THE CELLAR OF THE STORY

But perhaps the story went like this.

March 1945. The war is coming to an end. A battle for a small Hungarian town, ferocious, the upper hand constantly changing, street by street. A Bulgarian soldier is seriously wounded and loses consciousness. His regiment is pushed back, the city remains temporarily (for a few days) in German hands. The soldier comes to in a cellar, lying on an old bed, above him stands the woman who has bandaged him up. She had managed to drag his body from the sidewalk straight through the little basement window, which is at street level.

She signals to him not to move, but he couldn’t even if he wanted to, he’s lost a lot of blood. In very bad German, the enemy’s language, he manages to exchange a few words with the Hungarian woman. Days go by, weeks, a month. Sometimes he loses consciousness, then wakes up again, still on the cusp between life and death. She continues bringing him food every day, applying compresses, changing his bandages. By the second month he has visibly improved, it’s clear that he’ll survive. The woman tells him that the little town is still in German hands and that the war has dragged on.

She lives alone, a widow, childless, she’s the same age as the soldier, around twenty-five. She falls in love with the wounded man. And because of him, she decides to change the entire course of the war. The Germans have not surrendered, they’ve come up with a secret weapon that has slowed everything down, the front has been pushed back east. Once she even fakes a search of the house. The man in the cellar only hears someone stomping the floor above him with roughshod boots and hurling the chairs to the ground, some containers fall, the sound of a broken dish. He grips his machine gun, ready to shoot the first ones to enter the cellar, but he remains undiscovered, thank God.

The closed space of that little room starts driving him mad. The sole small window has been boarded up with sheet metal. Through a single thin crack — good thing the sheet metal is bent — a bit of light gets in, just enough to distinguish day from night. He can’t stop tormenting himself with the question of how a practically finished, a practically won war could so suddenly change its course. And how long he will remain unnoticed by the Germans in this basement.

We should note that he, too, has secretly fallen in love with the woman taking care of him, but he does not yet want to admit it to himself. There, in his home country, he has a wife and child, who certainly think him dead. One night his rescuer stays with him, she merely touches his face and that is enough.

It was unexpected, as always happens after a long wait, they embraced, their breaths quickened, they uttered some fragmented words, passionate, tired, amorous, each in his own language. He didn’t understand any of that crazy Hungarian, she didn’t understand any of that crazy Bulgarian. Afterward silence fell, in which the two of them lay side by side. Languor and happiness on her part. Languor, happiness, and some unclear alarm (but clear guilt) on his. He tells her, in Bulgarian, that he has a wife and little boy, whom he left when the child was only a week old. Both to salve his conscience that he said it, yet also for her not to understand because it was in Bulgarian. He didn’t know that when it comes to understanding things they shouldn’t, women have another literacy altogether. The Hungarian woman got up suddenly and went upstairs. For several days he did not see her at all.

One afternoon a sudden blow smashed through the window of the cellar. The man leapt up — he always slept with his weapon by his side — and hid in the corner. The light pouring in stung his eyes. Soon a boy’s tousled head poked through the window. The man crouched behind a huge barrel. Only then did he see the heavy rag ball a meter away from him. The boy muttered something, crawled like a lizard through the narrow window and slipped inside. The man held his breath. The boy was so close that he could feel the warmth of his sweaty body. The boy grabbed the ball, tossed it through the window, pulled himself up on the ledge and wriggled out.

Along with dust and the scent of cat urine, the wind blew a scrap of an old newspaper through the window. And even though it was in Hungarian, he could still make out Hitler Kaput and see the photo of the Russian soldier raising a flag over the Reichstag.

He understood everything. He battered down the door and went up the stairs with his carbine. The light stung his eyes, and he hung on to the furniture as he walked. The woman was standing in front of him. She told him that he could shoot her or stay with her. She told him that she loved him and that they could live together, she also told him that he wouldn’t get very far with that rifle and his military uniform, that the world was no longer the same a whole month after the end of the war. Yes, it turned out that it was already June. She spoke softly, mixing Hungarian and German. He, mixing German and Bulgarian, replied that she was his savior and without her he would now be rotting on the Hungarian steppe. He also said that he would like to live with her until the end of his days (that was in Bulgarian), but that he had to go back to his son, who by now must be more than six months old, but that even if he tried, he would never be able to forget her. And both of them knew that once they parted, they would never see each other again. And that if they embraced now, they would never let each other go. Fortunately for his son, who was nine months old, each of them swallowed back their desires. In the end, they just said awkwardly: well, okay then, farewell. She filled him a backpack with whatever there was to eat and burst into tears only when the bell above the front gate jingled behind him.

