THE BULGARIAN PSYCHIATRIST (pages)

 

For many years I have been writing a book about four men I contained in a book NOTHING DOING.  These are some pages...

George has been drinking again and I have been listening to him in The Grass Roots.    One of those nights when no one we knew came it.  

It had been a long day with my patients.  I am old fashioned. They become part of my life even though I have them out there as I am supposed to.  But how to remain human, isn't that all anyone can ask for…

       Once one of them, even back in Bulgaria, you know who I mean, became human for a moment and said to me, very quickly as we walked near Sveta Nedelya : just leave, or maybe it would be better to catch it exactly: just go away, he said

This man didn't have to say anything more.  It was all he was capable of.  I had helped him with his son who was very sick.  I won't tell you who he was.  It doesn’t matter but I knew that he was speaking for them.  I had had helped some of them when they had no one else to turn to:  for some reason they understood that nothing else worked.

George is talking about Bulgaria, a Bulgaria that no longer exists and even then it did not exist or at least people did not see it or even know it might exist. 

I am still sometimes in Bulgaria.  You can not take a language out of the brain.  A new language does not replace the old language. Bulgaria under the communism:  people look at me when I say that:  none of that exists except in books.

But in my head, I want to say and I know they are holding back from saying: poor man. 

45

I should tell you--- like I told George--- about going into The Guardian office in London having come back from Sofia and trying to talk about the Freedom Village that was set up in front of the Communist Party building in the summer of 1990.  I did not know how to make it vivid to these English people.  They had a man in Bulgaria.  They did not want another voice.  One voice was enough and he had his two or three inches somewhere in the paper.  No one that summer, that hottest summer on record in England, wanted to know about a Freedom Village in Bulgaria. It sounded like an American resort filled with people waving Bibles and shotguns, Clare told me and everybody in England knew enough about Bulgaria.  I had known Clare for twenty years.  That didn’t help.  At all.  She thought I was making it up and I wasn't trained to look at things like their man in Bulgaria.

And George embarrassed me by saying, you understand this Bulgaria, all these Bulgarias, without speaking the language.  You are as powerless as all this implies and is understood.  No one in the West will care what you have to say.  No one in Bulgaria will understand what you are saying.

45

If they find you still in Bulgaria, this man was telling me, you would be sent to the psychotic ward, George was saying.  That is how I was to understand this man's words: just go away.    I understood what they meant:  just go away.  They didn’t need to say anything more.  If I did not understand what they were saying they had a place for me in one of their hospitals…

45

To try to understand driving across the Air Force range--- I should have looked carefully at the map, the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range--- with a road like a wire bisecting it on the way to Barstow---  this time--- and  George nudging aside the man in Ajo who I see walking into a diner in a small strip mall just outside… 

though George is going to talk about violent death also: torture, beatings, and how a man put on a dead man's clothes as if he always belonged in that clothing:  without the slightest twinge of guilt: something that is not in his or their vocabulary… but this man in Ajo… where has he gotten to?  

Can I pretend I knocked on the door where he was staying or can I write, his car was not there in the morning?  Probably on his way up to Phoenix and then to get the lead out as he had to be in Chloride before it got dark.  His wife was waiting for him and the child was going to need a lot of love, and he would curl his lip as if anyone knew what the phrase:  she will need a lot of love.

45

Forget the local colour, George is saying.  You are not some guy stuck in a pig hole in the countryside.  I want you to move me about in your mind.  I want not to be fixed like some dead bug tacked to an exhibit wall.  I was happy, every day I was happy to see the new buildings going up in New York--- do you remember where we lived in Brooklyn?  None of it is there anymore.   The landlord moved to Florida.  The building was torn down and no one knows what it looked like.  That is not something to mourn, at all.  A person can always go to Paris to see things that stay the way they were.  Every city is different.  People get confused when they try to criticize a city with the standards of another city.  It is a way to go crazy.  You have to see what is in front of your face, first.    You go crazy if you can not look and see what is really there…   never forget that.

