The Physics of Sorrow

III. THE YELLOW HOUSE

ASYLUM

A yellow, peeling building, far past the last houses, long and low, with barred windows, the fence girded with barbed wire. An “asylum for the mentally ill,” as they officially called the place, which everyone in that Podunk southeastern town simply called the nuthouse. Rumor had it that the fence was electrified at night and that several people had been fried. I was afraid, yet at the same time it was precisely this fear that drove me to hang around nearby.

One evening, passing by there, I heard a chilling howl. There was something excessive and inhuman in that howling or bellowing, something from the mazes of the night Ooooooooohhh. That endless Oooohh dug tunnels in the silence of the early November evening. It was Sunday. The fallen leaves blanketed the whole street, still emitting a faint scent of rot and acetone, which preceded the corpse of autumn. Only the light above the gate scattered the damp dusk. The nurse had gone home, while the head doctor only came once a week in any case. The porter more or less had to be there, but he was probably dozing drunk in the doctor’s office. In this case, that saved the howler, who would otherwise undergo the traditional ice-cold shower under the garden hose. It was said that they sprayed them with water directly in their rooms (“cells” is the more precise term) through the bars of the window, as a natural curative procedure for cooling down demons. The head doctor had long since made peace with the fact that he would end his career here in this Podunk town. And he didn’t worry about any inspections or sanctions, just as a man who finds himself in hell is freed from the fear that something worse could befall him.

I walked around the yellow house on that Sunday evening, the gloomy corridors of that howl sucking me in ever deeper. I was afraid to enter it, whatever was inside was not fit for the human eye and ear. But my body continued to move mechanically in a circle, I sensed that I was beginning to slip away from myself. Just a bit more and I’ll enter the corridors of the scream, I’ll crawl along the furrows, I’ll embed myself in the body of the screamer.

Just then a hand grabs me firmly by the shoulder; startled, I return to myself like a snail withdrawing into its shell. My father.

Neither of us can hide our surprise at seeing the other in this place. Neither of us has any business being here. And neither of us asks the other what brings him here at this hour. We turn toward the city without a word and sink into the November evening, far from that cry.

I knew that I would never again free myself from the tunnel of that Oooooooohhh. The howl would pursue me throughout the years with varying degrees of doggedness. Appearing and dying away in unexpected situations. Sometimes it would quiet down, I would lose it in my happiest moments, in joyful gatherings with people amid their deafening chatter. But in the next moment of silence it would inevitably appear. And ten years later, when I came down with that constant ringing in my ear, I knew that that howling-bellowing-crying thing was now settled in there for good. In the very center, in the cave of the skull, from there to the tympanic membrane, the hammer and the anvil, in the very labyrinth of the inner ear, as the doctors put it.

THE DIAGNOSIS

Much later, already in my student years, I got up the courage to tell an older doctor friend of mine about the “embedding” that had seized me in childhood. The doctor thought for a long time and finally offered a rare diagnosis, perhaps made up on the spot, which went more or less like this: pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome. According to him, the illness was exceedingly rare and incurable, but it peaked in childhood. Over the years the attacks became easier to control and lost their most acute manifestations, without disappearing entirely. Just as in epilepsy, he said, we never know where the person wanders when he is in such a fit.

In my case, there were no fits per se, my body remained completely calm, if slightly stiff, like a person lost in thought or deeply absorbed in some story. When I fell into such a state, I didn’t blink, my pupils stopped moving, my mouth hung half-open, my breathing switched to some automatic regime, while I (part of me) shifted into someone else’s story and someone else’s body.

I accepted this with a mixture of fear, a vague sense of guilt, and satisfaction. I had put quite a lot of effort into hiding this ability or illness as much as I could. Only my grandmother could always recognize it: “Eh, he’s gone off again.” It often happened against my will. As if right where another felt pain, in that cut, that wound, that point of inflammation, a corridor would open that sucked me inside. In stories, especially those told by loved ones, there was always some blind spot, a momentary gap, a weak point, incomprehensible sorrow, longing for something lost or that had never taken place, which pulled me inside, into the dark galleries of the unspoken. There were such secret galleries and corridors in every story.

For his own peace of mind, the doctor sent me for an MRI, into that enormous white capsule where they cut your brain into thin slices and peer at all its secrets. Relax and think pleasant thoughts, the nurse said.

Two hours later I entered the office of the doctors who would analyze the image, but I could sense from afar their poorly disguised consternation. The picture hadn’t come out. Maybe it was due to the machine, it was old, after all. Actually, this was the first time something like this had happened to them, absolutely nothing could be seen, just a dark-black plate. This didn’t come as a surprise to me. I know nothing can be seen, because inside is darkness, an unilluminable, centuries-deep darkness. My skull is a cave. I didn’t tell them that, of course.

Sometimes — at the same time — I am a dinosaur, a fish, a bat, a bird, a single-celled organism swimming in the primordial soup, or the embryo of a mammal, sometimes I’m in a cave, sometimes in a womb, which is basically the same thing — a place protected (against time).

SIDE CORRIDOR

The tendency toward empathy is strongest between the ages of seven and twelve.

The most recent research is focused on the so-called mirror neurons, localized in the anterior portion of the insular cortex (insula). To put it simply, they react in a similar fashion when a person feels pain, sorrow, or happiness, or when one observes these emotions in another person. Some animals also experience empathy. The connection between shared emotional experiences and mirror neurons has not been well studied; experiments are in the works. Researchers believe that the conscious cultivation of empathy, including through the reading of novels (see S. Keen), will make communication far easier and will save us from future world cataclysms.

— The Journal of Community and Cortex

MY BROTHER, THE MINOTAUR

Still, what was my father doing that night near the yellow house? Okay, so it was part of his job — going wherever they called him. Almost all the town’s residents kept animals in their yards. But what would a veterinarian be doing at a home for the mentally ill? He must have been coming from there, where else would he have appeared from in that wasteland?

Suddenly the whole picture came together in my head with staggering clarity. I say “suddenly,” but in fact the separate pieces of that puzzle had been elaborated carefully and at length with the fastidiousness intrinsic to a child’s imagination. Now everything came together so easily, frighteningly easily within me.

That inhuman howl really was inhuman, and it wasn’t Ooooh, but Moooo. And it came from a half-man, half-bull locked up in there. (I’d already seen one such boy in my grandfather’s hidden memory.) The human doctor hadn’t been able to do anything for the human, so they had decided to treat the bull. Of course, they called the best (and only, incidentally) veterinarian in town: my father.

There was another, darker version of the story, also fine-tuned at length during those lonely childhood afternoons. That half-human-half-bull boy was not just anybody, but my “stillborn brother,” whom I’d heard them whispering about. Actually, he’d been born alive, but with a bull’s head and they’d put him in the home. They had abandoned him. With the best of intentions. So he wouldn’t disturb his healthy brother. I remember that I wrote all that down in my most clandestine (read: secretly illegible) handwriting, rolled the sheet of notebook paper into a scroll and shoved it in my secret box under the bed.

Or maybe I wasn’t even their son at all, instead they had adopted me, despairing of giving birth only to kids with bull-heads?

This was one of the basic fears of my childhood. If this were true, then I could easily be abandoned again. We could be abandoned again, my Minotaur brother and me.

