East of the West (19 page)

Maya’s first cousin had already lived in New York for fifteen years and he let us stay at his place—a one bedroom in Bronx—until we rented our own one bedroom above his one bedroom.

The cousin helped me get a job as a cashier at a Russian convenience store during the days and another at night, as a 7-Eleven clerk, three times a week. I worked like this for four months until, one morning, I came home after a long shift with a high fever and abdominal pain so sharp, I cried louder than the baby. Five hours later I lay in a hospital room without an appendix. The operation cost us twenty-five thousand, out of which we could pay zero. We decided to save up for a few months, buy tickets to Bulgaria and vamoose. But while Maya had been waiting in the hospital, she had, entirely by accident, as these things are prone to happen, overheard a Bulgarian name mispronounced over the intercom. She’d seen a doctor rush down the hallway and chased him to the elevator. She’d read his tag. And lo and behold … Buddy Milanov, M.D.

For months I thought of Buddy as my Christ, my God-sent Savior: he called insurance companies for us, filed claims on our behalf and finally, because we were so officially poor, managed to get ninety percent of our hospital fees remitted. We made him Elli’s godfather. We invited him for
musaka
on the weekends. We even hiked up our skirts so he could bend us properly over the kitchen counter. With the baby in the room.

After I walked in on them, Maya moved on the offensive. She blamed me for this, and that, and for other things. A week of fighting later, she had already taken Elli to Buddy’s apartment—overlooking the river, with plenty of rooms and a granite counter in the kitchen.

I decided to kill Buddy. I quit my night job so I could wait for him outside the hospital with a knife in my pocket. I waited for a week, watching him call cab after cab, until it became clear I’m not, alas, a real man from the Balkans. So like a slug I began to befriend him again. Buddy, my friend, what’s going on, pal? Let bygones be bygones. I knew that if I could talk to Maya, reason with her over time, she would undoubtedly come home with me.

Five years went by. Last March my wife informed me that Buddy had found a job in some clinic in Texas and that they were all moving. They would graciously pay for my plane tickets, twice a year, so I could come down and visit Elli at dates of my convenience.

I decided it was time to kill Buddy again. I sharpened the knife, polished its thick, wooden handle. Then I poured myself some vodka and made a tomato salad with too much vinegar and a lot of onions and ate the salad and drank the vodka, and sharpened the knife. I stared at my Seiko until the phone rang, eight in the evening.

“Taté,”
Elli said on the other side, “we just rode an airplane.” And after, when I hung up, I could not breathe, could not move, knowing she was there and I here. I could not imagine where she was. I could not see the things she saw, did not understand what she meant by a huge sky and no tall trees. After I finished the bottle I called my mother back home, in Bulgaria.

She did not recognize my voice right away.

“Mother,” I said, “I’m moving to Texas.”

“Good for you,” she said. “Are you thinking …” she said, “are you considering …”

I told her I was not. I had no money, no time for trips to Bulgaria.

“Of course,” she said. “Money and time. I know how it is.”

III.

We’re kicking the ball in John Martin’s backyard, catching the last sun of the day, while he sways in his rocker—one hand holding a beer, the other one swatting mosquitoes. The rocker creaks and every now and then there is the sound of crushed metal, of his boots knocking on the planks, as he reaches over for a new can from the cooler.

We play a quick game, which I win, ten goals to seven. Then, when it’s too dark for playing, I teach her how to dive for penalties, how to kick her own heel and roll to the ground with an agonizing yell.

“Always seek contact,” I say, “but if there is none, kick yourself to the ground. Make this a rule: you must dive for a penalty at least once every game.”

She listens and, like a great sport, runs, kicks her heel and rolls in the grass.

“It hurts,” she says and rubs her knee.

“What can you do?” I tell her. “Life.”

Then John Martin brings his beer down to the pitch. “I can’t understand your Bulgarian gibberish,” he says, “but goddamn it, Princess, is he teaching you to cheat?”

“No, John,” I say. “I’m teaching her to play the game.”

“Some game this is,” he says, and pokes the ball with the tip of his cowboy boot. “Come on, Princess, let’s play a real sport.”

“John Martin,” I say, “American football is not for girls.”

“My daughter loved it,” he says. “I threw the ball with my daughter every day, in this very yard, for nine years and she loved every minute of it. Come on, Princess. I’ll teach you to throw.”

