I. THE BREAD OF SORROW
THE SORCERER
And then a sorcerer grabbed the cap off my head, stuck his finger straight through it and made a hole about yea big. I started bawling, how could I go home with my cap torn like that? He laughed, blew on it, and marvel of marvels, it was good as new. Now that’s one mighty powerful sorcerer.
Come on, Grandpa, that was a magician, I hear myself say.
Back then they were sorcerers, my grandfather says, later they became magicians.
But I’m already there, twelve years old, the year must be 1925. There’s the fiver I’m clutching in my hand, sweaty, I can feel its edge. For the first time I’m alone at the fair and with money to boot.
Step right up, ladies and gents. See the fearsome python, ten feet long from head to tail, and as long again from tail to head.
Daaang, what’s this twenty-foot-long snake?. Hang on there you, where do you think you’re going, you owe me a fiver. Well, I only got five and I’m not gonna waste it on some snake.
Across the way they’re selling pomades, medicinal clay, and hair dyes.
Dyyyyyyye for your ringletsssss, brains for your nitwitssss.
And who is that guy with all the sniffling grannies gathered around him?
. Nikolcho, the prisoner of war, finally made it back home, and heard that his bride had married another, Nikolcho met her at the well and cut her head clean off, as her head sailed through the air it spoke, oh Nikolcho, what have you done. Time for the waterworks, grannies.
And the grannies bawl their eyes out. Now buy a songbook to find out what terrible mistake he made, slaying his innocent wife. A songbook hawker. Geez, what could that mistake have been?.
People, people, jostling me, I clutch the money, just don’t let anybody steal it, my father had said when he gave it to me.
Stop. Agop’s. Syrup. Written in large, syrupy pink letters. I swallow hard. Should I drink one?.
Come and get your rock candyyyyyy. The devil is tempting me, disguised as an Armenian granny. If you’re in the know, here is where you’ll go. So what now? Syrup or rock candy? I stand in the middle, swallowing hard, completely unable to decide. My grandfather in me cannot decide. So that’s where I get the indecisiveness that will constantly torment me. I see myself sitting there, scrawny, lanky, with a skinned knee, in the cap that will soon be punctured by the sorcerer, gawking and tempted by the world offering itself all around me. I step yet further aside, see myself from a bird’s-eye view, everyone is scurrying around me, I’m standing there, and my grandfather is standing there, the two of us in one body.
Whoosh, a hand grabs the cap off my head. I’ve reached the sorcerer’s little table. Easy now, I’m not going to cry, I know very well what will happen. Now there’s the sorcerer’s finger coming out the other side of the cloth, man oh man, what a hole. The crowd around me roars with laughter. Someone smacks my bare neck so hard that tears spring into my eyes. I wait, but the sorcerer seems to have forgotten how the rest of the story goes, he sets my torn cap aside, brings his hand to my lips, pinches his fingers and turns them and, horror of horrors, my mouth is locked. I can’t open it. I’ve gone mute, the crowd around me is now roaring with laughter. I try to shout something, but all that can be heard is a mooing from somewhere in my throat. Mmmmm. Mmmmm.
Harry Stoev has come to the fair, Harry Stoev has come back from America.
A husky man in a city-slicker suit rends the crowd, which whispers respectfully and greets him. Harry Stoev — the new Dan Kolov, the Bulgarian dream. His legs are worth a million U.S. dollars, someone behind me says. He puts ’em in a chokehold with his legs, they can’t move a muscle. Well, that’s why they call it his death grip, whispers another.
I clearly imagine the strangled wrestlers, tossed down on the mat one next to the other, and start feeling the shortage of air, as if I’ve fallen into Harry Stoev’s hold. I rush to escape, while the crowd takes off after him. And then from somewhere behind me I hear:
Step right up, ladies and gents. A child with a bull’s head. A never-before-seen wonder. The little Minotaur from the Labyrinth, only twelve years old. You can eat up your fiver, drink up your fiver, or spend your fiver to see a marvel you’ll talk about your whole life long.
According to my grandfather’s memory, he didn’t go in here. But now I’m at the Fair of this memory, I am he, and it irresistibly draws me in. I hand over my fiver, say farewell to the python and its deceitful twenty feet, to Agop’s ice-cold syrup, to the story of Nikolcho the prisoner-of-war, to the Armenian granny’s rock candy, Harry Stoev’s death grip, and sink into the tent. With the Minotaur.
From this point on, the thread of my grandfather’s memory stretches thin, yet doesn’t snap. He claims that he didn’t dare go in, yet I manage to. He’s kept it to himself. Since I’m here, in his memory, could I even keep going if he hadn’t been here before me? I’m not sure, but something isn’t right. I’m already inside the labyrinth, which turns out to be a big, half-darkened tent. What I see is very different from my favorite book of Greek myths and the black-and-white illustrations in which I first saw the Minotaur-monster. They have nothing in common whatsoever. This Minotaur isn’t scary, but sad. A melancholy Minotaur.
In the middle of the tent stands an iron cage about five or six paces long and a little taller than human height. The thin metal bars have begun to darken with rust. Inside there is a mattress and a small, three-legged stool at one end, while at the other — a pail of water and scattered hay. One corner for the human, one for the beast.
The Minotaur is sitting on the stool, with his back to the audience. The shock comes not from the fact that he looks like a beast, but that he is in some way human. Precisely his humanness is staggering. His body is boyish, just like mine.
The first down of adolescence on his legs, feet with long toes, who knows why I expected to see hooves. Faded shorts that reach his knees, a short-sleeved shirt. and the head of a young bull. Slightly disproportionate to the body, large, hairy, and heavy. As if nature had hesitated. And just dropped everything right in the middle between bull and man — nature got frightened or distracted. This head is not just a bull’s, nor just a human’s. How can you describe it, when the tongue is also pulled in two directions? The face (or snout?) — elongated; the forehead — slightly sloped backward, but nevertheless massive, with bones jutting out above the eyes. (Actually, it is not unlike the forehead of all the men in our family. At this point I unwittingly run my hand over my own skull.) His lower jaw is rather protruded, the lips quite thick. The bestial always hides in the jaw, it’s where the animal leaves us last. His eyes, due to the elongated face (or snout) that flattens out on the sides, are wide set. Over the whole facial area there is some brownish fuzz, not a beard, but fuzz. Only toward the ears and neck does this fuzz congeal into fur, the hair growing wild and in disarray. And yet he is more human than anything else. There is a sorrow in him, which no animal possesses.
Once the tent fills up, the man makes the Minotaur-boy stand. He gets up off the stool and for the first time looks at the crowd in the tent. His gaze wanders over us, he has to turn his head, given his obliquely set eyes. They seem to rest on me for a moment. Could we be the same age?
The man who herded us into the tent (his master and guardian) begins his tale. An odd mix of legend and biography, honed over the course of long repetitions at fairs. A story in which eras catch up with one another and intertwine. Some events happen now, others in the distant and immemorial past. The places are also confused, palaces and basements, Cretan kings and local shepherds build the labyrinth of this story about the Minotaur-boy, until you get lost in it. It winds like a maze and unfortunately I will never be able to retrace its steps. A story with dead-end corridors, threads that snap, blind spots, and obvious discrepancies. The more unbelievable it looks, the more you believe it. The pale and straight line — the only way I can retell it now, lacking the magic of that tale — goes roughly as follows.
