East of the West (6 page)

Then out comes Vera. Bright, speckled face, firm sappy lips.

“My God,” she says. The old spot grows red above her lip and she hangs on my neck.

I lose my grip, the earth below my feet. It feels then like everything is over. She’s found someone else to care for her, she’s built a new life in which there is no room for me. In a moment, I’ll smile politely and follow them inside their place, I’ll eat the dinner they feed me—
musaka
with
tarator
. I’ll listen to Vladislav sing songs and recite poems. Then afterward, while Vera tucks him in, I’ll talk to Dadan—or, rather, he’ll talk to me: about how much he loves her, about
their
plans—and I will listen and agree. At last he’ll go to bed, and under the dim kitchen light Vera and I will wade deep into the night. She’ll finish the wine Dadan shared with her for dinner, she’ll put her hand on mine. “My dear Nose,” she’ll say, or something to that effect. But even then I won’t find courage to speak. Broken, not having slept all night, I’ll rise up early and, cowardly again, I’ll slip out and hitchhike home.

“My dear Nose,” Vera says now, and really leads me inside the apartment, “you look beaten from the road.”
Beaten
is the word she uses. And then it hits me, the way a hoe hits a snake over the skull. This is the last link of the chain falling. Vera and Dadan will set me free. With them, the last connection to the past is gone.

Who binds a man to land or water, I wonder, if not that man himself?

“I’ve never felt so good before,” I say, and mean it, and watch her lead the way through the dark hallway. I am no river, but I’m not made of clay.

BUYING LENIN

W
hen Grandpa learned I was leaving for America to study, he wrote me a goodbye note. “You rotten capitalist pig,” the note read, “have a safe flight. Love, Grandpa.” It was written on a creased red ballot from the 1991 elections, which was a cornerstone in Grandpa’s Communist ballot collection, and it bore the signatures of everybody in the village of Leningrad. I was touched to receive such an honor, so I sat down, took out a one-dollar bill, and wrote Grandpa the following reply: “You communist dupe, thanks for the letter. I’m leaving tomorrow, and when I get there I’ll try to marry an American woman ASAP. I’ll be sure to have lots of American children. Love, your grandson.”

•

There was no good reason for me to be in America. Back home I wasn’t starving, at least not in the corporeal sense. No war had driven me away or stranded me on foreign shores. I left because I could, because I carried in my blood the rabies of the West. In high school, while most of my peers were busy drinking, smoking, having sex, playing dice, lying to their parents, hitchhiking to the sea, counterfeiting money or making bombs for soccer games, I studied English. I memorized words and grammar rules and practiced tongue twisters, specifically designed for Eastern Europeans.
Remember the money
, I repeated over and over again down the street, under the shower, even in my sleep.
Remember the money, remember the money, remember the money
. Phrases like this, I’d heard, helped you break your tongue.

My parents must have been proud to have such a studious son. But no matter how good my grades, Grandpa never brought himself to share their sentiments. He despised the West, its moral degradation and lack of values. As a child, I could read only those books he deemed appropriate.
Party Secret
was appropriate.
Treasure Island
was not. The English language, Grandpa insisted, was a rabid dog, and sometimes a single bite was all it took for its poison to reach your brain and turn it to crabapple mash. “Do you know,
sinko,”
Grandpa asked me once, “what it is like to have crabapple mash for brains?” I shook my head, mortified. “Read English books, my son, and find out for yourself.”

The first few years after my grandmother’s death, he stayed in his native village, close to her grave. But after Grandpa had a minor stroke, my father convinced him to come back to Sofia. He arrived at our threshold with two bags—one full of socks, pants and drawers, the other of dusty books. “An educational gift,” he said, and hung the bag over my shoulder and tousled my hair, as though I were still a child.

Every week, for a few months, he fed me a different book. Partisans, plots against the tsarist regime. “Grandpa, please,” I’d say. “I have to study.”

“What you have to do is acquire a taste.” He’d leave me to read but then would barge into my room a minute later with some weak excuse. Had I called him? Did I need help with a difficult passage?

“Grandpa, these are children’s books.”

“First children’s books, then Lenin’s.” He’d sit at the foot of my bed, and motion me to keep on reading.

If I came home from school frightened because a stray dog had chased me down the street, Grandpa would only sigh. Could I imagine Kalitko the shepherd scared of a little dog? If I complained of bullies Grandpa would shake his head. “Imagine Mitko Palauzov whining.”

“Mitko Palauzov was killed in a dugout.”

