Top Quotes: “East of the West: A Country in Stories” — Miroslav Penkov

The Split Village

“My folks and I lived on the Bulgarian side of the river, in the village of Bulgarsko Selo, while she and her folks made home on the other bank, in Srbsko. A long time ago these two villages had been one — that of Staro Selo — but after the great wars Bulgaria had lost land and that land had been given to the Serbs. The river, splitting the village in two hamlets, had served as a boundary: what lay east of the river stayed in Bulgaria and what lay west belonged to Serbia. Because of the unusual predicament the two villages were in, our people had managed to secure permission from both countries to hold, once every five years, a major reunion, called the sbor. This was done officially so we wouldn’t forget our roots.”

“Then came the Balkan Wars and after that the First World War. All these wars Bulgaria lost, and much Bulgarian land was given to the Serbs. Three officials arrived in the village; one was a Russian, one was French and one was British. East of the river, they said, stays in Bulgaria. West of the river from now on belongs to Serbia. Soldiers guarded the banks and planned to take the bridge down, and when the young master, who had gone away to work on another church, came back, the soldiers refused to let him cross the border and return to his wife.

In his desperation he gathered people and convinced them to divert the river, to push it west until it went around the village. Because according to the orders, what lay east of the river stayed in Bulgaria.

How they carried all those stones, all those logs, how they piled them up, I cannot imagine. Why the soldiers did not stop them, I don’t know. The river moved west and it looked like she would serpent around the village. But then she twisted, wiggled and tasted with her tongue a route of lesser resistance; through the lower hamlet she swept, devouring people and houses. Even the church, in which the master had left two years of his life, was lost in her belly.”

“The control across the borders tightened. Both countries put nets along the banks and blocked buffer zones at the narrow waist of the river where the villagers used to call to one another. The sbors were canceled. Vera and I no longer met, though we found two small hills we could sort of see each other from, like dots in the distance. But these hills were too far away and we did not go there often.

Almost every night, I dreamed of Elitsa.”

“The good thing about our countries, the reassuring thing that keeps us falling harder, is that if you can’t buy something with money, you can buy it with a lot of money.”

Grandpa

“When Grandpa learned I was leaving for America to study, he wrote me a goodbye note. “You rotten capitalist pig,” the note read, “have a safe flight. Love, Grandpa.” It was written on a creased red ballot from the 1991 elections, which was a cornerstone in Grandpa’s Communist ballot collection, and it bore the signatures of everybody in the village of Leningrad. I was touched to receive such an honor, so I sat down, took out a one-dollar bill, and wrote Grandpa the following reply: “You communist dupe, thanks for the letter. I’m leaving tomorrow, and when I get there I’ll try to marry an American woman ASAP. I’ll be sure to have lots of American children. Love, your grandson.””

“Every week, for a few months, he fed me a different book. Partisans, plots against the tsarist regime. ‘

“Grandpa, please,” I’d say. “I have to study.”

“What you have to do is acquire a taste.” He’d leave me to read but then would barge into my room a minute later with some weak excuse. Had I called him? Did I need help with a difficult passage?

“Grandpa, these are children’s books.”

“First children’s books, then Lenin’s.” He’d sit at the foot of my bed, and motion me to keep on reading.

If I came home from school frightened because a stray dog had chased me down the street, Grandpa would only sigh. Could I imagine Kalitko the shepherd scared of a little dog? If I complained of bullies Grandpa would shake his head. “Imagine Mitko Palauzov whining.” “Mitko Palauzov was killed in a dugout.”

“A brave and daring boy indeed,” Grandpa would say, and pinch his nose to stop the inevitable tears.

And so one day I packed up the books and left them in his room with a note. Recycle for toilet paper. Next time he saw me, I was reading The Call of the Wild.”

“What Grandpa had been through was basically this:

The year was 1944. Grandpa was in his mid-twenties. His face was tough but fair. His nose was sharp. His dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. He was poor. “I,” he often told me, “would eat bread with crabapples for breakfast. Bread with crabapples for lunch. And crabapples for dinner, because by dinnertime, the bread would be gone.”

That’s why when the Communists came to his village to steal food, Grandpa joined them. They had all run to the woods where they dug out underground bunkers, and lived in them for weeks on end — day and night, down there in the dugouts. Outside, the Fascists sniffed for them, trying to hunt them down with their Alsatians, with their guns and bombs and missiles. “If you think a grave is too narrow,” Grandpa told me on one occasion, “make yourself a dugout. No, no, make yourself a dugout and get fifteen people to join you in it for a week. And get a couple pregnant women, too. And a hungry goat. Then go around telling everybody a grave is the narrowest thing on earth.”

“Old man, I never said a grave was the narrowest thing.”

“But you were thinking it.”

So finally Grandpa got too hungry to stay in the dugout and decided to strap on a shotgun and go down to the village for food.

