Georgi Tenev - Party Headquarters

“Come on, get up.”

But I don’t move.

How did I meet her? Our whole shared path has passed under the banner of tension. I can’t understand why, I can’t even recognize myself.

“Get up, get dressed.”

I remain silent in response.

She leans over me threateningly:

“I’m not going to let you do this.”

“You go ahead, leave me alone.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“I said leave me alone!”

We fall easily into a childish squabble. Only I can’t remember what we’re fighting about, as usual. There was some theme, some attempt to outwit each other. A childish war always flares up over some formal reason, but the symbolism of the toy, the object under dispute, is usually deeper, much deeper. Like an unconscious motif, for example, a lack of parental love, more precisely a father’s love. I strike again while I know the wound has not yet healed:

“Tell me about your father and I promise to get up right away.”

The glass alarm clock in its see-through case rings near my head — I don’t have time to close my eyes, to protect myself, she hurls it at me from very close range. She didn’t even pick it up in her hand, just swatted at it with her open palm and it smashed against the wall, shattering into pieces.

With eyes now closed, as I overcome the fear of a potential new blow, I continue. So cold and calm that I am amazed at my own voice:

“Tell me about him and you’ll feel better. We’ll both feel better. We’ll make peace. You’ll make peace with yourself.”

A much-needed pause. Silence.

“I’m not going to let you do this,” she speaks the words very quietly, but very clearly, right over my head.

I open my eyes. I see her directly above me. She’s looking at me vertically, her gaze like a plumb line, in its lower part her irises are hidden under the edges of her lower eyelids.

How did I find her? I don’t think it was a matter of choice. Every moment of my communication with her is actually movement toward the very moment when she will strip herself naked, like a steel blade unsheathed, and the true reasons will blaze forth. The more I resist, the longer and more cruelly the blade will be sharpened, raised like a scorpion’s tail, ready to strike.

“I had a really weird dream,” I tell her, to soften her up, at least to start.

“It doesn’t matter,” she replies and makes the first move, just like every other time.

Just like every other time, first a drop of childish blood is shed, in the sense that she makes me suffer through all my childish scorching-enchanting memories all over again. We reach this stage easily — we need only to start the familiar game. In the game, she is never his daughter, as it were. Total disguise, total relief, total flight from the reality of whose daughter she actually is.

His

They only make such an effort for the children of the Party elites. Black cars, no motorcade. They bring the boys and girls there as inconspicuously as possible, at dawn. The children are sleepy, they don’t resist. The medical checkup has to take place in a semi-dream state.

The building is surrounded by woods, you can hear the birds. The stone path leads up to the entrance, now is a convenient time, Sunday, the whole complex is empty. At the entrance: only the guard.

They lead her into a changing room and point to the hook. She takes off her skirt, her shoes, her T-shirt cut low under the arms — they all wear those, both boys and girls. She’s left only in her panties.

“Don’t be afraid,” the doctor with the horn-rimmed glasses tells her, a professor of something or other, and the woman has her lie down on a metal stretcher in front of a strange machine. She isn’t actually a woman, but rather a pudgy man; below the elbow his arms have the same meaty, twisted flab as on the arms of the cleaning lady whom she sees every morning at home with her mop and bucket in the hallway in front of her father’s office. This strange man-woman’s hair is hidden under a white cap, just like the lady who gives out rolls and pours warm milk from a teapot later in the morning at school.

They don’t have school for a few days, so they don’t have snacks during recess. They brought different food and milk in a jar, frothy and very sour — this is the way it has to be, they told her, you mustn’t eat anything else. The wild plums of springtime, the wild cherries in the courtyard of the residence — everything was forbidden. Vacation, they told her, but not at the seaside — you can’t go to the seaside, now isn’t a good time for the seaside.

“Don’t be afraid,” the doctor of something or other tells her, “we’re just going to measure something, we’ll check something, it won’t hurt.” The steel frame of the stretcher and its brown leather hammock start moving slowly. She slides along, lying on top of it, she slides toward a towering lead pyramid in the center of the room, the walls are painted a very light blue, it’s enough to make your head spin and your eyes ache. The pyramid is made up of fat gray rectangles. Her legs are swallowed up with a hissing sound from the electric motor, her body slowly slides forward. She wants to close her eyes, but she can’t, not before reaching the mountain of lead.

“See,” says the doctor, trying to speak in a fairytale voice and failing miserably, “you’ll just pass through this little tunnel and that’s it. It’ll just take a minute, long enough for us to measure something, and then you’ll come out the other side. There’s nothing to be afraid of, it won’t hurt a bit, I promise.”

It must weigh a ton, it must weigh two or ten or a hundred tons even, that mountain, that pyramid. What is it and what’s going on? — no one tells her, no one can explain it to her. There’s no way to quickly and easily explain the function and principle behind the workings of the gamma spectrometer with lead shields, the electro-radiation scanner, the isotope identifier.

Just a year or two later the girl would become dangerous. Because children ask questions when they grow up.

I know she has memories she doesn’t share with me. That’s where she’s hidden the hate, along with the cause and the reason. I still haven’t asked her, I haven’t even hinted at his money , I pretend that it would never even cross my mind. I’m interested in her body alone, it’s the only thing I’m possessive of.

Today they want to condemn K-shev, as if he were an illness — the charges have been brought under an article from the Health Act. They try him in absentia, of course, because he’s not there. I’m also absent, even though I’m a potential witness.

Do you remember that rain, that radioactive rain? they could ask me.

The rain? Yes, I remember it, but look, I’d feel like telling them, by a twist of fate he’s now dying of cancer. What’s the point? The judgment has already been pronounced on some symbolic level.

I could find more and more dull topics to hush up the main one, to keep my hidden goal and secret safe. But no one hears me, because I don’t actually talk, I’m silent. I haven’t been summoned. She orders me to get dressed, to finally get up. Maybe she wants — in a fit of hatred toward her father — dreams of going to the courtroom, of supporting the prosecutor’s accusations. But I don’t get up, I stubbornly resist. And why, you ask? I’ve got plans of my own, heh heh!

There’s no use trying to convince me, I’m sure there are memories she hasn’t shared with me. The longer sincerity is put off, the more vicious the use of the lips becomes — not for speaking, but for biting. The descent into speechlessness deepens. I hope that we’ll finally start talking, at least before we definitively and fatally harm ourselves.