her Father
Notes on the Translation
1
HIS DAUGHTER
THE strangest part is when I see she’s starting to cry. With us, tears often lead to unexpected consequences.
Even without the tears I still want to hit her, painfully hard. But when she cries it just gets out of control. The victim’s magnetic attraction inflames the perpetrator. I’m driven to tears myself—out of frustration that I can’t force myself to finish it off, to do absolutely everything I want to her. In exactly the order I would like.
If anyone were to see us at this moment, bawling, locked in this torture chamber at opposite ends of the bed—in the middle the bloody sheets are stained with wet spots, but not from blood, lymph, vaginal secretions, sperm, or who knows what else—could it be that some other beings are copulating here with us?—at that moment the shocked outside observer would think we are crying for each other, for ourselves.
Wrong. An incorrect judgment, a faulty interpretation of ambiguous facts. I’m not sorry. What can I say? Regret is most certainly far beyond the boundaries within which I would torment her. Tears are just one more weapon in this battle, nothing more. I must be very careful now; tears, like all water, temper freshly forged metal. Her blue zirconium glare blazes out twice as pliant, resilient, like eyes on a rifle sight, eyes like bullet tips—and I’m the bull’s-eye.
On the very first day, or afternoon, rather, when we met, on that fatally happy day of our acquaintance, she explained to me that she didn’t have a father. She stubbornly insisted that her father did not exist. He was alive, you see, but as soon as she spoke his name and sharply declared, It’s as if I don’t have a father—then I understood, it was all clear.
His name is K-shev.
I never imagined that I would get mixed up with the daughter of one of them. But fatal meetings are always marked by signs from the very beginning. I’m talking about fleeting clues. But no one tells you “Watch out!”, you don’t hear any voice yelling “Stop!” And the fact that at that very moment the angels fall silent most likely means they’re egging you on. That the meeting is divinely inspired; the meeting is the beginning of the collision of love.
>>>
So his name is K-shev.
Everyone remembers their names, they’re strange. And they get that way because of the people they belong to, and not the other way around. Yet it somehow seems like fate also chooses them by the sounds of their names.
Who is this person, completely anonymous behind his name? Later I began to understand, things started to become clear. But by then it was too late to save myself, I was already caught in the trap. So why bother trying to go back now to fix things? There’s no point. I can only return as an observer, as remote and nonchalant as if I’m watching a stranger and not myself.
>>>
You are the reason words exist—I want to pause on this thought. That is, I want to pause precisely here to make this absolutely clear. It’s doubtful I’ll succeed in getting any relief or satisfaction, as much as I would like to. Perhaps I suspect there is some higher purpose or calling in pornography, when you watch and somebody shows you everything.
The moment I took my eyes from the screen, the last thing lingering in my pupils was the image of naked bodies. Everything about it screams scam, despite the originality of the moans and the excitement in the voice of the nude, sweat-drenched woman. It’s a scam because of the presumed viewer, because of my gaze. This is also the source of the shame.
I leave the colorful barn, its booths with their blue doors and neon lights. The dark room and the screen overhead reflected in the mirror. Next to the armchair are buttons to select the channel, a box of Kleenex, a wastebasket with a plastic liner. The silver slit that swallows coins, black speakers that spit out sound.
>>>
I go outside. It would be frightening if it weren’t night. But now there’s no light, just electric sparks from the street. I light a cigarette to dull the arousal. I don’t want it to stay with me, I have to separate it from myself, from my body. If I had come inside like I wanted to, I most likely would’ve failed all the same. But I didn’t make the move, I froze up, I couldn’t do it. A naked woman—pretty, by the way. And another one, looking very much the same. Both with nice, full breasts, one with long fake fingernails, the other with girlish, almost infantile fingers, both with navel rings. I shouldn’t feel bad about it, yet there was some kind of anxious beauty in that shot of frantically jumping bodies. That’s exactly what should’ve relaxed me—the precision and obvious professionalism of the action. Even to the point of seeming to give them pleasure—paid for in advance by me or someone like me. These two golden-skinned bodies impatiently jostling on top of each another, with no man in between, of course—because I wouldn’t be able to stand anyone else besides myself here.
I got up and left before the final minutes, leaving behind a part of myself, my hotly beating pulse—I didn’t run, but somehow, despite the tension, casually and masterfully made my way to the exit. With the professional gait of a smoker waiting for intermission to give himself over to an older and more acceptable vice, one that can be shared on the street.
>>>
Although it’s difficult for me to admit, I don’t think there’s anyone here who could help me. Yet I still have faith in words—they’re the only thing I have left. I worship them fervently. For their sake I put up with all of you, whom I honestly couldn’t care less about. You’re just some mute imaginary listeners to talk at. You are the reason words exist, because otherwise it would simply be too difficult. And at least you know who he is.
The name K-shev scared me, took me aback. Yet the girl’s flight, her shame, her self-disgust—I thought to myself in the first instant—isn’t it all very unusual? It made me feel compassion for her. But also a sort of suspicion. Fear.
