East of the West (17 page)

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Authors: Miroslav Penkov

Tags: #General, #Short Stories, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Fiction

BOOK: East of the West
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“There is one thing,” her father said once, “I’ve heard from the old masters. One hundred bagpipes, if played together over a sick man, chase death away.”

One hundred bagpipes, Kemal wanted to tell him, was a lot of bagpipes. How would they find skins, all at once, for a hundred bagpipes?

That night, in the yard, Kemal helped him dig up a cooking pot from under the pear tree, a pot stuffed with rolled bills. With the money, they’d buy more skins. The same week her father canceled the three school orders. But in his telegrams to the headmasters he did not speak of the advances he’d been given, nor of the raw skins he’d already purchased with Party funding.

8.

It was a week after the canceled orders that a militia sergeant stopped by the workshop. They sat him down under the trellised vine, and Kemal’s father sent her to draw a pail of well water. She poured a jar for the sergeant and one for her father, and watched her father lift his jar with trembling hands, and the sergeant drink in bird sips.

“Good water, this,” the sergeant told her. “I was thirsty.”

She kept her eyes on the gun in his holster and said nothing. Her father cleared his throat and asked her for more water.

“There have been Party orders,” the sergeant started, “straight from the Politburo. Unfortunate business, but no way around it. I’ve been walking from door to door all morning, informing people. Now, if you ask me, it’s ugly business, but no one asks me. It’s Party orders, straight from the Politburo.” And he told them: All Turks, Pomaks and other Muslims would be given new, Bulgarian names. If you lived in Bulgaria, he said, then you had to have a Bulgarian name. If you didn’t like it, no one stopped you from leaving for Turkey. “Be at the square tomorrow. The buses will take you to town for your new passports.”

“Nachalstvo
, my wife is sick in bed and can’t ride buses.”

“Nobody asks me,” the sergeant said, stood up and saluted.

9.

It rained while they waited for the bus to get them. There was no awning on the square and they did not own umbrellas, so Kemal’s father had brought goatskins. He held one with his hand shaking over her mother, but still the rain pounded. Kemal knew all eyes would be on them—look how pale Zeynep is, people would say of her mother, how the sickness has eaten her innards, how Allah has cursed her—so she hid far away under her goatskin, also watching. No wind blew, and still her mother clutched the edges of her head scarf tight in one hand. With the other she held her dress, the nylon pouch underneath it, Kemal imagined. She looked like a spotted goat, poor, sick Zeynep, steaming in the cold, her dress dry in spots and wet in others.

When the bus arrived her father lowered the goatskin and all the rain the skin had collected splashed over her mother. There was laughter, so in the bus Kemal sat back, away from her parents. Everything smelled of wet head scarves, of wet mustaches, and the windows misted with people’s breathing. With her sleeve Kemal wiped a tiny pupil and watched the slopes run muddy rivers, until again the window misted. A few times the bus stopped to pick up more people, a few times for her mother to retch in the bushes. Kemal hid under the stinking goatskin and listened.

“Last night I had a dream,” a man was saying. “I’m in line waiting for something. My mouth is cracked from thirst and my stomach is churning. The line is long I tell you, not a line but a rope of people. And all I can hear is crying to make your hair stand like budding tobacco. Only it’s not crying but a million stomachs churning, hungry from waiting. At last it’s my turn at the front, and there before me stands my grandfather—a giant, I tell you, with his mustaches waxed and shiny like oiled hoofs, twirled on the sides the size of ram horns. Behind Grandpa, wide as the world, shine the gates of heaven. I can see in his hand a tray of figs, so ripe their honey flows out of them in rivers, and in his other hand a tray of thorns, the bitter hell fruit. ‘What’s your name, boy?’ Grandpa asks me, and from his voice I go slack in the knees, and from the ripe figs my stomach churns harder. I tell him what my name is. ‘It’s Mehmed,’ I tell him, ‘so give me a fig, Grandpa. Let me pass through the good doors.’ ‘Mehmed, eh?’ the giant says. Right then his mustaches unwind, I tell you, and turn to hands, my mother’s hands, and hold a thorn ball to my dry lips. “That’s a thorn ball, Grandpa,” I cry, and the giant starts laughing.

“Well, change its name, then, traitor. Call it a fig and feast on it in the Jahannam.”

