East of the West (18 page)

“Let me touch your hair,” her mother asked sometimes, but never dared raise her hand to touch it. She’d only smooth a crease on the blanket. “Beautiful hair, Kemal. Down to my waist. Do you remember?”

Sometimes Kemal took her bagpipe above the village to play with the echo. Once, she saw cars on the road below her, bumper to bumper, with mattresses, chairs, wooden cribs roped to their tops—blue, green, yellow, red cars, blood flowing away from the mountain. She’d heard men talking of fleeing to Turkey, so she tried to imagine herself in a red car, and the car speeding, and only the road before them, clean, smooth, endless. Her father was driving, her mother beside him, and in the back Kemal played the one song she loved most.

Down the slope she watched people from the upper hamlets haul their households on their backs like camels. Men and women and children loaded. She watched a woman trip and all the things tied to her back snap loose and roll down the slope with her body. Pans and pots and spoons and ladles and metal plates jumping wildly and catching the sun like gold coins. So Kemal struck her song with the bagpipe:
A little pebble rolled down the mountain, gathered its brothers. Down in the valley Stoyan was herding a hundred white sheep. “Don’t roll, little pebble,” Stoyan begged it. “Don’t gather your brothers. I’ll give you my two sons, little pebble, just spare my white sheep.”

15.

One night Kemal’s mother called her over. “Listen, Kemal, I’ll be facing the Merciful soon, so do me a favor. Bring me a bagpipe. I want to blow into it.” When Kemal brought her own bagpipe, her mother cradled the bag in her arms like a baby and touched her lips to the blow pipe. A frail breath escaped her and the bag expanded, just slightly. “Have I told you, Kemal, how I met your father? I was a young girl then, sixteen, but my father had already promised me in marriage. I was to marry a neighbor, twice my age, but a rich man—he owned five fields and had traveled to Mecca. Well, one summer evening I go to the fountains—there were fountains, Kemal, outside my village where the water was softer—and I begin to fill the coppers. I hear footsteps behind me, and when I turn around I see your father. His shirt unbuttoned, his hair disheveled and his face sweaty and covered with sawdust. In his arms—two bagpipes. ‘I’m a bagpipe maker,’ he says. ‘Blow up one bagpipe and I’ll blow up the other. I want to hear,’ he says, ‘how they sound together.’ So I blow up one bagpipe and he blows up the other. In two breaths—that’s how quickly he did it. ‘Have you seen,’ he says, ‘a man blow up a bagpipe faster?’ ‘My husband,’ I tell him, ‘needs only a single breath to do it.’ ‘I’ll be your husband,’ he says, and sets the bagpipes to screaming. He holds one under each arm, squeezes and dances. And I can’t stop laughing. But I did stop when I saw, running toward us, my brothers, back from the tobacco. They’d seen your father courting me, and they didn’t need to see more. They gave him a good thrashing. Split the bagpipes, tore his girdle belt. That night, a pebble knocks on our window pane. ‘I’m stealing you,’ your father says when I meet him under the shed, ‘and tomorrow we’re getting married.’ Zeynep, Zeynep, I told myself, you’re a promised bride and your father will kill you. But if you live, your life will be a song with this man, a merry man, a bagpipe maker.”

Then in one swing her mother threw the bag down on the floor. “Take me to his workshop, Kemal,” she said. “In fifteen years he never let me set my foot there.”

And Kemal took her.

“So many skins,” her mother said, “so many chanters. One hundred bagpipes, your father told me before they took him.” Then she looked at Kemal and her eyes misted just enough. “Do you think that maybe—”

In the morning, Kemal moved her mother’s bed to the workshop. And she started making bagpipes. But she butchered the wood parts, ripped holes too large in the goat skins. None of the bags she’d crafted could make music. What they made was screeching, hoarse and ugly.

16.

