The sound of the footsteps, sluggish and slow, like a person dragging their feet on the floor, drove him mad. Each time they came from upstairs, he changed the room – from the living room to the kitchen, from there through the terribly creaking glass door into the small bedroom – and back again, as the footsteps caught up with him again, with that unmistakable predictability that, over time, he had come to accept as part of his punishment. If he were in Berlin, he would probably have caused a scandal long ago – picking fights with the Deutsche all the time, rubbing their arrogant noses in it at every opportunity had, until a month ago, been one of the things that had helped him survive in the icy sterility of the German aquarium, but here, in the hiding place he had chosen against all odds, he had a clear sense that he could not afford such things. Not in this provincial town, where everyone knew everyone else. The last thing he needed was for them to find out that a stranger was living in the apartment. At the thought of that, his head filled with images of curious noses poking deep into the crack of the half-open door, his ears rang with the scrutinizing, well-intentioned questions of the neighbors-investigators, and his stomach curled up into a ball and began to pound like a wounded animal. No, thank you. Anything but people. Not now, after… Yes, after the defeat.
And the days dragged on like the blind men in Bruegel’s painting – slowly but surely moving towards the void, grinning maliciously and senselessly into the darkness, themselves part of it. A week or so had passed here in Lyubo’s hometown, but only the impartial persistence of the calendar prevented him from being certain that he had fallen into the grip of a silicon timelessness – dimensionless, opaque, formless and endless. In itself, this did not surprise him – he himself came from such a place – and these sensations did not catch him unprepared, only the intensity with which they haunted him surprised him, especially at night, in his dreams. Berlin, as much hated as secretly longed for, appeared to him in dozens of different images, from the cold geometry of Potsdamer Platz to the defiantly grinning ruin of Tacheles alongside the long-legged, outrageously expensive girls of Oranienburger Strasse. Berlin, du bist so wunderbar, Berlin, the refrain of a German Schlager echoed in his ears to the point of madness – stupid, but indelible, like all Schlager. In the hope of somehow escaping the emptiness, he tried to work from dawn to dusk, burying himself in work to the point of oblivion, so that only his ears and eyes stuck out, like a hippopotamus, but rarely did anything meaningful come out of it. A few successful passages, here and there a page that he might later use as padding in a future novel – but the feeling that he was trying to outwit himself was too strong to be fooled in such an easy way. One of the things a person gets from defeat is a sense of reality. Defeat – that is two plus two equals four.
***
Mr. Samsa rubbed two of his furry paws together, chuckled discreetly into a third and, gesturing with the remaining ones in what he must have thought was a very artistic way, began to recite:
In die Rehe bin ich so verliebt,
wenn ich doch eins fände!
Ich nähm’s in die Zähne, in die Hände,
das ist das Schönste, was es gibt.[1]
“Stop it, Gregor,” said Milena, bored. “We did that yesterday, I’m tired today. I want to sleep, leave me alone.”
The spider pouted a little, but still stopped showing off and curled up in his corner, pretending to be very busy. Milena yawned once or twice, tried to fall asleep again, but the sleepiness had left her and, pursued by boredom, she was forced to get up and find some kind of activity. She put on her worn-out slippers, went into the kitchen and made some coffee, following the instructions for the gas cooker, which Mama had placed in a visible place, despite the fact that she had long since proved herself to be an expert in the use of kitchen appliances. At first the coffee was too hot, so she left it to cool, but then it became too cold and tasteless, so she poured it into the sink and repeated the procedure, this time setting the alarm clock to remind her exactly when to drink the chilled coffee. The procedure worked perfectly, and Milena drank the bitter liquid with the deserved pride of a pioneer, albeit unrecognized.
Her peace was soon shattered, however, by the unpleasant clattering from below, just like every day. The Woodpecker had obviously started work. She imagined that one day Mr. Samsa would swoop down and fight an unequal battle with the mad Woodpecker, that he would defeat him and silence him, that he would finally leave her alone, but as she was a clever girl and didn’t like to spend her time daydreaming, she hastily chased away her fantasies and looked for another, more sensible way to pass the time.
She went to the corridor where the library was and searched all the shelves in the faint hope of finding a volume that had been mistakenly placed in the wrong order, but luck was not on her side – as always, the books were perfectly arranged, first by country, then by genre, and finally by name, so she soon gave up. Today was obviously not a day for good magic.
Mr. Samsa pretended to be offended and did not react to her teasing. There was nothing but boring shows on the television, nothing on the radio and the book she had found in Mum’s room yesterday was too rosy. So she had no choice but to do her daily chores. She tried to take as long as possible to prepare the exact mixture of water and soap, but of course one cannot outwit oneself indefinitely; finally the mixture was ready, and Milena began to clean the windows, on which, as she knew best, there was not a trace of dust – after all, she had washed them only two days ago. The work went unpleasantly fast; ever since Mum had bought that new window brush, washing the windows had gone from a serious task to a child’s play, but she had got used to it – after all, no one can resist progress.
