This Translation Tuesday, a grim vision of the future comes to us from Bulgarian author Georgi Tenev and his translator, Traci Speed. Rado is on a train through a dystopian but dimly recognisable Europe, trying to get off the continent before apocalypse sweeps in from the east. As the carriages inch around a radioactive Mediterranean, he muses about how things came to be so wrong. The signs of moribund civilisation that spring from Tenev’s imagination are graphic and pointed. Passengers trade in the bones of migrants who died trying to enter Europe in the ‘better days’. Mutant rabbits, originally bred for KFC, serve as ‘edible companions’ for the journey ahead. There are whispers that Hitler has come back from the dead. When things go catastrophically wrong, Tenev shows, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.
This war’s been going a long time, and it’s being fought for what’s most important inside of you. The struggle’s between those of us who want to save you and that animal force that wants to swallow you up. We found the subgenetic formula for intelligence, for human reason. We determined the principle behind the absorption of ephermine, that subtle substance with a negative mass, that diaphanous matter. Ephermine cannot exist independently, and so it gravitates in an orbit around the photon and comprises part of its spectrum. This form is vulnerable and unstable, but without it—consciousness, thought, and reason wouldn’t exist. Something else that wouldn’t exist is that thing which, for a change, we call the soul—that which is not quite intrinsic to the body. For some time now, we’ve been trying to migrate from this body, from the biochemical base to another independent host of identity. We made attempts and we made mistakes; you, however, turned out to be a paradox, an exception to the rule. You’re too attached to the biological, to what you consider life. We have to put people like you under quarantine until we’ve researched the vector of your development better. Until we write the story of your—yours personally, in this case—your rise and fall. You call it birth and death. Fine, call it that. In order to reach the heart of the ephermine, however, the casing has to be destroyed. A person has to be crushed and broken down before receiving a new unrestricted identity. But you stubbornly persist, you want to maintain the status quo. Fine, listen to your story. Then you can evaluate whether or not you have anything to be sorry for.
1.
Kids of indeterminate race are playing at the end of the passenger car. One holds a mutant rabbit in their arms. The parents have brought the rabbit for food, but it’ll also do for a toy. Children are the hardest thing when you’re traveling. Rado watches them with his tired eyes, bloodshot from the oncoming wind. Up till now he’s been standing at the end of the train car with his head squeezed through the crevice between the flapping rubber seals. Both inside the train and outside, the air is equally unpalatable. With children, Rado thinks, migration is a horror. He recalls these words from The Book: Woe to those pregnant then. He has neither child nor wife, nor has he brought a pregnant woman with him. He expects nothing and he hopes for nothing. For Rado, migration is just a form of survival. I should start taking notes, he tells himself, I have to do that, to start writing. Then he unfolds himself from his painfully hunched position, removes his notebook from his lap, puts down his pen, and stands up. There are pins and needles in his legs. To change his place, he has to find some kind of occupation—to look out the window or straddle the urinal, for instance. There’s something hopping in the corridor. The mutant rabbit’s escaped from one of the RBE farms. After BMG and KFC merged with Volvo, all that remained of the food industry was the local middlemen and one principal chain supplying them—RBE, the rabbit breeding farms. Rado hadn’t brought any live food. And his canned food wasn’t portioned out well—he’d run out of time for that. He had been a chronicler for too long, working for newspapers, most often as an on-call reporter. He’d gotten accustomed to setting out suddenly and going on unforeseen work trips. And now he’d left like that again, without any particular preparations, and certainly not as if for a final transoceanic voyage.
Barely a few back, when he reached the coast, Rado had bought a suitcase and tossed his stuff inside. In the town he found chaos, profiteering, and a miserable selection of provisions. A voucher seller at the station in Vardaris tried telling him this would be the last express of the season. This was probably just a rumor; the black marketeers were trying to sell more tickets for the sleeping cars. In the mayhem they foisted off counterfeit tickets with doubled couchette numbers. Rado himself was indifferent—he could sleep on the bundles of baggage. The hardest was for families with kids. A lot of the passengers had parted with their final assets, had paid in gold jewelry and old valuables to obtain tickets for the Express.
Rado patiently waited out the crush at boarding and ended up in the cold third-class car. Instructions thundered out over the intercom, the smell of chemicals wafted in from outside, and forklifts rumbled. Shouts could be heard from the crowd on the platform, along with occasional weeping and indistinct noises. The middlemen offered everything at triple the price, there was no getting around it. Most of these swindlers were bankrupted farmers and impoverished entrepreneurs who had chosen this as a means of survival. Coarse desperation was written on their faces, and the ordinary traveler wouldn’t dare try haggling with them.
Now the train is in motion and Rado feels better. His luggage is wretchedly little. The people around him are clinging to their bags, to the remnants of their possessions. It’s no longer certain what belongs to whom and for how long. Rado recalls the words of the chancellor, remembers the Nationalization. I have to write this down, he tells himself, to not forget the things I saw. Europe should be abandoned. An express train will set off across the ocean; this is all that’s left for us. But to build the tracks, the chancellor had said, nationalization must take place. First and foremost, a state monopoly on the railroads . . .
