Duncan Greenlaw
Kaloyan
Every New Year’s Eve in the tenement blocks, men step onto their balconies with pistols.
They shoot at the sky, shocking the whole quadrangle alive for ten minutes or so, sometimes fifteen or twenty while they wait for the stragglers who’ve paced their drinking badly to jerk awake, buckle their belts, find their guns.
Most of the shooters prepare for the event by sitting with relatives under bright lights at tables strewn with pastries and cheese and congealing meats, re-filling their tumblers with liquor, growing steadily louder or quieter while their eyes go vague and damp and the seats of their slacks are steam-creased by the heat of their dormant bodies.
Then it starts. The scraping of the chair legs pushed back from the tables. Screen doors screeching as the bodies barge out, their thick breath ghostly on the air. Lit cigarettes flicked from the railings, fingers freed for the triggers. And behind them, the firm clicking shut of the latches by the women or children or old men who choose to stay in.
The bullets mainly clear the tops of the buildings across from them. But now and then a message goes astray between a brain and a gun-holding hand, causing the holes to appear in the walls of the towers, in the concrete undersides of the balcony floors, in the maroon and beige plastic railing covers. In ’89, a retired electrician in Block 2 shattered his own window when he spun around giddy from all the excitement, the bullet missing his sister by a hair as she sat at the sewing machine.
Kaloyan snorts at that memory as he drives home from the Black Sea coast toward his city, Sofia, with eighteen unsold Turkish carpets riding in the back of his van. He picked up thirty from the Turks at their warehouse three days ago, before leaving the city. On the coast, he’s been heaving them out with his thick white fists and unfurling them in the lobbies and regency suites of the Christmas tourists, but these eighteen have been spurned each time. Now they’re just weight over the wheels. He drives slow on the wet cold roads this morning. Mud fields both sides. Bleached grey barns. It takes eight hours to drive from the coast to the city, but he’s stretching it over two days to avoid returning before New Year’s Eve to a deflating day and night of TV and slippers and vodka and Lyudmila, her scorn and boredom, her sighs, her silence. This way he’ll skip all of that and be home tomorrow near dark, just in time for the shooting.
The problem with the electrician was a lack of composure. Understandable on a special occasion, but like most people—like Kaloyan—he drank the same way every night. The difference is that Kaloyan keeps hold of himself. Half a bottle before dinner, and that’s it. The rest after. Part of a second, sometimes. It depends on Lyudmila, on how much of her contempt he’s obliged to bleach out of himself before bed. After dinner, or during, he sleeps off and on. Most evenings, Lyudmila has nothing to say. Kaloyan has nothing to say. He watches TV. She places his food on the arm of the sofa and eats hers at the other end of the same main room at the table wedged in beside the old upright piano with their daughter, Zhenya. Sometimes Kaloyan sees or hears something he wants to share with his wife and child, or he thinks of his own thing to say, and he flaps a heavy arm in their direction. But then the thing goes away.
After tomorrow, that same paralyzed pattern will take hold, same as all his returns from the road. But at least at the start, as he pulls in to park, little Zhenya will be there, charging down the half-lit stairwell in her black buckled shoes to welcome him home, her pleated school pinafore flipping up to expose the chilled knees and the mauve-mottled goose-bumped thighs. She’ll lunge behind his back and snatch the gift he has brought back from Varna: a Lego set, elves and fairies, Disney knockoffs. Then they’ll trudge together up the five flights of stairs to their apartment as they’ve done since the elevator died. That was almost a year ago. Still noone coming to fix it. Like everything these days. Like the fire alarm. Like the ludicrous thick black spring that pokes out of the dirt in the gated playground at the centre of their tenement yard, abandoned in front of the swings and seesaw, its red plastic rocking horse torn off long ago and now kicked most nights by teenagers from one greasy patch of grass to another, or pelted with bits of cracked asphalt from the road that runs out to the school.
