East of the West

by Miroslav Penkov

“We’re getting the hell out of here,” John Martin says. He slices a package of bologna, then a package of bread, and begins to fix sandwiches on the kitchen counter. Elli wraps the sandwiches in the stack of napkins we took from the Dairy Queen and I watch them work as a team for a while. The TV is booming one warning after the other, but I can’t get my eyes to focus. They caught me in the thickest of sleep, and now even that lobotomizing siren can’t seem to screw my head back in its place.

  I finish a can of beer on the table, a few warm sips that now taste almost as bad as a Dr Pepper. “Listen,” I tell them. I nod at the TV. “It’s just a warning. Relax.”

  “No way, man,” John Martin says, and wipes the knife in his jeans, then folds it. “I ain’t relaxing with this siren going. You can stay if you want, but I’m going.”

  He blows up a Wal-Mart bag to make sure there are no large holes in it and lays the sandwiches inside. He fills up with tap water an empty sweet-tea jug and that, too, goes in a Wal-Mart bag. The prerecorded voice on TV tells us that a warning has been issued for northwestern Buddyville County, for Buddy-view County, for Buddysonville … and I can’t decide whether I should be hopeful or fearful to hear my wife’s new house mentioned. Relieved not to hear John’s house on the news, or thankful that I’ve heard it? Because right now, the way things have been going, some total destruction, some utter annihilation, might not be too bad for me.

  The tornado, we hear, has touched ground two counties north from us and away from my wife’s. We’ll drive south, John tells us, five, ten miles, just out of town to a McDonald’s. He’ll buy us McGriddles, coffee, orange juice for the Princess. We’ll sit there and wait this all out in peace and quiet. Then we’ll come back here and clean the yard of branches and leaves. But for Christ’s sake, let’s get going.

  We grab Elli’s bag, the way my wife packed it, and as for me—I have nothing worth taking that you can put in a bag.

  It’s beginning to dawn. The sky is strangely green this early in the morning and the wind has stopped almost completely. The air smells bad, like a stinkbug on a raspberry bush, I suppose from the ozone. Far away we can see lighting and feel the roar of thunder, muffled at times and louder at others with the distant wind changing direction. We stand on the front porch while John Martin, the two bags in hand, runs to the truck to get it ready. It’s then that Elli’s cell phone starts ringing in my pocket.

  I’ve already answered it before she can ask how I have it.

  “Elli, honey, are you okay? How’s the weather?”

  “Turbo sunshine,” I say in an authentic Bulgarian peasant dialect. We run through the yard and John Martin pushes the door open. Elli hops in the middle and I follow.

  “Michael,” my wife says so loudly even John Martin flinches, “what’s going on? Are you down in the shelter?”

  “We don’t have a shelter,” I tell her. “Listen. We’re fine. Don’t worry about us.”

  “Get to the shelter,” she says, and her voice breaks up with static and an ugly accent. “Michael,” she says, and I’m thinking, seven years in the States and already calling her husband by a name that is not his. And then it strikes me: I am not her husband—and this thought seems so new at first it’s like someone else’s.

  “You’re breaking up,” I say.

  “Michael,” she says, “is that a truck engine? Are you driving?”

  “We have to go down to the shelter. Here’s Elli.” But before I pass the phone my thumb ends the call.

  Elli shouts to her mother, into the dead receiver. “We need to dial again,” she says. “I want to talk to Mommy.”

  I hide the phone in my pocket and tell her there is no reception. I help her buckle up and hug her tightly. “But I’m here. I’m right here, Elli.”

  “I want to talk to Mommy,” she says. Then, like that, she starts crying. All in English, too. “I wanna go to Mommy. Take me to Mommy.”

  “Hush, hush,” I say. I try to kiss her on the forehead, but she pushes me away. So I say, “God damn it, John Martin, drive the fucking truck already,” and Elli begins to wail louder. I start with that tale I’ve been telling her, but she won’t listen. Not even when John Martin begs her. On she cries, a siren of our own in the car. It’s like this that we drive, the green sky thickening greener above us, a blinding thing. It’s raining again.

  “Don’t look back,” I tell John Martin when he steals a peek at his house in the rearview mirror. I am speaking, of course, of pillars of salt.

  IX.

  “They arrive at the mountain path a day later when the sun is high above the horizon. The trail is narrow, with steep slopes on both sides; if you roll a stone over the edge, it will crumble to sand before it has reached the bottom. One wrong step and both the horse and its rider fall in the abyss. Ali Ibrahim leads. My great-grandmother follows.

  “ ‘I’m exhausted,’ she says and stops her horse. ‘When I appear before the sultan, I must be at my best.’

  “Ali dismounts his horse and, while she hides in the shadow of hers, sharpens his yataghan.

