—Nikolai Berdyaev, The Philosophy of Freedom
1.
Returning
Folk music is playing softly on the airplane. The stewardesses are rushing around before takeoff in stylized native costumes, their hair in braids, their tunics shortened above the knee. The only male flight attendant looks slightly ridiculous in his modified breeches and vest. The pilot’s voice comes over the loudspeaker.
We are proud to welcome you on board the Bulgarian national air carrier . . .
I notice the little changes to language. Until recently they said “we are happy to welcome you.” Where did this pride come from all of a sudden? The airline is certainly not one of the best, it is a public secret that it will soon be heading for bankruptcy. The airplane starts rolling away from the gate as those safety instructions that we are all sick to death of begin. I put in my earplugs and only watch the stewardesses’ movements. Without sound their gestures resemble a strange conjuring ritual, the gestures of tribal soothsayers. The strange thing is that they keep doing it. There is no evidence that anyone has ever been saved during a plane crash thanks to having put on their oxygen mask that automatically drops down from above or by having pulled out the life vest from beneath your seat and by blowing the emergency whistle. Perhaps a joint prayer would do more good.
The plane I am on resembles one of those fixed-route taxi-vans so ubiquitous in Sofia. I wouldn’t be surprised if they soon start allowing standing-room-only passengers. A few years ago I flew on some domestic flight from Belgrade to Montenegro standing up as if on a bus, hanging on to a metal bar. The driver, pardon me, the pilot, was just an arm’s length away from me. There was no door, just a threadbare curtain that was unhooked on one side, so he and I shot the breeze a bit. At one point he lit up a cigarette and I was praying he didn’t open up the window to ash outside, and thus wreak havoc with the cabin pressure.
With age the fear of flying grows. Clearly it accumulates with the hours and miles you fly, too bad you can’t cash it in, too. A Frequent Frighter card would be a good idea.
After the safety ritual the plane takes off relatively smoothly, perhaps the stewardesses’ conjuring did have an effect after all. The upholstery is threadbare, the seat pockets are ragged, the in-flight magazine is crumpled from the nervous fingers of dozens of passengers. The Bakelite body of the plane creaks softly. The smoking sign only shows how old these machines are, from the era when you could still smoke on board.
Suddenly a fly lands above me, right next to the call button. A fly in the airplane. (A friend once sent me a poem with that title, knowing of my passion for flies, and now look, the poem is coming true, in a manner of speaking.) I have a special relationship with this creature, which most find annoying, thus its presence here makes me happy. I wonder if it’s a Bulgarian fly; the plane had come from Sofia earlier that day. Or perhaps it’s a misguided Swiss fly (actually, do they allow flies into Switzerland at all?) who mixed up the flights. A fly who shall remain a foreigner its whole life in an obscure Balkan country that proclaims itself the Switzerland of the Balkans.
Do flies have nations? What are the characteristics of the national fly? Does it feel devotion and nostalgia for its homeland, could it develop some primitive form of patriotism? What would happen if we were to put that nationalism under the microscope of natural history?
The fly and the nation, now, there’s a serious topic for you. In the framework of historical or natural time, the nation is only a speck of dust, a microscopic part of the evolutionary clock, far more ephemeral than the fly. In any case, the fly surpasses the nation time-wise hundreds and thousands of times over. What would Homo nationalisticus be, if it could slip into the taxonomy of living creatures?
Genus—Homo . . . sapiens . . . I’m afraid that even at this level the nationalist will jump up, who are you calling a Homo? Where are you putting me?
Where did we start from? From the fly. And where did we end up? At the elephant of nationalism.
A fly, my seat neighbor squeals, stating the obvious and interrupting the newly built evolutionary chain in my head . . .
The stewardess rushes over. Can I help with something?
An unregistered passenger on board, I say, he flew away just now.
The fly, however, makes a circle and naïvely lands in the same place. Get out of here, I tell it in my head, but with an unexpectedly quick grab, the stewardess catches it in her hand. Do they get special training for that?
Please let it go, says the women next to me, who had outed the fly only a few moments earlier.
Yes, I would also ask you to let it go, I join in, it isn’t bothering anyone.
Everything teeters on the edge between irony and seriousness.
Is it with you? the stewardess fixes me with a stern gaze, taking up the game. Good God, if stewardesses, those ironclad creatures, have a sense of humor, there is hope for the world yet.
It’s with me, as a pet, I reply. That’s not a problem, is it?
It just needs to be in a cage or in its owner’s lap, she recites. And delicately opens the bars of her long fingers.
My neighbor turns to me a bit later. Thank you for stepping in. A woman of a difficult-to-determine age around fifty, with narrow blue eyes and freckles.
Oh, I am a great friend of flies, I say casually. I’m something like their historian.
She smiles, giving herself time to assess whether I am some kind of maniac or just a man with a strange sense of humor. Ultimately, she seems to go with the latter.
I didn’t know flies had a history.
Quite a bit longer than ours, I reply. They appeared several million years before man.
It’s strange to see a fly at this altitude, she says.
Actually, it shouldn’t be all that strange. The first living being sent into space was none other than a fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Its name is longer than the fly itself. Right after the war, with the then-prized rocket V-2.
I thought it was the dog Laika.
That’s what everyone thinks. There is a great injustice in that. Before the dog Laika there were quite a few other dogs, there were monkeys, snails . . . All of them remained anonymous. Like the poor fly, who sacrificed itself first, after all. But flies don’t have names, and therein lies the whole problem. If you don’t have a name, you’re dropped from history.
But why exactly a fly? my seat-neighbor asks.
Now, that’s a good question. Because they are short-lived and die quickly. The rocket flew for only a few hours, at an altitude of a hundred kilometers, on the very border of space, incidentally. So they needed a creature with a quick life cycle. It needed to be born, develop, attain sexual maturity, conceive, give birth, and die . . . The simple fruit fly possesses all these qualities. Besides that, the death of a few flies is far more acceptable than that of a dog, monkey, or cow, don’t you think? People are very impressed by size.
I look around and notice the subject of our conversation has wisely hidden somewhere.
At that time they start passing out “Bulgarian Rose” wet wipes—now, there’s something that hasn’t changed since my first flight so many years ago. The scent of rose oil wafts amid the clouds. The airplane prepares for landing. Mount Vitosha is visible, as is the outline of Sofia, the neighborhoods with their concrete panel-block apartments, then Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, the green rectangle of Boris’s Gardens, and the strip of Tsarigrad Road down below. There, somewhere to the right of the highway, is a neighborhood called “Youth,” where I used to live in some other lifetime. Suddenly the woman next to me, we never did introduce ourselves by name, starts to cry, quietly, calmly, without hysterics, as she turns her head toward the window. I’m sorry, she says, I haven’t been back in seventeen years.