Different people are travelling on the express. A lot of Italians have sold their collections of African bones to be able to board this train. This is still a stable unit of exchange; its demand is not falling. The skeletons of Libyan emigrants, tossed up on the shores of Sicily by the current, are astonishingly white, like synthetics, like plastic. Collecting and selling them has been a business on the island for years on end. Today they’re mostly bought by the black marketeers who fill warehouses with antiques and precious metals. These usurers turn money into gold or other secure substances. They’re hoping that when the traffic gets unclogged and the big wave comes from the East, the Chinese will be seeking out bones like these. They’ll need them in order to tame the Mediterranean through their rituals. They’ll need the bones of locals to process the spirit of the place.
The Algerian and Libyan skeletons are pleasant to the touch, with no residual odor—they’re well aired-out and polished by the waves. And quite light, which raises the price. Just let the Chinese come—this is the dream of those who buy and stay behind. Let them hold off for just one more year, hope those who are still looking for ways to leave.
A Swiss child is crying, “Es tut mir weh!”[1] Maybe someone stepped on him, or he’s lost his mother in the corridor.
The passengers don’t pay any particular attention to children weeping. Kids adapt quickly and their cries are more like defensive reactions. They howl and stomp their feet before the surprises have even come.
2.
The train is slowly picking up speed. All along the shoreline the soil has eroded, leaving the rails sprawling dangerously in many places. The long train rolls out of the last tunnel like mercury from a tube. The sunset scatters cold reflections over the sea. Now the spreading horizon is visible. The buildings to the side are like toys scattered over the slope. One patch stands out vividly, an amusement park with a large balloon hovering above it. The balloon is in the shape of a child, maybe even a baby, floating in the grayish air. The baby has a mustache in the middle of its upper lip, narrow and black, and its face is painted on with garish colors. The nylon material shimmers; the balloon is filled with helium. The train squeals and slows down, making a wide half-moon. Rado’s eyes capture the scenery. The seaside amusement park could collapse at any moment, landslides having eaten away at it from all sides. The rumbling can still be felt, the residual vibration. First to collapse had been the built-up slopes with a moderate incline, pulled downhill by the weight of the buildings. These dragged the terraces of the panoramic restaurants and the places with the most beautiful views behind them. Eels of metal—little adrenaline trains—have slithered along the exhumed concrete foundations and plummeted into the bay. Cabins, ice cream stands, and parking lots have collapsed. With each passing second, something else might set off toward the chasm and disappear. There’s no chance for the mud to settle into the depths so the water can clear up. There’s no hope for Thessaloniki’s economy—the organized beach industry is in its death throes. The park continues its slow and relentless disintegration. To keep the train tracks from tearing, they’ve moved the route higher up, along the narrow viaduct on top of metal supports. The tracks look brittle and rickety, and they can barely support the weight of the Express. And hovering above all of this is the balloon, the inflated figure of a toddler with a mustache. The passengers recognize the face of little Adolf, the child Hitler. It looks like a painted blimp, held by a cord or wire, anchored somewhere in the center of the extinguished amusement park. The passengers avert their eyes. They don’t want to know whether this is the work of The Sect or a just the game of some loner who’s squatting in the garbage dumps of the holiday complex. It looks like a giant ball of cotton, like a cocoon. Maybe there’s a creeping caterpillar or a maturing butterfly inside.
Back in the day it looked like nothing remained of the old Führer, at least that’s what everyone thought. Rado clearly remembered those days of consolation. People lived under the illusion of Hitler’s demise. Names of town squares were changed, and Vienna was once again a town of waltzes. The foundation stones of the war monument were crushed to gravel, and the sizable swastika with ruby walls, behind which burned the eternal flame, was melted down. The paving stones Hitler had tramped on at his first triumph on Heroes’ Square were dug up and thrown to the bottom of the Danube. Everything is fixed, the chancellors said—they were ready to rename Vienna the City of Freedom. Adolf’s time was forgotten, but his name returned from this oblivion. He looked younger than he did in even his youngest photograph familiar from the textbooks. He had started being reincarnated, that’s what his new prophets whispered. Madness, of course, but this was The Sect.
Rado looks away and stands with his back to the window. Then he casts a final glance outside. The blow-up doll is making small radial circles. Like some random clouds that’s paused in the sky, the image of Hitler floats in the haze of evaporating salt water and particles of uncertain origin—maybe ashes from a distant dump fire or vaporized fuller’s earth carried on the coastal winds. The air is shimmering. The passenger’s eyes start swimming. He shouldn’t stare so far for so long.