Days on end Kemal worked, and because the silence scared them, they left the old radio playing. They listened to the news from foreign places, to a voice reading the Danube levels.
Povishenie edinatsa
, the voice read in Russian.
Onze centimeters
, in French. Kemal had never seen the Danube, never would see it, but she wondered how big of a river it was and what it meant for its waters to be up by eleven. Was this a good thing or a bad thing? To whom did it matter?

At night, they listened to a program called
Night Horizon
. People could phone that program and talk on air about the things that hurt them. One engineer from Plovdiv called every night to say he could not sleep. “Dear Party,” he always began his confessions, “I haven’t slept in fifteen years.” He kept a close count—“and three months, and four months, and ten days, nine hours, twenty-one, no, twenty-two minutes.” An old man from Pleven recited children’s poetry to his daughter. After each poem he begged her to phone him in the morning. His daughter never phoned him in the morning and so he kept reciting. But there was a woman from Vidin who Kemal and her mother liked to listen to above all. That woman read letters she’d written to herself, mostly, but sometimes also to other people.
I am outraged, comrades
, the woman read from one letter,
because there were green peppers on sale at the farmer’s market today and no one told me. All my neighbors bought green peppers. Stuffed jars for the winter. I can still smell the peppers roasting and no one told me
.

Kemal’s mother laughed at that one. “Peppers in November,” she said, and asked Kemal to throw more wood in the fire, to keep it burning a little longer. By the stove, Kemal kept waiting for the woman to mention the Danube. Could the woman see it outside her window, Kemal wondered, the way they could see the peaks of Rhodopa? And what did Kemal’s father see out his window? She hoped he had one. She hoped they let him listen to the
Night Horizon
.

“I want to call that program,” Kemal said, “and play Father my bagpipes. I want him to tell me how to make them better. I need a man’s name, Mother, don’t I, to make bagpipes?”

“My dear Kemal,” said her mother, “I had forgotten how pretty your voice was.”

17.

So, like the pepper woman, Kemal began to write letters. She wrote in copying pencil and taped up notes all over the village, mostly outside the village hall, where people could see them.
“Dear Party, a Turk cannot become Bulgarian. Give us back our old names so we can eat figs and go to the Jannah.”

But nothing happened. So one day she wrote a new note and nailed it to the well bucket, down on the square of a Christian village.
Dear Party, a large amount of poison has been dumped into the well. Do NOT drink water and give us back our old names
.

In daylight, from up the road she watched a crowd surround the well. A man splashed two buckets on the pavement and all stood over the puddle as if over a deep hole. A woman began wailing. At last two militia Ladas arrived from the city, blue jars spinning. Kemal did not know if these were the people who’d taken her father—she could not tell one from the other—but she watched them scratch their heads under the blue caps and stare into the puddle like they could see the poison.

To see them so puzzled and stupid gave her a sense of lightness. She would write more notes like this one.

18.

A few drops of blood rolled down her mother’s shoulder and Kemal licked them. She watched more drops gather and wondered if her blood knew yet, if it had sensed death had come. She had moved the body back to the old room, but had nicked a spot when cutting the dress to remove it. She filled up a wooden pail with water and gathered clean gauzes from a box in the corner, and washed her mother’s arms, chest, legs. After she’d washed her, she dressed her in her other good dress. She rolled her to her father’s side of the bed and spread newspapers over where she’d just lain, to soak up the water. She brought her bagpipe but didn’t play it. Instead she lay on the newspapers, held the bag and thought of how her mother’s breath had filled it slightly. She spread out her fingers and watched them. The more she watched them, the more they looked like another girl’s. They felt borrowed, cold, swollen, and they crafted lousy bagpipes. She spoke her old name—Kemal—and the more she repeated it, the more it flowed in itself, the deeper it bit its own tail. She repeated her new name, Vyara, and kept repeating—the old name, the new name, until one devoured the other. Until both felt foreign.

Her body was not her body. Her name was not hers.

19.

