Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

It’s early afternoon, but out the window the sky is dark. The road black, the clouds black and the hills round like Ferris wheels. “They look like Ferris wheels,” I say, and Magda smears her hands all over the window, pulls on the curtains, chews on the strings.

Gently, I brush the cut hairs one by one off her neck and sweaty forehead. It won’t be fair, I think. To have a baby with a swollen brain, with Grandmoms for mother. With me for aunt. “Stay still,” I say.

At last we are in town. The driver is nagging me about the bus. By six o’clock, he says, we must be back in the depot. I tell him I have to think. “Go smoke a cigarette outside. Get coffee,” and keep at the tiny hairs. “It’s just not fair, Magda, you know?”

“All right,” she says.

“No wonder you’re where you are. That’s all you say.”

“All right.”

We burst out laughing. And then I picture her, spread like a , the baby gone. Or else, I see the baby crying, all day, all night, hungry, and then I see it grown up, choking for air, because like me it feels the need to steal. And I am always by its side, filling its little head with tricks. I teach it how to pocket pens, necklaces, lighters … Quickly, like so, and no one will see .

One thousand green in my hand. And if I left now, no one would see. One thousand green would get me so far away from all this mess, so quickly, even my thoughts would fall behind. I say, “Wait here, Magda. I’ll be back before you know it. Just hold on to the blanket, hold tight like so, and I’ll be back.” She holds. I kiss her swiftly on the lips, a spit-wet little peck.

I am my mother’s daughter. And so I run as fast as you can run through rain — and even out of breath I keep on running. I fear that if I stop, my feet might take me back.

At last I find myself at the other end of town, muddy and soaked, outside some beauty parlor. Beyond the parlor glass I see women nesting in rows of chairs, long-necked and elegant, aristocratic, some with blow-drying helmets on their heads and others with cotton balls between their toes. I also see my own reflection in the glass, as thin as a ghost and just as lively. All through my life it has been Grandmoms cutting my hair with the same pair of scissors her grandma used on hers. To hell with it, I think.

And twenty dollars later I’m in a chair.

“I want it short,” I say, and watch in the mirror, one wet rope falling after the other. By now they must be home. Uncle Pesho would have taken Magda to Grandmoms, who would be worried sick. At last the mirror girl is someone else — a lighter, more beautiful version of me. A stranger really.

After the cut, I need dry clothes. A dress. Green, red, yellow, blue. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s expensive and new. I need new shoes, high heels that splash clink-clanking through the puddles. From there, of course, I’m off to the hotel. Balkan Tourist.

The waiter calls me “Mademoiselle” and walks me to a table. The dress rustles against my thighs, the heels peck the polished floor. He lights a candle. White cloth and forks of different sizes. I order sandwiches with ham and cheese and eat them, while to the side some grandpa plays the piano, his bald head twinkling, itself a candle top. I order chicken fricassee and fish, flan for desert, and crème brûlée, and rice with cinnamon and milk, and barely touch them, but still I order more.

From there I fly up to the hotel bar. Tonight as every night, a poster says, it’s a variety show. I sit in the corner and call for almonds, for orange and pineapple juice. The bar is half empty, here and there older men in pairs sip on their drinks — they’re all nicely dressed, most of them foreign it seems. And on the stage, under the glow of a million tiny colorful lights, dance glittering girls, long-legged, short-skirted, with haircuts like mine, with big and stupid smiles. Variété . It seems more like a circus to me. I bet they make some decent cash. I bet I could be such a girl. I’ll rent a room in town, I’ll work the nights and sleep the days, a dreamless sleep, until one day a British man, with hats made from puppies and snow-white suits, will offer me a drink.

Pops, Magda is pregnant. They are kicking her out of the Home .

I read the letter again. I can barely make out the words, with all the flashing lights onstage, but words are words. I think of Grandmoms, then of Magda, by now most likely sleeping in my bed.

I know all this is not a dream, but even so — why does it have to be like this?

I feel the suffocating need to stuff my pockets with all those shiny lights onstage. If I don’t, I’ll positively drown. I sit and watch the bulbs explode, a thick fiery swarm, but I’ll be damned if I move.

Some petty change. That’s all that’s left when the program ends. I phone from the lobby and Grandmoms picks up right away. I don’t wait to hear her speak.

“How’s life treating you?” I say. “Listen,” I say, “I need some money for a ticket home.”

Yuki and I arrived in Bulgaria three weeks before our hospital appointment, mostly so we’d have enough time to get over jet lag, but also so we would get there before the big summer heat, and not buy plane tickets at peak season prices. We spent the first week in Sofia, with my parents, and got along with them surprisingly smoothly, considering the circumstances. But my hometown did not sit well with my wife. When they’d first heard we were coming, my parents had equipped my old room with a new bed and an AC, which had arrived defective, and the new part would take a month to arrive. At night Yuki complained of the heat and when I opened the window it was the boulevard that annoyed her, the barking stray dogs, the drunks who had turned the bus stop into their drinking spot.

For a few nights straight Yuki did not sleep. She would sit in bed and press the AC remote repeatedly and the AC would rattle but not cool.

“It’s all nerves,” I told her. I reminded her that just the other day she had smoked her last cigarette outside O’Hare. She reminded me that just the other day her suitcase had not landed with us in Sofia. That when it had finally arrived, her toothbrush had been missing, her blue Starter sneakers, the box of Nicorette gum.

“These things happen,” I assured her. “Besides, I bought you Bulgarian gum. Just as good, and probably better.”

She popped a piece and chewed it vehemently for a while. She dug her thumb, with the nail peeled ragged by her other nails, into the remote. “Bulgarian crap,” she said, “it doesn’t work. Nothing here works.”

She started to cry. I told her she was wrong. Some things, yes, but not all things. Some things, I told her, were bound to work. We deserved a break, I told her, because we were good people and good things happened to good people, sooner or later. I blabbered like that for a while and she said, “You’re blabbering. Stop it.” She said I didn’t know anything. If I’d known something, she said, I wouldn’t have married her in the first place.

That’s when my mom knocked on the door. I was glad she had it in her, the audacity, to knock on our door at four in the morning.

“Tell Yuki I bring linden tea,” my mother commanded, and found her way in the semidarkness to set the tray on the night stand. “Lipov chay, Yuki,” she said in Bulgarian. “It’ll help her sleep. Tell her that. With acacia honey. Why aren’t you telling her that?”

I told her that and Yuki, who’d hidden under the blanket, peeked up to nod thankfully.

“Did I …” my mother said and raised an eyebrow. “Were you—”