The Physics of Sorrow Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  GEORGI GOSPODINOV

  “Gospodinov’s first novel blends the personal and the philosophical. . . . The resulting mixture is both earthy and intellectual.”

  —Guardian

  “With The Physics of Sorrow Gospodinov launches . . . himself into the premier league of European authors. . . . [Gospodinov] rises above the lowlands of novelistic commercialism and convention, saving not only himself, but literature as well—and with it, the entire world.”

  —New Journal of Zurich

  “Georgi Gospodinov wants to blow your mind. . . . The formal playfulness suggests Kundera with A.D.D.”

  —Village Voice

  “This book is madness. It is extraordinary and restless, reflective, terribly funny, jarring, as philosophical as it is poetic, microscopic and grandiose. In short: fantastic.”

  —Berliner Zeitung

  “Gospodinov’s novel, with its metafictional games, playful narrative fragmentation, and obligatory epigraph from Foucault, belongs more to the cosmopolitan postmodern aesthetic of Italo Calvino than its native locale.”

  —Believer

  ALSO BY

  GEORGI GOSPODINOV

  And Other Stories

  Natural Novel

  Copyright © 2011 by Georgi Gospodinov

  Translation copyright © 2015 by Angela Rodel

  First published in Bulgaria as Fizika na tagata by Janet 45 Publishing

  First edition, 2015

  All rights reserved

  Lines from Works and Days by Hesiod on p. 145 translated by Daryl Hine, University of Chicago Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-940953-10-6

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additionally, Angela Rodel’s translation was supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPHY

  PROLOGUE

  I. THE BREAD OF SORROW

  II. AGAINST AN ABANDONMENT: THE CASE OF M.

  III. THE YELLOW HOUSE

  IV. TIME BOMB (TO BE OPENED AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD)

  V. THE GREEN BOX

  VI. THE STORY BUYER

  VII. GLOBAL AUTUMN

  VIII. AN ELEMENTARY PHYSICS OF SORROW

  IX. ENDINGS

  EPILOGUE

  EPIGRAPHY

  O mytho é o nada que é tudo.1

  —F. Pessoa, Mensagem

  There is only childhood and death. And nothing in between . . .

  —Gaustine, Selected Autobiographies

  The world is no longer magical. You have been abandoned.

  —Borges, 1964

  . . . And I enter the fields and spacious halls of memory, where are stored as treasures the countless images . . .

  —Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X

  Only the fleeting and ephemeral are worth recording.

  —Gaustine, The Forsaken Ones

  I feel a longing to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl. I would like to have wings, a tortoise-shell, a rind, to blow out smoke, to wear a trunk, to twist my body, to spread myself everywhere, to be in everything, to emanate with odors, to grow like plants, to flow like water . . . to penetrate every atom, to descend to the very depths of matter—to be matter.

  —Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony

  . . . mixing

  memory and desire . . .

  —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  Purebred genres don’t interest me much. The novel is no Aryan.

  —Gaustine, Novel and Nothingness

  If the reader prefers, this book may be taken as fiction . . .

  —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

  1Myth is the nothing that is everything.

  PROLOGUE

  I was born at the end of August 1913 as a human being of the male sex. I don’t know the exact date. They waited a few days to see whether I would survive and then put me down in the registry. That’s what they did with everyone. Summer work was winding down, they still had to harvest this and that from the fields, the cow had calved, they were fussing over her. The Great War was about to start. I sweated through it right alongside all the other childhood illnesses, chicken pox, measles, and so on.

  I was born two hours before dawn like a fruit fly. I’ll die this evening after sundown.

  I was born on January 1, 1968, as a human being of the male sex. I remember all of 1968 in detail from beginning to end. I don’t remember anything of the year we’re in now. I don’t even know its number.

  I have always been born. I still remember the beginning of the Ice Age and the end of the Cold War. The sight of the dying dinosaurs (in both epochs) is one of the most unbearable things I have seen.

