East of the West

by Miroslav Penkov

  Once, in the winter, they stacked an armful of frozen branches away in the corner and left them there for a few days, in the warm hut. Then one morning Kemal saw that the branches had blossomed: thick white flowers that smelled of dog feces. “This is an omen,” her father told her, and she helped him set the stack on fire.

  3.

  Kemal’s father kept her head cleanly shaven, though Kemal did not like that. She did not like herself in the mirror. She liked her mother’s hair, the thick black tresses that fell like ropes from under the head scarf. But she was not allowed to touch those tresses nor was she allowed to braid them.

  “Enough with this nonsense,” her father had said once while under the awning Kemal had combed her mother’s hair as her mother spun yarn for booties. “The bagpipes are waiting.”

  The village children made fun of Kemal because her head was shiny like a lizard’s, because she smelled like a goat, and because her father was crazy. He must be, they told her, or why else would he give his daughter a boy’s name? And if Kemal was really a girl, how come she didn’t wear a shamiya? Didn’t she know that Allah hated women without head scarves? That He sent a plague of hungry maggots to hatch in their brains and eat their innards?

  “Nonsense,” her father said when Kemal asked him. “You are a bagpipe maker. To make bagpipes, you need a man’s name.” Then he took her to the mosque and when the hodja refused to let her in—when he cried, “You’re making Allah angry!”—her father laughed loudly and pushed her inward regardless. Kemal prayed with him, and later, in his workshop, her father taught her verses from the Qu’ran that she recited while she worked on the bagpipes, so the work would flow lighter, so their music would pour out sweeter.

  Kemal was six when her father made her her own bagpipe—small enough so she could put her arm around it, so she could squeeze it with her elbow. For months that’s all he taught her: how to keep a steady tone; no melody, just air gushing out in an even stream. At first Kemal could not do it. In bed, she held her pillow like a meh and squeezed it, not too harshly and not too lightly, until one day her father lay his dusty palm on her shaved head.

  “That’s it,” he told her. One day, he said, she could forget her own name, even, but she’d never forget how to squeeze the bagpipe. Then he covered the windows with old newspapers, picked up a kaba gayda himself and filled it up with air. “Don’t think,” he said, “just follow.”

  The shriek exploded—the songs too large for the small hut, the songs longing for sky and meadow. They thrashed, wrecked, shattered and then curled up in the corner, curs who’d recognized their master.

  “You are,” her father told her, “a conqueror of songs now.”

  And so they played together, days on end, long hours; they danced in circles around the lathe, with shadows of words on their faces, Kemal’s chest ablaze, her fingers enflamed like the roots of sick teeth. And they emerged of the hut reborn, to air fresh and sunsets so sharp, Kemal had to seek refuge in her father’s arms or else go blind completely.

  But he gave her no refuge. “Hugs are for girls,” he’d tell her.

  4.

  When Kemal was ten, her mother went away to the city. Before she left, she stopped by Kemal’s room and made her put aside the bagpipe. “I’m not feeling well,” her mother said, and rested a hand on her belly. “Give me a kiss so I’ll feel better.” Her face was yellow, and when Kemal kissed her, her sweat tasted of dogwood blossoms. “Do you feel better now?” Kemal asked her. “I feel better,” said her mother.

  For a whole week after that Kemal’s father stayed locked in his workshop. But the lathe didn’t turn, and the hammer lay quiet. He wouldn’t let Kemal in, no matter how much she begged. She boiled milk and hominy for dinner and every night she left a wooden bowl at the threshold. The hominy always turned chunky—her mother had never really taught her how to cook it properly—but still, in the mornings, she found the bowl empty, washed it and filled it up with breakfast. She fed the chickens, and though a couple died of something, she did well for the most part. She hoed the garden. She watched bats draw nets in the blue night and listened to the hodja from the minaret call everyone to prayer. She missed the sawdust and the cold of the chisels. And there was no one to talk to. So sometimes, when the silence got too thick, Kemal walked above the village, above the gorge and the river, and played her bagpipe. Her songs flowed screeching and smashed against the hilltops and bounced back muffled, as if there was another piper blowing in answer, as if it were her father playing back from the hilltops.