I’ve tried to make sense of it before: the thrill of suspicion is the hidden urge that incites you to crush her with your hands, with your whole body. To force her to scream, to make her cry. To hurt her, to see the real depths, the entire essence. To my regret, I was soon forced to realize that she had told me the truth. She had wanted to escape from the nightmare, but it’s not as easy as simply crossing out your father’s name and taking a new one in its place.
This is most likely why the angel stayed silent: he caught a whiff of compassion. But what angels, what am I even talking about—the truth is always repulsive. Since it is still too early for the truth, let’s console ourselves just a bit longer on the brink of our first meeting, that moment back then.
Perhaps times were different then. I even suspect that they illuminated that which lay ahead, the future, with a shadowless light. Sometimes when I reminisce about a kind of coupling, for example, I’m trying to get at that accumulation of concentrated tenderness. Is it possible that she was perfect, despite her last name? Was it the same with my naïvety—te
mporarily wonderful, but naïvety all the same. When falling in love we are children, if only for a short while. In general we are children only for a short while, like a brief attack of perfection and light. But enough of that.
>>>
I had this dream—of something like a Communist party headquarters in a provincial town. Or in the capital, but in some rundown neighborhood. Outside the summer heat is stifling. Deathly calm, a park bathed in scorching light that bleaches the green from the trees. The immaculate walkways with whitewashed curbs, all deserted. As usual the bureaucrats are using their work time for something else. Inside the hallways are cool and it would be almost pleasant if it weren’t so cold. Although there aren’t any mummies here, the door-lined tunnels make it feel like some kind of space for preservation, a mausoleum. But never mind all that, what’s important is the content.
The girl is wearing a Pioneer’s uniform, the Communist Youth League. We’re holding hands. We walk along, go up the stairs, turn down one of the hallways, I think it’s the fourth floor, the top one. The sense that we are alone grows even stronger here. And again that same coolness, but when we pass through the small foyer beyond the stairs and head toward the long straight line of darkness—somewhere there the windows behind the false balustrade breathe heat on us through the glass, because of the lights outside.
She is dressed in a Pioneers uniform, like I said: a white blouse, a blue pleated skirt, if that’s what they call those overlapping accordion folds. Her white socks are pulled up a little over her ankles or below the knee—that’s the one thing I’m not quite sure about. Her shoes have no laces, the blue tongues are sticking straight up. Her shoulder-length hair is straight, and she wears it in pigtails behind her ears. But she isn’t wearing the little barrettes that usually keep her bangs out of her eyes. Under her blouse she’s wearing a tank top, cut low under the arms—we all wore those back then, even the girls. All around, like I said, there’s lots of stone, granite, marble, and from time to time the wine stain of the curtains, red pedestals without statues, only here and there peeling names and letters in the flaking gold cellophane used to inscribe mottos. This is a mysterious space I have yet to dive into, at once hollow, empty, yet full of sharp edges—the building itself feels heavy. It is made up of intersecting squares and rectangles. The windows are stately, I don’t know why the windows are so important here, the wooden window casings are themselves embedded in striking granite frames. The railings around the stairs, the floor is gouged by canals, grooves, red spirals, and brass rods that keep the carpet taut against the folds of the staircase. Railings, banisters, polished snails at the end of stone waterfalls on either side of the slide of steps.
We go up to that floor and walk down the hallway. The window at the end shows only light; we are above the treetops. We don’t speak, so as not to get caught. Anticipation.
She, of course, is a virgin. And I press down on that barrier with the whole weight of my body, as if poured into a funnel. A whirlpool that changes my own anatomy: at the very bottom, in the center, the point that I flow through—this is where my heart is. And my belly button as well, and maybe even some steaming spot on my back has been sucked down into this vortex. While up above, all at once my head, legs, and bangs are the leftover silt in the funnel.
She is a virgin, of course, but why is she not wearing panties under her skirt? And that vulgar smile—in her eyes, not on her lips. I, too, am a virgin, perhaps in a more concrete or more specific sense—both of us realize our innocence at the same moment, but of the two of us there’s one who senses that . . .
>>>
Here, in short, is what I want to find out, what I want to clarify in this split-second before the memory is shattered by that internal explosion between two bodies: is that gaze really there, the eyes in that portrait above me, on the wall of the quiet dusky hall we tiptoed into? We’re naked now, her skirt hiked up, my pants down around my knees, shirt unbuttoned. Who is watching us?
But no matter how quickly everything was over, according to the prescription of nature and the summary procedure of the moment, it turns out that time itself, chronology, does not exhaust—and can never exhaust—the energy hidden in the body. Even years later, most probably in my imagination or perhaps not quite, I found myself forced again and again to bend over that body, her body, the object of this coupling, in order to understand. A body that could be the joyful center of my very self, of my very own I. The mirror of my masculinity, if it didn’t represent above all the risk of being accused of a crime.
