“Is this a camera, Yuki?” a little boy asked. He pronounced her name perfectly. She showed him the tiny device and then she took his picture. Everyone gathered to see the picture on the back screen.
“Can we take a picture with you, Yuki?” someone said. Someone said, “Yuki, have you ever tried Bulgarian rakia? Grandma,” someone said, “bring rakia for Yuki.”
•
Yuki and I first met by baggage claim number eight. Her bag from Tokyo hadn’t arrived and she looked on the verge of tears.
“These things happen,” I assured her. I had just finished my shift, but I took her to her airline office so she could file a claim and helped her to the front of the line. My Bulgarian friends whistled after us as her high heels clicked down the hall. I asked her if she wouldn’t want to grab some coffee and she said all she wanted was a cigarette and to go home and maybe have a bath. I pictured her in the bath, her shoulders shiny above the foamy water and her long hair tied in a ball.
I talked to her while she lit up outside and I also lit up when she offered. She had first come to the States four years ago, she said, to study art. She wanted to be an animator but was sick of Japan, of how you had to know people to get good jobs. There was a problem of course: the kind of animation she wanted to do was best done in Japan, not in the States. Now that she was finishing her degree, she had to decide …
I started coughing. Distracted by her closeness, I had inhaled by mistake. I dropped the cigarette at my feet. She laughed. She bowed over and clapped a hand on her knee, that’s how hard she was laughing.
“Have you never smoked before?”
I shook my head.
“Really? Never?”
“Never,” I said.
“Why did you do it, then?” she asked, though I’m sure she knew why. She kept laughing at me and I didn’t mind it one bit. I asked her to finish her story but no longer listened to the things she said. I was afraid that at the end she’d simply bid me farewell and walk away, that once her story ended she would dissolve like smoke. “You look awfully pale,” she said, and searched for a place to throw the stub away. “Tell me about yourself,” she asked. “What are you doing in the States?”
So I told her. I was loading other people’s bags in the States. I was unloading other people’s bags. I lived in a small apartment with two other Bulgarians and was saving money to go to college. I had arrived in the U.S. five years before, winner of a green card.
The day I won my green card it stormed in Sofia, ravaging wind, deluging summer rain. I had come back home from work, soaking wet, to find the thick envelope stuck in the mailbox like a heart too big for its chest. Dear winner, the letter began.
I sprinted up eight flights of stairs to find my parents watching the rain out the living room window. My mother wept when I told them.
“When did you do this?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I didn’t think I’d win the lottery.”
“Now, let’s all calm down now,” Father said. “No need for tears. Have a seat. Let’s talk it over. What are your reasons? What are you missing here? Are you unhappy? You’re not hungry. You have a good room, a computer with Internet. You have a job. Let’s talk it over. What are your reasons here?”
“I’m twenty-seven. I can’t still live with my parents. My job …”
“You’re absolutely right,” my father agreed. He nodded and rubbed his chin. “We’ll get you your own place. One of my colleagues is leasing.”
“Taté,” I said. “I don’t want you to get it for me. I want to try my own luck in America. Do you understand?”
He said nothing. He put his arm around my mother and said nothing.
•
After we ate what our neighbors brought for breakfast, I decided to show the village to Yuki. We took turns with the camera. She posed by a house where I’d often played as a child. The house was in ruins now. There were many obituaries on the gates and Yuki asked me what these were. I told her that in Bulgaria when someone died the family made a nekrolog, a sheet with the deceased’s name and picture, a brief, sorrowful poem underneath. People pasted this necrology on their gates, on light poles, and all around their villages or towns so others who might have known the dead would learn the news.
“We do something similar in Japan,” Yuki said, staring closely at the face of an old man, almost inkless from rain. “But no pictures. We post a notice on the entrance to the house of the dead. So and so died, the funeral will be at this time, this place. People often rob those houses,” she said, and took the camera from my hand. She made me pose under an old linden tree. “They lurk outside, wait for the procession to leave, then rob the house. When my uncle died my aunt asked their neighbor to stay in and guard while everyone was away for the service.”
I made the typical peace sign Yuki made on every picture, to mock her. “What if the neighbor wanted to come to the funeral as well?”
“No one wants to go to funerals,” Yuki said. We took more pictures. We followed the road down to the square. An old Lada loaded with Gypsies whizzed by us in a cloud of dust. They blew their horn. “Be very careful here,” I told Yuki. “If you hear a car coming, always step to the side. Always, do you understand?”
She nodded.
“I didn’t know there were Gypsies in the village,” I said.
“Gypsies? Were these Gypsies?” She grew excited. She had always wanted to see real Gypsies, beautiful dark-eyed enchantresses dancing barefooted around tall fires, and violin players whose fingers flew up and down the fingerboards so fast only a deal with the devil could explain their mad skill.
“But that’s in the fairy tales, Yuki.”
She was unbending. I had to, she said, at all cost, take her to see the Gypsies, let her photograph them. I had no intention of doing such a thing.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe later.”
It was a little after noon and people were coming home from their fields. Yuki greeted everyone with a smile and everyone smiled back at her and watched us long after we’d passed.
“I don’t get it,” Yuki said. “Why am I so interesting to them?”
We took pictures of the square, of the bridge and the river, barely a trickle underneath, then of the fountain with the five spouts — one for each partisan from our village who had been killed in 1944.
“What happened in 1944?” Yuki asked me. “In Bulgaria I mean.”
She stood by the fountain, whose pool was overflowing, its bottom clogged with rotten leaves. Water barely oozed out of two of the spouts that had been bashed in with something. Yuki made the peace sign as I took a picture.
“In ‘44 the Communist partisans seized power,” I said. “But not without a fight. Many of them were killed.”
“Why are these spouts bashed in?” Yuki asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “When communism fell, people got braver. I guess that’s how someone must have shown their dislike for the Party.”
With two fingers Yuki held a ladle tethered to the fountain with a rusty chain. The ladle was green except for the rim where thirsty lips had kissed it for over sixty years: the metal there shone, as pure as the day it had been forged. Yuki brought the ladle to her nose, sniffed it and let it dangle on the chain.
“They look like they were bashed in with a rock,” she said.
I took the ladle and drank the cold mountain water. “Well,” I said, “how would you bash them, Yuki?”
We bought groceries from the shop on the square; then, as we walked up the road, people called us over to their gates and gave us bags of tomatoes as gifts, an early greenhouse sort, slightly rosy, which though not as good as the summer tomatoes was still a million times sweeter than what we bought in the States. The neighbors gave us cheese and bread, a bottle of red wine. We ate a good lunch in our yard. We drank some of the wine.