East of the West

by Miroslav Penkov

  In the car I checked the backseat to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything.

  “Did we get everything?” I said. “All the bags? Your cigarettes?”

  “I don’t need cigarettes,” she said. “I threw them away.” She was chewing nicotine gum.

  I started the engine.

  “Wait,” she said. She turned around and rummaged through the luggage. She pulled things out and put them back again. At last she held out the bag of herbs the Gypsy woman had given us. She cradled it in her lap. “It’s all here,” she said, “now we can go.”

  CROSS THIEVES

  A girl with no breasts storms inside the café to tell us the government has fallen and there will be no school today. Someone throws a beer bottle at her so she will shut the door. It’s minus five outside but in the schoolyard café it’s just right. We’ve stayed up all night, drinking clouds and playing svarka. Very early on, Gogo managed to flap a thirty-three against this rich kid who bet his watch and pager on a pair of aces, so for the rest of the night we keep getting pages from the kid’s parents. Dechko, where are you? Dechko, come home!

  “You imagine my parents paging me?” Gogo asks me.

  “What’s so hard to imagine? You owning a pager or them calling you ‘dechko’?”

  It’s not that Gogo’s parents don’t give a shit about him. But then there’s his big brother who always keeps their hair on fire. As for my parents, let’s say I haven’t seen them in four days, blame Father for it and leave it at that.

  The girl shuts the door and goes to the bar to get a ViK. She is an all right girl, maybe too short in the legs. She downs her vodka and wipes her mouth with her sleeve. Then she drinks her kola in tiny sips.

  “Kopche, look at that dog,” Gogo says, and yells at her, “Woof-woof.” Right now that’s what we call each other. Kopche, which means button. Before that it was, What’s up, shnur. Cable. Before that, what’s up shprangel, which isn’t even a word. Why? I don’t know, it’s nonsense. We’ve renounced our names. No more Radoslav, no more Georgi. I was named after my Grandpa who was named after his, but so what?

  “Kopche, watch my chips,” I say, and leave the café to take a piss. Glass shatters behind me and Bay Petko, the owner, curses at whoever threw it. It’s a chilly, bitter morning and already the streets beyond the school fence are teeming with people, a dirty flood. I watch it whirl, a mishmash of faces, arms and legs, and the chants, loud and angry, blow fuses in my skull. Down with the Reds! Cherveni boklutsi. Communist trash!

  It’s January 1997 and once again the government has fallen. That’s hardly a surprise. The first time it fell I was seven. November 1989. It was a spectacular collapse—the end of communism. At home we were glued to the TV while in a droning voice some big-shot Party member declared that the head of the Party, Todor Zhivkov, was stepping down from power. Zhivkov himself sat left of the podium, his eyes fixed dully on something only he could see, unblinking, like a cow’s, his mouth half open and glistening with spit. “My God, these bastards have drugged him,” my father said, and bit into the dried tail of a tiny salted fish. “I thought he’d rule forever,” said my mother.

  “No, thank you very much,” Father said, and pointed the fish at me like a mummified finger. “Are you watching this, Rado? This is important. Make sure you remember this.” As if I ever forgot a thing.

  Then people choked the streets in mass protests and walls crumbled all over Eastern Europe. Bulgaria held its first democratic elections and since then the governments have dropped like rotten pears. 1990, 1992, 1994. Hyperinflation, devaluation. My father now makes 15,000 levs a month and a loaf of bread costs 600. And the zeros keep piling up.

  Sometimes it seems to me things can’t get worse than they already are. Surely we’ve sunk as deep as you can sink. Surely we should be pushing off the bottom, kicking, up and out of the swamp.

  Last week, Gogo says, his brother beat their mom. She wouldn’t tell him where she hid the money, so he splintered a chair and thrashed her with the leg. When their dad came home Gogo’s brother was in the corner, shaking and chewing on his fingers. Gogo’s father dragged him out on the street and found the dealer and bought him his dose. He bought him a clean syringe, then left him on a bench and went home to take care of his wife.

