The most beautiful woman in Sofia, Mr. A. says finally. She didn’t belong here, not in this time and this place. I knew a lot of people were dying to be with her. Some of your problems were because of her. Of course, first and foremost you were in trouble because of what you wrote and said in the cafés, especially in ’68, about all the events happening then. But also because of her. She was the daughter of an old writer, by the way. He couldn’t stand you, may he rest in peace. A talentless hack, from the big-time nomenclature, the joke was that she was his only good work. She knew she had no future with you. Because you yourself had no future. I think that’s also why she loved you.
Again the future. If he could have, Mr. N. would have remembered that he had always been indifferent to the future. Conversations about the future under communism inspired him to make snarky comments at parties; the cosmic future also seemed unclear and suspicious to him, the new order, the new people—all of it sounded so distant and hollow. The bright future gives me heartburn, he once told a group of friends. (That, of course, immediately got written down). Shortly thereafter Brodsky, if I recall, formulated it more beautifully, but it was the same idea: “My objections to that system were not so much political as aesthetic.” Nevertheless, I prefer Mr. N.’s formulation. His objections to the system were physiological.
19.
There is also a dead, mummified past.
For those of my generation, our first memory of a dead body is a shared memory. It’s as if there was an order from the Ministry of Edification (surely there was just such an order) for everyone in the earliest years of primary school to visit the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov. To bow before the leader and teacher who so loved children and would take time for photos with them, despite his busy workday. To pay their respects to the hero of Leipzig, who bravely set fire to the German Reichstag, as one of my confused classmates put it, thus calling down a world of trouble on himself, which included his parents being called in, getting scolded, etc. Goebbels himself didn’t manage to convict him, yet you have the cheek to call him an arsonist, the teacher shouted at my poor classmate.
Anyway, that first meeting with death stays with you your whole life. The mausoleum guaranteed you a real live experience of death, if I can put it that way. All subsequent deaths and deceased bodies would be compared to that body, they would be copies of that first, model dead body. We knew we were very lucky, as the world is not exactly bursting at the seams with mausoleums and stuffed guys. That’s what we whispered among ourselves before we went inside, and good thing nobody heard that “stuffed guy,” because we would’ve caught hell for it.
They brought us there all the way from the other side of Bulgaria. A whole night rocking and swaying on the slowest passenger train so as to avoid having to pay for a hotel in the capital city. In the morning still groggy, sleepy-eyed, directly from the train station we waded into the thick November fog in front of the mausoleum. Fear comes when it’s our turn to go in. We pass by the honor guards at the entrance, who stand stock-still. Perhaps they are stuffed as well? Inside, the hallways are darkened, illuminated only by electric torches and cold as a refrigerator. The mausoleum is a refrigerator, of course. Something like our freezers at home which our mothers stuff full of pork knuckle and chicken so the meat doesn’t go bad.
We near the room with the body, we can already see the glass coffin lid. Chubby Demby, my friend whom I sit next to in class, had whispered to me outside that if you take a really close look at his eyelids, you can see them twitching slightly. That’s what his brother had told him, who’d already passed through here.
The dead man looked like he was made of plastic, his suit coat and pants were more alive than he was, his lapel covered with medals, the hair of his mustache like a clothes brush. Just then, as I passed slowly by his head, I saw perfectly clearly how for a split second his eyelid twitched. Tick-tick, two times, the left eyelid. I could barely stop myself from screaming. It was as if he were giving me a sign, winking at me from his glass-lidded coffin. Be careful, because Comrade Dimitrov sees everything, our teacher at school had warned us, pointing at the portrait on the wall. Yeah, right, he can see, my ass, I had said to myself then, but now he was winking to punish me for my doubts. He really will turn out to live eternally, as they were always telling us.
Good thing Demby was there to save me from this early metaphysical fear. I’m not sure whether he saw the wink (or whether the sign was for me alone), but as an amateur biologist who had devoured his older brother’s textbooks, he explained everything to me in graphic detail based on the experiments with dead frogs described there. With a frog, even if it’s dead and its legs are just dangling there limp, if you give it a little electrical shock, it’ll start kicking as if alive. We would do this experiment in sixth grade, he said. So the guy here was dead as a frog and would never be getting back up, he just had muscles that still moved.
I still use this explanation when my fears grow too metaphysical.
20.
Mr. N.
(the end)
So how did she end up with me, despite everything? Mr. N. asks.
She was the wife of a friend of yours. He came over to our side, had a few skeletons in his own closet, we put the screws to him a bit. To tell you the truth, he didn’t put up much resistance. He was our main source, but you always suspected other people, at least that’s what you said on the phone. You tapped my phone? Mr. A. does not even deign to reply. The day your friend got promoted to some big-shot position, she came to you on her own for the first time. It was Thursday afternoon, the first of all those Thursdays to follow.
Mr. N. listens and gradually begins to imagine this woman, with her long hair with the white streak in her bangs, and her careless gait. When she walked down the street, they would all turn around to stare after her. A famous theater director was crazy about her, too; he staged a play and had the actress done up like that—hair in a ponytail, with the white streak . . . Everyone knew who she was playing. The director was immediately sent to another theater, the play was canceled, his marriage was over. That woman brought nothing but trouble, Mr. A. said.
But why does the secret agent Mr. A. keep coming? In the beginning, surely out of curiosity or fear of being blackmailed. He quickly must have realized that there was no risk of anything like that. There is something else. If Mr. N. remembers nothing or almost nothing of all that, then Mr. A. is free of guilt, in a manner of speaking. Without being able to formulate it clearly, he senses that if no one remembers, then everything is permissible. If no one remembers becomes the equivalent of If there is no God. If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted. God will turn out to be nothing but a huge memory. A memory of sins. A cloud with infinite megabytes of memory. A forgetful God, a God with Alzheimer’s, would free us from all obligations. No memory, no crime.
So why, then, does Mr. A. come and tell these stories? Probably because a human being is not meant to keep a secret for so long. Secrets, it seems, are a late outgrowth in the course of evolution. No animal keeps secrets. Just man. If we had to describe a secret’s structure, it would most likely be uneven, granular, some kind of lump. In Mr. A.’s case, this is not a metaphor. The lump is real, he had been trying to ignore it for several months, but after going to the doctor three weeks ago, everything is now clear. The fact that he is terminally ill frees him from many things, but it also spurs him on toward others. Now the predator begs the prey to hear him out. Age is the great equalizer. They have become brothers-in-arms, they have crossed over to the losing side in a battle whose outcome is clear. Mr. A. can finally tell everything. And Mr. N. can finally hear the whole story about himself.