The Physics of Sorrow

VII. GLOBAL AUTUMN

HOWL

Elenaa, Elenaaa, child of the wild desert, Amooour. A drunken song wafting through the night from the panel-block apartment building next door. We sang it as school kids at summer camps, but to this day I still don’t know which Elena and what desert it’s talking about. The obligatory kitsch that each and every one of us needed, some sort of romantic exoticism, an oasis amid the only possible desert here, in which the sand has been turned to concrete. The same song now, thirty years later, at three in the morning, drifting over with drunken longing from a group of friends celebrating nearby. This is the alternative Bulgarian song in the cosmos. Youth has passed away, socialism has passed away, yet the demons of erstwhile desires have remained, drowned in the alcohol of that which never happened. Those erstwhile school kids have grown old, they’ve gotten beer bellies, they’ve married themselves an Elena a piece, but something has gone wrong, something just isn’t what it should be. Meaninglessness has entered the uncertain Troy of the body via a wooden horse. That’s what all this howling in the night is about. I hate them and feel close to them in all their helpless sorrow and absurdity. Sometimes I feel like I want to add my howl to theirs. If I had a small, loyal pack of friends, I’d surely howl with them, happy and disconsolate amid the city’s eternal concrete fields. Amid its wild desert, Amooour. But I don’t have that pack. So I howl quietly, oh so quietly, and ostensibly with such subtle irony that I can barely hear myself.

THE SADDEST PLACE IN THE WORLD

To the Angel of Inexplicable Nighttime Noises,

who watches over those crying in the bathroom,

those cutting themselves in the kitchen

and those smoking on balconies at three in the morning.

Revoltingly lonely. That’s how I had been feeling over the last few years, that’s the most precise definition. A while back I saw it written in black marker on a telephone booth: “I love people and that makes me revoltingly lonely.” I added it to the collection of persistent phrases that I run through my head during fits of. revolting loneliness.

I went to take a walk around the neighborhood during autumn’s late, joyless afternoon. The scent of rot. The scent of overripe, falling plums, inebriating, with a whiff of mash. The brandy that will never be. Scattered watermelon rind, already drained by an army of wasps, then sucked dry by a procession of ants. I was breathing it in, no, I was swilling it down, with the doggedness of a man who has decided to get sloshed in some grimy neighborhood dive.

I was looking at the beat-up, rusting, wrought-iron casings of the glassed-in balconies. The poor man’s pathetic trick for enclosing your only balcony, putting up windows and curtains, turning it into an aquarium, reclaiming a few more square feet, adding another room to your panel-block apartment, putting your stove, hot plate and pepper roaster out there, planting dill, parsley, onion, and even a tomato plant in square plastic pots, turning it into a kitchen and a winter garden all at once. Frying peppers in the evening in that shop window onto your miserable life or smoking in your wife-beater in the inexplicable sorrow of the wee hours.

I cut through a schoolyard, with battered basketball backboards, their hoops missing, overgrown with weeds. Grass was sprouting up through the cracked asphalt where a few kids were fervently kicking around a ball, dude, you’re a fucking faggot, one of the kids, not more than ten, yelled, then the “faggot” told him to go fuck himself and the game continued. It wasn’t so much the words themselves, but more the doctoring of the voices, the rasping, the straining of throats to produce something growling and threatening that made me get the hell out of there. Smashed water bottles, a scrap of newspaper that read: “Sozopol has become a second Jerusalem. Miracle-working relics of St. John the Baptist were discovered there yesterday: three knucklebones from the right hand, a heel, and a molar belonging to Christ’s cousin. ” The pseudo-mystical kitsch of Bulgaria’s backwaters.

It has turned into a ghetto. Or maybe it always was. Nothing has changed — except for the creeping rust everywhere; the panel-block apartments are thirty years older, irreparable. Back in the day, everybody was always saying: it’s too late for us, but let’s hope that at least the kids will live a different life. The mantra of late socialism. I now realize that it was my turn to utter that same line.

The boxes have to contain a little of everything. Most of all something of those whispered, buried, hidden things. Something of that which didn’t make it into the shot, which didn’t last, but vanished, dried up like an autumn leaf, which started stinking like fish on a hot afternoon, went sour like milk, wilted like a pissed-on geranium, rotted like a pear.

I passed by a power substation. They needed to be recorded, photographed, documented: the rusty sign reading “Warning: High Voltage” and the death notices with pictures of the deceased hung all around it. As if all those people from the death notices had illegally rummaged around in the power substation (of life?) and the electric shock had swept them away. Death notices and want ads. From these want ads, pasted up on the crumbling plaster, you could reconstruct the entire unwritten history of the last twenty years. Of supply and demand. I took out my notebook and started copying them down.

A company is looking for elite dancers to work abroad. Young women needed to work for Italian families. Apartment for rent for two female students, non-smokers. Learn English in three weeks. I break curses, cast spells to improve your love and professional life. A cure for hemorrhoids and hair loss. Lost dog. We buy hair.

What’s up, douchebag, someone clapped me on the shoulder. The phrase dated back twenty years ago, the gesture, too. Let’s put it down in the catalogue of vanished words and gestures, I instantly filed it away. I turned around, a vaguely familiar face, most likely a schoolmate: Ooh, Señor Schlong. My own answer surprised me, I had never used that form of address, but now the situation somehow naturally called for it. From that point on, the conversation shifted into the genre of “two old acquaintances chat, while asking themselves ‘who the hell is this guy?’” A rhetoric of flanking maneuvers. A feast of general and diluted speech. Skillful avoidance of the minefields of concrete facts and names. You can’t think of his name, you have no idea what he does for a living, you don’t even know whether he’s mistaken you for someone else, thus causing you to rummage around in the bottomed-out sack of your memory in vain. At that moment the omnipresent question “How are you?” comes to the rescue. And everything falls into place — the army of adages about the unrelenting passage of time, the kids are growing up, we’re getting older, you haven’t changed a bit, you’re exactly the same (who the hell are you, for Christ’s sake), well, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it, okay, I’ve gotta run, okay, let’s get together some time.

