It was now, as the boy wept, as I watched my mother watch him guardedly, as we all withdrew into our privacies so as to allow the boy his own, that I felt an odd aligning of things, that weird pressure as they found their place and as I found my place among them, my mother and the boy, the hot compartment, my memories of Mitko that came back so fiercely I was wrung by them, by the thought of our last meeting that had left me even after all these months bereft. I pulled my notebook from my bag, wanting to catch this before it faded, scribbling not sentences but impressions, a certain arrangement of things, even as I heard the boy, who had found his voice again, begin his recriminations. He was holding his arm where she had grabbed him, pressing it bent against his chest. Schupi mi rukata, he said, you broke my arm, it hurts, you didn’t have to pull so hard, but the woman was unmoved, used to his dramatics, I supposed. You should do what I tell you, she said. It’s not your train, he responded, less pained now than sullen, you didn’t build it, you didn’t buy it, using logic like a rampart he could retreat behind, you can’t tell me what to do, but none of this merited any reply. There’s nothing for me to do, he went on, trying another tack, I don’t have anything to play with, I don’t have any toys, you won’t let me climb, I’m bored, he said, skuka mi e. He was on better ground here, I thought, there was some justice in his complaint, though the woman still sat silent. My arm, he said a moment later, as if remembering, it really hurts, and he held it out to her as she took it again in her hand, gently this time, looking concerned, saying Let me see, and then yes, it’s very bad, I’m afraid we’ll have to cut it off, so that suddenly he was giggling, twisting away as she leaned in, still holding his arm, and began to tickle him. He was all joy now, the tears barely dry on his face, and after a moment at this game he ended draped across her lap, his arms cast about her, a posture so sweet it was almost painful to see, as it was painful to see my mother, who watched them with such longing I had to look away. I could remember a time when we had touched like that, my mother and I, when I sought out her presence and her touch, too, and I wondered where that ease and openness had gone, and why they had been replaced with such stiff discomfort, a sense almost of taboo that kept me from making any answer to her expressions of love. I felt for the first time how cruel I had been, when I had stopped answering her calls and e-mails, which grew increasingly frantic until they fell away. For a time I had been lost to her, and she couldn’t have known I would return. They stayed like this for some time, the woman and the boy, with his arms around her and her hands resting on his back.
I lost myself then, writing my notes, so that it was a few moments before I became aware that the boy was watching me; he had pushed himself from his grandmother’s lap and was sitting upright, and there was an intensity to his looking, a gravity of desire. I want to write too, he told his grandmother, and while she looked in her bag for a pen, he leaned forward and shyly, as if she might object, drew from the metal bin one of the cards my mother had discarded from her magazines, and then, when she nodded at him and smiled, a second and a third. He settled back, and holding the cards on his lap he began to write, in large block capitals copying out the three words, BUSINESS REPLY MAIL, again and again, practicing the alphabet, I realized, the letters uncertain in his childish hand, a Cyrillic Б replacing the Latin as often as not. I can’t say why it affected me as it did, his studiousness, the quiet earnestness with which he worked, but it was heartbreaking, the more so when he turned to the woman and said When I’m finished, he will read it, inclining his head toward me. Maybe now that I saw Mitko in the boy, any future I could imagine for him gave me something to grieve. Should he fail in his studies, or should he find after them there were no jobs to be had, should he turn, like Mitko, to drink or to drugs, thwarting his grandmother’s hopes, there was the lost promise of the bright boy before me. But if the boy made the most of that promise, if he left Bulgaria (where there is no future, my students tell me again and again, where there is only the narrowing horizon of diminished expectations), if he thrived beyond anything his grandmother hoped, then there was the thought, unbearable to me, of what Mitko might have been. By the third paper card the boy’s writing had lost its shape altogether, softening and flattening out until it was just a wavy line across the page. As the train slowed in its approach to Plovdiv, where my mother and I would spend the night—I wanted her to see the beautiful old city, the ornate wooden houses climbing the hills—he held up this last card with its scribbles for me to read. That must be a language I don’t know, I said, smiling, I can’t read it, and he seemed satisfied, he grunted and said Tova e ispanski, that’s Spanish, making me laugh again. You’re very smart, I said, as his grandmother shook her head, it’s good to know so many languages. My mother and I were standing now, gathering our things, lifting our large bags from the rack, and I found I didn’t know how to say goodbye to the boy. I wanted to tell him to study, to work hard, above all to study his English, which he would be helpless without; it was his best chance, I wanted to say, but that’s the kind of thing one can never say, there’s no way to say it, or no way for it to be heard. And so instead I opened a small pocket of my bag, telling him I wanted to give him something, something you couldn’t find in Bulgaria, I said, and I handed him a drugstore peppermint from a packet my mother had brought over for me. It was my favorite candy when I was a child, and I was glad beyond words at the pleasure it gave him when he twisted off the plastic wrapper and popped it in his mouth. Then the train stopped, and my mother and I moved into the corridor, clumsy with our bags and with the prospect of being alone together. As we joined the line of people getting off at the last stop before Sofia, I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn’t exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it. The doors opened, the line began to move, and I saw that the boy was already clambering into the seats we had left, claiming a new space as his own. And then my mother and I stepped off the train into the evening air, nearly gasping in relief at its freshness.
