It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  • • •

  Lunch about 2 in Nessebar, an ancient port town. Old churches, walls of brick and mortar mixed with shards of tile and colored glass. Too many tourists. Still, maybe Herodotus passed through? My aborted classics major keeps pointing an accusing finger at me (one of many).

  After lunch we stop to refuel at a super-modern Shell (!) station. A brief explosive fight between Kroum and Eva about his having to explain for the umpteenth time how he fills the car with both “benzene,” i.e., gasoline, and “gaz,” that is, vapor, and has a mechanism for switching between the two he wants her to know how to use. He snarls, she scolds, I tune out, stroke Romy between the ears, hating couples’ fights, wishing I’d just taken off for Cuba or Vietnam instead of coming here. When he returns from paying inside he’s holding an ice cream cone and feeds it to Eva bite by bite, kisses her.

  Sudden desolation. Scratch the dog between the ears. Tear up. No talent for love. No fun being a third wheel. Not sure how long I’ll stay here except that I’m OUT of the lousy USA. They don’t know and nobody else knows either but I’m gone. For good. Never going back.

  On the road again Romy and I fall asleep. Her head in my lap. When I wake up it’s almost five, inland, sea long gone. On both sides of the road acres and acres of sunflowers. They look at you as if they’re psychiatrists. Or FBI agents.

  A sudden catch in my throat, a dry tickle, and I’m just about to make a major public announcement that I’ve caught an airplane cold when Eva coughs and Kroum coughs and Romy coughs. Kroum pulls over. We get out of the car. Eva gives water to the dog. We had come to the Black Sea through the Balkans. Now we’re in the Thracian Plain far to the south, and both to our left, in the distance, and now, to our right, up in the Sredna Gora, or “Middle Mountains,” the sky overhead an evil gray-orange, the sun a sickly blur, and clusters of billowing flame.

  “Pozhari,” Kroum says.

  “Fires?” asks Eva.

  He shakes his head: a Bulgarian yes. (For no you jerk your head upward. Go figure it.)

  “And do you know what causes these fires?” Kroum shouts, startling both Eva and me, his face contorted with fury. “These are forest fires that someone deliberately makes to destroy the trees. This is how it works now in this ‘democracy’ that is so fuckin.”

  “So that’s why there are no storks this year,” Eva says. She coughs and turns to me. “Usually you see them all over Bulgaria this time of year. They build nests on village roofs. People say they bring good luck. But this spring I haven’t seen even one.”

  Inside the car Kroum starts the engine. “You see how it is? They burn the branches and the leaves, and the skin”—“Bark,” Eva interjects—“but not the trunks. These they cut down and sell.”

  “Wait,” I say. “So what’s the story?”

  “When any mutra—that’s a mafia guy, Ben, a criminal—who calls himself a ‘businessman’ can hire some starving Gypsy to set a forest on fire, that is the story. Some gangster wants a burned forest because it will be cheaper. Or someone wants to destroy the forests to get the land to build new houses with, what do you call it—‘washed’ money.”

  “Laundered,” Eva says.

  “This is the deliberate, planned destruction of the Bulgarian economy, done on orders to prove to the Western masters we will be reliable slaves if they let us join the EU. And all we have to do is commit economic suicide, and let Western Europe fuck us in the ass.”

  “Whose orders?” I ask.

  “You can very well guess yourself.”

  “The U.S., you mean?” His innuendos are exasperating.

  “Of course the U.S. The IMF and the World Bank also follow the orders of the U.S. ruling elite.”

  “The ‘ruling elite’ again!” Eva says. “You and your tired old commie-speak. Anyway, why would people here agree to their own economic suicide?”

  “Because, my naive American darling,” he answers, as his Lada Samara grinds its way through the smoky haze, “the shits in control here think only of themselves and their personal profits. They sell off the government enterprises for ridiculous amounts and the IMF looks the other way and meanwhile these mutri guys give the enterprises to their twenty-two-year-old whores who are listed as the CEOs of fake companies while the criminal oligarchs put not millions but billions in their pockets and the U.S. ambassador congratulates them and says, ‘Oh, very good, my dear neoliberal children, you are doing such a fine job privatizing everything!’ and, ‘Ooh, aah, how you are creating such a wonderful free-market economy! Now to prove yourself even more you must throw the people out of work and punish them for communism and teach them the magnificent ways of glorious capitalism!’ which as you very well know is nothing but economic rape and thievery.”

