Mihaela Ilieva
Three short stories translated from the Bulgarian by Danila Raycheva
An X-Ray of Freedom
Many things crossed Toma’s mind when he first opened the box and saw the stack of paper envelopes carefully tied with hemp string. A secret will, sketches of an old estate, letters from some illegitimate son of his grandfather. The latter was quite possible, as Toma had recently found out about his grandfather’s many mistresses. Being a member of the Communist Party, he had provided them with cars, dresses, or apartments while Toma’s grandmother stored up pain and bitterness in her chest so as to feed them to her sickness later.
Toma had been close to the old man—being his namesake, he’d spent his childhood never leaving his grandfather’s side, but at that moment, he once again felt as if he had never known him at all. He vividly remembered the day his grandfather taught him to walk barefoot on the hot flagstones in the courtyard as well as the day of his funeral, when Toma’s lips curled into an unexpected smile, which he could hardly suppress, leaving the others present and especially himself filled with embarrassment. Toma wished the ground would open up and swallow him along with the old man.
He realized the fact that a small slice of his life had overlapped with that of the old Toma, which had given him the deceptive feeling of knowing him. He was even more afraid to open the envelopes, and when he finally did, their contents puzzled him and proved to him that he really knew nothing about his grandfather. X-ray images. That was something he hadn’t even thought of. Perhaps this was one of the old man’s jokes. He must have decided to play posthumous pranks. As if his savings book wasn’t enough of a joke—Toma received his share of the money only after he came of age. Back in the day, the amount may have been enough to buy an apartment, but now Toma barely managed to get himself a new mobile phone. Which is why, years later, when he found the map drawn on the back of that same savings book, Toma figured that his grandfather was quite a thoughtful man—he must have buried gold somewhere, and gold does not depreciate over time. So he dug out this treasure, only to be disappointed.
X-ray images. What was the big secret that had made his grandfather bury them at the edge of the city instead of just leaving them to him? And what kind of an inheritance was this? On top of that, the images were clumsily cut in the shape of a circle, and each had a hole in the middle, as if burnt with a cigarette.
He began to arrange them on the floor. Hundreds of images. If they all belonged to the same person, he must have died of radiation sickness. Could they have been his grandpa’s? Or perhaps they belonged to his whole family? An X-ray photo album . . .
When he pulled out the last one, a tiny piece of paper fluttered his nose. The note, which could unravel the mystery.
In the 1960s his grandfather held a leadership position in the Komsomol and was in charge of confiscating pirated copies of Western music vinyl records. The records were made in the USSR out of X-ray images, and the music was recorded from albums that were imported illegally from Hungary and East Germany. There weren’t many X-ray records in Bulgaria, but some still managed to find their way in, one way or another. His grandfather was tempted to listen to them. He felt like a warden who had befriended a prisoner. In the music recorded over bones, however, he discovered a whole new life that, until then, had been hidden from him. At this moment, he had realized that he himself was the actual prisoner. He cut up some normal X-rays, handed them over for destruction and kept the illegal records.
He didn’t know if, after all these years, when his grandson received them, they would still be playable. Generally, they were of very poor quality, some could not be listened to more than three or four times. His grandfather had allowed himself to listen to each of them once. But if this type of music was no longer forbidden, Toma could find the original vinyl records and listen to them. He had left Toma a list, convinced that his grandson would appreciate the collection. It was unlikely that anyone in Bulgaria would own even one such record.
And here they were now, lying all over the floor. X-ray images that had preserved the illnesses and fractures of a whole generation. Hardly anyone would have thought that their X-rays would be swiped from the medical archives or dug up out of the waste containers in front of the hospital, and music would flow out of their bones. Perhaps some Little Richard song was recorded on the broken wrist of the local Party secretary. Or a wild Chuck Berry guitar riff would sound from the dislocated collarbone of some kolkhoznik’s wife?
Toma opened Spotify on his phone and looked up the songs from his grandfather’s list. The names of the performers were written in Russian, whereas the titles of the songs were in English.
