Praise for Natural. Novel.

"Like Fernando Pessoa, Gospodinov has disappeared within

his multiple selves (author, narrator, editor, gardener) and has
become a detached observer of his own life.The narrative is rich
in mini-stories . . . and the composition is multifaceted....All
this informs the postmodern quality of Gospodinov's fiction."
-World Literature Today

"Natural Novel is really an unidentified literary object and is

almost impossible to retell. It is at the same time funny and
erudite, arrogant and refined, yet brilliant in every respect and
innovative in form."
-Livre-Hebdo

"The superb style and flowingly written narrative along with

the clever switching between different forms of discourse and
genres turn Gospodinov into a harbinger of a new, fruitful
literary form."
-Politika
 r
=er '. Sh-- .... ��-·,

Georgi \
G/o
.
spodino?v
I (

liATURAL i
NOVEL I

Translation by Zornitsa Hristova

Dalkey Archive Press

NORMAL • LONDON
Originally published in Bulgarian as Estestven Roman by Janet-45, 1999
Copyright © 1999 by Georgi Gospodinov
Translation copyright © 2005 by Zornitsa Hristova
French edition published as Un roman nature! by Editions Phebus, 2002
T his edition made through an arrangement w ith Editions Phebus

First edition, 2005

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Gospodinov, Georgi, 1968-

[Estestven roman. English]
Natural novel I by Georgi Gospodinov; translated from the Bulgarian
by Zornitsa Hristova.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56478-376-6 (alk. paper)
I. Hristova, Zornitsa. II. Title.

PG1038.17.085E8413 2005
891.73'5-dc22
2004052738

Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

�
�
Dalkey Archive Press is a nonprofit organization located at Milner Library
(Illinois State University) and distributed in the UK by
Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd. (London).

www.centerforbookculture.org

Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the

United States of America.
"Natural history is nothing more than the nomination of the
visible. Hence its apparent simplicity, and that air of na'ivete
it has from a distance, so simple does it appear and so obvi­
ously imposed by things themselves."
-Michel Foucault
�IATURAL
NOVEL
 1

There is always a long train of crying people

and a shorter train of laughing people. Yet)
there is a third train ofpeople who no longer
cry and no longer laugh. The saddest of the
)
three. That s what I want to talk about.

We are getting a divorce.

I had a nightmare about what it would be like leaving. All
our possessions are packed, cardboard boxes stacked to the
ceiling, and yet the room still feels quite spacious. The hall­
way and the other rooms are filled with relatives-Emma's
and mine. Whispering, rustling, and waiting to see what
we're going to do. Emma and I are standing by the window.
All that's left to do is divide a pile of record albums and
we're done. Suddenly she takes the first LP out of its jacket
and hurls it through the window. This one's mine, she says.
The window is closed, yet the LP flies through it as if the
glass were made of air. I take the next one out and hurl it
too. Somewhere near the garbage cans it hits a filthy pigeon
in mid-flight.
Everything happens in slow motion, which intensifies the
horror. As the LP cuts through the pigeon's neck, there are
several distinct short notes. The sharp bone of the pigeon's
throat plays a few seconds from the track on the record. Just
the opening tune. Some sort of cabaret song, I don't remem­
ber which one. 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg'? 'Oh, Paris'?

1
'The Cafe with the Three Pigeons'? I don't remember. But
there was definitely music;. 'The severed head keeps flying (on
momentum) a few yards further while the body tumbles to
the ground around the garbage cans. There isn't any blood.
In the dream everything is simple. Emma bends down
and hurls the next LP. Then I do. She does. I do. She does.
Every LP repeats what happened to the first one. The side­
walk across the street is littered with bird heads, grey, identi­
cal, their eyes closed. With each severed head, the relatives
behind us burst into enthusiastic applause. Mitza, our cat,
stays by the window and salivates.
I woke up with a sore throat . At first I wanted to tell
Emma about my dream, then changed my mind. It was just
a dream.

2
 2

The apocalypse may take place in one particular

country.

I bought a rocking chair one Saturday in early January

1997. I had just got my paycheck and half of it went into
buying that chair. It was the last one at the old, comparatively
low prices . The incredible inflation that winter made the
craziness of my purchase even worse. The chair was a wicker
bamboo-imitation, not particularly heavy but large and diffi­
cult to carry. It was unthinkable to give up the other half of my
salary for a taxi, so I hauled it like a basket-seller and started
on my way home . I was walking, carrying the chair on my
back and getting angry stares from passers-by for the luxury
I had afforded myself. Someone has to describe the miserable
winter of 1997, as well as all the other miseries-the winters
of 1990 and 1992. I remember an elderly woman asking for
half a lemon at the market. Others searched around the empty
stalls at night for a potato that might have been accidentally
dropped . More and more well-dressed people overcame
their shame and reached into the garbage cans. Hungry dogs
waited on the side or gathered in packs to attack pedestrians
coming home late. As I write these fragmented sentences, I
imagine big newspaper headlines in bold letters.

3
 One night I came home and found that my apartment
had been broken into. ·The only thing missing was the TV
set. Strangely, my first concern was the rocking chair. It was
still there. Perhaps they couldn't get it through the door-it
was too big, I had moved it in through the window. I spent
the whole night in the chair. When Emma came back, she
tried calling the police. To no avail. Nobody paid attention
to burglary calls anymore. Fuck it. I sat in the rocking chair,
caressed my two cats that were scared by the mess (where
were they hiding when the thieves came?) and smoked a ciga­
rette over the ruins of whatever was left of my male dignity.
I was unable to protect even Emma and the cats. I wrote a
story.
An apartment is broken into. At the time of the burglary
only the wife is home-fortyish, slightly fa ding, watching a
soap opera on TV. The intruders-young, normal-looking
guys-don't expect to find anybody there, but they quickly
figure it out. The woman is frightened enough anyway. She
takes the money out of the closet herself. She doesn't resist
when they tell her to give them her jewelry. Wedding ring
too? Yes, the wedding ring too. She removes it with great
difficulty because it is stuck on her finger. Suddenly, when
the thieves try to take away the TV set (the soap opera
is still on, by the way), the woman puts her arms around
it . She speaks for the fi rst time, pleading that they take
anything except the TV set . She just stands there with her
back to the two men, clasping the screen to her breasts,
ready to do anything to protect it . The thieves could easily
push her aside, but they are surprised by her sudden reac­
tion . She senses their hesitation and says ambivalently that

4
they could do anything to her if they only leave the TV set
alone.
The deal is struck. We' ll fuck you, one of them says. She
doesn't move. They quickly lift her skirt . No reaction. Her ass
is still tight. The first one comes right away. The second takes
more time. The woman holds on to the TV and doesn't move,
only asks them to get on with it because her kids will soon
be home from school. This, finally, discourages the second
one and the men leave the apartment . The soap opera is over.
Relieved, the woman lets go of the TV and heads for the
bathroom.
How are the ' 90s going to end-as a thriller, a gangster
movie, a black comedy, or a soap opera?

5
 Editor's Note

Here's the story of this story.

As the editor at a literary newspaper in the capital I
received a notebook. It was stashed in a self-made envelope
addressed to me personally at the office. There was no return
address, just smears of dry glue. Removing the notebook did
little to relieve the sickness I already felt-approximately
eighty crumpled sheets with tightly written lines on either
side. Such manuscripts were never a good omen for an editor.
Their authors, mostly elderly pests, drop by a couple of days
later to ask if the work of their life-what else?-was accept­
ed for publication. I knew from experience that if you didn't
refuse them bluntly but, respecting their old age, kindly told
them you hadn't finished reading it yet, they besieged you
every week like weary warriors, determined to fight to the
end. And though the end was near, the clatter of their canes
on the office stairs often made me swear to myself.
Oddly, there was no title, nor an author's name. I put
the notebook in my bag, planning to take a look at it when
I got home. I could always reject it with the excuse that we
accepted only typed texts and thus postpone the second visit

6
by a few months. That night I naturally forgot about it, but
in the next few days nobody showed up to seek an answer. I
opened it a whole week later. As incredible as it sounds, it was
one of the best things I had read since I became an editor.
A certain man was trying to talk about his failed marriage
and the novel (I don't know why exactly I decided it was a
novel) was based on the impossibility of relating this fail­
ure. In fact the novel itself could hardly be summarized. I
immediately published an excerpt and waited for the author
to drop by. I had added in a little note that the manuscript
had come in unsigned, probably due to the negligence of
the author whom we would like to meet . A whole month
passed. Nothing . I published a second excerpt . Then one
day a youngish woman came into my office. She was furious
that the newspaper was intruding into her private life. The
woman wasn't a regular reader, but a friend had showed her
the published excerpts. She claimed that they were written
by her ex-husband who wanted to slander her. On top of it
all the names were real, which, according to her friend, was
reason enough for a lawsuit . All of a sudden the woman
burst into tears, and then her anger subsided and she even
looked kind of sweet . By fits and starts she told me that her
husband was once a very decent man who wrote at odd times
and even published a few short stories. Admittedly she never
read them. He went nuts after the divorce. Now he had sunk
to the status of a bum, loitering around the block to harass
and discredit her.
'Would you show him to me?'
' No, you find him, he's always dragging his rocking chair
around the local market . There's no mistaking him . And,

7
please, don't publish this anymore, I can't stand it,' she said
quite softly and left.
He made a living as all bums do, though he didn't
rummage in garbage cans for food, or at least nobody saw
him doing that. He' d get money by selling used paper for
recycling. He was one of those quiet loonies. Hanging around
the market, doing small favors, keeping an eye on the goods
in the evening, which got him a few peppers, tomatoes, water­
melons . . . whatever was in season. That much I got from the
sellers after they repeatedly asked me if I were the police.
They didn't know much.
I found him in the local park. He was rocking in his chair
somewhat mechanically, as if he were in a trance. Matted hair,
a long-discolored T-shirt and torn sneakers. Ah, yes, and a
raw-boned street cat humped in his lap. He kept methodi­
cally stroking her. He couldn't be more than forty-five. They
had warned me he hardly spoke, but I was a bearer of good
news after all. I introduced myself. I think he smiled faintly
without looking at me. I had brought the two issues with his
excerpts. When I asked him if he was the author, he nodded
without coming out of his trance. I tried to tell him how
good the text was; I talked about publication and asked about
other works. No effect . At last I took whatever money I had
on me and gave it to him, saying this was his payment. He
was obviously not used to earning money. For the first time
since I got there he stirred, came out of his trance and looked
at me.
'You're getting a divorce, right? ' He sounded almost
friendly, like someone offering his condolences.
Damn it, I didn't think it showed. In any case I looked

8
better than he did. I hadn't told any of my friends yet . A few
days earlier my wife and I had filed for divorce. Since he had
finally started talking, I asked him his name.
'Georgi Gospodinov.'
'That's my name,' I almost screamed.
'I know,' he shrugged, unmoved . 'I used to read your
paper. I've met seven people with the same name besides
you and me.'
He didn't say anything else. I left him there and hurried
off. Everything unfolded like a bad serial novel. It occurred
to me that I could call his wife and double-check the name.
Before I turned the corner, I had to look back at him. He was
still sitting there, rocking back and forth in his wicker chair.
Like one of those plastic hands people used to stick to the
rear windows of their cars, waving mechanically.
I returned a year later. In the meantime I had found a
book publisher who liked the manuscript, so I only had to
find the author and get him to sign the contract . I doubted
I would be able to bring the man to the publisher, so I
had brought the contract with me. It was late spring . I had
already learned the name from his wife and had to swallow
the coincidence. I felt a bit guilty for cringing that such a
degenerate type could have the same name as mine. The
publishing contract contained a decent advance that would
surely do him good. I searched the local park, but he was
nowhere to be found . I tried the market . I asked one of the
grocers who looked familiar from my last visit . He didn't
have a clue . My man was last seen sometime in October,
no . . . maybe in early November. He didn't come anymore .
Then the grocer shook his head and hinted, by the way,

9
that last winter was bitter cold and the Wicker-Ticker (as
he was known here) had 'planned to spend it in his rock­
ing chair. Du ring this time the man sold two kilograms
of tomatoes, two kilograms of cucumbers and some green
parsley, without missing a chance of praising his goods to
me. All that-in a stale, somewhat screeching voice. I felt
like crushing his tomatoes, one by one, plucking each leaf
off his fresh parsley and sticking his head in the resulting
puree. How come none of the grocers, the only people this
bum seemed to talk to, hadn't done anything about him?
Whatever, maybe get him a small room to spend the winter
in, or even a basement . . . Yet my anger gradually subsided
as it led straight to the question of why I, myself, hadn't done
anything about the poor bugger. I left the market and found
a bench in the park not far from the spot where last year I
had my first and probably last talk with the man in the rock­
ing chair. On top of it all, by a strange coincidence-because
all coincidences always seem strange-we shared the same
name. I told myself maybe it all turned out okay. Maybe
the man pulled himself together, maybe the publication in
my newspaper got him out of his chair and off to work
somewhere; maybe he even started writing again, rented
an apartment and found a new wife. For a while I tried to
picture him in the living room of a condo, sitting in his
rocking chair in front of the TV with slippered feet, old but
clean pants and a warm sweater. And, in his lap, the same
street cat he was stroking back then. The more I polished
this picture in my mind, the less I could believe it. Finally
I took out the publishing contract and did the last thing I
could do for my namesake. I signed it .

10
 3

Atoms float in the void (the void does exist))

and by combining with each other they cause
things to appear, and by separating they cause
things to perish.
Democritus (according to Aristotle)

Flaubert once dreamed of writing a book about nothing,

a book without content, 'a book that would be held together
by itself, by the internal force of its style just as the Earth is
suspended in the air without any support.' Proust has partly
achieved that goal using associative memory. But he too could
not resist the temptation of having content . My immodest
desire is to mold a novel of beginnings, a novel that keeps
starting, promising something, reaching page 17 and then
starting again. The idea or nucleus of this kind of novel can
be found in classical philosophy, and mostly in the naturphi­
losophical triad of Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus.
The novel of beginnings would rest on those three pillars .
Empedocles insists on a limited number of arch-beginnings,
adding Love and Enmity to the four basic elements (Earth, Air,
Fire and Water) in order to start them moving and combin­
ing. The one closest to my novel is Anaxagoras . His idea of
panspermia, or the seeds of things Oater Aristotle would call
them homeomeria, but this sounds nowhere near as warm
and personal), could turn into the impregnating force for
this novel . A novel created from countless tiny particles,

11
arch-substances, i.e., beginnings that fall into an unlimited
number of combinations : If Anaxagoras claims that every­
thing consists of tiny particles similar to one another, then
a novel could indeed be built with beginnings only. Then
I decided to try openings that had already acquired classi­
cal status. I would call them atoms, thus paying my debt to
Democritus. An atomic novel of opening lines floating in the
void. My first attempt went like this:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you' ll
probably want to know is where I was born, and what my
lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied
and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield
kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to
know the truth.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or

iohether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages
must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I
record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe)
on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night.

My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentle­

men having asked me to write down the whole particulars about
Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing
back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there
is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of
grace 17- , and go back to the time when my father kept the

12
'Admiral Benbow' inn, and the brown old seaman, with the
sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof

They helped Bai Ganio take down the cape from his shoul­
ders; he donned a Belgian cloak-and everybody said he was
now a true European.
'Why don't we all tell some story about Bai Ganio ? Let's
do it. ''I'll tell an anecdote.''Wait, I know more . . . ''No, me,
you don't know anything . .. '
After much clamor we finally agreed that Stani would start.
And so he began:

Immer fiillt mir, wenn ich an den Indianer denke, der Turke
ein; dies hat, so sonderbar es erscheinen mag, doch seine Bere­
chtigung.

Eh bien, mon prince. Genes et Lucques ne sont plus que des

apanges, des proprietes de la familie Bonaparte. Non, je vous
previens, si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si
vous permettez encore de pa/lier toutes les infamies, toutes le
atrocites de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j 'y crois)-je ne vous
connais plus, vous n' etes plus mon amt� vous n ' etes plus mon
"faithful slave," comme vous dites! Oh, hello, hello. Je vois que
je vous fais peur, sit down and tell us about it.

The second day of Easter I was having lunch with Mr. Petko
Rachev, a Bulgarian writer and journalist. He lived in a crammed
two-story house on the corner of two narrow streets in one of
the most uncivilized Istanbul areas, Balkapan Khan. Mrs. K., a
relative of Mr. Rachev's who lived with him, placed before us

13
two big glasses, filled them with peeled sliced apples and poured
'

on them black and delicious Palishman wine. We took the apple

slices out with our fingers and sipped the wine, thereby continu­
ing our conversation in a merry and contented manner.

I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good

family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner
of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate
by merchandise and, leaving off his trade, lived afterward at
York, from whence he had married my mother . . . I had
two elder brothers, one of which was lieutenant-colonel to an
English regiment offoot in Flanders, formerly commanded by
the famous Colonel Lockhart, and was killed at the battle near
Dunkirk against the Spaniards; what became of my second
brother I never knew, any more than my father or mother did
know what was become of me.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy

in its own way. All was confusion in the Oblonsky's house­
hold.

That cool May evening chorbad.;i' Marco, bare-headed, dressed

in his robe, was having dinner with his offspring in the court­
yard.

The dream of the Texas deer who's resting in its night shelter
is disturbed by the clatter of horse hoofs. It doesn't leave its
hiding, nor rises, because there are wild horses in the prairie
too that wander in the night. The deer only raises its head, its
antlers show over the high grass, and it listens carefully.

