It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  No doubt he has important deals to make at his office.

  What Eva tells me later is that Biliana reports on the democratically wrecked Dimitrovgrad economy for a newspaper in Sofia. From Niko she has “learned” that America, which is “owned by the Jewishes,” is responsible for the destruction of Bulgaria and that “the Jewishes are trying to establish world domination.” While Kroum and Niko and I were loading up the car, Biliana was asking Eva if she had ever read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, showed her a copy of the book in Bulgarian, and recommended it highly. At that point, Eva told me, she lost it, and said “Surely you don’t believe that absolute shit!” whereupon Biliana burst into tears and started apologizing and made her try on the peasant dress.

  The really odd thing is that Eva had told me over the phone a year or so after she started coming here how Bulgaria saved its Jews—well, most of them—in World War II, and that Kroum had told her there’s no anti-Semitism here. Now I thought of that old saying “An anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than necessary.” Niko, then, but maybe not hapless Biliana?

  The hot, heavy meal, late in the hot afternoon, is like a drug. I’m almost stuporous and feel like passing out right at the table. Then comes baklava oozing with honey, and lokum (Turkish delight), very sweet, with powdered sugar, reminding me maybe even more than the visit to Shipka Pass that Bulgaria was under the Ottomans for five hundred years.

  Though the drive back to Sofia is going to take at least four or five hours, we just can’t up and leave. Finally, to appease the gods of hospitality, Kroum takes a shot of rakia, to the great joy of the uncles. As we’re downing multiple tiny cups of sweet Turkish coffee—I swear to God I don’t know what came over her—perhaps it’s because she’s by nature a peacemaker—Eva, who has been to these kinds of feasts here before, says to Kroum, “Why don’t we have some singing!” Kroum relays her request in Bulgarian to everyone at the table, but Niko’s old mother, who had been nearly invisible cooking all day, and had said nothing during the meal except to encourage everyone to eat more, throws Eva a stern look and says (I learned later), loud and clear, “We do not sing when they are bombing our Slavic brothers.” (“Which,” Kroum also tells me later, “made me want to laugh because between the Serbs and the Bulgarians there is a lot of bad blood.”)

  Eva’s Bulgarian is good enough by now to understand immediately what the old lady has just said, and again she turns as red as one of those hot little Bulgarian chili peppers. She puts her hand to her heart and says, in English, as Kroum translates, “Forgive me. I meant no disrespect. You are of course right. There should be no singing. Both my cousin and I feel nothing but shame at what our country is doing to Serbia. We are completely against this criminal NATO war.”

  Everyone has gone silent. Biliana, who, having made an ass of herself, now understands that Eva has just done so too, shakes her head from side to side and smiles. Then the old mother shakes her head, Kroum shakes his head and I shake my head and the old uncles and their wives shake their heads in a general Bulgarian yes-fest and so Eva redeems herself as an American and even possibly as a “Jewish.” As for me, I just help myself to another couple of pieces of lokum. Eva catches my eye and makes a gesture that, I realize, means that I should wipe the powdered sugar off my face.

  It took us about four hours to reach Sofia.

  In the late-spring twilight here you don’t see how bad the roads are, how treacherous the potholes, how forlorn the villages with their left-behind old people, empty storks’ nests and ravenous, diseased, homeless dogs.

  “Look,” says Eva, “how the shadows overtake the fields and mountains and turn everything into a deepening violet blue.” I think of Harry and how much he liked to listen to her talk about color and light. Remember how, at Dad’s place in Springs, when he was about fifteen, sixteen, before the sickness hit, he and Eva liked to do pastels together late afternoons at the beach? I think Nora still has those drawings. So I’ll never see them again, I guess.

  Just as we reach Sofia, huge clouds gather and by the time we get to Boyana a violent thunderstorm unleashes a savage downpour, with lightning and hail. This creates a serious dilemma for Kroum: with so much thievery here, to leave the computers in the car is a big risk, but taking them out and up to safety in the house, which involves climbing a steep incline and a flight of muddy and thus slippery concrete steps, in heavy rain, is perilous. He decides to leave the computers in the car, for now, but says he won’t sleep well because he’ll be worrying all night that they’ll be stolen by Gypsies.