The town of H. and his village in Bulgaria were separated by exactly 965 kilometers and two borders. He walked only at night, first, so as not to meet people, and second, because during the day his eyes continued to ache terribly from the light. He walked back along the same route he had trod with his regiment half a year earlier. He hid in abandoned shacks, burned out villages, he slept by day in old foxholes, trenches, and pits dug by bombs. In the end he had decided to leave his weapon and uniform with the Hungarian woman, so as not to attract attention. She had given him a real knitted sweater — this June happened to be cold and rainy — and a good hunting jacket with lots of pockets, left over from her late husband. And so, without a weapon, without epaulets or ID papers, he retraced the path of the war, always heading east, hiding from everyone. On the thirty-fourth day, in the middle of July, he reached his village. He waited until midnight and slipped like a thief into his own home. His parents were sleeping on the second floor, his wife and son were most likely downstairs, in the room next to the shed. This scene of recognition is clear. Fear, horror, and joy all in one. The dead husband returns. Here he was already proclaimed a fallen hero, awarded some small medal, his name had even been chiseled into the hastily erected memorial on the village square, alongside the names of his fellow villagers who had died to liberate the homeland. His reappearance, like all resurrections, only upset the normal course of life.

What now? Bulgarian joy is quickly replaced by fretting. They woke up the parents and they all started asking the risen one how it had all happened and what are we going to do now? That he’s safe and sound is all very well and good, but it creates some mighty big headaches as well. The resurrected soldier was so exhausted that he couldn’t explain a thing. As the third rooster crowed and day began to break, the family council made the only possible decision — to stick him in the cellar, both so he could sleep and so that no one would see him. Thus the returning Bulgarian soldier spent his first night at home — as well as all the following days and nights over the course of several months. He simply exchanged one basement for another.

Those were troubled times. The communists were roaming the country, killing for the slightest infraction. The soldier’s family was in any case on the list of village high-rollers, thanks to their three cows, herd of sheep, and nice old-fashioned cart with the rooster painted on the back. But what sin could the soldier possibly have committed? I’ll tell you what. First of all, he lied to the authorities about his heroic death, for which he had been crowned with a medal and glorified on the village memorial. The other thing that would earn him a bullet straight away was separation or desertion from his army unit. To disappear from your regiment for four months, without death as an alibi, and then to return a month after the end of the war without the weapon and uniform issued to you likely goes beyond the imagination of even the most merciful political commissar. What could the soldier possibly say in his own defense? The truth? Admit that he had spent four months in a Hungarian town with a lonely young widow, hiding in a basement long after the town had been liberated by his countrymen? Who, in fact, were you hiding from, comrade corporal?

The resurrected man’s wife continued to wear black. To her, he told almost the whole truth. He simply added thirty or so years to the compassionate Hungarian lady’s age and everything fell into place. The elderly Hungarian woman had lied to him about the continuation of the war and a German siege, because her motherly heart had wanted him, the Bulgarian soldier, to replace the son of the same age that she had lost.

His wife was a decent and reasonable woman, she was glad that her husband had returned alive and did not wish to know more. Even when she carelessly opened that envelope which the postman, her brother’s son, had furtively pressed into her hands, with only a baby’s handprint and an unreadable address, she didn’t say anything, but painstakingly sealed it up again, gave it to her husband and continued wearing her widow’s weeds.

A year later, half-blind from staying in the dark, the man came out of the cellar and went to give himself up. He gave them the scare of their lives. His beard and hair had gone white during that year, they could hardly recognize him. Where did you come from, the mayor asked him. From the other world, the soldier said and that was the most precise answer. He quickly told some poorly patched together story about how he fell prisoner to the Germans during the attack on H., how he was sent to work in the salt mines behind German lines, how they worked there, slept there — in the end the Germans were forced to beat a hasty retreat and dynamited the entrance to the mine. Of the thirty prisoners, he was the only survivor and found a hole to crawl out of. But from that long stay in the dark he had badly damaged his eyes and so, half-blind, he had traveled for months before reaching his home village. The mayor listened, his fellow villagers who had gathered around in the meantime listened. The women bawled, the men blew their noses noisily so as not to bawl themselves, while the mayor grimly crumpled his cap. Whether the people really swallowed that story or whether they wanted to save him is unclear, but in any case they all decided to believe it, and the mayor helped arrange things with the higher-ups in the city. They quietly reissued the dead man’s passport, cut off his wife’s widow’s pension, only his name remained on the memorial. And so as to do away with any lingering doubts, the mayor ordered the local bard to make up a song about the soldier who happily returned home a year and some after the end of the war. The song was a heroic one, according to all the rules of the time, telling at great length and breadth about “his dark suffering in the mine so deep” and how Georgi the Talashmaner (from the name of the village) “tossed the boulder to make his way, to see the sun” with Herculean strength. This was followed by his almost Odyssey-length return and the blind hero’s miraculous orientation toward his beloved homeland and the village of his birth.