I note this encounter as well (everything is important). Saying farewell to someone whose name you can’t even remember, someone you’ll write down as Señor X, that eternal X of the unknown perpetrator. No matter how hard you wrack your brain all day, you won’t come up with his real name, but paradoxically, this is precisely what keeps him alive in your mind for some time. We cannot run away from the ones we’ve forgotten.

Farewell, Señor X, farewell to all those I’ve forgotten, and to all those who have forgotten me. May your memory live on forever.

DESCRIPTION OF A PHOBIA (SIDE CORRIDOR)

A friend of mine was terrified by dolls’ gazes. She would fall into an actual stupor if she ever met their glassy eyes. They certainly did have creepy stares, those dolls from back in the day. It turn out that this fear has been described and has a name, it’s called pediophobia.

My fear is even more terrible, because the threat can be anywhere. I’ve never found it in any nomenclature of phobias, so that’s why I’ll duly add its description here. Let this be my humble scientific contribution to the endless List of Fears.

I have a phobia of a certain question. A nightmarish question that can literally jump out at you from around the corner, hidden in the toothless mouth of the neighbor lady or mumbled by the clerk at the newspaper stand. Every telephone call is charged with this question. Yes, it most often lurks in telephone receivers:

How are you?

I stopped going out, stopped answering my phone, I started shopping at different stores so as to not fall into the trivial acquaintances of everyday life. I wracked my brain trying to hammer out defensive responses. I needed a new Shield of Achilles against bullshit. How to come up with an answer that doesn’t multiply the banality, that doesn’t get bogged down in clichés? An answer that doesn’t force you to use ready-made phrases, an answer that doesn’t lie, but which also doesn’t reveal things you’d rather not reveal. An answer that does not predispose you to entanglement in a long and pointless conversation.

What spurious tradition of etiquette has given rise to it, how has it slipped through the centuries, that hypocritical question. “How are you?”—that is the question. (The sublime “To be or not to be” has been replaced by that pitiful inquiry, now there’s proof positive of degradation.)

How are you?

How are you?

How are you?

How are you supposed to answer that?

Look, the English have pulled a fast one and made it into a greeting. They’ve defanged it, taken away its interrogative sting: Howdoyoudo.

“How are you?” is the banana peel so courteously placed beneath your feet, the cheese that lures you toward the mousetrap of cliché.

How are you — the weak, enfeebling poison of the everyday. There is no above-board answer to this question. There isn’t. I know the possible answers, but they repulse me, understand? They truly repulse me. I don’t want to be that predictable, to answer “fine, thanks,” or “hanging in there.” or “getting by.” or.

I don’t know how I am. I can’t give a categorical answer. To give you a fitting reply, I’d have to spend nights, months, years, I’d have to read through a literary Tower of Babel, and to write, write, write. The answer is an entire novel.

How am I?

I’m not. End of story.

Let that be the first line. And from there, the real answer begins.

LIST OF AVAILABLE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTION HOW ARE YOU

So-so.

The most common answer in these parts. “So-so” means things are not so good but not so bad, either. Around here, you never say you’re doing well, so as not to call down some huge calamity on yourself.

Still alive and kicking.

In other words, I’m not doing well at all, but I’m not going to sit down and bore you with complaints, ’cause complaining is for sissies. This is the manly answer.

Let this be as bad as it gets!

This is said around the table, when you’ve gathered the whole gang together and you’re drinking toasts, munching on your salad, and sipping your brandy. I’ve always wondered what “as good as it gets” would look like. I don’t mean to be harsh, but I would guess it hardly looks any different.

We’re fine, but it’ll pass.

A waggish answer from the socialist era, someone clearly got fed up with the absurdity of the question and the system, in which complaining openly would only bring you grief. Hence the popular joke from that time:

“How are you, how are you?” The general secretary of the Communist Party jokingly asked.

“We’re fine, we’re fine,” the workers jokingly replied.

A l’il sick t’day, dead as a doornail t’morrow.

The whole phony concern of the question “How are you?” collapses.

Any better would be criminal.

An answer again along the same lines, the brainchild of someone displeased with the essence of the question.

Not very how.

A classic, Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh. But it, too, is now threadbare from use.

Putting one foot in front of the other.

Nothing happens, I’m not looking forward to anything, I somehow get by, I keep pushing on through. Whom and what keeps getting pushed on through and gotten by isn’t quite clear, the day, or life, most likely. The day is hard to push on through, like a donkey that’s dug in its heels on a bridge and won’t move an inch, like a hefty buffalo that has settled down for his noontime nap and refuses to budge.

One thing I’ll never forget from my childhood are the old men sitting in front of their houses or gathered in front of the general store on the little square in the late afternoon, puffing on cheap cigarettes and digging around in the dirt at their feet with sticks, the day’s unknown and unlettered philosophers. In those parts, life is short, but the day is endless.

Still breathing, but that might change.

A sly variant version on the preceding answer, but its meaning or meaninglessness is more or less the same.

Losing brain cells.

The sincere and merciless response given by my nephew and his high school classmates in a sleepy, backwater town.

HOW ARE YOU

Somewhere, a brilliant idea pops into your head, the words come of their own accord, you can hardly take them all in, you immediately look for a pen and paper, you always carry at least three pens with you, you dig around in your pockets, can’t find a single one. You try to remember the phrases, you use tried-and-true mnemonic devices, taking the first letters or syllables from every word to forge a new keyword. You hurry home, dropping everything, chanting this word over the rosary of your mind. Right in front of your building, a neighbor stops you with that awful question “How are you?” and starts telling you some story, you open your mouth to say you’re in a terrible rush and at that moment the keyword flits out of your mouth like a fly and disappears into space as if it had never existed.

