Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

•

“I’m writing my senior thesis on you,” I told him one day in my final year of college.

On the other end of the line something fell with a deafening bang. Grandpa’s voice seemed to come from a distance across the room, and then, much closer.

“I dropped the receiver,” he said apologetically. “You bored me so much I fell asleep.”

“What you call boredom,” I corrected him, “psychology refers to as denial. I talk about this in my paper and also I explain why you believe the things you do. Care to hear?”

“Categorically not.”

I cleared my throat. “The Lenin Complex is the representation of a person’s overwhelming need to organize his life around the blind following of an ideology, without regard for the validity of its ideals; of a person’s consuming need to participate in a group. Both the need and the necessity are motivated by irrational fears of loneliness and/or rejection.”

I let the silence between us accentuate my words.

“I never knew,” Grandpa said, “that my grandson was so damned crazy, and/or such an ass.”

•

I finished my undergraduate studies summa cum laude, which was something, I’d noticed, Americans liked to mention if they’d done. Still, I had no idea what to do next. I applied and was accepted to graduate school. I tried to save up money for a ticket home, but the graduate program was in another state and all my savings were wasted on the move. I hoped that a change of scenery would lift my spirits. Instead, I found it increasingly difficult to talk to people. Mostly I stayed home, missed Bulgaria as much as I ever had, and for some strange reason, now missed Arkansas as well.

“Grandpa,” I sometimes asked over the phone, “what are you eating?”

“Watermelon with cheese.”

“Is it good?”

“It was good for Lenin, his favorite snack.”

“I wish I had a plateful.”

“You always hated fruits with cheese.”

“Grandpa, what are you drinking?”

“Yogurt.”

“Is it good?”

“The best there ever was.”

“Grandpa, what are you looking at, right now, this very moment?”

“The slopes above the house. The linden trees are white. The wind has turned their leaves before the coming rain.”

I knew he was teasing me, sowing my wounds with salt, and still I kept asking. If only I could borrow his eyes for an instant, if only I could steal his tongue — I would eat my fill of bread and cheese, drain six gourds of water from our well, fill my gaze with slopes, fields, rivers.

“Grandpa,” I said once, squeezing the receiver. “I have been thinking. How about you recommend a book?”

“A book?” he said. “I thought you hated my books.”

I told him to forget it.

“Is the prodigal son doing an about-face?”

“I’m hanging up.”

But I didn’t. We were quiet for a while. I could tell he was choosing his words carefully. “I’ll give you something better than a book,” he said at last. “I’ll give you three easy steps.”

•

“First,” Grandpa told me, “you need to learn who Lenin really was. Obtain volume thirty-seven of his collected works.”

“Letters to Relatives,” I repeated the subtitle after I had obtained the tome.

“The best kind of letters. Read those to his sister. No,” he corrected himself, “read to his mother first.”

Mother dearest , Lenin wrote, send me some money because I’ve spent mine . In one letter he was in Munich, in another he was in Prague. In one he crossed a half-constructed bridge in a horse sleigh, and in another he wanted to see a doctor for his catarrh. Like me, he’d spent his youth abroad, in exile. He sounded permanently hungry and cold. He dreamed of sheepskin coats, felt boots, fur caps. Mother dearest , he complained from an Austrian train station, I don’t understand the Germans at all. I kept asking the conductor the same question, unable to understand his answer, until at last he stormed angrily away .

Mother dearest, I am miserable without letters from home. You must write without waiting for an address .

My life goes on as usual. I stroll to the library outside town, I stroll in the neighborhood, and sleep enough for two …

The letters weren’t half bad. That’s what I told Grandpa. “Grandpa dearest, Lenin and I are so much alike.”

He snickered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He said he didn’t know. He said he had his doubts.

“Your grandson’s finally doing what you want him and now you sulk?”

“I’m not sulking,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking. When I was young I hid in dugouts. I didn’t read books.”

“Should I dig a hole in the ground, then? Is this step two?”

“My boy,” he said. “Don’t be an ass.”

He’d pestered me with this ideological crap all my life, and now, when I was finally getting interested, he had his doubts. “Are you afraid I’ll take your Lenin away from you?”

“I’m hanging up,” he said.

“Don’t bother,” I told him, and slammed down the phone.

•

I kept reading. Notebooks on Imperialism, on the Agrarian Question. But with every page, whatever connection I’d felt through the letters weakened irretrievably. Grandpa was right — these texts would get me nowhere.

“You’re twenty-five,” he’d told me once. “Your blood should be champagne, not yogurt. Go out. Mix with the living, forget the dead.”

I felt low for hanging up on him like that. As penance, I decided to buy him something little from eBay — a badge, a pin, a set of cheap stamps he could add to his collection. I did not expect to stumble upon an auction for Lenin’s corpse. CCCP Creator Lenin. Mint Condition , it said. You are bidding for the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The body is in excellent condition and comes with a refrigerated coffin that works on both American and European current . The Buy It Now button indicated a price of five dollars flat. And five more for worldwide shipping. The seller’s location was marked as Moscow.

This was a scam, of course. But what wasn’t? I clicked Buy It Now, completed the transaction. Congratulations, Communist-Dupe_1944 , the confirmation read. You bought Lenin .

•

The following day I called Grandpa and told him what I’d done. I told him to consider the purchase as step two of his three-step plan. I’m not sure he understood me.

“I’m getting old,” he said. “I feel pinching in my arm and leg. Surely a new stroke waits for me around the corner. So I’ve been thinking. You are a good boy, my son, but I failed you. You have all the right to mock me.”

I had relished mocking him once, I said, but not any longer. “Tell me the third step. I need to know.”

“Step three,” he said after some thought. “Come home.”

•

I did not sleep that night. Nor did I sleep well for two weeks after. My thoughts were murky, sunk to their chins in the crabapple mash that was my brain.

I phoned and told him just enough. How unhappy I was in America. How I’d come here, not as a reaction against him, but because I’d wanted to try something new. I said, “It’s payback time, old man. Go on, it’s now your turn to tease me.”

“Sinko,” Grandpa said instead. He spoke to me the way he’d done so often when as a child I’d thrown a fit or bloodied my knees. “Stop for a minute. Hear me out. Today, not one hour before you called, a large red truck arrived at our house. Inside the truck was an enormous crate. Inside the crate lay Lenin. The leader of nations now lies in your room, glorious, refrigerated, as peaceful as a lamb.”