East of the West (16 page)

I ask Gogo for his pocketknife. He watches me, smiling and drinking, as I cut the old man’s clothes. The first few years after we’d moved to Sofia, we had no money for gas to go back to our little town and visit Grandma regularly. We went to see her only twice a year. The second time was in the summer. We found her on the kitchen floor so stiff, Father had to cut her out of her dress and then out of her undergarments with my kindergarten Yakky the Duck scissors. That smell, that sight, stays with you, no phenomenal memory required.

“Help me carry him to the altar,” I say.

“To the what?” But Gogo helps me. “I never carried a lighter man,” he says once we lay the old man on the clean cloak. “And have you seen paler skin?”

“I wonder what he has,” I say. I shake the bread towel from all the crumbs and start to wipe the old man’s chest.

“My money is on cancer,” Gogo says. He picks up some church cloths from the altar—or rather, something that looks like a long, broad scarf—and he, too, starts to clean the man. The old man moans. I hope he’s thankful for our help.

“Why are you laughing?” Gogo says.

I shrug. “I’m not.”

“The hell you’re not.”

I point at the old man’s crotch.

“It’s a good-sized dick,” Gogo says. “Nothing funny about it.” He looks at me. “Like you can do better.”

The old man’s arms are nothing but skin on bone, and I hold them while Gogo struggles to put on the clean shirt. I’m afraid that if I stretched the arms farther back, they’d snap right out of the sockets. “Jesus Christ,” Gogo says. His face is all sweaty and red and he wipes it with the shirt. “I can’t even get one hand through the sleeve hole.”

After the shirt, we manage to put on the tight white drawers, like pants Napoleon’s soldiers would have worn. Then woolen pants, then the sweater. I drink more wine.

“I feel great,” I say. I step back to have a good look at the man, all nicely dressed, all clean, serene on the altar. I’m proud. I’m happy with myself. “God, am I hungry.”

I drink a little more for courage and zigzag to the altar. “Grandpa,” I say. “You feel better now? Cleaner?” I hold my face a fist away from his. Gogo leans in.

“I don’t think Gramps is breathing,” he says. He pinches the old man’s nose and holds it pinched.

“How do you know?”

“I’m pinching his nose.”

“Don’t pinch his nose.”

He lets go and we stand very still, waiting. “That doesn’t seem to help,” he says.

•

The draft is stronger where we sit, down on the floor, leaning against the iconostasis.

“I feel like shit,” I say.

Gogo breaks off a piece of bread and lays it in my hands. We eat, we drink.

“Do you feel better now?”

Of course I don’t. My throat hurts. My gums feel swollen. The golden candelabra is poking me in the ribs like a spear, but I can’t take it out; it’s stuck in my shirt and I give up pulling.

I ask Gogo if he thinks we killed the man.

“I’m pretty sure we did,” he says. He says if he was lying in his own filth, all skin and bone, he’d pray for death. “Maybe he prayed for us to appear and set him free. You ever thought of that?”

I try to hold the altar, the dead old man, in sight, but both the altar and the man keep swirling in an ugly, quiet dance. The wine keeps rhythm, sloshing in the demijohn.

“If you had to guess,” I say, “what did he do for a living? You think he loved his kids? You think he lived an all right life?”

“You think I care?” Gogo says. “You think it matters? Look at him,
kopche
, the man is dead.” He bumps his head against the wooden wall. “This is too much for me. My hands are literally covered in shit: Smell them,” he says, and shoves his hands in my face.

“When did I say they weren’t?” I push him off.

“Christ, Rado,” he goes, “what’s the point? The moment I bring home my sweet, sexy TV, Brother will pawn it off again. I’d rather be broke and sleep on the floor.” And Gogo chucks away the cup, cross, tray he’s tucked in his jacket. One by one they hit something in the gloom, bounce back and roll with a metallic bark.

“I would totally ditch Brother here,” Gogo says. “I’d bring him here and leave him behind.” He says some other things, but I don’t listen.

