East of the West (8 page)

“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 Lenin. 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

I
t’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?”

•

In the summer, Tuesdays and Saturdays. That’s when we have buses running, one in the morning and one in the p.m. When we have school, Saturdays only. Sometimes I skip school just to go, but rarely since Grandmoms sets all over me for turning down the knowledge. She says only men can afford to be uneducated. “Women,” she says, “need to develop their brains.” “Oh, yeah?” I say. “And how about Magda? Her brain is the opposite of developed, but she is always well fed, wears nice clothes and sleeps in nice sheets. Watches a plasma TV.” “Now, now,” Grandmoms says, “don’t be a bitch.”

At the bus station I pay the driver, Uncle Pesho, and he says, “Mariyke, did you rob a bank?” I shove the money in my pocket. Thirty levs. The other twenty were for Grandmoms, after she sold the earrings. And two are gone for the ticket, there and back. The bus is empty and I’m cold so early in the morning. “Can’t you turn the heat on, Uncle?” He turns and looks at me, then at my shirt. “I
see
that you’re cold. I like it.” And, laughing, he starts the bus and off we go.

He is a good man, Uncle Pesho, he’s known me for ten years now. And he’s been driving me for seven. That’s when I started seeing Magda. Before that, I didn’t know about her. Nine years. Days, nights, summers, winters. I’d go to bed and wake up in the morning, I’d swim in the river, work the fields, go to school, clueless. Then, when Grandmoms told me, it was, like, yes, I knew it all along. Like I didn’t know it, but like I’ve
known
it. Like when old people say their kneecaps hurt so it must rain soon. Only my kneecaps hurt
after
the rain. I might have shown it because one day Grandmoms said, “Okay, okay, I’ll take you there. Just stop.”

Magda was this tiny thing. A whole head shorter than me, and her face was like this, distorted. Her tongue was swollen in her mouth. I couldn’t look past her rolling tongue, and the spit trickling down her chin. Grandmoms wiped it with a kerchief as if she’d wiped it time and time before. Later I asked her, “How long?” and she said, “On and off, once a month for three years.”

“Why three?”

She said, “I couldn’t go on forever without sleep. I thought I could. But I couldn’t.”

When we first met, Magda put her hands all over my face. Sticky hands on my cheeks, on my ears. She poked inside my nose. “Quit it!”

“Now, now,” Grandmoms said, “that’s how she’s getting to know you.”

You can’t get to know someone by shoving a finger up their nose. But if someone shoves their finger up your nose, you learn some things about them. It’s called a one-way implication. We studied it in Math.

I try to teach Magda some things. Since we’re not men and can’t afford. I take my books to her and sit her in a corner in a nice room that smells of rice with milk and cinnamon and teach her things. She does okay in math. She knows multiplication. At first it was, like, 1 × 1, 1 × 2, and it was never past the two, everything equaled two. 5 × 7, 9 × 8, everything was 2. But now she gets it. She gets history. She likes simpler things, made up stories, poems, but she is awful with language. And she can’t spell to save her life. There is one letter in particular she just can’t write.
.

is the gallows upon which Magda will hang. I tell her, “Girl, you are sixteen and your
looks like a dead frog.” And she laughs. At least she laughs. Her words might be all mumbly and downright stupid sometimes, but her laughter is snowdrops and there is nothing stupid about her laughter.

Now, on the bus, Uncle Pesho calls me over. “Mariyke, you want to sit in my lap? Drive the machine?” That’s what we used to do when I was little. I’d sit in his lap and hold the wheel and drive. So I say, “Okay, why not. Because the way my thoughts were going, I’d rather change their course.”

I sit in his lap and the bus goes and then he moves his hand up. He pinches my nipple and laughs and I say,
“Pederas
, let me out.” He’s laughing, laughing, and I stand up and slam my foot onto his knee and he veers the bus off the road. I pull the hand brake and then it’s all nuts and bolts thrashing underneath us, and smoke. The bus halts. I hit the button, out the door, and I’m two hills away.