45

So throw in the picture from that cemetery.  A moment before the plastic flowers get blown apart to become burial rubbish against the barbed wire fence.  Make sure you mention the birthday candles arranged in the earth but not lit.  To be lit by lightning, you can suppose…memorial rubbish for someone going to a shop, buying, carrying, leaving behind, blown away… idle sentimentality, poor man.

 You told me once of walking around in Dublin and wanting to almost cry because it was all so painful… to have admitted that is sufficient.  No one walks around in New York talking:  do you remember when… the city is a wonderful drug wiping itself clear and wipes away those thoughts from the people who find themselves living here.  And it’s something to be proud of, not scorned like some pretend.  When I go Upstate Katya's sister has a photo book of OLDE NEW YORK.  She bought it because she thought she would impress me with her new found interest in history.  I wanted to tell her what Ed said in the Grass Roots:  Francis Bacon liked old photographs of masses of people because all the people in the photographs were dead, now, and I am alive looking at them. 

45

While George did not know the novels of Gerhard Roth--- it is a permanent regret  we were not able to talk about them--- George did tell me he had read two books by Max Frisch:  Man in the Holocene and I'm not Stiller.   

He did not want to forget his German.  While no longer having a desire to go to Germany the language allowed him to think, he said.  Only if you know German could you know what I am trying to say.  It is not that German is better than English but English is the language of the streets, of this bar, of the television, the language my patients speak to me, the language my children use and which I talk to them in.  German is my other language.  The language took me out of Bulgaria even during the Communism.  I have told you all of that and even in East Germany the language, though damaged by the communism, could not have been hurt at its center which even resisted the Nazis contrary to what some would have you believe.  People do not lose everything and yet rebuilt everything if there is nothing at the center.  That is a mystery, George would say.  I wonder if everything was wiped out in the United States if it could all be re-built.  To think of the United States broken into pieces and then divided into two competing systems and then re-united!  Americans do not know what it is means to lose.  Bulgarians only know about loss and it is nothing to be proud of, nothing is gained from the experience.  Germany is different, in some way, and it drives some people crazy but they can't do anything about it.

NOT UPON A TIME: a Bulgarian moment

        Once upon a day like many days, Lilia responded to a beautiful black/white photo from Venice which I had put on Facebook of her (age 18) feeding the pigeons in San Marco after we had left Sofia in April of 1968, “I remember being happy to leave Bulgaria but the black and white photograph makes me seem like I am dead.”

        I also wrote at that time, Of course, all places are like no other place.

        Both of us are dead in that time when we were on our way to Dublin by way of Paris and London.  All the people we stayed with from that time are now dead… and while I thought I would be able forever to retrace my steps in Paris and London I wonder if it would be possible.  In London we stayed in a hotel in Bayswater and then took the train to Dublin to be met at Dun Laoghaire by Eugene Lambe whose funeral I have heard described in ever diminishing detail as the years go by.

                 Lilia is wearing a black and red sweater I had bought for her in the Kings Road in London since she told me she was easily bothered by the cold and found that she had never been warm enough growing up in Sofia.

        I am aware of myself only in the corduroy jacket which I had bought in Dublin on the north side after seeing a French boy wearing a jacket like this on the train on the way to Calais, once upon a time before this year.

          In a passageway between the Locanda San Stefano and San Marco I heard Bulgarian being spoken and I suggested we say hello to the man and woman but Lilia said in English you can’t talk to Bulgarians abroad, you don’t know why they are here…      
            Never would Venice be like this again when I, when we were on our way to Paris…at Easter, 1968 which we spent in a small village, Serifontaine--- during that visit we were taken to Dieppe--- a cold stony beach at night--- and Rouen for the train back to Paris and in the village square a too familiar reminder: a memorial to the war dead in Vietnam in both the 19^th and 20^th centuries---  
         Jean, the husband of Lilia’s relative by marriage---the daughter of the woman a few streets over from Ulitza Yordan Lutibrodski in Nadeshda who had married Ratcho--- you never met him back then, Lilia says, my father---  after Medy had divorced him--- was a French orphan from Algeria who read only the memoirs of Charles de Gaulle which he showed me in a fancy bound edition… he had been in the army and learned the trade that he worked at in a photo printing shop near Montmartre Cemetery, as I remember--- is now long dead--- and it was with his relatives we celebrated Easter at a long table under trees behind a village house… in the shade of shed while nearby large rabbits waited to be slaughtered in a few weeks.

