The Physics of Sorrow (6 page)

Risen Georgi (that’s what they called him in the village) lived a long life, he saw well in the evenings, but by day was blind as a mole. He came out of the basement, yet the basement stayed inside him. During that year and a half, several lives had happened to him and it became ever harder for him to remember which of them was the real one.

Perhaps he had perished in that little Hungarian town after all? Was that Hungarian woman who changed the course of the war to keep him really young, or was she an old woman who had lost her son? How did he manage to escape from the German mine? And that which gave him no peace until the very end—the child’s hand, traced on an ordinary white sheet of notebook paper and sent in a postal envelope.

(Both versions end with the same small child’s hand, traced on a piece of paper. But stories always end in one of two ways—with a child or with death.)

A P
LACE TO
S
TOP

Let’s wait here for the souls of distracted readers. Somebody could have gotten lost in the corridors of these different times. Did
everyone come back from the war? How about from the fair in 1925? Let’s hope we didn’t forget anyone at the mill. So where shall we set out for now? Writers shouldn’t ask such questions, but as the most hesitant and unsure among them, I’ll take that liberty. Shall we turn toward the story of the father, or continue on ahead, which in this case is backward, toward the Minotaur of childhood . . . I can’t offer a linear story, because no labyrinth and no story is ever linear. Are we all here? Off we go again.

A S
HORT
C
ATALOGUE OF
A
BANDONMENTS

The history of the family can be described through the abandonment of several children. The history of the world, too.

The abandoned child with the bull’s head, thrown into Minos’s labyrinth . . .

The abandoned Oedipus, the little boy with the pierced ankles, tossed on the mountainside in a basket, who would be adopted first by King Polybus, later by Sophocles, and in the end by his later father, Sigmund Freud.

The abandoned Hansel and Gretel, the Ugly Duckling, the Little Match Girl, and the grown-up Jesus, she wants to go to her grandmother’s house, he to his father’s . . .

In this line come—even without legends to back them up—all those abandoned now or in the past, and all those who shall be abandoned. Having fallen from the manger of myth, let us take them in, in this inn of words, spread beneath them the clean sheets of history, tuck in their frostbitten souls. And leave them in hands, which, as they turn these pages, shall stroke their frightened backs and heads.

How many readers here have not felt abandoned at least once? How many would admit that at least once they have been locked
in a room, a closet, or a basement, for edification? And how many would dare say that they have not done the locking up?

In the beginning, I said, there is a child tossed into a cellar.

T
HE
B
ASEMENT

For a long time, I used to watch the world through a window at sidewalk level. The apartments changed, but every one of them had one such low window. We always lived in the basement, the rooms were cheapest there. My mother, father, and I had just moved into yet another basement. Actually, into another “former basement,” as the landlord said. There’s no such thing as a former basement, my father replied sharply, and the landlord, not knowing how to take this, just laughed. In these parts, when somebody feels uncomfortable, he starts laughing, who knows why.

It’s temporary, my father said, as we carried in the table. It was the mid-70s, I knew that we were defined as “extremely indigent,” I knew that the extremely indigent were those who inhabited a space of less than five square meters per person, and we were waiting our turn for an apartment on some list. Clearly, the list was quite long or someone was cutting in line, because we continued to live in that basement room for several years. On the “ground floor” (which was, in fact, underground), there was a long corridor and just one other room, always locked. I didn’t ask why we didn’t rent it as well, I knew the answer, we’re saving money for an apartment. Plus, we had to maintain that cramped five square meters per person so as not to slip from the category of the extremely indigent. The long corridor played the role of entrance hall and kitchen, but it was so narrow that it had room for only two chairs, a hotplate, and something like a little table. When my mom and dad fought, my dad would go out
there to sleep, on the table. He also listened to Radio Free Europe there, secretly, on an old taped-up Selena. I was very proud that my father listened to that station, because I knew it was forbidden. Actually, I was proud that I was part of the conspiracy. When you share a single room, you can’t keep too many secrets.

In fact, the house where that basement apartment was located was downright beautiful. Three stories with big, light windows looming up above. Thousands of shards of glass from beer bottles, green and brown, had been stuck into the deliberately rough plaster, following the fashion of the times, and they sparkled like diamonds in the sun. And the third floor formed a slight semi-circle, almost like a castle. What would it be like to live there, in that round room, with its round windows and curved balcony? A room without edges. From up above you could probably see the whole city and the river. You could see everyone who passes by on the street, and full-length at that, not just as strange creatures made solely of legs and shoes. At school, I never failed to mention that I lived in that house with the rounded tower. Which was the truth. Of course, I didn’t specify which floor.

At the same time, my father dreamed of an apartment with a living room, fully furnished with a drawing-room suite, he could see himself sitting in the large, square armchair with his paper, legs propped on the footstool. He had seen this in a Neckermann catalogue, which some family friends had briefly lent us. My mother dreamed of a real kitchen with cupboards, where she could line up the little white porcelain jars of spices she would some day purchase. I would suspect that same West German Neckermann was responsible for that dream as well.

. . .

Feet and cats. Indolent, slow, cat-length afternoons. I would spend the whole day glued to the window, because it was the lightest place. I would count the passing feet and put together the people above them.

Men’s feet, women’s feet, children’s feet . . . I watched the seasons change through the change of shoes. Sandals, which gradually closed up, transforming into fall shoes, which later crept up the leg, exquisite ladies’ boots, the stylish ones made of pleated patent leather, the workers’ coarse rubber boots that took out the trashcans, the villagers’ galoshes, arriving for the market on Thursday, the blue or red kids’ boots, the only colorful splotches amid the overwhelming brown and black. And again the gradual spring easing, the undressing of shoes down to the bare summer soles, ankles and toes, shod only in sandals and flip-flops. The flip-flops were something like swimsuits for feet.