I remember that I devoted the next few days to finding some crack, some door left slightly ajar, through which I could enter into the cave of this secret. I asked my father — ostensibly off-the-cuff and cautiously — what kinds of diseases cows came down with. Had he ever seen Siamese twin calves and what would he do in such a case? Would they kill one to save the other? My father gave absentminded replies. Once, however, he nevertheless let his guard down and launched into some story about a cow who was in labor for fourteen hours right on New Year’s Eve when he had been a kid and. I didn’t hear any more of the story, I simply slipped down the corridor the story had opened up to me. I stopped at the entrance. It definitely wasn’t right to sneak into a father’s secrets. There was something indecent and unnatural about it, you could see things you’d rather not see. I could still hear his voice, he was carried away with his story, I could still turn back. I told myself, I’ll do it only this one time. I pushed on ahead, then quickly ducked into a side corridor of his story, I was no longer interested in it, his voice died away. I wandered aimlessly through my father’s childhood, look how alike we are, skinny, in baggy clothes, probably hand-me-downs, look, there he’s stealing eggs out from under the chicken, they’re still warm, I can feel them, my grandma, his mother (now mine, too), sees me, I run with the eggs toward the general store, if I manage to sell them to Grandpa Angel the shopkeeper, I’ll get a candy bar for each one. I run and run, go into the store, thank God there are no other customers. Grandpa Angel, here are three eggs for candy bars, I wheeze breathlessly, he looks at me, does your mother know, yes, she sent me, he takes the eggs, holds them up to the sunlight, well now, these eggs here are stolen, heeey, how did you know, he gives them back to me, at that moment my mother is coming up the street, I grab the eggs, stuff them in my pocket and dash out, but I trip on the crumbling steps and fall. Careful with those eggs, Grandpa Angel laughs. I feel the yoke seeping over my crotch.

I leave that incident before retribution comes, I turn down another corridor, change direction. I tell myself that I’m not going to lend an ear to things that don’t concern me. At the last minute, I veer away from a girl my father is kissing, I’m kissing, behind the stone wall of the house. She’s attractive, but she won’t become my mother. He’s attractive, too. I’m attractive as well, as long as I’m him. Tall, with curly hair, I feel women’s eyes on me as we pass. That one looks foreign. That one is familiar from somewhere. That one. Wait, now there’s my mother. The answer to the riddle that brought me here should be somewhere around here. I need to turn down some corridor and look on from there, but I can’t move. She’s in pain. The pain is terrible and I can’t stand aside, it sucks me in. Something alive is being torn apart. I’m tearing her apart. Finally, a baby’s cry, that cry comes from me, I am myself, that wrinkly, wet, bluish hunk of meat. Tossed out, choking, shaking all over.

Something gives me a good hard shake and pulls me back down those dark corridors — light, words, my father’s face. What’s wrong. What’s wrong. I’ve been trying to wake you for ten minutes now.

I feel bruised from the journey. Everything’s fine, Dad, I’m here. I was born to my own mother, what a miracle.

My father dragged me out, before I managed to see whether there was someone else there, if someone else came out after me. I was left with the uncertain feeling that I wasn’t alone in that cave.

I was born to my own mother and father, but that doesn’t make me any less a Minotaur. I continued spending long days alone, at the window, paging through a book.

NIPPERS

Just as in antiquity, the children of socialism were also invisible. Little nippers hanging around at the grown ups’ feet. Prepared for life, without entirely being a part of it.

Run down to the cellar for some pickles! Go and play in the other room, we’re talking to our guests! Hightail it out of here, I’ve got work to do! Don’t make me start up the spanking factory. Patriarchy and industrialization rolled into one.

Three months at the village every summer, with their grandmothers, in the fresh air and sunshine, to get toughened up, drink milk straight from the sheep, and eat raw eggs. You take a warm egg out from under the chicken, your grandma wipes it on her apron, pokes a hole in it with a thick needle, sprinkles a little salt inside and you suck it up through the hole with all your might under her fond gaze. Drink up, drink up, an egg is equal to a shot, she would say. That’s what some famous doctor who had passed through the village thirty years ago and had spent the night had said. One egg, he said, is equal to a shot, take it from me.

I would find out much later that this pedagogical regimen of “fresh air and sunshine” was also crucial for German children of the 1930s, so they would grow up healthy, energetic and in fine fighting form. I wonder if they stuffed them full of raw eggs, too?

While rereading ancient Greek myths from that already dog-eared book on those endless summer afternoons, I made the following discovery. Zeus turned out to be exactly like us from the late 1970s. A child sent deep into the countryside, to be looked after by his grandmother Gaia (and kept far from his father), to drink goat’s milk (his goat was divine, of course), and to grow up hale and hearty.

I will always remember milk from an ordinary mortal sheep, straight from the udder and still warm, with a few shiny turds floating in it, to be blown off to the side with the foam. Only in childhood is immortality possible. Perhaps because of that milk and the raw eggs.

But there’s a very slow, creeping fear, too. I’ve been abandoned. They’ve left me here, they’ve gone back to the city, they’re gone.

MOTHER BEAN

Mother Bean had a green body and two little beans for eyes. We were really afraid of her. Don’t go into the bean patch, my grandma would holler when she saw us in the garden, or Mother Bean will come after you! We never did see her, but she was always in the back of our minds as we carefully skirted the rows planted with beans.

In the vineyard, on the other hand, lived Mother Vine, guarding her children. For that reason we didn’t dare trample through the rows, snitching grapes left and right.

Once my grandma caught us committing true genocide on a colony of red ants that was crawling across the paving stones in front of the house. Then we heard about Mother Ant for the first time, huge and with sharp claws yea big.

Everything had a mother, only we didn’t. We had grandmothers.

THE MINOTAUR SYNDROME

The 1970s. Our mothers were young, studying — first, second, third year, working — first, second, third shift. We were there in the empty apartments, ground floors, basements, lost in boredom and fear, roaming amid the vague anxieties of the one left on his own. Is there a Minotaur Syndrome?

I didn’t have fish, a cat, a turtle, or a parrot, because that was the last thing we needed, as my mother wisely noted. In any case, we were constantly moving to new rental apartments, awaiting the great day when we would receive an apartment of our own. The only thing I had was Laika, the dog, whose homeless soul was howling through the cosmos. And my brother, the Minotaur. They lived illegally in my five square meters of living space, invisible to my mother and father, and to the landlords.

A PRIVATE HISTORY OF THE 1980S

And then.

A History of Boredom in the 1980s needs to be written. This is the decade that produced the most boredom. The afternoon of the century.

When I heard the word “boredom” for the first time, I was six and felt anxious because I didn’t know what it was. You must be bored being alone all day, one of the neighbors, Auntie Pepa, said to me. I imagined it as a slight illness, some sort of malaise, like a stuffy nose, a cold, or an allergy to poplar fluff. That’s why I answered evasively: uh no, nothing’s wrong, I’m fine. Where I came from, boredom was unheard of, they never used the word. There was always something that needed doing, the animals would never let it take root, they would mow it down as soon as it cropped up. But here, in the town of T., it thrived everywhere. It shimmered like a haze above the hot asphalt, chipped away at the houses’ fading ochre, lulled the sunflower-seed hawker to sleep in the shade of the park, purred like a cat or brought on one of the deafening sneezing fits of Uncle Kosta from across the street.

Catalogue of Collections

Napkins

Empty packs of cigarettes

Matchboxes

Pins and stamps

Pocket calendars

Winking postcards

Wrappers from imported candies, paper and tinfoil

Wrappers from chocolate bars, paper and tinfoil

Gum wrappers (minus the gum)

Empty bottles of whiskey, cognac, Campari.

Clearly, the things in this collection are abandoned, empty, used up. Somebody has smoked Marlboro Reds and Rothmans Blues, eaten imported chocolate candies, chewed some gum, and downed a Metaxa brandy. Only a few bottles, boxes, and wrappers are left for us. The collectors of emptinesses and abandonments.

There’s my first cassette tape player, a Hitachi mono, we bought it from some Vietnamese people in exchange for my grandfather’s old donkey. To the very end, my grandpa thought it was a bit like trading a horse for a chicken, as the saying goes. The horse being the donkey, and the chicken — the tape player.

