Georgi Tenev - Party Headquarters

There he is — it isn’t easy for him to hide. I catch sight of droplets on the rocks, red drops of fear, red drops of death. Not his — killers always leave traces behind them in the blood of their victims. In just a short while I myself will rise like the sun, after taking the shot. I take out the pistol. I know there’s at least one bullet left, I’m sure of it. The blue cartridge glints in the hole of the chamber, like the gap from a pulled tooth, and the hammer glows whitish-silver from up above.

His head — resting against the wall, leaning back and to the side, his cheek propped against a sack. The hemp rope encircles its edges like a pillow under a corpse’s skull. Should I fire point-blank, from a few feet away? In the chest or neck? The last cartridge, the last bullet, the last drop of my blood. A lone fugitive, the only one left. Not quite killed off yet, the last guerrilla.

The tube shifts — the transparent piping that connects the still-breathing chunks of flesh in some strange way — the blood in his blood, the blood in my blood. This is the end, which means that the long chase is coming to a close.

Like twins of an evened-out age, the bodies hooked up to the IV find their center, the golden mean.

As I’m killing you

I might resemble, too

a star that is

finishing its flight.

As I’m killing you

I might be dying, too—

but death is also

a form of life.

I can’t deny it, Blondy , I can’t help but admit after everything that’s happened, that I, too, used to sing along with the Argirovi Brothers.

In the golden mean, the silver of my blood, like electrolysis, welds together the twins in me and in him.

In Hamburg the lioness at the Hagenbeck Zoo startles, pricks up her ears. Victim, prey or carcass? K-shev is sick, far too unwell for his bodily remains to be fed to the king of predators. As for the crocodiles — why not? Those prehistoric reptiles can digest everything, evolution itself passes through their stomach and intestines.

He knows, of course, that in the end his corpse will have to be buried. Now I understand why he picked Hamburg of all places — not because of the quality of the medical care. And not because of the Reeperbahn. The reason lies in the uniqueness of the Ohlsdorf Cemetery: the largest graveyard in Europe, covering 400 hectares, and the largest in the world. Here you can really get lost, be nobody. However, he’ll be of no use to me anonymous.

Only a short while remains until morning, only a short while until sunrise, washed in a radioactive haze. Just the physical luminary that spews life and under which life crackles as if electrified. We’re standing in long rows in front of the granite pedestal. Music blares through the loudspeakers, and our shoulders touch — mine and the shoulder beneath the white blouse of the girl next to me. I don’t know her name, but if we were alone right now, even right here out of the open, under all that music and those lights, with the convenient untying of our Pioneer neckerchiefs that is even prescribed in the manual for the ceremony. And if our shirts went as well. And if after that.

But then the drape covering the monument is pulled away, terribly slowly and irreversibly. You aren’t ready — no matter how much you’ve prepared, and despite the fact that you’re expecting it, can you really be ready? — the cover slips off, falling like a sheet revealing the body of a dead man for his loved ones to identify. It’s him all right, no doubt about it, the sculptor has captured a striking resemblance. With the help of characteristic details. By means of perspective. K-shev, cast in metal — it’s terrible.

To tell you the truth, I know that in the end his death will rob me of everything. It will leave me only the monuments, from which you can’t demand accountability, not for anything.

Since his corpse really does need to be buried, for hygienic reasons at the very least — I’m forced to make a decision. However, on the other hand, due to certain personal, historical reasons of my own, it’s important that we wait until she is convinced that it’s true. To that end, even if only temporarily, the most convenient solution is the mausoleum.

The Mausoleum

Everyone else goes to visit loved ones in some normal way — to the neighboring street, to the country or to a near or a faraway city. Even abroad, if they’ve managed to maximally distance themselves from familial circles.

We, however, visit “Daddy”—my father-in-law, in fact — in the heart of the nation, at the foot of the very citadel of power.

“Let’s go see Daddy again,” she’ll say.

“Fine, let’s go,” I’ll reply.

And shove my fist into my pocket.

I don’t have a father , she had told me. Now, when the dream is on the way to becoming a reality, she cries absolutely unexpectedly, at every entering. I don’t like it, but whatever — I’m the last one, who. What can I say?

The mausoleum is cold. Cold and always empty when I go with her to see Daddy . Special visiting hours, a sliver of space arranged by the authorities for the intimate seclusion of family members, direct descendents. Despite this luxury, they don’t allow me to bring flowers — even relatives are forbidden from doing so. Such a gesture on my part is self-serving, of course, as it would allow me to stick my nose in the filter of roses and distance myself a bit from the oppressive smell spilling out around us. Posthumous aftershave, a sweet perfume, wafting out from under his armpits.

“Your daddy is a corpse,” I feel like telling her, “your daddy died a long time ago and stinks,” I feel like screaming at her. “If we’d left him to rot like all the others, there’d be nothing left of him by now. Just a few bones and a skull for you to keep your pencils in. Just take a whiff, don’t you smell that stench? His skin has been rotting for years, they shine it up and steam it, they polish it, but it rots and thins out. So that it doesn’t tear, they cover it with talcum powder, which mixes together with the putrefaction, the talcum powder decays along with the skin.”

They’ve taken out his intestines, his lungs and his whole brain through his nose — but the skin remains. Beneath his eyelids there are glass balls, translucent, greenish and translucent, they didn’t even bother drawing fake eyes on them — the skin remains, however, it’s real and it stinks. And even though they keep sticking hairs into his scalp over and over again — they keep falling out.

In the darkness the guards whisper in a strained voice, startling the paralyzed visitors: “Move along!”—move along, they say, so that no one will see the hair slowly falling from his head. And afterward they’ll spend the whole night putting it back on. He has no right to sleep, your father.

I’m going to be sick, I say, I’m going to be sick, I want to leave.

Truth be told, he looks a little like a cosmonaut under that oval orb placed over his head. His skull is covered with stretched skin, strained, yellowed like parchment. He steals even in death — but you’re not going to take away my final dream, too, I tell him, you’re not going to snatch it away!

Yes, I was little at the time, and I didn’t understand. But I sensed it clearly, only the lack of suitable words prevented me from creating a strong argument for Comrade Todorov during our class on morals or ethics or law, whatever it was. Because now I know that he would’ve understood me.

“And what is the point of going into the cosmos?” He had asked me, peering through the thick lenses of his glasses.

“The cosmos is infinite.” That’s how I should’ve answered him, maybe I even really said it.