East of the West Read online

  We would step out of the woods, into the meadow, and with the night sky unfolding above us, we would see them. The river and the crawfish. The river always dark and roaring, the crawfish on the grass, moving slowly, pinching blades of crowfoot.

  We would sit on the grass, take out the sandwiches and eat. In the sharp moonlight the wet bodies of the crawfish glistened like live coal, and the banks seemed covered with burning embers and the hundreds of little eyes that watched us through the dark. When we were done eating, the hunt began.

  Grandpa would give me a stick and a bag. Hundreds of twitching crawfish at our feet: poke their pincers with the stick, and they pinch as hard as they can. I learned to lift them, then shake them off in the bag. One by one you collect.

  “They are easy prey,” Grandpa would say. “You catch one, but the others don’t run away. The others don’t even know you are there until you pick them up, and even then they still have no idea.”

  One, two, three hours. The moon, tiring, swims toward the horizon. The east blazes red. And then the crawfish in perfect synchrony turn around and slowly, quietly, make for the river. She takes their bodies back, and lulls them to their sleep as a new day ripens. We sit on the grass, our bags heavy with prey. I fall asleep on Grandpa’s shoulder. He carries me home to the village. But first, he lets the crawfish go.

  •

  The possibility that I was jealous of my grandfather’s life gave me no rest. At night, hugging the pillow, I tried to picture him my age, remembering vaguely a portrait Grandma had kept on her night stand—handsome face, eyes burning with Communist ideals, lips curved in a smile, a sickle readied for revolutionary harvests, sharp enough to change the world. And what could be said of my eyes and lips?

  I wondered if I had made a mistake resisting him all these years. But then, when I would finally begin to drowse off, Grandma would come to my bed and caress my forehead the way she’d done when I had been sick with fever. “Your grandpa’s dying,” she’d say. “We are expecting him soon. But please, my dear, next time you talk to him, ask him to stop reading Lenin at my grave.”

  •

  “I’m writing my senior thesis on you,” I told him one day in my final year of college.

  On the other end of the line something fell with a deafening bang. Grandpa’s voice seemed to come from a distance across the room, and then, much closer.

  “I dropped the receiver,” he said apologetically. “You bored me so much I fell asleep.”

  “What you call boredom,” I corrected him, “psychology refers to as denial. I talk about this in my paper and also I explain why you believe the things you do. Care to hear?”

  “Categorically not.”

  I cleared my throat. “The Lenin Complex is the representation of a person’s overwhelming need to organize his life around the blind following of an ideology, without regard for the validity of its ideals; of a person’s consuming need to participate in a group. Both the need and the necessity are motivated by irrational fears of loneliness and/or rejection.”

  I let the silence between us accentuate my words.

  “I never knew,” Grandpa said, “that my grandson was so damned crazy, and/or such an ass.”

  •

  I finished my undergraduate studies summa cum laude, which was something, I’d noticed, Americans liked to mention if they’d done. Still, I had no idea what to do next. I applied and was accepted to graduate school. I tried to save up money for a ticket home, but the graduate program was in another state and all my savings were wasted on the move. I hoped that a change of scenery would lift my spirits. Instead, I found it increasingly difficult to talk to people. Mostly I stayed home, missed Bulgaria as much as I ever had, and for some strange reason, now missed Arkansas as well.

  “Grandpa,” I sometimes asked over the phone, “what are you eating?”

  “Watermelon with cheese.”

  “Is it good?”

  “It was good for Lenin, his favorite snack.”

  “I wish I had a plateful.”

  “You always hated fruits with cheese.”

  “Grandpa, what are you drinking?”

  “Yogurt.”

  “Is it good?”

  “The best there ever was.”

  “Grandpa, what are you looking at, right now, this very moment?”

  “The slopes above the house. The linden trees are white. The wind has turned their leaves before the coming rain.”

  I knew he was teasing me, sowing my wounds with salt, and still I kept asking. If only I could borrow his eyes for an instant, if only I could steal his tongue—I would eat my fill of bread and cheese, drain six gourds of water from our well, fill my gaze with slopes, fields, rivers.

