Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

“And then, when my great-grandmother is about to speak again, a shadow emerges from the dark. A woman in a black dress wearing a black apron and a black cloth on her hair walks toward them and sits by the fire. Two dark holes gape in her face. She has no lips and no nose. The apparition loosens her hair and combs it with a wooden comb. From underneath the fall of tresses, she seems to look at my great-grandmother and then at Ali.

“ ‘Sunshine,’ she cries out, ‘why did you do it?’

“Ali grabs a burning brand from the fire and tosses it at the apparition. The twig blazes through the air, falls in the grass and slowly sinks in darkness. The apparition is gone, and where she was sitting there now blossoms a tiny snowdrop.

“ ‘They follow wherever I go,’ Ali tells my great-grandmother. ‘All those I have killed. They are chained to me.’

“ ‘And the one we saw now? Whose shadow was she?’ ”

VI.

The rain is no longer so bad, but the wind has kicked up into a storm. I move Elli to the side and tuck her in. She stirs in her sleep but doesn’t wake. I kiss her smooth forehead. I listen to the gusts slam sheets of rain against the glass, and to the AC unit oscillating just outside my window. A car whizzes by in the dark and its tires howl as they push water away from the road.

I wouldn’t mind if like in some cheap movie with a twist John Martin turns out to be a figment of my imagination. If the truck is all mine and I drive it alone, a maniac talking to himself, up and down the dirt roads of Texas; if somewhere along those roads, from grief and envy, I lose my mind. I wouldn’t mind some help from ghosts and shadows is all, I suppose. Like in the fairy tales I read to Elli.

And I wouldn’t mind if we were on the road right now, just me and her, in John Martin’s truck. Heading to the ocean, or to Mexico, even. We’ll make it across the border somehow, down in El Paso. We’ll buy tickets to one of those enormous cruise ships and sail across the Atlantic.

When we first moved to the U.S. our idea was to save up some money, buy our own place and later, when we received citizenship, bring our parents over to the better life — Diet Coke and fried okra, and five-minute commercial breaks on TV every ten minutes. They would be retired by then and would quietly take care of Elli when both Maya and I went to work. They would teach her proper Bulgarian, how to read and write. They would keep all the roots from withering. But it was too expensive to even maintain a phone and so we wrote letters. It took the letters two weeks to arrive from Bulgaria, and from the States — if the envelopes were too bulgy, if they looked like there could be dollars stuffed inside — the letters never arrived. So we wrote shorter notes. And those notes thinned in meaning. Yes, a letter from your sister is always something you hold dear, but they told us nothing of substance, these notes, only the big facts that can never paint a living picture. What do I care that the family vacationed on the sea? That the other day, while buying lettuce, my mother met an old friend who said hi? That my niece was born? I’m here now, so far away I can’t really know how warm the sea was, whether my mother bought the lettuce at a good price, whether it snowed on the day my niece took her first breath. I don’t know who held the umbrella over my sister when she carried the baby to the car. I know it wasn’t me, and sometimes that’s all I have to know.

This is a natural occurrence, Maya’s cousin, the one who lived in the Bronx apartment below us, once said. Do yourself a favor, he said, and kill the things that pull you back. He hadn’t heard from his brothers in three years and look at him: he was a perfectly happy human being. Fewer stones to carry, so to speak. Onward and upward. Never look back. Nothing good, he told me, ever came from looking behind you. You either turned to a pillar of salt or lost your beloved into Hades. He, too, was a schoolteacher, the poor guy, and now a fine cabdriver in New York.

I lie in bed and watch the wind whose howls are so strong now they turn to shapes, and I can’t hear Elli’s breathing over the beating of their wings. Then my thoughts get mixed up a little. I’m on the street in Sofia buying sunflower seeds from an old man with no teeth because I want to feed the pigeons, a thick, black mass on the square around us. But the old man won’t give me the seeds I’ve paid for. No, no, he tells me. You haven’t paid. He’s holding red balloons now and I snatch a bunch and he yells with a lisp Fffnimanie! Fffnimanie! Attention! And then I’m in a parade, with children marching and waving paper flags and a siren, a loud, ugly war siren cuts through the rain, because of Chernobyl, maybe, because they want us off the streets and it’s raining.

“Taté,” I hear and someone’s shaking my shoulder. I see Elli, but it’s John Martin who has me in his grip.

“Wake up, goddamn it,” he says, and Elli repeats it. “Tornado.”

VII.

“Sometimes when he was still young, Ali Ibrahim dreamed of his mother. He saw her sitting on a rock in the middle of the river, combing her long black hair. In the dream it is raining.

“ ‘Come, my sunshine,’ she calls to him, ‘come help me braid.’

“The river is low and he can walk to the rock in the middle, following a path of white stones. But the rain falls harder. The waters rise, the stream becomes turbulent and the path to his mother is closed for Ali. Soon the flow starts to drag dead bodies, and they all float with their backs facing the dark sky. His mother still sits on the rock and still she combs her hair. It’s raining blood now.

“ ‘Come, my sunshine,’ she calls again, ‘come help me braid.’ But her face is no longer there: the rain has washed it away.

“Every night that he dreamed this vision, Ali remembered less and less of his mother. Until one night there is no one on the rock, only the bodies floating in the stream, bodies whose faces he cannot see.”

VIII.

“We’re getting the hell out of here,” John Martin says. He slices a package of bologna, then a package of bread, and begins to fix sandwiches on the kitchen counter. Elli wraps the sandwiches in the stack of napkins we took from the Dairy Queen and I watch them work as a team for a while. The TV is booming one warning after the other, but I can’t get my eyes to focus. They caught me in the thickest of sleep, and now even that lobotomizing siren can’t seem to screw my head back in its place.

I finish a can of beer on the table, a few warm sips that now taste almost as bad as a Dr Pepper. “Listen,” I tell them. I nod at the TV. “It’s just a warning. Relax.”

“No way, man,” John Martin says, and wipes the knife in his jeans, then folds it. “I ain’t relaxing with this siren going. You can stay if you want, but I’m going.”

He blows up a Wal-Mart bag to make sure there are no large holes in it and lays the sandwiches inside. He fills up with tap water an empty sweet-tea jug and that, too, goes in a Wal-Mart bag. The prerecorded voice on TV tells us that a warning has been issued for northwestern Buddyville County, for Buddy-view County, for Buddysonville … and I can’t decide whether I should be hopeful or fearful to hear my wife’s new house mentioned. Relieved not to hear John’s house on the news, or thankful that I’ve heard it? Because right now, the way things have been going, some total destruction, some utter annihilation, might not be too bad for me.

The tornado, we hear, has touched ground two counties north from us and away from my wife’s. We’ll drive south, John tells us, five, ten miles, just out of town to a McDonald’s. He’ll buy us McGriddles, coffee, orange juice for the Princess. We’ll sit there and wait this all out in peace and quiet. Then we’ll come back here and clean the yard of branches and leaves. But for Christ’s sake, let’s get going.