14
 Separated like this, the openings acquire a life of their
own and come together through intertextual similarities and
contrasts just as Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus
had foreseen. If read quickly one after another, they merge
and move like frames on a film reel, transfigured in a shared
kinetic that kneads characters and events into some sort of
new story. Salinger's opening, though disparaging of David
Copperfield-type beginnings, flows smoothly into those
particular lines by Dickens. Then the first sentence of The
Story of Arthur Gordon Pym coldly introduces itself, only to
fuse into the circumstantial story from Treasure Island. Then
Bai Ganio smoothly tells the story of Winnetou, while the
courteous French opening of the reception ball in War and
Peace merrily flows into the ritual of an afternoon feast of
Palishman wine and sliced apples at Mr. Petko Slaveikov's
house. Like a story that's sprung from this conversation ensue
the first lines of Robinson Crusoe, by the way, translated into
Bulgarian by the same Mr. Petko. Somewhere around here the
book decides to be a family novel and merges the Oblonsky
family with that of chorbadji Marco without any qualms (why
need there be any? one is Russian, the other pro-Russian)
and anyway something goes wrong in both families, someone
jumps the wall, be it Ivan Kralich or Anna Karenina. Even
the Texas deer somewhere in the prairies is disturbed by the
same noise. The world is one and the novel puts it together.
The openings are already there, the combinations are endless.
Every character is liberated from the predestination of his or
her story. The first capital letters of the decapitated novels
start floating like panspermia in the void, creating something
new, don't they, Anaxagoras?

15
 Or as Empedocles has put it so nicely, if a bit excessively,
from the earth rose many. neckless heads, bare arms that swung
to and fro, eyes with no foreheads above them floated around,
trying to merge with each other . . . From here on, everything
can go in any direction. The headless horseman could arrive
at Rostovi's reception and start cursing with the voice of
Holden Caulfield. Other things could happen, too. Yet this
Novel of Beginnings will describe nothing. It will only give
the initial impetus and will subtly move into the shadow of
the next opening, leaving the characters to connect as they
may. That's what I would call a Natural Novel .

16
 4

The divorce was neither long nor painful . The proce­

dure didn't take more than four or five months, which was
considered quite normal. Of course, we paid something to
get it over quickly. I thought I wouldn't take it to heart . So
did my wife. At the first hearing (which didn't last more
than a couple of minutes) we testified that our decision was
'peremptory and irreversible.' The prosecutor was rude. She
had hairy arms and a big mole on the left side of her nose.
She set a date for the second hearing after a three-month
reconciliatory perio d and called the next couple in . We
decided to go for a walk .
'Well, you have enough time to decide before the next
hearing,' my wife said. I was picturing all of our wedding
guests now coming to the divorce. The two rituals are related,
right? It would be appropriate to get the same witnesses now.
At least this would save us the awkwardness of having to
inform each one that we have broken up, that I no longer
answer the same phone, etc. I also pictured our relatives
crying at hearing us answer the judge with a 'peremptory and
irreversible' yes. But they cried at the wedding, too.

17
 'So, it turns out a marriage lasts between two yes's,' I said,
avoiding her question ..
My wife's pregnancy was already noticeable.
'Look, let's continue some other time. The final hearing
is way off.'

18
 00

'I was living with a girl who kept staying in the bathroom.
At least four times a day for an hour and a half each. I've
timed her. I waited like a dog in the hall and we talked. We
had some very serious conversations like this . Sometimes
when she fell silent, I looked through the keyhole .'
'The crapper is a rotten place ! '
'Don't interrupt him; so what happened?'
'Nothing: we talked . As if she's locked herself in and
you are trying to make her get out, thinking up anything to
persuade her to unlock the door so you can finally see her
face. Looking through the keyhole doesn't count; besides,
sometimes she blocked it with toilet paper. But once when
I was urging her to come out, she unlocked the door and
told me to come in . It didn't work . The room is too small for
two, you know. There she is, sitting with her panties down,
looking sunk into the bowl with only her knees and feet
sticking out . We couldn't have a decent conversation .'
'You were disgusted, weren't you? '
'I told you . The crapper is a rotten place!'
'No . . . It wasn't that . It just didn't work . It wasn't smelly.

19
Well, not much.'
'Wait . . . That's it .. Tliat's the heart of the matter. If you
can stand the stench of your girlfriend shitting in f rant of
you, if you're not disgusted, if you accept it like your own
smell, 'cause you don't mind your own (do you?), then you
stay with that woman. Get it? Call it the great love, one and
only, Miss Right, the one you can stay with for at least a few
years, etc. That's it . These things don't happen often. Just
once, and that's the test.'
'Cheers! Have you patented those things or are you trying
out your next novel on the present audience?'
'No, I'm serious, but the test might be different for jerks
like you. Cheers! '
'Enough about bathrooms, please. We're at a table, eating,
drinking, and then suddenly all those toilets and smells . . .'
'No, wait a minute. Why shouldn't people talk about
toilets at the table, huh? Why do you go to the bathroom?
....

Because you've been at the table, stuffing your face, eating

and drinking, and then you rush to the bathroom . That 's
natural, isn't it? Yet you're telling me it's not natural to talk
about it at the table. Now listen: is there anything closer to
the toilet bowl than the bowl that's on the table? They're both
called bowls. And both are porcelain. Porcelain bowwww­
wwwls! I 've thought about those things and I tell you there's
plenty in common. You must be fucking stupid not to see
how important the toilet is. You know what I ' ll do one day?
I ' ll collect all toilet stories, I'll put them in order, I ' ll add
commentaries and indexes and I'll publish a Great History
of the Toilet . . . '
'Paperback, printed on toilet paper.'

20
 'Good idea. But the history will be divided in two. The
house toilet is fundamentally different from the public toilet.
And I' ll tell you what the difference is.'
'Can I finish my livers first? 'Cause soon everything will
get disgusting.'
'The big difference is that when you go to the public toilet
it's only a procedure for you. You close the door, you unzip
your fly, do it, pull your pants up, and leave. Everything is
done as quickly as possible.'
'Because the toilets are shit.'
'Maybe so. But that's the procedure. But in your toilet at
home you can go at any time, even if you don't need to. You
can stay for hours, read a book or read cartoons. You can
simply rest your chin on the palm of your hand and think. No
other room gives you such privacy. This is the most important
room, you know. The most important room.'
'So, when you go in the public john it's a procedure, and
when you shit at home it's a ritual.'
' Yeah, something like that. Those are private rituals, for
your eyes only. Because nobody sees you there. I don't think
even God looks at you.'
'That's why I tell you the crapper is a rotten place. Some
grandfather of mine hanged himself in the outhouse. He took
his belt off and slid it over a beam under the roof tiles. He
put his feet in the hole so he could hang down. His trousers
had fallen to his ankles because they were too loose without
the belt.'
' When I was a kid, I went to the village movie theater
and wondered why nobody in movies went to the toilet. All
those Indians, cowboys, entire Roman legions, and no one

21
took a shit or peed. While I ran to the john after only two
hours in the theater, those guys from the movies never went
there in their whole life . See, I told myself, real men don't
squat with their warm asses; I had decided to try to see how
long I could go without defecating. I held it in for three days.
My stomach hurt like hell, I was walking slightly bent; my
parents got scared and were about to call the doctor. On the
third night, I gave up. I locked myself in the bathroom and
let go. I felt like an untied balloon that deflates, whooses and
flaps until there's nothing left of it . That's when I started not
believing in movies. There was something wrong about them,
something . . . unrealistic.'
'That's just because you've been watching stupid films.
You can judge a movie by its toilet-shyness. Remember how
in Pulp Fiction Bruce Willis goes back to get his watch and
decides to toast Pop-Tarts, while Travolta is reading in the
john? When Travolta comes out, the toaster clicks, and Bruce
Willis jumps and shoots him. So the toaster pulls the trigger
and the kitchen blows up the ass of the toilet . See how it
fits? '
'How about the cop in Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Orange was it?
the one that told the story about drugs in the john with all the
details added to make it believable? When he was making his
story up, his boss told him: you've only got to remember the
details. That's what will make them believe you. The action,
he says, takes place in the men's room. You've got to know
everything about that john. Paper towels or a dryer, what kind
of soap, and so on. Whether it smells a lot or whether some
son of a bitch shit all over one of the stalls . . . Everything.'
'I think I am going to throw up . . . '

22
 5

Plant Weddings
Linnaeus

My wife's pregnancy was already noticeable. This seem­

ingly innocent phrase has a darker side if I told you (how shall
I put it?) that I wasn't the author of her pregnancy. Someone
else was the father, but I was still her husband. The preg­
nancy did her good, giving a certain ease to her movements
and a nice curve to her otherwise bony shoulders.
I was walking her home after the final hearing for our
divorce. What do people do on such occasions? A few days
earlier I had rented an apartment in the area and Emma had
the insane idea to get photographed together for one last
time. Just like a wedding. We entered the first studio we came
across. The photographer was one of those sweet old talkative
guys who always need to know what the occasion is. "A family
photo, eh? " as if this determined the right positioning. He
took his time arranging us, slung my hand first around her
shoulders, then in hers, turned our faces towards each other,
looked through the eyepiece, then came back again. At last a
click, a downpour of wishes for a happy and large family (yes,
obviously the pregnancy did show), and we were free to go .

23
 00

'The greatest thing about the '90s is still that dive down
the dirtiest Scottish toilet in Trainspotting.'
'What about Fassbinder's films, or Antonioni's-always
an important toilet scene. Or Kusturica, with that ridiculous
suicide attempt in the toilet. I think it was When Father Was
Away on Business. The guy hung himself on the tank above
the toilet but flushed instead of dying.'
'I don't like Kusturica. Boring slob. A moody B alkan
sentimentalist.'
'Okay, then forget about Kusturica. See how Nadya Auer­
man poses before Helmut Newton on the toilet bowl, while
Naomi Campbell gulps down another beer, squatting there
with her panties warming her ankles. On the cover of her
album. Makes you want to be reincarnated as a toilet bowl.'
'A year ago there was a symposium of owners of Asian
public toilets and field experts in Hong Kong. I read about
it in a newspaper. You know what kind of p apers were
presented? S omething like "Practical Measures for Elimi­
nating Bad Odors" or "Historical Developments of Public
Toilets in the Guangzhou Province." But the best one was

24
"An Analysis of Civil Satisfaction in the Public Toilets in the
Republic of Korea." I must have put up that newspaper clip
somewhere.'
'A friend of mine went to Beijing and told us about the
airport toilets . A big hall divided into cells with four-foot
partitions (you know how short the Chinese are) and no ceil­
ings . You squat in your cell, completely exposed above the
wais t, with two polite Chinese guys nodding and smiling on
either side. Right below is a gutter which, if you look closely,
features the excrement of everybody on your left.'
'We had the same toilets in the army. Just thinking about
them makes my eyes hurt. We had to pour chloric acid in
them for disinfecting. Makes you blind in no time. The
latrines were the old soldiers' responsibility and when they
wanted to harass us, they made one of us clean them. One
guy decided to pay them back by stealing a pound of yeast
from the kitchen and dumping it down the hole. You should
have seen that pus swell and spill ! '
'I saw something funny on a toilet wall in Berlin. " Eat shit.
Millions of flies can't be wrong." In German, of course.'
'More sauce, anyone ? '
'Toilet graffiti will have its own chapter in The History .. .
Why does the toilet induce the urge to write ? Most of those
writers hardly have the urge any other time. I 'm sure they
never wrote a single line on paper. The toilet wall, however,
is a special kind of medium. Publishing there brings different
pleasures . What if being on your own triggers secret mecha­
nisms, the primal instinct of writing, of leaving a sign ? I
wouldn't be surprised if all those cave drawings were scraped
while primitive man was squatting over his warm turds .'

25
 'But that's difficult to prove because excrement is perish­
able, with a short period' of decomposition.'
' Still it would be nice to look closer at the area around the
cave drawings. But let's get back to toilet graffiti. The most
isolated and lonely place on earth is actually quite public.
Once you could read anti-government slogans there. The
courage of society was displayed on the toilet wall.'
'Intimate toilet revolutions. Some courage, some society.
Look at them, shitting out of fear and then scribbling "Fuck
Todor Zhivkov" and "Screw the Communists" on the walls .
Forget that crap. All our bed-wetting dissidents are like that.
The only public place these people protested in were the
public toilets .'
'Loud standing ovations .'
'I've seen a wall that read: Don't push yourself, we don't
have any standards here.'
'Ok, what did I say? The toilets are the only surveillance­
free space. A real utopia where power is absent, everybody is
equal and everybody can do what he wants under the pretext
of doing what he came for. A feeling of absolute impunity.
You can't get it anywhere else, just the grave and the toilet.
The interesting thing about it is that both are about equally
large. On the other hand, all that calls . . . '

'The calls of nature as calls for freedom. Now there)s a title

for a thesis.'
'Hold it . . . all those slogans on the toilet walls could be
completely apolitical. Maybe it's only language rioting. It's
not just your body with its lower depths entering the toilet,
it's language as well. Language also feels the urge to unbutton
its trousers, to let go, to blurt everything pent-up that fucking

26
day, the whole shitty life. All those stupid fairy-tales, stupid
newspapers, stupid people you meet, so when you are finally
alone in the toilet you feel a rightful urge to write "Fuck " on
the wall. This is language's urination and intestinal relief.'
'So when we're talking about toilets, we're talking about
language.'
' The food is getting cold and I have to go home. And
when my wife asks me what the hell we talked about, I'll tell
her-we talked shit.'
'You said it ! Mr. Queasy! Guys , a toast to him. I think
this is a revelation.'

27
 6

I wish somebody had said: This novel 's good,

because everything is uncertain in it.

He woke up late the ne xt day. He h adn't cleaned up

after last night. The ashtrays stank like dormant volcanoes,
if volcanoes had a stench. Last night he was drinking with
three of his friends who had helped him move to his house.
They spent the n ight talking about toilets . He pushed the
conversation in that direction himself. This suited everyone
best. Nobody wanted to talk about what had happened.
Nobody said a word about it . The best way to liven up a
conversation is to try avoiding a certain subject. He got out
of bed . . . in fact he had slept fully dressed on a mattress on
the floor. He headed for the bathroom, tripped over a stack of
books and started swearing. When will he put all that stuff in
order-cardboard boxes, bags of books, a still-unassembled
bed, an old typewriter and all the other bits and pieces like
that? Ah, yes , and a disproportionately large wicker rocking
chair that takes up half the room and lends a decadent finesse
to the whole chaos. On the way back from the b athroom he
carefully evaded the cardboard boxes piled up in the corri­
dor, but once in the room, his head hit the rather low-hung
lampshade inherited from the last tenants. He collapsed in

28
his chair and for the first time in a couple of days considered
the situation. It seemed like only yesterday he had every­
thing-a large apartment in one of the best parts of town, a
telephone, two cats, a decent job, a couple of family friends
who often came by. Oh, yes, and a wife. Though the last few
months they communicated only when they had guests, she
was the force that kept their home in order. Peace and quiet,
and he only had to find the time to write. All that had ended
in a couple of days . The collapse had in fact started at least
a year earlier, but with some masochistic pleasure they both
ignored it. He got up and took a pack of cigarettes out of the
precious rations in his travel bag. They had used up every­
thing last night. At thirty he didn't exactly want to start all
over. Starting over. What a dumb phrase, fit for second-rate
novels and box-office hits . 'Turn your back on all that.' 'Get
up and fight.' 'Rise up for a new beginning.' Bullshit.
So where do you start? What kind of start is that anyway?
Going back five years . . . No, five were not enough. Ten,
fifteen . . . Everything started a whole lot earlier.
It was almost lunchtime. He had several options . Screw
everything and go to another city, or another country. Hang
himself on the tank above the toilet. Take all his money, buy
five packs of cigarettes and just as many bottles of brandy,
lock the door and wait for death. Go out for a sandwich and
a large coffee.
Fifteen minutes later he decided to start with the last one.

29
 7

In the temple of that rose

a black beetle took the vows.

How can a novel be possible these days, when we no

longer have a sense of the tragic? How can even the idea of a
novel be possible when the sublime is gone and all we have is
everyday life-in all its predictability, or worse, in the unbear­
able mystery of destructive chance ? The daily grind in all its
mediocrity-but only here do we get a glimpse of the tragic
and the sublime. The mediocrity of everyday life.
Once, when time moved more slowly and the world was
still enchanted, I heard or made up the following magical
formula : if you pluck a horsetail hair and soak it in water for
forty days, it will turn into a snake. Lacking a horse, I tried
a donkey hair. I don't remember if I waited the whole forty
days or whether the hair turned into a snake-maybe not,
since the tail wasn't equine.
Anyway, I discovered that the idea of the magical only
had to spend a minute in my head to turn all donkey asses
into magnificent Gorgons . I had read about the Gorgon in an
illustrated volume of Greek mythology. I wrote it down in a
calligraphy notebook with a Levski print on the cover. This
was the first miracle nature had offered me, the first everyday

30
miracle. What would I do if ass rumps had stayed ass rumps
and that was it ? As I see them now in their disenchanted
state. Anyway, it's been a long time since I last saw an ass
rump.
We could mention here that even in ancient times Epicu­
rus and his student Lucretuis insisted on the natural auto­
genesis of living organisms under the influence of dampness
and sunshine.
If ontogenesis really imitates philogenesis, i.e., if human
life does repeat all the centuries from the beginning of nature,
then childhood took place somewhere between the seven­
teenth and the eighteenth centuries. At least regarding the
loving attitude towards that same nature. Linnaeus , he who
like a new Adam gave names to the plants and introduced
binary nomenclature, the so-called nomina trivialia, named
one of his early writings Introduction to Vegetable Engage­
ments (written in the early eighteenth century yet published
as late as 1909) . Here's a description of pollination that could
well belong to Hans Christian Andersen:
The petals of the flower contribute nothing to reproduction;
they only serve as a nuptial bed so splendidly arranged and so
preciously scented by the Great Creator himself to let the groom
with his bride celebrate their wedding with utmost magnifi­
cence. When the bed is done the time comes for the groom to
embrace his darling bride and pour himself inside her .. .

