East of the West by Miroslav Penkov Read Free Book Online Page B

there often.
    Almost every night, I dreamed of Elitsa.
    “I saw her just before she left,” I would tell my mother. “I could have stopped her.”
    “Then why didn’t you?” Mother would ask.
    Sometimes I went to the river and threw stones over the fence, into the water, and imagined those two silver earrings, settling into the silty bottom.
    “Give back the earrings,” I’d scream, “you spineless, muddy thief!”
    •
    I worked double shifts in the mine and was able to put something aside. I took care of Mother, who never left her bed, and occasionally brought bread and cheese to Father at the distillers. “Mother is sick,” I’d tell him, but he pretended not to hear. “More heat,” he’d call, and kneel by the trickle to sample some parvak .
    Vera and I wrote letters for a while, but after each letter there was a longer period of silence before the new one arrived. One day, in the summer of 1990, I received a brief note:
    Dear Nose. I’m getting married. I want you at my wedding. I live in Beograd now. I’m sending you money. Please come .
    There was, of course, no money in the envelope. Someone had stolen it on the way.
    Each day I reread the letter, and thought of the way Vera had written those words, in her elegant, thin writing, and I thought of this man she had fallen in love with, and I wondered if she loved him as much as she had loved me, by the cross, in the river. I made plans to get a passport.
    •
    Two weeks before the wedding, Mother died. The doctor couldn’t tell us of what. Of grief, the wailers said, and threw their black kerchiefs over their heads like ash. Father brought his drinking guiltily to the empty house. One day he poured me a glass of rakia and made me gulp it down. We killed the bottle. Then he looked me in the eye and grabbed my hand. Poor soul, he thought he was squeezing it hard.
    “My son,” he said, “I want to see the fields.”
    We staggered out of the village, finishing a second bottle. When we reached the fields, we sat down and watched in silence. After the fall of communism, organized agriculture had died in many areas, and now everything was overgrown with thornbush and nettles.
    “What happened, Nose?” Father said. “I thought we held him good, this bastard, in both hands. Remember what I taught you? Hold tight, choke the bastard and things will be all right? Well, shit, Nose. I was wrong.”
    And he spat against the wind, in his own face.
    •
    Three years passed before Vera wrote again. Nose, I have a son. I’m sending you a picture. His name is Vladislav. Guess who we named him after? Come and visit us. We have money now, so don’t worry. Goran just got back from a mission in Kosovo. Can you come?
    My father wanted to see the picture. He stared at it for a long time, and his eyes watered.
    “My God, Nose,” he said. “I can’t see anything. I think I’ve finally gone blind.”
    “You want me to call the doctor?”
    “Yes,” he said, “but for yourself. Quit the mine, or that cough will take you.”
    “And what do we do for money?”
    “You’ll find some for my funeral. Then you’ll go away.”
    I sat by his side and lay a hand on his forehead. “You’re burning. I’ll call the doctor.”
    “Nose,” he said, “I’ve finally figured it out. Here is my paternal advice: Go away. You can’t have a life here. You must forget about your sister, about your mother, about me. Go west. Get a job in Spain, or in Germany, or anywhere; start from scratch. Break each chain. This land is a bitch and you can’t expect anything good from a bitch.”
    He took my hand and he kissed it.
    “Go get the priest,” he said.
    •
    I worked the mine until, in the spring of 1995, my boss, who’d come from some big, important city to the east, asked me, three times in a row, to repeat my request for an extra shift. Three times I repeated before he threw his arms up in despair. “I can’t understand your dialect, mayna,” he said. “Too Serbian for