The Physics of Sorrow (10 page)

Sometimes—at the same time—I am a dinosaur, a fish, a bat, a bird, a single-celled organism swimming in the primordial soup, or the embryo of a mammal, sometimes I’m in a cave, sometimes in a womb, which is basically the same thing—a place protected (against time).

S
IDE
C
ORRIDOR

          
The tendency toward empathy is strongest between the ages of seven and twelve.

              
The most recent research is focused on the so-called mirror neurons, localized in the anterior portion of the insular cortex (insula). To put it simply, they react in a similar fashion when a person feels pain, sorrow, or happiness, or when one observes these emotions in another person. Some animals also experience empathy. The connection between shared emotional experiences and mirror neurons has not been well studied; experiments are in the works. Researchers believe that the conscious cultivation of empathy, including through
the reading of novels (see S. Keen), will make communication far easier and will save us from future world cataclysms.

—
The Journal of Community and Cortex

M
Y
B
ROTHER, THE
M
INOTAUR

Still, what was my father doing that night near the yellow house? Okay, so it was part of his job—going wherever they called him. Almost all the town’s residents kept animals in their yards. But what would a veterinarian be doing at a home for the mentally ill? He must have been coming from there, where else would he have appeared from in that wasteland?

Suddenly the whole picture came together in my head with staggering clarity. I say “suddenly,” but in fact the separate pieces of that puzzle had been elaborated carefully and at length with the fastidiousness intrinsic to a child’s imagination. Now everything came together so easily, frighteningly easily within me.

That inhuman howl really was inhuman, and it wasn’t Ooooh, but Moooo. And it came from a half-man, half-bull locked up in there. (I’d already seen one such boy in my grandfather’s hidden memory.) The human doctor hadn’t been able to do anything for the human, so they had decided to treat the bull. Of course, they called the best (and only, incidentally) veterinarian in town: my father.

There was another, darker version of the story, also fine-tuned at length during those lonely childhood afternoons. That half-human-half-bull boy was not just anybody, but my “stillborn brother,” whom I’d heard them whispering about. Actually, he’d been born alive, but with a bull’s head and they’d put him in the home. They had abandoned him. With the best of intentions. So he wouldn’t disturb his healthy brother. I remember that I wrote all that down in my most clandestine (read: secretly illegible) handwriting, rolled the sheet of
notebook paper into a scroll and shoved it in my secret box under the bed.

Or maybe I wasn’t even their son at all, instead they had adopted me, despairing of giving birth only to kids with bull-heads?

This was one of the basic fears of my childhood. If this were true, then I could easily be abandoned again. We could be abandoned again, my Minotaur brother and me.

I remember that I devoted the next few days to finding some crack, some door left slightly ajar, through which I could enter into the cave of this secret. I asked my father—ostensibly off-the-cuff and cautiously—what kinds of diseases cows came down with. Had he ever seen Siamese twin calves and what would he do in such a case? Would they kill one to save the other? My father gave absentminded replies. Once, however, he nevertheless let his guard down and launched into some story about a cow who was in labor for fourteen hours right on New Year’s Eve when he had been a kid and . . . I didn’t hear any more of the story, I simply slipped down the corridor the story had opened up to me. I stopped at the entrance . . . It definitely wasn’t right to sneak into a father’s secrets. There was something indecent and unnatural about it, you could see things you’d rather not see. I could still hear his voice, he was carried away with his story, I could still turn back. I told myself, I’ll do it only this one time. I pushed on ahead, then quickly ducked into a side corridor of his story, I was no longer interested in it, his voice died away. I wandered aimlessly through my father’s childhood, look how alike we are, skinny, in baggy clothes, probably hand-me-downs, look, there he’s stealing eggs out from under the chicken, they’re still warm, I can feel them, my grandma, his mother (now mine, too), sees me, I run with the eggs toward the general store, if I manage to sell them to Grandpa Angel the shopkeeper, I’ll get a candy bar
for each one. I run and run, go into the store, thank God there are no other customers. Grandpa Angel, here are three eggs for candy bars, I wheeze breathlessly, he looks at me, does your mother know, yes, she sent me, he takes the eggs, holds them up to the sunlight, well now, these eggs here are stolen, heeey, how did you know, he gives them back to me, at that moment my mother is coming up the street, I grab the eggs, stuff them in my pocket and dash out, but I trip on the crumbling steps and fall. Careful with those eggs, Grandpa Angel laughs. I feel the yoke seeping over my crotch.