31
 8

Sub rosa dictum.

I'm pregnant, my wife said that night. That's all. Films

and books offer two types of response to such an announce­
ment:
1) The man is surprised but happy. He looks silly, goes
to her and puts his arms around her. Carefully, so he won't
harm the baby. He doesn't know it's still a handful of cells.
Sometimes he presses his ear to his wife's belly: it's too early
for kicking. A close shot of the woman's eyes, deep and moist,
already maternal;
2) The man is unpleasantly surprised. We've felt there was
something wrong about him from the beginning of the novel
and now, in the moment of revelation, his whole hypocrisy
shows up as obvious as the blue line on a pregnancy test.
He doesn't do a good job of disguising his displeasure. He
doesn't want this child. He lies to his wife. The woman's eyes
in a close-up.
So, Emma came home, sat against me without taking her
coat off and said, 'I'm pregnant.' She didn't need to specify
who the father was . We hadn't had sex for about six months.
She said only 'I'm pregnant,' thereby erasing the above two

32
variants . I couldn't think of how to react. I didn't remem­
ber ever reading about such a situation. Learning that your
wife is pregnant with another man's child happens once in a
lifetime, no, once in a couple of lifetimes . You jump to your
feet, you swear, kick the table over, and break her favorite
vase. The moment must be made use of. Outside lightning
flashes, a thunderstorm's approaching. The world cannot stay
indifferent at such a time. But no, nothing of the sort. I tried
to light a cigarette very slowly. I didn't know what to say. My
wife seemed confused by my silence and blurted out that
she' d seen the baby on ultrasound and it was tiny, just half
an inch long.
I admitted I didn't know what to say. I was surprised at
not feeling any hate or any jealousy. How can you react to the
unthinkable ? What can you do ?
She said she wanted to keep the baby and me.
I stayed with Emma for two more months .
The baby got three o r four inches long.
Every day I said a mental goodbye to her, to the cats and
to my room .
Two months when nobody made a decision.
With ever y new day your wife turns into a mom, and you
cannot be the father of her child.

33
 9

Towards a Natural History of the Toilet

Where does a story start? What do people say at the very

beginning? Shall we start with wrath, as Homer did ? Or
shall we start with names ? If Plato was right in Cratillus that
there is an innate rightness of names for both Greeks and
barbarians , then we have to start here.
Going back to the history of the word 'toilet,' we come
to the English 'closet,' and then we find the Latin claudo,
clausis, which from its very first meanings insists on closing
and locking the door. Other meanings of the verb have a
conclusive connotation-a closing-off activity. It also means
hiding, secluding. The Romans had a knack of saying every­
thing with one word. So the toilet was the place where you
locked yourself up, finished whatever you came for and then
covered your tracks. Indeed the Romans didn't specify what
exactly one did there. It could 've been anything. In Ephesus ,
for example (what i s this city doing now i n Turkey ! ) , you
can see a well-preserved Roman toilet. Vast, marble-seated,
and completely unpartitioned. It's right next to the public
baths, with something like a covered bridge between them.
After bathing, the Romans would spend the whole afternoon

34
in casual conversation on these marble seats . Memento ! I
forgot something. Of course they didn't immediately place
their warm bodies on the cold marble-they let the bare asses
of their slaves warm up the stone.
But back to names . Don't you think that the Bulgarian
word kenef ( ' toilet' ) sounds better in this part of the world ?
It wasn't coined by bums, as many worthy ci tizens think.
It comes from the Old Arabic kaniph and denotes what
is hidden from the eye. It rings true because it came to us
through Turkish or because it somehow suits our latrines
best. If we open the Naiden Gerov six-volume dictionary we
will find a name that is even more precise and uneuphemis­
tic. Late nineteenth- century Bulgarian boldly calls the place
'nuzhdnik ' ( 'neednik') and 'sernik ' ( 'shitnik' ) . At the end of
this century my grandfather calls it the same, without having
read Naiden Gerov. He still can't imagine having your toilet
inside the house, right nex t to the kitchen. 'Going outside'
is much more decorous. That's another phrase, as literal as
it is euphemistic. Outside, somewhere in the backyard-the
inveterate patent of his generation. In fact every male has
experienced that watery copulation with nature every time
he's pulled off to the side of the road. In the bush, or over
virginal snow where you could even drip-paint something
vaguely resembling the late Picasso.
Or maybe we should start with a date, a notch in time, a
number. In 1855, England saw the invention of the first under­
ground public lavatory, or water closet. Men only. Perhaps
assuming such needs in the ladies showed lack of refine­
ment, to say the least. Although it was below ground level,
the running-water facility was not the least bit rundown. It

35
was prestigiously and lavishly tiled and brassed, with heavy
oak doors, something like a pub, except you're pissing out the
'

liquid instead of taking' it in. From those times dated this ode
to Thomas Crapper, the inventor of the water closet, written
by an anonymous , relieved user. It goes like this :

Crapper)s invention
Is well worth the mention
No need to blush-
Here comes the flush.'

How far can you go into history? Can it tell private stories,
everyday experiences, like Duret did in his Wondrous History
of Plants? Aldrovandi in The History of Snakes and Dragons
and Jonston in his Natural History of Quadruples-they did
just that. Natural history, especially the one we know from
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has no scruples about
its field. Thus Aldrovandi's history includes etymology, struc­
ture, sustenance, reproduction, tropes and traps, allegories
and mysteries , emblems and symbols, legends and hearsay,
dreams and cooking recipes.
Occasionally we hear strange stories and rumors about
toilets. A couple of years ago the newspapers told the story
of the Swede who found a boa in his toilet. The man went
to the smallest room in his house and was just about to sit
down when he saw something move beneath him, coiled in a
spiral-a real boa. History keeps silent about what happened
next-whether the Swede was bitten or whether he automati­
cally flushed.
The fact is that similar rumors appear sporadically. The

36
toilet, although it has been cultivated into something pleas­
ant, is still connected with the underground world.
The '30s saw the rumor that the New York sewage system
was full of alligators. And why? A certain family went to
Florida on vacation and brought back two baby gators. When
they got bored with them, they flushed them down the toilet.
The reptiles, however, didn't give up but instead fed off dead
rats and sewage and even reproduced, to the horror of New
Yorkers. Even later denials in serious publications like the
New York Times only convinced the citizens more that the
New York underworld was a downright jungle. I don't know
whether there was anything to it, but I personally know an
old lady who swore she saw a garter-snake slide down the
spout when she turned on the tap. It's only a matter of size.
Of course our talk about toilets we had at the table will
also enter my natural history. Sine qua non. All kinds of
stories go there, even the most trivial ones, especially the
trivial ones. Like the story of my friend Wensel, told by him
personally:
'I went to a university washroom. One of those unisex
ones. Splashed with shit. And I'm not a student, so I do
mind. That's when I heard a knock on the door and I said
it was occupied. A fantastic female voice answered, "Sorry."
A gorgeous sexy voice, I tell you. I was dumbstruck. And
wondering how I could get out of this mess, so that this girl
won't think it was me who crapped there when she came in .
So I stayed there-I was done but I didn't know how to get
out. If I stayed long enough, she might leave. But if she stayed,
the whole plan would backfire. That's enough time to crap
all over the place. There's no proving it wasn't me. So what

37
if I was even wearing a bow tie and carrying a leather bag?
For her I would be npthing but a champion shitter. Tricky
.

business, the whole system of public toilets is awful, with

no way out, not even a fucking window. The bow tie even
makes you look more like a pervert in that crappy context.
Makes you an idiot. Meanwhile the girl outside is waiting and
surely getting mad. Then I made a decision. I took the bow
tie off, crammed it in my pocket, unbuttoned my shirt, flung
the jacket over my arm and rolled up my sleeves. I became
invisible, part and parcel of this miserable washroom. I still
think this is the best strategy in such situations.'
'I kicked the door and went out.'

38
 10

Nobody has seen it, but still it exists . . .

After the wedding we lived at Emma's place for a few

years. Her parents' place, actually. Emma was on rather
strained terms with her parents and my arrival only made
things worse. The apartment was too small for two families.
We lived in a small bedroom with a balcony, so the only places
we would bump into her parents were the kitchen and the
bathroom. My wife would seize the chance, while her parents
were watching TV, to cook a quick supper, which she then
brought to our room. The other hot spot was the bathroom. I
got the knack of sensing when someone was getting ready to
take a shower or use the toilet. I suppose Emma's father also
made an effort to avoid me, because we managed to spend a
couple of months without seeing each other. We were more
likely to meet in town (where we just nodded formally) than
in those 70 square meters we inhabited. I don't remember
having any arguments with him-small wonder, since we
never talked. But I still can't say how the tension piled up
the way it did. Mutual antipathy, just like its opposite, has no
need for excuses. In fact excuses would only ease the tension,
but we carefully avoided them. Four years later, when my

39
wife and I were finally living on our own, the tension stayed
with us. That's the most ·amazing thing about it. Her parents
'

were gone to a new ap � rtment at the other end of town and

we controlled the recently forbidden realms of the kitchen
and the living room. I could go to the toilet at will and stay
as long as I pleased. And still the tension haunted the place. I
had the feeling it had oozed into the furniture, the wallpaper
and the carpeting. Emma and I started fighting incessantly. It
just happened, I can't remember any particular reason. As if
everything pent up in that small room had now found release.
Emma's relationship with her father was strangely mirrored
in her relationship with me. I felt I was going insane. We
changed the wallpaper, threw away the two old armchairs
and rearranged the rooms beyond recognition. I didn't tell
Emma what drove my enthusiasm, but I think she sensed it.
Nothing helped. There was a flawless, indestructible mecha­
nism that never failed to spoil everything.
The short stories I wrote back then (I had found a second­
rate magazine with a first-rate budget and published under a
penname for a handsome fee) got increasingly paranoid. One
of them, called 'The Mechanism,' was about an old press that
used to print a not-very-popular daily newspaper dedicated
to criminal stories and paranormal phenomena. The news­
paper went bankrupt and the machine was put away in a
storehouse. A month later the newspaper surprisingly came
out on the market again. Nobody knew who was publishing
it. The former editors didn't have a clue. The strangest thing
about it was that the news was covered one day in advance, so
you could read what would happen tomorrow. All forthcom­
ing murders, rapes and accidents were described in minute

40
detail. It finally turned out that behind all that was the same
press. It had printed the newspaper for so long and lived on
its ink and blood that even though the people were gone, it
kept working with terrifying momentum.
What was the mechanism that spoiled my m arriage with
Emma ? I'll never forgive myself for staying in that place,
though I doubt that moving out of the apartment would 've
solved the problem . Things had gone too far. We slept in
separate rooms . Each morning we took care not to run into
each other on our way to the bathroom. The same old story.
I knew it was getting to Emma, too, but neither of us could
do anything about it. The mechanism was working.

41
 11

I'm thinking about a novel of verbs and verbs only. No

explanation s , no descriptions . Only the verb is honest,
accurate and aloof. The beginning took me three nights . I
chain-smoked and didn't write anything. Which verb should
go first ? Each one looked weak and inadequate. You can't
start with ' deliver,' because 'conceive' must precede it, and
'copulate' comes even earlier, and before that comes ' desire'
and so on, all the way back to another ' deliver,' a crazy vicious
circle. Verbs on every level-a circulation of liquids inside
the organism, an oscillation of cell membranes, verbs in the
alveoli.
I'm sure a verb started it all. It couldn't be otherwise. I
got up. Lit a cigarette. Walked to the window. My wife came
in. Going to bed ? No.
She shrugged and left. I thought of her getting into her half
of the bed, the two cats sliding under the blanket with her.

42
 12

Only the banal stirs my interest. Nothing else

amuses me so.

The more irrationally isolated I became about my

ma rriage-that is, talking about it- the more I drifted
towa rds the bath room . Only in that place, in that room,
and in that language of toilets could I relax.
I buried myself in all kinds of research to find with some
wicked satisfaction how shyly-or shall I say queasily-the
toilet was always excluded. Language avoided the subject .
No science explored it, no discipline claimed it. I decided to
look it up as a partition of space, as an architectural element,
as a building. I read everything about civil engineering. All I
found was a meagre couple of lines somewhere at the end of
the otherwise circumstantial chapters on country and urban
housing, on downtown and uptown areas, on public services
and water-supply systems. And that was it. I started reading
every thing with the toilet in mind and annexing all sorts
of tidbits to my topic, even if their ostensible meaning was
elsewhere. As Garfinkle was surveying The Routine Grounds
of Everyday Activities or when sociology was discussing the
banal in our daily life, I secretly rejoiced because that was
my subject precisely. I loved reading Schutz who claimed to

43
study the world of immediate social experience (die Sociale
Umwelt) where 'we sh�ie with our closest p eople not just
the periods of time but a sector of our spatial world that is
commonly accessible. Thus the other person's body is within
my range, and vice versa.' Wasn't Schutz talking about that
very place ? Wasn't the toilet part of the primeval ground
( Urgrund) of the unquestionably given that must now be
questioned and subjected to interrogation ?
S chutz was appointed grand master of the new science
whose primary subject would be the toilet. Another invitation
was issued to Lyotard, who was searching for the 'oikeion) '
that shadowy space of privacy and solitude that counterbal­
ances the politikon. Well, I knew the answer to his prayers .
In the 193 0s Ortega y Gasset complained that the walls
had soaked up the anonymous noise of the plaza and the
boulevard. I could offer him the quietest and most secluded
place in the house. The last haven of civilization. I saw myself
as a new Virgil waiting to lead those people to the circles of
domestic paradise.

44
 13

Carlson ? Wasn't he a good-natured pedophile?

'W hen women overeat, their tummies swell and they lay
babies'-that's how children explain nature.
I love to talk with them seriously, as if they were adults.
Actually I find adults boring. We started light-heartedly.
'Do you know who lays the eggs ? '
'Hens do. They don't lay cows or clocks.'
' W ho lays the hen then ? '
'Well . . . the tree'-what an easy escape from the vicious
circle of the paradox, what an easy change of species.
'Who lays the tree then ? '
'The seed. ' Aha, he 's learned his lesson here. Slightly
disappointed, I decide to bluff.
'The seed ? How could a seed that small lay a tree so
.
b1g.:> '
'Well . . . ' Pondering the question for over a minute, baffled
by my remark. Normally big things give birth to smaller ones ,
and here . . . 'Well . . . the roots then ! '
'And who laid the roots ? '
'Thunderbolts,' he says with lightning speed. 'They fall
into the ground and they become roots.'

45
 I give up. I never thought of the shared rhizome of the
thunderbolt and the root.

Half an hour later I try the young physiologist again.

'Have you ever seen a beetle ? '
'Yes, the beetle is what bites the ladybugs.'
'So that's where the dots are from . . .'
'Only it's not dots but holes.'

46
 14

The fly. The fly is the only creature God has allowed to
haunt dreams. She alone is admitted by the Creator into the
realm of the sleeper. She alone can cross the impermeable
membrane between the two worlds. In that she is a tiny likeness
of Charon-if we assume that sleep is a little death. It's hard to
gauge how the fly deserved this faculty. Oh Lord, what if she
is Thy Angel in disguise, so when we shoo it away in disgust
or, Heaven forbid, squash it between the palms of our hands,
we are committing a mortal sin ? (Here readers are requested
to say a prayer and ask for forgiveness, just in case. )
It's also hard to determine how exactly the fly enters the
dream. We shall never know whether nostrils , ears or other
hidden apertures are her gates of choice.
And yet I would advise you to lie down in the afternoon,
when flies are buzzing around the room, and try to drift off.
You will seem to stop hearing them, but pay attention to a
few details in your dream-the noise of a passing chariot, the
lovely voice of a benevolent lady or the drizzling of rain from
clear skies . The fly will be waving the baton.

47
 15

God was fine milk and melting . . .

Nobody has ever succeeded in transporting something

from his dream. On the way out of dreamland there's an
invisible customs-house where everything is confiscated. I
was a kid when I first noticed the thin barrier where That
Thing stood. I called it That Thing because I had no name
for it. That Thing searched me thoroughly on my way out of
sleep and only let me wake up when it had made sure I wasn't
smuggling anything. Sometimes I dreamt of the local confec­
tionery for days, or rather nights, on end. I waited in line and
when it was my turn to face the salesgirl, I started rummaging
through my clothes and my terror grew with each searched
pocket. I had forgotten my money again. It was there, in day
territory, in the pocket of the trousers I had taken off for the
night. So shame and horror were all that was left from my
dream. That and the taste of untouched pastries .
One night I took all my savings with me. With the money
from the piggy bank they amounted to the considerable sum
of two leva and twenty to thirty stotinki. I put them in my
pajama pocket and I was off. Off to sleep, that is . I think
That Thing didn't search me on the way in. I stood before

48
the salesgirl, clutching the money in my pocket. I wanted to
impress her by pouring a handful of coins into the saucer so
I could 'contemplate' her. I don't know where I had heard
that word but I persisted in using it as a synonym of 'woo.'
The smaller the coins I gave to the salesgirl, the longer I got
to contemplate her. I splurged on several butter-rose petit
fours , some muffins , two bottles of millet-ale and a hand­
ful of toffees . I didn't want to eat them on the spot. I put
everything in a bag and I patiently waited to wake up . In
the morning my bed was empty. I searched the pocket of
my pajamas . The coins were there. It was That Thing at the
customs-house again, the thing which gobbles up the best
memories from your dreams . I have heard people calling it
the Itslippedmymind. Maybe that was its name.