  “Grandpa,” I said once, squeezing the receiver. “I have been thinking. How about you recommend a book?”

  “A book?” he said. “I thought you hated my books.”

  I told him to forget it.

  “Is the prodigal son doing an about-face?”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  But I didn’t. We were quiet for a while. I could tell he was choosing his words carefully. “I’ll give you something better than a book,” he said at last. “I’ll give you three easy steps.”

  •

  “First,” Grandpa told me, “you need to learn who Lenin really was. Obtain volume thirty-seven of his collected works.”

  “Letters to Relatives,” I repeated the subtitle after I had obtained the tome.

  “The best kind of letters. Read those to his sister. No,” he corrected himself, “read to his mother first.”

  Mother dearest, Lenin wrote, send me some money because I’ve spent mine. In one letter he was in Munich, in another he was in Prague. In one he crossed a half-constructed bridge in a horse sleigh, and in another he wanted to see a doctor for his catarrh. Like me, he’d spent his youth abroad, in exile. He sounded permanently hungry and cold. He dreamed of sheepskin coats, felt boots, fur caps. Mother dearest, he complained from an Austrian train station, I don’t understand the Germans at all. I kept asking the conductor the same question, unable to understand his answer, until at last he stormed angrily away.

  Mother dearest, I am miserable without letters from home. You must write without waiting for an address.

  My life goes on as usual. I stroll to the library outside town, I stroll in the neighborhood, and sleep enough for two …

  The letters weren’t half bad. That’s what I told Grandpa. “Grandpa dearest, Lenin and I are so much alike.”

  He snickered.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He said he didn’t know. He said he had his doubts.

  “Your grandson’s finally doing what you want him and now you sulk?”

  “I’m not sulking,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking. When I was young I hid in dugouts. I didn’t read books.”

  “Should I dig a hole in the ground, then? Is this step two?”

  “My boy,” he said. “Don’t be an ass.”

  He’d pestered me with this ideological crap all my life, and now, when I was finally getting interested, he had his doubts. “Are you afraid I’ll take your Lenin away from you?”

  “I’m hanging up,” he said.

  “Don’t bother,” I told him, and slammed down the phone.

  •

  I kept reading. Notebooks on Imperialism, on the Agrarian Question. But with every page, whatever connection I’d felt through the letters weakened irretrievably. Grandpa was right—these texts would get me nowhere.

  “You’re twenty-five,” he’d told me once. “Your blood should be champagne, not yogurt. Go out. Mix with the living, forget the dead.”

  I felt low for hanging up on him like that. As penance, I decided to buy him something little from eBay—a badge, a pin, a set of cheap stamps he could add to his collection. I did not expect to stumble upon an auction for Lenin’s corpse. CCCP Creator Lenin. Mint Condition, it said. You are bidding for the body of Vladimir Ilyich Le
nin. The body is in excellent condition and comes with a refrigerated coffin that works on both American and European current. The Buy It Now button indicated a price of five dollars flat. And five more for worldwide shipping. The seller’s location was marked as Moscow.

  This was a scam, of course. But what wasn’t? I clicked Buy It Now, completed the transaction. Congratulations, Communist-Dupe_1944, the confirmation read. You bought Lenin.

  •

  The following day I called Grandpa and told him what I’d done. I told him to consider the purchase as step two of his three-step plan. I’m not sure he understood me.

  “I’m getting old,” he said. “I feel pinching in my arm and leg. Surely a new stroke waits for me around the corner. So I’ve been thinking. You are a good boy, my son, but I failed you. You have all the right to mock me.”

  I had relished mocking him once, I said, but not any longer. “Tell me the third step. I need to know.”

  “Step three,” he said after some thought. “Come home.”

  •

  I did not sleep that night. Nor did I sleep well for two weeks after. My thoughts were murky, sunk to their chins in the crabapple mash that was my brain.

  I phoned and told him just enough. How unhappy I was in America. How I’d come here, not as a reaction against him, but because I’d wanted to try something new. I said, “It’s payback time, old man. Go on, it’s now your turn to tease me.”