  I haven’t been born yet. I am forthcoming. I am minus seven months old. I don’t know how to count that negative time in the womb. I am as big as an olive, weighing a gram and a half. They still don’t know my sex. My tail is gradually retracting. The animal in me is taking leave, waving at me with its vanishing tail. Looks like I’ve been chosen for a human being. It’s dark and cozy here, I’m tied to something that moves.

  I was born on September 6, 1944, as a human being of the male sex. Wartime. A week later my father left for the front. My mother’s milk dried up. A childless auntie wanted to take me in and raise me, but they wouldn’t give me up. I cried whole nights from hunger. They gave me bread dipped in wine as a pacifier.

  I remember being born as a rose bush, a partridge, as ginkgo biloba, a snail, 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 am.

  I.

  THE BREAD OF SORROW

  THE SORCERER

  And then a sorcerer grabbed the cap off my head, stuck his finger straight through it and made a hole about yea big. I started bawling, how could I go home with my cap torn like that? He laughed, blew on it, and marvel of marvels, it was good as new. Now that’s one mighty powerful sorcerer.

  Come on, Grandpa, that was a magician, I hear myself say.

  Back then they were sorcerers, my grandfather says, later they became magicians.

  But I’m already there, twelve years old, the year must be 1925. There’s the fiver I’m clutching in my hand, sweaty, I can feel its edge. For the first time I’m alone at the fair and with money to boot.

  Step right up, ladies and gents . . . See the fearsome python, ten feet long from head to tail, and as long again from tail to head . . .

  Daaang, what’s this twenty-foot-long snake? . . . Hang on there you, where do you think you’re going, you owe me a fiver . . . Well, I only got five and I’m not gonna waste it on some snake . . .

  Across the way they’re selling pomades, medicinal clay, and hair dyes.

  Dyyyyyyye for your ringletsssss, brains for your nitwitssss . . .

  And who is that guy with all the sniffling grannies gathered around him?

  . . . Nikolcho, the prisoner of war, finally made it back home, and heard that his bride had married another, Nikolcho met her at the well and cut her head clean off, as her head sailed through the air it spoke, oh Nikolcho, what have you done . . . Time for the waterworks, grannies . . .

  And the grannies bawl their eyes out . . .
Now buy a songbook to find out what terrible mistake he made, slaying his innocent wife . . . A songbook hawker. Geez, what could that mistake have been? . . .

  People, people, jostling me, I clutch the money, just don’t let anybody steal it, my father had said when he gave it to me.

  Stop. Agop’s. Syrup. Written in large, syrupy pink letters. I swallow hard. Should I drink one? . . .

  Come and get your rock candyyyyyy . . . The devil is tempting me, disguised as an Armenian granny. If you’re in the know, here is where you’ll go . . . So what now? Syrup or rock candy? I stand in the middle, swallowing hard, completely unable to decide. My grandfather in me cannot decide. So that’s where I get the indecisiveness that will constantly torment me. I see myself sitting there, scrawny, lanky, with a skinned knee, in the cap that will soon be punctured by the sorcerer, gawking and tempted by the world offering itself all around me. I step yet further aside, see myself from a bird’s-eye view, everyone is scurrying around me, I’m standing there, and my grandfather is standing there, the two of us in one body.

  Whoosh, a hand grabs the cap off my head. I’ve reached the sorcerer’s little table. Easy now, I’m not going to cry, I know very well what will happen. Now there’s the sorcerer’s finger coming out the other side of the cloth, man oh man, what a hole. The crowd around me roars with laughter. Someone smacks my bare neck so hard that tears spring into my eyes. I wait, but the sorcerer seems to have forgotten how the rest of the story goes, he sets my torn cap aside, brings his hand to my lips, pinches his fingers and turns them and, horror of horrors, my mouth is locked. I can’t open it. I’ve gone mute, the crowd around me is now roaring with laughter. I try to shout something, but all that can be heard is a mooing from somewhere in my throat. Mmmmm. Mmmmm.