        In the years after, Lilia never visited the now a widow of Jean though her daughter once came to New York with a female partner, as we now say, wanting to buy knockoff Rolex watches on Canal Street… but here all the details just disappear into gossip poorly remembered

        But how can Lilia write, “makes me seem like I am dead”?

        BUT THE OTHER DAY I found myself in Virginia, in a park in a suburb of Washington talking to a man who announced he had written a Bulgarian movie without ever having gone to that country.  He had been to every country that bordered on Bulgaria but he was given the chance in Hollywood to write a 91 minute version of a three part Bulgarian epic entitled ASZPARUH, originally 323 minutes long, which was to be called 681 AD The Glory of the Khan.

        I heard myself repeating something I have now been saying for more than 20 years: I went from the obscurity of Bulgaria to the further obscurity of Estonia and this guy went on to explain that they cut the movie a lot, moved scenes around and tried to make it so Americans could understand what was going on.  The Bulgarians had put up a lot of money and this was a small part of their celebration of 1600 years of the Bulgarian state…  it was sponsored by the daughter of the communist boss of Bulgaria Todor Zhivkov which lead on to another story about Zhivkov’s drunken son, Vladimir who was notorious for having thrown his first wife out of an upstairs window, breaking her back and paralyzing her for the rest of her life.  He married a second time it seems and was abusive to that wife though they had a daughter together.  She divorced him and fled to Greece but the husband, for obvious reasons, was given custody of their daughter.  The child was a sort of hostage and here is where Minton’s story became vague:  there was an American, Tom Marshall, who had been involved with the film and he somehow got introduced to a scheme to kidnap the daughter from Bulgaria and re-unite her with the mother. They were going to helicopter her out of the country.  It never happened as Marshall was warned, Jules had been told, if he did actually try to do this he would be eliminated and no one would care.

        Here the story ended as Jules went over to talk to Sally who had been friends with Anastasia Moser, whose own life had been lived as a sort of hostage in Bulgaria while her mother and father G.M. Dimitrov lived in Washington.

        All of this is ancient and obscure in the present moment of a park in suburban Virginia.

        But in truth, this conversation happened twenty years ago and I was making it seem as if it happened yesterday but every moment only has the potential to become the past: the sure project that comes with being alive and which is designed to see that person, this me, dead.

        As if I knew anything, could be said by another and why would anyone want to have been told of this conversation in a park in Herndon, Virginia, a park that…

        Lilia would have had nothing of this.  Bulgaria existed for her only when I mentioned the word and she was forced to remember that yes she had come from that place and this is how she always phrases:  that place.

        At one time I remember my father using that phrase when mentioning where his parents had come from and it was because back in that country there had been nothing for them to do except leave it and they didn’t exactly leave that country but were sent away from that country to this country and there was never a thought to go back to Ireland, since you had left that country or been sent away from that country when you were twelve and everyone who had a part in the sending away was long dead and there had been no contact with that country over the years except on St. Patrick’s Day when you had to agree with the ethnicity of your last name and celebrate its origin and while St. Joseph was the patron saint of Brooklyn since Manhattan had the monopoly on St. Patrick with both an old St. Patrick’s cathedral downtown and a new St. Patrick’s cathedral on Fifth Avenue…

      But here, I find myself:

23 years old in the marriage palace in Sofia, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria.
     The witnesses to either side of us are dead. Yordan was prudent enough to become a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party in August 1944, when that was still possible.  His prudence allowed him to become a lawyer and a small time fixer of problems for Lilia's mother who always had problems, as did most people in Bulgaria of one sort or another and a member of the party was essential in the fixing of those problems.  He told Lilia that in America lawyers had a person who did their typing for them unlike in Bulgaria where he had to do his own typing.  That was the extent of his knowledge about America.  He was a nice guy who later I visited in Veliko Tarnovo... he had been the person who found the police official that Lilia's mother could pay to have the permission for her daughter to marry an American.