Next morning, she wrapped her mother in white sheets. She dragged the bundle out in the yard and onto the two-wheeled carriage they used to haul raw skins from the pens. There were still skins in the carriage, so she spread those for a cushion. She fixed a shovel beside the body and pulled on the carriage. It wasn’t heavy.

She could see shapes behind curtains, ghosts without names and honor. By the time she reached the graveyard, the sun was as high as it would be. By the time she dug the hole up, the sun was setting. She lined the bottom with goatskins so her mother wouldn’t be too cold. She stained the sheets when she rolled her over; her hands had blistered from digging.

It was in that boy’s grave that Kemal lay her. But she would not let the boy rest beside her. So later, after she’d piled back the earth in a black heap, Kemal chucked his bones at the sun to feed its burning a little longer.

20.

That night, Kemal sheared her hair with the kitchen knife. Then, in the workshop, she gathered up all bagpipes—eighty-seven, she counted—and began to inflate them. One after the other the bagpipes let out their pointless screeching. Then, one after the other, Kemal set the woodpiles, boxes, skins, on fire. Out in the yard, she held her own bagpipe and squeezed her elbow, and let the pipe draw flat lines of sound, terrible, stabbing. She watched the flames fatten, and sparks exploding, the hut collapsing and hissing pipes and chanters shooting up in ashen showers.

All over the village dogs were barking. Once more Kemal could see shadows from dim-lit windows, and once more no one stepped out, not even to curse at her for all the clamor.

She stuffed her sweater with gauze and old newspapers, then crawled out of the village toward the cooperative haylofts. The guards were already drunk in their barrack, and even when Kemal nailed her new note on their door, they did not wake up.

Dear Party, give back my parents
.

Two tractors stood in the dark, and Kemal remembered what her father had once told her: a day would come when from the east a white ram would rush, sprinting, and from the west a black ram. Both enormous, with horns like nesting snakes, like serpents of bone scattering lightning and fire. The earth would tremble with their hoofs and young and old would gather to see them. Some would hop on the white ram and up it would take them, up to the Jannah, so they could glide with the eagles. But others, vile and wretched, would crawl onto the black ram. Down the black ram would drag them, down to the low earth, to creep with the maggots.

Kemal crouched by the black ram and pressed her face against its bumper. She stuffed its mouth with gauze and paper. Lit a match, let the flame loom from under her fingers. Hid far away by the hayloft and waited for something to happen. For some time nothing happened.

Then, in pyre and lightning, the horns uncoiled and heavy hoofs made the earth tremble. She saw the black ram collide with the white ram and the guards stumble drunk and dreamy out of their barrack. Which ram would take them, she wondered, and which would take her?

DEVSHIRMEH

I.

It’s Friday afternoon and John Martin is driving me to my wife’s. We’re picking up my daughter for the weekend and I don’t want us to be late again. I’m tired of my wife rolling her eyes, arms crossed over that heavenly chest, and tapping her foot in some maddening rhythm only she can hear. I’m tired of making her new husband look good in comparison.

I crane my neck to see how fast we’re going and tell John Martin to step on the gas.

“You want speed?” John Martin says, “Get your own damn car,” and cranks the heat higher. It’s a hundred and five outside, and John’s truck, the same one he bought after he came back from Vietnam, has trouble staying cool. Sometimes, when he drives me to Wal-Mart, he pulls over to the shoulder, pops the hood up and like shipwreck survivors on a raft with a flat sail we wait for wind to cool down the engine. But there is no time for wind now.

“How does this help, exactly?” I say, and hold my hand against the stream of hot air.

“It’s specific science,” John Martin says. “You won’t understand it.” His eyebrow twitches on an otherwise calm face, and I take this as my cue to keep pushing. “Some shortcut this is, John.”

