Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

My dearest darling . I shove the notebook in the box and hurry back to bed. Under the blankets I shiver and listen to imaginary sounds. I can’t afford to read about this man. There is a chance, however slim, that he isn’t what I need him to be.

•

“So she’s kept a few old letters, big deal.” Buryana takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes are red and puffy and she blinks while they adjust to the afternoon sun. We sit out in the garden, on a bench farthest from all other benches, but not far enough from the sound of the cripples who drag their feet and canes and walkers across the pebbly lanes.

“ ‘Big deal’?” I say.

“Big deal,” she says again, and I’m terrified by how calcified she has become, consumed by her failing marriage.

“You ought to read those letters,” she says. “They might help the boredom go away. And read them to Mother. Why not? It’ll bring her at least some joy.”

Some joy! And so I say, “I won’t take love advice from you.” I mean it as a joke, of course, but Buryana is in no mood for joking. And soon I wish I’d kept my mouth shut, because from that point on it’s all about her husband and that other woman, a colleague of his from school, like him a literature teacher.

She says, “Yesterday, I followed him out of the apartment. He met her in a café and bought her a garash cake. He got himself some water, obviously he had no money for more, and while she ate her cake, he talked and talked for an hour.”

“You think he talked of you?” I say. She starts to cry.

“The worst part is,” she says sobbing, “this other woman isn’t even pretty. Why would he leave me for a woman less pretty than me? So what if I think that a grown man writing poetry is stupid? So what if I don’t like to read? That doesn’t make me a bad wife, does it?”

I put my arm around her shoulder and let her have her cry.

“This is a valid question,” I say. A valid question . What’s wrong with me? And while she sobs my thoughts drift and I imagine little Pavel, upstairs with Nora. They must be laughing, happy, both unsuspecting.

“You ought to talk to him,” I say, and gather her hair in my palm, away from the wetness of her face. “You can’t keep spying on him like this. It isn’t right.”

She straightens up. “I won’t take love advice from you,” she says.

•

It’s night again. It could be yesterday’s, or tomorrow’s. A night four years back. They’re all the same. I sit in Nora’s wheelchair and listen to the world. I see beyond the walls, not with my eyes, but with my ears. I see the nurses, in their office, boiling coffee. The water bubbles. I hear needles clicking; someone is knitting socks. I hear the benches, the trees, the mountain. Each thing possesses a noise unique, and, like a bat, I drink the noise of all things, dead and living alike. My palate has grown a taste for sound.

I hear my grandson sleeping in his bed, my daughter talking to her husband. I hear my wife’s dreams, sweet to her, but tasting of wormwood to me. No doubt she dreams of Mr. Peyo Spasov. And so it strikes me as only fair that I too should be allowed to sample the noise he’s left behind. I take the notebook and read his messy writing.

February 5, 1905My dearest darling Nora. I’m freezing and my fingers hurt, but I don’t want to think of such things. I’m writing you a letter. We’re crossing the Pirin Mountains and tomorrow, if God decides, we will be in Macedonia. The Turks have all the main passages guarded, so we had to find a new way through. Two of my friends slipped on ice, and were lost. The first one, Mityu, was leading the donkey with the supplies, and the donkey slipped and dragged him off the cliffs. So now we’re hungry, spending the night sheltered between some rocks. The snow has begun to fall. Dearest Nora, I miss you. I wish I was by your side now. But you know how things are — a man can’t stay put, knowing that in Macedonia the Turks are slaughtering our brothers, trying to keep them under the fez. I told you then and I tell you now — if men like me don’t go to liberate the brothers, no one will. The Russians helped us be free. It’s now our turn to help. I love you, Nora, but there are things before which even love must bow. I know with time you’ll understand and forgive. Draw the knife, cock the pistol. That’s what our captain, the Voivode, says. I wish you could meet him. He has only one eye, but a hungrier eye you’ve never seen. He lost the other in the Liberation war. He fought on the Shipka Pass, 1877, the Voivode. Can you believe that? He says the Turks were vicious then, but now, he says, we can take them. Of course it won’t be easy. The Voivode says I have no father, I have no mother. My father is the mountain, my mother is the shotgun. All those back home you loved, he says, bid them farewell. It’s for your brothers’ blood we spill our own. But I can’t say farewell, dearest Nora. And I can’t hold the pencil any more. I’m cold. And please forgive. Love, Peyo .

Love, Peyo … Why did I read these words? I vow not to envy or fear this man. Instead, I kiss my wife’s good hand and kiss her lips, as if to mark her. She’s mine now and has been for a lifetime, and that is that. I listen to the nurses down the hall, I listen to the benches and the trees. But in the moonlight my pillow is a rock, and so I lie beside this rock and so the snow begins to fall. I hear the rustle of every flake on my face, the chill spreads through my traitor knees and elbows. The Voivode lost an eye in the Liberation war. My God, what an awful thing to put in a love letter. I’ve seen men with their eyes gouged out. Men close to me, barefooted, with wrists tied together behind their backs. Hanged on the village square for everyone to see. As I lie in bed, eyes shut tightly, I still hear the rope creaking when the bodies sway, and I can hear the sound the bodies make swaying.

•

I was born a year after my brother. When I was twelve Mother bore another boy, but it died a baby. Two years after that she had twin girls. We lived in my grandfather’s house and worked his land. Our grandpa was a lazy man, the laziest I’ve known, but had his reasons. He sat out on the threshold from dusk till after dawn and smoked hashish. He’d let me sit beside him and told me stories of the Turkish times. All through his youth he’d served a Turkish bey, and that bey had broken his back with work enough for seven lifetimes. So now, in freedom, Grandpa refused to do as much as wipe his ass. That’s what he’d say. “I have your father to wipe my ass,” he’d say, and hit the smoke. He drew maps of Bulgaria in the dust, enormous as it had been more than five centuries ago, before the Turks had taken over our land. He’d draw a circle around the North and say “This is called Moesia. This is where we live, free at last, thanks to the Russian brothers.” Then he’d circle the South. “This is Thrace. It stayed part of the Turkish empire for seven years after the North was freed, but now we are one, united. And this,” he’d say and circle farther south, “is Macedonia. Home to Bulgarians, but still under the fez.” He’d brush fingers along the lines and watch the circles for a long time, put arrows where he thought the Russians should invade and crosses where battles should be waged. Then he’d spit in the dust and draw the rest of Europe and circle it, and circle Africa and Asia. “One day, siné , all these continents will be Bulgarian again. And maybe the seas.” Again he’d hit the smoke and sometimes he’d let me take a drag, too, because a little herb, he’d say, never hurt a child.

And now, in bed, I suddenly long to fill up my lungs with all that burning so that my head gets light and empty. Instead, I fill up with memories of things long gone the way a gourd fills up with water from rain.