Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

“No,” the boy said. He shook his arms. He touched his legs to check them. He smiled at Yuki.

“We need to take him to a hospital,” she said.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Assencho.”

“We’ll take you to the hospital, Assencho. We’ll have a doctor look at your head.”

The boy sprung up to his feet. He seemed really okay. He didn’t wobble or limp. We had not hit him. He had just fallen off his bike, an orange Balkanche, like the one I’d ridden as a kid. In the grass, the boy tried to readjust the chain, which had come off the cog.

“Let me help you,” I said. I kneeled beside him and turned the bike on its side. I held one end of the chain and the boy the other and we stretched it and fought to line it up against the gear. By the time we were done, my fingers and the boy’s were black with grease.

“Come on,” I said, and wiped my fingers in the grass. “We’ll put the bike in the trunk and take you home.”

The boy pulled up his bike. “If Father learns I was here, he’ll tan my hide. I’m supposed to be helping Brother with the wood. But if I come early to the river, other kids won’t let me swim with them. I wait for all the kids to leave. Then I have the pool to myself. And it’s warmer in the evening. The water’s warmer.”

The boy chattered excitedly like this for a while.

“What’s he saying?” Yuki said. She was sitting in the middle of the road, so I told her to get up and go back to our car. The boy mounted his bike.

“Listen, Assencho,” I said.

“Goodbye, baté,” the boy said. He waved at Yuki, rang the bell on his bike and set off down the road.

We sat in the grass and said nothing for a long time. I tried to wipe my fingers. Yuki took out some gum. “But we didn’t hit him?” she asked, and I told her that no, we hadn’t hit him.

“How do you know? How can you be sure?”

“We were going too fast. It would be different if we’d hit him.”

“We should have taken him to the hospital. Why did you let him go?”

“He jumped on his bike and was gone. You saw that. He was all right. He didn’t wobble.”

“No, he didn’t wobble,” she said. She wiped her cheeks. I got in the car and started it and the car started without a problem. I pulled out of the ditch. The fender was bent where we’d hit the rock and some of the paint had come off.

“Was the boy a Gypsy?” Yuki said as I drove down the mountain, but I’m not really sure that’s what she said.

•

We didn’t sleep that night. We lay in bed and listened to the mice in the attic, to the wind in the walnut branches, to the pines up the slope. We lay stiff and did not hold hands.

“Let’s talk about something,” Yuki said. She sat up in bed. We talked about some things. How sweet the tomatoes had been. What our friends might be doing at this time in Chicago.

“It’s no good,” she said. She got dressed and went outside. I didn’t follow her right away. I watched the walnut out the window and for some reason, maybe because the moon was behind clouds, maybe because of the shadows, I thought of my great-grandfather. I’d never thought of him before, but now it was him I thought about. Then I brought my fingers to my nose and sniffed that faint smell of grease from the bike chain still lingering unwashable. I remembered how the boy had smiled at Yuki, how he’d called her pretty. No one had called her pretty so far. But I thought she was. Very. I thought of how the boy had mounted his bike. How he didn’t wobble at all and how his head had not hurt.

“I’m sure he’s all right,” I told Yuki, who sat on the threshold to the yard and chewed gum. “We can ask about him tomorrow.”

“I’m dying for a cigarette,” she said.

I sat beside her. I wanted to, but I did not touch her.

•

There was no need to ask the neighbor at breakfast. He came to bring us some buhti and milk and sat down while we ate. “Let me tell you what happened,” he said. “This Gypsy kid came home last night and his father beat him. I mean with a stick, tanned his hide, battered him real good. And after that the boy just went to his bed, lay down and closed his eyes. They haven’t been able to wake him up since. The doctor visited and said it was a coma. That’s how hard his father had thrashed him.”

I’m not really sure what we did that afternoon. We didn’t leave the house and we didn’t speak. “Please, go find me some cigarettes,” was all Yuki managed to say, and at one point I walked down to the square and was glad to finally leave the house. I bought her a few packs.

“Did you hear about the boy?” the cashier asked me. “Awful story,” she said. “And the father …” She shook her head. “Wanted to drown himself in the river.”

On my way back, outside our house, I saw a neighbor inspecting the Moskvich.

“Zdrasti, amerikanets,” the neighbor said. He was holding a large pan in his hands. “Where did you hit the car?”

I mumbled something. It was like this already, I said, my father had done it.

“I heard Yuki wasn’t feeling too well,” the neighbor said. “I heard she didn’t look good at breakfast. Hardly ate a thing. So my wife made her one of her banitsas . With extra eggs and butter.”

I thanked him and took the pan.

“You all right, amerikanets?” he said.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you, we’ll be fine.”

•

After three days in which Yuki and I barely ate, slept, or talked, the boy died. We heard about it from another neighbor. There wasn’t much more to it really. The boy had died.

“Is she saying something about the boy?” Yuki asked while the neighbor was speaking.

“Yes,” I said.

“What is she saying?”

“He’s dead. He died this morning.”

Yuki didn’t cry. She stood very still and I stood still until the neighbor left us.

“What are we going to do?” she said.

“There is nothing we can do. The boy is dead.”

“I know that. Stop saying it. I know that already. But we have to tell them. Don’t we have to tell them?”

We didn’t know what to do. We were in limbo, weightless, floating in empty space. We were really scared. I’d never felt scared like that before.

Then, early that afternoon, someone knocked on the gates and out the window we saw a cart with a donkey, and a Gypsy man by the cart. Yuki gave out a cry. She dug her peeled nails into my arm. For a minute we watched the man crumple his cap in his big hands. He wore no shoes, I could see that; blue working trousers, a sailor T-shirt with white and blue stripes. His skin was very dark from the sun and his bald head glistened with sweat. For a minute we just watched him and I thought we should hide until he left.

“Open the gates,” Yuki said, and sent me out on my own.

I opened the gates.

“Are you …” the man said. He came closer.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “I’m the American, yes.”

The man apologized. “I apologize,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you.” He spoke fast, as though he were afraid he might never speak again if he stopped. “My boy just died,” he said. “We’ll bury him tomorrow and we don’t have a picture of him. We never took his picture. My wife won’t look at me now, but I know she would have liked me to come here. We heard, someone told us — Tenyo, was it, or someone else? — someone told us you were taking pictures. Your wife was taking pictures. You had a camera, someone told us. Tenyo, was it? It wasn’t Tenyo, I don’t think.” Then the man held his cap and watched me in silence.

I told him to wait there. I told him I’d be back right away. I rounded the corner and bowed, fell to the ground. I wanted to vomit but couldn’t. It was that bad. Back in the house, I told Yuki what the man had come to ask for.