“When did I say they weren’t?” I push him off.
“Christ, Rado,” he goes, “what’s the point? The moment I bring home my sweet, sexy TV, Brother will pawn it off again. I’d rather be broke and sleep on the floor.” And Gogo chucks away the cup, cross, tray he’s tucked in his jacket. One by one they hit something in the gloom, bounce back and roll with a metallic bark.
“I would totally ditch Brother here,” Gogo says. “I’d bring him here and leave him behind.” He says some other things, but I don’t listen.
“You know, Gogo,” I say, “this is so silly. Hear me out. The other day we were at this retiree club, my father and I … hey, wake up, listen … I’m writing this formula on the black board, r equals p over one plus epsilon times cosine theta—you know, the orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus? So I’m writing it all down just the way I’ve memorized it, just the way I’d seen it written in that old textbook Father gave me a long time back. I’m proving a point. Some old woman had randomly flashed the page before my eyes twenty minutes earlier and I’m proving my gift now. ‘What does the epsilon stand for?’ the woman asks me when I’m finished. No one’s ever asked me that. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘if you are really amazing, you ought to know.’ Well, fuck it. See, that explanation was on the next page of the book and that page was missing, torn. Turns out the woman was a physics teacher. She goes, ‘And what about that Newton’s third law you talked about? Do you understand,’ she says, ‘what that law is really telling us about the world?’ ”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Gogo says. He tries to stand up but falls right back down, flat on his ass.
“Wait, listen. My father comes to me after we’re done. ‘Well, he goes, maybe it’s a good thing.’ Meaning maybe, after all, we don’t need to add new books to our gig. Meaning maybe my memory isn’t really good enough for new books. Meaning maybe there was a reason I didn’t make the cut to that school. He didn’t know the page was missing. So all he says is, ‘Well, maybe it’s a good thing.’ ”
“Well,” Gogo says, “maybe it is a good thing, kopche.” He lifts the demijohn up and shakes it empty. Three liters of holy wine, gone.
“What did you say?” I go, and he goes, grunting, “See? Case in point.”
But I don’t see. I don’t see anything at all.
“The thing is, kopche,” Gogo says, “you’ve memorized some ancient books — history, geography, whatever. You keep an article that says you’re great, but aside from this, what have you done? Sure, you’ve killed an old man in a church, but I mean, what have you really done?”
“How about your aunt? Does your aunt count?”
“The Amusing Rado, is that the name you’re going for now?”
None of this is funny to me. I say, “Wait a minute, kopche. Are you telling me you have some doubts that I am the smartest kid that ever lived?” I get up, stumble, fall down again. I really want to shake my finger in his face, but I don’t know if his face is where my finger is shaking. “The last word of the Bible is Amen,” I say. “The first is In. The eye of the ostrich is bigger than its brain. In England, all swans belong to the queen. Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance. Stalin never had a mother. He was born by his aunt. Hitler was born with a full set of teeth, including four fillings and a crown.”
“Oh, yeah,” Gogo says, “the yellow press is a well of knowledge.”
“A yellow well,” I say, and listen to the wind howling, and to the chanting crowd. Then something, like a cricket, starts chirping in my pocket. It’s that rich boy’s pager we won at cards. Come home, dechko, the page reads. Mama fried meatballs.
“Mama fried meatballs,” I say, and chuck the pager to the gloom. I repeat this over and over again, until the meaning rots away from the words. “Kopche,” I say, “watch my chips. I gotta take a piss, all right?”
I get up somehow. With a swift pull I untuck my shirt and the candelabra rattles at my feet. I try to kick, but miss. I try to open the gates, but can’t. There seems to be only one way for me now — up. I can’t piss in the church. I’m not like that. So I start climbing this staircase, these wooden steps, and I look for pots of pelargonium. But the neighbors must be keeping all pots under lock and key now. So up I climb, up until there is nothing left to climb, until wind slices my face. I’m where the bells are hanged.
It’s snowing big, white chunks. Below me are the willows and the people — one million at my feet, two million, eight million. My Bulgarians.
It would be nice, I think, if someone tolled the bells. A metamorphic gesture. No, metaphoric is what I mean. But I just watch the snow fall, and the people still jumping like crickets in my pocket and at my feet.
Jump, my poor sick bastards — or brothers, rather. Mama has fried meatballs for all of us. Jump at my command. At the rise of my hand. Prove that you want change. That you’re not Red.
“Gogo,” I yell, “are you still doubting? Come see what I can do.”
I climb upon the ledge, unzip my pants. My belt hits the rail like a copper tongue.
I’m sorry, my dear Bulgarians. There, you got my apologies beforehand. But I have you all memorized now. Each and every one of you. And so, watch out, my people. This boy has stones in his kidneys.
THE NIGHT HORIZON
1.
She fit like a stone in her father’s cupped palm when he first held her. Yellow palm, stained from stringing leaves of tobacco, and she bloody, blind and quiet. She did not scream when her father took her. She did not breathe. A bloody stone was all she was back then. So her father shook her and smacked her face, and then she screamed, and then she breathed.
He raised her up to the ceiling as if God had poor eyesight and wouldn’t see her down where she lay. He called her name, Kemal, which was his name, really, the name of his father, and then repeated it, like a proud song, to make sure that up in the Jannah the angel had heard right and had written her name correctly in the big book.
“You cannot give your daughter a man’s name,” the hodja told him.
“It’s too late now,” her father answered. “It has been written.”
2.
Kemal’s father made bagpipes up in the Rhodope Mountains. Kaba gaydi, they were called — enormous in the arms of the piper, with a low song, monotonous, mournful. He had built himself a workshop in the yard and kept Kemal’s cradle there in the workshop, while he drilled chanters and reeds, while he perforated goat skins and turned them into mehs for his bagpipes.
“Let her breathe in the sawdust,” he’d tell her mother. “Let it flow with her blood and let her heart pump it.”
When Kemal was still very young, her father sat her down on a three-legged chair in the corner and placed in her hands a chisel. He showed her how to carve small half circles on the sides of a chanter and then he told her to make her own patterns. “Make them pretty,” he told her, and so, day after day, while he hunched over his lathe, Kemal carved tiny half-moons and dots like distant stars on a wooden sky. Sometimes she pricked her fingers, sometimes she cut them. But she never cried. She only set the tools on the ground and walked to her father and held her finger up to his lips, the dust red and sticky, so he could suck away the dirty blood, so he could spit the pain out on the floor. Then he made her stomp on it, like a snake’s head under her heel.