49
 16

A certain Mr. Knaute froze a Jew frogs; they

became fragile and broke easily)· yet he took
the unbroken ones to a warm room and seven
to eight hours later they melted and became
fully alive.
Priroda Magazine, 1904

When I was nine, God came to me disguised as a light­

bulb. That's how it happened. I was on a school trip to Sofia.
After the zoo we were taken to the Alexander N evski Cathe­
dral, maybe b ecause we were close and it was starting to
rain. They told us that what we were about to enter was not
a church but a 'temple monument.' We understood only the
second half of that strange combination but somehow didn't
imagine monuments to be like this. It was really impressive
inside and we were wary of getting lost. While we were wait­
ing for the others to come out, a crippled old man came to us
and started telling us about God. The more loud-mouthed
kids immediately informed him that God didn't exist, or
Gagarin and the other astronauts would have met him long
ago. The old man just shook his head and said God was like
electricity-it exists but you cannot see it, it flows and makes
everything work. Shortly afterwards, the teachers came out
and took us away from the old man. But his words made
us think. God and electricity were equally vague to us, yet
I immediately blurted out to the teacher that God lived in
lightbulbs. There was another school trip the next year; this

50
time to the biggest water power station in the country, for
educational purposes . We were shown huge coils , gears and
motors and we were told that this was where electricity came
from. The teacher took me aside and asked whether I still
believed in that rubbish about God and electricity. I was
a big boy now so I said no. And yet , at home I was always
extra careful when I turned on the lamp or the hotplate. God
blinded and scorched.
A great time for empiricism. As high school students
we had heard that human urine was particularly medicinal
and drinking it could cure all kinds of diseases . It seems the
rumor hit the grapevine hard because our biology teacher
(that robust blonde whose crossed legs thrilled the virgin
souls of us in the first row of desks ) , got mad at the innuendo
one day in class and took to weeding it out so disgustedly you
would think somebody had offered her the remedy. Which
only proved that this urine theory thing was not so bogus
after all, or what was the fuss about? The next day three or
four of us had already tried the liquid (need I say that your
future naturalist was one of them) and described its taste as
not particularly nasty, slightly salty and sour like sea water
according to some sources or like pickle juice according to
others . We knew that uric acid was the reason. Never again
did we taste life so intimately as we did in childhood when
every rumor was unflinchingly tried.

51
 17

310 Dreams - Dyslexia

614 Mammary glands - Manz/est Destiny
1030 Slavonic languages - Sweetshops
From the catalogue of the
National Library

What happened to that photograph of me and Emma

taken on the day of our divorce ? Did anyone collect it from
the old guy at the studio?
Or have I quite consciously misplaced it among meticu­
lously bound old newspapers to make sure I never find it ?
That's what people do with photographs they take at funerals,
as well as with the dead themselves . They tuck them away
somewhere at the far end of town or in a special sector of
their not particularly reliable memories.
There comes a point when people start losing their desire
to have their picture taken, or they only do it under special
lighting.
My wife had the strange hobby of collecting photos from
weddings and funerals. She kept them together, which seemed
sacrilegious at the time. Now it doesn't. You open the drawer
and by the sweetly grinning faces of the newlyweds you
glimpse the waxy stiff jaws of the deceased. But all photos
had flowers. Lots of them. Mostly the same ones-from all­
purpose carnations and various kinds of roses to the cheaper
wild flower bouquets and hastily picked dahlias and lilac

52
branches from somebody's garden. The foreground of one
funeral photo was adorned by several magnificent callas ,
'the bridal flower,' as my grandma called it. The mourners
looked like strange black- clad wedding guests. Somewhere
behind them lurked the village band. The band for weddings
and funerals. Looking into the photos, I knew why people
didn't like keeping funeral pictures. The camera is unforgiv­
ing. When the photographer had been noticed, the mourners
posed, as if they were about to smile.
Dividing the pictures of me and Emma together was the
hardest thing to do.

Here we are in the very beginning of our relationship.

Sometime in our sophomore year. Strolling along Shipka St.
by the Doctor's Garden. Emma, I and Vesso, the eternal trin­
ity. For a year people were wondering which one was dating
her. Each of us is awkwardly caught in mid-movement. Were
we really so happy? I don't remember who took the photo.
Here we are at a party: Vesso, Emma, I and . . . Sanya,
with whom I split up just a few months earlier. Sanya was
one of those women who try to get close to your new girl­
friend. She' d hung on to Emma who had naively invited her
to party with us. In another photo, taken perhaps three or
four hours later, somebody (might well be me) had registered
the two of them dancing cheek to cheek. In fact 'cheek' is
not the right word. A foot shorter and generously endowed
(our bosom friend, as we used to joke) , Sanya was virtually
glued to Emma. The photo clearly showed the fingers of her
left hand clutching the ass of my future wife. Was she taking
revenge or did her lust, as I ' d always suspected, extend to

53
women ? I almost got worried for Emma. In my fear I used
up a lot of film. I don't remember the three of us ever getting
together after that evening. I suppose the two of them didn't
either.
Ah, here's the wedding series at last. Emma is looking
even taller and slimmer than usual in a simple tight-fitting
dress complemented by long gloves and a veil. I'm wearing a
toxic-green suit that's too big for me. Both mothers are weep ­
ing. Today, now that the marriage is over, their tears seem
justified. Emma's father is missing from the picture. Well, he
was missing from the wedding, too. In the last moment some­
body dragged an uncle beside her mother so she wouldn't
look like a widow.
The seven years of our marriage are painstakingly docu­
mented . Plenty of friends and parties . In reality there are
never as many as there seems to be in the pictures.
I skip two more albums with similar photos ; time and
again the occasional new face, otherwise the crowd remains
the same.
And here I am alone at last. On the bank of the Danube,
in Sremski Karlovtsi, Yugoslavia. There was a peculiar kind
of pleasure in being alone in a strange place, on the streets of
a strange city, in a country where you don't know anyone and
you're certain that nobody knows you. Here I am in Novi Sad,
sitting in a street cafe in front of the cathedral square. All
former Austro-Hungarian states have one. Naturally, at the
other end of the square is a McDonald's. The square and the
cafe are full of young people. Gorgeous women, teenagers,
young girls with roller-skates. You are distinctly aware that
nothing will happen between you and any of the women at

54
the nearby tables . And romance is all that matters to you in
the long run. Because you are a lunatic who purports to be a
writer and all the pretty women around you are nothing but
a future story. That's why you're going to sit alone, pampered
by the waitresses. No wonder: you keep ordering to prolong
your stay at the cafe. At last you will take a 'final ' walk around
the already empty square, you'll have a quick Big Mac and
go back to your hotel room. The only thing you'll write in
your notebook tonight will be the sentence you saw sprayed
on the back of the cathedral : 'Opium forever ! ' And that will
be all that you accomplish.
A cold breeze is wafting in from the river. Probably there
is some Danubian Europe, a utopian state unlike any other
part of the continent. An integral space where the waltz and
the salon coexist with the boat and the fishermen village.
Where the steps of 'The Blue Danube Waltz' intertwine with
the raw rhythm of 'The Serene White Danube.' Where local
reasons (of the general sentimental variety) prompt college
girls to throw themselves in the Danube so the river trans­
ports drowned bodies from Schwarzwald to the Black Sea.
Where the water is dirty and the catfish are always larger
than the small boats.
The Kinks used to sing, 'People take pictures of each
other I Just to prove that they really existed.'

55
 18

A List of Pleasures in the 1960s

(Birth to 2 years)

. . . The pleasure of floating in the womb, your first and

only nursery . . . of peeing in your own diapers . . . the plea-
sure of what's warm and damp . . . then clean and dry . . .
the pleasure from mother's breasts . . . and generic pleasures
of my parents : Elvis Presley, Gina Lolobrigida, dinner at a
Bulgarian restaurant in Sofia, movies at the village theater, a
pack of Sun filter cigarettes, romantic French films . . .

56
 19

I knew a man-kind, quiet and thoroughly deserving of

everybody's good feelings-except for one unfortunate habit.
He liked to belch after a good meal. He did it spontaneously
and said he felt an urge to do so, and that it was one of the
few pleasures he had in this life. He rarely had company for
lunch. One day he read that the people in the Orient not only
belched on a regular basis but even considered it a sign of
good manners . My acquaintance then packed his things and
said something that earned him the reputation of a smart and
sensible man . He said that people who turn their pleasure
into a form of good manners know the difference between
what is pleasure and what is good manners. And, with a final
belch, he turned and left for the Orient.

Another friend of m ine had the reputation as a great

seducer. Women were to him what alcohol, work or drugs
are for others. He devoted all his time to them . In the rare
cases when he was womanless for a couple of days he claimed
withdrawal symptoms, he was nauseated, grew pale and sank
into the deepest depression I had ever seen . He kept a map of

57
Bulgaria over his bed, with flags marking each of his intimate
venues. The map bristled like a hedgehog. He had only a few
mountain towns left. After each conquest he summoned me
to his place, poured two glasses of anisette (he considered
anisette a strong aphrodisiac and drank nothing else) and
told me the history of his conquests in great detail. I had the
feeling he did it all for the sake of description. Then he took a
new flag and slowly pierced the next town, the way you pierce
a rare specimen in a herbarium.
The ending was banal, as with most stories that start out
well. One day, in a moment of insanity, my confirmed bache­
lor friend got married unexpectedly. 'I got flagged,' he smiled
sadly on the rare occasions when he could get out. Nothing
was left of the great conqueror, the taxidermist of women.
Nothing but the stories. He asked me to pick out a town, be
it Elhovo, Sopot or Rousse, and recalled that particular story
once more. Alive as ever.

Both stories are made up, of course. Although to me they

sound real enough. I'm sitting in my room, making up stories
and trying to be cheerful. Why am I doing all this ? Why am
I trying to write a Natural Novel? So I can forget a certain
woman ? So I can remember how I used to live ? There's a
reassuring lot of geography in these histories.

58
 20
A List of Pleasures in the 1970s
(3 to 12 years)

. . . The first pleasure of language, of babbling, 'He's alive,

he's alive' by heart . . . first introduction to my brother, a blond
baby, entrusted to my other grandma . . . the first squiggly letters
(my handwriting has hardly evolved since) in the margins of
childrens' poetry books . . . the pleasure of writing my own
name . . . the first infatuation with one of my cousins . . . the
pleasure of playing doctor with her . . . the pleasure of the first
serious book, the only one my grandparents owned: Notes on
the Bulgarian Uprisings-a huge, brown hardcover, the first 60
pages were missing . . . 'Pants down' by my father's command
. . . watching cowboy (East German) movies, 'Uncle Goika,
Uncle Goika, he's behind you ! ' . . . the first dirty song:

Mungo Jerry
Is newly married
She scrambles the eggs
He scrambles the beds

. . . playing spin the bottle in the dark . . . my first story

. . . sweet things , syrupy sponge cake, b aklava, butter-nose
toppings . . . getting my first poem published . . .

59
 21

They say I' d been enamored. Who hasn 't

been enamored . . .
Philodemus, first century B . C .

Everything started on 4 May 18-.

Here's a possible beginning for a mid-nineteenth- century
novel. It makes me feel good when somebody knows the
precise date of the beginning. On the fourth of May. Not a
day earlier, not a day later. OK, and what happened on the
third of May? On the second ? On the same date in 17-.
And so, I found out on the fourth of May, but I still can't
say whether that was the beginning or the end. My wife came
home from work a little after 8 P. M . I was watching the news .
She didn't take off her shoes and jacket. Outside a cold May
rain was falling. She collapsed in the armchair, the two cats
immediately snuggled next to her, and she said it. She didn't
say it loud; she seemed to be speaking to the cats . . .
Many years ago I found the courage to write in a letter
something I had never dared tell a girl. I remember that the
sensitive nature of the letter had prompted me to use a green
pen . 'Everything can be written in green pencil,' Kharms
says. I was in the final year of high school and I had firmly
chosen this girl to be the only woman in my life. A long
week of feverish expectation. When I got the answer, I didn't

60
dare read it immediately. I didn't open the envelope until the
evening of the next day. Inside was a single sentence : ' I love
you as a brother and something more.' I was confused and no
good at the interpretation of such feelings . I phoned a female
friend who seemed far more experienced. She told me that
to be loved as a brother was a catastrophe, but the second
p art of the sentence-' and something more'-gave serious
hopes . I clutched at that 'something more.' When I opened
the letter a second time, however, and I looked more carefully
at the words . . . my God . . . I had misread a few letters . The
phrase was actually 'and nothing more.' No chance at all. I
remember my throat got instantly sore, my temperature rose
and all my energy seemed to drain. I stayed in bed for three
days . As they used to write in the nineteenth century-some­
thing broke deep inside me. Nothing after that would seem
so tragic and important.

61
22
A List of Pleasures in the 1980s

. . . I can't remember any pleasures.

62
 23

Italy ? Where they all wear boots and eat

frogs . . .

When I was in seventh grade , one of my classmates

refused to join the Komsomol and once during recess we
were summoned to the vice-principal's office-me as the class
president. The sun was shining through the sheer curtain and
glowing in the ashtray on the bureau where the clean-shaven,
nicked-throated vice-principal was smoking a Stewardess .
We all feared him more than we fea red the principal, just
as the lieutenant-colonel is dreaded more than the colonel.
When this scrawny man stood before us (we were both half
a foot taller than him) , I panicked that he wouldn't recognize
us and would start slapping me. He, however, had decided to
try the nice approach. Here's the conversation, or shall I say
the interrogation, as it stands in my memory.
'Let's see, who doesn't want to be a member? '
'Me,' said my classmate Krasyo.
'So you don't want to join the Komsomol ? '
Krasyo said nothing.
'Would you tell me why? '
Krasyo kept silent and looked to the side.
'Why doesn't he want to be a member? ' He was asking

63
me this time. My turn to say nothing. I really didn't know.
I was sure Krasyo didn't �now either. When admitted, you
were normally asked, 'Why do you want to be a member of
the Komsomol ? ' There was an official answer to that and
we knew it, but this was the first time we heard the opposite
question . I was trying to use a technique of 'transposition.' I
fixed my gaze on something in the room and tried to trans­
port myself there. I'm not in the room anymore, I'm that
fly down on the windowsill over there and nobody notices
me. I have no other goal but to walk the pane. And I do it
diligently.
'Perhaps you've made up your mind to leave the country? '
To Krasyo again, sarcastically. A positive answer was out of
the question.
Just then Krasyo hesitantly answered 'yes.'
I remember how I switched back from flyhood and how I
was sure we were about to be slapped. But the vice-principal
was so surprised that his voice went falsetto.
'And where do you choose to go ? '
'To Italy,' Krasyo answered almost in jest, or so I thought.
Then the slapping began. I saw the vice-principal stand on
his toes to hit us. Two slaps each. It didn't matter who was
planning to escape and who wasn't.
'Where will you emigrate ? To Italy? ' he answered himself
and added: ' So you can listen to ABBA, huh ? '
I sensed that Krasyo was opening his mouth to explain to
the vice-principal his mistake when the bell rang and saved
us.
Only later did we learn that his daughter had immigrated
to Italy two years ago and he would never be a principal.

64
 'How did you pick the country,' I teased Krasyo later.
'I was just joking,' he said. And he shook with laughter.
But we both knew that recess was over.

And still Italy was appealing. It sounded soft and lustrous,

with lots of vowels and a sliding ' l '. I-T-A-L -Y. Seven years
after the slaps I went there for a couple of days . At the age
of twenty, on my first trip outside the country, I ended up in
Venice. I walked the streets with a notebook, trying to record
everything I saw.

65
 24

Let's t alk about something else. Footb all ? Tarantino ?

Dogs ? C ats would be better. I prefer them to dogs. C ats
never go in p acks . There's nothing I pity more than stray
dogs and cats. They've got it even worse than the homeless.
And still I pity felines more. Dogs have learned a few tricks.
They've picked up after the beggars, successfully copying
their sympathy-inducing behavior. They approach you with
feigned innocence, wistful eyes, they get hit by cars, smashed
on the asphalt or crippled . Their misery stares you in the
face.
Stray cats have a different kind of pride. They avoid close­
ness and hide their misfortune, creeping into basements or
under parked cars. They don't count on our sympathy. I've
heard that even domestic cats, sensing their time was up,
run away from home or find some nook where they could be
alone in their agony.
Emma and I had two cats-Mitza and Patzo. Mitza was
a Siamese with glass-blue eyes . We courteously called her
'the hyacinth kitten.' She was a baby when a friend gave her
to us. I took a week off work so I could feed and cuddle her.