I leave that incident before retribution comes, I turn down another corridor, change direction. I tell myself that I’m not going to lend an ear to things that don’t concern me. At the last minute, I veer away from a girl my father is kissing, I’m kissing, behind the stone wall of the house. She’s attractive, but she won’t become my mother. He’s attractive, too. I’m attractive as well, as long as I’m him. Tall, with curly hair, I feel women’s eyes on me as we pass. That one looks foreign. That one is familiar from somewhere. That one . . . Wait, now there’s my mother. The answer to the riddle that brought me here should be somewhere around here. I need to turn down some corridor and look on from there, but I can’t move. She’s in pain. The pain is terrible and I can’t stand aside, it sucks me in. Something alive is being torn apart . . . I’m tearing her apart . . . Finally, a baby’s cry, that cry comes from me, I am myself, that wrinkly, wet, bluish hunk of meat. Tossed out, choking, shaking all over.

Something gives me a good hard shake and pulls me back down those dark corridors—light, words, my father’s face . . . What’s wrong . . . What’s wrong . . . I’ve been trying to wake you for ten minutes now . . .

I feel bruised from the journey . . . Everything’s fine, Dad, I’m here . . . I was born to my own mother, what a miracle.

My father dragged me out, before I managed to see whether there was someone else there, if someone else came out after me. I was left with the uncertain feeling that I wasn’t alone in that cave.

I was born to my own mother and father, but that doesn’t make me any less a Minotaur. I continued spending long days alone, at the window, paging through a book.

N
IPPERS

Just as in antiquity, the children of socialism were also invisible. Little nippers hanging around at the grown ups’ feet. Prepared for life, without entirely being a part of it.

Run down to the cellar for some pickles! Go and play in the other room, we’re talking to our guests! Hightail it out of here, I’ve got work to do! Don’t make me start up the spanking factory . . . Patriarchy and industrialization rolled into one.

Three months at the village every summer, with their grandmothers, in the fresh air and sunshine, to get toughened up, drink milk straight from the sheep, and eat raw eggs. You take a warm egg out from under the chicken, your grandma wipes it on her apron, pokes a hole in it with a thick needle, sprinkles a little salt inside and you suck it up through the hole with all your might under her fond gaze. Drink up, drink up, an egg is equal to a shot, she would say. That’s what some famous doctor who had passed through the village thirty years ago and had spent the night had said. One egg, he said, is equal to a shot, take it from me.

I would find out much later that this pedagogical regimen of “fresh air and sunshine” was also crucial for German children of the 1930s, so they would grow up healthy, energetic and in fine fighting form. I wonder if they stuffed them full of raw eggs, too?

While rereading ancient Greek myths from that already dog-eared book on those endless summer afternoons, I made the following discovery. Zeus turned out to be exactly like us from the late 1970s. A child sent deep into the countryside, to be looked after by his grandmother Gaia (and kept far from his father), to drink goat’s milk (his goat was divine, of course), and to grow up hale and hearty.

I will always remember milk from an ordinary mortal sheep, straight from the udder and still warm, with a few shiny turds floating in it, to be blown off to the side with the foam. Only in childhood is immortality possible. Perhaps because of that milk and the raw eggs.

But there’s a very slow, creeping fear, too. I’ve been abandoned. They’ve left me here, they’ve gone back to the city, they’re gone.