Risen Georgi (that’s what they called him in the village) lived a long life, he saw well in the evenings, but by day was blind as a mole. He came out of the basement, yet the basement stayed inside him. During that year and a half, several lives had happened to him and it became ever harder for him to remember which of them was the real one.

Perhaps he had perished in that little Hungarian town after all? Was that Hungarian woman who changed the course of the war to keep him really young, or was she an old woman who had lost her son? How did he manage to escape from the German mine? And that which gave him no peace until the very end — the child’s hand, traced on an ordinary white sheet of notebook paper and sent in a postal envelope.

(Both versions end with the same small child’s hand, traced on a piece of paper. But stories always end in one of two ways — with a child or with death.)

From a Catalogue of Important Erotic Scenes

Now as she ran up the steps toward Sonny a tremendous flash of desire went through her body. On the landing Sonny grabbed her hand and pulled her down the hall into an empty bedroom. Her legs went weak as the door closed behind them. She felt Sonny’s mouth on hers, his lips tasting of burnt tobacco, bitter. She opened her mouth. At that moment she felt his hand come up beneath her bridesmaid’s gown, heard the rustle of material giving way, felt his large warm hand between her legs, ripping aside the satin panties to caress her vulva. She put her arms around his neck and hung there as he opened his trousers. Then he placed both hands beneath her bare buttocks and lifted her. She gave a little hop in the air so that both her legs were wrapped around his upper thighs. His tongue was in her mouth and she sucked on it. He gave a savage thrust that banged her head against the door. She felt something burning pass between her thighs. She let her right hand drop from his neck and reached down to guide him, her hand closed around an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle. It pulsated in her hand like an animal and, almost weeping with grateful ecstasy.

The mythical page 28 from Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was a revelation, a baptism-by-fire for a whole generation. I had copied it out longhand, just like most of my classmates, while some braver souls sliced it right out of the book with a razor blade.

Sex appeared to be a complicated acrobatic routine with hops, holds, lifts, thrusts, first with one hand, tongue, then with the other. I would never learn. But in any case, the very knowledge of that figural composition gave me the confidence of the initiated. At least in theory I knew what I had to do to reach that “grateful ecstasy”.

The other novel was French. Unlike the mute scene in The Godfather, now there was an abundance of words, sighs, ellipses. From here we learned that you can talk during sex, too. Bel Ami by Maupassant. “I adore you, my little Made. ” Please don’t, I beg you. a quick thrill. wild and clumsy copulation.

Let’s add the secret erotic stories that were distributed in mimeographed copies and attributed to Balzac, about intercourse (that was the word used) between a woman and an animal (something like Pasiphaë with the bull), only in this case it was a dog or a bear, I don’t remember anymore.

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In all that scarcity, we found sources of erotica in unexpected places.

In classical painting, for example. An inexhaustible reservoir of naked female bodies, of course chubbier and more Baroque than we would have liked, but it was still something. We gazed at the cheap reproductions. Goya’s “The Naked Maja,” Botticelli’s “Venus,” Rubens’s “Three Graces,” Courbet’s “Bather”. But Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” from our history textbook, with all the revolutionary zeal of her breast surging up out of her dress, became part of our own sexual revolution.

Underwear ads in old Neckermann catalogues.

The “golden girls” of Bulgarian rhythmic gymnastics.

All figure skating competitions.

Sculptures of the nude goddess Diana with her bow. The whole town of D., the erstwhile Dianopolis, was scattered with them. One afternoon, for a split second I caught a glimpse of a classmate of mine naked through the window of the house across the street; her name was also Diana. I already knew the myth and was afraid that the curse would catch up with me, that I would be turned into a stag that very minute, I felt my feet growing hooves, while enormous antlers would sprout out of my head any moment. A dog in the yard next door started barking at me right then, a sure sign that he’d sniffed out the stag in me.

