by Georgi Tenev
“Where would I go? Just listen to yourself.” I stroke her neck. I trace the curve of her ear with my fingers. She leans her head to the side and squeezes my hand between her shoulder and cheek.
“What’s wrong? Did I upset you?” I whisper, while trying to catch her face between my palms, but she keeps turning her head from side to side. As if she’s playing, she’s smiling, but I can see tears flowing from her eyes. From under her motionless eyelids, sealed shut with Band-Aids, these droplets are creeping out—when I lick them, they taste like a camp drugstore, like a bandage.
Now that’s it, today I can finally say that I’ve perfected my notion of the face of a girl who is suffering and who is beautiful because of it. In its pristine whiteness, her hidden gaze cannot reflect me, this angel can’t see me, I’m not here, for a moment at least I don’t deserve my well-deserved punishment. And for that reason her perfect body attracts me twice as strongly. I slide my hands under her shirt, she hiccups and sobs in a choked voice. But the rope wound around her body digs into the skin beneath her breasts, I can’t reach any farther down.
This isn’t love, of course, and it’s starting to get out of hand. Nevertheless, something always has to be done about desire. The rope is wrapped around the tree trunk, a few loops and a firmly tied knot at the end. Only her legs are free. “Goodbye,” I tell her, as if wanting to escape my own presence. Then I jerk apart her ankles, her heels, which had been planted on the ground on rubber soles.
I sink into her, just as I am, backpack and all, we collapse into each other, but this time I don’t sense the stalking that always trips me up before the end—the gaze, the eyes from the portrait on the wall. When we had tiptoed in, without knowing, however, that we’d have to break the silence even if we didn’t want to.
Her eyes are sealed shut, her hands are tied, she can scream if she wants, I purposely left her mouth free. But she doesn’t even make a sound now, she’ll only scream at the very end. For the first time since I’ve made love out in the open and consciously, it happens: everything in me manages to focus itself straight ahead and to the end. We come inside each other, fused, numb. She screamed at the end after all, simultaneously in despair and ecstasy.
The idea of bringing her to the final control point, CP 0, was not, in fact, new; it had crossed my mind before. I’d thought about it—as I had with most of the others, by the way. But I had never done it with any of them until now—never, not since I had discovered the zero point within the system of coordinates. The place where everything begins and ends.
Time, during which we’re sufficiently free to be able to play K-shev. With no qualms, at that. But now, at this age, games have become dangerous.
Interrogation/Game
1.) What’s your name?
You know it.
2.) What do your parents do?
C’mon, cut it out.
3.) How old are you?
How old am I?—I’ve reached the age when girls become a threat. You afraid?
“No,” I reply after a pause.
Hopefully she won’t be able to figure out whether I’m afraid that she started on her own, that she started first. Or whether I’m happy about it.
“C’mon, ask, I know you want to.”
“Fine. Why did they send us there? That time, back then.”
“Where?”
“You know where. For the tests.”
“They were preventative measures.”
“But why didn’t everyone go, why only me?”
“We couldn’t send everyone. We didn’t want to stir up mass panic.”
“So why me in that case, since it wasn’t dangerous? And what about the others, tell me about the other people’s kids.”
“I did it for my personal reassurance, I had to be sure.”
“I remember how they would bring us food, only milk and bread for a whole month—from a village, from somewhere really far away, right? ‘Clean food,’ that’s what you called it. But what about the others? What about their children? Was their food clean?”
“I had to make an important decision, I had to be sure. I needed to know that everything was okay with you.”
“They ran through the grass, they walked in the rain, they were all out at the May Day demonstrations—couldn’t you have at least spared them that, was it really necessary?”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“Would it have been such a big deal for you to tell people not to drink milk and not to pick anything from the trees? To at least forbid them from swimming in rivers and the sea until the danger had passed?”
Silence. She begins again: “Do you think you’re going to get away with it? Do you think that nobody has found out about it and nothing is known about it? Don’t try to tell me that they didn’t inform you, don’t try to tell me you were misled—who sent me there for a check up? Why don’t you just admit that you did it on purpose—which means you had your doubts, you were afraid! Even back then you wanted it to stay a secret, you only wanted to take care of yourself.”
“I didn’t take care of myself.”
“To take care of yourself only and others like you, as for the rest—who cares what happens! It was a Sunday, you purposely chose Sunday, when there were no other people at that institute. They stripped me naked and put me through some machine . . .”
“They didn’t put you through any machine.”
“At the Institute of Radiology—did you think I didn’t understand anything, did you think I couldn’t read? Do you think I’m just a child, you’re counting on that, right? Me being a child and not understanding.”
“You’re not a child, of course. Children don’t speak that way to their parents.”
“Shut up! Shut up, just stop talking, you’re making me sick. All you do is talk and talk and stroke your chin like that, making that face. I’m not like the rest, I’m not like the others—I know you. I know, get it? And the others know, how do you think you’re going to wriggle out of it, to get away with it? You’re hoping to get away scot-free after committing a crime!”
If only she could move her arms, I tell myself, if only she could hit me.
“You’re imagining things, you’re making things up. Tell me, do you really believe that I’m a criminal, that I could do something to hurt someone? And if so, what?”
