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
The running, the transformation into pain, doesn’t lead me any farther from or closer to the goal, for now. But it’s the only effective reality I have at my disposal.
The only thing I knew about adults was that adults, unlike children, go to work. But I didn’t get what this meant.
Parents worked, neighbors did, too. The day was divided into work time and free time, with a lunch break and the hygienic half-day off, into the five-day work week plus that disputed slice of Saturday.
I took me a lot of time to grow up. It took me even more time to figure out what the point of that everyday motion was: so mechanistic and ingrained that it even turned vacations into work. An activity with regulated parameters, innocent and naïve, just like those men and women with their rounded shoulders who went to their offices every morning as if going on vacation.
I couldn’t read yet. The only understandable things in the newspaper for me were the red splotches of the medals — the only colored elements, placed next to the masthead and surrounded with wreaths. I saw the determined profiles of nameless men — I had never seen in adults anything like the movement in those slanted brows, the tension captured in the portrait, as if caught mid-jump.
Most adults tended toward chubbiness and on top of that often, even regularly, got sick. Pharmacies were a favorite meeting place, while the delivery of imported medicines for myriad and ever-more-threatening illnesses was a sign of elevated social status.
The newspapers watched me with their portraits, but then perhaps it was still too early to look for K-shev’s face in the line-up. And perhaps it was still too early for him to step so far forward, to appear on the front page.
The newspapers showed traces of sausage and other cold cuts, along with dried tomato seeds, sometimes a spot of mustard, after the workers or clerks had finished their lunch break. There were brick-layers in paper hats, on which you could read the major headlines. The white village eggs, which were something entirely different, with their milky hue, arrived wrapped in small torn-up squares of newspaper.
I couldn’t wait to grow up and be able to read: then I’d be able to understand the messages everyone else failed to notice, even though they were broadcast with such fat, black-scented letters. Or worse yet, they purposely pretended not to see them.
Instead, the adults became even heavier, they drooped, they began dragging their exhausted legs — surely from the pointlessness of it all. I never figured it out in any case, and in my failure to understand I simply despised them. I begged them to sign me up for more and more new sports, and to leave me to my own devices. I strained my sinews, but despite this effort I didn’t feel like I had achieved anything. “Bravo,” they told me, “you’re improving yourself.” But I knew: if I continue on like this, I’ll just end up as an average athlete, most probably a gym teacher. Then I joined the army. Then I was discharged. In the interim between these two events nothing happened. Nothing except getting close to K-shev from a rather strange angle, getting dangerously close alongside him and dangerously near.
Was I hoping for something more? Of course. My secret weapon was Hope—one of the socialist-era concrete jungles on Sofia’s outskirts. By the way, I always knew that a white rabbit could pop out of the concrete top-hat of that neighborhood and cut across my life with joyful hops. Not expecting anything in particular doesn’t mean that you don’t have hopes. So I wasn’t waiting for anything, on the contrary, I had even thoroughly given myself over to the general despair. And then it happened all of its own accord. I just had to get far enough away from home, to find myself in no-man’s-land. What better place than the Hope neighborhood?
Late one evening I went into a store, the only one I would find open from here to downtown. I could feel my stomach growling, my head was practically spinning. But I didn’t even ask myself why I was so hungry.
I bought bread and canned meat, chocolate and generic beer. Between the metal grating of the bread rack I saw a girl in a jean jacket near the alcohol display. Short, light-brown hair, curly. Her face made me stop and stare. She was about four or five meters away, she didn’t see me. I was struck by how clean her skin seemed, if that means anything from such a distance, under the whitish sheen of the fluorescent lights. She seemed somehow self-assured, a badass. I wasn’t surprised when I saw her head toward the checkout with a bottle of vodka. I hurried over there, too — not that I had anything in mind, I simply didn’t want to let her out of my sight. So I could see her face, I got into the other checkout line. However, my line moved faster, so I went outside.
I leaned against the empty crates and broke off a hunk of bread. I started chewing, but that just made my stomach hurt even more. I sat down on a crate and leaned against the wall, I didn’t care if I got dirty. I thought it would be best to catch a cab and go home.
The door opened and I saw her coming down the stairs. She wound the plastic bag around her hand and spit the gum out of her mouth.
Then something almost unbelievable happened: the spit-out gum somehow swerved and spun, it flew up and before I could duck, it hit me in the face, right on the cheek. She burst out laughing with her hand over her mouth. Then she stepped toward me and leaned over:
“Sorry!”
I lifted my hand, touched my cheek — I could feel the moist trace of her spit on my skin.
“I didn’t mean to,” she said, her gaze guilty, but not overly so. As if she were waiting for a cue from me to smile.