East of the West

by Miroslav Penkov

  “I got some protesting to do,” she says. “But fine. One thousand levs.” And then she nooses a scarf around her neck.

  “Gospozho,” Gogo says, “we’re short on cash. But this boy here’s a wunderkind. He can do a trick for a loaf.”

  “I’ve seen tricks to last me six lifetimes,” Missis says. She sizes me up with greedy eyes. “Who’ll win the parliament elections? No, wait. What are the winning numbers to the lotto?”

  I shrug. “I’m not that kind of wunderkind,” I say. Missis rounds the counter and prepares to lock the door. “But of course. You are some other kind. In Bulgaria today, everyone’s a wunderkind,” she says, and shoos us out.

  “Why the hell didn’t we just take a loaf and run?” I ask Gogo, and he says, “We aren’t like that. Our ancestors died for bread. We can’t steal bread.”

  That’s rare talk from Gogo. But when you’re hungry, all your history reveals itself clearly before you, if only in a flash. Though I suppose Gogo has a point. Some things are bigger than we are. “The essential” being one of them. Nasashtniyat, “the essential,” that’s what we call bread here in Bulgaria. No one is bigger than bread. Proverbs and Sayings, volume 35, page 124.

  “Gogo,” I say now to add a proverb of my own, “no one gives you bread for free.”

  •

  When I was still very young, Father would often call me over to the table, where he and his friends worked on the nth bottle of vodka and the always-present string of dried, salted little fish. They’d pick up the daily paper and read in hoarse, drunk voices whole passages, pages sometimes, which I’d repeat from memory in the same sluggish, drunken manner word for word. I imagine it was in such a moment of intoxicated clarity one of them suggested that my father should send me to study in Sofia, in the school for gifted children.

  There is such a school in Sofia, where, in theory at least, children with gifts are handpicked through rigorous examination and then their gifts—scientific, humanitarian, artistic—are allowed to bloom and bear sweet, juicy fruit.

  “If they find out your kid is in fact a genius—” the friend must have explained, and my father must have interrupted on the spot: “What do you mean, if? What do you mean, in fact? Look at him! It’s a sure thing.”

  “Anyway, when they establish that he has a gift, they’ll move your whole family to Sofia. They’ll buy you an apartment, give you and your wife good jobs. They’ll take good care of him.”

  “We’ll do it,” Father must have said, and slammed a determined fist on the table, “but not for our benefit. No, comrade, thank you very much. We’re not like this. We’ll do it for his own good sake.”

  But I was still too young to apply for school, and Father decided to use the remaining time to make my name heard throughout the Motherland. He dug up some archaic textbooks, history, chemistry, physics, visited every school in town and convinced a few teachers to let us interrupt their classes. He’d sit me down in a chair before the gaze of bored tenth graders and pass around the books we’d brought. It was always I who carried the heavy tomes, because Father insisted such physical effort would develop my endurance for knowledge. “Open to any page,” he’d tell the students, “and read aloud. Then my son will repeat back to you like a miraculous echo!” The students read, one after the other. We’d let some time pass and then I’d repeat, words whose meaning I did not understand, but whose sounds had imprinted themselves eternally upon my ear. “The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. Valence is a measure of the number of chemical bonds formed by the atoms of a given element. Pi is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet.”

  The students would produce a mangy clap. The teacher would pet me on the head. “Look at you bums,” she’d say to the class, “a five-year-old made you look foolish,” as if everyone’s memory were supposed to be an all-retaining sponge. After that, Father and I would eat lunch at the school cafeteria and fill up with musaka or gyuvech the jars we’d hidden under our coat and call this dinner.

  “When you get into that school in Sofia, we’ll never have to eat the same food twice. We’ll never have loud, drunken neighbors, either, because the government will give us a flat in an expensive complex. Things will get stellar when we move to Sofia. You wait and see.”

  When the town newspaper wrote about me, Father bought dozens of copies to hand out to friends. He even mailed one to his pen pal, someone in Yekaterinburg he hadn’t exchanged letters with in thirty years.