  “ ‘The sun is too strong,’ my great-grandmother says, ‘and my skin is too fair. Give me the feredje so I can veil my face.’ Ali sighs deeply, puts the yataghan back in the sheath and takes the black kerchief out of his saddlebag. He hands the feredje to my great-grandmother, but she drops it, and the precious silk kerchief flies off the trail and down the steep slope, the wind tossing it toward the bottom of the abyss. Ali knows he can’t bring my great-grandmother to the sultan without the special silk covering her face, so very carefully he descends after the feredje.

  “Narrow trail, steep slopes. The feredje jumps in the air like a bird; Ali stalks it—slowly, measuring his steps, seeking footing in the weeds that grow in between the rocks. Then he trips. He rolls down the slope.

  “The moment she sees this, my great-grandmother leaps on her horse and spurs it on. She rides swiftly down the mountains, but the farther she gets, the sharper the pain in her chest becomes. She despises Ali—his face, his eyes, his voice—yet, something pulls her back. It begins to feel like her own blood she’s spilled.

  “Once on a broader road, she stops the horse.

  “ ‘If I see a sign,’ she whispers, ‘if I see a pink lark, I’ll go back and help him.’

  “At that moment, a shower of larks pours from the sky. When she turns her horse back and spurs it toward the mountain, its hoofs squash the tiny bodies.

  “She finds Ali half buried in stones. His face is bloody; pebbles embedded in his cheeks glisten underneath his skin. His arms are bruised, his knees mangled; his clothes have turned to rags. My great-grandmother kneels and strains to pick him up. She puts his arm around her shoulder and, bent in two under his weight, attempts to walk toward her horse.

  “She sinks to the ground. Ali crushes her, his face upon her chest. My great-grandmother rises. She drags him five more feet and once again collapses. The rocks cut through her dress. Her knees, her elbows, palms are bleeding. She stands up again. Her hair, now sticky with Ali’s blood and her own, falls loosely over her shoulders.

  “ ‘Ela, konche!’ she calls for the horse. The horse kneels down and she drops Ali on the saddle. The sun pours fire upon the gorge. The Mountain rises in the distance, its peaks still snowy.

  “ ‘I can’t go on the road like this,’ she says. ‘If people see us, they’ll kill him.’

  “She takes the reins and calls out at the Mountain, ‘Oy, Planino, hide us in your bosom, your precious children.”

  •

  “My great-grandmother leads the horse up the Mountain trails. Snowdrops blossom in a line at her feet and she follows.

  “Before sunset she reaches a shepherd’s hut. There is no one in the meadow, the house is deserted and fifty sheep bleat in a pen. Inside the hut, she finds the fireplace burning. Water is boiling in a copper, and an armful of white towels lie on the solitary bed.

  “My great-grandmother lays Ali down. His eyes shiver under closed lids, and every now and the
n he mumbles words she cannot tell apart. She unbuttons his torn shirt, takes off the shreds of his trousers, his red boots, his blood-soaked belt. The yataghan falls to the floor, and when she touches the ivory handle, cold waves pass through her body: a thousand mournful screams. She flings the sword away. She soaks a towel in the hot water, then washes him. He cries in pain every time she touches his wounds; his broken limbs and his cries echo in the falling night. Only the sheep bleat from the pen. The Mountain is quiet.”

  •

  “For a month my great-grandmother takes care of Ali. She changes his bandages, tightens the splints, washes out his wounds and smears them with crushed centaury and boiled crowfoots. Once a day she bathes him outside on the meadow. Because the spring she draws water from is far away, she bathes him in sheep milk. She makes cheese and yogurt to feed him, she kindles the fire at night to keep him warm, she sings to him when the silence around them gets heavy. And through this care, despite her hatred, she grows to love him.

  “It is always strange when a woman falls in love, and it is stranger still when she is the most beautiful in the world. The laws of cause and effect break down again. Every time my great-grandmother milks a sheep, the grass on the meadow grows taller. Every time she lights the fire, an avalanche of stones rumbles down the distant peaks. Her love for Ali grows stronger with each day, and it is her love that cures him.”

  •

  “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 follo
ws 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.

  XI.

  “One evening, just when my great-grandmother is about to breast-feed the baby, the earth begins to tremble. The sun is still an hour away from setting and Ali is still out with the herd. My great-grandmother, the baby in her arms, runs out to the meadow.

  “A black wave eats the hills in the distance and approaches quickly. As it moves closer, my great-grandmother realizes soldiers are marching toward her. Five thousand janissaries, the great sultan in the lead, riding on three horses tied to one another with golden ropes so as to carry his enormous weight. And on a horse in front of the sultan, she sees Ali Ibrahim, disfigured, beaten nearly to death. His hands are tied, and bloody tears roll down from his blinded eyes.

  “Panic seizes my great-grandmother. The baby sleeps in her trembling arms and only mewls quietly from time to time. The forest, the peaks, the gorges, are all too far away; the meadow spreads under the cloudy sky. My great-grandmother understands that she can never outrun the soldiers, so back in the house she lays the baby in the crib and kisses her farewell. She opens the seven locks that chain the chest and takes out Ali’s sword. Again—the chill, the painful cries. Just then, Ali calls out from the meadow.