Our history and literature textbooks — we got a kick out of adding finishing touches to the painfully familiar photographs inside. A moustache and a pirate’s skull cap on top of the general secretary of the communist party’s head, which was a round and bald as an egg. And on the poet-revolutionary Hristo Botev’s heroic face — may the gods of literature forgive me! — I drew round, John Lennon-style glasses. The glasses completely transformed the fearsome Botev into a slightly bewildered, bearded hippie of Bulgarian revolutions, which are as a rule unsuccessful.

The world was simple and ordered, simply ordered. On Wednesday — fish, on Friday — Russian TV.

In East German cowboy movies, the redskins were the good guys, the proletariat of sorts, since they were the reds.

The television listing for Monday, November 18, 1973 or 1983 (it’s not clear from the scrap of newspaper):

17:30 — Discussion of decisions made by the July Plenum of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party. 18:00 — News. 18:10 — For Pioneers: “The Little Drum.” 18:30 — “Children of the Circus,” a film. 19:00 — “Beautiful and Comfortable,” a program about economics. 19:20 — For the People’s Army: “At Attention with a Song,” concert. 19:40 — Advertisements. 19:45 — Melody of the Month. 19:50 — Good night, children! 20:00 — Around the World and At Home. 20:20 — Sports Screen. 20:30 — Televised theater: “Wedding Anniversary” by Jerzy Krasnicki. 21:40 — Winners of International Concerts. 22:00 — News.

I can’t explain why, but this listing always plunges me into melancholy. The last news at 10 P.M. and that’s it. Only sssssssssssssss and snowflakes after the national anthem.

Here’s the green canvas bag from the gasmask, filled with the exhausting fear of the atomic and neutron bombs, of air raid sirens being tested. I remember the bomb shelter under the school gym, where once a month we hid “on alert.” Ragged breathing in the dark, the back-up lighting generator that didn’t work anyway, the chaos, the scent of sweat and fear, the subsequent boasts of one fellow student who claimed to have “bombed,” i.e. grabbed the tits (in the jargon of the day, may it rest in peace) of our chemistry teacher in the dark — by accident, he had been aiming for a different target.

While I was putting on my gasmask during our military training drills in school — which took me a whole seventeen seconds — the major kept shouting: “That’s it! You’re dead. ” And he shoved the stopwatch in my face.

It’s not easy living thirty years after your death.

The end of our training coincided with the end of that for which we had been trained.

THE SEXUAL QUESTION

Was there sex in socialism? And socialism in sex? At the start of our erotic Bildungsroman stood Man and Woman, Intimately, translated from the German, the secret bestseller of that time, always well hidden on the highest shelf way in the back. Once the book disappeared.

Did anybody touch that book?

Which book?

You know which one.

We all read it behind one another’s backs. It was at once a practical handbook, an intimate physician, and erotic literature.

And so we first discovered sex through medical discourse. Masturbation (or so it said there) was harmful to one’s health, as was sex without love. But actually, for us, love without sex was no less torturous.

From a Catalogue of Important Erotic Scenes

Now as she ran up the steps toward Sonny a tremendous flash of desire went through her body. On the landing Sonny grabbed her hand and pulled her down the hall into an empty bedroom. Her legs went weak as the door closed behind them. She felt Sonny’s mouth on hers, his lips tasting of burnt tobacco, bitter. She opened her mouth. At that moment she felt his hand come up beneath her bridesmaid’s gown, heard the rustle of material giving way, felt his large warm hand between her legs, ripping aside the satin panties to caress her vulva. She put her arms around his neck and hung there as he opened his trousers. Then he placed both hands beneath her bare buttocks and lifted her. She gave a little hop in the air so that both her legs were wrapped around his upper thighs. His tongue was in her mouth and she sucked on it. He gave a savage thrust that banged her head against the door. She felt something burning pass between her thighs. She let her right hand drop from his neck and reached down to guide him, her hand closed around an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle. It pulsated in her hand like an animal and, almost weeping with grateful ecstasy.

The mythical page 28 from Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was a revelation, a baptism-by-fire for a whole generation. I had copied it out longhand, just like most of my classmates, while some braver souls sliced it right out of the book with a razor blade.

Sex appeared to be a complicated acrobatic routine with hops, holds, lifts, thrusts, first with one hand, tongue, then with the other. I would never learn. But in any case, the very knowledge of that figural composition gave me the confidence of the initiated. At least in theory I knew what I had to do to reach that “grateful ecstasy”.

The other novel was French. Unlike the mute scene in The Godfather, now there was an abundance of words, sighs, ellipses. From here we learned that you can talk during sex, too. Bel Ami by Maupassant. “I adore you, my little Made. ” Please don’t, I beg you. a quick thrill. wild and clumsy copulation.

Let’s add the secret erotic stories that were distributed in mimeographed copies and attributed to Balzac, about intercourse (that was the word used) between a woman and an animal (something like Pasiphaë with the bull), only in this case it was a dog or a bear, I don’t remember anymore.

.

In all that scarcity, we found sources of erotica in unexpected places.

In classical painting, for example. An inexhaustible reservoir of naked female bodies, of course chubbier and more Baroque than we would have liked, but it was still something. We gazed at the cheap reproductions. Goya’s “The Naked Maja,” Botticelli’s “Venus,” Rubens’s “Three Graces,” Courbet’s “Bather”. But Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” from our history textbook, with all the revolutionary zeal of her breast surging up out of her dress, became part of our own sexual revolution.

Underwear ads in old Neckermann catalogues.

The “golden girls” of Bulgarian rhythmic gymnastics.

All figure skating competitions.

Sculptures of the nude goddess Diana with her bow. The whole town of D., the erstwhile Dianopolis, was scattered with them. One afternoon, for a split second I caught a glimpse of a classmate of mine naked through the window of the house across the street; her name was also Diana. I already knew the myth and was afraid that the curse would catch up with me, that I would be turned into a stag that very minute, I felt my feet growing hooves, while enormous antlers would sprout out of my head any moment. A dog in the yard next door started barking at me right then, a sure sign that he’d sniffed out the stag in me.

Pantyhose packages showing long female legs.

Later we heard the rumor that sperm was very beneficial for female skin, and one of the older kids from our neighborhood bragged that he was often called upon to make “deliveries.” It’s the Bulgarian Nivea, he liked to say.

I’ve kept a whole bag full of love letters from that time. Should I add them here? It’s unbelievable how many letters were written back then. For a moment I wondered what would happen if I sent them back to the girls who wrote them? If I scrounged up their addresses and started dropping them in the mail one by one? I think V., the writer of the longest and most amorous missives, is happily married in Mexico.

V. wrote on both sides of the sheet, there was never enough room, so she would keep writing on the envelope, on the inside. One time I received a whole seven letters from her at once. She had mailed one, then wanted to add something more, and so on. She went to the post office every half-hour. I was in the army when I got them. The soldier who went to pick up the mail from the nearby village waved the seven letters over his head from afar. Everyone from the base came outside, each expecting a letter in that abundance. He started reading off the names on the envelope; actually, it was only a single, solitary name, seven times. I felt so guilty looking at the others’ faces after each letter — sorrow, which quickly changed to quiet hatred. Because of all the injustice in the world. Seven letters can’t arrive and be all for the same person.

Now I see that some of their opening lines were literally taken from the little tome Love Letters of Great Men. An innocent deception that I only now have discovered. This explains the lofty style—“My love, I believe that fate is sheltering us. ”—after which it launches without transition into everyday life: “Most of the lectures are lame, and some of the professors couldn’t care less. ” “Do you remember Petya, whom I introduced you to?. She’s snagged herself an Italian, if you can believe it. ”

Or this: “I want us to be as happy again as we were on March 8 and 9!!!” With three exclamation marks.

What I wouldn’t give to remember what happened on March 8 and 9.

Overheard on a train: “During socialism, we made lots of love, because there wasn’t anything else to do.”

THE COOK BOOK OF SILENCES

To the “List of Unwritten (and Impossible) Stories from the 1980s,” I’ll add yet another: A Short History of Keeping Mum.

