Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

“Ali Ibrahim was sent to a small village in Anatolia where he served in the house of a linen merchant. An old man, who’d once fought the Siamese to the east. There Ali Ibrahim was taught the foreign tongue and the new faith. There he was taught to hate all he once loved.

“Ali Ibrahim’s mind is haunted, Elli. The invisible pull of his wicked heart is so strong that none of those he has slain has ever managed to escape it. Fettered to his body, the dead follow wherever he goes. A never-ending chain of wretched souls trails behind him, and no one else can hear their cries. Behind his back, his soldiers call him ‘Deli Ali,’ which in Turkish means Crazy Ali, but no one dares say that up front, for they also know him to be Merciless Ali, who never hesitates to take a head. Some say that during a conversion in his native village, among the non-believers who refused to recognize the greatness of Allah, Ali killed his own sister and his own mother.”

Then I’m quiet for a long time. Elli is asleep on my chest and I have to get up, to turn the light off. But I don’t want to get up. I lie and I think of my own mother, of how I haven’t seen her in seven years; of my sister, who had a baby last spring. I listen to Elli’s even breathing and wish for things that can’t be.

IV.

Next morning I ask John Martin if he’d let us borrow his truck to go to the zoo.

“Over my cold, stiff body,” he says, rocking in the recliner, and behind him Elli mouths off his words exactly as he says them.

“But I’ll take you fishing,” he says, “if you pay for gas.”

I look at Elli and she shrugs a Why not? So I tell John to put it on my tab and hurry off to get us ready before he’s had the time for some clever reply. Half an hour later we’re loading his boat behind the truck. Another half hour after that, I’m dipping my toes in the lake.

“Get your toes out,” John Martin scolds me, “you’re slowing us down.”

In the back of the boat he holds the handle-looking thing on the motor and steers us forward. I know nothing of fishing or boats. What I do know is that this boat looks about as sturdy as the ones the Russians must have used when crossing the Danube to attack the Turks in 1878. But this boat is John’s jewel, dearer to him than his truck, even. He has named it Sarah , and that there says it all.

My own daughter sits at the nose, or the stern, or however you call it, and points at distant spots across the lake where she thinks fish will be hiding. But John Martin never listens. He always takes us to the same place on the far end of the horseshoe, by an abandoned, half-collapsed wooden dock where the water, only three feet shallow, is filthy with osier, lilies and grass, where there is a permanent fog of mosquitoes and large, black turtles snap on the oars, where dipping your toes is completely out of the question.

“Jesus Christ, John,” I tell him when I realize that’s where we’re heading again. I smear mosquito repellent on Elli’s neck, legs, arms. “Take us someplace else, will you? There, by that concrete tower, or by that island. Anywhere else but the dock.”

“The dock,” John Martin says, and once more Elli mouths off his words as he speaks them, “is where the fish are situated. The dock is where I’ve been going for fifteen years and where I’ll be going for another fifteen if the good Lord wills it. That’s where Sarah took that ten-pounder, and if it was good enough for Sarah, by golly …”

But I’m not listening anymore. The sun is climbing steadily toward mid-sky, and there is no shade for us to hide in, no good trees along the banks. Here and there across the lake I can see other boats, all larger than ours, with faster motors. I can see expensive rods bending, and waves splashing, and men pulling out fish as large as calves, or at least baby lambs.

The first few times I took Elli to fish with John Martin — the first few times when we gutted the bass and cleaned them, when Elli peed behind a bush, once upon a time — those first few times were fun and I enjoyed them. I could lie in the boat and look at my daughter and feel empty inside, free of regret, of envy. It didn’t matter that I saw her only on the weekends. It didn’t matter that my wife lived with another man now, and even that man himself didn’t matter. So what if I didn’t own a car? So what if I lived at John Martin’s, drank his beer and ate his macaroni? At least I had Elli.

But now our weekends have become repetitions of those first weekends of fun. Only, we’ve murdered the fun. Sure, Elli seems to enjoy them, but I no longer lie in the boat free of hatred. Oh, how I hate now. Nothing seems enough.

“Don’t you just hate them, John Martin?” I ask him. “Don’t you just envy the shit out of these people in their fancy boats?”

“No, sir, I sure don’t,” he tells me, and keeps steering.

“Well, I hate them,” I say. “I feel this thing called yad when I watch them. So much yad , my chest gets constricted. Elli?” I say and gently nudge her on the back with my toe. “Do you feel yad when you watch them?”

“Not really,” she says.

“You should, honey. You ought to. Yad , John Martin,” I explain, “is what lines the insides of every Bulgarian soul. It’s yad that propels us, like a motor, onward. Yad is like envy, but it’s not simply that. It’s like spite, rage, anger, but more elegant, more complicated. It’s like pity for someone, regret for something you did or did not do, for a chance you missed, for an opportunity you squandered. All those feelings in one beautiful word. Yad . Can you say it?”

But he doesn’t say it. “Let me give you,” he says instead, “one word of my own. Elli, Princess, cover your ears.”

Then Elli turns around and looks at him. “Bullshit,” she says. “Is that the word, John Martin?”

•

We take six bass. Or rather, Elli catches two and the rest are John Martin’s. I drink my Champagne of Beers at the back, while John teaches my daughter flippin’ and pitchin’ and other neat angler tricks. It’s a bit creepy how he pets her head, how he calls her “Princess” over and over, but the lesson is worth it and I decide not to intervene.

Finally, Elli says she can’t hold it much longer. And would I please quit asking her to go over the side: girls don’t go over sides like that. John Martin orders me to retrieve the cinder block we use for an anchor and I pull on the rope, but the anchor is stuck in the mud below us. With a sigh John takes the rope and pulls, as if he can do better, and his face turns tomato. “God damn it,” he says.

“That’s right,” I say. “Every time.”

We pull on the rope for a while, left, right, in circles. Elli has clenched her legs crossed and, eyes shut, she’s biting her lip. John Martin curses and I curse a little as expected.

“Come on, now,” he says, and twines the rope around his hand. “Come on.”

We pull for fifteen minutes, give or take.

“I can’t hold it much longer!” Elli cries. So John Martin jumps out on one side of the boat and I jump on the other. The water is up to my chest, waist for him, and it gets up to our chins when we kneel and grope in the warm mud for the anchor. We puff, we work the mud, we kick on the block until it finally loosens. With a yelp John Martin lifts the block up and lays it enormous in the boat, a chunk of lake, and weeds, and slimy brown leaves.

Then, after seven pulls of the cord, the motor is roaring and we fly, four miles an hour, toward the closest bank. Elli hops out of the boat and splashes to seek cover behind some mangy bush.

“Jesus Christ, that was close,” John Martin says, and searches the cooler for full cans. He begins to roll one against his cheeks to cool them. I look at his neck.