“You know, Gogo,” I say, “this is so silly. Hear me out. The other day we were at this retiree club, my father and I … hey, wake up, listen … I’m writing this formula on the black board,
r equals p over one plus epsilon times cosine theta
—you know,
the orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus?
So I’m writing it all down just the way I’ve memorized it, just the way I’d seen it written in that old textbook Father gave me a long time back. I’m proving a point. Some old woman had randomly flashed the page before my eyes twenty minutes earlier and I’m proving my gift now. ‘What does the epsilon stand for?’ the woman asks me when I’m finished. No one’s ever asked me that. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘if you are really amazing, you ought to know.’ Well, fuck it. See, that explanation was on the next page of the book and that page was missing, torn. Turns out the woman was a physics teacher. She goes, ‘And what about that Newton’s third law you talked about? Do you understand,’ she says, ‘what that law is really telling us about the world?’ ”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Gogo says. He tries to stand up but falls right back down, flat on his ass.

“Wait, listen. My father comes to me after we’re done. ‘Well, he goes, maybe it’s a good thing.’ Meaning maybe, after all, we don’t need to add new books to our gig. Meaning maybe my memory isn’t really good enough for new books. Meaning maybe there was a reason I didn’t make the cut to that school. He didn’t know the page was missing. So all he says is, ‘Well, maybe it’s a good thing.’ ”

“Well,” Gogo says, “maybe it
is
a good thing,
kopche.”
He lifts the demijohn up and shakes it empty. Three liters of holy wine, gone.

“What did you say?” I go, and he goes, grunting, “See? Case in point.”

But I don’t see. I don’t see anything at all.

“The thing is,
kopche,”
Gogo says, “you’ve memorized some ancient books—history, geography, whatever. You keep an article that says you’re great, but aside from this, what have you done? Sure, you’ve killed an old man in a church, but I mean, what have you really done?”

“How about your aunt? Does your aunt count?”

“The
Amusing
Rado, is that the name you’re going for now?”

None of this is funny to me. I say, “Wait a minute,
kopche
. Are you telling me you have some doubts that I am the smartest kid that ever lived?” I get up, stumble, fall down again. I really want to shake my finger in his face, but I don’t know if his face is where my finger is shaking. “The last word of the Bible is
Amen,”
I say. “The first is
In
. The eye of the ostrich is bigger than its brain. In England, all swans belong to the queen. Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance. Stalin never had a mother. He was born by his aunt. Hitler was born with a full set of teeth, including four fillings and a crown.”

“Oh, yeah,” Gogo says, “the yellow press is a well of knowledge.”

“A yellow well,” I say, and listen to the wind howling, and to the chanting crowd. Then something, like a cricket, starts chirping in my pocket. It’s that rich boy’s pager we won at cards.
Come home
, dechko, the page reads.
Mama fried meatballs
.

“Mama fried meatballs,” I say, and chuck the pager to the gloom. I repeat this over and over again, until the meaning rots away from the words.
“Kopche,”
I say, “watch my chips. I gotta take a piss, all right?”

I get up somehow. With a swift pull I untuck my shirt and the candelabra rattles at my feet. I try to kick, but miss. I try to open the gates, but can’t. There seems to be only one way for me now—up. I can’t piss in the church. I’m not like that. So I start climbing this staircase, these wooden steps, and I look for pots of pelargonium. But the neighbors must be keeping all pots under lock and key now. So up I climb, up until there is nothing left to climb, until wind slices my face. I’m where the bells are hanged.

It’s snowing big, white chunks. Below me are the willows and the people—one million at my feet, two million, eight million. My Bulgarians.

It would be nice, I think, if someone tolled the bells. A metamorphic gesture. No,
metaphoric
is what I mean. But I just watch the snow fall, and the people still jumping like crickets in my pocket and at my feet.

Jump, my poor sick bastards—or brothers, rather. Mama has fried meatballs for all of us. Jump at my command. At the rise of my hand. Prove that you want change. That you’re not Red.

“Gogo,” I yell, “are you still doubting? Come see what I can do.”

I climb upon the ledge, unzip my pants. My belt hits the rail like a copper tongue.

