What Belongs to You (8 page)

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, which rose stark on both sides twelve or thirteen stories, the length of city blocks, their blankness relieved by graffiti and, higher up, by lines of laundry hung out in the sun, as well as by fissures and patches where the facades had cracked. As I walked a narrow path between the buildings and the cars that were parked nose-first almost against their walls, like nursing cats, I looked into the dim boxes framed by the windows I passed, apartments identical in size and shape though none of them was exactly the same. I was walking quickly and only glimpsed them, but in each there was some distinguishing feature, a flower box or patterned curtains or small panes of colored glass hung to catch the light, attempts at beauty, I thought, or at least signs of care. Almost all of the rooms were empty, but in a few there were solitary figures, old men or women, sometimes absorbed in some task but mostly just sitting and fanning themselves, staring at little televisions or simply staring, their faces turned to the windows I passed, so that our eyes met for a moment and I saw their vacancy liven and shift, like still water ruffled by a stone. It was a balm of which I was unaware, the safety I felt as I lay with my father, and it sustained me throughout his many absences, even, a few years later, when he left my mother and was unreachable for months, and then reappeared in a new home where we were welcome only on invitation. Even after my parents separated, though they occurred less and less frequently, I still had these moments of closeness with my father. Until I was eight or nine I enjoyed an access to his physical presence free of suspicion or doubt, even as I grew aware of the differences between his body and mine, aware of them and interested, troubled perhaps and drawn to that trouble, so that what had been our games (the race to the toilet after a long drive, pissing in the tight space pressed together) became occasions of greater and greater solemnity and unease, possessed of a mystery I couldn’t resolve. This was happening with my friends, too, the boys whose company I sought out with a new urgency, and though it was still slight and free of intention they could sense the added heat. They were starting to think of me as a kind apart, and what was a shadow of separation between us would become absolute, I felt it already with a terrible dread. I don’t remember how old I was when I realized the full measure of that separateness, I must have been nine or ten, still young enough to shower with my father, though it happened less often now and excited me more, in the mysterious way that would lead to the still unimagined breach I was already approaching. Though I can’t remember the season or year or anything that was said, I remember the room, the ornamental bulbs and the tile and the water already running, the mirror obscured with fog; and I remember my father, his body large and bare, the fascination of it and its availability in the small space where, laughing, we wrestled to stay beneath the hot stream of water. I was old enough to wash myself but we still touched each other; he would ask me to wash his back, which was difficult for him to reach, and then he would wash mine in turn. Though he was often severe and sometimes cruel he was gentle with me there; if the soap ran into my eyes he would rinse them, tilting my face up with his hand, a kind of physical care he seldom undertook. We had stepped out of the water onto the tiles, which could be slick, he reminded me each time, Be careful, he said, and then I approached him, not with any specific intent but perhaps not innocently either, I can’t be sure after so many years, as I can no longer recall whether he was facing me or looking away, though he must have been looking away or he would have stopped me or avoided my touch. Or maybe it’s more true to say I was innocent but not without intent, what was it but an intention that drove me, a bodily intention; I wanted to touch him, not with an outcome in mind but with an ache, perhaps not an intention but an ache, which drove me to him and which he felt, too, when I put my arms around him and pressed my body to his and he felt my erection where it touched him. That was the end of care, he thrust me away without a thought for the slickness of the tiles; and when I looked at his face, which was twisted in disgust, it was as if I saw his true face, his authentic face, not the learned face of fatherhood. He covered himself quickly and left the room, saying nothing, but his look entered me and settled there and has never left, it rooted beneath memory and became my understanding of myself, my understanding and expectation. From that day, all the ease we had enjoyed together was gone. He took away the safety I had felt, the certainty of my bond with my father, the first bond; until that day I hadn’t realized it could be dissolved like any other. And it was as though I lost something of myself as well, as though I became somehow less real as my father withdrew from me, less substantial or less certain of my substance, as though I too were something that might dissolve. It still shows me to myself, that look, I saw it again as I walked among the
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without thinking of where I walked. The sun was high and already I was dripping with sweat, the page I had been given was a damp ball in my hand. It would be years before my father spoke the words that finally severed the bond between us, but there were no more showers or games. Nor could I find anywhere else the closeness I had taken for granted: the friends I turned to were scared off by the need I felt for them, and soon the best I could hope for was their indifference. It was then that I retreated into the uneasy solitude from which I’ve never entirely emerged. Only once did I let myself imagine I had found again the closeness I had lost, and this memory too returned as I walked through a part of Mladost I had never seen. The