From her silence, my mother made wonderful fried zucchini, baked lamb, banitsi.

Everything can be said with a few dishes. Only now do I realize why my mother and grandmother were such good cooks. It wasn’t cooking, but storytelling.

The labyrinths of their banitsi were as delicious and winding as Scheherazade’s fairytales. Here is the missing Bulgarian epos, the Banitsi Epos.

.

Our next-door neighbors at the time enjoyed pleasant but slightly strange marital relations. They argued every Saturday afternoon. It had become a ritual, part of the weekend spectacle. I remember once how, when their Saturday fight didn’t take place, we were honestly worried. My mother in full seriousness urged my father to go over and make sure nothing had happened to them. My father replied that he couldn’t go and ask: “Why aren’t you fighting?” Especially since no one had ever asked them why they fought in the first place. He went over there in the end, of course. My mother always emerged the victor. No one answered the door. It turned out they were out of town.

In fact, all of their arguments followed one and the same script. The husband would grab his suitcase, a splendid hard-sided brown suitcase, hollering that this time he was leaving for good. He would step out the front door, set his suitcase on the ground, sit down next to it and light up a cigarette. The woman would start cooking and after an hour or so the anesthetizing scent of Saturday dinner — chicken with potatoes, beef stew, or lamb with green onions, depending on the season — would start wafting through the yard, it would smell so nice and homey that the man would slowly pick up his suitcase and simply step over the threshold back into the house, returning from the brink of his latest Saturday flight. Resigned and hungry.

RETURNING TO THE TOWN OF T.

The Metaphysics of Dust

I’ve fallen asleep on the windowsill. I wake up from the sun shining through the dirty glass, a warm afternoon sun. Still in that no man’s land between sleep and afternoon, before I return to myself, I sense that soaring and lightness, the whole weightlessness of a child’s body. Waking up, I age within seconds. Crippling pain seizes my lower back, my leg is stiff. The light in early September, the first fallen leaves outside, the worry that someone may have passed by on the street and seen me.

I climb down from the window carefully, unfolding my body, instead of simply jumping down. The room, lit up by the autumn sun, has come alive. One ray passes right through the massive glass ashtray on the table, breaking the light down into its constituent colors. Even the long-dead, mummified fly next to it looks exquisite and sparkles like a forgotten earring. The Brownian motion of the dust specks in the ray of light. The first mundane proof of atomism and quantum physics, we are made of specks of dust. And perhaps the whole room, the afternoon and my very self, with my awkward three-dimensionality are being merely projected. The beam of light from the old whirring film projector at the local movie theater was similar.

I recalled the darkness, the scent of Pine-Sol, the whirring of the machine. Everything in the movie theater was made from that darkness and a single beam of light. The headless horseman arrived along the beam, as did the great Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon; horses and Indians, whooping Sioux tribes, geometrical Roman legions, and ragged Gypsy caravans headed for the heavens kicked up dust along it, Lollobrigida and Loren came down that beam, along with Bardot, Alain Delon and his eternal rival Belmondo, oof, what an ugly mug. I remember how, when the movie was boring — less fighting, more talking — I would turn my back on the screen and peer into the beam coming from the little window at the back of the theater. It swarmed with chaotically dancing particles. But this wasn’t your average, ordinary dust wiped off the furniture in every home. This magical dust made up the faces and bodies of the most attractive men and women in the world, as well as horses, swords, bows and arrows, kisses, love, absolutely everything. I watched the specks of dust and tried to guess which would turn into lips, an eye, a horse’s hoof or Lollobrigida’s breasts, which flashed by for an instant in one scene.

I pass my hand through the beam of light in the room, stir up the specks of dust, and quickly close my fist, as if trying to catch them, that’s what I did as a child. I would wave my arms, charging into battle against them. From today’s point of view, the battle was lost, they’ve won. My one small consolation is that soon I, too, will be with them. Dust to dust.

The House

I’m here incognito. The ironic thing is that I’m not making any particular effort. The surest refuge, if you want to remain unnoticed, is to go back to your hometown. I nevertheless try to keep up the conspiracy to some extent, going out only rarely. Before coming, I let it slip here and there that I was leaving the country for a good long while, I made up some writers’ fellowship in Latin America. I got my regular dose of snarky comments on two or three literary websites, to the effect that the number of trips I’ve taken has significantly outstripped the number of sentences I’ve published in recent years. Completely justified accusations. I grabbed my bags and took off. Or rather, I came back. I don’t know which verb is more accurate in this case.

The house we’d once rented rooms in had stood empty for years. The old owners had passed away, their descendants were scattered all over the world. I managed to get in touch with the caretaker. I paid him for three months, although I didn’t count on staying for more than two or three weeks. I planned on returning to Sofia incognito, where all those boxes and my gloomy birthright of a basement awaited me.

Still, the caretaker couldn’t help but ask what had brought me here and why I wanted to rent this particular house. I had an alibi ready, of course. If nothing else, in this line of work I could always come up with a story that sounded believable. I put my money on the tried-and-true spiel about a scholar who had chosen an isolated place to finish up an important study.

But still, what made you choose these parts, of all places? The locals run away from here as fast as their legs can carry them.

That’s exactly the reason, I’m looking for peace and quiet. I passed by here some years back, treated my broken leg at the Baths. This is a wonderful place you’ve got here, just wonderful, I repeated. His suspicions melted away. If you praise the place where someone lives, it’s like he personally deserves the credit for it, and you’re already one of the gang, you’re in. I again stressed that I would have lots of work to do and would like to remain undisturbed. The caretaker assured me that I had picked the right place. My neighbor to the left was an old deaf woman, while the house to the right had been empty for many years and rats and hobgoblins had the run of the place. They say, he went on, that you can catch sight of a faint light flickering through the rooms from time to time. That’s the soul of Blind Mariyka, who was the last one to live there. The man fell silent, perhaps afraid I would back out of the deal, before adding that he, of course, didn’t believe in such nonsense.

I remember that neighboring house very well. Back then, Blind Mariyka was alive and Lord knows why we were so terrified of her. During the day she would stay hidden inside her room, only in the evenings would she come out into the yard and wander amid the trees with her arms stretched out wide. Some said she saw better at night than during the day, since the darkness within her and the darkness outside got along. Just like with moles. Folks in these parts don’t mince words.

Otherwise, everything was the same. The street still bore its old name, that of a Soviet commander, the room was the same, with a table, a bed, and an old oil stove. Even the now-faded orchids on the wallpaper hadn’t changed.

A family of swallows had built a nest under the eaves of the house. They had three little ones. In the evening I would deliberately leave the light on outside. It lured flies and moths, which the swallows would catch. Soon I found myself wondering if what I was doing was right. I was helping one species kill another more easily. Yes, the swallows had babies that needed more food. Children are a bulletproof alibi. But most likely those flies and moths I was victimizing had children, too. Why should the little swallows be more precious than flies’ larvae? Are not the murder of a fly and the murder of an elephant both murders equally?

I had come back to that house in T. for a specific reason. I pull up the floorboard to the right of the window. That’s where the bed had been. As a child, I had hidden a secret stash box there. Afterward we had moved quickly and I hadn’t been able to take the box. I told myself that one day, I would come back for it. That box gave rise to all those later boxes and crates, they all stemmed from it and at the end of the day, without it my collection would never be complete.

The End of the Indians

Let’s have a moment of silence for the dead Indians and those of us from their tribe. I need to add them to that catalogue of disappeared things. Along with those extinct pagers, videotapes, and Tamagotchis. When we watched Winnetou, we all become Winnetou. After Osceola, the neighborhood was filled with Osceolas. It was the same thing all over again with Tecumseh, Tokei-ihto, Severino, and Chingachook, the Great Snake. I know that now these names mean nothing to those who were born later. Batman, Spider-Man, and the Ninja Turtles have managed to get the upper hand over the Indians and their whole mythology, dishonestly at that, never once going directly into battle against them. They finished up what the pale faces had begun two centuries ago.