M
OTHER
B
EAN

Mother Bean had a green body and two little beans for eyes. We were really afraid of her. Don’t go into the bean patch, my grandma would holler when she saw us in the garden, or Mother Bean will come after you! We never did see her, but she was always in the back of our minds as we carefully skirted the rows planted with beans.

In the vineyard, on the other hand, lived Mother Vine, guarding her children. For that reason we didn’t dare trample through the rows, snitching grapes left and right.

Once my grandma caught us committing true genocide on a colony of red ants that was crawling across the paving stones in front of the house. Then we heard about Mother Ant for the first time, huge and with sharp claws yea big.

Everything had a mother, only we didn’t. We had grandmothers.

T
HE
M
INOTAUR
S
YNDROME

The 1970s. Our mothers were young, studying—first, second, third year, working—first, second, third shift. We were there in the empty apartments, ground floors, basements, lost in boredom and fear, roaming amid the vague anxieties of the one left on his own. Is there a Minotaur Syndrome?

I didn’t have fish, a cat, a turtle, or a parrot, because that was the last thing we needed, as my mother wisely noted. In any case, we were constantly moving to new rental apartments, awaiting the great day when we would receive an apartment of our own. The only thing I had was Laika, the dog, whose homeless soul was howling through the cosmos. And my brother, the Minotaur. They lived illegally in my five square meters of living space, invisible to my mother and father, and to the landlords.

A P
RIVATE
H
ISTORY OF THE
1980
S

And then . . .

A History of Boredom in the 1980s needs to be written. This is the decade that produced the most boredom. The afternoon of the century.

When I heard the word “boredom” for the first time, I was six and felt anxious because I didn’t know what it was. You must be bored being alone all day, one of the neighbors, Auntie Pepa, said to me. I imagined it as a slight illness, some sort of malaise, like a stuffy nose, a cold, or an allergy to poplar fluff. That’s why I answered evasively: uh no, nothing’s wrong, I’m fine. Where I came from, boredom was unheard of, they never used the word. There was always something that needed doing, the animals would never let it take root, they would mow it down as soon as it cropped up. But here, in the town of T., it thrived everywhere. It shimmered like a haze above the hot asphalt, chipped away at the houses’ fading
ochre, lulled the sunflower-seed hawker to sleep in the shade of the park, purred like a cat or brought on one of the deafening sneezing fits of Uncle Kosta from across the street.

Catalogue of Collections

     
Napkins

     
Empty packs of cigarettes

     
Matchboxes

     
Pins and stamps

     
Pocket calendars

     
Winking postcards

     
Wrappers from imported candies, paper and tinfoil

     
Wrappers from chocolate bars, paper and tinfoil

     
Gum wrappers (minus the gum)

     
Empty bottles of whiskey, cognac, Campari . . .

Clearly, the things in this collection are abandoned, empty, used up. Somebody has smoked Marlboro Reds and Rothmans Blues, eaten imported chocolate candies, chewed some gum, and downed a Metaxa brandy. Only a few bottles, boxes, and wrappers are left for us. The collectors of emptinesses and abandonments.

There’s my first cassette tape player, a Hitachi mono, we bought it from some Vietnamese people in exchange for my grandfather’s old donkey. To the very end, my grandpa thought it was a bit like trading a horse for a chicken, as the saying goes. The horse being the donkey, and the chicken—the tape player.

Our history and literature textbooks—we got a kick out of adding finishing touches to the painfully familiar photographs inside. A moustache and a pirate’s skull cap on top of the general secretary of the communist party’s head, which was a round and bald as an
egg. And on the poet-revolutionary Hristo Botev’s heroic face—may the gods of literature forgive me!—I drew round, John Lennon-style glasses. The glasses completely transformed the fearsome Botev into a slightly bewildered, bearded hippie of Bulgarian revolutions, which are as a rule unsuccessful.