Is all of that me?
4.
There’s something, a draft and grief, which instead of weakening seems to grow stronger with the years. And it is surely tied to the ever-quicker emptying of the rooms of my memory. One who opens door after door, going from room to room in the hope, the hope and fear of finding himself in one of them—there, where he is still whole.
Isn’t this draft pulling toward the past in the end an attempt to reach that sound place, no matter how far back it might be, where things are still whole, where it smells of grass and you see the rose and its labyrinth point-blank? I say place, but it’s actually a time, a place in time. Some advice from me: Never, ever visit a place you left as a child after a long absence. It has been replaced, emptied of time, abandoned, ghostly.
There. Is. Nothing. There.
A man sets out to pull himself together by returning to the places where he grew up. He gathers up all the addresses of the girls and women he has been in love with from kindergarten until now. He won’t ask anything of them, he only wants to see them, to tell them that he has carried them in his head his whole life (he wanted to say in his heart, but that seemed too sentimental) and that only they have remained in the end. The doctors have given him a few months at most. Like a miser, he splits them into days and hours, as if breaking large bills into small change. It seems like more to him that way. He still has three months, which means at least 91 afternoons, he loves afternoons and . . . multiplied by 24, that means about 2,184 hours. That still seems like too little to him, so he multiplies by 60, then ends up with more than 130,000 minutes. Now, that’s better, he has never felt like such a tycoon, he can spend them down to the last minute. He travels all day on a bus to the little town. The house he lived in is no longer there. Most of the other addresses have changed. The girls have long since become women, they’ve married other men, how awful. Who knows why, but he thought they would lie there bleeding in the middle of their relationship that had been cut short, still pining over him like Chekhovian heroines.
In the end he nevertheless finds one of the great loves of his life in that little town. They had been fourteen. They had pretended to get married; he had stolen a ring from his mother (who had practically torn the house apart looking for it). She had been a tall, dreamy girl, that’s how he remembers her, like a young Romy Schneider. As he nears the house, he catches sight of an elderly woman with frazzled, tied-back hair lugging a tub of wet clothes. She’s not here, he says, she must have moved. But he still decides to ask, this woman might know something.
It’s her.
Nothing is left of that girl. He doesn’t know what to say. We know each other from such-and-such . . . She doesn’t make the connection right away. Several lifetimes have passed since then. She guesses, says the wrong name. Then it is as if something opens up in her memory. At that moment an old man in a tank top comes out, her husband. What’s going on? he asks, gripping his cane, seeing his wife talking to a strange man through the fence. What do you want? He can’t say what he wants, he hasn’t managed to explain why he is here.
She keeps silent, too.
Nothing, our man says, nothing, I’m just buying old junk, pictures, embroidery, watches, radios, old stuff. Go on, the old man says, get on your way now, go on, now, we ain’t got nothing old, nothing new, either . . .
The woman still stands there like a statue, hasn’t even set down the tub. The man hides in the shade on the sidewalk across the street. From somewhere he can hear a radio giving the level of the Danube River in centimeters, that abracadabra of his entire childhood. So it’s three in the afternoon, he tells himself, he doesn’t need to look at his watch. He slowly sets off down the street, the soles of his shoes sticking to the asphalt melted by the heat; he is shrinking while they scatter from his pockets, tinkling softly and gleaming like coins, all those (no longer needed) minutes that were left to him.
The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories.
5.
For an afternoon, I stop by the city where I used to live. I go back there every time I’m in Bulgaria, even though I know that nothing remains of that time, that neither the park, nor the little square by the covered market, nor the street I grew up on remember my footsteps.
On the trunk of a chestnut by the post office I see a sheet of paper affixed with four tacks, upon which the following is written in large letters. I have copied it down exactly:
TRADE
Big L-C-D tellevision
32 inches works good 8 years old
For 30 liters of rakia
Yambol, phone number: 046 . . .
15 feb.
I stand in front of this message, true marginalia taken from the tree of life, or rather, pinned to it with tacks. Now, there’s part of the Bulgarian epos for you, a piece of it, the mystery of the Bulgarian voice, quiet, inscrutable, and suddenly erupting with its most sublime dream.
A TV in exchange for brandy.
There are dreams and horror here, horror and dreams . . . February, it says down at the bottom. Only in February could this cry arise, with all its tragedy . . . The rakia is gone, but the winter is still here. Now, there’s the whole existential novel of a people for you. The jeep of life, that old battered jeep with the canvas roof, or no, the Moskvitch of your life has gotten stuck at the end of winter, darkness has fallen, the jackals are howling, and you are out of gas. Fuck this life, you say, pounding your fist. Fuck it, fuck you, you even took my rakia. (Nobody’s taken it from you, you drank it yourself, but that’s how people have talked around here since time immemorial, somebody has taken something from you or let you have it.)
And now you’re sitting in the middle of nowhere, in the jeep or Moskvitch that is your life. And you decide, to hell with shame, you’re going to post an ad, you can’t take it anymore. You take a sheet of paper, a notice from the bank warning that if you don’t pay off the interest by . . . You don’t have any rakia, and they’re wanting interest. You flip it over and look for a pen. You think about asking your son to write it, because it’ll come out nicer, with fewer mistakes, but you feel too ashamed to ask him. That’s the only thing you’re still ashamed of. Finally you sit down and write it yourself, with all the spelling errors and missing commas. You grab a handful of tacks and go to the neighborhood all the way on the other side of town, for the second time you’re a bit ashamed. And what are you offering in exchange for the rakia—you’re offering your most precious possession, of course. Measure for measure, meaning for meaning. The television or the rakia, that is the question. The television is transcendence, a false transcendence, of course, but nevertheless the final dream of the beyond. Your grandmother had an icon, your mother had a little portrait of Lenin, and you have your TV. But what good is your TV if you don’t have rakia? The TV simply cuts life, like pouring water into your rakia . . . They’re already selling electronic cigarettes, tomorrow you’re going to be shoving electronic rakia in my hands, fucking electronic motherfuckers . . . Well, now, that’s what the TV is, electronic rakia . . . so there, take it back, a 32-inch screen for 30 liters of rakia, a liter an inch, I’ve giving you a deal. Thirty liters of rakia for a month more of life, maybe even a month and a half if we’re economical about it. Only rakia is honest, goddamn it. It doesn’t lie to you like the TV, it doesn’t try to pull the wool over your eyes, it doesn’t blather on and on. It hits you in the nose, burns your throat real good, then it goes down and warms up all that stuff down below that has long since gone cold. Rakia is the Bulgarian sublime, the Bulgarian television at long last.