The story I want to tell takes place after the showing of one of these old East German cowboy films. I remember that we always came out of the movie theater dazed, as if after a battle with the Whites. For at least an hour afterward, we always had one foot still in the film, half-Indians, half-third-graders. It was almost a physical sensation. And so, after one of these films, we went to a bakery near the movie theater to get our usual boza and tulumbichka. We needed quite some time to pull ourselves together after the battles, to climb down off our horses and reenter the dull Bulgarian world. We got in line at the bakery. Finally, it was time for the first of our gang, let’s call him our “chief,” to order, and he ordered his boza and tulumbichka with dignity. The woman at the counter, however, was chatting with someone and didn’t hear him. Our chief stood in front of the display case with a stony expression on his ten-year-old face. When the woman finally looked at him and somewhat rudely snapped, “Come on, squirt, tell me what ya want, I don’t have all day,” he spat out coldly: “Chingachook does not like to repeat himself.” No one had expected this. It definitely took guts to spout off such a line and the long pause, during which only the ceiling fan could be heard, underscored the magnificence of the moment. A second later, however, the woman and several of the regular customers burst out laughing as if on cue. That was really low (super-duper low, as we would have said back then), worse than if they’d smacked us around or thrown us out. Chingachook couldn’t take it and dashed outside. We also “spurred our horses.”

None of us made fun of Chingachook afterward; on the contrary, we admired his courage in a world that didn’t give a shit about you. Especially if you’re a kid in third grade.

The epilogue to this story is far more depressing. Strolling around the town of T. now, years later, I came across a carnival shooting gallery. I could have sworn that it was the same trailer from my childhood, faded and rusted out. Even the rifles were the same, the butts were just more worn than ever. This had once been the most magical place for us. Only here could we see all the foreign treasures that were otherwise locked away (I now know that they came from Yugoslavia). It was an Ali Baba’s cave with candy cigarettes, color postcards of Gojko Mitić, Claudia Cardinale, Brigitte Bardot, pocket calendars of naked women, decks of cards, pictures of a woman who would wink at you, depending on which angle you looked at her from, pens with a boat floating inside it, scented Chinese erasers, pistol-shaped cigarette lighters, cap guns, leather belts with huge metal buckles, Elvis Presley pins, Eiffel Tower key chains, old calendars with the whole Levski soccer team, glass canes full of colorful candy, sparklers, leather cowboy hats, plastic holsters, glass balls of every size and color, Bakelite ballerinas, porcelain Little Red Riding Hoods complete with a wolf. This whole porcelain-plastic kitsch emporium, which, I repeat, was once priceless to us, now looked run down and defeated. In every store, you could now see far greater treasures (and far greater kitsch). Right in front stood those brown, poorly molded Indians with their tomahawks, bows, spears, horses, and so on, which we would have given our right arms for back then. I went over to the trailer and suddenly recognized in the man behind the counter the once-proud Chingachook, aged and paunchy, calling out to a group of kids who were passing by unimpressed. The film was over.

I didn’t say anything to him, I stepped back into the shadows of the chestnuts across the way and stayed there, watching. A short while later, a boy of around fifteen, most likely his son, came up to the trailer; they exchanged a few words and Chingachook left. I waited a bit, then went over to the boy. I paid for ten shots, picked one of the two rifles, and started shooting at the walnuts. With the first shot it became clear that the rifle’s aim was off a few centimeters to the left. That old trick used in all shooting galleries, it downright warmed my heart.

“This rifle’s aim is off,” I said.

“Well uh, no, it shouldn’t be,” the boy blushed. “Try the other one.”

“No, no, I’ve already figured out how far this one is off,” I laughed. I broke a few walnuts, then took aim at the wolf that was hot on the rabbit’s trail, then at the prince, who bowed and kissed the princess.

“Pick a prize, sir,” the boy said, after I’d put the rifle back in its place.

I asked how much the Indians cost, I picked up a squatting brave shooting a bow and arrow, another on horseback, I caressed their edges, looking them over like a connoisseur. The boy stood there, staring in disbelief. I was surely the first one who had shown any interest in them. When I said that I wanted to buy all the Indians, he looked frightened. He didn’t know what his dad would say, he was really attached to them. But they are for sale, aren’t they, I asked more sharply. Yes, of course, they’re for sale, the boy replied, looking around helplessly for his father. How much? The price, of course, was laughable. Look, here’s what we’ll do, I said, I’ll pay for all of them, but only take half. I’ll leave the others for your dad. And tell him not to give them away so cheap. They’ve got added value from the past. I’m not sure he understood me.

“Are you a collector?” The boy asked, while handing me the cheap plastic bag full of Indians.

“You could say that.”

“Leave me a name or stop by again, I’m sure my dad would be happy to meet you. Nobody around here cares about Indians.”

“Tell your father ‘hello,’” I replied, walking away.

“What’s your name?” The boy called after me.

I took a few more steps, I was under no obligation to answer, I could pretend that I hadn’t heard him. Yet I turned around.

“Swift-Footed Stag is my Indian name.” I waved and disappeared around the corner.

Side Corridor

Blind Man’s Bluff. The easiest way to make a labyrinth — you just put on a blindfold and start walking. Suddenly the world is turned upside-down, the room you knew so well is different. A true labyrinth in which you stumble into things, get hurt, move about with moans and groans. It now occurs to me that this would be the Minotaur’s favorite game.

When we were kids, my female cousins and I made a pact that no matter how old we got and how much we changed, even if we had kids of our own and become bigwigs or total losers, we would get together on one particular day every year to play Blind Man’s Bluff. Until we really do go blind, they laughed. Those accidental brushes while trying to catch someone in the dark, the drawn-out process of recognition through touch were part of the innocent eroticism of that game. We played for the last time sometime toward the end of college. I only remember that I stumbled into the giant cactus in the living room and was pulling out needles for the next two days.

Juliet in Front of the Movie Theater

This is probably my third outing at most since I’ve been here.

I’m walking slowly down the dusky streets, meeting people whose faces mean nothing to me. Sullen, tired, expressionless. The early October twilight falls quickly, the scent of roasted peppers hangs in the air, everyone has gone home for dinner, I can hear lines from (one and the same) television show. I pass by the town movie theater, which has long since forgotten the scent of film reels. And suddenly behind me, a female voice spits out in a single breath: “Hi, hi. what are you up to? I’m leaving. Okay, goodbye. I won’t be back anytime soon. ”

A tongue-twister, followed by strange, soundless laughter. It was so unexpected that it really did make me jump. By the time I had summoned up a reply, even though there was clearly no need to do so, the woman had already passed me by. Juliet, crazy Juliet! I recognized her from behind, slightly stooped and always rushing. The same old-fashioned pink suit she’d worn for as long as I could remember, with big cloth buttons and a drooping hat like the Queen of England’s.

Juliet from my childhood, Alain Delon’s fiancée, who was always hanging around the local movie theater, they let her in for free, and she knew all the films by heart.

Once as a child, when I still possessed that ability in spades, I sensed the whole cacophony inside her. As if she herself were made of movie scenes, slightly blurred and changing at breakneck speed. Runaway trains swooped down on me, along with horses, amorous shivers, a few merciless kicks to the gut, faces, lines, a punch in the nose, low-flying planes, off-the-cuff remarks, sorrow, and euphoria. I slipped back out exhausted and dazed.

