What Belongs to You Page 6

  I woke early the next morning. There was an eerie quality to the light seeping in around the drapes, and when I pulled them aside I saw that the air was full of snow, though the flakes were fine and not yet sticking to the ground. In the bathroom I studied my face, tilting it back and forth in the light, relieved that I could hardly see a bruise. I stepped out of my room, giving a wave to the watchman, who must have been coming to the end of his shift, and turned toward the Sea Garden, wanting to see the water again. The park wasn’t deserted this time, despite the hour and the snow; as I walked I passed old couples strolling briskly, men with their dogs, even cyclists, all out for a morning’s exercise beside the sea. Just past the entrance on the left there was a huge casino complex, from the depths of which I could hear the driving beat of dance music; there must have been a disco there, where even in the off-season the morning had yet to come. I wanted to see the water, but not just to see it; I wanted to be close to it, to imagine if not to feel the unearthly cold of it. And so I walked more purposefully through the garden, bypassing, as best I could, its more winding paths, and when I reached again the line of hotels and bars and, beyond them, the road, I didn’t retreat, I crossed the road and held my face to the wind, though it was biting and filled now with snow. Three long walkways extended from the beach into the sea, branching out at their ends into three separate promenades, like the arms, it seemed to me, of a snowflake as drawn by a child. I walked to one of these piers, which unlike the park was deserted, as was the sea, except for the gulls and, far out in the water, two huge tankers that sat unmoving at the horizon. At the near end of the pier there was a large stone sculpture, two stylized figures in robes, who might as easily have been monks as sailors and who seemed to be embracing although they were looking away from each other, one toward the sea and one toward the shore, an image of irreconcilable desires. The stone was pocked and scarred, already dissolving in the abrasive air. I walked the length of the pier, which was lined with huge stone objects shaped like jacks from the children’s game, a defense against the heavier element of the sea. I walked to the farthest point of the pier, to its very edge, and spent some time looking at these stones and at the white froth surging between them. I felt the pressure of the water striking the stones and the steadfastness of their resistance, of what seems like their resistance and is simply a slower giving way. The snow was easing now though the wind was still fierce, the air tossed the birds as wildly as the sea. I could already sense remorse gathering, it was distant and abstract still but I knew it would flood in, that it would be terrible, and as I watched the motion of the sea I accused myself, thinking bitterly oh, what have I done. I stood there until I was chilled beneath my clothes and my face was numb with cold. Then I turned and walked back toward the shore, stamping my feet a little to quicken the sluggish blood.

  II

  A GRAVE

  I was in the middle of a sentence when there was a knock at the door and a woman entered my classroom without a word. I knew her, of course, she worked in the front office of my school, but there was something in her manner that checked my greeting before I spoke it, perhaps her silence or the oddly formal way she carried the single, unfolded page in her hand, so that she walked toward me through an atmosphere strangely ruffled or unquiet, in which my interrupted sentence still hung. The students perked up at her knock, not that they had been to that point bored exactly, but any interruption is welcome, and especially when it suggests some hidden drama, as when this woman, whom I considered almost a friend, who had always been kind to me and who surely thought she was doing me a kindness now, walked quickly but with a subdued manner to deliver me what she held. I found myself flustered as I took the page from her hand, standing awkward in front of students to whom a moment before I had been speaking freely, even eloquently, rehearsing thoughts that had burned for me once and that now were a repertoire of dull gestures, a custom. It was mid-September, the very beginning of the year; the sun beat down and the room, which was high and received the brunt of the morning light, was almost unbearably hot, despite the windows we had opened. It was toward these windows that I longed to look, not toward the page now in my hand but toward the trees and the field beyond them and the road and, though I had only a glimpse of it, the mountain that hovered beyond the huge blocks of government buildings. But of course I did look at the page, an e-mail that had been sent to the school’s address and that this woman, my friend or almost friend, had printed out to deliver by hand. She stood beside me as I read, still without speaking, and her silence inspired or inflicted silence upon the students as well, who were aquiver with interest, sensing it was news of some import and hoping it was news of freedom, or at least of a break in routine. And it was such news, there would be no more class that day, or not with me. My father had fallen ill, I read, suddenly and gravely; he was in danger, he might be dying, and he had asked that I come to him, despite the fact that we hadn’t spoken in years. When I read this I looked helplessly at the woman next to me, unable to speak. She reached out her hand, saying It’s all right, go, I’ll stay with them, that’s why I came, speaking in Bulgarian as she always did in front of students, she was embarrassed of her English. I managed to thank her, I think, and I murmured something to the class, an apology perhaps, I’m not sure, and then I left the room, the woman, the students eager for news, the sentence that now would never be taken back up; I left the room and descended the broad stairs and stepped out into the scorching day. Though it was September and fall already the sun beat like a bell upon the streets, the grass was dry, the trees seemed withered in their shells; but I walked without thinking, barely noticing the heat. I must have passed the august, slightly crumbling buildings of my school, the Soviet blocks of the police academy, the gate with its guards, the dogs curled in the shade beside it; I must have passed them though I have no memory of them now. I was seeing something else, images that burst in on me, scenes from a childhood I hadn’t thought of for years; I had worked hard to forget them but now they came all at once, too quickly to make any sense of them. It was only after I reached Malinov, the main boulevard, with its lanes of cars stalled miserably in the heat, that this procession of images began to slow and settle, resolving into more distinct scenes of the life I had left behind. I saw my grandparents’ farm, my father lying in a large field used as pasture, I saw myself lying beside him. It was late, and I think it was summer, the night was cool but I could feel the ground releasing the day’s heat beneath me, its long exhalation. I remember the freedom I felt, awake far past my bedtime, and my father too was free, having set aside for once the work that filled his days and nights. He was the only one in his family who had gone to college, he studied law and moved to the city, and though it wasn’t far from where he and my mother had been born, it was a different world. He hated going back to their small town, to the poverty and dirt he had worked so hard to escape; he only visited once or twice a