The Literary Review

Summer 2006

Georgi Gospodinov
Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots

They had met only a few hours before. He was in his very early thirties, she was in her late twenties. He had to give her a package to deliver to a friend of his across the ocean. She was only a go-between. It was a five-minute job, but two of the three hours left to her flight had passed, and they still couldn't find any good reason to part. Now, sixty minutes to flight time, they were standing in the corner of the café in the departure lounge, having their third coffee without saying a word. They had exhausted all the subjects that could keep a conversation going between two people who don't know each other. And the silence was becoming unseemly. The small table in front of them was piled with empty plastic cups that had acquired most unexpected shapes after long hours of being fumbled. The coffee stirrers had long been broken into the smallest possible pieces, the empty sugar bags turned into tiny cornets and little boats.
It occurred to him that he could turn this table into a ready-made object, an installation, so to speak, that he could name "An Apologia for Embarrassment" (plastic coffee cups, stirrers, empty sugar bags, a white table). Then he found it stupid, so he decided to keep silent. "What one leaves unsaid turns into broken stirrers and smashed cups," she said all of a sudden. He thought that he would never meet another woman like this one, who would be capable of reading his thoughts, with whom he would want to spent the rest of his life in this café. He was startled to have used a phrase like "the rest of his life," even silently.
"Let's talk," she said, as if they hadn't been talking non-stop for two hours.
The remaining hour was too little time to be wasted in beating around the bush and making boats. But since he wouldn't start talking, she said simply:
"We have to accept it that sometimes people just walk past each other."
"The whole irony of it is that they realize it the moment they meet," he said.
"Maybe we've met before. We've lived in the same city for so long. It's not possible that we haven't passed each other at some traffic light or other."
"I'd have noticed you," he said.
"Do you love her?" she asked.
"Do you love him?" he asked.
They quickly admitted that it made no difference and that it wasn't anybody's fault.
Later he couldn't even remember who was the one who had come up with the life-saving (or so he thought then) idea of inventing shared memories, to make up a whole life together before and after their meeting. A pathetic attempt to take revenge on merciless chance that had brought them together, only to separate them. They had fifty minutes at their disposal.
"Do you remember," he started, "our school days, when we were living on the same street? Every week I would secretly drop a tinfoil ring made of caramel candy wrapper into your mailbox."
"Oh," she said, "so you were the one with the rings. My father was always the first to find them and suspected that some crazy admirer from the neighborhood was sending wedding rings to my mother. It now turns out that they were for me."
"Yes, they were for you," he said.
"Do you remember," she started, "our last year at the university, when we went off, just the two of us, to that monastery? It was the first time we were traveling alone. There weren't any rooms available at the hotel, so they put us up in one of the monks' cells for the night. It was very cold, and the bed was so hard. I was a little scared. I crossed myself secretly after each time. I did it five times during the night.
"Six," he said. "I was scared, too. Do you remember what happened later, how you came to live with me? Your mother said that she would disown you through The Official Gazette, because she didn't want illegitimate grandchildren."
"I remember," she said. "Anyway, I couldn't have children."
At that point she fell silent. He took her hand for the first time since they had met. Very gently, comfortingly.
"It's OK," he said. "And I broke my leg once, remember? I was already forty-eight, working like crazy, and that month I spent at home seemed to me like real paradise. You took time-off, as well, you even said you'd break your arm if they didn't let you do it. And we never poked our noses out of the apartment."
"And the next year, when they found that I had that tumor…. You had read somewhere that laughter could be used as therapy against cancer, and the next two weeks you were telling me jokes non-stop, so that I'd laugh. I still don't know how you collected them all. You were so frightened and nice. I think that was when your hair turned white. And every day you would bring me peonies and forget-me-nots."
"Thank God you're better now. What would I do without you."
At that moment a voice invited all the passengers flying to New York to advance to the departure terminal. The silence lasted no more than a minute. Then she stood up and said that she had to go. He took her suitcase and they both left the café. Before going through the passport control, she turned and gave him a very long kiss. As if for the last time, he thought, although there had never been a time before.
Half an hour later he turned and walked out. He felt terribly old, he had trouble moving his legs. He deliberately closed his eyes as he walked through the mirrored-glass door, so as not to see his hair suddenly turned white and those stooped shoulders of an old man. With every step he realized more and more clearly that he could never go back home to his unattainable young wife. And he could never tell her what he had been doing these last fifty years, while he was away.

