East of the West (10 page)

I can’t write English, though we studied it in school, but it’s not so hard to copy. At least on paper words are words.
Pops, Magda is pregnant. They are kicking her out of the Home. We ask for your help. The abortion costs a lot of money. Send it in an envelope to Grandma. We wish you health. Maria and Magda
.

After I’m finished, Missis inspects the writing. “Mistake,” she says, and shows me where I’ve butchered one letter. “Again.”

I copy it again and she says, “Mistake,” and brings more sheets and over and over again it’s mistake, mistake, mistake. Missis is drinking her fifth cocktail when she starts to cry. “Oh, my,” she says, and tries laughing instead.

Then she is quiet, but I can tell she wants to speak.

“Missis,” I go. She goes, “I knew this girl, very pretty. A neat student at the language school. She served cocktails to foreigners in the Balkan Tourist hotel for cash. Her father was a drunk who wasted all their money. One night, an old English bastard asked the girl to make him a Corpse Reviver. The girl had no idea what that was.”

She shakes her glass. “It’s not that bad. It’s just a simple operation really. You never feel a thing.” And then, like that, as if she’s slapped her own face, Missis is once more collected. “Go on, now, finish the letter.”

I copy a few more times and must be making little mistakes, which is strange, because I can’t really see how what I’ve written is wrong. But Missis says it’s wrong. Finally she says, “Give me the pen and stretch out your hand.” She smacks the pen on my fingers again and again. “This is how you learn your English. This is how you marry Mister and live rich. What? You don’t think I know you’ve been stealing my things? My shoes, my earrings, my necklaces. You are a little thieving bitch, aren’t you?”

It hurts. But I’ll be damned if I pull my fingers back. Let her hit. Let her hit
me
for once. Bring it on, Missis. It isn’t even a thing.

When she’s had her hitting, Missis calms down. She seems to think of something for a time. Her back stiff and straight, she leaves the room and then returns with a wad of money. “Forget the letter,” she says, and places the wad before her on the table. “Do one thing for me and this is yours.”

I don’t like now the way her eyes have blurred.

“Kiss me,” she says.

One thousand dollars for a single kiss. I say, “You got it,” and lean forward ready to get this done. Then Missis giggles and she, too, leans forward, eyes closed, whole body swaying slightly, her face streaked from the crying, her upper lip beaded with sweat. She smells of perfume and
rakia
. We touch lips, my eyes tightly shut, because I am afraid to look, when Missis squeals. “Oh, garlic. Gross!” and pushes me away. She bursts out laughing. “I can’t do this!” She shakes her hands like little wings. “Take it, it’s yours …” she manages at last, and keeps on laughing.

•

From there I run to the bus, as hard as I can, fighting to keep an empty head. “You want me to sit in your lap again, Uncle? You want to pinch me some more?”

“Mariyke,” he says, “I didn’t mean nothing by it. Please, my soul. Forgive.”

“I’ll forgive if you do me a favor,” I say, and he goes, “For you, always.”

He drives and I sob in the back. The wad is like mud in my hand. The more I squeeze it, the more it runs in dirty trickles down my sleeve.

In the orphanage Magda is sitting on her bed, rocking slightly. The bedsprings squeak beneath her like the village wailers at their last funeral for the day. Her hair is cut short and there are tiny hairs all over her forehead, cheeks and neck. She wears a blue dress, a soft fresh color. No doubt a dress they bought with Mister’s money.

“Well, Magdichka,” I say, “there are no dresses like this with Grandmoms.” I wrap all her clothes in a blanket: a pair of jeans, three blouses, six underpants, six bras, six pairs of socks that don’t really match. With the bundle in one hand, and holding Magda with the other, I walk out of the home.

I tell her it’s okay. “We’re going on a trip,” I say.

“All right,” she manages to say.

We sit back and Uncle drives. He wants to know exactly where in town.

“Just drop us at the station and wait,” I say. I count the money. A thousand green. Dr. Rangelov is the name. A yellow co-op, on the second floor. I’ll know it by the linden tree outside, struck by lightning, all charred. I’ll tell him Missis sends us and let him count the money. And then it’s a simple operation. And then we won’t feel a thing.

