East of the West

by Miroslav Penkov

  I talked to her while she lit up outside and I also lit up when she offered. She had first come to the States four years ago, she said, to study art. She wanted to be an animator but was sick of Japan, of how you had to know people to get good jobs. There was a problem of course: the kind of animation she wanted to do was best done in Japan, not in the States. Now that she was finishing her degree, she had to decide …

  I started coughing. Distracted by her closeness, I had inhaled by mistake. I dropped the cigarette at my feet. She laughed. She bowed over and clapped a hand on her knee, that’s how hard she was laughing.

  “Have you never smoked before?”

  I shook my head.

  “Really? Never?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “Why did you do it, then?” she asked, though I’m sure she knew why. She kept laughing at me and I didn’t mind it one bit. I asked her to finish her story but no longer listened to the things she said. I was afraid that at the end she’d simply bid me farewell and walk away, that once her story ended she would dissolve like smoke. “You look awfully pale,” she said, and searched for a place to throw the stub away. “Tell me about yourself,” she asked. “What are you doing in the States?”

  So I told her. I was loading other people’s bags in the States. I was unloading other people’s bags. I lived in a small apartment with two other Bulgarians and was saving money to go to college. I had arrived in the U.S. five years before, winner of a green card.

  The day I won my green card it stormed in Sofia, ravaging wind, deluging summer rain. I had come back home from work, soaking wet, to find the thick envelope stuck in the mailbox like a heart too big for its chest. Dear winner, the letter began.

  I sprinted up eight flights of stairs to find my parents watching the rain out the living room window. My mother wept when I told them.

  “When did you do this?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I didn’t think I’d win the lottery.”

  “Now, let’s all calm down now,” Father said. “No need for tears. Have a seat. Let’s talk it over. What are your reasons? What are you missing here? Are you unhappy? You’re not hungry. You have a good room, a computer with Internet. You have a job. Let’s talk it over. What are your reasons here?”

  “I’m twenty-seven. I can’t still live with my parents. My job …”

  “You’re absolutely right,” my father agreed. He nodded and rubbed his chin. “We’ll get you your own place. One of my colleagues is leasing.”

  “Taté,” I said. “I don’t want you to get it for me. I want to try my own luck in America. Do you understand?”

  He said nothing. He put his arm around my mother and said nothing.

  •

  After we ate what our neighbors brought for breakfast, I decided to show the village to Yuki. We took turns with the camera. She posed by a house where I’d often played as a child. The house was in ruins now. There were many obituaries on the gates and Yuki asked me what these were. I told her that in Bulgaria when someone died the family made a nekrolog, a sheet with the deceased’s name and picture, a brief, sorrowful poem underneath. People pasted this necrology on their gates, on light poles, and all around their villages or towns so others who might have known the dead would learn the news.

  “We do something similar in Japan,” Yuki said, staring closely at the face of an old man, almost inkless from rain. “But no pictures. We post a notice on the entrance to the house of the dead. So and so died, the funeral will be at this time, this place. People often rob those houses,” she said, and took the camera from my hand. She made me pose under an old linden tree. “They lurk outside, wait for the procession to leave, then rob the house. When my uncle died my aunt asked their neighbor to stay in and guard while everyone was away for the service.”

  I made the typical peace sign Yuki made on every picture, to mock her. “What if the neighbor wanted to come to the funeral as well?”

  “No one wants to go to funerals,” Yuki said. We took more pictures. We followed the road down to the square. An old Lada loaded with Gypsies whizzed by us in a cloud of dust. They blew their horn. “Be very careful here,” I told Yuki. “If you hear a car coming, always step to the side. Always, do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “I didn’t know there were Gypsies in the village,” I said.

  “Gypsies? Were these Gypsies?” She grew excited. She had always wanted to see real Gypsies, beautiful dark-eyed enchantresses dancing barefooted around tall fires, and violin players whose fingers flew up and down the fingerboards so fast only a deal with the devil could explain their mad skill.

  “But that’s in the fairy tales, Yuki.”

  She was unbending. I had to, she said, at all cost, take her to see the Gypsies, let her photograph them. I had no intention of doing such a thing.

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe later.”

  It was a little after noon and people were coming home from their fields. Yuki greeted everyone with a smile and everyone smiled back at her and watched us long after we’d passed.

  “I don’t get it,” Yuki said. “Why am I so interesting to them?”

  We took pictures of the square, of the bridge and the river, barely a trickle underneath, then of the fountain with the five spouts—one for each partisan from our village who had been killed in 1944.

  “What happened in 1944?” Yuki asked me. “In Bulgaria I mean.”

  She stood by the fountain, whose pool was overflowing, its bottom clogged with rotten leaves. Water barely oozed out of two of the spouts that had been bashed in with something. Yuki made the peace sign as I took a picture.

  “In ‘44 the Communist partisans seized power,” I said. “But not without a fight. Many of them were killed.”

  “Why are these spouts bashed in?” Yuki asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “When communism fell, people got braver. I guess that’s how someone must have shown their dislike for the Party.”

