•
I arrived in Arkansas on August 11, 1999. At the airport I was picked up by two young men and a girl, all in suits. They were from some sort of an organization that cared a whole lot for international students.
“Welcome to America,” they said in one warm, friendly voice, and their honest faces beamed. In the car they gave me a Bible.
“Do you know what this is?” the girl bellowed slowly.
“No,” I said. She seemed genuinely pleased.
“These are the deeds of our Savior. The word of our Lord.”
“Oh, Lenin’s collected works,” I said. “Which volume?”
•
My first week in America unfolded under the banner of International Orientation. I made acquaintances from countries smaller than my own. I shook hands with black people. Those of us for whom English was a second language were instructed what to expect when it was fixin’ to rain. What “yonder” meant, and how it was “a bummer” to be there “yonder” with no umbrella and it “fixin’ to rain.”
Every English word I knew, I had once written at least ten times in notebooks Grandpa brought from the Fatherland Front. Each page in these notebooks was a cliff face against which I shouted. The words flew back at me, smashed into the rock again, rushed back. By the end of high school I had filled with echoes so many notebooks they towered on each side of my desk.
But now in America, I was exposed to words I didn’t know. And sometimes words I knew on their own made no sense collected together. What was a hotpocket? I wondered. Why was my roommate so excited to see two girls across the hallway making out? What were they making out? I felt estranged, often confused, until gradually, with time, the world around me seeped in through my eyes, ears, tongue. At last the words rose liberated. I was ecstatic, lexicon drunk. I talked so much my roommate eventually quit spending time in our room and returned only after I’d gone to bed. I cornered random professors during their office hours and asked them questions that required long-winded answers. I spoke with strangers on the street, knowing I was being a creep. Such knowledge couldn’t stop me. My ears rang, my tongue swelled up. I went on for months, until one day I understood that nothing I said mattered to those around me. No one knew where I was from, or cared to know. I had nothing to say to this world.
I barricaded myself in the dorm — a narrow cell-like room cluttered with my roommate’s microwave, refrigerator, computer, speakers and subwoofer, TV, Nintendo. I watched Married with Children and Howard Stern. I spoke with my parents, rarely, briefly, because the calling rates were high. I cradled the receiver, fondled the thin umbilical cord of the phone that stretched ten thousand miles across the sea. I listened to my mother and felt almost connected. But when the line was cut, I was alone.
•
When he was thirty and holding the position something-of-the-something, Grandpa met the woman of his heart. It was the classic Communist love story: They met at an evening gathering of the Party. Grandma came in late, wet from the rain, took the only free seat, which was next to Grandpa, and fell asleep on his shoulder. He disapproved of her lack of interest in Party matters, and right there on the spot he fell in love with her scent, with her breath on his neck. After she woke up, they talked about pure ideals and the bright future, about the capitalist evil of the West, about the nurturing embrace of the Soviet Union and, most important, about Lenin. Grandpa found out that they both shared the same passion for following his shining example, and so he took Grandma to the Civil Office where they got married.
Grandma died of breast cancer in 1989, only a month after communism was abolished in Bulgaria. I was eight and I remember it all very clearly. We buried her in the village. We put the open coffin in a cart and tied the cart to a tractor, and the tractor pulled the cart and the coffin and we walked behind it all. Grandpa sat by the coffin, and held Grandma’s dead hand. I don’t think it actually rained that day, but in my memories I see wind and clouds and rain; the quiet, cold rain that falls when you lose someone close to your heart. Grandpa shed no tears. He sat in the cart, the rain from my memory falling on him, on his bald head, on the coffin, on Grandma’s closed eyes; the music flowing around them — deep, sad music of the oboe, the trumpet, the drum. There is no priest at a Communist funeral. Grandpa read from a book, volume twelve of Lenin’s collected works. His words rose to the sky, and the rain knocked them down to the ground.
“It’s a good grave,” Grandpa was saying when it was all over. “It’s not as narrow as a dugout, which makes it good. Right? It’s not too narrow, right? She’ll be all right in it. Certainly, she’ll be all right.”
It was this funeral, with Grandpa’s words rising and falling broken in the mud, that I started to dream about during my sophomore year of college. I no longer went to class regularly because the professors’ words now tormented me like a rash, but I read a great deal in my room. I had chosen psychology as my major, mostly on a whim, so I devoured Freud and Jung in industrial quantities. “Their words are the yeast that brings my brain to life,” I’d tell Grandpa a few months later, and he would say, “You got that right. Your brain is dough. Or better yet — crabapple mash.”
I was fascinated to learn that our dreams reflected not only our personal unconscious but also the collective. My God, was there such a thing? A collective unconscious? If so, I wanted in. I longed to be a part of it; connected, to dream the dreams of other people, others to dream my dreams. I went to sleep hoping to dream vivid, transcendental symbols.
Today, I wrote in a little journal, I dreamed of Father on the sofa, peeling sunflower seeds, his socks pulled off halfway like donkey ears.
I dreamed of Mother spooning yogurt from a jar.
I dreamed of Grandpa, waiting in the hallway to trip me up with his cane.
It was after this particular dream and after two years without Grandpa’s voice that I finally picked up the phone, on the eve of Fourth of July, and dialed.
I tried to imagine him, out in the yard, straining his eyes to read in the dusk. He would hear the ringing phone, and slowly, with pain, make his way into the house. I tried to see his face, so old and terrifying that I graced it with an imaginary beard to hide its age. The beard must be white, I thought. No, yellow from nicotine. A lion’s mane, angry and wild, which had consumed the face. Two fiery eyes peered out from the mane, burning with Lenin’s words. Electrification plus Soviet power equals Communism. Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever. I waited, petrified, for his incinerating voice to turn me to ash, for his brimstone breath to scatter me like wind.
“Grandpa,” I said.
“Sinko.”
I shivered so bad the cord between us crackled. I was afraid he’d hung up already.
“Grandpa, are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“You’re there,” I said. I said, “Grandpa, there is so much water between us. We are so far apart.”
“We are,” he said. “But blood, I hope, is thicker than the ocean.”
•
After Grandma’s funeral, Grandpa had refused to leave the village. In one year he’d lost everything a man could lose: the woman of his heart, and the love of his life — the Party.