What Belongs to You Read online

  I saw that Mitko had cleared the table when I stepped out of the bathroom. Only the paper cup of the milkshake was left, and he leaned over it with his elbows planted on the table, looking at me with his head quizzically cocked. He looked like a child, I thought, as I had so often before. He watched me with a kind of guarded expectancy, as if he knew he hadn’t acted strictly as he should, but thought he had been so charming he could still expect a reward. When he asked me if everything was all right, I said Yes yes, everything was fine. Malko sme ludichki, he said then, his face breaking into its smile, a real smile, full voltage: we’re a little crazy; and I had to agree that this was so, smiling at him weakly in response. But my smile faded quickly, and without sitting down I said that we should go. Yes, Mitko replied, your friend is waiting, and before I remembered my earlier excuse I thought of R. He stood up, then took his cup and sucked loudly at the straw one last time, gathering all the sweetness he could. The cold was brutal after the warmth of the restaurant, but I paused to give Mitko the money he had asked for, taking the five new bills from my wallet and folding them once as I passed them to him. Thank you, he said, closing the money in his fist and bringing it to his heart, thank you a lot, naistina, I mean it. It’s nothing, I said, you need it; and then quickly I asked him how he wanted to get home, whether by metro or by bus. But it was late now, and a Sunday, and neither of us was sure how late the metro would run. There was a bus stop across the boulevard that would get him downtown, and we made our way there together, the slush of the day’s traffic already frozen in the quiet street. Mitko walked confidently in his new shoes, a few steps ahead of me, no longer quite so attentive, I couldn’t help thinking, now that he had what he had come for; and he looked around restlessly, as if he were frustrated by the empty street. There was only one other person waiting at the flimsy structure of plastic and corrugated tin, a thirty-something man in a heavy coat, huddling away from the wind and curled around the cigarette in his hand. He glanced at us and then quickly looked away, but Mitko spoke to him without hesitation, calling him bratle, brother, asking first for a cigarette and then, when this was handed over, for a light. Dobre, I said after this transaction, all right, I’ll leave you here, I should get back, and Mitko stuck the cigarette in his mouth, holding his hand out to me for a brief farewell. Then he stepped out from under the shelter, and, though it meant exposing himself to the wind, turned his face in the direction from which the bus would come.

  The buses of the 76 line are old and in poor repair, and the one that finally pulled up the next morning looked like all the others, square and painted a flat metallic green. It was double length, the two compartments joined by a great hinge in the center, the seam sealed with accordioned plastic that gave and took up slack as the two halves struggled against each other on the poor roads. The plastic was torn in places, letting in drafts that were painfully cold and yet did nothing somehow to relieve the stifling heat. My stop was early enough on the route that I was able to find a seat, and I wiped the window with my sleeve, clearing a half circle in the condensation, though it fogged over again almost at once. At each stop more people got on and only a few got off; by Tsarigradsko Shose, the boulevard leading downtown, the bus was full, and a large older woman had taken the seat next to me. In the more restricted space I gave up trying to keep the window clear, letting it steam over entirely, and shifted my attention to the inside of the bus. The aisles were filling up, and so was the open space around the contraptions for punching tickets, just a row or two from my seat, and the larger space farther up where the two halves of the bus were joined, a circular panel in the floor covering the hinge or joint between them. It was a difficult place to ride; older people avoided it, though there was a railing to help manage the rocking motion that could sometimes, depending on the driver’s mood, be quite violent. I remembered one afternoon that fall, just after school and so before the evening rush, when I watched a group of male students take turns standing there, riding without holding on to the railing, bending their knees and throwing out their arms in a surfer’s pose, laughing as they were thrown off balance. No one was in the mood for that now, there was a Monday morning dourness in the way the men gripped the rail. The bus grew hotter as even more people got on, and the air took on a winter smell I had grown accustomed to, of wet wool and cigarettes and even this early of beer.