He wobbles back to the house and reemerges a few minutes later with a half-deflated eggball in hand. I step to the side and open a beer while he positions Elli at the right spot, while he throws the ball so far away from her it’s embarrassing to watch.

“Just warming up the old joints,” he says, and sways his arms madly about, forgetting he’s holding a can. Beer splashes all over him. “Come on, Princess, throw it back,” he yelps, dripping, clapping his hands, stomping his boots. Elli giggles and looks at me for the green light.

I tap my nose with a finger a few times. “At his mug,” I clarify in Bulgarian.

“Quiet, Commie!” John Martin yells. “We’re playing ball now. Come on, Princess. Throw.”

With a light grip, just the way I’ve taught her, Elli raises the ball to her ear, shoulders parallel to John’s body, left foot forward. Then she extends her arm back gracefully, and with a swift half circle, rotating her shoulder for maximum velocity, chucks the ball straight into his face.

The ball knocks him flat on his ass.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. He sits panting and wipes his bloodied nose. He starts laughing. “Jesus Christ, that was a cannon. I did not see that coming.”

Elli runs to the house for napkins and I help John up and pass him my beer.

“I told you American football was not for girls,” I say, and he shakes his head.

“She’s good,” he says. “Jesus Christ.” Then he figures Elli was not the girl I meant.

•

After three boxes of macaroni and cheese for dinner, John Martin unfolds the flat earth of his Risk game and we battle each other for all the continents of the world. As always John Martin conquers Asia. He clusters the majority of his troops in Siam, now officially amended to Vietnam with a pen. Elli holds the Americas and I’m spreading the Great Bulgarian Empire.

“Watch out, John Martin,” I tell him. “The Great Bulgarian Empire is spreading.”

“Bring it on, Commie,” he says. He arranges some of his manned cannons in a row, like that would help him. I pet the musket of one of my soldiers.
“Avtomat Kalashnikov,”
I say, “Bulgarian-made.”

He pushes forward a soldier of his own. “Napalm, mother fucker. American as apple pie.” Then he looks at Elli and his big, square face is flaming red from swearing.

We have never finished a game. After an hour John Martin is too drunk to keep rolling the dice. He retires to his recliner and watches us for a while, every now and then, yelling, “Kick his Communist ass,” or “Atta girl.” Sometimes he takes the phone and cradles it in his lap. Sometimes he fondles it until he falls asleep.

“He wants to call his daughter, doesn’t he?” Elli asks, and sometimes I suppose that’s exactly what he wants to do. Either his daughter or Anna Maria, the Mexican widow. With John Martin there is no telling. We lay the board and all the tiny soldiers back in their box. Elli pulls the stinky boots off John Martin’s feet, and while I take them out to the porch she throws a blanket over him. Then she takes a shower and brushes her teeth.

In my room we read Bulgarian books, mostly fairy tales of
samodivi
in beautiful garments, of men with scales and dragon wings, of
vampiri, karakonjuli, talasumi
. But we’ve read those books so many times, there is no surprise in the stories, no heart left.

So sometimes Elli asks me to tell her a story. And I tell her. I make things up about the old khans, about the glorious battles. I teach her history as I remember it from school. Important dates, memorable moments: how they made the Cyrillic alphabet, how we defeated the knights and kept their emperor imprisoned in our castle until finally we decided to push him off the tower to die a deserved death.

“Have you seen this tower,
taté?”
she asks me, and I tell her, of course I have. All Bulgarians have, it’s there, part of the castle.

“When can I see it?”

And I don’t know what to tell her, because the way my wife is raising her, the way Buddy dictates things, I can never see them actually going back to Bulgaria, even as tourists. For Christ’s sake, they won’t let her speak her own language out of fear it’ll ruin her English. In their eyes, my daughter is capable of speaking a single language only.

Tonight Elli asks me for another tale. I change into my sleeping T-shirt and jump in bed, but she remembers something and takes a cell phone from her jeans on the chair. She hammers a quick text message, and twenty seconds later comes the reply.
Sweet dreams, angel. XOXO
.

“What the hell is
XO
?” I say. “What the hell is this phone for?”

“To keep contact,” she says and slips the phone back in her jeans. “Hugs and kisses.”

“Remember,” I tell her as she gets back to bed. “Even if there is no contact …”

“Kick your heel, and fall for penalty. I remember.”