Blissful over her “romance” with Alain Delon, she was always explaining how he would come get her from T. to take her directly to Paris, par avion. She was illiterate and was constantly looking for someone to help her write letters to her beloved. Since I, too, was often hanging around the movie theater and was one of the few who didn’t mock her, I became her go-to letter-writer, a local Cyrano de Bergerac. They all began with “To my heart’s true love, Alain,” then obligatorily moved on to a short critique of his latest film, with a detailed explanation of how she had deciphered all the signs he was sending her from the screen. Sometimes, she would allow herself brief, jealous admonitions, for example to watch out for that young Anne Parillaud, as well as for that ditzy M. D. (I silently replaced “ditzy” with “ritzy”). The letters always ended with assurances that she, Juliet, was ready, she didn’t have much luggage and was waiting for him, so why didn’t he drop her a line or two to let her know when he would be coming to get her? He could find her every afternoon in front of the movie theater. I would put the letter in an envelope, write “Alain Delon, Paris” on it, and she herself would drop it into the yellow mailbox. The return address was invariably “The Town of T., Juliet, in front of the movie theater.” Clearly, these addresses only underscored the fame of both correspondents. Known to the world and to their town.

One day, however, the miracle of miracles occurred and Juliet received a letter from Alain Delon. Someone had left it at the box office of the movie theater. The fact that the postmark on the envelope bore the name of the neighboring city and that the letter was written in Bulgarian were negligible details. I had the honor of being its first reader. Juliet no longer trusted anyone else.

“My dear Juliet,” the local wags had written, with all of their small-town cruelty, “I get your letters regularly and I was forced to learn Bulgarian so I would be able to write back to you. I don’t always manage to reply, because I’m swamped with work and women, but I don’t pay any attention to the women due to my eternal devotion to you, my dearest child, my darling fiancée. Never stop waiting for me, gather up your dowry, be sure to throw in a swimsuit, I’ll swing by T. to take you directly to Sardinia. Your ever-loving, Delon.”

They had reeled her in like a sardine, but she was darting around in such joy that I didn’t have the heart to insist that the letter was a forgery. She snatched the envelope out of my hands and stuffed her nose into it, as if trying to catch a whiff of Delon’s cologne, then she hugged me, tucked the letter in her bosom and set off to make the rounds of the city, mad with happiness, spreading the good news and saying her goodbyes.

Now nothing could shake her certainty that Delon would come, and she spent all her afternoons in front of the movie theater with a shabby little bag holding her dowry and swimsuit. Years passed, the movie theater closed down in the ’90s, Delon himself grew mercilessly old, but Juliet never missed an afternoon, hanging around the agreed-upon place. I’ve rummaged through my personal archives and old newspapers from those days, I can’t find any pictures or any sign of her, the town’s sole aristocrat. Her brother, Downtown Gosho, had wrested the title of town madman from her, what inequality in madness as well! Gosho himself, good-natured and harmless, was found drowned, entangled in the reeds of the Tundzha River. From the surviving picture of him, which I include here, we can reconstruct a bit of his sister Juliet’s luminous face as well.

Let me add Juliet’s story to the time capsule that is this book. One day, Delon, old and forgotten, will learn that every afternoon in the town of T. for forty years (here Penelope shrinks in shame), a woman has been waiting for him in front of the long-defunct local movie theater with all her luggage in a small bag.

AN OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE 1980S

In 1981, Bulgaria turned 1,300 years old. For two years running, we watched herds of galloping proto-Bulgarians and hordes of barbaric Slavs hidden in the bogs, breathing through hollow reeds like snorkels. Everybody had a friend or relative who was an extra in the crowd scenes in those historic epic films. Rumors flew about proto-Bulgarians with digital watches that carelessly appeared in some of the shots. At that time, digital watches were a big hit, to the delight of the Vietnamese wheeler-dealers we bought them from on the black market; you couldn’t just take them off and leave them lying around somewhere. In a certain sense, the 1,300^th anniversary passed like a film premiere. The true events of 1981, the ones we hadn’t prepared for, were something else entirely.

Mehmet Ali Ağca shot the pope. Bulgaria was mixed up in it somehow and we all stood glued to our TV sets. Nothing brings a small nation together like the feeling that everyone is against it.

Bulgaria was not directly involved in the other important event. In December, we heard about AIDS for the first time. Which, in 1981, officially put an end to the ’60s. All sexual revolutions were called off for health reasons. Since they had never really started here in Bulgaria, we didn’t take their end as anything particularly tragic.

Brezhnev died the very next year. Did this have anything to do with the AIDS epidemic? I doubt it. It was a November day, cheerless and dreary, it was raining. They announced the news at school, the teachers looked more scared than sad. Yes, fear was stronger than grief. Who will protect us now? Classes were cancelled for the day. The next day, they brought the television set from the teachers’ lounge out into the corridor and made us line up at attention to watch the funeral, in all of its dismal detail: the massive coffin heaped with flowers, the slow marches that echoed throughout the whole school. They had cranked up the volume to the max. The youngest kids, who were right in front of the television, looked on in bewilderment — it was most likely the first time they had seen a dead person. And so we confronted death head-on, in a cold school corridor, forcing ourselves to sniffle a bit for a person who had meant nothing to us. I was twelve and had kissed a girl for the first time the day before, albeit it in the dark during a game of spin-the-bottle at a birthday party. First kiss, first death.

That marked the beginning of the end. Soviet general secretaries started dying off every year or two, like an epidemic. The ritual was already worked out. School would be called off for a day. The next day, we would watch the funeral in the school hallway and the class presidents would cry, while those of us in the back rows would peg each other with rice launched from pens-turned-blow-darts. After so much repetition, death no longer made such an impression on us.

In fact, the whole period I was in puberty can be briefly described through the prism of the complex political context of the ’80s.

First kiss (with a girl).

Brezhnev dies.

Second kiss (different girl).

Chernenko dies.

Third kiss.

Andropov dies.

Am I killing them?

First fumbling sex in the park.

Chernobyl.

A long half-life of exponential decay ensues.

YELLOW SUBMARINE

After numerous, careful listens to “Yellow Submarine,” recorded in 1968, you can discover an encoded call to revolution, a conspiratorial message from the Beatles to the youth of Bulgaria. In the middle of the song (precisely one minute and 35 seconds from the beginning) in the background noise you can clearly hear the phrase “pusni mi verigata” or “let go of my chain,” with the accent on the “u,” uttered very quickly in impeccable Bulgarian. Just like that: pusnimiverigata. Unfortunately, we decoded it far too late, in the mid ’80s, when all was already lost.

We all live in a. tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm. tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm. tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm

We all live in a. tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm. tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm. tum-tuh-dum-tuh-dumm

But no Yellow Submarine ever passed by the Yellow House.

FOUR SECONDS FROM THE ’90S

I saw myself in a three-minute video from November 3, 1989, the only surviving one as far as I know, despite all the cameras that were there. For four seconds, I was twenty years old. Four long seconds, which gave me time to remember everything. God, how skinny and ridiculous I was, with my bulging Adam’s apple, hair hanging in my eyes, my jacket, as cheap as only a student’s could be. And there’s Gaustine, too, the only shots of him, he never let himself be photographed. We’re constantly looking around, curiosity and fear. It was the first protest rally in Bulgaria in forty years. Seen from today, the protest was completely harmless in its demands: stop some hydro-project from polluting the Rila Mountains. But the Wall hadn’t fallen yet, nor had the regime in Bulgaria. I noticed the plainclothes people with cameras, who definitely weren’t from the news station. Secret service agents use a different filming technique, they zoom in on individual faces so that they can be identified. Thanks to that I can be seen up-close for a whole four seconds. The cameraman overdid it a bit. Here and there I catch sight of familiar faces, a few people from the university, a poet. Their faces are anxious, their bodies tense, ill-at-ease, our clothes are almost identical, badly cut, mass-produced. Yes, unlike the ’60s, which were truly sexy, colorful, they knew how to dress, the ’80s, like communism as a whole, came to an ugly end.

