Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

I take the demijohn and gulp up a few strong gulps of wine. I rinse, wipe my lips, repeat.

I say, “They brought him here so the priest would bless him. So he would be cured. Then they ran away. Isn’t that right, Grandpa? They left you behind?”

Gogo takes the demijohn and drinks. We watch the cocooned man.

If that was me, I think, I’d lose my mind. Just lying like a grub in that cloak, and only my eyes moving, and my mouth. I wonder if this old man knows he was left behind to die? Does he begrudge those who left him? Does he remember anything at all? I hope, for his sake, he has no memory left — of who he is, of where he lies. I hope he is the opposite of me.

Gogo lights up and tells me to watch this shit. He holds the cigarette to the old man’s lips and lets him take a drag. Smoke gushes out of the old man’s nose, his eyes fill up, he coughs.

“You were a smoker, weren’t you, Grandpa?” Gogo says. “That’s what did you in.” He takes the round loaf from the towel and tries to break off a chunk against his knee. “Is this a loaf or a stone? Jesus Christ.” He bites off a morsel and spits it in his hand. He holds it to the old man’s lips and the old man sucks on it until the morsel turns to mash. Then the old man sucks on Gogo’s fingers. “This is so vile, kopche,” Gogo says, and wipes his fingers in his coat.

“That’s enough,” I say. “You hear me, Gogo. Enough of that.”

But Gogo breaks off another piece. “Who is my hungry saint?” he says. “Are you my hungry little saint?” Then he brings the demijohn to the old man’s lips but doesn’t touch them. He pours wine from a distance. The old man drinks; the wine runs red down the creases of his wrinkled neck.

“Look at yourself, Grandpa,” Gogo says at last, happy with himself. “Some saint you are,” and starts with his grunting laugh.

I don’t know what to make of this.

I touch the cloak. “God damn it, kopche , he’s soaking wet.”

“He’ll be all right.”

“The hell he will.”

“Well, change him up, then, wunderkind.”

And then it strikes me: this is exactly what I need to do. I peel back the edge of the cloak to unwrap the man. “Oh, Christ.”

“Sweet Jesus, cover him up. That is some pungent shit.”

I take a few more gulps and I can feel the contours of my esophagus and stomach, scorched, as the wine flows through. I lay the clothes from the bag out on the table — the underpants, trousers, socks, the knitted sweater.

I ask Gogo for his pocketknife. He watches me, smiling and drinking, as I cut the old man’s clothes. The first few years after we’d moved to Sofia, we had no money for gas to go back to our little town and visit Grandma regularly. We went to see her only twice a year. The second time was in the summer. We found her on the kitchen floor so stiff, Father had to cut her out of her dress and then out of her undergarments with my kindergarten Yakky the Duck scissors. That smell, that sight, stays with you, no phenomenal memory required.

“Help me carry him to the altar,” I say.

“To the what?” But Gogo helps me. “I never carried a lighter man,” he says once we lay the old man on the clean cloak. “And have you seen paler skin?”

“I wonder what he has,” I say. I shake the bread towel from all the crumbs and start to wipe the old man’s chest.

“My money is on cancer,” Gogo says. He picks up some church cloths from the altar — or rather, something that looks like a long, broad scarf — and he, too, starts to clean the man. The old man moans. I hope he’s thankful for our help.

“Why are you laughing?” Gogo says.

I shrug. “I’m not.”

“The hell you’re not.”

I point at the old man’s crotch.

“It’s a good-sized dick,” Gogo says. “Nothing funny about it.” He looks at me. “Like you can do better.”

The old man’s arms are nothing but skin on bone, and I hold them while Gogo struggles to put on the clean shirt. I’m afraid that if I stretched the arms farther back, they’d snap right out of the sockets. “Jesus Christ,” Gogo says. His face is all sweaty and red and he wipes it with the shirt. “I can’t even get one hand through the sleeve hole.”

After the shirt, we manage to put on the tight white drawers, like pants Napoleon’s soldiers would have worn. Then woolen pants, then the sweater. I drink more wine.

“I feel great,” I say. I step back to have a good look at the man, all nicely dressed, all clean, serene on the altar. I’m proud. I’m happy with myself. “God, am I hungry.”

I drink a little more for courage and zigzag to the altar. “Grandpa,” I say. “You feel better now? Cleaner?” I hold my face a fist away from his. Gogo leans in.

“I don’t think Gramps is breathing,” he says. He pinches the old man’s nose and holds it pinched.

“How do you know?”

“I’m pinching his nose.”

“Don’t pinch his nose.”

He lets go and we stand very still, waiting. “That doesn’t seem to help,” he says.

•

The draft is stronger where we sit, down on the floor, leaning against the iconostasis.

“I feel like shit,” I say.

Gogo breaks off a piece of bread and lays it in my hands. We eat, we drink.

“Do you feel better now?”

Of course I don’t. My throat hurts. My gums feel swollen. The golden candelabra is poking me in the ribs like a spear, but I can’t take it out; it’s stuck in my shirt and I give up pulling.

I ask Gogo if he thinks we killed the man.

“I’m pretty sure we did,” he says. He says if he was lying in his own filth, all skin and bone, he’d pray for death. “Maybe he prayed for us to appear and set him free. You ever thought of that?”

I try to hold the altar, the dead old man, in sight, but both the altar and the man keep swirling in an ugly, quiet dance. The wine keeps rhythm, sloshing in the demijohn.

“If you had to guess,” I say, “what did he do for a living? You think he loved his kids? You think he lived an all right life?”

“You think I care?” Gogo says. “You think it matters? Look at him, kopche , the man is dead.” He bumps his head against the wooden wall. “This is too much for me. My hands are literally covered in shit: Smell them,” he says, and shoves his hands in my face.

“When did I say they weren’t?” I push him off.

“Christ, Rado,” he goes, “what’s the point? The moment I bring home my sweet, sexy TV, Brother will pawn it off again. I’d rather be broke and sleep on the floor.” And Gogo chucks away the cup, cross, tray he’s tucked in his jacket. One by one they hit something in the gloom, bounce back and roll with a metallic bark.

“I would totally ditch Brother here,” Gogo says. “I’d bring him here and leave him behind.” He says some other things, but I don’t listen.

“You know, Gogo,” I say, “this is so silly. Hear me out. The other day we were at this retiree club, my father and I … hey, wake up, listen … I’m writing this formula on the black board, r equals p over one plus epsilon times cosine theta —you know, the orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus? So I’m writing it all down just the way I’ve memorized it, just the way I’d seen it written in that old textbook Father gave me a long time back. I’m proving a point. Some old woman had randomly flashed the page before my eyes twenty minutes earlier and I’m proving my gift now. ‘What does the epsilon stand for?’ the woman asks me when I’m finished. No one’s ever asked me that. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘if you are really amazing, you ought to know.’ Well, fuck it. See, that explanation was on the next page of the book and that page was missing, torn. Turns out the woman was a physics teacher. She goes, ‘And what about that Newton’s third law you talked about? Do you understand,’ she says, ‘what that law is really telling us about the world?’ ”