Литл Ричард—Tutti Frutti
Билл Хейли—Shake, Rattle and Roll
Чак Берри—Johnny B. Good
Элвис Пресли—Blue Suede Shoes
Бадди Холли—Blue Days, Black Nights . . .
With the hundreds of arms, legs, ribs, and skulls in front of him, forming the X-ray of freedom, Toma made himself a playlist and started listening to the tracks.
An X-Ray of Freedom. That sounds like a pretty good name for a playlist, he thought, while that same smile curled up his lips once more.
Matryoshka, Or a Chandelier of a Modern Bulgarian Woman
I am listening to Maria’s voice on the phone, but I can no longer hear anything. Instead, I can see an image that inexplicably, but very vividly, appears in my mind. A matryoshka doll. I reach for it and open up the first doll, and another one comes out. I open the second one, and a third one emerges . . .
But perhaps I should start over. Who am I? I’m a badante. That’s right, just like the ones who look after sick, old people in Italy. We look them right in the eye while changing their adult diapers.
Old people’s eyes are our mirrors; we look at our sorrow in them. Or we look after it—every day we water it with tears so salty, as though we had filled our gaze with water not from the Mediterranean but from the Dead Sea. And when the grief grows big enough—Basta! We pack our bags and Arrivederci, Italia!
There are some lucky ones, too. On her first visit to Italy, a woman bought a lottery ticket at the gas station, rubbed it with her fingernail until the sum of thirty thousand euros appeared under the gray shavings, then she paid the driver to take her back to Bulgaria on his next return trip.
The things I have seen and heard in this crowded minibus, from the north-westernmost point of Bulgaria to the south-easternmost one in Italy, right at the tip of the boot’s heel. Being stepped on with a heel hurts the most. Don’t be fooled by the elegant look of the Italian boot—its heel is very sharp. To be a badante here requires strength and endurance. The word badante comes from the verb “care,” but I associate it precisely with the meaning of dante—durable. And sometimes being a badante is quite infernal, in a very Dantesque kind of way.
Living here is miserable. Recently, a woman from Lecce was killed by the person she was taking care of. While another saved two old people from a fire in their house, only to end up dead herself. Some badantes beat the people they take care of. When they start playin’ dumb, a badante once told me, give’em a slap and they’ll understand you. All of this stems from poverty and misery. Misery. All kinds of stories.
Here, at the endmost point of Italy, two seas merge. We, however, the care- givers and the care receivers cannot connect. We cannot merge because we are too similar—they are parents, abandoned by their children, while we have abandoned our children as well as our parents. We all watch each other’s pain, together we look at them and we look after them.
All kinds of women become badantes—engineers, doctors, accountants, teachers. Well, some come with other goals—to get a hold of someone’s property. Galina, for example, who lives across the street, married the son of the person she was looking after. And she became Donna Lina. Not Galina, which means hen in Italian. Donna Lina no longer works, her husband supports her. Now she washes her hair only at the hairdresser’s salon. She also bought a scooter, which she drives to the neighboring town to do some shopping, then she goes to the beach in the neighboring village where no one knows that she is not Italian. She is ashamed that she was once a badante. Not that there is anything shameful about it, it’s actually a very crucial job. And we are not just caretakers either. Cooks, cleaners, nurses, listeners of the same stories—we are a bit of everything. We are Italy’s secret healthcare system, and the money we send home makes us Bulgaria’s largest foreign investor. Over there, we are vague human outlines; over here, we are dark shadows.
There is one thing, however, all of us badantes have in common. If you see a photo of a prom, of a wedding or a birthday party, of a baptism or a funeral, as some have their photos taken even at funerals, we are right there, in the front—missing. In every family photo, there is an empty seat in the front, left for a badante, who at that moment is preparing someone’s lunch.
Back to Maria and the matryoshka doll, though. Maria does the same thing I do but in Bulgaria—she looks after someone else’s parent: my mother. Maria’s mother is being looked after by another woman, and Maria called to tell me that she wanted a pay raise because the woman who was looking after her mother had also hired someone to look after her mother. Absence comes at a high price.