Helio, the boy’s grandfather on his mother’s side, was in charge of the sun and the stars; in the evening he locked up the sun and drove the stars out into the sky, like driving a herd out to pasture. In the morning he gathered up his herd and let the sun out to graze. The old man’s daughter, Pasifette, the mother of this boy here, was kind and beautiful, she married a mighty king from somewhere way down there in the islands. This was long ago, even before the wars. It was a rich kingdom, the Lord God himself (their god, that is, the local one) drank whiskey with the king of the islands, they set store by each other, God even gave him a big bull with a pure white hide, which was a downright wonder to behold. So the years went by and God demanded that same bull as a sacrifice. But Old King Minyo (Minos, Minos. somebody yelled out) was feeling stingy and decided to pull a fast one on God and slaughtered another bull, again fat and well fed. But can you really pull a fast one on God? God found out, hit the roof, started blustering, saying, don’t pull this while-the-grass-grows-the-horse-starves business on me, now you’ll see who you’re messing with. He fixed it so that Minyo’s meek and loyal wife, Pasifette, sinned with that very same handsome stud of a bull. (Here a buzz of disapproval sweeps through the crowd.) And from this a child was born — a man in body, but a bull in countenance, with a bull’s head. His mother nursed him and cared for him, but that laughingstock King Minyo just couldn’t stomach the disgrace. He didn’t have the heart to kill the little baby-Minotaur, so he ordered it to be locked up in the basement of the palace. And that basement was a real labyrinth, a master stonemason made it so that once you go in, there’s no getting out. That mason must’ve been from around these parts, one of our boys, since here we’ve got the best, while those Greeks are lazy as sin. (A buzz of approval sweeps through the tent.) But afterward that poor old mason didn’t earn a red cent from the whole business, but that’s another story. They tossed the little boy inside, at the tender age of three, torn away from his mother and father. Just imagine what his poor angelic little soul must’ve suffered in that dark dungeon. (At this point, people began sniffling, even though they themselves did the exact same thing with their little snot-nosed brats, fine, so it wasn’t for eternity, they’d lock them up between the thick cellar walls only for an hour or two.) They tossed him there in the dark, the storyteller went on, the little guy cried day and night, calling for his mother. In the end, Pasifette begged one of those master masons who had made the labyrinth to sneak the boy out secretly, while they put a young bull in his place. But that’s not in the book, some know-it-all in the crowd chimes in. Let’s keep that between us, the storyteller says emphatically, so that old Cretan King Minyo doesn’t find out about the switch, ’cause he still doesn’t have the slightest inkling. And so they secretly freed the little boy with the bull’s head and again secretly loaded him onto a ship bound for Athens (the same one going to take the seven Athenian lads and lassies, supposedly for the Minotaur). The little Minotaur gets off in Athens, there an old fisherman finds him and hides him in his hut, looks after him for a year or two, and gives him to one of our boys, a shepherd, who goes down south in the winter to graze his herd of cattle, all the way to the Aegean. He took him, saying since he’ll never be able to live out in the open among people, hopefully the cattle will take him in as one of their own. Well now, that very same shepherd personally passed him on to me a few years back. The cows don’t want him neither, he said, they don’t accept him as their own, they’re scared of him, my herd’s scattered, I can’t keep him with me any longer. Since then we’ve been going around to fairs with the poor little orphan, abandoned by his mother and father, not man enough for men, nor bull enough for bulls.
While he tells this story, the Minotaur bows his head, as if the story has nothing to do with him, only making a soft throaty sound from time to time. The same as I made with my locked lips.
Now show ’em how you drink water, the master orders and the Minotaur, with visible displeasure, falls to his knees, dunks his head into the bucket and slurps noisily. Now say hello to these good people. The Minotaur is silent, looking down. Say hello to these people, the man repeats once again. Now I see that in one hand he is holding a staff with a sharp spike on one end. The Minotaur opens his mouth and growls out what is more likely a deep, raspy, unfriendly Mooooo.
With that, the show ends.
I turn around before leaving the tent (last), and for an instant our eyes meet again. I will never be able to escape the feeling that I know that face from somewhere.
Outside I realize that my mouth is still locked shut, and my cap is torn. I dash toward the stand, but there is no trace of the sorcerer. That’s how I left the memory, or rather, that’s how I left my twelve-year-old grandfather. With locked lips and a torn cap. But why would he hide his visit to the Minotaur in his story?
MOOOO
I didn’t ask anything then, because he would’ve realized that I could get inside other people’s memories, and that was my biggest secret. And I hated the Yellow House, where they would’ve taken me, just like they’d taken Blind Mariyka, because she saw things that would happen.
Nevertheless, I very secretly managed to find out something from Grandfather’s sisters, seven in number, who came to see him every summer until the end of their lives, skinny, dressed in black, dry as grasshoppers. One afternoon I cornered the eldest and chattiest of them and casually began asking her what grandpa had been like as a child. I had bought her candy and lemonade in advance — they all were crazy about sweets — and thus got the whole story.
It was then that I learned that as a boy, my grandfather had suddenly gone mute. He had come back from the village fair and could only moo, he couldn’t utter a single word. Their mother took him to Granny Witch to “pour him a bullet.” She took one look at him and declared — this child has had quite a fright, I’ll have you know. Then she took a bit of lead, poured it into an iron mug, heated it up over the fire until it melted and started sizzling. In “pouring a bullet,” the lead takes on the form of whatever has frightened you. The fear enters the lead. Afterward you sleep with it under your pillow for several nights and then you throw it into a river, into running water, to carry the fear far away. Granny Witch poured the bullet three times and all three times a bull’s head appeared, with horns, a snout, everything. Some bull at the fair had scared him, said Grandpa’s sister, they’d go there to sell animals from the neighboring villages, buffalo, cattle, sheep, whole herds. For six months he didn’t utter a word, only mooed. Granny Witch came nearly every day, burned herbs over him like incense, they held him upside down over the crumbs of dinner to make the fear fall out of him. They even slaughtered a young calf and made him watch, but his eyes rolled up into his head, he fainted and didn’t see a thing. It cleared up on its own after six months. He came into the house one day and said: “Mom, come quick, Blind Nera has calved.” They had a cow by that name. And so his lips were unlocked. Of course, most of the details came from my smuggled entry into my great-aunt’s memory. Her name was Dana. She was hiding one other story, whose corridors I had already secretly slipped into.
THE BREAD OF SORROW
I see him clearly. A three-year-old boy. He has fallen asleep on an empty flour sack, in the mill yard. A heavy bee buzzes close above him, making off with his sleep.
The boy opens his eyes just a crack, he’s still sleepy, he doesn’t know where he is.
I open my eyes just a crack, I’m still sleepy, I don’t know where I am. Somewhere in the no-man’s-land between dream and day. It’s afternoon, precisely that timelessness of late afternoon. The steady rumbling of the mill. The air is full of tiny specks of flour, a slight itching of the skin, a yawn, a stretch. The sound of people talking can be heard, calm, monotone, lulling. Several carts stand unyoked, half-filled with sacks, everything is sprinkled with that white dust. A donkey grazes nearby, his leg fettered with a chain.
Sleep gradually recedes completely. That morning in the darkness they had come to the mill with his mother and three sisters. He had wanted to help with the sacks, but they wouldn’t let him. Then he had fallen asleep. They’re surely ready to go by now, they’ve finished everything without him. He gets up and looks around. They are nowhere to be seen. Now here come the first steps of fear, still imperceptible, quiet, merely a suspicion that is rejected immediately. They’re not here, but they must be inside or on the other side of the mill, or they’re sleeping in the shade under the cart.
The cart isn’t there, either. That light-blue cart with a rooster painted on the back.
And then the fear wells up, filling him, just like when they fill the little pitcher at the well, the water surges, pushing the air out and overflowing. The stream of fear is too strong for his three-year-old body and it fills up quickly, soon he will have no air left. He cannot even burst into tears. Crying requires air, crying is a long, audible exhalation of fear. But there is still hope. I run inside the mill, here the noise is very loud, the movements hasty, two white giants pour grain into the mill’s mouth, everything is swathed in a white fog, the enormous spider webs in the corners are heavy with flour, a ray of sunlight passes through the high, broken windows, and in the length of that beam the titanic dust battle can be seen. His mother isn’t here. Nor any of his sisters. A hulking man stooped under a sack almost knocks him over. They holler at him to go outside, he’s in the way.
Mommy?
The first cry, it’s not even a cry, it ends in a question mark.
Moommy?
The “o” lengthens, since the desperation is growing as well.
Mooommy. Mooooooommy.
The question has disappeared. Hopelessness and rage, a crumb of rage. What else is inside? Bewilderment. How could this be? Mothers don’t abandon their children. It’s not fair. This just doesn’t happen. “Abandon” is a word he doesn’t yet know. I don’t yet know. The absence of the word does not negate the fear, on the contrary, it heaps up ever higher, making it even more intolerable, crushing. The tears begin, now it’s their turn, the only consolers. At least he can cry, the fear has uncorked them, the pitcher of fear has run over. The tears stream down his face, down my face, they mix with the flour dust on the face, water, salt, and flour, and knead the first bread of grief. The bread that never runs out. The bread of sorrow, which will feed us through all the coming years. Its salty taste on the lips. My grandfather swallows. I swallow, too. We are three years old.
At the same time, a light-blue cart with a rooster on the back raises a cloud of dust, getting farther and farther away from the mill.
The year is 1917. The woman driving the cart is twenty-eight years old. She has eight children. Everyone says that she was a large, fair, and handsome woman. Her name also confirms this. Calla. Although in those days it’s unlikely that anyone had deduced its meaning from the Greek — beautiful. Calla and that was that. A name. It’s wartime. The Great War, as they call it, is nearing its end. And as always, we’re on the losing side. The father of my three-year-old grandfather is somewhere on the front. He’s been fighting since 1912. There’s been no news of him for several months. He comes back for a few days, makes a child, and leaves. Could they have been following orders during those home leaves? The war is dragging on, they’re going to need more soldiers. He didn’t have much luck with future soldiers, he kept having girls — seven in all. Surely when he returned to his regiment they would arrest him for every one of them.