year, though my mother took us to see her family often, it was important to know where we came from, she said. Her family were small farmers, poor, and though I loved visiting them I knew my life would always be different from theirs, my father made sure I knew it. After the summers we spent on the farm we came back speaking like them, my brother and I, we’d say ain’t and y’all and my father would snap at us, angry in a way I didn’t understand; Don’t talk like that, he’d say, I didn’t raise you to talk like that. When we complained about how often he was gone, how much time he spent at his office or away for work, he told us to be grateful, he said we were lucky he worked so hard, we didn’t know how lucky, he was giving us a better life than what he’d had. It was rare for him to set aside his work as he did that night, lying with me in the field, when I was still young enough to be a part of him, to touch and be touched by him. It must have been summer, the night was vivid with sounds, with insects and frogs and the low murmurings of cattle; they were familiar sounds and yet every night I was surprised by them, by their density and nearness, like a heavy quilt drawn close. It was dar
k as it never was in the city, and if I had been alone I would have been frightened, I think, I wasn’t a brave child; but my father lay beside me, large and warm in the grass, resting his head back pillowed on his hands. I mimicked this posture as I listened to his voice direct me to the stars and their patterns, which I could never pick out, the patterns and the names that I loved, some of them strange and others homely, Cassiopeia, I recited, the Big Dipper and the Little Bear. I was in my father’s confidence, I felt, in the warm thick of it, and so it didn’t frighten me to think of the stars and the millions of years it had been since that light was made, even the very light that rained down on us now; nor did it frighten me to think of the dark through which it passed or the dark (my father said) from which it had come, the star itself having gone dark already, perhaps, having ceased to produce the light that reached us and would continue to reach us for millions of years; or maybe then (the voice still spoke but not I thought to me) it would fall where there was no one to receive it, the orphaned light, maybe it would rain on barrenness, our human kind having gone somewhere else, or maybe having disappeared altogether. Surely I only imagine now, from this distance, that there was longing in his voice as he spoke, surely I didn’t hear it then, when I turned to him and put my arms around him and buried my face in his chest, as I was still young enough to do, when he wrapped his arms around me in turn, holding me even as I could feel him withdraw into his own reverie or contemplation. But I do hear it, the longing I think he felt as he drifted away from me and from the scene we inhabited together, which must have seemed so different to him, for whom it was the life he had escaped. It was only six months or so before the day when I left my classroom and walked into the September heat that I learned fully both the extent of his longing and the full measure of what he had fled. My sisters had come to visit me in Sofia, my half sisters, the two daughters my father had with his second wife. They were more than a decade younger than I, and I had always felt an overwhelming tenderness for them, which competed with the envy I felt of the love my father showed them so freely. This was especially true of the youngest, G., whom my father loved as he had loved none of the rest of us; he delighted in her swiftness when she was a child, the way she sped about the house, quieting only when he caught her and gathered her in his arms. It was G. who one night told us the stories he had shared with her, stories I couldn’t remember ever having heard, though occasionally some note in what she said struck as if at a distance a familiar tone. We hadn’t seen one another for years, and in that time my father’s second marriage had failed, ending what had always seemed to me my sisters’ good fortune. One of them was just out of college, the other still studying, and I was shocked at the sight of them; they were competent and adult, elegant, with a sophistication I could never dream of having. We were in the main room of my apartment, the common room and kitchen, surrounded by the detritus of a gathering we had had; we sat with half a bottle of wine, two of us at the table and G. alone on the couch. We had let the room go almost dark, only a few candles were still burning, and through the windows the lights of the neighboring blokove were lovely, now that the gray of their concrete had faded into the night. It was my birthday, we had all been drinking, but G. with an abandon I watched with concern. She had arrived a few days before my other sister, and each night we spent alone together she stayed up drinking long after I had gone exhausted to bed. There was a note of defiance in how she drank, an assertion of adulthood, but also something desperate, I thought, an escape either from or to. Her estrangement from my father was recent enough that the loss still held a kind of electric charge for her, so that at times as we spoke I thought I could see her jerk with the pang of it. All my life, she told me in those first nights we spent together, speaking with the wonder of someone for whom the examination of life still offers the promise of revelation or escape; all my life I’ve lived to please him, she said, every choice I’ve made has been his choice, it’s like nothing I’ve ever wanted has been my own. So what do I do now, she asked, how do I even know what I want to do? She had always been driven; as a child she worked harder than any of the rest of us in school, she excelled at sports, she was the president of her class, in everything she did she was exceptional. She questioned all of it now, she said, everything she had done, everything she had wanted, not just these public ambitions but also more private needs. We had never talked about sex before; she was so much younger and I had always shied away from it, though she knew something about my own history from the poems I had published, which she searched out and read with an attention they seldom, probably in no other case received. I just wanted to get it over with, she said about the first time she had sex, it was a relief, I didn’t want it to be a big deal. She was fourteen when she started sneaking out at night, she told me, boys would wait for her, their cars running on the next street over; they were always older guys, she said, first seniors at her school and then college students she met at parties. I’d lie about my age, she said, I’d say I was sixteen or seventeen and they’d believe me, or maybe they just pretended to believe me. It’s not like there were that many of them, she said, seeing the dismay I felt, I didn’t even have sex with all of them, I just liked being with them, I liked the attention. I don’t know why I cringed at her stories, when I had done so much worse at her age, having sex in parks and bathrooms, dangerous and indiscriminate sex; but I was troubled that her history seemed to parallel my own, that we shared what I had thought of as my own gnawing affliction. And I knew she would outgrow the satisfactions she had found, that soon she would desire other and more intense experiences, drawn forward by those appetites we share, that humiliating need that has always, even in my moments of apparent pride, run alongside my life like a snapping dog. Even these desires, I thought as I listened to my sister, seemed to descend from my father like an