Albena Stambolova - Everything Happens as It Does

Poor man. She never meant to shock him. Or at least not as much. She didn’t want to think about him. What a strange thing, she was thinking. He was so funny and so kind, he deserved… Who knows really? Maria burst into laughter again and fell in the snow.

She remained lying in the soft thickness. She rolled over on her back and spread her arms. Down there the tree branches were black. Black on white. Or black under white. Or white over black.

And the snow was falling and falling. She imagined closing her eyes and white snowflakes covering her black scarf and her black hair and her black velvety boots.

She felt tempted like never before. The unspeakable tenderness of the snow. Black underneath the white. The world can be described. Maria knew this. Or rather, the world allows descriptions. And resists thought. Maria turned sideways onto her elbow and propped her head on her hand. As if she was on a bed. A bed as wide as a forest. The snow descended like a winding sheet. The world accepts you if you don’t try to think about it. Maria was not thinking about it, she was watching it. She was watching the world, and it was watching her. How marvelous. She never thought about other people, but now she suddenly remembered Boris. His word for this was “communication.”

She turned again and got up on all fours. She took a few steps like this and started laughing again. She felt the urge to get up and walk.

She raised her head a little like a turtle and saw the chapel in front of her. She was here, and it was there — waiting for her.

Here I come.

She started slowly, her scarf, held between her fingers, trailed behind her. For a moment she stood motionless in front of the chapel. Looking back down the forest, with its black strokes against the white, she considered the path she had walked. It was part of her now, filling her with that familiar onslaught of force.

She touched the door with the bare tips of her fingers, which protruded from the unfinished, black-knit gloves.

She only touched it.

The door recognized her and opened itself.

Then it closed behind her.

Christmas morning in the city. Valentin was watching from the window of his garret. The white roofs stretched under him like a rolling sea.

He had sneaked out of Fanny’s with excessive politeness, even though the party had been dying down anyway. His last memory of it was Margarita sitting at the piano and her music. It was real music, wholly separate from any possible imperfections of the performance.

That Margarita had gathered enough courage to play in front of an audience was a miracle. It had never happened before. She played at home, he knew she also played at their father’s place, but that was all. How many times they had begged her to play. Something had changed.

Valentin could not tell if it was good or bad that Margarita had played the piano. He wanted to believe it was good.

In the same train of thought he remembered Raya and realized that he had neither seen her, nor spoken to her for more than a week.

He grabbed his coat and rushed down the stairs. The telephone booths by the university looked deserted. For a fraction of a second he considered going back home, to Maria’s. Her white house, impossible to miss, was only a couple of stops by tram, on the corner of Stambolijski Boulevard and Samuil Street. No, he decided to go there later. Now he wanted to hear Raya’s voice.

The little Ralitsa, his five-year-old daughter, answered the phone. He told her he had presents for her and they agreed that he would come over to bring them.

Raya opened the door and Valentin could immediately see that she had been drinking.

Her eyes were shiny, her words tripped over one another. Like a spoiled child, she slurred her syllables and paused after banalities like “of course,” “whatever you say,” or “okay.”

Their daughter was running around the rooms, hugging the plush monsters he had brought her. He managed to understand that Raya was planning to spend New Year’s Eve with some girlfriends, and he left, feeling oppressed by the smell of unwashed clothes, the dirty dishes, and the reigning chaos. What a nightmare. What had happened to her house. How much he needed her house the way it was before, how much he needed it now when he no longer wanted anything from her. How much this house could help him, if only she could be happy again.

He left with a sense of hopelessness, thinking that in spite of all her qualities and her mild temper, Raya was never going to find a man for herself.

And that was all he wanted — to know that there was a man to take care of her and the child.

He asked himself why. Why this torment, this riddle. The solution seemed to be just around the corner, sitting like a sphinx, beckoning. It had scared him at the time and he had decided not to deal with it. But the thing was still there, waiting. It didn’t seem like it was going anywhere.

What the hell, Valentin thought to himself and suddenly cheered up. Raya needed a man. It was easy. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Ergo…

Their story seemed unfinished and weaving a pattern of its own. Raya was not showing interest in anything, Valentin was pursuing his studies, their daughter was growing up. But there were two things that resembled knots in the whole affair. One was out in the open — Raya was drinking; the other was hidden — Valentin was unable to make love. This, in a strange way, brought them together, as neither was doing anything with anybody else.

Raya gravitated toward journalism. She hung around radio stations, newspapers; wrote freelance news reports, interviews, reviews of the foreign press. She could speak many languages — French, English, German, Italian. But she neither cared to define herself as having any particular profession, nor wanted to make herself in some way irreplaceable. She had languidly accepted Valentin’s attentions, then his lovemaking, then his child. When he had bristled at the news of her pregnancy, she had realized that she was in love. That she could not live without him.

He secretly admired her daring, her charm, which was winning her so many friends. Admired her flexibility in changing from one thing to another. Until he felt the weight of that lightness. And it filled him with inexplicable fury. He blamed himself, but pushed Raya away anyway.

At that moment, Raya was just discovering how much she needed him. But her need made him panic. While these complex states were evolving, no decision could be taken and the baby was born — to everyone’s relief.

Maria offered to take them home, both Valentin and Raya. Raya said no, Valentin said no. Raya continued to live with her parents, with the baby. Unsurprisingly, her parents accused Valentin of being irresponsible, he stopped going there and the first few years were a nightmare. Later Raya started working and moved with her daughter to a place of her own. She did something Valentin had dreamt about doing with her, back then when the time had been right.

Every now and then both reassured themselves that all was well, time was passing, things were fine. But whenever they met, the space between them filled with strange ambiguity, a thick cloud annihilating all possibility for shared thrills and desires. When either of them managed to pierce through the cloud, as now with the plush Christmas monsters, both behaved like amateur actors unexpectedly forced into an unfamiliar play. They tried to guess what their lines should be, to keep things from falling completely apart. At least that was what her father thought. And Raya’s father was no ordinary man. He was a bigshot. Apart from the fact that he looked like Jeremy Irons, he had the capacity of gathering the world around him and twisting it around his pinky. And the world was happy. Well, such people existed, nothing to be done about that.