Then she took on the toilet, carefully inspecting the bowl for a stain, finding none, but scrubbing it thoroughly anyway, dusting all the rooms, and finally coming to the most important part – cleaning the carpets. The vacuum cleaner, although almost as old as she was, still did a good job, albeit with a furious roar and howl. She had just finished in the bedroom and was wondering if she should start in the living room when she was startled by the furious ringing of the front doorbell.
Milena cowered in fear and tried for a few endless moments to ignore the menacing sound, but the person outside did not give up and kept pressing the button furiously. ‘His fingernail must be turning blue by now,’ Milena thought as she tiptoed through the dark corridor, not turning on the light, of course. Cautiously, she pressed her eye to the peephole, secretly hoping to see one of the neighbors, but her hope was not justified; on the contrary, at the sight of the unshaven man’s face, from which, beneath a bald crown and bushy eyebrows, menacing grey eyes stared at her almost at point-blank range, she shrank back as if struck.
Her heart pounded idiotically against all common sense, its beats sure to be heard outside the door. “No panic, no panic,” she repeated to herself several times, trying to regain control of her heartbeat, but the effort proved too much even for her trained will. After about a minute, she gave up and settled for breathing evenly and counting to ten. A tried and tested technique. The man outside didn’t even know who he was dealing with. An amateur, most likely. Almost all of them are amateurs.
“Well, are we going to keep stalking each other through the door like this?”, came his voice from outside, strangely high, almost boyish. “I know you’re in there, there’s no point in hiding. I just wanted to ask you to turn off the siren for a few minutes if possible. I’m trying to work downstairs.”
“I know who you are,” Milena heard, to her horror, her own voice, obviously trying to play a dirty trick on her, not for the first time, by the way. “You are the Woodpecker. And I’m trying to work too, if you want to know.”
“What, what?” The one outside almost coughed from confusion, which gave Milena brief but well-deserved satisfaction. “What kind of nonsense is this, tell me, how old are you?”
“And if you don’t stop bothering me, I’m going to call Mr. Gregor Samsa for help,” Milena played with her last weapon, which was only for emergency use.
For some reason, the one outside laughed out loud, and after a few unbearably long moments of giggling, replied:
“You’d better call Mr. Nilsson for help, if I’m not mistaken. What are you, a child prodigy? Or does mummy feed you Kafka early so you don’t waste your years?”
His reaction turned out to be not entirely amateur, and that confused her for a moment, but she quickly focused and replied again, this time more calmly:
“Your assumption is quite wrong. I have been an adult for three years. Actually, much longer, but that’s none of your business.”
The smile suddenly disappeared from his face, as if someone had drawn the blinds in an already darkened room. He looked around nervously, cleared his throat a little awkwardly and said, now with much more respect in his voice:
“Well, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m just asking you to turn the vacuum cleaner off once in a while, that’s all.”
“Still an amateur,” Milena thought with relief. “Even though he unmasked Mr. Samsa so quickly. Thank God. Otherwise I would have had to prepare something tasty for him. With mushrooms.”
Meanwhile, the man had disappeared from the view of the peephole, but for some reason Milena’s heart would not calm down; it continued to beat wildly, preventing her from continuing her work. She used all the techniques she knew, but for some reason they didn’t help today; on the contrary, at one point the Voice even appeared, and that was a very, very bad sign, of course.
“Come here, sit on my lap. Do you hear what I’m saying, you little idiot, I said sit on my lap!” The Words, which hadn’t appeared for months, buzzed in her ears
Panic, a chicken with a red comb and huge, wide eyes filled with fear, fluttered again in her chest, spreading its wings and trying to take flight. She desperately searched for some sensible activity to save herself, breathing slowly, counting to a hundred, even thinking for a moment of calling mum, but luckily, before she did something very irresponsible, she finally came up with a saving idea.
With hands trembling with tension, but still obeying reason, she began frantically rummaging through the large drawers under the bed in her bedroom. Finally, drenched in cold sweat, she triumphantly lifted above her head the small cloth doll, tattered and dirty, but still her old, one and only, irreplaceable doll.
Without wasting any time on unnecessary emotions, she ran to Mama’s room, took the large scissors from their hiding place, which, as always, was all too easy to find, then, so as not to damage the surface of the kitchen table, placed a thick piece of cardboard on it and, after laying the doll on top, began to stab it with the heavy blade with measured and systematic movements, repeating after each blow:
“Bad girl! Bad girl! Bad girl!”
