Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

I miss myself, too.

I doubt that the referendum will bring back the taste of stew.

It’s well known that our inept homegrown police of all eras have always shown unerring taste in poets and writers—they always manage to kill the most talented and leave the most mediocre.

He says that we missed our chance to explain communism with all its horrors and labor camps and now a whole generation just takes it as a “lifestyle.”

You can’t make a museum to preserve something that has never left.

I no longer remember who said that a nation was a group of people who have agreed to jointly remember and forget the same things.

The evening wind buffets the napkins, the table is covered in glasses and dirty dishes not yet cleared away. And amid that whole jumble suddenly, who knows why, I recall that distant evening in the late 1980s, that seminar by the seaside, as if from a different lifetime.

Things are clearly not okay if the most categorical person I know shakes his head, uncertain.

a firework blooms in a trio of white, green and red,

Socialism was fond of early risers.

I’ve seen this picture hundreds of times, I’ve buried it somewhere in the basement of my mind and now it is floating up before my eyes like a ghost, but one of those ghosts which you know are made of flesh and blood and which won’t disperse if you stick your hand through them. And in that sense, if they are real, then you yourself are the ghost.

My poor aunt, her whole life she dreamed of a career as an artiste, as she herself put it, while the role of her life had been as a hair in Lenin’s mustache.

The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory.

language endured everything like a beast of burden, it didn’t revolt.

he likes for everything to be neat and clean at home, that’s why he dumps his ashtray into a little plastic bag, then throws the bag outside, over the balcony railing, so that tomorrow when he’s walking down the street and the wind picks up the bag and sticks it to his forehead or when he steps in dog shit, he can say, Damn, but isn’t Bulgaria a pigsty, and again let fly a few choice curses.

The years are the biggest Turk of them all, they’ve taken everything from me.

The sidewalks were like minefields, the paving stones would tilt and spit mud up on your pant legs.

Whenever I see a rifle on display, I automatically imagine Chekhov.

In a glass carafe with a red five-pointed star on the lid floated a brain in formaldehyde, as if stolen from some biology lab. It’s Georgi Dimitrov’s, Demby noted casually, as he brought over the juice. They preserved it when they mummified him.

I’ve pissed on them plenty of times, as he put it. I presume that only he understood these “pissings” and they served mostly as an alibi before his own conscience.

I wondered whether he didn’t sometimes secretly dream of getting out of business and going into art. I asked him. His answer was exactly what I expected: You’ve always lived outside the real world.

like somebody who had traveled to the future and everyone he knew was already dead,

I must have looked pretty shabby and dejected, like in that old joke: Are you a writer? No, I’m just hungover.

It should be my city and my past tumbling through these streets, peeking out from around every corner, ready to chat with me. But it seemed we were no longer talking.

When people with whom you’ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there’s no such thing as half a past. It’s as if you’ve torn a page in half lengthwise and you’re reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends. And nobody understands anything. The person holding the other half is gone. That person who was so close during those days, mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, in the months and years … There is no one to confirm it, there is no one to play through it with. When my wife left, I felt like I lost half my past. Actually, I lost the whole thing. The past can only be played by four hands, by four hands at the very least.

And upon turning back, they saw what was to come …

Sooner or later all utopias turn into historical novels.

the crude oil of sorrow is their only inexhaustible resource.

Most likely 1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.

That’s what Madrid smelled like, beer and urine, and there was joy in that smell.

The body and the rain have an old, ongoing conversation that I had forgotten.

It’s not the clashes, the broken windows, the exiled, the imprisoned, the beaten and raped, or even the murdered ones that crush you, but rather the subtle, chilling sense of meaninglessness in some subsequent afternoon, when you see people laughing on the street, getting together, making children within that same system that has already kicked you out of life for a good long while.

History can afford to make a hash of fifty or sixty of its years, it’s got thousands of them, to history, that’s no more than a second, but what is that human-fly to do, for whom that historical second is his whole life?

In the end, almost all the countries from Eastern Bloc (with two exceptions, Bulgaria and Romania) chose the years around 1989 as the desired point for returning and restarting.

