The following is from Georgi Gospodinov’s Death and the Gardener. Gospodinov is one of Bulgaria’s most prolific authors. He is the recipient of the International Booker Prize, the Premio Strega, and the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, among many other accolades. He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria.
My father was a gardener. Now he’s a garden.
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*
I don’t know where to begin. Let that be the beginning.
Yes, we’re talking about an end, of course, but where does the end begin?
I think I wet myself, my father said on the threshold. He was standing in the frame of the front door, painfully thin, slightly hunched, with that slouch typical of tall people. He had been driven to Sofia late in the evening at the very end of November. He had travelled three hundred kilometres in the back seat, lying down, to dull the pain. I had managed to make an appointment for medical tests the next day.
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I wet myself, he said again, guilty like a child, apologetic and with that characteristic self-irony of his, I’ve become a laughing stock in my old age.
Everything’s fine, I said, and we set about changing his clothes in the hallway, shutting the door to the living room.
I’m afraid, my daughter whispered into my ear at one point. Looking back now, I realise she was the first to sense it. I still didn’t know, I didn’t want to know.
*
Let me say right away that at the end of this book, the main character dies. Actually, not even at the end, but in the middle, although he will come alive again after that point in all the stories I will tell about him. Because, as Gaustine always says, in the past, time does not flow in a single direction.
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When I was little, I would choose only books written in the first person from the library, because I knew that the main character wouldn’t die in them.
OK, fine, this book is written in the first person, even though it’s real main character does die.
Only the storytellers survive, but they, too, will die one day.
Only the stories survive.
And the garden, which my father had planted before he died.
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Surely this is why we tell stories. To create another parallel corridor where the world and everything in it are in their rightful places. To divert the story down another furrow when danger and death flood in, just as he would divert the water into another row in his garden.
*
I would like there to be light, soft afternoon light in these pages. This is not a book about death, but rather about sorrow for a life that is ending. There’s a difference. Sorrow not just for the honeycomb full of honey, but an even greater sorrow for the empty cells within it. Sorrow for that honeycomb, which the wax candles also remember, while they burn down in our hands. Nothing to fear, as he always liked to say.
*
The notebook I’m now writing in (I’ve been writing in notebooks for thirty years) was begun in October, in all innocence. He was already in pain. The signs were there, in plain sight, only the decoding came too late. I was heading off somewhere again. This time for Cracow or Frankfurt, I can’t remember.
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OK, but when you get back, come visit for a bit, so you can rest for a few days.
It was a monstrously intense year with countless trips. Come visit for a bit, so you can rest . . . I didn’t pay much attention back then. He was always grumbling that we didn’t visit often enough, that we didn’t give ourselves any breaks. Now I read something new into those words. Come visit for a bit, I heard, and stay with me, so we can spend some time together; I won’t be here for much longer, I don’t know whether I’ll last the winter.
*
That very October, when we saw each other for one day, shortly before I took off, standing next to the last roses of autumn:
You know, I’ve been having some funny pains in my lower back.
Your lower back?
And they’re kind of creeping upwards.
Up to where?
Up to my shoulders. And my chest feels tight . . .
He’d gone to the doctor in the nearby town. They’d given him some pills. Whose lower back doesn’t hurt these days, especially with all that working in the garden? At first, the pills helped.
*
I had one final trip to Portugal and then nothing for the rest of the year.
How are you, hanging in there?
Nothing to fear, he said. ‘Nothing to fear’ was his favourite phrase. His ready answer to every question.
Is your lower back really hurting?
Nothing to fear.
You look like you’ve lost weight.
Nothing to fear.
But then – I only notice it now when replaying that October over and over in my head – when we hugged goodbye, before I got in the car, he said something else.
Nothing to fear, I’ll wait for you to get back.
Did I notice it then? Yes and no.
*
At seventy-nine he took care of a huge garden with vegetables, fruit trees and flowers. It had everything: tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, corn, strawberries, peonies, roses, tulips, trees. Planting, weeding, watering, hoeing, spraying, staking . . . We had already agreed he should stop, or at least ease up a little. I remember that then, next to those last October roses, the light purple ones, I had again told him that if he kept working in the garden like this and didn’t go to the doctor he’d simply collapse all of a sudden and the garden would go to seed before his eyes. It’s strange which words fate (or whatever we call that thing hidden in the future) lets into its ears. From the point of view of today, I see all the retrospective cruelty in my comment.
*
I knew that this garden was special. It had saved his life after the first cancer, it had given him seventeen years, but it would also be the death of him. It grew out of nothing in the empty yard of a village house my brother bought. Here’s where I feel my best, he would always say. The rounds of chemo and radiation therapy had helped him, but they had also taken their toll. He never recovered his old laugh, his cheerful high spirits. He would sit in silence for long stretches, occasionally shaking his head in some soundless monologue of his own.
The garden was his other possible life, the voice unused and everything left unsaid. He would speak through it, and his words were apples, cherries, big red tomatoes. The first thing he’d do when I arrived would be to show me around. It was different every time.
*
I liked being there, especially in spring, burying my head amid the branches of a heavily blossoming plum tree, closing my eyes and listening to the buzzing Zen of the bees. Other times I secretly hated it, watching my father swinging his hoe, thin, stripped to the waist, revealing the scars left by operations on his sliced-up body. He and the garden became one, he wouldn’t leave it, but now it, too, refused to let him go. There was some strange fatal connection, some Faustian deal, between them. I imagined it slowly sucking away his strength, feeding the fruit and roses within it – the rosier the cherries, tulips and tomatoes grew, the paler he became.
*
My father managed to turn every place into a garden, every house into a home. This is a particular skill. Every rented apartment we ever moved into, and we moved a lot, who knows why, always somehow became our home. For this reason now, on top of everything else, I feel homeless. I will never forget how he even managed to transport his garden with us. He would carefully dig up the hyacinth, narcissus and toadflax bulbs, the peonies and tulips – his favourite dark-blue tulips from Holland – which he refused to part with and would replant in the garden at each new place. I wonder whether flowers aren’t covert assistants to the dead who lie beneath them, observing the world through the periscope of their stems.
Yes, my father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.
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From Death and the Gardener. Copyright © 2025 by Georgi Gospodinov. Translation copyright © 2025 by Angela Rodel. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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