It’s early afternoon, but out the window the sky is dark. The road black, the clouds black and the hills round like Ferris wheels. “They look like Ferris wheels,” I say, and Magda smears her hands all over the window, pulls on the curtains, chews on the strings.

Gently, I brush the cut hairs one by one off her neck and sweaty forehead. It won’t be fair, I think. To have a baby with a swollen brain, with Grandmoms for mother. With me for aunt. “Stay still,” I say.

At last we are in town. The driver is nagging me about the bus. By six o’clock, he says, we must be back in the depot. I tell him I have to think. “Go smoke a cigarette outside. Get coffee,” and keep at the tiny hairs. “It’s just not fair, Magda, you know?”

“All right,” she says.

“No wonder you’re where you are. That’s all you say.”

“All right.”

We burst out laughing. And then I picture her, spread like a
, the baby gone. Or else, I see the baby crying, all day, all night, hungry, and then I see it grown up, choking for air, because like me it feels the need to steal. And I am always by its side, filling its little head with tricks. I teach it how to pocket pens, necklaces, lighters … 
Quickly, like so, and no one will see
.

One thousand green in my hand. And if I left now, no one would see. One thousand green would get me so far away from all this mess, so quickly, even my thoughts would fall behind. I say, “Wait here, Magda. I’ll be back before you know it. Just hold on to the blanket, hold tight like so, and I’ll be back.” She holds. I kiss her swiftly on the lips, a spit-wet little peck.

I am my mother’s daughter. And so I run as fast as you can run through rain—and even out of breath I keep on running. I fear that if I stop, my feet might take me back.

At last I find myself at the other end of town, muddy and soaked, outside some beauty parlor. Beyond the parlor glass I see women nesting in rows of chairs, long-necked and elegant, aristocratic, some with blow-drying helmets on their heads and others with cotton balls between their toes. I also see my own reflection in the glass, as thin as a ghost and just as lively. All through my life it has been Grandmoms cutting my hair with the same pair of scissors her grandma used on hers. To hell with it, I think.

And twenty dollars later I’m in a chair.

“I want it short,” I say, and watch in the mirror, one wet rope falling after the other. By now they must be home. Uncle Pesho would have taken Magda to Grandmoms, who would be worried sick. At last the mirror girl is someone else—a lighter, more beautiful version of me. A stranger really.

After the cut, I need dry clothes. A dress. Green, red, yellow, blue. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s expensive and new. I need new shoes, high heels that splash clink-clanking through the puddles. From there, of course, I’m off to the hotel. Balkan Tourist.

The waiter calls me “Mademoiselle” and walks me to a table. The dress rustles against my thighs, the heels peck the polished floor. He lights a candle. White cloth and forks of different sizes. I order sandwiches with ham and cheese and eat them, while to the side some grandpa plays the piano, his bald head twinkling, itself a candle top. I order chicken fricassee and fish, flan for desert, and crème brûlée, and rice with cinnamon and milk, and barely touch them, but still I order more.

From there I fly up to the hotel bar. Tonight as every night, a poster says, it’s a variety show. I sit in the corner and call for almonds, for orange and pineapple juice. The bar is half empty, here and there older men in pairs sip on their drinks—they’re all nicely dressed, most of them foreign it seems. And on the stage, under the glow of a million tiny colorful lights, dance glittering girls, long-legged, short-skirted, with haircuts like mine, with big and stupid smiles.
Variété
. It seems more like a circus to me. I bet they make some decent cash. I bet I could be such a girl. I’ll rent a room in town, I’ll work the nights and sleep the days, a dreamless sleep, until one day a British man, with hats made from puppies and snow-white suits, will offer me a drink.

Pops, Magda is pregnant. They are kicking her out of the Home
.

I read the letter again. I can barely make out the words, with all the flashing lights onstage, but words are words. I think of Grandmoms, then of Magda, by now most likely sleeping in my bed.

I know all this is not a dream, but even so—why does it have to be like this?

I feel the suffocating need to stuff my pockets with all those shiny lights onstage. If I don’t, I’ll positively drown. I sit and watch the bulbs explode, a thick fiery swarm, but I’ll be damned if I move.

