The Darkness We Will Remember

Players popped up one after the other from the locker room clad in jerseys and shorts in the most variegated of colours. The small audience welcomed them with lifeless, fragmentary applause.

Galin gazed towards the high school’s gateway. Class C’s former soccer star firmly refused to join the game on account of not bringing his sports outfit. He had no intention to come to the high school reunion at all, but Emil phoned him in the last moment to say there is a free seat in his car.

He stayed for a few more minutes near the playing field out of decency. His classmates, now young men no more, with thinning hair and blown-up bellies, had imperceptibly infatuated themselves in the game, dorkily hand-grabbing and tripping each other, and at some point, they began arguing in all earnestness over whether a penalty kick should be called or not.

He sneaked out unnoticed past the school’s backyard and came out in front of the doors of the dormitory’s male section. All around it was entirely empty. The students were dismissed for spring break. He glared at the dormitory’s peeling bleached façade and, with effort, managed to recognise part of a semi-erased title in English: BURNT, the name of the American College that was once housed here. Fires take central place in the history of all notorious buildings, he noticed ironically in his mind. He knew little about the College’s past and had never been interested in learning more. Back in his day, someone had dug out pins with the initials ASL – American School of Lovech – from the boarding school’s basements. The lucky ones to decorate their jackets with them nearly faced disciplinary measures for their behaviour. When he was already an undergraduate in Sofia, Galin recognised with surprise in a Bulgarian movie the tall stone wall running along the heights on the left of the embankment, directly across from the Covered Bridge where there transpired, behind the linden and chestnut trees in a tiny park, the whitening façades of those very same ancient, massive edifices – the brick gables of the male and female dormitories, the school, and the ‘German house,’ that was inhabited by the foreign teachers. He had felt oddly depressed in the cinema, perhaps affected by the familiar view now brought to life on screen but populated with the alien faces of actors.

And now he was staring ahead with the same confused, helpless intention and try to pick some trace – however negligible – of his erstwhile presence here. The new dormitory building, a small three-story residential block, had recently been built. Once, the college church had stood at this spot, repurposed with classrooms for the preparatory school year. It was called the ‘cabaret’ because in the evening time it transformed into a haunt for smokers and amorous couples.

The entrance of the old dormitory building was unlocked. With slow steps, Galin ascended the spacious stairways to the first floor. On both sides the hallways, with their green plinths scratched all over, were semi-dark. A splash of water wafted through a washroom’s barely opened door. A mirror tunnelled through the dark cave’s antechamber. Beneath it, a shoe stood in a pile with slippers.

He had no strength to continue onward. He rested on the last step of the stair and leaned on the wall with his eyes closed. Suddenly, he remembered Marina. Through all those ten years, he had not seen her even once. Her traces had perished. He knew that for a while she worked as a tour guide on the seacoast. She had been admitted to the Institute for International Tourism in Varna. Some claimed she had a child and divorced, while others claimed she had never married. On his way here Emil dropped the last version. She was married to a foreigner, somewhere in Belgium or Netherlands. Would she show up now? Lost and found, as in that T. S. Elliot poem, bearing her name for its title. They would find each other again after a painful separation – the King of Tyre and his daughter lost after a shipwreck. Marina was to appear, she is perhaps already here somewhere, nearby, arrived. But she was no daughter of his, nor a beloved. It was just once in the school park that their lips touched.

He decided to go down to the park. From here, a spacious view to the old town of Varosha unfolded, with the aspiring monument of Vasil Levski overlooking cottages in the revival style. The Covered Bridge was undergoing renovation. Beneath, the sludgy-yellowish spring waters of the Osam river gushed onward. At the other end of the alley, he noticed an elderly man in a dark grey suit. A raincoat hung over his hand. To avoid crossing paths, Galin diverted to between the blossomless lindens and hurried to sit on the first bench that met the eye. On its inner side, the park’s fence was quite low and ended with a sill of stone slabs. He knew that had he leaned over them, he would observe holes etched into the wall, polished by the feet of generations of boarding students lulled by the illusion of a forbidden life beyond. Galin smiled. We will open gates that we have never closed, and we will close gates that we have never opened… It sounded like the opener of a new poem and he kept on whispering to himself this soothing, monotonous play of words.

Someone put their hands on his eyes. He froze in surprise.

– Go on, guess who that is! – an excited female voice propelled him.

Embraced by artificial darkness with a taste of forced melancholy, he did not hurry to provide an answer. Dürer’s Melencolia with a compass in the hand. And more: the orb, the plane, the saw, the nails, the straightedge at her feet. The evenings spent with the only TV in the school lounge. The walks on alleys in this park and the night watch teachers disrupting the amorous couples. The ladder, the hourglass, the apothecary scales, the pensive putto, the magic square, the recumbent cow.[1] The green shield bug he ate after losing a bet for ten Levs. The soccer games. Goethe’s and Heine’s love poems, transcribed by one hand after another. The polyhedron object, the Sun, the Sea, the shore. The ancients called the art of measuring space and time Saturn’s art. We will open gates that… We will close gates that… We will lose… We will find each other… Saved…

– I give up – Galin said.

