Miroslav Penkov - East of the West

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“Nine months after they lie by the fire, the prettiest woman in the world bears an equally beautiful girl. Ali shepherds the fifty sheep along the lush pastures. He no longer carries his yataghan, which now lies locked in a wooden chest. My great-grandmother takes care of the baby, makes the cheese and yogurt, and it seems like the sun will never set upon their home. But this story starts with blood, and so with blood it must end.”

X.

John Martin takes us on a shortcut, a thin dirt road south through an endless field. Elli is no longer crying, but she refuses to speak. We drive past someone’s ranch, separated with a barbed wire from the rest of the world. There are cows on the other side — big brown cows, and calves with long wet coats — all huddled together next to a large hole in the ground filled with bubbling, green water. As we drive by, they stomp their hoofs, stretch their necks restlessly, and I can see their blue tongues tasting air, as if the ozone were salt for the licking.

Behind us, far in the distance, the rain is thickness and the sky flashes with lightning. But the sky ahead is just as green, just as flashing. We drive for six miles before the truck overheats and John Martin pulls over in the grass.

“Why don’t you turn the heat on?” I ask him, and he nods ahead.

“No sense of rushing that way.”

I let out a sigh that is perhaps more tortured than it should be. “Why did I listen to you?” I say. I know exactly what will follow, but right now I don’t care. “We should’ve stayed in the house.”

John Martin nods. He rubs his chin and bites his lip.

“What a terrible idea this was. Why did I listen to you?”

And then he opens his door. “I’ve had enough,” he says. “Princess,” he says, and tips the rim of an invisible hat. He steps out into the rain and gently closes the door. Then he walks away back down the road, blurring almost immediately. I call after him. I honk the horn. “John Martin!” Elli shouts, but he keeps on walking, hands in his pockets, an apparition in the storm.

I let out a curse, step over Elli and get the truck running and turned around. I roll my window down and, once leveled with John, I tell him to knock it off. I do apologize. “Witness the tears of repentance,” I say, and wipe the rain on my face with my sleeve. Behind me Elli adds to the pleading until at last John Martin is back in the truck, soaked and dripping.

“What the hell was I thinking?” he says. “It’s crazy out there.”

I know I shouldn’t. But still I say, “We should have stayed.”

And then softly, without animosity, John asks me what in the Lord’s holy name is wrong with me. At least, I’d like to think that’s how he asks it. And suddenly I feel obligated to answer, not for his sake, but for mine.

“Quite honestly, John,” I say, “I really hate it here. I think that’s what it boils down to. We should have never come. The States, I mean — not just Texas, not just this road.” I pet Elli’s shoulder, but she shrugs my hand off. “There are no tornadoes in Bulgaria, and that’s a fact.” And then I tell them how I cannot look at people who smile, at young, beautiful couples, at fathers with daughters, and old men with their old wives, healthy together, full of some life that I have been robbed of. It’s a ridiculous feeling, this yad . I know that much. “It’s so bad,” I say, “that sometimes, when I’ve had a few, I actually regret losing my appendix. I miss it. I feel incomplete without it.”

“You are a sad human being, Michael,” John Martin says, and leans forward to kiss the cross.

“Also,” I say. “My name is Mihail. Not Michael.”

“Listen, Michael,” John goes on. “No one made you leave the house this morning. And no one made you leave your country. Those were your choices and you should be man enough to stand behind them. You make a decision, you accept the consequences. You move on. This, Princess,” he says, “is life. You don’t win by tripping yourself and rolling in the grass. You stay on your feet and keep on marching. The way you live, Michael, this is your future,” he says, and pokes a thumb at his chest. “At least you still have your daughter. Why not enjoy that? And let her be. Enough pretending. You’re not in Communist Russia. Maybe ten years from now she’ll still come to visit. Maybe she won’t come to visit …” But John Martin doesn’t finish.

We know then that something has happened. The wind has come to a complete stop. It’s no longer raining, and the air gets, suddenly, so charged that every sound, no matter how tiny, travels without the slightest distortion.

It sounds to me like my mother is calling us, this very moment, me and my sister, home for dinner.

“Hush … listen,” John Martin says and the three of us lean forward against the windshield as if that would make us hear better.

A terrible gust smacks the side of the truck, like another truck, but much larger. Elli yelps and throws herself in my arms. The wind slaps us, left, right, left, and we can do nothing but sit there and take the beating. The whole truck is shaking, rattling, and any minute now it seems the glass will shatter. I cover Elli’s face in my shirt and hold her very tightly against my chest. For some reason John Martin is punching the truck horn. He unloads, but the horn is barely audible against the slapping of the wind.

Then we see it — to the right of us, half a mile away: a white funnel stretched between sky and field, perfectly peaceful in its rage. Elli peeks up from my grip and now we are glued to that window and we are all children now, stunned, Elli’s breath on my neck and even John Martin’s breath, sharp and warm, sour with the smell of stale beer. It could kill us of course, this funnel of air, which is ridiculous to even consider. It could pass through us and wipe us clean from the earth, like we never existed, truck and all. Yet, we feel no fear — I can sense that — we feel only awe, and that is all there is to feel, no regret, no envy, no yad .

Then it’s gone, decomposed into thinner wind, into sky and field. It begins to rain again, large drops that splash against the windshield and then bounce off it, because they’ve hardened in midair and turned to hail. Chunks the size of walnuts. They slam against the truck top, crack the windshield up in the corner.

And with the ice chunks, a black crow slams on the hood, and then another, and we watch, frozen, as a flock of dead crows rain around us, their bodies splashing mud and water on the road.

This is the craziest thing we have seen, there is no doubt about that. But like before, we aren’t scared — not even Elli, who’s climbed on the dashboard and her face, flattened against the glass that divides them, is just inches away from the crow on the hood.

When the hail lets up, I step out into the rain, and Elli follows and then John Martin. We poke the crows with our feet, their necks at awful angles, their wings broken like the spines of little umbrellas. We keep moving, quiet with each other. I kick a crow lightly, like a football, and the crow, neck droopy, suddenly flaps its wings, three-four mighty flaps in the mud. I pounce back, trip on my own foot, and land flat on my ass.

Elli, of course, starts screaming. But soon, strangely, her screaming turns to laughter. John Martin, too, is laughing beside me, his big belly shaking. So, just to amuse them I run down the road, and kick my own heel. I land in the mud again and sit there for a while with the rain pounding, with my daughter laughing, with my hands up at the sky, waiting for something. Maybe a whistle.

I know that Elli wants to call her mother and tell her all about the rain and the tornado. Thank God there’s no reception. But what about my mother? There are no tornadoes in Bulgaria, and that’s a fact, so surely she’ll fail to understand me. But I can try to make her feel at least. How cold the wind was, how shiny the feathers of the crows. It’s true, she hasn’t seen the Texas sky, but I have seen it. It’s true her hair was never soaked with Texas rain, but mine is dripping rivers. She doesn’t need her eyes to see my world. Neither do I to see the things she sees. My blood runs in her veins and hers in mine. Blood will make us see.