Georgi Tenev - Party Headquarters

The radio is on, the prosecutor’s accusations continue. Willing and unwilling semi-guilty semi-idiots, witnesses and participants line up. They dump onto K-shev the remnants of their memories, along with the remnants of their responsibility. The primary defendant’s absence is just so convenient, he has no way to speak for himself. The experts pedantically rehash the chronology. They point to data, numbers in tables. The Party crumbles into pieces, disintegrates into atoms — just as it did then.

April-May 1986

In the party headquarters of the reactor, in the reactor of the party headquarters — foreign gazes invade the pried-off lid. The whole world already knows everything, only we remain in the dark. Malaysia returns shipments of milk imported from Poland. Sparks and telegrams fly between capital cities around the world. Moscow finally, grudgingly confesses. Kiev is in mourning, albeit unofficially. But Sofia stays silent, the spring unfolds panic-free.

Is there anyone else out there who still gets heated up by these decades-old memories? Is it only the two of us, me and her? While decomposing, we leave naked bodies behind — during brief collapses they quiver from the scalding stray sparks.

A hand — impossible to tell whose, mine or hers — hits upon the island of the nightstand. In the first second I don’t know what for: gauze, cotton, or a Band-Aid, or a canister of ethyl chloride, because there are times when the skin itself can’t take anymore, so it has to be numbed. With the scent of evaporating gas from the glass balloon, all the questions come out. What prevented Comrade K-shev from informing the population on time? What, for God’s sake?

But I don’t care. I’m radiating rays, I’m lit up. Glittering nucleotides bursting from my body in all directions. The water tastes unbelievably bitter in my mouth, the stinging air envelops my hands, all the hairs standing on end in my skin shoot out arrows. Butterflies fall all around me, along with stunned spring sparrows, the frogs in the marshes don’t finish their jet-propelled jumps. The water fleas, legs splayed on the surface of the pond scum, lose their electrical footing. The miracle of walking on translucency has broken down.

I’ve got a small, pocket-sized dosimeter, I keep it on me at all times now. I’m holding it in my hand, checking the area around here. And even before I’m touched, I know what that stretched-out hand is planning to do.

She searches for my lips with hers, she presses down on my chest, which is heated up from running, from the search for Control Point 6. She probably wants to save me, to correct, if possible, her father’s mistake. But it’s not a question of a mistake, don’t you get it? — there’s no point in telling her this.

I now control the world, for a moment I’ve received the power that otherwise only birth and death bestow. All clocks have stopped, the drifting away of that childish love has stopped as well, the fading of her pale image. The agony ceases: of seeing her as always the same, of seeing her in the bright full-color comics of memory, frame by frame — how she slips out of your hands like a lifeline.

The dosimeter shudders in my hand. You lying old fart, I think. Liar and traitor — but whatever, live and let live. What’s with this trial, these accusations — it’s all bullshit, I don’t blame anybody for anything. All you need are just a few such unique, exceptional moments, let the blows land, let the grasses sway, the sheets of rain, with me among them.

The great, the interesting, the notable — the miraculous, the fairytale — may they never fade away. May the sensors’ arrows never quiet down, may iodine-131 continue to hang in the air amid the rain, a freeze-frame of magnetized droplets, may the half-life never end.

“Squeak-squeak”—like a little mouse with its toothy pliers cutting through the wires of a time bomb hidden in my groin — this is how the dosimeter starts to make noise. It lightly passes the indicator needle over the magnetic pad, crawling across the cliff—“squeak-squeak.” Her hand slides across me, loaded like a weapon, to finish the unfinished business. I hope that finally the right moment will come, at least before we definitively and fatally harm ourselves.

My head is buzzing. It’s like my brain itself is growing. This is it, radiation sickness, I tell myself.

Her hand searches for a way through my pants, under my T-shirt, toward my stomach, but the flag is wound around my waist, the color of blood, with a crest in the corner.

“Don’t touch it!” yells the Pioneer on guard, the small sentry at the door to the dangerous void.

Now I have to stop, right here. I snatch up the bottle with the diagonal blue label Ethyl chloride and press down on the nozzle. A cold stream flows across my stomach. Then the freezing follows. “Me, too. spray me, too!” she whispers, her voice like embers. I turn my back to her, hiding the toy.

“No!”

“I want some, too!”

How beautiful she is, with wet hair stuck to her cheeks, her eyes deeper than ever. She knows what I’ve seen in them and immediately takes advantage of this, quickly repeating:

“I want some, too!”

Sometimes hitting or kissing is absolutely one and the same thing. But I don’t do it. It’s simply that I’m already numb, with winter skin, impervious to influence.

Now, after everything, she seems impossibly young, babyish, and this is the only thing that stops me — the infantile memory awakened by the invisible shaved hairs crushes me into dust, melts me, I release my grip. This probably disappoints her, the pain drains out of her body. But she also realizes: it’s better to stop, better for both of us.

The clutching at each other ceases, falls away with a creak, she releases me from the bite of her grip and I remove my fingers from the wounds I had thrust my fingernails into. Blood quickly seals up the emptiness. The blue flesh of my elongated body emerges from conquered orifices. I fall onto my back, she drops onto one side, water flows out of both of us, through both of us.

Do I love her or hate her? No one has ever asked me anything more relative.

I hope that finally the right moment will come. The moment when we split up, the moment before the moment in which we definitively and in all seriousness really could harm ourselves.

I know there are theories that radiation striking the earth from the cosmos plays an important evolutionary role. Radiation, arriving from galaxies, in pulsars and quasars, exploding supernovas. A magic wand in the hand of God, with which He creates the primordial state .

In our original and final pose, we are always naked.

There’s a sober-minded square inside me who puts up barriers — I hate him. He is what hinders me. He binds me with the hemp noose of the rope makers who unwound their wares along the endless Reeperbahn. I take empty steps, while in front of me something is waiting. Something and someone, the stuff of nightmares — but I wonder whether it isn’t the stuff of perfect images as well? Such as prostitutes in tracksuits. Plain and simple, but I like their smiles:

“ Komm schon, Blondy !”

“ Komm schon, wir machen es atomisch!”

There’s a very small room where the sober-minded square has peevishly entrenched himself. He stuffs wet towels under the door and breathes through a gasmask, he slips a hopcalite aspirator over the anteater-like snout. However, even this last bastion of resistance will fall. He deserves to meet the other in me. And the other in me deserves it, too.

My numb legs and feet in their crude shoes pound the banks along an arm of the Elba. The running continues.

Attempts to Replace the Comsomol with Sports