Out the rolled down window I can see a thin strip of scorched Texas earth and yellow grass. The rest is sky, so large and dull I get angry just watching it. I look at my wrist, an old habit from the days when I still owned a watch, then I look at John Martin’s wrist. That’s where my watch is now: an original Seiko I bought, once upon a time as a student of English philology in Sofia, from an Algerian fellow for a demijohn of Father’s
rakia
and a pallet of Mother’s canned tomatoes. I sold the watch to John Martin and with the money took Elli to Six Flags; a great experience, if it hadn’t been for all the hitchhiking. When we returned to the house, John Martin had thrown my bed out in the front yard and piled all my clothes on top. He’d left a spiteful note on the pile, in case the message wasn’t clear enough.
Pay rent, Commie
. So I sent Elli in to melt his heart with some sweet talk about how much all that bonding time in line for the Judge Roy Scream ride at the Goodtimes Square had meant to her. Later she told me John Martin wept while she talked, that’s how touched he was.

Now I tilt my head to see the time better. As expected, we are already ten minutes late.

“God damn it, John. This car is absolute rubbish.”

Like that, John Martin slams on the brakes. We slide along the gravel, and when we finally come to a halt, the dust we’ve roused catches up in a thick cloud. I try to roll up my window, but that’s no good. I’m dust-slapped already, I can feel it on my face and hair and on my shirt.

“You little Communist shit,” John Martin says. He stares me down and I can’t get my eyes off his epileptic eyebrow. I try hard not to laugh. “This here truck is an American truck,” he says, in case I ever doubted it. The statement alone is meant to refute the shittiness of the vehicle and put a full stop to any further discussions. “Like you ever drove something as fine in Russia.”

“I drove a tank, John,” I say. “And you know I’m not Russian.”

“You’re all alike to me.”

“Cool it, John,” I say. “God is watching.” I nod at the cross that dangles from the rearview mirror—a tiny wooden crucifix on a black string John Martin received as a gift from the fifty-year-old Mexican widow he’s in love with at his church.

He grabs the cross and kisses it. “Shame on you,” he says, and I apologize right away. I tell him I didn’t mean anything, really, that I was just yapping, nervous because of my daughter. Because we’re late. His truck is fine, a fine American truck. “Here,” I say, “Peace,” and hand him a beer from the cooler at my feet. Miller High Life. America’s finest. The Champagne of Beers. He rolls the can against his neck, cheeks, forehead, and sweat runs in dirty creeks. We both slurp hoglike and wait for the car to cool. I watch a flock of Texas crows land far in the field and I can see their heads twisting to peck dead earth.

“You should call her tonight,” I say, meaning Anna Maria, the widow from church. “You should take her on a date. Taco Bueno? Taco Bell, even.”

“I don’t know,” John Martin says, and takes a big gulp from the beer. He watches the heat gauge still in the red. “It might be too early for that.”

“It’s never too early for Taco Bell.”

He crushes his can and throws it back in the cooler. “You don’t know shit,” he says. He raps his fingers on the steering wheel. “Last time I checked,” he says, “another dude was boning your wife.”

“Great talk, John,” I say. I say, “God is watching. Besides,” I say, “I’m working the situation. It’s all a temporary matter. I’m getting her back, one step at a time, even as we speak.”

“One step?” He shakes his head. “Look at yourself. At least shave that stupid mug of yours. Wear a shirt that’s not brown with dust. You don’t get women back like this, man. Especially one married to a doctor.”

“Why bring up his occupation?” I say. And I tell him, less time spent listening to Delilah on the radio might do him good. He starts the truck and we’re back in motion. Across the field the crows, too, rise up and head in the opposite direction, flapping chaotically. “I swear, man,” John goes, “I feel sorry for you. That’s the only reason I put up with your shit.”

“You know it,” I say. “And it’s God that puts this pity in your heart, don’t forget. Love thy neighbor. Love, love.” John Martin first started going to church in hopes of finding a wife. That’s a fact, he told me so. To look good, an eligible bachelor, he assumed the role of a pious Bible abider. Soon he grew into that role and finally convinced even himself. John Martin is not a religious man, he’s not a believer. But he doesn’t know it yet and that’s exactly what I’m banking on.

