We are by the Levski memorial when Gogo tells me he has to eat, something, anything, or he’ll die. My stomach, too, is churning. I’m getting dizzy with the heat from all the bodies around us, so we elbow out.
There is a bakery around the corner. The smell of bread scratches purple shavings across my eyes.
“We’re closed,” the saleswoman tells us, and fastens her coat with safety pins. Behind her I can see whole tins of hot bread, steaming golden.
“Gospozho, we need just a loaf,” I say. I’m hoping that gospozho—“missis”—will warm her Communist-despising heart. But secretly I wish she was our comrade—drugarka—so we might eat for free, the way we used to when we were kids, when bakeries belonged to the state and cashiers would give you bread and not care one bit about losing money.
“I got some protesting to do,” she says. “But fine. One thousand levs.” And then she nooses a scarf around her neck.
“Gospozho,” Gogo says, “we’re short on cash. But this boy here’s a wunderkind. He can do a trick for a loaf.”
“I’ve seen tricks to last me six lifetimes,” Missis says. She sizes me up with greedy eyes. “Who’ll win the parliament elections? No, wait. What are the winning numbers to the lotto?”
I shrug. “I’m not that kind of wunderkind,” I say. Missis rounds the counter and prepares to lock the door. “But of course. You are some other kind. In Bulgaria today, everyone’s a wunderkind,” she says, and shoos us out.
“Why the hell didn’t we just take a loaf and run?” I ask Gogo, and he says, “We aren’t like that. Our ancestors died for bread. We can’t steal bread.”
That’s rare talk from Gogo. But when you’re hungry, all your history reveals itself clearly before you, if only in a flash. Though I suppose Gogo has a point. Some things are bigger than we are. “The essential” being one of them. Nasashtniyat, “the essential,” that’s what we call bread here in Bulgaria. No one is bigger than bread. Proverbs and Sayings, volume 35, page 124.
“Gogo,” I say now to add a proverb of my own, “no one gives you bread for free.”
•
When I was still very young, Father would often call me over to the table, where he and his friends worked on the nth bottle of vodka and the always-present string of dried, salted little fish. They’d pick up the daily paper and read in hoarse, drunk voices whole passages, pages sometimes, which I’d repeat from memory in the same sluggish, drunken manner word for word. I imagine it was in such a moment of intoxicated clarity one of them suggested that my father should send me to study in Sofia, in the school for gifted children.
There is such a school in Sofia, where, in theory at least, children with gifts are handpicked through rigorous examination and then their gifts — scientific, humanitarian, artistic — are allowed to bloom and bear sweet, juicy fruit.
“If they find out your kid is in fact a genius—” the friend must have explained, and my father must have interrupted on the spot: “What do you mean, if? What do you mean, in fact? Look at him! It’s a sure thing.”
“Anyway, when they establish that he has a gift, they’ll move your whole family to Sofia. They’ll buy you an apartment, give you and your wife good jobs. They’ll take good care of him.”
“We’ll do it,” Father must have said, and slammed a determined fist on the table, “but not for our benefit. No, comrade, thank you very much. We’re not like this. We’ll do it for his own good sake.”
But I was still too young to apply for school, and Father decided to use the remaining time to make my name heard throughout the Motherland. He dug up some archaic textbooks, history, chemistry, physics, visited every school in town and convinced a few teachers to let us interrupt their classes. He’d sit me down in a chair before the gaze of bored tenth graders and pass around the books we’d brought. It was always I who carried the heavy tomes, because Father insisted such physical effort would develop my endurance for knowledge. “Open to any page,” he’d tell the students, “and read aloud. Then my son will repeat back to you like a miraculous echo!” The students read, one after the other. We’d let some time pass and then I’d repeat, words whose meaning I did not understand, but whose sounds had imprinted themselves eternally upon my ear. “The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. Valence is a measure of the number of chemical bonds formed by the atoms of a given element. Pi is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet.”
The students would produce a mangy clap. The teacher would pet me on the head. “Look at you bums,” she’d say to the class, “a five-year-old made you look foolish,” as if everyone’s memory were supposed to be an all-retaining sponge. After that, Father and I would eat lunch at the school cafeteria and fill up with musaka or gyuvech the jars we’d hidden under our coat and call this dinner.
“When you get into that school in Sofia, we’ll never have to eat the same food twice. We’ll never have loud, drunken neighbors, either, because the government will give us a flat in an expensive complex. Things will get stellar when we move to Sofia. You wait and see.”
When the town newspaper wrote about me, Father bought dozens of copies to hand out to friends. He even mailed one to his pen pal, someone in Yekaterinburg he hadn’t exchanged letters with in thirty years.
I took the exams at the school for gifted children in the spring of ’89. I was denied admission two months later. I remember waiting in the car with my mother while Father took the newspaper article to the principal’s office to demand an explanation. A spiky metal fence separated the school’s campus from the rest of the world, and I walked to it and glued my face to the posts. I could see a football field, a tennis court on the other side. “It would be nice to study here,” I told my mother, and she started to cry.
Father said nothing on the way back from the school. He smoked one cigarette after the other, but wouldn’t open the window because it rained and he didn’t want the orthopedic sheet of stringed bamboo beads on his seat to get wet.
“They said he wasn’t special enough,” he told my mother at last. We were waiting for a traffic light to change and he turned around and looked at me through the smoke, with more smoke coming from his nose as he spoke. “Is this true?” he asked me.
Years later we found out that admission to this school was really a scam. That to get in, you needed connections; it was a place where all high-profile Party members sent their children to study. But we didn’t know this at the time.