  I took the exams at the school for gifted children in the spring of ’89. I was denied admission two months later. I remember waiting in the car with my mother while Father took the newspaper article to the principal’s office to demand an explanation. A spiky metal fence separated the school’s campus from the rest of the world, and I walked to it and glued my face to the posts. I could see a football field, a tennis court on the other side. “It would be nice to study here,” I told my mother, and she started to cry.

  Father said nothing on the way back from the school. He smoked one cigarette after the other, but wouldn’t open the window because it rained and he didn’t want the orthopedic sheet of stringed bamboo beads on his seat to get wet.

  “They said he wasn’t special enough,” he told my mother at last. We were waiting for a traffic light to change and he turned around and looked at me through the smoke, with more smoke coming from his nose as he spoke. “Is this true?” he asked me.

  Years later we found out that admission to this school was really a scam. That to get in, you needed connections; it was a place where all high-profile Party members sent their children to study. But we didn’t know this at the time.

  “We can’t leave Sofia now,” Father said, and turned to look at me again, though this time the car was in motion. “You’ll retake the tests next year. You’ll prove yourself special.”

  I nodded, absolutely ashamed.

  That November, after thirty-five years as the first secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov stepped down from power. Many saw this as a crack in the wall and great masses were unleashed upon the streets. It was a cold and dark winter that followed, but Father recognized much promise in our situation. We would sit in the evenings by the candle, waiting for electricity to come back, and Father would smoke and speak of the bright future that awaited us. “Things will turn out stellar for us,” he’d say. “This kid has a gift. He’s bound to get some recognition.”

  But on the following spring I was not even admitted to the school entrance exam. “You cannot apply again if you’ve been rejected once,” an official told Father. “But we were told we could,” Father protested to no avail.

  I was very happy with the situation. I hated Sofia. I dreamed of going back to our little town, to our apartment and the acres of woods above it, with the deer and the bunnies, with the snowdrops Mother and I picked once the snow began to melt in March.

  “We cannot surrender,” Father said one night, and slammed a fist on the table. “No, thank you very much. We need to regroup, that’s all. There is opportunity that must be seized here. There is finally free market. People would pay to see your gift.” He held a cigarette to the candle and smoked for some time in silence. “Why couldn’t you be some other kind of genius?” he said at last. Then he said, “Go tell your mother to stop crying and fix some dinner. Then come back and help me figure out a way to introduce you to the crowd. I’m thinking something simple: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the Amazing Rado to the stage …’ ”

  •

  The flood drags us to the parliament building, the one Gramps wanted to kamikaze into with a tank. A double helix of policemen entwines around its base, but most of them look half asleep, tenth graders propped on their shields with apathetic weariness. They’ve been out here so long, four days now, it seems they’ve lost all interest. Gogo greets them accordingly. “Pigs, hooks, fucking Ushevs,” but even then they don’t react. One of them asks me if I
got the time. His watch, he says, has stopped.

  “Do I look like someone who cares?” I tell him, and then I ask Gogo the same.

  “No, kopche, you just don’t give a shit.”

  The crowd splits in two streams, because right in front of the parliament there stands a huge pile of stones. A huge pile. Someone has stuck a flag on top, white-green-red, but the flag has frozen like a pair of boxers on the laundry line.

  I recognize now that everyone in the crowd is carrying a stone. As they pass by, the people dump their stones and the pile grows immense, ugly, like a pile of broken bodies. I know that’s not the freshest way to paint it, but that’s what it looks like to me: hands and feet on top of skulls and torsos.

  I ask Gogo if he knows what this is all about. “The Amazing Rado doesn’t know?” he says, and I say, “Yeah, yeah, very funny.” I tell him I haven’t been home for a few days, remember? I haven’t watched TV the way he has, on a nice, big Sony Trinitron set.

  “Oh, fuck you, kopche. That TV is the first thing I’m buying back.” He tells me then that all this masonry charade is part of the civilized protest. It was decided that people ought to lay stones this way instead of throw them like savage beasts. It’s all a message to the politicians inside.

