The Gentle Spiral
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On a cold winter day, I was travelling across the Ludogorie in a horse-drawn sleigh.1 There were several of us tightly packed in the wooden cart, some with their backs to the horses, others facing them, still others sitting sideways, all of us chilled to the bone, downcast and drowsy. We were returning from a hunt, wrapped in scarves, collars up, hats and kalpaks down to our eyes such that not a single face could be fully seen. The men’s breathing steamed like smoke from beneath their scarves and hats; smoke steamed from the horses’ nostrils, too. When travelling in a sleigh, the body cools quickly, the cold creeps into the flesh, eyes begin to water, all of the surrounding nature appears hostile. The sky above us was grey, to the left of the sleigh the forest lowered greyly, and to our right, the plain stretched out, slightly slanted, covered in snow.
The road meandered alongside the forest, sank into a valley, sloped upward. At times, the sleigh skidded, its runners grating over gravel and stones; the horses would then begin to snort, the coachman would crack the whip in the air and start to shout, ‘Giddy-up! Giddy-up!’
The white plain gradually extended and wound around us, the hushed forest tiptoed away, the trees closest to the road scurried back swiftly, the ones further afar moved more slowly, and this created the impression that the forest was running backwards with a thousand feet without its trees stepping over one another.
At one of the turns, a rosehip bush suddenly appeared in the snow, bristling with scarlet fruit. It faced every direction all at once. ‘Ha,’ cried the coachman, ‘would you look at that!’ He swirled his whip in the air and smacked the bush in the face.
The wild rosehip bush shivered, and all of its shiny red fruit shivered in turn; they began to dance like living eyes, as though not a frozen bush had been struck but rather a living creature had been whipped in the face. The runners of the sleigh continued to squeak evenly on the snow path, echoed by the steady jingle of the horse bells; the bush was retreating all the while staring at us with its hundreds of scarlet eyes. The road tilted slightly downwards, the horses began to neigh; I turned around and saw shoulders, backs, kalpaks and the blue eyes of one of the hunters. He was chewing on a cigarette that had been long put out. ‘That must be a vampire,’ the hunter said. ‘What?’ asked a hoarse voice from the front of the sleigh. ‘That bush,’ said the man with the extinguished cigarette and turned his head around over his shoulder to indicate the rosehip bush. I saw bewilderment cross his face.
I looked back, the rosehip bush was gone. The plain was all white, the grey forest stood upright next to it; above it, the sky lowered greyly. We slid down a slope, and the slope hid the sleigh from the staring eyes of the rosehip bush.
A sharp notion pierced my thoughts: ‘It’s almost like a person . . . almost like a person!’ I remained seated, my head turned around, and I could hear the horse bells coughing behind me, someone’s mumbling, the squeaking of the leather equipment. A nagging memory took off running alongside the sleigh on the snow path, and the thousand-legged forest ran alongside it, silently, without stumbling anywhere – it was a man with a beard and a Hutsul cap who was running, his high forehead and penetrating, almost fanatic gaze plainly visible. The rosehip bush, as if smacked by an invisible whip, rolled and coiled across the snow in front of the man, staring at its stalker with its hundreds of scarlet eyes, equally penetrating. The bush and its stalker stopped for a minute. I saw the man scratching his beard in thought and looking at the bush as if searching for something buried inside it.
The man with the Hutsul cap was Metodi Andonov.2
It’s now been five years since he’s no longer among the living, but it often happens that my imagination will bring him back to life, so real and alive that if I were to call out, I’m certain I’d hear back his voice. But not even once have I dared call for him, out of a certain sense of fear. I fear that if I were to hear his voice and see him approach me upon recognising my call, my heart would barely be able to withstand it. When he was alive, we once went to the Ruy mountains for big-game hunting.3 It was winter then, too, and we hunted in a forest that was silent and uninviting. The sky was in tatters; at times, sunlight flooded the forest; at others, a shadow ran across it, a thunder reverberated in some hunting blind and the valleys answered back with a roar. At the end of the hunt, Metodi called me; we were in neighbouring hunting blinds. I saw him prowling around a rosehip bush, staring at it so intently, as though a wild beast were lurking inside. ‘Come, come!’ he said softly. I asked him what was going on. ‘Look!’ he said, pointing to the bush with a finger. His face was thoroughly radiant, it seemed to me that there was something fanatical in his gaze. I studied the rosehip bush carefully.