Several pieces of silver hidden away for a rainy day have already been spent, the barn has been emptied, the woman has sold everything she could possibly sell — the bed with the springs and metal headboard, a rarity in those days, her two long braids, the string of gold coins from her wedding. The children are crying from hunger. All she has left is an ox and a donkey, which is now pulling the cart. With the ox, she struggles to plow. Autumn is getting on into winter. She has managed to beg off a few sacks of grain and is now on her way back from the mill with three bags of flour. Her daughters are sleeping in the cart amid the sacks. Halfway home they stop to let the donkey rest.
“Mom, we forgot Georgi.”
A frightened voice comes from behind her back — Dana, the eldest. Silence.
Silence.
Silence.
Thick and heavy silence. Silence and a secret, which will later be passed on year after year. What is the mother doing, why is she silent, why does she not turn the cart around immediately and race back to the mill?
It’s wartime, they’re human, they won’t leave a three-year-old child all alone. He’s a boy, someone will take him in, look after him, there are barren women hungry for children, he’ll have better luck. Words that I try to find in her thoughts. But there is only silence there.
We forgot him, we forgot him, the daughter chants behind her back through tears. Never mind that the word is different — we’ve abandoned him.
Yet another long minute goes by. I imagine how in that minute the faces of the unborn look on, holding their breath. There they are, craning their necks through the fence of time, my father, my aunt, my other aunt, there’s my brother, there’s me, there’s my daughter, standing on tiptoes. Their, our appearance over the years depends on that minute and on the young woman’s silence. I wonder whether she suspects how many things are being decided now? She finally raises her head, as if waking up, turns in her seat and looks around. The endless plains of Thrace, the scorched stubble fields, the changing light of the sunset, the donkey that is chewing some burned grass, indifferent to everything, the three sacks of flour which will run out right in the middle of winter, three of her seven daughters, who wait to see what she will say.
The sin has already been committed, she has hesitated.
She considered, if only for a minute, abandoning him. Her voice is dry. If you want, you can go back. Said to Dana, the eldest, thirteen. The decision is shoved off onto another. She doesn’t say “we’ll go back,” she doesn’t say “go back,” she doesn’t move. And yet, my three-year-old grandfather still has a chance. Dana leaps from the cart and dashes back down the dirt road.
We, the as-of-yet unborn, craning our necks through the fence of that minute, draw our heads back and breathe a sigh of relief.
Dusk is falling, the mill is miles away. A girl of thirteen is running down a dirt road, barefoot, the evening breeze flutters her dress. Everything around is empty, she runs to tire her own fear, to take its breath away. She doesn’t glance aside, every bush resembles a lurking man, all the frightening stories she has listened to in the evenings about brigands, bogeymen, dragons, ghosts, and wolves run in a pack at her heels. If she dares turn around, they will hurl themselves on her. I run, run, run in the still-warm September evening, alone amid the fields, on the baked mud of the road, which I sense more intensely with every step, my heart is pounding in my chest, someone is there crouching along the road, but why is his arm twisted up like that so strangely, oh it’s just a bush. There in the distance the first lights of the mill. There I should find my three-year-old brother. my grandfather. myself.
The mother, my great-grandmother, lived to be ninety-three, passing from one end of the century to the other, she was part of my childhood, too. Her children grew up and scattered, they left her, grew old. Only one of them never left her and took care of her until her death. The forgotten boy. The story of the mill had entered the secret family chronicle, everyone whispered it, some with sympathy for Granny Calla and as proof of how hard the times had been, others as a joke, yet others, such as my grandmother, with undisguised reproach. But no one ever told it in front of my grandfather. And he never once told it. And he never parted from his mother.
A tragic irony of the kind we usually discover in myths. When the story reached me on that afternoon, the main heroine was no longer with us. I remember how at first I felt anger and bewilderment, as if I myself had been abandoned. I experienced yet another pang of doubt in the justness of the universe. That woman lived to a ripe old age under the care of that once-abandoned three-year-old boy. And perhaps that was precisely her punishment. To live so long and to see that child before her every day. The abandoned one.
I HATE YOU, ARIADNE
I never forgave Ariadne for betraying her brother. How could you give a ball of string to the one who would kill your unfortunate, abandoned brother, driven beastly by the darkness? Some heartthrob from Athens shows up, turns her head — how hard could that be, some provincial, big-city girl, that’s exactly what she is, a hayseed and a city girl at the same time, she’s never left the rooms of her father’s palace, which is simply a more luxurious labyrinth.
Dana returns to the mill all alone in the darkness and rescues her brother, while Ariadne makes sure that her own brother’s murderer doesn’t lose his way. I hate you, Ariadne.
In the children’s edition of Ancient Greek Myths, I drew two bull’s horns on Ariadne’s head in pen.
CONSOLATION
Grandma, am I going to die?
I’m three, I’m standing next to the bed in the middle of the small room, with one hand I’m clutching my ear, it hurts, with the other I’m tugging on my grandmother’s hand and crying as only a scared-to-death three-year-old child can cry. Inconsolably. My great-grandmother, that very same Granny Calla, now over ninety, having seen plenty of death, having buried more than one loved one, an austere woman, is sitting up in bed with tousled hair, no less frightened than I am. It’s midnight, the witching hour, as she called it. Grandmaaaa, I’m dying, Grandmaaa, I howl, holding on to my ear.
You’re not going to die, my child. Good God, the poor little thing, so he knows about dying, too.
My mother runs in and catches sight of us like that, embracing and crying in the dark. I can imagine that composition clearly — a boy of three, barefoot, in short pajamas and a desiccated ninety-year-old woman in her nightgown, who, incidentally, will pass away in only a few days. Crying and talking about death. Perhaps death was hovering nearby, perhaps children can sense it? Hush now, child, you’re not going to die, my great-grandmother repeated then, to console me. There’s an order to things, my child, first I’ll die, then your grandma and your grandpa, then. And this made me bawl all the harder. A consolation built on a chain of deaths.
My great-grandmother died exactly one week later. Just like that, out of nowhere, she lay in bed for a day or two and passed away on New Year’s Eve. That was the first death I remember, even though they didn’t let me watch. She was lying on the bed in the room, small and waxen, like an old woman-doll, I thought to myself then, even though dolls never get old. In the middle of the room, reaching almost to the ceiling, stood the Christmas tree, decorated with cotton, silver tin-foil garlands, and those fragile ornaments from the ’70s, which lay all year carefully wrapped in a box in the wardrobe. Each of those shiny colored orbs during that unforgettable New Year’s Eve reflected my dead great-grandmother.
I was more worried about my grandfather, who was sitting at her feet, crying quietly. This time abandoned for good.
Much later my grandfather would lie in that same bed one January night and take his leave of us, since he had a long road ahead of him. Mom is calling me to help her with the sacks.
TROPHY WORDS
Szervusz, kenyér, bor, víz, köszönöm, szép, isten veled.
I will never forget that strange rosary of words. My grandfather strung them out on the long winter evenings we spent together during my childhood vacations. Hello, bread, wine, water, thank you, beautiful, farewell. Immediately following my grandmother’s quick and semi-conspiratorially whispered prayer would come his szervusz, kenyér, bor.
He always said that he used to be able to speak Hungarian for hours, but now in his old age all he had left was this handful of words. His trophy from the front. My grandfather’s seven Hungarian words, which he guarded like silver spoons. My grandmother was certainly jealous of them. Because why would a soldier need to know the word for “beautiful”? And she simply could not accept calling “bread” by such a strange and distorted name. God Almighty, Blessed Virgin, what an ugly word! Those folks have committed a terrible sin. How can you call bread “kenyér,” she fumed, in dead seriousness.
Bread is bread.
Water is water.
Without having read Plato, she shared his idea of the innate correctness of names. Names were correct by nature, never mind that this nature always turned out to be precisely the Bulgarian one.
My grandma never failed to mention that the other soldiers from the village had brought real trophies home from the front, this one a watch, that one a pot, yet another a full set of silver spoons and forks. Stolen, added my grandfather, and they had never even taken them out to eat with, I know their type.
But my grandmother and Hungary were not at all on friendly terms, between them that spirit of understanding and cooperation, as it was called in the newspapers back then, just didn’t work out. Quite a while later I came to understand the reason for this tension.
