The Physics of Sorrow (11 page)

The world was simple and ordered, simply ordered. On Wednesday—fish, on Friday—Russian TV.

In East German cowboy movies, the redskins were the good guys, the proletariat of sorts, since they were the reds.

The television listing for Monday, November 18, 1973 or 1983 (it’s not clear from the scrap of newspaper):

              
17:30 – Discussion of decisions made by the July Plenum of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party. 18:00 – News. 18:10 – For Pioneers: “The Little Drum.” 18:30 – “Children of the Circus,” a film. 19:00 – “Beautiful and Comfortable,” a program about economics. 19:20 – For the People’s Army: “At Attention with a Song,” concert. 19:40 – Advertisements. 19:45 – Melody of the Month. 19:50 – Good night, children! 20:00 – Around the World and At Home. 20:20 – Sports Screen. 20:30 – Televised theater: “Wedding Anniversary” by Jerzy Krasnicki. 21:40 – Winners of International Concerts. 22:00 – News.

I can’t explain why, but this listing always plunges me into melancholy. The last news at 10
P.M
. and that’s it. Only sssssssssssssss and snowflakes after the national anthem.

Here’s the green canvas bag from the gasmask, filled with the exhausting fear of the atomic and neutron bombs, of air raid sirens being tested. I remember the bomb shelter under the school gym, where once a month we hid “on alert.” Ragged breathing in the dark, the back-up lighting generator that didn’t work anyway, the chaos, the scent of sweat and fear, the subsequent boasts of one fellow student who claimed to have “bombed,” i.e. grabbed the tits (in the jargon of the day, may it rest in peace) of our chemistry teacher in the dark—by accident, he had been aiming for a different target.

While I was putting on my gasmask during our military training drills in school—which took me a whole seventeen seconds—the major kept shouting: “That’s it! You’re dead . . .” And he shoved the stopwatch in my face.

It’s not easy living thirty years after your death.

The end of our training coincided with the end of that for which we had been trained.

T
HE
S
EXUAL
Q
UESTION

Was there sex in socialism? And socialism in sex? At the start of our erotic Bildungsroman stood
Man and Woman, Intimately
, translated from the German, the secret bestseller of that time, always well hidden on the highest shelf way in the back. Once the book disappeared.

Did anybody touch that book?

Which book?

You know which one.

We all read it behind one another’s backs. It was at once a practical handbook, an intimate physician, and erotic literature.

And so we first discovered sex through medical discourse. Masturbation (or so it said there) was harmful to one’s health, as was sex without love . . . But actually, for us, love without sex was no less torturous.

From a Catalogue of Important Erotic Scenes

Now as she ran up the steps toward Sonny a tremendous flash of desire went through her body. On the landing Sonny grabbed her hand and pulled her down the hall into an empty bedroom. Her legs went weak as the door closed behind them. She felt Sonny’s mouth on hers, his lips tasting of burnt tobacco, bitter. She opened her mouth. At that moment she felt his hand come up beneath her bridesmaid’s gown, heard the rustle of material giving way, felt his large warm hand between her legs, ripping aside the satin panties to caress her vulva. She put her arms around his neck and hung there as he opened his trousers. Then he placed both hands beneath her bare buttocks and lifted her. She gave a little hop in the air so that both her legs were wrapped around his upper thighs. His tongue was in her mouth and she sucked on it. He gave a savage thrust that banged her head against the door. She felt something burning pass between her thighs. She let her right hand drop from his neck and reached down to guide him, her hand closed around an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle. It pulsated in her hand like an animal and, almost weeping with grateful ecstasy . . .

The mythical page 28 from Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather
was a revelation, a baptism-by-fire for a whole generation. I had copied it out longhand, just like most of my classmates, while some braver souls sliced it right out of the book with a razor blade.

Sex appeared to be a complicated acrobatic routine with hops, holds, lifts, thrusts, first with one hand, tongue, then with the other . . . I would never learn. But in any case, the very knowledge of
that figural composition gave me the confidence of the initiated. At least in theory I knew what I had to do to reach that “grateful ecstasy” . . .

The other novel was French. Unlike the mute scene in
The Godfather
, now there was an abundance of words, sighs, ellipses . . . From here we learned that you can talk during sex, too.
Bel Ami
by Maupassant. “I adore you, my little Made . . .” Please don’t, I beg you . . . a quick thrill . . . wild and clumsy copulation . . .

Let’s add the secret erotic stories that were distributed in mimeographed copies and attributed to Balzac, about intercourse (that was the word used) between a woman and an animal (something like Pasiphaë with the bull), only in this case it was a dog or a bear, I don’t remember anymore.

. . .

In all that scarcity, we found sources of erotica in unexpected places.

In classical painting, for example. An inexhaustible reservoir of naked female bodies, of course chubbier and more Baroque than we would have liked, but it was still something. We gazed at the cheap reproductions . . . Goya’s “The Naked Maja,” Botticelli’s “Venus,” Rubens’s “Three Graces,” Courbet’s “Bather” . . . But Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” from our history textbook, with all the revolutionary zeal of her breast surging up out of her dress, became part of our own sexual revolution.