I must have been sleeping deeply, one night that spring, I must have been in a state beneath dreams or any kind of thought, when suddenly I bolted awake. Just for an instant, I felt what I had felt a few weeks before, when in the dead of night there was a violent jolt and shuddering, a movement that violated not just my sense of physical law but some deeper certainty I had taken for granted. I was pinned to my bed by an animal fear as the world shifted with a sound I had never heard before, a deep grinding thunder and the sound of alarms, all the cars of my neighborhood shrieking their warnings, a bewildering cacophony of patterns and tones. It was the strongest earthquake to strike Bulgaria in a century, the papers would say the next morning, though really it had only been of a middling strength. In Sofia the blokove had swayed but none had fallen, and there wasn’t much damage beyond broken windows and cracked facades; even in the villages only the oldest structures collapsed. There was one death, the articles said, an old woman whose heart stopped at the shock of it. It was the first earthquake I had ever experienced, and the first time I had known that absolute disorientation and helplessness, the first time I had felt in that incontrovertible way the minuteness of my will, so that underlying my fear, or coming just an instant after it, was total abandon, a feeling that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, a kind of weightlessness. It was the noise that
made me feel that fear again, just for a moment, and then I was on my feet as I realized the sound that had woken me wasn’t a calamity, but someone pressing again and again the whirring chime of my door, while at the same time striking the door itself, not knocking but pounding, quickly and heavily. I knew who it was, of course, though he had stayed away for many weeks. I had promised R. I wouldn’t let him in again if he returned, You can’t speak to him, he had said, if you speak to him, if you give any sign to him at all, he will come back; he has to stop existing for you, he said, using almost those words. But what could I do, I thought as I moved to the door, calling out to stop the noise, which must already have woken the neighbors and which soon would draw them out, in curiosity or anger; what could I do when he was constrained by so little, the man on the other side of the door, who kept up his noise despite my calling to him from the hall, or perhaps he hadn’t heard me over that noise, since at the first motion of my hand on the key it stopped all at once, as if now he were ready to be patient. When I turned the heavy tumblers in their grooves and then the handle, intending to open the door just slightly, a weight was applied from the other side, and as I stepped back quickly, almost falling, I thought maybe he wasn’t alone, that he had come finally to see through the threats he had made in Varna.
But it wasn’t that at all, I saw when Mitko came in, not stepping but stumbling, moving past me in a strange sidelong way, as if his body were oddly weighted and pulling him to one side; he wasn’t a threat to anyone, a wind could blow him over. He didn’t stop to shake my hand or remove his shoes or say anything at all, but with his sidelong lurching movement went into the main room and fell onto the couch. I stood with the door open for a moment, reluctant to close it, as if there were still a chance for what had blown in to blow out, as though he might change his mind and leave before a new revelation emerged, some new drama. I was listening for my neighbors, too, for any opening doors; I would apologize for the noise, in English or Bulgarian, depending on which doors opened. I would say that my friend was drunk, which was true; when he moved past me I had been struck by a strong smell of beer, the kind that comes in two-liter bottles, the cheapest kind. But there was no sign of anyone, the hallway was quiet, and so I did close my door, having no other choice, unless it were to close it behind rather than in front of me, to step out into the hallway and away, which of course was no choice at all.