I found it strange that my grandfather didn’t like to talk about the war. Or at least he didn’t talk about the things I expected to hear and had seen in movies, the constant battles, artillery fire, kurrr-kur-kurrr (all our toys were machine guns and pistols). I clearly remember asking him how many fascists he had killed and bloodthirstily awaited the tally. Even though I already knew that he couldn’t chalk up a single kill to his name. Not one. And to tell you the truth, I was a bit ashamed of him. Dimo’s grandfather from the other neighborhood had shot thirty-eight, most point-blank, and had stabbed another twenty in the gut with his bayonet. Dimo took a step forward, thrust the invisible bayonet a foot into my stomach and twisted it. I think I gave him a good scare when I dropped to the ground pale and started throwing up. It’s awful getting stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. I barely survived.
LIVE MEDICINE
The slugs slowly drag themselves across the newspaper, without letting go of it. Several are timidly clinging together, body to body. My grandfather grabs one with two fingers, closes his eyes, opens his mouth and slowly places the slug inside, close to his throat. He swallows. My stomach turns. I’m afraid for Grandpa. And I want to be able to do as he does. My grandfather has an ulcer. The slugs are his living medicine. They go in, make their way through the esophagus and stop in the soft cave of the stomach, leaving their slimy trail there, which forms something like a protective film on top, a thin medicinal layer that seals off the wound. He learned this recipe on the front. Whether the slugs come out the other end alive and well afterward, or die as volunteers, plugging up the embrasure of the stomach lining.
A huge hand lifts me up and sets me at the opening of a red, warm and moist cave. It is not unpleasant, even if a bit frightening. The red thing I have been placed on constantly twitches, slightly bucking and rising, which forces me to crawl farther in toward the only available corridor. At the entrance there is a soft barrier, it isn’t difficult to overcome. It’s as if it opens on its own, in any case it reacts when I touch it. Now there’s the tunnel, dark and soft, which I sink into, horns forward, like a slow bull. I leave a trail behind me to mark the way back. I feel safer with it. The path down is easy, short in any case. The tunnel soon broadens and ends in a wider space, a rather soft cave different from the first one I passed through. At one end I notice a brighter spot, sore and radiating warmth. I pass over it slowly, leaving a little slime. I don’t like this place at all, though. It’s cramped, dark, and musty, claustrophobic, as if the walls of the cave are shrinking and pressing in on me. But the scariest part is some strange liquid that the walls themselves are pouring over me and which is starting to sting. I don’t have the strength to budge, as in a nightmare where you keep moving more slowly and slowly and slow.
To feel for everything, to be simultaneously the swallowed snail and the snail swallower, the eaten and the eater. How could you forget those few short years when you could do so?
Sometimes, while writing, he feels like a slug, which is crawling in an unknown direction (in fact, the direction is known — there where everything goes), leaving behind itself a trail of words. It’s doubtful whether he’ll ever follow it back, but along the way, without even meaning to, the trail may turn out to be healing for some ulcer. Rarely for his own.
HAVE A GOOD TRIP
And yet, my grandfather did have his secret from the war. On that January night, when he wanted the two of us to be left alone, the door to the unspoken opened just a crack. He called me in, the eldest of his grandsons, the one who bore his name, I was 27. We were standing in his room, low-ceilinged, with a little window, where he had grown up with his seven sisters, where I had spent all my summer vacations as a child. He could hardly speak due to the recent stroke. It was just the two of us, he went over to the wooden sideboard, rummaged at length in one of the drawers, and there, from beneath the newspaper lining the drawer’s bottom, he pulled out an ordinary sheet of notebook paper, folded into four, quite rumpled, and yellowed. Without opening it, he pressed it into my hand and signaled to me to hide it. Then we sat there, embracing, as we had when I was a child. We heard my father’s footsteps in front of the house and let go. Two days later, my grandfather passed away. It was the end of January.
Lots of people came to see him off. He probably would’ve been anxious if he had seen them. The sons and daughters of his seven sisters arrived from all over, laid some meager winter flower by his head and placed their order for the beyond. The dead man is something like express mail in these parts. Okay now, Uncle, give Mom our best wishes when you see her. Tell her we’re fine, that little Dana is graduated this year, everything is tip-top. Oh, and also tell her that her other granddaughter left for Italy. For now she’s just washing dishes, but she’s got high hopes. Well, okay then, Uncle, have a good trip. Afterward the nephew giving these instructions kisses the dead man’s hand and moves away. He returns again shortly, apologizing, he’d forgotten to say that they’d sold the house in the village, but it was bought by good people, all the way from England. Well okay, goodbye again and have a good trip. Have a good trip. In these southeastern regions people don’t say “rest in peace”. they just wish you a good trip. Have a good trip.
SIDE CORRIDOR
A friend told me how as a child she was convinced that Hungary was up in the sky. Her grandmother was Hungarian and every summer she came to visit her daughter and her beloved granddaughter in Sofia. They always met her at the airport. They would arrive quite early, craning their heads upward like chicks until their necks grew sore, her mother would tell her: your grandma will show up any minute now. The grandmother from Hungary who came out of the sky. I like this story, I immediately tuck it away in the warehouse. I suspect that when the Hungarian grandmother passed away she simply stayed up there in heavenly Hungary, waving from some cloud — except that now she no longer lands.
THE CHIFFONIER OF MEMORIES
Four months later, in the middle of May, I was driving to Hungary in an old Opel. I had suggested to the newspaper I was working for that I write a story about Bulgarian military cemeteries from the World War II. The largest one is in Harkány in southern Hungary.
The boss agreed and here I am on the road through Serbia. Harkány, once a village, now a small town, is close to the site of the Battles of Drava. I soon left the highway and chose a more varied route through Stracin, Kumanovo, Prishtina, then I turned toward Kriva Palanka, through Niš, Novi Sad. I wanted to take all the roads my grandfather had trudged on foot through the mud in the winter of 1944. I had carefully studied the available military maps for the movements of the 11th Sliven Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, First Army. I drove, and in my pocket sat that folded sheet of paper. A Hungarian address was written on it.
I reached Harkány. There would be time for the military cemetery. Before that I wanted to find a house. I wandered for a while before I found the street written on the paper. Thank God the street name hadn’t been changed during those fifty years. I parked the car at the very end of the street and set out to find the house. It was only now that I stopped to think that, in fact, I had no idea what I was expecting from this late visit. My grandfather had lived here, billeted during those couple of calm weeks before the battles. Happy and worried at the same time. There’s the house, built before the war. It’s larger than my grandfather’s, I note with a certain envy, more Central European. It has a big garden with blooming spring flowers, but my grandma’s tulip’s are prettier, I tell myself in passing. At the far end of the garden there is an arbor, sitting inside it is a woman my grandfather’s age, with white, well-groomed hair, with no kerchief. I realize there’s no telling who she may be. Over fifty years, houses change their inhabitants, people move, they die. I push open the front gate, a bell above it announces my arrival. A man in his 50s comes out of the house. I greet him in English — I could’ve done it in Hungarian, thanks to my grandfather’s lessons, but I keep that to myself for now. Thank God, he speaks English, too. I explain that I am a journalist from Bulgaria, I even show him my press badge from the newspaper and say that I’m writing an article about Bulgarian soldiers who fought in this region during World War II. Have you been to the cemetery? The man asks me. I say that I haven’t been there yet. I’m interested in what the people living here know, what they remember. He finally invites me into the arbor with the elderly woman.
This is my mother, he says. We hold out our hands. A light, distrustful handshake. Her memory is failing, he explains. She can’t remember what she ate for dinner last night, but she remembers the war, there were Bulgarian soldiers here, I think they were even quartered here in the house. Then he turns to her and obviously tells her who I am and where I’ve come from. She only now notices me. Her memory is a chiffonier, I can sense her opening the long locked-up drawers. A long minute, she has to wade back through more than fifty years, after all. The man seems ill at ease with this silence. He asks her something. She turns her head slightly, without taking her eyes off me. It could pass as a tick, a negative response, or part of her own internal monologue. The man turns to me and says that at the end of January she suffered a brain hemorrhage and now her memory is no longer quite all there.
The end of January, you say?
Yes, the man says, slightly puzzled. What difference could that make to a foreigner?
My grandfather fought in this region, I say.
The man translates. I can’t explain how, but I’m sure she recognizes me. I’m the exact age now that my grandfather had been back then. My grandma also said that I am the spitting image of him — the same bulging Adam’s apple, lanky and slightly hunched, with the same distracted gait and slightly crooked nose. The old woman says something to her son, he jumps up, apologizing that he hasn’t offered me anything to drink and suggests cherry cake and coffee. I accept, since I want to stay here longer and he darts into the house. We are finally alone, sitting across from each other at the rough-hewn table in the arbor. The table is quite old — I wonder if my grandfather sat in this very arbor? Spring has gone berserk, bees are buzzing, nameless scents waft through the air, as if the world has just been created, without a past, without a future, a world in all its innocence, before chronology.