Look, now on the recording you can see the plainclothes agents bursting in, driving a wedge in the rally to cause chaos. We spot them, my friend and I exchange a few words, then I turn my head to the right, directly toward the camera that is filming me. That happens during the third second. I try to enlarge the frame, but the recording is too grainy. By the fourth second, I’m already gone.

So I don’t forget.

From a bookstore on Vitosha Boulevard, I stole the book What to Cook During a Crisis, so I could give it to the girl I was living with at the time. We didn’t have anything to eat in our apartment besides two cans of beans, food aid from the Swiss Army’s supplies, already past their expiration date. We would sit down in the evenings with the stolen cookbook.

What should we whip up for dessert?

Well, what do you say to pear cake?

We would open up to page 146, where the cake recipe was, and would start to read slowly, savoring the taste of every word. We would add half a cup of honey to the butter melted in a pan. We would carefully separate the egg yolks from the whites. We would then mix the yolks with half of the sugar, plus the oil, milk, flour, and baking powder. We would stir the ingredients very well with a wire hand mixer and pour them into the greased pan. We would put the pan in the oven and bake it until golden-brown. We didn’t have any of the abovementioned things, except the pan, the oven, and the wire hand mixer. But we got so into it that afterward, you could see traces of flour on our hands.

Auntie Fannie, 70, from the Youth 1 neighborhood, requested a stomach X-ray at the local polyclinic because of the free oatmeal they gave out before the exam.

The cold and the power outages during the ’90s. The dark foyer of the Globus movie theater, strangers’ blind breathing backs.

Meetings across dark Sofia, as I make the rounds as a freelance nighttime reporter for some newspaper. A bear-trainer without his bear, wandering through the city. Some newly minted Mafiosi had rolled up in an SUV, asked him how much the bear cost, he had stood his ground, telling them it wasn’t for sale, they whacked him over the neck, grabbed the bear’s chain and tied it to the back of the SUV. They needed it, they said, to train their pit-bulls. They tossed fifty leva at him, and the bear went running off after the SUV, roaring. These little things don’t even make it into the black chronicles of the ’90s.

The story of Blind Tony, who is trying to find himself a wife on the bus to Students’ Town with a single, endless recitative:

Yes, Tony am I, I’m a one-in-a-million guy,

I’m looking for a wife, with whom to share my life.

This is followed by an epic, adventure-filled tale about who he is and where he is going, how he has struggled to make a life for himself in the big city, a story about the future young family he’ll found, plans for children and a peaceful old age. At the end, in the same rhythm and in rhyme, Blind Tony gives his exact address and telephone number.

The story of a college classmate of mine, who would spend several hours every day in the noisiest café near the university, desperately hoping to find someone to marry her before she went back to her hometown of B. There, her father would scream at her from the doorstep: “Did you get married yet, girl? What did we waste all that money on for these five years, only to have you come back an old maid? There’s no man for you here!”

She would sit there, slowly sipping the biggest coffee in the world, waiting. Her secret desire for marriage was already painfully obvious. All the men avoided that table. Once she called me up in a panic, saying that she was in a very tight spot, her father was really sick and she wanted to bring home some man before he passed away. Just this once, she assured me. I agreed, we went to her hometown. They had laid out a huge table under the trellis, around which her closest aunts and uncles and a few neighbors were sitting in gloomy silence. They carried out her father, he looked like a very ill local Don Corleone. I went up to him, he looked at me for a full minute, tried to say something, coughed, and they carried him back inside.

Years later, I happened to end up at the bus station in the same town. An old woman peered at me and cried: “Hey, there’s the boy! The same one who lied to our girl and left her at the altar, why didn’t you get married, my boy. ”

Books with their old socialist price tags from bookstores on the brink of going out of business, which we would sell in the courtyard of the university. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love by Shklovsky, a collection of Kafka’s letters entitled I Was Born To Live in Solitude, all pocket editions, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in hardcover, for a whopping 4.18 leva, but nobody bought it. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

These are just the little things that will fall by the wayside, everything else is there in the newspapers from that time. Yet despite everything, the ’90s was the most lively, the best decade in which everything could have happened. We were young for the last time then. It was then that Gaustine appeared, a philosophy drop-out, with his ingenious projects (and flops), which occupy a whole separate notebook.

Why does Gaustine continue to be important to me? I’ve rarely had friends. Empathy predisposes you to closeness with people, but not in my case, when the weight of others’ sorrows pressed down on me like a sickness. No women, no relationships, no friendships. But Gaustine seemed to be made of a different time and different matter. I don’t know anyone like him — translucent, yet simultaneously opaque. I would pass through him like thin air or run into a glass wall. But despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, he was the only one I could call a friend.

GAUSTINE’S PROJECTS

All the ways of earning money honestly had slowly evaporated. One day, we were hanging around the movie theater to see which new films were out. The tickets were unattainably expensive, we just gaped at the poster and a few photos in the display window. Then Gaustine had an ingenious idea: we would retell movies. A detailed retelling over the course of thirty minutes for a minimal fee. His “Movies for the Poor” Project. Complete dumping of the film industry. And he got really worked up. Can you imagine what a move this is, what a historical reversal from the visual back toward the narrative? You stand in front of the movie theater, mingling with those folks hanging around outside, and strike up a casual conversation, saying how amazing the film was, but these movie theater types are motherfucking bloodsuckers for charging those prices; however, you’ve seen it already and would be happy to retell it to them in detail in exchange for an absolutely negligible 700 leva. Tickets cost ten times that amount. We gather up a group of fifteen or so and we’re good to go.

Wait, wait, I interrupt him, when are we going to watch the movie?

We’ll watch it afterward, after we get the money, Gaustine replies.

But then what will we tell them?

We’ll make it up, he replies innocently. How hard could it be, you’re a writer, right? You’ve got a title, a few lines from the poster and a couple photos in the display window. What more could you want?

He was something else. He wasn’t even kidding. He had absolutely no sense of humor. Like all obsessed people. Like those who are off the beaten track, as my grandma would say. Like revolutionaries and women — according to Nietzsche.

Movies for the Poor. Like those Tamagotchi for the poor from that old joke. Tamagotchi, if anyone still remembers, were those pager-like (perhaps I need to explain what a pager is, too?) gadgets on which you could take care of your electronic pet, feed it at certain times, give it water, and play with it when it whined. And when you got sick of it, you’d ditch it for a few days, until it starved to death. Where have all those Tamagotchi gone? To all the old pagers. A person has no idea how much death he is capable of generating.

I know I’m getting sidetracked, but let’s have a minute of silence for the souls of:

The pagers of yore

Tamagotchi

Videocassettes and the VCR

Cassette-tape players,

which buried eight-tracks,

which buried record-players,

Audiocassettes

Telegrams, with their whole accompanying ritual

Typewriters (allow me to add a personal farewell to my Maritsa, filled with cigarette ashes and coffee from the ’90s.) Writing on a typewriter required physical exertion, a different type of movement, if you recall.

OK, the minute’s over. What were we talking about? Movies for the Poor, yes, but first let me finish the joke. Since Tamagotchi also cost money, Tamagotchi for the poor also cropped up. And you know what they were? A cockroach in a matchbox. That’s it. It may not be funny anymore, but I insist upon gathering up these odds and ends, all the things that have already passed away, they’re gone, dead. Which I guess is the opposite of what is written: “to carry them through the flood alive and to go forth and multiply again”. I’ve gotten completely turned around. I don’t know whether the things I’ve now chaotically and slightly hysterically saved from my own flood will be able to live, let alone go forth and multiply. I know that the past is as fruitless as a barren mare. But that makes it all the more dear to me.

That idea about movies for the poor didn’t bear any fruit, either. Let me just say that we barely escaped unscathed after I tried to tell the first group the story of a film I hadn’t seen.

The “Personal Poem” project also met a similar end.