Mitko was sitting at the end of the couch, though perhaps sitting isn’t the word for his slumped-over posture, his body tilted to one side like a listing boat. He had shrugged off his jacket and left it lying crumpled behind him, an uncharacteristic gesture, given the care with which he usually treated his things. He pulled one knee half onto the seat and turned, a welcoming posture, I thought, an invitation for me to sit beside him. His shoulders and back were bowed forward and his head was tilted up at a strange angle, as if he were studying something at a middle height, the cupboards above the sink, perhaps, though as I approached and then sat at the other end of the couch, keeping as much distance between us as I could, I saw he wasn’t studying anything. His eyes were moving eerily, rolling uselessly in his head, as if disjointed from his will, and his neck was not merely tilted up but straining. It was a posture of agony, I thought, and though clearly he was drunk, drunker than I had ever seen him, drunker than I had ever seen anyone, I thought surely he must have taken something too, some substance the effects of which were beyond my acquaintance with such things. He looked terrible, even thinner than before, so that the clothes he had always worn tight hung loose against his frame; and there was something else as well, less easy to pinpoint but just as alarming, some subtly wrong color to his skin that made it difficult not to pull away from him.
I didn’t recoil, but it was as though he had seen the impulse as he reached over and took one of my hands in his. I had noticed his hands moving oddly, the fingers rubbing against one another in a strange way, as though surprised to find such close neighbors, and now he clasped my hand tightly, taking it in both of his, and kneaded it, squeezing so hard the knuckles popped. Dobre li si, I said to him, are you all right; clearly he wasn’t but I had to say something. He shook his head quickly, not in answer but as if to shake off my voice, and I thought he made an effort to look at me; his eyes stopped their rolling for a moment, they seemed to seek me out, but then began their motion again. He held my hand quietly for a while, still kneading it in his strange way, grinding the joints of my fingers against one another, so that I had to squeeze back to avoid pain. And then he started speaking, though not to me, exactly, or to anyone; he began to repeat a single phrase, which even though it was short I didn’t catch at first, both because his speech was slurred and because it was so odd, a statement of counterfact, Men me nyama, he said, the three words again and again, men me nyama, men me nyama, I’m gone, it means, or I’m not here, literally there’s no me, an odd construction I can’t quite make work in English. For a moment I thought he was singing a pop song from the previous summer, “Dim da me nyama,” which is impossible to translate but the idea is of disappearing in smoke, like a car spinning its tires before shooting off, maybe, or like the running bird in the cartoon. It was a rap song, and the chorus repeated the title again and again, rhythmically, almost like a chant, which was why I thought Mitko was singing it for a moment, his own words matched it so closely, men me nyama, men me nyama. I almost smiled at his drunkenness before I realized that he wasn’t singing at all, and that his eyes, which hadn’t stopped their weird motions, had welled with tears. What is it, I said then, what does that mean, I don’t understand, and at this Mitko stopped his chant, snapped it off as if he were biting it with his teeth, and almost angrily he said Nishto ne razbirash, you don’t understand anything. Okay, I said soothingly, I don’t understand, tell me, but even before I could soothe him his anger, if it was anger, had melted away, had become a more agitated pressing of my hands. Dnes sum tuk, he said, a utre men me nyama, today I’m here, tomorrow I’m gone, and then he took up his weird chant again. It was a charm against something, I thought, though maybe that was giving it too much meaning, maybe it was less than a charm, like a stone one turns in one’s hand, not for any purpose but for the feel of it.
