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.
“It’s pretty deep,” I said. “You sure you’ve been down there?”
She put a hand on my back. “It’s okay if you’re scared.”
But it was not okay. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and dove off the bank.
“Swim to the cross!” She yelled after me. I swam like I wore shoes of iron. I held the cross tightly and stepped on the slimy dome underneath. Soon Vera stood by me, in turn gripping the cross so she wouldn’t slip and drift away.
“Let’s look at the walls,” she said.
“What if we get stuck?”
“Then we’ll drown.”
She laughed and nudged me in the chest.
“Come on, Nose, do it for me.”
It was difficult to keep my eyes open at first. The current pushed us away so we had to work hard to reach the small window below the dome. We grabbed the bars on the window and looked inside. And despite the murky water, my eyes fell on a painting of a bearded man kneeling by a rock, his hands entwined. The man was looking down, and in the distance, approaching, was a little bird. Below the bird, I saw a cup.
“It’s a nice church,” Vera said after we surfaced.
“Do you want to dive again?”
“No.” She moved closer and quickly she kissed me on the lips.
“Why did you do that?” I said, and felt the hairs on my arms and neck stand up, though they were wet.
She shrugged, then pushed herself off the dome, and laughing, swam splashing up the river.
The jeans Vera sold me that summer were about two sizes too large, and it seemed like they’d been worn before, but that didn’t bother me. I even slept in them. I liked how loose they were around my waist, how much space, how much Western freedom they provided around my legs.
But for my sister, Elitsa, life worsened. The West gave her ideas. She would often go to the river and sit on the bank and stare, quietly, for hours on end. She would sigh and her bony shoulders would drop, like the earth below her was pulling on her arms.
As the weeks went by, her face lost its plumpness. Her skin got grayer, her eyes muddier. At dinner she kept her head down and played with her food. She never spoke, not to Mother, not to me. She was as quiet as a painting on a wall.
A doctor came and left puzzled. “I leave puzzled,” he said, “she’s healthy. I just don’t know what’s wrong with her.”
But I knew. That longing in my sister’s eyes, that disappointment, I’d seen them in Vera’s eyes before, on the day she had wished to be Bulgarian. It was the same look of defeat, scary and contagious, and because of that look, I kept my distance.
I didn’t see Vera for a year. Then, one summer day in 1976 as I was washing my jeans in the river, she yelled from the other side.
“Nose, you’re buck naked.”
That was supposed to embarrass me, but I didn’t even twitch.
“I like to rub my ass in the face of the West,” I yelled back, and raised the jeans, dripping with soap.
“What?” she yelled.
“I like to . . . ” I waved. “What do you want?”
“Nose, I got something for you. Wait for—and—to—church. All right?”
“What?”
“Wait for the dark. And swim. You hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you. Are you gonna be there?”
“What?”
I didn’t bother. I waved, bent over, and went on washing my jeans.
I waited for my folks to go to sleep and then I snuck out the window. The lights in my sister’s room were still on and I imagined her in bed, eyes tragically fixed on the ceiling.
I hid my clothes under a bush and stepped into the cool water. On the other side I could see the flashlight of the guard, and the tip of his cigarette, red in the dark. I swam slowly, making as little noise as possible. In places the river flowed so narrow people could stand on both sides and talk and almost hear each other, but around the drowned church the river was broad, a quarter mile between the banks.
I stepped on the algae-slick dome and ran my fingers along a string tied to the base of the cross. A nylon bag was fixed to the other end. I freed the bag and was ready to glide away when someone said, “This is for you.”
“Vera?”
“I hope you like them.”
She swam closer, and was suddenly locked in a circle of light.
“Who’s there?” the guard shouted, and his dog barked.
“Go, go, you stupid,” Vera said, and splashed away. The circle of light followed.
I held the cross tight, not making a sound. I knew this was no joke. The guards would shoot trespassers if they had to. But Vera swam unhurriedly.
“Faster!” The guard shouted. “Get out here.”
The beam of light etched her naked body in the night. She had the breasts of a woman.
He asked her something and she spoke back. Then he slapped her. He held her very close and felt her body. She kneed him in the groin. He laughed on the ground long after she’d run away naked.
All through, of course, I watched in silence. I could have yelled something to stop him, but then, he had a gun. And so I held the cross and so the river flowed black with night around me and even out on the bank I felt sticky with dirty water.
Inside the bag were Vera’s old Adidas shoes. The laces were in bad shape, and the left shoe was a bit torn at the front, but they were still excellent. And suddenly all shame was gone and my heart pounded so hard with new excitement, I was afraid the guards might hear it. On the banks I put the shoes on and they fit perfectly. Well, they were a bit too small for my feet—actually, they were really quite tight—but they were worth the pain. I didn’t walk. I swam across the air.