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had grown sparse, there were larger plots of wasteland between them and also abandoned hulks of construction, huge concrete frames rising up like excavated ruins or ships rotting at sea. Every surface was covered with graffiti, mindless obscenities or slogans or art of a strangely childlike incompetence, affecting in its incompetence; and though the area must have been inhabited, this graffiti was the only evidence I had seen for some time of living human presence, the graffiti and also, where branches overhung the concrete, adhesive puddles like tar where fruit had ripened and fallen and been trodden to pulp, drawing large black birds that clawed and pried at it and rose up clamoring at my approach. It was like a land of ravens, if that’s what they were, of ravens and of dogs, which are everywhere in Sofia but were rougher and more numerous here; they were battered, vicious things, more desperate than the dogs where I lived. A few made as if to lunge when I startled them, bracing themselves and snarling in a way that would usually have alarmed me but that now I took in stride, ready to meet them, ready myself to lunge should it come to that; I was eager for it, even, and maybe this eagerness was what kept them in check. There were dogs of all types and a range of sizes, though it was clear a certain bulk was necessary for survival, and most were muscular and medium-sized, with bullish features and square jaws, solid dogs with a brutal elegance that appealed to me, as did their short coats, mottled and tawny, so that as they slept they looked like fawns curled in the unmown grasses. Not all of the dogs were hostile, some were friendly enough, emerging to trot beside me for a few steps, swinging their low tails. Normally I would have felt sympathy for them, especially for the gentlest of them, a beautiful dog that trotted beside me longer than the others and that bore an extraordinary scar along his right side. The skin had been ripped open and had unevenly healed; it was puckered and hairless and raw, as if something had half melted the flesh along the whole length of him. It was a terrible scar, from an injury he was lucky to have survived, and yet he was the least savage of the dogs, the most eager for my attention; at one point he even nudged against my hand with his nose, the hand in which I held the news of my father. It was cruel not to acknowledge him but I didn’t acknowledge him, and I had the sense that he stuck with me as long as he dared before he reached some invisible border and turned back. I didn’t turn back, I walked farther, to the very edge of habitation, where the
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gave out finally at the rim of a steep hill. Down the embankment there were grasses and scattered trees and beyond the trees a huge clearing extending for kilometers; and on the other side of the clearing there was another district of concrete towers, so that it was like a bay, the half ring of
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braced against the grasses like waters. Where I stood the pavement was broken, marking an uncertain border, a not quite wild place; and then suddenly without deciding to I was making my way down the steep bank. It was difficult to climb down, especially in the shoes I had been wearing in the classroom, black dress shoes of the sort my father had taught me to take care of when I was a child, polishing them until they shone. They were a sign of who I was, he said, and I was never careful enough, I would forget I was wearing them and run with them on, they would get dirty or scuffed and he would say I had no sense of the worth of things, or worse that I had no pride, the pride it was incumbent upon me as his son to have. It was difficult to stay upright as the ground beneath me shifted, and soon my shoes were caked with mud from gouging the side of the hill. For years after that day in the shower, there was nothing to replace the closeness I had lost with my father, and more and more I took refuge in books, not serious or significant books but books that offered an escape from myself, and it was these books, or rather our shared love for them, that bound me to the few friends I had and that laid the ground for my friendship with K. He was from my city but our paths had never crossed, he lived in another part of town and went to a different school. But we had friends in common, and one of them suggested we should know each other. He called me one afternoon when K. was visiting his house; You like the same writers, he said, and then he handed K. the phone. It would be months before we met in person, and in those months our conversations grew longer and more frequent, until they became, I think for both of us, the primary fact of our lives; sometimes we talked the whole night long, as one does only in adolescence or very early in love. I was happy, but also I felt an anxiety that gnawed at me and for which I could find no cause, that gnawed at me more deeply precisely because I could find no cause. For months our friendship consisted of nothing but words, and though I wanted to see him this was a comfort; already I felt that the best of me was words, that it was in words our friendship would flourish. Soon we had told each other everything about ourselves, all our stories, multiple times, and I never tired of them, of them or of his voice as he spoke them. I wanted to see him but it frightened me, too, the thought of meeting him, of K. seeing the body that increasingly felt alien to me, outsized and malformed, that in no way conformed to my sense of myself, to the self I lived inwardly. But we did finally meet in person, in October, at the very end of the month. It was a kind of Indian summer, the mildness of it a surprise and a pleasure. I was living in the basement of my father’s house, having been tossed between houses many