The Physics of Sorrow by Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel Georgi Gospodinov Page A
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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 the Bible furtively, she had wrapped it in a newspaper so it wouldn’t show. She would read at random, dragging her arthritis-gnarled index finger along the lines and moving her lips. Thus, I heard the whole Apocalypse in whispers, in the late afternoons of my childhood, under the quiet Jericho trumpets of the flies buzzing around the room.
My grandmother knew she shouldn’t talk about such things in front of people, so as to protect my father, who could get into trouble. My father knew that he shouldn’t talk about other things and locked himself up with the radio in the kitchen, so as not to screw up mylife (that’s what my mother said). I knew that I shouldn’t talk about anything I’d heard at home, so the police wouldn’t come and screw up my parents’ lives. A long chain of secrets and lies that made us a normal family. Like all the others. That was the greatest trick of the whole conspiracy—being like the others.
I NVISIBLE I NK
At five I learned to read, by six it was already an illness. The indiscriminate guzzling of books. Some kind of literary bulimia. I would read whatever I found and soon reached my mother’s bookshelf and that purple volume with a hard cover and a large title reading “Criminology.” The first chapter began with the sentence that before the socialist revolution of September 9 th , criminology did not exist. While the following one, already having forgotten this, stated that the study of bourgeois criminology was necessary for two reasons: first, to denounce its reactionary essence, and second, to recover everything of value within it . . .
The denunciation was the most interesting part. Only there, between the lines and the distorted quotations, could you understand what was going on in the world after all.
Bourgeois criminology had nevertheless discovered several “minor” things, such as the lie detector, forensic psychology, dactyloscopy. I liked the title Finger Prints (1897) by some Francis Galton or other, a bourgeois criminologist.
At the root of revolutionary criminology, of course, stood Lenin. It was obvious that the criminal was in his blood. At the same time, he had laid the foundations of all the other sciences and all textbooks confirmed this ab-so-lute-ly (to use one of his favorite words). “Language is the most important means of human communication” was written above the blackboard in the classroom. That genius of the banal.
But the most interesting things in that purple textbook on criminology were the parts on forensic photography, weapons and . . . invisible ink. “Invisible inks are solutions of organic or inorganic substances: fruit juices, onion, sugar solutions, urine, saliva, quinine . . .”
This repulsed and attracted me at the same time. I had never imagined spies as bedwetters writing with urine, syrup, and spit. Scribbling your secret messages in various secretions?
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 the Bible furtively, she had wrapped it in a newspaper so it wouldn’t show. She would read at random, dragging her arthritis-gnarled index finger along the lines and moving her lips. Thus, I heard the whole Apocalypse in whispers, in the late afternoons of my childhood, under the quiet Jericho trumpets of the flies buzzing around the room.
My grandmother knew she shouldn’t talk about such things in front of people, so as to protect my father, who could get into trouble. My father knew that he shouldn’t talk about other things and locked himself up with the radio in the kitchen, so as not to screw up mylife (that’s what my mother said). I knew that I shouldn’t talk about anything I’d heard at home, so the police wouldn’t come and screw up my parents’ lives. A long chain of secrets and lies that made us a normal family. Like all the others. That was the greatest trick of the whole conspiracy—being like the others.
I NVISIBLE I NK
At five I learned to read, by six it was already an illness. The indiscriminate guzzling of books. Some kind of literary bulimia. I would read whatever I found and soon reached my mother’s bookshelf and that purple volume with a hard cover and a large title reading “Criminology.” The first chapter began with the sentence that before the socialist revolution of September 9 th , criminology did not exist. While the following one, already having forgotten this, stated that the study of bourgeois criminology was necessary for two reasons: first, to denounce its reactionary essence, and second, to recover everything of value within it . . .
The denunciation was the most interesting part. Only there, between the lines and the distorted quotations, could you understand what was going on in the world after all.
Bourgeois criminology had nevertheless discovered several “minor” things, such as the lie detector, forensic psychology, dactyloscopy. I liked the title Finger Prints (1897) by some Francis Galton or other, a bourgeois criminologist.
At the root of revolutionary criminology, of course, stood Lenin. It was obvious that the criminal was in his blood. At the same time, he had laid the foundations of all the other sciences and all textbooks confirmed this ab-so-lute-ly (to use one of his favorite words). “Language is the most important means of human communication” was written above the blackboard in the classroom. That genius of the banal.
But the most interesting things in that purple textbook on criminology were the parts on forensic photography, weapons and . . . invisible ink. “Invisible inks are solutions of organic or inorganic substances: fruit juices, onion, sugar solutions, urine, saliva, quinine . . .”
This repulsed and attracted me at the same time. I had never imagined spies as bedwetters writing with urine, syrup, and spit. Scribbling your secret messages in various secretions?
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