  “And how,” I say. Maybe this time he sees I mean it.

  Our lovely apolitical Eva looks out at the fields on both sides of the road, dabbing her eyes and nose with Kleenex. “Um, guys,” she says, “I read somewhere about a family that was incinerated in their car when they drove over a tiny cinder from a forest fire.”

  “That’s not going to happen, darling.” He reaches his hand over and squeezes the back of her neck.

  I can still see flames. She’s right to worry.

  “Poor storks,” she says. “Where do they go?”

  “They die,” Kroum says. “That’s all. They die.”

  Finally, maybe fifteen, twenty miles later, the air begins to clear. The light is fading. This is such an old, old country. Who knows, maybe it was along this road that Thracian tribes or Roman legions built campfires and rested for the night. Somehow a comforting thought. A country that has outlasted everything perhaps?

  I bought a tourist book on Bulgaria before I left L.A. and when I got to the part about Dimitrovgrad (named for my Reichstag-trial hero Georgi Dimitrov, yes!), it said that the city hasn’t changed since the communist time and is so dreary and depressing you should just skip it.

  Ah, my kind of town . . .

  We get there around nine. Kroum disappears into a café and a few minutes later comes out with this tall guy, Niko, who speaks no English. He gets into the car with us and in seconds we’re at one of these big concrete apartment “blocks” exactly like the ones Kroum showed me on the way from the Sofia airport to his house in the suburb of Boyana. Niko takes us up to a two-bedroom apartment he owns (?), and we dump our stuff. Then we all go back to the café where we’d picked him up and eat grilled sausages with lyutenitsa, a savory sauce made of red peppers and tomatoes.

  Too tired for more, conking out.

  Boyana. Tues., May 25, 1999—I think. Just past midnight. The “Old Little House.”

  Yesterday NATO bombed Serb power grids. Blackouts in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Nis. Millions without water or electricity. Kroum says don’t believe what they say about thousands of Albanians being expelled and disappearing. “It’s all lies and propaganda to justify the bombing.”

  To pick up where I left off: In Dimitrovgrad we join Niko’s entire clan (mother, sister, uncles, et al.) for breakfast at his apartment, in another high-rise block. Kroum takes me aside. “I am very sorry, Ben, but we are trapped. We will not be able to leave until very late today.” He looks so grim I nearly burst out laughing.

  “Rules of Bulgarian hospitality,” Eva whispers to me.

  But, for me, serendipity: Kroum wastes no time telling Niko (an old friend from university), who relays it to his uncles, that I’m “a real American communist.” They have never met an American before, much less an American communist. They shake their heads like crazy, all the while smiling. Ben Swift the white Bengal tiger.

  After breakfast, we drive with Niko to a hilly area within the city where the two uncles (on Niko’s dead father’s side) have gone ahead and are waiting for us. They are now in their late seventies or early eighties and “pensioneers,” Kroum says, but years ago they built their side-by-side houses with their own hands. Traditional Bulgarian design: red tile roofs, white walls, brown wood trim, the sec
ond floor jutting out over the first.

  Behind the houses, and parallel with them, twin gardens, where the uncles and their wives grow what must be every fruit and vegetable known to man. Beyond the gardens a sublime industrial vista like a Sheeler painting: cylinder after cylinder, miles of interconnected tubes and pipes. But only a few spout vapor and smoke.

  The brothers’ adult children and grandchildren live in cities (Sofia and one called Haskovo, I believe). As we talk the wives appear with orange juice, a bowl of sugar, and cookies. We all spoon the sugar into the OJ (my fillings ache!). Both women buxom, blocky, with muscular arms and strong wide backs like rafts you could float down the Mississippi on. The old guys are lean, tan, spry, wear immaculate jeans and running shoes. One is taller than the other; both still have a lot of hair, thick and white. The tall one chain-smokes.