We pull outside my wife’s house half an hour late. I step out and the heat feels cool after the sauna of the truck.

“Five minutes,” John Martin says. I take a swig from the canteen in my back pocket and he shakes his head again disapprovingly. At the door I smooth my hair over, brush my face with a sweaty palm. I pop a mint in my mouth and check my breath.

No one answers the bell for five minutes. When I look back, John Martin is drinking beer against the truck, its hood open. He taps my watch. I ring the bell again and finally there is a voice on the other side. “Buddy, buddy,” I hear, a thick, ugly, stupid Bulgarian accent. “Sit. Good boy.” One lock turns, then another, then a chain falls.

My wife’s new husband emerges before me, absurdly obese in the door frame. He’s wearing flip-flops, American ones, a single string between his wet, puffy toes, long shorts that drip water on the parquet, and a cell phone clipped to his waistband. He has no shirt on, and his chest hair, and the hair on his legs, is smoothly glued to his body, layer upon dripping layer. By his side is an equally obese, equally wet dog whose breed I can never remember.

“Buddy!” he yells at me in English. “What’s going on! You’re late. We’ve been waiting.”

“Traffic,” I say.

“Oh, no, buddy. English. We speak English here.”

“Traffic,” I repeat. “That’s an international word.”

He swats a mosquito on his shoulder with a thick slap of his meaty palm. Droplets splash my face. “Well, get in,” he says. “Hurry, hurry.”

I bet he’s eager to get back to the pool before my wife has seen him inside, all wet and with that dog. I know she’d be furious if I ever did such a thing. So I stand where I am and tell him all is well, that I’m only here to pick up Elli, that I don’t want to impose. I keep peeking behind him, hard as that is, waiting for my wife to show, waiting for the parquet to get well soaked and start peeling up. I even reach for the dog and my heart melts with joy when the dog growls and shakes its shaggy coat, sending water all over the shoe rack.

At last my wife appears from behind Buddy, in a two-piece red swimsuit, her bronze skin oiled up and gleaming. She’s trying to dry her hair with a towel, but it’s not her hair I’m looking at. Somehow she manages to squeeze herself between Buddy and the door frame and attempts to put an arm around his waist—an impossible gesture, really. “We’ve been waiting,” she says, also in English.

I don’t know what to say.

“Buddy, hey, buddy,” Buddy says. “Up here,” he says and snaps his fingers. “Yeah? You like those? Ten grand each. We got them done in Dallas. Best investment I ever made, if you know what I mean.”

I want to ask him why, but they’re already walking through the house. I wave at John Martin.

“Five minutes!” John yells, licks his finger and touches his sweaty shoulder with a gesture that’s meant to convey eroticism, among other things. As I start through the living room my wife orders me to take my shoes off and keep the floor clean. Shoes in hand, I follow them to the pool.

Their yard is full of people—all in swimsuits, all holding broad, stemmed glasses, margaritas, martinis. There are people in lounge chairs, on towels spread in the grass, on the concrete by the pool. A large grill on one side sizzles with burgers and steaks. Everyone turns to me, and all conversation seems to hang in the heat, but only for a moment.

My wife brings me a Dr Pepper. “Have a Dr Pepper,” she says.

I’d rather not, but I take it. “What’s the occasion?” I say.

She sticks out her chest, in case I didn’t get it. I get it all right, but I refuse to stare. Instead, I search for Elli, who’s nowhere to be found, not even in the pool with all the other splishy-splashy children. I ask where she’s gone.

“It was Buddy’s idea,” my wife says. Maybe she doesn’t say it exactly like this, maybe she calls him Todor or whatever his real name is, but it sounds like Buddy to me.

“You shouldn’t have,” I tell her. “They were great to begin with.”

“What? No,” she says, “no, these were my idea, a self-esteem issue. I mean the scuba set. Buddy thought of that.” And then I see it—through the crystal-clear water, at the bottom of the deep end of the pool—my daughter with a tiny oxygen tank on her back.

