The Physics of Sorrow (26 page)

I note this encounter as well (everything is important). Saying farewell to someone whose name you can’t even remember, someone you’ll write down as Señor X, that eternal X of the unknown perpetrator. No matter how hard you wrack your brain all day, you won’t come up with his real name, but paradoxically, this is precisely what keeps him alive in your mind for some time. We cannot run away from the ones we’ve forgotten.

Farewell, Señor X, farewell to all those I’ve forgotten, and to all those who have forgotten me. May your memory live on forever.

D
ESCRIPTION OF A
P
HOBIA
(
SIDE CORRIDOR
)

A friend of mine was terrified by dolls’ gazes. She would fall into an actual stupor if she ever met their glassy eyes. They certainly did have creepy stares, those dolls from back in the day. It turn out that this fear has been described and has a name, it’s called pediophobia.

My fear is even more terrible, because the threat can be anywhere. I’ve never found it in any nomenclature of phobias, so that’s why I’ll duly add its description here. Let this be my humble scientific contribution to the endless List of Fears.

I have a phobia of a certain question. A nightmarish question that can literally jump out at you from around the corner, hidden in the toothless mouth of the neighbor lady or mumbled by the clerk at the newspaper stand. Every telephone call is charged with this question. Yes, it most often lurks in telephone receivers:

How are you?

I stopped going out, stopped answering my phone, I started shopping at different stores so as to not fall into the trivial acquaintances of everyday life. I wracked my brain trying to hammer out defensive
responses. I needed a new Shield of Achilles against bullshit. How to come up with an answer that doesn’t multiply the banality, that doesn’t get bogged down in clichés? An answer that doesn’t force you to use ready-made phrases, an answer that doesn’t lie, but which also doesn’t reveal things you’d rather not reveal. An answer that does not predispose you to entanglement in a long and pointless conversation.

What spurious tradition of etiquette has given rise to it, how has it slipped through the centuries, that hypocritical question. “How are you?”—that is the question. (The sublime “To be or not to be” has been replaced by that pitiful inquiry, now there’s proof positive of degradation.)

How are you?

How are you?

How are you?

How are you supposed to answer that?

Look, the English have pulled a fast one and made it into a greeting. They’ve defanged it, taken away its interrogative sting:
Howdoyoudo
.

“How are you?” is the banana peel so courteously placed beneath your feet, the cheese that lures you toward the mousetrap of cliché.

How are you—the weak, enfeebling poison of the everyday. There is no above-board answer to this question. There isn’t. I know the possible answers, but they repulse me, understand? They truly repulse me . . . I don’t want to be that predictable, to answer “fine, thanks,” or “hanging in there.” or “getting by.” or . . .

I don’t know how I am. I can’t give a categorical answer. To give you a fitting reply, I’d have to spend nights, months, years, I’d have to read through a literary Tower of Babel, and to write, write, write . . . The answer is an entire novel.

How am I?

I’m not. End of story.

Let that be the first line. And from there, the real answer begins.

L
IST OF
A
VAILABLE
A
NSWERS TO THE
Q
UESTION
H
OW
A
RE
Y
OU

So-so.

The most common answer in these parts. “So-so” means things are not so good but not so bad, either. Around here, you never say you’re doing well, so as not to call down some huge calamity on yourself.

Still alive and kicking.

In other words, I’m not doing well at all, but I’m not going to sit down and bore you with complaints, ’cause complaining is for sissies. This is the manly answer.

Let this be as bad as it gets!

This is said around the table, when you’ve gathered the whole gang together and you’re drinking toasts, munching on your salad, and sipping your brandy . . . I’ve always wondered what “as good as it gets” would look like. I don’t mean to be harsh, but I would guess it hardly looks any different.

We’re fine, but it’ll pass.

A waggish answer from the socialist era, someone clearly got fed up with the absurdity of the question and the system, in which complaining openly would only bring you grief. Hence the popular joke from that time:

“How are you, how are you?” The general secretary of the Communist Party jokingly asked.

“We’re fine, we’re fine,” the workers jokingly replied.

A l’il sick t’day, dead as a doornail t’morrow.

The whole phony concern of the question “How are you?” collapses.

Any better would be criminal.

An answer again along the same lines, the brainchild of someone displeased with the essence of the question.

Not very how.

A classic, Eeyore from
Winnie-the-Pooh
. But it, too, is now threadbare from use.

Putting one foot in front of the other.

Nothing happens, I’m not looking forward to anything, I somehow get by, I keep pushing on through. Whom and what keeps getting pushed on through and gotten by isn’t quite clear, the day, or life, most likely. The day is hard to push on through, like a donkey that’s dug in its heels on a bridge and won’t move an inch, like a hefty buffalo that has settled down for his noontime nap and refuses to budge.

One thing I’ll never forget from my childhood are the old men sitting in front of their houses or gathered in front of the general store on the little square in the late afternoon, puffing on cheap cigarettes and digging around in the dirt at their feet with sticks, the day’s unknown and unlettered philosophers. In those parts, life is short, but the day is endless.

Still breathing, but that might change.

A sly variant version on the preceding answer, but its meaning or meaninglessness is more or less the same.

Losing brain cells . . .

The sincere and merciless response given by my nephew and his high school classmates in a sleepy, backwater town.

