The Swimmer
Ashira Morris
I used to get looks. Not the direct ones, of course — they were stolen, furtive glances from people walking toward the Maria Louisa bathhouse and pools in the Borisova Gradina. They would catch my eye out of the side of their vision, then keep starting, their heads fixed on me for a beat or two even as their feet propelled them forward. It’s the sort of look that’s important to hide, from yourself first and from who you’re with second. I was stoic, of course. My bronze face stayed the same as it was cast in 1959.
Photo: Central State Archives, Sofia
No one is looking at me now. The Maria Louisa complex has been closed for nearly twenty years. All the pools are empty. From the multi-level diving boards you can leap into ten meters of air. Printed signs on the corroding metal fence warn about dangerous dogs — but the real threat is handwritten over it: mafia thugs.
Photos: Ashira Morris
People talk about bringing the pool back to life because yes, for now it is dead, a blue-tiled echo of its former self. But I’m still inhabited. My broad shoulders and strong back and tapered legs, my perfectly etched pectorals, my swimmer’s speedo-clad body remain the same. My eyes still gaze out at an aspirational middle distance.
I was originally displayed in the state’s General Arts Exhibition, among the last models cast in the socialist realism celebration of aspirational athletic bodies, before sculptures became more abstract, more monumental. Georgi Kotsev sculpted two “Swimmers.” My twin watches over the Danube River from Vidin. I stayed in Sofia.
The Maria Louisa bathhouse was one of the first open-air pools in the capital. I can’t tell you firsthand what those early decades were like — I wasn’t there in 1939 when the mayor of the time, an engineer named Ivan Ivanov, declared the bath house would provide residents “the opportunity to find a summer vacation here, to bear the summers more easily heat, and children to spend their summer vacation strengthening their health with sun, fresh pine air, coolness, and sports.”
But later, I saw his words realized and the pool full of life — after the communist regime came to power in 1944, they renamed the garden “Freedom” and the pool “Republika” but its function stayed the same. Hundreds of thousands of people strolled past every year on their way to swim, play backgammon in the grass, and dine in the garden restaurant attached to the bathhouse. Every summer, the entire perimeter around the pools would be packed with bathers lounging on the artificial beach. Friends in speedos just like mine would egg each other on to take the leap from the highest diving platform. I loved watching their bodies leave the platform and slice through the air. Occasionally I’d catch their eyes. I like to think we acknowledged each other in mutual admiration.
Source: Kinoclub Super 8 / www.kinoclubsuper8.com
After 1989, the changes were sudden and gradual: the pool name reverted to Maria Louisa, and the park was named for the Tsar. Letters advertising Nescafe frappe were installed over the diving board, and the pool umbrellas advertised Red Bull and Stella Artois. The Changes, spoken with a capital C, didn’t bother me then. I was still keeping watch over the swimmers, the divers, the lounge chair nappers, and sometimes they looked back at me.
But when the new private owners closed the pool to the public, the transition changed me too. Over the nearly decades since, I watched from across the stone pathway as it fell into disrepair — water drained, yellow paint on the diving platform stairs chipped, the blue tiles graffitied. Some days my lower body was obscured by the uncut grass. An atmosphere of abandonment settled over my corner of the garden.
On increasingly hot summer days, I hallucinated the divers plunging arrowlike into the water. They turned to wink at me before they lept and dissipated into the air. My pool full of ghosts read magazines, splashed at crushes, slipped down the pair of arched slides.
I was the only sign outside the pool’s gates that there was once a beach within the garden. But people didn’t notice me either.
This year, when winter ended and the trees started growing green again, I got the most intense looks in years. I could feel their gaze move from my proud head to secured feet. I relished the intentional care and attention to my form.
They came back at night. This was new, unexpected. The pain in my leg that came next was too. The wrenching, the pulling — my feet remained firmly planted to my pedestal, barely — they groaned with the effort. I was silent. I didn’t move. Eventually, they left.
The next morning, a garden maintenance crew drove up. I wasn’t flattered this time as they approached. They unwelded my feet from the pedestal base and hoisted me horizontally onto a truck. When I was upright again, I couldn’t see at first. There was no natural light. As my vision adjusted, a warehouse came into focus. I’ve been here since, waiting for repair, uncoupled from the shimmering memory of water.
There have been plans to renovate and reopen the pool, but they remain an unrealized future — one that now diverges from mine. I miss the bathhouse. I miss it alive, but I miss it haunted too.