inherited disease. It was my father we spoke of that night after our party, as we always did when we were together; but now my sisters’ anger had changed, their mother had told them about my father’s cruelty, about his many affairs and her sense of abandonment. But G. already knew about those affairs, she said, she had known about them for a long time. She was very young, she told us, when she discovered my father’s infidelities, which already were unsettling her life, accounting for so much of the tension and noise around her, her parents’ incessant quarrels. She was thirteen or fourteen when she came upon the cache of Internet sites and chat rooms he visited; he hadn’t even bothered to hide them, my sister said, there wasn’t any password to crack, she had found them really without looking, less curious than bored as she clicked through files. It was his computer, but she was allowed to use it from time to time, so it wasn’t exactly forbidden territory she wandered when almost by accident she stumbled upon images he had saved, hundreds of them, she said, showing men with women, or two women alone. It was as though he had filed them by some logic of progression, the images growing ever more obscene and upsetting, little pageants of submission and need. It never occurred to her to go to her mother with what she had found, she said; she had already been enlisted in her parents’ battles, subjected to the cruelty of sparring adults in relation to their children, a cruelty that reduces those children to tools or weapons, to weapons of a particularly brutal kind. He had made her his partisan, her first thought was to protect him, and so she wasn’t only aware of what he was doing but implicated in it, that was the word she used, implicated. But it wasn’t only that, I imagined, it wasn’t just keeping his secrets that implicated her; I thought there must have been another fascination too as she told us how she went back again and again to his store of images, tracking how it changed, its additions and substitutions. And soon she wanted more, she became devious, she installed a program on his computer that recorded everything he typed. What, she said, seeing my surprise, it’s easy, there are a million of them, you just download one from the Internet, and I had to laugh, despite her story and the disquiet I felt. She could follow his tracks now, she went on, she had the passwords for the pa
ges that had been locked, chat rooms and hookup sites, and not only that; in these new records she could pull up transcripts of his conversations, or not conversations exactly, since she could only see his side of them, a solitary voice calling out its desires. She read his profiles, the various selves he fashioned, all of them a mixture of the real and the ideal. Sometimes he said he was single, sometimes he lied about his age, in one he used a picture that was a decade old. It was ridiculous, she said, who did he think he was kidding, you could tell it was an old picture. There was one site that was for married men, there was a market for them, she said, can you imagine? It was on this page that he came closest to telling the truth about his life, and among his enticements he listed his children, our accomplishments, the good schools and awards, the ways we had all sought to please him; all of it was laid out like grotesquely splayed plumage. But what she went back for, she said abruptly, as if catching hold again of her thought, were the transcripts her program produced, their record of each key struck. She read these lines with fascination and disgust, she said, watching my father’s fantasies played out before her in skeletal form, the pleading tones, the boasts and commands clear even through the poorly typed lines, the symbols and abbreviations of Internet chat that make such language seem so much like a process of decay. As I listened to her, I imagined (imagining myself in her place) that she couldn’t help but provide the missing voice, inventing the invitations and evasions that his own lines responded to or provoked, until it must have felt as if she had become part of those dramas, I imagined, how could she not. She followed his conversations for months, she told us, checking them every few days. I should have known it was going to happen, she said, I mean I did know, I guess I was waiting for it, but she was still surprised when it became clear that he had taken one of these conversations offline. He was actually fucking one of them, my sister said, grimacing at the words, he wasn’t just dicking around online. And now, since she still hadn’t said a word about what she knew, she didn’t just feel complicit, she told us, but guilty of a crime. She became more difficult with her mother, they fought all the time, she said, she felt pity and disgust for her, she wasn’t sure which she felt more. He never just chatted with one woman, she went on, he was always chatting with several of them at once. He was polite sometimes, sweet, but he could be rude, too, he was rough with some of them, it was like he was a different person with each one. It was like that for me, too, I thought as I listened to her, it’s one of the things I crave in the sites I use, that I can carry on these multiple conversations, each its own window so that sometimes my screen is filled with them; and in each I have the sense of being entirely false and entirely true, like a self in a story, I suppose, or the self I inhabit when I teach, the self of authority and example. I know they’re all I have, these partial selves, true and false at once, that any ideal of wholeness I long for is a sham; but I do long for it, I think I glimpse it sometimes, I even imagine I’ve felt it. Maybe it’s an illusion but I think I did feel this wholeness in the field with my father, alone and with the night surrounding us, and my father was necessary to it even as he withdrew into his own longings, as I imagine now, contemplating the stars that I contemplated beside him, though I was contemplating him perhaps more than the stars. His withdrawal didn’t diminish our closeness but deepened it, it was a sign of vulnerability and trust, like an animal turning its back. I emerged from these thoughts to find myself on a small street deep among the blokove, 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 s
ubstance, 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 blokove 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 blokove 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 blokove 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 blokove 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 ho