“A brave and daring boy indeed,” Grandpa would say, and pinch his nose to stop the inevitable tears.

And so one day I packed up the books and left them in his room with a note.
Recycle for toilet paper
. Next time he saw me, I was reading
The Call of the Wild
.

From then on Grandpa listened to the radio a lot, read the Communist newspaper
Duma
and the collected volumes of his beloved Lenin. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes on the balcony and recited passages from volume twelve to the sparrows along the TV antenna. My parents were concerned. I was truly amused. “Did you hear, Grandpa,” I asked him once, “about the giraffe who could fly?”

“Giraffes can’t fly,” he said. I told him I’d just read so in
Duma
, on the front page at that, and he rubbed his chin. He pulled on his mustache. “Perhaps a meter or two?” he said.

“Did you hear, Grandpa,” I kept going, “that last night in Moscow Yeltsin fed vodka to Lenin’s corpse? They killed the bottle together and, hand in hand, zigzagged along the square.”

There was something exhilarating about teasing Grandpa. On the one hand, I was ashamed, but on the other … Sometimes, of course, I went too far and he tried to smack me with his cane. “Why aren’t you five again?” he’d say. “I’d make your ears like a donkey’s.”

It was not the teasing but rather the sight of me hunched over an abridged edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
that finally drove Grandpa back to his native village. When my father asked for an explanation, he could not let himself admit the real reason. “I’m tired of looking at walls,” he said instead. “I’m tired of watching the sparrows shit. I need my Balkan slopes, my river. I need to tidy your mother’s grave.” We said nothing on parting. He shook my hand.

Without Grandpa to distract me, I focused on my studies. It had become popular at that time for kids to take the SAT and try their luck abroad. Early in the spring of 1999 I got admitted to the University of Arkansas, and my scores were good enough to earn me a full scholarship, room and board, even a plane ticket.

My parents drove me to Grandpa’s village house so I could share the news with him in person. They did not believe that phones could handle important news.

“America,” Grandpa said when I told him. I could see the word dislodge itself from his acid stomach, stick in his throat and be expelled at last onto the courtyard tiles. He watched me and pulled on his mustache.

“My grandson, a capitalist,” he said. “After all I’ve been through.”

•

What Grandpa had been through was basically this:

The year was 1944. Grandpa was in his mid-twenties. His face was tough but fair. His nose was sharp. His dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. He was poor. “I,” he often told me, “would eat bread with crabapples for breakfast. Bread with crabapples for lunch. And crabapples for dinner, because by dinnertime, the bread would be gone.”

That’s why when the Communists came to his village to steal food, Grandpa joined them. They had all run to the woods where they dug out underground bunkers, and lived in them for weeks on end—day and night, down there in the dugouts. Outside, the Fascists sniffed for them, trying to hunt them down with their Alsatians, with their guns and bombs and missiles. “If you think a grave is too narrow,” Grandpa told me on one occasion, “make yourself a dugout. No, no, make yourself a dugout and get fifteen people to join you in it for a week. And get a couple pregnant women, too. And a hungry goat. Then go around telling everybody a grave is the narrowest thing on earth.”

“Old man, I never said a grave was the narrowest thing.”

“But you were thinking it.”

So finally Grandpa got too hungry to stay in the dugout and decided to strap on a shotgun and go down to the village for food. When he arrived, he found everything changed. A red flag was flapping from the church tower. The church had been shut down and turned into a meeting hall. There had been an uprising, the peasants told him, a revolution that overthrew the old regime. While Grandpa was hiding in the dugout, communism sprouted fragrant blooms. All people now walked free, and their dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. Grandpa fell to his knees and wept and kissed the soil of the motherland. Immediately, he was assimilated by the Party. Immediately, as a heroic partisan who’d suffered in a dugout, he was given a high position in the Fatherland Front. Immediately, he climbed further up the ladder and moved to the city, where he became something-something of the something-something department. He got an apartment, married Grandma; a year later my father was born.

•

I arrived in Arkansas on August 11, 1999. At the airport I was picked up by two young men and a girl, all in suits. They were from some sort of an organization that cared a whole lot for international students.

“Welcome to America,” they said in one warm, friendly voice, and their honest faces beamed. In the car they gave me a Bible.

“Do you know what this is?” the girl bellowed slowly.

“No,” I said. She seemed genuinely pleased.

“These are the deeds of our Savior. The word of our Lord.”

“Oh, Lenin’s collected works,” I said. “Which volume?”

