Читать книгу Party Headquarters - Georgi Tenev - Страница 7

1

HIS DAUGHTER

THE strangest part is when I see she’s starting to cry. With us, tears often lead to unexpected consequences.

Even without the tears I still want to hit her, painfully hard. But when she cries it just gets out of control. The victim’s magnetic attraction inflames the perpetrator. I’m driven to tears myself—out of frustration that I can’t force myself to finish it off, to do absolutely everything I want to her. In exactly the order I would like.

If anyone were to see us at this moment, bawling, locked in this torture chamber at opposite ends of the bed—in the middle the bloody sheets are stained with wet spots, but not from blood, lymph, vaginal secretions, sperm, or who knows what else—could it be that some other beings are copulating here with us?—at that moment the shocked outside observer would think we are crying for each other, for ourselves.

Wrong. An incorrect judgment, a faulty interpretation of ambiguous facts. I’m not sorry. What can I say? Regret is most certainly far beyond the boundaries within which I would torment her. Tears are just one more weapon in this battle, nothing more. I must be very careful now; tears, like all water, temper freshly forged metal. Her blue zirconium glare blazes out twice as pliant, resilient, like eyes on a rifle sight, eyes like bullet tips—and I’m the bull’s-eye.

On the very first day, or afternoon, rather, when we met, on that fatally happy day of our acquaintance, she explained to me that she didn’t have a father. She stubbornly insisted that her father did not exist. He was alive, you see, but as soon as she spoke his name and sharply declared, It’s as if I don’t have a father—then I understood, it was all clear.

His name is K-shev.

I never imagined that I would get mixed up with the daughter of one of them. But fatal meetings are always marked by signs from the very beginning. I’m talking about fleeting clues. But no one tells you “Watch out!”, you don’t hear any voice yelling “Stop!” And the fact that at that very moment the angels fall silent most likely means they’re egging you on. That the meeting is divinely inspired; the meeting is the beginning of the collision of love.

>>>

So his name is K-shev.

Everyone remembers their names, they’re strange. And they get that way because of the people they belong to, and not the other way around. Yet it somehow seems like fate also chooses them by the sounds of their names.

Who is this person, completely anonymous behind his name? Later I began to understand, things started to become clear. But by then it was too late to save myself, I was already caught in the trap. So why bother trying to go back now to fix things? There’s no point. I can only return as an observer, as remote and nonchalant as if I’m watching a stranger and not myself.

>>>

You are the reason words exist—I want to pause on this thought. That is, I want to pause precisely here to make this absolutely clear. It’s doubtful I’ll succeed in getting any relief or satisfaction, as much as I would like to. Perhaps I suspect there is some higher purpose or calling in pornography, when you watch and somebody shows you everything.

The moment I took my eyes from the screen, the last thing lingering in my pupils was the image of naked bodies. Everything about it screams scam, despite the originality of the moans and the excitement in the voice of the nude, sweat-drenched woman. It’s a scam because of the presumed viewer, because of my gaze. This is also the source of the shame.

I leave the colorful barn, its booths with their blue doors and neon lights. The dark room and the screen overhead reflected in the mirror. Next to the armchair are buttons to select the channel, a box of Kleenex, a wastebasket with a plastic liner. The silver slit that swallows coins, black speakers that spit out sound.

>>>

I go outside. It would be frightening if it weren’t night. But now there’s no light, just electric sparks from the street. I light a cigarette to dull the arousal. I don’t want it to stay with me, I have to separate it from myself, from my body. If I had come inside like I wanted to, I most likely would’ve failed all the same. But I didn’t make the move, I froze up, I couldn’t do it. A naked woman—pretty, by the way. And another one, looking very much the same. Both with nice, full breasts, one with long fake fingernails, the other with girlish, almost infantile fingers, both with navel rings. I shouldn’t feel bad about it, yet there was some kind of anxious beauty in that shot of frantically jumping bodies. That’s exactly what should’ve relaxed me—the precision and obvious professionalism of the action. Even to the point of seeming to give them pleasure—paid for in advance by me or someone like me. These two golden-skinned bodies impatiently jostling on top of each another, with no man in between, of course—because I wouldn’t be able to stand anyone else besides myself here.

I got up and left before the final minutes, leaving behind a part of myself, my hotly beating pulse—I didn’t run, but somehow, despite the tension, casually and masterfully made my way to the exit. With the professional gait of a smoker waiting for intermission to give himself over to an older and more acceptable vice, one that can be shared on the street.

>>>

Although it’s difficult for me to admit, I don’t think there’s anyone here who could help me. Yet I still have faith in words—they’re the only thing I have left. I worship them fervently. For their sake I put up with all of you, whom I honestly couldn’t care less about. You’re just some mute imaginary listeners to talk at. You are the reason words exist, because otherwise it would simply be too difficult. And at least you know who he is.