Then he stopped his chant and said my name, or not my name but that syllable he used to approximate it, since my name was unpronounceable in his language; he had tried to say it at first but each time stumbled over sounds he couldn’t make, the intricate shapes that made him shake his head in bemusement. I had felt this myself with R.; the English version of his name is common enough, but it sounded strange in Portuguese, and though I practiced pronouncing it endlessly and though I’m good at learning languages, each time I said his name R. would laugh, and so I stopped using it, I used other names instead, private names I had invented and so could never mispronounce. The syllable Mitko used was a private name too, it was his alone, and he said it now as if to bring me into focus, saying it a second time and a third, and then, Shte umra, he said, I’m going to die, they say I’m going to die, and at his own words the tears that had welled up spilled over, streaming down his cheeks. He let go of me to wipe them away, using the palms of both hands, and then he held his hands over his eyes, rocking his whole body back and forth now that his hands were still. Mitko, I said, reaching over to place my hand on his back, unsure what to do with it now that it was free, Mitko, what do you mean, who says this, and he answered, still rocking, Lekarite, the doctors, they say my kidneys and my liver don’t work, they say I will only live a year. Mitko, I said again, Mitko, and maybe the single syllable oh, I’m not sure what I intended it to mean. But how, I found myself saying, from what, thinking that it couldn’t be the syphilis, which should have taken years to do its work, even if he hadn’t taken the drugs I gave him money for, gave him money for twice over; but he shook his head at this sharply when I asked him, Ne, he said, ne, and then he said nothing else. I remembered the months he had spent in the hospital years before, something do with his liver, though he n
ever really spoke of it, avoiding it as he did so much of his past; hepatitis, I had thought, which I knew was rampant here and against which I had long been immunized. Or maybe it wasn’t that either, maybe it was just the endless alcohol he drank, though he was still so young, I don’t know. And then I remembered what he had said that night in the McDonald’s, just before the encounter I had thought of so often since, with longing and excitement and remorse so tightly bound there was no picking them apart, when he said that the drugs we were both to take were dangerous for him. Maybe he hadn’t been able to walk away from the illness unscathed, as I had; maybe that was what I meant by that syllable I repeated, oh, the unfairness of the luck I couldn’t regret, even as already it was opening up some great space between us, an even greater distance than had existed before. And so I said his name a third time, calling to him across that open space, though he didn’t respond, he just kept rocking back and forth, already unreachable.
I want to go, he said then, and heaved himself off the couch. He swayed for a moment and stumbled, catching himself by throwing out first one leg and then, as he began to fall forward, the other. Maybe he had stood up too quickly and was dizzy, in addition to being drunk and whatever else he was, and in this odd, almost falling way he moved from the main room to the hallway. I stood too, unsure whether I should stop him or be grateful the ordeal had been so brief. Now that I knew or thought I knew I would finally be rid of him I didn’t want him to go, and I was almost happy to see him turn away from the door, walking or stumbling instead down the hallway to my bedroom. I got up to follow, and watched as he collided with the bed and then fell down upon it, as if he were feeling his way in the dark and had been surprised by it. He lay for a moment and then pushed himself up, swaying before half falling again. He stayed then in a half-sitting, half-lying posture, his hands still working, I saw, gripping and releasing the light blanket I had been sleeping under. I stood at the doorway, watching, unsure whether I should go to him; the bed was a dangerous place, with its memories of what we had done there. But then as if his strength gave out Mitko let himself fall, drawing his legs onto the bed (he hadn’t removed his shoes, I saw them muddy the sheets), and then he pulled his knees to his chest and again began to weep, but quietly this time, the tears sprang and his face closed in on itself but his mouth opened and shut without making a sound. I did go to him then, I went to the bed and lay beside him and put my arm on his shoulder, not embracing him but offering him comfort, I hoped, a sign of my presence though I touched him nowhere else, and immediately he seized my arm with his and pulled it to his chest, which rose and fell as he gasped in his silent weeping. And he didn’t just pull me to him, he rolled back as well; I had kept a space between us but he pressed against me, the whole length of his back against my front. I tightened my arms around him, holding him as he wept, and he reached one of his legs through mine and pulled me tight, so that I felt his body all along my own, his body that had been, in however partial or compromised or intermittent my fashion, beloved to me. As I pressed my face to his neck and breathed him in, his scent sour with sweat and alcohol, it seemed impossible it could dissolve, simply dissolve, this form I had known so intimately with my hands and my mouth, it was unbearable that this body so dear to me should die. But though I held him more tightly the space that had opened up between us remained, and I knew I would stay on the other side of it, the side of health, I knew I wouldn’t stay with Mitko and face the death he faced; I know it’s everywhere, that it’s an illusion we ever look anywhere else, but as long as I could believe it I would pretend to look away. Love isn’t just a matter of looking at someone, I think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face, and sometimes I wonder whether there’s anyone I could stand with and watch what I wouldn’t watch with Mitko, whether with my mother, say, or with R.; it’s a terrible thing to doubt about oneself but I do doubt it.
What Belongs to You Page 13