Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

“What name did you choose?” the man asked her, licked his fingers and turned a page, not looking. She told him she already had a name. That no one could force her. No Party, no militia.

“There are four hundred people waiting behind you,” the man said, finally looking.

So she said, “Vyara,” and the man wrote that in the big book.

On the drive home, she kept repeating that new name, watching her face in the window — and beyond the window, the mountain, her head too in a head scarf, her face veiled in cloth of rain fog. It wasn’t a bad name, the new one, she thought, and kept repeating it. Then she remembered how her father had pulled the goatskin, and how the water had soaked her mother. She started laughing. And laughing she walked to their seat and sat between them.

She had expected to see her father outraged, angry. Instead, quiet, he stared out the window. A different man already, Kemal thought, and put one hand on his knee, and one on her mother’s. “Nice to meet you,” she told them. “Who are you now?”

11.

It wasn’t only the living.

They were making bagpipes when a neighbor told them.

“Shame on you, Rouffat, for spreading cheap lies,” Kemal’s father said, but all the same, still holding an awl, he ran out the village. Kemal ran in his footsteps.

Every stone on every grave had been plastered over. They had chiseled new names on some stones and left others empty. Kemal’s grandfather had been given a new name. Her grandmother had been left nameless. Her father kneeled beside another, smaller headstone and ran his fingers across the fresh plaster. More and more people gathered, and up the row Kemal saw a man with a mattock beat the stone of his father. The man broke the stone to pieces and started digging.

Her father stabbed the stone before him with the chisel until the plaster crumbled. And once he licked his fingers and polished each letter, it was Kemal’s old name she saw in the tombstone. Her father polished the years. But this grave was not her grave, and she figured the boy who lay in it had never lived to be half her age, even.

Up the row the man with the mattock, now shirtless, his hands sticky with mud to the elbows, pulled out bones from the ground and lay them one by one in the shirt beside him.

12.

They worked on the bagpipes. Day and night without rest. When Kemal’s fingers bled, her father no longer kissed them. “My fingers, too, are bleeding,” he’d tell her. He started drinking, despite the Qu’ran and his own judgment. Sometimes, tired, Kemal pierced a hole too broad in the chanter, butchered a reed, snapped a mouthpiece.

“It’s that new name they gave you that makes you clumsy,” her father would say, flaming. “To make bagpipes you need a man’s name.” At first it was a quick blow behind the neck he dealt her, but soon his hand loosened further. No day rolled by without a beating.

The money they’d dug up was not enough for a hundred skins, so one night her father took her up to the goat pens to steal kid goats.

There was no moon when they walked out of the village. Hot wind blew in their faces, a gust from the White Sea, and Kemal’s lips cracked the more she licked them. So she kept licking, the salt and seaweed, so clean after the stench of her mother. They climbed a hill and crossed a meadow. The wind turned musky. In the distance they could see a scatter of sparks from a fire, tall and bursting with pinewood. Around that fire, Kemal knew, the shepherds lay too drunk to notice them coming. The dogs started, but when the wind threw the familiar smells at their muzzles, the dogs fell once again silent. This was the pen Kemal’s father came to when he bought meh skins. These were the dogs Kemal played with, the dogs she rode like mules, the dogs that had once licked her body clean when, as a baby, her father had bathed her in a trough of goat milk by this same fire.

At the pen hedge Kemal clamped the knife in her teeth, and hoisted herself over. She stood silent amidst the herd, sleeping goats dreamily munching, flickering ears. She could see the fire over the hedge and hear the shepherds snoring, the dogs whimpering, lazy, the wind gusting muffled between the twined hedgerows. In the dark her father was looking for kid goats. Only kid goats could turn meh s for a bagpipe. An older goat, ready for mating, reeked so bad, not even rose oil could cure it.

Kemal waded through the darkness on all fours, still biting the knife, her spit drooling. She came to a kid goat and like her father had taught her, rolled it flat on its back, sat on its hind legs, clenched the front in her fist. The goat did not scream even when she cut a hole in its belly. She breathed the stench in. The goat flapped its ears. Kemal buried her hand deep inside it and the wet heat stunned her fingers the way snail horns are stunned when you touch them. She felt her way around the stomach, a meh bloated with half-grazed grass instead of air. Then she caught the goat’s heart, midway in its beating. The goat kicked lightly, its neck stretching when she clamped its muzzle.

In the dark, she could hear her father dragging his belly across the short grass, stopping goat hearts. His nose whistling, stuffed from hay and flower, his breaths deep and even, regular knocking. She could not see him nor did she need to. She could not imagine that this same hand could hit her. In the dark, he was the way Kemal would always remember.

From that night on, she began to sleep in the workshop on the piles of stolen goatskins and in her dreams she saw hubs, reeds, chanters, mehs , like hearts beating in her clenched fists. And in her dream, it was her mother’s heart she was clenching, and so she clenched tighter.

13.

They were up to seventy bagpipes when the militia car came back to the workshop. Three men and the sergeant Kemal had treated with well water. “Now listen up, comrade,” the sergeant told her father. “The shepherds called from the goat pens to say some goats were stolen. So we followed the wool thread, if you permit the expression, and guess where that thread led us? Show us, kindly, the receipts for these skins you’ve purchased.”

“I’ve lost them,” Kemal’s father answered.

“And your passport?”

“I might have burned it.”

“Losho, drugaryu,” the sergeant told him. “That’s too bad, comrade.” He walked between the boxes and kicked them over gently, and Kemal watched the reeds and chanters spill out on the wood floor. He leaned down a little to face her better, then licked his thumb and wiped the dried blood from her split lip. “Why is your lip split?” he asked her, then took her hands and examined her fingers. “And why are your fingers bleeding? Is Father trying to make a quick buck?” The sergeant kept pacing and counting the bagpipes. Then he suggested Father come back to the station to have some coffee — some Turkish delight, even — and talk things over. He handed a pair of handcuffs to Kemal’s father and asked, kindly, for him to snap them on his own wrists.

14.

From then on, it was Kemal who took care of her mother. When the dark fell, she jumped over the fence to their neighbors and squeezed what little milk they’d left in their goats — half a jar, a whole jar sometimes. She felt no remorse for stealing. No neighbor had come to ask how Kemal managed, now that her father was taken. How her mother was feeling. So she cooked lumpy hominy or popara , and though her mother refused to eat, Kemal forced her — twenty spoonfuls at dinner and ten at lunchtime.

They kept waiting for the militia car to bring back Kemal’s father.

“Is that,” her mother often said, “an engine I hear?”