HERE’S HOW

I’d been feeling more and more foreign in this place over the past few years. I started going out only at night. As if at night the city regained something of its style, its legend. Perhaps late at night the shades of those who had lived here during the 1910s, ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s would come out. They would wander through their old haunts, banging into the newly built glass office buildings like sparrows that have accidentally flown into a room, looking for peace and quiet in the park in front of St. Sedmochislenitsi Church, strolling around the Pépinière, or hustling down Tsar Liberator Boulevard, passing by the other shades. I wanted to walk through that old Sofia like a shade among shades. At first I seemed to be succeeding. When I would stop by Yavorov’s house, sometimes I could hear a couple arguing from behind the dark windows.¹ Once a window was lit up.

Lately the shades have left this city as well. This is a forsaken city, a city without a legend. And the more people pour into it during the day, the emptier it seems. Its own dead have abandoned it. And that is truly irreparable.

One evening, as I was wandering through this dark, beat-up, deserted city, I stumbled across a fight. I had never seen one so close up before. They were wailing away on one another as only people in these parts can, crudely, with no sense of style. They were thrashing away, that’s the word for it, pummeling faces, about seven or eight young guys around twenty years old. I now realize that my only experience with fights is from movies and literature. And how different the picture actually is. It had nothing in common with the battle between Achilles and Hector. Nor with Rocky Balboa, nor with Jackie Chan, nor with De Niro in Raging Bull. Ugly stuff. Then one of them pulled out a knife. I knew I had to intervene, but I didn’t know how. I stepped out into the open and yelled something. Someone shouted at me to get the hell out of there and they kept fighting. Yes, I was scared, there were lots of them, they were young, strong, ferocious. Where are those snoozing cops when you need them? Then an idea occurred to me. I picked up a broken paving tile from the sidewalk and hurled it through the nearest shop window on the street. It was a cell phone store. The alarm started howling. The fight stopped instantly. They looked at me stunned that some dweeb had dared to interfere. I could read their minds, as if their bloodied heads were made of glass. Suddenly all of them were ready to jump on me. But they realized what I had actually just done, the alarm was shrieking and in less than a minute the strapping private security guards would show up, who, unlike the police, wouldn’t just sit back on their heels. They hadn’t totally lost their grip on reason, so both gangs quickly got out of there. Nevertheless, the guy with the knife made sure to jab me, just like that in passing, as he made his getaway. I managed to raise my arm to protect myself, so the knife struck a little below the elbow. Nothing serious. I sat there bleeding meekly in the warm June night, sitting on the sidewalk amid pools of other people’s blood, waiting for the security guards.

Afterward, I had to pay for the window.

I’d better get out of here quick. I’d better be someone else. Someone else, somewhere else.

EMPTY SPACE

If you turn to the back pages of the European newspaper you’re reading, there, on the map showing the weather forecast, you’ll see an empty space — between Istanbul, Vienna and Budapest.

The saddest place in the world, as the Economist called it in 2010 (I clipped out the article), as if there is truly a geography of happiness.

I wrote about this for a newspaper. An innocent piece, which stirred up a backlash on the Internet, and I received threats — the first since I had started publishing. (No one wants to be told he doesn’t exist.) I didn’t take the hint. I wrote a few more pieces, more ironic than anything else, about the fact that 1968 never happened here. About how we don’t exist, how we’re so nonexistent that we have to do something really over-the-top to be noticed, like Georgi Markov being jabbed with a poisoned umbrella on a bridge in London. To get mixed up in hazy dealings with Turkish terrorists, an assassination attempt on the Pope that later, proof or no proof, will be called “the Bulgarian connection.” To steal Charlie Chaplin’s dead body, to hold his corpse hostage. The Internet forum was already abuzz with threats, the mildest of which was that I’d be trailing my guts out behind me like a beat-up dog. I still didn’t pay much attention, dismissing them as the work of anonymous nutcases with inferiority complexes. One night the telephone rang, the message was brief, but it was no longer just about me, they knew exactly what to do. That was the final straw, I decided to drop everything, take my daughter and leave.

Somewhere else, somewhere else.

ADVICE FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Your bile is stagnant, you see sorrow in everything, you are drenched in melancholy, my friend the doctor said.

Isn’t melancholy something from previous centuries? Isn’t there some vaccine against it yet, hasn’t medicine taken care of it yet? I ask.

There’s never been as much melancholy as there is today, the doctor said with a throaty laugh. They just don’t advertise it. It’s not marketable, melancholy doesn’t sell. Imagine an ad for a slow, melancholic Mercedes, S-class. But getting back to the point, I’ll recommend something to you that you’ll say is straight out of the nineteenth century: travel, stir up your blood, give your eyes new sights, go south.

That sounds pretty Chekhovian, doctor.

Well, Chekhov knew what to do, after all he wasn’t just some ignorant writer, but a doctor, the doctor laughed.

He’s right, of course. I had exhausted my personal reserves of meaning. The doctor read a lot, I’m sure that he secretly writes stories similar to those of his mentor, Chekhov. What I really love him for is the fact that he has never taken advantage of the opportunity to foist them on me.

I’d better travel, I’d better travel.

AS A BEGINNING AND END: BERLIN

Eighty percent of Bulgarians had not

left their native country before 1989.

.

Being abroad is like being in space, a woman I know said as I was preparing to leave, you don’t age as quickly there. When you get back, we’ll already be little old ladies, while you’ll still be forty-something. How awful, I thought to myself then, to still be young, when the women you thought were hot have grown old.

What was in the beginning? Not the chicken, not the egg, nor the darkness upon the face of the deep. Now, in the middle of my empty and unorganized room, I look for something to write in. There’s that damn notebook. Seen from the outside, the moment is solemn, a new life in a new and unknown city. Which words are fitting, the first words for such a moment? I hurry so as not to forget them.

Bread, apples, toothbrush, honey, mouse, corkscrew.

In the beginning was the list.

The first night under the oppressively high ceilings of a Berlin apartment. I lay there, remembering all the ceilings and all the rooms of my life.