  With two fingers Yuki held a ladle tethered to the fountain with a rusty chain. The ladle was green except for the rim where thirsty lips had kissed it for over sixty years: the metal there shone, as pure as the day it had been forged. Yuki brought the ladle to her nose, sniffed it and let it dangle on the chain.

  “They look like they were bashed in with a rock,” she said.

  I took the ladle and drank the cold mountain water. “Well,” I said, “how would you bash them, Yuki?”

  We bought groceries from the shop on the square; then, as we walked up the road, people called us over to their gates and gave us bags of tomatoes as gifts, an early greenhouse sort, slightly rosy, which though not as good as the summer tomatoes was still a million times sweeter than what we bought in the States. The neighbors gave us cheese and bread, a bottle of red wine. We ate a good lunch in our yard. We drank some of the wine.

  “I really like it here,” Yuki said.

  “Good,” I said. I hugged her and kissed the top of her head. She put her arms around my waist and we held each other in the yard. “Remember,” I said, “good things happen to good people. All right? Look at me,” I said, and she looked up. “All right?”

  •

  Yuki and I had gotten married quickly, cheaply, and without much fuss. That’s not to say we didn’t fantasize about a proper wedding. And then another in Tokyo. And a third in Sofia. But we had to hurry things up not just for the lack of money. After graduating from college, Yuki would lose her student visa. My green card would allow her to stay in Chicago without hiding.

  I called my parents to let them know we were about to get married. I told them who Yuki was, how good she was to me—for me—how much we loved each other.

  “I can’t believe you’re telling us now,” my father said.

  “I didn’t want to jinx it,” I told him, which was the truth. “You know my luck.”

  “Where is she from, again?” my mother asked, and I told her.

  “At least she is
n’t black,” my mother said.

  In the afternoon I took Yuki to the river. We waded in the water, which was still cold, then sat on the rocks and watched some village children splash in a shallow pool below us. There were a good twenty of them, and their bicycles, parked side by side up where the road was, shone with the sun. Another car whizzed madly by and blew its horn and down below the children yelled and waved as if the car could see them.

  “I’ll jump in with them,” I said.

  “No you won’t.”

  I took my shirt and pants off and walked down to the pool and jumped in. The water was cold and I screamed and up above Yuki laughed and made her beloved peace sign.

  “That’s some cold water,” I told the children.

  “No it’s not. Just keep moving,” they said. We splashed around. They climbed on my shoulders, muddy feet, and held me by the neck and hair and by my ears. “My ears!” I cried, and up above Yuki laughed again. I could see she was getting ready for a picture. She stood up on the cliff and leaned forward.

  “Stop!” I yelled. I rushed out of the pool and scrambled up the rocks.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

  “You scared me. Don’t lean forward like that.”

  “Psycho,” she said. She kissed me. I kissed her on the belly. We watched the footsteps I’d left on the rocks dry up, then I got dressed and we walked back to the house. I asked her if she wanted to see something historic. I led her to the barn and I shoveled very dry hay away from a corner. There was an old wooden gate under the hay, with big runny letters painted on the wood.

  “What does it say?” Yuki asked me.

  I knew the gate from my father because Grandpa never spoke of such things. On the morning of September 9, 1944, a bunch of beardless boys, fresh out of the woods after months of hiding in dugouts, knocked on my great-grandfather’s gate. They informed him that all his stock, fifty cows, one hundred sheep, and his land—three hundred decares—were now property of the Communist Party and would be added to a collective farm. It was the Communist Party, they said, that had taken over and now governed Bulgaria.

  My great-grandfather asked to be excused for a moment and returned with his shotgun. How things unfolded exactly I don’t know in detail, but he ended up shooting one of the boys dead. Three days later the comrades returned, summoned an improvised people’s court, declared my great-grandfather an enemy of the people and hanged him on the lower branch of the walnut tree. They made Grandpa, then in his twenties, watch and draw conclusions about his own future. The comrades wrote KULAK on the gates in big tarry letters so everyone who passed by would know our family was a class enemy.

  When I was twelve Father brought me to the barn and showed me the gates, which Grandpa had taken off the hinges and preserved hidden under the hay. I remember I didn’t feel anything special reading the letters, with the tar running at their base like green onions that had sprouted roots. But now, with Yuki by my side, I felt something I could not explain, something that, suddenly, I did not want to be passed on to her.

  “I don’t know what it says,” I told her.

  “You are a psycho,” she said.

  •

  I was all out of ideas for the rest of the afternoon, so Yuki asked if she could drive the Moskvich. I saw no reason against it. I took her photo by the car, then one of her inside as she waved out a window eternally doomed to open only halfway.

  “Maybe we could drive to the Gypsies,” she said.

  Instead, I told her to drive up the road, out of the village. She shifted the gears clumsily at first, the teeth grinding as she shifted, but she got into a rhythm soon.

  “This isn’t nearly as bad as I expected,” she said, and I told her the engine of the Moskvich was a copy of a BMW engine, so it was, in reality, a BMW we drove.

  “It feels more like the Flintstones’ car.”

  “The Flintstones? Really, Yuki? That’s your best joke?”