uses 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 moment of quiet I interrupted when I told him that K. was sick, that he needed to go home. Could he drive us, I asked, and then I added as I always did with my father a kind of apology, so that even before he answered I had apologized for asking. All right, he said, and though he didn’t move from the window or turn around I understood that I should hurry to get us ready, that having disturbed my father I shouldn’t also make him wait. I went back downstairs to K., who was calmer now; he had risen from his knees to the edge of the bed, where he was bracing himself with his hands. He thought he would be all right on the ride, he said, he just wanted to be home, he would feel better there. I took towels from the bathroom and began to clean up his mess, which shamed me somehow, I didn’t want my father to see it. When K. moved as if to help me I motioned him back, though I could see that he was ashamed too, that he was mortified to have me clean up after him. Please, he said, but I motioned him back, I couldn’t say exactly why, I told him to get his things together instead. My father had gone up to his bedroom to get dressed and now he was coming back down, we could hear his bulk on the upper stairs. K. was thrusting his few things into his bag when the door opened and my father appeared at the top of the hall, rattling his keys. Hurriedly I dropped a towel over the vomit I had yet to mop up, thinking that if I could do nothing about the smell I could at least hide the sight of it away. As he opened the door to the garage (the same door we had left through a few hours before), my father said I’m sorry you’re not well, or something like it, something neighborly, the sort of thing one says, and K. thanked him as we got into the car, my father alone in front and K. and I together in the back. As if by instinct we sat well apart, and though I couldn’t help glancing at him we said nothing to each other. Shortly into the ride I realized I could still smell him, not only his vomit but his body, too, his sweat, which was bitter and strong; I was embarrassed for my father to smell it. I lowered the window a little and laid my head against the glass. The air was cool as it flooded in but the foulness still remained, and though K. had always before filled me with joy he seemed part of my shame now and of the foulness in the air, not just a bodily foulness but something stranger and heavier. My father glanced at us often in the mirror, a quick flick of the eyes. K. sat with his face to the window but I thought he must feel it too, that watchfulness and the weight it added to the air. It was the watchfulness that made it foul, I realized, not with its own foulness but with a foulness it found in us. K. turned away from the window but didn’t look at me, and when I asked him if he was all right he didn’t answer, though when my father asked him the same question, the very same, as though he hadn’t heard me ask it or as though it were a different question from his lips, K. spoke, he said Yes, sir, and I felt him turn from me, in that foul air I felt him identify me as foulness. It was as though he felt my father was health and I contagion, and I was at once bewildered by this and unsurprised. Those were the only words they shared; for the rest of the drive we were silent, and it wasn’t until we arrived at K.’s house that he glanced my way and nodded, and then he thanked my father and got out of the car and hurried inside the door his mother held open. My father waved at her, leaning across to the passenger-side window, and then he reversed the car and slid out of the driveway as I turned to look at the door that closed behind K. When the car stopped for a light at the end of the street, I looked again at the mirror where I could see my father’s face. He was watching me, not with the flickering surveillance of moments before but steadily, and when my eyes met his he grimaced, as if he could still smell K., though there wasn’t any smell in the air anymore. I stared back at him. For a moment I thought he was going to speak and I steeled myself, I saw his face harden with what he would say; but instead he saw that the light had changed and began driving again, and I let my head fall back against the window, watching the streets as they passed. I had been ready to accuse my father of what he had done, the disgust he had shared with K., and I felt my anger again as I walked through the grass in that undeveloped space I hadn’t known was there. The wastes of Mladost, I had often said about the whole blighted district, but this was a genuine wasteland; people threw their trash down the hill, not just bottles and cans but tires and bricks and, in one spot, a mound of broken concrete that a truck must have poured out from above. Everywhere else I had walked had been dry, the ground beside the pavement parched and hard, but here my shoes sank into the soil. I was thick in the grasses that from a distance had looked like waters, the grasses like a bay and the blokove like land, and still I walked without any destination in mind. K. and I remained friends for a while after that day, but we never had another night like that first; we were more reserved with each other, we didn’t speak for hours on end anymore, or with the same freedom. Over the next weeks he called me less often, and when I called him he was almost never home. He had met a girl, he said, and when we did speak he spoke about her, he told me every word they said to each other, every gesture they made. As he cataloged his feelings I tried to meet him as I always had in his words, but I couldn’t now, they were like a territory he receded into and that excluded me. He told me about every victory and frustration, the teasing games she played, how she made him wait for everything he wanted, and how even her delays delighted him, so long as he was sure that they would end. But increasingly as the weeks passed K. was frustrated by a delay beyond their control, by his mother’s vigilance, her denial of the privacy they craved. She was always watching them, K. said, she insisted his door remain open, they could be interrupted at any time; and they couldn’t go to her house, either, her father was even more strict, there they couldn’t even kiss; and it was winter now, even if they could find a suitable place outside, secluded, romantic, it was impossible, it was bitterly cold. If they had cars it would be different, he said, when you have a car you always have privacy, but we didn’t have cars, we were still too young to drive. It was after this inventory of impossibilities that he told me he thought I could help him, if I didn’t mind, as of course I didn’t; I was grateful he would ask me for help, it would bring us closer again, I thought. I would do anything for him, I said, and what he asked was nothing, just that I come to his house and be present, simply be there with him and his girlfriend in his room. His mother wouldn’t be so vigilant then, they would have some uninterrupted time, and if they weren’t quite alone it would be the next best thing. I was his best friend, he said. And she wouldn’t mind either, the girl he said now that he loved; he had told her everything about me and she wanted to meet me, he said, she understood why I had to be there, she wanted it as much as he did. Please, he said again, though I had already agreed, the repetition a kind of courtesy; of course I would help him, I said, in this as in everything. And so the following weekend I met K.’s girlfriend, about whom I had heard so much I felt I already knew her, though we were still awkward and reserved with each other when we met in the kitchen of K.’s house. His mother handed us our drinks and made a general fuss of welcome, while of course all we wanted was to be left alone, to claim our privacy, which I anticipated with eager dread and for which K. I knew was simply eager. He fidgeted in his seat, glancing first at me and then at her, holding my gaze though he didn’t hold hers, as though he couldn’t bear to look at her for long. I was safer,