Some petty change. That’s all that’s left when the program ends. I phone from the lobby and Grandmoms picks up right away. I don’t wait to hear her speak.

“How’s life treating you?” I say. “Listen,” I say, “I need some money for a ticket home.”

A PICTURE WITH YUKI

Y
uki and I arrived in Bulgaria three weeks before our hospital appointment, mostly so we’d have enough time to get over jet lag, but also so we would get there before the big summer heat, and not buy plane tickets at peak season prices. We spent the first week in Sofia, with my parents, and got along with them surprisingly smoothly, considering the circumstances. But my hometown did not sit well with my wife. When they’d first heard we were coming, my parents had equipped my old room with a new bed and an AC, which had arrived defective, and the new part would take a month to arrive. At night Yuki complained of the heat and when I opened the window it was the boulevard that annoyed her, the barking stray dogs, the drunks who had turned the bus stop into their drinking spot.

For a few nights straight Yuki did not sleep. She would sit in bed and press the AC remote repeatedly and the AC would rattle but not cool.

“It’s all nerves,” I told her. I reminded her that just the other day she had smoked her last cigarette outside O’Hare. She reminded me that just the other day her suitcase had not landed with us in Sofia. That when it had finally arrived, her toothbrush had been missing, her blue Starter sneakers, the box of Nicorette gum.

“These things happen,” I assured her. “Besides, I bought you Bulgarian gum. Just as good, and probably better.”

She popped a piece and chewed it vehemently for a while. She dug her thumb, with the nail peeled ragged by her other nails, into the remote. “Bulgarian crap,” she said, “it doesn’t work. Nothing here works.”

She started to cry. I told her she was wrong. Some things, yes, but not all things. Some things, I told her, were bound to work. We deserved a break, I told her, because we were good people and good things happened to good people, sooner or later. I blabbered like that for a while and she said, “You’re blabbering. Stop it.” She said I didn’t know anything. If I’d known something, she said, I wouldn’t have married her in the first place.

That’s when my mom knocked on the door. I was glad she had it in her, the audacity, to knock on our door at four in the morning.

“Tell Yuki I bring linden tea,” my mother commanded, and found her way in the semidarkness to set the tray on the night stand.
“Lipov chay, Yuki,”
she said in Bulgarian. “It’ll help her sleep. Tell her that. With acacia honey. Why aren’t you telling her that?”

I told her that and Yuki, who’d hidden under the blanket, peeked up to nod thankfully.

“Did I …” my mother said and raised an eyebrow. “Were you—”

I said we weren’t—

“I didn’t think you were,” she said, waiting for Yuki to drink the tea. “After all, in your condition, what’s the point?”

The following morning I asked my father for the old Moskvich and by sunset, Yuki and I were two hundred kilometers north, in my grandparents’ old village house.

•

We’d learned about the in vitro program in Sofia last year, from a friend of my mom’s—a forty-something schoolteacher who, after many barren years, was now, finally, the mother of twins—Lazar and Leopold, or some similar-sounding madness.

By that time Yuki and I had been married and had tried to conceive for eighteen months. We consulted a doctor in Chicago, a Bulgarian my friends at O’Hare had recommended. It turned out there was something the matter with Yuki’s fallopian tubes. It would be very hard, the doctor said, to get pregnant as nature designed it, though by all means, he said, keep trying. It would be easier to try other means, but these, of course, required hefty sums. I am a luggage loader at O’Hare. Yuki waits tables at a low-level sushi restaurant, imaginatively named Tokyo Sushi, and on the side babysits youngster Americans, whose parents have deemed her speaking Japanese to their children somehow beneficial. We cannot produce hefty sums.

A phone call to Japan revealed even grimmer prospects, and I found myself forced to get my parents involved. At that time my mother still did not speak to me, so when she picked up the phone I had to wait for my father to take the receiver. That wasted almost a minute of my expensive calling card. “What time is it in Chicago?” my father asking, and “What’s the weather like?” wasted another. Seven years in the States and their questions were the same; so were my answers. Eight hours behind. Windy.