  On the second week Kemal’s father stepped out of the hut another man. He held her up and she tried to tear off his beard, to see if his real face was not hidden beneath it. He took her to the mosque to pray for her mother, but Kemal prayed for other things: she prayed back home he wouldn’t lock the workshop; she prayed he’d shave off his beard.

  5.

  On the first school day Kemal rose up before the cocks crowed. When she stepped out of the house, her father splashed water at her feet, for good luck. He said he wished her mother could see her. Kemal wore a white shirt and black trousers, but her shoes were her cousin’s. “Drag your feet a little,” her father told her, so she wouldn’t walk out of the shoes. In the school yard she was given a paper flag, white-green-red, and lined up with the other children. She chewed on the flag handle, which was like a stick for cotton candy, and so one of the teachers scorned her. Divak, the teacher called her, thinking Kemal was a boy, a savage. Kemal was this close to tears. But she remembered what her father said to people. “My daughter,” he told them, “does not know tears. Even when she was born, she didn’t cry.” So while the teacher wasn’t looking, Kemal bit off a chunk of the flag stick, chewed it and swallowed. The splinter was salty from all the hands that had touched it, but by the time they led her inside the classroom she had eaten half of the stick. By the time it was her turn to recite the poem, she was already chewing on the flag. All kids recited the same poem. A teacher had come to Kemal’s house a month before this to make sure she had a copy. A classic by Ivan Vazov. A3 the poem went. I am a little Bulgarian. I live in a free land. I cherish all things Bulgarian. I am the son of a heroic tribe. When Kemal said heroic tribe she coughed out a piece of the flag. Her spit had washed the dye away and the piece lay wet on the floor like a cat tongue. All the children started laughing. The teacher sent Kemal home for her father.

  “That poem you learned,” her father said on the way back from the headmaster’s office, “you must forget it. You’re not Bulgarian, no matter what people tell you. You were born a Turk and you will stand a Turk before the Almighty when He calls you. ‘Kemal,’ the Almighty will tell you, ‘recite me a poem.’ What will you tell Him then, Kemal, lest he throw you down in Jahannam to eat thorns from the thorn tree?”

  “What poem, Almighty?” Kemal answered, frightened to look up at her father. “I remember no poems.”

  6.

  Kemal’s mother, too, came home not her mother.

  When Kemal was still very little, her father had asked her to take an old shirt of his and stuff it with hay to make a scarecrow for the garden. And now, when she watched her mother stooped at the threshold, weightless, her hand on her belly, her skin the color of spoiled tobacco, cheekbones like sharp stones and face like a wolf’s under the head scarf, Kemal thought of that scarecrow, of how the scarecrow had needed more hay for the stuffing.

  From then on, Kemal rarely saw her mother. Her mother ate no breakfast and had no dinners and Kemal was not allowed to talk to her or hold her hand, even. Her mother’s room stayed locked at all times.

  When Kemal blew up her pipe, hoping they could play together, her father brushed her away and demanded silence. But there was no silence. Doors opening, closing, water running in the bathroom. And in her room Kemal’s mother weeping softly, and her father trying to soothe her, his voice calming to her, but to Kemal dreadful. Why wouldn’t he talk to Kemal this way? Why was he allowed to hold her mother’s hand, while Kemal herself
wasn’t? And even when her mother didn’t weep, her father’s voice kept Kemal awake.

  At night she held her bagpipe, face buried in the meh like in a bosom, and sucked the blow stick, and breathed that goat smell, and prayed Allah to make things quiet.

  Once, while her mother was taking a shower, Kemal snuck in her room and rummaged through a drawer of packaged syringes. The whole room smelled like camphor, like piss and shit, and the floor was covered with large sheets on plastic to preserve the rugs from staining. In the corner she found a box of nylon pouches, took one and tried to blow it up, to get it to make music.

