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 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 my life (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.
INVISIBLE INK
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 9th, 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
