Elitza Georgieva

The Cosmonauts Aren’t Here to Stay

Part One

The Contest of Space

            You are standing in front of a multitude of shiny little stones in all different colors, which don’t look like anything in particular, but since your mother seems deeply moved by it, you understand that this is serious business. She tells you that this is him, this is Yuri Gagarin, and when she was your age—a few centuries ago, at least—she personally saw him plant some pine trees, here, next to this very building. The building in question is your new school, and you’re here to enroll, says your mother, as she lights her nineteenth cigarette of the day. You turn your head and notice that skittish-looking children of all shapes and sizes, carrying huge backpacks and sticking close to their mothers, are walking here and there in the enormous, orange-lit schoolyard. You automatically latch onto yours and try to seem intimidating, just in case someone has the nerve to look at you—you flare your nostrils, puff up your cheeks until they turn purple, and wriggle your ears around clockwise. Your mother continues her explanation, as though nothing is happening. She is talking about the conquest of space.You aren’t sure you understand the first word and you assume it must be some kind of contest, something special or glorious, something good, all things considered, and something that is related to planting pine trees. But since you don’t know exactly, you prefer to avoid inventing a new and potentially inaccurate definition of the word conquestand you focus on what is in front of you. That is, a multitude of shiny little stones in all different colors which don’t look like anything in particular.

            Your initial confusion is swept away an hour later when, leaving the courtyard, you turn around and see the same image from farther away: the collection of sparkly little pebbles which don’t look like anything in particular take on a coherent shape. It’s what your mother calls a mosaic, kind of like in your bathroom at home, but not exactly. The one in the bathroom looks like an omelet of green, grey, and black specks with no pictorial ambitions. Here, though, there’s something very different going on: a man, young, handsome, upright and courageous, mouth open in a smile, eyes raised to the horizon, against a background that is all black, but red and yellow, too, in a style that’s quite fanciful overall but realistic in the details. It’s Yuri Gagarin, right in the middle of a space contest. You want to stop and stare up at him a bit longer, but it’s getting late and you’ve looked long enough, your mother says. 

The First Man in Space

            Your father is nota cosmonautics manual, he assures you as he gnaws nervously on a toothpick. You understand that your research into the subject of Yuri Gagarin, enthusiastically conducted over the last few days within the family circle, is not being taken seriously, a state of affairs which outrages you in the extreme. You decide to retaliate by hiding the box of toothpicks behind the refrigerator. Your covert maneuver is swiftly countered by your father, who demands that you explain yourself. You tell him, as you put the box of toothpicks back in its place, that you would like to discuss a few practical queries with him in order to better understand the history of the space contest, including: 

1. What is it?
2. Who is it?
3. How can you participate?

A few days later, you are invited to drink a glass of Coop-Cola in the living room of your grandfather, communist emeritus. He tells you that from now on, he is the one who will be helping you pursue your research on Yuri Gagarin and you are relieved to know that your questions are finally being taken seriously. After a few introductory remarks, your grandfather sits you down in front of what he solemnly refers to as “a Soviet film.”

The image is light grey and dark grey, the sound deafening. Men run around in all directions, shouting in an unknown but vaguely decipherable language—the Russian language, says your grandfather, communist emeritus, as he drinks Coop-Cola directly out of your glass. Pretty soon, something explodes, enormous structures fall toward the dark ground, and in the midst of all the hubbub, a man with a brilliant smile looks directly into the camera—it’s Yuri! His head is inside a transparent bubble and he himself inside a metal sphere with a tiny window—it’s a Vostok, explains your communist grandfather—which is itself inserted into a cannon that blasts off with great determination. Поехали, Yuri shouts—Let’s go, translates your grandfather, who has apparently decided to comment on each and every shot—and you can see his tonsils through the bubble. You think about your own, recently removed without anesthetic, an experience which constituted the first real hardship of your life. It’s comforting to know that Yuri has kept his—he has enough problems as it is. During lift-off, he has trouble breathing and you can hear his heart beating loud and fast. Military music comes in to accentuate the rhythm. His veins swell, and it’s clear that he isn’t feeling well, but, being naturally good-humored, he continues to make jokes that greatly amuse the frantic people back on Earth, as well as your grandfather, who is sitting next to you, shaking with laughter in a way you’ve never seen before. Yuri doesn’t lose his courage, nor his talent for conversation, and certainly not his sense of duty to the motherland, says your grandfather, communist emeritus, and you wonder if he’ll give back your glass of Coop-Cola before he drinks it all. Yuri transmits some data and some mysterious numbers, and later he concludes that the Earth is, in fact, orange—just as you always suspected—as the camera shows what looks like a cardboard circle lit by a table lamp and filmed through a tiny hole. Haha! your grandfather exclaims, seeking some sign of your approval, but you are still don’t understand exactly what’s going on.