The St. Matthias Cemetery in Schöneberg, near the Turkish market. On the one side the vendors’ shouts — kilo-euro, kilo-euro. Buyurunuz! Here you are. On the other side, a few yards away, the absolute silence of the walkways and the dead under the grass.

My father, whom I took with me for a few months, never managed to get used to the size of the apartment and asked to sleep in the kitchen, the smallest room. He never managed to get used to the size of Berlin, either. The only place he wanted me to take him was that Turkish market and the cemetery next to it.

There he could always exchange a few “Bulgarian” words like arkadaş (friend), çok selam (many greetings), aferim (bravo), mashallah (bravo), evallah (bravo again). and to buy himself some “Bulgarian” cheese and a roll. Afterward, he would sit on a bench in the cemetery across the way, where the dead didn’t speak German anymore, so he could chat with them a bit and throw crumbs to the pigeons. I would leave him there in the morning and go pick him up in the evening.

I would bike around the afternoons of Grunewald. Huge, heavy houses. Another time, another Germany. A monolith that has weathered catastrophes.

You don’t come to Berlin for fun. In February 1918, the Bulgarian poet Geo Milev came here to patch up his shattered head and stayed a whole year. Auden arrived in Berlin in 1928, driven here by despair. Eliot came here to lick his wounds, after his first book had been rejected. Russian emigrants, fleeing the revolution, settled here in Charlottenburg. When the elderly writer Angelika Schrobsdorff was asked why she left her cozy home in Israel at such an advanced age to come live in Berlin, her withering answer was: “Who said I was coming here to live?” And to be maximally clear, she added: “Berlin is a more comfortable place to die.”

One day, while we were poking around the Olympic Stadium, two German officers in Nazi uniforms suddenly jumped out in front of us. We were startled, then we spotted the camera behind them. They were shooting a film. One of the assistant directors signaled to us to quietly slip away, but Aya started bawling at the top of her lungs and the stadium resounded with her screams. Cut! Cinema’s whole machinery fell silent. For a few minutes, World War II was subject to a compulsory lull.

And since things happen simultaneously, I imagined how precisely in those two minutes during that battle in Hungary, a woman took advantage of the inexplicable lull in military operations to go out onto the street and drag a wounded soldier into her home.

What remains in the end — a wintry Berlin day in a high-ceilinged room, almost empty, on the edge of Charlottenburg, a sense of emptiness, monumentalism and minimalism. Here, where Arvo Pärt lived for a year, I’m now listening to his “Für Alina,” every note breaks away, circles around the empty room, you can hold it in your hand before it disappears. Aya will take her first steps in this room, here she’ll say her first word: Nein.

What else. The sky above Berlin, the saddest bakery in the world at the very end of Kurfürstendamm with wedding cakes that nobody buys, Savignyplatz’s autumn with its leaves falling endlessly over the pizzeria, the lakes of Grunewald, the glass dome of the Reichstag set ablaze by the sunset, the early dusk of November, the widows of Wilmersdorf who survived the air raids, exhausted from the peacetime they must die in, the late autumnal crocuses along Halensee, the Chinese women selling tulips in the subway, Christmas Eve, when we leave the table uncleared following some custom, so that our dead can come and eat their fill. Anxiousness over whether they’ll find the way, and consolation in the fact that even if the place is different, the heavens are not.

I did everything possible to make a life for us there, but my melancholy, instead of scattering, only deepened. I grew ever gloomier and more withdrawn. In such moments I wanted to spare others my presence — my daughter most of all. I started accepting all sorts of literary invitations, even for second-rate festivals and residencies in other countries and cities. Before I left, she gave me her favorite dinosaur. I’ve always kept it with me.

I imagine how some day in the future, when she is telling stories to her own children, she’ll start with the line: “My father and the dinosaurs disappeared at the same time. ” which is a good beginning, or rather, end.

GLOBAL AUTUMN

Now here I am. Following an autumn all over Europe. In the beginning a chestnut tree in Berlin fell just a few feet from me, then several fall leaves slowly fluttered down in Warsaw, enough to set fire to all of Europe, I watched it landing over Normandy, I walked beneath the seemingly ablaze (or rusting) chestnuts of Sibiu, stood stunned before a burning blackberry bush in Wrocław, walked in the buffeting wind in Gent and watched the endless November rains through the windows of an attic room in Graz.

Cities that look empty at three in the afternoon

Graz

Turin

Dresden

Bamberg

Topolovgrad

Edirne

Mantua

Helsinki

Cabourg

Rouen

The wounded Jesus from Caen, Normandy, in the church knocked askew by the bombings in 1944. All that’s left of him is his head with the crown of thorns, his wooden torso is scorched, his arms blown off by shells. He has no legs.

The marble Jesus with a shattered right hand in the half-destroyed church on Ku’Damm.

Europe’s maimed Jesuses.

The small towns of Normandy gasping under the historical shell of their own past, of fortresses and cathedrals. A dozen centuries ago, they were grand; now they are provincial. There’s a cause for historical melancholy for you. The only thing left for them is to nobly bear both their fame and their oblivion. Falaise is a town of 8,000 with an enormous chateau and fortress wall. The birthplace of the man known as William the Conqueror to some and William the Bastard to others. After seven o’ clock the town is deserted, I almost said “devastated.” It smells of hay and herbs. No fortress wall can stop the merciless cavalry of the hours.

Rouen. First scents. Of lilies. strong and devout along the city’s abbey. And immediately a memory of my grandma’s house, the lilies at the back of the yard, on the way to the outhouse. Everything seen is projected somewhere there, in the lost country of childhood. The ideal city lies there, the heavenly city, which has already happened to us, and in all of our later wanderings, we can only note its likenesses — sometimes more felicitous, sometimes not. The second scent I add to the catalogue is that of urine, again here by the cathedral. The homeless people who sleep nearby are already gathering up their cardboard bedding.