Relief did not come easily, forcing her to work up a sweat before it emerged from the corners of her consciousness, but even then it would not stay in one place, circling around her like the tail of a little kitten, giving her a nasty feeling of dizziness, until finally, only after she had carefully hung the doll on the woven chandelier, it agreed to settle down and give her some peace. Just until Mum came home. Just that much. Hardly more than that.
***
“Well, didn’t I tell you, there’s no problem, you can stay as long as you like? The flat has been empty since my mother died anyway. What, is that the only reason you’re calling? Come on, speak quickly, we have a general council meeting soon”. Lyubo, as always, immediately sensed that something else was hiding behind the harmless call and hurried to take the bull by the horns, as was his wont.
Marin tried to keep the conversation on a more general topic, but under the pressure of his friend’s curiosity, he finally spat out the truth.
“Oh, the neighbors? What, have you caused some sort of scandal? All right, all right, I believe you. Wretched people, I don’t know what to tell you. The father was a well-known mushroom picker and herbalist, even wrote a couple of books on the subject, I think. Then, about seven or eight years ago, he unexpectedly poisoned himself with mushrooms, a silly story. The mother and daughter live alone, as far as I know… But I’m not sure, I’ve never been very interested. Ok, tell me seriously – have you really decided to leave Germany? I don’t understand it, honestly. The whole world is running away, and you’re rushing back to our so-called paradise. You spent ten years there, everything was fine, so what happened now?”
Marin gritted his teeth, mumbled some flimsy excuse and hurried to say goodbye before Lyubo could continue with the questions. Then he tried to work, but the work didn’t go well; inside he was gnawed by a guilty conscience, mixed with the worry that by tomorrow the whole building would surely know of his presence here, on their territory. He wandered around a bit, fighting temptation for a while, just enough not to give in too easily, but finally he went back upstairs, his heart pounding stupidly and excuses bouncing around in his head, each more ridiculous than the last.
The obituary on the door distracted him, but only briefly. “Seven years without our beloved husband and father,” and below it the rounded, slightly plump face of a middle-aged man with kind, perhaps too kind, eyes… He hesitated at the threshold for a minute or two, fighting the absurd feeling that he was doing something utterly childish, but the itch had already settled somewhere under his ribs and wouldn’t leave him alone, pushing him forward against all the arguments of common sense.
Still, the final step didn’t come easy, as it always did; he spent another tense minute listening carefully, watching for any sound from the stairwell, ready to retreat at the slightest sign of someone’s presence. But the building remained silent, dozing in the afternoon haze like everything else in the small town, silently enduring the heat, grey, silent and dreary…
Before ringing the bell, he used an old trick, giving fate one last chance to escape, and slowly counted to twenty-five with his eyes closed. Still nothing. Marin made one last effort, still trying to find an argument against the childish temptation, but in the end he reached out his hand and, squinting with tension, pressed the bell.
Nothing happened for a long time, and he was about to turn back downstairs, tormented by both relief and disappointment, when the door suddenly swung open and a young girl stood before him, not quite a woman, but no longer a girl either… But he didn’t have much time for long judgements, because the expression on her face, a strange mixture of fear and icy threat, made him shiver in earnest.
“Get out! Get out now, before something bad happens!”
He began to stammer a confused apology, then saw the large pair of scissors she held like a dagger in her fist, and became seriously frightened, but whether out of stubbornness or wounded pride, he forced himself to speak for a few more moments, until she finally turned inwards and began to scream:
“Hold him, Gregor! Tear him apart, eat him, Gregor!”
Marin jumped back and curled up into a ball, expecting a dog or similar creature to attack, but nothing emerged from the darkness. He stared at her in confusion, secretly hoping that this would all turn out to be some absurd invention, but in vain – she looked at him with deadly seriousness, as if trying to push him away with her gaze, until finally, perhaps even more irritated by his stubborn persistence, she swung and hurled something round and white at him.
He screamed in fright, instinctively shielded himself with his hands and clattered down the stairs, three at a time…
Only later, already behind a securely locked door, did he realise that he was still clutching the thing she had thrown at him in his fist. It turned out to be a piece of paper, crumpled into a ball. Another absurdity in a day that was threatening to turn into a complete fiasco – one of many in recent months.
Marin uncrumpled it with shaking hands, walked over to the window and began to examine it carefully.
“Absurdity, complete absurdity,” he growled in disgust at the sight of the ugly drawing.
On the paper was a huge spider, its jaws sunk somewhere under the belly of a young girl – a spider with a thick, hairy body and a human face that looked strangely familiar – the rounded, slightly plump face of a middle-aged man with kind, perhaps too kind, eyes…
[1] I’m so in love with the doe
if only I could find one!
I would take it in my teeth, in my hands,
that is the most beautiful thing there is.
(Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf)
You can find the Bulgarian original here.
