I remember being born as a rose bush, a partridge, as ginkgo biloba, a snail, a cloud in June (that memory is brief), a purple autumnal crocus near Halensee, an early-blooming cherry frozen by a late April snow, as snow freezing a hoodwinked cherry tree . . .
We am.
THE SORCERER
And then a sorcerer grabbed the cap off my head, stuck his finger straight through it and made a hole about yea big. I started bawling, how could I go home with my cap torn like that? He laughed, blew on it, and marvel of marvels, it was good as new. Now that’s one mighty powerful sorcerer.
Come on, Grandpa, that was a magician, I hear myself say.
Back then they were sorcerers, my grandfather says, later they became magicians.
But I’m already there, twelve years old, the year must be 1925. There’s the fiver I’m clutching in my hand, sweaty, I can feel its edge. For the first time I’m alone at the fair and with money to boot.
Step right up, ladies and gents . . . See the fearsome python, ten feet long from head to tail, and as long again from tail to head . . .
Daaang, what’s this twenty-foot-long snake? . . . Hang on there you, where do you think you’re going, you owe me a fiver . . . Well, I only got five and I’m not gonna waste it on some snake . . .
Across the way they’re selling pomades, medicinal clay, and hair dyes.
Dyyyyyyye for your ringletsssss, brains for your nitwitssss . . .
And who is that guy with all the sniffling grannies gathered around him?
. . . Nikolcho, the prisoner of war, finally made it back home, and heard that his bride had married another, Nikolcho met her at the well and cut her head clean off, as her head sailed through the air it spoke, oh Nikolcho, what have you done . . . Time for the waterworks, grannies . . .
And the grannies bawl their eyes out . . . Now buy a songbook to find out what terrible mistake he made, slaying his innocent wife . . . A songbook hawker. Geez, what could that mistake have been? . . .
People, people, jostling me, I clutch the money, just don’t let anybody steal it, my father had said when he gave it to me.
Stop. Agop’s. Syrup. Written in large, syrupy pink letters. I swallow hard. Should I drink one? . . .
Come and get your rock candyyyyyy . . . The devil is tempting me, disguised as an Armenian granny. If you’re in the know, here is where you’ll go . . . So what now? Syrup or rock candy? I stand in the middle, swallowing hard, completely unable to decide. My grandfather in me cannot decide. So that’s where I get the indecisiveness that will constantly torment me. I see myself sitting there, scrawny, lanky, with a skinned knee, in the cap that will soon be punctured by the sorcerer, gawking and tempted by the world offering itself all around me. I step yet further aside, see myself from a bird’s-eye view, everyone is scurrying around me, I’m standing there, and my grandfather is standing there, the two of us in one body.
Whoosh, a hand grabs the cap off my head. I’ve reached the sorcerer’s little table. Easy now, I’m not going to cry, I know very well what will happen. Now there’s the sorcerer’s finger coming out the other side of the cloth, man oh man, what a hole. The crowd around me roars with laughter. Someone smacks my bare neck so hard that tears spring into my eyes. I wait, but the sorcerer seems to have forgotten how the rest of the story goes, he sets my torn cap aside, brings his hand to my lips, pinches his fingers and turns them and, horror of horrors, my mouth is locked. I can’t open it. I’ve gone mute, the crowd around me is now roaring with laughter. I try to shout something, but all that can be heard is a mooing from somewhere in my throat. Mmmmm. Mmmmm.
Harry Stoev has come to the fair, Harry Stoev has come back from America . . .
A husky man in a city-slicker suit rends the crowd, which whispers respectfully and greets him. Harry Stoev—the new Dan Kolov, the Bulgarian dream. His legs are worth a million U.S. dollars, someone behind me says. He puts ’em in a chokehold with his legs, they can’t move a muscle. Well, that’s why they call it his death grip, whispers another.
I clearly imagine the strangled wrestlers, tossed down on the mat one next to the other, and start feeling the shortage of air, as if I’ve fallen into Harry Stoev’s hold. I rush to escape, while the crowd takes off after him. And then from somewhere behind me I hear:
Step right up, ladies and gents . . . A child with a bull’s head. A never-before-seen wonder. The little Minotaur from the Labyrinth, only twelve years old . . . You can eat up your fiver, drink up your fiver, or spend your fiver to see a marvel you’ll talk about your whole life long.
According to my grandfather’s memory, he didn’t go in here. But now I’m at the Fair of this memory, I am he, and it irresistibly draws me in. I hand over my fiver, say farewell to the python and its deceitful twenty feet, to Agop’s ice-cold syrup, to the story of Nikolcho the prisoner-of-war, to the Armenian granny’s rock candy, Harry Stoev’s death grip, and sink into the tent. With the Minotaur.
From this point on, the thread of my grandfather’s memory stretches thin, yet doesn’t snap. He claims that he didn’t dare go in, yet I manage to. He’s kept it to himself. Since I’m here, in his memory, could I even keep going if he hadn’t been here before me? I’m not sure, but something isn’t right. I’m already inside the labyrinth, which turns out to be a big, half-darkened tent. What I see is very different from my favorite book of Greek myths and the black-and-white illustrations in which I first saw the Minotaur-monster. They have nothing in common whatsoever. This Minotaur isn’t scary, but sad. A melancholy Minotaur.
In the middle of the tent stands an iron cage about five or six paces long and a little taller than human height. The thin metal bars have begun to darken with rust. Inside there is a mattress and a small, three-legged stool at one end, while at the other—a pail of water and scattered hay. One corner for the human, one for the beast.
The Minotaur is sitting on the stool, with his back to the audience. The shock comes not from the fact that he looks like a beast, but that he is in some way human. Precisely his humanness is staggering. His body is boyish, just like mine.
The first down of adolescence on his legs, feet with long toes, who knows why I expected to see hooves. Faded shorts that reach his knees, a short-sleeved shirt . . . and the head of a young bull. Slightly disproportionate to the body, large, hairy, and heavy. As if nature had hesitated. And just dropped everything right in the middle between bull and man—nature got frightened or distracted. This head is not just a bull’s, nor just a human’s. How can you describe it, when the tongue is also pulled in two directions? The face (or snout?)—elongated; the forehead—slightly sloped backward, but nevertheless massive, with bones jutting out above the eyes. (Actually, it is not unlike the forehead of all the men in our family. At this point I unwittingly run my hand over my own skull.) His lower jaw is rather protruded, the lips quite thick. The bestial always hides in the jaw, it’s where the animal leaves us last. His eyes, due to the elongated face (or snout) that flattens out on the sides, are wide set. Over the whole facial area there is some brownish fuzz, not a beard, but fuzz. Only toward the ears and neck does this fuzz congeal into fur, the hair growing wild and in disarray. And yet he is more human than anything else. There is a sorrow in him, which no animal possesses.
Once the tent fills up, the man makes the Minotaur-boy stand. He gets up off the stool and for the first time looks at the crowd in the tent. His gaze wanders over us, he has to turn his head, given his obliquely set eyes. They seem