THE BLIND MAN WITH THE BLUE EYES

(A Novel)

by Dimitar Bochev

While the comrades-in-arms of the Unknown Soldier, many of whom would leave the front in the form of obituaries sealed in yellow envelopes dispatched by the field post, lay in the frozen trenches talking and dreaming of fucking, the Unknown Soldier was inseminating the Serbian girl and along with her the rest of the girls. He preferred to fertilise her himself, rather than just fuck her with words. Anyway he didn’t like words – he always looked for what was hidden behind their carnival mask. He knew full well that neither speaking, nor writing meant doing anything. He also knew that by giving names to things and phenomena, we just want to possess them. By giving names to things, we personify them and systematise them but the final aim, albeit unuttered, is always the same: To transform them – word by word – into our own property and to pull them out by their roots from their natural habitat and force them into an artificial world we call an era, society, nation or civilisation. Even today the eyes of man continue to roam the heavens and should he find the slightest galactic star hidden in magnetic storms and galaxies, he rushes to give it a name. He knows nothing about it, other than it exists somewhere in the cosmos, but still he gives it a name. How much arrogance do you need to give a name to something unknown. Even the first conquistadors and explorers of the new worlds realised that by giving something a name, the unknown becomes an object of property even before it has become known.

It is so much easier, profitable and painless to name something, rather than to know it. The designated name is no more than a sentence pronounced without giving the accused a fair hearing.

It is a mark of propriety, the urine and excrement with which animals mark their hunting territory! Do not touch - it is mine!

When an animal possesses something it protects and owns it honestly and openly – by tooth and by claw. When man possesses something, he owns and protects it with words and sentences, with abstractions which deny the roots of life. That little star has no use for the name given to it by man. Even without a name it will continue to wax and wane for centuries to come. Nevertheless, man will proudly point to it and say, “That star is Vega!” As though saying: “That is me!” It doesn’t matter that all nomination of objects usurps and kills them – what is more important is that it makes them our property, albeit dead. I own, therefore I am! Forced to choose between life beyond himself and the death of obsession, man has chosen for once and for all death.

Only one ancient Far Eastern mystic attempted to save man from this fatal choice. He threatened to restore the primary meaning of words. I will continue his unfinished work. It will be both terrible and exciting – like the blood-ridden poetry of Furnadzhiev. There is no public law which can stop me. I shall go to the end of the earth like the Unknown Soldier, to the last, the very last and lonely boundary and then beyond it! One by one I shall restore the primary meaning of words, until word by word I reach the essence of things, the kernel of their substance. But then what? Then I’ll make that enormous step which no-one other than the Unknown Soldier has dared take. From everything that’s ever been named, I’ll take away the word used to designate it and just leave it as it was in the beginning – unaltered, pure, untainted and chaste. Morals, nature, no-one will stop me! I take the words away from things, I’ll free the world of hollow verbosity and I’ll populate it with essence. Things will no longer be prisoners fettered to the words of men. They won’t belong to anyone; they will belong only to themselves. Nothing, nothing will be symbolised or personified, everything will be self-contained and be totally self-sufficient – totally themselves – and least of all the name given by man and, the notion given by man, the perception of man, the idea of man and the way in which man talks of them. Thus shall I release the entire world, all the space between heaven and earth from the deception of words. Then shall I fill it with substance until it splits at the seams – everything which is, will be, and everything which is not, shall not be. Between the IS and the IS NOT, there will be nothing – no human abomination and anything which deforms, perverts and counterfeits this clean and pure world of God word by word . Only the Unknown Soldier shall stand in eternal vigil over this purity. He shall listen alertly to every word uttered in relations between men. Then shall the word become flesh, it shall give body to the flesh which has until now been helplessly personified by it. Then shall the world of shadows, phantoms and mystifications, in which we vegetate anaemically from the moment time began to flow and tick away pointlessly, suddenly collapse. Then shall everything which is vital and evil suddenly be restored for eternity with sagacious ceremony. I shall dig tooth and nail like an animal, I shall dig out the elements from under the heaps of unnecessary words: water shall once again become water, and earth shall once again become earth, air – air, and fire – fire. Never again shall these elements despise and abandon each other. Never again shall they become mere words and cease to be themselves. Because it is not the word water, not the word earth, not the word air, nor the word fire which give us life – they can do no more than form the word for life. Words are mere actors, mimics always playing and enacting someone else, but never themselves. It is only when you kill the actor that you can summon to life that thing which he has been concealing so as not to reveal its true essence in his performance. It doesn’t take much to commit such a live-giving murder – just an unknown soldier who hates war and a woman with her backside raised towards the sun.

I would carry out this monumental task with boldness, humility and self-denial. Boldness and a little fear, just a tiny little smidgeon of fear, microscopic and miniscule as a microorganism, but still concealed and flickering inextinguishably in my heart. A fear that should I deprive man of words, I would have nothing to write this novel with. Then there would remain nothing other than to write it and finish it with my life and essence other than with words. However, it will not be easy, far from it, to enclose the elements of water, earth, air and fire between the two covers of a book in the place of words.

“You will never release objects of their words, you will never restore the authenticity of their substance. Not you, nor anyone else. Even if you were to gather all the known and unknown soldiers beneath their banners, and even if all the dead were to be resurrected and stand shoulder to shoulder with them, and even if all the girls were to raise their backsides to the sun to greet their stiff cocks, you will never do it – not with the help of man, nor with the help of God”, the Philosopher reproached me. “Why?” “Because things are not just what they are, but what they seem to be”.

