CULTURE

‘You’re so sour-tempered, Gergana’ asserted baba Zoya and kept knitting. ‘As if a lemon wedge is stuck to your tongue.’

I kept my mouth shut, didn’t want to argue with her. That’s not why I was there.

‘Have you seen Boyan?’

‘No, he hasn’t come home yet, no. Why? Doesn’t he drop by Mitko, the huntsman, anymore?’ The woman had such a mirror-like gaze. I didn’t see her, but myself in her eyes.

‘Maybe he’s in the tap-room with the other workers.’

Baba Zoya fell silent for a second. She put aside the green ball of yarn and took the black one.

The gulp of winter air fills my lungs with chills, then retreats with a sigh. It clears off old visions and carries them away. The visions vanish, soaring high, where they belong. They were here only for an instant - for comfort, hope or advice. They predate us, and send us off. They will be around after the last human is extinct. Then, finally at peace, they will tend to noon. They will dance floating in the skies, or descend at their whim – for no reason and with no duties. Unfettered visions bound only by their own immortality.

11 August 1999

“I hate her.”

I stood in my room, gritting my teeth so hard I was in danger of breaking a molar. Of course she wouldn’t come.

“Viki! Come on, you’ll miss it!” Grandma called to me from downstairs, and I slammed the phone down. I had squeezed so hard that my knuckles turned white – even though the conversation was long over – and I went downstairs.

“Who were you talking to for so long? Your father’s already waiting for you outside.”

There is a pedestrian tunnel beneath Fourteenth Street, connecting the subway trains at Sixth Avenue with those at Seventh. Daily, a wash of people are flushed through this hot pipe of meat, the bodies so densely packed that you cannot see the tunnel’s end until you’ve already passed through it. It’s like a scene out of Metropolis, almost Biblical.

So will things be different, do you think, for us now? She asked this from the bathtub. Her voice was surprising because it was so light.

I suppose they must, he said. He was in the kitchen preparing lentils. The skins of these lentils were a mottled grey with green and brownish flecks. Whatever they expressed they expressed through some arcane, subliminal code.

She said, It’s funny, isn’t it? A funny feeling, I couldn’t say why. He heard the bathwater stir. Strange and sort of amazing, she said, the things that come back to you.

Like what?

When my aunt Fani called me in Chicago from Bulgaria to tell me she had found her brother, my father, dead, lying back across his bed with his right hand over the heart, she chose the inferential mood to relay the news. Баща ти си е отишъл. / Bashta ti si e otishal. / Your father has left, apparently.

“Bashta ti si e otishal,” she said. It wasn’t a “Your father’s dead” but more of a “It appears that your father’s gone.” The structure enabled a lack of finality that my brain chose to translate as my father had decided to slip out of the room, elegantly and without witnesses.

…

[…]

“That was really not necessary,” the doctor tells Nadezda as he takes the box of assorted chocolates and places them on the side. She finds a certain dismissiveness in his gesture. They are past the Best Before date on the box, but he couldn’t have made that out so quickly.

“Thank you again for seeing me at such short notice,” she says, placing her hand on her heart.

He leans back in his seat. “Well, we had a cancellation. What seems to be the trouble?”

“I’m worried,” Nadezda says. “I’m getting tired easily. I can’t remember things.”

A young man, with an apron, stained from a just filleted fresh fish, storms out of the back entrance of a small restaurant to a crossing of Stamboliyski boulevard, sits in front and lights a cigarette. A gargantuan grey cat with what used to be a white patch around the neck, approaches him with a dancing step, and begins to rhythmically caress its face in his black leather ankle boots: now to the left side, now to the right.

Alex is 8 years old and loves walking in the forest, playing football with his friends and his swimming lessons. He dreams of becoming a football player one day. He is also a caring person and loves very much his family: his mother, father, brother and two sisters.