Pantyhose packages showing long female legs.

Later we heard the rumor that sperm was very beneficial for female skin, and one of the older kids from our neighborhood bragged that he was often called upon to make “deliveries.” It’s the Bulgarian Nivea, he liked to say.

I’ve kept a whole bag full of love letters from that time. Should I add them here? It’s unbelievable how many letters were written back then. For a moment I wondered what would happen if I sent them back to the girls who wrote them? If I scrounged up their addresses and started dropping them in the mail one by one? I think V., the writer of the longest and most amorous missives, is happily married in Mexico.

V. wrote on both sides of the sheet, there was never enough room, so she would keep writing on the envelope, on the inside. One time I received a whole seven letters from her at once. She had mailed one, then wanted to add something more, and so on. She went to the post office every half-hour. I was in the army when I got them. The soldier who went to pick up the mail from the nearby village waved the seven letters over his head from afar. Everyone from the base came outside, each expecting a letter in that abundance. He started reading off the names on the envelope; actually, it was only a single, solitary name, seven times. I felt so guilty looking at the others’ faces after each letter — sorrow, which quickly changed to quiet hatred. Because of all the injustice in the world. Seven letters can’t arrive and be all for the same person.

Now I see that some of their opening lines were literally taken from the little tome Love Letters of Great Men. An innocent deception that I only now have discovered. This explains the lofty style—“My love, I believe that fate is sheltering us. ”—after which it launches without transition into everyday life: “Most of the lectures are lame, and some of the professors couldn’t care less. ” “Do you remember Petya, whom I introduced you to?. She’s snagged herself an Italian, if you can believe it. ”

Or this: “I want us to be as happy again as we were on March 8 and 9!!!” With three exclamation marks.

What I wouldn’t give to remember what happened on March 8 and 9.

Overheard on a train: “During socialism, we made lots of love, because there wasn’t anything else to do.”

FUTURE NUMBER 73

Many years after the apocalypse, life springs up again and after several millennia man makes a reappearance. These new post-apocalyptites develop more or less the same as earlier people did, not counting a few insignificant deviations (mutations), for example, the fact that they are incapable of abstract thought. Clearly, nature or God learned a lesson from the previous, less-than-smashingly successful experiment and has made some healthy adjustments.

Suddenly, the New Ones accidentally stumble across a buried but miraculously intact capsule with messages from before the apocalypse. The event is indescribable. Finally, some trace of their forefathers. But it is the most idiotic and laughable message imaginable (but they don’t realize this). Some testament to their descendants, which should be opened 200 years later. Part of it has been worn away, but individual phrases have survived. They decipher it carefully. And devotedly, as stone tablets are read.

We must heed this testament and change our lives accordingly, that’s how it is everywhere. Only one person resisted. On the contrary, he kept saying, we should do the exact opposite of what is written on the stone tablets if we want to avoid the fate that befell our forefathers. But no one listened to him. The Testament was circulated far and wide and every word was interpreted as specific instructions for action.

Every cliché (and a cliché is nothing more than an abstraction that has swallowed its own tail) becomes dangerous when it is made literal. Three empty, meaningless phrases from the distant twentieth century turned the life of a heretofore united and happy society, in which abstractions did not exist, upside down:. Prepared and trained for the sea of life. The socialist family — the basic cell of our society. To spill your blood for the homeland.

The sea wasn’t far away. They immediately turned it into an Academy, where they began training the young and the old. The teacher would swim out in front, with the students around him in shoals, with their frail, knowledge-hungry bodies, flailing their arms and legs. The more frail and sickly among them quietly sank, falling back and left behind. The survivors felt at home in the water, their backs grew enormous, they knew everything about life in the sea. What erudite athleticism, what academic muscle. the non-drowned poets sang. On land they started to feel like beached whales. And life gradually returned to the sea. (What an evolutionary step backward.)

After that, true to the second line of the Testament, they filled the sea with wooden cells. Every newly married couple received one as a wedding present and lounged in it of their own free will.

Three times a year they celebrated the Day of the Great Bloodletting, on which they injured themselves, so as to offer up spilled blood to the Homeland. And since they had no idea or instructions as to what it was, they simply gathered up the blood in a huge container, which they soon dubbed accordingly: “Homeland.”