Like every decent and honest citizen I shall pay my water and electricity bills to the council. I’ll have a bite to eat in the café over the road and get my leg over Vera Belotserkovskaya who was very stressed out. She was stressed out from head to toe and tense with an incessant and dangerous tension straight from the infinite depths of the cosmos. “Be gentle, I’m very tense”, she repeated as my impatient fingers pulled her ragged pants down to her rounded knees. My cock thrust uneasily into her taught and still dry labia, and each time it entered the damp and warm birds nest of her vagina, Vera Belotserkovskaya would yelp briefly, “Oh!” This shrill but quiet “Oh!” contained everything – everything from a plea to a threat, and from delight to fear. “Oh, Oh, oh, oh, oh!” her thin little voice repeated rhythmically, as though she was conducting the fucking. “Oh!, Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh….!” The sounds flew from her entire body and chased each other like angry insects around the room. We fucked day in day out, night in night out, oh-ing and ooh-ing, but Vera Belotserkovskaya was still as tense as ever. Her constant yelping seemed to be like sparks exploding from a volcanic crater only hinting at the demonic pressure therein, and suggesting the unheard of forces fomenting in its bowels. “When I yelp like that, the sounds hint at the entire world concealed within me – all the madness in my soul, so much that even my broad Russian soul is powerless to hold them all in”. I began to understand her. Vera Belotserkovskaya was the youngest news editor in the Russian section and perhaps of all of us was the most pre-occupied with her profession. Every single day her telex delivered important, run-of-the mill and unimportant current events. Precisely every hour Vera Belotserkovskaya’s news bulletin would spew out the most important of these, but the run-of-the-mill and the unimportant remained with her, unshared with the listener. But they were enough to poison and ruin her young life. Even when the working day was over, revolutions, the hunger of the Third World , the reformation of the Second World and the overindulgence of the First continued to boil beneath the surface of Vera’s taut, tense skin. “I need to be as big as the entire earth to contain all this inside me”, Vera Belotserkovskaya would say through gritted teeth. From time to time, however, her safety valve would open and the sparks of high tension would fly out from her gaping mouth, “Oh!” Oh-oh-oh-oh!” “If I don’t cry out, I’ll burst”, she once confessed to me. But she cried “Oh” every day and every night in her spacious double bath, in her bed, on the carpet, and when her mother was visiting – on the sofa in her editorial office, and in the telephone box next to the supermarket, on the back seat of my old knackered Fiat, in the cool, inky shade of the English garden. It was not genes, nor God, not existence or consciousness – the “Oh!” was the most authentic self-portrait of Vera Belotserkovskaya. It was her own – it was something distinct from existence and consciousness. It was so much her own that Vera Belotserkovskaya did not want to share it with anyone, not even with me. She felt oppressed and tormented that by force of the circumstances of the civilisation she so despised, she was confined to yelp “Oh!” in the luxury of her apartment, in her bath, on the bed, on the carpet and on the sofa. The flat she lived in along with all the furniture were provided to the staff by the administration of RFE and RL and paid for by the American Congress. “When I yelp in the middle of all my things, it’s like yelping in front of the American Congress, and since Congress is a democratic product of the people who elected it, that means that I’m yelping in front of the entire American people, in front of the millions of US voters, in front of every one of them. You even bought your Fiat with the salary you get from RFE, and if we were to trace the money, we’d reach the American Congress. No, this world is not for me. I want to get down to its true essence, the essence I started looking for the first time I yelped “Oh!” But I always end up at the same despised institution. There’s no greater downfall than when the most personal and sacred thing you possess, becomes public knowledge. And that’s just what I’ve done – yelping my “Oh!’s” amongst all these things and institutions financed by the American Congress. I’ve got the feeling that I’ve been yelping into a microphone and turned my own yelps into a daily news bulletin. And that’s almost as awful as your tiresome efforts to turn it into literature”. That is why Vera Belotserkovskaya so naturally and sincerely yelped with her arms embraced around a tree in the English garden. The tree was just a tree, self-possessed in its entirety, and as she yelped “Oh!” in a loving embrace, Vera Belotservkoskaya did not feel like a news bulletin or a work of literature, but a component part of the universe, an ineluctable particle of the cosmos, she felt herself. Amongst the picturesque flora of the English garden, every “Oh” was extracted bit by bit from the paws of the social world, freeing her from gravity and bringing her closer to the Almighty, transforming her into the cosmos. Until one awful day, she read in the newspaper that the telephone box and the English garden did not belong to nature or the cosmos, but to the Munich city council. This dreadful piece of news was enough to leave Vera Belotserkovskaya distraught. It meant that her yelps were heard not only by the American Congress and the entire American people, not only by all her listeners and all my potential readers, but by the City Council of the capital of Bavaria, and from there – all the Bavarians they represented. There were no two ways about it: Vera Belotserkovskaya’s intimacy was becoming less personal, less private, less her own and all the more public. Her hope of protecting herself from the rest of humanity was become more and more uncertain. Her individuality was become more and more irreversibly dissipated into the amorphous masses, into the septic pit called civilisation. That deep and sacred intimacy which Vera had decided to share only with God and the universe, was now shared and distributed amongst those despised, anonymous, cold and alien organisations, communities and institutions. And her autobiographical yelping seemed to make her part of them, rather than distinguish her from them.

I remember when she yelped for the first time. I rang her doorbell and the moment she opened it, I threw the decorative bouquet onto the floor and grabbed her cunt. “Oh!” Vera Belotserkvskaya yelped in fright and jumped backwards to the other end of the living room as though stung by a bee. “What do you actually want from me? My soul or my body?” Her voice rasped in anger. “Your soul, your soul, your unfathomable Russian soul!” “Well, if you want my soul, why are you always grabbing my cunt?” “I wanted to start from the bottom and work my way up. Anyway the cunt is the only way into the soul”. “I thought it was the opposite, that the way to the cunt was through the soul”. “That’s because you’re a woman, and more than that – because you’re a Russian woman”. Vera Belotserkovskaya yelped and yelped – not out of pleasure, but as a matter of survival and to get rid of the tension. “There’s nothing so strange about it, you do the same thing when you write. Every letter you type on your typewriter releases something from you, something concealed deep inside you, something which the world has imposed upon you without asking. Every little word you write in your novels is the same as one of my “Oh!”s. We are both the same: if I could write, I wouldn’t yelp, but if you could yelp, you wouldn’t write!” This reciprocity voiced by Vera Belotserkovskaya and decorated by my written word forms the bastion for all life on earth. Her yelping was the accompaniment to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the crisis in the Middle East, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dissident movement, and the civil war in Nicaragua and all the phases of détente. As I listened to her yelping hour by hour, I was left in no doubt that even the Birth of Christ and Barbarity and the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, and Genesis itself had been accompanied by the shrill yelping of Vera Belotserkovskaya. Her yelps had guided our way like milestones from primitive cave life to the age of electricity. They accompanied my own private path and taken me to a place I had no desire to go to, and without Vera Belotserkovskaya’s yelping, I would never have gone. The place was Dr.Zigler’s private urology clinic. Yelping and repentant, Vera Belotserkovskaya phoned me one morning and said, “You’ll have to get a microbiological urine test done. I think I might have given you some little bugs – at least I’ve got some”, “Oh!” I yelped for the first time, condemning the entire universe with the words of the poet Botev, before making m way to the doctor’s medical practice. I already had an inkling of the medical contagion. My prick was dribbling and sniffling like a baby in diapers. It had all begun a week previously when my dick had suddenly started producing tears. I peeled it back one morning when I went to pee, and before my first drop of urine came, a little clear tear dripped off its little pink head. My prick seemed to be crying tears from the bottom of its soul. Then like the poet, I cursed the entire universe, and poured scorn on this despicable world, a world which had filled the channel of my reproductive organ not with live-giving sperm but with its own filthiness which I could neither piss out, nor keep in. Every though of pissing became repugnant. The recollection of Vera Belotserkovskaya’s every “Oh!” pricked my like an injection. “I might not be able to fuck again for the rest of my life”, I moaned to Vera Belotserkovskaya. “It’ll be your own fault if you don’t”, she replied uncaringly. “Is that what you think? Why? After you’ve infected me with these horrible little bugs?” “The infection’s not serious, it’ll pass, it won’t leave you impotent. What’s worse are the anxieties you wallow in and which torment you. They’re more likely to ruin your dick’s appetite. Just remember: a sick dick can fuck, a worried one can’t!” Vera Belotserkovskaya’s words just made me over more worried. Then she tried to reassure me, “Don’t worry. Just look at things positively and you’ll see how much you’ll enjoy the present and the future. Imagine that I’ve fertilised your vacuous and infertile life with a pain and that a little something of me has seeped into you”. But I didn’t, I didn’t want my vacuous and infertile life to be fertilised by anything. I didn’t want anything to seep into me from Vera Belotserkovskaya.