The name K-shev scared me, took me aback. Yet the girl’s flight, her shame, her self-disgust—I thought to myself in the first instant—isn’t it all very unusual? It made me feel compassion for her. But also a sort of suspicion. Fear.

I’ve tried to make sense of it before: the thrill of suspicion is the hidden urge that incites you to crush her with your hands, with your whole body. To force her to scream, to make her cry. To hurt her, to see the real depths, the entire essence. To my regret, I was soon forced to realize that she had told me the truth. She had wanted to escape from the nightmare, but it’s not as easy as simply crossing out your father’s name and taking a new one in its place.

This is most likely why the angel stayed silent: he caught a whiff of compassion. But what angels, what am I even talking about—the truth is always repulsive. Since it is still too early for the truth, let’s console ourselves just a bit longer on the brink of our first meeting, that moment back then.

Perhaps times were different then. I even suspect that they illuminated that which lay ahead, the future, with a shadowless light. Sometimes when I reminisce about a kind of coupling, for example, I’m trying to get at that accumulation of concentrated tenderness. Is it possible that she was perfect, despite her last name? Was it the same with my naïvety—temporarily wonderful, but naïvety all the same. When falling in love we are children, if only for a short while. In general we are children only for a short while, like a brief attack of perfection and light. But enough of that.

>>>

I had this dream—of something like a Communist party headquarters in a provincial town. Or in the capital, but in some rundown neighborhood. Outside the summer heat is stifling. Deathly calm, a park bathed in scorching light that bleaches the green from the trees. The immaculate walkways with whitewashed curbs, all deserted. As usual the bureaucrats are using their work time for something else. Inside the hallways are cool and it would be almost pleasant if it weren’t so cold. Although there aren’t any mummies here, the door-lined tunnels make it feel like some kind of space for preservation, a mausoleum. But never mind all that, what’s important is the content.

The girl is wearing a Pioneer’s uniform, the Communist Youth League. We’re holding hands. We walk along, go up the stairs, turn down one of the hallways, I think it’s the fourth floor, the top one. The sense that we are alone grows even stronger here. And again that same coolness, but when we pass through the small foyer beyond the stairs and head toward the long straight line of darkness—somewhere there the windows behind the false balustrade breathe heat on us through the glass, because of the lights outside.

She is dressed in a Pioneers uniform, like I said: a white blouse, a blue pleated skirt, if that’s what they call those overlapping accordion folds. Her white socks are pulled up a little over her ankles or below the knee—that’s the one thing I’m not quite sure about. Her shoes have no laces, the blue tongues are sticking straight up. Her shoulder-length hair is straight, and she wears it in pigtails behind her ears. But she isn’t wearing the little barrettes that usually keep her bangs out of her eyes. Under her blouse she’s wearing a tank top, cut low under the arms—we all wore those back then, even the girls. All around, like I said, there’s lots of stone, granite, marble, and from time to time the wine stain of the curtains, red pedestals without statues, only here and there peeling names and letters in the flaking gold cellophane used to inscribe mottos. This is a mysterious space I have yet to dive into, at once hollow, empty, yet full of sharp edges—the building itself feels heavy. It is made up of intersecting squares and rectangles. The windows are stately, I don’t know why the windows are so important here, the wooden window casings are themselves embedded in striking granite frames. The railings around the stairs, the floor is gouged by canals, grooves, red spirals, and brass rods that keep the carpet taut against the folds of the staircase. Railings, banisters, polished snails at the end of stone waterfalls on either side of the slide of steps.

We go up to that floor and walk down the hallway. The window at the end shows only light; we are above the treetops. We don’t speak, so as not to get caught. Anticipation.

She, of course, is a virgin. And I press down on that barrier with the whole weight of my body, as if poured into a funnel. A whirlpool that changes my own anatomy: at the very bottom, in the center, the point that I flow through—this is where my heart is. And my belly button as well, and maybe even some steaming spot on my back has been sucked down into this vortex. While up above, all at once my head, legs, and bangs are the leftover silt in the funnel.

She is a virgin, of course, but why is she not wearing panties under her skirt? And that vulgar smile—in her eyes, not on her lips. I, too, am a virgin, perhaps in a more concrete or more specific sense—both of us realize our innocence at the same moment, but of the two of us there’s one who senses that . . .

>>>

Here, in short, is what I want to find out, what I want to clarify in this split-second before the memory is shattered by that internal explosion between two bodies: is that gaze really there, the eyes in that portrait above me, on the wall of the quiet dusky hall we tiptoed into? We’re naked now, her skirt hiked up, my pants down around my knees, shirt unbuttoned. Who is watching us?

