The Smallest Things
Two years after my grandmother’s funeral, my mother and I were back in Sofia to clean out and sell her house, the house where she’d been born and had lived her entire childhood. When we arrived, we discovered КУРВА—whore—spray-painted in massive pink bubbly letters on the brick exterior. Local huligani, my mother claimed. Unlocking the door to the house, she feared that those same hooligans had broken in through a window and stolen our family heirlooms—in particular, my great-grandfather’s silver and enamel samovar. But everything remained in place, preserved under the sheets she’d thrown over the furniture two years ago. Even Babet’s pickled peppers and cauliflowers were left on the ground beside her misshapen slippers. The house had become a mausoleum.
Since celebrating the birthdays of the dead was a tradition on my mom’s side of the family, we were accordingly toasting in the spirit of Babet’s eighty-fifth birthday. My mother was getting wine drunk, clinking her glass with mine repeatedly, as I sat across from her in the mob restaurant, Bar Carnival, in the basement of a communist-era hotel. The dark green walls seemed to ripple around me and I felt the pulse in my neck and wrists. Faint Euro-trash beats played on invisible speakers. The tables around us were populated by square-faced, broad-shouldered unsmiling men with black buzzed hair. I was turned on by the one to my right, a tattoo of a snake swallowing its own tail on his bicep. He sat alone scrolling on his android phone, occasionally lifting his eyes to scan the room as if he was expecting someone. With my boozy confidence, I flashed snake man a smile, as fast as a wink. I’m not gorgeous, but I’ve gotten cute in a mousy way. To my surprise, he nodded and the left corner of his mouth twitched. I felt pressure in my womb.
Everything is a revelation if you look: a slight jerk of the arm, a pair of eyes wet with desire, an escaped sigh. That is the unspeakable making itself heard. I watched this man and I loved him for the twitch in his mouth. I found myself loving easily, too freely. When he unlocked the door to his apartment, was there a dog on the other side, ready to lick his face? This was one of the questions I was interested in asking. Communists, mobsters, and corrupt politicians only mattered to me if they swung a leather briefcase in a pathetic, yet endearing way. I cared only for the smallest things. I reserved my most treasured thoughts for dogs licking mean men with fervent devotion.
I hadn’t expected that being back in Bulgaria with my mother—after nearly eight years away, trapped in the whirlpool of a suburban Canadian adolescence—would feel so good. The pace of life here was coated in snail mucus, everyone moved sluggishly. When I wasn’t accompanying my mother in her paperwork pilgrimage across the city, or visiting the few remaining extended family members we had, I read on the back verandah. My degree in English had demanded a whole lot of reading, synthesizing, and tipsy discussions in student pubs, but this was different. There was no longer the pressure to perform for an audience. Now I could read in peace, without intellectualizing the process, no narrative theory or talk about voice. I read so lightly, everything soon evaporated from my memory.
Before all the dying started (and before we’d broken up), my ex-boyfriend Ryan and I had made a plan in jest. We were supposed to meet in Sofia at the place of my christening, the Church of Saint George, in May after my last university semester, before my graduation ceremony and his move back to the United States. My godmother Elena, mom’s best childhood friend, had held my little body as the black-bearded Orthodox priest drenched my fontanelle with water and I screamed for dear life. Twenty-two years later, my godmother jumped in front of a train after leaving her husband and son at home in the middle of the day. “Her hair straightener was still plugged into the wall,” my mother had said, after receiving the overseas phone call. It is strange how the brain short-circuits in those moments; it zooms in on a detail.
Ryan was beautiful and I hoped that one day we would reunite for good. He infuriated me with his silences, but he was someone who would bring me a pair of his tattered slippers when I had bleeding blisters on my feet from breaking in stiff loafers. He was now on some farm in Colorado, nine hours behind me in time, writing violent and smutty stories inspired by me, and yet refusing to speak to me. The fissure in our relationship cracked open when I published a short story—my first—which drew inspiration from our worst fight about money and work ethic (which had really been about our incongruent worldviews and the incoming long distance). To him, it had been a betrayal on two levels: a betrayal of our private world; and even worse, of the unspoken agreement we shared that he was the talented writer in the couple, and I was the aspiring one.