I open my pain, only now Maria’s appears; I remove hers too, someone else’s emerges, and so on.
Basta!
The Sea
At his Holy Baptism, during the third immersion in the font, the priest dropped Miklosh, and he almost drowned. He was an infant then, so he surely didn’t remember, but they used to tell him this story so many times that it lodged itself in his mind and shaped his first conscious memory. This was how his immense fear of water was born.
When he turned five, his father tried to teach him how to swim. He took Miklosh to the shore, grabbed him under his arms, and while swinging him, said: Whenever you’re afraid of something, face it. And then he threw him into the water. Now, this second baptism left a vivid and conscious memory in Miklosh. It was almost like the water didn’t want to let him in, so he felt it like cold glass breaking in his body. For a long time, Miklosh thought that the Danube was a sea because he had heard that seas were huge expanses of water in which people drowned.
Many years later, Miklosh watched the same river from a Bulgarian shore, but he remembered almost nothing from his life before he came to Bulgaria. He also had no memories of the days when he and his family sailed away on the boat mill down the Danube to reach this shore and settle in this village called Ostrov, or “island.” He only remembered his life here–his school years, the work in the roller mill, the wedding, and the birth of his children and grandchildren.
But his fear was still so overwhelming that when faced with water Miklosh grew smaller, turning into that trembling five-year-old boy again. In any case, however, the river was not an endless sea. And Ostrov was not an island as its name suggested, but simply the small Bulgarian village in which Miklosh spent almost his entire life. He had often wished to see the sea, but never made his way to it. However, he thought that if his fear of water was so great, then the river would not be enough for him to overcome it. So he planned to see the Black Sea. He came across a poem once saying that the sea loves only the living, washing the dead ashore.
Although it was still the same river, over the years, Miklosh felt that it became more and more unknown to him. His entire life, albeit short, cut to the time before he came to Bulgaria, remained not only unremembered but also untold. And now those same distant years started to feel like the coziest home to which he could return only through the sounds of his mother tongue. Each syllable could push out a familiar but forgotten scent, each word could have its own flavor, and all this would shape the overall picture of his memory.
He knew that even if he could remember something, he would not be able to choose the appropriate Bulgarian words to bring to light all the props buried behind the curtains of his memory, and there was no one left he could tell. His wife had long ago passed away. His children and grandchildren were scattered in different cities and countries and rarely came to visit.
That is why Miklosh was looking forward to the international regatta, which also docked at the coast of his village. He bought a case of cold beer, picked the sweetest melons and watermelons, and on his way to the coast, thought about what he might ask the Hungarians. Yet, this happened only once a year and for a short time; and Miklosh could see the annoyance in the Magyars’ eyes. He could feel he was a Bulgarian-Hungarian to them and a Hungarian-Bulgarian to his fellow villagers. No one thought of him as complete. Miklosh’s conversations with the Hungarian participants in the regatta only whetted the appetite of his memory, then the old man watched as the small boats continued on their way to the mouth of the Black Sea, and their oars seemed to stick not into the water but into his mind, from where they pulled to the surface more and more sparks of memories.
So he came up with his redemptive ritual—every morning before sunrise he would come to the shore and tell stories to the river, which spoke many languages, including his native one.
Until one morning he told it everything that had happened to him here. Then he entered the same river a second time, and the water was indeed different. The August sun peered impatiently over his shoulder as the current, warm and caressing, enveloped him. The river started telling Miklosh about his childhood as he went further and further to remember everything even better.
Many sunrises have come and gone since Miklosh’s last baptism; and the water must have loved him, because it never washed him ashore.
Mihaela Ilieva is a Bulgarian writer and professor at NBU, Sofia. Her debut book was published in 2023.
Danila Raycheva is a Bulgarian writer and translator, currently translating Mihaela Ilieva’s short story collection, An X-Ray of Freedom.