Georgi Gospodinov - The Physics of Sorrow

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.

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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.