But I kept telling myself that this was better. He wouldn’t have understood the necessarily primordial and impenetrable maternal bond I had with Maria, my mother, my mom, my mama: all the names I’ve called her depending on my level of affection. My mother had been hit with two deaths within the last two years: her mother, and then her best friend Elena. She hadn’t once cried in front of me. Come to think of it, the only time I’d seen her cry was over the death of our tabby cat, Kapka, who got mauled and shredded by a coyote on a local trail.
I was her surrogate friend, the recipient of all her confessions. And because we had drunk two bottles of Riesling, my mother was unrestrained as she caught me eyeing the snake tattoo man. I imagined that in watching me she caught a glimpse of herself.
“I wasn’t born yesterday,” she said, sipping from her lipstick-stained glass.
“How do you feel about tomorrow?” I said. My mother had promised to meet up with one of her old friends and attend Elena’s posthumous exhibition. She scraped the edge of her plate with her fork. “Tomorrow is tomorrow. I’ll face it then. I haven’t seen those people in years. We have nothing in common anymore. Some of them are grandparents now.”
When I imagined my mother, my mind projected an image of the woman she had been when I was a child. I’d see her profile, refined, looking up at the CN tower, pointing at it and saying something unintelligible. She was tall to me then, her hair fluttered in a hundred directions in the breeze, silky and black, and her eyes sparkled green in the sunlight. But the brightness of those features had dimmed. Her jawline sagged faintly, deep vertical lines bracketed her mouth, and gray-white roots sprouted from her hairline.
“More wine?” I asked.
I watched the cytoplasmic quivering of raindrops against the window of the cab. The night wasn’t dead yet. People still walked the streets, liquor and tobacco stores were open—their 24/7 signs flashing fluorescent red—, and packs of youths my age cowered in side streets, gossiping and sharing cigarettes. We drove by the National Palace of Culture that glowed eerily like a deserted alien spaceship. I suddenly felt home-sick looking out at the casual bleakness of this world, which was simultaneously mine and not mine.
My friends back in Canada—hell, even Ryan—saw me as delightfully foreign, with admirable ties to a mysterious homeland. I was exotic to them. Eastern Europeans were acceptable outsiders, made cool by their aloofness, their Adidas tracksuits, their excessive drinking, their squats, their whiteness. In middle school, some of the boys made fun of my last name, Rakovski, or rather, the first syllable of my last name, Rak. The comments got especially creative around the time I reached puberty and inherited my mother’s breasts. I pandered to other people’s perceptions, playing along. I was their quasi-Russian. I’d learned to embrace this identity despite my parents’ deep aversion to post-Soviet stereotypes and their lifelong efforts to isolate me from everything Bulgarian. They only went to church for Christmas and Easter. They didn’t sign me up for language school. They lowered their voices when speaking Bulgarian in public.
My mother was quiet now, her head down and her eyes closed. The soft streetlights kept sliding over her eyelids.
“I might stick some more traps around before I go to bed,” I said.
I closed my eyes and thought of the house’s smell: damp coal dust and mildewy wood. The limestone walls cold to the touch, a refuge from the summer heat outside. I knew I would miss it most only after I could no longer return to it.
Rolling to a stop, the cabbie cleared his throat and asked whether this was the place, pointing his chin at the two-storey brick house. We both replied da at the same time.
My mother paid the man, struggled with the sliding door, and staggered out. Once he’d driven away, I peeled off my Oxfords, which had been digging into my heels.
“Compose yourself, Katerina,” my mother said with contempt. She stumbled over to the green metal gate on the cobblestone path and added, “You’re drunk.” She fumbled with her keys in the dark, squinting because she hadn’t brought her reading glasses with her. Then, she belched. Instinctively, I looked down at my feet, which seemed angelically pale and far away in the woolly darkness. I was ashamed of her, ashamed of myself. The wine was wearing my body down and making my thoughts jumbled. My mother unlocked the door.