It was a shrub of human stature, spread out on the snow, bristling with scarlet fruit. ‘Come take a look from the other side,’ Metodi Andonov told me, and we both moved over to the other side, but it looked the same from there, too. ‘Wherever you stand, it will stare at you!’ Metodi Andonov pointed out. I lit a cigarette and let the man prowl round his rosehip bush. He threw a snowball at it several times, the bush shivered, its hundreds of red fruit shivered in turn, and if one resorted to their imagination, they might decide that this rosehip bush really shivered like a living being whose eyes fidgeted in all directions, like those of a bandit. Metodi Andonov touched his grey-and-white Hutsul cap, repeatedly; he scratched his beard with a certain nervousness, almost sensually. I discerned impassioned notes in his voice. ‘That’s theatre!’ he cried. ‘A miracle! A miracle! . . . Can you picture this bush on the stage, utterly real, pulled directly from the forest, wild, frozen, bristling with scarlet fruit! And the entire stage would be perfectly white, pristine, just like the snow around us now, and we’d flood it with light, we’d let shadows run across it, we’d envelop parts of the bush in fog, then we’d blow wind to sweep through it . . . wouldn’t that be terrifying!’
He beat himself in the chest with exaltation and continued to stare fanatically at the calm rosehip bush, calmly perched in the snow. At that moment, he appeared like a man who no longer perceived life and nature around him as decorative curtains, but who was trying to break through this curtain or veil, to tear it, to peek behind it. Metodi Andonov had likely succeeded in peeking behind them; though only through the peephole, he had been able, it appeared, to glimpse something truly fundamental and important. How else could I explain that a perfectly sane person would circle around a frozen rosehip bush with such a fateful stare in his eyes?
It wouldn’t have surprised me if at that moment he had mustered up all his strength and jumped inside the bush; it’s hard for me to determine whether it was the man or the rosehip bush that looked wilder. Perhaps both of them were equally wild . . . This is how I’ll remember them my whole life, staring at each other, and I cannot understand why nature, which has always been alert but calm, claimed this bearded boy from Kalishte so prematurely, so rashly?4 As if nature didn’t have enough rosehip bushes to herself, she decided to uproot even this rosehip bush from our hearts and to chase after him across her snowy desert.
. . . I once again heard the horse bells behind me, someone’s coughing, human voices. I glanced back at the snow path – everything was desolate. There wasn’t much to look for in this emptiness, really. If I wanted to find anything, I had better start ferreting within my own self again. But I didn’t have enough time to ferret around for I noticed that birds began to appear in the grey sky, and grey though they were, the birds became more and more clearly visible. They grew into a big grey flock, glided calmly above the grey forest, making no sound. ‘Woodpigeons!’ shouted the hoarse voice that earlier had asked the blue-eyed man what he had called a vampire.
Everyone in the sleigh fidgeted. The man with the blue eyes quickly loaded his shotgun, yelled at the coachman to stop the horses; the reins were drawn, one could hear the horses angrily grinding the metal bridle with their teeth. Someone remarked that the woodpigeons were flying too high, that it would be useless to shoot at them because it was impossible to hit them with a shotgun at such a height. The man with the blue eyes declared, ‘I’ll do it,’ while the other man objected, repeating the same words, ‘It can’t be done.’ The flock was flying calmly and smoothly, the man with the blue eyes was calmly aiming at it and he smoothly shifted the barrels of his shotgun. When the birds whooshed above us and everyone in the sleigh could hear how mighty the flap of their wings was, the man fired his gun. At the shot, the flock immediately rose higher. Only one bird remained to the side; it swung gently, made a small circle to check what this thunderclap coming from the ground was, what possibly could have occurred.
It found out neither what the thunderclap coming from the ground was nor what had occurred, that’s why it made another circle, and then yet another one; the bird was drawing these circles in the sky in a spiral motion, for while it was gliding, it was also careful to follow the direction of the flock. But suddenly one of its wings became weak, it was unable to flap it as vigorously as before; the circles gradually shrank, the bird began to lose height even though it was still flying away from us, and at one point its wings ceased flapping. It turned into a grey rag; unable to remain in the air, it plunged steadily downwards.
No sound accompanied the fall. The woodpigeon disappeared in the snow as suddenly as the rosehip bush had just a moment before.