At lunchtime he stops halfway home in the old town of Tarnovo, parks his van by the cobbled square, drags the carpets out and drapes them over the backs of the benches. Two women walk over. Bad hips, bulging ankles. He runs his palms up and down the carpet grain to reveal the shimmering peacock greens and blues. Kostandovo carpets, he calls them. Hand-woven, he says, with the highest knot counts, in the Persian style, at the little Bulgarian factory that takes orders from Prince Charles and Mick Jagger. These women can’t tell a Kostandovo rug from his factory-made Turkish ones anyway. No one can. Well, there are some who still can, but they mostly buy from him anyway, cheaper, with the little glint in their eyes signalling that they appreciate his nerve, the necessity of it, with things as they are in this shitty little shell of a country. It’s a shell even here in this town where his namesake, Tsar Kaloyan the Roman-slayer, ruled from his liberated fortress high on the hill in twelve hundred and something, descending to rage on horseback across the plains, sword at the ready, vanquishing his foes before finally he was killed and the Turks slithered in to poison the place for a few hundred years, then fled again.
The Turks have done it forever, invading and retreating across the southern border. Zhivkov elbowed them out only ten years ago. He made enough trouble for them that they ran back to Turkey, just before the fall of the wall. But then Zhivkov was ousted, all his efforts for nothing, and they’ve crept back in. Hard to imagine these ones ever leaving again. Like Kaloyan’s carpet suppliers from Ankara, lounging flaccid all day in the back of a warehouse outside Sofia in their baggy dresses, their blackened sandals, doing nothing, drinking tea, sending their kids to help him load his van. It pains him to pay them, but what can he do? No one thinks anymore about anything.
The disgrace of the past decade pools in his chest and flanks as the women walk away. Three hours later, he has sold only one carpet, a little red-and-orange runner, to an English family. He sits in his room in his usual hotel, the half-timbered place perched on the Tarnovo cliffs with its support beams curling talon-like over the edges. He has an ashtray beside him on the smooth stone ledge and a bottle in his lap. He watches the wind in the trees on the hill opposite. When he was younger, with knees, he used to hike up that zigzagging path to the fortress on his visits to Tarnovo, climb the iron ladder to the bell tower and stand in the hard grey wind that gave him the squint and the swept-back hair of a hero.
The next morning, he gets back into his van and drives on towards home, past the gutted villages where only the old folks remain. Maybe also the odd summer student waiting tables at a restaurant, visiting relatives soon to be buried. Ancient farmers chug along ditches at the roadsides, bony bottomed on the paint-peeled metal of the tractor seats. And just outside some of these villages, grey monoliths burst out of the neglected fields: tower blocks just like his own in the city, but near-derelict now and mostly vacant, the inhabitants either dead or shipped out to Sofia for work, or more likely to Austria, Germany, Italy, France, anywhere that hasn’t gone crooked and sullen and sick.
The fields and villages yield in the end to the sprawl of Sofia. He steers through the outskirts and parks at the base of his tower. No one appears. He waits. He lugs his suitcase up the pocked concrete stairs and stands jiggling his keys in the hall outside his apartment to signal his arrival. Nothing. He lets himself in and drops into the sofa with a bottle in front of the TV, lifting his feet in their moist brown socks onto the cushion beside him.
When he wakes, the room is a few shades greyer. He’s lying on his side, one arm flopped over the cushion’s edge, the bloated hand at the end of it twitching toward the TV as if willing the knob telepathically to click away from the news. Kosovo again. Another dump like Bulgaria since the fall. Even before. The embarrassment of Yugoslavia degrading itself ever since it lost Tito, and now everything exploding. On a dirt road, the refugees trudge bedraggled out of Kosovo, identical to the ones that walked out of Bosnia five or six years ago. They carry objects that no one could possibly want: straw baskets, bundles, plastic shopping bags, battered blue suitcases with the handles ripped off.
Then Kosovo is gone. The knob is being turned and he’s watching a mattress ad, a couple kissing on the Rialto Bridge, a game show with grown men and women in tracksuits laughing and wobbling on enormous translucent inflatable armchairs, the host in a silk suit with a microphone, jabbering.
Zhenya is standing to one side of the screen looking quizzical, her hand on the knob. Her bruised bluish knees are like onion bulbs but everywhere else she’s unblemished and white: her plump cheeks, the smooth backs of her legs. Such a relief for him when she was born, he remembers, after Lyudmila, pregnant, had told him that her own grandfather had been in the Ottoman navy.