At this, the women in the bus commenced weeping. But the men, who this rambling had amused more than frightened, clapped their hands in roaring laughter. “Don’t listen to this drunkard,” an old grandfather told Kemal. He must have seen her shiver under the goatskin. Her lips were chapped with thirst and her stomach was churning. Then the old man twisted his mustache, leaned in and asked her, “What’s your name, boy?” and around her the men once more burst laughing.

10.

In the militia department the line went up for three stories. Kemal was forced to wait beside her mother. It was dim in the hallway and Kemal could see no colors, no sharp edges, and so her mother seemed almost peaceful for the first time in a whole year. She wanted to hold her hand then, and tell her not to grip the scarf so hard, not to mind a head without hair. Instead, she held a notebook someone gave her, and in the notebook, pages and pages of first names. Proper. Bulgarian.
Aleksandra, Anelia, Anna, Borislava, Boryana, Vanya, Vesselina, Vyara
.

It was three hours before she stood at the front of the line.

“Whatever happens in there,” her father said, “you must forget it.” Then Kemal stepped in a room, with a desk, with a man behind it writing names in a book, with a dead ficus in the corner, with a portrait of Todor Zhivkov askew on the wall, with a floor muddy from the boots of other people.

“What name did you choose?” the man asked her, licked his fingers and turned a page, not looking. She told him she already had a name. That no one could force her. No Party, no militia.

“There are four hundred people waiting behind you,” the man said, finally looking.

So she said, “Vyara,” and the man wrote that in the big book.

On the drive home, she kept repeating that new name, watching her face in the window—and beyond the window, the mountain, her head too in a head scarf, her face veiled in cloth of rain fog. It wasn’t a bad name, the new one, she thought, and kept repeating it. Then she remembered how her father had pulled the goatskin, and how the water had soaked her mother. She started laughing. And laughing she walked to their seat and sat between them.

She had expected to see her father outraged, angry. Instead, quiet, he stared out the window. A different man already, Kemal thought, and put one hand on his knee, and one on her mother’s. “Nice to meet you,” she told them. “Who are you now?”

11.

It wasn’t only the living.

They were making bagpipes when a neighbor told them.

“Shame on you, Rouffat, for spreading cheap lies,” Kemal’s father said, but all the same, still holding an awl, he ran out the village. Kemal ran in his footsteps.

Every stone on every grave had been plastered over. They had chiseled new names on some stones and left others empty. Kemal’s grandfather had been given a new name. Her grandmother had been left nameless. Her father kneeled beside another, smaller headstone and ran his fingers across the fresh plaster. More and more people gathered, and up the row Kemal saw a man with a mattock beat the stone of his father. The man broke the stone to pieces and started digging.

Her father stabbed the stone before him with the chisel until the plaster crumbled. And once he licked his fingers and polished each letter, it was Kemal’s old name she saw in the tombstone. Her father polished the years. But this grave was not her grave, and she figured the boy who lay in it had never lived to be half her age, even.

Up the row the man with the mattock, now shirtless, his hands sticky with mud to the elbows, pulled out bones from the ground and lay them one by one in the shirt beside him.

12.

They worked on the bagpipes. Day and night without rest. When Kemal’s fingers bled, her father no longer kissed them. “My fingers, too, are bleeding,” he’d tell her. He started drinking, despite the Qu’ran and his own judgment. Sometimes, tired, Kemal pierced a hole too broad in the chanter, butchered a reed, snapped a mouthpiece.

“It’s that new name they gave you that makes you clumsy,” her father would say, flaming. “To make bagpipes you need a man’s name.” At first it was a quick blow behind the neck he dealt her, but soon his hand loosened further. No day rolled by without a beating.

The money they’d dug up was not enough for a hundred skins, so one night her father took her up to the goat pens to steal kid goats.

There was no moon when they walked out of the village. Hot wind blew in their faces, a gust from the White Sea, and Kemal’s lips cracked the more she licked them. So she kept licking, the salt and seaweed, so clean after the stench of her mother. They climbed a hill and crossed a meadow. The wind turned musky. In the distance they could see a scatter of sparks from a fire, tall and bursting with pinewood. Around that fire, Kemal knew, the shepherds lay too drunk to notice them coming. The dogs started, but when the wind threw the familiar smells at their muzzles, the dogs fell once again silent. This was the pen Kemal’s father came to when he bought
meh
skins. These were the dogs Kemal played with, the dogs she rode like mules, the dogs that had once licked her body clean when, as a baby, her father had bathed her in a trough of goat milk by this same fire.

