Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

My pops works in England now. I haven’t really met him, but I would like to meet him. I would like to send him a letter and tell him how things are here, in our village. I suppose he has forgotten our language, but sometimes I go to Missis and I almost tell her, listen, Missis, how about …

Then I know better. I am my mother’s daughter, which is to say I’m a bitch. I lie and steal. I can’t help it. It’s like if I don’t steal, my lungs get filled up with magic glue. C-200. And I can’t breathe. Also, I’m mean to people for no reason. Not always, of course. Only when it counts. “Maria, for God’s sake,” Grandmoms says. “I gave you this name so you could be like Jesus’s mother.” But she always plays me. Look at those earrings, check out that wallet. Then she sends the money to my mother. So I say, “Grandmoms, don’t be stupid. You gave me this name because you lack imagination. Because you gave that same name to our mother and look at her now, gone three hundred and sixty days a year and begging for money the other five.” And I say, “Grandmoms, would Jesus’s mother have left him in the manger? Would his grandmother have picked him up to raise him a savior? And, Grandmoms, how come you picked me up and left my sister an orphan?”

•

In the summer, Tuesdays and Saturdays. That’s when we have buses running, one in the morning and one in the p.m. When we have school, Saturdays only. Sometimes I skip school just to go, but rarely since Grandmoms sets all over me for turning down the knowledge. She says only men can afford to be uneducated. “Women,” she says, “need to develop their brains.” “Oh, yeah?” I say. “And how about Magda? Her brain is the opposite of developed, but she is always well fed, wears nice clothes and sleeps in nice sheets. Watches a plasma TV.” “Now, now,” Grandmoms says, “don’t be a bitch.”

At the bus station I pay the driver, Uncle Pesho, and he says, “Mariyke, did you rob a bank?” I shove the money in my pocket. Thirty levs. The other twenty were for Grandmoms, after she sold the earrings. And two are gone for the ticket, there and back. The bus is empty and I’m cold so early in the morning. “Can’t you turn the heat on, Uncle?” He turns and looks at me, then at my shirt. “I see that you’re cold. I like it.” And, laughing, he starts the bus and off we go.

He is a good man, Uncle Pesho, he’s known me for ten years now. And he’s been driving me for seven. That’s when I started seeing Magda. Before that, I didn’t know about her. Nine years. Days, nights, summers, winters. I’d go to bed and wake up in the morning, I’d swim in the river, work the fields, go to school, clueless. Then, when Grandmoms told me, it was, like, yes, I knew it all along. Like I didn’t know it, but like I’ve known it. Like when old people say their kneecaps hurt so it must rain soon. Only my kneecaps hurt after the rain. I might have shown it because one day Grandmoms said, “Okay, okay, I’ll take you there. Just stop.”

Magda was this tiny thing. A whole head shorter than me, and her face was like this, distorted. Her tongue was swollen in her mouth. I couldn’t look past her rolling tongue, and the spit trickling down her chin. Grandmoms wiped it with a kerchief as if she’d wiped it time and time before. Later I asked her, “How long?” and she said, “On and off, once a month for three years.”

“Why three?”

She said, “I couldn’t go on forever without sleep. I thought I could. But I couldn’t.”

When we first met, Magda put her hands all over my face. Sticky hands on my cheeks, on my ears. She poked inside my nose. “Quit it!”

“Now, now,” Grandmoms said, “that’s how she’s getting to know you.”

You can’t get to know someone by shoving a finger up their nose. But if someone shoves their finger up your nose, you learn some things about them. It’s called a one-way implication. We studied it in Math.

I try to teach Magda some things. Since we’re not men and can’t afford. I take my books to her and sit her in a corner in a nice room that smells of rice with milk and cinnamon and teach her things. She does okay in math. She knows multiplication. At first it was, like, 1 × 1, 1 × 2, and it was never past the two, everything equaled two. 5 × 7, 9 × 8, everything was 2. But now she gets it. She gets history. She likes simpler things, made up stories, poems, but she is awful with language. And she can’t spell to save her life. There is one letter in particular she just can’t write. .

is the gallows upon which Magda will hang. I tell her, “Girl, you are sixteen and your looks like a dead frog.” And she laughs. At least she laughs. Her words might be all mumbly and downright stupid sometimes, but her laughter is snowdrops and there is nothing stupid about her laughter.

Now, on the bus, Uncle Pesho calls me over. “Mariyke, you want to sit in my lap? Drive the machine?” That’s what we used to do when I was little. I’d sit in his lap and hold the wheel and drive. So I say, “Okay, why not. Because the way my thoughts were going, I’d rather change their course.”

I sit in his lap and the bus goes and then he moves his hand up. He pinches my nipple and laughs and I say, “Pederas , let me out.” He’s laughing, laughing, and I stand up and slam my foot onto his knee and he veers the bus off the road. I pull the hand brake and then it’s all nuts and bolts thrashing underneath us, and smoke. The bus halts. I hit the button, out the door, and I’m two hills away.

Then I cry a little. Shut up, I say, and slap my own face. Slapping your own face is very effective in case of tears. I saw a woman do it in this American movie. Grandmoms and I watch every movie on TV. So the tears are almost gone when a car comes toward me up the road. The car stops, window comes down. “Mary , is that you?”

Mister opens the door and I jump in without a word.

“Are you going to the orphans?” he says. He sounds just like Magda. The right words, but every word a touch off, crippled.

“Yes,” I say, and Mister says, “Let me take you.”

Grandmoms is secretly in love with Mister. And she hates Missis in the guts. We watched this one movie Zorba the Greek and Grandmoms said, “I hope Missis dies like that old whore so we can rob her house, vases and jewels and even her nightgown, still warm with her heat. I hope the peasants catch her with the hide buyer, naked on his furs, and, like in the movie, slice her throat side to side for the infidelity.” Then there will be no more Missis, and it will be all Mister. White skin and blue eyes. Soft hair. Mister looks just like the gentleman in the movie, the writer. Older of course, but more handsome, because of his age. Because of his white suits and smooth hats. Because of his eyes.

I put my hand on his as he shifts gears. “Dear girl,” he goes, and adds something about how cold my hand is, but I’m not listening.

“This is a nice car, Mister.” His hand is warm and I can feel his knuckles moving and his muscles.

“How is your sister?” Mister asks me. He knows all about her. He’s been pouring money into the orphanage, dumping money with a shovel. Out of pure kindness, I think, though Grandmoms once told me it had to do with taxes and things along those lines. “That poor girl,” he says.

“She’s not so poor, now, is she?” I say. I mean you bought them new cribs, new curtains. You bought them a microwave! But I don’t say this of course. I just keep my hand on his and I’m glad the hills are hills and the road snakes the way it snakes, so the stick would shift as much as it shifts. So his knuckles would move.