There is no other surviving evidence of this civilization.

BUFFALO SHIT, OR THE SUBLIME IS EVERYWHERE

I remember how we walked through a historical town famous for its Revival Period architecture, uprising, fires, cannons made from cherry-tree trunks, history rolled down the narrow streets but my father was impressed mainly by the geraniums on the window sills, praising aloud those who had grown such flowers. Suddenly he stopped in a street and started hovering over something on the ground. I went to see what he had discovered. A pile of buffalo shit. It was standing there like a miniature cathedral, a church’s cupola or a mosque’s dome, may all religions forgive me. A fly was circling above it like an angel. It is very rare to see buffalo shit nowadays, my father said. No one breeds buffalos here anymore. And he spoke with such delight about how one could fertilize pumpkins with it, plaster a wall, daub a bee hive (of the old wicker type), how one could use it to cure an earache — you should warm it well and apply it to the ear. At that moment I would have agreed that the Revival-Era houses we were touring and the pyramids of Giza were something much less important than the architecture, physics, and metaphysics of buffalo (bull?) shit.

Even if you weren’t born in Versailles, Athens, Rome, or Paris, the sublime will always find a form in which to appear before you. If you haven’t read Pseudo Longinus, haven’t heard of Kant, or if you inhabit the eternal, illiterate fields of anonymous villages and towns, of empty days and nights, the sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language. As smoke from a chimney on a winter morning, as a slice of blue sky, as a cloud that reminds you of something from another world, as a pile of buffalo shit. The sublime is everywhere.

SCHEHERAZADE AND THE MINOTAUR

Usually stories are told by the one in the weaker position. This is clearest with Scheherazade. One doomed woman tells story after story to gain night after night. The thread of the story is the only thing leading her through the labyrinth of her doom. Inside the stories she tells, the most frequently tendered coins to buy someone’s life are again stories. It’s enough simply to recall the first — about the poor merchant who accidentally kills a genie’s son with an olive pit, and three passing sheikhs each buy a third of the merchant’s life from the fearsome father (here we really are talking about direct trade) by telling (selling) him stories. “O Genie, thou Crown of the Kings of the Genies! Were I to tell thee the story of me and this gazelle and thou shouldst consider it wondrous wouldst thou give me a third part of this merchant’s blood?”

If your stories are good and you really do impress me, replies the genie, then it’s a done deal. And it’s a done deal. The genie gives them the merchant’s blood, and Shahryar, who is listening to the story, gives one more night to the storyteller, Scheherazade. Blissful times. “By Allah, I will not slay her, until I shall have heard the rest of her tale.” But the story is endless. Just as the labyrinth is endless.

It’s obvious that that’s where Scheherazade got the idea from. You set off down the corridor of one story, which sends you off toward another, which leads you toward a third and so on. She has moved the labyrinth of stories into Shahryar’s bedroom. And — now here’s the secret — upon going inside, she has brought along her own executioner, she has sneaked him inside without him suspecting a thing. The two of them are there, but she holds the thread of the story, its thin opium leads Shahryar through the galleries and corridors. If the thread snaps, this mass murderer of women — because that’s what he is — will wake up, realize where he is, and all will be lost.

Where does the storyteller’s strength come from, even if it is the strength of the weaker one? Is it from his power over that which he tells? To hold in your hands, or rather, on the tip of your tongue, a world in which you can dole out death and put it off whenever you wish. A world that can be so real or so fabricated as to duplicate the real one, to become its double. If in one, death’s sword is hanging over you, you can escape down the redeeming corridors of the other.

Almost no one remembers or pays attention to how One Thousand and One Nights begins. In the exact same way as the myth of the Minotaur starts. With an infidelity. Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife, betrays him with a bull (Poseidon is peeking out from behind it). For their part, all the 1,001 stories begin thanks to the unfaithful wife of Shah Zaman, Shahryar’s younger brother, ruler of the Persian city of Samarkand. He sets out on a journey, realizes he has forgotten something, goes back and catches his wife embracing a slave. In one case, the lover is a bull, in the other a slave — always taboo bodies. For now, this infidelity costs only the couple involved their lives. Then the younger brother sets out to where he had been going — to visit his elder brother, Shahryar. There his brother’s wife’s infidelity is indeed on a mass scale, involving ten concubines and as many slaves. Shahryar decides to avenge his brother, himself, and the whole male world. Then the serial killing of women begins, along with the series of fairytales.