“Don’t use me as an excuse.”
“Just tell me what!”
“Don’t try to use me. You always do that—you use me.”
“You know I’ve always only done what’s best for you. If you stop to think about it, if you finally learn to think, you’ll realize that everything I’ve done was for you and because of you.”
“But I don’t want that!”
“Think about it.”
“I don’t want to think!”
“See, what did I tell you?”
“Don’t start with that again. Don’t keep telling me to think, don’t keep tormenting me.”
“Who, me?”
“I can’t, I can’t do it like this . . .”
She can’t think like this, I know. Her thoughts break up, get cut off, they short-circuit.
“You can’t do this anymore, I forbid you.”
“Who, me? Am I the one doing this? So now you’re accusing me?”
“You have no right!”
“I know I have no right. So why is it happening all over again, why has it ended up like that? What are you doing here in front of me? Get the hell out of here!”
“No.”
If only she could really get the hell out of here. If only she could not be here. If only she could take a swing and hit me, but so hard that I would fly back, far away from her face. I’d be torn away from her presence, lose consciousness, the end—for her to stop existing. If only she, not me, would disappear and melt away, cease.
“This is a crime, this is something that shouldn’t be done! I’m your daughter!”
She doesn’t hit me, however, she just prolongs the moment. So I�
�m forced to hit her myself.
She screams, but not aloud, not out loud—her body curls inwardly and then erupts again: “Why did you do that?”
The question that destroys me. It pierces me and makes me wince. And she repeats it: “Why did you do that do me? Why did you do it?”
Her arms grow shorter, her knees, pressed against my knees, turn into narrow disks that desperately try to kick me, her body shrinks in my hands. She pummels me with her little fists, her hands with their childish nails are frenzied with rage. Night is falling, it’s raining, the nightmare thickens. I fall with her in my arms, I fall on top of my very self.
Her body slowly passes beneath the edge of the leaden cliffs. It is swallowed up, both of us are swallowed up by the pyramid, the gray squares stacked up without a crack.
“Just a few more minutes,” says the doctor, a professor of something or other, von Ehrenbauer. “Just a few more minutes, Herr K-shev, and the test results will be ready.”
Leukemia was the mildest punishment I expected to befall me—for everything I had done.
>>>
It smells horrible.
The river is murky, black lines parallel to the current. Muddy shafts and fuses flit past, matted balls of paper pop up in the eddies. Slimy, frayed rags of unknown consumer origin lap at the furry, sticky rocks. Rough bristles line the canal’s cement walls. It’s not even a river, but actually a canal, the longest reinforced canal in Sofia, narrow and straight as a gutter, cutting straight through the settlement: The Perlovska River.
The intestine-river flows swiftly, as if it can’t wait to carry off the shameful filth somewhere—where?—somewhere else. However, I return once more to that place, cast out of the illusion that I was ever anywhere at all.
The dream of escape crumples in my hands, nothing but a cheap wrapper. The scent of vomit at my feet invades it like a signal of reality, even though I myself was the one who vomited here, see, that’s the juice from my innards—which, by the way, simply confirms yet again that reality is something entirely internal. I always run this far and stop here, at the bridge over the river. The canal, slippery stones on both sides of the channel.
>>>
Did I fail? Of course—but that’s a feeling that helps me hang on: at least on the edge, at least for a bit.
You are the reason words exist, as I admitted before, and now I’ll admit that even if no one among you can help me, I still respect you, I bow passionately before every yes that extends the path through fear in the face of every no that could stop me.
So here I am in shoes, tube socks, and ridiculous, non-sporty shorts. The journey continues, the running continues, begun at the roots of the night only to hit the light from the iris of the sun itself.
The guys at the reception desk only briefly lifted their heads when I flew through the door’s revolving wings and entered via the hotel’s electric lobby into the natural darkness of the night. The cold metal vase of the Elba, knocked over onto the ground, flowed to one side. The water, the pontoon bridge, the pathway—I remember, that much I remember clearly—that I’m running, right? Please say yes, please fix me to this game board for at least a little while longer with the pin that I have been preserved on.
>>>
It turned out that the sign for Makarenko Strasse really marked a street with that name, and not just a nightmare in my head. What’s more, further on I also discovered a school also named after the Soviet pedagogue. So it would be bad manners not to reach the end. A thousand meters or so to the clinic. After all, we’re talking about money, a whole briefcase-full, a million and a half.
>>>
I enter quietly, I enter slowly—that’s how a needle should find a vein. It’s early, the hallways are empty. There’s a white splotch in front of his door, light coming from a window built way up into the ceiling for some unknown reason. This strange Hamburgian and Saxon architecture. But whatever, it doesn’t matter. I don’t pay too much attention to the hospital design—if nothing else, I’m still a medical student. Who never graduated.
Medicine
My choice, not accidental, as always. The demon with the ruby-red eyes—I’ll admit my naïveté—I wanted to conquer it with my own two hands.
So medicine it was, that’s where we met. She was looking for the same thing I was—the same self-absorbed image of that which kills everything. The death-demon is always exactly your same age.