Zhenya releases the knob and approaches her father with an intense stare, scientific, as if assessing a starfish. When she blocks his view of the screen, he nudges her aside with his toe. She side-steps and continues to close in without shifting her focus. He stares back in order to gain some control over this game, but knows that his gaze is foggier than hers even when he’s sober, her brain faster, better ordered, more disciplined. She has that list on her bedroom wall, full of letters and numbers in blue and red pen: the license plates of every car she has seen in the city with the Sofia code. C 7435 BH. C 2836 PT. C 5096 EK. Her tiny zone of control in the chaos that makes muddled men shoot at their sisters. She takes a notebook whenever she leaves the apartment, and when she returns to her list, she cross-references to avoid duplications.
Kaloyan has ribbed her frequently about the list, but when he has stood at her bedroom doorway watching her intent at her desk, the left side of her mouth twitching while the rest of her features hang placid as a little Buddha, he has envied the solace it gives her and wanted that for himself, her world, her serenity, wanted it in a way that builds bewilderingly into a powerful bodily urge that prevents him from thinking about which kind of list he might make for himself, so he has shaken his head to dispel the desire and shuffled on the down the hall, knowing none of that urge can go anywhere.
There are so many inaccessible things with her. She’s not even eight years old and already divides fractions in her head, flips them into decimals, calculates how many seconds the universe has existed, how many more times distant the sun is than the moon, than Venus, than Mercury. She beats everyone at chess, even Ivan, his brother, who promised that if she beat him three times in a row he would get her the Scorpions album with the song that Kaloyan hears everywhere now, “Wind of Change,” at the markets, the bars, the pharmacies—the album with the pretentious art on the cover, the woman’s languid manicured hand inserting the key in the door that opens onto the field with the other door in it. When Ivan lost the bet and brought the album over, Kaloyan stopped him in the hallway, asked to look at it, and frisbeed the thing down the stairwell.
Wind, sure. Then everything sucked away west, and the leftover people just skulking around. No one knows where they stand. Except the children, who know without knowing, who stand straight and firm with their drum-tight bellies thrust forward like those little marble statues you see in the posh gardens, polished and proud and intact, their luminous chins aloft. They’re the future, people say—all the usual bullshit. That’s not it at all. They’re the past. Doomed now if they stay, but too innocent to remember the start of it all, when things began to go dark: the clouds drifting down from Chernobyl and bursting. People afraid to go out, to drink milk, to eat vegetables. Catastrophe, they said. They said the kids were getting sick from it. Even his sister, when her girl had the thing with the sniffles and sweats for a couple of weeks. A headache maybe. But of course she was fine. Everybody was fine. Then came ’89, the actual catastrophe, and people just accepted that one without worrying at all, the young people anyway, the university types with their whooping and drinking and pissing in the alleys, blaming Zhivkov for everything. Wanting what? The Fantastico markets. The basketball shoes.
As Zhenya steps still closer now, he begins to grasp that she has produced a piece of paper with dots drawn on it, and that she is asking him to join them with lines. She is telling him that it’s a problem from her math book. The salesman’s problem. Some such thing. The problem of the travelling salesman. The first dot is Sofia; the rest are the towns where he sells his carpets. The lines he must draw will be roads. Straight roads. He explains that the roads he drives are not straight, but that isn’t her point. He should make them straight, make the journey as short as he can. She has a ruler. She places a pencil between his fingers. The air between his eyes and the pencil goes spongy. He blinks and waves her away.
She tells him to focus. She takes his face in her little hands, his meaty cheeks, but it’s no use, there’s a halo haze around everything. He tries to summon a serious look to match hers, bringing his brows together, but his effort only makes her sigh and wobble a knee in frustration. Noises reach them from the kitchen, Lyudmila at the dishes, and as Zhenya holds her pose she blurs into no more than a flesh-coloured sweet-smelling shape at the end of his nose. In response to the fluttering pressure of her fingers fanned on his cheeks, he feels a familiar pulsing in his groin and a gush of warm power that he wants to banish but also, in spite of himself, to savor. He allows her to keep holding his face, and as their breaths mingle he feels himself hardening, wanting to pull her little body toward him and press that urgent heat against her. He doesn’t. But she lingers so long he feels sure she knows.
