Party Headquarters

by Georgi Tenev

  I don’t want to forgive, I can’t forgive. The time taken from me cannot be returned. What if those moments, even those filled with suffering—like that punch in the face years ago—had no meaning? What will happen then with the night after that instant of humiliation, after that second of fear in the crumbling panel block-apartment with its flickering, naked light bulbs? The price of the night with the girl from Hope and my reckless inspiration with her dark, almost black body in the gloom—wouldn’t it, too, be diminished, if the ordeal is diminished? No, I don’t want to, I can’t forget.

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  The Comsomol could not easily be replaced. I tried sports, I tried other religions. I counted on the army with particular enthusiasm: I was supposed to become a pilot after all! I only later discovered the reason for this attraction, when the dream was already dead.

  I’m a good runner and thus I became not a pilot, but a foot soldier.

  Every boy dreams of becoming a cosmonaut, but then he takes up something easier: girls. After that, or more or less at the same time, he starts to smoke, although at the beginning, of course, he coughs. Later it becomes clear—you really have to be a complete geek to not replace the cosmonaut with something more realistic. Okay, so I was stuck in that phase for a long time. I remember our classes in Morals and Law in school and the basketball-esque physique of our teacher, a philosopher, six-and-a-half feet tall.

  “So, in your opinion,” he asked me pleasantly, although I think he felt like smacking me upside the head, but at the time I didn’t understand why, “what’s the path of evolution, of development? After a just society has been created and all needs have been met—what’s next?”

  “After that,” I answered after thinking it over a bit, “man will turn toward the cosmos. He’ll conquer the space beyond the earth.”

  “Aha,” my comrade teacher nodded knowingly. And he didn’t hit me.

  But he should’ve. I needed to learn at least something in school, even at the price of violence, because there’s no way to save ourselves from violence, it catches up with us sooner or later.

  I would go home, take off my backpack, toss it down and separate the one outside from the one inside. I would fall asleep. The nights didn’t have any connection to the days. There were cats wailing in the courtyards like children. The outrageous ecstasies of nocturnal love. I didn’t understand it then, but the consciousness also processed that information, unthinkingly. And that’s how I began to suspect that night was the time for battles, for struggles. But who was the enemy?

  Quite early—that’s what I’m trying to say—painful shadows crept over love. Does that make more sense?

  That “who is the enemy” always eluded me. The question wasn’t satisfied with the answers from war games; besides, girls weren’t allowed to play anyway. Only concrete, real death—without games, without roles that you can step out of—death alone eased at least a little of the emptiness that we would now call “the ideological model.” With childish cruelty we doggedly attacked the ants crawling between the rocks. We barraged their columns with bombs of hot plastic as they scrambled, panicked, into pockets in the ground. Falling, hissing globs that melted into black smoke. Crawling black tears from the mouth of an empty Vero detergent bottle with its top set on fire . . .

  Yes, I had my reasons for looking forward to the army. But it was precisely because of these optimistic hopes that the idiocy of it hit me so hard and, in the end, became yet another disappointment.

  The Army, Infantry

  Everything began with mild attempts: how much can you handle? Individual training tests the foundations of the psyche, which will be necessary later on—the system had made secret calculations about my career. The system itself had already failed, but I personally had been given a head start, acceleration. Is it worth forgetting the lessons learned during those three months of quiet September hell, infantry battalion? The system now has reason to be scared—I don’t forget easily. Like a pin-drum in the music box of my heart, through the holes in the aortas, some goal was filtering its signal, the music of the hollow barrel-organ was playing its commands.

  I’m not trying to say, Comrade Commander-in-Chief, that two hours of unenlightened marching are some kind of limit. I’m not trying to say that two mandatory years of service, Comrade Commander-in-Chief, just two of the impressionable and golden years of my youth, are reason to try to settle the score at the price of such cruel diligence. But the rage within me, my dear comrade, even then had something else in mind. I have to admit I regret that I didn’t believe it—back then, at the time.