Blind Vaysha (an unfinished story)

With her left eye she could only see the past, and with the right one only what was about to happen in the future. And even though both her eyes were open, like the eyes of all seeing people, Vaysha was blind. Everybody called her Blind Vaysha. She barely left her house, and out in the yard she walked with her arms stretched before her, stumbling against the cherry tree, getting scratched all over by the blackberry bushes, and toppling down the pots in the shed. To her, the cherry tree, the blackberry bushes and the pots didn't exist, as well as the day itself. To her left eye they still hadn't come out of the earth, to the right one they had already died and turned back to earth.
When Vaysha was still a child, her mother had first noticed that strange blindness of hers. How could she know that to Vaysha's left eye the woman bent over her was a little girl taking her first steps, and to her right eye an ugly, hunched over old woman.
When Vaysha learned to speak and tried to explain in a rambling way what she was seeing, they decided that she had black magic in her eyes. Old women started visiting one after another, spitting over their shoulders, pulling at their ears and clicking their tongues.
Peony seed infusion before sunrise, daily, for forty days…
Goshawk's bile, burnt and applied still warm to the eye…
Black hen's gizzard, peel, take just the skin, the peel, and place on eyes…
Only one of the old women sat apart from the others, shaking her turtle-like head and saying nothing. Finally, after everyone else had left, she stood up and, just before walking out, said softly that none of that would help until something came along to gather her eyes together and to bring her back into the world.
Vaysha grew and grew, until she became a beautiful young woman. And the fact that her left eye was brown and her right one green only added to her beauty.
One day a young man, come to ask for her hand, stood in front of Vaysha, and when she looked at him, she saw the following:
Left: Right:
Oh,God, is that little boy with a running nose going to ask for my hand, dear child, his shirt is hanging out, his knees are skinned, I could be his mother, and they have sent him to ask for my hand in marriage, they are making fun of me, oh, God… His hands are shaking, his hair is gray, what a sin, oh, God, he smells of earth, his time has come, and he wants a wife, how could I go to bed with him, how could I look at him, oh, God…
And so the same story repeated itself with anyone who came to her. There wasn't a single one among them who could gather her eyes together.
Years went by, the beautiful Vaysha kept living with one eye on the past, the other far ahead on future days. Sometimes the borderlines of what she was seeing would get closer, almost coming together in the present. But while for the right eye the sun was rising, the left one was already seeing the moon. At other times, however, the distance between the past and the future grew longer at a wild speed, and Vaysha would mutter that her left eye was seeing the earth still deserted and unmade, darkness hanging over an abyss, with something (she couldn't find the right words to describe it) hovering over the waters. And at exactly the same time, a square city, just as wide as it was long, would appear before her right eye, the city walls decorated with various gems - the first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardonyx, and so on.
And lying in bed at night, Vaysha still couldn't give her eyes peace. Her dreams would split in two like a snake's tongue, and while, in the dream, with the one eye she chased after butterflies and the peonies were reaching her height, in the other eye's dream the peonies had already been picked and were covering her cold body, and other butterflies were chasing each other above her face.
Life became a real burden to Vaysha. There came a time when she decided to pluck out one of her eyes, just to tear it away with her fingers. OK, but which one? If she took out the left eye, she would have to live only in what was coming next, and it wasn't at all good. And with whom would she live in the coming days, whom would she know. Well, then she should take out the right one. Past days always feel cozier, safer. But how would she look at her mother and father, those small children, what would she call them, how would she live with them. There was no way out for Vaysha, neither in the past nor in the future.
This story has no ending. Because there was nothing in this world that could gather Vaysha's eyes together, so that all things would be the same both to the left and to the right eye.
And if you, the reader of this story, closing your right eye and reading it only with your left one, see no letters and no story, but just a blank page from before the story, or not even a page, but the tree from which it was made, woe to you.
And if you, upon closing your left eye and reading everything with your right one, still see no letters, because they have already vanished, and the paper has turned into white dust, woe to me. Either you read through blind Vaysha's eyes, or this story is as perishable as this piece of paper and this withering, crumbling world.

Translated from the Bulgarian by Magdalena Levy and Alexis Levitin