East of the West by Miroslav Penkov

Author:Miroslav Penkov [Penkov, Miroslav]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Short Stories, Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
ISBN: 9780385676007
Publisher: Sceptre
Published: 2010-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

CROSS THIEVES

A girl with no breasts storms inside the café to tell us the government has fallen and there will be no school today. Someone throws a beer bottle at her so she will shut the door. It’s minus five outside but in the schoolyard café it’s just right. We’ve stayed up all night, drinking clouds and playing svarka. Very early on, Gogo managed to flap a thirty-three against this rich kid who bet his watch and pager on a pair of aces, so for the rest of the night we keep getting pages from the kid’s parents. Dechko, where are you? Dechko, come home!

“You imagine my parents paging me?” Gogo asks me.

“What’s so hard to imagine? You owning a pager or them calling you ‘dechko’?”

It’s not that Gogo’s parents don’t give a shit about him. But then there’s his big brother who always keeps their hair on fire. As for my parents, let’s say I haven’t seen them in four days, blame Father for it and leave it at that.

The girl shuts the door and goes to the bar to get a ViK. She is an all right girl, maybe too short in the legs. She downs her vodka and wipes her mouth with her sleeve. Then she drinks her kola in tiny sips.

“Kopche, look at that dog,” Gogo says, and yells at her, “Woof-woof.” Right now that’s what we call each other. Kopche, which means button. Before that it was, What’s up, shnur. Cable. Before that, what’s up shprangel, which isn’t even a word. Why? I don’t know, it’s nonsense. We’ve renounced our names. No more Radoslav, no more Georgi. I was named after my Grandpa who was named after his, but so what?

“Kopche, watch my chips,” I say, and leave the café to take a piss. Glass shatters behind me and Bay Petko, the owner, curses at whoever threw it. It’s a chilly, bitter morning and already the streets beyond the school fence are teeming with people, a dirty flood. I watch it whirl, a mishmash of faces, arms and legs, and the chants, loud and angry, blow fuses in my skull. Down with the Reds! Cherveni boklutsi. Communist trash!

It’s January 1997 and once again the government has fallen. That’s hardly a surprise. The first time it fell I was seven. November 1989. It was a spectacular collapse—the end of communism. At home we were glued to the TV while in a droning voice some big-shot Party member declared that the head of the Party, Todor Zhivkov, was stepping down from power. Zhivkov himself sat left of the podium, his eyes fixed dully on something only he could see, unblinking, like a cow’s, his mouth half open and glistening with spit. “My God, these bastards have drugged him,” my father said, and bit into the dried tail of a tiny salted fish. “I thought he’d rule forever,” said my mother.

“No, thank you very much,” Father said, and pointed the fish at me like a mummified finger. “Are you watching this, Rado? This is important.

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