  The door opened and her mother walked in wearing a bathrobe. Her head was bald, not smoothly shaven like Kemal’s, but in patches. Under the robe Kemal could see that her mother held a pouch like the one she was holding.

  “Where did your hair go?” Kemal asked her.

  “It’s not that bad, really,” her mother told her.

  They watched each other, silent, water dripping from under the robe and the drops drumming on the sheets on plastic.

  7.

  It was tobacco harvest, so out the window Kemal watched the road, dark now before sunrise, busy with carts and people. She could hear women singing, and their children fussing on their backs, sleepy in rucksacks. Oil lamps shone and torches burned, and as the carts rattled and as the people climbed the mountain they looked like a snake just hacked to pieces, one piece thrashing and chasing the other, no pieces connecting. But she would not pick tobacco.

  Her father had once more taken up making his bagpipes. “We need the money,” Kemal had heard him say to her mother. “If you need something,” he’d told her, “just blow in this chanter.” So in the workshop Kemal helped him fulfill an order: thirty bagpipes for three schools in the region. They worked in the mornings, yet their work did not flow well. Every so often her father stopped and scolded Kemal to be quiet. “Is that,” he’d say, “a chanter blowing?” At lunchtime he went to take care of her mother, while Kemal kept on working. Goatskins lay in piles around her and waited to be turned to mehs. Old, dry wood sat in the corners, plum, dogwood, and in boxes, for decoration, black buffalo horns, shiny in the noon sun. She felt good in the workshop. She even ate there, goat cheese and white bread, and drank well water from a sweaty jar, while sawdust spiraled and stuck to the jar walls.

  “There is one thing,” her father said once, “I’ve heard from the old masters. One hundred bagpipes, if played together over a sick man, chase death away.”

  One hundred bagpipes, Kemal wanted to tell him, was a lot of bagpipes. How would they find skins, all at once, for a hundred bagpipes?

  That night, in the yard, Kemal helped him dig up a cooking pot from under the pear tree, a pot stuffed with rolled bills. With the money, they’d buy more skins. The same week her father canceled the three school orders. But in his telegrams to the headmasters he did not speak of the advances he’d been given, nor of the raw skins he’d already purchased with Party funding.

  8.

  It was a week after the canceled orders that a militia sergeant stopped by the workshop. They sat him down under the trellised vine, and Kemal’s father sent her to draw a pail of well water. She poured a jar for the sergeant and one for her father, and watched her father lift his jar with trembling hands, and the sergeant drink in bird sips.

  “Good water, this,” the sergeant told her. “I was thirsty.”

  She kept her eyes on the gun in his holster and said nothing. Her father cleared his throat and asked her for more water.

  “There have been Party orders,” the sergeant started, “straight from the Politburo. Unfortunate business, but no way around it. I’ve been walking from door to door all morning, informing people. Now, if you ask me, it’s ugly business, but no one asks me. It’s Party orders, straight from the Politburo.” And he told them: All Turks, Pomaks and other Muslims would be given new, Bulgarian names. If you lived in Bulgaria, he said, then you had to have a Bulgarian name. If you didn’t like it, no one stopped you from leaving for Turkey. “Be at the square tomorrow. The buses will take you to town for your new passports.”

  “Nachalstvo, my wife is sick in bed and can’t ride buses.”

  “Nobody asks me,” the sergeant said, stood up and saluted.

  9.

  It rained while they waited for the bus to get them. There was no awning on the square and they did not own umbrellas, so Kemal’s father had brought goatskins. He held one with his hand shaking over her mother, but still the rain pounded. Kemal knew all eyes would be on them—look how pale Zeynep is, people would say of her mother, how the sickness has eaten her innards, how Allah has cursed her—so she hid far away under her goatskin, also watching. No wind blew, and still her mother clutched the edges of her head scarf tight in one hand. With the other she held her dress, the nylon pouch underneath it, Kemal imagined. She looked like a spotted goat, poor, sick Zeynep, steaming in the cold, her dress dry in spots and wet in others.