  With Kroum interpreting I ask questions. “Under democracy, how are you doing?”

  “Not well. Bread keeps going up. Electricity too. We can’t afford medicines. We never go to doctors now.”

  It’s everything Kroum’s been saying.

  We sit on the back porch of the taller brother’s house. Eva sketches the two gardens.

  Under communism, they say in answer to more questions, they had good wages. Free education and medical care. The promise of a comfortable old age. No fear. Dignity and purpose: they were building socialism.

  They both retired in the late eighties, just before the Changes. Until then the shorter one had worked in a cement factory. The tall one and both wives had worked at a chemical fertilizer plant (a Dimitrovgrad specialty). Today both factories are closed.

  And what about now? The brothers both say the same thing: “We were lied to. Democracy has made our lives very uncertain. It is counterrevolution and a catastrophe.”

  As the two old guys take turns talking, unsmiling Niko says nothing, looks bored, glances at his watch.

  The shorter one asks Kroum to ask me, “So, how does a communist live in the United States?”

  My answer: “Now that the Cold War is over they think of you as a kind of harmless fossil. They used to think you were the devil out to destroy ‘the greatest country on earth.’ Now they say, like idiots, ‘We won! We won!’ ”

  With this the brothers burst out laughing and slap me on the back.

  The taller brother asks me about my family. I keep it short: I’m divorced, have a daughter in her late twenties, a dancer. “I had a son, but he died.” Sudden silence, solemn faces. I tell them how beautiful their gardens are, sip my sugared OJ.

  “Oh, Ben, you’re such a red romantic,” Eva says to me on the way back to the car. “These two guys walk right out of a Socialist Realism poster and you love them for it, don’t you?”

  “Why not? Communism worked for them.”

  “You really believe that?”

  I have the weird feeling that it’s someone else, a past me, who could get into a big argument with her, but all I do is nod: an American yes. I no longer have the energy for arguing. I’m still a communist (aren’t I?) but no longer feel married to communism. Or anything else for that matter, though these old guys would be great subjects for a documentary film. Will I ever make another? It seems like somebody else made my own (including the one about Harry).

  Huge lunch, back at Niko’s. An incredible spread, all of it whipped up by his mother after this morning’s huge breakfast. Of course when I refuse the rakia the old men look at me in disbelief. “Help me out here, Kroum,” I beg him, and though I can see that in front of these old guys he’s itching to tease me about not drinking, he tells them simply that we’re going to share the driving back to Sofia and so we both have to abstain. DUI laws here are very strict, apparently.

  Afterward, in the high dry heat, all I want to do is sleep, but Kroum, who seems, like Niko, anxious and impatient, says there’s work to be done. So after parking Eva and Romy with Niko’s sister, a woman in her early forties who can speak some English and whose very black hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail, Kroum, Niko and I drive a couple of streets away to a little almost bare white office Niko rents while he tries to make a go of it in the life insurance biz. According to Kroum he isn’t doing very well. Most people in this city are out of work. They can’t afford to live, much less die.

  A few minutes later the two nice old uncles show up and stand around kibitzing as we schlep three pairs of boxed PCs from the office to Kroum’s old Lada Samara. While he fits two pairs of computers in the trunk and one in the back seat, Kroum explains that he’d originally brought the computers to D. because he and Niko were going to be partners in a computer club right where Niko now has his office. After months of silence from him, Kroum learned that Niko had never gotten around to setting up the club. So we’ve come to retrieve the computers because Kroum is going to open his own computer club, and very soon, in a couple of days. Hearing this jolts me out of the muzziness of jet lag. What had I been thinking? That he and Eva had nothing better to do than drive me around the country and take me to the beach? This has been a business trip.

  Niko edgy, thin, round-shouldered, very short salt-and-pepper hair. Gives off a hyperactive desperation. Some kind of hustler? As we load the car he keeps going into his office to make phone calls to “klienti.” The big-shot “entrepreneur.”