Alone, I stroll through the Saturdays and Sundays of the world, which is always very family-oriented on those days. And everyone is laughing, they’re laughing, it’s unbelievable. With the lightness of laughter that takes pleasure in life. Laughter for no visible reason. Not throaty, obliterating, sardonic or hysterical laughter. Rather the laughter of lightness that you’re enjoying a nice day, rolling around in the meadows of the world with other people rolling around carefree.

In one edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, I saw a picture of the already elderly Horkheimer at some celebration at Frankfurt University in distant 1952. A round face, grinning awkwardly, holding a carnival stick with a paper ball hanging from its end. As if the aging philosopher was feeling slight guilt at having been swept up in the festivities and some fear that, at any moment, his friend Adorno would appear and give him a stern and judgmental look. Hey, I’m not even enjoying myself, the grinning Horkheimer from the photo seems to be saying in his defense. And please let that be taken as an extenuating circumstance mitigating my guilt.

The best thing about provincial European museums of fine arts is that they do not show us the high points — despite the fact that they all have a Renoir or two, a Monet, and, of course, a Picasso, who keeps the whole museum industry afloat — but they do show us the intensity of a life without geniuses. The art of good, second-string paint-slingers, who, to be frank, are more interesting to me now. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were swarming with artists who didn’t stand much of a chance.

I stood for a long time, disconsolate, in front of a painting by Tilborch, “Banquet Villageois.” Feasting peasants, captured at the very end of the celebration, breaking up into groups. Such sorrow, coming up from below. the deep sorrow of the belly. The stomach is sated, yet joy has not come in any case, or has already departed. Sorrow from the seventeenth century.

Directional signs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen

ROMANTISME

IMPRESSIONISME

NATURALISME

CUBISME

TOILETTES

As I make the rounds of the world’s museums, I seem to meet one and the same group of old men shuffling stiffly and fragile old women with white hair, curious in their late meeting with the world’s art. At first, I used to think how tragically late this group is. Then I slowly began to realize, drawing nearer to their stiffness and fragility, that the meeting was right on time. From the eternity of the old masters toward another eternity — such a smooth transition.

I’m standing on a square in Pisa, looking at faces. I’ll never get tired of it. After the hunger for faces which I experienced in those basements and ground-floor apartments and lonely afternoons, I find the human face our creator’s greatest accomplishment.

People have gotten more beautiful. No, it’s not just another sign that I’m getting old. Or at least, it’s not only that. People really have gotten more beautiful. The women in particular, of course. Especially the women.

Rome — an abandoned city. Sunday.

I will add these to the list of cities’ first scents: asphalt melted by the sun in the late afternoon (a scent from childhood), the heavy scent of roses and a hint of rot. If something in nature can be pushed to the point of kitsch (since culture has done its fair share on that front), it’s the rose. The city is full of roses. Is it to cover up all the death that has accumulated throughout the centuries? All graveyards smell like roses.

The sunset on this day will catch me on a hill, in the garden of a monastery founded by the Knights of Malta, with oranges rotting on the grass and ravens pecking at the fruit’s flesh. Momentary epiphanies, which will disintegrate in the next instant. Which raises their value a hundredfold. For a few minutes, the sunset of the Roman Empire and the sunset over the Roman Empire mean one and the same thing. The nocturnal barbarians can be heard, racing along on their Vespas and Piaggios.

You don’t quite connect with some cities, just like you don’t quite connect with certain women. You meet them either too early or too late. Everything is set for your meeting, but some random whim makes you suddenly turn down some other street.

And Sunday again, all the Sundays in the world, in the morning, somewhere in Europe.

The bells wake me up and, half-asleep, I try to guess exactly where I am. I recall all the mornings in the world, starting like this, chanting the rosary of cities and towns — Graz, Prague, Regensburg, Vienna, Zagreb.

Every place has a small square, a cathedral and a hotel behind it, just one bell’s ring away. I look around the room. It’s Ljubljana, as the thick green folder of Hotel Union confirms, with its gold Secession-style inscription reading “1907”—the year it opened. The bells are ringing, some gentle, bright force hurries me to get dressed and go down to the street. Bells and the body likely have some very old conversation of their own tied to all the joys and sorrows, weddings and deaths, fires and uprisings, floods and parades that bells announced over centuries past. Run out onto the street as soon as you hear them. I mingle with the crowd, trying to dissolve into it, obliterating my own identity. Now, I tell myself, I am only here, in this city, on this square, with these people, on this Saturday or Sunday. I want to be a part of all this, to enter the cathedral humbly, to cross myself at the entrance, sometimes I do it Orthodox-style, sometimes Catholic-style, I don’t know which one is more proper, forgive me, O Lord, I pick up the hymnal, open it up to some page, I don’t understand the words, I listen to the singers’ voices, the organ’s response, is that what God’s voice would sound like, full, warm and stern all at the same time. I feel protected and calm, a part of everything. Except with a slight feeling of sinfulness that I’ve tasted only one day, not even a full day, but only a single morning of a life that doesn’t belong to me.

The woman who was crossing the square in front of the cathedral in Cologne on that overcast afternoon, godlessly and majestically screaming at somebody over the phone.

The Angel of the North near Newcastle with airplane wings.

.

Why didn’t I write down more names? The names of all the places I’ve been. The names of cities and streets, names of foods and spices, women’s names and men’s names, the names of trees — a memory of the purple jacaranda in Lisbon, the names of airports and train stations.

I’m sitting in front of my notebooks like an aged Adam, who once had given out names, but who now merely waves after them, watching their tails disappear in the distance.

MEMORY OF HOTELS

I’m developing a peculiar kind of memory for those memoryless places, hotels. The ideal hotel room should not recall anyone’s previous presence. Cleaning the room after the guest checks out is above all about erasing the memory. The bed must forget the previous body, new sheets must be put on and stretched tight, the bathroom must be shined to a sparkle. Every trace of a prior human presence — a hair on the sheet, a faded lipstick stain on the pillowcase, is a disaster. Only oblivion is aseptic.