The screen gradually goes dark and the lights come up on a new set, a peaceful landscape, a pine forest flooded with orange light, which seems coherent, given the facts. Slowly, the music becomes more lyrical. A woman walks through the woods, seeming bored. She recites a poem in a low voice and her murmur blends with the buzzing of the flies and the crackling of dry branches under her feet as the music, less and less lyrical, begins to fade away ominously. A brutal noise rings out, putting an end to the cacophony, and the woman turns around. A strange thing is suddenly there, above her head, hovering, as though nothing could be more natural, without touching the pines around it. Yuri, alive and well, head still in the bubble, battles awkwardly against the pointy nature of a pine tree, which finally yields and allows him to penetrate its branches so that it can eject him into the river. In the background, you see the Vostok, all shiny, as though it had just pulled out of the parking lot. Yuri emerges from the river and, after a few steps, finds himself nose to nose with the only spectator of his space landing, the young woman, who seems less bored than she did at the beginning of the scene. I am one of your own, a Soviet, says Yuri Gagarin, in order to break the ice between them, but their privacy is quickly interrupted by an influx of happy men who shout in unison: it’s him, it’s Yuri Gagarin, it’s our hero! Laughter, joy, end music, and the End.

Your grandfather, communist emeritus, has fallen asleep and is making noises very similar to the Vostok in the film. At that moment, everything makes sense to you: Yuri Gagarin is a hero, and you wait impatiently for your grandfather to wake up so that you can tell him as much.   

Your very own heroic destiny

            If one day you get lost in the woods, keep going forward, walk straight ahead, and eventually, you will find your way, shouts your communist grandfather who, seized by excessive ardor following the Soviet film, begins to tell you about his youth—an intense time where he came face to face with fascism and other problems in the woods. Once the war was over, he was able to continue his studies, become a machinist, and learn how to drive:

1. a train
2. then an airplane
3. and finally, a Vostok,

the ultimate dream, he tells you in a voice that trembles with emotion. But he stuck to trains because the next step seemed too vertiginous, and he preferred staying on Earth with his family, which already required a great deal of heroism from him on a daily basis. Now it’s official: the dream of your grandfather, communist emeritus, has failed. He deflates, his exhalation going on for so long that the room fills with melancholy: you decide that it’s time to go home.

            On the way back, your communist grandfather’s nostalgic sigh continues to resonate in your ears like the wind that blew through the pine trees in the Soviet film, or like the waves of the Red Sea in a storm. You want to fulfill his dream in his place, despite the delay, despite the fact that you have no idea where to begin.  You look up—your pensive stroll has brought you to the playground behind your building, right next to a rusty metal rocket ship. You walk around it a few dozen times until you fall into a trance, and in this peculiar mental state, you make an existential decision: you will become Yuri Gagarin, join the space contest, and make your grandfather, communist emeritus, happy at last. Besides, your family doesn’t really need you here on Earth.

You are aware of the challenges you’ll have to face. That you’ll have to be brave. That you have to start somewhere. A thought and a half later, you are on the top of the rocket ship shouting Поехали loud enough to make your mother appear on the balcony above you. There’s too much wind for you to hear her, but the unfavorable expression on her face and her much too repetitive gesture make you understand that you need to come home, right this instant. As the elevator propels you toward your floor, you reflect upon the role of families in the accomplishment of unique heroic destinies. You decide that it’s best to keep your new mission secret, just in case, and not to share it with your entourage until you are certain of your success.  

The Real and the Fake

            Your grandfather is a communist. A real communist, you are told several times over, and you understand that there are fake ones also. It’s like with the Barbies and the Nike sneakers—you can only get real ones if you have very high-level connections. Your Nikes are fake, which is really for the best, since it means that none of the older, tougher kids want to steal them from you. When it comes to Barbies, you couldn’t care less—except that Constanza has a real one and that kind of drives you crazy.

            Constanza is dazzling. She wears a dress full of little holes, put there on purpose, and it shimmers every time she moves. Transparent layers of fabric make the dress even more complicated. Its shape is very original, and it changes color according to the weather. You, on the other hand, don’t have anything special, unless you count a wasp sting that gives you a lopsided and less than flattering appearance. Constanza’s other big advantage: she has a mother in Greece, whereas yours stays home. She gets several perks as a result, each one more obnoxious than the last:

1. she can travel out of the country,
2. she has a golden elephant and, most importantly,
3. a real Barbie.