The doctor took my puss-ridden, inflamed and swollen dick in his soft, virginal hand. He began to rotate it and inspect it with a child-like curiosity. I looked at it as well. It was my entire life – sick and spoiled, filled with a gnarly mixture of healthy and rotten flesh. The doctor looked at my useless prick from all sides, prodded it carefully, squeezed it softly and when its pale pink head sobbed a painfully familiar tear, he said, “Urine!” He said it with a note of decisiveness which seemed so out of character for the gentle doctorly bedside manner. He sounded like a Guard’s General barking the command “Fire!”

I’m not the Unknown Soldier, I’m just a pisshead. I had to become a patient of Dr.Zigler’s urology clinic to realise it. I had all the desires of the Unknown Soldier, but not his strength. It takes more than just desire to become the Unknown Soldier, you need courage. The Unknown Soldier unbuckled his belt in front of the entire cruel world to fertilise and ennoble it. While here I was standing in front of Professor Dr. Zigler in his private clinic, to provide a urine sample. That was as far as my courage extended. His extensive private practice was buzzing with pissheads like me and inundated with urine. All the patients were holding transparent plastic jars filled with splashing amber liquid in their right hands, as though attending a cocktail party. Then surreptitiously and with a slight air of repulsion they placed the cups of warm urine on the enormous buffet table upon a little piece of paper containing their names. The good doctor would look closely at it through the lens of his microscope, attack it and diffuse it with compounds and reagents, and thus find out a little bit about each one of us. He would study and investigate us more skilfully than Shakespeare or Dostoevsky. He would divine our contradictory substance down to the last single micron and extract everything little thing about it. Then his perfectly working computer would transport it onto the black sheet of printing paper. Dr. Zigler would then give me the print out and smile triumphantly, “That is what you are, my boy. From the first spark of fire to the glowing communist future. Your urine reveals more about you, than your most precious intimate anxieties – not to mention the insincerity and hypocrisy of your literary head banging. Unlike your readers and lovers, I know how you are. I know you in more detail and more infallibly than your mother does, your wife, or even the executioners from the secret police!”

Professor Dr. Zigler in his private practice took only morning urine from his many patients. He did not want to hear about afternoon, evening or night-time urine. “They do nothing but deceive. They lead me to the wrong diagnosis – in the same way as the thought of man corrupts him. You see, morning urine is different. It is knows your dreams, dream by dream, drop by drop, the entire night, the subconscious so inaccessible to psychologists and soul-searchers fills your bladder, to let me decode it with the first rays of sunlight, transforming it into knowledge and awareness. Just as long as it is urine and the second ray”. “What does second ray mean?” “I could say, of course, stream, trickle or spurt, but that sounds too vulgar, ugly, pissy. It reeks too much of the toilet. If you want, I could say puddle. Divide the contents of the urine in your bladder into three puddles in your mind and give me the middle one. Discard the first and third in the normal way. However, I prefer to say ray, since it sounds more poetic, more elegant and more educated. The first ray is just waste, it’s not worth anything. It contains waste from the urethra channels. It flows from the surface of the body without touching the essence of the patient, without containing it and bringing it into my laboratory. However, the second ray comes from the bottom of the body and the soul. It is your personality, your life, your authentic being. Something which the microscope will reveal to me and bring to the light of the day. Thus, in order for medical science to capture you exactly as you are, there is only one way. You need to discard the unnecessary first ray into the toilet bowl and let it run away into the sewers, and then squeeze out the second ray into the little cup and bring it to me”. The doctor immediately unzipped his white trousers, took a plastic cup and demonstrated the entire procedure. Then he shoved the cup under my nose. The contents did not differ in terms of colour and smell from that of his patients. However, in terms of contents it surely belonged to the doctor. The doctor wiped his hands in impatience to get his hands on the truth about me, otherwise known as the second ray. I wondered and speculated about how I was going to divide the urine in my bladder into three puddles in my mind and give the doctor the middle one, while discarding the other two in the usual way. The bright winter sun beamed through the wide, festively opened windows of the doctor’s clinic straight into the cups of urine. In each of the cups a little sun appeared to lay drowning. One tiny individual sun belonging to each patient glittering like a little lamp, illuminating and working, lighting and heating the pitiful pissy life of each one of us. When the patients put their cups down on the buffet table, they suddenly flared up into yellow, sunny and urine-coloured flames – beaming in rays (second ray) like a kaleidoscope of urine, wave after wave, waves over the entire earth.