  Because at quite a young age—at a perversely and criminally young age—I met her. Comrade Commander-in-Chief, there are things that go beyond the barrier of military secrets. Things that make the memory rather specific, and for that reason I’m only able to share them with you personally. Of course, I’ll also share the physical gesture of my repentance as well. You see, it’s for that reason that I run so selflessly, to make it on time. By the way, in the infantry no one taught us how we should run—and that’s strange, don’t you think? No characteristic features of leaping advances across flat terrain, to say nothing of rugged country. Why was running somehow taken for granted in and of itself: Am I born to run, perhaps? But I’m impoverished ideologically, comrade, and for that reason to this very day, I don’t know whether I’m running properly. I suspect not. I run quickly, I run recklessly, energetically, but my bones fuse from the effort, my joints creak, you can already hear them, because I’m inevitably getting closer to you, to the new location of your temporary headquarters, Mr. Commander-in-Chief—your white hospital. I was left to learn everything on my own—at least I liked running. The drills, however, the marching, shackled me in the chains of their exercises more and more, with the soured sweetness of torture. Like a merry-go-round, an endless spiral of broken ellipses, in a circle, left and right, the legs intermingling.

  And still, I would obey every fitting command that would allow me to make my way to K-shev more quickly and directly, even if this way pierces deeply into death itself. My running is ugly, but somehow effective, I sense the rhythm. However, I found marching in a closed column unbearable, the brink of madness—doing something orderly, yet devoid of meaning. Marching is an art, the Comrade Sergeant was always saying: finding ourselves in the museum itself, we stumbled along to obliviousness on the exhibits that were our feet.

  How and when did we give someone else the right to command us like mechanical toys, right down to the smallest movements of our arms and legs, fastened with bolts at the joints? Every moment when a hand reached out, deliberately slow, to give us a foretaste and for it to get a foretaste of the degradation—time would stop. When you could no longer take the standing, not out of exhaustion and not out of tension, but because of the helplessness, because of the senselessness. The horizon that has bitten into your own time like a toothless mouth. Time hasn’t even stopped—you simply realize now that it was never really passing.

  Childhood, those naïve lessons at school, were an illusion that life is valuable in and of itself. The army is that blessed experiment that divides the body on the one hand from its meaning on the other. In the sun, in a uniform sewn with an unimaginable flair for discomfort. In scratchy fabric that even wild tribes wouldn’t wrap their dead in before tossing them into the grave—there and as such, here and now you stand. And while the sun crawls slowly overhead, as if waiting for you to curse it, insulting comparisons explode in the brain. Curses and insults want to fly off your tongue toward your very self—but why?

  Yes, the sun, you tell yourself, is crawling terribly slowly. Like shit. You spit the filth out of your mouth, but you’ve already gulped it down, you’re already cursing, already swearing every other word like all the others. Who do you dislike and who do you hate now? With stripes also comes the right for you to commit abuses—“I can’t! I won’t!”—but you do it. You do it with relish, nasty and slow. Some frustrated sergeant, some I, hardboiled from boredom.r />
  The sun, contrary to all expectations, shines on everyone with equal indifference and your problem is not solved. You’re no longer innocent, you’ve lost the right and the moral assets of victimhood. You sense it, that fiery glob of brains, its sadistic immobility. It sounds impossible, the maddening thought that the projector’s yellow light has to make at least 700 more circles at that same lazy pace before two years will be over, the brain is incapable of comprehending this. And the future, which is actually the truth, is transformed into fiction. And until then, consequently, you are simply nobody.

