Georgi Tenev - Party Headquarters

I’m not trying to say, Comrade Commander-in-Chief, that two hours of unenlightened marching are some kind of limit. I’m not trying to say that two mandatory years of service, Comrade Commander-in-Chief, just two of the impressionable and golden years of my youth, are reason to try to settle the score at the price of such cruel diligence. But the rage within me, my dear comrade, even then had something else in mind. I have to admit I regret that I didn’t believe it — back then, at the time.

Because at quite a young age — at a perversely and criminally young age — I met her. Comrade Commander-in-Chief, there are things that go beyond the barrier of military secrets. Things that make the memory rather specific, and for that reason I’m only able to share them with you personally. Of course, I’ll also share the physical gesture of my repentance as well. You see, it’s for that reason that I run so selflessly, to make it on time. By the way, in the infantry no one taught us how we should run — and that’s strange, don’t you think? No characteristic features of leaping advances across flat terrain, to say nothing of rugged country. Why was running somehow taken for granted in and of itself: Am I born to run, perhaps? But I’m impoverished ideologically, comrade, and for that reason to this very day, I don’t know whether I’m running properly. I suspect not. I run quickly, I run recklessly, energetically, but my bones fuse from the effort, my joints creak, you can already hear them, because I’m inevitably getting closer to you, to the new location of your temporary headquarters, Mr. Commander-in-Chief — your white hospital. I was left to learn everything on my own — at least I liked running. The drills, however, the marching, shackled me in the chains of their exercises more and more, with the soured sweetness of torture. Like a merry-go-round, an endless spiral of broken ellipses, in a circle, left and right, the legs intermingling.

And still, I would obey every fitting command that would allow me to make my way to K-shev more quickly and directly, even if this way pierces deeply into death itself. My running is ugly, but somehow effective, I sense the rhythm. However, I found marching in a closed column unbearable, the brink of madness — doing something orderly, yet devoid of meaning. Marching is an art, the Comrade Sergeant was always saying: finding ourselves in the museum itself, we stumbled along to obliviousness on the exhibits that were our feet.

How and when did we give someone else the right to command us like mechanical toys, right down to the smallest movements of our arms and legs, fastened with bolts at the joints? Every moment when a hand reached out, deliberately slow, to give us a foretaste and for it to get a foretaste of the degradation — time would stop. When you could no longer take the standing, not out of exhaustion and not out of tension, but because of the helplessness, because of the senselessness. The horizon that has bitten into your own time like a toothless mouth. Time hasn’t even stopped — you simply realize now that it was never really passing.

Childhood, those naïve lessons at school, were an illusion that life is valuable in and of itself. The army is that blessed experiment that divides the body on the one hand from its meaning on the other. In the sun, in a uniform sewn with an unimaginable flair for discomfort. In scratchy fabric that even wild tribes wouldn’t wrap their dead in before tossing them into the grave — there and as such, here and now you stand. And while the sun crawls slowly overhead, as if waiting for you to curse it, insulting comparisons explode in the brain. Curses and insults want to fly off your tongue toward your very self — but why?

Yes, the sun, you tell yourself, is crawling terribly slowly. Like shit . You spit the filth out of your mouth, but you’ve already gulped it down, you’re already cursing, already swearing every other word like all the others. Who do you dislike and who do you hate now? With stripes also comes the right for you to commit abuses—“I can’t! I won’t!”—but you do it. You do it with relish, nasty and slow. Some frustrated sergeant, some I, hardboiled from boredom.

The sun, contrary to all expectations, shines on everyone with equal indifference and your problem is not solved. You’re no longer innocent, you’ve lost the right and the moral assets of victimhood. You sense it, that fiery glob of brains, its sadistic immobility. It sounds impossible, the maddening thought that the projector’s yellow light has to make at least 700 more circles at that same lazy pace before two years will be over, the brain is incapable of comprehending this. And the future, which is actually the truth, is transformed into fiction. And until then, consequently, you are simply nobody.

I’ve counted the minutes, I’ve counted the seconds, strung taut at my post by the flag, every second thinking up the name of a girl, known or unknown, but please, I beg you, let her be a runner, please make her legs speed up the clock hands at least a little! At the most banal moment in my life I sense the very depths of the ineptness — and at the same time the talent — of that devil who created the system. It’s as moronically simple as Chinese water torture, as that staff idiot who purposely keeps the door to his office, which reeks of linoleum and cigarette ashes, open. You expect him to peek out at any second, you know he’s lurking, just so you can’t figure out a way to get some relief. The pulsating, repetitive thought: there’s no way to put down your weapon, it’s impossible even to glance at the clock, there’s no way out, didn’t I tell you? Moments in which you offer a year of life in exchange for a half-hour less of this un-life. Moments that you will pass over with a smile years later. But not me, I tell myself — not me. I remember. I hate. I despise.

No matter how many

years will pass by

I won’t resign myself

to that—

we don’t want to relive

unlived things!

Like everyone else, my favorite band at the time was The Crickets, too.

1989

Blind time, as if jerking awake after dozing off unexpectedly.

“I’m not a Communist!” I yell in my sleep, lathered in sweat. I stand up: “And I never will be!”

Otherwise they wouldn’t let me into the demonstrations.

Demonstrations

There were plenty of girls at the demonstrations. All quivering with excitement, I’d say. This is how I’d describe them: quivering with excitement and ultra-sensitive. I wonder whether she wasn’t there among them? But how would I recognize her without an exploratory grope? No, I hadn’t fallen so low as to sheepishly rub up against their bodies — I walked straight ahead with my head held high, chanting the necessary slogans, while I let that same old anger blaze in my eyes, something you still can’t quite fully achieve. Regardless of whether the elections were won, the thirst remains — the girls of democracy were especially impressed by this seemingly magical gaze. But I walked right on through them, I hardly noticed them, I was looking for something different, I wanted all of them together, at the same time, yet because of my clear recognition that it could never happen, I was looking for something that would bring it all together — the body of one girl who was different. Like being amid the trees in a wet forest, orienteering between bodies, among so many women with feverish skin, which is twice as sensitive.

Under those circumstances there was no way to avoid a spark blazing up in a more general sense. Amid so many suppressed desires, the flaring up of sparks is imperative. It heightens the sensation of an explosion, of expanding space in which insignificant bodily processes take on the scope of atmospheric phenomena. Collective energy should not be underestimated, but who can control it? Certainly not me.