But no matter how quickly everything was over, according to the prescription of nature and the summary procedure of the moment, it turns out that time itself, chronology, does not exhaust—and can never exhaust—the energy hidden in the body. Even years later, most probably in my imagination or perhaps not quite, I found myself forced again and again to bend over that body, her body, the object of this coupling, in order to understand. A body that could be the joyful center of my very self, of my very own I. The mirror of my masculinity, if it didn’t represent above all the risk of being accused of a crime.

So that, in short, is what I want to figure out. That’s the very core I’m trying to reach: she is still a part of his body and he is present in hers. What could K-shev’s gaze mean here, because in the dream I didn’t know his name, since she hadn’t yet told me, nor his significance, since at that moment I was still a naïve Pioneer. And now for the explanation: why is it that if you cross out a name, if you have the nerve to repeal it, to change your own family name—why does that still add up to nothing but vain attempts and wasted efforts? The body, the flesh does not play by those rules. The body, the flesh transforms itself according to its own laws.

That’s why this story has turned into such a bodily adventure—no connection is more bodily than inheritance, which makes up the whole of you, yet which you also desperately want to get rid of more than anything. I think that here on the Reeperbahn, in Hamburg, Germany, there is no way to prevent bodies from playing their role. You can couple with bodies, but you can’t run from them. They always get in your way. In the end, you have no choice but to go through.

In this case, I really wasn’t prepared—for the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, that is. My premature exit from the booth and that unfinished scene, which was like the graphic truth about coupling—but without the increasing tenderness, just flesh and color. An act that is far too bodily.

The same problem yet again—the body. I didn’t want to tear my eyes away, but I had to run, I had to get the hell out of there.

>>>

In an ironic twist of fate, K-shev is now dying of cancer in this sterile, private German clinic—as much as it may look like a hospital, it’s obviously little more than a very expensive hospice. The still-breathing corpses lie inside, while outside nobody waits for them anymore. At best, a battle is raging to divide the spoils.

In this case everything was gathered into a small, thin briefcase.

It was a brand-new briefcase, or at least it was new when they put it in the safety deposit box in the bank vault. A very well-insulated place, that vault—I can vouch for that now that I’ve brought the briefcase back to my hotel room and can still catch a scent of new leather, as if it had been bought only yesterday.

To kill time, I measured its height, width, and depth with a pack of cigarettes: 1 × 5 × 3, more or less.

Just as he told me, there is more than a million inside. I’ve never seen so much money in one place. But besides this cliché, I can also tell you that there is nothing optically unusual about this huge amount of cash. Or maybe I was already numb, perhaps my senses were dulled like his from the life-support machines whirring away behind the doors lining the white corridors. You absorb old people’s anesthesia by induction, the opiate of medication, the opiate of age.

He needs the money now, needs it with a fatal urgency, whether his brain realizes it or not. I made sure to confirm this as soon as I arrived. I thought the place would be disgusting, but it was only strangely arid, sterile, quiet. I didn’t experience any revulsion, impatience, or rage. I didn’t feel anything at all inside myself, only on the surface. Instead of the torturous spasm of my whole being that I expected, I experienced only a bodily discomfort, as if I were wearing the wrong-sized clothes or too-tight shoes.

I was uncomfortable in the white hospital chair; my back was to the window and the potted plant next to it. It looked dried out, pressed in an album, even though it was still alive; I even caught the slightly tangy scent of its leaves and the sweetish odor of withering and decay. A hospital room, a room for death. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t look into the old man’s eyes to see: is he thinking about the end?

When I got back after going to the bank, I went straight into the bathroom, undressed, and filled up the tub. Afterward I stood for a long time under the shower. I wanted my body to soften up; it was like some kind of shell had crusted onto me—I know this was just my imagination, but the scrubbing did me good and I no longer saw myself in the fogged-up mirror. Just a huge profusion of bottles in the white steam, little flasks of monochromatic creamy liquids, all in twenty-gram doses for hotel junkies. I didn’t feel like going out yet, so I examined them—most had Italian labels. Care of the body, it seems, carries a whiff of the exotic and distant. No matter whether they’re made in Hong Kong or here, the labels must be in a foreign language—what are people thinking when they choose their dreams? Money is definitely a crucial element. Okay, well here’s the money, I’ve got it. What happens now?

Yes, the money was already on the table when I left the bathroom, stepping barefoot onto the soft carpet. Water dripped all around me as I stood in the center of the room, my head was spinning ever so slightly from the heat, from exhaustion, from the red-eye flight, from impatience to do the deed and from the wavering question mark lodged in my stomach: Why did I do it? Do I even understand what I’m doing now? Do I have to do this? Is it right? Does it mean I’m responsible, that by doing this the blood is on my hands?