Underwear ads in old
Neckermann
catalogues.

The “golden girls” of Bulgarian rhythmic gymnastics.

All figure skating competitions.

Sculptures of the nude goddess Diana with her bow. The whole town of D., the erstwhile Dianopolis, was scattered with them. One afternoon, for a split second I caught a glimpse of a classmate of mine naked through the window of the house across the street; her name was also Diana. I already knew the myth and was afraid that the curse would catch up with me, that I would be turned into a stag that very minute, I felt my feet growing hooves, while enormous antlers would sprout out of my head any moment. A dog in the yard next door started barking at me right then, a sure sign that he’d sniffed out the stag in me . . .

Pantyhose packages showing long female legs.

Later we heard the rumor that sperm was very beneficial for female skin, and one of the older kids from our neighborhood bragged that he was often called upon to make “deliveries.” It’s the Bulgarian Nivea, he liked to say.

I’ve kept a whole bag full of love letters from that time. Should I add them here? It’s unbelievable how many letters were written back then. For a moment I wondered what would happen if I sent them back to the girls who wrote them? If I scrounged up their addresses and started dropping them in the mail one by one? I think V., the writer of the longest and most amorous missives, is happily married in Mexico.

V. wrote on both sides of the sheet, there was never enough room, so she would keep writing on the envelope, on the inside. One time I received a whole seven letters from her at once. She had mailed one, then wanted to add something more, and so on. She went to
the post office every half-hour. I was in the army when I got them. The soldier who went to pick up the mail from the nearby village waved the seven letters over his head from afar. Everyone from the base came outside, each expecting a letter in that abundance. He started reading off the names on the envelope; actually, it was only a single, solitary name, seven times. I felt so guilty looking at the others’ faces after each letter—sorrow, which quickly changed to quiet hatred. Because of all the injustice in the world. Seven letters can’t arrive and be all for the same person.

Now I see that some of their opening lines were literally taken from the little tome
Love Letters of Great Men
. An innocent deception that I only now have discovered. This explains the lofty style—“My love, I believe that fate is sheltering us . . .”—after which it launches without transition into everyday life: “Most of the lectures are lame, and some of the professors couldn’t care less . . .” “Do you remember Petya, whom I introduced you to? . . . She’s snagged herself an Italian, if you can believe it . . .”

Or this: “I want us to be as happy again as we were on March 8 and 9!!!” With three exclamation marks.

What I wouldn’t give to remember what happened on March 8 and 9.

Overheard on a train: “During socialism, we made lots of love, because there wasn’t anything else to do.”

T
HE
C
OOK
B
OOK OF
S
ILENCES

To the “List of Unwritten (and Impossible) Stories from the 1980s,” I’ll add yet another: A Short History of Keeping Mum.

From her silence, my mother made wonderful fried zucchini, baked lamb,
banitsi
. . .

Everything can be said with a few dishes. Only now do I realize why my mother and grandmother were such good cooks. It wasn’t cooking, but storytelling.

The labyrinths of their
banitsi
were as delicious and winding as Scheherazade’s fairytales. Here is the missing Bulgarian epos, the Banitsi Epos.

. . .

Our next-door neighbors at the time enjoyed pleasant but slightly strange marital relations. They argued every Saturday afternoon. It had become a ritual, part of the weekend spectacle. I remember once how, when their Saturday fight didn’t take place, we were honestly worried. My mother in full seriousness urged my father to go over and make sure nothing had happened to them. My father replied that he couldn’t go and ask: “Why aren’t you fighting?” Especially since no one had ever asked them why they fought in the first place. He went over there in the end, of course. My mother always emerged the victor. No one answered the door. It turned out they were out of town.

In fact, all of their arguments followed one and the same script. The husband would grab his suitcase, a splendid hard-sided brown suitcase, hollering that this time he was leaving for good. He would step out the front door, set his suitcase on the ground, sit down next to it and light up a cigarette. The woman would start cooking and after an hour or so the anesthetizing scent of Saturday dinner—chicken with potatoes, beef stew, or lamb with green onions, depending on the season—would start wafting through the yard, it would smell so nice and homey that the man would slowly pick up his suitcase and simply step over the threshold back into the house, returning from the brink of his latest Saturday flight. Resigned and hungry.

R
ETURNING TO THE
T
OWN OF
T.

The Metaphysics of Dust

I’ve fallen asleep on the windowsill. I wake up from the sun shining through the dirty glass, a warm afternoon sun. Still in that no man’s land between sleep and afternoon, before I return to myself, I sense that soaring and lightness, the whole weightlessness of a child’s body. Waking up, I age within seconds. Crippling pain seizes my lower back, my leg is stiff. The light in early September, the first fallen leaves outside, the worry that someone may have passed by on the street and seen me.