And if she does, won’t she share what she knows with her mother, whenever she chooses—today, tomorrow, the day after that? He looks into her hard blue patient expressionless eyes. This reminder of her capacity to betray him makes his skin twitch with anger. Abruptly he shoves her away. She falls backwards onto the rug, her head barely missing the edge of the coffee table. She cries out and looks up at him, then at her mother who has heard the thump and appeared in the hallway, still drying a fistful of forks. All the pulsing in Kaloyan rushes to his head, makes his eyeballs swell, and now what he wants most of all is to kick that little cheat who has whimpered for her Mama, to bury the heel of his brown socked foot into her belly and punish her for being so feeble on her feet. What he wants, too, is to lash out at Lyudmila, to swipe hard at her head with the back of his hand for standing there with that saintly look of disdain and condescension, as if he’s the only one here who has ever done or thought anything wrong.
“But I’ve never fucking touched her!” he wants to yell. It’s true. Never once. Not in that way. Though of course he can’t say this. He can’t ever defend himself against what his wife’s look accuses him of, because it would mean admitting to having contemplated what “that way” means. Lyudmila, meanwhile, had no trouble a few years ago defending herself, denying up and down that she’d ever fucked their friend Grozdan that winter, fucked him over and over in rage and lust and vindictiveness after she learned about Kaloyan’s affair with Svetlanka in Dobric. It’s so perverse that Lyudmila could have wanted that man, and still does, no doubt—that weakling with the knots of gristle so visible all over his half-starved body, up his arms and on his neck—after not wanting Kaloyan at all ever since Zhenya was born, refusing to touch her own husband who has now grown bleary while she has grown fat and graceless and stinks all day of the salami and cabbage and garlic she has eaten the night before, the week before, just to spite him, he’s sure.
And what about the girly look she’s begun giving his brother Ivan when he comes over? The little thrill in her eye, the spark of life and desire and danger like the one she gave Kaloyan for a few months after they first met, to draw him in, but then never again. And Ivan gleaming back at her, like a shy little boy. It’s all so pathetic. They’re walruses, both of them—pale ugly slack-bodied beasts. Ivan can have her if he wants. He can stick his tongue in her mouth, in the hot muggy gap between her breasts, between her legs, wherever. Maybe that will solve the whole problem.
He watches her now as she helps Zhenya up from the carpet. He thinks again about Grozdan, about the way she must have bent over and shoved her rump up at him all heaving and groping and sweaty those afternoons while Zhenya was at nursery school and Kaloyan out on the road making money for her. She must be dying to do this for Ivan, too. Slut cow, he thinks. He draws in his breath to turn this thought into words, but only the first syllable gets out while the other crumbles to nothing and his chin drops to his chest. He lifts his eyes to the TV, but that effort is also too much. As his eyes close, his body spins in irregular oval formations and he watches the shifting cosmos of black-orange dots and streaks and shooting stars behind his eyelids, feeling the tilting of his torso, first slow and then fast, as his shoulder sags and his head flops into the plush stuffed arm of the sofa.
He wakes again, this time to the sweat-sour smell of his nylon shirt. The TV has been turned off. The light is finally dying outside. This is it. The New Year only hours away. He thinks of the pistol lying in wait in his bedroom drawer, of the ways he will tend to it, clean it, snap the barrel open and shut, and of the fortifying throatful of burning booze that he will give to himself while performing these duties. He thinks of the new paths he will tell himself he is going to take, the bold breaking away from the bland limp days he's forced to tolerate now.
From the kitchen comes the creak of the oven door spring. Lyudmila preparing dinner for Ivan’s visit. Humming. Some shallow poppy crap. Her skin tingling with anticipation, like the skin of the Roman-slayer’s wife, who tried to screw the enemy Emperor in his prison cell in Tarnovo before Kaloyan found out, cut him up, and fed him to the dogs—that wife who, in return, betrayed Kaloyan one last time by hiring a thug to run him through with a lance. He should have fed her to the dogs as well.