  Harry Stoev has come to the fair, Harry Stoev has come back from America . . .

  A husky man in a city-slicker suit rends the crowd, which whispers respectfully and greets him. Harry Stoev—the new Dan Kolov, the Bulgarian dream. His legs are worth a million U.S. dollars, someone behind me says. He puts ’em in a chokehold with his legs, they can’t move a muscle. Well, that’s why they call it his death grip, whispers another.

  I clearly imagine the strangled wrestlers, tossed down on the mat one next to the other, and start feeling the shortage of air, as if I’ve fallen into Harry Stoev’s hold. I rush to escape, while the crowd takes off after him. And then from somewhere behind me I hear:

  Step right up, ladies and gents . . . A child with a bull’s head. A never-before-seen wonder. The little Minotaur from the Labyrinth, only twelve years old . . . You can eat up your fiver, drink up your fiver, or spend your fiver to see a marvel you’ll talk about your whole life long.

  According to my grandfather’s memory, he didn’t go in here. But now I’m at the Fair of this memory, I am he, and it irresistibly draws me in. I hand over my fiver, say farewell to the python and its deceitful twenty feet, to Agop’s ice-cold syrup, to the story of Nikolcho the prisoner-of-war, to the Armenian granny’s rock candy, Harry Stoev’s death grip, and sink into the tent. With the Minotaur.

  From this point on, the thread of my grandfather’s memory stretches thin, yet doesn’t snap. He claims that he didn’t dare go in, yet I manage to. He’s kept it to himself. Since I’m here, in his memory, could I even keep going if he hadn’t been here before me? I’m not sure, but something isn’t right. I’m already inside the labyrinth, which turns out to be a big, half-darkened tent. What I see is very different from my favorite book of Greek myths and the black-and-white illustrations in which I first saw the Minotaur-monster. They have nothing in common whatsoever. This Minotaur isn’t scary, but sad. A melancholy Minotaur.

  In the middle of the tent stands an iron cage about five or six paces long and a little taller than human height. The thin metal bars have begun to darken with rust. Inside there is a mattress and a small, three-legged stool at one end, while at the other—a pail of water and scattered hay. One corner for the human, one for the beast.

  The Minotaur is sitting on the stool, with his back to the audience. The shock comes not from the fact that he looks like a beast, but that he is in some way human. Precisely his humanness is staggering. His body is boyish, just like mine.

  The first down of adolescence on his legs, feet with long toes, who knows why I expected to see hooves. Faded shorts that reach his knees, a short-sleeved shirt . . . and the head of a young bull. Slightly disproportionate to the body, large, hairy, and heavy. As if nature had hesitated. And just dropped everything right in the middle between bull and man—nature got frightened or distracted. This head is not just a bull’s, nor just a human’s. How can you describe it, when the tongue is also pulled in two directions? The face (or snout?)—elongated; the forehead—slightly sloped backward, but nevertheless massive, with bones jutting out above the eyes. (Actually, it is not unlike the forehead of all the men in our family. At this point I unwittingly run my hand over my own skull.) His lower jaw is rather protruded, the lips quite thick. The bestial always hides in the jaw, it’s where the animal leaves us last. His eyes, due to the elongated face (or snout) that flattens out on the sides, are wide set. Over the whole facial area there is some brownish fuzz, not a beard, but fuzz. Only toward the ears and neck does this fuzz congeal into fur, the hair growing wild and in disarray. And yet he is more human than anything else. There is a sorrow in him, which no animal possesses.

  Once the tent fills up, the man makes the Minotaur-boy stand. He gets up off the stool and for the first time looks at the crowd in the tent. His gaze wanders over us, he has to turn his head, given his obliquely set eyes. They seem to rest on me for a moment. Could we be the same age?