“Atta girl,” I say and we laugh. “What story do you want to hear?”

“Any story. Something nice. About our family. Back home.”

Back home. I kiss her on the forehead. “Okay,” I say. I take a deep breath while she lies on my chest and prepares to listen. “And so this story, this story, too, begins with blood,” I say. “And with blood it ends. Blood binds those in it and blood divides them. Many have told it before and many have sung about it, but I didn’t learn it from them. I was born and I knew it. It was in the earth and in the water, in the air and in the milk of my mother. But it was not in your mother’s milk and not in your air, so you must listen now as I tell you.”

I can feel her breath, tiny and warm against my neck. I rest a hand on her hair.

“See now,” I say, “how black smoke plasters the sky of Klisura. Feel the fires that burn the flimsy houses. Hear the children screaming and their mothers weeping. Ali Ibrahim is converting slaves to the true faith. ‘Who else will refuse to put a fez on his head?’ Ali says, and his deep voice cuts through the air like a damascene sword. He sits on his black stallion not far away from a chopping log, in a yard filled with soldiers and poor peasants. Dark blood has soaked into the log, and only five more heads must be cut for the blood to finally reach the feet of Ali Ibrahim’s horse.

“ ‘Whose head will roll next?’ Ali asks. Weeping rises above the crowd. A young girl steps forward. She moves slowly; she swims above the ground. Her hair is long, so long that it trails in the dirt behind her and winds out of the yard like a river. Snowdrops wreath her head, and a white gown envelops her in a ghostly cocoon. Her blue eyes cut through the darkness around Ali and search for his face.

“He watches as she comes near.

“ ‘Why, my poor brother,’ the girl asks him, ‘have you forgotten your own? It is your blood you shed as you slay them, my brother. It is your blood you spill.’

“Ali takes out his yataghan and jumps off the horse to cut the girl. The frightened eyes of the villagers—Christians he has sworn before the sultan to convert to Islam—follow him as he swings the sword through the air, desperately trying to butcher this apparition. But, as usual, the girl is gone. She has sunk back in his mind, only to return again on some other occasion and in some other form.”

I stop for a moment to catch my breath.

“Taté?”
Elli says. “How is this story about our family?”

“Wait,” I say. “Just listen. And try to fall asleep. It’s getting late. So this story,” I say, “does not begin with Ali Ibrahim, really, although it ends with him. It begins eighteen years earlier with the birth of my great-grandmother—the prettiest woman who ever lived.

“It is well known, even before her birth, that my great-grandmother would be the most beautiful woman in the world. So on the day she draws her first breath, men from all over come to pay her tribute. The line in front of the house is so long that it takes the last man twelve years before he finally falls at her feet and presents his gifts of honor.

“Because of my great-grandmother’s supreme beauty, the laws of cause and effect in the village break down for a while. An event is no longer followed by its usual consequence but instead leads to something completely unexpected. This is first noticed when a few of the men waiting to see the newborn get so anxious that they start throwing stones at the house. Contrary to all expectations, the windows do not shatter, but the leaves on the nearby trees momentarily turn red and begin falling as if autumn has come months before its time. Five houses down, a girl desperately falls in love with her uncle because two kids try to drown a bag of black kittens in the river, and an old woman is run over by a bull because on the other end of the village a housewife forgets to put potatoes in the stew.

“Word that the child destined to be the most beautiful woman has been born spreads quickly. It travels from the steep banks of the Danube through the snowcapped peaks of the Balkan range to the vast rose valleys of Kazanlak and the strait of the Bosporus until it finally reaches the ears of the great sultan in Istanbul. His Greatness immediately loses sleep over the beauty of my great-grandmother simply by listening to others talk about her. For days, a wretched shadow, he sits under the fig trees longing for her, and nothing seems to bring him pleasure anymore. The songs of the most exotic canaries of Singapore are but dreadful noise to his ears. The caresses of the prettiest of his wives chill him to his bones and make him want to weep in solitude. Eating is his only way out of the misery. With every sunrise the sultan devours a dozen dishes of baklava, each one more soaked in honey than the one before. With every noon he feasts on three roasted lambs garnished with trout liver and woodpecker hearts, and when the sun sets behind the palace he seeks comfort in the meat of twenty ducks and two baby calves. All this food makes him so obese, so absolutely humongous, that nothing within a hundred steps can escape his shadow.”