Existential Nightmares

by

Nicki Leone

Back in my arty college days one of my arty boyfriends took me to an arty film called After Hours. For those of you unfamiliar with this 1985 Scorsese cult classic, the film features an unassuming guy named Paul Hackett on what ends up being the worst night of his life.  Hackett (who is a “word processor”—how’s that for quaint?) is sitting around reading Tropic of Cancer in a coffee shop when he gets an unlikely invitation, and phone number, from a beautiful woman. Around midnight he screws up enough guts to call her and she invites him to come on over. He does. He then spends the rest of the film trying to get back home. Hackett’s night degenerates into a surreal, blackly comedic existential nightmare as seemingly random occurrences—including murder, suicide, theft, vigilante violence, art performance pieces, femme fatales and nightclubs—continually thwart his desire to get from point A to point B. In the middle of New York City, the city which never sleeps, Hackett is utterly alone and abandoned, blown about by a capricious series of increasingly absurd coincidences that rob him of his money, his friends, and his identity until he comes to believe he is the only sane man in an insane world. The movie is about an hour and a half long, but it feels endless. By time it was over, gorgeous cinematography not withstanding, I was nearly frantic, ready to run screaming from the theatre.

I hated it. The truth is, of all the different hells envisioned by the human imagination—from fiery pits of endless torment to bland rooms with unsuitable occupants and unlocked doors—the one described by the movie After Hours will forever be the most hellish to me. An endless, pointless journey; isolated and adrift in a world to which everyone seems to belong but you; an existence that makes a mockery of your feeble attempts at free will and self-determination. Really, it’s been twenty-five years since I saw that movie and even the thought of it still sets my teeth on edge.

And I was thinking about it almost the entire time I was reading Zift, a debut novel by the Bulgarian writer Vladislav Todorov which was written back in 2006, but which has finally been published in English this year. Dubbed, or subtitled, “socialist noir” Zift (the word refers to a kind of mineral pitch, bitumen, used as cheap chewing gum but is also slang in Bulgarian for “shit”) is Lev Kaludov Zhelyazkov’s account of the day after he is released from Central Sofia Prison where he has served twenty years for a murder that he didn’t commit. Lev, also known as “Moth,” was one of three partners in a botched robbery to steal a black diamond from a jeweler’s shop. The other two—Moth’s girlfriend Ada and their partner Slug—got away, but Moth was wounded in the robbery attempt and ended up taking the fall for the murder of the jeweler, who was shot during the failed heist.

Moth walked into prison in 1943, when he was eighteen. He walks out on December 21, 1963 at the age of thirty-eight. While he was inside, the world changed.

Less than a year after Moth was sentenced, Bulgaria went through what is now called the 9 September Coup d’etat, which overthrew the moribund Tsarist monarchy and put into place a socialist government. The Kingdom became the Fatherland, and Moth, moldering in his cell waiting on letters from his beloved Ada, missed all of it. The most significant change the revolution made in his life was that one day all the Bibles were taken away from the prisoners, and copies of Bakalov’s Dictionary of Foreign Words were handed out instead—as a guide, presumably, to reeducation of the prisoners along Marixst principles.

It apparently had the proper effect on Moth, whose release was authorized after he finished what he calls “my propaganda installation”—a kind of art piece put together “. . . with  my bare hands, based on my own free will and conceptual design. But it cost me a great deal of effort to find and provide all kinds of badges, painted cast-iron symbols, anthracite lumps, turbine countershafts, flywheels, and other ideologically charged machine parts.”

When the authorities see the finished work, they deemed Moth to be reformed and be released into a city that Moth hardly recognizes anymore. A city that is apathetic to his existence.

As must be clear by now, Zift is part noir, part crime story, part social satire, part black comedy (extremely black), part absurdist fairy tale. “A Chinese saying has it,” says Moth at the beginning of the story, “that a plan is a dream with a target date.” Moth’s plan for release is simple: he wants to visit the grave of the son Ada bore him and who he never saw, and the grave of the man whose murder he served time for. Then he wants to catch a train to the port of Varna, get on a ship heading south, and spend the rest of his life sleeping in a hammock swinging in the breeze of some tropical island.