We look at each other. Between us lie almost sixty years and a man whom she remembers at twenty-five, and whom I saw off a few months ago at eighty-two. And no language in which we can say everything.
She had been a beautiful woman. I try to see her with my grandfather’s eyes from January of 1945. Amid all the ugliness, mud and death of the war you enter (I enter) the European home of a girl of twenty-something, blonde, with lovely skin and large eyes. Inside there is a gramophone, something you have never seen, music unlike any you’ve ever heard is playing. She is wearing a long, urban dress. It is calm and bright throughout the whole house, a sunbeam passes through the curtains, falling precisely on the porcelain bowl on the table. As if the war had never been. She is reading in a chair by the window. Some sound draws me out of the picture. Her glasses have fallen to the ground, I hand them to her. Crossing over half a century instantaneously is frightening. That beautiful face suddenly wrinkles and ages in seconds. First I thought of showing her the paper from my grandfather. Then I decided that I shouldn’t. We’ve had these few minutes alone (how clever of her to send her son away).
In front of her stands the grandson of that man. So everything has worked out as it should. Finally, here is the living letter, sent with such delay. So he survived. He returned to his wife and his infant son, the son grew up and had a son. And now here is the grandson, sitting in front of her. Life had taken a turn, she had been forgotten, gotten over, everything worked out as it should. A long-deferred tear trickles from her eye and gets lost in the endless labyrinth of wrinkles on her palm.
She grasps my hand, without taking her eyes from mine, saying slowly in impeccable Bulgarian: hello, thank you, bread, wine. I continue in Hungarian: szép (beautiful). I said it as if passing on a secret message from my dead grandfather and she understood. She squeezed my hand and let it go. The last two Bulgarian words I heard from her were “farewell” and “Georgi.” My grandfather and I had the same name. Her son reappears with the coffee, he immediately notices that his mother has cried, but doesn’t dare ask. We drink coffee, I ask him what he does, it turns out he’s a veterinarian (like my father, I was about to say, but take a sip of my coffee instead).
Is your grandfather still alive, he asks politely. He passed away in January, I reply. I’m really sorry to hear that, my condolences. I could clearly see that he did not suspect anything. She had decided to spare him that. Or perhaps I have imagined everything. I’ve avoided looking at him the whole time, so as not to discover too much of a likeness. After all, the world is full of men with crooked noses and bulging Adam’s apples. I got up to leave and kissed the woman’s hand. At the front gate he shook my hand just a second too long and for an instant I thought he must know everything. I quickly let go and headed around the corner to the car. I opened up the sheet of paper from my grandfather. A baby’s hand from 1945 had been traced in pencil above the address. Who could say whether it was the same one I had just shaken goodbye?
THE GOOD MAN FLEES WHEN ONE PURSUES
A few years ago I had to get a new passport and take care of a few formalities at the town hall. I filled in my personal data — divorced, tall, college-educated. I turned in the form at the window, the woman compared it to the information she had in the computer, looked at me, and said coldly: “Why are you hiding a child?” This statement echoed loudly enough, I could sense how everyone filling out forms around me suddenly looked up, it even seemed that they drew back slightly. I myself stood there like someone caught at the scene of a crime. I’ve noticed that I can more easily make excuses for things I have done, but when I am accused of something that has never even crossed my mind, I freeze up, guilty. As the saying goes, the wicked man flees though no one pursues. However, for me the opposite was always truer: the good man flees when one pursues.
I kept silent longer than was probably acceptable before managing to utter that I have only one daughter. In that time — how unsure one is of his own innocence! — I calculated all my past relationships. I recalled one girlfriend who claimed to be pregnant every time we were on the verge of breaking up. You have a twelve-year-old son, the woman at the window announced unceremoniously. I stood there thunderstruck. All that was missing was for her to add “congratulations.” Can I see? I asked. She turned the monitor toward me and, thank God, it wasn’t me, just a case of identical names. The woman didn’t even apologize, turning around angrily in her chair, disappointed that I’d gotten away so easily. If she had known that I would spend the rest of the day going over in my mind all the women I had been with twelve years ago, even listing them by initials on a piece of paper, rating on a scale from 1 to 10 the potential risk of having a child I didn’t know about with each of them. If she had only known that, she would have been somewhat satisfied.
THE CELLAR OF THE STORY
But perhaps the story went like this.
March 1945. The war is coming to an end. A battle for a small Hungarian town, ferocious, the upper hand constantly changing, street by street. A Bulgarian soldier is seriously wounded and loses consciousness. His regiment is pushed back, the city remains temporarily (for a few days) in German hands. The soldier comes to in a cellar, lying on an old bed, above him stands the woman who has bandaged him up. She had managed to drag his body from the sidewalk straight through the little basement window, which is at street level.
She signals to him not to move, but he couldn’t even if he wanted to, he’s lost a lot of blood. In very bad German, the enemy’s language, he manages to exchange a few words with the Hungarian woman. Days go by, weeks, a month. Sometimes he loses consciousness, then wakes up again, still on the cusp between life and death. She continues bringing him food every day, applying compresses, changing his bandages. By the second month he has visibly improved, it’s clear that he’ll survive. The woman tells him that the little town is still in German hands and that the war has dragged on.
She lives alone, a widow, childless, she’s the same age as the soldier, around twenty-five. She falls in love with the wounded man. And because of him, she decides to change the entire course of the war. The Germans have not surrendered, they’ve come up with a secret weapon that has slowed everything down, the front has been pushed back east. Once she even fakes a search of the house. The man in the cellar only hears someone stomping the floor above him with roughshod boots and hurling the chairs to the ground, some containers fall, the sound of a broken dish. He grips his machine gun, ready to shoot the first ones to enter the cellar, but he remains undiscovered, thank God.
The closed space of that little room starts driving him mad. The sole small window has been boarded up with sheet metal. Through a single thin crack — good thing the sheet metal is bent — a bit of light gets in, just enough to distinguish day from night. He can’t stop tormenting himself with the question of how a practically finished, a practically won war could so suddenly change its course. And how long he will remain unnoticed by the Germans in this basement.
We should note that he, too, has secretly fallen in love with the woman taking care of him, but he does not yet want to admit it to himself. There, in his home country, he has a wife and child, who certainly think him dead. One night his rescuer stays with him, she merely touches his face and that is enough.
It was unexpected, as always happens after a long wait, they embraced, their breaths quickened, they uttered some fragmented words, passionate, tired, amorous, each in his own language. He didn’t understand any of that crazy Hungarian, she didn’t understand any of that crazy Bulgarian. Afterward silence fell, in which the two of them lay side by side. Languor and happiness on her part. Languor, happiness, and some unclear alarm (but clear guilt) on his. He tells her, in Bulgarian, that he has a wife and little boy, whom he left when the child was only a week old. Both to salve his conscience that he said it, yet also for her not to understand because it was in Bulgarian. He didn’t know that when it comes to understanding things they shouldn’t, women have another literacy altogether. The Hungarian woman got up suddenly and went upstairs. For several days he did not see her at all.
One afternoon a sudden blow smashed through the window of the cellar. The man leapt up — he always slept with his weapon by his side — and hid in the corner. The light pouring in stung his eyes. Soon a boy’s tousled head poked through the window. The man crouched behind a huge barrel. Only then did he see the heavy rag ball a meter away from him. The boy muttered something, crawled like a lizard through the narrow window and slipped inside. The man held his breath. The boy was so close that he could feel the warmth of his sweaty body. The boy grabbed the ball, tossed it through the window, pulled himself up on the ledge and wriggled out.
Along with dust and the scent of cat urine, the wind blew a scrap of an old newspaper through the window. And even though it was in Hungarian, he could still make out Hitler Kaput and see the photo of the Russian soldier raising a flag over the Reichstag.
He understood everything. He battered down the door and went up the stairs with his carbine. The light stung his eyes, and he hung on to the furniture as he walked. The woman was standing in front of him. She told him that he could shoot her or stay with her. She told him that she loved him and that they could live together, she also told him that he wouldn’t get very far with that rifle and his military uniform, that the world was no longer the same a whole month after the end of the war. Yes, it turned out that it was already June. She spoke softly, mixing Hungarian and German. He, mixing German and Bulgarian, replied that she was his savior and without her he would now be rotting on the Hungarian steppe. He also said that he would like to live with her until the end of his days (that was in Bulgarian), but that he had to go back to his son, who by now must be more than six months old, but that even if he tried, he would never be able to forget her. And both of them knew that once they parted, they would never see each other again. And that if they embraced now, they would never let each other go. Fortunately for his son, who was nine months old, each of them swallowed back their desires. In the end, they just said awkwardly: well, okay then, farewell. She filled him a backpack with whatever there was to eat and burst into tears only when the bell above the front gate jingled behind him.