he could share with me what he felt, and if this wasn’t the intimacy we had known or that I craved it was still a kind of intimacy, which I could be part of even if it wasn’t exactly mine. He drummed his fingers on the table, he shuffled his feet beneath it. We had already introduced ourselves, K.’s girlfriend and I; she was slight and blond and unremarkably pretty, smiling at me with her big teeth. I had resisted liking her but I did like her, she was kind and wanted my friendship, she had heard so much, she said, she had been waiting so long to meet me. Her name was K., which was something they joked about, their sharing of the initial: K. and K., they said, laughing, making a kind of music of their names, K. and K. They already had jokes of their own, which made them laugh even in front of K.’s mother, who laughed at them too. Even in her presence it was clear what they felt for each other, their feelings were bright and open, sure of their place; if there were certain obstacles to be overcome they were just for show, scenery for a drama everyone would applaud. Even their parents would applaud it, they only pretended to disapprove, when what they really felt was indulgence and pride and the sweetness of youth, their own youth that they could remember and relive and sanction. K.’s mother finally allowed us upstairs, though she admonished us as well, telling me to keep an eye on things, to make them behave; she was trusting me, she said, pointing her finger at me jokingly, though she wasn’t joking, I thought, and I said Yes, ma’am, as though I too were part of the rightness of the world. We walked up the narrow corridor of the stairs in single file, K.’s girlfriend first and then K. and then I, and once we were out of sight their hands reached out for each other. As I walked behind them I felt an excitement that was deep and unsettling and, alongside this, a dread that increased as we neared K.’s room. I paused, as if to weigh what I felt, but when K.’s voice called out for me I hurried up the final stairs, turning the corner to see him at the door looking for me quizzically. Come on, he said, still eager, more eager now, and then his face broke into a grin and I forgot my dread. I moved past him into the small room where K. already sat on the bed, crossing and recrossing her legs. I moved toward the only other seat, the wooden chair at K.’s desk, but he stopped me, asking me to wait a minute as he closed the door, or didn’t close it, exactly, which his mother had forbidden, but left it as little ajar as he dared. Then he asked me to sit in front of it, if I didn’t mind; since the door opened into the room I could make sure they wouldn’t be surprised, I might hear his mother coming and I could take my time getting up, delaying her while they composed themselves. Again he apologized, he knew it was an imposition, I would have to sit on the floor; but of course I didn’t object, I welcomed it, it was a service I could provide. And also it meant that I could watch them, since with my back to the door I would face his bed. I had never been in his room before, which was unremarkable, any teenager’s room, with books and his boxy computer and posters of soccer stars on the walls. The only object in it of any interest at all was the bed on which they sat, the two K.s, which was unmade, the sheets tangled at its foot where he had kicked them off, and I remembered with sudden sharpness the heat of his body beside me as we slept. We talked for a while, K. wanted to get to know me, she said, and she drew me out, but as she and I talked K. was silent. He was frustrated, I realized, he didn’t want us to talk; but K. insisted, when I fell silent she drew me out again, asking about my family and my school, about stories she had heard, things she had learned from K. I was stung that he had told her so much, that he had used my stories as a way to strengthen his bond with her: they were secrets we had shared, and now they were secrets he shared with her. She kept talking, making K. wait, which was the point of her questions; it was a way to hold him off, one of the games they played. Finally K. got up from the bed, he went to the stereo on a shelf above the desk and turned on some music, not loud, not with the intention of covering noise but to cover the absence of noise, the absence of talk, which he put a stop to when he sat back down on his bed and placed his hand on K.’s thigh, leaning in and pressing his mouth to hers. She didn’t resist him, anything but; she relaxed and allowed him to lean her back against the wall. As they kissed each other I felt something twist in me, something that made me look quickly away to the posters pinned inert to the walls, but I couldn’t look away for long, again and again I was drawn back to the sight of them on the bed. I didn’t want them to catch me looking but there was no need to worry, their eyes were closed, they were entirely engrossed in each other. I was surprised to see that though K. had toyed and delayed she was leading the action now; it was her hand that dropped into his lap and as I saw it my excitement deepened, my excitement and my dread both. They were still kissing each other, their lips hadn’t parted though now K.’s hand was at his belt; all her nervousness was gone, replaced with expertise, or what looked like expertise as she worked to undo it with a single hand. She knew how to please him, I thought as her hand slipped into his jeans, where I could see it moving as she touched him, and could see his erection as well, the shape of it against the cloth. I couldn’t stand it suddenly, being in that room with their bodies and the passion joining them at the mouths, I wanted to be anywhere else, though I still couldn’t look away. I don’t think I had let myself realize until then what I wanted or how much I wanted it. Finally they stopped kissing, K. pulled her mouth away and whispered something in his ear and then lowered her head to his crotch, using both her hands to unbutton his jeans before she placed her mouth where her hand had been. I pulled my knees up and hugged them against my chest. I couldn’t see anything, she had turned her head so that her hair hung down like a veil, but I watched frozen as K. put one of his hands on her head and then dropped it to her shoulder, gripping her there. I looked at K.’s face then and saw that he was watching me, that he had seen me watching them and was waiting for me to look up. He caught me and held my gaze without welcome or warmth or any hint of what we had shared, and my sense of having violated something, of having looked where I shouldn’t have faded, as I understood that this was what he wanted me to see all along, that I was there not as guard but as audience. I was there to see how different from me he was, how free of the foulness my father had shown him; and now that I had seen it, I knew our friendship had run its course. He closed his eyes then, he gave himself over and with a quick breath sucked between his teeth let his head fall back against the wall. He knew I was watching and he let me watch. It was like a parting gift, I thought as I kept watching his face and the movements it made, it looked almost as if he were in pain. I was in pain too, and almost without thinking I let my hand drop between my legs and gripped myself hard. I’ve sought it ever since, I think, the combination of exclusion and desire I felt in his room, beneath the pain of exclusion the satisfaction of desire; sometimes I think it’s the only thing I’ve sought. I had been walking away from the base of the hill, into that declivity or bay where all the runoff from the surrounding districts must have run, so that despite the dryness everywhere else the ground here was a morass, I was mired in roots and mud. I couldn’t get across, I realized, I was ankle-deep in it already, I had ruined my shoes. I turned back to the base of the hill I had climbed down and continued to walk there, skirting the mud as best I could. It was still hot though the height of the day had passed, the sun beat down but less insistently now. There was no pavement where I walked, no concrete or steel, and it was quiet, there was no human noise at all. I had been thinking for a long time of K. and it wasn’t anger I felt for him; if he had been cruel I could understand it, he had been a child, he had reached for what he needed. There was a copse of trees ahead and I aimed for it, quickening my pace, wanting to be out of the sun; I felt the tightness and warmth of my skin now where it had burned, and even the weaker late-afternoon light was painful. As I drew nearer I became aware of a sound, of movement first and then of water, of water flowing swiftly, and soon I could see it too, a light among the trees, a broad low stream sliding shallow over rock. I was surprised to find it here, so close to the blokove, I hadn’t seen any sig
