There was something exhilarating about teasing Grandpa. On the one hand, I was ashamed, but on the other … Sometimes, of course, I went too far and he tried to smack me with his cane. “Why aren’t you five again?” he’d say. “I’d make your ears like a donkey’s.”
It was not the teasing but rather the sight of me hunched over an abridged edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that finally drove Grandpa back to his native village. When my father asked for an explanation, he could not let himself admit the real reason. “I’m tired of looking at walls,” he said instead. “I’m tired of watching the sparrows shit. I need my Balkan slopes, my river. I need to tidy your mother’s grave.” We said nothing on parting. He shook my hand.
Without Grandpa to distract me, I focused on my studies. It had become popular at that time for kids to take the SAT and try their luck abroad. Early in the spring of 1999 I got admitted to the University of Arkansas, and my scores were good enough to earn me a full scholarship, room and board, even a plane ticket.
My parents drove me to Grandpa’s village house so I could share the news with him in person. They did not believe that phones could handle important news.
“America,” Grandpa said when I told him. I could see the word dislodge itself from his acid stomach, stick in his throat and be expelled at last onto the courtyard tiles. He watched me and pulled on his mustache.
“My grandson, a capitalist,” he said. “After all I’ve been through.”
•
What Grandpa had been through was basically this:
The year was 1944. Grandpa was in his mid-twenties. His face was tough but fair. His nose was sharp. His dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. He was poor. “I,” he often told me, “would eat bread with crabapples for breakfast. Bread with crabapples for lunch. And crabapples for dinner, because by dinnertime, the bread would be gone.”
That’s why when the Communists came to his village to steal food, Grandpa joined them. They had all run to the woods where they dug out underground bunkers, and lived in them for weeks on end—day and night, down there in the dugouts. Outside, the Fascists sniffed for them, trying to hunt them down with their Alsatians, with their guns and bombs and missiles. “If you think a grave is too narrow,” Grandpa told me on one occasion, “make yourself a dugout. No, no, make yourself a dugout and get fifteen people to join you in it for a week. And get a couple pregnant women, too. And a hungry goat. Then go around telling everybody a grave is the narrowest thing on earth.”
“Old man, I never said a grave was the narrowest thing.”
“But you were thinking it.”
So finally Grandpa got too hungry to stay in the dugout and decided to strap on a shotgun and go down to the village for food. When he arrived, he found everything changed. A red flag was flapping from the church tower. The church had been shut down and turned into a meeting hall. There had been an uprising, the peasants told him, a revolution that overthrew the old regime. While Grandpa was hiding in the dugout, communism sprouted fragrant blooms. All people now walked free, and their dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. Grandpa fell to his knees and wept and kissed the soil of the motherland. Immediately, he was assimilated by the Party. Immediately, as a heroic partisan who’d suffered in a dugout, he was given a high position in the Fatherland Front. Immediately, he climbed further up the ladder and moved to the city, where he became something-something of the something-something department. He got an apartment, married Grandma; a year later my father was born.
•
I arrived in Arkansas on August 11, 1999. At the airport I was picked up by two young men and a girl, all in suits. They were from some sort of an organization that cared a whole lot for international students.
“Welcome to America,” they said in one warm, friendly voice, and their honest faces beamed. In the car they gave me a Bible.
“Do you know what this is?” the girl bellowed slowly.
“No,” I said. She seemed genuinely pleased.
“These are the deeds of our Savior. The word of our Lord.”
“Oh, Lenin’s collected works,” I said. “Which volume?”
•
My first week in America unfolded under the banner of International Orientation. I made acquaintances from countries smaller than my own. I shook hands with black people. Those of us for whom English was a second language were instructed what to expect when it was fixin’ to rain. What “yonder” meant, and how it was “a bummer” to be there “yonder” with no umbrella and it “fixin’ to rain.”