Her breathless body abruptly hissed behind his back and, as expected, he saw Vesela’s face. She stared at him in examination and quite close to his eyes. Then, unexpectedly, she began crying.

– Calm down, please – he pulled her next to himself. – The show is just beginning.

– It’s not because of that – Vesela sobbed. – They still have not told you? Mommy went blind.

– Mommy?!

That is how they called their literature teacher. She must have retired long ago.

– They say there was still hope for one of her eyes – Vesela went on with a trembling voice. – Such horror! Every year she disappeared when the school’s festivities happened. You guessed it, right? She does not want us to see her in this state.

She snuck out a handkerchief from her purse. He breathed in a strong perfume scent.

– Did the rest arrive? – he asked her.

– More or less. Sonya is in Berlin, and Vicky is in Golden Sands with some delegation. Vlaevski sent a telegram from Budapest. He isn’t coming. Only Interpol can gather us all.

Galin absently listened to her. Did she not mention Marina’s name on purpose? The three of them were connected by a funny and stupid story that once happened in the alleys of this park. He had explicated his love to them, two friends, separately, thereby causing their spat. Later, both united against him, particularly after they cross-checked the letters that he had sent them by establishing that the addressee’s name was the sole difference. During his military service as well Galin sent them identical letters. It was not possible that Vesela would have forgotten this epistolary polygamy.

– Do you see this one there? – she pointed at the man with the dark grey suit walking serenely in front of them down the alley. – He told me he is from the class that graduated twenty-five years ago. Only he showed up. Lord, I will go insane!

There was no one around when they found themselves by the playing field. The game was over. They entered the school building and started entering the classrooms. They found the football players from the class of 11C, seated on the desks, clad in their sports uniforms, and with their faces red from running.

– Absent! They must be marked absent! – Chavo screamed provocatively once they entered.

This machine engineer, married in Berlin and a father of two, was now head to toe an Adidas model. He rushed towards Vesela and grabbed her raffishly around the waist while brandishing a bottle of vodka in his free hand. The sweat on his neck had dried up in the shapes of muddy trickles.

The formulas from yet another physics class appeared on the black board. Galin tried to decipher them and failed. This threw him in melancholy once again. At the other end of the room two people threw chalks at each other.

He tried to sneak out and go outside without a trace, but Vesela had him under her watch and followed him immediately. She offered to walk with him across the river until the official dinner time came. They walked silently past the summer showers. Above their heads, the Cut Rock towered to the right, while the entry to the road to Troyan intersected it. Intermittently, the much stronger engines of passing trucks would roar down the road. Various wells spurt out of the Rock, most of them in the guise of fountains, which during Ottoman times led the garden to be called Bash Bunar.[2] The rocky waters powered a small power plant at the far end of the alley, rumble-running down the Osam river past a terrace-like passage of stone slabs. Above the passage stood out the very same small bridge with its rotting wooden railings.

– Let’s go back – Galin stopped. The walking bored him.

Vesela inspected him with a thoughtful look. Her facial skin had paled. Barely noticeable shades layered up, suggesting the first signs of wilting.

– Why are you looking at me like that? – he asked her.

– Because it’s getting dark. – And, after a brief silence, she added: – I don’t feel like going to the restaurant.

– Why?

– This reunion is sheer exhibitionism, don’t you get it?

– What’s that supposed to mean?

– Blindness. A Narcissus who can’t see himself in any mirror.

– That’s according to your vocabulary, however – he noted with irony.

– Why? How is it in yours?

Instead of giving an answer, he pulled her towards himself in a move of reconciliation. They stood embracing on the bridge for a while. The water was running in waterfall shapes down the passage’s artificial edges. They were all alone as the air was swiftly darkening. Exhibitionism! Vesela had given this word the most twisted and ironic of meanings possible. Narcissus, devoid of all opportunity to bask in his image after the annihilating, eternal darkness within the abysses of being. Mommy blinded… Those grey school buildings amidst the denuded park, irradiating with the melancholic relic-like light of their own genesis. Is it the case that our symbols, visions, landscapes, thoughts, and feelings help us understand ourselves better? – Galin asked himself. With their aid, don’t we become even more artificial, perverted, and lonely in an unrealizable and unfulfilled yearning? We live our lives in so far as we can fit and endure our knowledge of reality, busying ourselves with fixing the conditions of its illusionary certainty, being always ready to expose the said conditions and then replace them with new ones. Maybe Narcissus is blind by birth, and is not blinded and gone blind, as we tend to believe.

The official dinner at the restaurant’s hotel commenced quite boringly. The ends of the long adjacent tables were occupied by the teachers, and they were smiling politely in all directions. Latecomers arrived continuously, immediately drawing the attention to themselves. After a minute or two of hugs and handshakes, they kept on looking around and gesturing in excitement, prostrating themselves across the tables one after the other, and then suddenly going silent, finding solitude away from the spectacle around them by way of their enduring glances brimming with passionless acumen. At some point around midnight, the pinnacle happened – the moment when the music teacher showed up at the restaurant. The former choir boys and girls formed a semi-circle in the nick of time, with their heads protruding forward, and then a mighty roar made the window glasses ding. They were singing the high school’s anthem. Some had teared up with affection. Waiters and chefs crammed in front of the kitchen, observing with curiosity a scene that was supposed to be moving.