“I need to speak to you about Yuki,” I told him. I could hear my mother’s voice from the other end of the room, like a ghost’s from another dimension, instructing him what to say and waiting for him to relate the things I was saying.

“Tell Mom to come to the phone,” I said.

“Tell him to invite me to his wedding next time,” I heard her saying.

“There will be no next time,” I said, and watched the phone tick away more pricey seconds.

“There might be,” my father said. He asked my mother to repeat something and then related it.

I told them about the problems at hand.

“I expected this,” my mother said, and I hung up before Father could speak.

The thing about Yuki—at least, that which infuriates my parents even more than the fact that she is not a good Bulgarian girl—is her age. The fact that she is four years my senior seems to have a cataclysmic effect on them.

“You cannot blame her for this,” I told them once I dialed again.

“We blame you,” I heard my mother. “And your poor choices,” my father added.

I hung up again. More cents were wasted from my card. We repeated this charade several times before finally I heard my mother promise she would look into things.

“We’re also considering adoption,” I said. This time my father didn’t wait for instructions. “Nonsense,” he said. “Our seed must not be lost. Do you hear me?”

A week later Mother called me herself with the news of Lazar and Leopold.

“It will cost three thousand dollars,” she said.

“We can make three thousand,” I told her.

“It’s on us,” she said. “A wedding gift.”

•

My grandparents were dead now, but even before we arrived in Bulgaria I knew I would take Yuki to see their vacation house. I had spent every summer since the age of five in there: two rooms, a kitchen, an attic with an inclined ceiling that was too low to stand straight under, an acre of orchard for a yard. There was a river in the village, and above the village there was the mountain. You could ask for nothing more.

We carried our bags to the front door, and while I fought with the lock, Yuki chewed nicotine gum and took pictures of the yard and the outdoor toilet. She took a picture of me fighting the lock and then carrying the bags into the dark hallway.

“Please stop with the pictures,” I told her.

She put the camera back in its case. “Are you all right?” she said.

I walked from room to room and opened the windows. I climbed into the attic and opened the window and I opened the window in the basement. Back in the living room I sat on Grandma’s bed, and Yuki sat on Grandpa’s. For a very long time we said nothing at all. I watched the cherry trees, and the peaches, the apples, the plums in the yard, which all looked dead now, completely dried. The sun was slipping behind the giant walnut, and I watched it, orange in the bare branches. It was starting to smell better inside.

“My parents were here last week,” I said. They had stopped by to clean the house and bring clean blankets. My father had mowed a path to the toilet in the yard.

“It looks nice,” Yuki said. “The house looks really nice.”

I lay my palm on the bedcover and ran it up and down and in circles.

“This is Grandma’s bed,” I said. “This is where I slept.”

Then I showed Yuki a hanger in the corner, a wooden stand, with a wool jacket on it and a pair of blue trousers. “These are Grandpa’s trousers.”

•

We didn’t have anything to eat, so we went down the road to a neighbor, an old woman who’d been friends with my grandma. The woman cried and kissed me on both cheeks. I was afraid she would want to kiss Yuki. Japanese people, especially strangers, don’t kiss each other nearly as much as we do.

“My God,” the woman said, and clapped her hands. “She is so tiny.” Then she studied Yuki, head to toes. Yuki stood, flaming red, smiling.

“They aren’t that yellow,” the woman told me at last.

“What did she say?” Yuki asked.

“What did she say?” asked the woman. Inevitably, she plunged herself forward with unexpected agility and took Yuki’s hands. She kissed them and then she kissed Yuki on the cheeks. Yuki obeyed, but wiped her face when the woman wasn’t looking.

Then everyone came out to see Yuki. There were many faces I didn’t recognize, many children and young women. They sat us down on a table in the yard, under the trellised vine, which was just budding green.

“Your family has grown, Grandma,” I told the woman. They were all watching Yuki, all beaming with excitement. One little girl edged herself closer, touched Yuki on the knee and ran away giggling.

“I feel awful,” Yuki said.

“What did she say?” someone asked. They asked if this was Japanese.

I didn’t tell them it was English we spoke. They brought dinner and we ate under the vine, with the sky almost dark and the moon big and still red, low above the hills.