Every English word I knew, I had once written at least ten times in notebooks Grandpa brought from the Fatherland Front. Each page in these notebooks was a cliff face against which I shouted. The words flew back at me, smashed into the rock again, rushed back. By the end of high school I had filled with echoes so many notebooks they towered on each side of my desk.
But now in America, I was exposed to words I didn’t know. And sometimes words I knew on their own made no sense collected together. What was a hotpocket? I wondered. Why was my roommate so excited to see two girls across the hallway making out? What were they making out? I felt estranged, often confused, until gradually, with time, the world around me seeped in through my eyes, ears, tongue. At last the words rose liberated. I was ecstatic, lexicon drunk. I talked so much my roommate eventually quit spending time in our room and returned only after I’d gone to bed. I cornered random professors during their office hours and asked them questions that required long-winded answers. I spoke with strangers on the street, knowing I was being a creep. Such knowledge couldn’t stop me. My ears rang, my tongue swelled up. I went on for months, until one day I understood that nothing I said mattered to those around me. No one knew where I was from, or cared to know. I had nothing to say to this world.
I barricaded myself in the dorm—a narrow cell-like room cluttered with my roommate’s microwave, refrigerator, computer, speakers and subwoofer, TV, Nintendo. I watched Married with Children and Howard Stern. I spoke with my parents, rarely, briefly, because the calling rates were high. I cradled the receiver, fondled the thin umbilical cord of the phone that stretched ten thousand miles across the sea. I listened to my mother and felt almost connected. But when the line was cut, I was alone.
•
When he was thirty and holding the position something-of-the-something, Grandpa met the woman of his heart. It was the classic Communist love story: They met at an evening gathering of the Party. Grandma came in late, wet from the rain, took the only free seat, which was next to Grandpa, and fell asleep on his shoulder. He disapproved of her lack of interest in Party matters, and right there on the spot he fell in love with her scent, with her breath on his neck. After she woke up, they talked about pure ideals and the bright future, about the capitalist evil of the West, about the nurturing embrace of the Soviet Union and, most important, about Lenin. Grandpa found out that they both shared the same passion for following his shining example, and so he took Grandma to the Civil Office where they got married.
Grandma died of breast cancer in 1989, only a month after communism was abolished in Bulgaria. I was eight and I remember it all very clearly. We buried her in the village. We put the open coffin in a cart and tied the cart to a tractor, and the tractor pulled the cart and the coffin and we walked behind it all. Grandpa sat by the coffin, and held Grandma’s dead hand. I don’t think it actually rained that day, but in my memories I see wind and clouds and rain; the quiet, cold rain that falls when you lose someone close to your heart. Grandpa shed no tears. He sat in the cart, the rain from my memory falling on him, on his bald head, on the coffin, on Grandma’s closed eyes; the music flowing around them—deep, sad music of the oboe, the trumpet, the drum. There is no priest at a Communist funeral. Grandpa read from a book, volume twelve of Lenin’s collected works. His words rose to the sky, and the rain knocked them down to the ground.
“I
t’s a good grave,” Grandpa was saying when it was all over. “It’s not as narrow as a dugout, which makes it good. Right? It’s not too narrow, right? She’ll be all right in it. Certainly, she’ll be all right.”
It was this funeral, with Grandpa’s words rising and falling broken in the mud, that I started to dream about during my sophomore year of college. I no longer went to class regularly because the professors’ words now tormented me like a rash, but I read a great deal in my room. I had chosen psychology as my major, mostly on a whim, so I devoured Freud and Jung in industrial quantities. “Their words are the yeast that brings my brain to life,” I’d tell Grandpa a few months later, and he would say, “You got that right. Your brain is dough. Or better yet—crabapple mash.”
I was fascinated to learn that our dreams reflected not only our personal unconscious but also the collective. My God, was there such a thing? A collective unconscious? If so, I wanted in. I longed to be a part of it; connected, to dream the dreams of other people, others to dream my dreams. I went to sleep hoping to dream vivid, transcendental symbols.