Then I flopped down on the still-made bed. The bedspread was clean, but somehow shabby. Sterilized and ostensibly normal, yet with my body’s expanded and cleansed pores I sensed its lack of coziness, overcrowded with reminders of previous guests, sleeping bodies. Of course, all this turned my thoughts back to the hospital, or perhaps it was the opposite: I continued to be there in my mind, until in the end the bed itself from room 308 at the Hotel Hamburg actually began to move toward Krankenstrasse—or better, Krankenhausstrasse—in any case, it was moving toward that Strasse as if toward a test point where I can check with a simple physical touch whether I really am moving or whether I’m dreaming under hypnosis, or both, or most likely some third possibility, or whether I really am fighting my way toward the goal I have set for myself.

>>>

I began to entertain the thought of saying “to hell with all this” and going out and having fun with his money. Whatever his means is a different story, but now isn’t the time for that, not tonight.

Right then, that night, at 8 P.M. as I left the Hotel Hamburg, I was sure that this long day would end by midnight at the latest and with a girl, paid for with cash. Or better yet, with two hired girls. And I would pay them more than I had to, because it would be his money. The booth with the red ceiling and the neon lights was merely a rehearsal. So that I would later be able to last longer with real girls, with prostitutes—I’m not going to come fast, I told myself. And so on.

Those were my plans at eight.

>>>

It is worth noting that this city, with one foot in the sea and the other in the river, has strange pigeons. At first, you mistake them for northern seagulls, but they are actually pigeons, they have a white or dark gray ring around the neck. A sign of something familiar, native, like back home. Here’s the other thing that made an impression on me: As I was wandering around at night, next to the manicured green lawns on either side of the navigation canal, I saw light shadows jumping on the grass. Because of their size, I first thought they were rabbits. But then I saw that they were rats, nonchalantly passing by on some path of their own. Hamburg—a river town, a sea town, northern and very rich. Rats, prostitutes, and the Reeperbahn: they didn’t give the impression of seediness, but quite the opposite, the feeling of stable Saxon comfort, which made it almost fitting to pay for pleasure with his money.

Of course, when I think about that money, the pleasure can only fade, nothing more.

I couldn’t give in that easily, however. I tried to find somebody to blame: the mechanized environment, the change machine, the video player that projected the films on the screen, those monotonous doors, too, and the neon light, the apathetic or overexcited faces, the silhouettes lingering by the windows—the whole disturbing yet quintessentially German erotic system, from which you expect at least a little more chaos, but no. All of these tiny elements pile up like obstacles, speed bumps against accelerating sensitivity, and instead of awakening more excitement, they arouse thought above all. And in the end, maybe even some pangs of conscience, and a little fear.

>>>

Hamburg, early or late. Love is already laid out on the autopsy table. I’m becoming more and more alarmed. Am I ruining my life? Just a month ago, even a week ago I still could’ve turned back. But now I’ve made my move, I’ve rolled the dice. I think some parts of my body are rolling around with them, my head definitely is. Somebody else is calling the shots and making decisions instead of me, someone who looks like me, but in a different form and a different phase, somewhere in the past. That’s why I’ve started to trust that somebody more. But if it turns out that the path from here on out leads me to some final abyss, the figure of that somebody won’t be solid enough; it will disintegrate, leaving me disagreeably alone. Whom will I blame then, who will be the guilty one?

I turn back the clock, then quickly wind it forward, and then back again. I take one of the bundles: new, smooth bills, all hundreds, a hundred times a hundred in a light-blue wrapper. I fan through the stack, the paper passes quickly under my fingers and the identical edges repeat themselves. No motion at all, suspended animation. The silhouette of a bridge reflected in water smacks into the reflections on the bills above it. There are no pedestrians on the bridge, the map in the lower corner is too general, too empty. Where is Hamburg on that map, where am I on Seewartenstrasse, in a gray concrete citadel-hotel on the shore, wrapped in night and glass? The thought of going down to the lobby gives me the chills, but the dangerous thing is that I don’t even know why. I got mixed up in something I had no right to mess with; touching this money, I smell the scent of the leather coffin it was put into, ready for burial. In fact, I was this close to throwing it into the dark waters of the harbor. To the rats. To the girls in the bluish outfits, leaning on eighteenth century façades up there on the street called Reeperbahn. A strange slice of the city’s history, where the rope makers used to spread out bales of hemp to braid kilometers of rope, reaching as far as the city gates. It would be a naïve lie, however, one you wouldn’t believe, if I told you that I blame some other noose, and not the noose I’m tightening within myself. How did I end up here? Not accidentally, of course. Even if there were coincidences and chaotic stabs into the flesh of fate, I nevertheless said “yes.”

Money frightens, that’s another one of its characteristics: it arouses fear. It’s as if its very origins evoke crime, despite the bank’s guarantee of cleanliness. The more money, the more suspicion.