  I had begun to sweat, and I glanced at the latch at the top of the window, wishing I could reach up and pull it down. But I didn’t dare; everyone would have been upset, people here are convinced they can catch their death from a draft. There was a man standing in the space just in front of me, leaning against the window, who was moving slightly, not just with the bus but with a motion of his own, shifting his weight forward and then back, his coat dragging against the window. It was while he was leaning forward that I saw a fly on the pane of glass behind him. It was still, maybe numbed by the cold of the window, a common housefly that must have ridden in from the heated interior of someone’s apartment via the heated interior of someone’s clothes. In the summer flies are common on buses, of course, a buzzing nuisance, but this one seemed special; it must have survived against all odds to make it here, so deep in the season. It clung to the pane despite the shuddering of the bus, until finally it made a tiny movement upward, like an exploratory step up the glass. When the man leaned back, his coat falling over it again, I almost cried out to stop him. I waited for the fly to reappear, unable to look away from the spot I had last seen it. I had forgotten the stifling heat and the general misery of the ride in my concern for the creature and in my relief, when the man shifted again, to find it still intact. For the next few minutes I watched as the man leaned forward and back and the fly was covered and revealed. Almost every time the coat was lifted it made another movement upward toward the point where the man’s shoulder met the glass; Don’t do that, I said under my breath, that’s the wrong way. It was ridiculous to care so much, I knew, it was just a fly, why should it matter; but it did matter, at least while I watched it. That’s all care is, I thought, it’s just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it’s hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can’t look at many at once, and it’s so easy to look away.

  Downtown, at Orlov Most, Eagle Bridge, the bus finally got less crowded, with half or so of the passengers stepping off and many fewer getting on. The woman beside me stood up, much to my relief, and the man leaning against the glass left too, moving with the others to escape the bus. I looked eagerly for the housefly, and when I saw no sign of it I stood, before the new riders climbed on, and scanned the floor to see if it had fallen. But there was nothing there either, and I sat down again at a loss. There were only a few more stops before we entered Gotse Delchev and turned onto residential streets, and since I was unfamiliar with the route now I moved to be near the door, where I leaned out to read the name of each station that we passed. But I needn’t have worried; the polyclinic had its own stop and several people got off there, leaving the bus almost empty as we stepped down into the snow. It was a broad gray concrete structure of four or five stories, much larger than the clinic near the school, nearly a hospital. The steps leading up to the entrance were perilous, packed with ice, as was the unusable wheelchair ramp to my left. I climbed up carefully, planting both feet on a single stair before chancing another, feeling how easily I could lose my footing, feeling elderly, and wondering how the genuinely infirm could possibly manage. The ground floor of the building was a large, echoing space that seemed unfinished; the floors were untreated, little more than concrete, the walls coated in bare plaster. There was no reception or information desk, only a large notice board with the departments organized by floor, the doctors’ names on long plastic strips that could be taken out and replaced. I had the page with the name of the department I needed, but the woman from the clinic had written in a quick cursive hand I couldn’t quite make out. Some of the words on the
board were familiar, ophthalmology, gynecology, but the transliterations were awkward, I had to sound them all out, and there were several I couldn’t make any sense of at all. As I looked around in confusion, I saw a woman in a white coat coming down the large central stairs, holding a plastic cup of coffee and clearly on her way out for a break, though the day had hardly begun. Excuse me, I said, using the politest form, proshtavaite, forgive me, as I held my page out to her, can you help me find this? She took it from me, and then her eyes flicked up once, from the paper to my face, almost without expression. She pointed me toward a far corner, where there was a sign that read Dermatologiya i Venerologiya. I recognized the first word, but the second took me a moment; we say venereal disease in English, of course, but I had never heard of a venereology department, and I wondered whether the word was used in the States. By its Latin roots it should have meant the study of love, and I wondered too how often that made it the right word for the people who came here, and whether it was the right word for my own predicament.

