by Georgi Tenev
Yes, that’s how it seems at first glance. But after all the old norms have been obliterated and you have been left and are left on your own—with the mechanism of pure causes and effects—then the only working principle remaining comes to the forefront. And that is the Law of the Right of the Firstcomer.
Today I judge him for things that he probably wouldn’t do if he could see them as I do—from the position of time. My accusations would be part of his conscience, if only everything could be given a new order. If I could be him, or vice-versa—he could be me. It looks very simple, a question of chronology in time. The bodies with which and over which we battle—his, mine, hers—are, in fact, the battlefield.
One critical, criminal question hangs over everything, however: Why am I rehashing all of this? Why, through her purifying body, the body of K-shev’s daughter, am I approaching the very same place where her father also is—the narrow transitional space of death? Could it be that the most horrifying part has already begun, the part I have always feared exactly as much as growing up? Has the process of transforming into K-shev begun?
Going Back
So for that reason I go back to earth, to his bedside, amid the signals of reality. Outside a truck relieves the dumpsters of trash with a steady hum.
In the end, I have to reach out—I take the envelope sitting on the nightstand. There’s a name written on it. Even in the cramped letters of the sickly script I recognize that his hand has written it:
“A letter to my son.”
His Son
“I wanted you to love me for what I am. For that reason I never pretended. Was that terrible? Now I’m dying, dying of a disease that I almost brought on you, too. Forgive me.”
Blah-blah, and so on. He’s sleeping now and will probably never wake up again. So he must’ve fallen asleep for good, since he finally decided to write. He’s fallen into those forms of the words “eternity” and “sleep” that are used in obituaries. Is there any point in reading any further? Why, for something new that I don’t already know?
“Of course, first of all, that unnatural Article One had to be repealed. But a change in the law still doesn’t mean a judgment. Once my leading and fatherly role has been rejected, you both can invite someone else into the vacant position. Anyone else. My end is near—I assume the two of you won’t wait much longer. There’s money in the briefcase. More than a million, I hope it’ll be enough. I don’t have any more, that’s all of it. Don’t be afraid, go ahead and take it, stow it away somewhere. I don’t need painkillers anymore, the drugs are useless at this point.
I’m now looking at my hands. Believe me, I can’t feel anything anymore. If someone comes close to me, even very close, I can’t feel it. I touch the sheets, I can still move my fingers, but it’s as if I’m not touching anything.
I’m on the bed, half-turned on my side—that’s how they leave me during the day. For a long while now I’ve spent all my time lying down and hungry, because I can’t swallow any food. They don’t feed me, they just give me nutrients through the IV. But I’m still hungry, I’m hungry. They inject some chemical so I don’t feel the hunger, so I won’t want to eat—but I’m hungry, my stomach is empty. They say it’s already gotten thinner, burned up or something with the intestines. I don’t know what it is, but I feel hunger. My teeth are falling out, the holes are numb and empty, but I still want to chew. I’m hungry, come and feed me, or nurse me—with bare gums, toothless, I can suckle from your breasts. Can’t you see how much I need you, my girl?”
“Filthy old man!” I feel like telling him. “You’ve got the wrong address. Shut up, you make me sick!”
Then: Shhh.
The shushing comes from behind my back.
“Shhhh, be quiet,” she whispers and takes a step forward.
Unbuttoning the buttons just above her breasts.
“Don’t do it,” I tell her, don’t, I beg her.
“Shut up,” she waves her hand, brushing me aside. “Leave, or if you want, stay. Watch, but be quiet.”
I see her, I see him. He opens his mouth, I see it—his lips open thirstily.
>>>
The fusion that splits you into halves—yet a strange wholeness is somehow achieved along with it. Something made up of its own parts, but in a different configuration. This connection is predatory—it is the predator—and that is precisely what is so painful for her.
She wants to feel the supercharged particles—how they change the shape and contents of the cells with the invisible vibrations of their heavy neutrons. They shove aside the cell membranes, warp the mitochondria’s soft form, and derail the nuclei from their orbits. She wanted—at least on the day of those May Day demonstrations, on the bright white day of Chernobyl—to change something. She sensed a great opportunity to correct the genes: not mine, not his, and if possible, not even her own anymore. And in this way she is not mine, not his. Free, finally.
“You want to run away,” I hear K-shev say.
He is speaking both to me and to her, simultaneously. “You’re striving toward this illness, I realize, as if toward salvation. I’d have let you go, you know, if it had been possible. But it wasn’t.”
“Why? Why?!” I scream voicelessly with my eyes, since she has forbidden me all sounds and words. I scream as they fuse together, and I know that she feels him in her stomach like a knife:
“Why?”
A simple answer, thus terrible and unnerving:
“Because I love you too much.”
I don’t know who is guilty, but I do know who’s going to pay for all of this—the price was a question of time. Our horror ends in one and the same moment, spread out like a roll of thunder. Her flat, still childlike stomach. The wall against which my waves are doomed to break.
Check-out
I sit up in bed. I can reach out exactly far enough to grab the knife off the table. In my crazed hunger I had pounced on—and eaten (last night, I think it was last night)—devoured the food, and the knife remained there, like a harmful convenience—why?
Why am I cutting my ankle three or four times—three or four lines (I’d like even more)—but it’s best to stop.