I was striding back home, when someone giggled in the bush. Grass rustled. I hesitated, but snuck through the dark, and I saw two people rolling on the ground, and would have watched them in secret if it weren’t for the squelching shoes.
“Nose, is that you?” a girl asked. She flinched, and tried to cover herself with a shirt, but this was the night I saw my second pair of breasts. These belonged to my sister.
I lay in my room, head under the blanket, trying to make sense of what I’d seen, when someone walked in.
“Nose? Are you sleeping?”
My sister sat on the bed and put her hand on my chest.
“Come on. I know you’re awake.”
“What do you want?” I said, and threw the blanket off. I could not see her face for the dark, but I could feel that piercing gaze of hers. The house was quiet. Only Father snored in the other room.
“Are you going to tell them?” she said.
“No. What you do is your own business.”
She leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead.
“You smell like cigarettes,” I said.
“Good night, Nose.”
She got up to leave, but I pulled her down.
“Elitsa, what are you ashamed of? Why don’t you tell them?”
“They won’t understand. Boban’s from Srbsko.”
“So what?”
I sat up in my bed and took her cold hand.
“What are you gonna do?” I asked her. She shrugged.
“I want to run away with him,” she said, and her voice suddenly became softer, calmer, thou
gh what she spoke of scared me deeply. “We’re going to go West. Get married, have kids. I want to work as a hairstylist in Munich. Boban has a cousin there. She is a hairstylist, or she washes dogs or something.” She ran her fingers through my hair. “Oh, Nose,” she said. “Tell me what to do.”
I couldn’t tell her. And so she kept living unhappy, wanting to be with that boy day and night but seeing him rarely and in secret. “I am alive,” she told me, “only when I’m with him.” And then she spoke of their plans; hitchhiking to Munich, staying with Boban’s cousin and helping her cut hair. “It’s a sure thing, Nose,” she’d say, and I believed her.
It was the spring of 1980 when Josip Tito died and even I knew things were about to change in Yugoslavia. The old men in our village whispered that now, with the Yugoslav president finally planted in a mausoleum, our western neighbor would fall apart. I pictured in my mind the aberration I’d seen in a film, a monster sewn together from the legs and arms and torso of different people. I pictured someone pulling on the thread that held these body parts, the thread unraveling, until the legs and arms and torso came undone. We could snatch a finger then, the land across the river, and patch it up back to our land. That’s what the old folks spoke about, drinking their rakia in the tavern. Meanwhile, the young folks escaped to the city, following new jobs. There weren’t enough children in the village anymore to justify our own school, and so we had to go to another village and study with other kids. Mother lost her job. Grandpa got sick with pneumonia, but Grandma gave him herbs for a month, and he got better. Mostly. Father worked two jobs, plus he stacked hay on the weekends. He no longer had the time to take me plowing.
But Vera and I saw each other often, sometimes twice a month. I never found the courage to speak of the soldier. At night, we swam to the drowned church and played around the cross, very quiet, like river rats. And there, by the cross, we kissed our first real kiss. Was it joy I felt? Or was it sadness? To hold her so close and taste her breath, her lips, to slide a finger down her neck, her shoulder, down her back. To lay my palm upon her breasts and know that someone else had done this, with force, while I had watched, tongue swallowed. Her face was silver with moonlight, her hair dripped dark with dark water.
“Do you love me?” she said.
“Yes. Very much,” I said. I said, “I wish we never had to leave the water.”
“You fool,” she said, and kissed me again. “People can’t live in rivers.”
That June, two months before the new sbor, our parents found out about Boban. One evening, when I came home for supper, I discovered the whole family quiet in the yard, under the trellis. The village priest was there. The village doctor. Elitsa was weeping, her face flaming red. The priest made her kiss an iron cross and sprinkled her with holy water from an enormous copper. The doctor buckled his bag and glass rattled inside when he picked it up. He winked at me and made for the gate. On his way out, the priest gave my forehead a thrashing with the boxwood foliage.
“What’s the matter?” I said, dripping holy water.
Grandpa shook his head. Mother put her hand on my sister’s. “You’ve had your cry,” she said.
“Father,” I said, “why was the doctor winking? And why did the priest bring such a large copper?”
Father looked at me, furious. “Because your sister, Nose,” he said, “requires an Olympic pool to cleanse her.”
“Meaning?” I said.
“Meaning,” he said, “your sister is pregnant. Meaning,” he said, “we’ll have to get her married.”
My family, all dressed up, went to the river. On the other bank Boban’s family already waited for us. Mother had washed the collar of my shirt with sugar water so it would stay stiff, and now I felt like that sugar was running down my back in a sweaty, syrupy stream. It itched and I tried to scratch it, but Grandpa told me to quit fidgeting and act like a man. My back got itchier.