  Christ, in one day, a full-blown shot of anti-Semitism, with an anti-Roma chaser.

  Time to turn in. Tomorrow we will network the computers and open the club. This is what I need. Something to wake up for.

  I can hear the rain clattering on the tin roof of the “Old Little House,” the cottage they’ve given me for as long as I’m here. I asked Kroum if Romy could spend the night in my room and here she is, curled up on the end of my bed.

  Later Tues., May 25, 1999. Postscript.

  This morning (dry, sunny), after K. and I set up the computers in the space he’s rented for his club, guess what we found: porn sites, dozens of them, on each desktop, not to mention missing and corrupted files galore on the operating systems. Niko hadn’t said one word about any of this. The great “businessman” must have been inviting “klienti” to his office and charging them to look at the porn. Sure beats the life insurance game.

  Kroum is beyond furious. “That fucking moshenik! He was my friend! Oh, this rotten democracy! It has brought us nothing but betrayal and degradation!”

  So we have our work cut out for us. Some neighborhood boys—very polite—came around this afternoon on their bikes to ask when the club will open. Kroum gave them candy bars and Cokes and orange Fanta from the fridge he’s installed near the front desk and promised them that the computers will be loaded with games and ready for play the day after tomorrow. He told them to bring their friends, their relatives, everyone they know.

  Meanwhile, the three of us will be up all night working. I’m about to get Eva, who’s making sandwiches, and drive the Lada over to the club. Kroum is already there.

  He’s tried capitalism before. After the Changes he had a shop in Sofia where he sold detergents and “household chemicals,” but there was so much competition from other shops selling exactly the same thing that it failed. He then went into the export electronics business with a couple of friends but one turned out to be thoroughly corrupt and the partnership collapsed. Worst of all, what hard currency he had he lost when the bank he’d put it in supposedly went bust, though what really happened was a scam in which the owners put all the money in untouchable offshore accounts. Nobody was prosecuted, there was no deposit insurance, so Kroum and thousands like him couldn’t get any of it back. When he and Eva reconnected on the alumni Listserv for the Swiss school where they’d met a thousand years ago, he and a pal had a business making car alarms. That too brought in hardly anything. Now he’s about to open the first and, we all hope, the only computer club in Boyana. There’s buzz in the neighborhood, and so he’s almost hopeful.

  As for me, well, it’s good for me to have some kind of purpose. Something to wake up for. But the three months till my visa expires is a long time to hang out with a pair of lovey-doveys and their occasional fights. And if I do manage to see the past here, see how it worked? Then what? It’s not coming back, for now—and now may last another couple hundred years. There’s always Vietnam, I suppose, if I decide to just slip away in the night, pilgrim that I am, and poor wayfaring commie stranger.

  ELIZABETH FRANK was born in Los Angeles. Her father, the producer-writer-director Melvin Frank, moved the family to London in 1960. Upon graduation from the International School of Geneva, she went to Bennington College, transferring two years later to the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her BA, MA, and PhD in English. Since 1982 she has been a member of the literature faculty at Bard
College. In 1986 she won the Pulitzer Prize in biography for Louise Bogan: A Portrait. She writes frequently about art, and is the author of Jackson Pollock, Esteban Vicente, and Karen Gunderson: The Dark World of Light as well as the novel Cheat and Charmer, about Hollywood during the McCarthy period. The Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Bard College, she lives in New York, has an adult daughter, and in 1999 began spending every summer in Sofia, Bulgaria. She cotranslated two novels by Bulgarian screenwriter and novelist Angel Wagenstein, both published in the United States by Other Press, and is currently working on a novel about Bulgaria since the “Democratic Changes” of 1989.

  NEIL GAIMAN

  * * *

  Hate for Sale

  Hate for sale. All the very best

  Hate for sale. Vintage stuff.

