What Belongs to You Page 4

  That morning I spent grading papers was almost two months after my final meeting with Mitko in Varna, a meeting that was itself preceded by three months of silence. In the days and weeks that followed the night we spent together in Mladost, one of only two nights, as it turned out, we would spend together in all the months we knew each other, Mitko appeared at my apartment every few days, always friendly and eager, and always with some request. Whenever I heard the ringing of the bell linked to the street entrance, which no one else ever rang, I felt torn between a desire on the one hand for the routines of solitude (my writing and my books); and, on the other, for the thrill of Mitko’s presence and its disruption of all routine. But after weeks of these visits I’d had enough disruption, and I came to resent the requests he made, which were never exorbitant (money for cigarettes or credit for his phone, once forty leva for a pair of shoes), but which it seemed would never end. Still, on the very evening I put a stop to these visits, my heart leapt up as it always did at the buzzer’s announcement of his presence. He was friendly when I opened the door and seemed well enough, but I was worried by the state of him; his clothes, about which he was usually so fastidious, were dirty, and as he walked past me I could smell it had been days since he had bathed. We had just sat down on the couch, he had just smiled at me in invitation and I had laid my head on his chest, inhaling his sour smell, when there was a knock at the door. I had forgotten about my dinner with C., a friend who lived on the floor above me and also taught at the American College; he had come to pick me up on the way to a restaurant nearby. Mitko was delighted to see this friend, whom he had met before on one of his visits and with whom he was clearly smitten, as was nearly everyone who met C., who had an effortless, ingratiating charm and was nonetheless entirely indifferent to the needs and desires of others, so that he seemed always to be receding while still inviting pursuit. Mitko hardly took his eyes off him and touched him whenever he could, always robust and friendly touches, a physical language he used to compensate for their inability to speak to each other; and yet touches that, though there was nothing at all seductive about them, I knew would at the slightest sign of permission or desire have taken on a sexual heat.

  At dinner, Mitko ordered far more than he could consume, as he always did, food and drink and cigarettes. I was soon exhausted by my attempts to translate, and we settled into a silence interrupted by Mitko’s sallies at conversation, nearly all of them directed, through me, to C. Maybe it was out of jealousy, then, that I suddenly asked Mitko whether he liked his life among his priyateli, putting the question as baldly as that. Ne, he answered with the same bluntness, showing his usual reticence to discuss anything unpleasant, especially about his past or how he had reached his present. I pressed him, unsure whether I was motivated by cruelty or interest or concern, and, entirely neglecting my friend, who was unable to follow even my halting Bulgarian, I asked Mitko why then he chose to live as he did. I knew the question was naïve, or not even that; it was unfair, it presumed a freedom of choice that implied a judgment I had no business making. Sudba, Mitko said, fate, the single word serving to dismiss at a stroke all choice and consequence. In Varna there were no jobs, he said, and in Sofia what jobs there were were shut off to him, since he had no address he could give to employers, and no way to get an address without work. This was the end of our exchange, which colored the remainder of the evening, for the rest of which there would be no more innuendo from Mitko (innuendo that I had received ambivalently, to his visible confusion) and during which in other respects as well his mood was subdued, as was my own. At one and the same time, I wanted to repair the damage I had done and sensed with relief the possibility of extricating myself from an entanglement that had become more intricate than I could bear. It seemed to me there was no attitude toward Mitko I could take that would let me be at once sufficiently compassionate and sufficiently free, so that I wavered between eagerness and distance, an ambivalence that I knew, though it was especially acute with Mitko, characterized all of my relationships, casual and profound. When we stood up from the table, I told Mitko I would walk with him to the metro, making clear that this once, at least, we wouldn’t be having sex. I was relieved to make this clear, to find I was able to make it clear, but I still didn’t feel at ease with myself or with him, and the mood was heavy as we walked. I had asked C. to come too; I thought he would help my resolve, and I didn’t want to be alone when I saw Mitko off, but he kept his distance, walking a few steps behind us. Finally I asked Mitko if he was all right, unable to bear his silence anymore. He looked away from me, toward the traffic on the boulevard, and said Iskam da zhiveya normalno, I want to live a normal life. I was silent for a moment, torn between a terrible sadness and my desire for escape. And then, watching his face, I don’t want to be one of your clients, I said. He turned to me in surprise, saying But you aren’t a client, you’re a friend, but I waved this objection away. I like you too much, I said, clumsily but with candor, it isn’t good for me to like you so much. We had reached the station by then, and he stood a moment looking at me with bemusement, not quite sure what to make of what I had said, and perhaps wondering which of the faces I had shown him was the true face, the face of need he had been accustomed to, or this new face that suddenly was closed to him. Then, as if deciding it wasn’t worth his while to understand, he shrugged and put out his hand, asking for a ten-leva note to see him on his way.

