“How many meters in a mile? How many feet in a meter? My daughter was born on March 21, 1980. What day was that? What does traffic sign B1 signify? How many elements in the periodic table? Which element is number 32?”
I didn’t like his questions. For one thing, I was sad he didn’t know what day his daughter was born. Rado is an alert little boy, the article read, interested in everything that is unified in a system. He was only two when he memorized all 110 traffic signs as well as the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Once he turned three, his father says, he was given a world atlas and he memorized all countries, all capitals, all flags. In front of this reporter Rado draws the flag of Cameroon with a pencil and then explains which stripe is green, which red, which yellow. The star in the middle, he explains, is also yellow. Then he draws a diagram of the human hand and labels each bone. To the question of what he wants to become when he grows up Rado answers: a cosmonaut, like Georgi Ivanov, the first Bulgarian in space. Soyuz 33 from Baikonur, April 10, 1979, at 17:34 … Little comrade, bright future awaits you …
The following year my parents moved to Sofia in hopes of placing me in a school for gifted children. But I didn’t pass the entrance exam, and so they signed me up in the neighborhood school instead. Two months into first grade, our rent jumped so high we had to move to a cheaper neighborhood. I’ve changed schools eleven times because of high rent. Finally my father took me to the city council. “This boy,” he said, “has a phenomenal memory but no place to live.” He made me do a trick: I read from a book some clerk had left behind, Accounting Principles for Non-Accountants, and recited the page backward word by word. Then he showed everyone the newspaper clipping and everyone laughed. “If you had ten children,” an official told him, “maybe then we could give you a flat. But at this point it’s the Gypsies, with their countless offspring, that take precedence.”
“Ten children like this one?” my father said outraged. “No, thank you very much.”
We walked out, homeless still. About a week later a friend of my father’s took him to some apartment in the outskirts he’d noticed nobody lived in. And we moved in. Just like that, without permission. There are thirteen Gypsies below us in a two-bedroom. Great-grandparents and a girl at fourteen breast-feeding her second, but at least now we don’t have to move. Not until they catch us and kick us out.
Little comrade, bright future awaits you … I’ve never had a teacher come to me and say this. But I had a teacher say to me once, “Big deal, Rado, you can calculate pi to fifty decimal places. We got calculators for that, and now,” he said, “we got the Internet.”
•
Someone kicks my boots. “Wake up, kopche.”
“I’m awake.”
I take Gogo’s hand and he helps me up. Every muscle hurts and I’m still a little drunk from the mint and mastic brandy. We smoke in the school yard and watch the streets boiling and the sky white above us, readying for snow.
“Gramps told me a million people will be out today.”
“I don’t give a shit about the people,” Gogo says. “Kopche, my brother is in some serious trouble. He’s fucked us all up. He pawned everything. My sweet Sony TV, the fridge, the oven. He pawned my fucking bed. I gotta sleep on the floor.”
I laugh and then apologize. One thing I’ve learned from our politicians is you can say or do close to anything provided that you apologize afterward. Or beforehand, as is often the case.
“I need cash quick, right now,” Gogo says. “The shithead at the pawnshop won’t give us the furniture back. Brother’s throwing a fit and we don’t have the money to buy his stuff. We’re keeping him chained to the radiator, which is stupid. He only needs to pull on the pipe once and then the whole place will be flooded.”
“Let me stop you right there, kopche,” I say. “I’ve had enough of your brother. It’s too much.”
“I’m serious. We need to help him. The other day,” he keeps going, “my mother dragged me to that church, Sveti Sedmochislenitsi. She brought bread and wine for the priest to bless. She paid him to sprinkle some of Brother’s shirts and pants with holy water. I bet she would have dragged Brother himself if she could. To get exorcised, you know, like in the movie. She bought candles for five thousand levs and left another five in a wooden box. She gave me a bunch of coins to place on the icons. She said, if the coin sticks to the glass, your prayer might come true. She didn’t even say will. She said might. She told me to pray for Brother and wish for good things.”
“What did you wish for?”
“Not to be in the fucking church.”
He lights another cigarette off the one he’s just finished and looks at me, a mirror. His eyes are red from the smoke, his face yellow from the cold, lips chapped.
Up the street, someone yells that all Communists are faggots.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I say, and Gogo says, “Okay, here it is. In that church, above the wooden throne, there is a cross. The cross is made of gold and you, kopche, will help me steal it.”
•
Gogo and I have turned stealing into a humanitarian mission of sorts. We steal magnanimously, with great unwillingness, with repulsion. We don’t do it for ourselves, of course, because that would be low. We steal for Gogo’s brother. We buy him heroin, we bail him out of jail, we purchase tickets for football games so Gogo’s brother, too, will feel like a normal person and have some healthy fun. Half of the time, it just so happens, we forget to pass the money on to him. For instance, we didn’t really bail him out of jail. We figured some discipline would do him good. How could we know the hooks in uniform would beat him so bad they’d break his nose?
Gogo and I steal things and sell them, mostly to Gramps. We snuck into the biology classroom and took the skull our teacher used for an ashtray. Later Gramps claimed he resold it on the black market as an authentic skull from the 1944 Communist uprising. He was not impressed when I told him the skull had actually belonged to Toshko Afrikanski, a chimp at the Sofia Zoo. “That wouldn’t sell so well, now, would it?” he said. “Listen, Rado, a shoe, without the proper history to back it up, is nothing, less than shit. But say it’s the shoe that Khrushchev smashed against that table and then the price jumps to at least ten thousand. I’ve sold five of those, and two were sneakers. Even the shit, with proper history, becomes important.” And then he shoves stolen objects in my hands and asks me to endow them with history and meaning.
Gogo and I have stolen flasks and pipettes from the chemistry classroom that later Gramps resold as Nazi flasks and pipettes brought to Bulgaria after the fall of Berlin (the reason for their smuggling into our country as mysterious as the acid that erased their swastika stamps). We’ve stolen coils of copper wire from the physics lab (a Soviet leftover from the ’68 Prague spring), a map of the Balkan Wars (vintage, first edition!), a globe (with the USSR still whole and strong). In Bulgaria today there is a black market for everything, it seems.
But Gogo and I are no thieves. Appropriators, maybe. Myth-makers. But thieves would be too low. You ought to draw the line some place, and drawing lines, I’ve come to realize, is just like offering apologies. Sometimes you are allowed to draw a line after the fact.
•
“Communist trash!” Gogo chants, and we flow with the torrential crowd. It’s exhilarating, like on the way to a good football match. Funny I should think of that, because some of the chants, it strikes me now, are really football chants. Only we’ve substituted the rival team’s name with that of the Party, the referee’s with the premier’s. It’s mostly young people around us. Right in front a little girl in a pink anorak is nagging her father. “I can’t breathe,” she whines. He picks her up on his shoulders and I watch her ponytail jerk up and down like a flag from the olden days of khans — a horse tail on a spear. “I can’t hear you,” her father says and the girl shouts, “Red trash! Red shit!” and everyone around her laughs. She basks in this attention. “Say ‘Red cunts!’ ” Gogo tells her, and she yells it, “Cherveni putki.” More people laugh. The wind bangs on the balconies above us, flaps frozen laundry on the lines, and then the girl complains she’s cold. Her father brings her down and I can hear her little voice cursing long after the torrent has taken them away.