  I’ve counted the minutes, I’ve counted the seconds, strung taut at my post by the flag, every second thinking up the name of a girl, known or unknown, but please, I beg you, let her be a runner, please make her legs speed up the clock hands at least a little! At the most banal moment in my life I sense the very depths of the ineptness—and at the same time the talent—of that devil who created the system. It’s as moronically simple as Chinese water torture, as that staff idiot who purposely keeps the door to his office, which reeks of linoleum and cigarette ashes, open. You expect him to peek out at any second, you know he’s lurking, just so you can’t figure out a way to get some relief. The pulsating, repetitive thought: there’s no way to put down your weapon, it’s impossible even to glance at the clock, there’s no way out, didn’t I tell you? Moments in which you offer a year of life in exchange for a half-hour less of this un-life. Moments that you will pass over with a smile years later. But not me, I tell myself—not me. I remember. I hate. I despise.

  No matter how many

  years will pass by

  I won’t resign myself

  to that—

  we don’t want to relive

  unlived things!

  Like everyone else, my favorite band at the time was The Crickets, too.

  1989

  Blind time, as if jerking awake after dozing off unexpectedly.

  “I’m not a Communist!” I yell in my sleep, lathered in sweat. I stand up: “And I never will be!”

  Otherwise they wouldn’t let me into the demonstrations.

  Demonstrations

  There were plenty of girls at the demonstrations. All quivering with excitement, I’d say. This is how I’d describe them: quivering with excitement and ultra-sensitive. I wonder whether she wasn’t there among them? But how would I recognize her without an exploratory grope? No, I hadn’t fallen so low as to sheepishly rub up against their bodies—I walked straight ahead with my head held high, chanting the necessary slogans, while I let that same old anger blaze in my eyes, something you still can’t quite fully achieve. Regardless of whether the elections were won, the thirst remains—the girls of democracy were especially impressed by this seemingly magical gaze. But I walked right on through them, I hardly noticed them, I was looking for something different, I wanted all of them together, at the same time, yet because of my clear recognition that it could never happen, I was looking for something that would bring it all together—the body of one girl who was different. Like being amid the trees in a wet forest, orienteering between bodies, among so many women with feverish skin, which is twice as sensitive.

  Under those circumstances there was no way to avoid a spark blazing up in a more general sense. Amid so many suppressed desires, the flaring up of sparks is imperative. It heightens the sensation of an explosion, of expanding space in which insignificant bodily processes take on the scope of atmospheric phenomena. Collective energy should not be underestimated, but who can control it? Certainly not me.

  And to rub our noses in it—that is, in short, as intimidation—K-shev and his people, quite experienced in Party-style electrical engineering, harnessed the thunder and lightning hanging over the ruins of the Party structure. They stripped the lightning rods of their precious metals and left the negative waves to be unleashed in a controlled burn, for their own good and for the satisfaction of the general public.

  I was there in order to understand, as it were, that an inescapable logic controls my fate. For that reason, the wee hours of August 27th in front of the burning Party Headquarters also have a deeper meaning for me. And it is not symbolic, not merely symbolic as for everyone else.

  What I remember most of all is this: it smelled terrible. Be it from the hissing panels in the hallways, from the droplets of aging tar mixed with decades-old dust that came sizzling out through the holes, burned away by red hot nails. Or from the melting sausage in the burning storerooms on the ground floor. And on top of everything—the scent of boiling Freon erupting through the cylinders of charred refrigerators—it smelled terrible, that much I remember.

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  I think that even there, at that very place, I ritually sacrificed part of myself—the fire was sufficiently strong to warm my blood to the decision. The red neckerchief blazed up and transformed into a black fuse even before the flames lapped at it. It immediately reminded me of the dripping streams of ash from the lit-up bottle of Vero dish soap. The cloth burned up instantly, without a trace. So did the shirt with the bleached collar. But first I tore the Bulgarian Communist Youth League emblem off the front of it. It was a nice shirt, I thought to myself—it fit me well. At the ends of its short sleeves there was a rather wide, turned up cuff. I don’t know why, but as I destroyed the wardrobe of the past, I heard engines and trains going by, chaotic noises, like the sound of a guerrilla propaganda movie unrolling its reels somewhere. Or was I just hearing things?