Moth takes about two steps away from the prison and towards his goal and is brought up short when a police car pulls up and he is hustled in the back seat by two ugly and menacing officials. And thus begins Moth’s own surreal journey through a mad city over a mad, mad night. As it turns out, the officials are in league with Moth’s former partner Slug, who has done rather well for himself under the new regime. Slug is now a major in the force, a position with enough cachet to indulge his taste for abusing power. Plus, there’s the small matter of that black diamond from the original robbery. It was never found, and Slug thinks Moth knows where it is. He’s more than willing to beat the answer out of him.

From boiler-room torture chambers in the bowels of the Turkish baths, to the sickly-lit waiting rooms of understaffed hospitals, to seedy dive bars where the faded remnants of the old city still gather to drink White Slave cocktails and watch women with too much make-up sing under flickering neon lights, Moth careens through this new Socialist city of Sofia, barely recognizing the neighborhoods he grew up in, alternately running from Slug’s minions and running towards the woman he went to prison for so many years ago—Ada, because every noir story needs a femme fatale:

There she was, graceful, fragrant, and tremulous, dangerous like a bud brimming with fulminating mercury. Her body—taut in a diamond-black school uniform with a snow-white collar and a beret; the eyes—hypnotic, their pupils like black crystals, edged by brows of pure asphalt…

He goes on and on in that vein, and it is hard to know if he is describing a woman or a predator. When they decide to get tattoos together, Moth asks the barber to draw a night moth on his shoulder:

The moth—just imagine how it flies: not flying, really, but zigzagging erratically. If you try to sketch a moth’s flight, you will end up with an unintelligible drawing. My life paints a similar picture—anyone’s life, really.

He is at heart a noir hero—flawed (moths aren’t butterflies), but also gentle and faithful, even when tossed about by the winds. Ada, however, decides her tattoo will be a praying mantis.

The conventions of noir fiction and the conventions of social satire trip over each other in Moth’s mad, manic journey through the night city. The bad guys are pasty white and ugly, with mean eyes, skin conditions, meaty faces and ham-fisted knuckles. The women are dark beauties sallowing under the artificial neon and fluorescent lights. The city streets are grimy with refuse and litter and shining with the reflected light of street lamps and un-curtained windows. The voice of the Republic—heard everywhere Moth alights over the state-run Wired Radio Outlet—broadcasts an increasingly absurd soundtrack of patriotic music to his increasingly absurd journey.  The Moth, the Mantis and the Slug all eventually come together at the Central Sofia Cemetery—where one of them is looking for the diamond, one for answers, and one, enigmatic, won’t say.

Frantic, frenetic, violent and sometimes gross—atmospheric and occasionally degenerate, Zift felt exactly like After Hours. I loved it.

I’ve been asking myself all day why this absurdist “socialist noir” story so appeals when it’s cinematic counterpart makes me cringe. The truth is, I understand metaphor when I read it, but I don’t always recognize it when I see it. Perhaps it is simply that I speak the language of print better than I do of film. In any case, the weirdly pointless journey of Moth  (which turns out to have a point, after all, but I won’t spoil it for you) never once had me screaming in frustration to just get on with it, already, in the way Paul Hackett’s maddening journey through New York City did. And when Moth pens the last words in his confessional tale of his own terrible night, I didn’t feel relieved that it was over, but sorry to see it end.

Zift was originally published in Bulgarian in 2006. In 2008, it was made into a film of the same name by the Bulgarian director Javor Gardev, and has received numerous ornate-sounding awards (“Golden Rose,” “Golden Chest,” “Silver George”) at film festivals around the Globe. It is, by all accounts, a fantastic film and true to the story.

But I don’t dare see it.

Books mentioned in this column:
Zift by Vladislav Todorov, translated by Joseph Benatov (Paul Dry Books, 2010)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.