“Wait, kopche, this isn’t right,” Gogo says, still going through the bags.
I kiss the wrinkled cheek, dry, very cold.
And then a sigh escapes the saint, a low, long moan, and with his opened mouth the stench of rotten meat.
We stumble back. The things we’ve stolen rattle in our coats. “My fucking heart will stop,” I say. I try to shake this off; a horde of woodworms, wet and wriggly, roll down my back. I wipe my lips on my sleeve and keep on wiping.
“This is no saint, you all-knowing shit,” Gogo says, and takes some clothes out of one bag: a T-shirt, long white underpants, a wool sweater. “Look at this,” he says, and goes through the other. A round loaf of bread, a demijohn of wine, a jar of boiled wheat. “This is just like the stuff my mom brought the priest to bless for Brother.”
We sneak up closer to the groaning saint. His mouth closes and opens, his eyes turn to us. Tarry, bulging eyes. That’s all he is, this old cocoon, a pair of eyes that watch first Gogo, then me.
I say, “Old man …” but I don’t know what else to say.
“Hey, Grandpa,” Gogo calls and snaps his fingers. “Shhh, alo. Look at me. What’s your name? You been here long?”
The eyes blink, the mouth opens, closes, opens again. The stench is too much.
“How did you like your kiss?” Gogo says, and looks at me. “Lover boy,” he says.
I take the demijohn and gulp up a few strong gulps of wine. I rinse, wipe my lips, repeat.
I say, “They brought him here so the priest would bless him. So he would be cured. Then they ran away. Isn’t that right, Grandpa? They left you behind?”
Gogo takes the demijohn and drinks. We watch the cocooned man.
If that was me, I think, I’d lose my mind. Just lying like a grub in that cloak, and only my eyes moving, and my mouth. I wonder if this old man knows he was left behind to die? Does he begrudge those who left him? Does he remember anything at all? I hope, for his sake, he has no memory left — of who he is, of where he lies. I hope he is the opposite of me.
Gogo lights up and tells me to watch this shit. He holds the cigarette to the old man’s lips and lets him take a drag. Smoke gushes out of the old man’s nose, his eyes fill up, he coughs.
“You were a smoker, weren’t you, Grandpa?” Gogo says. “That’s what did you in.” He takes the round loaf from the towel and tries to break off a chunk against his knee. “Is this a loaf or a stone? Jesus Christ.” He bites off a morsel and spits it in his hand. He holds it to the old man’s lips and the old man sucks on it until the morsel turns to mash. Then the old man sucks on Gogo’s fingers. “This is so vile, kopche,” Gogo says, and wipes his fingers in his coat.
“That’s enough,” I say. “You hear me, Gogo. Enough of that.”
But Gogo breaks off another piece. “Who is my hungry saint?” he says. “Are you my hungry little saint?” Then he brings the demijohn to the old man’s lips but doesn’t touch them. He pours wine from a distance. The old man drinks; the wine runs red down the creases of his wrinkled neck.
“Look at yourself, Grandpa,” Gogo says at last, happy with himself. “Some saint you are,” and starts with his grunting laugh.
I don’t know what to make of this.
I touch the cloak. “God damn it, kopche, he’s soaking wet.”
“He’ll be all right.”
“The hell he will.”
“Well, change him up, then, wunderkind.”
And then it strikes me: this is exactly what I need to do. I peel back the edge of the cloak to unwrap the man. “Oh, Christ.”
“Sweet Jesus, cover him up. That is some pungent shit.”
I take a few more gulps and I can feel the contours of my esophagus and stomach, scorched, as the wine flows through. I lay the clothes from the bag out on the table — the underpants, trousers, socks, the knitted sweater.
I ask Gogo for his pocketknife. He watches me, smiling and drinking, as I cut the old man’s clothes. The first few years after we’d moved to Sofia, we had no money for gas to go back to our little town and visit Grandma regularly. We went to see her only twice a year. The second time was in the summer. We found her on the kitchen floor so stiff, Father had to cut her out of her dress and then out of her undergarments with my kindergarten Yakky the Duck scissors. That smell, that sight, stays with you, no phenomenal memory required.
“Help me carry him to the altar,” I say.
“To the what?” But Gogo helps me. “I never carried a lighter man,” he says once we lay the old man on the clean cloak. “And have you seen paler skin?”
“I wonder what he has,” I say. I shake the bread towel from all the crumbs and start to wipe the old man’s chest.
“My money is on cancer,” Gogo says. He picks up some church cloths from the altar — or rather, something that looks like a long, broad scarf — and he, too, starts to clean the man. The old man moans. I hope he’s thankful for our help.
“Why are you laughing?” Gogo says.
I shrug. “I’m not.”
“The hell you’re not.”
I point at the old man’s crotch.
“It’s a good-sized dick,” Gogo says. “Nothing funny about it.” He looks at me. “Like you can do better.”
The old man’s arms are nothing but skin on bone, and I hold them while Gogo struggles to put on the clean shirt. I’m afraid that if I stretched the arms farther back, they’d snap right out of the sockets. “Jesus Christ,” Gogo says. His face is all sweaty and red and he wipes it with the shirt. “I can’t even get one hand through the sleeve hole.”
After the shirt, we manage to put on the tight white drawers, like pants Napoleon’s soldiers would have worn. Then woolen pants, then the sweater. I drink more wine.
“I feel great,” I say. I step back to have a good look at the man, all nicely dressed, all clean, serene on the altar. I’m proud. I’m happy with myself. “God, am I hungry.”
I drink a little more for courage and zigzag to the altar. “Grandpa,” I say. “You feel better now? Cleaner?” I hold my face a fist away from his. Gogo leans in.
“I don’t think Gramps is breathing,” he says. He pinches the old man’s nose and holds it pinched.
“How do you know?”
“I’m pinching his nose.”
“Don’t pinch his nose.”
He lets go and we stand very still, waiting. “That doesn’t seem to help,” he says.
•
The draft is stronger where we sit, down on the floor, leaning against the iconostasis.
“I feel like shit,” I say.
Gogo breaks off a piece of bread and lays it in my hands. We eat, we drink.
“Do you feel better now?”
Of course I don’t. My throat hurts. My gums feel swollen. The golden candelabra is poking me in the ribs like a spear, but I can’t take it out; it’s stuck in my shirt and I give up pulling.
I ask Gogo if he thinks we killed the man.
“I’m pretty sure we did,” he says. He says if he was lying in his own filth, all skin and bone, he’d pray for death. “Maybe he prayed for us to appear and set him free. You ever thought of that?”
I try to hold the altar, the dead old man, in sight, but both the altar and the man keep swirling in an ugly, quiet dance. The wine keeps rhythm, sloshing in the demijohn.
“If you had to guess,” I say, “what did he do for a living? You think he loved his kids? You think he lived an all right life?”
“You think I care?” Gogo says. “You think it matters? Look at him, kopche, the man is dead.” He bumps his head against the wooden wall. “This is too much for me. My hands are literally covered in shit: Smell them,” he says, and shoves his hands in my face.