I had no doubt that everything was being done in the name of goodness and humanity. I was deeply impressed by the nobility and the boundless capabilities of medical science, but my admiration was mixed with a sense of repulsion. I could imagine the Unknown Soldier handcuffed with a dick in his hand. I could imagine him with his head proudly raised and even his skull shattered by shrapnel. But I could not imagine him with a cup of urine in his hand. What sort of destiny was that? Dear God! Swimming like an invisible microbe in the murky fluid of your own piss! There was no way that I, the proud and unbending son of God, the crowning glory and summit of God’s creation, was going to look for refuge in my own urine, and turn my urine into my own place of habitation! That is where I lived, there – in my stinking piss, not on “Graf Ignatiev” 26! That is where I lived and lived out my pissy, useless life, and that is where I would die from the invisible infections seeking me out in the plastic cup. After all that, how could you believe in God and Gorky, that the name of man sounds proud! The Lord God himself could not tell me what this pride might be, if it was concealed in a drop of urine – and I don’t want even to talk about Gorky! I was the contents of my urine, that was quite plain and clear. It was plainer and clearer than my passport, the state archive, and the recollections of Tittie. “I can read your entire being from your urine – It contains you, in the same way as you contain it” the doctor stated proudly, “Don’t worry, you should be happy that in these days of universal absence, you exist somewhere, that you are what you are”. “So when you pour my urine away into the medical toilet after my examination, it’s the same as pouring me away into the sewers!” I cried out anxiously. “Don’t worry”, the doctor reassured me, “Before I pour your urine away, I will have extracted you from it, I will have transferred you to my computer which will also contain you and preserve you perfectly”. “Me?” “Yes, you”, “Is that how I’m going to live on, extracted and then transferred?” “No-one can escape from their urine (second ray) – the laboratory assistants transfers it into the hard drive of the computer…” “But how can you store a fluid in a hard drive?” “You will remain encoded there for the rest of your life. And beyond. It will live for you in parallel with you; your urine will live together with you. And when you die, it will remain, it will outlive you, and overcome death by death transforming itself into your immortality, into that indestructible and eternal monument made not by human hand which the poet created in his verse, and you in your piss. Anyone who wants to find you, will find you safe and sound at my address – Arzisstr.32 – Any deviation from your authentic self is out of the question. There is nothing strange about it at all: in the same way as you contain your urine, your urine contains you as well”. The urologist reassured me, but I only felt more anxious. How on earth could my urine contain me? I would rather be contained by some clever thought or the excited emotions of the Philosopher. Or the radiant eyes of my mother. Or the beautiful, impishly smiling cunt of the naked girl in the magazine in front of me contained within the last issue of Playboy. Instead of that and without being asked and without wanting to know who I was, I was contained by my urine, my passport, my residential registration and countless soulless local and international statistics. “I don’t know anything about them, I am solely responsible for your urine”, the doctor justified himself. “Does your urine contain you?” “One hundred percent. In the same way as I contain it. Even urine contains its owner: the writer’s contains the writer, the doctor’s urine contains the doctor. My urine contains the private urologist, Professor Dr. Zigler, yours contains Dimitar Bochev, a man with no progeny. You see that clean, well-dressed man over there who has just put his cup down next to yours? That is Dr. Hlopak Hlopcek, a member of parliament. Come with me to the laboratory, take a look at his urine and you will see Dr. Hlopak Hlopcek, member of parliament, in flesh and blood: clean, well-dressed, with the confident gestures of a member of parliament and his soul filled with stately emotions. And you will see his bowtie – perched like a black butterfly on his white double chin. The moment I looked at your urine, it yelped a short, quiet and shrill “Oh!” “I know one man who is not contained within his urine”. “Who’s that?” The doctor replied with a note of anger and offence in his voice, that I might be calling the infallibility of his profession into question. “His name is the Unknown Soldier and he stands at the side of God”. “Bring me only one drop of his urine and I will turn him into the known soldier”, “Will you reveal him through his urine? I had intended to do that through my literature”. “Do not even try! You are biting off more than you could chew. Such miracles cannot be achieved through literature. Only my urology can achieve them. There is no more objective and accurate mirror of the individual than a puddle of urine. Your literature provides no knowledge of man, my laboratory, the second ray, provides knowledge of man. When you write about someone, you recreate him, which means that you corrupt him. Furthermore, the more talented, the more literary the description, the greater will be the corruption – realism does not create literature. Whereas my laboratory copies him the way he is – honestly, candidly and scientifically. Your pen deforms and warps things, while my urine preserves and protects them from the passions not only of poets and artists but ideologues, dictators and executioners. We shall see who shall win in the future, but for the moment I am winning, or rather the urine is”. So that’s what has become of me, my entire literary career trampled into the ground and no more no less than a cup of piss! But whose fault is it, when I create my subjects I see the world as I see it, and when Dr. Zigler looks through his microscope, he sees it as it is in reality. Of course, his world is more viable of life. As I wondered, I suddenly recalled Hanchev’s advice:

"To remain and to be needed

To live even when you’re gone

In everything and every likeness

Reveal anew and recreate.

Reveal them like the vine,

Enfolds the space inside its grains”.

What about me? What can I enfold space within? In my bladder! What shall I recreate the elements in? How shall I recreate our daily bread and wine? As a puddle of stinking, murky piss! Is that what I remain with and will be needed for? Is that how I will live even when I’m gone? If that’s the case, then I’m better off not being here at all! Yes, and if anyone asks you. Life is not Shakespeare – life doesn’t even let you ask if you want to be or not to be. You are and that question is decided without asking you. “Your urine contains you and you contain it”, the doctor continued arrogantly to grin. I had secretly begun to despise him. My real biosphere was not the ancient and wise books, not the keys of my typewriter, not the work of God or the eroticism of Vera Belotserkovskaya collected in the slim plastic cup of urine – second ray. I was living in there along with the invisible bacteria, there would I die, outlived many times by their immortality. Nor on the blank sheet of paper or the Playboy cunts I lusted after. It was just in the doctor’s computer, which also stank of urine, that’s where I would leave an indelible trace of me – until the most distant eternity of God.

