The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  “Come on, Nose, be a man. Take her to the woods.”

  And she laughed so loud even the deaf old grandmas turned to look at us.

  I scurried away, disgusted and ashamed, but finally I had to approach Vera. I asked her if she had my jeans, then took out the money and began to count it.

  “Not here, you fool,” she said, and slapped me on the hand with the smoldering stick.

  We walked through the village until we reached the old bridge, which stood solitary in the middle of the road. Yellow grass grew between each stone, and the riverbed was dry and fissured.

  We hid under the bridge and completed the swap. Thirty levs for a pair of jeans. Best deal I’d ever made.

  “You wanna go for a walk?” Vera said after she had counted the bills twice. She rubbed them on her face, the way our fathers did, and stuffed them in her pocket.

  We picked mushrooms in the woods while she told me things about her school and complained about a Serbian boy who always pestered her.

  “I can teach him a lesson,” I said. “Next time I come there you just show him to me.”

  “Yeah, Nose, like you know how to fight.”

  And then, just like that, she hit me in the nose. Crushed it, once more, like a biscuit.

  “Why did you do that?”

  She shrugged. I made a fist to smack her back, but how do you hit a girl? Or how, for that matter, will hitting another person in the face stop the blood gushing from your own nose? I tried to suck it up and act like the pain was easy to ignore.

  She took me by the hand and dragged me toward the river.

  “I like you, Nose,” she said. “Let’s go wash your face.”

  We lay on the bank and chewed thyme leaves.

  “Nose,” my cousin said, “you know what they told us in school?”

  She rolled over and I did the same to look her in the eyes. They were very dark, shaped like apricot kernels. Her face was all speckled and she had a tiny spot on her upper lip, delicate, hard to notice, that got redder when she was nervous or angry. The spot was red now.

  “You look like a mouse,” I told her.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Our history teacher,” she said, “told us we were all Serbs. You know. Like, a hundred percent.”

  “Well, you talk funny,” I said. “I mean you talk Serbianish.”

  “So you think I’m a Serb?”

  “Where do you live?” I asked her.

  “You know where I live.”

  “But do you live in Serbia or in Bulgaria?”

  Her eyes darkened and she held them shut for a long time. I knew she was sad. And I liked it. She had nice shoes, and jeans, and could listen to bands from the West, but I owned something that had been taken away from her forever.

  “The only Bulgarian here is me,” I told her.

  She got up and stared at the river. “Let’s swim to the drowned church,” she said.

  “I don’t want to get shot.”

  “Get shot? Who cares for churches in no-man’s-water? Besides, I’ve swum there before.” She stood up, took her shirt off, and jumped in. The murky current rippled around her shoulders and they glistened, smooth, round pebbles the river had polished for ages. Yet her skin was soft, I could imagine. I almost reached out to touch it.

  We swam the river slowly, staying along the bank. I caught a small chub under a rock, but Vera made me let it go. Finally we saw the cross sticking up above the water, massive, with rusty feet and arms that caught the evening sun.

  We all knew well the story of the drowned church. Back in the day, before the Balkan Wars, a rich man lived east of the river. He had no offspring and no wife, so when he lay down dying he called his servant with a final wish—to build, with his money, a village church. The church was built, west of the river, and the peasants hired from afar a young zograf, a master of icons. The master painted for two years and there he met a girl and fell in love with her and married her and they too lived west of the river, near the church.

  Then came the Balkan Wars and after that the First World War. All these wars Bulgaria lost, and much Bulgarian land was given to the Serbs. Three officials arrived in the village; one was a Russian, one was French, and one was British. East of the river, they said, stays in Bulgaria. West of the river from now on belongs to Serbia. Soldiers guarded the banks and planned to take the bridge down, and when the young master, who had gone away to work on another church, came back, the soldiers refused to let him cross the border and return to his wife.

  In his desperation he gathered people and convinced them to divert the river, to push it west until it went around the village. Because according to the orders, what lay east of the river stayed in Bulgaria.

