East of the West

by Miroslav Penkov

  •

  We didn’t sleep that night. We lay in bed and listened to the mice in the attic, to the wind in the walnut branches, to the pines up the slope. We lay stiff and did not hold hands.

  “Let’s talk about something,” Yuki said. She sat up in bed. We talked about some things. How sweet the tomatoes had been. What our friends might be doing at this time in Chicago.

  “It’s no good,” she said. She got dressed and went outside. I didn’t follow her right away. I watched the walnut out the window and for some reason, maybe because the moon was behind clouds, maybe because of the shadows, I thought of my great-grandfather. I’d never thought of him before, but now it was him I thought about. Then I brought my fingers to my nose and sniffed that faint smell of grease from the bike chain still lingering unwashable. I remembered how the boy had smiled at Yuki, how he’d called her pretty. No one had called her pretty so far. But I thought she was. Very. I thought of how the boy had mounted his bike. How he didn’t wobble at all and how his head had not hurt.

  “I’m sure he’s all right,” I told Yuki, who sat on the threshold to the yard and chewed gum. “We can ask about him tomorrow.”

  “I’m dying for a cigarette,” she said.

  I sat beside her. I wanted to, but I did not touch her.

  •

  There was no need to ask the neighbor at breakfast. He came to bring us some buhti and milk and sat down while we ate. “Let me tell you what happened,” he said. “This Gypsy kid came home last night and his father beat him. I mean with a stick, tanned his hide, battered him real good. And after that the boy just went to his bed, lay down and closed his eyes. They haven’t been able to wake him up since. The doctor visited and said it was a coma. That’s how hard his father had thrashed him.”

  I’m not really sure what we did that afternoon. We didn’t leave the house and we didn’t speak. “Please, go find me some cigarettes,” was all Yuki managed to say, and at one point I walked down to the square and was glad to finally leave the house. I bought her a few packs.

  “Did you hear about the boy?” the cashier asked me. “Awful story,” she said. “And the father …” She shook her head. “Wanted to drown himself in the river.”

  On my way back, outside our house, I saw a neighbor inspecting the Moskvich.

  “Zdrasti, amerikanets,” the neighbor said. He was holding a large pan in his hands. “Where did you hit the car?”

  I mumbled something. It was like this already, I said, my father had done it.

  “I heard Yuki wasn’t feeling too well,” the neighbor said. “I heard she didn’t look good at breakfast. Hardly ate a thing. So my wife made her one of her banitsas. With extra eggs and butter.”

  I thanked him and took the pan.

  “You all right, amerikanets?” he said.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you, we’ll be fine.”

  •

  After three days in which Yuki and I barely ate, slept, or talked, the boy died. We heard about it from another neighbor. There wasn’t much more to it really. The boy had died.

  “Is she saying something about the boy?” Yuki asked while the neighbor was speaking.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What is she saying?”

  “He’s dead. He died this morning.”

  Yuki didn’t cry. She stood very still and I stood still until the neighbor left us.

  “What are we going to do?” she said.

  “There is nothing we can do. The boy is dead.”

  “I know that. Stop saying it. I know that already. But we have to tell them. Don’t we have to tell them?”

  We didn’t know what to do. We were in limbo, weightless, floating in empty space. We were really scared. I’d never felt scared like that before.

  Then, early that afternoon, someone knocked on the gates and out the window we saw a cart with a donkey, and a Gypsy man by the cart. Yuki gave out a cry. She dug her peeled nails into my arm. For a minute we watched the man crumple his cap in his big hands. He wore no shoes, I could see that; blue working trousers, a sailor T-shirt with white and blue stripes. His skin was very dark from the sun and his bald head glistened with sweat. For a minute we just watched him and I thought we should hide until he left.

  “Open the gates,” Yuki said, and sent me out on my own.

  I opened the gates.

  “Are you …” the man said. He came closer.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “I’m the American, yes.”