66
Small kittens need cuddling more than they need milk . Our
friend, who got her as a present, had heard some scary stories
about Siamese cats gnawing their owner's throats at night. He
just wanted to get rid of her. Mitza didn't have any teeth yet.
She slept in our bed, between me and my wife. I often found
them hugging each other in the morning. Annie, our friends'
five-year- old daughter, used to say that 'Emma's born herself
a kitten.' One of our cat-breeding manuals said that felines
tolerate their owners but rarely get attached to them. Mitza
was separated from her mother too early to remember her so
I suppose she took us for guardians of her own species who
obstinately tried to walk on their hind paws . The desire to
own a cat was differently motivated but equally infantile in
me and Emma. I admit that for me the cat was more of an
affectation, something like the pipe and rocking chair that
every self-respecting writer has . I had already acquired the
latter two. I saw myself sitting in the chair in a housecoat and
slippers, a pipe between my teeth and a warm electric body
purring faithfully in my lap. I must have seen that picture
somewhere.
For Emma the cat was the minimum condition for feeling
like a mother. She talked to her, cuddled her and brought
her up like a child. Sometimes Emma herself looked like an
overgrown kid lost in her game. Too late did I find that inside
this game was another in which Emma was trying to show me
how much she longed for a baby. Our marriage had already
started cracking and I stubbornly claimed that I didn't want
any children while our relationship was so undecided. With
every argument the cat cringed on the windowsill, staring
at us wildly and hissing. Books describe this condition as

67
typical anxiety neurosis. We knew a couple who had several
cats that threw themselves from their ninth-floor balcony.
They got divorced some time later. Ours was a very humane
divorce. It saved a couple of cats.
Mitza was all right, though, because our apartment was
on the first floor. We found Patzo two years later. Somebody
had dumped a whole litter of cats in the basement. All night
long we heard distant sounds of mewing that grew weaker
and weaker. We searched around the building for hours
until we found where the sound was coming from . Only
one kitten had survived. A few nights later Patzo perked up
and started venturing out of his box. The Siamese bared her
teeth immediately. She had never shown such aggression. Her
body stiffened, her hair bristled and she gro\vled so fiercely
that the sounds choked and suffocated her. Meanwhile the
kitten naively approached and sniffed her, as if he' d found
his mother. For several months Patzo lived in a separate room
and cried for the Siamese. And then Mitza felt a gush of some
maternal feeling and went to the kitten herself. She licked
him, cared for him and let him play with her luxurious tail.
And so the two cats who couldn't bear to be in the same
room didn't stray to more than a muzzle's length from each
other. My marriage with Emma was going in just the opposite
direction.

68
 25

The white rose has always been a symbol of silence and

discretion. When there were confidential and very personal
talks to be had, the room was adorned with white roses . To
this day people use the expression 'said under a rose .' Sub
rosa dictum.
The clover is the emblem of Ireland .
The leek is the emblem of Wales.
The emblem of Japan is the chrysanthemum.
The thistle became the emblem of Scotland after a curi­
ous incident. Once, when the Danish decided to attack the
Scottish army, a soldier stepped on one of the many thistles
on the coasts of Scotland and screamed in pain. The Scots
heard him and forever banished the Danish. From there on
they have honored thistles as their national emblem.
And the rue (Ruta graveolens) is famous as the model for
the club symbol in a deck of cards.

The Guide to Amateur Gardening, 1913

69
 26

One must never eat fish before he's two, lest

he grow mute.
(I forget where this comes from. )

We realize it too late, after we have been seduced. It would

be easiest to call it 'The Big S educer Up There.' I would
accept that, if we agree that by 'God' we mean 'language.'
Not 'the Word' but ' language.' In fact He (God or language)
spoke for a mere six days . . . On the sixth day He uttered
'Man' as his final word. He never spoke again. All kinds of
words have been attributed to him, but I don't think He said
them. B ecause He doesn't communicate with words , He
creates with words . The things this Language has uttered
materialize in the moment of their articulation. Nobody else
has attained such language. And many have tried. The Bible
is an anthology of such attempts. That's why I call the study of
God philology. What would happen if somebody did achieve
God's language (the tautology is inevitable) ? I made up the
story of one such man and I was overcome with fear.
A man appears who had mastered the Language, the
Language of those six days . When he says water, an ocean
opens before him, when he says night, instantly the day gives
way to darkness, when he says woman, she's right there beside
him. Such language needs open spaces, a void. Being already

70
articulated, this world proves too narrow for the language
of the newcomer, too fragile for his imagination. The whole
history of the world depends on what he'll say. The newcomer
can hardly bear the responsibility weighing upon him . He
shuts up and keeps to himself. He struggles to stay awake
lest he mumble in his sleep something that could delete the
world in a flash. What would happen if the words fire, ashes
and ice, apocalypse slipped from his tongue ? My wife asked
what would happen if the man just stumbles and swears ?
And she burst into laughter. You're right, I told her, but it's
not funny at all-and I shuddered. As a man.
I didn't know how to finish this story. One way was to
have terrified friends pull his tongue out, but I didn't think
that would help . So I chose the other ending, which seemed
more natural and reliable. Everything lasted for six days .
On the seventh day the man realized that he had lost the
Language.
And he sat down to rest.

71
 27

Sclerosis will make us new people. Old jokes

will always be funny.

I had been dead for a few hours. That's exactly how my

wife put it . I don't remember anything. She' d come home
from work and found me in the rocking chair, as usual. I was
looking strange, my mouth half-open and drooling. She could
have spared me the last detail. She' d talked to me, called my
name-nothing. Then she shook me hard. I'd given her a
confused look, you didn't recognize me, do you get it?; Madam,
you're not my mother, I had said, her I remember. Nothing,
I don't remember anything. Just then the doorbell rang. I
heard it and walked to the door. I had come to my senses, my
wife said. I was fine. Just a little headache. I really couldn't
remember the last few hours. Must have been fatigue. A
temporary breakdown.
'You must see a doctor,' my wife said. 'A . . . neurologist.'
I'm sure her first thought was 'psychiatrist.'
'Yes,' I told her.
Of course I would see no doctor. If I had what I was afraid
I had, doctors could do nothing to help me. One of my aunts
had Alzheimer's. They poisoned her with drugs and they kept
telling her family to put her in a psychiatric ward. That's what

72
they called the madhouse. She did go to one shortly before
she died. In her rare moments of clarity she cried like a little
girl begging her parents to take her home from camp. She
complained they soaked her with cold water, that they gave
her electric shocks. No, I won't give up so easy. The latent
period of this malady is long. I can live as a normal man some
more. On the other hand, it could have really been fatigue. I
only had to slow down a bit. I would leave work if I had to,
I'd search for something else. Still, on the next evening I dug
out letters from my cousin who regularly wrote to me about
her mother's illness. Ten years ago. I skipped everything else
and read only the passages on Alzheimer's.
' . . . A friend, an evangelist, told me that only the Virgin
Mary could help my mother now. Not the Son and not the
Father, can you imagine ? . . . Morning and night I pray to
the Virgin to save Mom. I know you don't believe in these
things, but we have tried everything, everything. We already
lock her in. She managed to get out a few times and walked
the streets, no instinct for self-preservation at all. She got
lost, half-naked. At times she comes to her senses, remembers
who I am, hugs me and cries . Then she can't recognize me
again. She forgot Papa first. She yelled she couldn't sleep with
a strange man. She begged me to let her visit her mother,
though you know Grandma died 15 years ago. I feel like the
mother of my own mother. I let her cry, sometimes I scold
her like a child. I avoid looking at her face, because I don't
want to remember her like this. I just don't want to remember
her like this . . . '
I'll never get that far. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.

73
 28

Smoke gets in your eyes . . .

If someone asks me what I did last year, I can safely answer

that I smoked. Nothing was granted as much diligence as
cigarettes . Going out was down to a minimum . My work
permitted it. I rarely answered the phone. I stayed home with
the cats and smoked. From time to time an old acquaintance
would visit; she was a terrible addict. Just out of rehab, she
claimed she was clean but nobody would hire her. I don't
think she insisted much. She borrowed small sums of money
from me and never paid them back. On the other hand, she
always offered me a joint. Perhaps she thought she was paying
back the loans . For her, drugs were more valuable than money.
She said that in the West dope was not considered a drug.
She told me how she once tried some forest mushrooms that
where much stronger than heroin.
When you take a bite , Hasha told me (I don't know
whether the nickname was derived from her name Hristina
or from hashish, but who cares) , you see all kinds of elves,
gnomes , spirits and fairies . Sometimes you can even see
Queen Mab herself. Those mushrooms make you see things
that are otherwise invisible, but exist.

74
 I liked the mushroom story, but I stayed with cigarettes .
I've always felt some guilt towards Hasha. We started smok­
ing together in high school. She went further. I don't know
whether she's given up 'mushrooms,' but I'm sure she lived
with elves. She made me feel like a schoolboy who ran from
class along with everyone else but came back at the last
moment . Others would say I was saved. I thought Hasha
looked pretty saved to me. Two years earlier she had started
talking about emigrating to Israel. When I asked her about
it, she always gave me the same answer: "I'm in Jerusalem
already." And she must have been, while I never left the living
room of our apartment at the periphery of Sofia.
My father's ashtray is Finnish, with a lid. It looks a bit
like a little cask with a single-cigarette indentation. I always
liked the idea of a personal ashtray, as personal as only a
toothbrush and a razor can be. Some completely unfamiliar
letters are engraved on the side of the ashtray (my father
didn't know what they meant either) . Much later, when some­
body translated them for me, I was struck by their bluntness :
'Everything is ashes .'
When I smoke, I unconsciously copy my father's gestures .
The energetic tapping of the index finger on the cigarette,
the knit brow as you suck on it, all the concentration and
importance of the gestures . The hardest thing to learn was
the natural slight bending of the index and middle fingers.
Mine were always artificially straight.
While I was browsing an illustrated pre-war magazine,
I came across a short article about some guy who smoked a
record number of cigarettes per day. When they asked him
why he used matches instead of the newly fashionable lighters,

75
he said he didn't want to spoil his teeth with the burnt gases
from the lighter. The trll;e' smoker is an aesthete who takes
care of his teeth.
Well then, I didn't want any more from life than to be
sitting in the backyard of some house among nettle and
hemlock, sinking in my rocking chair with a pack of cheap
cigarettes, inhaling everything with the smoke: clouds, roof­
tiles, airplanes, the Milky Way, everything. You can swallow
anything with a bit of smoke. I wanted to feel the smoke get
into my lungs, and come out pale blue and exhausted.
There is something angelic to ending up like this, dying
as you smoke one cigarette after another very slowly in the
backyard of a house. In the urn of a special ashtray, for you
and you only; that's where one day they will find your ashes.
And nothing else. Nothing they can hold on to, no body, no
stained fingers, corroded lungs or decayed teeth. Just some
ashes. If you are the perfect smoker, there will be no ashes,
either. Fade into thin air . . . Now that I think of it, didn't the
words on that ashtray say that 'everything is smoke' ? There's
more hope in that. And more ecology.

76
 29

Towards a Natural History of Flies

Flies are dipterous insects with a pair of well developed

front wings . Most flies h ave lived around Man since the
beginning of time and are therefore called synanthropic (syn
means with, together; anthropos means man) . They dwell in
a man's house, around his excrement, on landfills , etc. We
can thus assume that the typical synanthropic flies we know
today have been involuntarily created by man. Or by his waste
activities . Some scientists argue that flies have existed long
before Man and were even then feeding on corpses and excre­
ment. But even they don't deny that once Man came onstage,
flies readily recognized him as their host and importunately
entered his home. Ever since then, the host won't welcome
his pestilent guests , although they want no more than the
crumbs off his table, and thinks up all sorts of contraptions
to chase them away. He nails plastic curtains over the door to
keep them out ; puts a piece of rubber on a stick to hit them ;
fills platefuls of vinegar to drown them ; or catches them
with his hand and encloses them in matchboxes . Small kids
practice something even more effective: capturing a fly and
tearing off both wings which immediately excommunicates it

77
from its dipterous order and turns it into an infantry creature
meant to scare and warn _o'ff other flies . People practice all of
the above (thankfully with little success) for no other reason
than their ignorance of the true significance and possible
usefulness of the fly.
First, the fly is a reducer, i.e. , an organism that decom­
poses complicated organic matter-corpses , offal, carrion
or excrement-to inorganic matter that can be used by the
plants again. Thus the ordinary fly Musca domestica or the
lavatory Eristalis tenax, and even the Bluebottle fly Musca
vomitoria serve as a natural restriction of a raging organic
revolution.
The body structure of dipterous in sects and flies in
particular is quite curious . The fly's eye is a true revelation.
It is well developed and covers most of the head. In fact the
eye consists of thousands of tiny eyes, hexagonal facets, each
slightly protruding. Every facet can perceive just one pixel of
the picture, whereas the whole image is formed in the brain.
Therefore the fly sees the world as mosaic, or multi-angled.
It is commonly believed that flies are nearsighted, but what
more detailed, indeed minute perception can we imagine ?
The fragmentation used by some novelists as a literary device
is in fact borrowed from the fly's eye. What kind of novel
would we get if a fly could write a story . . .
What kind of novel would it be ? Of course, I don't doubt
the fact that it has a language, which naturally is different
from ours . As I am the one currently interested in the fly
(why isn't the fly interested in me ? ) , I have to discover the
mechanism of its language. As far as I know, the language
of bees has something to do with the figures they draw with

78
their flight. The same analogy could be sought with flies . The
domestic fly is closest to people, it is always at hand. I said 'at
hand ' out of habit. That's how Man has communicated with
them for all time. When we are looking for a new language,
we should avoid inertia, that's why we' ll keep flies not at
hand, but at eye level . The next stage in the investigation
of this language can be named the ability to converse with
one fly only. This would require daily observation of a single
specimen. Every fly has its idiosyncratic flight, i.e. , language.
Some flies are more loquacious and circle in the air longer;
others speak slowly, alight in mid-sentence, go back to the
beginning and forget their point. It would be wise to look for
flies with a clear and legible flight that do not decorate their
stories too much and know where to stop . All flies look the
same to the ignorant. If the person who has set to educate
himself by learning this foreign language disregards the
aforementioned stage of concentrated observation of a single
fly, he would often fail to identify the different specimens and
would constantly buzz from one story into another.

79
 30

When ashes are sprinkled on a deadfly) it rises

up) experiences a second birth) and starts life
afresh.
Lucian, The Fly) An Appreciation

Lately I 've been occupied with something that m ight

seem strange and maybe symptomatic. I 've been studying
flies . . . and, frankly, their stories . Fortunately, the object of
my observation is always right before my eyes. Right before
everybody's eyes as well, and therefore invisible to them.
And why this sudden interest in flies ? I 'm t rying to
convince myself it's for the novel I'm writing. A multi-angled
novel, like a fly's way of seeing. A novel full of details, matters
small and invisible to the naked eye. A novel as banal as flies .
See, I tell myself, that's why I need flies . Those insects that
buzz above us, sleeping on the ceiling or strolling along on
our tables ; living and reproducing in decaying bodies and
outhouses.
They and they alone are capable of connecting the ether
to the chthonic realm of the toilet. The fly is the mediator of
the world, the angel and the devil in one. What better model
to base a novel on, what better allegory ! Or, as Plato says in
Ion : 'For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and
there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is
out of his senses , and the mind is no longer in him.'

80
 Like a crazed fly. We know that Plato was never particu­
larly fond of poets .
In the ideal novel individual episodes will be held together
by the trajectory of a fly. I will say it again-the thread of the
story will be the trajectory of a fly.
And again : a fly.
A fly. Af-ly. A fl-eye. A fly. A fly. A fly. A fly. A fly. A fly. A
� A� A� A� A�A� A� A�A� A�
OK, there is another good reason that I keep contemplat­
ing flies, digging deep in the toilet and the whole of natural
history. An obsessive reason, a fly in its own right whose
buzzing I manage to drown out for a few hours while I study
the rest of its species . Yet this fly stays inside me. The fly in
my head needs a way out.

81
 31

The fishing net is used to catch fish. Let us take the fish and
forget the net. The snare is used to catch hares. Let us take the
hare and forget the snare. The word is used to convey ideas.
When ideas are understood, we can forget the words. How
delightful to be able to talk with such a man, who has forgotten
the words!
Chuang Tzu, Third Century B.C .

82
 32

He collects stories)
)
But he himself doesn t have a story.

