Carts and Other Stories by Zdravka Evtimova

Author:Zdravka Evtimova [Evtimova, Zdravka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-937677-15-2
Publisher: Fomite

Narrow Street

Most of the time, I felt peaceful. I rarely talked to anybody. I had always lived in unstable silence, winters hurling snow and rain at my windows, passing unnoticed and unnecessary. Probably, my next-door neighbor thought I was a queer fish, I could tell that by the way she stared at me when she met me at the grocery store. I’d been living in this neighborhood for five months. I chose that room with a window to the North tucked away down a narrow street. All the houses here were small and you could scarcely see them in the fog. There was fog everywhere: on the roofs, in the trees, in my hair and coat. The sun gave birth to fog instead of mornings.

I thought I was a bad company so I kept myself to myself, going for interminable strolls in the wasteland surrounding the only bridge in town. I tried to remember the outlines of the low squat buildings as they slowly dissolved into the afternoons like memories of a snowstorm. Sometimes guys whistled at me. The town was not big, people knew each other and I was a complete stranger in it, like a new poster advertising a concert in the main street.

I guessed the townsfolk unanimously mistrusted me when they got to know I what I did for a living. Even before the end of the first month of my sojourn in the narrow street, I gained a steady notoriety as an unbearable teacher in mathematics. I wanted the students to prove theorems and solve problems. I didn’t speak much to them. Even on the first day at school, I caught two guys cribbing from finely folded sheets of paper they had tucked up their sleeves. The bad thing about me was that I saw and heard most of what happened in the classroom. I could almost always tell when a guy was trying to cheat. When I was a little girl, even grandma could not trick me into believing that dad had gone on a long business trip to Greece to make money for us. I knew he had divorced mother. A year after that I knew mother would not come back home to see me as she had promised after uncle Ivan took her to hospital for some blood tests. I tried to keep a stiff upper lip but all I managed to do was to bite my lower one that had long ago become very thin and colorless.

The only place I talked was the classroom when I examined my students. I hated to see guys copying from their neighbors. I took the neatly folded sheets of paper with the formulae from their fists and kept them on my desk. I supposed it was mortifying to be stared at by your math teacher but I couldn’t think up anything else.

My classes hated me. I saw it in their eyes and everything I said seemed short, stiff and formal. I felt awkward every time I

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