During the Nationalization, Rado followed the events as a reporter. During the day he would work, and at night, he would sleep on the rolled up official rugs. He didn’t leave the Senate building for an entire month. It was a hot summer, and at least the marble corridors provided some defense against the heat. Rado heard the protests from afar, the shouts beyond the barricades guarded by the senate gendarmes. His plastic pass granted him privileges—he could take shelter there, in the Senate. The season of the changes was crowned by a bloody event. Chancellor Vranitzky himself fell victim, pierced by a poisoned arrow at the summit in Vienna. Anything he heard from the journalists in the smoking lounge, Rado noted down on cigarette paper: for the Commission, this outcome was most advantageous. The leader paid with his life, taking a share of the people’s anger with him. Now everyone connected the Nationalization with Vranitzky alone, and the others could rest a little . . . These were the tales of harassed correspondents, the ravings of people who had lost all meaning in their work. Rado remembered the name of the hotel where the summits had taken place during the Week of Fury. Hotel Anna am Ring. He had gone there before, too, had crossed its lobby at some point when he was still earning his wages as a courier, journalist, and reporter. The time when he was truly travelling and living, and not just attempting to survive. He could no longer remember the good old days clearly, but he had been to the opera in Vienna. The Opera House, Vienna, the Anna am Ring Hotel. These were scraps of memories with no taste, with no real meaning. Just words and the images that accompanied them like fragments of a photograph, pieces of someone else’s life.
Now, as he walks down the corridor of the Express, Rado has an onset of dizziness. Maybe it’s from the creaking of the viaducts, from the vibrations that penetrate all the way to the bone. Maybe it’s some kind of radioactivity—there’s all kinds of waste lying at the bottom of the bay. His shoulder brushes against the plywood wall. He takes a breath and feels their speed increasing. Just a little longer and they’ll leave the coastal zone behind. Goodbye and good riddance. A porter is wobbling at the end of the train car, his eyes roving about. He’s wearing a blue and black uniform and looks embittered by his solitude. Rado enters his field of vision and their eyes met. The porter senses that something has made this passenger stop instead of passing him by, like everyone else does. The two of them look at each other. Could they know each other from somewhere? The porter doesn’t shy away and quickly begins speaking, searching for some common topic. Minutes later Rado already knows the main parts of his biography. The railroad man was once military, but with the disintegration of the army he’d been laid off. The DWSF—the day we stopped flying—is what they call that momentous date. The porter remembers it like it was today. He draws a deep breath into his tired, leaden body.
“After we stopped flying, everything collapsed. The Asians controlled all our drones. They stopped our planes, manned and unmanned . . .”
The former soldier is speaking frankly—Rado discerns this from his eyes. Though a railway man by necessity, this man is still military in his soul. He’s ready to tell his story because memories are all he has left. Somewhere around the DWSF he’d lost his beloved wife. Rado examines the man’s hands, his fingers, as the porter licks a small square of paper and rolled a cigarette. In some ways, having a wife’s like not having a wife. A part of the porter’s memory departed along with his wife. It’s clear to him that he’s missing some things, and he admits this to Rado. Intimate memories, which are no longer his property, have disappeared. There’s nothing to be done. Possession is a question of awareness, and as he no longer fully possesses the past, the porter also avoids delving too deeply into the present. This is why he limits himself to mechanical actions: punching tickets, opening and closing stuck restroom doors, keeping an eye on the movement of passengers between train cars. He avoids looking outside the train. There’s a world out there that no longer belongs to him. The departure was as much of a delight for the porter as for the passengers. The Express’s pulling out of the station was an escape from the need to disembark onto the platform and go home. He has no home.
Could Rado not try, nevertheless? To begin from here, from this man. To write his memories, or at least part of them—wouldn’t there be at least some meaning in this? The archiving of memoirs is like working with a pump, it boils down the infinite material of memory. Here we are, the porter turns out to be loquacious. Only a few questions are necessary and he keeps going all on his own. He’s ready to tell everything he knows about the Express—Rado just has to give him some direction. To ask him, for example, about these animals that roam the corridors, lost or escaped from their owners.
“People don’t really choose what they take with them. If they only knew . . .” The porter waves his hand. “The middlemen at the stations are the foulest lot, most of ’em are alcoholics or junkies. Whatever cash they make, they immediately squander it on drugs or alcohol. They raise puppies and rabbits . . .”
That’s the way it was, Rado had seen their primitive hovels. When he had to change apartments and look for cheaper boarding houses, he roamed a lot of streets in Kavala. He wandered a long time through the fresh water port of Axios in Thessaloniki, and then also in Piraeus. They sold animals there, everywhere. Canned food was expensive and, packaged in large quantities, it turned out to be too heavy; besides, it was easily stolen. But a small animal is living food for along the way. And when it’s tied on a rope, it’s harder for them to steal that from you than soulless baggage. A puppy gets attached and keeps watch even when the traveler is sleeping. It will always cry out if they start to untie it, if they try to cut the leash and steal it from its owner. What’s more, for people with children, a puppy or a rabbit is fun, a way to impart some magic to the evacuation for the little ones. Ostensibly like a game. Otherwise, the children are always asking, Where are we going? When are we coming home?
[1] “It hurts!” (German)
Translated from the Bulgarian by Traci Speed
Georgi Tenev is an award-winning novelist, playwright and scriptwriter.
Traci Speed is an American from Alabama who began studying Bulgarian from an old library textbook after spending a wonderful month in Bulgaria in 1990. She ended up at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a PhD in Slavic Linguistics. In 2017, she went to Shumen, Bulgaria, on a Fulbright research grant, and she now lives in Sofia, where she teaches translation at Sofia University.
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