The town of H. and his village in Bulgaria were separated by exactly 965 kilometers and two borders. He walked only at night, first, so as not to meet people, and second, because during the day his eyes continued to ache terribly from the light. He walked back along the same route he had trod with his regiment half a year earlier. He hid in abandoned shacks, burned out villages, he slept by day in old foxholes, trenches, and pits dug by bombs. In the end he had decided to leave his weapon and uniform with the Hungarian woman, so as not to attract attention. She had given him a real knitted sweater — this June happened to be cold and rainy — and a good hunting jacket with lots of pockets, left over from her late husband. And so, without a weapon, without epaulets or ID papers, he retraced the path of the war, always heading east, hiding from everyone. On the thirty-fourth day, in the middle of July, he reached his village. He waited until midnight and slipped like a thief into his own home. His parents were sleeping on the second floor, his wife and son were most likely downstairs, in the room next to the shed. This scene of recognition is clear. Fear, horror, and joy all in one. The dead husband returns. Here he was already proclaimed a fallen hero, awarded some small medal, his name had even been chiseled into the hastily erected memorial on the village square, alongside the names of his fellow villagers who had died to liberate the homeland. His reappearance, like all resurrections, only upset the normal course of life.
What now? Bulgarian joy is quickly replaced by fretting. They woke up the parents and they all started asking the risen one how it had all happened and what are we going to do now? That he’s safe and sound is all very well and good, but it creates some mighty big headaches as well. The resurrected soldier was so exhausted that he couldn’t explain a thing. As the third rooster crowed and day began to break, the family council made the only possible decision — to stick him in the cellar, both so he could sleep and so that no one would see him. Thus the returning Bulgarian soldier spent his first night at home — as well as all the following days and nights over the course of several months. He simply exchanged one basement for another.
Those were troubled times. The communists were roaming the country, killing for the slightest infraction. The soldier’s family was in any case on the list of village high-rollers, thanks to their three cows, herd of sheep, and nice old-fashioned cart with the rooster painted on the back. But what sin could the soldier possibly have committed? I’ll tell you what. First of all, he lied to the authorities about his heroic death, for which he had been crowned with a medal and glorified on the village memorial. The other thing that would earn him a bullet straight away was separation or desertion from his army unit. To disappear from your regiment for four months, without death as an alibi, and then to return a month after the end of the war without the weapon and uniform issued to you likely goes beyond the imagination of even the most merciful political commissar. What could the soldier possibly say in his own defense? The truth? Admit that he had spent four months in a Hungarian town with a lonely young widow, hiding in a basement long after the town had been liberated by his countrymen? Who, in fact, were you hiding from, comrade corporal?
The resurrected man’s wife continued to wear black. To her, he told almost the whole truth. He simply added thirty or so years to the compassionate Hungarian lady’s age and everything fell into place. The elderly Hungarian woman had lied to him about the continuation of the war and a German siege, because her motherly heart had wanted him, the Bulgarian soldier, to replace the son of the same age that she had lost.
His wife was a decent and reasonable woman, she was glad that her husband had returned alive and did not wish to know more. Even when she carelessly opened that envelope which the postman, her brother’s son, had furtively pressed into her hands, with only a baby’s handprint and an unreadable address, she didn’t say anything, but painstakingly sealed it up again, gave it to her husband and continued wearing her widow’s weeds.
A year later, half-blind from staying in the dark, the man came out of the cellar and went to give himself up. He gave them the scare of their lives. His beard and hair had gone white during that year, they could hardly recognize him. Where did you come from, the mayor asked him. From the other world, the soldier said and that was the most precise answer. He quickly told some poorly patched together story about how he fell prisoner to the Germans during the attack on H., how he was sent to work in the salt mines behind German lines, how they worked there, slept there — in the end the Germans were forced to beat a hasty retreat and dynamited the entrance to the mine. Of the thirty prisoners, he was the only survivor and found a hole to crawl out of. But from that long stay in the dark he had badly damaged his eyes and so, half-blind, he had traveled for months before reaching his home village. The mayor listened, his fellow villagers who had gathered around in the meantime listened. The women bawled, the men blew their noses noisily so as not to bawl themselves, while the mayor grimly crumpled his cap. Whether the people really swallowed that story or whether they wanted to save him is unclear, but in any case they all decided to believe it, and the mayor helped arrange things with the higher-ups in the city. They quietly reissued the dead man’s passport, cut off his wife’s widow’s pension, only his name remained on the memorial. And so as to do away with any lingering doubts, the mayor ordered the local bard to make up a song about the soldier who happily returned home a year and some after the end of the war. The song was a heroic one, according to all the rules of the time, telling at great length and breadth about “his dark suffering in the mine so deep” and how Georgi the Talashmaner (from the name of the village) “tossed the boulder to make his way, to see the sun” with Herculean strength. This was followed by his almost Odyssey-length return and the blind hero’s miraculous orientation toward his beloved homeland and the village of his birth.
Risen Georgi (that’s what they called him in the village) lived a long life, he saw well in the evenings, but by day was blind as a mole. He came out of the basement, yet the basement stayed inside him. During that year and a half, several lives had happened to him and it became ever harder for him to remember which of them was the real one.
Perhaps he had perished in that little Hungarian town after all? Was that Hungarian woman who changed the course of the war to keep him really young, or was she an old woman who had lost her son? How did he manage to escape from the German mine? And that which gave him no peace until the very end — the child’s hand, traced on an ordinary white sheet of notebook paper and sent in a postal envelope.
(Both versions end with the same small child’s hand, traced on a piece of paper. But stories always end in one of two ways — with a child or with death.)
A PLACE TO STOP
Let’s wait here for the souls of distracted readers. Somebody could have gotten lost in the corridors of these different times. Did everyone come back from the war? How about from the fair in 1925? Let’s hope we didn’t forget anyone at the mill. So where shall we set out for now? Writers shouldn’t ask such questions, but as the most hesitant and unsure among them, I’ll take that liberty. Shall we turn toward the story of the father, or continue on ahead, which in this case is backward, toward the Minotaur of childhood. I can’t offer a linear story, because no labyrinth and no story is ever linear. Are we all here? Off we go again.
A SHORT CATALOGUE OF ABANDONMENTS
The history of the family can be described through the abandonment of several children. The history of the world, too.
The abandoned child with the bull’s head, thrown into Minos’s labyrinth.
The abandoned Oedipus, the little boy with the pierced ankles, tossed on the mountainside in a basket, who would be adopted first by King Polybus, later by Sophocles, and in the end by his later father, Sigmund Freud.
The abandoned Hansel and Gretel, the Ugly Duckling, the Little Match Girl, and the grown-up Jesus, she wants to go to her grandmother’s house, he to his father’s.
In this line come — even without legends to back them up — all those abandoned now or in the past, and all those who shall be abandoned. Having fallen from the manger of myth, let us take them in, in this inn of words, spread beneath them the clean sheets of history, tuck in their frostbitten souls. And leave them in hands, which, as they turn these pages, shall stroke their frightened backs and heads.
How many readers here have not felt abandoned at least once? How many would admit that at least once they have been locked in a room, a closet, or a basement, for edification? And how many would dare say that they have not done the locking up?
In the beginning, I said, there is a child tossed into a cellar.
THE BASEMENT
For a long time, I used to watch the world through a window at sidewalk level. The apartments changed, but every one of them had one such low window. We always lived in the basement, the rooms were cheapest there. My mother, father, and I had just moved into yet another basement. Actually, into another “former basement,” as the landlord said. There’s no such thing as a former basement, my father replied sharply, and the landlord, not knowing how to take this, just laughed. In these parts, when somebody feels uncomfortable, he starts laughing, who knows why.
It’s temporary, my father said, as we carried in the table. It was the mid-70s, I knew that we were defined as “extremely indigent,” I knew that the extremely indigent were those who inhabited a space of less than five square meters per person, and we were waiting our turn for an apartment on some list. Clearly, the list was quite long or someone was cutting in line, because we continued to live in that basement room for several years. On the “ground floor” (which was, in fact, underground), there was a long corridor and just one other room, always locked. I didn’t ask why we didn’t rent it as well, I knew the answer, we’re saving money for an apartment. Plus, we had to maintain that cramped five square meters per person so as not to slip from the category of the extremely indigent. The long corridor played the role of entrance hall and kitchen, but it was so narrow that it had room for only two chairs, a hotplate, and something like a little table. When my mom and dad fought, my dad would go out there to sleep, on the table. He also listened to Radio Free Europe there, secretly, on an old taped-up Selena. I was very proud that my father listened to that station, because I knew it was forbidden. Actually, I was proud that I was part of the conspiracy. When you share a single room, you can’t keep too many secrets.