There’s no such thing as shameful work, Gaustine repeated this old chestnut one morning. You’ll sit there like those street artists who draw people for money, you’ll hold a pencil and paper, saying: Would you like me to write a poem for you? Every pretty girl has the right to a poem. (I think that was a quote). It’ll only take ten minutes.

So there I was on a bench, in the park in front of Café Crystal downtown, with a few sheets of paper, a pencil, and a discreet sign in front of me offering “personal poem” services. Toward the end of the second uneventful hour, a woman of around fifty came up to me. This wasn’t the way we’d imagined it. For some reason, we’d imagined all of our clients being twenty-year-old girls. She was plump and looked like a bad guy from a Soviet cartoon. She asked for her personal poem. The designated ten minutes passed. Nothing. My head was empty and hollow, like a basement in which you can hear only the minutes dripping and trickling away. I started feeling worse and worse for both of us. She started sweating, took out a tissue, can I move, yes, of course, I’m not drawing you, after all. Where should I look? It doesn’t matter, slightly off to the side, you don’t need to look at me, it’s a bit distracting. She was either romantic or nouveau riche. And with every passing minute echoing in the void, my failure gleamed ever brighter. Finally, I decided to grab the bull by the horns. I raised my head, looked her straight in the eye and said: “Actually, you have such a strong aura today that it’s very difficult for me to concentrate. Would you mind stopping by some other time?”

At that time, all the newspapers were writing about auras and aliens. And it worked, the woman, instead of slapping me across the face, beamed. She said I was a true poet, and that she had immediately recognized this. Only a natural born poet could catch auras. (As if auras were carp.) She announced that she lived nearby and invited me to her place for a glass of wine. I agreed mostly out of a sense of guilt. It turned out that she lived alone. She took out the bottle, sat down quite close to me on the couch, despite the abundance of open seats, and pressed her body up against me. I beg your pardon, I’m a poet, I shot out, quickly standing up. As if wanting to remind her that I work mainly with auras and that bodies do not enter into my sphere of competence.

Sssssmaaack! Her slap quickly sent that project, too, into the heap of Gaustine’s great and misunderstood ideas.

He took the lead in the “Condom Catwalk” project himself.

All he needed to do was go to the people with the cash and explain what a goldmine he was offering. He came back crestfallen. We sat down, poured ourselves green cows (crème de menthe with milk) and he described in detail how as soon as he set foot in that obscenely rich agency, he knew that they wouldn’t appreciate the idea.

A fashion revue for rubbers. A revolution, Gaustine was getting enthused.

A revue-lution, I chimed in.

That’s good, remember it, he noted in passing before going on. No one has ever done that kind of fashion show, know what I mean? They’ve put everything imaginable on the catwalk, but never this accessory, Gaustine was getting worked up. Total minimalism. Condom producers will pour crazy cash into it. But they were like — how would the whole catwalk with condom-wearing models work? First, the state would slap them with a huge fine for pornography, second, no TV station would broadcast that kind of fashion show. Or if they did, they would have to put little black squares right over the most central part of the event.

And lastly, heh heh heh, they were just rolling with laughter, who’s gonna guarantee non-stop erections backstage, huh? Who? Do you have any idea what a huge job that’d be? Like changing tires in a Formula 1 pit stop. Ha ha ha. We’re talking serious pumping!

Gaustine waited for the jokes to die down and told them coldly: Come on, take your wangs out of your mouths nice and slowly. In fact, the show won’t involve live models.

What do you mean, the agency guys gaped at him.

To avoid all those problems, Gaustine said, we’ll use African ritual figures. They all have large phalluses.

Large what? the dudes asked, confused.

Large, erect phalluses, Gaustine repeated calmly.

Cocks, the boss explained.

That way we’ll add some art to the whole business, since only then is an erect phallus not pornography, Gaustine concluded his presentation.

They made him wait outside while they made their decision. They called him back in an hour later and turned him down. Because of the art thing. Who’s gonna want to look at some African statues with boners? They had nothing against art (or porn either, probably), but in this case neither was worth their while.

So this idea, too, was sent to the repository of failures. Fine, put it down in the notebook, Gaustine said. Clearly we’re ahead of our time. Some day they’ll be fighting each other tooth-and-nail for that idea. And so he piled up his treasures in the future. I was merely the treasurer. In the end, writing, too, is the preservation of failures. Now that would really make him mad. Something that hasn’t happened yet is not a failure, I can hear him saying.

I believe that somewhere else, in some other time and place, he is an ingenious and successful inventor or a great swindler.

Here, in the brown notebook of failures, also rest Gaustine’s other unrealized projects:

Vault for personal stories. We would hear out, preserve, and keep stories in full confidence for a certain period of time. If the client so desired, after his death, his story could be willed to his heirs.

Projections on the sky. (One of his most monumental projects.) An ultra-powerful apparatus would project upon the whole “screen” of the sky. In the beginning, he didn’t have a clear idea of what exactly would be projected, yet the idea of that celestial open-air cinema filled him with excitement. Such a huge space can’t just sit there empty and unused. Just imagine the whole hemisphere craning their necks and looking up at the same moment.

A month later the project had taken on much more concrete parameters. Let’s project clouds on the clouds themselves, best of all when there’s low, dense cloud cover.

And what will you project onto them?

Clouds, for example, for a start.

Clouds?

Clouds on clouds. Let’s see how nature reacts to the duplication, to the tautology. And it’ll be best if we project rain. Just imagine — cinematic rain from real clouds. At first, the audience will scatter, frightened. Like in The Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat Station in 1896. At the beginning and end of cinema stands a natural scare. There’s more. Garden of Novels. Classic novels will be planted in rich soil, watered and fertilized with manure to see which of them will bear fruit. A project for reestablishing balance — what is made of wood should once again return to the earth.

The project “A la Minute Architecture” is also here. Small wire sculptures recreating several seconds or a minute from the flight of the ordinary housefly; the wire should accurately reproduce all the twists and turns of the flight.

And the photo exhibition “Skies over various cities, photographed at three in the afternoon.” And Lord knows what else.

Gaustine. His only successful project was his own disappearance. One evening he came to say goodbye, I asked where he was going, sure that he had come up with some new scheme. To 1937, he said simply. I took it as a joke. Drop me a line, I said. At that time the ’90s were in full swing, the most interesting of times, but he disappeared. I had no idea (and still don’t) what he had come up with. But when I got the first letter followed by two or three postcards, written in the old handwriting from the 1930s — yes, I think every decade has its own hand — I realized that this time, unlike all the others, he had managed to pull it off.

(I’ve told more about this in some “And Other Stories.”)

I saw him one winter afternoon years later at a café in the London airport, holding a magazine in his hand and looking worried, as far as I could tell from a distance. My plane was about to take off, I just ran over to say “hi,” I almost threw myself down on his table. He looked at me coldly, I noticed his white turtleneck sweater, of the type that had long since gone out of style, Are the gentleman and I acquainted? I stood there stunned for a few seconds, heard my name on the last call for my flight and dashed back to the gate. I had noticed that the magazine he was reading was Time from 1968, opened up to an article on the war in Vietnam. It was January 2007.

A late text message at 3 A.M. years later.

I found out that cat urine glows in the dark. I thought that might interest you.

There was no name, but it could only be from one person. At least now he was in some closer year (unless he was already a cat).

Recently the London Times mentioned a new invention designed for rich yet harried businessmen with a taste for pinching pennies (or leading double lives) — a tourist agency for virtual tourism. The agency also supplies souvenirs from the untaken trip. You receive all the material evidence of a journey, including stamps in your passport, photos, ticket stubs from the Louvre, for example, or shells from the Cote d’Azure. (Maybe even sandwiches from the Sandwich Islands.) They tell you how your very own vacation went, outfit you with a whole set of memories. It’s enough to make you yourself believe that you’ve taken the trip. For a moment it crossed my mind that Gaustine was giving me a sign.