  A little past five we’re done and Kroum is eager to hit the road, but, eyes glazing over, he tells me we’re expected to stay for an early supper—one last gargantuan feast. We go back to Niko’s place, which is on the ground floor of the high-rise block and has a nice porch with a grape trellis, and Kroum and I take brief sitting-up naps on the sofa. I wake up to what I now can identify as the characteristic smell of this country: roasting peppers, and it’s delicious.

  Just when Niko’s mother calls us to the table, who should appear from out of nowhere but Eva, all decked out in what she tells me is a traditional Bulgarian women’s outfit: white linen shirt with long embroidered sleeves, under a heavy wool dress with embroidery and trim in a lot of bright colors. Also a red-checked linen apron and a wide sash.

  Kroum stares at her with an expression I’d have to call astonished, admiring and amused; the outfit looks good on her but he so thoroughly sees her as American that he’s obviously never imagined her in a peasant getup like this. Niko’s sister stands beside Eva, with an odd fixed smile. “I give this national dress to my new friend Eva,” she says to me and Kroum, in English, “to remember us and our city Dimitrovgrad. This belong before to one good friend. She die few years ago—cancer from the fertilizers factory—and before she die she give me this dress, which belong to her mother in the near-to-here village of Rakovski.”

  “Thank you, Biliana, really, it’s a wonderful gift,” Eva says. It’s very hot and in the heavy wool dress she’s flushed and sweating.

  “And I am so sorry, Eva, if I offend you by what I say about the Jewishes. I do not know you is a Jewish,” she says, taking Eva’s hand, smile gone, eyes brimming.

  Whoa, what’s this?

  Eva looks at me as if to say, Uh-huh, you heard that right. Kroum, lighting one of his infernal cigarettes, looks up at the two women.

  “It’s okay, Biliana,” Eva says. I sense she’s being extremely careful. “A lot of people have this idea about us . . .” she begins. (Can’t help it but here’s a horrible pun: Jewishes my command. Ouch.)

  “Yes!” says the sister, eyes now bright and eager. “That the Jewishes are behind the financial manipulatsia of the world.”

  “Well, as I said to you, Biliana”—Eva puts her arm around the sister—“don’t believe everything you hear!” A forced smile and a kiss planted on Biliana’s cheek. Kroum has turned to stone.

  “Now, my brother Niko—” Biliana jerks her head toward her brother, who has just come in and has the pissed-off, running-on-empty look of someone who has failed to complete even one single economic transaction so far that day—“has many books against the Jewishes. He is—what you call it?—a real anti-Semite. Yes, Niko
?” I can clearly hear the word anti-seMEET. She says something to him in Bulgarian.

  “Da,” he says, curtly, it seems to me, and, unsmiling, says something else to his sister in Bulgarian.

  Niko’s mother again calls everyone to the table, where the uncles and their wives are already sitting.

  “You see,” the sister says, her weird smile now reckless, “he say he cannot stand the Jewishes.”

  “It’s JEWS,” Eva says. “Not Jewishes.”

  “Because he say they are swindlers—moshenitsi. But I tell him you is a Jewish and your cousin here is a Jewish—”

  “No,” Eva says. “My cousin is not a Jew. I am, he’s not.”

  The sister stares for a moment at me. She has no idea what to make of this.

  “—and that you is very nice. You see”—her eyes fill again—“he is not tolerant but I am tolerant. My brother act like a cretin,” which she pronounces in a sort of French way—cre-tanh. “When you say you is a Jewish and I say the Jewishes are the ones who do the financial manipulatsia, I see you face become sad, and I think you is going to make apology for the Jewishes, and so I see is not possible that you is one of the ones who do this manipulatsia.”

  “You think, Biliana, that I am going to apologize to you on behalf of the Jews?” Eva doesn’t sound angry. Just flabbergasted.

  My guess is that Kroum, seated beside me, is silently begging her not to lose her cool. She doesn’t. On the contrary, she looks as if she’s trying not to laugh.

  At this point the mother comes in and speaks sharply to Biliana. Eva disappears and comes back in a minute in her jeans and T-shirt, the national outfit put away in a plastic shopping bag. Kroum and I and she and Biliana join everyone at the table. Niko seems to have disappeared.