Sometimes, you hate her on purpose. Whatever she does, Constanza is always the best: she runs faster than you do, she wins the rhythmic gymnastics championship where you don’t even place, and she glides along beautifully on her skates while you execute one clumsy free fall after another. One thing does reassure you in this sad state of affairs: at seven years old, she doesn’t know how to count past one thousand; and what’s more, she doesn’t have any clear-cut ideals, nor any kind of heroic destiny, like you do. When it comes to Yuri Gagarin, she couldn’t care less—she just wants to play with her real Barbie and her fake grandfather, who isn’t even communist. 

Art can be subversive

Your parents lock themselves in the bathroom more and more often to tell each other jokes. You can’t hear everything because they leave the water running in the sink, the shower, and the bidet all at once. Every now and then, you manage to catch a few less than flattering remarks about the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party and Chairman of the State Council of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, Comrade Todor Zhivkov, who you thought was a hero in the war against fascism and, more importantly, your mother’s idol. Then they lower their voices to continue the conversation, which is drowned out by the sound of running water: this frustrates you to the point where you become furious. You are sure that they are plotting against your space contest and you decide that you will not give up so easily. A container of yogurt, a carton of eggs—the ones that your grandmother brought from her village with lots of love—and your father’s glasses, which don’t look very good on him anyway, are used to build a monumental sculpture, a symbol of your profound disapproval of the maneuvers undertaken against you. You know you’re taking a big risk this time, especially since you’ve built your subversive oeuvre on the Chepelare carpet, which has been passed down through several generations and is therefore a prized family heirloom.

An hour and a half later, bath time is finally over: your parents come out of the bathroom with towels in hand, even though they are still dry and dressed in their sweaters and their shapkas made from real Siberian rabbits. You take a deep breath and brace for impact. But the situation is worse than you realized: they silence and humiliate you by ignoring your existence. Your father removes his glasses from the sculpture without even bothering to scold you and begins reading some wrinkled pages that he’s hiding—from you—with his bath towel. Then you see him stash the pages in the cabinet, the one that’s known for being hard to open, and you wonder if they could be the letters you’ve written to Father Frost. Your mother, already in the living room, also pretends not to notice the massacre on the carpet that your dog Joki—whose fur is still growing at cosmic speeds—is making disappear with great sweeps of his tongue. She lights her thirtieth cigarette and begins talking about how she can’t do it anymore, how she’s suffocating here. Disgusted by the events of the evening, you open the window and clean the Chepelare carpet without saying a word.

A few hours later, when they think you’re asleep, you take the papers out of the cabinet, and you see, written in mysterious letters:

RADIO

FREE

EUROPE

It’s a struggle, but you manage to read the first two lines of the document, from which you draw two conclusions:

1. your mother does not work at the Bulgarian “People’s Radio,” or at least, it’s only a cover, and
2. your parents are not plotting against your space contest.

Berlin is not a man

            Astounded, amazed, breathless, bewildered, panicky, red-faced, glowing, frightening—your mother is jumping on one foot in the middle of your bedroom, babbling and stammering. She hugs you, shakes you, breathes cigarette smoke into your face, and says things you don’t understand. For a moment, upset by this behavior, you think about crying, then you change your mind because your mother leaves the room, shouting. You follow her hesitantly down the hallway, and then into the living room where she throws herself at your father, but not in an aggressive way, and it seems more and more likely that she is, in fact, happy.

            The Berlin Wall has fallen, your mother seems to be saying, but her words are smashed up against your father’s cheek, his neck, and even his mouth, where he swallows them, and then begins kissing her back: on the cheek, on the right eyebrow, and, you notice, on the mouth. You realize that this is, in fact, the first time your parents have kissed in front of you, though it’s something you’ve seen other people do, including your neighbor, and your cousin Andrei—who is allowed to, because he’s ten—and some people on television. It’s not really the thing in itself that bothers you, but the fact that it’s being done in your own home, by your own parents, that they are no different from other people, who kiss because they like each other. You suddenly feel forgotten about. Their heads have totally disappeared in a cloud of cigarette smoke which reflects the light from the chandelier, an object imported from the Soviet Union with the help of some very high-level connections. Determined to put an end to this unwelcome spectacle and to shock your parents as much as possible, you throw yourself at your dog Joki and lay a passionate smooch on his yellow whiskers. Their wet, sticky surface causes you to push him away before your parents even have time to notice you—and at the same time, you discover that Joki has finished the cabbage soup that you didn’t really want anyway.