  “Sinko,” Grandpa said instead. He spoke to me the way he’d done so often when as a child I’d thrown a fit or bloodied my knees. “Stop for a minute. Hear me out. Today, not one hour before you called, a large red truck arrived at our house. Inside the truck was an enormous crate. Inside the crate lay Lenin. The leader of nations now lies in your room, glorious, refrigerated, as peaceful as a lamb.”

  Silly, hollow words that I knew were chaff, and still I listened, eyes dreamily closed. “Do you remember, Grandson,” he was saying, “the story I used to tell you, of how I lived in a dugout, with fifteen other men, two pregnant women and a hungry goat, and how, desperate and starving, I finally found the courage to go down to the village? Well, I wasn’t desperate or starving. At least not in the corporeal sense. I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. The men cheated at cards. The women gossiped. The goat shat in my galoshes. Three years later I went back to that same place in the forest. I wanted to see the dugout again, now with my free eyes. I counted twenty steps from a crooked oak we’d used as a marker, found the entrance and climbed down the ladder. They were still there, all of them, mummified. No one had told them the war was over. No one had told them they could go. They hadn’t had the courage to walk out themselves, and so they’d starved to death. I felt like shit. I dug and I dug and I buried them all. I told myself, what kind of a world is this where people and goats die in dugouts for nothing at all? And so I lived my life as though ideals really mattered. And in the end they did.”

  I held the receiver and thought of Lenin lying refrigerated in my childhood room, and an awful feeling swept me up, a terrible fright. I wanted the old man to promise he’d wait for me out in the yard, under the black grapes of the trellised vine. Instead, I started laughing. My belly twisted, my temples split. I couldn’t help it. I laughed until my laughter took hold of Grandpa, until our voices mixed along the wire and echoed like one.

  THE LETTER

  It’s not like Grandmoms is urging me to steal from the British. But she knows I can’t help it. So when I walk under the trellis, she looks up from her newspaper and says, “Maria, today Missis was seen at the store with new earrings. Real pearls.”

  She tells me to tie the end of a loose vine string, and while I tie it Grandmoms says, “I’m not saying, you know. But we could split it down the middle.”

  I throw her this look. She says, “Sixty-forty?” and then she’s back to her paper. Turning one page and licking her fingers to turn the next, like the ink on her fingers is honey.

  I know what she needs the money for. She’ll fold the bills neatly and wrap them in some old article about hog farming and seal the envelope with two strips of tape. Then she’ll mail the envelope to my mother so she won’t call for a couple of months.

  I go to feed the chickens, to unthink the earrings, but it’s all pearls before my eyes. I collect four eggs. Two of them are big enough and I polish them in my apron, then I put them in a basket. I pick some dahlias, white, that’s how Missis likes them, and put them in the basket. Then from the basement I pour Missis a hundred grams of Grandpa’s rakia in a small bottle and that, too, goes in the basket.

  Missis is sunbathing in her yard and her long, smooth legs are reflecting sun like they are tin-plated with the best tin a Gypsy can sell you. “Hello, Mary, dura-bura-dura-bura,” Missis says in English. She looks bored and depressed as always, but when she takes off her sunglasses her eyes glisten. She’s a Russian dog, salivating at the sight of me. She knows I always bring baskets.

  First she takes a tiny gulp, elegant, but then it’s Grandpa’s rakia, that good grape, that dark oak cask, so she kills half the bottle. Thirty-three years old and a woman, drinks more than uncle Pesho. And Uncle Pesho drives the village bus.

  “Is Mister home?” I ask her. She shakes her head. The earrings make this expensive sound. The pearls beam with sun and I’m suffocating.

  “Drink up, Missis,” I say, and sit at the edge of the lounge chair.