Night. Everything happens at night from here on out. In the eternal night of the Labyrinth, where the Minotaur lives, or in those thousand and one nights in Shahryar’s royal palace. Night is the time for stories. Day is another world, which has no inkling of night’s world. The two worlds should not be mixed.

Directional signs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen

ROMANTISME

IMPRESSIONISME

NATURALISME

CUBISME

TOILETTES

As I make the rounds of the world’s museums, I seem to meet one and the same group of old men shuffling stiffly and fragile old women with white hair, curious in their late meeting with the world’s art. At first, I used to think how tragically late this group is. Then I slowly began to realize, drawing nearer to their stiffness and fragility, that the meeting was right on time. From the eternity of the old masters toward another eternity — such a smooth transition.

I’m standing on a square in Pisa, looking at faces. I’ll never get tired of it. After the hunger for faces which I experienced in those basements and ground-floor apartments and lonely afternoons, I find the human face our creator’s greatest accomplishment.

People have gotten more beautiful. No, it’s not just another sign that I’m getting old. Or at least, it’s not only that. People really have gotten more beautiful. The women in particular, of course. Especially the women.

Rome — an abandoned city. Sunday.

I will add these to the list of cities’ first scents: asphalt melted by the sun in the late afternoon (a scent from childhood), the heavy scent of roses and a hint of rot. If something in nature can be pushed to the point of kitsch (since culture has done its fair share on that front), it’s the rose. The city is full of roses. Is it to cover up all the death that has accumulated throughout the centuries? All graveyards smell like roses.

The sunset on this day will catch me on a hill, in the garden of a monastery founded by the Knights of Malta, with oranges rotting on the grass and ravens pecking at the fruit’s flesh. Momentary epiphanies, which will disintegrate in the next instant. Which raises their value a hundredfold. For a few minutes, the sunset of the Roman Empire and the sunset over the Roman Empire mean one and the same thing. The nocturnal barbarians can be heard, racing along on their Vespas and Piaggios.

You don’t quite connect with some cities, just like you don’t quite connect with certain women. You meet them either too early or too late. Everything is set for your meeting, but some random whim makes you suddenly turn down some other street.

And Sunday again, all the Sundays in the world, in the morning, somewhere in Europe.

The bells wake me up and, half-asleep, I try to guess exactly where I am. I recall all the mornings in the world, starting like this, chanting the rosary of cities and towns — Graz, Prague, Regensburg, Vienna, Zagreb.

Every place has a small square, a cathedral and a hotel behind it, just one bell’s ring away. I look around the room. It’s Ljubljana, as the thick green folder of Hotel Union confirms, with its gold Secession-style inscription reading “1907”—the year it opened. The bells are ringing, some gentle, bright force hurries me to get dressed and go down to the street. Bells and the body likely have some very old conversation of their own tied to all the joys and sorrows, weddings and deaths, fires and uprisings, floods and parades that bells announced over centuries past. Run out onto the street as soon as you hear them. I mingle with the crowd, trying to dissolve into it, obliterating my own identity. Now, I tell myself, I am only here, in this city, on this square, with these people, on this Saturday or Sunday. I want to be a part of all this, to enter the cathedral humbly, to cross myself at the entrance, sometimes I do it Orthodox-style, sometimes Catholic-style, I don’t know which one is more proper, forgive me, O Lord, I pick up the hymnal, open it up to some page, I don’t understand the words, I listen to the singers’ voices, the organ’s response, is that what God’s voice would sound like, full, warm and stern all at the same time. I feel protected and calm, a part of everything. Except with a slight feeling of sinfulness that I’ve tasted only one day, not even a full day, but only a single morning of a life that doesn’t belong to me.

The woman who was crossing the square in front of the cathedral in Cologne on that overcast afternoon, godlessly and majestically screaming at somebody over the phone.

The Angel of the North near Newcastle with airplane wings.

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Why didn’t I write down more names? The names of all the places I’ve been. The names of cities and streets, names of foods and spices, women’s names and men’s names, the names of trees — a memory of the purple jacaranda in Lisbon, the names of airports and train stations.

I’m sitting in front of my notebooks like an aged Adam, who once had given out names, but who now merely waves after them, watching their tails disappear in the distance.

Things that resemble a labyrinth

The human brain. The cranial folds of all mammals.

A body’s nervous system or a nerve taken individually with all of its branches, nerve fibers, axons, and so on.

The serpentine of the small intestine and the internal organs.