I listened to the dulled echo of her footsteps on the cobblestone path leading to the back door. In the foyer, we were greeted by a moth hitting itself against the wall, blinded by the naked lightbulb. The bowl lampshade had been tossed on the ground and was covered in a thick layer of dust.
“At least there’s lots of spiderwebs to catch them,” my mother said, giving a queer little laugh. The comment had been meant for her, an inside joke of sorts. Even though I clearly saw the state of the house, she wanted to swiftly exclude me from sharing this experience of deterioration. I imagined that she wanted to reclaim her privacy. She’d been depleted. She was tired of seeing my face: a younger, uglier, more muted version of hers, staring back at her, making her feel weak and old. Her loss was bigger than mine. I didn’t even grow up here, hadn’t known all these people the way she’d known them, couldn’t possibly begin to understand the pain of returning to a city where so much had changed and people vanished while she was off living her North-American dream. And now all that was left was a crumbling house of mildew.
My mother went upstairs, while I checked on my moths in the kitchen. The sticky traps had attracted new ones. I turned my phone’s flashlight on to examine them more closely. I counted and re-counted them: twenty-three on this strip. Lovely. A few of them flapped their wings wildly, but their eyelash-thin legs were stuck to the poisonous adhesive. I observed the larva I’d manually placed in the corner of the strip before going out. It was still alive and writhed in a sightless attempt to choose life. Stupid slime baby. I felt a strange mixture of disgust and care. I liked watching the antennae flickering, imagining them sensing the rhythm of my breath on their bodies like a summer breeze. I liked how they left behind powdery brown spots from their tissue-thin wings. I wanted them dead. I wished death upon every last moth survivor clinging to the ceiling, out of reach. My mouth was like cotton. I threw up in the sink.
In the early morning, the house still in darkness, I dreamed that my soul, a luminous and faceless body, floated through the ceiling of the bedroom and rose to join the sun. Years ago, when I slept here as a child during the endless summers, I felt the house stretch back to life and move: her floorboards creaked, a doorknob turned gently, Babet’s faint footsteps disappeared down the staircase. I would listen for these signs, always in between sleep and wakefulness, the bedsheets clinging to my damp skin. Down below, soon enough, there would be the clang of plates and silverware, so distant that I could never really hear it, but still knew. A sense of calm would run over me, a rhythm I knew like a pulse. As the crackling of life crept up to the second floor, I would be pulled back to an electric static nothing, a sense of temporary relief. Babet would wake me up soon, but not just yet.
Now I slept alone in her old room while my mother was next door, in her childhood bedroom. The kid that I had once been—drawing on the walls and collecting snails from the garden—had shrunk; she lived inside me on a makeshift raft. I listened to the constant whir of the fan. Everything in the room was heavy with death.
Back in this house, my shame scraped its way out of the deep tunnel it had dug over the past two years. I hadn’t come for the funeral. I’d made a list of excuses to stay back: the pandemic, my university classes, the need to housesit for my mother. It was as if I had decided that Babet, my baba, had never existed, that she was a person I’d invented as a child. I could not rid myself of the shame. Babet had slipped and fallen on the bathroom floor, toothless, laughing, unable to get up, and the house had caved in around her, disintegrating thousands of kilometers away from me, while I agonized over finishing my university degree, caught up in page counts and comma placements. I felt ashamed of my mother who hadn’t seemed to love Babet hard enough to drop everything back home—her job, her savings, her routine—and return here to care for her.
Moths flew into my face when I opened kitchen drawers. A colony of ants crawled under the tub. Dust-coated stained antique furniture, Christian knick-knacks, containers of Tiger Balm, expired medications, crumpled prescription slips, piles and piles of random shit in every corner and on every shelf. Family pictures hung lopsided on the yellow walls (everyone in those pictures now dead, except for my mother and me), the windows covered in Styrofoam, Babet’s last washed dishes stored on the rusty rack beside the sink, a wilted bouquet of hydrangeas in a vase where the water had evaporated, opened boxes of biscuits and crackers in the buffet, cans of soup and lentils in the cabinets, grease marks on the counter-tops, Babet’s glasses on the coffee table, ready to be picked up and worn. No one had cleaned up anything in the aftermath.