•

My first week in America unfolded under the banner of International Orientation. I made acquaintances from countries smaller than my own. I shook hands with black people. Those of us for whom English was a second language were instructed what to expect when it was fixin’ to rain. What “yonder” meant, and how it was “a bummer” to be there “yonder” with no umbrella and it “fixin’ to rain.”

Every English word I knew, I had once written at least ten times in notebooks Grandpa brought from the Fatherland Front. Each page in these notebooks was a cliff face against which I shouted. The words flew back at me, smashed into the rock again, rushed back. By the end of high school I had filled with echoes so many notebooks they towered on each side of my desk.

But now in America, I was exposed to words I didn’t know. And sometimes words I knew on their own made no sense collected together. What was a hotpocket? I wondered. Why was my roommate so excited to see two girls across the hallway making out? What were they making out? I felt estranged, often confused, until gradually, with time, the world around me seeped in through my eyes, ears, tongue. At last the words rose liberated. I was ecstatic, lexicon drunk. I talked so much my roommate eventually quit spending time in our room and returned only after I’d gone to bed. I cornered random professors during their office hours and asked them questions that required long-winded answers. I spoke with strangers on the street, knowing I was being a creep. Such knowledge couldn’t stop me. My ears rang, my tongue swelled up. I went on for months, until one day I understood that nothing I said mattered to those around me. No one knew where I was from, or cared to know. I had nothing to say to this world.

I barricaded myself in the dorm—a narrow cell-like room cluttered with my roommate’s microwave, refrigerator, computer, speakers and subwoofer, TV, Nintendo. I watched
Married with Children
and
Howard Stern
. I spoke with my parents, rarely, briefly, because the calling rates were high. I cradled the receiver, fondled the thin umbilical cord of the phone that stretched ten thousand miles across the sea. I listened to my mother and felt almost connected. But when the line was cut, I was alone.

•

When he was thirty and holding the position something-of-the-something, Grandpa met the woman of his heart. It was the classic Communist love story: They met at an evening gathering of the Party. Grandma came in late, wet from the rain, took the only free seat, which was next to Grandpa, and fell asleep on his shoulder. He disapproved of her lack of interest in Party matters, and right there on the spot he fell in love with her scent, with her breath on his neck. After she woke up, they talked about pure ideals and the bright future, about the capitalist evil of the West, about the nurturing embrace of the Soviet Union and, most important, about Lenin. Grandpa found out that they both shared the same passion for following his shining example, and so he took Grandma to the Civil Office where they got married.

Grandma died of breast cancer in 1989, only a month after communism was abolished in Bulgaria. I was eight and I remember it all very clearly. We buried her in the village. We put the open coffin in a cart and tied the cart to a tractor, and the tractor pulled the cart and the coffin and we walked behind it all. Grandpa sat by the coffin, and held Grandma’s dead hand. I don’t think it actually rained that day, but in my memories I see wind and clouds and rain; the quiet, cold rain that falls when you lose someone close to your heart. Grandpa shed no tears. He sat in the cart, the rain from my memory falling on him, on his bald head, on the coffin, on Grandma’s closed eyes; the music flowing around them—deep, sad music of the oboe, the trumpet, the drum. There is no priest at a Communist funeral. Grandpa read from a book, volume twelve of Lenin’s collected works. His words rose to the sky, and the rain knocked them down to the ground.

“It’s a good grave,” Grandpa was saying when it was all over. “It’s not as narrow as a dugout, which makes it good. Right? It’s not too narrow, right? She’ll be all right in it. Certainly, she’ll be all right.”

It was this funeral, with Grandpa’s words rising and falling broken in the mud, that I started to dream about during my sophomore year of college. I no longer went to class regularly because the professors’ words now tormented me like a rash, but I read a great deal in my room. I had chosen psychology as my major, mostly on a whim, so I devoured Freud and Jung in industrial quantities. “Their words are the yeast that brings my brain to life,” I’d tell Grandpa a few months later, and he would say, “You got that right. Your brain is dough. Or better yet—crabapple mash.”

I was fascinated to learn that our dreams reflected not only our personal unconscious but also the collective. My God, was there such a thing? A collective unconscious? If so, I wanted in. I longed to be a part of it; connected, to dream the dreams of other people, others to dream my dreams. I went to sleep hoping to dream vivid, transcendental symbols.

Today
, I wrote in a little journal,
I dreamed of Father on the sofa, peeling sunflower seeds, his socks pulled off halfway like donkey ears
.

I dreamed of Mother spooning yogurt from a jar
.

I dreamed of Grandpa, waiting in the hallway to trip me up with his cane
.