  The man who herded us into the tent (his master and guardian) begins his tale. An odd mix of legend and biography, honed over the course of long repetitions at fairs. A story in which eras catch up with one another and intertwine. Some events happen now, others in the distant and immemorial past. The places are also confused, palaces and basements, Cretan kings and local shepherds build the labyrinth of this story about the Minotaur-boy, until you get lost in it. It winds like a maze and unfortunately I will never be able to retrace its steps. A story with dead-end corridors, threads that snap, blind spots, and obvious discrepancies. The more unbelievable it looks, the more you believe it. The pale and straight line—the only way I can retell it now, lacking the magic of that tale—goes roughly as follows.

  Helio, the boy’s grandfather on his mother’s side, was in charge of the sun and the stars; in the evening he locked up the sun and drove the stars out into the sky, like driving a herd out to pasture. In the morning he gathered up his herd and let the sun out to graze. The old man’s daughter, Pasifette, the mother of this boy here, was kind and beautiful, she married a mighty king from somewhere way down there in the islands. This was long ago, even before the wars. It was a rich kingdom, the Lord God himself (their god, that is, the local one) drank whiskey with the king of the islands, they set store by each other, God even gave him a big bull with a pure white hide, which was a downright wonder to behold. So the years went by and God demanded that same bull as a sacrifice. But Old King Minyo (Minos, Minos . . . somebody yelled out) was feeling stingy and decided to pull a fast one on God and slaughtered another bull, again fat and well fed. But can you really pull a fast one on God? God found out, hit the roof, started blustering, saying, don’t pull this while-the-grass-grows-the-horse-starves business on me, now you’ll see who you’re messing with. He fixed it so that Minyo’s meek and loyal wife, Pasifette, sinned with that very same handsome stud of a bull. (Here a buzz of disapproval sweeps through the crowd.) And from this a child was born—a man in body, but a bull in countenance, with a bull’s head. His mother nursed him and cared for him, but that laughingstock King Minyo just couldn’t stomach the disgrace. He didn’t have the heart to kill the little baby-Minotaur, so he ordered it to be locked up in the basement of the palace. And that basement was a real labyrinth, a master stone
mason made it so that once you go in, there’s no getting out. That mason must’ve been from around these parts, one of our boys, since here we’ve got the best, while those Greeks are lazy as sin. (A buzz of approval sweeps through the tent.) But afterward that poor old mason didn’t earn a red cent from the whole business, but that’s another story. They tossed the little boy inside, at the tender age of three, torn away from his mother and father. Just imagine what his poor angelic little soul must’ve suffered in that dark dungeon. (At this point, people began sniffling, even though they themselves did the exact same thing with their little snot-nosed brats, fine, so it wasn’t for eternity, they’d lock them up between the thick cellar walls only for an hour or two.) They tossed him there in the dark, the storyteller went on, the little guy cried day and night, calling for his mother. In the end, Pasifette begged one of those master masons who had made the labyrinth to sneak the boy out secretly, while they put a young bull in his place. But that’s not in the book, some know-it-all in the crowd chimes in. Let’s keep that between us, the storyteller says emphatically, so that old Cretan King Minyo doesn’t find out about the switch, ’cause he still doesn’t have the slightest inkling. And so they secretly freed the little boy with the bull’s head and again secretly loaded him onto a ship bound for Athens (the same one going to take the seven Athenian lads and lassies, supposedly for the Minotaur). The little Minotaur gets off in Athens, there an old fisherman finds him and hides him in his hut, looks after him for a year or two, and gives him to one of our boys, a shepherd, who goes down south in the winter to graze his herd of cattle, all the way to the Aegean. He took him, saying since he’ll never be able to live out in the open among people, hopefully the cattle will take him in as one of their own. Well now, that very same shepherd personally passed him on to me a few years back. The cows don’t want him neither, he said, they don’t accept him as their own, they’re scared of him, my herd’s scattered, I can’t keep him with me any longer. Since then we’ve been going around to fairs with the poor little orphan, abandoned by his mother and father, not man enough for men, nor bull enough for bulls.