  The man apologized. “I apologize,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you.” He spoke fast, as though he were afraid he might never speak again if he stopped. “My boy just died,” he said. “We’ll bury him tomorrow and we don’t have a picture of him. We never took his picture. My wife won’t look at me now, but I know she would have liked me to come here. We heard, someone told us—Tenyo, was it, or someone else?—someone told us you were taking pictures. Your wife was taking pictures. You had a camera, someone told us. Tenyo, was it? It wasn’t Tenyo, I don’t think.” Then the man held his cap and watched me in silence.

  I told him to wait there. I told him I’d be back right away. I rounded the corner and bowed, fell to the ground. I wanted to vomit but couldn’t. It was that bad. Back in the house, I told Yuki what the man had come to ask for.

  “We can’t say no,” she said. “We have no right to say no. But I can’t come with you. I can’t stomach this.”

  “You’re coming,” I said. “You’re not leaving me alone. Do you hear me, Yuki? We’re going together.” We turned on the camera. We made sure the batteries were charged. We made sure there was room on the memory card. We made sure the strap wasn’t tangled.

  The Gypsy was looking at the Moskvich outside. He nodded at my wife. He kissed her hand. He thanked us. He apologized again. “Mighty good car,” he said at the Moskvich. He ran his hand over the bump in the fender. “I can fix this for you. Bring it to my place. I could use some work.”

  He invited us to his cart. I was relieved we wouldn’t have to drive. He helped Yuki get in. We sat in the back and he lashed the donkey. “Diy,” he called. “Diy, Marko. Git.”

  The cart rattled. We went through the village and I could see people watching us as we passed. The sun was still high and there was no wind and the air felt stuffy, unbearably hot. I touched Yuki’s elbow, but she wiggled away. She was pale and her lips were chapped. She looked thirsty. She held the camera in her lap with both hands the way she had held a live chicken at the neighbors, afraid it would flap its wings or scratch her.

  “We have to tell him,” she said. She whispered.

  “He can’t understand you.”

  “We have to tell him.”

  The Gypsies lived on the other end of the village. They’d made a little hamlet for themselves. The man’s house wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. They had a satellite dish, a garden with flowers in it. There were many people in the yard, and cars all up the street, with license plates from other places. More people were arriving and the air smelled of boiled cabbage and car exhaust.

  The Gypsy spoke only once, just before we got out, and I didn’t know if he spoke at us at all. “I don’t know how it happened,” he said. “How did it happen?”

  We walked in the yard and all the people there stood up to meet us. They all wore black, even the children. Some of the women were sobbing behind black shawls. One by one the men came to us and shook our hand.

  “Why are they doing this?” Yuki asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to run. I wanted to turn around and run and never look back. They took us inside the house. We walked through a curtain of bamboo beads—with flies perched along the strings, waiting for someone’s hand to grant them passage.

  “The flies,” I heard a voice say as we stepped inside and saw a few shoot in. The whole house smelled of the cabbage I’d noticed before. In the hallway we walked by a large round mirror that was covered with a white sheet, so the boy’s bodiless soul wo
uldn’t catch a glimpse of itself. There were women in the kitchen making salads and stirring pots. Someone was cleaning fish and I smelled that too. The women looked at us when we passed and nodded. Yuki sought my hand. We held hands as they led us in the room with the boy.

  The boy lay on a small bed and looked the way we remembered him. His mother sat on a chair by his side and fended the flies off his face with a newspaper. She didn’t look at us. She flapped the paper. For a moment she adjusted his collar with her free hand. The boy was dressed in black pants, a brown sweater, a white shirt underneath. He had black shoes on, which they had tried to polish. His hair was combed neatly to one side. He looked as though any moment now he’d sit up, rub his head and smile. I searched his face for bruises, but saw none. His fingers were entwined, and I recognized the shadows of the grease his mother had tried to wash off, but couldn’t.