  Missis is the single most unhappy woman I have ever robbed. For starters, she makes us call her “Missis,” but she isn’t British. Her Bulgarian is native, soft, a northern accent, yet when she speaks her sentences are littered with foreign sounds, with words that hold no meaning up here in our village. She strolls the dirt roads with a parasol that never opens, she powders her nose while waiting for the bread truck to arrive from town. She asks the bartender for drinks with English names and rolls her eyes when he pours her mint with mastika. But she drinks it all the same. When Missis leaves the pub, with the loaf in a netted sack and her high heels clunking, all the village drunks drool after her calves, and all the peasant women after her sophisticated nature. Missis is very pretty, no doubt in that, though I think her neck’s a bit too long (bred to showcase jewels, Grandmoms says). But I think Missis would be prettier still if she didn’t pretend to be some other woman. I’ve seen her around the corner, thinking she can’t be seen, sink her teeth into the bread ear and take a sloppy bite. I’ve seen her step into a buffalo splash on the road and curse a saucy curse. I like her much better that way. Sometimes I wonder if her depressed look too isn’t just a pretense. Especially since last she went to town and back her sighs have tripled in duration. But then again, I’ve seen the hide buyer drive down our road yelling, “I’m buying hides, I’m buying leather,” and sometimes, when Mister is away, I’ve seen him sneak inside Missis’s house. He comes back out in thirty minutes. Always. I’ve timed him. And I know no pretense will ever justify your lying down with hide buyers; her sadness at least seems genuine enough.

  “Hey, Missis,” I say and move up the lounge chair slightly, “who sunbathes with jewelry on, eh?”

  She fakes a smile and smacks her lips together. She is a nice woman, but right now I’m thinking how easy it is to steal a pair of pearl earrings off a pair of drunk ears.

  •

  The British, as we like to call them, came to our village two years ago, when I was fourteen. First we heard that someone bought the house across from ours. Then these workers arrived and gutted the house. Threw the entrails on the dump, chairs, tables, bookshelves. Whitened the façade with lime, fixed new window frames, aluminum, put new doors, new gates. Raked the yard. Planted seeds. Transplanted boxwood shrubs and cherry trees. When the cherries blossomed the British arrived. Missis and Mister.

  Mister is a century older than Missis and he speaks decent Bulgarian. His face is wrinkled, but his eyes are blue. He wears white suits and white hats made of puppies. I thought they were made of puppies because when he let me touch the brim once, it felt
just as smooth. Some folks say he was a spy and it is rumored that Mister lived in Sofia for many years, working the embassy. Most folks call him zero-zero-seven and he laughs, a set of perfect teeth, but I call him “Mister.” Zero-zero is like toilet language, unaristocratic.

  “What do you know about aristocrats?” Grandmoms tells me, but she knows I’m not a peasant, she knows I was born in the city. I was born the winter after the Soviets fell. I don’t really give two shits about the Soviets falling, but Grandmoms makes me learn these things because she says I ought to know my history. I think that’s pretty daft of her to say, because of all the things she’s kept secret from me. Personal histories, mostly. But Grandmoms teaches me like there will be no tomorrow if I didn’t know when the Berlin wall was knocked down, or why it was put up in the first place.

  The winter I was born, Grandmoms says, wolves roamed the streets and snatched away babies. She says money was toilet paper and coupons were the new money and you had to stand in line for coupons days in a row. Three hundred coupons bought you a loaf of bread. Five hundred bought you cheese. She says a wolf snatched my father and chewed his dick off. And then, she says, your father came home a man without a dick.

  My pops works in England now. I haven’t really met him, but I would like to meet him. I would like to send him a letter and tell him how things are here, in our village. I suppose he has forgotten our language, but sometimes I go to Missis and I almost tell her, listen, Missis, how about …

  Then I know better. I am my mother’s daughter, which is to say I’m a bitch. I lie and steal. I can’t help it. It’s like if I don’t steal, my lungs get filled up with magic glue. C-200. And I can’t breathe. Also, I’m mean to people for no reason. Not always, of course. Only when it counts. “Maria, for God’s sake,” Grandmoms says. “I gave you this name so you could be like Jesus’s mother.” But she always plays me. Look at those earrings, check out that wallet. Then she sends the money to my mother. So I say, “Grandmoms, don’t be stupid. You gave me this name because you lack imagination. Because you gave that same name to our mother and look at her now, gone three hundred and sixty days a year and begging for money the other five.” And I say, “Grandmoms, would Jesus’s mother have left him in the manger? Would his grandmother have picked him up to raise him a savior? And, Grandmoms, how come you picked me up and left my sister an orphan?”