  How they carried all those stones, all those logs, how they piled them up, I cannot imagine. Why the soldiers did not stop them, I don’t know. The river moved west and it looked like she would serpent around the village. But then she twisted, wiggled, and tasted with her tongue a route of lesser resistance—through the lower hamlet she swept, devouring people and houses. Even the church, in which the master had left two years of his life, was lost in her belly.

  We stared at the cross for some time, then I got out on the bank and sat in the sun.

  “It’s pretty deep,” I said. “You sure you’ve been down there?”

  She put a hand on my back. “It’s okay if you’re scared.”

  But it was not okay. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and dove off the bank.

  “Swim to the cross!” she yelled after me.

  I swam like I wore shoes of iron. I held the cross tightly and stepped on the slimy dome underneath. Soon Vera stood by me, in turn gripping the cross so she wouldn’t slip and drift away.

  “Let’s look at the walls,” she said.

  “What if we get stuck?”

  “Then we’ll drown.”

  She laughed and nudged me in the chest.

  “Come on, Nose, do it for me.”

  It was difficult to keep my eyes open at first. The current pushed us away so we had to work hard to reach the small window below the dome. We grabbed the bars on the window and looked inside. And despite the murky water, my eyes fell on a painting of a bearded man kneeling by a rock, his hands entwined. The man was looking down, and in the distance, approaching, was a little bird. Below the bird, I saw a cup.

  “It’s a nice church,” Vera said after we surfaced.

  “Do you want to dive again?”

  “No.” She moved closer and quickly she kissed me on the lips.

  “Why did you do that?” I said, and felt the hairs on my arms and neck stand up, though they were wet.

  She shrugged, then pushed herself off the dome, and laughing, swam splashing up the river.

  The jeans Vera sold me that summer were about two sizes too large, and it seemed like they’d been worn before, but that didn’t bother me. I even slept in them. I liked how loose they were around my waist, how much space, how much Western freedom they provided around my legs.

  But for my sister, Elitsa, life worsened. The West gave her ideas. She would often go to the river and sit on the bank and stare, quietly, for hours on end. She would sigh and her bony shoulders would drop, like the earth below her was pulling on her arms.

  As the weeks went by, her face lost its plumpness. Her skin got grayer, her eyes muddier. At dinner she kept her head down and played with her food. She never spoke, not to Mother, not to me. She was as quiet as a painting on a wall.

  A doctor came and left puzzled. “I leave puzzled,” he said. “She’s healthy. I just don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

  But I knew. That longing in my sister’s eyes, that disappointment, I’d seen them in Vera’s eyes before, on the day she had wished to be Bulgarian. It was the same look of defeat, scary and contagious, and because of that look, I kept my distance.

  I didn’t see Vera for a year. Then, one summer day in 1976 as I was washing my jeans in the river, she yelled from the other side
.

  “Nose, you’re buck naked.”

  That was supposed to embarrass me, but I didn’t even twitch.

  “I like to rub my ass in the face of the West,” I yelled back, and raised the jeans, dripping with soap.

  “What?” she yelled.

  “I like to …” I waved. “What do you want?”

  “Nose, I got something for you. Wait for——and——to——church. All right?”

  “What?”

  “Wait for the dark. And swim. You hear me?”

  “Yeah, I hear you. Are you gonna be there?”

  “What?”

  I didn’t bother. I waved, bent over, and went on washing my jeans.

  I waited for my folks to go to sleep and then I snuck out the window. The lights in my sister’s room were still on and I imagined her in bed, eyes tragically fixed on the ceiling.

  I hid my clothes under a bush and stepped into the cool water. On the other side I could see the flashlight of the guard, and the tip of his cigarette, red in the dark. I swam slowly, making as little noise as possible. In places the river flowed so narrow people could stand on both sides and talk and almost hear each other, but around the drowned church the river was broad, a quarter mile between the banks.

