Georgi Tenev - Party Headquarters

We ran between the apartment blocks, then across the bridge toward the train station. We were laughing, and she kept asking: “Did he hit you hard?”

No, not really, I would answer, despite the fact that my teeth were numb. Such a night, of course, is unforgettable. I got home — without the bag of food, as it turned out — but with her instead. I wasn’t hungry anymore. We shut the doors and windows tight, turned out the lights, and the music, cranked up to ten, exploded in our heads.

I, of course, am deeply convinced that the world revolves around me — as its center or at least as the object of its dictatorship. The idea is grandiose and never gets tiresome. Until you finally decide to enter real life.

Like a needle jabbed into your arm, reality stings you, hurting more than your skin and flesh. You realize that you’re nobody. The electricity’s gone out, the darkness is your sudden enemy — an ally and enemy simultaneously because it demands action — you have to protect yourself from the dark. Otherwise the world goes out, along with the artificial light from the power plant. The night once again disintegrates into atoms, changes from cultivated to wild, fitting itself afterward into its original black hues, its cat skin.

Too bad if you find yourself lying on the carpet with your pants down when the lights come back on. With a sticky stain on your stomach — a pathetic wanker.

Such nights, like the night after my escape with Hope from Hope, compensates for all my patheticness for months on end. In the morning, however, she left, which was to be expected. She didn’t like the decor. She liked me, as she said, more than she should have. So it wouldn’t be cool to steal my cash or some valuables from the closet. For that reason she decided upfront, like an honest dude , as she put it — to take off. What kind of dude are you, I asked her, which was also an excuse to touch the crotch of her jeans. I smiled, hoping she’d let me strip her again, even if it was only at the door, a goodbye quickie, standing there like that with my bare feet on the tile. But no.

This girl hadn’t been that girl. In the morning I secretly snuck a peek — I’ll admit it — at her passport. Her name wasn’t K-sheva, of course, but then again I didn’t expect it to be. Her last name started with G.

Yet I had somehow believed in the myth of the father . And that thought, as it turns out, never left me. My obsession with predestination was obviously entering a new phase.

I don’t think I’m an exception. Everyone my age — how many times have they experienced humiliation, how many times have they come face-to-face with violence, so innocently hidden in the ridiculous outbursts of demonic childhood? The pockets shaken down in school, the stolen small change, the backpack scattered on the ground. The ball popped and skewered on the metal spikes of the fence. These dregs are washed away with time, especially when you pass through the key moment when you yourself can and indeed must — inevitably — commit violence.

But I remember, I’ve etched it in my brain, I can’t shake it off, I can’t smile, I can’t get free of it. The cyclical motion in which you change from victim to perpetrator, those gears keep slipping for me. Time doesn’t turn its spokes. The circle of nature that torments or delights you, depending on your participation and role — it all seems senseless to me. Where is it leading, what’s its cause, its reason? What should I hope for, why should I pay a high price since I’ll fail to remember its value, I’ll forget it.

I don’t want to forgive, I can’t forgive. The time taken from me cannot be returned. What if those moments, even those filled with suffering — like that punch in the face years ago — had no meaning? What will happen then with the night after that instant of humiliation, after that second of fear in the crumbling panel block-apartment with its flickering, naked light bulbs? The price of the night with the girl from Hope and my reckless inspiration with her dark, almost black body in the gloom — wouldn’t it, too, be diminished, if the ordeal is diminished? No, I don’t want to, I can’t forget.

The Comsomol could not easily be replaced. I tried sports, I tried other religions. I counted on the army with particular enthusiasm: I was supposed to become a pilot after all! I only later discovered the reason for this attraction, when the dream was already dead.

I’m a good runner and thus I became not a pilot, but a foot soldier.

Every boy dreams of becoming a cosmonaut, but then he takes up something easier: girls. After that, or more or less at the same time, he starts to smoke, although at the beginning, of course, he coughs. Later it becomes clear — you really have to be a complete geek to not replace the cosmonaut with something more realistic. Okay, so I was stuck in that phase for a long time. I remember our classes in Morals and Law in school and the basketball-esque physique of our teacher, a philosopher, six-and-a-half feet tall.

“So, in your opinion,” he asked me pleasantly, although I think he felt like smacking me upside the head, but at the time I didn’t understand why, “what’s the path of evolution, of development? After a just society has been created and all needs have been met — what’s next?”

“After that,” I answered after thinking it over a bit, “man will turn toward the cosmos. He’ll conquer the space beyond the earth.”

“Aha,” my comrade teacher nodded knowingly. And he didn’t hit me.

But he should’ve. I needed to learn at least something in school, even at the price of violence, because there’s no way to save ourselves from violence, it catches up with us sooner or later.

I would go home, take off my backpack, toss it down and separate the one outside from the one inside. I would fall asleep. The nights didn’t have any connection to the days. There were cats wailing in the courtyards like children. The outrageous ecstasies of nocturnal love. I didn’t understand it then, but the consciousness also processed that information, unthinkingly. And that’s how I began to suspect that night was the time for battles, for struggles. But who was the enemy?

Quite early — that’s what I’m trying to say — painful shadows crept over love. Does that make more sense?

That “who is the enemy” always eluded me. The question wasn’t satisfied with the answers from war games; besides, girls weren’t allowed to play anyway. Only concrete, real death — without games, without roles that you can step out of — death alone eased at least a little of the emptiness that we would now call “the ideological model.” With childish cruelty we doggedly attacked the ants crawling between the rocks. We barraged their columns with bombs of hot plastic as they scrambled, panicked, into pockets in the ground. Falling, hissing globs that melted into black smoke. Crawling black tears from the mouth of an empty Vero detergent bottle with its top set on fire.

Yes, I had my reasons for looking forward to the army. But it was precisely because of these optimistic hopes that the idiocy of it hit me so hard and, in the end, became yet another disappointment.

The Army, Infantry

Everything began with mild attempts: how much can you handle? Individual training tests the foundations of the psyche, which will be necessary later on — the system had made secret calculations about my career. The system itself had already failed, but I personally had been given a head start, acceleration. Is it worth forgetting the lessons learned during those three months of quiet September hell, infantry battalion? The system now has reason to be scared — I don’t forget easily. Like a pin-drum in the music box of my heart, through the holes in the aortas, some goal was filtering its signal, the music of the hollow barrel-organ was playing its commands.