I sit up, get to my feet, put on my sunglasses, and pause in front of the mirror hanging on the wallpapered wall of room 308, Hotel Hamburg. Who do you look like now? Am I sufficiently suspicious looking? Obviously not to the girls lounging in their usual places on Davidstrasse, who readily toss invitations my way:

“Komm schon, Blondy!”

“Komm schon, wir machen es französisch!”

>>>

The docks of Hamburg, on the banks of the Elba, the largest pontoon structure in Europe. St. Michael’s Tower with its four clocks—the tallest clock tower in Europe. I don’t dare fix my gaze there for long, on the home of the Archangel, so instead my eyes follow the smaller mast of light, the white clock faces. They shine straight at me: the harbor tower. Where should I sail away to?

I get dressed. I don’t have the right clothes or storm gear to stand proudly on the deck. I have nowhere to sail to now, so it wouldn’t make any sense. I know what I have to do this morning, at dawn: run.

Running is a forgotten pleasure, but that’s not the point now; we’re talking about survival. About escape—running usually turns out to be the path to it. The only difference is the starting and ending points—from what or from whom, and to where and why am I running?—everything is still unclear.

I don’t care if I look ridiculous in my hiking boots and too-short shorts verging on Speedos. I don’t glance at the professional maniacs who start while it’s still dark, I pass them by as if they’re shadows stuck inside fancy three-ply runner’s gear made of revolutionary fibers. I’m hopelessly sweaty, dark wet stains appear in my armpits and on my back. I don’t have a hat or a visor or earphones to sway to some rhythm like those sports zombies on the paths. They pass, meet, and go around me because I don’t swerve, I run in a straight line. A tall German with his two-meter-long strides tries to pass me—I don’t think so, my friend. You may not realize it, but I can tolerate pain. My heels are burning, my socks are twisting around my shins. My gait is aggressive, ugly, but I keep an enviable distance—see ya’ later, sucker!—and he turns off, as if he’d been planning to go that way all along, to avoid defeat. Because he can’t pass me. Now that I’ve gone into sprint mode, there’s no turning back. Full speed ahead. Sweat pours down, gluing my eyelids shut, drenching my eyebrows—I can’t see and have no idea where I’m going, but the running continues, I run and run.

>>>

From control point CP-9 to control point CP-8

I had this dream with my eyes wide open: wilderness orientation.

Pioneer camp. A Spec Ops orienteering race through the woods, the thick grass in the rain. Xenon, the camp dog, a big, black German shepherd, zigzags left and right, but—thanks to his border-guard genes—doesn’t bark.

We run around using compasses to search for invisible lines, azimuths, hidden among the trees. Once we guess the direction, we discover orientation signs, concealed by pine boughs. A cardboard sign reading “CP-8”—there is a small map and a symbol, our goal is marked with a colorful arrow. Around my waist, under my T-shirt, our team’s flag is twisted and tied into a knot. We pass it around, taking turns carrying it. The fake silk soaks up the childish salt of our sweat. Now, in my memory I notice that despite the sweat and grime, my body gave off no scent. And so . . .

. . . woods, pines, firs. Cedars. Sharp green needles and wide leaves. We run over the silent moss, in step, our knees and shins scratched from the still-soft milk teeth of wild roses, of blackberry bushes. Our elbows and shoulders stinging from the little whips of jutting branches, the thick hazel trees. And all of a sudden amid the bottomless green: a dark blue spot, movement with a persistent color.

Strange white shoes, hair swinging in a ponytail. One moving spot, and another one right next to it. I saw her.

Wilderness orientation—from CP-7 to CP-6

I lost sight of the vision. The ghost born of entangled, blinking eyelashes flew away quickly, like a bird amid the branches. At least that’s how it seemed to me. It’s just a game, there’s no real danger here. Pioneer camp, a children’s war, the running continues.

We reached the river—we crossed without fording, with quick steps across the stones. Under the thin rubber soles of your tennis shoes you can feel the edges of the rocks, splashes of water cool you off momentarily. And again running, quickened breath—where is the mirage, the blue spot on green infinity? The bouncing braid, the white heels of the odd shoes, which still had their strange treads—look, there they are here—leaving unfamiliar tracks.

We reach a long curve, encircling the slope bristling with trees. The dank shade raises goose bumps on our bare arms. Who is waiting for us around the corner?

An April rain begins to fall.

>>>

Raindrops glistened through the sunshine, fluff floated from the poplars, crossing into the rain’s line of fire.

My eyes swim from so much blonde hair, girls in blue blouses. My head starts to spin. A strange taste invades my lungs, the scent of ozone—what does ozone smell like anyway?—at least that’s what I tell myself now as I try to grasp something more, a greater meaning and importance held in those last few moments.