DNA

Banitsi, burek, saralias. All the winding, phyllo-dough sweets of the Orient.

The flight of bees, the language they use to communicate with one another, the interwoven figures. The language of bees is a labyrinth.

A forest.

The root systems of annual and perennial plants.

The structure of the inner ear with its membranous and bony labyrinth.

A city without a river that you find yourself in for the first time. The absence of a river is important. Otherwise the Ariadne’s thread of its course easily shows you the way.

Secret routes taken on a walk with a mistress you are keeping hidden.

Doodles on a scrap of paper while having a boring phone conversation.

The pubis of a young woman. Here the labyrinth comes before the cave.

A ball of yarn.

The labyrinth sketched out by the reader’s eyes.

If you look closely at a rose for a long time, you will see the labyrinth within it. And the horns of a beetle-Minotaur.

Good thing this darkness is here, this basement, so I can stay here, turning back time, running through its corridors, shouting, mooing. The darkness helps me get used to it. When the one who is coming comes, I’ll be ready. The transition will be truly smooth, from one darkness to another.

I remember, or I imagine that I remember, strange things. I remember afternoon, towns baking in the sun, deserted streets that grow crowded toward evening. I remember, and this is my earliest memory, my mother hiding behind a curtain and waving to me, I’m laughing, because I get the game, I head toward the curtain, I’ve just learned to walk, but she’s not there. Sometimes I see rooms with high ceilings, a girl from behind, a cart disappearing into a field, an injured man in a strange city, a book in which I read my own story, full of mistakes.

I remember that I was once happy. It lasted about six minutes. It happened in the Kensington Gardens in West London, early in the morning. I can’t find a reason for that happiness, which is proof positive of its authenticity. Any other kind of happiness is a conditioned reflex, like in Pavlov’s dog. The stimulus comes and happiness is secreted, like gastric juices.

I was walking down the pathway, breathing deeply and sensing things with the body of a child. That is the key. With the body of a child.

I haven’t gone out to the street in eighty-four days. I only slip out late in the evening to get the newspapers out of the mailbox, they’re how I count the days. I don’t want to meet anybody. I’ve stopped shaving, my jaw has gone stiff, probably because I haven’t talked to anyone. Can your mouth atrophy?

I stop eating for some time. In any case, my supply of tin cans and provisions has been drastically diminished. I consider reducing my weight as part of going back in time. Children do not weigh 180 lbs. I feel better in this thinning skin. I’m looking more and more like that child-Minotaur. I don’t know whether I’m a boy, the sickly thin person has no gender or age.

When Theseus came out of the cave, he was leading a child by his left hand. The myth has erased that child from its memory. Myths don’t like children. Just imagine how incredibly awkward it would be. The hero Theseus with his short sword, Theseus who had defeated the giant Periphetes, the bloodthirsty bandit Sinis, the wild Crommyonian Sow, the hulking Cercyon, the cruel Procrustes, the Marathonian Bull, and so on, in the end sees a frightened child. Theseus tosses his short sword on the ground and leads the child out of the labyrinth.

That night he tells Ariadne: you know what, there was no monster there, just a little boy with a bull’s head. And that boy somehow reminded me of myself.

(Theseus and I really do look alike, yet at the same time he is handsome. Perhaps he sensed that one and the same divine father was peeking out from behind both of us — at once god and bull. My brother begotten by a god, I by a bull.)

Ariadne doesn’t pay attention to his words, but only hugs and kisses him, telling him that they have to get out of there right away.

The truth is, while looking for loopholes for the Minotaur in the story, I keep dreaming ever more frequently of my death in a basement, run through by a short, double-edged sword. The hand and the sword come out of the darkness of another time, they have travelled for so long that my human-faced killer is completely worn down from the journey, his arm is weak, and I myself have to help him with my own execution. To make a door with a sword in my very own body. My whole life I’ve been trying to lead the Minotaur out of myself.

But what if my killer (that which will kill me) doesn’t notice me in the darkness and passes me by? What if I hide, like way back on that summer night when we were playing hide-and-seek and they forgot me. And I stand there hidden for a long time, while death goes about its business for years, a century. And what if outside there are now other people, a few generations have passed, and I won’t be able to share the apple of a single memory with anyone? If that’s the price. I hear myself yelling, howling, mooing like a bull in the corridors of that basement, because I no longer know which language is mine. I’m here, don’t pass me by, here I am. Moooooo.