The Physics of Sorrow (35 page)

It passes through my own death, the Minotaur replies, but it’s all the same whether you’ll kill me for real or in the story you’ll hear.

I see them walking along together through the corridors of cities and cellars, weaving parallel labyrinths from the threads of their stories, themselves entangled in them. And nothing can ever separate them again, the storyteller and his killer.

P
OLICE
R
EPORT

(. . .)

A short, double-edged sword was found, in all likelihood an unusually valuable object from antiquity. An expert appraisal has been ordered to determine the precise period of its production, its value and provenance. There are no traces of blood on the sword.

Description of items found in the basement. Boxes filled with contents whose organizational logic is difficult to establish. Seven of them—filled primarily with clippings from newspapers and magazines. An old
halvah
box. Eight notebooks of varying thickness and with different sorts of bindings, almost entirely filled, have been found. Four large trunks filled with books in various languages. A gas mask. A computer and a dinosaur, which will be requisitioned for the needs of the investigation. (The dinosaur is a rubber children’s toy). Fingerprints have been taken from all suitable surfaces. A literary expert must be appointed to examine the content of the notebooks. With an eye above all to what possible clues or leads could be derived from that material.

I am the appointed expert. As far as I know, the neighbors repeatedly called the police to complain of strange, random noises and howling (mooing—according to others) coming from the basement of the apartment building. Then for a week, no sounds were heard, the building manager went downstairs and found the heavy door to one of the storage units (part of a former bomb shelter) wide open. A sword was lying on the floor.

They asked me whether I had anything against working in the basement itself, since it would be a Herculean task to remove everything, besides the police had no free space. I agreed. I felt a strange sort of excitement, I had a complicated relationship with that writer, without having known him. I have always felt personally robbed while reading him.

I entered the basement on March 17 at 10
A.M
. A strange feeling in the beginning that there was someone else there, watching me. I’m not afraid, the gaze is well-intentioned, if I can put it like that. I again peered into all the corners and niches, even though the police had done so before me. Nothing. Just a slug slowly crawling across the tin halvah box. I started reading. I stop, go back, go down a corridor that seems familiar to me, get lost, continue on. During the first month, I went out only once. Then never again.

W
HAT
I
S
L
EFT AT THE
E
ND

I’m back on that warm stone, six again, I step closer to the girl from the vision who is sitting in front of the piano with her hands raised, I’ve opened the door to the room, I’m leaning against the frame in my shorts, what’s that ugly scar doing where my left leg was broken, a single beam of light passes through the heavy curtains, slicing the whole room in two, we are in two different halves. And then the miracle happens, the picture starts moving, the girl turns around . . .

At that moment, the Minotaur finds his mother in the crowd at the bullfight, my three-year-old grandfather sees his mother running back toward the mill,

a woman in Harkany receives a letter,

a man steps out of a poster, goes over to Juliet in front of the movie theater and the two of them set off arm-in-arm down the main street of T.,

Gaustine installs the biggest projector in the world and a night rain that doesn’t get anything wet falls over the whole northern hemisphere,

my father and mother are watching from the balcony of a lit-up apartment on the top floor . . .

the girl and I are now on the same side of the beam of light, I see the edge of her face, she turns around . . .

Hi, Daddy.

EPILOGUE

I died (left for Hungary) in late January 1995 as an eighty-two-year-old human being of the male sex. I don’t know the exact date. It’s best to die in the winter, when there’s not much work, so you don’t cause too much trouble.

I died as a fruit fly, at dusk. The sunset of the day (of my life) was beautiful.

I died on December 7, 2058, as a human being of the male sex. I don’t remember anything from that year. That’s why I recalled the year I was born, 1968, day by day.

I have always been dead. And it’s always been dark. If death is darkness and the absence of others . . .

I haven’t died yet. I’m forthcoming. I am minus three months old. I don’t know how to count that negative time in the womb. It’s dark and cozy here, I’m tied to something that moves. In three months, I’ll pass beyond to the outside. Some call that death birth.

I died on February 1, 2026, as a human being of the male sex. My father was always telling me that it was best to die in winter, I
listened to him. I was a veterinarian my whole life. I once went to Finland . . .

I remember dying as a slug, as a rose bush, a partridge, as
Ginkgo biloba
, a cloud in June (that memory is brief), a purple autumnal crocus near Halensee, an early-blooming cherry frozen by a late April snow, as snow freezing a hoodwinked cherry tree . . .

We was.

B
EGINNING

My father and the dinosaurs died out at the same time . . .

Acknowledgements

This book was written in various places. It began near the Wannsee at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, where I had all the tranquility and sunsets in the world at my disposal; it continued on the banks of the Danube in Krems (Literaturhaus NÖ), the Wachau Valley in Lower Austria, between the river and the strictest Austrian prison; the final I’s were dotted and T’s crossed on the Adriatic, in Split (thanks to an invitation from KURS), in the labyrinth of Diocletian’s Palace. I am grateful to the benevolent geography and my hosts in these places.

Thanks to Ani Burova, Nadezhda Radulova, Boyko Penchev, Miglena Nikolchina, Bozhana Apostolova, and Silvia Choleva for their valuable advice.

I thank Ivan Teofilov for his encouragement and shared faith in the wonder of language.

Thanks to Bilyana, who read and edited before there was even a book, and to four-year-old Raya for her patience and willingness to offer a story about cats and dinosaurs whenever she sensed that I was stuck.

Thanks to everyone who secured me the solitude necessary for a novel.

G
eorgi Gospodinov (1968) is a poet, writer, and playwright, and one of the most translated Bulgarian authors after 1989. His
Natural Novel
is published in twenty-three languages (in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive) and was praised by the
New Yorker
,
New York Times
,
Guardian
,
Believer
, and
Village Voice
, among others. A collection of his short stories,
And Other Stories
, was published by Northwestern University Press.
The Physics of Sorrow
, his second novel, is a finalist for four International European Prizes in Italy and Germany, among them Premio Strega Europeo and Haus der Kulturen der Welt Preis.

A
ngela Rodel earned an MA in linguistics from UCLA and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and learn Bulgarian. In 2010, she won a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev’s short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today and received an NEA Fellowship for her translation of Gospodinov’s
The Physics of Sorrow
.

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