H
OW
A
RE
Y
OU

Somewhere, a brilliant idea pops into your head, the words come of their own accord, you can hardly take them all in, you immediately look for a pen and paper, you always carry at least three pens with you, you dig around in your pockets, can’t find a single one . . . You try to remember the phrases, you use tried-and-true mnemonic devices, taking the first letters or syllables from every word to forge a new keyword. You hurry home, dropping everything, chanting this word over the rosary of your mind. Right in front of your building, a neighbor stops you with that awful question “How are you?” and starts telling you some story, you open your mouth to say you’re in a terrible rush and at that moment the keyword flits out of your mouth like a fly and disappears into space as if it had never existed.

H
ERE’S
H
OW

I’d been feeling more and more foreign in this place over the past few years. I started going out only at night. As if at night the city regained something of its style, its legend. Perhaps late at night the shades of those who had lived here during the 1910s, ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s would come out. They would wander through their old haunts, banging into the newly built glass office buildings like sparrows that have accidentally flown into a room, looking for peace and quiet in the park in front of St. Sedmochislenitsi Church, strolling around the Pépinière, or hustling down Tsar Liberator Boulevard, passing by the other shades. I wanted to walk through that old Sofia like a shade among shades. At first I seemed to be succeeding. When I would stop by Yavorov’s house, sometimes I could hear a couple arguing from behind the dark windows.
¹
Once a window was lit up.

Lately the shades have left this city as well. This is a forsaken city, a city without a legend. And the more people pour into it during the day, the emptier it seems. Its own dead have abandoned it. And that is truly irreparable.

One evening, as I was wandering through this dark, beat-up, deserted city, I stumbled across a fight. I had never seen one so close up before. They were wailing away on one another as only people in these parts can, crudely, with no sense of style. They were thrashing away, that’s the word for it, pummeling faces, about seven or eight young guys around twenty years old. I now realize that my only experience with fights is from movies and literature. And how different the picture actually is. It had nothing in common with the battle between Achilles and Hector. Nor with Rocky Balboa, nor with Jackie Chan, nor with De Niro in
Raging Bull
. . . Ugly stuff. Then one of them pulled out a knife. I knew I had to intervene, but I didn’t know how. I stepped out into the open and yelled something. Someone shouted at me to get the hell out of there and they kept fighting. Yes, I was scared, there were lots of them, they were young, strong, ferocious. Where are those snoozing cops when you need them? Then an idea occurred to me. I picked up a broken paving tile from the sidewalk and hurled it through the nearest shop window on the street. It was a cell phone store. The alarm started howling. The fight stopped instantly. They looked at me stunned that some dweeb had dared to interfere. I could read their minds, as if their bloodied heads were made of glass. Suddenly all of them were ready to jump on me. But they realized what I had actually just done, the alarm was shrieking and in less than a minute the strapping private security guards would show up, who, unlike the police, wouldn’t just sit back on their heels. They hadn’t totally lost their grip on reason, so both gangs quickly got out of there. Nevertheless, the guy with the knife made sure to jab me, just like that
in passing, as he made his getaway. I managed to raise my arm to protect myself, so the knife struck a little below the elbow. Nothing serious. I sat there bleeding meekly in the warm June night, sitting on the sidewalk amid pools of other people’s blood, waiting for the security guards.

Afterward, I had to pay for the window.

I’d better get out of here quick. I’d better be someone else. Someone else, somewhere else.

E
MPTY
S
PACE

If you turn to the back pages of the European newspaper you’re reading, there, on the map showing the weather forecast, you’ll see an empty space—between Istanbul, Vienna and Budapest.

The saddest place in the world, as the
Economist
called it in 2010 (I clipped out the article), as if there is truly a geography of happiness.

I wrote about this for a newspaper. An innocent piece, which stirred up a backlash on the Internet, and I received threats—the first since I had started publishing. (No one wants to be told he doesn’t exist . . .) I didn’t take the hint. I wrote a few more pieces, more ironic than anything else, about the fact that 1968 never happened here. About how we don’t exist, how we’re so nonexistent that we have to do something really over-the-top to be noticed, like Georgi Markov being jabbed with a poisoned umbrella on a bridge in London. To get mixed up in hazy dealings with Turkish terrorists, an assassination attempt on the Pope that later, proof or no proof, will be called “the Bulgarian connection.” To steal Charlie Chaplin’s dead body, to hold his corpse hostage. The Internet forum was already abuzz with threats, the mildest of which was that I’d be
trailing my guts out behind me like a beat-up dog. I still didn’t pay much attention, dismissing them as the work of anonymous nutcases with inferiority complexes. One night the telephone rang, the message was brief, but it was no longer just about me, they knew exactly what to do. That was the final straw, I decided to drop everything, take my daughter and leave.

Somewhere else, somewhere else . . .

A
DVICE FROM THE
N
INETEENTH
C
ENTURY

Your bile is stagnant, you see sorrow in everything, you are drenched in melancholy, my friend the doctor said.

Isn’t melancholy something from previous centuries? Isn’t there some vaccine against it yet, hasn’t medicine taken care of it yet? I ask.

There’s never been as much melancholy as there is today, the doctor said with a throaty laugh. They just don’t advertise it. It’s not marketable, melancholy doesn’t sell. Imagine an ad for a slow, melancholic Mercedes, S-class. But getting back to the point, I’ll recommend something to you that you’ll say is straight out of the nineteenth century: travel, stir up your blood, give your eyes new sights, go south . . .

That sounds pretty Chekhovian, doctor.

Well, Chekhov knew what to do, after all he wasn’t just some ignorant writer, but a doctor, the doctor laughed.

He’s right, of course. I had exhausted my personal reserves of meaning. The doctor read a lot, I’m sure that he secretly writes stories similar to those of his mentor, Chekhov. What I really love him for is the fact that he has never taken advantage of the opportunity to foist them on me.