  When the bus arrived her father lowered the goatskin and all the rain the skin had collected splashed over her mother. There was laughter, so in the bus Kemal sat back, away from her parents. Everything smelled of wet head scarves, of wet mustaches, and the windows misted with people’s breathing. With her sleeve Kemal wiped a tiny pupil and watched the slopes run muddy rivers, until again the window misted. A few times the bus stopped to pick up more people, a few times for her mother to retch in the bushes. Kemal hid under the stinking goatskin and listened.

  “Last night I had a dream,” a man was saying. “I’m in line waiting for something. My mouth is cracked from thirst and my stomach is churning. The line is long I tell you, not a line but a rope of people. And all I can hear is crying to make your hair stand like budding tobacco. Only it’s not crying but a million stomachs churning, hungry from waiting. At last it’s my turn at the front, and there before me stands my grandfather—a giant, I tell you, with his mustaches waxed and shiny like oiled hoofs, twirled on the sides the size of ram horns. Behind Grandpa, wide as the world, shine the gates of heaven. I can see in his hand a tray of figs, so ripe their honey flows out of them in rivers, and in his other hand a tray of thorns, the bitter hell fruit. ‘What’s your name, boy?’ Grandpa asks me, and from his voice I go slack in the knees, and from the ripe figs my stomach churns harder. I tell him what my name is. ‘It’s Mehmed,’ I tell him, ‘so give me a fig, Grandpa. Let me pass through the good doors.’ ‘Mehmed, eh?’ the giant says. Right then his mustaches unwind, I tell you, and turn to hands, my mother’s hands, and hold a thorn ball to my dry lips. “That’s a thorn ball, Grandpa,” I cry, and the giant starts laughing.

  “Well, change its name, then, traitor. Call it a fig and feast on it in the Jahannam.”

  At this, the women in the bus commenced weeping. But the men, who this rambling had amused more than frightened, clapped their hands in roaring laughter. “Don’t listen to this drunkard,” an old grandfather told Kemal. He must have seen her shiver under the goatskin. Her lips were chapped with thirst and her stomach was churning. Then the old man twisted his mustache, leaned in and asked her, “What’s your name, boy?” and around her the men once more burst laughing.

  10.

  In the militia department the line went up for three stories. Kemal was forced to wait beside her mother. It was dim in the hallway and Kemal could see no colors, no sharp edges, and so her mother seemed almost peaceful for the first time in a whole year. She wanted to hold her hand then, and tell her not to grip the scarf so hard, not to mind a head without hair. Instead, she held a notebook someone gave her, and in the notebook, pages and pages of first names. Proper. Bulgarian. Aleksandra, Anelia, Anna, Borislava, Boryana, Vanya, Vesselina, Vyara.

  It was three hours before she stood at the front of the line.

  “Whatever happens in there,” her father said, “you must forget it.” Then Kemal stepped in a room, with a desk, with a man behind it writing names in a book, with a dead ficus in the corner, with a portrait
of Todor Zhivkov askew on the wall, with a floor muddy from the boots of other people.

  “What name did you choose?” the man asked her, licked his fingers and turned a page, not looking. She told him she already had a name. That no one could force her. No Party, no militia.

  “There are four hundred people waiting behind you,” the man said, finally looking.

  So she said, “Vyara,” and the man wrote that in the big book.

  On the drive home, she kept repeating that new name, watching her face in the window—and beyond the window, the mountain, her head too in a head scarf, her face veiled in cloth of rain fog. It wasn’t a bad name, the new one, she thought, and kept repeating it. Then she remembered how her father had pulled the goatskin, and how the water had soaked her mother. She started laughing. And laughing she walked to their seat and sat between them.

  She had expected to see her father outraged, angry. Instead, quiet, he stared out the window. A different man already, Kemal thought, and put one hand on his knee, and one on her mother’s. “Nice to meet you,” she told them. “Who are you now?”

  11.

  It wasn’t only the living.

  They were making bagpipes when a neighbor told them.

  “Shame on you, Rouffat, for spreading cheap lies,” Kemal’s father said, but all the same, still holding an awl, he ran out the village. Kemal ran in his footsteps.