Today, I wrote in a little journal, I dreamed of Father on the sofa, peeling sunflower seeds, his socks pulled off halfway like donkey ears.
I dreamed of Mother spooning yogurt from a jar.
I dreamed of Grandpa, waiting in the hallway to trip me up with his cane.
It was after this particular dream and after two years without Grandpa’s voice that I finally picked up the phone, on the eve of Fourth of July, and dialed.
I tried to imagine him, out in the yard, straining his eyes to read in the dusk. He would hear the ringing phone, and slowly, with pain, make his way into the house. I tried to see his face, so old and terrifying that I graced it with an imaginary beard to hide its age. The beard must be white, I thought. No, yellow from nicotine. A lion’s mane, angry and wild, which had consumed the face. Two fiery eyes peered out from the mane, burning with Lenin’s words. Electrification plus Soviet power equals Communism. Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever. I waited, petrified, for his incinerating voice to turn me to ash, for his brimstone breath to scatter me like wind.
“Grandpa,” I said.
“Sinko.”
I shivered so bad the cord between us crackled. I was afraid he’d hung up already.
“Grandpa, are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“You’re there,” I said. I said, “Grandpa, there is so much water between us. We are so far apart.”
“We are,” he said. “But blood, I hope, is thicker than the ocean.”
•
After Grandma’s funeral, Grandpa had refused to leave the village. In one year he’d lost everything a man could lose: the woman of his heart, and the love of his life—the Party.
“There is no place for me in the city,” I remember him telling my Dad. “I have no desire to serve these traitors. Let capitalism corrupt them all, these bastards, these murderers of innocent women.”
Grandpa was convinced that it had been the fall of communism that had killed Grandma. “Her cancer was a consequence of the grave disappointments of her pure and idealistic heart,” Grandpa would explain. “She could not watch her dreams being trampled on so she did the only possible thing an honest woman could do—she died.”
Grandpa bought a village house so he could be close to Grandma, and every day at three o’clock in the afternoon he went to her grave, sat by the tombstone, opened volume twelve of Lenin’s collected works and read aloud. Summer or winter, he was there, reading. He never skipped a day, and it was there, at Grandma’s grave, that the idea hit him.
“Nothing is lost,” he told me and my parents on one Saturday visit. “Communism may be dead all over this country, but ideals never die. I will bring it all here, to the village. I will build it all from scratch.”
On October 25, 1993, the great October village revolution took place, quietly, underground, without much ado. At that time, everybody who was sixty or younger had already left the village to live in the city, and so those who remained were people pure and strong of heart, in whom the idea was still alive and whose dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. Officially, the village was still part of Bulgaria, and it had a mayor who answered to the national government and so on and so forth; but secretly, underground, it was the new Communist village party that decided its fate. The name of the village was changed from Valchidol to Leningrad. Grandpa was unanimously elected secretary general.
Every evening there was a Party meeting in the old village hall, where the seat next to Grandpa was always left vacant, and water was sprinkled from a hose outside on the windows to create the illusion of rain.
“Communism blossoms better with moisture,” Grandpa explained, when the other Party members questioned his decision; in fact, he was thinking of Grandma and the rain on their first meeting. And indeed, communism in Leningrad blossomed.
Grandpa and the villagers decided to salvage every Communist artifact remaining in Bulgaria and bring them all to Leningrad: to the living museum of the Communist doctrine. Monuments chiseled under the red ideal were being demolished all over the country. Statues, erected decades ago, proudly reminding, glorifying, promising, were now pulled down and melted for scrap. Poets once extolled now lay forgotten. Their paper bodies gathered dust. Their ink blood washed away by rainwater.