My head pounded and the room twirled. I needed an Advil for my hangover. My feet were crisscrossed under the fleece blanket. This was how my Babet had slept, mummified on her back, the covers lifted all the way up to her chin and her feet sticking up at the end. I got up, opened the blinds, and recoiled from the morning’s brightness. The window was half-open, and down below, on the street, a middle-aged man in a mustard orange dress shirt stood smoking a cigarette in front of our gate, a bouquet of flowers in his hand. I instinctively felt self-conscious, as if he would notice that my face was unwashed through the second floor window. My shower routine required me to go down two flights of stairs to turn on the boiler in the cellar, then go back upstairs, turn on the hot water, place my glasses on the sink to avoid the fogging, but also to avoid seeing the ants crawling along unbothered in their military line. A careful maneuver out of my flip flops, a tight clutch of the tub ledge as I climbed in, standing, and then pulling the spout diverter, the water dripping onto my scalp and trickling down the rest of me. Nothing luxurious, just a bar of rose soap scrubbed aggressively against my bush to create lather and efficiently spread over the rest of my body. I was in and out in five minutes, about as much as the boiler would allow. I put my bathrobe on, drew tits on the fogged up mirror, and brushed my teeth and tongue until the latter bled just a tiny bit. That was how minty I wanted to taste. I popped the last Advil we had in the cabinet.
When I came out of the bathroom, I saw my mother standing in front of the mirror in the hallway, blotting bronzer on her cheeks. She was dressed in a long mauve chiffon dress that flared out at the calves. I noticed she’d even painted her nails.
The buzzer rang. She shooed me out of her way and disappeared into her room. From behind the half-closed door I heard her swear.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Your godmother’s cousin,” she said, passing me.
I followed her down the stairs like a dog, turning into the kitchen to eavesdrop. Since the stone foundation of the house was quite thick, the first floor sat higher than the street, so one could easily stand above the heads of passersby. I avoided getting too close to the window, though, for fear of being seen. My mother released a singsong greeting. The other voice was masculine, smooth, slow to respond, but then bursting with affection.
“Mara, Mara, Mara! Our sweet Mara!” It was the man with the orange dress shirt and the bouquet.
“Sasho! Sasho! How long has it been? Too long,” she said, sounding like an entirely different person.
“Too long, Mara,” he echoed. “Please, come in.”
When I came downstairs dressed several minutes later, they were seated on the verandah. She’d evidently made an effort to tidy up. Last night’s cluster of snack plates had been cleared. The room smelled faintly of a pear vanilla aerosol. A glass vase containing the fresh bouquet of flowers sat on the coffee table.
Sasho was taller than he’d appeared through the window; he sat twisted on one end of the bench on the verandah. My mother was seated in one of the white plastic chairs in front of the railing. She glowed dewy with pink cheeks, lifting her arms to welcome my appearance.
“Here she is, finally! Isn’t she beautiful?”
Sasho turned his head and lit up, revealing a mouth of crowded and stained teeth.
“Krasavitsa,” he said.
We hugged and performed a customary cheek peck. He smelled like cigarettes and a heavy, musky cologne.
“The two of you are just like sisters,” he said.
My mother and Sasho jointly marveled over the fact that the last (and only) time he’d seen me was during my christening, when I’d been an angry choleric baby, dressed in a doll-sized red dress with white polka-dots (and a little matching hat, my mother added). They released a torrent of laughter, and I sat there, taxidermy stiff.
“We have coffee. We have beer. We have food. Please eat!” my mother commanded, pointing to the plate of kashkaval cheese and slices of dry-cured salami on the table. Stuck on one of the slices of moistening cheese was a short brown hair, vaguely pubic in curvature. I lifted the slice and picked off the hair.
In the hour of talking, my mother made two things clear to Sasho. The first was that she was divorced, and what a pleasure it was to exterminate the male presence from her home, how serene it was to no longer hear him breathing, how beautiful it was to never again see his infinite clutter, although she admitted that she’d now resorted to paying her neighbour’s son to shovel the driveway in the winter. If that was the price of freedom, she was willing to pay it! Then Sasho shared that he’d also recently divorced. One day, taking a stroll on his lunch break, he’d caught his ex-wife Radka scratching another man’s neck at a café. In the end, he’d always known he was too cerebral for her.