At the pen hedge Kemal clamped the knife in her teeth, and hoisted herself over. She stood silent amidst the herd, sleeping goats dreamily munching, flickering ears. She could see the fire over the hedge and hear the shepherds snoring, the dogs whimpering, lazy, the wind gusting muffled between the twined hedgerows. In the dark her father was looking for kid goats. Only kid goats could turn
meh
s for a bagpipe. An older goat, ready for mating, reeked so bad, not even rose oil could cure it.

Kemal waded through the darkness on all fours, still biting the knife, her spit drooling. She came to a kid goat and like her father had taught her, rolled it flat on its back, sat on its hind legs, clenched the front in her fist. The goat did not scream even when she cut a hole in its belly. She breathed the stench in. The goat flapped its ears. Kemal buried her hand deep inside it and the wet heat stunned her fingers the way snail horns are stunned when you touch them. She felt her way around the stomach, a
meh
bloated with half-grazed grass instead of air. Then she caught the goat’s heart, midway in its beating. The goat kicked lightly, its neck stretching when she clamped its muzzle.

In the dark, she could hear her father dragging his belly across the short grass, stopping goat hearts. His nose whistling, stuffed from hay and flower, his breaths deep and even, regular knocking. She could not see him nor did she need to. She could not imagine that this same hand could hit her. In the dark, he was the way Kemal would always remember.

From that night on, she began to sleep in the workshop on the piles of stolen goatskins and in her dreams she saw hubs, reeds, chanters,
mehs
, like hearts beating in her clenched fists. And in her dream, it was her mother’s heart she was clenching, and so she clenched tighter.

13.

They were up to seventy bagpipes when the militia car came back to the workshop. Three men and the sergeant Kemal had treated with well water. “Now listen up, comrade,” the sergeant told her father. “The shepherds called from the goat pens to say some goats were stolen. So we followed the wool thread, if you permit the expression, and guess where that thread led us? Show us, kindly, the receipts for these skins you’ve purchased.”

“I’ve lost them,” Kemal’s father answered.

“And your passport?”

“I might have burned it.”

“Losho, drugaryu,”
the sergeant told him. “That’s too bad, comrade.” He walked between the boxes and kicked them over gently, and Kemal watched the reeds and chanters spill out on the wood floor. He leaned down a little to face her better, then licked his thumb and wiped the dried blood from her split lip. “Why is your lip split?” he asked her, then took her hands and examined her fingers. “And why are your fingers bleeding? Is Father trying to make a quick buck?” The sergeant kept pacing and counting the bagpipes. Then he suggested Father come back to the station to have some coffee—some Turkish delight, even—and talk things over. He handed a pair of handcuffs to Kemal’s father and asked, kindly, for him to snap them on his own wrists.

14.

From then on, it was Kemal who took care of her mother. When the dark fell, she jumped over the fence to their neighbors and squeezed what little milk they’d left in their goats—half a jar, a whole jar sometimes. She felt no remorse for stealing. No neighbor had come to ask how Kemal managed, now that her father was taken. How her mother was feeling. So she cooked lumpy hominy or
popara
, and though her mother refused to eat, Kemal forced her—twenty spoonfuls at dinner and ten at lunchtime.

They kept waiting for the militia car to bring back Kemal’s father.

“Is that,” her mother often said, “an engine I hear?”

In the shower, Kemal brought the three-legged chair for her mother to sit on. She could not stand to see her mother naked—how thin her arms were, her legs, how swollen her kneecaps, how her bald skull glistened, and the hole in her belly where the pouch connected.

“It’s not that bad, really,” her mother told her. “I’m doing much better.”

Kemal could no longer stand to see her own skull in the mirror. So she let her hair grow longer—thick and prickly at first, like pig bristle, then much softer. She did not like the way her hair tickled her neck, cheeks, eyelids, but she liked to run her fingers through the locks and twirl them. Her mother had given her an old comb, and for an hour each morning Kemal combed at the threshold.

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