It’s not that Gogo’s parents don’t give a shit about him. But then there’s his big brother who always keeps their hair on fire. As for my parents, let’s say I haven’t seen them in four days, blame Father for it and leave it at that.
The girl shuts the door and goes to the bar to get a ViK. She is an all right girl, maybe too short in the legs. She downs her vodka and wipes her mouth with her sleeve. Then she drinks her kola in tiny sips.
“Kopche, look at that dog,” Gogo says, and yells at her, “Woof-woof.” Right now that’s what we call each other. Kopche, which means button. Before that it was, What’s up, shnur. Cable. Before that, what’s up shprangel, which isn’t even a word. Why? I don’t know, it’s nonsense. We’ve renounced our names. No more Radoslav, no more Georgi. I was named after my Grandpa who was named after his, but so what?
“Kopche, watch my chips,” I say, and leave the café to take a piss. Glass shatters behind me and Bay Petko, the owner, curses at whoever threw it. It’s a chilly, bitter morning and already the streets beyond the school fence are teeming with people, a dirty flood. I watch it whirl, a mishmash of faces, arms and legs, and the chants, loud and angry, blow fuses in my skull. Down with the Reds! Cherveni boklutsi. Communist trash!
It’s January 1997 and once again the government has fallen. That’s hardly a surprise. The first time it fell I was seven. November 1989. It was a spectacular collapse — the end of communism. At home we were glued to the TV while in a droning voice some big-shot Party member declared that the head of the Party, Todor Zhivkov, was stepping down from power. Zhivkov himself sat left of the podium, his eyes fixed dully on something only he could see, unblinking, like a cow’s, his mouth half open and glistening with spit. “My God, these bastards have drugged him,” my father said, and bit into the dried tail of a tiny salted fish. “I thought he’d rule forever,” said my mother.
“No, thank you very much,” Father said, and pointed the fish at me like a mummified finger. “Are you watching this, Rado? This is important. Make sure you remember this.” As if I ever forgot a thing.
Then people choked the streets in mass protests and walls crumbled all over Eastern Europe. Bulgaria held its first democratic elections and since then the governments have dropped like rotten pears. 1990, 1992, 1994. Hyperinflation, devaluation. My father now makes 15,000 levs a month and a loaf of bread costs 600. And the zeros keep piling up.
Sometimes it seems to me things can’t get worse than they already are. Surely we’ve sunk as deep as you can sink. Surely we should be pushing off the bottom, kicking, up and out of the swamp.
Last week, Gogo says, his brother beat their mom. She wouldn’t tell him where she hid the money, so he splintered a chair and thrashed her with the leg. When their dad came home Gogo’s brother was in the corner, shaking and chewing on his fingers. Gogo’s father dragged him out on the street and found the dealer and bought him his dose. He bought him a clean syringe, then left him on a bench and went home to take care of his wife.
Awful story, right? And what did Gogo do to help? A few days later he found the money his mother had buried in the ficus pot and blamed the theft on his brother, who, naturally, was in no shape to deny a thing. But, you’d say, that’s what friends are for, right? A few reproachful words, some sensible advice on my behalf and goodness will be restored once again. The money returned, we will be pushing off the muddy bottom, if only momentarily.
We spent the money on two bottles of vodka, three loaves of bread, we played the lotto and gambled the rest on cards. Playing the lotto was my idea. “Sometimes, I have this feeling,” I told Gogo as I was scratching crosses inside the tiny number boxes on the ticket, “that things can’t get any worse than this. We’ll get a break, kopche. Just wait and see.”
•
So now I’m pissing on the school wall, with the protestors chanting beyond the fence, when the guard sees me. He’s just put a lock on the school to show it’s closed and runs toward me, grunting.
“Chill there, Gramps,” I say. “Can’t you see I’m drawing a star?”
I’ve been known to go out of my way on several occasions just to piss on the school wall. Once I took the trolley from the Palace of Culture all the way to school, holding it back so long my dick was on fire for an hour. My father said I had passed a grain and probably had stones in my kidneys. That I should drink more water.
“I’ll cut your dick off, Rado!” the guard yells at me.
“Want to bite it off?”
He leans on his knees to catch some air. “The Amazing Rado,” he says, though I’ve told him a million times not to call me this. His breaths escape in sharp clouds against the cold like souls of words he is about to speak. “Can’t even piss a straight spurt, zigzagging drugged.”
“I don’t do drugs, Gramps,” I tell him. “I drink Doctor’s vodka, the one that comes with vitamin C in it.”
I zip up and he offers me a ciggy. We smoke as the morning mist unfolds around us, as kids arrive to find the school locked. Gramps is all right for an old guy. Used to be in the army, a UAZ driver, but during the hungry years they caught him stealing provisions from the tank brigade, beat him and threw him out on the street. He told me he had been stealing cans of buffalo meat for six months before they caught him. The cans were thirty years old but the meat, he said, was juicier than chicken. A thirty-year-old can, that’s twice my age.
“Any new gigs this month?” Gramps says, and nudges me in the ribs. “Will the Amazing Rado grace us old farts at the retiree club with his gift again?”
“Knock it off, Gramps, will you?”
“Just making small talk, Rado,” he says. “Just being friendly.” He pulls a stone out of his pocket and lets me hold it. “You feel how much freedom is packed inside?” he asks.
Then he tells me his nephew, a TIR driver who often travels to Germany on rounds, brought it the other day. “A piece of the wall,” he says. “Do you believe it? I’ll get at least ten thousand levs for this.”
“No, Gramps,” I say, “I don’t. This here is slate. A metamorphic rock. The wall was made of concrete, like our apartment blocks. Haven’t you seen those pictures of Russian soldiers lining up the panels side by side?”
“I have no time for pictures,” Gramps says and pockets the rock. “You’re a smart devil. But someone stupid might pay,” and leaning over he whispers in my ear, “Speaking of devils, do you have something to sell? A coin? A silver spoon?”
I brush him off. “I heard the government has fallen.”
That’s all it takes for Gramps to bite. He starts his rant about how much he hates the government, how one day he wants to sneak back into the barracks, steal a BTR — a tank, even — and drive into the parliament head-on. “I think I’ll look good smashed in a tank,” he says. “A glorious, heroic death becomes me. Fuck it, Rado, let’s get a tank.” And then he pesters me to go with him to the protests. There will be one million people out on the streets today. All of Sofia. “I got no one else,” he says.
“You’re an ill man, Gramps,” I say, and tell him how all politics is kitsch.
“Your dick is kitsch,” he says.
Back in the café I look for Gogo. But Gogo is gone and I lie in the corner, on a pile of jackets and school bags, and close my eyes for just a moment.
•
I am the smartest kid you’ll ever meet. So in this context, I suppose I am amazing. But I’m not really science-smart, or street-smart, even. It’s just that I never forget a thing. They wrote about me in the paper once. “WUNDERKIND: Phenomenal Memory Turns Kid into a Walking Encyclopedia.” I was six. The reporter came to our apartment in the small town where we lived before we moved to Sofia. He started off with questions right away.