            The Berlin Wall has fallen, your mother continues to yell, this time into the phone to someone who repeats the same phrase at the other end of the line. Meanwhile, your father rushes to get a bottle of transparent liquid, which he opens, and the room starts to smell like fermented fruit. He starts to take down glasses, all the while shouting with joy and making random gestures with his hands, like windshield wipers that wave in several directions at once. After several very long minutes, you manage to understand that Berlin is a city, and not a man like you thought. You remember the wall between the living room and your parents’ bedroom: your mother attacked it one afternoon while your father was out. She needed to room to breathe, she had announced just before driving a hammer into the plaster, though the only result was a scratch in the paint and a terrible back ache.

At the moment, you are trying to understand the connection between the scratched paint, the city of Berlin, and the strange activity that your parents have started up again. But it’s all in vain. Your grandmother joins the festivities and takes down the bottle of rotten fruit with conviction. Everyone seems extremely happy, except for the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party and Chairman of the State Council of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, Comrade Todor Zhivkov, who is going through a difficult ordeal live on national television, accompanied by excessive applause from your family. Another man tells him that he is no longer General Secretary, nor President of the Republic, all while declaring his eternal affection and profound respect for his merits during his thirty-five-year term. The grey eyes of Todor Zhivkov—who, for the moment, is allowed to keep the title of Comrade—look even larger than usual because of his thick, round glasses, behind which you think you see some tears.

            You ask yourself how this business with the Berlin Wall will influence your space contest and wonder what Yuri Gagarin would do. You wish he were around so you could ask him. Instead, you phone Constanza and call an emergency meeting in the hallway of your building, your new Secret Magical Place #2.

Part Two

Smells Like Teen Spirit

It’s the Democratic Transition, and you can pick up a new channel, MTV, thanks to a cable covertly plugged into the flying saucer on your neighbor’s balcony. This ingenious device allows you to connect to the new international hero: Kurt Cobain, a novelty introduced to you by your big cousin Andrei, whose upper lip is now covered with something thin and unattractive. At first, you have your doubts. Kurt is nowhere near as magnificent as Yuri—his sweater is full of holes, his sleeves are far too long and, all things considered, his hair is very dirty. Not to mention, he’s always brooding.

Your conquest of space is a dirty communist piece of shit, argues your big cousin Andrei, who looks a lot less dazzling without his battalion medal and officer’s uniform, but still fairly impressive in his new pubescent thug look, which isbetter suited to the economic situation and recent change in social values. Yuri Gagarin is a fucking loser, he says, doing his best mobster impression.

Besides, Neil Armstrong didn’t walk on the Moon either, chips in the little beige radio, which is about the tackiest thing you’ve ever seen. It was just a video filmed by an American director to intimidate the Soviets, the tacky little beige radio continues, just before you turn it off once and for all.

You try to ignore these bad vibes: deep down, you know that Yuri is out there somewhere,that he is still watching over you from his exile in a far-away galaxy, first cosmonaut or not. But in the meantime, while you’re waiting to hear from him, you immerse yourself in loud music with American lyrics. Nirvana’s music videos are broadcast regularly, and you can watch every hour as Kurt appears, mysterious or downright depressed, sometimes on a distant hill, swinging in the darkness on a giant chandelier, or barely visible behind an artificial waterfall, his face projected onto a giant wall that disfigures it, or at the back of a smoke-filled gymnasium. He is often surrounded by dark creatures: newborns swimming the free-stroke, wasted cheerleaders jumping around in what your big, mustachioed cousin Andrei calls a crazy pogo, or a dog with a broken neck, and what look like hysterical little tadpoles that explode at the end of the video. It’s grunge—the atmosphere is edgy, shady, and mega-cool, asserts your big cousin Andrei, who thinks that he’s going to squat your covertly wired television for several centuries, at least. During all this time, Kurt keeps on howling, so loud that you start to worry about the state of his tonsils. You rarely see his eyes, which are hidden under a heap of wet, sticky locks, but you glimpse a shadowy expression, one that seems mostly empty. After careful consideration, you announce to your big, mustachioed, and soon to be very pissed-off cousin Andrei that it’s time for him to go.  