n of it as I wandered, and it was as though something in me softened as I walked beside it. I felt grief more than anger now, though I wasn’t sure for what exactly, whether for myself or for K., or for the men I had known since him, none of whom I’d loved as fully, few of whom I’d loved at all; and finding it was for all of these things I turned my thoughts to the page that was coming apart as I gripped and regripped it. I thought of my father, old and sick, I imagined him bedridden and frail; I wanted to see if I felt grief for him, too, if my grief extended so far. Were they with him now, I wondered, had my sisters received a similar message, had they softened and gone to him, had G. softened and gone to him? I remembered how angry she had been that night in Mladost, when she told us the stories about my father that were also stories about herself, also stories about me. We had listened to her for a long time, my other sister and I; the last candles had finally gone out, though we could still see ourselves in the light from the street. G. was my father’s youngest child, his last child, who (perhaps he thought) finally loved him as he deserved to be loved, and he had told her stories about his childhood that I had never heard. His mother, she began, and then interrupted herself, as she would do often, saying Do you already know this? But my father’s past had always been opaque to me, he spoke of it so seldom and it seemed so complex, a tangle of half brothers and cousins, too many to track. And he didn’t speak to most of them; Bad blood, he would say whenever their names came up, cutting off any conversation. Do you know how young she was, my sister said, when our father was born she was still just a kid, only fourteen, can you imagine? When our father started school they rode the bus together, she for her final year and he for his first. There were other children too, three sons, and a daughter who died, none of them by the same father. She was a scandal, my sister said, can you imagine what it must have been like for her in that place? I couldn’t reconcile what G. said with the small woman I had known, always at a remove, who seemed so proper and content when we visited her once a year or so in the house she shared with a man I thought of as my grandfather, though I guess I knew he wasn’t, or not by blood, since my father only ever called him by his first name. My sister was right, she must have been a scandal in that town, and to her parents something worse than a scandal. They were the ones who took care of my father, especially his grandmother, who alone among his relations was spared his future scorn. He always called her Ma, the single syllable, and even now I have no other name for the woman I remember seeing only once, slight to the point of disappearance, with her beautiful white hair spread about her on the sheets in whatever hospital or facility she had been taken to to die in. I don’t remember what time of year it was, or how far we had traveled, or why I was alone with my father, who lifted me up to set me gingerly on the bed next to that woman who was impossibly old, older than anyone I had ever seen, and whose image, though so much else is lost, remains vivid to me as day. My father sat on the other side and fed her like a child, spooning food from a dish; he murmured words of encouragement or recrimination when she rejected the food, sealing her lips against it or spitting it back into the bowl. I hadn’t thought of her for years, the woman whose image returned to me so clearly, though my father spoke of her sometimes after she died, as he never spoke of his grandfather, who had died before I was born. Or never spoke of him to me, I should say, since my sister did know about him, and that night she told us what she knew. He was a hard man, my sister said, he tried to rein in his daughter, to discipline her and (perhaps he thought) to save her, and his violence, provoked and unprovoked, governed my father’s life. But then they were a constant provocation, his daughter and her multiplying sons, her string of men and the children they left; it must have made them the talk of the county, that bilious joyful talk of small places with little news. He terrorized them, my sister said, his daughter and her children, he threatened them, he beat them, he promised worse than beatings. Our father’s father was older than our grandmother, in his twenties when they met, and she had fallen in love with him; if she took up with other men as a way of defying her father, the first man wasn’t just that, G. said, she loved him, and the man loved her too. She was too young to be going with men, she knew her father would be angry, but she was in love, she slept with him, and then she was pregnant with my father. He killed him, my sister said then, before our father was born he killed him, and though to that point we had been silent my other sister and I both started at this, expressing our shock and disbelief. The story G. told us then was disjointed, handed down incomplete: it was winter when his grandfather understood what had happened, my sister said, there was a storm and he went out into the storm to find the man who had ruined his daughter, as he must have thought of it; and he killed the man—But how, I asked, interrupting her, and my sister couldn’t say, she only knew that he was found the next day frozen in his car. But that’s crazy, I blurted out, even in that place how could such things happen, or happen without consequences? And anyway our father loved to tell stories, I went on, he was always claiming outlandish things were true; surely this was one of his Southern Gothics, I said. But my sister insisted, something in how he told it convinced her it was true, or that he believed it was true. And after all, I thought, his belief was what mattered, and I wondered when he had been given this account of his father, of the absence of his father, whether he was still a child, and I wondered too how the absence had weighed on him, how he had explained it to himself until then. I wanted to know who had told him and why, whether his mother to make him angry or his grandfather to make him afraid. Besides, my sister said, it explains what happened to her, to my father’s mother, she meant, who seemed to seek out not just other men but the least acceptable men, as if she gave herself to them not just to defy her father but to injure him, and increasingly to injure herself. Often they were violent men, my sister said, repeating what she had been told; from as early as he could remember my father was scared of them, and he was frightened of his grandfather, too, who lashed out at him and his brothers without warning. And they fought with one another, as kids and as adults, these boys with different fathers; one of them died a soldier before I was born and we hardly knew the others, we saw them so seldom. Two or three times when I was very young my father took us to a reunion, and each time there was a fight, a quick flare of violence that left one or more of them in the dirt. When they were children they