Georgi Tenev - Party Headquarters

“Who, me? Am I the one doing this? So now you’re accusing me ?”

“You have no right!”

“I know I have no right. So why is it happening all over again, why has it ended up like that? What are you doing here in front of me? Get the hell out of here!”

“No.”

If only she could really get the hell out of here. If only she could not be here. If only she could take a swing and hit me, but so hard that I would fly back, far away from her face. I’d be torn away from her presence, lose consciousness, the end — for her to stop existing. If only she, not me, would disappear and melt away, cease.

“This is a crime, this is something that shouldn’t be done! I’m your daughter!”

She doesn’t hit me, however, she just prolongs the moment. So I’m forced to hit her myself.

She screams, but not aloud, not out loud — her body curls inwardly and then erupts again: “Why did you do that?”

The question that destroys me. It pierces me and makes me wince. And she repeats it: “Why did you do that do me? Why did you do it?”

Her arms grow shorter, her knees, pressed against my knees, turn into narrow disks that desperately try to kick me, her body shrinks in my hands. She pummels me with her little fists, her hands with their childish nails are frenzied with rage. Night is falling, it’s raining, the nightmare thickens. I fall with her in my arms, I fall on top of my very self.

Her body slowly passes beneath the edge of the leaden cliffs. It is swallowed up, both of us are swallowed up by the pyramid, the gray squares stacked up without a crack.

“Just a few more minutes,” says the doctor, a professor of something or other, von Ehrenbauer. “Just a few more minutes, Herr K-shev, and the test results will be ready.”

Leukemia was the mildest punishment I expected to befall me — for everything I had done.

It smells horrible.

The river is murky, black lines parallel to the current. Muddy shafts and fuses flit past, matted balls of paper pop up in the eddies. Slimy, frayed rags of unknown consumer origin lap at the furry, sticky rocks. Rough bristles line the canal’s cement walls. It’s not even a river, but actually a canal, the longest reinforced canal in Sofia, narrow and straight as a gutter, cutting straight through the settlement: The Perlovska River.

The intestine-river flows swiftly, as if it can’t wait to carry off the shameful filth somewhere — where? — somewhere else. However, I return once more to that place, cast out of the illusion that I was ever anywhere at all.

The dream of escape crumples in my hands, nothing but a cheap wrapper. The scent of vomit at my feet invades it like a signal of reality, even though I myself was the one who vomited here, see, that’s the juice from my innards — which, by the way, simply confirms yet again that reality is something entirely internal. I always run this far and stop here, at the bridge over the river. The canal, slippery stones on both sides of the channel.

Did I fail? Of course — but that’s a feeling that helps me hang on: at least on the edge, at least for a bit.

You are the reason words exist, as I admitted before, and now I’ll admit that even if no one among you can help me, I still respect you, I bow passionately before every yes that extends the path through fear in the face of every no that could stop me.

So here I am in shoes, tube socks, and ridiculous, non-sporty shorts. The journey continues, the running continues, begun at the roots of the night only to hit the light from the iris of the sun itself.

The guys at the reception desk only briefly lifted their heads when I flew through the door’s revolving wings and entered via the hotel’s electric lobby into the natural darkness of the night. The cold metal vase of the Elba, knocked over onto the ground, flowed to one side. The water, the pontoon bridge, the pathway — I remember, that much I remember clearly — that I’m running, right? Please say yes , please fix me to this game board for at least a little while longer with the pin that I have been preserved on.

It turned out that the sign for Makarenko Strasse really marked a street with that name, and not just a nightmare in my head. What’s more, further on I also discovered a school also named after the Soviet pedagogue. So it would be bad manners not to reach the end. A thousand meters or so to the clinic. After all, we’re talking about money, a whole briefcase-full, a million and a half.

I enter quietly, I enter slowly — that’s how a needle should find a vein. It’s early, the hallways are empty. There’s a white splotch in front of his door, light coming from a window built way up into the ceiling for some unknown reason. This strange Hamburgian and Saxon architecture. But whatever, it doesn’t matter. I don’t pay too much attention to the hospital design — if nothing else, I’m still a medical student. Who never graduated.

Medicine

My choice, not accidental, as always. The demon with the ruby-red eyes — I’ll admit my naïveté—I wanted to conquer it with my own two hands.

So medicine it was, that’s where we met. She was looking for the same thing I was — the same self-absorbed image of that which kills everything . The death-demon is always exactly your same age.

During our lectures in anatomic pathology we were always in the front row, right by the dissection table. The yellow gloves I’d wear — too plastic, non-surgical, with no intention of saving anybody from anything. The body, already progressing beyond the fated stages, crossing over into chemistry — it no longer had anything to do with biology.

That’s where we met — I couldn’t help noticing her gaze, which never strayed from the instructor’s hands, never blinked. I liked isolating myself from the group, I would take notes, ignoring the groans of fainting female classmates and the huffing of everyone else who was waiting for this foul-smelling trial — and their entire course of study — to finally be over, so they could rush into the pristine and private practices of their dreams — without blood, if possible, full of well-guarded and wealthy clients.

Like she told me, she wanted to become a pediatrician. The first lie, although I wouldn’t say she was lying to me. She, of course, was always completely sincere — but she was fooling herself.

I’ll admit it, I had a dream that we were going down the white staircase toward the anatomy lab at night. I already know that childhood memories are ineffaceable. But both in childhood and in the youth of a profession, life-changing discoveries are also etched on the memory: tastes, smells, accidental touches, indescribable movements, sometimes overpowering and concrete. However, don’t believe for a second, don’t expect me to say that we cut things up (even if only in my dream), that we sliced off little pieces, organs and limbs, from the unfeeling corpses and that we nibbled on them, testing the flavor — no.

Don’t expect me to say anything more than that — it’s just a dream, right?

They admitted me the third time I applied, but kicked me out by my second year. Chemistry was always terrible — not just for me, but terrible in and of itself, even when I managed to cleverly copy the problems on the entrance exam. I knew that chemistry would find a way to take revenge on me for that scam.

The professor wasn’t impressed by my deep yet rather narrow knowledge of one specific section of the periodic table: the radioactive isotopes. It’s a little too early for you to be curing leukemia, young man. Set aside the actinoids for now, let’s first focus on some of the simpler elements from the first group: potassium, sodium, lithium, and best of all — hydrogen.