  Awful story, right? And what did Gogo do to help? A few days later he found the money his mother had buried in the ficus pot and blamed the theft on his brother, who, naturally, was in no shape to deny a thing. But, you’d say, that’s what friends are for, right? A few reproachful words, some sensible advice on my behalf and goodness will be restored once again. The money returned, we will be pushing off the muddy bottom, if only momentarily.

  We spent the money on two bottles of vodka, three loaves of bread, we played the lotto and gambled the rest on cards. Playing the lotto was my idea. “Sometimes, I have this feeling,” I told Gogo as I was scratching crosses inside the tiny number boxes on the ticket, “that things can’t get any worse than this. We’ll get a break, kopche. Just wait and see.”

  •

  So now I’m pissing on the school wall, with the protestors chanting beyond the fence, when the guard sees me. He’s just put a lock on the school to show it’s closed and runs toward me, grunting.

  “Chill there, Gramps,” I say. “Can’t you see I’m drawing a star?”

  I’ve been known to go out of my way on several occasions just to piss on the school wall. Once I took the trolley from the Palace of Culture all the way to school, holding it back so long my dick was on fire for an hour. My father said I had passed a grain and probably had stones in my kidneys. That I should drink more water.

  “I’ll cut your dick off, Rado!” the guard yells at me.

  “Want to bite it off?”

  He leans on his knees to catch some air. “The Amazing Rado,” he says, though I’ve told him a million times not to call me this. His breaths escape in sharp clouds against the cold like souls of words he is about to speak. “Can’t even piss a straight spurt, zigzagging drugged.”

  “I don’t do drugs, Gramps,” I tell him. “I drink Doctor’s vodka, the one that comes with vitamin C in it.”

  I zip up and he offers me a ciggy. We smoke as the morning mist unfolds around us, as kids arrive to find the school locked. Gramps is all right for an old guy. Used to be in the army, a UAZ driver, but during the hungry years they caught him stealing provisions from the tank brigade, beat him and threw him out on the street. He told me he had been stealing cans of buffalo meat for six months before they caught him. The cans were thirty years old but the meat, he said, was juicier than chicken. A thirty-year-old can, that’s twice my age.

  “Any new gigs this month?” Gramps says, and nudges me in the ribs. “Will the Amazing Rado grace us old farts at the retiree club with his gift again?”

  “Knock it off, Gramps, will you?”

  “Just making small talk, Rado,” he says. “Just being friendly.” He pulls a stone out of his pocket and lets me hold it. “You feel how much freedom is packed inside?” he asks.

  Then he tells me his nephew, a TIR driver who often travels to Germany on rounds, brought it the other day. “A piece of the wall,” he says. “Do you believe it? I’ll get at least ten thousand levs for this.”

  “No, Gramps,” I say, “I don’t. This here is slate. A metamorphic rock. The wall was made of concrete, like our apartment blocks. Haven’t you seen those pictures of Russian soldiers lining up the panels side by side?”

  “I have no time for pictures,” Gramps says and pockets the rock. “You’re a smart devil. But someone stupid might pay,” and leaning over he whispers in my ear, “Speaking of devils, do you have something to sell? A coin? A silver spoon?”

  I brush him off. “I heard the government has fallen.”

  That’s all it takes for Gramps to bite. He starts his rant about how much he hates the government, how one day he wants to sneak back into the barracks, steal a BTR—a tank, even—and drive into the parliament hea
d-on. “I think I’ll look good smashed in a tank,” he says. “A glorious, heroic death becomes me. Fuck it, Rado, let’s get a tank.” And then he pesters me to go with him to the protests. There will be one million people out on the streets today. All of Sofia. “I got no one else,” he says.

  “You’re an ill man, Gramps,” I say, and tell him how all politics is kitsch.

  “Your dick is kitsch,” he says.

  Back in the café I look for Gogo. But Gogo is gone and I lie in the corner, on a pile of jackets and school bags, and close my eyes for just a moment.

  •

  I am the smartest kid you’ll ever meet. So in this context, I suppose I am amazing. But I’m not really science-smart, or street-smart, even. It’s just that I never forget a thing. They wrote about me in the paper once. “WUNDERKIND: Phenomenal Memory Turns Kid into a Walking Encyclopedia.” I was six. The reporter came to our apartment in the small town where we lived before we moved to Sofia. He started off with questions right away.