And the question I add to all this today: why didn’t anybody call out to us, tell us to come back? So many secrets in such a short time, in the seconds before I fainted for no good reason.

“From exhaustion and too much running,” as the Pioneer camp doctor dryly declared afterward. Okay—before I dropped from exhaustion into the soft blades of the tall grass. Before the kaleidoscopic reflections of the girls’ ghostly silhouettes accumulated into a single body.

The sky above my head widened, filled my eyes, and I fell into it, fell into the rain, into something huge and blue, not black like they usually say the color of collapse is.

“From exhaustion and too much running,” repeats the doctor and gives me an injection in the arm.

“No!”—I feel like shouting—but my voice slips into weightlessness at the edge of my throat.

“You didn’t see anything,” the comforting voices repeat, the needle pulls out of my skin.

“It was nothing, nobody, you’re imagining it,” I hear, or rather dream, that they’re speaking to me.

“Shh, shh, go to sleep”—the last thing I can make out is the voice of the scout leader: “Go to sleep, dream”—the warmth of a hand on my chest. The warmth of the sun still at its zenith, while I fall asleep too early, exceptionally early. A cotton ball with a drop of rubbing alcohol on it raises a silent toast to the tiny puncture where the mixture of beneficent poison and healing sleep has entered. Time passes, the minute and hour hands can’t hold me. The clocks on all sides of the tower spin. Now I can see in all four cardinal directions, too, but I can’t seem to move in a single one of them.

Uranus

The control point is the smallest possible space that can contain the ultimate goal—or just the temporary goal—of this leg of the race, the searching and finding, the blazing of a trail in this thick impenetrable forest. So what’s the function of the meadow, then? A place to rest and to play or a ruse, a trap set by strange forces? Clever bait to draw you out of the forest and into the open, so that the eyes of spy satellites can see you from invisible heights? Or so the radioactive rain can fall on you?

We had no way of knowing, it wasn’t marked on the map and no dosimetric lines were drawn on the orienteering stencil—a few days earlier, a thousand kilometers to the north and east, Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl had exploded, under the watch of the Fifth Shift.

The pioneer camp commander later summed it up with his favorite saying: “Shit happens.”

Letter to an Unknown Comrade

I know, my dear, little, unknown Soviet and Ukrainian comrade, I know, but please—don’t finish yet, tell me again. Tell me how it happened once more, tell me, even if it means repeating yourself and wasting yet another whole page of graph paper. For me it’s important, it’s so important, you can’t even begin to imagine.

I want to hear about the banks of the Pripyat River—I can see its water boiling, I understand. But more about that later, it’s still too early, April hasn’t arrived yet, nor the beginning of May, the water is calm. Longer ago and further back, before spring and before winter. Tell me about the summer, the past, as if there never was and never will be one like it again, as if it were the last. As if we are running for the last time with pounding carefree steps toward the banks, toward the water, and it flows smoothly from the tributaries and empties out into the Dnieper. Show me around the flat terrain, across those 106,000 square kilometers, geographically, like a straight-A student. There, where the water-drainage basin stretches past the nuclear power plant. Scribble on the map, all along the river’s 748 kilometers with a black marker. Give me a little more time. I’m playing here in the grass, it’s raining, my dear little unknown comrade from the Pale between Ukraine and Belarus—I’m not even exactly sure where you are, on the map in my textbook that little corner is too small, between two holes of the spiral binding that hold the pages together. So tell me about it now, give me time to stand here a little longer, in the rain.

In return, let me admit that you are now extending this moment in Paradise—she is blonde, my little Soviet comrade from Ukraine, from Belarus, she is a blue T-shirt and blonde hair in braids and shoes with a strange design on the heels. Tell me whatever you want, don’t make me ask, my lips are busy, my words are busy. I put a lot of effort into my Russian, see how beautifully I write to you with loops and hooks, correctly using the instrumental case and the backward “e,” right?

While here with her, we can’t utter a single word, so we just move, we move and breathe.

Don’t ask me why or what for, just close your eyes and tell me, like you used to write me. Tell me again about the Pripyat River, about its waters. I know they’re brown because those waters flow from Geography, from peat-bogs. And if you want to swim, you’d better be strong because the current will sweep you away. After swimming, a coating like chocolate covers your skin, it tightens, dries out, and bakes in the air—if you pick at it with your fingers it squeaks. Like a festive Misha the Olympian, one of those marzipan bears sold as an Olympic souvenir. Of course, you know that it’s because of the swamp acids, which must be good for you—even fish swim in and breathe them. But after the disaster they will turn into coagulating agents, as the nuclear physicists call them, since they are excellent conveyors of radioactive particles, the leftovers from the breakdown of the spilled nuclear fuel, God damn it, as the nuclear physicists, or “nukies,” swore through their teeth. You are probably the child of a nukie, my dear little unknown comrade—otherwise what would you be doing in that city built in the middle of nowhere? In the middle of the Pale, there and where else in that emptiness would you be born, at that unremarkable age, the same age as the fourth reactor, the pride of the golden five-year-plans for energy construction.

