JOGGING

I couldn’t come back to my senses for quite some time

having gotten an e-mail from berlin from a friend of mine, olaf

in it besides the mandatory attributes that

are usually limited to ritual questions

about news, health, and creative plans

(as if one can plan anything about this creativity)

as it were in passing totally in the german style without any pathos but

with a very tragic feeling within just a few sentences

he said approximately this:

“yesterday I started avoiding meetings with my neighbor

we have lived side by side for twenty years already—we are the same age

and every morning

we go jogging together in a nearby park

he always seemed

a little strange to me when the chornobyl explosion happened

he started wallpapering his place with old newspapers so that

God forbid any radiation didn’t penetrate his apartment and yesterday at

the landing I met his wife who told me he had leukemia

the final stage incurable, that this was the end

and I’m now afraid to look him in the eye and you know he

is such a nice person it was so good to jog with him in the morning . . .”

I wanted somehow to calm olaf down immediately

talk him out of it say something like “don’t take it to heart, this is fate after all

you’ll find yourself another neighbor for morning jogs and if

you don’t find a neighbor, get yourself an irish setter

you know how much they like to run? this is so much better than

with a person and besides, dogs don’t get cancer” but

I don’t even know why but I didn’t do it

suddenly it all seemed far too literary to me

I thought this could have been a nice plot-starting point

for a novel by kundera

who loves to depict human tragedy masterfully and here all the ingredients

are ready: berlin shortly before the unification, the weird neighbor, twenty years

of jogging together, newspapers on the walls like a chronicle of historic events

that have changed the face of europe, then cancer, and you see

he doesn’t know how to look him in the eye

I wrote him something completely neutral

something like “hang in there, after all you cannot help him with anything now, and you

still have to live and live, don’t think bad thoughts, don’t think

about cancer”

and then a completely heretical thought came into my head

I thought

that for the past ten years I’ve been living less than 100 km

away from chornobyl—I live here and walk down these granite and marble

streets and get choice portions of radiation

I am nearsighted—recently they found I have hepatitis

just as a carrier I’m not sick with it but still I have a muffled

form of gastritis which reminds me of itself every now and then I’ve

been having

warts now for 15 years they don’t bother me much but still they don’t disappear

just like all the chornobyl children I have thyroid gland problems

sometimes I get a prickling pain in my heart and I’m not yet thirty

but I know for sure I won’t come down with cancer

I am simply convinced that I definitely won’t come down with cancer

I will live long oh I will live so long

I won’t buy newspapers won’t jog in the morning won’t read kundera

won’t walk around the city with a geiger counter won’t go have a physical

I won’t submit a declaration won’t quit the party

won’t join a party won’t take blood tests won’t kill won’t steal

I won’t leave my homeland I will climb deeply so deeply inside my

Homeland

and fall asleep

Translated by Vitaly Chernetsky