  Do my cries excite your interest?

  Lovely hate. Your life is rough.

  Buy my hate. You’ll come right back for more.

  Hate for sale. Enough to start a war.

  Hate the rich, the brown, the black, the poor.

  Hate is clean. And hate will make you sure.

  Hate for sale. You’ll feel superior.

  Hate for sale. You’ll make the news.

  Hate the families who come here fleeing war.

  Hate the gay, the trans, the new, the Jews.

  Don’t need to care who you detest,

  hate makes you feel a whit less scared,

  to know your people are the best

  and burn to ashes all the rest

  who will not face the real test

  but showed up naked, unprepared

  to be sent back, or drowned, or hurled

  back into the abyss. Your world

  will be so safe, so clean, so great.

  And all you needed was some hate.

  Hate for sale. All the very best

  Hate for sale. Vintage stuff.

  Do my cries excite your interest?

  Hate for sale. Never enough.

  NEIL GAIMAN is an award-winning author of books, graphic novels, short stories, and films for all ages. His titles include Norse Mythology, The Graveyard Book, Coraline, The View from the Cheap Seats, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, and the Sandman series of graphic novels, among other works. His fiction has received Newbery, Carnegie, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Eisner awards. The film adaptation of his short story “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” and the second season of the critically acclaimed, Emmy-nominated television adaptation of his novel American Gods will be released in 2018. Born in the UK, he now lives in the United States and is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees.

  PHILIP GOUREVITCH

  * * *

  Unaccountable

  This was on the outskirts of the capital, where Boulevard de la Révolution used to run through the shantytowns to the old aerodrome. In those days, three or four révolutions ago, we still had a base out by the north runway—we, the Americans: a half dozen hangars full of men and matériel, deployed to remind the Big Man, in his palace across the lagoon, that he was beholden to our interests. One of the Marine guards at the embassy had told me they had a pool table there, and a strategic supply of bourbon, and that if I wanted to partake, I could join him any Saturday. So that’s where I was bound, behind the wheel of the absurd car I’d bought off my predecessor, a canary-yellow Buick Skylark that some long-ago diplomat had shipped in new in 1975, on the taxpayers’ dime, and had been passed down through the years, through the embassy ranks, as it depreciated from showboat to relic to little more, by the time it became mine, than a gag. Saturday was market day, and the streams of pedestrians spilling along the road’s shoulders in the shantytowns were particularly dense that afternoon. It was rainy season, the light mercurial and shuddering under greasy-gray clouds. And just as the skies opened, a black Mercedes appeared in my rearview mirror. A black Mercedes meant power; it was the car of rank among the Big Man’s cronies, the car of those in a position to command the big bribes for the big favors—the car that signified that the person it carried was one of those whom everyone else in the country called “an unaccountable.” This one, in my rearview, wasn’t slowing down as it closed in on me. The headlights flashed. The horn sounded. It wanted me out of the way, and I wanted the same. The rain was crashing down too fast for my old Buick’s wipers. Everything was a blur. Then something hit my car with a juddering thump and crack, and a hideous grating sound came from below. I’d killed a man—I felt sure of it at once—a bicyclist who I swear wasn’t there the split second before. His bike had flipped under my car, and he’d flipped over it, and as I stopped the car, right there in the road, a boy tapped my window and pressed his face as close to mine as the glass would allow, pointing to where the body lay, then running his finger over his throat, and popping his eyebrows in alarm as he mouthed the word: “Vas-y! Vas-y . . .” Go! Go . . .

  That’s what everyone always said there: if you hit someone, don’t stop—the people will mob you, and hold court on the spot, rob you or stomp you or both, and you’ll be lucky to live to tell of it. My predecessor, when he sold me the Skylark, when he handed me the keys, said, “Just hope you don’t kill anyone.” I told him I didn’t plan on it. He said, “You should—it happens all the time here, and you’ll have a lot better chance if you’ve got a plan.” He told me that he’d heard that sometimes, when a poor child died, the family would wait by the roadside to throw the body in front of a foreigner’s car and cry bloody murder until the whole neighborhood mobbed in for the shakedown. I thought that sounded far-fetched. “Very,” he said. “I see no reason to believe it, except that one ignores such legends at one’s peril.”