In fact, the house where that basement apartment was located was downright beautiful. Three stories with big, light windows looming up above. Thousands of shards of glass from beer bottles, green and brown, had been stuck into the deliberately rough plaster, following the fashion of the times, and they sparkled like diamonds in the sun. And the third floor formed a slight semi-circle, almost like a castle. What would it be like to live there, in that round room, with its round windows and curved balcony? A room without edges. From up above you could probably see the whole city and the river. You could see everyone who passes by on the street, and full-length at that, not just as strange creatures made solely of legs and shoes. At school, I never failed to mention that I lived in that house with the rounded tower. Which was the truth. Of course, I didn’t specify which floor.
At the same time, my father dreamed of an apartment with a living room, fully furnished with a drawing-room suite, he could see himself sitting in the large, square armchair with his paper, legs propped on the footstool. He had seen this in a Neckermann catalogue, which some family friends had briefly lent us. My mother dreamed of a real kitchen with cupboards, where she could line up the little white porcelain jars of spices she would some day purchase. I would suspect that same West German Neckermann was responsible for that dream as well.
.
Feet and cats. Indolent, slow, cat-length afternoons. I would spend the whole day glued to the window, because it was the lightest place. I would count the passing feet and put together the people above them.
Men’s feet, women’s feet, children’s feet. I watched the seasons change through the change of shoes. Sandals, which gradually closed up, transforming into fall shoes, which later crept up the leg, exquisite ladies’ boots, the stylish ones made of pleated patent leather, the workers’ coarse rubber boots that took out the trashcans, the villagers’ galoshes, arriving for the market on Thursday, the blue or red kids’ boots, the only colorful splotches amid the overwhelming brown and black. And again the gradual spring easing, the undressing of shoes down to the bare summer soles, ankles and toes, shod only in sandals and flip-flops. The flip-flops were something like swimsuits for feet.
During autumn, the window became piled with yellowish-brown fallen leaves from the sidewalk, making the light in the room soft and yellow. Then the late autumn wind would scatter them. The rains would come — and the eternal puddle out front. I could sit and watch the drops falling into it for hours, forming fleeting bubbles, whole armadas of ships, which the drops would then smash. How many historic sea battles unfolded in that puddle! Then the snow would bury the little window and the room would become a den. I would curl up into a ball like a rabbit under the snow. It is so light, yet you are hidden, invisible to the others, whose footsteps crunch in the snow only inches away from you. What could be lovelier than that?
THE GOD OF THE ANTS
He was six when they started leaving him home alone. In the morning his mother and father would light the gas heater, constantly telling him to keep an eye on the flow of gas inside the little tube. Two gas heaters on their street had exploded. They left him food in the refrigerator and went out. A typical 1970s childhood. Left on his own all day, with that early unnamed feeling of abandonment. The half-dark room frightened him. He would spend the warm autumn days outside. He would sit on a rock by the gate, on the sidewalk, like a little old man, counting the people passing by, the cars, the makes of the cars. He’d try to guess them from the humming before they appeared from around the curve. Moskvitch, Moskvitch, Zhiguli, Trabant, Polski Fiat, Zhiguli, Moskvitch, Moskvitch. When he got tired of that, he would rest his head on his knees and stare at the stone slabs of the sidewalk. Each slab was crisscrossed uniformly by vertical and horizontal lines, and in the furrows they created ants would run, meet and pass one another. This was a whole other, quasi-visible world. It looked like the labyrinth from that book with the illustrations. He would sit like that for hours, thinking up stories for every ant. He observed them with the skill of a naturalist, without knowing the word, of course. He would study them, devoting to them hours of the time he was so generously allotted. Each ant was different from the others.
Sometimes he would imagine that he was the God of the Ants.
Most often he was a kind God, helping them, dropping crumbs or a dead fly down to them, nudging it with a stick toward their home so they wouldn’t have to struggle to carry it.
But sometimes he grew wrathful without reason, like the real God, or he simply felt like playing and so would pour a pitcher of water into the corridors of the labyrinth. He made a flood for them.
Other times he would pour salt at the ends of the flagstone, he had discovered by chance that they detested salt, and they would stagger through the corridors of that temporary prison, frightened senseless. When they met, they would quickly press their feelers together, as if passing on some very important secret.
His other discovery, divine and scientific, was that ants hate the scent of humans. If you trace a circle around an ant with your finger, it will run up against that invisible border as if you had built a wall.
He had already noticed this ability of his, he considered it a terrible defect to be able to experience that which happened to others. To embed himself — the word would come later — into their bodies. To be them.
One night he dreamed that he, his mother, and his father were walking down the street and suddenly a giant finger, whose nail alone was as big as a cliff, thumped down and began circling around them. And as if it wasn’t terrifying enough that this finger could crush them at any second, just like that, out of carelessness, it also reeked toxically to boot. A stench you could ram into and crack your skull on.
But in the winter things change, you can’t stay outside all day. The room grows ever dimmer, the stove smells like gas, while scary things peek out from under the bed or creak inside the worm-eaten wardrobe. The only salvation then is the window. He would climb up to it in the morning and get down only to eat his slice of bread at lunchtime and to pee.
A PLACE TO STOP
I’m thinking about the first person, which easily recedes into the third, before returning again to the first. But who can say for certain that that boy there forty years ago was me, that that body is the same as the one here? Even the ants from 1975 are not the same. I don’t find any similarities between the body of a six-year-old, with that thin, pale-pink skin and invisible blond fuzz on his legs. No preserved sign of identification, no trace, except the vaccination scar with which our whole generation is marked. That nearly invisible scar on the shoulder, which over the years has treacherously grown and begun to creep downward.
A detour within a detour. A friend of mine told me a story about how after an amorous night, when she was lying exhausted on the floor with her younger lover, he suddenly asked her (with certain sympathy) what that scar on her arm was from (it had already left her shoulder). She then realized with horror that he didn’t have that vaccination brand anywhere on his shoulders. Those who came after us are no longer marked in that way, she said, he seemed like an alien to me, like a clone. She got up, got dressed, and they never saw each other again.
ANT-GOD
Most likely all dreams, when being retold, should begin with the opening statement, revealing and startling in its simplicity, which I heard from Aya, who was then four: I dreamed that I was awake.
And so, I dreamed that I was awake. I was standing in front of huge curtains with nameless colors that flowed into one another — like I said, huge, but light and ephemeral. It was made clear to me in the dream that concealed behind them was “the beautiful face of God,” in those exact words. I draw aside the first curtain. (It seems that between curiosity and fear, curiosity always takes the upper hand, or at least that’s how it is in dreams.)
Behind it there was a second one. I draw it aside.
A third.
A fourth.
I notice that every subsequent curtain becomes ever smaller and smaller. Hence whatever it was hiding is ever smaller as well. I keep drawing them aside until finally only one is left, the size of a child’s handkerchief. I stop myself. Should I really draw this curtain? Could God possibly be so small? Perhaps the Antichrist is tempting me in my dreams?
I draw it aside. Behind it stands a big black ant. And I somehow know that this is God. But he has no face. The discovery is terrifying. How can you pray to and trust in someone who has no face? Someone who is that small? The revelation that the Ant-God gave me in the moment of awakening, without opening its jaws, went more or less like this: God is an insect who watches us. Only small things can be everywhere.
CRUMBLING LANGUAGE
I learned the alphabet from the cemetery in that town languishing in the sun. I could put it this way, too — death was my first primer. The dead taught me to read. This statement should be taken absolutely literally. We went there every Thursday and Saturday. I stood reverentially before the hot stone crosses. I was as tall as they were. With a certain dread, I dragged my finger along the grooves, reading more through my skin, I memorized the half-moon of C, the door of H, and the hut of A. Language seemed warm and hard. It had a crumbling body. Only a bit of dust and fine sand remained on my fingers from the stone. The first words I learned were:
rest
eternal
here
memory
born — died
God
And names, so many names, cemeteries are teeming with names.
Atanas H. Grozdanov
Dimitar Hadzhinaumov
Marincho — 5 years old
Dimo Korabov
Georgi Gospodinov
Egur Sarkissian (Granny Sarkistsa’s son)
Calla Georgieva
.
What happened to the names after their owners died? Were they set free? Did the names continue to mean something, or did they disintegrate like the bodies beneath them, leaving only the bones of consonants?