I get up late. Get dressed and go to the market. I rarely

buy anything. I slowly wander around the stalls, looking at
fruits and vegetables . I don't pay attention to the vendors .
Just watching. Meditating on warm colors and round shapes .
I call this exercise 'vitamins for the eyes.' Quite helpful when
you are weary from gazing at letters all night long. Then I
buy a newspaper. It doesn't matter which one. The newspaper
and the cigarettes are an excuse to sit on a bench for more
than an hour. It doesn't look strange. You read and you listen
to people talking. Otherwise I'll forget how to talk. I don't
feel like talking, I don't remember having spoken in the last
few days , but I'm a good listener. In the cafe by the market,
conversational themes change with the seasons. In May people
talk of prom night s ; in June-of forthcoming vacations ; in
July-of university exams ; in August-of spoiled vacations ;
in September-of pickles and first-grade notebooks . All this
is quite soothing. It means that somewhere, quite close to
me actually, life is still peaceful and orderly like the lines of
food in a smorgasbord. Sitting behind my newspaper, I hear
people talk and I dissolve into their words like a sugar cube

83
in a cup of coffee. If voyeurism is related to the eye and the
gaze, what shall we call �avesdropping? Some sort of voyeur­
ism for the ear.
Take these two thirtyish women sitting at my table and
chatting. One is accompanied by her six-year-old (I'm guess­
ing) son who is running around; each time he comes near his
mother, the conversation stops for a moment while the boy
gets his next piece of the cake, and then resumes as quickly
as if it hasn't stopped at all. I'm almost invisible to them. At
least they don't show any embarrassment. The childless one
is the one who does the talking.
'It's been six years since we got married, and this idiot
will never forgive me.'
'Jerk,' replies the other one.
'He only sleeps with me when I have my period. Five days
a month. The rest of the time he won't even look at me. The
more I fawn over him, the angrier he gets. Now that we're
alone in our apartment, we could do it every day. Yes , but
no. He yells at me, says he can't stand me : bitch, he says, you
fucked the whole neighborhood before you married me.'
'What did he expect, for Christ's sake? '
'You couldn't wait for just one year, he says. Says I had
promised him a virgin marriage, right out of a romance novel
or something. Who does he think I am, Brooke Shields ? '
'And you think Brooke Shields is a virgin ! And then ? '
'I should tell you I almost kept that promise. But he had
to stay in Komi for two more months. After all, I'm not made
of stone ! ' (Here I can't refrain from glancing at her over
my coffee. She certainly isn't made of stone ! -small, almost
girlish, perky breasts , slightly expanding hips and toned,

84
seductive legs with sun-kissed, almost invisible hair. ) 'It just
happened. You know how it is, you have a drink or two to
unwind, and you think a groping hand is just a groping hand.
I was twenty-five. The guy was stunned to see me bleeding.
I must have been the last virgin in the neighborhood. Such a
mess, I wished I could have died. And that was that, I never
saw him again. He probably still curses the day he met me.
Two weeks later Kapcho came back; we had already set the
date for the wedding. Came loaded down with dinner sets
and jewelry.'
'Gold is cheap over there in Komi.'
'He had made a nice pile of money and we had a great
wedding. But when he saw I wasn't a virgin . . . he yelled that
I had betrayed him, that he' d never as much as looked at a
woman there, that he worked double shifts, the others were
right to tease him for trusting me and working his ass off for
me, while I was screwing around. He didn't touch me for
three months. Then he waited for my period and that was the
first time we ever had sex. I couldn't be your first, he said,
but now every time will be like the first time. He didn't get
off me for the five days when I was bleeding. I always have
terrible cramps with my period, so I cried and screamed, but
the more I tried to pull away from him, the better he felt. Like
I was losing my virginity all over again.'
' Sick bastard. It's your fault for putting up with him.'
'He's got his own problems. He's not a bad person. If only
it weren't for that . . . I don't know what he does the rest of
the month. Jerking-off in the bathroom or fucking someone, I
don't know. I begged him to do it just once when I don't have
my period. If only I could get pregnant . . . '

85
 I start feeling awkward. I get up and leave. Noticing me
for the first time, they s4ut up and start sipping their coffees.
On my way home I think about how for half an hour I've been
closer to these women than their own husbands will ever be.
What a sad ending. Somewhere there must be other men
more intimate with your wife than you are.

86
 33

Three of us are living here)

Playing chess and Black Maria . . .

OK, let's try again.

I was still living with Emma, but I had made a final deci­
sion to leave. Actually I made several final decisions to that
effect but I kept putting it off. That's why this time I ordered
a small truck for the following Saturday and I called three
of my friends. I didn't have much luggage. The last night
with Emma. We're sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by
boxes of books, two bags of clothes and my suit on a hanger,
Jesus, my toxic-green wedding suit. I've taken the two cats in
my lap and I'm stroking them. They always get restless when
there's luggage in the room. They don't like being alone. I'll
visit them sometime, I say. Bad move, Emma starts crying.
I try to calm her. I really want to hug her but I know that if
I do, I won't go and the agony will continue. We smoke in
silence. We talk about trivial things . Despite everything I
wanted this night to last longer. We had never been so close
together. Somewhere there was a man I didn't know, in her
there was a child who wasn't mine, and behind us-a couple
of years with few peaceful days. I was wondering which one
split us apart. During that night, however, neither seemed to

87
exist. I wished something could happen to change things . At
that very moment. At le�st some kind of sign. Our attachment
to people is never as strong as when we're losing them.
'It's kicking,' Emma says, pointing to her belly. This must
be the sign.
My wife's child. An example of a grammatically correct
and still deeply mistaken phrase. There is a child between
me and my wife. And this child 's kicking against me. Taking
strange steps in her womb. Starting from some obscure place
to this room. Will he ever know that we have walked a couple
of months together? That the door he opened had slammed
behind me ?
My grandmother used to say that if somebody must be
born, somebody else has to die to make room for him. That
evening we went to bed together for the first time in six
months . I feigned sleep while Emma was hugging me. The
cats also snuggled with us . What a sweet family. If only
the child in Emma was not kicking so often. It was feeling
cramped.
In the morning the truck came.

88
 34

Matthew} Mark} Luke} John} where are you ?

I can already walk on water . . .

Somewhere there lived an old man who was responsible

for balance in the world. Not that anyone had called upon him
to do so. The man just felt responsible for it. His usual occu­
pation was gardening. He didn't talk to anyone. Many years
ago he came to the village and bought a house at the edge of
the village. They said he didn't pay very much because it had
been empty for years and people swore they had seen strange
fires in its windows at night. When the gardener moved in,
everyone noticed the huge truck that brought him, filled with
bundled books, crates of seeds and a big rocking chair, old
and rotten, tied with wire at places . Ah, yes , and a cat. At the
sight of these outlandish accessories the man was instantly
recognized as crazy. That is, not one of the ordinary loonies
the village was long used to, but one of those intellectuals
who had gone nuts from too much reading. Had the village
heard of Don Quixote, it would have been more precise with
its diagnosis , but 'crazy' did just fine for the time being.
The old man was actually doing nothing wrong. Some­
times he didn't leave the house for days ; he didn't even have
a lamp on at night. It looked as though he' d gone somewhere.

89
Or he' d spend all his time in the garden, planting new seeds
and grafting the plants. � ometimes he took the big chair out
and sat in it, stroking the cat and staring at a tree. Strange,
outlandish trees grew in his garden. Trees with big flat leaves,
low bushes with tiny vermilion fruits, blue-chaliced tulips,
huge prickly (beardy, as the villagers called them) trunks
whose tops seemed as though they were on fire once a year
in sumptuous flowers. Old wives swore that the garden was
bewitched. A neighbor's pig once ventured into the garden
and swelled up and died three hours later. The bees swarmed
like mad at the garden with the weird blossoms and came
back to their hives heavy and drunk.
Once a month the man went to the village post office and
invariably sent one letter and one telegram. The addresses
were always the same. The telegram-to some place in Sofia.
And the letter . . . the address was written in a foreign language
that the clerk could never decipher to the great disappoint­
ment of the whole village. When she copied stroke by stroke
every letter on the envelope and sent it to her daughter in
town, the village gasped at the name of the addressee. The
addressee was the UN, the headquarters in New York. And
while the telegram always contained the same text that the
clerk was 'professionally obliged ' to read in order to count
the signs, no one knew what was in the letters to this over­
important recipient. The telegrams consisted of the following
two short sentences : 'I'm really OK now. I'm waiting for you.'
The names of the addressees alternated. Two women with the
same family name.
The last time the old man came to the post office he didn't
look good. His eyes had sunken deeply in their sockets and

90
his hand was shaking violently while he wrote the telegram.
The clerk didn't even read the text, she already knew the
number of signs by heart. This time, however, she noticed
that there were only two words on the form. Words to make
your flesh creep : I'm dead . The clerk objected that it was
forbidden to write such things in a telegram. The man said
nothing, just tore up the form, took a new one and wrote :
I'm off. Paid and left. Two days later two women came to
the village, most probably mother and daughter. They were
dressed in black and this color looked especially becoming
on the younger one. They got off the bus, they asked about
such and such a man and they headed straight for the house
of the mad gardener. Less then an hour later they came out
and went to the town hall. They had a couple of talks and
came back accompanied by two village men with shovels .
The mayor gave them permission to bury the gardener in his
own garden, behind the house. Something unheard of in this
village. They buried him the same day and the two women
caught the last bus back. The only thing they took from the
house was an old leather-bound notebook. With time the
whole garden grew rank and almost blocked the house from
view. It still had that strange exotic look, the big-leafed tree
grew enormous but nobody dared pass the gate.
For some time after the gardener's death, woeful feline
wails wafted from the house but soon they too died away.

The notebook was old and bound by hand . Pocket-size,

with a wire spiral. The leather, once cherry-colored, was now
dark. The beautifully handwritten letters on the cover were
still visible : Notes of the Naturalist.

91
 35

Notes of the Naturalist

I'm starting over. I'm not sure that the letters I'm sending
to the Organization reach their destination. I suppose they
get plenty of letters over there. Yet someone must be read­
ing them. Someone must come across one of mine. Because
time goes by and things get worse. They get out of control.
I'm doing what I can about the equilibrium but they have to
be warned. I cannot hold out much longer on my own. I'm
wondering if I made a mistake with the Organization. I have
no other choice.
The house I have rented is a good one. It has a big, south­
facing garden. The climate is also good ; the winds are mild
and low. The cat got used to it quickly, which shows that
the place is really nice. Tomorrow I'll start cultivating the
garden.

I'm trying to explain to the Organization that balance is

at stake. And what's going to happen is not what everybody
fears. The apocalypse is not that scary. The way they describe
it, it's more of an illumination. World war is harmless. The
apocalypse and war only serve to distract our attention. That's

92
what they were sent for. What can happen any moment now
is much deadlier and, alas, much harder to notice. It affects
the hidden mechanisms of Earth and the universe. It won't
be long before strange things start happening with us. Or
they might already have started. Things that won't be as fiery
as the apocalypse and therefore nobody will notice them at
first. The worst is I cannot describe them in accurate detail.
I have the words at hand but I can't do it. I mustn't. I suspect
that a detailed and accurate description of what's coming
will set its mechanism in motion. A detailed and accurate
description will be the detonator; it will supply the formula
for how things will develop . This makes my task incredibly
hard. I must use another language. I'm trying gardening. Say
it with plants , use their silent language that speaks with noth­
ing but forms. I expect serious admonitions on their part. In
my letters to the Organization I try to talk in allegories. I'm
trying not to give too accurate a description of what's coming
in order to avoid bringing together the words that might open
the floodgates. But they obviously don't take my letters seri­
ously. They don't comprehend the allegory.

It occurs to me that one of those six days of the Lord

must have lasted a million of what we now call years. Thus
I can reconcile God with Darwin. What the latter ascribes
to millenary evolution and what the former created in mere
days could be one and the same, if only I equalize the units of
measure. One more thing : I suspect that there is someone in
this world doing just the opposite of what I'm doing to keep
the balance. The strangest thing is that he exists due to the
same principle of natural equilibrium. Behind Darwin's back,

93
I could call him the Anti-Christ; behind God's back (which is
much harder) I could Gall'him anti-evolutionist. I can see him
peeling words off things, the way you peel an apple.

The imbalances stalking us show up everywhere, but I

think the most horrible one is the imbalance between the
names of things and the things themselves. Things have start­
ed slipping out of their names like peas from a dry pod. So far
names had clung close to things in an inseparable whole, just
as the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen formed the molecule
of water. And when man managed to separate the hydrogen
atoms from the oxygen atoms, incredible energy was released.
Imagine that energy multiplied a million times and you'll get
an idea what will befall us when names are finally separated
from things. I think there will be no explosion, but rather
something much more horrid. I will not give it a name for the
time being. Because the names create the named.
We must talk only in allegories .

There are invisible scales. For greater clarity we could

picture them like ordinary open-market scales. The weights
are always on one side. No matter whether we measure beans,
or mackerel, or plain crab apples , we look at the weights and
we say: here's a pound of beans, or mackerel, or crab apples,
etc. We say so when the scales are b alanced and one pan
holds the words , the other-things. But what will happen if
the words swarm and shove the things, and then leave them
like the queen bee leaves the hive with her swarm ? They
will start playing with themselves, measuring each other.
Weights in one scale, weights on the other, i.e., measures ,

94
words, call them as you wish. And both scale pans will shout:
we are mackerel, we are crab apples, we are black beans .
And nobody will ever be able to set them straight or even
tell them apart.

Did the guys in the Organization understand my story

about the weights ? I will keep writing though. I must find out
where words breed. I must reach their nest, their litter, their
hatch. I don't know what to call it. And I must avoid accurate
names . I've been looking for that place for many years . So
many I haven't even counted them . What did I do before
that? I don't remember anything, I don't wish to remember.
I must find out how words breed. I'm watching the plants in
my garden. I've bought a pile of botanical manuals.
These chives here and that bulbous meadow-grass (Poa
Vivitara) over there reproduce by parthenogenesis, i.e., agam­
ically. The new plants are born from tubers, bulbs derived
from their parents, and they have the same hereditary qualities
as their parents do. Reproduction through the root system.
Could words have resorted to this simplest method of repro ­
duction ? I don't believe they blundered so. With this method
of reproduction, new words would be indistinguishable from
the old ones. And still there must be something to it, since
both words and plants have roots . There must be something.
Books quote the early depletion of the genetic fund as the
main evolutionary disadvantage of this method. Pollination
offers a much greater variety. Wind or bees, wasps, chafers
and all kinds of insects could carry the pollen for dozens,
for hundreds of miles. If the pollen of this birch over there
rise with the air currents at about a mile and a half, which is

95
perfectly possible, they will travel five hundred miles from
here. And words are so .much lighter than pollen . Why has
nobody ever calculated the weight of a word ? Just approxi­
mately. I suppose different words weigh differently. Damn it,
I hate such negligence. They know the weight of the pollen
seed, a mere speck of dust, while nobody cared to measure
the word. Does it assume the weight of the voice pronouncing
it or the weight of the ink in which it was written ? I cannot
find any Natural History of Words. Not anywhere.

Here are some questions whose answers I have not yet

found:

Do words have sexes ?

Is sex the same as gender?
If a word is of the masculine gender, shall we consider
it male ?
If words come in both sexes, when and how does inter-
course take place?
Do letters carry their sexual characteristics ?
If so, how is the alphabet divided sexually?
Can we accept that vowels are female and consonants are
male, or is the division more complicated than that ?
Could words be basically sexless but acquire the sex of
the man or woman mouthing them ?
If so, what happens when male words enter a female
mouth ?
What happens when the word is merely written ? What
sex would it be ?

96
 I feel a growing suspicion that the whole mess started
with writing. How many devils sit on top of a letter . . . There
is something Satanic in words which have outlived their
authors . I don't know why others don't feel it, but for me this
is vintage vampirism. There is a dead man laid out in every
written word. I shudder as I write this. Because I, too, have
built myself a nice coffin with this notebook. I hope I find
the strength to burn it before I die. I don't want to become
undead in these written pages. Though now that I think of
it, aren't spoken words the same ? As we speak, we--by the
way-slyly plant those seeds in the heads of other people.
Like pollen. Radio can take them much farther than air
currents . Yes, the only pure use of words is thought. Words
should be thought. Nothing but. At least for a year. I have
to warn the Organization. I know it's cruel but it's the only
way. Things have gone too far. Indiscriminate procreation of
names . They already carry the taint. We don't know how to
disinfect them. A horrible infection is coming, more horrible
than AIDS . Dead men's words . Words that curdle human
relationships as illness can curdle a new mother's milk.

I realize that what I wrote the other night was obscure and
complicated. But that's the only way I am allowed to express
myself. Otherwise I' d be helping Evil. But I won't supply the
formula. I'll take it away with me. Here I must mention my
father, may he rest in peace, who first started the struggle for
equilibrium. My mother said he was nuts, left him and ran
away with another man. I stayed with him and helped him.
He didn't write a single line. The times he said something
unrelated to his preoccupations can be counted on the fingers

97
of one hand. I have inherited his dislike for idle talk-my
mother used to call it surliness. My father was a self-educated
naturalist, a naturalist-naivist. He loved to muse on the names
of the flowers. Made out the Latin names without ever having
studied Latin, relating them to names he knew. Sometimes
he grumbled, apparently finding disparity between the flower
and its name. He regularly consulted a gardening manual, the
same one I'm using. One of those books which inform you
that the lotus was the favorite flower of the ancient Egyptians
and the tulip came from Asia. In fact these were precisely the
facts he was interested in. 'The leek appears in the national
emblem of Wales ,' my father would read and Wales would
seem to grow in his garden. And when he put some leeks
on the table, they were no mere leeks but symbols, heraldry.
The bitter fibrous husks held stories, History itself was sleep­
ing there. Nothing was merely what it seemed. And so he
maintained balance in the world through his relationships
with leeks. My father knew that anybody who doesn't honor
the leeks on his table is offending the honor of Wales . Wales
would have a reason for-justified-protest, and a conflict
would ensue. That's why my father always said a benedic­
tion to Wales when a stalk of leek happened to grace his
table. With great tact and diplomacy he begged forgiveness
for those who in their ignorance and thoughtlessness did not
even know what they were chewing. This was his mission.
And thus, while he was alive, he managed to keep the fragile
equilibrium in the world.

Sometimes books play weird jokes on us. Years ago I

worked hard on one of my ideas . I thought this would be my

98
legacy, something beautiful and to some extent practical. I
knew that different flowers opened up at different times of
the day. I spent two years searching botanical books and
meadows ; I roamed the fields for days on end. I wanted to
find the appropriate flowers and, planting them in a circle,
to create a natural clock. A clock with a natural mechanism.
Asked what the time was , people would no longer answer '3
'
P. M . but 'tulip.' I was proud of my idea. And then, two days
before the planting of the flowers I had already collected, I
happened, just happened to read in the trivia section of a
newspaper the following note : 'Carl Linnaeus, the father of
botany, knowing the precision of botanical cycles , planted
in the sections of a circle flowers that opened up at specific
times of the day.' Why did I never come across this informa­
tion when I searched all sorts of reference books ? Words
had tricked me once again . While I was gathering flowers ,
happy to be doing something yet unknown, they snickered at
me and carefully selected the moment for their appearance.
Once again I was convinced that we don't really control texts ;
they dance around us . They hide somewhere while we are
looking for them , and they alone pick the time to appear
before us . Something must be done.