  I stepped on the algae-slick dome and ran my fingers along a string tied to the base of the cross. A nylon bag was fixed to the other end. I freed the bag and was ready to glide away when someone said, “This is for you.”

  “Vera?”

  “I hope you like them.”

  She swam closer, and was suddenly locked in a circle of light.

  “Who’s there?” the guard shouted, and his dog barked.

  “Go, go, you stupid,” Vera said, and splashed away. The circle of light followed.

  I held the cross tight, not making a sound. I knew this was no joke. The guards would shoot trespassers if they had to. But Vera swam unhurriedly.

  “Faster,” the guard shouted. “Get out here.”

  The beam of light etched her naked body in the night. She had the breasts of a woman.

  He asked her something and she spoke back. Then he slapped her. He held her very close and felt her body. She kneed him in the groin. He laughed on the ground long after she’d run away naked.

  All through, of course, I watched in silence. I could have yelled something to stop him, but then, he had a gun. And so I held the cross and so the river flowed black with night around me and even out on the bank I felt sticky with dirty water.

  Inside the bag were Vera’s old Adidas shoes. The laces were in bad shape, and the left shoe was a bit torn at the front, but they were still excellent. And suddenly all shame was gone and my heart pounded so hard with new excitement, I was afraid the guards might hear it. On the banks I put the shoes on and they fit perfectly. Well, they were a bit too small for my feet—actually, they were really quite tight—but they were worth the pain. I didn’t walk. I swam across the air.

  I was striding back home, when someone giggled in the bush. Grass rustled. I hesitated, but snuck through the dark, and I saw two people rolling on the ground, and would have watched them in secret if it weren’t for the squelching shoes.

  “Nose, is that you?” a girl asked. She flinched, and tried to cover herself with a shirt, but this was the night I saw my second pair of breasts. These belonged to my sister.

  I lay in my room, head under the blanket, trying to make sense of what I’d seen, when someone walked in.

  “Nose? Are you sleeping?”

  My sister sat on the bed and put her hand on my chest.

  “Come on. I know you’re awake.”

  “What do you want?” I said, and threw the blanket off. I could not see her face for the dark, but I could feel that piercing gaze of hers. The house was quiet. Only Father snored in the other room.

  “Are you going to tell them?” she said.

  “No. What you do is your own business.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead.

  “You smell like cigarettes,” I said.

  “Good night, Nose.”

  She got up to leave, but I pulled her down.

  “Elitsa, what are you ashamed of? Why don’t you tell them?”

  “They won’t understand. Boban’s from Srbsko.”

  “So what?”

  I sat up in my bed and took her cold hand.

  “What are you gonna do?” I asked her. She shrugged.

  “I want to run away with him,” she said, and her voice suddenly became softer, calmer, though what she spoke of scared me deeply. “We’re going to go west. Get married, have kids. I want to work as a hairstylist in Munich. Boban has a cousin there. She is a hairstylist, or she washes dogs or something.” She ran her fingers through my hair. “Oh, Nose,” she said. “Tell me what to do.”

  I couldn’t tell her. And so she kept living unhappy, wanting to be with that boy day and night but seeing him rarely and in secret. “I am alive,” she told me, “only when I’m with him.” And then she spoke of their plans, hitchhiking to Munich, staying with Boban’s cousin and helping her cut hair. “It’s a sure thing, Nose,” she’d say, and I believed her.

  It was the spring of 1980 when Josip Tito died and even I knew things were about to change in Yugoslavia. The old men in our village whispered that now, with the Yugoslav president finally planted in a mausoleum, our western neighbor would fall apart. I pictured in my mind the aberration I’d seen in a film, a monster sewn together from the legs and arms and torso of different people. I pictured someone pulling on the thread that held these body parts, the thread unraveling, until the legs and arms and torso came undone. We could snatch a finger then, the land across the river, and patch it up back to our land. That’s what the old folks spoke about, drinking their rakia in the tavern. Meanwhile, the young folks escaped to the city, following new jobs. There weren’t enough children in the village anymore to justify our own school, and so we had to go to another village and study with other kids. Mother lost her job. Grandpa got sick with pneumonia, but Grandma gave him herbs for a month, and he got better. Mostly. Father worked two jobs, plus he stacked hay on the weekends. He no longer had the time to take me plowing.