  I retracted my own fingers into the shell of my fist. Yuki started to cry. It seemed like that’s what the women were waiting for. They tore their head scarves and tossed them up in the air, and wailed like bagpipes in the head-scarf rain. But the mother hushed them. “A curse on you, furies. You’re scaring him. He’s watching us now and you’re scaring him with your wailing.”

  “Yuki,” the father said. He knew her name. He said it beautifully. “Is this a good place for the picture? Or is it too dark?”

  My wife was in no shape to answer. It was very difficult for me to speak, but I said it was too dark here. Our camera was cheap, I said, and made poor pictures indoors. The flash was bad. I had to shut myself up. I had to force myself to be quiet.

  I led Yuki outside by the hand. I told her to breathe deeply. Someone brought water and she drank. She asked for more. She sprinkled some on her face. Finally they carried the boy out.

  Everyone huddled to the sides as though the boy and the people were magnets facing each other with the same pole. They brought a chair and sat the boy in it.

  I could see what they were trying to do.

  “Oh, no,” I said. I had not expected them to do such a thing.

  “They can’t,” Yuki said. “He’s not …”

  But they brought pillows to steady his body. His brothers and sisters stood around him and held him upright. Then the mother joined her children on one side and the father stood on the other, but she said something to him in their language I couldn’t understand. He said something back. He begged her, but she said no, no, no. She chased him away from the picture.

  Careful not to expose my grease-stained fingers, I held them locked inside the LCD screen—a box in which their two-dimensional images would remain linked forever, in which time did not exist, nor did the need to breathe. There were no living in this box, no dead. Just perfect stillness.

  “We are ready,” the mother said at last. “Take the picture.”

  •

  The Gypsies insisted we stay for dinner. They fixed a long table in the yard and started to bring food. They put bricks on the ground and long planks on the bricks for sitting.

  “No,” I said.

  “Né, né, né,” said Yuki. She waved about.

  “You can’t say no,” the father said. “Sit down. You can’t say no.”

  We sat almost in the middle of the table. We held hands. People crowded on the planks, like fat swallows along a wire.

  “Eat as much as you like,” the mother told us. “This is fresh cabbage. This is lamb soup. This is river fish, so watch out for the bones. It’s all very good.”

  No one spoke. We heard only spoons against the metal plates, the licking of fingers. Someone sucked marrow from a bone, and outside, on the road, a bicycle bell rang.

  “Is it nice in America?” a man asked us.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Is it nice in Japan?”

  “I haven’t been yet. I would like to go.”

  “You’ll go,” another man said. “You’re still young. There is a whole world at your feet.”

  “We’re trying to have a baby,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. I shouldn’t have. This was not the place, not the time. But I couldn’t help it. Yuki was looking at me. Stop, her eyes were telling me. “We can’t conceive,” I kept on going. “We’ve tried for a long time, but we can’t. We’re going to the hospital next week. We’ll try in vitro. Do you know what that is?”

  “Sure,” the Gypsy said.

  Some woman said, “I can give you a few herbs. Raspberry leaf, nettle, damiana. Those should help. Those are always good.”

  “Really?” I said. “Would you really?”

  The woman stood up. “I’ll be back,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” Yuki asked me. “I beg you, let’s go. I can’t take this any more.”

  I held her down. “Wait,” I said. “In a minute. Wait.”

  The woman came back with a small bag of herbs. “Boil them like tea. Let her drink it. Then let the doctors do what they do.”

  I thanked her. I took the bag and explained to Yuki what this was about.

  The woman smiled at her. “Are you having trouble, my child?” she said. “Do you mind?” I scooted over and she sat between us. “You don’t mind, do you?” she said, and put her palm on Yuki’s belly. Yuki didn’t protest. She closed her eyes. Her face became very still. The woman ran her palm in circles over Yuki’s stomach and her calluses caught on Yuki’s dress and moved it slightly. Then the woman held her palm still. “There you go,” the woman said. “There you have it.”

  •

  It was dark when we stood up to leave.