During my not insignificant lifetime, I have been to many countries and continents, and visited many doctors. Everyone of them a specialist, and I albeit a patient began to specialize as well. One of them made me feel like a liver, the other made me feel like an eye, the third one a heart, the fourth one made me feel like skin, the fifth blood, until Professor Dr. Zigler in his private clinic made me feel like urine. And what’s more – impure and sick urine, mixed with microbes insatiably, although painlessly, consuming and poisoning me from within. Dr. Zigler so convincingly drew an equals sign between all these repugnant things and me, so imperatively compared my individuality with my piss, that he completely undermined and ruined my self-confidence. Now I walk about with my tail between my legs. I don’t dare piss like everyone else, because I know that when I piss, I am pissing way myself. My doctor has purged my microbes one by one, cleansed the second ray from them all and it is now pure and clean. But he has created much more damning ills. He cured my dick, but filled it with anxiety and charged my nervous system with an existential fear. I had never imagined that one could be so dreadfully afraid of one’s own urine. Somewhere inside me I felt that enormous tension which Vera Belotserkovskaya was overcome with. While she could yelp, I was not certain whether I could write.

I am selecting the characters for my book. I published an advert in the local newspaper, “Untitled novel looking for characters – positive, negative and neutral”. I actually knew at the time that I didn’t need neutral ones. When positive and negative characters get mixed up in a subject line, they end up as neutral ones…. They end up completely neutralizing each other – like fire and water, right until the moment when the sheet of paper becomes blank again due to a lack of substance. And it’s not just in chemistry that it happens, it can happen in literature as well. But I was young and naïve. I asked for them all and they all appeared – positive, negative and neutral. They’re waiting patiently in front of my typewriter. They’re all waiting for personification: positive as positive, negative as negative and neutral as neutral. They’ve already got their names – the Pornographer, the Sado-Masochist, the Philosopher, the Useless, the Absent and Tittie – they just haven’t been personified yet. And I’m one of them, and I’ve got a name, but I don’t have any personification. “If you’ve got a name, don’t worry about your personification, it will come. Actually it already has, your name is already personification. There is no personification without a name, in the same way that there is no name without personification, like there is no Unknown Soldier”. “What do you mean there isn’t? What about that one with the fine pair of balls on his waist?” “They’re all known soldiers – it’s just the marble that doesn’t know them and calls them unknown”, the Philosopher would not concede, and the yellow wine in his glass glowed like urine (morning, second ray) in the private clinic of Professor Dr. Zigler. Did it contain the individuality of the Philosopher from head to toe in the same way as the doctor’s urine? Did it know everything about him in the same way as urine? Something like that… Sip after sip, the words of the Philosopher started to become more precise and meaningful. The quantity of wine drunk seemed to be speaking from inside him and bringing him out, spilling his guts onto the dirty café table and revealing him authentically just like Dr. Zigler’s urine had revealed me and defined my under the lens of his microscope. While urine reveals the individual as it leaks out, wine reveals it as it is poured in. What does the urine of the Absent contain? No doubt his absence. And I imagine the urine of the Useless contains his uselessness. However, if that is the case, what do I need characters for? Why should I look for people, select people or write about people? Their urine should be enough.

I will make them one by one piss the second ray of their first morning urine onto the blank sheets of paper and they will remain forever upon them – unadulterated, pure, authentic and not corrupted or tainted by the perverse word. Henceforth shall I write only urine. That is the pure truth – everything else is deception. Albeit a beautiful deception, as beautiful as the philosopher’s wine which speaks incessantly – with clever philosophical speech. No doubt his urine was just as clever and philosophical, but I am no urologist, nor am I a philosopher – I am only Dimitar Bochev from the attic flat on Slaveikov square. Only a little later, the same wine on the same table was to speak of the pornography of the Pornographer. And then of the sadomasochism of the Sadomasochist and then of the uselessness of the Useless, and of the absence of the Absence, and of the tits of Tittie, around which we had all gathered like shepherds around a fire. Her face was empty and vanishing – all her life was gathered within her two pert tits. The Pornographer could not take his eyes off them, ‘What tits there are in this world! What tits! And here I am – fucking Goshe!” The Pornographer could not forgive himself that he only wrote about tits in his works, but outside of them he found comfort in Goshe. He would have preferred it to be the other way around, but being does not always ask the consciousness – it merely defines it, although that is not always certain either.

The wine spoke and spoke with the voice of each one of us – positive, negative and neutral characters. Each one of us recounted with the few real words left under the sun. The wine was the same glowing liquid in a large round jug in the middle of the table like a huge golden lemon – and it contained each one of us and then brought each one of us out, in a much more skilful way than these helpless lines could. But what do I care? It’s nothing to do with me! I have found my characters – and nothing can stop me now. Nor I them, or they me. They are all competent and clever, highly qualified experts, supreme actors, the Pornographer, the Sadomasochist, the Philosopher, the Useless, the Absent and Tittie – they have been waiting for all eternity, through epochs and eras patiently and honestly at the labour exchange. But not during the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Barbarity did they find an employer with my taste and heart to make them an offer.

I alone managed to extract them from their prehistoric unemployment.