  For three months there was no sign of Mitko, and over the course of that time my surprise that he would take my parting words to him seriously turned to concern and finally, inevitably, to longing. It was on a weekend afternoon late in February that with a ping he appeared on Skype, from which he had been absent all that time, as he had been absent from NDK and from the streets I had begun to haunt in the hope of finding him again and of picking up the thread I had (as it seemed to me now) too quickly and with too little thought let drop. How extraordinary that with the press of a key, allowing no time for regret, my screen should be filled with his moving image, dear to me again after the long absence. He was peering at his own screen, his face, at first knit with attention, suddenly relaxing and coming alive, as he smiled with what seemed a genuine smile at seeing me after all this time. As we spoke, I stared at his image as if to consume it, taking in what I was surprised to find I had nearly forgotten, though he had let me take photographs of him that night we spent in my apartment, dozens of them, and I had looked at them often in the months he had been gone. But now I could see how he moved, the gestures he made that were too swift for photographs, the living tale of him, and I was filled with a longing free of all ambivalence. He looked better than the last time I had seen him, his clothes were clean, his head freshly shaved, so it was a shock to learn that he had spent the last ten or so weeks in a hospital in Varna, laid up with a liver disorder of some kind. I couldn’t make out the details, either because of my Bulgarian or because he shied away from telling me too much. He did speak of the terrible boredom he felt in the hospital, where he was confined to a bed, without a computer or even a television for distraction, since the one mounted in his room would only play if fed constantly with coins. Nor were books or magazines a diversion, since he read Cyrillic with difficulty; he had left school in the seventh grade, and was more comfortable with the Latin characters used in Internet chat rooms. He confessed this to me with evident shame one day when I had run out briefly for something he wanted—cigarettes or alcohol or the sweets he loved—and returned to find him at the computer moaning with frustration, unable either to type in the Cyrillic script it was set to or to switch it back. His only visitors had been his mother and grandmother and the boy he called brat mi, whom I hadn’t seen since that first day at NDK.

  But he was better now, he said, he felt fine, though in a month he was supposed to return to the hospital, for a stay that might be as long as the first. I thought of how often, for all his ebullience, I had seen Mitko sick, his colds, the ear infection he had had for weeks, the herpes that sometimes di
sfigured his mouth; I thought of his drinking and the risks of his trade, and for an instant I wanted desperately to save him, though from what exactly and how I wasn’t sure. I knew it was a ridiculous desire, that it imagined a relationship I didn’t want; and I also knew Mitko had never expressed any desire of his own to be saved. He was in an Internet café (every now and again I saw someone walk by behind him), and he made more and more use of the keyboard as we talked, typing comments that were too suggestive for him to speak out loud. This had the effect he intended, overwhelmingly when he stood and under the pretext of stretching displayed his body to me, reaching into his pockets to pull the folds of his jeans tight against his crotch. By the end of the conversation, surprising myself, I had proposed to come to Varna at the end of the week, a proposition he was eager to accept. I will be with you the whole weekend, he said, I promise, hundert protzent.