I’m sorry, my dear Bulgarians. There, you got my apologies beforehand. But I have you all memorized now. Each and every one of you. And so, watch out, my people. This boy has stones in his kidneys.

THE NIGHT HORIZON

1.

She fit like a stone in her father’s cupped palm when he first held her. Yellow palm, stained from stringing leaves of tobacco, and she bloody, blind and quiet. She did not scream when her father took her. She did not breathe. A bloody stone was all she was back then. So her father shook her and smacked her face, and then she screamed, and then she breathed.

He raised her up to the ceiling as if God had poor eyesight and wouldn’t see her down where she lay. He called her name, Kemal, which was his name, really, the name of his father, and then repeated it, like a proud song, to make sure that up in the Jannah the angel had heard right and had written her name correctly in the big book.

“You cannot give your daughter a man’s name,” the
hodja
told him.

“It’s too late now,” her father answered. “It has been written.”

2.

Kemal’s father made bagpipes up in the Rhodope Mountains.
Kaba gaydi
, they were called—enormous in the arms of the piper, with a low song, monotonous, mournful. He had built himself a workshop in the yard and kept Kemal’s cradle there in the workshop, while he drilled chanters and reeds, while he perforated goat skins and turned them into mehs for his bagpipes.

“Let her breathe in the sawdust,” he’d tell her mother. “Let it flow with her blood and let her heart pump it.”

When Kemal was still very young, her father sat her down on a three-legged chair in the corner and placed in her hands a chisel. He showed her how to carve small half circles on the sides of a chanter and then he told her to make her own patterns. “Make them pretty,” he told her, and so, day after day, while he hunched over his lathe, Kemal carved tiny half-moons and dots like distant stars on a wooden sky. Sometimes she pricked her fingers, sometimes she cut them. But she never cried. She only set the tools on the ground and walked to her father and held her finger up to his lips, the dust red and sticky, so he could suck away the dirty blood, so he could spit the pain out on the floor. Then he made her stomp on it, like a snake’s head under her heel.

When Kemal grew up a little, her father taught her how to choose wood for the chanters. He’d take her out of the village, up the narrow road to the tobacco fields and farther up along the meadows, scouting for dogwood. If they came to the right tree, her father would dig his teeth into a branch and taste it and Kemal, too, would taste it. The more bitter the taste, her father told her, the tougher the wood. The tougher the wood, the softer it sang. Only very hard wood could make music. Then he axed down the tree and pruned its branches, which Kemal roped up and carried home in an armful. They left the stems to dry in the workshop, because, to make music, Kemal learned, the wood had to be dry.

Once, in the winter, they stacked an armful of frozen branches away in the corner and left them there for a few days, in the warm hut. Then one morning Kemal saw that the branches had blossomed: thick white flowers that smelled of dog feces. “This is an omen,” her father told her, and she helped him set the stack on fire.

3.

Kemal’s father kept her head cleanly shaven, though Kemal did not like that. She did not like herself in the mirror. She liked her mother’s hair, the thick black tresses that fell like ropes from under the head scarf. But she was not allowed to touch those tresses nor was she allowed to braid them.

“Enough with this nonsense,” her father had said once while under the awning Kemal had combed her mother’s hair as her mother spun yarn for booties. “The bagpipes are waiting.”

The village children made fun of Kemal because her head was shiny like a lizard’s, because she smelled like a goat, and because her father was crazy. He must be, they told her, or why else would he give his daughter a boy’s name? And if Kemal was really a girl, how come she didn’t wear a
shamiya?
Didn’t she know that Allah hated women without head scarves? That He sent a plague of hungry maggots to hatch in their brains and eat their innards?

“Nonsense,” her father said when Kemal asked him. “You are a bagpipe maker. To make bagpipes, you need a man’s name.” Then he took her to the mosque and when the
hodja
refused to let her in—when he cried, “You’re making Allah angry!”—her father laughed loudly and pushed her inward regardless. Kemal prayed with him, and later, in his workshop, her father taught her verses from the Qu’ran that she recited while she worked on the bagpipes, so the work would flow lighter, so their music would pour out sweeter.

