Dear mother, dear mother, the church is cold,
But the ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm;
Besides I can tell where I am used well,
Such usage in Heaven will never do well.
But if at the church they would give us some ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We'd sing and we'd pray all the live-long day,
Nor ever once wish from the church to stray.
Once upon a time, there was a young man who set out to seek his fortune. One chill autumn morning, he was walking through the mountains when he came to an old and rotten beech tree that stood in the middle of a web of gnarled roots. As he walked past, he tripped over a root and fell into a deep hole.
A film was playing on the tiny screen above the driver – it was about a beautiful woman looking for the right husband and ultimately finding him. Or maybe it was about a handsome man looking for the right wife, but not before the final credits. To make it even more fun, the film was split into novellas which opened with colourful lettering and wedding music. All the actresses looked like Jennifer Lopez, or maybe she was in it herself, who knows? The question required the kind of focus that Galya was unable to spare.
a
summer with its easy wins
summer with its plans
made at the drop of a hat
everyone’s willing
to give in to warmth
the holiday is today
let’s seize it
go through summer’s open doors
and its garden shadows
the first freezing gust of wind
is easily dismissed
summer an abyss of hope
in which year after year
you collapse ever downward
summer the warmest of life’s seasons
z
summer
summer
Beginning
it’s light out I tell you
there’s still lots more
my beautiful bird
is far away I can see it
flying away again
I love without being loved
Human
to A
I’m at 2130 metres above sea level
This story took place on the New Year’s Eve of my last winter in Bulgaria. Together with my wife and daughter, I greeted 1997 in a rented one-bedroom apartment in a windy, ugly suburb of Varna. I don’t remember this day to have heralded аnything new and different for us.
There’s someone you have not yet met:
He wears three mittens in crimson red.
His furry coat – so soft it feels;
his socks have holes on all five heels.
He’s always hiding in the pantry;
details of his life are scanty.
In the dark he quietly moves,
munching on some sugar cubes
and frolicking in secrecy
when no one else is there to see.
A tiny cockroach he has tamed;
this land of jars he has reclaimed,
and he is the lonely lord
to all that people here have stored --
I. The Eternal City
Chapter Three: The Frogs
“A RETIRED PEDIATRICIAN LOOKING TO MEET a modest and respectful woman. Dad, are you sure about this ad?”
“Seeking to meet sounds better, right?”
“Yes, seeking to meet is better, but what I meant was…”
“Should I put my age down as well? I did write I was retired.”
“You’re still young at sixty-eight, so you better write that down, but I meant the rest of it.”
“Well, what is it? Don’t make me drag it out of you! You keep nagging me to meet somebody, and now… should I leave the pediatrician part out? Should I not write that I’m a doctor at all?”
She remembered the day she went to the hair salon. She hadn’t dyed her hair in four years, and hadn’t gotten a drastic haircut in three. She explained in detail everything she had read on the charity’s website – before being cut, hair had to be sectioned into small ponytails, secured with rubber bands and then carefully placed in a transparent snaplock bag. It mustn’t be wasted.
Sometimes, Lola and I would take out a bunch of covers and blankets out on the porch and spend the night under the stars. We arranged them in such a way that only the end of the small awning was above us and then we lay down and gazed at the night sky. Whenever we looked at it for more than a minute or two, Lola panicked that she would “fly away.” That’s exactly what she said – that she was afraid of flying away, and I tried to harbor that fear with me, to feel it and share it with her.
‘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.