  Over the next few days I received a number of e-mails from him, as he visited hotels and reported back on prices and their nearness to the sea. It was the sea, as the days passed, that I longed for almost as much as I longed for Mitko, having spent so many months in landlocked Sofia, and it was the thought of the sea even more than of Mitko that I dwelled on for the seven cramped hours I spent on the bus from Sofia to the coast. It was a gray day, cold, more like winter than spring. There were martenitsi pinned to everyone’s clothes, small bundles of red and white yarn exchanged on the first of March, a ritual meant to encourage the year to turn. My own bag was covered with them; students had given them to me with great ceremony, with wishes of health and wealth and happiness, all day long. But there was no magic in them, and for the whole trip a light precipitation fell, sometimes as rain, sometimes as snow. I was depressed by both the weather and the landscape we passed, the beauty of which was ruined everywhere human hands had touched it. Along the highway, which must have dated to Communist times, the buildings we passed were squat and concrete and often falling apart, abandoned no doubt for their larger counterparts in the city I had just left. I was amazed by how completely the impulse to beauty had been erased from these buildings, which were so different, in everything but their poverty, from the mountain villages I had visited, where almost every dwelling showed as if defiantly an urge toward art.

  As evening fell, the landscape darkened and was lost, and the window offered nothing but the reflection of my own face. I’ve never been able to read on buses, and so the only distraction from the discomfort of the ride was the line of small screens that ran the length of the center aisle, looping the same low-budget American action movie over and over. There was no sound, and the subtitles moved too quickly for me to puzzle them out, but even so I was unable to stop watching. It was a terrible movie, a revenge tragedy, every shot was a cliché. In each scene the violence grew more brutal, the tortures more baroque, my own excitement more intense; and not just my own, at one point I heard a woman gasp and glanced away from the screen and saw that nearly everyone on the bus was transfixed. The film had bound us together, it had made us all feel the same thing, so that we became a kind of temporary corporate body. How easily we are made to feel, I thought, and with what little foundation, with no foundation at all. At the movie’s climax, a final scene of slaughter and settling of accounts, an old man across the aisle breathed Chestito, well done, just loudly enough to be heard, and it was almost as if I had spoken the word myself.

  As we neared Varna, the lights of the city drew me back to the windows, to the blurred world glimpsed through glass streaked with rain. We stopped at the edge of the city center, or what I took to be the city center, not at a terminal but in a lot beside a gas station, where Mitko was standing without an umbrella, his shoulders hunched against the rain. I was the first off the bus, bounding out to greet him, so overcome with excitement that he had to send me back for my bag, which I had left on the seat beside me. We both laughed at this, at my eagerness and forgetfulness, and he shook his head in rebuke and indulgence, having provided once again a service beyond the terms of our contract. He took the bag from me, insisting with a show of gallantry when I said I could carry it myself, and led me to a line of taxis. He asked me about the trip, if I was hungry, if I wanted to go straight to the hotel or explore a bit first, though of course he already knew my answer to these questions. It was a short drive to the hotel he had chosen, a nice place, he said, very close to the sea. And it was nice, in a faded way, two old houses around a courtyard on a narrow street off the city’s main square, the pedestrian avenue leading to the sea. There was a single attendant, an old man who came out of his booth, a glassed-in porch attached to one of the buildings, to greet us. He and Mitko shook hands warmly, and I wondered what their relationship was, whether Mitko came here often with men, whether perhaps they had some arrangement. Our room was shabby and spacious, on the first floor with large windows that faced the street and were inadequate against the wind. There was a stand-alone radiator against one of the walls, and Mitko went over to it and switched it on; he must have been chilled to the bone from his wait. He sat on top of it, sighing with pleasure as it warmed. Without getting up, he reached to the old television against the wall and flipped through the few channels, stopping at a station playing videos of Balkan pop-folk songs; he hummed along, wagging his head from side to side with the jagged rhythms as he fiddled with my iPod, which I had set on the bedside table when we arrived and which he immediately snatched up. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t the same device that had so fascinated him in Sofia, and when I told him that that one had been stolen, that a man had taken it from me during an encounter, he shook his head in sympathy—such is the world—and then his features hardened. When I’m in Sofia, he said, we’ll look for him, you show me who he is and I’ll take care of him. Samo da go vidya i do tam. It was clear that his sickness, whatever it was, hadn’t kept him from the brawls I suspected he enjoyed; above his left eye, now, there was a wound just a day or two old, the skin still split. I tried to delay, settling in a bit, arranging my things, but his presence was too much for me, I went to him and touched him and he put his hand on my neck and pushed me down, then unbuttoned his fly and fished himself out, still clutching my iPod in his other hand. It was only when I stood up again and took his arm, tugging him toward the bed, that he laid the device aside and made himself more fully available to me. But he was still detached, he kept glancing at the television, and when I asked him what was wrong he just shrugged and answered that he had already had sex that afternoon, which seemed like a breach of contract, though I suppose I had no real basis for complaint. I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn’t welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived. Mitko was right next to me, naked now and stretched out with his arms behind his head, but he didn’t touch me or respond to my touch, his cock lay half-hard against his stomach. He was granting me access but he wasn’t really present, and finally I fell back beside him, my eyes closed, and concentrated on his warmth where our bodies touched as I brought myself off.