Kemal was six when her father made her her own bagpipe—small enough so she could put her arm around it, so she could squeeze it with her elbow. For months that’s all he taught her: how to keep a steady tone; no melody, just air gushing out in an even stream. At first Kemal could not do it. In bed, she held her pillow like a
meh
and squeezed it, not too harshly and not too lightly, until one day her father lay his dusty palm on her shaved head.

“That’s it,” he told her. One day, he said, she could forget her own name, even, but she’d never forget how to squeeze the bagpipe. Then he covered the windows with old newspapers, picked up a
kaba gayda
himself and filled it up with air. “Don’t think,” he said, “just follow.”

The shriek exploded—the songs too large for the small hut, the songs longing for sky and meadow. They thrashed, wrecked, shattered and then curled up in the corner, curs who’d recognized their master.

“You are,” her father told her, “a conqueror of songs now.”

And so they played together, days on end, long hours; they danced in circles around the lathe, with shadows of words on their faces, Kemal’s chest ablaze, her fingers enflamed like the roots of sick teeth. And they emerged of the hut reborn, to air fresh and sunsets so sharp, Kemal had to seek refuge in her father’s arms or else go blind completely.

But he gave her no refuge. “Hugs are for girls,” he’d tell her.

4.

When Kemal was ten, her mother went away to the city. Before she left, she stopped by Kemal’s room and made her put aside the bagpipe. “I’m not feeling well,” her mother said, and rested a hand on her belly. “Give me a kiss so I’ll feel better.” Her face was yellow, and when Kemal kissed her, her sweat tasted of dogwood blossoms. “Do you feel better now?” Kemal asked her. “I feel better,” said her mother.

For a whole week after that Kemal’s father stayed locked in his workshop. But the lathe didn’t turn, and the hammer lay quiet. He wouldn’t let Kemal in, no matter how much she begged. She boiled milk and hominy for dinner and every night she left a wooden bowl at the threshold. The hominy always turned chunky—her mother had never really taught her how to cook it properly—but still, in the mornings, she found the bowl empty, washed it and filled it up with breakfast. She fed the chickens, and though a couple died of something, she did well for the most part. She hoed the garden. She watched bats draw nets in the blue night and listened to the
hodja
from the minaret call everyone to prayer. She missed the sawdust and the cold of the chisels. And there was no one to talk to. So sometimes, when the silence got too thick, Kemal walked above the village, above the gorge and the river, and played her bagpipe. Her songs flowed screeching and smashed against the hilltops and bounced back muffled, as if there was another piper blowing in answer, as if it were her father playing back from the hilltops.

On the second week Kemal’s father stepped out of the hut another man. He held her up and she tried to tear off his beard, to see if his real face was not hidden beneath it. He took her to the mosque to pray for her mother, but Kemal prayed for other things: she prayed back home he wouldn’t lock the workshop; she prayed he’d shave off his beard.

5.

On the first school day Kemal rose up before the cocks crowed. When she stepped out of the house, her father splashed water at her feet, for good luck. He said he wished her mother could see her. Kemal wore a white shirt and black trousers, but her shoes were her cousin’s. “Drag your feet a little,” her father told her, so she wouldn’t walk out of the shoes. In the school yard she was given a paper flag, white-green-red, and lined up with the other children. She chewed on the flag handle, which was like a stick for cotton candy, and so one of the teachers scorned her.
Divak
, the teacher called her, thinking Kemal was a boy, a savage. Kemal was this close to tears. But she remembered what her father said to people. “My daughter,” he told them, “does not know tears. Even when she was born, she didn’t cry.” So while the teacher wasn’t looking, Kemal bit off a chunk of the flag stick, chewed it and swallowed. The splinter was salty from all the hands that had touched it, but by the time they led her inside the classroom she had eaten half of the stick. By the time it was her turn to recite the poem, she was already chewing on the flag. All kids recited the same poem. A teacher had come to Kemal’s house a month before this to make sure she had a copy. A classic by Ivan Vazov.
A3
the poem went. I am a little Bulgarian. I live in a free land. I cherish all things Bulgarian. I am the son of a heroic tribe. When Kemal said
heroic tribe
she coughed out a piece of the flag. Her spit had washed the dye away and the piece lay wet on the floor like a cat tongue. All the children started laughing. The teacher sent Kemal home for her father.