times, a consequence of my parents’ wrangling, which hadn’t ended, they were in and out of court for years. When K.’s mother dropped him off we were shy at first, it took a moment for me to reconcile the voice I knew with the boy before me, who was shorter than I and thin, with red hair he let hang over his eyes and a face that was beautiful and pale and streaked with acne. We had chosen my house over K.’s because we would have more privacy and freedom there, and if we had no real plans for the use of these things we had an instinctive preference for them. My father gave us a wide berth, having always been ill at ease around children, around anyone at all unknown, and after he shook K.’s hand he left us to ourselves. He had ordered pizza for us, and we ate it in my basement room, talking and laughing with each other. We had all the freedom we could want and yet we waited for even greater freedom, for my father and stepmother to retreat to the upper floor of the house and leave the large middle floor between us empty. And then, when we thought they were sleeping, we slipped into the garage, where it was easy to pop the large mechanical door free of its mechanism and then slide it up slowly, silently or nearly silently, just enough for us to crawl on our stomachs through. I did this almost every night, though there was no reason for it, I had nowhere to go, we lived in the suburbs and every street was the same. Nor was there any point to the secrecy, since by that time my father had largely if not yet finally washed his hands of me and I could do as I liked. But it was crucial somehow that I sneak out, that I disappear from my room without anyone knowing, beyond the reach of the authority I chafed under at every other moment of the day, at school and at home; it was only out on these walks that I felt I could relax the guard I kept at every other moment. Whatever the weather I went out and wandered, and now I wandered with K.; I introduced him to my solitude and he deepened it without disturbance. We clambered down the steep hill from my father’s house, which towered over the whole neighborhood, a sign of how far he had come. It was the night before Halloween and so there was, this once, something to look at in the streets, the houses had been decorated for the holiday, each more elaborately than the last. Trees had become the habitations of ghosts, there were scarecrows and jack-o’-lanterns and ghouls of every kind, whole covens of plastic witches danced in ragged clothes. It was tawdry and crass and all of it an invitation to mischief. We imagined stealing decorations from one yard and placing them in another, we thought up obscene arrangements—but we left all of it undone, the joy was in the planning of it, in our own inventiveness, and we bent over choking on our hushed laughter, having brought each other to tears. But there were other decorations, too, more strident ones: it was an election year and there were campaign signs among the ghosts and cauldrons, an odd juxtaposition of playfulness and belligerence. For months the news had been full of debate and raised voices, and my house was full of them, too; my father loved to hold forth and for the first time I had begun to challenge him, wanting an opinion of my own. It was as though every word I said was a provocation, every discussion became a quarrel; though he gave me a wide berth we still collided and our collisions were a kind of theater, like animals locking horns. It was a Republican state and my father held the expected views, like everyone else he knew, or so it seemed to me; but K. and I agreed, we hated my father’s party, and we were both angered by the signs in the yards, nearly all of them echoing the same names. K. approached one of these signs and kicked it, bending its wire legs a bit, and then he pulled it from the ground and ripped it and threw the torn halves back on the grass. I was shocked at first, but then I was delighted, and I grabbed a sign of my own. We took turns for a while and then enthusiasm or impatience took over; K. chose one side of the street and I the other, and we went methodically house by house, wrecking all of the signs in sight, pretending perhaps it was something else we wrecked. As we walked away, laughing again, K. hung his arm around my neck. It was a casual gesture but one I wasn’t used to, and I was almost frightened by the happiness that overtook me, that filled me up and charged me and at the same time carried a threat; it was too unrestrained, there was nothing to keep it in check. I felt solid again as I walked with him, more certain of myself than I had been for years, with his arm around my neck and my own slung at his waist. We knocked against each other but what did it matter, there was no one to see us, we moved with an awkward freedom but a freedom nonetheless. My father’s house was close to the neighborhood where I was born and where my mother still lived; he moved there with his new wife a few months after he left my mother, who became as much a part of his past as the poverty and dirt of my grandparents’ farm. Though our walk had seemed aimless, in fact I was leading us to my mother’s street and the house I had grown up in, which I wanted K. to see, as though in the very architecture there were some further revelation I could make. We didn’t need to go in, it was enough to stand on the sidewalk looking at the large house in which my mother now lived alone; I pointed out my window to him, or what had been my window, which was dark like all the others. And then I led him farther along the long street circling the neighborhood (though I haven’t walked it for years I can walk it now, I can see the very cracks in the stone) as it curved and led us to my first school, a squat ugly building of concrete slabs and bricks. It was a part of my history and I wanted it to be his as well, the grounds, the diminutive athletic fields, the tree-bordered fence with its dried vines of honeysuckle. We were in no hurry, no one knew