The second thing my mother made clear was that she believed Macedonians were just rural Bulgarians, and that there was no real ethnic difference. So why did they insist on making such a fuss over some minor linguistic and geographical variances, hadn’t they learned from the historical curse of nationalism, hadn’t they already suffered enough after the fall of Yugoslavia? In support, Sasho lamented that the propaganda was just as bad as it had been during communism, and that Macedonian politicians were even more corrupt now. They’d manipulated their people by erasing our shared history from textbooks, the truth had always been that, at least historically speaking, Macedonians were indeed Bulgarians, and their language was just a Bulgarian dialect.
My mother and Sasho didn’t bring up Elena, beyond a passing “may she rest in peace.” My mother also avoided elaborating on our mission to clean out my grandmother’s house and sell it. There was no mention of the chaos of taking time off and being on unpaid leave, anguishing over our dwindling finances and my inability to find work. Miseries were carefully curated for her audience.
“What are you studying?” Sasho asked.
Instinctively, the child in me waited a few seconds expecting my mother to answer for me, but I noticed that she was no longer seated at the table.
“English literature, but I graduated,” I said. “Literature… Not art? Your mother was a great artist. Her and Elena. They were the best. Does she still paint?”
“Sometimes.”
In truth, my mother hardly ever had the time or the energy to paint anymore. After work, she would reheat leftovers for dinner, and watch the weather channel until bedtime. He reached out his hand and pulled a leaf out of my hair. I was stunned by the intimacy of the gesture.
He placed the same hand on my armrest. “Are you an artist like her?”
I craned my neck to fish out my mother’s silhouette in the living room, but she wasn’t there.
“I write more than I paint,” I said.
“A novel? Will you be the next Hristo Botev? Or Joyce?”
Embarrassed, I cracked open one of the beers on the table. “Nothing like that.”
“Your mother also used to write a lot, ama mnogo. That was the first thing I noticed about her. She carried around a fat—a very fat—notebook.” He demonstrated the thickness with his fingers. “She took notes on us. Did she ever tell you about the summer we all met?”
I shook my head. Here I was, at the age of twenty-three, having lived all of these years at my mother’s side, and I had never heard about her writing, even from my father. At home, the only time my mother held a pen was to write grocery lists, file taxes, or calculate expenses. I imagined how much this stranger knew about my mother from a period of time that preceded my existence. My mother appeared with a plate of thickly-sliced sujuk.
“Mara, tell her about the summer we met,” Sasho said.
My mother laughed. “Why would we talk about something that happened a thousand years ago?”
As she said this, she didn’t look at me. Her eyes were set on Sasho. Some brief recognition flashed between them, something complicit tinged with yearning that wasn’t meant for me, and which was promptly eclipsed by the blare of a nearby car horn.
Sasho drove us to the art gallery in his old Mercedes, the windows rolled up to protect us from catching a cold from the breeze. Elena’s posthumous exhibition was called Тишина—Silence. The art gallery was on the third floor of a traditional Bulgarian house. The upper levels of the house were wider than the first so that it resembled a wooden mushroom. We rose with the heat up the narrow stairs. There were red folk dresses displayed on the walls and wagon wheel chandeliers hanging from the low wood beam ceilings.
The exhibition itself was a small affair. There was the three of us, Elena’s thirty-year-old son, delicate and thin-boned Biser, whom my mother snatched up in an embrace, a few tourists who spoke in hushed Japanese, and one elderly Czech couple flipping through the pages of their tour book. I was in the company of odd mourners and self-motivated globe-trotters who left me alone in my private observation of Elena’s brushstrokes.