“It’s all safe,” my wife says. “We hired a diving instructor. You see him down there? All Buddy’s idea,” and laughs as if she’s cracked a great joke. So much for working the situation. I have no desire to talk to her now; all the little lies I planned on telling her—that I was declared employee of the month yet again, that I found a great little place I’m thinking of moving to—will now remain unspoken. All I want now is to pick up Elli and get the hell out.

“Tell her I’m here,” I say, and my wife lets me know there is another twenty minutes on the diving lesson. “Have a seat,” she says, “have another Dr.”

“John Martin,” I say, but as before, she’s already drifting away. I find a chair with a broken leg far from the pool and pour some vodka into the soda can. Then I watch Buddy, flipping steaks with one hand and with the other holding the cell phone to his mouth like a walkie-talkie. He drops a chunk of hamburger meat to the dog and the dog pushes the chunk with its muzzle, licks it and refuses to eat. I could go for a burger right about now. Most likely John Martin, too, could go for a burger, out in the truck. I drink more and wait for the lesson to be over, for my daughter to reemerge from the deep. She does that at last. My wife helps her out of the pool and the instructor removes the oxygen tank from her back. I would never make my daughter carry anything of such weight. Then my wife tells Elli something and Elli looks about and sees me in the corner. She runs to me and, one hundred words a minute, asks if I saw her scuba diving, with a tank and all, down there in the pool, breathing underwater like a mermaid, like a real mermaid, in the pool.

“Elli, Elli, Elli,” I say. “Slow down, baby,” I say. “Na
bulgarski, taté
. Tell me all this, but in Bulgarian.”

I keep drinking while Elli is changing up in her room, while my wife is packing her a bag for the weekend, because it is just so hard to have the bag packed already. I watch the diving instructor teach a freckled woman how to suck air through a snorkel. Then I watch Buddy by the grill in his flip-flops, dry now, with his fur all bristly, forking meats, taking their temperature with a stick, talking to the dog in his stupid accented English. I feel so utterly out of place here, so stranded I can’t even hate him right. I can’t even envy him properly for all the things he has that I don’t. This is not the way I imagined it. This life. Sometimes, at night, long after John Martin has gone to bed, I sit on his back porch and I drink his beers and chuck empty cans at the dark and I wonder—this everything. Is it worth staying?

Then Elli emerges, with a bag in her hand.

“I’m ready,” she says. Buddy comes for a good-bye and she gives him a kiss on the lips. He asks me if I want some steak and I tell him I’d already had plenty of steaks today—for breakfast, for lunch, for an afternoon snack—all steaks, rare, medium, well done. Elli pets the dog and it licks her fingers while my wife whispers something in her ear, all the while watching me with a serious face. “Michael,” she tells me, though she knows this is not how my name should sound. “Take good care of her.” As if such instructions are ever needed.

By the time we walk out, the sun is slipping behind the scorched earthline. John Martin pushes himself off the truck with a dusty boot and shuts the hood closed. I tell Elli to get in, because she’ll be riding between us, and as I climb in I see that John hasn’t touched any more beers from the cooler, that they are all floating like dead fish in what was once ice.

“Jesus Christ, John,” I say. “I’m really sorry for the wait.”

“It’s okay, man,” he says and closes his door gently. “Hi, beautiful,” he tells Elli. He tousles her wet hair. “Hi, Princess.”

II.

We came to the U.S. seven years ago. Maya, the baby and I—despite the slim chances—proud winners of green cards. I submitted our lottery applications on the day Elli was born. Ten months later, we passed the interview at the embassy, and two weeks after Elli turned one we flew to New York City. There was very little fear when we left Sofia. We figured if we had to be poor—and we were, very, both of us English teachers at neighborhood schools—we might as well be poor in America. We left in hopes of a better life, I suppose—not for us, but for the baby. And I suppose a better life is what we got. Certainly not me, but the baby. Perhaps. And, as much as I hate to admit it, Maya as well.