So that, in short, is what I want to figure out. That’s the very core I’m trying to reach: she is still a part of his body and he is present in hers. What could K-shev’s gaze mean here, because in the dream I didn’t know his name, since she hadn’t yet told me, nor his significance, since at that moment I was still a naïve Pioneer. And now for the explanation: why is it that if you cross out a name, if you have the nerve to repeal it, to change your own family name—why does that still add up to nothing but vain attempts and wasted efforts? The body, the flesh does not play by those rules. The body, the flesh transforms itself according to its own laws.
That’s why this story has turned into such a bodily adventure—no connection is more bodily than inheritance, which makes up the whole of you, yet which you also desperately want to get rid of more than anything. I think that here on the Reeperbahn, in Hamburg, Germany, there is no way to prevent bodies from playing their role. You can couple with bodies, but you can’t run from them. They always get in your way. In the end, you have no choice but to go through.
In this case, I really wasn’t prepared—for the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, that is. My premature exit from the booth and that unfinished scene, which was like the graphic truth about coupling—but without the increasing tenderness, just flesh and color. An act that is far too bodily.
The same problem yet again—the body. I didn’t want to tear my eyes away, but I had to run, I had to get the hell out of there.
>>>
In an ironic twist of fate, K-shev is now dying of cancer in this sterile, private German clinic—as much as it may look like a hospital, it’s obviously little more than a very expensive hospice. The still-breathing corpses lie inside, while outside nobody waits for them anymore. At best, a battle is raging to divide the spoils.
In this case everything was gathered into a small, thin briefcase.
It was a brand-new briefcase, or at least it was new when they put it in the safety deposit box in the bank vault. A very well-insulated place, that vault—I can vouch for that now that I’ve brought the briefcase back to my hotel room and can still catch a scent of new leather, as if it had been bought only yesterday.
To kill time, I measured its height, width, and depth with a pack of cigarettes: 1 × 5 × 3, more or less.
Just as he told me, there is more than a million inside. I’ve never seen so much money in one place. But besides this cliché, I can also tell you that there is nothing optically unusual about this huge amount of cash. Or maybe I was already numb, perhaps my senses were dulled like his from the life-support machines whirring away behind the doors lining the white corridors. You absorb old people’s anesthesia by induction, the opiate of medication, the opiate of age.
He needs the money now, needs it with a fatal urgency, whether his brain realizes it or not. I made sure to confirm this as soon as I arrived. I thought the place would be disgusting, but it was only strangely arid, sterile, quiet. I didn’t experience any revulsion, impatience, or rage. I didn’t feel anything at all inside myself, only on the surface. Instead of the torturous spasm of my whole being that I expected, I experienced only a bodily discomfort, as if I were wearing the wrong-sized clothes or too-tight shoes.
I was uncomfortable in the white hospital chair; my back was to the window and the potted plant next to it. It looked dried out, pressed in an album, even though it was still alive; I even caught the slightly tangy scent of its leaves and the sweetish odor of withering and deca
y. A hospital room, a room for death. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t look into the old man’s eyes to see: is he thinking about the end?
When I got back after going to the bank, I went straight into the bathroom, undressed, and filled up the tub. Afterward I stood for a long time under the shower. I wanted my body to soften up; it was like some kind of shell had crusted onto me—I know this was just my imagination, but the scrubbing did me good and I no longer saw myself in the fogged-up mirror. Just a huge profusion of bottles in the white steam, little flasks of monochromatic creamy liquids, all in twenty-gram doses for hotel junkies. I didn’t feel like going out yet, so I examined them—most had Italian labels. Care of the body, it seems, carries a whiff of the exotic and distant. No matter whether they’re made in Hong Kong or here, the labels must be in a foreign language—what are people thinking when they choose their dreams? Money is definitely a crucial element. Okay, well here’s the money, I’ve got it. What happens now?
Yes, the money was already on the table when I left the bathroom, stepping barefoot onto the soft carpet. Water dripped all around me as I stood in the center of the room, my head was spinning ever so slightly from the heat, from exhaustion, from the red-eye flight, from impatience to do the deed and from the wavering question mark lodged in my stomach: Why did I do it? Do I even understand what I’m doing now? Do I have to do this? Is it right? Does it mean I’m responsible, that by doing this the blood is on my hands?
Then I flopped down on the still-made bed. The bedspread was clean, but somehow shabby. Sterilized and ostensibly normal, yet with my body’s expanded and cleansed pores I sensed its lack of coziness, overcrowded with reminders of previous guests, sleeping bodies. Of course, all this turned my thoughts back to the hospital, or perhaps it was the opposite: I continued to be there in my mind, until in the end the bed itself from room 308 at the Hotel Hamburg actually began to move toward Krankenstrasse—or better, Krankenhausstrasse—in any case, it was moving toward that Strasse as if toward a test point where I can check with a simple physical touch whether I really am moving or whether I’m dreaming under hypnosis, or both, or most likely some third possibility, or whether I really am fighting my way toward the goal I have set for myself.