  I know that K-shev himself also wanted to destroy something in that fire, otherwise he wouldn’t have set it—but why? Just to obliterate some stupid old documents, traces? To sneak out the back door with the money along with the strongbox—just like he’d done before—while the suckers out front rushed in to save the wounded?

  In that sense, running toward a confrontation with him, I’m not looking for confessions or apologies. And that’s precisely why he’s waiting for me. How much longer can those doctors continue to treat him? They’ll only give up when the regular payments stop rolling in. It’s very easy to switch off the IVs if that’s what the patient’s loved ones want. They need only to hint that the cost has become excessive. And, in fact, the cost is ridiculously high, especially for an old man like him . . .

  . . . for a sick old man like me.

  >>>

  For ten years the party paid for my treatment, for the next five—the remnants of the old upper echelon, my fellow antiques, with long years of service to the party under their belts. For some time I was still necessary to various circles, which vied with each other to pay for my salvation. However, when symbols become devoid of meaning, they must be recast. After the fifteenth year it became clear that I only caused them trouble. They’ve washed their hands of me and my demise is simply a matter of time. I know, I know all too well: you have to leave the wounded to die of their wounds. In that pouring rain—I remember well, there, as we were retreating through the forest—there, through the half-open door of the church, next to the monastery, I overheard just that: “leave the dead to bury their dead.” Now that’s what gave me the courage.

  Out of the five partisans from our detachment who had managed to stay half alive, four of them fell on the road through the gorge. Two were killed or at least fatally wounded, I saw it with my own eyes. My comrade whose guerrilla name was Chavdar got stuck in the swamp—he couldn’t crawl out along the fallen tree because his leg was injured. I’m sure I should’ve tried to help him, I should’ve gone back down, broken off the branches, pulled him out. I should’ve stripped down and tied my shirt and sweater into a rope. But I didn’t, what would’ve been the point anyway? The police were sure to arrive any second, and catch me in the middle of my heroics. I turned my back on him and kept on climbing. Then I thought I heard a popping sound, as if I’d stepped on a dry branch, but I hadn’t—I assume he shot himself in the mouth, but the mud of the swamp muffled the sound.

  I saw the fourth one of the five of us running after me up the slope like a shadow. He
was clutching a grenade in his right hand. It’s really wet, I thought to myself, with all this rain the primer is never going to ignite, it’s ridiculous. He didn’t have any other weapon, so he kept clutching the grenade, even now, in desperation. If only I’d taken Comrade Chavdar’s revolver. If only I’d been able to pull my revolutionary brother out of the swamp. But it was too late now, it didn’t matter. Get rid of that grenade, I told him, put it away, we have to retreat. We have to retreat, I said, as if I were still commanding a detachment. As if there weren’t only five of us left, and now only two out of the five. And a little baggage—a radio transmitter, a notebook full of watchwords, passwords, and codenames of go-betweens, all written on cigarette papers inside a tobacco case. Traitor, I think he said. Why, I don’t know. Traitor, he repeated and squeezed the grenade in his mangled hand.

  It’s only now that I realize that this comrade most likely had a bent for leftist fanaticism. I know that look: revolution to the bitter end, red terror. Actually, grenades are best suited to anarchists, for that reason our commissar, who knew all the recruits, didn’t issue him his own weapon—untrustworthy. Even though the truth was that the kid didn’t have any fingers on his hand—they’d been cut off during an interrogation at the police headquarters.

  But no matter, I’m not one for crying over such things. I hit him once, it was enough. His body slid down the rocky slope into the ravine and in an instant he was gone. It was over.

  I’m left alone, so now I can ditch the radio transmitter; against my chest under my windbreaker is a leather pouch full of documents. And the little suitcase, the strongbox, of course, the revolution’s gold reserves, the fruit of many years’ labor. Money for the insurrectional revolutionary committee—money that was donated, or confiscated, voluntarily, or not quite. The suitcase was nice and full, our comrade commissar wasn’t a spendthrift, not a single cent went to waste. Rightly so, comrade!—our comrade commissar, may he rest in peace, was the first to fall in the ambush.