How easy it would be now for Kaloyan’s breaking away to begin with an accident, a tiny lapse of control in the midst of the midnight confusion, a bullet for his brother who’d be out there on the balcony beside him. Or for his wife. Not for both, though—you couldn’t dream up an excuse for that. Then next thing he’d be gone, up and out with a bag to his van, driving calm through the city and out across the Serbian border an hour away, maybe parking to look down at the river, napping awhile on his carpets in the back, then bursting awake with vigour and purpose and plans.
Years ago he used to make them, plans like that, for a rupture, a total revision of everything, even without the business of fleeing the scene of a murder. Just fleeing, that was all. Those plans always started with a fresh new woman. She would be clean and frisky like the ones on the talk shows. She would have many supple leather handbags with golden bangles and clasps and would sit with one slender leg curled around the other all the way to the ankle while she threw her head back to laugh, exposing her teeth and tongue, and she would spend long languid moments investigating her painted nails for defects, lifting them periodically to be kissed. She would want him and feel his suppressed strength and infuse him with more of it. But these days he can’t even imagine the woman who would want to be found by him, in his sloppy spent stupefied state.
Kaloyan yanks himself upright and swigs from his bottle to clear the peach-fuzz sleep from his mouth. He’s sick of those cravings that he crushes every time by doing nothing at all, by just letting them go. That one, too. Better just to look at his magazine girls, masturbate in the bathroom, stand on tiptoe to wash himself off in the sink, and step out with that pointless desire dead and done with.
“Zhenya,” he barks. Then louder. “Zhenya!”
Nothing moves. Only the dust through a pale patch of sun by the window. They’ll rot here, the three of them. The stench will seep into the hallway. They’ll be discovered all putrid and gummy in this airless apartment, coated in a thin layer of garlic-scented dust.
Kaloyan stands, steadies himself with a hand on the TV, strides into his bedroom. He reaches up to the narrow shelf in the closet above the hangers and places his hand on the shape of the pistol wrapped in his hunting hat. He unwraps it and brings it down, closes his palm over the cool cross-hatching of the grip, feels his strength returning. There will be fireworks along with the gunshots, everything blasting at once, all that fury and hard loud light.
As if sensing the change in her father, Zhenya comes to his open bedroom door and rests a dimpled hand on the knob. He smiles down at her, calm now, confident, firm in the jaw like Gregory Peck. He hitches his pants up, tugs the undershirt down over his belly. He flips the chamber open, packs it with bullets, then pops the pistol back onto the high shelf and gives it a reassuring pat, winking at his daughter. She smiles up at this funny and kind and competent man, the one they’d both hoped he would be. A little wrinkle in her nose, eyes shining. A wave of sad, stuck joy bubbles up through his chest and neck, making his lips quiver. He swallows to send the bubble back down and it rushes to his fingers, like fear only different. The rest of his body feels empty, as if he could fill it with somebody younger, cleaner.
A deep sing-song voice calls from the hallway outside the apartment door. Zhenya spins around and runs to let Ivan in. Kaloyan watches from his bedroom doorway as Ivan lifts her off the ground, clasping her against his leather-jacketed chest a long while as her feet hang limp. Lyudmila comes coquettishly out of the tiny kitchen, curling a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She wipes her fingers on her apron and places the heels of her hands on Ivan’s shoulders, kissing him lightly twice on the cheeks. As she pulls away, they look at each other for only a moment, but it goes deep, intimate, a new seriousness, and now Kaloyan knows. Pressure builds behind his eyes and his breath won’t come. He brings his hands to his hips and grips his belt on both sides, crushing the leather, forearms straining under the shirtsleeves, but nobody notices.
On Lyudmila’s instruction, they settle at the table and dig into their steaming slices of banitsa pastry, excavating the buried treasures of tinfoil containing the New Year’s wishes that Lyudmila has copied from a magazine onto four tiny twice-folded pieces of paper:
May your heart and faith in all things guide you.
May you flourish and prosper.