  “Kopche, we don’t have any stones,” I say.

  A woman right beside opens her bag. “I have some extras,” she says. Her bag is a quarry. We each dump a stone on the pile and I’m thinking, some message this is. Dear madams, dear sirs, parliament members, we are displeased. Our pockets are full of stones, not money. Fix this injustice. We’re civil still, but we’re also hungry. Here are some of the stones we carry, in a pile.

  We have become so meek, much worse than sheep. But I suppose five hundred years of Ottoman rule will do that to a people. And then forty-five years of the Communist yoke. That’s what’s eating me as we walk away from the pile. We didn’t used to be this way. We were once fierce horsemen. We stormed blazing from the east, shot arrows riding backward, made treaties with the Byzantines, conquered the Slavs. Man, would I have liked to live back then. When the treaties were broken we went to war. Khan Krum the Terrible slew Nikephoros, one of only a handful of Greek emperors to ever die in battle, and turned his perfectly human skull into a cup from which he sipped his wine. Tsar Simeon the Great defeated Leo the Wise and chopped off the noses of five thousand of his men, just because—just to insult him. And we weren’t simply a brute force: when Great Moravia imprisoned the first apostles who worked on creating our alphabet, we rescued them and let them transcribe books in the safety of our land. The seven apostles of the Cyrillic alphabet. Sedmochislenitsi. Those were some amazing men. And now what? A pile of stones. Stones are created to break skulls and we lay them down like flowers.

  “Kopche,” Gogo says. “You look like a pelargonium someone’s pissed on.”

  That’s a pretty common expression, but still I laugh. We keep on walking and I remember how in our block of flats some neighbors would keep their pots of ficus, of pelargoniums, out on the stairway and how Gogo and I sometimes pissed in those pots. Eventually the neighbors took their burned plants in, never daring to put them on the stairs again. And then it strikes me that it wasn’t Gogo but some other boy whose name I can’t remember, in some other block of flats a long, long time ago.

  “We should do that again, kopche,” I say.

  “Do what again?” asks Gogo.

  •

  Here is my all-time favorite joke. No one ever laughs when I tell it. A circus. Almost end of the show. The announcer says, “And now, ladies and gents, please welcome the boy with phenomenal memory.” Drumroll. A little boy walks into the ring and for ten seconds stares bluntly into the front rows. Complete silence. Then the announcer says, “And now the boy with phenomenal memory will piss on the front two rows.” People start running and the announcer says, “No point in running, ladies and gents. There is no escape. The boy with phenomenal memory already has all of you memorized.”

  •

  “Drugarki i drugari, dear comrades, please welcome the Amazing Rado!”

  This is how my father introduces me to the crowd. For the past seven years, at least once a week. Nursing homes, neighborhood retiree clubs—of the retired engineer, retired welder, retired crane operator. There I am, in a room that smells of lavender spirit, in front of two rows of wheelchairs, trembling chins, dangling tubes, bags of urine, doing my mnemonic tricks to weak, Parkinsonian applause. And after that, my father begins his rounds among the rows, an empty three-liter jar in his hands. The label on the jar is peeled off almost completely and on the white space Father has scribbled boldly: Amazing Rado’s Scholarship Fund. But if you look closely, you’ll see a corner of the original label still standing and then you’ll know: this jar was once full of pickled cauliflower. On with his rounds Father goes, courting the poor old women, sweet-talking the poor old men. And sometimes, this week or the other, he manages to half fill the jar with wrinkled bills.

  For seven years we’ve toured retiree clubs like these. We’ve read from the same old textbooks Father once found in the basement, beside the strings of dried, salted fish—history, chemistry, physics. I told him all of this once. I said, “In seven years a monkey will learn to recite the periodic table.”

  “There is enough change in this country as it is,” Father said. “We have a good thing going. Why mess it up?”

