Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

I said we weren’t—

“I didn’t think you were,” she said, waiting for Yuki to drink the tea. “After all, in your condition, what’s the point?”

The following morning I asked my father for the old Moskvich and by sunset, Yuki and I were two hundred kilometers north, in my grandparents’ old village house.

•

We’d learned about the in vitro program in Sofia last year, from a friend of my mom’s — a forty-something schoolteacher who, after many barren years, was now, finally, the mother of twins — Lazar and Leopold, or some similar-sounding madness.

By that time Yuki and I had been married and had tried to conceive for eighteen months. We consulted a doctor in Chicago, a Bulgarian my friends at O’Hare had recommended. It turned out there was something the matter with Yuki’s fallopian tubes. It would be very hard, the doctor said, to get pregnant as nature designed it, though by all means, he said, keep trying. It would be easier to try other means, but these, of course, required hefty sums. I am a luggage loader at O’Hare. Yuki waits tables at a low-level sushi restaurant, imaginatively named Tokyo Sushi, and on the side babysits youngster Americans, whose parents have deemed her speaking Japanese to their children somehow beneficial. We cannot produce hefty sums.

A phone call to Japan revealed even grimmer prospects, and I found myself forced to get my parents involved. At that time my mother still did not speak to me, so when she picked up the phone I had to wait for my father to take the receiver. That wasted almost a minute of my expensive calling card. “What time is it in Chicago?” my father asking, and “What’s the weather like?” wasted another. Seven years in the States and their questions were the same; so were my answers. Eight hours behind. Windy.

“I need to speak to you about Yuki,” I told him. I could hear my mother’s voice from the other end of the room, like a ghost’s from another dimension, instructing him what to say and waiting for him to relate the things I was saying.

“Tell Mom to come to the phone,” I said.

“Tell him to invite me to his wedding next time,” I heard her saying.

“There will be no next time,” I said, and watched the phone tick away more pricey seconds.

“There might be,” my father said. He asked my mother to repeat something and then related it.

I told them about the problems at hand.

“I expected this,” my mother said, and I hung up before Father could speak.

The thing about Yuki — at least, that which infuriates my parents even more than the fact that she is not a good Bulgarian girl — is her age. The fact that she is four years my senior seems to have a cataclysmic effect on them.

“You cannot blame her for this,” I told them once I dialed again.

“We blame you,” I heard my mother. “And your poor choices,” my father added.

I hung up again. More cents were wasted from my card. We repeated this charade several times before finally I heard my mother promise she would look into things.

“We’re also considering adoption,” I said. This time my father didn’t wait for instructions. “Nonsense,” he said. “Our seed must not be lost. Do you hear me?”

A week later Mother called me herself with the news of Lazar and Leopold.

“It will cost three thousand dollars,” she said.

“We can make three thousand,” I told her.

“It’s on us,” she said. “A wedding gift.”

•

My grandparents were dead now, but even before we arrived in Bulgaria I knew I would take Yuki to see their vacation house. I had spent every summer since the age of five in there: two rooms, a kitchen, an attic with an inclined ceiling that was too low to stand straight under, an acre of orchard for a yard. There was a river in the village, and above the village there was the mountain. You could ask for nothing more.

We carried our bags to the front door, and while I fought with the lock, Yuki chewed nicotine gum and took pictures of the yard and the outdoor toilet. She took a picture of me fighting the lock and then carrying the bags into the dark hallway.

“Please stop with the pictures,” I told her.

She put the camera back in its case. “Are you all right?” she said.

I walked from room to room and opened the windows. I climbed into the attic and opened the window and I opened the window in the basement. Back in the living room I sat on Grandma’s bed, and Yuki sat on Grandpa’s. For a very long time we said nothing at all. I watched the cherry trees, and the peaches, the apples, the plums in the yard, which all looked dead now, completely dried. The sun was slipping behind the giant walnut, and I watched it, orange in the bare branches. It was starting to smell better inside.

“My parents were here last week,” I said. They had stopped by to clean the house and bring clean blankets. My father had mowed a path to the toilet in the yard.

“It looks nice,” Yuki said. “The house looks really nice.”

I lay my palm on the bedcover and ran it up and down and in circles.

“This is Grandma’s bed,” I said. “This is where I slept.”

Then I showed Yuki a hanger in the corner, a wooden stand, with a wool jacket on it and a pair of blue trousers. “These are Grandpa’s trousers.”

•

We didn’t have anything to eat, so we went down the road to a neighbor, an old woman who’d been friends with my grandma. The woman cried and kissed me on both cheeks. I was afraid she would want to kiss Yuki. Japanese people, especially strangers, don’t kiss each other nearly as much as we do.

“My God,” the woman said, and clapped her hands. “She is so tiny.” Then she studied Yuki, head to toes. Yuki stood, flaming red, smiling.

“They aren’t that yellow,” the woman told me at last.

“What did she say?” Yuki asked.

“What did she say?” asked the woman. Inevitably, she plunged herself forward with unexpected agility and took Yuki’s hands. She kissed them and then she kissed Yuki on the cheeks. Yuki obeyed, but wiped her face when the woman wasn’t looking.

Then everyone came out to see Yuki. There were many faces I didn’t recognize, many children and young women. They sat us down on a table in the yard, under the trellised vine, which was just budding green.

“Your family has grown, Grandma,” I told the woman. They were all watching Yuki, all beaming with excitement. One little girl edged herself closer, touched Yuki on the knee and ran away giggling.

“I feel awful,” Yuki said.

“What did she say?” someone asked. They asked if this was Japanese.

I didn’t tell them it was English we spoke. They brought dinner and we ate under the vine, with the sky almost dark and the moon big and still red, low above the hills.

“Is this a camera, Yuki?” a little boy asked. He pronounced her name perfectly. She showed him the tiny device and then she took his picture. Everyone gathered to see the picture on the back screen.

“Can we take a picture with you, Yuki?” someone said. Someone said, “Yuki, have you ever tried Bulgarian rakia? Grandma,” someone said, “bring rakia for Yuki.”

•

Yuki and I first met by baggage claim number eight. Her bag from Tokyo hadn’t arrived and she looked on the verge of tears.

“These things happen,” I assured her. I had just finished my shift, but I took her to her airline office so she could file a claim and helped her to the front of the line. My Bulgarian friends whistled after us as her high heels clicked down the hall. I asked her if she wouldn’t want to grab some coffee and she said all she wanted was a cigarette and to go home and maybe have a bath. I pictured her in the bath, her shoulders shiny above the foamy water and her long hair tied in a ball.