felt no loyalty to one another, my father and his brothers; they shifted their allegiances whenever it suited, teaming up against one and then another, or making friends with one or another of the men who appeared as if from nowhere and never stayed for long. Most of all they courted their grandfather, whom they hated but needed, too, especially as their mother sought out more and more brutal men. It was like she wanted to be hurt by them, my sister said, and didn’t care what happened to her sons. One day, she went on, when our father was still a boy, maybe eight or nine, he heard his mother shouting and ran to find her standing with one of his brothers in a field. In front of them was the boy’s father, who was enraged past all restraint, my father realized; he wasn’t surprised when he struck their mother, first with his open hand and then with his fist. And not just the woman, he struck the child too, not once or twice but many times, with a ferocity that frightened my father, who ran for help to the garage where his grandfather was working, bent over the hood of their car. And the child who was my father yelled at him to come, that the man was hurting his mother and his brother, that he (my father) was frightened, and his grandfather grabbed one of the tools around him, a heavy wrench, my sister said, and set off to the field and approached the man and brought the wrench down on him, beating the man who had been beating his daughter, not furiously but with an eerie calm, repeatedly, as his daughter cried for him to stop and my father felt a different fear. So did he kill him too, my other sister asked, but G. couldn’t answer us; like all of her stories this one was patchworked and incomplete. But she did know that my father’s grandfather bore a mark from that day, that the palm of his hand was
welted and scarred where he had gripped the wrench, which had been resting on the engine and was red-hot, she said. It didn’t even slow him down, she went on, can you imagine, for the rest of his life he was disfigured, the fingers on that hand were always a little bit curled, he couldn’t open them all the way. But when he grabbed it it didn’t even slow him down, he just took it in his hand like this—and here she raised her own hand, lifting it with her palm up and her fingers curled around an imaginary wrench, turning her wrist slightly as if it were dragged down by the weight of it. And though nothing in her story had been familiar to me I felt a sudden vertigo at the sight of it; I could see my father making that gesture, the very same, and I knew I must have heard the story before, that he must have told it to me when I was a child. It was my story too, I realized as my sister went on, and I wondered how much else I had forgotten about my father, how much I might still remember, how much was totally lost. As I sat by the water in Mladost, I held two images of my father in mind, weighing them against what I felt: in one he was a child, vulnerable and finally blameless as all children are blameless, and in the other he was old and in need and trying to repair what he had broken. I wanted to know what they could make me feel, these images, whether I could go to him as he had asked; but of all the images of that day these struck with the least force, my father as a child and my father dying, they struck with almost no force at all. I couldn’t hold on to them, they slipped away as I remembered instead another image of my father, from the time after K. put an end to our friendship, when my father, too, finally broke with me. It was the end of a long series of events in that large house where the atmosphere had become unbearable; my father and I hardly spoke to each other, maybe both of us afraid of what we might say. He was gone more often, he stayed later at work and took more trips away, on whatever pretext heading to Chicago or New York, leaving my stepmother with me and the older of my sisters, who was still just a toddler. I can see now how unhappy my stepmother was, how often my father abandoned her and how trapped she must have felt, and I can see that if she and I fought it was because for both of us the other was a safer target than my father. We attacked each other for the slightest reason, for no reason at all, raising our voices and slamming doors; and one night, after a particularly vicious argument, when I had crossed a line the nature of which I no longer remember, my stepmother ordered me out of the house. She locked the door leading from the basement stairs, ensuring that at some point I would have to leave, which I did quickly, without waiting her out, escaping as I always did through the garage. I was angry as I walked the two or so miles to my mother’s house, but I was satisfied, too; they punished me all the time but they had never kicked me out, and whatever I had done it didn’t warrant that. I thought my father would agree with me, I was sure he would tell my stepmother to let me back in. I walked quickly, eager to get to my mother’s house and call him; he was in New York, I had the number of the hotel where he always stayed. I visited my mother most weekends but I didn’t often show up unannounced, so she knew something must be wrong when she opened the door. She asked me what had happened but I didn’t answer. I need to call my father, I said, which was how we always referred to him in that house, my mother never called him by name. I dropped my bag by the door (I had brought my schoolbooks with me, a few overnight things) and went to the kitchen where the phone hung on the wall. My mother could see I was upset, she followed me and asked me again what was wrong, Tell me before you call him, she said, you need to calm down. But I didn’t want to calm down, I liked the indignation I felt and that I thought my father would share, I wanted to call him while it was still hot. I imagined him comforting me, telling me he would make things right, as he used to take it upon himself as a matter of course to do. But this confidence disappeared the instant he picked up, which he did too quickly, on the first ring. He was waiting for me to call, which meant that my stepmother had already spoken with him, and by the tone in his voice I knew he was convinced of her side of things. I couldn’t expect any sympathy, he would make me apologize to her, I would have to apologize again and again until she was satisfied; it would be humiliating, I thought, and she would love it. I prepared for it as I began to tell my father how outrageously she had acted, It’s where I live, I said to him, she can’t just kick me out. I went on for some time and he listened without saying a word, so that I might almost have thought the line had been cut except that I could sense his presence so clearly. His silence made me feel I was being led somewhere other than I intended, as if I were digging my own grave; and so I stopped short and waited for him to speak, leaning into his silence. I waited for what seemed like a long time, until finally I spoke again. Tell her to let me back in the house, I said to my father, and if I used the imperative I spoke with a tone of defeat. I knew I was waiting for admonishment, but I took it for granted that once I had apologized enough they would let me back in; it was my home, and in the world I came from children weren’t simply turned out. Tell her to let me back in, I said, and here my father did make a sound. I heard him shifting his weight in his chair, and then he exhaled, it wasn’t quite a sigh, it wasn’t angry or sad but emotionless, and he spoke for the first time since his greeting. If, he said, staying just a moment longer the sentence he would pronounce, if