  “You can’t leave yet,” the father said, but didn’t stop us. “Are you coming tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’ll be at the graveyard at ten. And we’ll go to town right after that and get the picture printed.”

  “Thank you,” the father said. He caught me by the elbow. “Please come with me inside,” he said. “Leave your wife for a moment. She’ll be all right. But take the camera.” I looked at Yuki. I knew she didn’t want to be left alone.

  “It’s okay,” she said. She sat down at the table again and someone filled her glass half with lemonade and half with red wine.

  The father took me to his boy’s room. Two older girls were sitting by the bed, in the glow of a small oil lamp whose reflecting mirror, too, was clothed over with a kerchief. The girls fled and their shadows scattered long across the wall, like tall grass cut down and blown away by a gust. The father kneeled beside the boy and lay a hand on his shoulder.

  “A quick picture before my wife sees us, will you?” he said.

  I fixed the camera on them and watched their grainy image in the back screen. The half of the boy’s face that was close to the light looked bright yellow, almost glowing. The Gypsies had put two coins on his eyes to keep them from opening, so one coin, closer to the light, shone like a cat’s pupil. The other coin was dark and that whole side of the boy’s face was darker and then his chest, his hands stiffly tied together with stained fingers were darker still, and finally his shoes were almost invisible in the dark, so far away from the oil lamp.

  I pressed the button and the flash came on and in the picture both the father and the boy were flushed with flooding light. Everything shone.

  The father looked at the little screen. “Is this a scratch?” he said. “Why is there a scratch here?” He had seen something on the boy’s photographed face I couldn’t see. “His face isn’t scratched,” the father said. “No scratches at all on his face.”

  I looked closer at the screen and then at the boy.

  “It’s an eyelash,” I said.

  The father went to see for himself. He licked his finger and picked up the eyelash from the boy’s face. He didn’t know what to do with it right away. Then with his free hand he took a kerchief from his pocket, lay the lash in it and bundled it up.

  I watched him do this and I knew if I didn’t tell him now, I’d never tell him. And if I didn’t tell him now, I’d never forgive myself, not in a thousand years.r />
  He came to me and leaned down to kiss my hands. He did not notice the grease.

  •

  Back in our yard, Yuki pulled out a cigarette. But she didn’t light it. We sat at the threshold, and she played with her lighter. She flipped it open and stared at the flame in silence, until the flame burned her finger and she let the light expire.

  “We have to get the picture printed out tonight,” she said, and dropped the unlit cigarette at her feet. “We’ll make a nekrolog and paste it around the village.”

  I told her it was already after nine. It would be difficult to find a printer in town.

  “We’ll find something,” she said. “An Internet café. There must be something that’s open.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We can do that.”

  “But we’re not going to the funeral tomorrow. We’ll print the picture out and we’ll take it to them tonight. We’re not going tomorrow.”

  I agreed. I told her we should get going, then; we had a long way to go. But she didn’t move.

  “Just a little longer,” she said. I could see she was waiting for me to put my arm around her shoulder, to kiss her forehead. Good things, Yuki, she wanted me to tell her, happened to good people.

  But I couldn’t tell her such a thing now. I couldn’t pull out the camera, the way I would have at the end of a pleasant vacation, and prop it on the hood of the busted car for one final, memorable picture. I couldn’t ask her, while I played with the self-timer, to stand just a little to the right, yes, right there, Yuki, so there’d be room for me by your side, so the house, and the orchard, and the barn would be visible behind us.

  I had kept quiet before the Gypsy, quiet before the gates in the barn. And now at the threshold, I kept quiet still. After a minute, I went in for the car keys, and while Yuki packed our bags, I folded Grandpa’s trousers and, so they wouldn’t get dusty, lay them out in a drawer. I made sure all the windows were shut, all the doors. Yuki waited in the car while I struggled with the lock. I stood outside the gate and allowed myself one final look at the yard, at the walnut tree. But I did not allow myself to think of the child, our child, nor of the summers that would have to pass before we could return to the village.