You are probably a nukie’s child, because you know, your daddy told you—when he didn’t prefer to stay silent, when he said that he was just coming home for a bit and then would have to go back—that the whole power plant was leaking. It was leaking like crazy, God damn it, the nukies cursed, it was leaking, the whole thing was just one leak after another, somewhere in the ballpark of fifty cubic meters an hour through the faltering reinforcement, through the drains. Fifty cubic meters of radioactive water an hour, my boy, my dear little Soviet boy—even I know that’s a lot. The vaporizers can hardly process it. Radioactive oversaturation, as they say, and they very often send your dad on radioactive business trips, all the way to the great country’s capital, to that special Sixth Moscow Clinic. God damn it—but there’s no cure for this exhaustion, he’s always falling asleep at the table, head on the tablecloth, facedown amid the cherry jam and slices of bread. That’s a gift from our native fields—so I’m there in the picture, too. You don’t know it, my dear little comrade, but I was on the work brigade at the jam factory. That very jar, cherry jam, with a pit.

It’s very easy for them to blame him, to call him an idiot, a drunk or an ideological freak, depending on the audience and the depth of the argument required. But, my dear little comrade, I know—daddies never do anything without thinking about their children. Or even without asking them. The disguised Father Christmas makes every child’s dreams come true.

So let them write, let them compile lists that pedantically point out oversights, let them count off at length the failures to conform to labor standards and operating procedures, to the Energy Code, to the material and moral principles for acting in zones of elevated radioactive risk—oversights, mistakes, and unimplemented security measures of primary importance. And in brief, including only the gravest errors, for example, the following: that the workers on the fifth shift shut down the emergency system, they stopped and started the machine however they saw fit, doing the same with the automatic regulation system. And what’s this talk of cooling turbines, given that for the purposes of this strange experiment all the backup energy sources were cut off and even sealed off in advance—let’s see what’ll happen, those sharp minds said, let’s just see.

And what happened? The temperature rose highly strangely and strangely high, somehow quite perceptibly. The reactor, of course, was itself a Party member, it didn’t want to explode and humiliate the great country, its scientists and academics, who shouted all the livelong day that the Soviet atom was the safest atom on the planet—the reactor resisted, wringing its hands, trying desperately to keep itself together. But here the masters of that deadly sport had already put it in a headlock that no one could escape from—not even Reactor Four of the world’s third-largest atomic power plant (both in terms of size and capacity), which is even described in the Apocalypse.

And the control system, the control system designed precisely for such cases, was frozen up in any case—on top of everything the leaders of the experiment themselves, engineers, scientists, physicists, had turned it off earlier so that it wouldn’t get in the way of their plans. And so, with its back against the wall, with access to all emergency generators cut off—the two diesel generators as well as the two electrical transformers—the block, the reactor was stranded above the abyss without any energy except atomic energy. Without energy to stop, that is.

And finally—sometime around 1:20 in the morning—finally when their hair began to stand on end because they realized that they were pulling the levers of a fuse measuring fourteen meters in diameter and seven meters tall, filled with toasty, warm uranium—funny, hadn’t they realized it before?—no, apparently not, alas—then they just threw up their hands and cried “Mommy!” But Mommy was nowhere to be found, so they pulled the fatal lever labeled ES: “Emergency Shield.”

Which allowed the incompetence of the reactor’s constructors and builders to come into play. Because some of the control rods had somehow been designed incorrectly, but who bothered about that, anyway? And who would’ve thought that those rods would ever need to enter the heart of the reactor with a crash, in such a state of wild panic—according to the regulations, they should never have even been taken out at all! And so on and so forth—an endless stream of mutual accusations and justifications between the builders, users, enemies, and friends of peaceful nuclear power for Soviet aims.

I know there are no longer birches, poplars, a city, houses, Lenin Street, the school; the 50,000 inhabitants have disappeared somewhere. But my dear little Soviet comrade, I still keep your address, I write you letters that never arrive—just so you know that I am eternally grateful to your father and to all those fathers who, despite the efforts of the control system, managed to blow the reactor sky-high. To blow me sky-high.

>>>

I, unlike everyone else, do not blame K-shev for not warning us. I don’t care—I have unique personal memories, historical ones. For me, Chernobyl is a flash of a moment that surpasses all moments worthy of the name “epic.” Like the eureka light bulb going off in Edison’s skull: the day you understand everything without needing to think.