The heavy plush rooms, as long and narrow as train compartments, at the Royal Station Hotel in Newcastle. The windows open vertically from the bottom like on a train. As if at any moment the hotel’s whistle will blow and it will take off. British workaday asceticism. It’s not easy to have invented the water closet a few centuries ago, yet out of loyalty to tradition to scorn the mixer tap. I think this as I try in vain to adjust the hot and cold water.

The Royal Victoria Hotel in Pisa, a room with heavy, lusterless mirrors, high ceilings, and two enormous, old, carved wooden beds. Prolonged dithering over which of the two to choose and the vague sense that I can see upon them the bodies of everyone who has lain there for the past 200 years, thin, translucent, as negatives.

The hotel in downtown Helsinki, behind the train station. Tall, with windows that open only a few centimeters, so that a human body cannot squeeze through and jump from there. A feeling of claustrophobia and of being denied a fundamental right.

You have salmon for breakfast, then asparagus soup, bananas, and oranges, which you used to dream about, so what’s this melancholy again, what could you be missing?

Nothing. Only that hunger.

The cheapest hotel in Paris — the Acacia in the Eleventh Arrondissement. The whole evening I listen to the bed in the room above me creaking in a precise, robust iamb. A thought crossed my mind and I wrote it down: the cheaper the hotel, the more furious the fucking.

A hotel from the fifteenth century in Old Prague, on Ostrovni 32. How uncozy the Middle Ages are for the human body.

The big hotel in Sibiu, light-blue rooms, a glassed-in bathroom, bad breakfast.

Hotel Vensan in Rouen, right in the center of town, a room over the boulevard, the unbearably heavy bordeaux of the fabric wallpaper. Among the brochures — a discrete flyer for an elite night club “Madame Bovary.” I’ll spend the night with Bouvard et Pécuchet.

The starless hotels of Normandy and the most starless of them all — Hôtel Bernières with a shower and toilet bowl in the wardrobe.

The bed-and-breakfast in Bairro Alto, Lisbon, with the wooden window shutters buffeted in the evening by the ocean wind. The butcher’s shop across the street, the clothes on the clotheslines, the crumbling ochre of the façade. The small papelaria for notebooks, paper, newspapers, and pipes, with a Pessoa faded from the sun on the door. A sudden memory of the town of T., which is precisely on the other end of the continent.

The Bible in the Catholic hotel in Wrocław. Next to the Beatitudes, next to “Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. ” which are anything but beatific, the female hand of a temptress had written in the margin: “I don’t mean to meddle, but if you’re bored, call Agnieszka, telephone 37475. ” (I’m not going to give you the whole number.) Thus, she had added one more bliss to those blessings. That “I don’t mean to meddle, but” was magnificent.

I didn’t call that night, but I carefully wrote the number down, along with the whole note. I wonder what Agnieszka is doing now, all these years later. Does she still manage to peddle some belated bliss, or do I need to cross out that (emergency) phone number as well?

LISTS AND OBLIVION

What do you call the obsession with constantly making lists, with thinking in lists, with telling stories in lists? What kind of disorder is that?

I rush to write everything down, to gather it up in my notebook, just as they rush to bring in the lambs before the thunderstorm whips up. My memory for names and faces is fading ever more quickly. That’s the most likely explanation. That’s how my father’s illness was at the end. Somebody with a big eraser came and started rubbing everything out, moving backward. First, you forget what happened yesterday, the most distant, out-of-the-way stuff is the last to go. In this sense, you always die in your childhood.

My father would go out and wander the streets, lost like a child in an unfamiliar city. Good thing it was a small town, people knew him and brought him back home. Most often they would find him at the train station. He would be watching the trains. Once when I was home for a short visit, I followed him and watched. Whenever a train stopped at the station, he would get up and head toward the open doors, then his gait would slow, he would stop, look around like a person who has suddenly forgotten or is having second thoughts about the point of his journey and finally he would totter back to his place with uncertain steps. The scene would repeat itself with every train.

My worst nightmare is that one day I will be standing just like that at some airport, the planes will land and take off, but I won’t be able to remember where I’m going. And worse yet, I’ll have forgotten the place I should return to. And there won’t be anyone to recognize me and bring me back home.

LABYRINTH AND CHOICE

The labyrinth is someone’s fossilized hesitation.

The most oppressive thing about the labyrinth is that you are constantly being forced to choose. It isn’t the lack of an exit, but the abundance of “exits” that is so disorienting. Of course, the city is the most obvious labyrinth. Barthes points to Paris as a model: “the labyrinths of the center and the outskirts built by Haussmann.”

I’ve been happily lost in that city, but here I’ll add just one disorienting afternoon. The time when I stood between two streets, wondering which one to go down. Both of them would have led me to the place I was looking for. Incidentally, there was nothing particularly unusual about the streets in and of themselves. The problem was, as always, no matter which one I chose, I would lose the other one. I could only have been satisfied in that quantum physics experiment that shows how a particle also acts like a wave, passing through two openings at once. The minutes were flowing past, and I was standing there, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I must have looked terribly lost, since an elderly woman stopped and asked me if I needed help.

What did I do? I headed down one of them, the street to the right, but I was thinking about the other one the whole time. And with every step, I kept repeating to myself that I had made the wrong choice. I hadn’t gone even a third of the way before I stopped decisively (oh, that decisive gesture of indecisiveness) and turned down an alley toward the other street. Of course, hesitation seized me with the first couple steps and again after a few meters, I practically ran down the next alley to the first street. And then again, seized by hesitation — back to the other one, then back to the first. To this day I don’t know whether with that zigzag I gained both streets or lost them both. In the end, completely exhausted, like a marathon runner in a labyrinth, my heart pounding as if to burst, I sank down onto a bench.

CHAMOMILE HARVESTERS

I never travel alone. It’s only that my companions are not visible to the naked eye. I’m like a human trafficker, sneaking whole columns of people across the border. Some of them are no longer alive. Others, on the contrary, are far too alive and curious, touching everything, asking about everything, getting lost, wandering away from the group. The metal detectors at the airport don’t catch them.