what you say about yourself is true, you’re not welcome in my house. It was my turn to be silent now, at first because I didn’t understand what he meant, and then because I did. I had a sense of something beginning, of a great weight dislodged and moving in the single direction it could. What are you talking about, I said finally, and my father answered, he told me that they had found, my stepmother and he, a notebook in my room. I knew the notebook he meant, a journal I had started keeping not long before, in which I had written about K. and what I had felt in his room, what I had learned about myself there. I had been careful to hide the journal; if they had come across it it was because they had searched, though my father gave no account or explanation of this. They had found it and seen what I had written, he said simply, they had read it weeks ago. What they learned about me had brought the two of them together, I realized, they were a united front, and I imagined they had spent weeks plotting how best to use what they knew. I was sure it was my stepmother who had searched my room, my father would never have bothered, and as he spoke I realized how entirely I had played into her hand. Is it true, he asked when he had finished speaking, giving me a choice, or the semblance of a choice. He presented it to me as if it were something that might be spoken away and made right, but I couldn’t speak it away, I realized; to speak it away would have been to speak myself away, what else could it have meant, and so Yes, I said, laying claim to myself, it is true, yes. My father exhaled again, sharply this time, so that even before he spoke I flinched, and I could see my mother stiffen as she watched me, standing at the sink with a cigarette in her hand. My father spoke in a different tone now, almost with a different voice, the voice of his own childhood, I thought, thick with the dirt he usually worked so hard to conceal. So you like the little boys, that voice said, the voice almost of instinct, the voice of the look he had given me once and of what had once fouled the air. As young as I was, I knew what he said was absurd, I was myself a little boy, what could he be accusing me of, though now I think it was his only understanding of what I could be, the person I was was lost in it. But it didn’t matter that it was absurd, I was already crying, I was a mess of tears, and when my mother started to come toward me I motioned her away, turning my back to her. I was ashamed of my tears, I could hardly breathe, and it was all I could do to say to him But I’m your son, which was my only appeal and the last thing I would say. He made a dismissive sound, almost a laugh, and then he spoke again, with a snarling voice I had never heard before, he said The hell you are. He went on, he spoke without stopping, A faggot, he said, if I had known you would never have been born. You disgust me, he said, do you know that, you disgust me, how could you be my son? As I listened to him say these things it was as though even as I lai
d claim to myself I found there was nothing to claim, nothing or next to nothing, as though I were dissolving and my tears were the outward sign of that dissolution. He was still speaking, there were still things he wanted to say, but I hung the phone back on the wall, holding it there a moment as if to clutch at something, as my mother crossed the room and put her hand on my back. I laid my head against the wall, hiding my face from her. I was still crying, but more than shock or grief I felt anger, more than anger, I was enraged, and rage filled me up with something that would not dissolve. What would I be without the anger I felt then, I wondered as I stood looking over the water, the anger I still feel, it ebbs or surges but is always there; whatever it has kept me from, without it I would have lost myself altogether. I lifted my hand. After so much time it was an effort to release my grip on the wadded page that was barely more than pulp now, but I let it fall into the stream and watched the water carry it away. I wouldn’t answer, I wouldn’t see my father again, I wouldn’t mourn him or pour earth on him. I stood watching the water for some time, I’m not sure how long, until I was startled by a distant noise that made its way over the sound of the water. It was an unmusical clanging that it took me a moment to recognize as a bell, a large bell as if from a tower, though I didn’t know of any such towers in Mladost, which was built by the Communists and so built free of churches; even now the only places of worship are little clapboard affairs, American missionaries in rented halls. I didn’t know of anything in Mladost that could make this sound, grand and unlovely, a single bell, ringing twice in quick succession with each pull of the rope (I imagined), so that its lopsided toll rolled out over the water and the trees. I walked toward it, and soon I could feel the ground getting smoother, becoming a path that led upward, until finally the uneven stones became brick. It was a lovely path, immaculate as few things are here, and on the right there was a low stone wall that as the path mounted joined with another wall, plaster and brilliantly white. It was a compound of some sort, tucked here behind the blokove, something large and old, I thought, though it was perfectly maintained; the bricks in the path were old, as were the trees that overhung them. I followed the sound, the bell ringing quite close now from the other side of the wall, as the path widened until it was large enough for a car, and I realized it must extend all the way up to the road. There was a gate in the wall, two large wooden wings interrupting the stone. It was closed, but in each of these doors there was an opening in the shape of a cross, and as the ringing of the bell stopped, I peered through at the grounds within, a series of small buildings and paths through green spaces. It was a community, not a church but a monastery, which predated the district and must have been built when the neighborhood was nothing but countryside, when Sofia must have seemed at once accessible and comfortably far away. I had heard a summons for prayer, then, though I saw no movement within. There are monasteries all over the country, in most of which a single monk keeps watch, or two, they’re dying out here like everywhere else; but there was still someone ringing a summons for prayer, even if no one was around to answer it. I set off again, intending to follow the path up to the road and then to find my way home. I had decided not to go back to school, I would go straight home, but after another turn in the path I stopped again. There was a clearing to the left and at the side of the path a horse was grazing, still hitched to its cart. Horses are common in Mladost, gypsies use them on their rounds, but I had never seen one unattended before. There was no one in sight; maybe someone had been called by the summons after all. It was a pitiful creature, sickly and thin, its skin hanging loose over protruding ribs; it might have been a portrait of misery, I thought as I stepped closer, but it was grazing sedately enough, pulling at the sparse tufts of grass in the rocky soil. I watched it for a few minutes, and then I laid my hand on its flank, which was dark and broiling with sun, almost too hot to touch. I felt it give a sudden sigh, a quick unburdening of breath as it shifted its frame a little. It wasn’t tied up, I saw, it could have wandered off anytime it chose; but there was nowhere for it to go, of course, and the cart I supposed was heavy, and there was something however meager to be had there where it stood.