“That poem you learned,” her father said on the way back from the headmaster’s office, “you must forget it. You’re not Bulgarian, no matter what people tell you. You were born a Turk and you will stand a Turk before the Almighty when He calls you.
‘Kemal,’
the Almighty will tell you,
‘recite me a poem.’
What will you tell Him then, Kemal, lest he throw you down in Jahannam to eat thorns from the thorn tree?”

“What poem, Almighty?” Kemal answered, frightened to look up at her father. “I remember no poems.”

6.

Kemal’s mother, too, came home not her mother.

When Kemal was still very little, her father had asked her to take an old shirt of his and stuff it with hay to make a scarecrow for the garden. And now, when she watched her mother stooped at the threshold, weightless, her hand on her belly, her skin the color of spoiled tobacco, cheekbones like sharp stones and face like a wolf’s under the head scarf, Kemal thought of that scarecrow, of how the scarecrow had needed more hay for the stuffing.

From then on, Kemal rarely saw her mother. Her mother ate no breakfast and had no dinners and Kemal was not allowed to talk to her or hold her hand, even. Her mother’s room stayed locked at all times.

When Kemal blew up her pipe, hoping they could play together, her father brushed her away and demanded silence. But there was no silence. Doors opening, closing, water running in the bathroom. And in her room Kemal’s mother weeping softly, and her father trying to soothe her, his voice calming to her, but to Kemal dreadful. Why wouldn’t he talk to Kemal this way? Why was he allowed to hold her mother’s hand, while Kemal herself wasn’t? And even when her mother didn’t weep, her father’s voice kept Kemal awake.

At night she held her bagpipe, face buried in the
meh
like in a bosom, and sucked the blow stick, and breathed that goat smell, and prayed Allah to make things quiet.

Once, while her mother was taking a shower, Kemal snuck in her room and rummaged through a drawer of packaged syringes. The whole room smelled like camphor, like piss and shit, and the floor was covered with large sheets on plastic to preserve the rugs from staining. In the corner she found a box of nylon pouches, took one and tried to blow it up, to get it to make music.

The door opened and her mother walked in wearing a bathrobe. Her head was bald, not smoothly shaven like Kemal’s, but in patches. Under the robe Kemal could see that her mother held a pouch like the one she was holding.

“Where did your hair go?” Kemal asked her.

“It’s not that bad, really,” her mother told her.

They watched each other, silent, water dripping from under the robe and the drops drumming on the sheets on plastic.

7.

It was tobacco harvest, so out the window Kemal watched the road, dark now before sunrise, busy with carts and people. She could hear women singing, and their children fussing on their backs, sleepy in rucksacks. Oil lamps shone and torches burned, and as the carts rattled and as the people climbed the mountain they looked like a snake just hacked to pieces, one piece thrashing and chasing the other, no pieces connecting. But she would not pick tobacco.

Her father had once more taken up making his bagpipes. “We need the money,” Kemal had heard him say to her mother. “If you need something,” he’d told her, “just blow in this chanter.” So in the workshop Kemal helped him fulfill an order: thirty bagpipes for three schools in the region. They worked in the mornings, yet their work did not flow well. Every so often her father stopped and scolded Kemal to be quiet. “Is that,” he’d say, “a chanter blowing?” At lunchtime he went to take care of her mother, while Kemal kept on working. Goatskins lay in piles around her and waited to be turned to
meh
s. Old, dry wood sat in the corners, plum, dogwood, and in boxes, for decoration, black buffalo horns, shiny in the noon sun. She felt good in the workshop. She even ate there, goat cheese and white bread, and drank well water from a sweaty jar, while sawdust spiraled and stuck to the jar walls.