I already know—now, later, after reading all those books, all those declassified documents. I, as they say, bless the right hand of the creators of those uranium-graphite reactors, with all of their thoughtlessness. The greatness of scientists is not measured by some abstract perfection—on the contrary, it is measured by their talent to make a predicted mistake. To hide it in a system of complicated formulas and terminology so as to remain invisible to small-minded Party leaders.

My brothers, may it be strong as ore,

that blessed right hand of yours—

with the valiant Reactor Four

you lit up a star!

>>>

“We trusted the experts’ evaluations,” they whisper on the upper floors, hidden in offices behind oak doors, huddled in corners near the trashcans. “All for the good of the people and the working class”—nodding, the participants in the Party schools explain this to one another, smoking during breaks, and come to an agreement with insulting ease. Comrade K-shev is somewhere among them, a guest in the great Soviet nation, sent by a small tomato republic, with his pompadour and hand-knit sweater vest. Sent on business from a quiet little country poised to soon become yet another car in the bullet-train—right after the end of lessons in mastering solidarity.

“We . . .” a slightly guilty and listless voice begins a summary over a radio loudspeaker that is somewhat sagging, yet well-slathered with paint just like the wallpaper and doorframe in the yellowish-dusky color of the era.

Now I realize why the hallways are so empty as she and I creep through them—the stairways, the corners, the railings, the mirrors without reflections in them, the crimson curtains and the empty pedestals. They are all at a meeting. They are making important decisions.

“We trusted the scientists,” they sniffle into the loudspeaker, passing around the responsibility like lice in a kindergarten. They squint an eye, pick at the ugly guts of this wart—an imaginary one, of course, yet still dangerous, even twice as dangerous for its imaginariness. What did you inadvertently touch in the pandemonium? Why are you still wiping your fingers on the curtains—to get rid of the invisible contagion of fear—could it be that something has happened? That something has finally happened to you.

“We carried out our orders. We met the deadlines.”

“The bosses, the Party . . . the Congress . . .”

K-shev remains silent, however; he doesn’t justify himself to anyone. There’s something I like about the guy, something that excites me to a particularly strange, radioactive degree, especially at the moment when I bury my fingers in the milky-blue, fleshy-cloth combination of the pleated skirt and naked thighs of his daughter.

He revolves around the axis of his own unshakable foundation, built over the void. It’ll only take a bit more to convince me, just a bit more. Just some extra gesture, accidental, seemingly trivial, that will let me know that he is not simply a Party flunky, but divine. He doesn’t need to run from responsibility because he is in a completely different relationship to responsibility itself. He himself is the creator of responsibilities.

Strangely, his illness now seems at first glance like a failure, a tumble from the altar I was prepared to place him on. But perhaps this is only at first glance—for this reason I’m not rushing to pity him so easily; I’ve seen many falls. Could the illness be the final proof I need to deify him once and for all? A strange sort of god, ready to die even—from an illness no less, one we ourselves all feared becoming infected with. Is he capable of such an act purely and solely to win our faith?

>>>

There, there, my dear little Soviet comrade: don’t cry, don’t be sad, don’t change your surname, don’t be ashamed of your name. Take flowers to your daddy’s grave, even though only a blue suit with metal buttons is buried there. After the hydrogen-oxygen explosion at the reactor, fueled by uranium dioxide UO₂ on a bed of zirconium, under the skeleton of niobium—nothing was left of the bodies.

“But we did everything just as we were supposed to”—only evaporated ghosts repeat these words now.

“We did everything correctly, following the established plan approved by the management!” Just as under socialism—we do and did everything correctly, yet life, the world, continues to collapse beneath our feet like a reactor that has entered a runaway state of nuclear meltdown. Is there any need to explain what those two great liberating words mean: chain reaction?

A reaction that breaks chains. Indeed, freedom is equal in strength to the truth. But first the opposite had to happen.

And I had to come across his daughter, of course.

>>>

K-shev watches me from the framed black-and-white photograph. Only in the meaning of that gaze, in the subsections of the ideological tract can I search for the true foundations. The sick passion that firmly grips and envelops both our bodies—mine and his daughter’s. It changes from tenderness into exertion, from exertion into force, into tension to the point of pain: power.

At the end, as usual, the tempo should speed up, just a bit more and everything is over. The moment of the happy ending, the verge of that thirsting absurdity. But that is precisely the moment when I can throw a wrench in the spokes of natural progression, of desire: I slow the beating of my heart, the throbbing of blood in the basement of my organism, the boiling of seething lava. All internal muscles push and jerk, hopelessly trying to overcome the built-up ballast—but I resist, working against them.

I’m pretty vile, that’s clear—I’m obviously depraved. Because I keep a dark and repulsive memory like a worn-out old photograph in my hand. And at the decisive moment, under cover of a final cherished kiss, of a free fusion of lips—I paste it onto her face.