The central room broke off into multiple smaller rooms displaying paintings from different periods of Elena’s life. The first room was the year 1987. The four walls were covered in book-sized square canvas paintings, all washed with a coat of radiant yellow. In each square, there was a naked back of a person. The paintings exposed intimate details—moles, scars, hair, ear shapes, spines, postures—without revealing their faces. In the next room, stuffier and smaller, there was Elena’s most recent period, the months leading up to her suicide. Two paintings faced each other on opposite walls like interlocutors. In one, a pale woman kneeled on the ground and sobbed, loosely draped in rags, and her white breast exposed by a tear in the fabric. She held up her clasped hands to three angels with their backs turned and their wings spread horizontally in flight, all painted in blood reds and deep purples. The background was a purgatory of contorted centaurs, human hybrids, dismembered limbs, and shrieking decapitated heads engulfed by flames. In each corner of the painting, there was a scythe. It was titled Mary Magdalene. On the right, there was a self-portrait, untitled. The woman was the same as the one in Mary Magdalene. In a white gown, she sat on a bed by a crooked window. Outside, it snowed on a forest. The woman’s hands formed a bowl in her lap and her eyes looked directly outside of the painting, at me. Under the painting, there was a brief description, written in Bulgarian. I struggled to read and translate the words: Elena Simeonova Dimitrova did not write about her work in her last year. Acquired from her home studio, these paintings represent the last body of work she completed before her death.
I tried hard to see the woman in the paintings and pull a thread between her and the only image that lived in my head: that of my godmother holding my infant body over a brass bowl at my christening. This image was so innate, so solid in my visual memory, that it felt like I actually remembered the day of my christening. I could not draw the link between the red-haired woman in that photo—vibrant and beaming—and the shrunken, begging figure of these paintings.
Back in the first room, I discovered my mother standing in front of a painting of a young woman turned towards the sun, looking down, shoulders exposed, hair up and wisps curling at the nape. As I stood next to her, I realized that she was weeping silently. Feeling the shadow of my presence, she turned her head to the left and wiped her face.
“That’s me,” my mother said. “The girl in the painting is me.”
I hugged her, awkwardly, but she stiffened at my contact so I released her. Sasho walked up to us. He smiled at the painting. Before he could announce it himself, I turned to him and said, “This is my mama.”
When we returned to the house, weariness settled in my body. I floated through the foyer and dining room with heavy eyelids. Back in Babet’s bedroom, I opened the bottom dresser drawer to look for a blanket. Underneath the folded blankets and pillowcases, I felt something hard and hollow. It was Lalka, the old doll I used to play with during bath time. Lalka had first belonged to my mother, but she had gifted her to me during one of our early visits to Bulgaria. Lalka had an opening in her mouth and in between her legs so she could take in water from the top and then pee it out. When I was younger, I was preoccupied with squeezing Lalka so that the contents of her swollen abdomen would trickle into my mouth. Now my heart tightened as I looked at her, forgotten under layers of blankets, waiting for my return all these years.
I brought Lalka to show my mother, who was in her bedroom. I found her squatting like a child on the floor, piles of journals and notebooks at her feet.
“Ela tuk,” she said. “Look.”
My mother picked up one of the journals and rifled through the pages with her thumb. Distantly, she said, “These are all mine, can you imagine?” Всички те са мои, представяш ли си?
The writing was in crowded Cyrillic blocks which blended into a sort of cuneiform from far away. I asked whether I could read them, convinced she would say no.
“Read all you want. Otherwise, they’re going to fly into the trash.” Her eyes drifted to Lalka in my hand. “But, I want her back.”
I felt the borders of our closeness expand. We exchanged our objects: she received Lalka and I collected each and every journal and notebook on the floor, balancing the Babylonian tower of my mother’s thoughts.
Back inside my room, I realized I would need to learn to read Bulgarian better. I read each sentence haltingly, the voice in my head inflecting the wrong syllables. One day, when my mother and father were gone, I would not have anyone left to speak to in Bulgarian. This thought flattened me and I closed my eyes, rested my head on Babet’s bed. I drifted off to sleep clutching a notebook. When I woke, it was dusk. I heard my mother setting the table downstairs, the clang of dropped silverware. A tender creature nuzzled up inside me, glowing and warm. I walked downstairs.
Photo by Ann Ann from Unsplash.
Read more