When he arrived, he found everything changed. A red flag was flapping from the church tower. The church had been shut down and turned into a meeting hall. There had been an uprising, the peasants told him, a revolution that overthrew the old regime.

While Grandpa was hiding in the dugout, communism sprouted fragrant blooms. All people now walked free, and their dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. Grandpa fell to his knees and wept and kissed the soil of the motherland. Immediately, he was assimilated by the Party. Immediately, as a heroic partisan who’d suffered in a dugout, he was given a high position in the Fatherland Front. Immediately, he climbed further up the ladder and moved to the city, where he became something-something of the something-some- thing department. He got an apartment, married Grandma; a year later my father was born.”

“I arrived in Arkansas on August 11, 1999. At the airport I was picked up by two young men and a girl, all in suits. They were from some sort of an organization that cared a whole lot for international students.

“Welcome to America,” they said in one warm, friendly voice, and their honest faces beamed. In the car they gave me a Bible.

“Do you know what this is?” the girl bellowed slowly.

“No,” I said. She seemed genuinely pleased.

“These are the deeds of our Savior. The word of our Lord.”

“Oh, Lenin’s collected works,” I said. “Which volume?””

“On October 25, 1993, the great October village revolution took place, quietly, underground, without much ado. At that time, everybody who was sixty or younger had already left the village to live in the city, and so those who remained were people pure and strong of heart, in whom the idea was still alive and whose dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. Officially, the village was still part of Bulgaria, and it had a mayor who answered to the national government and so on and so forth; but secretly, underground, it was the new Communist village party that decided its fate. The name of the village was changed from Valchidol to Leningrad. Grandpa was unanimously elected secretary general.

Every evening there was a Party meeting in the old village hall, where the seat next to Grandpa was always left vacant, and water was sprinkled from a hose outside on the windows to create the illusion of rain.

“Communism blossoms better with moisture,” Grandpa explained, when the other Party members questioned his decision; in fact, he was thinking of Grandma and the rain on their first meeting. And indeed, communism in Leningrad blossomed.

Grandpa and the villagers decided to salvage every Communist artifact remaining in Bulgaria and bring them all to Leningrad: to the living museum of the Communist doctrine. Monuments chiseled under the red ideal were being demolished all over the country. Statues, erected decades ago, proudly reminding, glorifying, promising, were now pulled down and melted for scrap. Poets once extolled now lay forgotten. Their paper bodies gathered dust. Their ink blood washed away by rainwater.

Once the two years of silence was broken by our call, Grandpa began to write me letters. I was amazed, but not surprised, to learn that, now back in Leningrad, he’d still not given up on his ideas. In one of his letters, Grandpa told me that the villagers had convinced a bunch of Gypsies to do the salvaging for them. “Comrade Hassan, his wife and their thirteen Gypsy children,” Grandpa wrote, “doubtlessly inspired by the bright Communist ideal, and only mildly stimulated by the money and the two pigs we gave them, have promised to supply our village with the best of the best ‘red’ artifacts that could be found across our pitiful country. Today the comrade Gypsies brought us their first gift: a monument of the Nameless Russian Soldier, liberator from the Turks, slightly deformed from the waist down, and with a missing shotgun, but otherwise in excellent condition. The monument. now stands proud next to the statues of Alyosha, Seryoja and the Nameless Maiden of Minsk.””

The Return

“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 tie 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.””

Assimilation

“”There have been Party orders, the sergeant started, “straight from the Politburo. Unfortunate business, but no way around it. I’ve been walking from door to door all morning, informing people. Now, if you ask me, it’s ugly business, but no one asks me. It’s Party orders, straight from the Politburo.” And he told them: All Turks, Pomaks and other Muslims would be given new, Bulgarian names. If you lived in Bulgaria, he said, then you had to have a Bulgarian name. If you didn’t like it, no one stopped you from leaving for Turkey. “Be at the square tomorrow. The buses will take you to town for your new passports.””

“It wasn’t only the living.

They were making bagpipes when a neighbor told them.

“Shame on you, Rouffat, for spreading cheap lies,” Kemal’s father said, but all the same, still holding an awl, he ran out the village. Kemal ran in his footsteps.

Every stone on every grave had been plastered over. They had chiseled new names on some stones and left others empty. Kemal’s grandfather had been given a new name. Her grandmother had been left nameless. Her father kneeled beside another, smaller headstone and ran his fingers across the fresh plaster. More and more people gathered, and up the row Kemal saw a man with a mattock beat the stone of his father. The man broke the stone to pieces and started digging.

Her father stabbed the stone before him with the chisel until the plaster crumbled. And once he licked his fingers and polished each letter, it was Kemal’s old name she saw in the tombstone. Her father polished the years. But this grave was not her grave, and she figured the boy who lay in it had never lived to be half her age, even.”