Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

Silly, hollow words that I knew were chaff, and still I listened, eyes dreamily closed. “Do you remember, Grandson,” he was saying, “the story I used to tell you, of how I lived in a dugout, with fifteen other men, two pregnant women and a hungry goat, and how, desperate and starving, I finally found the courage to go down to the village? Well, I wasn’t desperate or starving. At least not in the corporeal sense. I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. The men cheated at cards. The women gossiped. The goat shat in my galoshes. Three years later I went back to that same place in the forest. I wanted to see the dugout again, now with my free eyes. I counted twenty steps from a crooked oak we’d used as a marker, found the entrance and climbed down the ladder. They were still there, all of them, mummified. No one had told them the war was over. No one had told them they could go. They hadn’t had the courage to walk out themselves, and so they’d starved to death. I felt like shit. I dug and I dug and I buried them all. I told myself, what kind of a world is this where people and goats die in dugouts for nothing at all? And so I lived my life as though ideals really mattered. And in the end they did.”

I held the receiver and thought of Lenin lying refrigerated in my childhood room, and an awful feeling swept me up, a terrible fright. I wanted the old man to promise he’d wait for me out in the yard, under the black grapes of the trellised vine. Instead, I started laughing. My belly twisted, my temples split. I couldn’t help it. I laughed until my laughter took hold of Grandpa, until our voices mixed along the wire and echoed like one.

It’s not like Grandmoms is urging me to steal from the British. But she knows I can’t help it. So when I walk under the trellis, she looks up from her newspaper and says, “Maria, today Missis was seen at the store with new earrings. Real pearls.”

She tells me to tie the end of a loose vine string, and while I tie it Grandmoms says, “I’m not saying, you know. But we could split it down the middle.”

I throw her this look. She says, “Sixty-forty?” and then she’s back to her paper. Turning one page and licking her fingers to turn the next, like the ink on her fingers is honey.

I know what she needs the money for. She’ll fold the bills neatly and wrap them in some old article about hog farming and seal the envelope with two strips of tape. Then she’ll mail the envelope to my mother so she won’t call for a couple of months.

I go to feed the chickens, to unthink the earrings, but it’s all pearls before my eyes. I collect four eggs. Two of them are big enough and I polish them in my apron, then I put them in a basket. I pick some dahlias, white, that’s how Missis likes them, and put them in the basket. Then from the basement I pour Missis a hundred grams of Grandpa’s rakia in a small bottle and that, too, goes in the basket.

Missis is sunbathing in her yard and her long, smooth legs are reflecting sun like they are tin-plated with the best tin a Gypsy can sell you. “Hello, Mary , dura-bura-dura-bura,” Missis says in English. She looks bored and depressed as always, but when she takes off her sunglasses her eyes glisten. She’s a Russian dog, salivating at the sight of me. She knows I always bring baskets.

First she takes a tiny gulp, elegant, but then it’s Grandpa’s rakia , that good grape, that dark oak cask, so she kills half the bottle. Thirty-three years old and a woman, drinks more than uncle Pesho. And Uncle Pesho drives the village bus.

“Is Mister home?” I ask her. She shakes her head. The earrings make this expensive sound. The pearls beam with sun and I’m suffocating.

“Drink up, Missis,” I say, and sit at the edge of the lounge chair.

Missis is the single most unhappy woman I have ever robbed. For starters, she makes us call her “Missis,” but she isn’t British. Her Bulgarian is native, soft, a northern accent, yet when she speaks her sentences are littered with foreign sounds, with words that hold no meaning up here in our village. She strolls the dirt roads with a parasol that never opens, she powders her nose while waiting for the bread truck to arrive from town. She asks the bartender for drinks with English names and rolls her eyes when he pours her mint with mastika . But she drinks it all the same. When Missis leaves the pub, with the loaf in a netted sack and her high heels clunking, all the village drunks drool after her calves, and all the peasant women after her sophisticated nature. Missis is very pretty, no doubt in that, though I think her neck’s a bit too long (bred to showcase jewels, Grandmoms says). But I think Missis would be prettier still if she didn’t pretend to be some other woman. I’ve seen her around the corner, thinking she can’t be seen, sink her teeth into the bread ear and take a sloppy bite. I’ve seen her step into a buffalo splash on the road and curse a saucy curse. I like her much better that way. Sometimes I wonder if her depressed look too isn’t just a pretense. Especially since last she went to town and back her sighs have tripled in duration. But then again, I’ve seen the hide buyer drive down our road yelling, “I’m buying hides, I’m buying leather,” and sometimes, when Mister is away, I’ve seen him sneak inside Missis’s house. He comes back out in thirty minutes. Always. I’ve timed him. And I know no pretense will ever justify your lying down with hide buyers; her sadness at least seems genuine enough.

“Hey, Missis,” I say and move up the lounge chair slightly, “who sunbathes with jewelry on, eh?”

She fakes a smile and smacks her lips together. She is a nice woman, but right now I’m thinking how easy it is to steal a pair of pearl earrings off a pair of drunk ears.

•

The British, as we like to call them, came to our village two years ago, when I was fourteen. First we heard that someone bought the house across from ours. Then these workers arrived and gutted the house. Threw the entrails on the dump, chairs, tables, bookshelves. Whitened the façade with lime, fixed new window frames, aluminum, put new doors, new gates. Raked the yard. Planted seeds. Transplanted boxwood shrubs and cherry trees. When the cherries blossomed the British arrived. Missis and Mister.

Mister is a century older than Missis and he speaks decent Bulgarian. His face is wrinkled, but his eyes are blue. He wears white suits and white hats made of puppies. I thought they were made of puppies because when he let me touch the brim once, it felt just as smooth. Some folks say he was a spy and it is rumored that Mister lived in Sofia for many years, working the embassy. Most folks call him zero-zero-seven and he laughs, a set of perfect teeth, but I call him “Mister.” Zero-zero is like toilet language, unaristocratic.

“What do you know about aristocrats?” Grandmoms tells me, but she knows I’m not a peasant, she knows I was born in the city. I was born the winter after the Soviets fell. I don’t really give two shits about the Soviets falling, but Grandmoms makes me learn these things because she says I ought to know my history. I think that’s pretty daft of her to say, because of all the things she’s kept secret from me. Personal histories, mostly. But Grandmoms teaches me like there will be no tomorrow if I didn’t know when the Berlin wall was knocked down, or why it was put up in the first place.

The winter I was born, Grandmoms says, wolves roamed the streets and snatched away babies. She says money was toilet paper and coupons were the new money and you had to stand in line for coupons days in a row. Three hundred coupons bought you a loaf of bread. Five hundred bought you cheese. She says a wolf snatched my father and chewed his dick off. And then, she says, your father came home a man without a dick.