Now they’re mine – down to the last one! I will not, however, lead them into the pages, they will lead me, meaning that I am in their employ, rather than the other way around. I’m the one who’s been waiting for their proposal throughout all these epochs, eras and eternities. They haven’t been waiting for me. I was not me who extracted them from the prehistoric unemployment during the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Barbarity, it was they who extracted me from my unemployment. I did not find characters for my novels – I found new masters, as if my old ones weren’t enough. Now I am their serf. They will come to me and approach me with their dialogues and situations, without asking me and without wanting to know me; they will perform the entire novel without asking me and without wanting to know me. They’ll write their entire mad world. And with all the will I can muster, I will be able to restrain them. Nothing is left to me but to follow them, as hard as that may be. There are no two ways about it, as much as I might want it, since literature does not belong to the author, but the author belongs to his literature. He is the helpless captive of its inventions. Good literature writes itself – bad literature is written by the author. Good characters perform their own roles in the subject matter – bad characters are performed by the author. My characters are better than the best. So I will follow them strictly on their heels, and pursue my novel to its end. And if anyone looks, I will be following it step by step. If I write the whole novel, nothing, absolutely nothing will be left of me – I shall be transformed from a citizen of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria into a little novel. The most justified of all fears is to write yourself out of your own novel. It is not just the fear of exhausting all the subjects and themes – it is much more than that, it is a much more malevolent danger: the danger of exhausting yourself as an individual, to transfer your entire essence onto a piece of paper and nothing, absolutely nothing, will be left of you, other than an enormous void as big as the cosmos which will consume you from within. There are many ways in which a man may exhaust and destroy himself, the most certain of which is literature. The author frivolously ejaculates into the flaccid and slippery vagina of civilization, ejaculates all the life from him into the hope of fertilizing it. However, civilization will catch nothing of him, just as it retained nothing of Christ. Civilization has long passed its child-bearing age unfertilized and prefers to fall pregnant not with artistic emotions and philosophical ideas, but with death-giving ideologies. And the naïve author does not suspect that he is casting asunder his seed onto stone, that he has traded his own life in exchange for the death of the epoch. This is an irreversible process – if I want to take a step back from my novel into real life, my subject will not release me. It will hold me back, pressed between the pages like a dried flower collection. From my vantage point there, I will peer out at the fine wine in the café, and the fine foods and I shall look sadly at the pretty girls. My mouth will drool, but even with the help of God, I will be unable to migrate back into real life. From the moment I begin to exist in literature, I will cease to exist in real life. I will be more truly and convincingly absent from life than the Absent one. One has to think very carefully before entering literature, especially if it is immortal literature – it condemns to death. It will replace life with its subject matter and there will be no way back. You will sing and croon like the greasy-haired bar singer with his thin, trimmed moustaches. “Life is a fool, bring me a little luck!” But there will be no-one to hear you. No, there is no life left for you – your are just the subject of a novel. Talentless writers have a happier fate: their written word lives only from one day to the next. From one day to the next they are nothing more than dead, and from one day to the next they are exiled within their own words, after which their executioners – their subject matter - then die and they can calmly return to their normal life, which accepts them gratefully, if not as prodigal sons, then as temporarily delinquent, but legitimate sons. The more talented an author is, however, the longer he remains dead to normal life. The most unfortunate of all are the literary geniuses. They are dead forever, euthanized through their own immortality. I hope that I am not so talented, since I want to live this wretched life. But I hope I am talented, since I want to live not only in modern times, but in time itself and outside time. I want to exist with that same unbounded passion, I want to exist on Graf Ignatiev, 26, and in the Pantheon of eternity. If literary immortality looks upon me, and if it removes me from my normal life, I wouldn’t regret it too much. I don’t have anyone I want to please. I might upset a reader or two with my absurdities – but I would miss Tittie. I would feel sorry for Tittie. It would be an unforgiveable sin to lock that treasure away between two covers, to turn her from life into a non-life. Sitting opposite me with such curves and pedigree, smiling promisingly with her radiant tits as bountiful as the wine jug – how could I remove her from that life-giving evening and exile her into my novel. I must have a heart of stone, because that is what I have done. I am a real killer of life, an unsurpassed sadist! “That is what you are”, the Sadomasochist confirmed my most terrible suspicions. “Each one of us to certain extent and in a certain way is both Sadistic and Masochistic. The correlation between these two sons in each individual destiny is determined by the construction of the character and makes man what he is. I am all of you, all the people on the earth at the same time, because I am the Sadomasochist!” “You’re not me!” The Absent one retorted. “And there is no way you could be. I am unique in my ability to be totally absent, but at the same to be present. Not to be there at all, but at the same time to be there in some form. Even the Useless one can’t compare with me. He is just a fact of his uselessness, while I am not even a fact. My leading principle in life is “Without me!” We have begun to investigate who is who in life, and that does not bode well. It is just that in any people’s republic there are people who aren’t worth investigating and who by mistake end up in the list of those who are. Then after the irreparable has been done: two pairs of strong arms remove the investigator from the investigation, extract him from real life, and replant him not in literature, but in something else – an even more unambiguous domain of non-life, called investigate custody. And from there on, there is no way back – just like in literature. From there you will look sadly upon the pleasures of the world, your mouth will drool and dry, but no-one will ever release you from your historical responsibility and transfer you back into the only real time – the moment. So you will rot and wilt within the investigate statement, just like Tittie in her subject matter. And the investigators don’t give a damn about you – they will drink their wine and laugh at you. Thus unjustly is this mad world of the living and unloving arranged. A world of present and absent, fools and wise men. “I live on the foolishness of people, and you live on their intellect”, said the Pornographer to the Philosopher. “And since there is much more foolishness on the earth than intellect, I live a much richer life than you do. I am clever enough not to rely on the intellect of my compatriots. And you are sufficiently foolish not to rely on their foolishness. There is nothing better than man’s foolishness to feed you – you will always be satiated. For this reason I live a life of abundance, and you live a paltry life”, the Pornographer smiled malevolently. “As it is for me, so it is for you”. That Pornographer was a true genius. He possessed that undoubted genius which allowed him to read a dozen books at the same time, while listening to the radio, watching television, talking on the telephone, making coffee and masturbating. In his pornographic novels which he wrote with a pornographic genius, the truth always triumphed, good always conquered and punished evil as strictly as Makarenko, but justly, and when they cried, the characters only cried from happiness.