During our lectures in anatomic pathology we were always in the front row, right by the dissection table. The yellow gloves I’d wear—too plastic, non-surgical, with no intention of saving anybody from anything. The body, already progressing beyond the fated stages, crossing over into chemistry—it no longer had anything to do with biology.
That’s where we met—I couldn’t help noticing her gaze, which never strayed from the instructor’s hands, never blinked. I liked isolating myself from the group, I would take notes, ignoring the groans of fainting female classmates and the huffing of everyone else who was waiting for this foul-smelling trial—and their entire course of study—to finally be over, so they could rush into the pristine and private practices of their dreams—without blood, if possible, full of well-guarded and wealthy clients.
Like she told me, she wanted to become a pediatrician. The first lie, although I wouldn’t say she was lying to me. She, of course, was always completely sincere—but she was fooling herself.
>>>
I’ll admit it, I had a dream that we were going down the white staircase toward the anatomy lab at night. I already know that childhood memories are ineffaceable. But both in childhood and in the youth of a profession, life-changing discoveries are also etched on the memory: tastes, smells, accidental touches, indescribable movements, sometimes overpowering and concrete. However, don’t believe for a second, don’t expect me to say that we cut things up (even if only in my dream), that we sliced off little pieces, organs and limbs, from the unfeeling corpses and that we nibbled on them, testing the flavor—no.
Don’t expect me to say anything more than that—it’s just a dream, right?
>>>
They admitted me the third time I applied, but kicked me out by my second year. Chemistry was always terrible—not just for me, but terrible in and of itself, even when I managed to cleverly copy the problems on the entrance exam. I knew that chemistry would find a way to take revenge on me for that scam.
The professor wasn’t impressed by my deep yet rather narrow knowledge of one specific section of the periodic table: the radioactive isotopes. It’s a little too early for you to be curing leukemia, young man. Set aside the actinoids for now, let’s first focus on some of the simpler elements from the first group: potassium, sodium, lithium, and best of all—hydrogen.
Go to hell, I should’ve told him, but I knew that he, too, was just another naïve sucker, an innocent adversary. He was trying to make himself seem important—Mendeleev and the periodic table give you the sense of superiority, as if somebody up there has revealed life’s big secrets to you. The strength of the periodic law.
Yes, young man, The Law is very important, it takes precedence over the little boxes in the table. We can still add on as many little boxes as we want, but the principle is the crucial thing. What is chemistry? We can only understand this by contemplating what an element is. And what is a chemical element, young man?
“A chemical element”—I decide to give him an insolent and absolutely by-the-textbook answer—“is a substance that cannot be broken down or changed into another substance by chemical means. Yes, but by other, physical means, on the atomic level—that’s where the really exciting changes happen—and what changes they are! Just like every sickness, by the way, radiation sickness is also more of a blessing than a curse. But if I were to spell it out for you, especially for you, it might very well blow your mind. Because radiation arrives in a ray of unearthly beauty, my dear professor, with a hint of the cosmos and a headstrong character. It can’t be compared with any other force—it’s
corporal, yet incorporeal. And invisible. It’s a foreign substance, yet it permeates into this world boundlessly, because it arrives in waves, and the world as a whole is wavelike, woven out of sinusoids. Its colors excite the eyes. Sounds, aural stimulation, vibrate on the eardrums. Scents, undulating aromas, mobile abstract surges of information, television, radio—a vital stream of fluids!”
Thrown out of the auditorium, I stop in the empty hallway next to the milky-white, paint-smeared window. On the window ledge, on top of the layers of dust, lie the bodies of dead mosquitoes, right in front of the screen. Dead of their own accord. I see two that continue holding their pose—it’s deceptive, as if they could take flight again any second. I reach out, but they remain motionless. I blow on them, the bodies unexpectedly start crawling, far too easily. They look like decommissioned airplanes retired to some deserted airfield, left to time and to themselves. Take this one here, for example—it took off and landed, and afterward didn’t make any other movement. No effort whatsoever to continue. Or perhaps effort was impossible, too strenuous. So that’s it, game over—now it just sits in the same place, as if this act didn’t cause it any particular suffering. Its body is still standing on its legs, it hasn’t flipped over onto its back.
>>>
Again, a hallway. Now the door is not slamming behind my back, but is rather there in front of me: K-shev’s room, which I have to enter, for something more than a visit.
I have to enter quietly, to enter slowly. With all my hatred and all my respect.
3
HER FATHER
THERE exist so-called personal forms of leukemia. Some of them deserve to be studied with particular attention, above and beyond the usual care for the sufferer. Certain leukemic syndromes are so rare that they are named after the patient himself: the Leroi Syndrome or Leukemia Familiae Jacobsen. So why shouldn’t there be a K-shev Leukemic Syndrome—strange, but not impossible, right? German medicine could make a new and decisive breakthrough at his expense, while Hamburg could surpass Tubingen and the Max Planck Institute in terms of glory. And K-shev himself would be immortalized in the process. I would guess they’re already at it, they can’t help but notice something strange, something unusual in the arresting pathogenic mechanism. Something that renders useless the gas-transporting blood cells, pumped out of the heart of The Boss.