From the other side, Boban’s father shouted at us, “We want your daughter’s hand!”
Father took out a flask and drank rakia, then passed it around. The drink tasted bad and set my throat on fire. I coughed and Grandpa smacked my back and shook his head. Father took the flask from me and spilled some liquor on the ground for the departed. The family on the other side did the same.
“I give you my daughter’s hand!” Father yelled. “We’ll wed them at the sbor.”
Elitsa’s wedding was going to be the culmination of the sbor, so everyone prepared. Vera told me that with special permission Mihalaky had transported seven calves across the river, and two had already been slain for jerky. The two of us met often, secretly, by the drowned church.
One evening, after dinner, my family gathered under the vines of the trellis. The grown-ups smoked and talked of the wedding. My sister and I listened and smiled at each other every time our eyes met.
“Elitsa,” Grandma said, and lay a thick bundle on the table. “This is yours now.”
My sister untied the bundle and her eyes teared up when she recognized Grandma’s best costume readied for the wedding. They lay each part of the dress on its own: the white hemp shirt, the motley apron, the linen gown, festoons of coins, the intricately worked silver earrings. Elitsa lifted the gown, and felt the linen between her fingers, and then began to put it on.
“My God, child,” Mother said, “take your jeans off.”
Without shame, for we are all blood, Elitsa folded her jeans aside and carefully slipped inside the glowing gown. Mother helped her with the shirt. Grandpa strapped on the apron, and Father, with his fingers shaking, gently put on her ears the silver earrings.
I woke up in the middle of the night, because I’d heard a dog howl in my sleep. I turned the lights on and sat up, sweaty in the silence. I went to the kitchen to get a drink of water and I saw Elitsa, ready to sneak out.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Quiet, dechko. I’ll be back in no time.”
“Are you going out to see him?”
“I want to show him these.” She dangled the earrings in her hand.
“And if they catch you?”
She put a finger to her lips, then spun on her heel. Her jeans rasped softly and she sank into the dark. I was this close to waking up Father, but how can you judge others when love is involved? I trusted she knew what she was doing.
For a very long time I could not fall asleep, remembering the howling dog in my dream. And then from the river, a machine gun rattled. The guard dogs started barking and the village dogs answered. I lay in bed petrified, and did not move even when someone banged on the gates.
My sister never used to swim to the Serbian side. Boban always came to meet her on our bank. But that night, strangely, they had decided to meet in Srbsko one last time before the wedding. A soldier in training had seen her climb out of the river. He’d told them both to stop. Two bullets had gone through Elitsa’s back as she tried to run.
This moment in my life I do not want to remember again:
Mihalaky in smoke and roar is coming up the river, and on his boat lies my sister.
There was no sbor that year. There were, instead, two funerals. We dressed Elitsa in her wedding costume and laid her beautiful body in a terrible coffin. The silver earrings were not beside her.
The village gathered on our side of the river. On the other side was the other village, burying their boy. I could see the grave they had dug, and the earth was the same, and the depth was the same.
There were three priests on our side, because Grandma would not accept any Communist godlessness. Each of us held a candle, and the people across from us also held candles, and the banks came alive with fire, two hands of fire that could not come together. Between those hands was the river.
The first priest began to sing, and both sides listened. My eyes were on Elitsa. I couldn’t let her go and things misted in my head.
“One generation passes away,” I thought the priest was singing, “and another comes; but the earth remains forever. The sun
rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind goes toward the West, toward Serbia, and all the rivers run away, East of the West. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done. Nothing is new under the sun.”
The voice of the priest died down, and then a priest on the other side sang. The words piled on my heart like stones and I thought how much I wanted to be like the river, which had no memory, and how little like the earth, which could never forget.
Mother quit the factory and locked herself home. She said her hands burned with her daughter’s blood. Father began to frequent the cooperative distillery at the end of the village. At first he claimed that assisting people with loading their plums, peaches, grapes into the cauldrons kept his mind blank; then that he was simply sampling the first rakia which trickled out the spout, so he could advise the folk how to boil better drink.
He lost both his jobs soon, and so it was up to me to feed the family. I started working in the coal mine, because the money was good, and because I wanted, with my pick, to gut the land we walked on.
The control across the borders tightened. Both countries put nets along the banks and blocked buffer zones at the narrow waist of the river where the villagers used to call to one another. The sbors were canceled. Vera and I no longer met, though we found two small hills we could sort of see each other from, like dots in the distance. But these hills were too far away and we did not go there often.
Almost every night, I dreamed of Elitsa.
“I saw her just before she left,” I would tell my mother. “I could have stopped her.”
“Then why didn’t you?” Mother would ask.
Sometimes I went to the river and threw stones over the fence, into the water, and imagined those two silver earrings, settling into the silty bottom.