East of the West (14 page)

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.

“I got some protesting to do,” she says. “But fine. One thousand levs.” And then she nooses a scarf around her neck.

“Gospozho,”
Gogo says, “we’re short on cash. But this boy here’s a wunderkind. He can do a trick for a loaf.”

“I’ve seen tricks to last me six lifetimes,” Missis says. She sizes me up with greedy eyes. “Who’ll win the parliament elections? No, wait. What are the winning numbers to the lotto?”

I shrug. “I’m not that kind of wunderkind,” I say. Missis rounds the counter and prepares to lock the door. “But of course. You are some other kind. In Bulgaria today, everyone’s a wunderkind,” she says, and shoos us out.

“Why the hell didn’t we just take a loaf and run?” I ask Gogo, and he says, “We aren’t like that. Our ancestors died for bread. We can’t steal bread.”

That’s rare talk from Gogo. But when you’re hungry, all your history reveals itself clearly before you, if only in a flash. Though I suppose Gogo has a point. Some things are bigger than we are. “The essential” being one of them.
Nasashtniyat
, “the essential,” that’s what we call bread here in Bulgaria. No one is bigger than bread.
Proverbs and Sayings
, volume 35, page 124.

“Gogo,” I say now to add a proverb of my own, “no one gives you bread for free.”

•

When I was still very young, Father would often call me over to the table, where he and his friends worked on the nth bottle of vodka and the always-present string of dried, salted little fish. They’d pick up the daily paper and read in hoarse, drunk voices whole passages, pages sometimes, which I’d repeat from memory in the same sluggish, drunken manner word for word. I imagine it was in such a moment of intoxicated clarity one of them suggested that my father should send me to study in Sofia, in the school for gifted children.

There is such a school in Sofia, where, in theory at least, children with gifts are handpicked through rigorous examination and then their gifts—scientific, humanitarian, artistic—are allowed to bloom and bear sweet, juicy fruit.

“If they find out your kid is in fact a genius—” the friend must have explained, and my father must have interrupted on the spot: “What do you mean,
if?
What do you mean,
in fact?
Look at him! It’s a sure thing.”

“Anyway,
when
they establish that he has a gift, they’ll move your whole family to Sofia. They’ll buy you an apartment, give you and your wife good jobs. They’ll take good care of him.”

“We’ll do it,” Father must have said, and slammed a determined fist on the table, “but not for our benefit. No, comrade, thank you very much. We’re not like this. We’ll do it for his own good sake.”

But I was still too young to apply for school, and Father decided to use the remaining time to make my name heard throughout the Motherland. He dug up some archaic textbooks, history, chemistry, physics, visited every school in town and convinced a few teachers to let us interrupt their classes. He’d sit me down in a chair before the gaze of bored tenth graders and pass around the books we’d brought. It was always I who carried the heavy tomes, because Father insisted such physical effort would develop my endurance for knowledge. “Open to any page,” he’d tell the students, “and read aloud. Then my son will repeat back to you like a miraculous echo!” The students read, one after the other. We’d let some time pass and then I’d repeat, words whose meaning I did not understand, but whose sounds had imprinted themselves eternally upon my ear. “The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. Valence is a measure of the number of chemical bonds formed by the atoms of a given element. Pi is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet.”

The students would produce a mangy clap. The teacher would pet me on the head. “Look at you bums,” she’d say to the class, “a five-year-old made you look foolish,” as if everyone’s memory were supposed to be an all-retaining sponge. After that, Father and I would eat lunch at the school cafeteria and fill up with
musaka
or
gyuvech
the jars we’d hidden under our coat and call this dinner.

“When you get into that school in Sofia, we’ll never have to eat the same food twice. We’ll never have loud, drunken neighbors, either, because the government will give us a flat in an expensive complex. Things will get stellar when we move to Sofia. You wait and see.”

When the town newspaper wrote about me, Father bought dozens of copies to hand out to friends. He even mailed one to his pen pal, someone in Yekaterinburg he hadn’t exchanged letters with in thirty years.

I took the exams at the school for gifted children in the spring of ’89. I was denied admission two months later. I remember waiting in the car with my mother while Father took the newspaper article to the principal’s office to demand an explanation. A spiky metal fence separated the school’s campus from the rest of the world, and I walked to it and glued my face to the posts. I could see a football field, a tennis court on the other side. “It would be nice to study here,” I told my mother, and she started to cry.

Father said nothing on the way back from the school. He smoked one cigarette after the other, but wouldn’t open the window because it rained and he didn’t want the orthopedic sheet of stringed bamboo beads on his seat to get wet.

“They said he wasn’t special enough,” he told my mother at last. We were waiting for a traffic light to change and he turned around and looked at me through the smoke, with more smoke coming from his nose as he spoke. “Is this true?” he asked me.