A little later, in the packed discotheque, Galin felt sick. Among the quickly changing multi-colour lights, Vesela’s silhouette flickered as if behind the shutters of a sun-bathed window. He made his way towards the exit. Amorous couples froze on both sides of the stair. After all, some of his classmates had decided to catch up with what they have once missed. Their postures were similar as everywhere else in the world. Women with their heads tilted back, as if resisting, and the men with their bodies leaning ahead.

For a moment, he stayed at the reception desk. Marina had not arrived.

The street was empty. A militia car slid slowly across his path and behind the windows Galin recognised the gazes staring at him. But he was in excellent charge of his gait. The engine revved abruptly, and the car passed by him.

A thin fog had fallen over the Bash Bunar Garden. He hesitated whether he should continue down the alley. It seemed to him that he would inevitably run over someone else’s alien and disgusting body that carries with itself both disaster and death.

He descended to the very bank down a slippery fisherman’s route. The water shined with ominous phosphorescent glimmers. His shoes waded into the silt.

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands

…

What images return

O my daughter.

An invisible mighty energy reigned behind the shapes of this reality, an endless movement of creations and destructions of seas, rocks, shores and images of loved ones returning. Someone returns to you when you already expect nothing at all above the river and under the moon shine, when you already have no visions, landscapes, doubles, gods, when it seems to you that you have nothing. But the human condition is such that one cannot possess entirely even the Nothing. Someone always returns, or, more precisely, restitutes themself. By dint of our own existence, we perpetually recreate the verisimilitude of a reality we call our own.

I made this, I have forgotten

And remember.

Dawn was breaking and at the other end of the alley, among a fog as of yet ungone, a silhouette emerged, one that Galin was ready to run to with a rejuvenated hope. The silhouette grew relentlessly in his squinted eyes, and, with disappointment, he recognised it as the man with the dark suit from the class that graduated a quarter century ago and who showed up yesterday in the school’s park. Stuporously staring ahead, it was as if he was making small steps on the thin line of a ghostly jetty and a ship on the horizon – was the strange ship emerging from or sinking into the darkness that we will always remember?

Translator’s note

The short story The Darkness We Will Remember (in: Innocent Monsters, Sofia: Bulgarian Writer, 1985, 41–49) is a key and representative work of Zlatanov’s early development. The story is an important moment of the critical and crisis-ridden atmosphere within Bulgarian socialist society in the 1980s (the so-called ‘stagnation’ period). The text and its stylistics are distinguished by a paradoxical synthesis of critical realism and fantastic-philosophical fragments, key to understanding its message in translation. That mixture comes from the influence of Eastern philosophy which was just being introduced and was somewhat tolerated at the time. The narrative itself is a prosaic attempt at a cryptic re-creation of T. S. Eliot’s poem Marina, an attempt to re-narrate it within the unfolding and frozen late-socialist alternativeless reality in trying to break away from the deadening Zeitgeist. This story is an important example from the development of contemporary Bulgarian literature as it successfully combines both the critique of stagnation and the gradual entry of Bulgarian linguistic realities into a more general Western European context through its late modernist references, relatively rare for the 1980s and shortly before.

Within the story’s nearly idle and slow, sluggish plot, the hero Galin returns to his hometown Lovech for the jubilee of his class from the English High School. Through a meeting that happened (with Vesela) and one that did not happen (with his beloved Marina), Galin and his homecoming represent a spiritual, yet deadening memory of an unfulfilled love and the realisation of a number of unwanted interactions: with Vesela, with classmates and teachers. The figurative-descriptive style of the text immerses the reader in the town’s environment, its landscape, and the meetings and mishaps of oddly inane quasi-protagonists – a means by which the narrative compensates for the apparent inaction, but also a means by which Galin can express his main concern, namely, the futility of returning to his past, memories and the countryside. Key to the story is the chance encounter with a nameless unknown man in a dark gray suit, who, in turn, functions not so much as a character but as part of the landscape and the description of a fantastic-sinister inertness, which is nevertheless liberating for Galin. The narrative uses contemplative, immersive descriptions as an addition to the rudimentary plot in order to both quietly criticize the stagnant socialist society and use some ideas from Buddhism regarding categories such as being and non-being in the context of late socialist stagnation, and thus veers towards a spiritual, allegedly apolitical transcendence beyond that stagnation. The story ends with Galin leaving the dinner, helpless before the meaningless return to a place where his beloved Marina is gone, and philosophical-essayistic fragments inspired by Eliot’s Marina. What is most striking about this story is that Zlatanov, without ever writing in the canon of socialist realism, does not aim to repudiate realism itself, but balances Galin’s act of disappearance and spiritual liberation with the canonical realism of the time, enriched with Buddhist philosophy and high modernism.

Translated from the Bulgarian by Stanimir Panayotov

[1] The sleeping animal in Dürer’s engraving is typically identified as a dog; trans.

[2] Bash Bunar (Turkish) – The Great Wellspring; trans.