  None of this made any sense to me now. How could I go? Where could I go? You couldn’t exactly disappear in that Buick. The rain was already spent, little more than a drizzle, and I could see that a great crowd had gathered around me, albeit at a wary distance, so that my car seemed to stand in a sort of clearing, and I had the sense that everyone was waiting to see what I would do to see what they would do. Probably I didn’t think anything quite so clear as that, but that was the feeling, as I put the car in park and, leaving it idling, opened my door and stood in the road.

  As soon as I appeared, a man peeled away from the crowd and strolled slowly toward me, holding his empty hands out in a consoling gesture, saying, “Don’t worry about it, it’s over, he’s finished, be calm, it was an accident, an accident.” He came at me, repeating himself, and sidled past, and was gone. Then there was another man, coming at the same angle. This man was brandishing a big stick, and muttering angrily, and as he came a woman’s voice rose in fury behind me. I had forgotten about the black Mercedes, but of course it had to stop when I did, and out of it now erupted a magnificent woman in a flaming flower-print dress, with her head wrapped in a blazing orange turban. She flew at the man with the stick, this great grand fireball of a woman, crying out in a voice as loud as her outfit and even more adamant: “Stop! Don’t you touch him. It was an accident! You animal. Look—this is a man. He didn’t run. He got out. He has courage. He did right.”

  I didn’t feel courageous or right, or like I had anything to do with this woman’s spectacular passion, but the stick man shrank away, and she—suddenly calm, almost in a stage whisper, as if we knew each other well and were in this together—told me: “Go on, now, get out of here. I’ll sort this out, like it never happened.”

  What did that mean? I started to protest: “It did happen. There’s a body. That can’t be denied.” But she had turned away from me, and was moving into the crowd, dispersing it as she went.

  • • •

  Was that the moment I fell in love with her? I had no idea who she was. I didn’t know her name. I wasn’t even sure if she was real, or some apparition born of my state of shock. In my memory, she had no accent, which seemed as impossible as everything else about her. But when she spoke to me in that soothing conspiratorial voice, I had felt from her, all at o
nce, a powerful warmth and a powerful corruption, and when she showed me her back and stepped away, I felt my heart lurch after her.

  I must have done as she told me. I don’t remember driving back to my house, but there I was—and I did not go out again for days. I didn’t report the accident. I called the embassy without mentioning it, saying only that I had fever, and that was no lie. I slept an awful lot of the time, and spent my waking hours in a fugue state, with my collision replaying itself, as if on an unceasing loop tape in my mind. Or, I should really say my collisions—plural: the first with the bicyclist, and the second with that woman.

  Both seemed to me at once unreal and inevitable. Perhaps a week passed in this limbo. My phone kept ringing—the same unknown number. When I finally answered it, I knew her voice at once. She told me her name was Fatima. She said she’d been thinking of me, and I felt that lurch again in my chest. I didn’t need to ask how she, a woman with such a black Mercedes and such an air of command, had found me, a guy with such a Buick. I said I’d been thinking of her, too. I said, “I mean, where did you come from?” “Right here,” she said, but she’d gone to college in Wisconsin, which at least explained her accent.

  I had been half expecting in the days since our encounter to be summoned by the police for an inquiry; and I asked Fatima now if it didn’t seem wrong to her that a man had died, and that there were no consequences.

  “I told you that I’d fix it,” she said. “You know that’s how it is here—you’re an American, I’m not a nobody, either.”

  “Unaccountables,” I said.

  “Please,” she said sharply. “Should I have left you to the mob there? Or had you arrested? Would that make anything better?” She waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, she said: “I want to see you. I don’t want to talk about this. It’s pointless. Okay? Can I come over?”