  The road wound around the mountain, with a thick pine forest on one side and down below us the gorge where the river flowed. When we passed by the children’s bicycles, Yuki blew the horn. We drove for about four kilometers and I told her to pull over where the road broadened, where a huge concrete pipe stuck out and, when it rained, dumped water from the hills down into the gorge.

  We leaned on the hood and watched the pine trees on all sides, the mountain hills on fire with the setting sun. I remembered how Grandma would take me mushroom hunting after every major rain, how once we filled two sacks so large we barely managed to haul them home, fueled, I suppose, only by the exhilarating prospects of all the jars we’d can for the winter. But at home we discovered the mushrooms had drowned in their own blue milk, poisonous doubles of edible mushrooms not even the neighbors’ goats would eat.

  I wanted to share this memory with Yuki, but I did not know the names of the edible mushrooms in English, nor of their poisonous doubles.

  “Why do we live in America?” I asked her instead. “Can you tell me that? If it’s for the money, we make no money. We have other places to go. We could move back here.”

  “I don’t know,” Yuki said. “I don’t see myself living here. There is nothing for me to do here.”

  “This is a good place to raise a child,” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  I looked at her. I said, “Don’t say such things unless you mean them.”

  “Let’s see how things go next month,” she said. “Let’s not talk about it now. Let’s not jinx it.” She popped a piece of nicotine gum and chewed it quietly. “It’s like I don’t really need this stuff anymore. I’m fine without it.”

  “Good things, Yuki,” I reminded her. We got in the car and she drove back to the village, the gears grating as she shifted.

  “Go neutral down the hill. It’s the Bulgarian way. Save gas.”

  She flicked the stick in neutral and we moved faster, without the rattle. I held her hand. I felt really good about our situation. “I feel good about our situation,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said, and turned to look at me.

  The boy, too, must have been riding his bike without looking. But Yuki saw him when we were still a good distance away. She jerked the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes. The tires locked and we slid with a screech, off the road and into the ditch. We hit a rock, but it wasn’t a bad hit. Yuki was okay, and I was okay. We looked at each other to make sure. She turned off the engine and we got out.

  The boy lay on one side of the road with his bicycle a few feet away in the grass. He was a tiny boy, dark-haired, dark-skinned. He couldn’t have been older than ten.

  “Oh, my God,” Yuki said, and started crying. But the boy sat up and rubbed his head.

  “I’m all right,” he said, and looked at me and then at Yuki. She kneeled down and kissed him on the cheeks, on the forehead, she smothered him with kisses.

  “Get away from him,” I said, “don’t touch him.”

  “You’re very pretty,” the boy told her. He rubbed his head.

  I told him to stay as he was, then I told Yuki to go back to the car. She had stopped kissing him but refused to go. She no longer cried. She watched the boy.

  “Are you really all right?” I said.

  “Yes, baté, I’m fine.”

  “Did you hit your head?”

  “Maybe. But it doesn’t hurt.”

  “How are your arms? Anything broken?”

  “No,” the boy said. He shook his arms. He touched his legs to check them. He smiled at Yuki.

  “We need to take him to a hospital,” she said.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Assencho.”

  “We’ll take you to the hospital, Assencho. We’ll have a doctor look at your head.”

  The boy sprung up to his feet. He seemed really okay. He didn’t wobble or limp. We had not hit him. He had just fallen off his bike, an orange Balkanche, like the one I’d ridden as a kid. In the grass, the boy tried to readjust th
e chain, which had come off the cog.

  “Let me help you,” I said. I kneeled beside him and turned the bike on its side. I held one end of the chain and the boy the other and we stretched it and fought to line it up against the gear. By the time we were done, my fingers and the boy’s were black with grease.

  “Come on,” I said, and wiped my fingers in the grass. “We’ll put the bike in the trunk and take you home.”

  The boy pulled up his bike. “If Father learns I was here, he’ll tan my hide. I’m supposed to be helping Brother with the wood. But if I come early to the river, other kids won’t let me swim with them. I wait for all the kids to leave. Then I have the pool to myself. And it’s warmer in the evening. The water’s warmer.”

  The boy chattered excitedly like this for a while.

  “What’s he saying?” Yuki said. She was sitting in the middle of the road, so I told her to get up and go back to our car. The boy mounted his bike.

  “Listen, Assencho,” I said.

  “Goodbye, baté,” the boy said. He waved at Yuki, rang the bell on his bike and set off down the road.

  We sat in the grass and said nothing for a long time. I tried to wipe my fingers. Yuki took out some gum. “But we didn’t hit him?” she asked, and I told her that no, we hadn’t hit him.

  “How do you know? How can you be sure?”

  “We were going too fast. It would be different if we’d hit him.”

  “We should have taken him to the hospital. Why did you let him go?”

  “He jumped on his bike and was gone. You saw that. He was all right. He didn’t wobble.”

  “No, he didn’t wobble,” she said. She wiped her cheeks. I got in the car and started it and the car started without a problem. I pulled out of the ditch. The fender was bent where we’d hit the rock and some of the paint had come off.

  “Was the boy a Gypsy?” Yuki said as I drove down the mountain, but I’m not really sure that’s what she said.