  I woke early the next morning and went for a walk on my own. The sun was just rising, the wind was chill and fresh and laced with salt. Mitko had told me that the hotel was close to the sea, and as I turned from our street into the main plaza, I gasped at the horizon of water framed grandly by the pillars at the entrance of the Sea Garden. I quickly got lost in this large park, wandering paths that seemed to lead toward the water only to veer away. I loved the silence of the morning, and also the solitude that seemed part of the design of the place, or rather the rhythm it established of solitude and conviviality, the narrow, wooded paths giving out suddenly onto plazas with benches gathered at observatory points over the sea, which was endless and gray and pierced ceaselessly by gulls. After the desolation of the landscape I had seen the day before, I was moved to be in a place designed so clearly with beauty in mind. The very layout of the paths, with their apparent aim
lessness, seemed to rebuke the bare utility of the buildings we had passed on the bus. The park was built shortly after liberation, and as I wandered I came upon statues of revolutionaries and writers placed here and there along the paths. Some of their names were familiar to me, but not many of their stories, so that it was like walking a peculiarly lyrical account of the past, free of the usual narratives of triumph and loss. There were signs, too, in the darkest and most overgrown eddies, of the park’s other life, secret and ludic: cigarette butts and bottles and the occasional distended dry husk of a condom. They must have been left there the previous summer, when these paths would have been a carnival, filled with vacationers from across Europe, the beautiful young fueled by night and heat and the ever-present sea.

  It was the sea I longed for now, after so much misdirection and delay. Again and again the staircases I encountered leading down from the garden’s observatories to the beach were cordoned off, in such crumbling disrepair as to prevent safe passage. I was aware of time passing and knew I should get back to the hotel, to Mitko who might be waking to find me gone. When I finally made my way down from the garden, I was frustrated to find that access to the water was blocked by a seemingly endless line of construction, complexes of restaurants and casinos and discotheques, all of them boarded up for the season, barricaded against sea and weather and, I assumed, the plundering hands that had covered these boards with graffiti. And yet, when I did find a way through these linked complexes, reaching not quite the beach yet but the road that ran alongside it, I turned away after only a few moments. The wind coming off the sea, unbroken by trees or by the buildings that had frustrated my approach, was too fierce to stand facing it for long. And I was fascinated by those buildings, now that I saw the other side of them, with their garish, amusement-park facades rising above their boarded windows. I could hear a radio playing faintly from within one of the restaurants, but there was no other sign of human presence, no voices or movement save for the cats that had improvised some habitation on the rooftops, where they watched me, disinterested and alert. There was a ghostliness about the whole strip, as if it had been abandoned for years. One restaurant wasn’t boarded up, I don’t know why, and I walked up the few steps to the deck to peer in through the glass, which was crusted with salt and sand. It was a place for children, a restaurant and playroom both, with figurines and coin-operated rides in the shapes of characters from American cartoons. These were wrapped in sheets of plastic, further blurring an image already blurred by the glass, so that they were grotesquely distorted; and for a moment, as I looked at these figures I associated with my childhood, it was as if they took on a kind of agonized life, like quarantined victims of some plague or like infants themselves, suffocating in plastic cauls.