May you dance in the light of laughter and song.
May joy and abundance be yours.
Then a toast to their health, and vodka shots. Ivan inquiring about Kaloyan’s journey, Kaloyan answering curtly during the first two drinks, eyes trained on the fine white lacework that droops from the table’s edges, but with the third falling silent, his sharpening gaze shifting: to his wife’s fingers clasping the spoon that she dips into the yogurt, to Ivan’s cigarette sweeping through the air above his pastry-flecked plate, to Zhenya’s feet swinging under the table beside him, the skin stretched over the knees and the round curve of the calves above the sock-tops. Ivan and Lyudmila ignore him, chatting as usual, unaware that this time he is not sinking sloppily, harmlessly into himself but seeing everything sharply, adrenalin rising in tight compressed waves of potential and power. He envisions them feeling for each other under the table, sees Lyudmila wriggling out of her slippers and inching her naked toes upward, brushing Ivan’s crotch, then, overtaken by desire, compulsively standing and bending over with hands on the piano lid, begging Ivan to take her from behind right there, Ivan dropping his pants to his knees and the two of them squelching and spluttering with little Zhenya looking on at the pale pudding of her uncle’s backside flopping up and down over the bald patches at the tops of his hairy legs.
Pulsing through Kaloyan now is the exhilaration he felt as a teenager on the Black Sea cliffs where he used to go every summer, the clashing surge as the mind committed to the jump but the body rebelled, stepping back at the last split-second, limbs drugged as they emptied of blood in a rush that was fear and joy simultaneously. He can hear it, the wallop of the waves against the rocks so real that the voices of his wife and brother are only low mumbles beneath it. He braces for the jump.
The back of his chair hits the ground as he rises. He steadies himself, two fingers nonchalant on the edge of the table as the waves in his head heave in all directions. But in the stillness of his family’s startled response he finds his focus again and strides into the bedroom to snatch the gun from the shelf.
He is out on the balcony firing before anyone else. Cracking the blackness awake. Two fierce cold blasts and the people’s faces coming to the windows in the blocks all around. Ivan barging onto the balcony behind him, then stepping to the railing and leaning over to yell something reassuring at the woman one floor below who is saying it’s not time yet, it’s still only twenty past nine. Kaloyan steps back, stares at the curled grey hairs creeping down the tendons on his brother’s neck in two parallel blade-shaped tracks. He raises his gun again and aims at the soft white gap between them. Wags the barrel a bit, playful, then lines up the sights. So much time for all this. But then Zhenya is out on the balcony yanking at Kaloyan’s belt-loops, tugging at his trousers as if to shake him awake. But he doesn’t need this, he isn’t asleep. Just the opposite. She persists, reaches up to slap at his belly, his arms, and he feels her little hands on him, her blameless faithless fingers.
His hand lashes out with the pistol in it and she’s thrown sideways. Her head hits the screen door jamb. Then everything is silent. He’s down on his knees with her head in the crook of his arm but she’s shocked and staring and there’s a white-purple dent on her temple just under the hairline. Soon Ivan and Lyudmila are down there too, wrenching her out of his arms, Lyudmila screaming. Dragon-breath on the frigid air. The door slams as they carry the girl inside. He goes blurry again, all that pride and decisiveness fading. The gun lies on its side, a discarded toy, under the folded outdoor laundry rack. He lies on his side, too, alone now on the damp concrete balcony floor where Zhenya fell, as if he is the one he has hit. Through the gap below the railing, he looks down at the tenement yard where people are shuffling around by the playground gates, the exposed rocking-horse spring gleaming blackly at their backs in the rain in a way he has not seen before. The people bend their bodies in attitudes of concern, leaning forward, sideways, crooked under their umbrellas, while Lyudmila helps Zhenya into the back of Ivan’s pale blue Lada for the ride to the hospital, exhaust steaming in the red glow of the tail lights and across the unreadable license plate lit by its dim yellow bulb.
Duncan Greenlaw’s short stories have appeared in Pangyrus, The Nashwaak Review, The South Carolina Review, Green Mountains Review, The Dalhousie Review, and elsewhere.