For the last few months I'm trying to do what I never

dared to. I don't have the time to wait for plant instructions.
It's time for radical action. Time to enter the beehive. The
maximum concentration of words , the swarm of words . I
don't know what's the acceptable way to say it, in short-I'm
going inside the text. Yes, I break into books. I hope my ex­
wife and her charming daughter will never come across these

99
notes, because they will be the final proof of my diagnosis.
Yet I have no other choic;e. I have discovered that books-and
not all books, but just novels, and not all novels, but just a
few select ones (I own them, but I'll never give away their
names) contain the queen words who are ready to fly out and
swarm the unnamable. How could I keep these books with
the others, let them rest their infected covers on the covers of
innocent books ! They must be kept locked away in a palm­
tree chest, because the palm-tree is beatific and can isolate
the evil. The palm-tree chest must then be locked inside a
chest of iron, and the chest of iron must be buried deep in
clay soil so that nothing will sprout on it. Those books must
never ever be burned : first, because it is a sin to burn a book,
and second, because the fire could just release their dark
energy. And these books are dangerous just because they
describe what I'm unwilling to name in accurate and great
detail. Once upon a very old time one of those books had
broken into my life and was wrecking it daily. When things
tumbled down and, despite our happy marriage, my wife got
suddenly pregnant by another man (we were keeping a period
of continence) , I started sinking into those peculiar states
that still continue to plague me, on and off . . . And then,
just then I had the strange feeling that I've already read that
somewhere. What was happening to me was coming right out
of some bad novel, a novel I had read. I rummaged through
my library, I rummaged my friends' libraries and I found it.
Everything coincided, page by page, sentence by sentence,
word by word. My own private apocalypse.

In the last few days I've been carefully studying the novels

100
I set apart as particularly dangerous . I'm taking my time. I
must come well prep ared, as the beekeeper opens the hive
unnoticed by the bees . The trick is to suppress your fear
because they can smell it . Stop perspiring. Fear settles in
your perspiration, that's why it smells so bad. You must have
no smell, you must move smoothly so they can accept you as
one of their own, as a big and rather slow bee. It's the same
with novels. Harder actually, because my body is superfluous .
I must leave it and-naked a s a word-wedge my way among
them. A word among words .

I'm feeling more a n d more prepared . I'm looking for

cracks in the text where I could creep through. I think it
would be unwise to enter through the beginning. Novels start
strong, in the beginning the syntax is tense and I would be
easy to spot. I need some lyrical digression, some detailed
description to distract the words so that I could slip in like a
leaf shaken by a sudden wind, or like a lizard slinking under
a stone.

I've got a few personal matters to take care of. Tomorrow

I will post my last telegram . I don't want my body to stay
discarded. I believe they will come this time. I've left a letter
asking them to bury me under the palm tree in the garden.
I'm concerned about the cat though, poor creature, I wonder
how she' ll handle it. I can only hope that someday we will
meet again in another novel. This is about all. Taking leave
took less time than I expected. My mission continues . In fact
it just started . Well, I'm off.

101
 36

3 big oranges) a cup of sugar, some cornmeal)

1 0 cherries) some ginger . . .
A recipe for orange soup

Saturday. Drizzling rain, cold and damp. A perfect day

for banana fish. A perfect day for Salinger, in fact. You relax
because nothing worse can happen to you.
No author is better suited for such weather, although
Salinger is like an umbrella to soak under. Even Eliot is
jollier. Perfect for some dry October day.
This is what crosses my mind while I'm taking Salinger
out in the train compartment. I'm not the talkative type and
I see books as my shield against those endless conversations
that always start with destination inquiries and flow over to
kids and kidney problems. Besides, I don't have an accept­
able answer for the point, the end point of my journey. I had
bought a ticket to the last station but I could just as well get
off at the next stop.
I love this book because it's so unassuming, at least on
the outside. A simple cover without illustrations . I'm sure
that the name of the author doesn't mean anything to the
travelers on this train, which reduces my chances of being
talked to. I was early and the other passengers are only now
starting to fill the train. I can't read before we've departed

102
so I look at the corridor. I'm trying to guess which passenger
will enter my compartment. I'm rarely lucky enough to have
a beautiful woman to look at . There's only one place left
and I have almost lost hope. The train is already departing
when she comes. At first I pay no notice, 1nerely registering
her entrance-thirtyish, no luggage, sitting across from me
by the window. The usual conversations start, but are rather
brief. The woman and I seem to be the only ones not taking
part in them ; I am absorbed in my book and she is looking
out of the window. This time, though, I'm finding it hard to
read. I look at her a few times , or rather at her reflection in
the windowpane. Without being particularly beautiful, she is
totally out of place in this situation-the compartment with
its nondescript passengers and dirty curtains, the train, the
lousy weather. I feel a strong desire to start talking to her, to
go smoking with her in the corridor. I've never known how
these things work. With grace and levity, I suppose, though
I have neither. A newly divorced man who thinks of nothing
but his ex-wife. Almost dramatically, I take my pack out and
leave the compartment. I slowly chain-smoke two cigarettes
but the woman doesn't stir. On entering the compartment I
see her noting something down on a folded sheet of paper. I,
too, like to jot down certain things on the train, but I always
do it secretly, shying away from the stares of my fellow travel­
ers . This woman, however, is unperturbed. She takes long
pauses , looks out of the window, then adds another word.
I imagine charming her with Salinger. I naturally lack the
courage to talk to her. All the lines that come to me sound
stupid and blandly transparent. I close the book over my fore­
finger to give her a better view of the title. For all I know, this

103
might mysteriously unleash something, result in something.
'

A special woman would appreciate this title. A pretty mouth,

and her eyes-as far as I can see in the dwindling light-are
green. No reaction. At each station I shudder and pray she
doesn't get off the train.
I try a vile technique of slander and abasement. The sour
grapes technique. I imagine her in tattered stockings , with
rotting teeth, seated on a toilet. Then my imagination soars . I
make up a whole history for her-married with two, no, three
children (so her breasts would be sagging more), a teacher
of literature wasting her bespectacled evenings over a pile of
notebooks while her boring husband is drinking a lot in front
of the TV . . . I have mastered this technique to perfection
and I can swear it works almost every time. This woman,
though, seemed to come away unscathed; what's more, she
turned my technique against me. The situations I concocted
chipped nothing away from her image. On the contrary, they
reinforced it and kindled my desire. I imagined us discussing
the ending of 'Teddy' in bed. I take the view that Salinger was
faking it here : the ending is too transparent and predictable
for more than a page. Too bad. That could be her line.
As I was arranging the scene, I barely managed to see her
leaving the compartment. The train had stopped. She was
getting off. I had no time to lose. I grabbed my bag and I got
off at the same station. I nearly bumped into her. She looked
at me for the first time ; her eyes weren't green. I apologized
and I blurted the first thing that came to mind, just to stop
her from going away: A perfect day for banana fish, isn't it?
Then two, no, three kids ran to her and each one wanted to
hug her.

104
 The train had gone. I slowly took my bag and went search­
ing for a hotel. I'd forgotten to check the name of the town
at the station and when I asked the receptionist, she gave
me a horrified look. She did give me a key, however. Room
507. The number sounded familiar. I went in, turned the key
and took the book out of my bag. Everything happens for a
reason, I thought. The book opened at page 26, on the left. I
read the final paragraph eleven times :

He got off at the fifth floor, walked down the hall, and let
himself into 507. The room smelled of new calfskin luggage and
nail-lacquer remover.
He glanced at th e girl lying asleep on one of the twin
beds. Then he wen t over to one of the pieces of luggage,
opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts
he took out an Ortgies calibre 7. 65 automatic. He released
the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the
piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied
twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a
bullet th rough his right temple.

Then I must have fallen asleep.

105
 37

The Zen Zone

I suppose Man was made oblivious of his own beginnings.

We cannot recollect our birth. Memory does not function yet,
that center in our brain isn't ready. The beginn ing is shapeless
and obscure. The sum of several accidents setting in motion a
series of inevitable events . And still the door to the beginning
is never fully closed. There is always a crack-small enough
to stop us from entering and big enough to ooze soft, rosy,
seductive light.
We will never be loved as much as we were when we
were children. That is why childhood is such a cruel time.
Its cruelty is in what will come later. Where does this love
go after that? Why do we spend the rest of our lives wanting
to be loved as we once were ? for no other reason than that
we exist? For the last few days I've lived in my childhood
more often and for longer periods of time. I experience every­
thing so vividly-eidetic behavior, my psychiatrist says-that
sometimes I come back with my knees bruised and, once,
with a bump on my head. I don't share this with my psychia­
trist, there's no point. When I 'm back in my childhood I
mostly find myself in a cherry tree. I'm not doing anything

106
special, nothing but sitting on a branch, eating cherries and
spitting out the pits . Buddha sat under a tree for seven years.
What kind of tree was it ? Never mind. I'm sitting in the
cherry tree for seven years (the first seven) watching white
turn green and green turn red. Seven times. Seven slow years
of white, green and red. The cherry, the cherry will be the
tree of the Bulgarian Buddha. Yet Bulgaria is not the point
here. Children have no fatherland. Their fatherland is child­
hood. To make up for it, they have fathers. Well, so to speak.
Their fathers go to work, they aren't there. Can a father be
a nine-to -five cashier or vice-president or clerk or hustler,
then come back home and be a father for a few hours ? You
caaaan't, I mumble from the cherry tree, my mouth full of
pits like a Demostenes practicing oration with pebbles under
his tongue. OK, I'll spit it out: we can only have epiphanies
in our childhood, in those seven years when we are left to
our own devices. Seven years outside society. Seven years of
statelessness. Seven years of anarchy. Every day is fully yours.
Every day serves no other purpose but to make the world
your playground. See those ants, what a cherry, and that fly
over there, what if I catch it, what if I tear one wing away, look
how it spins around the table, what if I tear both . . . !

Last night I dreamed of the phrase 'my childhood wife.'

This morning I recalled all the wives I had in my childhood,
with my mother naturally topping the list.
At least a dozen wives and not a single divorce. No pain
at all.

107
 38

Where does all this excess lo ve go)

Who)s the sweepe0 ioho throws away the trash)
Where is the garbage can ?

When the marriage is over and the last dinner set has
already been divided, there's one more thing to divide : friends.
Every family creates an environment, a biocenosis populated
by relatives, family friends and the odd acquaintance. Emma
and I had too many guests . She \Vas good at entertaining. I
was a different case. When I' d had enough, I locked myself
in the bathroom. Everybody kne\v what this meant and filed
away with no hard feelings, saying goodbye through the door.
When Emma and I divorced, at first nobody believed it. We
had been the perfect family. They \Vere shocked, not knowing
how to react. The occasional attempts to 1neet me separately
(and, I suppose, Emma) were tragic. The absence of the other
was palpable. As one of them put it, it was like three persons
getting together for a game of bridge, dealing out the cards
and pretending there's nothing wrong. He was right. Most
of them avoided mentioning Emma in my presence and that
only made things worse. I wanted to talk about her.
Strange how people think that the aftermath of a divorce
is like the aftermath of a catastrophe : nothing is the same.
The world was supposed to be split in two and Emma and

108
I were supposed to be living in its opposite halves. And yet
the world h ad stayed together. We lived in the same city and,
as I had rented an apartment in the same neighborhood, we
used the same buses and shopped at the same places . One
grocer kept asking me why I was buying a loaf of bread when
my wife had already bought one. A couple of times I passed
by the windows of her apartment . It was late, the curtains
were drawn, the light was on. Once I saw one of the cats on
the windowsill, between the curtain and the pane. Did she
see me, too ? I knew I shouldn't go there. Emma was already
living with the other guy, I don't know what to call h im, OK,
with the fath er.

10 9
 39

Iwill be an ice-cream vendor,

Going broke in winter)s splendor.

Today I have to fix the rocking chair. It almost disinte­

grated while I was moving out of the house. I found some fine
wire. I ought to find a job, too. I had a look at the market. I
could be selling something seasonal. Or, at best, newspapers
in a kiosk. I've always wanted a job like that . I could read
all the newspapers or even write. These days I'm rarely up
to it. I sit down and have a cigarette but it just won't work.
My friend the psychiat rist was quick to give the diagnosis :
an inability to concentrate, obsessiveness and anancasm, if I
remember correctly. It's true that my notes have grown short
and chaotic. I started with the idea of a novel. Well, it's going
to be a fragmented one.

Anancasm (Gr, ananke-obsession) : a condition whereby

the sufferer cannot stop recounting certain experiences
despite realizing their futility and abnormality. Such experi­
ences could be ideas, desires, fears or impulses. They haunt
the sufferer incessantly, usually in the same manner. A. is a
psychoneurotic syndrome. Psychoanalysis sees A. as based on
a relevant ego -impairing inner conflict. Usually manifested

1 10
in persons with prior insecurities caused by an improper
processing of early childhood experiences . These persons
could be inclined to manage fear through a 'counter-magic.'
Dictionary of Psychology

S ometimes I feel a strange desire to walk the streets

at dusk and look into the ground-floor windows . Kitchen
windows , where normal families can be seen . What kind of
domestic voyeurism is this ?

. . . and a string of weasel testicles protects women against

unwanted pregnancies .
An old Irish remedy

If you want to write a Natural Novel , you must watch

the visible world closely. You must find resemblances. Each
autumn the cabbages mock the raised-collar style from the
time of Marie Antoinette. Or Marie Antoinette had an eye
for cabbages . Who can s ay whether history is influenced by
botany or vice versa ? The Novel of Natural History makes
no such distinctions . Yesterday the market was full of decapi­
tated Antoinettes .

. . . now she is the mother of her child the mother of her

child repeat it slowly I must get used to it she's not a woman
anymore she is a mother something else a pine-cone maybe
and a bee a mother-honeycomb-her child's hive . . .

Once I came home later than usual. Emma was talking on

the kitchen phone and didn't hear me. I, however, heard the

111
following phrase : 'A drone, he's just a drone, although he's
not a bad man.' I was str:uck by the fact that this phrase was
the exact replica of something her father had said years ago
and I had once again overheard.
Why do I keep replaying that phrase in my head ? What
does it matter a few months after the divorce ? People some­
times say such things without meaning to.
A drone, he's just a drone, although he's not a bad man.

Drones are born from unfertilized eggs; therefore they have

no fathers. They have the genetic characteristics of their mother
and of the drone that fertilized their grandmother.
I tell myself this is important and continue leafing through
the several beekeeping guides in my possession. I will never
be free from that phrase until I stuff it with information.
Until it swells like a tick and releases its grip on me.
The drone has a large body-15 to 1 7 mm long. It has
well-built chest muscles and wings which allow it to fly at a
great speed and distance. In the lower part of its back there are
sophisticated and well-developed reproductive organs.
So far Emma had said nothing bad about me.
The purpose of drones is to fertilize the bees in their wedding
flights. If they come across other hives) the bees are glad to
accept them.
Not bad, not bad at all.
. . . but in the second half of summer, when the main mellif
erous flowers have withered and the incoming nectar is sparse)
the swarming instinct disappears and drones become superflu­
ous. The bees isolate them from the honey and) starving them)
expel them through the entrance of the hive.

1 12
 The entrance of the hive becomes a natural exit for the
drones, exitus letalis.
What does the structure of bee families tell us, what kind
of analogies does it offer? I suspect that God created this
rather peculiar family to tell us something. I can't exactly pin
it down, but it is a clue. Yesterday I read in the newspaper
that the fin-de-millennium tendency pushed men further and
further away from the family. Women preferred raising their
children alone and the future belonged to families of two
(excluding the father) .
A drone, he's just a drone, although he's not a bad man.

1 13
 40

Somewhere people live in houses with an 'a ' . . .

Many years ago, when I was a small boy, I used to live in

the country. The world looked gorgeous, as if just washed
by rain. After everything that happened between me and
Emma I decided to go back there for a while. To substitute
my recent memories for those distant days and nights of
my childhood. Emma didn't belong there so I hoped she
would leave me alone. I didn't last a week. Nothing was the
same, nothing. That village was gone. The spell was broken.
The eccentric people whose stories I used to enjoy now just
seemed grim and depressing. Slowly but surely the village
was going insane. I saw madness everywhere. Half the old
men were fighting for the best graveyard lots. The graveyard
was full, but everybody wanted to be buried at a better spot,
somewhere closer to their relatives . 'I don't want nothing
else,' my grandmother wailed, 'just to be buried closer to my
little Kale. I want to talk to her, tuck her in at night, cuddle
her . . . ' Little Kale was her first daughter, died at the age of
three, and my grandmother never got over her.
Grandpa said she almost lost her mind. She' d made a doll
the size of a child (a scarecrow, Grandpa said) ; she carried

1 14
it everywhere, talked to it, tried to feed it and took it to bed
at night. One night Grandpa burnt the doll. He was a soft­
hearted man so I can imagine how much it must have hurt
him. Yet Grandma was saved.

Mad Risto, the last person in the village to wear a sheep­

skin hat in summer ( a detonated shell from the last war
made him insensible to temperature) , sits every morning at
the village square right below the simple monument of the
victims of that same war. Poking at the dirt, he asks passersby
the time, then says , like he has for fifty-three years : 'What a
day, blink and it's over.'

