Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

In the shower, Kemal brought the three-legged chair for her mother to sit on. She could not stand to see her mother naked — how thin her arms were, her legs, how swollen her kneecaps, how her bald skull glistened, and the hole in her belly where the pouch connected.

“It’s not that bad, really,” her mother told her. “I’m doing much better.”

Kemal could no longer stand to see her own skull in the mirror. So she let her hair grow longer — thick and prickly at first, like pig bristle, then much softer. She did not like the way her hair tickled her neck, cheeks, eyelids, but she liked to run her fingers through the locks and twirl them. Her mother had given her an old comb, and for an hour each morning Kemal combed at the threshold.

“Let me touch your hair,” her mother asked sometimes, but never dared raise her hand to touch it. She’d only smooth a crease on the blanket. “Beautiful hair, Kemal. Down to my waist. Do you remember?”

Sometimes Kemal took her bagpipe above the village to play with the echo. Once, she saw cars on the road below her, bumper to bumper, with mattresses, chairs, wooden cribs roped to their tops — blue, green, yellow, red cars, blood flowing away from the mountain. She’d heard men talking of fleeing to Turkey, so she tried to imagine herself in a red car, and the car speeding, and only the road before them, clean, smooth, endless. Her father was driving, her mother beside him, and in the back Kemal played the one song she loved most.

Down the slope she watched people from the upper hamlets haul their households on their backs like camels. Men and women and children loaded. She watched a woman trip and all the things tied to her back snap loose and roll down the slope with her body. Pans and pots and spoons and ladles and metal plates jumping wildly and catching the sun like gold coins. So Kemal struck her song with the bagpipe: A little pebble rolled down the mountain, gathered its brothers. Down in the valley Stoyan was herding a hundred white sheep. “Don’t roll, little pebble,” Stoyan begged it. “Don’t gather your brothers. I’ll give you my two sons, little pebble, just spare my white sheep.”

15.

One night Kemal’s mother called her over. “Listen, Kemal, I’ll be facing the Merciful soon, so do me a favor. Bring me a bagpipe. I want to blow into it.” When Kemal brought her own bagpipe, her mother cradled the bag in her arms like a baby and touched her lips to the blow pipe. A frail breath escaped her and the bag expanded, just slightly. “Have I told you, Kemal, how I met your father? I was a young girl then, sixteen, but my father had already promised me in marriage. I was to marry a neighbor, twice my age, but a rich man — he owned five fields and had traveled to Mecca. Well, one summer evening I go to the fountains — there were fountains, Kemal, outside my village where the water was softer — and I begin to fill the coppers. I hear footsteps behind me, and when I turn around I see your father. His shirt unbuttoned, his hair disheveled and his face sweaty and covered with sawdust. In his arms — two bagpipes. ‘I’m a bagpipe maker,’ he says. ‘Blow up one bagpipe and I’ll blow up the other. I want to hear,’ he says, ‘how they sound together.’ So I blow up one bagpipe and he blows up the other. In two breaths — that’s how quickly he did it. ‘Have you seen,’ he says, ‘a man blow up a bagpipe faster?’ ‘My husband,’ I tell him, ‘needs only a single breath to do it.’ ‘I’ll be your husband,’ he says, and sets the bagpipes to screaming. He holds one under each arm, squeezes and dances. And I can’t stop laughing. But I did stop when I saw, running toward us, my brothers, back from the tobacco. They’d seen your father courting me, and they didn’t need to see more. They gave him a good thrashing. Split the bagpipes, tore his girdle belt. That night, a pebble knocks on our window pane. ‘I’m stealing you,’ your father says when I meet him under the shed, ‘and tomorrow we’re getting married.’ Zeynep, Zeynep, I told myself, you’re a promised bride and your father will kill you. But if you live, your life will be a song with this man, a merry man, a bagpipe maker.”

Then in one swing her mother threw the bag down on the floor. “Take me to his workshop, Kemal,” she said. “In fifteen years he never let me set my foot there.”

And Kemal took her.

“So many skins,” her mother said, “so many chanters. One hundred bagpipes, your father told me before they took him.” Then she looked at Kemal and her eyes misted just enough. “Do you think that maybe—”

In the morning, Kemal moved her mother’s bed to the workshop. And she started making bagpipes. But she butchered the wood parts, ripped holes too large in the goat skins. None of the bags she’d crafted could make music. What they made was screeching, hoarse and ugly.

16.

Days on end Kemal worked, and because the silence scared them, they left the old radio playing. They listened to the news from foreign places, to a voice reading the Danube levels. Povishenie edinatsa , the voice read in Russian. Onze centimeters , in French. Kemal had never seen the Danube, never would see it, but she wondered how big of a river it was and what it meant for its waters to be up by eleven. Was this a good thing or a bad thing? To whom did it matter?

At night, they listened to a program called Night Horizon . People could phone that program and talk on air about the things that hurt them. One engineer from Plovdiv called every night to say he could not sleep. “Dear Party,” he always began his confessions, “I haven’t slept in fifteen years.” He kept a close count—“and three months, and four months, and ten days, nine hours, twenty-one, no, twenty-two minutes.” An old man from Pleven recited children’s poetry to his daughter. After each poem he begged her to phone him in the morning. His daughter never phoned him in the morning and so he kept reciting. But there was a woman from Vidin who Kemal and her mother liked to listen to above all. That woman read letters she’d written to herself, mostly, but sometimes also to other people. I am outraged, comrades , the woman read from one letter, because there were green peppers on sale at the farmer’s market today and no one told me. All my neighbors bought green peppers. Stuffed jars for the winter. I can still smell the peppers roasting and no one told me .

Kemal’s mother laughed at that one. “Peppers in November,” she said, and asked Kemal to throw more wood in the fire, to keep it burning a little longer. By the stove, Kemal kept waiting for the woman to mention the Danube. Could the woman see it outside her window, Kemal wondered, the way they could see the peaks of Rhodopa? And what did Kemal’s father see out his window? She hoped he had one. She hoped they let him listen to the Night Horizon .

“I want to call that program,” Kemal said, “and play Father my bagpipes. I want him to tell me how to make them better. I need a man’s name, Mother, don’t I, to make bagpipes?”

“My dear Kemal,” said her mother, “I had forgotten how pretty your voice was.”

17.

So, like the pepper woman, Kemal began to write letters. She wrote in copying pencil and taped up notes all over the village, mostly outside the village hall, where people could see them. “Dear Party, a Turk cannot become Bulgarian. Give us back our old names so we can eat figs and go to the Jannah.”

But nothing happened. So one day she wrote a new note and nailed it to the well bucket, down on the square of a Christian village. Dear Party, a large amount of poison has been dumped into the well. Do NOT drink water and give us back our old names .