  But Vera and I saw each other often, sometimes twice a month. I never found the courage to speak of the soldier. At night, we swam to the drowned church and played around the cross, very quiet, like river rats. And there, by the cross, we kissed our first real kiss. Was it joy I felt? Or was it sadness? To hold her so close and taste her breath, her lips, to slide a finger down her neck, her shoulder, down her back. To lay my palm upon her breasts and know that someone else had done this, with force, while I had watched, tongue swallowed. Her face was silver with moonlight, her hair dripped dark with dark water.

  “Do you love me?” she said.

  “Yes. Very much,” I said. I said, “I wish we never had to leave the water.”

  “You fool,” she said, and kissed me again. “People can’t live in rivers.”

  That June, two months before the new sbor, our parents found out about Boban. One evening, when I came home for supper, I discovered the whole family quiet in the yard, under the trellis. The village priest was there. The village doctor. Elitsa was weeping, her face flaming red. The priest made her kiss an iron cross and sprinkled her with holy water from an enormous copper. The doctor buckled his bag and glass rattled inside when he picked it up. He winked at me and made for the gate. On his way out, the priest gave my forehead a thrashing with the boxwood foliage.

  “What’s the matter?” I said, dripping holy water.

  Grandpa shook his head. Mother put her hand on my sister’s. “You’ve had your cry,” she said.

  “Father,” I said, “why was the doctor winking? And why did the priest bring such a large copper?”

  Father looked at me, furious. “Because your sister, Nose,” he said, “requires an Olympic pool to cleanse her.”

  “Meaning?” I said.

  “Meaning,” he said, �
��your sister is pregnant. Meaning,” he said, “we’ll have to get her married.”

  My family, all dressed up, went to the river. On the other bank Boban’s family already waited for us. Mother had washed the collar of my shirt with sugar water so it would stay stiff, and now I felt like that sugar was running down my back in a sweaty, syrupy stream. It itched and I tried to scratch it, but Grandpa told me to quit fidgeting and act like a man. My back got itchier.

  From the other side, Boban’s father shouted at us, “We want your daughter’s hand!”

  Father took out a flask and drank rakia, then passed it around. The drink tasted bad and set my throat on fire. I coughed and Grandpa smacked my back and shook his head. Father took the flask from me and spilled some liquor on the ground for the departed. The family on the other side did the same.

  “I give you my daughter’s hand!” Father yelled. “We’ll wed them at the sbor.”

  Elitsa’s wedding was going to be the culmination of the sbor, so everyone prepared. Vera told me that with special permission Mihalaky had transported seven calves across the river, and two had already been slain for jerky. The two of us met often, secretly, by the drowned church.

  One evening, after dinner, my family gathered under the vines of the trellis. The grown-ups smoked and talked of the wedding. My sister and I listened and smiled at each other every time our eyes met.

  “Elitsa,” Grandma said, and laid a thick bundle on the table, “this is yours now.”

  My sister untied the bundle and her eyes teared up when she recognized Grandma’s best costume readied for the wedding. They laid each part of the dress on its own—the white hemp shirt, the motley apron, the linen gown, festoons of coins, the intricately worked silver earrings. Elitsa lifted the gown, and felt the linen between her fingers, and then began to put it on.

  “My God, child,” Mother said, “take your jeans off.”

  Without shame, for we are all blood, Elitsa folded her jeans aside and carefully slipped inside the glowing gown. Mother helped her with the shirt. Grandpa strapped on the apron, and Father, with his fingers shaking, gently put on her ears the silver earrings.