With joy and hope I observed how freely and naturally my characters assumed their predetermined roles one by one. They entered them confidently and performed them well. They were all first rate, all excellent proponents of their craft. They all knew what was expected of them: the Pornographer – to perform pornography, the Sadomasochist – to perform sadism and masochism, the Philosopher – to philosophize, the Useless one – to be useless, the Absent one – to be absent, and Tittie – to show her tits. Her role appeared to be the easiest. “Easy?” She seemed offended, “If it’s so easy, why doesn’t some else get my tit out! Do you want to turn me into someone useless?” And she turned to run away. I barely managed to stop her and restrain her with the requirements of the subject matter. Thankfully the requirements of literature were greater than her female vanity; otherwise the novel would have collapsed even before marking out its vague objectives. The most difficult of which is undoubtedly mine – I am at one and the same time, both the author and a character. I fulfil both roles equally, which means that I fulfil neither properly. I’ll go mad, I will have a nervous breakdown in one unexpected chapter, and I will be crucified like Christ: between the earth and the heavens, between authorship and the subject matter. He was crucified between the impossibility of being both man and God, while I – from the hopelessness of being both author and character. Although all of us were divided, we were in the middle, living in no-man’s land – with one leg in life and the other in that un-life referred to by some as literature and others as investigate custody - measure for measure, as it is for you, so it is for me. Without wanting and without knowing, we were half of the people on earth – half positive, negative and neutral literary characters, half historical figures. How many halves make up one whole? “I’ll take the neutral ones”, promised the Useless one. “I’ll take them nowhere, never and into nothing”, “And I want to come nowhere, never and into nothing too – I’m fed up of sitting here with my essences”, the Philosopher begged him. “You can’t!” The Useless one interrupted him. “This journey is only for the neutral, and you are not neutral – you are a philosopher”. “Is there anything more neutral than my philosophy?” The Philosopher attempted to object, but orchestra soared and the singer sang and sang. They would perform and sing the entire world before I could manage to write it. I really wanted the Useless one to take them away nowhere – where they deserved to be – into Uselessness, but they were so deeply and tightly rooted into their life that neither literature nor investigative custody could shake them. The Useless one was well versed in taking people away. I would bring my characters into the subject matter, and he would take them away quietly one by one, turning them from useful into useless. But he would not take away the right characters – perhaps because I did not bring the right characters in. He didn’t take away the café musicians who made the wine sour, and our philosophy bitter – I could forgive him for that – but why didn’t he take away the local policeman, whom I hated from the bottom of my heart? Or the faculty party secretary, Kiril Petrov? “It’s all the same”, said the Philosopher, “The faculty is like a city region, and the party secretary is like the local policeman. He can’t be taken away, he’s the one who takes all of us away”. “That is just why I hate him”. “And I shouldn’t. He is just the objective reality, and objective reality cannot be loved nor hated. It is not subject either to subjectivity or objectivity, and objective reality is like the Guiding Party which punishes every deviation from the line of subjectivity.

“That’s how it punishes:” The Philosopher began to slap himself on the left cheek with his right hand, and his right cheek with his left hand. The air rang with the sound of his slaps. The wine which was about to be poured into us and corrupt us word by word, for the moment trembled within the jug, and the singer, clasping the microphone between his two hands, began to call and to curse, “Life the Fool, Give me some luck!” “Stop!” The Sadomasochist cried out, as if the Philosopher was going to take his bread away from him. “Don’t forget that I’m the Sadomasochist, not you!” The Philosopher continued to slap himself as a preventative measure for the mistakes which he was bound to make. However, he almost confused and ruined the entire novel by muddling our roles.

The wine poured into us gulp by gulp, and we word by word poured ourselves out onto the table, bending ourselves like participants in a beauty contest, one by one coming out onto the stage, revealing our awkward souls, instead of our graceful bodies. The amply flowing wine made our souls flow amply, wine souls, pure and honest souls – from midnight when the alcoholic thrills become more frequent, to the morning when words become vague and incomprehensible even to us. Then everyone returned to the cruelties of daily life, called lectures, seminars, organizational events and tits.

At the lectures, seminars, organizational events and tits, our souls were filled drop by drop with poison and stench, and like the character of the Useless one – with other people’s words. The Useless one read a lot. He read and read in the hope of turning from useless into useful. He didn’t understand that this could not be achieved by reading – it could only be achieved by living. Whoever doesn’t realize that ends up reading from night to morning – reference books, encyclopaedias, text books, and most of all the dictionary of foreign words. Every evening as soon as it got dark, the Useless one would open a copy of the dictionary of foreign words, which had for him become the book of his life, almost the meaning of his life. “You need foreign words to conquer the world, your own words are not enough”, the Useless one realized before opening the dictionary of foreign words for the first time. He learnt them one by one – in the same way as we drank wine gulp by gulp, in the same way as the urine of Professor Dr. Zigler in his private clinic filled our bladders with contents.

As the Useless one assimilated each newly acquired foreign word, it was either unceremoniously rejected or would predatorily devour one of his own words. Word by word as he read the Useless one expanded in volume. He was like an electric storage heater which charged up all night with cheap electricity, in order to discharge during the day. In this way did the Useless one get up every morning charged, swollen and full of foreign words, ready to discharge them and cast them around the intellectual cafes of Sofia. He enunciated them clearly one by one, in the exact same way as he had read them, explaining their origin, gender and transcription.

With every word he pronounced, the Useless one would deflate to exactly the same amount he had inflated during its assimilation, and as though someone had pricked an inner tube with a safety pin and the air escaped as silently and invisible, as the dictionary of foreign words had been pumped into him silently and invisibly.

By evening the Useless one was visibly thinner and as the evening progressed, when the yellow wine was being poured into us, to encourage our souls to speak, he would become completely emaciated. When the last cubic centimetre of air had left the pricked balloon, he would writhe in agony, but still be prepared to assimilate foreign words one by one and make them his own.

Thus by the time morning came, the Useless one would recharge himself again and run to the cafes and cultural clubs in Sofia to discharge himself. He vented each word in a measured way, in the same way as his storage heater vented a measured amount of heat accumulated throughout the night hour by hour. In the same way as the wine and the urine flowed in a smooth and measured rhythm, so did the intellectual life of the Useless one flow in and out. He had become an indefatigable perpetuum mobile which breathed in all night, and all day long exhaled pretty little two-for-a penny words.

“Foreign words – that’s what I need. Our own words aren’t worth a thing. The more foreign they are, they more I want them as mine. That’s the order of the day, the spirit of the times. Foreign words – that’s the only way to make your own career. And I am equal to it. I am equal and equivalent to the environment, I am the very environment”. Right down to the very last detail, down to its deepest essence, his entire personality consisted of circumstances, situations, givens – he was their given, prepared to dissolve the unnecessary subjectivity into any objective reality. “I know no more useful transformation than that”, the Absent one would say, and the Philosopher would not believe him, since philosophers don’t believe absent men, and because the day was still too far away. Foreign words were far away way – only our own words, like our own names could be heard at the table – and nothing was more own, more personal, more natural and essential than our names.

As long as you have your evening wine and morning urine, there is nothing which can deprive you of your place beneath the sun.

There was no God, no God at all at that faculty ceremony. It was opened by a short concert by a young girl, a student from the conservatory. She played beautifully, and her large, powerful breasts were in no way inferior to Tittie’s. Her nimble pianist’s fingers danced untiringly over the black and white key, the black and white, tender, lyrical sounds of Debussy, trickling like spring water from beneath her hands, combined and strangely uncombined with the uniformed figure of the colonel. I wanted this music never to stop and the colonel’s story never to begin. Still I preferred the vitality of her tits to the tenderness of the sounds. “You don’t need her”, the Absent one brought me back to earth, “A woman who plays the piano like that, isn’t good for anything else”.