  “How many meters in a mile? How many feet in a meter? My daughter was born on March 21, 1980. What day was that? What does traffic sign B1 signify? How many elements in the periodic table? Which element is number 32?”

  I didn’t like his questions. For one thing, I was sad he didn’t know what day his daughter was born. Rado is an alert little boy, the article read, interested in everything that is unified in a system. He was only two when he memorized all 110 traffic signs as well as the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Once he turned three, his father says, he was given a world atlas and he memorized all countries, all capitals, all flags. In front of this reporter Rado draws the flag of Cameroon with a pencil and then explains which stripe is green, which red, which yellow. The star in the middle, he explains, is also yellow. Then he draws a diagram of the human hand and labels each bone. To the question of what he wants to become when he grows up Rado answers: a cosmonaut, like Georgi Ivanov, the first Bulgarian in space. Soyuz 33 from Baikonur, April 10, 1979, at 17:34 … Little comrade, bright future awaits you …

  The following year my parents moved to Sofia in hopes of placing me in a school for gifted children. But I didn’t pass the entrance exam, and so they signed me up in the neighborhood school instead. Two months into first grade, our rent jumped so high we had to move to a cheaper neighborhood. I’ve changed schools eleven times because of high rent. Finally my father took me to the city council. “This boy,” he said, “has a phenomenal memory but no place to live.” He made me do a trick: I read from a book some clerk had left behind, Accounting Principles for Non-Accountants, and recited the page backward word by word. Then he showed everyone the newspaper clipping and everyone laughed. “If you had ten children,” an official told him, “maybe then we could give you a flat. But at this point it’s the Gypsies, with their countless offspring, that take precedence.”

  “Ten children like this one?” my father said outraged. “No, thank you very much.”

  We walked out, homeless still. About a week later a friend of my father’s took him to some apartment in the outskirts he’d noticed nobody lived in. And we moved in. Just like that, without permission. There are thirteen Gypsies below us in a two-bedroom. Great-grandparents and a girl at fourteen breast-feeding her second, but at least now we don’t have to move. Not until they catch us and kick us out.

  Little comrade, bright future awaits you … I’ve never had a teacher come to me and say this. But I had a teacher say to me once, “Big deal, Rado, you can calculate pi to fifty decimal places. We got calculators for that, and now,” he said, “we got the Internet.”

  •

  Someone kicks my boots. “Wake up, kopche.”

  “I’m awake.”

  I take Gogo’s hand and he helps me up. Every muscle hurts and I’m still a little drunk from the mint and mastic brandy. We smoke in the school yard and watch the streets boiling and the sky white above us, readying for snow.

  “Gramps told me a million people will be out today.”

  “I don’t give a shit about the people,” Gogo says. “Kopche, my brother is in some serious trouble. He’s fucked us all up. He pawned everything. My sweet Sony TV, the fridge, the oven. He pawned my fucking bed. I gotta sleep on the floor.”

  I laugh and then apologize. One thing I’ve learned from our politicians is you can say or do close to anything provided that you apologize afterward. Or beforehand, as is often the case.

  “I need cash quick, right now,” Gogo says. “The shithead at the pawnshop won’t give us the furniture back. Brother’s throwing a fit and we don’t have the money to buy his stuff. We’re keeping him chained to the radiator, which is stupid. He only needs to pull on the pipe once and then the whole place will be flooded.”

  “Let me stop you right there, kopche,” I say. “I’ve had enough of your brother. It’s too much.”

  “I’m serious. We need to help him. The other day,” he keeps going, “my mother dragged me to that church, Sveti Sedmochislenitsi. She brought bread and wine for the priest to bless. She paid him to sprinkle some of Brother’s shirts and pants with holy water. I bet she would have dragged Brother himself if she could. To get exorcised, you know, like in the movie. She bought candles for five thousand levs and left another five in a wooden box. She gave me a bunch of coins to place on the icons. She said, if the coin sticks to the glass, your prayer might come true. She didn’t even say will. She said might. She told me to pray for Brother and wish for good things.”

  “What did you wish for?”