  And on he strolls between the rows, the jar in hand. He always goes for seconds, because sometimes people are too senile to remember whether they’ve dropped their share or not. I watch him from the side and wonder, is this the bright future he spoke of in the light of the candle? Is this the stellar potential he prophesized? And sometimes, this week or the other, I am convinced that in his mind we’re simply playing the cards we were once dealt, as best as we can. “Life has given us medlars,” Father sometimes says, “heaps, and heaps of tough, unripe medlars. We could sulk. We could cry. Or we could wait for the fruit to rot and turn it into marmalade.”

  I wonder if you know what medlars are? If you’ve ever snuck into a cooperative orchard with rows and rows of the short trees, their branches heavy with fruit, filled your pockets, the bosom of your shirt, and then been chased by the orchard guard and shot at with pellets of salt, dropping brown medlars behind you as you ran, like a little scared goat? I wonder if you’ve eaten the fruit, sucked out the tart juice and munched on the pits, and then regretted it, because your gums feel swollen, your throat hurts, because the kid whose name you can’t remember got shot in the butt and then back home his father beat him for ruining his only good pair of pants? Kopche, I’m tired of waiting for the medlars to rot.

  “I swear, kopche,” Gogo says, and holds me by the shoulder, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  •

  We keep on marching, chanting. At one point someone gives me a blue balloon to hold. Its end is tied in a knot and frozen with the spit of whoever blew it up. Blue is now the democratic color. Gogo is waving a little paper flag. The sky above us has gone whiter, and any minute now there will be snow.

  I see a black cross above the frozen branches of pussy willows, branches with yellow lashes still hanging like golden hair. I see a dome, a bloated belly with ashen skin. I see a bell tower. I see the Church of the Seven Apostles. The church with the cross we are about to steal. And on the square before that church and in the branches are people waving large blue flags. It seems that Gramps was right, that everyone is out, that there are more of us than the land can bear.

  The democratic leaders are standing on the church steps and one of them is shouting something in a megaphone. I can’t make out his words, except when he yells, “Whoever doesn’t jump is Red!” Around us everyone begins to hop.

  “Are you red, kopche?” Gogo grunts. “Don’t be a Commie. Jump!”

  I, too, start hopping, mostly to warm up. And suddenly it strikes me that Gogo’s grunting, this hungry, foreign sound is just the way he laughs.

>   I’m faint with jumping hunger. We elbow our way to one side of the church and stand by a window. The windows are on our level, which is good, but they’re fenced off with black gratings. I hold my face against the bars and try to peek inside. The glass is smoked and I see nothing except my own faint reflection.

  We pull on the metal grating, there for decoration only, and it comes undone. Then Gogo retreats his fist into his sleeve and breaks the glass. Around us people watch, but no one cares enough to stop us. And soon the megaphone entices them to keep on jumping and jump they do.

  “All right, kopche,” Gogo says. He crosses himself like someone who’s never really done it, from left to right. He sinks into the church and I follow.

  It’s dark and cold and somehow very still inside. It’s like all voices from the square are only wind in a well. There is the howl of words, but not their gist. Words lose their meaning inside this church, and for a moment Gogo and I stand in the middle, stunned. The air is thick with the smell of candles, but there are none in the candelabra, none in the sand trays for the deceased; there is just wax, frozen down the brass holders, just frozen sand.

  “It’s so quiet,” I say, and watch my breath float away in the gloom.

  “Listen,” Gogo says. “Shhhhh, kopche, listen!” and then he belches out a ravenous burp.

  “You slob,” I laugh.

  Martyrs and virgins, cherubs and doves, watch us with pious boredom. To the side I see the archbishop’s throne—its intricate wood carvings, the four beasts of the revelation, the calf, the lion, the whole shebang—and above that throne, high up, expensive in the dark, two elbows long, the golden cross.

  “HiBlack Trinitron, here I come,” Gogo says, and hops upon the armrests. He grabs the cross by the arms. He pulls and pushes. The cross gives out a tortured creak as Gogo lets his whole weight snap its base. It’s like when in school we got new hoops and didn’t rest until we snapped them all clean off the boards—for no good reason, really, just because we could, just out of spite.