A stream of blood seeps through the leg of my jeans, and then another one next to it. Soon it isn’t even beautiful anymore, just a shapeless red stripe. The splotches slowly soak through, I can feel how the threads in the cloth swell up, like the black crumbs on a slice of toast as they soften up from the butter—the butter, the blood saturates them. The night rolls back, the morning comes, the train of black hours gathers up its cars full of ghostly passengers. The world of nighttime fears is terrifying due to the emptiness that surrounds its characters. In the blackness, their dim faces don’t cast back reflections. But the light—here it is again, the new, tolerable, daytime face of death. The death, so to speak, that appeals to us.
Come on, I say to myself, let’s start thinking about bodily functions. The body is alive, so it’s born to die. Death, considered realistically, shouldn’t frighten us. My pant legs are heavy, the blood streams out.
So now she finally comes out of the bathroom, buttoning up her clothes. She looks around with a very strange gaze, the eyes of a person who hasn’t found what she wanted. But if I were to ask her what she was really looking for, what more she could want from an empty hotel room—hotel rooms are always somehow empty, despite the furniture, despite the luggage—would she be able to formulate her desire? What does she know about me besides my name?
“So you’re really his son, then?”
I open the briefcase and give her a pack of bills.
“So he’s sick, huh? That sucks. Too bad.”
I notice she’s looking at the money, however, as she folds a piece of gum into her mouth and mashes it between her front teeth:
“I don’t have a father. It’s better that way.”
She combs her hair in front of the mirror, puts on lipstick.
“So I don’t have to worry about whether he’s sick now, somewhere or with something.”<
br />
She rubs her lips together, smearing the lipstick, fixing the edges with her finger.
“I don’t even want to know his name.”
The name sick passes within a hair’s breadth of the concept healthy, I think to myself.
She opens the door, looks around the room—at the money, of course—then exhales and without saying goodbye, walks out.
What a strange coincidence, COMING ACROSS A BULGARIAN GIRL ON THE REEPERBAHN. I don’t know, Hamburg really is a strange city.
I also don’t know whether it is acceptable to bring prostitutes to this hotel, but it’s a little late to ask.
The guys at reception look at me strangely, but don’t say anything. The key drops into the marble box that says:
“Thank you! Please come visit us again.”
I pay without saying a word and without staggering.
>>>
At dawn the rats are hopping lightly along the canal. I step aside onto the grass—the green, I think to myself, will soak up the blood. I shouldn’t leave a trace on the clean pathway, I think to myself, on the blue asphalt—in my imagination it can now serve as a bridge, which finally leads to the beyond.
NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION
p. 26: Parody of the poem “Northern Lights” by the proletarian poet Hristo Smirnenski (1898-1923).
p. 47: Bulgarian cosmonauts participated in the Soviet space program. The first Bulgarian visited space in 1979 on the Russian ship Soyuz-33. The second—and for the time being, the final—Bulgarian cosmonaut blasted off in 1988, several years before the break up of the USSR.
p. 62: A line from the song “Unlived Things” (1985) by The Crickets, the most popular Bulgarian rock group of its day, formed in 1967.
p. 63: This is a line from another Crickets’ song, “I Am Simply a Person” (1990).
p. 71: Anton Semenovych Makarenko was a pre-World War II Soviet pedagogue who created an educational system for homeless children living in colonies in Russia. To Bulgarian schoolchildren, this system was a symbol of harsh order and cruel discipline.
p. 97: A parody of the song “As I’m Loving You” by the Argirovi Brothers, a Bulgarian pop duo made up of the identical twins Blagovest and Svetoslav. They were among the most popular stars during the 1980s and the perestroika era.
p. 98: A mausoleum stood in the center of the Bulgarian capital from 1949 to 1999, housing the mummified body of Georgi Dimitrov, the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party and the general secretary of Comintern.
p. 109: A parody of the poem “Bulgaria” by Communist poet Georgi Dzhagarov (1925-1995).
p. 110: A line from the song “At Every Kilometer” (1969), the theme music from the Socialist-era propagandistic television series of the same name, which was the most widely viewed program in Bulgaria during the 20th century.
p. 117: A play on the Bulgarian word chlen, which can mean both “the male sex organ” and “a legal article,” as in the notorious Article One of Bulgaria’s socialist constitution: “The People’s Republic of Bulgaria is a socialist state, headed by the urban and rural Working Class. The leading power in society and the state is the Bulgarian Communist Party. The Bulgarian Communist Party leads the founding of a mature socialist society” (1971).
Georgi Tenev, before penning the Vick Prize-winning novel Party Headquarters, had already published four books, founded the Triumviratus Art Group, hosted The Library television program about books, and written plays that have been performed in Germany, France, and Russia. He is also a screenwriter for film and TV.
Angela Rodel earned an MA in linguistics from UCLA and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study Bulgarian. In 2010, she won a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev’s short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today.
Open Letter—the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press—is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers. Publishing ten titles in translation each year, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow.
Making world literature available in English is crucial to opening our cultural borders, and its availability plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy and vibrant book culture. Open Letter strives to cultivate an audience for these works by helping readers discover imaginative, stunning works of fiction and poetry, and by creating a constellation of international writing that is engaging, stimulating, and enduring.
Current and forthcoming titles from Open Letter include works from Argentina, Catalonia, China, Iceland, Israel, Latvia, Poland, Spain, South Africa, and many other countries.
www.openletterbooks.org