During autumn, the window became piled with yellowish-brown fallen leaves from the sidewalk, making the light in the room soft and yellow. Then the late autumn wind would scatter them. The rains would come—and the eternal puddle out front. I could sit and watch the drops falling into it for hours, forming fleeting bubbles, whole armadas of ships, which the drops would then smash. How many historic sea battles unfolded in that puddle! Then the snow would bury the little window and the room would become a den. I would curl up into a ball like a rabbit under the snow. It is so light, yet you are hidden, invisible to the others, whose footsteps crunch in the snow only inches away from you. What could be lovelier than that?

T
HE
G
OD OF THE
A
NTS

He was six when they started leaving him home alone. In the morning his mother and father would light the gas heater, constantly
telling him to keep an eye on the flow of gas inside the little tube. Two gas heaters on their street had exploded. They left him food in the refrigerator and went out. A typical 1970s childhood. Left on his own all day, with that early unnamed feeling of abandonment. The half-dark room frightened him. He would spend the warm autumn days outside. He would sit on a rock by the gate, on the sidewalk, like a little old man, counting the people passing by, the cars, the makes of the cars. He’d try to guess them from the humming before they appeared from around the curve. Moskvitch, Moskvitch, Zhiguli, Trabant, Polski Fiat, Zhiguli, Moskvitch, Moskvitch . . . When he got tired of that, he would rest his head on his knees and stare at the stone slabs of the sidewalk. Each slab was crisscrossed uniformly by vertical and horizontal lines, and in the furrows they created ants would run, meet and pass one another. This was a whole other, quasi-visible world. It looked like the labyrinth from that book with the illustrations. He would sit like that for hours, thinking up stories for every ant. He observed them with the skill of a naturalist, without knowing the word, of course. He would study them, devoting to them hours of the time he was so generously allotted. Each ant was different from the others.

Sometimes he would imagine that he was the God of the Ants.

Most often he was a kind God, helping them, dropping crumbs or a dead fly down to them, nudging it with a stick toward their home so they wouldn’t have to struggle to carry it.

But sometimes he grew wrathful without reason, like the real God, or he simply felt like playing and so would pour a pitcher of water into the corridors of the labyrinth. He made a flood for them.

Other times he would pour salt at the ends of the flagstone, he had discovered by chance that they detested salt, and they would stagger through the corridors of that temporary prison, frightened senseless. When they met, they would quickly press their feelers together, as if passing on some very important secret.

His other discovery, divine and scientific, was that ants hate the scent of humans. If you trace a circle around an ant with your finger, it will run up against that invisible border as if you had built a wall.

He had already noticed this ability of his, he considered it a terrible defect to be able to experience that which happened to others. To embed himself—the word would come later—into their bodies. To be them.

One night he dreamed that he, his mother, and his father were walking down the street and suddenly a giant finger, whose nail alone was as big as a cliff, thumped down and began circling around them. And as if it wasn’t terrifying enough that this finger could crush them at any second, just like that, out of carelessness, it also reeked toxically to boot. A stench you could ram into and crack your skull on.

But in the winter things change, you can’t stay outside all day. The room grows ever dimmer, the stove smells like gas, while scary things peek out from under the bed or creak inside the worm-eaten wardrobe. The only salvation then is the window. He would climb up to it in the morning and get down only to eat his slice of bread at lunchtime and to pee.

A P
LACE TO
S
TOP

I’m thinking about the first person, which easily recedes into the third, before returning again to the first. But who can say for certain that that boy there forty years ago was me, that that body is the same as the one here? Even the ants from 1975 are not the same. I don’t find any similarities between the body of a six-year-old, with that thin, pale-pink skin and invisible blond fuzz on his legs. No preserved sign of identification, no trace, except the vaccination scar with which our whole generation is marked. That nearly invisible
scar on the shoulder, which over the years has treacherously grown and begun to creep downward.

A detour within a detour. A friend of mine told me a story about how after an amorous night, when she was lying exhausted on the floor with her younger lover, he suddenly asked her (with certain sympathy) what that scar on her arm was from (it had already left her shoulder). She then realized with horror that he didn’t have that vaccination brand anywhere on his shoulders. Those who came after us are no longer marked in that way, she said, he seemed like an alien to me, like a clone. She got up, got dressed, and they never saw each other again.

A
NT
-G
OD

Most likely all dreams, when being retold, should begin with the opening statement, revealing and startling in its simplicity, which I heard from Aya, who was then four: I dreamed that I was awake.

And so, I dreamed that I was awake. I was standing in front of huge curtains with nameless colors that flowed into one another—like I said, huge, but light and ephemeral. It was made clear to me in the dream that concealed behind them was “the beautiful face of God,” in those exact words. I draw aside the first curtain. (It seems that between curiosity and fear, curiosity always takes the upper hand, or at least that’s how it is in dreams.)

Behind it there was a second one. I draw it aside.

A third.

A fourth.

I notice that every subsequent curtain becomes ever smaller and smaller. Hence whatever it was hiding is ever smaller as well. I keep drawing them aside until finally only one is left, the size of a child’s
handkerchief. I stop myself. Should I really draw this curtain? Could God possibly be so small? Perhaps the Antichrist is tempting me in my dreams?

I draw it aside. Behind it stands a big black ant. And I somehow know that this is God. But he has no face. The discovery is terrifying. How can you pray to and trust in someone who has no face? Someone who is that small? The revelation that the Ant-God gave me in the moment of awakening, without opening its jaws, went more or less like this: God is an insect who watches us. Only small things can be everywhere.