A detour within a detour. A friend of mine told me a story about how after an amorous night, when she was lying exhausted on the floor with her younger lover, he suddenly asked her (with certain sympathy) what that scar on her arm was from (it had already left her shoulder). She then realized with horror that he didn’t have that vaccination brand anywhere on his shoulders. Those who came after us are no longer marked in that way, she said, he seemed like an alien to me, like a clone. She got up, got dressed, and they never saw each other again.
ANT-GOD
Most likely all dreams, when being retold, should begin with the opening statement, revealing and startling in its simplicity, which I heard from Aya, who was then four: I dreamed that I was awake.
And so, I dreamed that I was awake. I was standing in front of huge curtains with nameless colors that flowed into one another—like I said, huge, but light and ephemeral. It was made clear to me in the dream that concealed behind them was “the beautiful face of God,” in those exact words. I draw aside the first curtain. (It seems that between curiosity and fear, curiosity always takes the upper hand, or at least that’s how it is in dreams.)
Behind it there was a second one. I draw it aside.
A third.
A fourth.
I notice that every subsequent curtain becomes ever smaller and smaller. Hence whatever it was hiding is ever smaller as well. I keep drawing them aside until finally only one is left, the size of a child’s handkerchief. I stop myself. Should I really draw this curtain? Could God possibly be so small? Perhaps the Antichrist is tempting me in my dreams?
I draw it aside. Behind it stands a big black ant. And I somehow know that this is God. But he has no face. The discovery is terrifying. How can you pray to and trust in someone who has no face? Someone who is that small? The revelation that the Ant-God gave me in the moment of awakening, without opening its jaws, went more or less like this: God is an insect who watches us. Only small things can be everywhere.
CRUMBLING LANGUAGE
I learned the alphabet from the cemetery in that town languishing in the sun. I could put it this way, too—death was my first primer. The dead taught me to read. This statement should be taken absolutely literally. We went there every Thursday and Saturday. I stood reverentially before the hot stone crosses. I was as tall as they were. With a certain dread, I dragged my finger along the grooves, reading more through my skin, I memorized the half-moon of C, the door of H, and the hut of A. Language seemed warm and hard. It had a crumbling body. Only a bit of dust and fine sand remained on my fingers from the stone. The first words I learned were:
rest
eternal
here
memory
born – died
God
And names, so many names, cemeteries are teeming with names.
Atanas H. Grozdanov
Dimitar Hadzhinaumov
Marincho – 5 years old
Dimo Korabov
Georgi Gospodinov
Egur Sarkissian (Granny Sarkistsa’s son)
Calla Georgieva
. . .
What happened to the names after their owners died? Were they set free? Did the names continue to mean something, or did they disintegrate like the bodies beneath them, leaving only the bones of consonants?
Words are our first teachers in death. The first sign of the parting between bodies and their names. The strangest thing about that cemetery was that the names repeated themselves. I stood for a long time in front of a headstone with my name, freed up by someone who had used it for only three years.
Years later, I make a point of visiting the cemeteries in the cities where I am staying. After paying my respects to the central streets, the cathedral on the square, and solemnly passing by the memorial to the relevant king on horseback (will today’s presidents jut out above granite limousines tomorrow?), I hasten to inquire after the city cemetery and sink down the walkways of that parallel city-and-park rolled into one. Death is a good gardener. I understood this even back then, at age six, amid the furiously blooming roses, lilies, aromatic bushes, the plums, wild apples, tiny cherries, and rotting pears of the village cemetery.
The crematorium at Père Lachaise resembles a cathedral with a chimney. Adorno says that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. But can you have crematoriums at all, even in cemeteries?
The dead taught me to read. I write this sentence again and realize that it says more and different things than I had intended. The people who taught me to read are no longer with us. The things which I have read since then were written primarily by the dead. That which I am writing out now are the words of a person who has set off . . . I did not know that so much death dozed beneath language.
G
After the primer of the graveyard I ran up against the real primer for first grade and felt simultaneously enlightened and confused. Every letter was connected to a word and a picture.
What word starts with the letter G?
God—I hastily called out, what an easy question. But something wasn’t right, the teacher blanched, she was no longer so smiley. She came over to me as if afraid I might say something more. Where did you learn that word? Uh, in the graveyard. Then one of the girls in the front rows said: “Government, Comrade.” That was the right answer. And the teacher latched on to that lifeline, excellent, my girl. While I felt so lonely with my God. Strange that you can’t have two words with one and the same letter, as if G’s curving back was too slippery to hold two such truly grandiose words.
The word “government” begins with G. There is no God in our government! That’s just gobbledygook, the teacher accented every G, we’ll learn about that later in the upper grades. Are we clear on this?
But he’s there in the graveyard . . .
This here is a school, not a . . .
Geez, all these problems just from a single word, I’m going to start hating school before long.
That evening, my mother and father had a serious talk with me. The comrade teacher had told them everything. Well, okay, but there is a God, right? It was as if I had asked them the most difficult question in the world. Look here, my mother started in (she was a lawyer), you know that there is, but you don’t need to go throwing his name around left and right, he gets angry if you mention him for no reason in front of strangers.
And as a rule, just keep your mouth shut, my father added.
God was the first secret. The first of the forbidden things that you could only talk about at home.
There’s no God in Bulgaria, Grandma, I blurted out as soon as we got home and I caught sight of her pouring oil into the icon lamp on the wall. My grandmother crossed herself quickly and invisibly. She surely would’ve snapped at me for such talk, but she saw my father in the doorway and merely said: Well, what is there in Bulgaria anyway, there’s no paprika, no oil . . . Only she could combine the country’s physical and metaphysical deficit like that. God, oil, and paprika.
She would read