I don’t know why but the performance took me back to my childhood. I was a child and my school report was filled from top to bottom with E’s and A’s, and I knew full well from the class teacher that there was no God, when suddenly one day I felt immeasurably old. Old, but not like a Buddhist exhausted by countless rebirths and journeys from one eternity to another, but physically and materially old. As old as the hill opposite my grandfather’s house, like the clouds above it, and their shadows on the grass, like the stones and the trees, like the water, darkness and light – that old. As old as nature itself. My entire childish body smelt of old age – and my childish soul smelt of old age. “How could I suddenly grow old at such a childish age?” I asked in astonishment and for the first time I began to doubt the atheism of my class teacher. “If God does not exist, why do we have a word for Him?” I asked timidly and her scientifically atheist slap left a burning wield on my cheek. “And if God does exist, why did he not stop and prevent your hand from slapping my face?” I asked with the same confusion. I am still asking myself that same question today, more and more insistently, and more and more helplessly, without understanding why my childish helplessness found the courage to defend God from the violence of the class teacher, while the omnipotence of God did not protect me from her admonishment.

And God?... What exactly is God? Was he ever a child? And what did he look like when he was little? Did he resemble the Little Prince? Or the omnipotent Pippie Long Stocking? Or did he look like me in my sailor suit in the old family photograph in front of me? Did he grew up like me, with joys and disappointments, with the impatience of getting big and strong and the fear of forever losing his childhood on the way to growing old? Perhaps God had never been a child – perhaps he suddenly became God. He probably never became God, because God is, not becomes. There is no little God, those are my own, human notions, which denigrate and humiliate God with my human mediocrity. God is, God has always been and will be always be grandeur and strength. It is profanity to believe that God could have been little! However, that means that God of everyone of us and everything – the God of children and the God of adults – is one and the same. This is not a thought which my mind can assimilate. Why should he have to fit inside my head? God is too big to fit inside me – even as a notion. What could that God be, what could be so Divine about him, if he can fit inside me?! He must be much smaller and awkward than me, and much more unworthy and pitiful than my own wretched human body! God is God, because he is great and the grandeur is unattainable, unrecognizable, and inaccessible to reason. The impossibility to define him is testimony of his Divinity. And there am I trying to turn him into a child! But how can we not define him?! Are not simplicity and accessibility also a sign of God. Another, different voice, but also my own asked. And since God is the absolute might, why can he not make himself both mighty and accessible? How noble it would be of Him just to do that, and how much poisonous doubt would he obviate in this way? No, God will not prove himself by inaccessibility, quite the contrary: by finding his way to man, through reason and perception. I will only have to sense this once, see it for a moment, and be reborn for only a moment, then I will immediately be transformed from a child of Darwin and descendant of the apes into the Son of God. And then nothing, absolutely nothing, not the immeasurable malice of man, nor the lectures in dialectical materialism, nothing will stop me on my way to God. Only once, only one single time will God divest himself on anonymity, to reveal himself for a split second – like the clicking of a camera – before my eyes. The example of Christ is not enough – every generation needs its Divine Revelation.

As I bashed my head, engrossed in impenetrable thoughts, there was an unexpected knock on the door. I felt as though someone had suddenly slapped my face. “What if it is God?” A frightening thought occurred to me. “What if God is coming to visit me personally and punish me for my sinful doubts?” No, it wasn’t God. It was the Useless One, and he bore no resemblance to God whatsoever. But then again, he may indeed have resembled God, but he didn’t look like himself.

I went back again and again to God, to the probability and improbability that he may or may not have been a child. He must have been, because a child is closer to God than an adult. The child’s life is purer, more holy and more Godly. But why had I never been so immeasurably unholy than in my childhood? There was not a single God’s commandment which I hadn’t broken sequentially and frequently. True, I hadn’t killed anyone, but only apparently. But there had been as many murders in my childhood as you like. Most frequently, and almost every day and hour, I would kill my class teacher, comrade Zhilkova. I would like on my back in the park next to the Danube, staring into the sky, at the highest point where the Lord God was supposed to live, and I would kill comrade Zhilkova in my most romantic imaginings. Actually it wasn’t her death I dreamt of, but the act of killing her. I would kill her day and night, in my dreams and in reality. Every minute and every second of the day and night I killed her over and over. I stabbed her fat body triumphantly with my pen from head to toe while whooping an Indian war cry. I killed her eye by eye, finger by finger, tooth by tooth, I pierced and ripped her pale skin millimetre by millimetre. And I insatiably enjoyed her slow and painful death. I was only sorry that I didn’t have many, thousands or millions of class teachers whom I could kill and kill thousands and millions of times with thousand-fold and million-fold pleasure. Every blow of my pen struck at the granite flesh of time taking me one step further upwards to God. That’s how I broke the most important of all God’s commandments, and it was the same for all the others. I broke them at will. I stole ripe and unripe fruit from the neighbours’ gardens, and the moment I entered high school and my prick began to tremble and move in my tight pants, the first thing I did was to lust after my kinsman’s wife without an ounce of shame, and then to lust after all other women, close and afar. While others reached out to God by adhering to the Holy Commandments, I found him by breaking them. I committed adultery, stole and killed, because it gave me pleasure, and pleasure is more characteristic of human nature, than refraining from it.

“Can you see? I’ve already written five chapters, and the world hasn’t changed, not one iota. Not only has it not changed for the better or become more beautiful, it is no different to what it was. And if I can’t make it better and more beautiful, I prefer to make it more evil and ugly. I just don’t want to leave it in the same way as it was when I wasn’t here. Because all lack of change means oblivion, because the world unchanged by my presence will inevitably be transformed from my birth certificate into my death certificate. If I was to write not five but five hundred chapters, all of them works of genius, even if I was to squeeze the very last thought from cold cerebral mush stuck in the fat Jewess’ stomach, and word by word fill the entire space between my old eyes with substance and meaning, the world would still be the same. Well, why do I write then? Would it not be more sensible to plant a tree instead of every word I have written? Or to cut down a tree? Or slap someone? But since for me writing is living, why do I live and how long will I live?” “Because only in that way can you live. Like the leopard can only live by killing, and the antelope only by grazing, you can only live by writing”.