Tin Dikko is one of those who went nuts from too much
reading. His cabin is made of empty cheese boxes . His
pet rabbit lives in a crate on the roof. Dikko's got his own
borehole of a well and he takes the water out in an empty
lemonade bottle tied on a string. He's grown a long unkempt
beard like Robinson Crusoe. That's what the village people
call him. The man was 'slightly unhinged,' in my grandma's
euphemistic, Christian phrasing.

Once upon a time I had found the stories of Mad Risto

and Tin Dikko amusing. Now these people-they are still
alive-fill me with gloom.
A dying village that's still trying to tell you its increas­
ingly mirthless , lifeless stories . I heard that people had
started paying Devil Dinyo, the semi-blind caretaker of
the village church, to ring the bells for them : 'Ring them
so we can hear them while we're still alive, because when

1 15
we die and scare away the crows , God knows what we will
hear.'
Death was the only adventure they prepared themselves
for. Some old men had ordered cheap tombstones and they
kept them at home with the name, year of birth and the first
three figures of the year of death already chiseled. The only
gravedigger left in the village was treated to endless glasses of
brandy for the promise to dig you the best grave ever. Every­
body imagined they would die in winter. As one of them said,
summer was no time for dying, what with all that work to do,
hay to store and vines to harvest . . .
Once, when the village was big and lively, the district
authorities wanted to make it a town . This was considered
prestigious , but the local folks gave it some thought and said
no. The only reason they gave was that towns had policemen,
policemen who would piss on their hedgerows and stare at
their wives. Those people just watched out for their wives and
hedgerows , that's all.
And I turned out to be a poor watchman. I wouldn't even
dare burn a sacrificial doll.

1 16
 41

I don )t trust anything that bleeds every month

and doesn )t die.
Men's room graffiti

. . . and she found out where the other one lived, got there,
grabbed her and dragged her home to her husband : and now
to bed, she said, since you want each other so much, right here
before me . . . they tried to resist but she was screaming and
pounding so badly that they lay down, now get started or else,
she shouted-and they did, what else could they do . . . while
she stood by the door and watched and watched and watched,
and then she said 'poor sweeties' and left .

. . . white chocolate, prime quality white chocolate. Every

time she was late she brought her husband a bar of white
chocolate . He craved the stuff so much he didn't see the
crumpled dress, he didn't smell the other man on her-noth­
ing, nothing at all. He munched on the chocolate and said
nothing while she disappeared into the b athroom . Who
knows how she'd come up with the white chocolate, was
she joking or feeling guilty or remorseful or was she merely
trying to distract him ? For one year it was bar after bar after
bar of white chocolate. The man was probably sick of it but
nevertheless ate it in silence. He said nothing and she thought

1 17
she' d got the knack of it. Then one night she came home to
an empty house. She op �ned the closet-no shoes, no coat.
A suitcase was missing, too. She checked the bathroom and
there, on the mirror, he had written with her own lipstick:
' 186 chocolates ! '

Stories I've overheard in the cafe by the market.

1 18
 42

Linnaeus had a proverbial passion for classification s .

Perhaps such was the passion o f the whole eighteenth century.
Having classified all known plants by genus and species and
having given them their simple names (nomina trivia) , he
made another, less famous systematization : flora: o/ficiariz�
or 'the officers' flora,' ranking all his botanical friends and
foes in a strict hierarchy. Services and friendships earned
the botanists-or the natural historians , as most of them still
called themselves-the rank of colonels , lieutenants, majors
and so on, down to plain sergeant maj ors and corporals .
This army was naturally led by General Linnaeus personally.
One of his touchier contemporaries (probably a corporal)
Lametrie wrote a cau stic article under the beautiful title
'The Man-Plant ,' where he inverted Linnaeus' method or
just his analogies and classified human beings as homospo­
rous, angiosperm and gymnosperm.
There is something in this Lametrie, a nice slip of our
anthropocentrism . Why should Man be at the hub of all
analogies ? How would plants describe us, I wonder, what
classification would they impose on us ? 'Described by a

1 19
Plant' sounds like a good title to be used later. I feel we're
being watched : by rubb er plants , sparrow-grass , bonsai,
small date palms, Chinese roses, geraniums and lemon trees.
They keep an eye on us. Let me ( as a good naturalist) add a
private observation : as the scandals between me and my wife
multiplied, the leaves of the rubber plant in the living room
withered and fell.

120
 43

Goats and roses were courting near me . . .

The plant and the fly, as well as all other living creatures,
appeared in this world millions of years earlier than Man.
Was God just preparing the cradle and nursery of Man ?
Wouldn't it be fairer-fairer on a universal scale-if God
had made Man as the plaything of all preceding plants and
anim als , a velvety, walking doll they could take care of?
Human thought is too egocentric to allow such a possibility.
Yet we could allow for it, at least here, on paper, in a couple
of lines . We are the perfect entertainment to the fly buzzing
in the room and to the rubber plant in the corner by the
window. We think we own them, but as a matter of fact they
own us . They watch our pointless wandering around from
the top of their own Olympus and when they get bored they
send out imperceptible signals to guide us .
I know, I know that in the very beginning of the Book,
in Genesis , God says :
'Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.
Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air,
the cattle and all the animals that crawl on the earth.' How
our heart rejoices to hear about that ' dominion' . . .

121
 Well yes , but this is from the human Bible. How would
'

the issue be rendered in ·the Fly Bible or the Plant Bible ? Flies
and plants have more genesis under their belt . How does
a Fly Bible sound ? Quite respectable, I would think. And
ancient. Let's read a few lines. Just the beginning. You know
my weakness for flies and beginnings . Just a note before I
start. The book of flies would certainly use no paper, it would
be, how shall I put it, a book of air. So we start. The Bible
of Flies.

It might be a bit unclear. I said I understand some of

their language. I've been observing them. Now I will try to
translate for you. Quite roughly of course. There's always
something lost in translation. In this case the first casualties
would be the flight and the three-dimensional vision. Still, it
would go like this :
1 : 1 In the beginning [was] air. And [God] said: let there
be movement. And [there was] movement.
1 : 2 Then [God] created the wings . The wings carried
nothing, yet drifted through the void. And [God] said : Let
there be a body to those wings. And [there was] a body. But
the body saw nothing. And said [God] : Let there be eyes in
that body. And [there were] eyes.
1 :3 And everything else was yielded by the eye, and there
was nothing that the eye did not yield. And the eye wished
for light and [there was] light. It wished for heaven and earth
and it saw heaven and earth. And then it wished for animate
beasts and humans and feces and it saw animate beasts and
humans and feces . And said [the eye] : Behold, this is good,
and it flew down to them.

122
 1 : 4 And so [God] created flies in His own image. And
when He created them He blessed them : be fruitful and
multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it ; and have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air
and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

I think that's it, if I have got it correctly. Some words are

always lost and therefore I hint at them in brackets, mostly
with 'God.' This word always sounds right. As you can see,
the 1 : 4 text is the same as in the human Bible. I couldn't
claim for certain who borrowed from whom. So much for the
Bible of Flies . For plants, I admit, I can't say anything yet.
I just suppose that their writing resembles forms of leaves,
roots, petals and stigmas .
I know that in 175 8 the ubiquitous 'general' Linnaeus
wrote a study on Somnus Plantaram, but I haven't come across
it yet. I envy him the title. The sleeping of plants. Just perfect
for a natural novel.

123
 44

'I think I discovered something important,' F. told me

one day.
'Important? '
'I think it's important.'
'And when did you discover it? '
'Yesterday. Yesterday afternoon.'
'Don't you remember the exact hour? '
'I don't have a wristwatch. Well, I could look at the clock
but . . . Is this important? '
'Enough of this importance. Of course it is important,
your discovery must be recorded precisely.'
'I didn't know,' F. whispered.
'Who will believe a discovery made yesterday after-
noon . . .
)

'I didn't know,' F. repeated crestfallen. 'But I might recall

it if I try.'
' . . . So ? '
'It was at the time flies drift in reverie through the air,
most of them napping on the curtain.'
'That's not precise enough.'

124
 'I remember the sun was not very hot anymore.'
' Not enough.'
'The stylus of the gramophone. The sun was illuminat­
ing the stylus of the gramophone. This is important . And
concrete.'
'OK, OK, we' ll record it like that: A discovery made
yesterday afternoon when flies drift in reverie through the
air an d the sun is shining on the gramophone stylus . Is that
OK? '
' Sounds like a poem. And it's concrete,' F. said emphati­
cally.
'I don't like poems . We must also record the name of the
discoverer.'
'Must we ? '
'You're killing me with this must we. It's your discovery,
isn't it ? '
'Well yes . Do you think anyone will be interested in the
author? '
'I'm not really sure. The author has no status anymore.'
'I don't know what you're getting at.'
' He died.'
'Who did ? '
'The author. In 1968 . Have you never read Barthes ? '
'Never.'
'How about Lyotard ? The Postmodern Explained to Chil-
dren ? '
'I'm not a child.'
'It's not really for children.'
'I wouldn't touch a book that lies in its title.'
'OK then, what was the discovery? '

125
 'Ah . . . damn . . . I t � ink I forgot it.'
'You think you forgot it? '
'Don't be angry with me. It must not have been that impor­
tant. Still, we had a great afternoon. An afternoon spent in
pleasantly pointless conversations.'

I like my conversations with F. She always knows what I'm

looking for. What's wrong in chatting with a fly? I'm alone
and I can do whatever I want. She's my friend. And she's
very nice. No, we don't have a sexual relationship. Anything
else ?

'You have recorded our pleasant p ointless afternoon

conversations ? ' F. is more scared than surprised.
'And I've prepared them for publication.'
'And you've prepared them for publication ? Then they
weren't pointless.'
'On the contrary, they were. At least such was my inten-
.
tlon. '
'An intention for pointless conversations' . . . F. is being
sarcastic.
'Why not? Nobody has published a book of pointless
conversations. A book about trifles, about flies, about your
own self.'
'You're nuts . You will be declared insane . A book of
pointless conversations. Shared stories . With whom, if I may
ask? With a fly? Do you really plan to publish this book? '
'Well . . . in fact I'm wondering if I can't make it a film
script. '
.

w ow . . . a movie
' 'VT • .I '

126
 'Yes , maybe a movie is more like it. Nobody ever made
a movie of trifles, of useless things. A movie made of what's
normally left out of movies .'
'A movie made of trashed scraps of film ? '
'Not quite. These things aren't even on the scraps .'
'I don't get it.'
' In this movie the protagonist will lie idly on the bed
on Sunday afternoon. The protagonist just hangs around his
apartment, goes to the toilet, looks through old newspapers
there, flushes and yawns . He may not speak at all. And no
inner voices . A man deep in his thoughts which remain
unknown to us. Depressing thoughts, on the whole. Everyday
thoughts .'
'A bit like you, yes ? '
'And worse. A slo-o-o-ow movie, where even tragedies
lack a climax. A movie with no society, no message. A movie
about dead things.'
'I like that. Dead. Something like the flies of the 1960s .
Nobody remembers them anymore.'
'The sixties were a great time.'
'Were they? You can't remember them.'
' So I have read. Le grand re/us ! The great refusal. Imagi­
nation was everything. The flower revolution . Important
years . '
'Imporant people. They try to remember those years. But
I don't like it when they try too hard.'
'They were all young in the sixties .'
' Everyb ody wants to m ake his youth sou nd terribly
.
important. '
'Right, but . . . '

127
 'But nobody remembers the flies of the sixties,' F. is shak­
ing. 'Nobody remember � them. There were swarms of flies
in 1968 .'
'OK, so this is what my movie or my book, if I ever come
to publish it, will be about. The big flies of the sixties that
came to nothing. Nothing at all.'

128
 45

Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing,

Nothing, Nothing, Nothing. I have only a few pages left and
I can fill them like that. What's behind those seven letters ?
Nothing. All the futility of life.

Today is the first anniversary of my divorce with Emma.

There are some dreams and other trifles I haven't collected

yet.

Dreams are like cats, the last to leave their former homes.

Everybody's talking about the end. Like kids trying to

scare each other. It's been the same game ever since Revela­
t ion . Blood and fire, a flood, a collision with a meteorite,
an ecological catastrophe, an ozone hole and another dozen
surefire prophecies.
For me there is something scarier than the end-the lack
of an end. I'm horrified to think that an ending might be
impossible. That is more of an apocalypse than all the other

129
apocalypse stories put together. There is no ending.
After everything that happened in this year of my life, the
Earth was supposed to crack, the skies should have fallen or
at least the ozone hole should have grown significantly bigger.
Nothing of the sort happened. I am still alive. The neighbors
give me funny looks but I don't care about them. I can stop
going out altogether. And I can take my pen and my chair
and never come back. I have to look for an ending. How was
it . . . to release that fly in my head. Just a little hole.

130
 46

The sun is shining. It's a good day to take a walk. Fred is

fishing. The rain is falling. The rose is beautiful. Grandma
is knitting. The yea r has twelve months , every month has
around thirty days , and every day has 24 hours. The cat is
purring. I'm sitting on a chair. Autumn is coming. Winter
has come. It started snowing. The trees are green in spring.
It's summer.
Why isn't everything as simple as a first-grade primer?

13 1
 47

This tramp is so drunk

That when he pees under the sky
The spurt alone keeps him from falling.
Male haiku

Today started much better. I felt like shaving. I even went

to the market. Well, the world was not particularly moved by
my absence. Same here. I bought a new notebook and two
pencils. I can't use a pen, it's too definitive for me. I wonder
why I'm feeling so good today. I'm not used to it. I bought
the notebook because I intend to write a new novel. The idea
sounds good to me : a tramp in a rocking chair. The image
came first. The tramp, a regular hobo, stinking, unshaven,
an old hat, is sitting in his rocking chair somewhere near
the garbage dump. Dogs are peacefully sleeping around
him. An emaciated cat is lounging in his lap. The chair is
rocking gently, as if moved by the wind. It would look good
on camera. The tramp in the rocking chair. Peaceful and
even kind of aristocratic. All other sounds have been muffled
except that gentle creak. This will be the leading episode,
followed by the story of the tramp. It started as an experi­
ment. The man wanted to write a novel with a tramp for a
protagonist, yet he was so determined to make everything
real that he decided to mingle with the hobos and try to live
their life for a week. He chose a different neighborhood so

132
he wouldn't be recognized. He grew a beard, tipped a shabby
hat over his eyes and changed beyond recognition. The first
two nights he came home to bathe and sleep, but then he
decided that this would compromise the purity of his experi­
ment, so he searched for another place to sleep. He found
some old shed and spent the night there. It wasn't that bad.
The early autumn weather was still warm. He sneaked home
several times for food. He made sure it was late in the evening
so nobody would see him, yet once a neighbor spotted him
and, taking him for a thief, scared him away with his shouts.
The man ran away from his own apartment. And so, a whole
month passed . The tramp had no intention of ending the
experiment. He got carried away. He' d never felt so free. He
found two shabby blankets , a piece of mirror, a knife without
a handle and an almost intact radio with missing batteries.
His big discovery was a rocking chair he mended with some
wire and never strayed away from. He even made friends with
a real tramp who taught him how to find some food every day,
though the man had brought some money with him. And so,
day by day, the line between the experiment and the real life
of the tramp faded away. He felt no inclination to go back
to his previous life. He didn't see the point. He was living in
another, yet parallel city.
Once he played the following joke. Or it wasn't really a
joke, because he was almost starving. He went into a little
restaurant on Slaveikov S quare which closed 'when the
kiosks opened,' as they used to say. Once he used to go there
with a crowd of aspiring writers. So the tramp went inside
and indeed everybody was there. He didn't flinch but headed
straight for their table, took a chair and sat down with a

133
polite greeting. Nobody �ecognized him. This restaurant was
frequented by all kinds of bums, so nobody paid much atten­
tion. The waitress even brought him a fork and he calmly
took a bite from the plate of his one-time best friend. Then
he took an empty glass, poured himself some wine and made
a toast to the whole group, ending it with a little quotation
from Eliot, his favorite lines from Ash Wednesday :

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn

And then he said something like : ' I drink to the fucking

postmodern situation whose prophets I take you to be.' He
knew those people well and he won them over immediately.
He spent the whole night with them, eating and drinking all
he wanted, he had fun, he watched them-deep in thought
about their pudgy wives . He never turned right, though,
because his ex-wife was sitting there (I didn't know he had
had a wife, honest) and he was sure she had recognized
him.

This is my idea so far. I don't know what will happen with

the tramp in the end. It occurred to me that if I want the
novel to turn out well, I' d also have to live as a tramp. Just
for a couple of days .

134
 that year many dogs were run over cats matted hair blood
on the bushes tails in the gutters he moved in with emma
with three aquariums fish breed easily die easily pigeons so
many around the ga rbage cans i what don't eat them i can
smell we are of the same breed season's greetings dogs are
not allowed into the store salesgirls wanted clinton is leaving
maybe whose is that girl no i don't want a home only a home
toilet flyyyy flyyyy is your decision final smile please sokolovi
bros get off from the cherry

1 35
A Final Epigraph

r ll become totally extinct

He told them
r ll become totally extinct
He told them
Like the dinosaurs

136
 About the Author

Georgi Gospodinov was born in Bulgaria in 1968 . In addition

to Natural Novel, he is the author of two collections of poet ry
and one book of short stories . He is also the editor-in-chief
of a weekly literary magazine published in Bulgaria and a
professor at the New Bulgarian University. He lives and works
in Sofia, Bulgaria.