Kurt Cobain Squirms in the Kitchen

You are sitting in front of a multitude of shots, all very cut and flash, that change according to the harsh rhythm of the music. MTV is showing a documentary all about Nirvana. The images are in color, bright and saturated, the sound compelling. Front yards covered in snow, an intersection, wooden signposts pointing towards new destinations, signs for fast food restaurants or different Western brands flashing in abundance. It’s in Aberdeen, in the state of Washington, that the incredible life of Kurt Cobain begins, says an unknown voice, a strong, expressive, American voice that imposes itself over the musical racket. A blond boy squirms atop a wooden horse, his gaze anxious, in the middle of a messy kitchen. It’s Kurt, sober, nervous, and very small. A caption indicates that it’s from the family’s archives. The unknown voice goes on to say that, since childhood, Kurt felt excluded from his family, fearful and solitary, that his stomach hurt all the time. To reinforce these revelations, photos of Kurt’s parents are presented and they immediately seem like monsters, much bigger than your parents, with enormous mouths, undoubtedly full of tonsils. Kurt, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have kept his, judging by the harsh sound of his vocal cords, which you can now hear vibrating at his first middle-school concert. Hyperactive or just restless, teenage Kurt is disliked by his teachers, says the unknown voice which has taken on a more dramatic tone, and he increasingly shuts himself away at home with his only friend, his electric guitar, says the unknown voice before dissolving into the tortured melody. Very strongly influenced by punk rock, Kurt Cobain composes constantly, says the voice with the showy American accent, and one day—a day that will mark the destiny of the entire planet, exalts the unknown voice—he invents grunge.

By all accounts, Kurt is a genius. You decide to announce this fact to Constanza. You dial her number and you let Kurt convince her himself: you press the phone up against the television speakers, from which “Smells Like Teen Spirit”is blasting at high volume. After a few minutes, you pull the telephone back, and you discover that Constanza has hung up. You understand, then, that you haven’t gone about this in the right way, and you call her back, but she doesn’t answer the phone—ever again.

Encouraged by the strident rhythm, your indestructible mutt Joki—who is, at present, your only best friend for all eternity—energetically devours your still-unemployed father’s slippers, the ones you’ve always hated anyway. His movements, characterized by their relentlessness, their destructive force, remind you of Kurt, who, at the end of a concert, after playing while sitting on, then lying down on his guitar, enthusiastically smashes it on the ground. It’s a fatal move, definitive, epic. It contains within itself all the suffering of humanity, all the scourges of the Earth. Kurt is so despairing—his attitude fascinating, and totally unfamiliar to you. You decide on a new life goal: become like Kurt Cobain, a famous and mysterious punk-grunge-rock star.

The New MutraGalaxy

It’s the Democratic Transition—everything is expensive and everyone is poor. You sometimes catch a glimpse of wealth that dazzles you with its brilliance, like the shiny little stonesin all different colors standing out from the rest of the mosaic, which is looking more and more grey. For example, the principal’s daughter has a driver, while you and your classmates make your way to school by less certain means. The only bus that passes by Gagarin Station dates from the time of the first manned space flight—a date that has since come into question—and it often breaks down. You’ve got to learn to enjoy trekking over rough terrain because the streets are slowly falling apart. Though there is a certain logic to this state of affairs: the principal’s daughter would have a hard time walking to school in her foreign, name-brand shoes with the heels that come halfway up your tibia. She suffers enough just walking to the currency exchange, where she trades in her dollars whenever she wants to buy a banitza or a pack of Marlboros, and it looks like a truly heroic effort.

All around you, people are changing, and you don’t see Yuri’s radiant smile anymore: the order of the day is to not smile at all and to make oneself intimidating. The men become like bookcases, or like tree trunks without the canopy, or like motionless robots after the workouts they inflict on themselves to become stronger, or at least more inflated. Some of them look like mutras—undesirable individuals who practice fraud, blackmail, and violence on a daily basis—and some really do become mutras: they wear gold chains, they drive 4x4’s, and they are dangerous. They have dollars, real Nikes, and most importantly, real guns, which they use as needed, which is to say, often. The principal’s daughter is married to a mutra, which makes her a mutresse. As for you, you have no place in the new system and no intention of finding one. Like Kurt, you cut yourself off from everyone, in your home, where, thanks to MTV, you live your own world, a far-away galaxy populated by Spice Girls, mohawked punks, gangsters who cruise around in their roofless cars, skaters who fly effortlessly over the streets, and suicidal teenagers who pray in rooms crammed full of candles. They are a lot nicer than the people who live in your reality, whose condition is beginning to deteriorate. 

Translated from French (France) by Georgia Lyon Froman