Once the two years of silence was broken by our call, Grandpa began to write me letters. I was amazed, but not surprised, to learn that, now back in Leningrad, he’d still not given up on his ideas. In one of his letters, Grandpa told me that the villagers had convinced a bunch of Gypsies to do the salvaging for them. “Comrade Hassan, his wife and their thirteen Gypsy children,” Grandpa wrote, “doubtlessly inspired by the bright Communist ideal, and only mildly stimulated by the money and the two pigs we gave them, have promised to supply our village with the best of the best ‘red’ artifacts that could be found across our pitiful country. Today the comrade Gypsies brought us their first gift: a monument of the Nameless Russian Soldier, liberator from the Turks, slightly deformed from the waist down, and with a missing shotgun, but otherwise in excellent condition. The monument now stands proud next to the statues of Alyosha, Seryoja and the Nameless Maiden of Minsk.”
•
I made a point of talking to Grandpa twice a month. At first we spoke of little things. He told me of rearranging his collection of Communist artifacts, of reading The Modern Woman at Grandma’s grave. For thirty years, he said, she had received this magazine once a month and he didn’t want to break the cycle.
“Although,” he told me once, “I’m slightly tired of weight loss diets and relationship advice. Three rules for dating, three steps to getting slim. Nowadays, Grandson, there are three easy steps for everything under the sun.”
I asked him if this meant he no longer read Lenin.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Listen,” he said, “I have been thinking. Why don’t I recommend a book for you?”
I begged him not to start again.
“I’ve failed you,” he said. “Sometimes I think you went away just to spite me.”
I told him that, contrary to what he thought, he was not the center of the world. I got along with my American friends handsomely, I felt at home.
“Bullshit,” he said. “You hate it there.”
My loneliness rose up in me like steam over a barren field. I choked with rage. Surely he had no way of knowing that these friends I spoke of did not exist? That I hadn’t left my room in days?
“You are a stubborn mule, Grandpa,” I declared. “Give up already. Burn your collection of artifacts, your books. The past is dead.”
“Ideals never die,” he said.
“But people do. Or what, you think you’ll live forever?”
I knew it was wrong of me to say such things, but I wanted to hurt him. And when he laughed, I knew I had.
“I think yo
u’re jealous,” he said. “As jealous as a one-legged maiden before the village dance. You can’t stand the thought that your grandpa is happy and you are not.”
“I can’t stand the thought that my grandpa is crazy. That he has filled his life with chaff.”
“A steady job? A loving wife? A son I managed to send to college? Is all this chaff to you?”
I must have kept silent for quite some time. At last he spoke. “My boy, do you remember the parades? I think about them often. You were so I little, I’d let you sit on my shoulders and we’d march together with the crowd. I’d buy you a red balloon, a paper flag. You’d chant for the Party and sing the songs. You knew them all by heart.”
“I remember,” I said. But it was not the parades I thought about.
•
When I was still a boy, I spent my summers at the village, with my grandparents. In the winter they lived in Sofia, two blocks away from our apartment; but when the weather warmed, they always packed and left.
At least once a summer, when the moon was full, Grandpa would take me crawfish hunting. We spent most of the day in the yard, reinforcing the bottoms of big bags with tape, patching the holes from previous hunts. Finally, when we were done, we sat on the porch and watched the sun dive behind the Balkan peaks. Grandpa lit a cigarette, took out his pocket knife and etched patterns along the bark of the chestnut sticks we had prepared for catching the crawfish. We waited for the moon to rise, and sometimes Grandma sat by us and sang, or Grandpa told stories of the days he had been out in the woods, hiding in the dugouts with his Communist comrades.
When the moon was finally up, shining brightly, Grandpa would get to his feet and stretch. “They are out on pasture,” he would say. “Let’s get them.”
Grandma made paté sandwiches for the road and wrapped them in paper napkins that were always difficult to peel off completely. She wished us luck, and we left the house and walked out of the village and then on the muddy path through the woods. Grandpa carried the bags and sticks, and I followed. The moon was bright above us, lighting our way; the wind soft on our faces. Somewhere close by the river was booming.
East of the West Page 6
