Mother worked as a teacher in the school. This was awkward for me, because I could never call her “Mother” in class and because she always knew if I’d done my homework or not. But I had access to her files and could steal exams and sell them to the kids for cash.
The year of the new sbor, 1975, our geography teacher retired and Mother found herself teaching his classes as well. This gave me more exams to sell and I made good money. I had a goal in mind. I went to my sister, Elitsa, having first rubbed my eyes hard so they would appear filled with tears, and with my most humble and vulnerable voice I asked her, “How much for your jeans?”
“Nose,” she said, “I love you, but I’ll wear these jeans until the day I die.”
I tried to look heartbreaking, but she didn’t budge. Instead, she advised me:
“Ask cousin Vera for a pair. You’ll pay her at the sbor.” Then from a jar in her night stand Elitsa took out a ten-lev bill and stuffed it in my pocket. “Get some nice ones,” she said.
Two months before it was time for the reunion, I went to the river. I yelled until a boy showed up and I asked him to call my cousin. She came an hour later.
“What do you want, Nose?”
“Levis!” I yelled.
“You better have the money!” she yelled back.
•
Mihalaky came in smoke and roar. And with him came the West. My cousin Vera stepped out of the boat and everything on her screamed, We live better than you, we have more stuff, stuff you can’t have and never will. She wore white leather shoes with little flowers on them, which she explained was called an Adidas. She had jeans. And her shirt said things in English.
“What does it say?”
“The name of a music group. They have this song that goes ‘Smooook na dar voooto.’ You heard it?”
“Of course I have.” But she knew better.
After lunch, the grown-ups danced around the fire, then played drunk soccer. Elitsa was absent for most of the time, and finally when she returned, her lips were burning red and her eyes shone like I’d never seen them before. She pulled me aside and whispered in my ear:
“Promise not to tell.” Then she pointed at a dark-haired boy from Srbsko, skinny and with a long neck, who was just joining the soccer game. “Boban and I kissed in the forest. It was so great,” she said, and her voice flickered. She nudged me in the ribs, and stuck a finger at cousin Vera, who sat by the fire, yawning and raking the embers up with a stick.
“Come on, Nose, be a man. Take her to the woods.”
And she laughed so loud, even the deaf old grandmas turned to look at us.
I scurried away, disgusted and ashamed, but finally I had to approach Vera. I asked her if she had my jeans, then took out the money and began to count it.
“Not here, you fool,” she said, and slapped me on the hand with the smoldering stick.
We walked through the village until we reached the old bridge, which stood solitary in the middle of the road. Yellow grass grew between each stone, and the riverbed was dry and fissured.
We hid under the bridge and completed the swap. Thirty levs for a pair of jeans. Best deal I’d ever made.
“You wanna go for a walk?” Vera said after she had counted the bills twice. She rubbed them on her face, the way our fathers did, and stuffed them in her pocket.
We picked mushrooms in the woods while she told me things about her school and complained about a Serbian boy who always pestered her.
“I can teach him a lesson,” I said. “Next time I come there, you just show him to me.”
“Yeah, Nose, like you know how to fight.”
And then, just like that, she hit me in the nose. Crushed it, once more, like a biscuit.
“Why did you do that?”
She shrugged. I made a fist to smack her back, but how do you hit a girl? Or how, for that matter, will hitting another person in the face stop the blood gushing from your own nose? I tried to suck it up and act like the pain was easy to ignore.
She took me by the hand and dragged me toward the river.
“I like you, Nose,” she said. “Let’s go wash your face.”
•
We lay on the banks and chewed thyme leaves.
“Nose,” my cousin said, “you know what they told us in school?”
She rolled over and I did the same to look her in the eyes. They were very dark, shaped like apricot kernels. Her face was all speckled and she had a tiny spot on her upper lip, delicate, hard to notice, that got redder when she was nervous or angry. The spot was red now.
“You look like a mouse,” I told her.
She rolled her eyes.
“Our history teacher,” she said, “told us we were all Serbs. You know. Like, a hundred percent.”
“Well, you talk funny,” I said. “I mean you talk Serbianish.”
“So, you think I’m a Serb?”
“Where do you live?” I asked her.
“You know where I live.”
“But do you live in Serbia or in Bulgaria?”
Her eyes darkened and she held them shut for a long time. I knew she was sad. And I liked it. She had nice shoes, and jeans, and could listen to bands from the West, but I owned something that had been taken away from her forever.
“The only Bulgarian here is me,” I told her.
She got up and stared at the river. “Let’s swim to the drowned church,” she said.
“I don’t want to get shot.”
“Get shot? Who cares for churches in no-man’s-water? Besides, I’ve swum there before.” She stood up, took her shirt off and jumped in. The murky current rippled around her shoulders and they glistened, smooth, round pebbles the river had polished for ages. Yet her skin was soft, I could imagine. I almost reached to touch it.
We swam the river slowly, staying along the bank. I caught a small chub under a rock, but Vera made me let it go. Finally we saw the cross sticking up above the water, massive, with rusty feet and arms that caught the evening sun.
We all knew well the story of the drowned church. Back in the day, before the Balkan Wars, a rich man lived east of the river. He had no offspring and no wife, so when he lay down dying he called his servant with a final wish: to build, with his money, a village church. The church was built, west of the river, and the peasants hired from afar a young zograf, a master of icons. The master painted for two years and there he met a girl and fell in love with her and married her and they, too, lived west of the river, near the church.
Then came the Balkan Wars and after that the First World War. All these wars Bulgaria lost, and much Bulgarian land was given to the Serbs. Three officials arrived in the village; one was a Russian, one was French and one was British. East of the river, they said, stays in Bulgaria. West of the river from now on belongs to Serbia. Soldiers guarded the banks and planned to take the bridge down, and when the young master, who had gone away to work on another church, came back, the soldiers refused to let him cross the border and return to his wife.
In his desperation he gathered people and convinced them to divert the river, to push it west until it went around the village. Because according to the orders, what lay east of the river stayed in Bulgaria.
How they carried all those stones, all those logs, how they piled them up, I cannot imagine. Why the soldiers did not stop them, I don’t know. The river moved west and it looked like she would serpent around the village. But then she twisted, wiggled and tasted with her tongue a route of lesser resistance; through the lower hamlet she swept, devouring people and houses. Even the church, in which the master had left two years of his life, was lost in her belly.
We stared at the cross for some time, then I got out on the bank and sat in the sun.