I was the youngest in the group, so I jumped off the sleigh and went to fetch the bird. The snow was deep, at places it reached up to my knees. There was no trace in sight, the white plain extended before my eyes, immaculate and luminous, without a single scratch, without a single speck of dust on it. But that didn’t last long. In one spot, I saw the scarlet colour of a drop of blood, somewhat to my side. When I approached, I saw the scarlet colour of a second drop next to it, a third one was shining a bit further. I halted before these drops of blood in the snow. They were arranged in the shape of a spiral, they formed a circle; then, within this circle, a second one inscribed itself, and a gentle arch emerged from it to trace a third circle . . . My eyes shifted back and forth between the sky and the drops of blood in the snow.
It was the blood of the woodpigeon. While the bird was gliding above ground and drawing circles and spirals in the sky, its blood fell in large drops on the snow and drew on it these very same circles and spirals. I didn’t dare make another step in the snow; some odd feeling took hold of me at the sight of the very first circle. Further up, the other circles were drawn brightly on the pristine emptiness.
The men began to shout from the sleigh and to direct me to the spot where the woodpigeon had hit the ground and sunk in the snow. I shouted back that there was no way to proceed forward. Half of the men jumped off the sleigh and lit one another’s cigarettes, marching in the snow towards me to see what it could be that had stopped me in my tracks. I could discern in their faces, wrapped up in scarves and covered in kalpaks, a certain surprise at seeing the bloody arches and circles, drawn so perfectly gently in the snow. Not a trace, not a scratch was visible – only the gentle bloody arches and circles that shone in red, beautifully drawn by the bird’s gliding in the sky. A woodpigeon in flight is tempestuous and elegant. When the shot from the sleigh halted its flight and the bird began to glide slowly, falling behind the flock, none of us could have suspected that while it glided, the bird was slowly squeezing the blood out of its body to draw on the white plain, in vague circles and spirals, its last reading, its last writing – the last phrase of its life.
Perhaps this phrase contains a curse; perhaps it contains a testament to other birds; or perhaps it is simply the imprint of a sudden end.
In any event, no one dared to step forward to break up or step over the gentle scarlet spirals of the bird. We all fell silent, it became awkward to stand still in the middle of the white plain; one by one, the men turned their backs, and we made for the sleigh without anyone uttering a word. The horse bells jingled faintly, the forest across from us was lowered in hostile grey, the vanished rosehip bush had once again emerged in the white field, strewn with the glowing embers of its fruit. The bush had not been visible from the side of the sleigh, which was inside a valley, but from here, it was clearly delineated against the backdrop of the white plain, so each one of us could see it, and it could see us in return with its glaring eyes. We scattered silently between the scarlet rosehip bush, which was staring at us like a vampire with its hundreds of red eyes, and between the gentle arches and circles, drawn in the snow during the bird’s fall from the sky.
‘Giddy-up,’ the coachman yelled loudly once we had all squished in the sleigh. The runners of the sleigh grated on the snow path, the horse bells jingled evenly and as we travelled, I increasingly felt that, alongside the bells, something else was jingling and softly reverberating within me, something reminiscent of a celestial red teardrop, of a whisper from a startled rosehip bush, and I felt that my innermost being, too, began to draw and to interweave vague but gentle circles and spirals.
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* This translation is dedicated to Elen Shalamanova. I would like to thank Finn Anderson and Carolyn Cargile for reading early drafts of this translation, as well as Yordan D. Radichkov for granting me the translation rights.
1 Ludogorie is a region in northeastern Bulgaria. Literally, its name means ‘a deranged forest’.
2 Metodi Andonov (1932–1974) was a renowned Bulgarian stage and film director, most celebrated for his film The Goat Horn (1972).
3 Ruy is a mountain range on the border of western Bulgaria and southeastern Serbia.
4 Kalishte is a village in southwestern Bulgaria.
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Yordan Radichkov (1929–2004) was one of the most prominent Bulgarian writers of the second half of the twentieth century. He is the author of numerous short stories, novels, plays and movie scripts, including the short story collection for children We, the Sparrows (Ние, врабчетата), the novel Noah’s Ark (Ноев ковчег) and the screenplay for the film Torrid Noon (Горещо пладне). ‘The Gentle Spiral’ (‘Нежната спирала’) first appeared in 1979 on the pages of the weekly Narodna Kultura.
Erag Ramizi teaches in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University. His work has appeared in New England Review, diacritics, Novel, Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Modern Language Notes. His first book, Ecological Time, is forthcoming with Verso Books. He is developing his next writing project on consolationis.com.
Cover image details: Plate Number 755. Pigeon flying, Eadweard Muybridge, 1887, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, 1887)
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