Words are our first teachers in death. The first sign of the parting between bodies and their names. The strangest thing about that cemetery was that the names repeated themselves. I stood for a long time in front of a headstone with my name, freed up by someone who had used it for only three years.
Years later, I make a point of visiting the cemeteries in the cities where I am staying. After paying my respects to the central streets, the cathedral on the square, and solemnly passing by the memorial to the relevant king on horseback (will today’s presidents jut out above granite limousines tomorrow?), I hasten to inquire after the city cemetery and sink down the walkways of that parallel city-and-park rolled into one. Death is a good gardener. I understood this even back then, at age six, amid the furiously blooming roses, lilies, aromatic bushes, the plums, wild apples, tiny cherries, and rotting pears of the village cemetery.
The crematorium at Père Lachaise resembles a cathedral with a chimney. Adorno says that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. But can you have crematoriums at all, even in cemeteries?
The dead taught me to read. I write this sentence again and realize that it says more and different things than I had intended. The people who taught me to read are no longer with us. The things which I have read since then were written primarily by the dead. That which I am writing out now are the words of a person who has set off. I did not know that so much death dozed beneath language.
G
After the primer of the graveyard I ran up against the real primer for first grade and felt simultaneously enlightened and confused. Every letter was connected to a word and a picture.
What word starts with the letter G?
God — I hastily called out, what an easy question. But something wasn’t right, the teacher blanched, she was no longer so smiley. She came over to me as if afraid I might say something more. Where did you learn that word? Uh, in the graveyard. Then one of the girls in the front rows said: “Government, Comrade.” That was the right answer. And the teacher latched on to that lifeline, excellent, my girl. While I felt so lonely with my God. Strange that you can’t have two words with one and the same letter, as if G’s curving back was too slippery to hold two such truly grandiose words.
The word “government” begins with G. There is no God in our government! That’s just gobbledygook, the teacher accented every G, we’ll learn about that later in the upper grades. Are we clear on this?
But he’s there in the graveyard.
This here is a school, not a.
Geez, all these problems just from a single word, I’m going to start hating school before long.
That evening, my mother and father had a serious talk with me. The comrade teacher had told them everything. Well, okay, but there is a God, right? It was as if I had asked them the most difficult question in the world. Look here, my mother started in (she was a lawyer), you know that there is, but you don’t need to go throwing his name around left and right, he gets angry if you mention him for no reason in front of strangers.
And as a rule, just keep your mouth shut, my father added.
God was the first secret. The first of the forbidden things that you could only talk about at home.
There’s no God in Bulgaria, Grandma, I blurted out as soon as we got home and I caught sight of her pouring oil into the icon lamp on the wall. My grandmother crossed herself quickly and invisibly. She surely would’ve snapped at me for such talk, but she saw my father in the doorway and merely said: Well, what is there in Bulgaria anyway, there’s no paprika, no oil. Only she could combine the country’s physical and metaphysical deficit like that. God, oil, and paprika.
She would read the Bible furtively, she had wrapped it in a newspaper so it wouldn’t show. She would read at random, dragging her arthritis-gnarled index finger along the lines and moving her lips. Thus, I heard the whole Apocalypse in whispers, in the late afternoons of my childhood, under the quiet Jericho trumpets of the flies buzzing around the room.
My grandmother knew she shouldn’t talk about such things in front of people, so as to protect my father, who could get into trouble. My father knew that he shouldn’t talk about other things and locked himself up with the radio in the kitchen, so as not to screw up my life (that’s what my mother said). I knew that I shouldn’t talk about anything I’d heard at home, so the police wouldn’t come and screw up my parents’ lives. A long chain of secrets and lies that made us a normal family. Like all the others. That was the greatest trick of the whole conspiracy — being like the others.
INVISIBLE INK
At five I learned to read, by six it was already an illness. The indiscriminate guzzling of books. Some kind of literary bulimia. I would read whatever I found and soon reached my mother’s bookshelf and that purple volume with a hard cover and a large title reading “Criminology.” The first chapter began with the sentence that before the socialist revolution of September 9th, criminology did not exist. While the following one, already having forgotten this, stated that the study of bourgeois criminology was necessary for two reasons: first, to denounce its reactionary essence, and second, to recover everything of value within it.
The denunciation was the most interesting part. Only there, between the lines and the distorted quotations, could you understand what was going on in the world after all.
Bourgeois criminology had nevertheless discovered several “minor” things, such as the lie detector, forensic psychology, dactyloscopy. I liked the title Finger Prints (1897) by some Francis Galton or other, a bourgeois criminologist.
At the root of revolutionary criminology, of course, stood Lenin. It was obvious that the criminal was in his blood. At the same time, he had laid the foundations of all the other sciences and all textbooks confirmed this ab-so-lute-ly (to use one of his favorite words). “Language is the most important means of human communication” was written above the blackboard in the classroom. That genius of the banal.
But the most interesting things in that purple textbook on criminology were the parts on forensic photography, weapons and. invisible ink. “Invisible inks are solutions of organic or inorganic substances: fruit juices, onion, sugar solutions, urine, saliva, quinine. ”
This repulsed and attracted me at the same time. I had never imagined spies as bedwetters writing with urine, syrup, and spit. Scribbling your secret messages in various secretions? Ugh. On the other hand, though, the very accessibility of invisible ink was a welcome discovery. I had everything I needed at hand. For starters, I decided to forgo urine, I went down to the cellar, grabbed a jar of canned peaches, opened it and with the end of a matchstick slowly wrote out the two most secret pages in my diary.
Here I will show part of what was written with invisible fruit ink:
What, so you don’t see anything? That means it really is invisible. If only I could write a whole novel in such ink.
SIDE CORRIDOR
After all the evidence that the history of the past four billion years is written in the DNA of living creatures, the saying that “the universe is a library” has long since ceased to be a metaphor. But now we will need a new literacy. We’ve got a lot of reading ahead of us. When Mr. Jorge said that he imagined heaven as a library without beginning or end, he most likely, without suspecting it, was thinking about the endless shelves of deoxyribonucleic acid.
I am books.
DAD, WHAT’S A MINOTAUR?
We bang around like Minotaurs in these basements, to heck with their. friggin’ housing fund and lists. My father made heroic attempts not to curse in front of my mother and me, not unlike his attempts to quit smoking. I was sure that he secretly made up for it, smoking up all those skipped cigarettes and cursing out all those unsaid curses. My father’s line following his stumble over the nozzle of our Rocket vacuum cleaner would have important consequences for me. I knew what “friggin” and “housing fund” were, just as I knew about “extremely indigent,” “Pershing,” and so on, but I didn’t know what a Minotaur was. Nor whether it was one of the good guys (our guys) or the bad guys. At that time, I divided everything into those two categories. I discovered with surprise that adults did, too. The world was divided in two — good vs. bad, ours vs. yours. We, as luck would have it, had ended up our side, hence that of “the good guys.” However, I had heard my father say in the evenings after the news: “Come on now, how is that idiot Jimmy Carter to blame for the fact that I live in a basement and that there’s no lids for the canning jars?!” My mother, who was always more sensible, would shush him. Did they think I would let something slip in front of the local cop who lived two doors down? And they really did draw Jimmy Carter like an idiot in caricatures, with huge teeth, a star-spangled top hat clapped over his eyes, chomping on a winged rocket rather than a cigar.
I’ve gone down other corridors again, I keep getting mixed up when I turn back. Past time is distinguishable from the present due to one essential feature — it never runs in one direction. Where did I start? Good thing I’m writing this down, otherwise I’d never find the thread again.
We bang around like Minotaurs in these basements. That was the line. and it immediately entered my as-of-yet unassembled catalogue of epiphanies, of all those revelations, which as a rule appeared in the most unexpected and even inconvenient of moments. My father tripped over the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner because he didn’t see it, because it was cramped, we lived underground, the afternoon was overcast, the window was low, and the sun failed to reach down there.
Dad, what’s a Minotaur? I asked. My father pretended not to hear me. Dad, is the Minotaur on our side? I think this question irked him all the more. The next day he brought me that old complete edition of Ancient Greek myths from somewhere. I never set the book down again. I entered into the Minotaur then and don’t recall ever coming out. He was me. A boy who spent long days and nights in the basement of the palace, while his parents worked as kings or slept with bulls.
Never mind that the book makes him out to be a monster. I was inside him and I know the whole story. A huge mistake and calumny lie hidden there, exceptional injustice. I am the Minotaur and I am not bloodthirsty, I don’t want to eat seven youths and seven maidens, I don’t know why I’ve been locked up, it’s not my fault. And I am terribly afraid of the dark.
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