where we were and there was no reason to rush back, so we sat for a while on the swings in the playground. We didn’t really swing in them, we just sat and talked, rocking a little side by side; I had talked for a long time and mostly K. talked now, and since we had nothing new to say to each other he repeated the stories that I loved for him to tell. I leaned back, holding on to the chains as I looked up at the suburban sky that was like dull metal or unvarnished wood, the few stars making none of the patterns I had been taught were there. And then I leaned back too far, I lost my balance and the plastic seat slipped out from under me, and I fell onto the dirt beneath. K. stopped talking, biting off his sentence, and then we both started to laugh, and K. leaned back and let himself fall, too, hitting the ground beside me. We kept laughing, with our backs in the dirt and our legs still hooked through the swings, and I felt the same happiness mixed with fear, as though I were being offered a nourishment that might, now I had tasted it, be denied. Finally we stopped laughing, we rose and brushed the dirt from our clothes. We had been walking for hours when we got back to my father’s house, and as we slid beneath the door again we complained that our feet and our legs hurt, and K. said his back hurt as well. We were both exhausted and we fell gratefully onto the bed in the main room; it was a waterbed and we laughed again as we fell onto it, it knocked us up and down and we grabbed on both to the frame and to each other to steady ourselves. We managed to find our balance and keep the mattress still, or not quite still exactly, even turning our heads made it wobble, but though we were tired neither of us was in the mood to sleep. We lay beside each other, as always endlessly talking, and then K. complained about his back again, asking if I would rub it for him. He rolled over to give me access but it was impossible on the bed, when I applied my weight the mattress just gave way beneath him, he said he didn’t feel anything, and so he got up and sat down on the wooden frame, placing his feet on the ground and turning his back to me. But he still wasn’t comfortable, he asked me to reach beneath his shirt and rub the skin itself, and I did, I gripped his shoulders and kneaded them, I applied pressure until he hissed and then I eased off. I worked his neck and down the column of his spine, the muscles bunched on either side, and maybe for the first time in our friendship our constant chatter had ceased. I had never touched anyone in that way before, I wanted to keep touching him, and I was dismayed when K. shifted his weight, I thought he had had enough and was getting up. But instead he began to lean back, so slowly that I was confused at first and resisted him, pressing my hands more firmly against his back; it was only when he insisted that I understood and allowed him to lean into me, as he pressed farther leaning back in turn, so that we fell slowly backward until we were lying on the bed again, I on the bed and K. on me. I hadn’t taken my hands out from under his shirt, I had reached around him as he lay back, and now I held him in an embrace that if he didn’t return he didn’t reject, either, he received it, he let his head fall back against my chest and we lay like that for a while. Then he shifted again, or maybe I did, and we were lying beside each other. He was holding me now or we were holding each other; I was turned toward him, pressed against his back with my arms still around him, and where my hands met at his chest he crossed his own arms over them. For a long time we lay without moving, and as we half slept I was conscious of touching him, of his stomach where my fingers curled beneath his shirt. In the center of his abdomen there was a line where the sheets of muscle met, a rivulet or ridge that I traced with the pads of my fingers; it was covered very lightly with hair, impossibly soft and fine, like the skin of certain fruit. It was a boy’s body, I realize now, we were younger it occurs to me even than my students; but K.’s body didn’t seem to me in any way incomplete or less than fully formed, I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect, he was entirely beautiful. It didn’t occur to me to want more from that moment, to test it and see how far it might be stretched; it didn’t occur to me to touch him in some way other than I touched him, or at least I don’t remember it now. We did sleep more soundly eventually, we must have, since I woke early the next morning to find that K. was ill. He was on his hands and knees beside the bed, as though he had fallen there, and it was the sound of his moans that had woken me. I could see that he had vomited and now he vomited again; it must have been something we ate, I thought, though we had eaten together and I wasn’t ill at all. He groaned again, with a sound that was almost a sob, and then seeing I was awake he apologized, I wasn’t sure for what, whether for waking me or for the mess he had made. His forehead was beaded with sweat, and when I placed my hand on his back the thin fabric of his shirt was damp. I kept my hand there as his back heaved with the gulping nauseous breaths he drew, until he shrugged me off and pushed me away as he vomited again, each of his convulsions accompanied by a moan or a sob. I was helpless, I wanted to take care of him but I didn’t know how, and when he was calm again I asked him what he wanted. I want to go home, he said, still on his hands and knees, and so I left him there to go find my father. I knew he was already awake, I had heard him moving on the floor above us, and when I opened the door at the top of the stairs I found him in the kitchen alone. He was standing at the sink with his back to the door, and though he must have heard me coming up the stairs he didn’t turn to greet or acknowledge me, not even when I began to speak. It was barely dawn, he was watching the first light rise through the window above the sink, a