Years later we found out that admission to this school was really a scam. That to get in, you needed connections; it was a place where all high-profile Party members sent their children to study. But we didn’t know this at the time.

“We can’t leave Sofia now,” Father said, and turned to look at me again, though this time the car was in motion. “You’ll retake the tests next year. You’ll prove yourself special.”

I nodded, absolutely ashamed.

That November, after thirty-five years as the first secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov stepped down from power. Many saw this as a crack in the wall and great masses were unleashed upon the streets. It was a cold and dark winter that followed, but Father recognized much promise in our situation. We would sit in the evenings by the candle, waiting for electricity to come back, and Father would smoke and speak of the bright future that awaited us. “Things will turn out stellar for us,” he’d say. “This kid has a gift. He’s bound to get some recognition.”

But on the following spring I was not even admitted to the school entrance exam. “You cannot apply again if you’ve been rejected once,” an official told Father. “But we were told we could,” Father protested to no avail.

I was very happy with the situation. I hated Sofia. I dreamed of going back to our little town, to our apartment and the acres of woods above it, with the deer and the bunnies, with the snowdrops Mother and I picked once the snow began to melt in March.

“We cannot surrender,” Father said one night, and slammed a fist on the table. “No, thank you very much. We need to regroup, that’s all. There is opportunity that must be seized here. There is finally free market. People would pay to see your gift.” He held a cigarette to the candle and smoked for some time in silence. “Why couldn’t you be some other kind of genius?” he said at last. Then he said, “Go tell your mother to stop crying and fix some dinner. Then come back and help me figure out a way to introduce you to the crowd. I’m thinking something simple: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the Amazing Rado to the stage …’ ”

•

The flood drags us to the parliament building, the one Gramps wanted to kamikaze into with a tank. A double helix of policemen entwines around its base, but most of them look half asleep, tenth graders propped on their shields with apathetic weariness. They’ve been out here so long, four days now, it seems they’ve lost all interest. Gogo greets them accordingly. “Pigs, hooks, fucking Ushevs,” but even then they don’t react. One of them asks me if I got the time. His watch, he says, has stopped.

“Do I look like someone who cares?” I tell him, and then I ask Gogo the same.

“No,
kopche
, you just don’t give a shit.”

The crowd splits in two streams, because right in front of the parliament there stands a huge pile of stones. A huge pile. Someone has stuck a flag on top, white-green-red, but the flag has frozen like a pair of boxers on the laundry line.

I recognize now that everyone in the crowd is carrying a stone. As they pass by, the people dump their stones and the pile grows immense, ugly, like a pile of broken bodies. I know that’s not the freshest way to paint it, but that’s what it looks like to me: hands and feet on top of skulls and torsos.

I ask Gogo if he knows what this is all about. “The Amazing Rado doesn’t know?” he says, and I say, “Yeah, yeah, very funny.” I tell him I haven’t been home for a few days, remember? I haven’t watched TV the way he has, on a nice, big Sony Trinitron set.

“Oh, fuck you,
kopche
. That TV is the first thing I’m buying back.” He tells me then that all this masonry charade is part of the civilized protest. It was decided that people ought to lay stones this way instead of throw them like savage beasts. It’s all a message to the politicians inside.

“Kopche
, we don’t have any stones,” I say.

A woman right beside opens her bag. “I have some extras,” she says. Her bag is a quarry. We each dump a stone on the pile and I’m thinking, some message this is. Dear madams, dear sirs, parliament members, we are displeased. Our pockets are full of stones, not money. Fix this injustice. We’re civil still, but we’re also hungry. Here are some of the stones we carry, in a pile.

We have become so meek, much worse than sheep. But I suppose five hundred years of Ottoman rule will do that to a people. And then forty-five years of the Communist yoke. That’s what’s eating me as we walk away from the pile. We didn’t used to be this way. We were once fierce horsemen. We stormed blazing from the east, shot arrows riding backward, made treaties with the Byzantines, conquered the Slavs. Man, would I have liked to live back then. When the treaties were broken we went to war. Khan Krum the Terrible slew Nikephoros, one of only a handful of Greek emperors to ever die in battle, and turned his perfectly human skull into a cup from which he sipped his wine. Tsar Simeon the Great defeated Leo the Wise and chopped off the noses of five thousand of his men, just because—just to insult him. And we weren’t simply a brute force: when Great Moravia imprisoned the first apostles who worked on creating our alphabet, we rescued them and let them transcribe books in the safety of our land. The seven apostles of the Cyrillic alphabet.
Sedmochislenitsi
. Those were some amazing men. And now what? A pile of stones. Stones are created to break skulls and we lay them down like flowers.