In the most unexpected and untimely places around this continent, even in the impersonal territory of the airport, that separate country, unexpected faces crop up. As I’m sitting there sipping my tea in the Munich airport, it is suddenly filled to the brim with Gypsy tinkers, boisterous and brightly colored. The police don’t notice them, nor do their silver bracelets, heavy tin pans, and copper kettles set off the metal detectors. There’s that friend of my grandma’s, too, the old Gypsy woman Rusalia, with her tulip-printed headscarf and an enormous wooden rake, going to harvest chamomile. The tea I’m drinking is chamomile, that’s the key. Chamomile doesn’t grow here at the Munich airport, I want to tell her, but Rusalia doesn’t look at me. Then I realize that I, too, don’t exist for her, just as the police, the metal detectors, and even the whole huge terminal don’t exist. It hasn’t been built yet. In its place stretches an endless field of chamomile.

As a child I was afraid of all those noisy Gypsies. Adults would scare us with them, saying they would whisk away naughty children in their big saddlebags. I wasn’t naughty, but who knows, mistakes happen. But I wasn’t afraid of old Rusalia. She would come into our house, sit down and talk with my grandma the whole afternoon. I would hover around them, listening. Rusalia loved my grandma, because she was the only one who let her into her house and talked to her as an equal. My grandma loved Rusalia, because she had travelled far and wide, and she respected everyone who had seen the world. Every summer, Rusalia would tell stories about the world, and my grandma would listen and spin, the stories becoming part of the fiber being spun from her distaff. Why do you invite them into the house, a neighbor woman would always chide her afterward, you can’t trust those Gypsies, while she’s bamboozling you with tall tales, her people are sneaking around, snatching some chicken or swiping some tomatoes from your garden. Let them swipe away, my grandma would say, they’ve got souls, same as we do, plus we’ve got tomatoes galore this year.

The voice over the loudspeaker announces that my flight is delayed, pulling me back to the Munich airport. There is no trace of the Gypsy Rusalia with her big wooden chamomile rake and her colorful people. My tea is gone, too.

As long as I live, Rusalia will go to harvest chamomile at the Munich airport, her people will clatter their pans behind her, and on those endless afternoons my grandmother will spin and listen to stories about the world.

DESCRIPTION OF A FINNISH FAMILY OF POETS AT LUNCH IN LAHTI

This could be a painting by Vermeer.

A handsome, very elderly Finnish poet, with an elongated face, as old age does to some faces, very blue, already fading eyes (one with a slight tic), has difficulty moving his hands, there’s a constant smile on his face (could that be a tic, too?), a sweet and uneasy smile, as if he were apologizing for his age. The elderly woman next to him is probably his wife — and enormous hat with a brim edged with strawberries, with a bit too much rouge on her cheeks, as elderly ladies are wont to do. She discretely keeps an eye on her husband’s movements, ready to come to the rescue at any moment. For now, he is doing fine on his own despite that tremor in his right hand, which always causes half the contents of his spoon to spill back into the bowl.

Next to her sits their son, also a poet, as he was introduced to us, around 40, thin, lanky, with glasses and teeth jutting forward, not as handsome and refined as the father. It’s strange that sometimes parents are more beautiful than their children, you always expect it to be the opposite. The daughter-in-law, in contrast to the whole family, is plump and dark-haired, most likely a foreigner. And the two charming girls of four and six in their blue suits, torn between table manners and the natural law inside them.

The conversation falters, but this is a picture in which conversation is unnecessary. Fascinated, you watch life itself in its elegant vanquishing of old age. There was love, love gave birth to children, those children have given birth to their own children. There surely have been cataclysms, too, but now here they are together for Sunday brunch, at the table of honor in front of all these writers gathered from around the world who most likely have never read a single line by the great Finnish poet and who surely will not remember his impossible name. To enjoy the respect of people who are seeing you for the first time, even for just one lunch, and to share it with your loved ones. What more could you ask for?

And now the Finnish poet does something that jerks him out of the picture. His trembling hand drops the spoon, it hits the edge of the bowl with a bang, scooping up a bit of asparagus soup as it falls, spilling it on his white shirt, splashing a few mischievous droplets onto the cheek of his astonished wife, and landing with a clatter on the stone floor.

The host rushes to pick up the spoon, as if this were the most important thing, and hits his head on the edge of the table in the process, the four-year-old girl can’t contain herself any longer and bursts out laughing, her mother shushes her, but this only makes matters worse, without a pick-up note the little girl replaces laughter with shrieking, the old poet’s son helplessly turns first toward his mother, then toward the children’s mother, but does not receive any instructions from either one. The wife is trying to clean the stain on the poet’s shirt with a napkin. And the poet himself? He keeps smiling in that innocent, apologetic way, like a little boy who has gotten up to some serious mischief.

If some invisible Vermeer is painting this picture and it is exhibited in the next century, pay attention to the dark spot in the lower right corner, right where the spoon fell. If you look at it long enough, like a Rorschach test, you’ll see the little devil of old age and his malicious grin.

SORROW MAKES BONES BRITTLE

I went to Finland mostly because of my father. I took advantage of a kindly invitation to a literary festival. I had had an intimate connection to this country since childhood, without ever having been there. My father had gone there by chance on his first and, as far as I know, only trip abroad back then. Finland, you might say, lived in our living room — six Finnish cups made from sturdy light-green glass, which we took out for guests. Setting them on the table always kick-started my father’s story. For us, it was like a fairytale, a Nordic saga, and an adventure novel all rolled into one. How they were each given only five dollars apiece, how they each illegally smuggled in a bottle of cognac or vodka, how afterward, with all the concomitant fear and shame, he had traded his bottle for the glasses we were drinking from, for the Finnish ashtray that was also sitting on the table, and for cloth for a dress for my mother. Here my mother would take the dress out of the wardrobe, bright and colorful, with big, withering roses, and everybody would click their tongues. Finland was the country of my childhood that came closest to that mythical country known as “Abroad.” The country of my father. Of fathers.

