Excerpt from The Wolves of Staro Selo
BY ZDRAVKA EVTIMOVA TRANS. BY YANA ELLIS
‘Leave,’ Grandma Elena told my mother.
‘I’ll leave, but your son will buy cockroach poison. And take it.’
‘Entirely his business,’ snapped Grandma.
Grandma Elena’s son is my father.
Grandma Elena is like that, doesn’t like idle talk. She picked up the poker, the one she sometimes used to threaten our dog Gasho, my best friend, but which more often strolled with her at night around the cherry orchard where it brought thieves to their senses.
Would it bring my mum to her senses now?
Who’s that venomous woman dragging frost under her skirts and poisoning the melon fields? the people of Staro Selo asked about Grandma Elena. As if they didn’t know. They had decided long ago to break her. But one day around noon, shrieks and wails came from the direction of the cherry orchard – as though the whole of Staro Selo was in its death throes. It wasn’t the whole of Staro Selo turning its head towards death, just four men – enormous, big as barns, their hands and legs tied with rope (I recognised the rope; my father kept it in his tool cupboard before he left to earn money in Spain). Commotion ensued.
‘Who did this, you thieves?’ the mayor asked.
Two of them were Roma. Though bandits, they were honourable and didn’t snitch on anyone, but the Bulgarians – Pavko and Ginger Dimitar – burst out together: ‘Elena.’
She hadn’t just tied them up. She had painted them with the poker too. Purple blotches glistened on their backs. And on their foreheads – I have no idea how she had heated it so white-hot that it branded the skin.
At sunset that day Ginger Dimitar burst into our kitchen, swathed in bandages and gauze from the neck up. Only his nose persisted, glowing like a naked light bulb. Grandma Elena and I were alone. She was clinking pots in the sink.
‘Oi, loony!’ the redhead shouted, and shoved Grandma. ‘I’m gonna gut you. Tomorrow.’
‘You can try,’ Grandma Elena invited him, carrying on with the washing.
The redhead looked hither and thither, nose in the air, then left. Cleared out.
‘I’m going to buy a rope for your neck, you old hag,’ he yelled from the gate.
Every evening Grandma Elena makes me read a page from Pippi Longstocking. I don’t go to school yet and I have no reason to read, but if I don’t open the book, she won’t give me dinner.
‘Read!’ she orders, but the letters wobble their naughty heads.
They escape; I can’t get them to stick together, and because I’m so hungry that my stomach’s about to run to the larder all by itself, I start making it up: ‘Pippi was very hungry. She went to pick tomatoes from the garden together with the dog Gasho, so that Ginger Dimitar wouldn’t frighten her.’
‘There’s nothing about Ginger Dimitar in Pippi.’ Grandma Elena pulls Pippi out of my hands and bundles me into the bedroom.
‘Give me some bread, Grandma,’ I plead, but she doesn’t open the door. ‘I can’t fall asleep.’
The door stays shut.
I know I can bleat until the cows come home but no bean soup will come my way. So I say, quietly and composedly, as if I’m not about to die from hunger: ‘Grandma, please, let me read Pippi Longstocking to you.’
She opens the book on page eleven; I sit down on the chair next to her and start slowly – like a headless caterpillar – to spell out the words. They are long, weighing a hundred tons, but until I read to the very end of the chapter there’ll be no bread or cheese.
One time, much to my surprise, Grandma gave me a piece of chocolate. ‘You read very well, and you didn’t stutter,’ she said. ‘There!’
Since then, I learnt that if you want to avoid starving in a dark room and get a pudding after your bean soup, you have to speak clearly. That’s why I asked Mum the other day – very clearly, without a single stutter – ‘Are you going away forever?’
I know that forever begins behind the bakery of the twins Dida and Dona and doesn’t end, ever. Your mother packs her socks in a suitcase; you’re dropped into forever and get nothing for lunch. Your tummy hurts. Grandma Elena might even chase you away to sleep in Gasho’s kennel because you missed the opening of Dida and Dona’s shop and failed to buy bread. That means you’ll eat sand.
‘I’m leaving for good,’ said Mum. ‘Stay with your grandma. Anyway, you’ll never amount to anything but a bean picker.’
In that moment I spotted Grandma Elena grip the poker – the one with which she had tattooed the backs of Ginger Dimitar and the other bandits – and touch it to Mum’s shoulder.
‘If you say that nothing will come of this child one more time, I’ll cut out your tongue,’ Grandma said serenely, and even more serenely pulled out a knife from the sideboard drawer.
The haughty air that surrounded Mum when she walked through the town square evaporated. ‘I’m not saying anything out of order to the child,’ she declared flatly. ‘There’s nothing wrong with picking beans.’ Then she fell silent. I would’ve fallen silent in her shoes too.
Grandma lay the knife on the table.
Mum left. Suddenly I felt sorry for her. She would let me use her make-up and say: ‘What a pretty little girl you are! What a shame you’re growing up in this godforsaken place.’
‘Mum, I love you. I don’t want you to leave!’ I’d be picking beans for the rest of my life anyway. But at least if she were nearby… She was very pretty.
‘Your mother’s beautiful,’ Grandma Elena said. And whatever Grandma Elena says is true. It’s more than true – her word weighs a ton in Radomir. It was a shame that she added: ‘But she’s not a good person.’
I looked up to see what was happening to Mum, just in case she had turned into a sparrow or a banichka. I ran out onto the pavement and there it was: Mum was still a woman. Tall, blushing, she walked with her head held high as the European Union flag over the town square. The neighbouring housewives came out to their gates to watch her, as silent and still as if they’d been tied up with rope.