Latvia would never choose this date!!

All those happy, well-fed peoples, Frenchmen, Englishmen … Oh, I am not from here, I have centuries of constant misfortune behind me. I was born in a nation devoid of opportunities. Happiness ends in Vienna; beyond Vienna begins Damnation!

Sometimes we don’t stop to think how some historical event only appears to be more distant than it actually is. When I was born, the Second World War was a mere twenty-three years in the past, but it has always seemed like a completely different epoch to me. As Gaustine would say: Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears …

You always say that the eighties are the decade that produced mostly boredom and disco in the East, E. wrote me after the elections, but clearly that’s what people want—disco and boredom.

So many places where I’m not. I’m not in Naples, in Tangier, Coimbra, Lisbon, New York, Yambol, and Istanbul. Not only am I not there, I am painfully absent. I am not there on a rainy afternoon in London, I am not there in the clamor of Madrid in the evening, I am not in Brooklyn in autumn, I am not there on the empty Sunday streets of Sofia or Turin, in the silence of a Bulgarian town in 1978 … I am so very absent. The world is overcrowded with my absence. Life is where I am not. No matter where I am …

Then you discover a piazza, with a little fountain and a church in the corner. And with a little group of friends, a few guys and girls, who have come out to shoot the breeze in the coolness around midnight. You sit down on a bench at the other end of the square, you listen to their voices, and if anyone had asked you at that moment what happiness is, you would point silently toward them. Growing old with your friends on a square like this, chattering and sipping your beer on warm nights, in a quadrangle of old buildings. Unperturbed by the lulls in the chatter, followed by waves of laughter, you don’t want anything more or less in the world, besides to preserve that rhythm of silence and laughter. In the inescapable nights of the coming years and old age.

Our handwriting was indistinguishable.

Over the years it became ever more difficult to discern who was writing whom.

The calming knowledge that there are different human faces, and the rising fear that yours is not among them. That perhaps it does not exist.

In the end, writing arises when man realizes that memory is not enough.

Time is not the last second that has just passed, but a whole series of failures going back (and up ahead), heaps of rubble, as Walter Benjamin puts it, before which the angel of history will stand aghast, his face turned away.

Something has changed, something is not the same. I hear its dragging footsteps, heavy breathing. It wasn’t like this before, there used to be rhythm, dancing, running. For a moment, between the shadow of the leaves I catch a glimpse of the tired light of yesterday or of a forgotten afternoon years ago. Something seeps in, drop by drop, the sediment of other times. On my palate I sense the taste of ash, with my nose I catch the scent of something burned. Like stubble or a forest that has set itself alight … Something has changed, something is not the same. With my fingers I touch another skin, cold and grainy. Before, it was warm and smooth, alive like a person’s hand, now it is like the shed skin of a viper. You stroll through the hot afternoon in August and suddenly out from behind some bush the stench of rot hits you. A corpse, of a rat most likely, but still a corpse. Something has started to go rotten, go bitter, to stink, to go dark, and to grow cold, I feel it with my five senses. Something has changed, something is not the same. But what if time has already stopped? How will we know? Will the clocks stop? Will the calendars be stuck on one and the same day? Hardly, they actually don’t feed on time, they do not live off it. So what feeds on time, then? Everything living, of course. The cats, cows, bees, and water snakes, the thistles, the lizard hawks and the lizards, the squirrels in the park, the earthworms and the fruit fly, the blue whale and redfish—everything ...

Birds sang even during the war. Therein lies the whole horror … and consolation.

It’s been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won’t set foot there.

Novels and stories offer deceptive consolation about order and form. Someone is supposedly holding all the threads of the action, knowing the order and the outcome, which scene comes after which. A truly brave book, a brave and inconsolable book, would be one in which all stories, the happened and the unhappened, float around us in the primordial chaos, shouting and whispering, begging and sniggering, meeting and passing one another by in the darkness. The end of a novel is like the end of the world, it’s good to put it off.