  I pulled open the door and stepped into a long bare hallway of offices, lined at intervals with benches bolted to the walls. It was almost empty, I saw with relief; an elderly couple occupied one bench, a teenage boy another. At the far end there was a door that led outside, and above the last office on the left I saw a sign for registration. The door to the office was closed, but at my knock a voice called for me to come in. A middle-aged woman was sitting at a desk with a newspaper spread in front of her, her right hand resting by a cup of coffee, clearly absorbed in a morning routine. She didn’t look up as I entered, her eyes still scanning the page, and turned to me only as I spoke, with an interest sparked, I suspected, by my accent. She returned my greeting and then looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to explain why I was there. I’ve received a positive result on a test, I said, handing her the note I had been given by the other clinic, I’m here for a second one to confirm it. All right, she said, rising slowly from the desk, as if loath to leave her coffee; have you had any symptoms, she asked, any sores, using the word rani, wounds, and when I said that I hadn’t, or none I had noticed, I knew they could be painless and small, she asked why I had gotten tested in the first place, whether I had any reason to think I might be infected. I hadn’t anticipated the question, and I paused before responding. A friend came to see me, I said finally, he told me that he had this sickness, he said that I should be tested. She raised her eyebrows just slightly at this, and then she said So you had contact with this person, using that word, which is the same in the two languages, kontakt; and I repeated it back to her, looking her directly in the eyes, Yes, I had contact with him. I wouldn’t accept the shame she seemed to want me to feel, and she acknowledged this, I thought, dropping her gaze as she reached past me to open the door. Dobre, she said, all right, follow me. She made quick work of me in a room across the hall, not speaking as she swabbed and drew blood, and once again I was surprised by the lack of gloves. Then she ushered me out with the promise that someone would see me when I returned that afternoon for my results.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of spending hours in that long hallway with its bare benches, still occupied by the same patients, or would-be patients, who hadn’t moved and seemed resigned to a long wait. I needed to walk, even if it was hard going in the snow, so I exited through the door next to the registration office and descended a long ramp leading to the street. The air had warmed, it looked to be a beautiful day, sunny and clear as few had been that season, and already the snow and ice had softened, the surface giving way just slightly, slick and wet. I thought of Mitko and his new shoes, the old ones would already have been soaked through. I was dry in my winter boots, though they didn’t help much with the ice, and I made my way slowly down the ramp and then across the little street that ran the length of the building toward the main boulevard. It was a pleasant neighborhood, Gotse Delchev, prosperous and older than Mladost, with more trees and green spaces; it might even be lovely come spring, I thought. There were still the apartment blocks, that Soviet model of collective life, but there wasn’t the same randomness and glut here as in Mladost, where in the chaos after the fall of the old system space was snatched up and structures built, or half-built, without rhyme or reason, cheap and unplanned. Here, in Gotse Delchev, there were fewer new buildings, and the original plan of the neighborhood was still visible, its geometrical shapes. The shops I passed weren’t just the single-shelf affairs of Mladost, the little markets made up of prefabricated shacks; they were urban, even elegant, or at least aiming toward an idea of elegance. In front of some of them paths had been shoveled through the snow, something almost unheard of here. Even in the cold, and even at an hour when many people were at work, I passed people shopping or walking their dogs, and young people, university students maybe, busy about their lives, so that the streets I walked seemed vibrant to me, more vibrant than my own. But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was. R. must be up by now, I thought, he must be heading for his own clinic, with whatever feelings of apprehension or shame, with whatever feelings of remorse.

  I turned onto the large and busy boulevard that marked the neighborhood’s edge, though this meant facing into the wind, which charged down it unimpeded by buildings or trees. Several blocks ahead I could see something that looked like a construction site, though not of the kind scattered throughout Sofia, for malls or apartments; there was a single concrete pillar rising above the billboards that lined the streets, I couldn’t imagine at first what it was for. When I reached it, I saw that the billboards, which were faded and worn at the edges, displayed information about the construction of a cathedral, and that the date set for its completion had passed by several years. There was a sketch of what the cathedral would look like on one of the boards, along with its name, SVETI PURVOMUCHENIK STEFAN, Saint Stefan the First Martyr, I thought, puzzling out the roots for first and pain, the suffix that makes a word signify a person. Printed in a larger font than the saint’s name was the project’s corporate sponsor, one of the country’s biggest banks. The site was surrounded by a fence draped with green mesh, which was torn away in places. No one was building anything now, and it didn’t look like anyone had been working there for a long time. The pillar was the only section they had really begun, though maybe they had laid foundations for the rest, I couldn’t tell because of the snow. There was also an arch, I could see now; it peeled off from the side of the pillar, and next to it were a few steps leading up to a small platform. It was going to be the entrance, then, and the pillar must have been intended for the bell tower, though they hadn’t gotten very far; there were thin metal rods extending naked a few feet beyond the concrete, an aspiration, so far as I could tell, entirely abandoned.

