Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

We play a quick game, which I win, ten goals to seven. Then, when it’s too dark for playing, I teach her how to dive for penalties, how to kick her own heel and roll to the ground with an agonizing yell.

“Always seek contact,” I say, “but if there is none, kick yourself to the ground. Make this a rule: you must dive for a penalty at least once every game.”

She listens and, like a great sport, runs, kicks her heel and rolls in the grass.

“It hurts,” she says and rubs her knee.

“What can you do?” I tell her. “Life.”

Then John Martin brings his beer down to the pitch. “I can’t understand your Bulgarian gibberish,” he says, “but goddamn it, Princess, is he teaching you to cheat?”

“No, John,” I say. “I’m teaching her to play the game.”

“Some game this is,” he says, and pokes the ball with the tip of his cowboy boot. “Come on, Princess, let’s play a real sport.”

“John Martin,” I say, “American football is not for girls.”

“My daughter loved it,” he says. “I threw the ball with my daughter every day, in this very yard, for nine years and she loved every minute of it. Come on, Princess. I’ll teach you to throw.”

He wobbles back to the house and reemerges a few minutes later with a half-deflated eggball in hand. I step to the side and open a beer while he positions Elli at the right spot, while he throws the ball so far away from her it’s embarrassing to watch.

“Just warming up the old joints,” he says, and sways his arms madly about, forgetting he’s holding a can. Beer splashes all over him. “Come on, Princess, throw it back,” he yelps, dripping, clapping his hands, stomping his boots. Elli giggles and looks at me for the green light.

I tap my nose with a finger a few times. “At his mug,” I clarify in Bulgarian.

“Quiet, Commie!” John Martin yells. “We’re playing ball now. Come on, Princess. Throw.”

With a light grip, just the way I’ve taught her, Elli raises the ball to her ear, shoulders parallel to John’s body, left foot forward. Then she extends her arm back gracefully, and with a swift half circle, rotating her shoulder for maximum velocity, chucks the ball straight into his face.

The ball knocks him flat on his ass.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. He sits panting and wipes his bloodied nose. He starts laughing. “Jesus Christ, that was a cannon. I did not see that coming.”

Elli runs to the house for napkins and I help John up and pass him my beer.

“I told you American football was not for girls,” I say, and he shakes his head.

“She’s good,” he says. “Jesus Christ.” Then he figures Elli was not the girl I meant.

•

After three boxes of macaroni and cheese for dinner, John Martin unfolds the flat earth of his Risk game and we battle each other for all the continents of the world. As always John Martin conquers Asia. He clusters the majority of his troops in Siam, now officially amended to Vietnam with a pen. Elli holds the Americas and I’m spreading the Great Bulgarian Empire.

“Watch out, John Martin,” I tell him. “The Great Bulgarian Empire is spreading.”

“Bring it on, Commie,” he says. He arranges some of his manned cannons in a row, like that would help him. I pet the musket of one of my soldiers. “Avtomat Kalashnikov,” I say, “Bulgarian-made.”

He pushes forward a soldier of his own. “Napalm, mother fucker. American as apple pie.” Then he looks at Elli and his big, square face is flaming red from swearing.

We have never finished a game. After an hour John Martin is too drunk to keep rolling the dice. He retires to his recliner and watches us for a while, every now and then, yelling, “Kick his Communist ass,” or “Atta girl.” Sometimes he takes the phone and cradles it in his lap. Sometimes he fondles it until he falls asleep.

“He wants to call his daughter, doesn’t he?” Elli asks, and sometimes I suppose that’s exactly what he wants to do. Either his daughter or Anna Maria, the Mexican widow. With John Martin there is no telling. We lay the board and all the tiny soldiers back in their box. Elli pulls the stinky boots off John Martin’s feet, and while I take them out to the porch she throws a blanket over him. Then she takes a shower and brushes her teeth.

In my room we read Bulgarian books, mostly fairy tales of samodivi in beautiful garments, of men with scales and dragon wings, of vampiri, karakonjuli, talasumi . But we’ve read those books so many times, there is no surprise in the stories, no heart left.

So sometimes Elli asks me to tell her a story. And I tell her. I make things up about the old khans, about the glorious battles. I teach her history as I remember it from school. Important dates, memorable moments: how they made the Cyrillic alphabet, how we defeated the knights and kept their emperor imprisoned in our castle until finally we decided to push him off the tower to die a deserved death.

“Have you seen this tower, taté?” she asks me, and I tell her, of course I have. All Bulgarians have, it’s there, part of the castle.

“When can I see it?”

And I don’t know what to tell her, because the way my wife is raising her, the way Buddy dictates things, I can never see them actually going back to Bulgaria, even as tourists. For Christ’s sake, they won’t let her speak her own language out of fear it’ll ruin her English. In their eyes, my daughter is capable of speaking a single language only.

Tonight Elli asks me for another tale. I change into my sleeping T-shirt and jump in bed, but she remembers something and takes a cell phone from her jeans on the chair. She hammers a quick text message, and twenty seconds later comes the reply. Sweet dreams, angel. XOXO .

“What the hell is XO ?” I say. “What the hell is this phone for?”

“To keep contact,” she says and slips the phone back in her jeans. “Hugs and kisses.”

“Remember,” I tell her as she gets back to bed. “Even if there is no contact …”

“Kick your heel, and fall for penalty. I remember.”

“Atta girl,” I say and we laugh. “What story do you want to hear?”

“Any story. Something nice. About our family. Back home.”

Back home. I kiss her on the forehead. “Okay,” I say. I take a deep breath while she lies on my chest and prepares to listen. “And so this story, this story, too, begins with blood,” I say. “And with blood it ends. Blood binds those in it and blood divides them. Many have told it before and many have sung about it, but I didn’t learn it from them. I was born and I knew it. It was in the earth and in the water, in the air and in the milk of my mother. But it was not in your mother’s milk and not in your air, so you must listen now as I tell you.”

I can feel her breath, tiny and warm against my neck. I rest a hand on her hair.

“See now,” I say, “how black smoke plasters the sky of Klisura. Feel the fires that burn the flimsy houses. Hear the children screaming and their mothers weeping. Ali Ibrahim is converting slaves to the true faith. ‘Who else will refuse to put a fez on his head?’ Ali says, and his deep voice cuts through the air like a damascene sword. He sits on his black stallion not far away from a chopping log, in a yard filled with soldiers and poor peasants. Dark blood has soaked into the log, and only five more heads must be cut for the blood to finally reach the feet of Ali Ibrahim’s horse.

“ ‘Whose head will roll next?’ Ali asks. Weeping rises above the crowd. A young girl steps forward. She moves slowly; she swims above the ground. Her hair is long, so long that it trails in the dirt behind her and winds out of the yard like a river. Snowdrops wreath her head, and a white gown envelops her in a ghostly cocoon. Her blue eyes cut through the darkness around Ali and search for his face.