“Is this a camera, Yuki?” a little boy asked. He pronounced her name perfectly. She showed him the tiny device and then she took his picture. Everyone gathered to see the picture on the back screen.

“Can we take a picture with you, Yuki?” someone said. Someone said, “Yuki, have you ever tried Bulgarian
rakia?
Grandma,” someone said, “bring
rakia
for Yuki.”

•

Yuki and I first met by baggage claim number eight. Her bag from Tokyo hadn’t arrived and she looked on the verge of tears.

“These things happen,” I assured her. I had just finished my shift, but I took her to her airline office so she could file a claim and helped her to the front of the line. My Bulgarian friends whistled after us as her high heels clicked down the hall. I asked her if she wouldn’t want to grab some coffee and she said all she wanted was a cigarette and to go home and maybe have a bath. I pictured her in the bath, her shoulders shiny above the foamy water and her long hair tied in a ball.

I talked to her while she lit up outside and I also lit up when she offered. She had first come to the States four years ago, she said, to study art. She wanted to be an animator but was sick of Japan, of how you had to know people to get good jobs. There was a problem of course: the kind of animation she wanted to do was best done in Japan, not in the States. Now that she was finishing her degree, she had to decide …

I started coughing. Distracted by her closeness, I had inhaled by mistake. I dropped the cigarette at my feet. She laughed. She bowed over and clapped a hand on her knee, that’s how hard she was laughing.

“Have you never smoked before?”

I shook my head.

“Really? Never?”

“Never,” I said.

“Why did you do it, then?” she asked, though I’m sure she knew why. She kept laughing at me and I didn’t mind it one bit. I asked her to finish her story but no longer listened to the things she said. I was afraid that at the end she’d simply bid me farewell and walk away, that once her story ended she would dissolve like smoke. “You look awfully pale,” she said, and searched for a place to throw the stub away. “Tell me about yourself,” she asked. “What are
you
doing in the States?”

So I told her. I was loading other people’s bags in the States. I was unloading other people’s bags. I lived in a small apartment with two other Bulgarians and was saving money to go to college. I had arrived in the U.S. five years before, winner of a green card.

The day I won my green card it stormed in Sofia, ravaging wind, deluging summer rain. I had come back home from work, soaking wet, to find the thick envelope stuck in the mailbox like a heart too big for its chest.
Dear winner
, the letter began.

I sprinted up eight flights of stairs to find my parents watching the rain out the living room window. My mother wept when I told them.

“When did you do this?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I didn’t think I’d win the lottery.”

“Now, let’s all calm down now,” Father said. “No need for tears. Have a seat. Let’s talk it over. What are your reasons? What are you missing here? Are you unhappy? You’re not hungry. You have a good room, a computer with Internet. You have a job. Let’s talk it over. What are your reasons here?”

“I’m twenty-seven. I can’t still live with my parents. My job …”

“You’re absolutely right,” my father agreed. He nodded and rubbed his chin. “We’ll get you your own place. One of my colleagues is leasing.”

“Taté,”
I said. “I don’t want
you
to get it for me. I want to try my own luck in America. Do you understand?”

He said nothing. He put his arm around my mother and said nothing.

•

After we ate what our neighbors brought for breakfast, I decided to show the village to Yuki. We took turns with the camera. She posed by a house where I’d often played as a child. The house was in ruins now. There were many obituaries on the gates and Yuki asked me what these were. I told her that in Bulgaria when someone died the family made a
nekrolog
, a sheet with the deceased’s name and picture, a brief, sorrowful poem underneath. People pasted this necrology on their gates, on light poles, and all around their villages or towns so others who might have known the dead would learn the news.

“We do something similar in Japan,” Yuki said, staring closely at the face of an old man, almost inkless from rain. “But no pictures. We post a notice on the entrance to the house of the dead. So and so died, the funeral will be at this time, this place. People often rob those houses,” she said, and took the camera from my hand. She made me pose under an old linden tree. “They lurk outside, wait for the procession to leave, then rob the house. When my uncle died my aunt asked their neighbor to stay in and guard while everyone was away for the service.”

I made the typical peace sign Yuki made on every picture, to mock her. “What if the neighbor wanted to come to the funeral as well?”