  I made my way across the road, two lanes on one side of the concrete median and two on the other, the ice more perilous than the traffic. The fence wasn’t really meant to keep anyone out, or not anymore; the metal posts were planted in concrete blocks one could move easily enough, as someone had already done where the segment of chain link was unsecured, creating a passageway I slipped through. The arch was graceful, despite the cheap material it was made of, and the whole site was like a ruin, or a ruin in reverse, caught rising rather than falling. The ground was strewn with beer bottles, cheap plastic jugs sticking up through the snow; there was no telling how long they had been there. I climbed the few stairs to the platform, which was sheltered from the snow by the arch, and here there was more refuse, a profusion of cigarette butts and plastic bags and, here and there, the discarded wrapper of a condom, the top strip torn and bent, opened hurriedly, I imagined, gripped by fingers or teeth. It hadn’t been entirely abandoned, then, and I thought of the teenagers w
ho must use it to escape apartments that often enough house three generations. I looked up at the arch, and something in me responded to the familiar shape of it, though I haven’t been to a church in years, or not as anything but a tourist. I thought of R., wondering if he had gotten tested yet, if he was waiting for the result; I hated that I wasn’t with him, that there was no one he could ask to go in my place, that he was there because of me. I worried it would make him regret having met me at all; I wondered if I thought it should. Maybe they were a mistake, my years in this country, maybe the illness I had caught was just a confirmation of it. What had I done but extend my rootlessness, the series of false starts that became more difficult to defend as I got older? I think I hoped I would feel new in a new country, but I wasn’t new here, and if there was comfort in the idea that my habitual unease had a cause, that if I was ill-fitted to the place there was good reason, it was a false comfort, a way of running away from real remedy. But then I didn’t truly believe there was a remedy, I thought as I stepped down from the platform into the snow, walking back to the boulevard, and how could I regret the choices that had brought me, by whatever path, to R., any more than I could regret those that had led to Mitko and to moments that flared in my memory, that I knew I would cherish whatever their consequences.

  I found a café, where I took refuge for a few hours with a book and bad coffee. When I returned to the polyclinic I was greeted by a different woman, who was much warmer than the first, even friendly as she told me that the test results were ready and that the doctor was available; she knocked on the office door and peered in briefly to announce my presence, and then told me to take a seat on the bench beside it. Just a minute, she said, she’ll call you in, though I waited much longer than that. The hallway was empty now, there were just two cleaning women standing at the other end, chatting beside a cart and mop, oblivious to who I was or why I was there. Soon it would all be over, I thought, remembering what R. had said; I would speak to the doctor and get my shot, and then I would be back in that cleaner life he and I had made together. It was only at the second or third shout from inside the room that I realized a voice, already exasperated, was calling for me to enter. I stood quickly, disconcerted, the more so as I opened the door to find a woman glaring fiercely at me from behind a desk. She stood as I walked in, but didn’t greet me or extend her hand, merely nodding at my murmured Dobur den. She was a slight woman, not quite young, and I was taken aback by her appearance, which suggested an idea of beauty at once ubiquitous and mocked here, a hypersexualized style associated with a certain kind of fashionable wealth. She was elaborately made up, with heavy eye shadow and glossy lips, and her hair was teased and styled into an enormous, unmoving mass. Her medical coat was pulled tight, and beneath it she wore a skirt of some vaguely reflective material and extremely high heels. She spoke Bulgarian in an odd way, very quickly and somehow at once clipped and indistinct, as though the words were a crisp fruit she bit into to find that it was soft. We have the results of the second test, she said, there’s no doubt now that you have this illness, which is something very serious for you, serious and dangerous, for you and for anyone with whom you have sexual contact of any kind. There was an odd formality to her speech, as though she were reciting a government text, as perhaps she was, and she asked me questions I had already been asked, whether I had had any wounds or sores on my genitals, but not only there, also in my mouth, beneath my tongue. Nothing I’ve noticed, I said, nothing unusual, though I had had sores in my mouth, they aren’t uncommon for me, they’ve come and gone since I was a child. This gave me pause, and the woman cocked her head just slightly. Are you sure, she said, a note of suspicion clear in her tone. I had heard university friends, medical students, complain that patients always lie, which they said with the same professional knowingness and exasperation I saw in the look the doctor gave me now, and if it was true in general it must be especially true here, in this room where there was such humiliation in revelation, where guarding a secret felt so much like guarding the self. Yes, I said, I’m certain.