Georgi Gospodinov - The Physics of Sorrow

Although he couldn’t explain why, he knew that the end of the world was not the end. After that, something would have to survive, to start all over again.

He had read in an encyclopedia that the most important discoveries in human history were fire and the wheel. That’s why the first thing he put in the tin was a box of matches. After some hesitation, he added his favorite toy car. First, they would figure out what a wheel was and how it worked, then they would produce a real car, following the prototype. The matches and the little red car formed the basis of this kit for surviving apocalypses. Then he added a bottle of iodine, a bandage, half a package of aspirin and that “Vietnamese wonder gel” with its fearsome ingredient “tiger balm,” whose sharp, pungent scent cured everything — from colds to mosquito bites. A first-aid kit for after the end of the world. That would do for a start.

I race into the bomb shelter of the third person singular, I send another into the minefields of the past. I was that same person, who was once in first person, and now I’m afraid to ask whether he’s still alive. Are they still alive, all those we’ve been?

DOUBLE PREPAREDNESS

1980. On the one hand, there was the apocalypse, the flood, the end of the world according to John and his grandmother. On the other hand, that toothy (and armed to the teeth) Jimmy Carter was lurking, with his cowboy hat, riding a Pershing missile, as he was drawn in his father’s newspaper. At school, the slide projector was constantly showing shots of that atomic mushroom cloud and he already carefully skirted any mushroom that happened to sprout up in the garden, as if it might explode under his sandals.

The two apocalypses — his grandmother’s and the school’s official one — didn’t coincide precisely, which only made matters worse. It clearly was a question of two different ends of the world, as if one weren’t enough. And a person had to be ready for each of them if he wanted to survive.

The preventative measures were also different. His grandma stopped slaughtering chickens, leaving that sin to weigh on his grandfather’s soul. According to her, a person had to constantly repent and avoid sins of any kind. To reduce his load, for some time he ceased his experiments with ants and tried not to hate so much that revolting creature Stefka, who sat in the desk behind him, who never missed a chance to make fun of him for blushing. He couldn’t think of any other sins.

Defense against nuclear and chemical weapons was more complicated. You needed to put on your gas mask in no time flat. “In no time flat”—his Basic Military Training teacher’s favorite phrase. Then immediately add your cloak, rubber gloves, rubber boots, and hightail it to the nearest bomb shelter. Or if the bomb shelter is too far away, fall flat on your face in the direction opposite the nuclear blast, and don’t look at the mushroom cloud so as not to ruin your eyes. He knew everything, just as the rest of his classmates did, about the chemical weapons sarin, soman, mustard gas, and the havoc they wreaked. They had become experts on poison gases, chemical and biological weapons, atomic and neutron bombs, Pershing and cruise missiles.

So there wouldn’t be any surprises, he practiced for both scenarios. Whatever happens, put on your gas mask and start praying. During one of the drills, he tried to say a prayer with his gas mask on his head, but only a quiet rumbling could be heard through the hose, while the eyepieces of the tight rubber mask fogged up.

“What are you babbling to yourself about, greenhorn?” His military training teacher barked at him — he was a major, wore a uniform, and they were all afraid of him. “When you prattle on, you only use up your oxygen more quickly.”

Whoever managed to put on his gas mask in the allotted time — how many seconds was it? — would survive. Whoever didn’t, like Zhivka the Gimp, whose left arm was deformed, would be toast.

During recess, he would sit by himself at his desk, calculating whether his mother and father would make the cut-off. If they didn’t, why should he bother trying to survive? As for his grandma and grandpa, they didn’t stand a chance, they were so slow. His grandma would first have to put on her glasses, she never knew where they were, then she’d have to find the bag with the gas mask, call to his grandpa, who was surely out somewhere with the cows. That definitely added up to more seconds than were allotted.

SIDE CORRIDOR

A person wearing a gas mask resembles a Minotaur.

DEATH IS A CHERRY TREE THAT RIPENS WITHOUT US

Nothing will be destroyed by the bomb. The houses will remain intact, the school will remain intact, the streets and trees will still be there, and the cherry tree in the yard will ripen, only we won’t be there. That’s what they told us today in school about the aftermath of the neutron bomb.

— Notebook with instructions, 1980

Only now do I realize how precise that description is. The street is still there, the trees are still there, look, there’s the cherry tree, except we’re dead. Nothing is left of me, the erstwhile savior of the world. So that means somebody nevertheless dropped the neutron bomb. The absence of my grandmother, my grandfather, my father, my mother, and of that boy, about whom it’s difficult for me to speak in the first person, only serves to confirm this.

No one has yet thought up a gas mask and bomb shelter that protects against time.

TIME SHELTER

The day after the Apocalypse, there won’t be any newspapers. How ironic. The most significant event in the history of the world will go unreported.

But it’s still beforehand. And I need to hurry. to finish my work.

A woman from Iran, sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery. Just don’t do it in front of my son, the woman says, having managed to give an interview to a European newspaper. A girl from Afghanistan on the cover of Time with her ears and nose cut off. The photo is shocking, a big black hole gapes where her nose should be.

A huge fire near Moscow, the suffocating smoke blankets the city, the number of victims rises every day. Floods in Europe. A deluge in Pakistan.

I copy down the newspaper headlines. The dates say August 2010. I’ve read similar news in the Old Testament and in some of the medieval chronicles. It would be interesting to make a journal out of newspaper headlines only. Flood. Fire. Cut off. I carefully fold the newspaper in half, then once again, then once again, until it is as small as a napkin and all that can be read of the words are. od. fi. off. I stuff it into a box labeled “Fragile.” I’m trying to keep a precise catalogue of everything. For the time when “now” will be “back then,” as we wrote in our school yearbooks, liberally doused with the tears of our youth, which didn’t cost a thing. Good thing that the basement is big, an old bomb shelter, and despite all the stuff I’ve gathered up over the years, there’s still free space to be found. I insisted on that when buying the place. A nice, big cellar, a whole underground apartment, with two hallways, walls that form niches and secret passageways. I quizzed the owner at length about the thickness of the walls, the year the place was built, any past flooding, and so on. He was quite surprised. He must’ve regretted not raising the price a bit. Are you planning on living down here? No, I replied. And the next day I moved the most basic necessities for living into the basement. I spend most of my time down here. I feel at home. I mostly use the floor above as an alibi. If you put some effort into appearing normal, you can save yourself a lot of time, during which you can be what you want to be in peace.