It just so happened that my visit to and initiation into Finland came about exactly thirty years later, right when I had become a father myself. And during the very same week when my father got the results of a “routine” test. At first, I decided to not go on the trip, but then it occurred to me that it was no coincidence that it had come about right at this moment, that it was fate, and that this trip would all but set some healing processes into motion.

I boarded the plane with an excess baggage of sorrow. It was the middle of June, the endless white nights. I was dwelling in some strange melancholy. It wasn’t the country I had imagined. It seemed to have aged since the time of my childhood. I was walking through the streets of Helsinki, but I wasn’t completely there. My daughter had just been born, and my father had just gotten a terrible diagnosis. When he had walked these streets, he had been twenty-five, I was already thirty-nine. I would never be able to match his eye for the world, I had already visited quite a few countries, the senses grow accustomed, the eye merely registers, the feeling of déjà vu builds.

And one night, my body gave out.

There is a lot of symbolism in breaking down in a country you have been inventing your whole life.

Past midnight, sometime around noon. It’s equally lightish-dark. In the dusk of the room I try to figure out what time of day it is and where my body is. I have no sense of either one. I feel light, hovering a few feet above the bed, nothing hurts, this is either heaven or. Those are either nurses or angels. They are speaking an unintelligible language — angelic or Finnish? I have no sense of a body, which would be wonderful if it were not slightly worrisome. With great effort I turn my head to the left and see the bag of liquid dripping into my arm. OK, got it, there are no IVs in heaven. My last memory is of riding the bike I had rented, mulling some things over, and suddenly there was a bright light ahead of me, turns out I was in the wrong lane, I swerved to get back into mine, then the sound of brakes, then. the room.

I slowly regain consciousness. The nurse on duty comes in from time to time with a syringe and a single English word, which is nevertheless sufficiently clear: “Painkiller!” She stops for a moment at the door, announces “Painkiller,” as if introducing some very important gentleman who will come in any second, forces the air out of the needle and plunges the syringe somewhere into my absent body. I try to explain in my broken English that nothing hurts. But she shakes her head and says something I don’t understand, in her Moomintroll-speak.

Sorrow makes bones brittle.

I have an almost cinematographic memory of being wheeled to the operating room. I’m lying on a moving stretcher and the long fluorescent lights above my head frame the empty shots of the film reel. I think to myself that if the stretcher were travelling at a speed of twenty-four frames per second, it would start some film rolling that is now invisible to me. The corridor is empty and echoes slightly. We pass through a floor that has a small café. A mother in a hospital gown and robe and three little girls, whom the father has clearly brought for a visit, are eating cake and drinking juice. I remember every movement in slow motion. I must look frightening, with my leg elevated, a slightly soaked bandage, an IV. The three little girls stop chattering, I hear the sounds of forks dropped onto plates as they innocently turn their heads in my direction as I pass by. I try to smile, the three little girls with pink shirts, straws, juice, their vague sympathy, mixed with curiosity and a bit of fear. The mother says something and the three of them immediately, albeit with displeasure, turn their heads away from the passing stretcher carrying some bandaged up thing. I hold this frame in my mind while the anesthesia overtakes me. You never know what your last vision before you cross over might be.

I open my eyes a crack and see the slightly blurry silhouette of Ritva, who immediately livens up when she notices I’m awake. She has stood by my bedside for hours. Once upon a time, back in distant 1968, she had been in Bulgaria for seven days. The best seven days of my life, she always says. I was twenty — young, leftist, and in love. Those three things never came together for me again, Ritva says. We must paint a strange picture for the doctors. A woman of sixty and an immobilized man of forty. The only thing we have in common is a year—1968. The year when she was happy is the year I was born. Without a visible connection between the two events.

What worries me most at the moment is a terrifying hypothesis. I can’t raise my head to look. So I try to move my leg. Nothing happens. I can’t feel anything from the waist down. Suddenly I imagine that the sheet there is empty. I feel myself falling back into that thick milky whiteness I had just swum out of. When I swim out of it again, it is because of a searing pain. My eyes jerk open. Ritva is again standing by me, I tell her it hurts, she calls Nurse Painkiller. I gradually realize that the pain is coming from my leg, so it must be there in its place and I can even move it. It hurts, thank God. It’s there and it hurts.

A week or two later, a cast-encased survivor, I’m lying at home, physically feeling the hours and minutes. I lie there throughout the summer of that year, serving it out like a prison sentence, without knowing for sure what crime I’ve committed. But that’s what all convicts say.

Triple fracture to the left ankle, two plates, seven pins, two cracked ribs, again on the left side. I stare at the ceiling for hours, the recumbent one’s only sky, and remember all the ceilings I’ve lain beneath. The high one in Berlin and the low one of my childhood. The constellations of flies on it. The bare light bulb wrapped in newspaper, that sole lampshade.

I recall the endless afternoons with which we were so generously endowed in that “once upon a time” of childhood, when I would again lie with my eyes open and stare up fixedly until the barely visible cracks and bumps in the ceiling started to change into strange mountains and seas upon which I set sail to distant lands. A few years later, the mountains and seas would magically transform into female hips, thighs, breasts, and curves. The more uneven and imperfect the surface, the more ships and women it hid.

And thus my journeys naturally came to an end. I returned to the saddest place in the world, shattered. All that remained from several years of hotels, airports and train stations were a couple of notebooks filled with hastily jotted impressions. Now, as I page through them distractedly to kill time, I finally realize it — melancholy is slowly swamping the world. Time has somehow gotten stuck and autumn doesn’t want to give way, every season is autumn. Global autumn. Traveling doesn’t cure sorrow, either. I need to look for something else.

The saddest place is the world.

1Peyo Yavorov, the most famous Bulgarian poet from the early twentieth-century, whose short and turbulent marriage ended in their double suicide, 1913–1914.