  “Not to be in the fucking church.”

  He lights another cigarette off the one he’s just finished and looks at me, a mirror. His eyes are red from the smoke, his face yellow from the cold, lips chapped.

  Up the street, someone yells that all Communists are faggots.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I say, and Gogo says, “Okay, here it is. In that church, above the wooden throne, there is a cross. The cross is made of gold and you, kopche, will help me steal it.”

  •

  Gogo and I have turned stealing into a humanitarian mission of sorts. We steal magnanimously, with great unwillingness, with repulsion. We don’t do it for ourselves, of course, because that would be low. We steal for Gogo’s brother. We buy him heroin, we bail him out of jail, we purchase tickets for football games so Gogo’s brother, too, will feel like a normal person and have some healthy fun. Half of the time, it just so happens, we forget to pass the money on to him. For instance, we didn’t really bail him out of jail. We figured some discipline would do him good. How could we know the hooks in uniform would beat him so bad they’d break his nose?

  Gogo and I steal things and sell them, mostly to Gramps. We snuck into the biology classroom and took the skull our teacher used for an ashtray. Later Gramps claimed he resold it on the black market as an authentic skull from the 1944 Communist uprising. He was not impressed when I told him the skull had actually belonged to Toshko Afrikanski, a chimp at the Sofia Zoo. “That wouldn’t sell so well, now, would it?” he said. “Listen, Rado, a shoe, without the proper history to back it up, is nothing, less than shit. But say it’s the shoe that Khrushchev smashed against that table and then the price jumps to at least ten thousand. I’ve sold five of those, and two were sneakers. Even the shit, with proper history, becomes important.” And then he shoves stolen objects in my hands and asks me to endow them with history and meaning.

  Gogo and I have stolen flasks and pipettes from the chemistry classroom that later Gramps resold as Nazi flasks and pipettes brought to Bulgaria after the fall of Berlin (the reason for their smuggling into our country as mysterious as the acid that erased their swastika stamps). We’ve stolen coils of copper wire from the physics lab (a Soviet leftover from the ’68 Prague spring), a map of the Balkan Wars (vintage, first edition!), a globe (with the USSR still whole and strong). In Bulgaria today there is a black market for everything, it seems.

  But Gogo and I are no thieves. Appropriators, maybe. Myth-makers
. But thieves would be too low. You ought to draw the line some place, and drawing lines, I’ve come to realize, is just like offering apologies. Sometimes you are allowed to draw a line after the fact.

  •

  “Communist trash!” Gogo chants, and we flow with the torrential crowd. It’s exhilarating, like on the way to a good football match. Funny I should think of that, because some of the chants, it strikes me now, are really football chants. Only we’ve substituted the rival team’s name with that of the Party, the referee’s with the premier’s. It’s mostly young people around us. Right in front a little girl in a pink anorak is nagging her father. “I can’t breathe,” she whines. He picks her up on his shoulders and I watch her ponytail jerk up and down like a flag from the olden days of khans—a horse tail on a spear. “I can’t hear you,” her father says and the girl shouts, “Red trash! Red shit!” and everyone around her laughs. She basks in this attention. “Say ‘Red cunts!’ ” Gogo tells her, and she yells it, “Cherveni putki.” More people laugh. The wind bangs on the balconies above us, flaps frozen laundry on the lines, and then the girl complains she’s cold. Her father brings her down and I can hear her little voice cursing long after the torrent has taken them away.

  We are by the Levski memorial when Gogo tells me he has to eat, something, anything, or he’ll die. My stomach, too, is churning. I’m getting dizzy with the heat from all the bodies around us, so we elbow out.

  There is a bakery around the corner. The smell of bread scratches purple shavings across my eyes.

  “We’re closed,” the saleswoman tells us, and fastens her coat with safety pins. Behind her I can see whole tins of hot bread, steaming golden.

  “Gospozho, we need just a loaf,” I say. I’m hoping that gospozho—“missis”—will warm her Communist-despising heart. But secretly I wish she was our comrade—drugarka—so we might eat for free, the way we used to when we were kids, when bakeries belonged to the state and cashiers would give you bread and not care one bit about losing money.