They fall together to the ground. Gogo stands up, turns his head from side to side and cracks his neck. He blows the dust from the cross and the dust hangs around him momentarily in a halo, which the air draft scatters away. Holding the cross, Gogo is like a midwife who knows exactly how much the newborn weighs. “Well, I’ll be fucked,” he says. “This shit is made of wood.”
We examine the cross in the light of a window: the yellow paint, not even gold leaf, is flaking off and the wood underneath is black and porous like a femur sick with osteoporosis. There are woodworms here and there in the little pores, curled up to pass the winter cold.
“Now what?” I start to say, but Gogo has already flung the cross aside and is working to prop the box with donations open. But the box is empty. Even the petty change along some of the icons has been wiped clean.
“Fuck, kopche, this is the wrong church to rob,” Gogo says. He tries to wrap his arms around an icon of Bogoroditsa and her infant son. “You think we can carry this out?”
No, the icon is too big. We need something expensive, yet small enough to hide in our coats and carry through the crowd unnoticed. I say, “Right there, behind that wooden wall,” and lead him to the iconostasis. I run my hand along the painted faces, along the wooden gates. There is a padlock on the gates but, like the cross, this wood too is brittle. One kick is all it needs.
The sanctuary is darker, colder still. I recognize an altar covered in a thick, red cloth, and on it a golden candelabra, a golden cup, a golden tray. They weigh just right.
“Bog si, kopche,” Gogo says, and kisses me on the head. “You’re a god!”
“Keep off, you fag,” I say. I’m starting to feel really good. My blood gets going. I tuck my shirt in, tighten my belt and stuff the cavity with the loot. The gold is so nicely cold against my skin, then warm.
“Look here,” Gogo says, and picks up a real golden cross. He kisses it. He rubs it in his sleeve and stows it in his jacket.
My eyes adjusted to the dark, I recognize a table in the corner, and on the table something long and bulky, wrapped in the same altar cloth.
I know immediately what this is. I call for Gogo and we stand by the bundled corpse, the mummy of a saint, a holy relic. Its face seems almost alive, unnaturally well preserved. “It’s considered a blessing to kiss the relic,” I say. “Come on, kopche. Give it some tongue.”
“You’re sick, you know that?” Gogo says. He looks disgustedly at the corpse, and then peers around. He finds two large nylon bags at the bottom of the table and rummages through what’s inside.
I wonder what this old man did to deserve such high esteem: sainthood and a cloak upon a table in a church. I lean forward and sniff his cheeks. A saint should smell like frankincense and myrrh. This saint smells nothing like that. But what the hell? We sure could use some luck.
“Wait, kopche, this isn’t right,” Gogo says, still going through the bags.
I kiss the wrinkled cheek, dry, very cold.
And then a sigh escapes the saint, a low, long moan, and with his opened mouth the stench of rotten meat.
We stumble back. The things we’ve stolen rattle in our coats. “My fucking heart will stop,” I say. I try to shake this off; a horde of woodworms, wet and wriggly, roll down my back. I wipe my lips on my sleeve and keep on wiping.
“This is no saint, you all-knowing shit,” Gogo says, and takes some clothes out of one bag: a T-shirt, long white underpants, a wool sweater. “Look at this,” he says, and goes through the other. A round loaf of bread, a demijohn of wine, a jar of boiled wheat. “This is just like the stuff my mom brought the priest to bless for Brother.”
We sneak up closer to the groaning saint. His mouth closes and opens, his eyes turn to us. Tarry, bulging eyes. That’s all he is, this old cocoon, a pair of eyes that watch first Gogo, then me.
I say, “Old man …” but I don’t know what else to say.
“Hey, Grandpa,” Gogo calls and snaps his fingers. “Shhh, alo. Look at me. What’s your name? You been here long?”
The eyes blink, the mouth opens, closes, opens again. The stench is too much.
“How did you like your kiss?” Gogo says, and looks at me. “Lover boy,” he says.
I take the demijohn and gulp up a few strong gulps of wine. I rinse, wipe my lips, repeat.
I say, “They brought him here so the priest would bless him. So he would be cured. Then they ran away. Isn’t that right, Grandpa? They left you behind?”
Gogo takes the demijohn and drinks. We watch the cocooned man.
If that was me, I think, I’d lose my mind. Just lying like a grub in that cloak, and only my eyes moving, and my mouth. I wonder if this old man knows he was left behind to die? Does he begrudge those who left him? Does he remember anything at all? I hope, for his sake, he has no memory left—of who he is, of where he lies. I hope he is the opposite of me.
Gogo lights up and tells me to watch this shit. He holds the cigarette to the old man’s lips and lets him take a drag. Smoke gushes out of the old man’s nose, his eyes fill up, he coughs.
“You were a smoker, weren’t you, Grandpa?” Gogo says. “That’s what did you in.” He takes the round loaf from the towel and tries to break off a chunk against his knee. “Is this a loaf or a stone? Jesus Christ.” He bites off a morsel and spits it in his hand. He holds it to the old man’s lips and the old man sucks on it until the morsel turns to mash. Then the old man sucks on Gogo’s fingers. “This is so vile, kopche,” Gogo says, and wipes his fingers in his coat.
“That’s enough,” I say. “You hear me, Gogo. Enough of that.”
But Gogo breaks off another piece. “Who is my hungry saint?” he says. “Are you my hungry little saint?” Then he brings the demijohn to the old man’s lips but doesn’t touch them. He pours wine from a distance. The old man drinks; the wine runs red down the creases of his wrinkled neck.
“Look at yourself, Grandpa,” Gogo says at last, happy with himself. “Some saint you are,” and starts with his grunting laugh.
I don’t know what to make of this.
I touch the cloak. “God damn it, kopche, he’s soaking wet.”
“He’ll be all right.”
“The hell he will.”
“Well, change him up, then, wunderkind.”
And then it strikes me: this is exactly what I need to do. I peel back the edge of the cloak to unwrap the man. “Oh, Christ.”
“Sweet Jesus, cover him up. That is some pungent shit.”
I take a few more gulps and I can feel the contours of my esophagus and stomach, scorched, as the wine flows through. I lay the clothes from the bag out on the table—the underpants, trousers, socks, the knitted sweater.
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 str
inging 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.
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