Georgi Gospodinov - The Physics of Sorrow

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. 1Once 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.