The-Short-Story

von Stoyan Valev (Copyright)

Translated from Bulgarian by: Nevena Pascaleva

It was a first time he came upon his father listening to the radio in daytime. He usually did it at night, selecting some special stations.
The speaker from radio Sofia was listing countries. Their troops were marching into Czechoslovakia.
Confused, he surveyed his father. The latter was pale and scared. The boy closed the door behind him, after the message was over and then he didn’t dare move.
‘What happened, dad?’ he asked, clutching at the bag where he carried the bread with his hands.
His father hesitated, but still, he gave the answer:
‘It’s hard to explain, my boy, you are too young…’ he was silent for a moment, then he asked: ‘What if both you and me decide now to bring the radio to the next room – can we do this?’
‘Yeah’ the boy nodded – a piece of cake – they take the radio and move it.
‘And after we move it, suddenly certain people come in and force us to take it back to its old place.’ The father went on, watching him with fervent curiosity.
‘How ever come?’ the boy was astounded and exclaimed outraged: ‘But this is our radio! And this is our house!’
‘Yeah…’ the father sighed ‘The Czechs decided to change something in their country which is in a sense their house and a number of other countries, including our own, decided to go in their way. Do you understand now what happened?’
‘But why?’ the boy asked, loosing the grip around the bag, dropping it on the ground, letting the white round bread tumble down on the floor and settle itself near the cat, which craned her neck and started sniffing it.
‘When you grow up, you’ll come to understand’ his father heaved another sigh, raised from the chair and walked out, for the first time forgetting to scold him about the disrespect of food.
In a minute the boy heard the blows of the ax: he already knew that when his father is extremely agitated, he was chopping wood. In such moments he would choose the broadest stumps and would hit as hard as he could… the neighbors would give each other a wink and throw some remarks on hearing the noise:
‘Costa is angry, he’s chopping!’
In the evenings, the boy peeped into the room, where the men, all of them sitting around the old radio, began listening to the special broadcasts. The most clearly heard were the cracks that were followed by oaths and curses. They had reacted to the interception, he understood later.
Everything in their house got so confused, that he was even allowed standing in the room and listening!
They were arguing.
Furiously, madly.
Even though they had done this before, the boy was already aware that you should be silent outside and speak freely only between these four walls. Now, it was somehow different. His father was constantly repeating, his sweat dripping down his face, red with strain and anger:
‘They’ll crush them! The same as in 1956! Just like in Hungary!…’
‘God! God help the Czechs!’ the priest Sava whispered, crossing himself.
‘Who’s that God? If there was any God, would all this madness be allowed in the world?’ his father hissed and sipped at his glass of rakia.
‘Don’t be blasphemous, Costa! God defends the weak!’ the priest gesticulated, reprimanding.
‘Blah-blah-blah!’ his father could not be hushed ‘They’ll crush the Chechs as a mad cow crushes her calf.’
‘America won’t let that happen!’ his uncle demanded, and his father gave a shout:
‘Now will you stop blabbering! We are just a medium of exchange! Churchill sold us to Stalin after the war for ever after!’ and angrily, he asked: ‘Your America, where was your America in 1956, in Hungary?’
’Strong are they, stro-o-ong!’ cried out Toncho, the neighbor.
’They are not strong, we are weak –in our minds’ priest Sava uttered accusingly.
‘They’ll crush them with their tanks!’ his father said over and over again.
The boy’s lids were heavy with sleep; often their voices came to him as if in a dream, he could hear them from far away.
One night, curling in his bed next to the wall, he saw it in his sleep: the tank was approaching powerfully, reaching him; and the boy held out both hands to stop it, but it was coming and… he screamed with terror.
His mother burst in from the next room.
But the tank emerged again, coming towards him and the red pentacle, cut out on its top, was burning like a flame. All night long the boy was tossing in his bed and when he opened his eyes, he felt his body, to see if it is still intact…
During the day, his mother prayed before the icon of Virgin Mary and his father, sitting with his inevitable glass of rakia and tomato appetizer, threw out:
‘Stop this nonsense! There is no God for such people as us!’
‘Don’t be blasphemous, Costa!’ priest Sava uttered upon coming, nodding to the mother ‘Pray, Catherina, pray, child! He sees all!’
And it was dreadful. Through the half-opened door the boy could hear the fervent, broken whisper of his mother. Even his father fell silent. But only for a while, because he couldn’t stand it and then he asked mockingly:
‘And wha’s your prayer about, I wonder?’
‘About the Czechs’ answered his mother meekly.
The boy got used to imagine the Czechs as some timorous and fragile people who stand in their houses and the tanks, just like in the movies, streaming from all sides, crush them. In his mind, apocalyptic, horrible pictures were born.
‘Daddy, are the children being crushed by the tanks?’ asked the boy one evening. Petrified, everyone looked at him. His mother took him in her embrace. In the darkness, sounded the father’s voice, hoarse with emotions and unrestrained cruelty:
‘They do, my boy! They crush children, too!’
A bomb of discontent exploded in the room; murmur went around and above all raised the voice of the mother:
‘Costa, you’re going too far! You’re scaring the child!’ she shouted, caressing the boy’s short cut hair with her trembling hand.
‘So, what? You want me to tell lies, s’that what you want, eh?’ his father snapped.
‘You’r-r-right… ‘Toncho the neighbor stammered ‘But, still… it’s not that… we shouldn’t… what’s their fault in the end…‘
‘He should know wha’s ahead of him!’ the father said curtly and severely.
His mother took him out of the room, made his bed for him and lay next to him.
‘Mum, it’ scary!’ the boy whispered.
The mother shivered with helplessness.
‘Sleep, don’t give ear to your father, he’s talking his arm off that’s all… ‘she managed to utter and then asked tenderly: ‘Do you want to tell you a tale, eh?’
‘No…’ the boy answered. And he understood it was the end of fairytales, that it was impossible to believe in that fantasy stuff about the good spirits and people who do noble deeds. ‘In the tales, the good ones always win. So, in life it is the opposite, isn’t it?’ he asked his mother and she caressed his hair and pressed her lips to his forehead.
‘It’s often like that, my boy, and it shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t be!’
The moonlight was pouring a soft shining over the room, a quiet breeze was rocking the apple’s branches and they were knocking gently on the window pane. It was so beautiful and frightful at the same time. The terror was springing out like a fountain from everywhere around him . . . and the boy heard again the rumble of tanks, advancing.
‘Why doesn’t God help the good guys, mum?’
His mother sobbed in despair:
‘I keep myself asking the same thing, my boy . . . and there is no answer, but I believe that the good ones win after all…’
‘Yes, but daddy says the good are being killed, mum! ‘Cause the Czechs were the good ones and they were chased by tanks…’
‘Don’t listen to your father; he doesn’t believe what he’s saying!’
They fell silent.
Squeezed in his mother’s embrace, the boy drifted off – and the tanks were there again. But, look, a miracle! They passed through houses, through people’s bodies and went away. And then… then the houses were built again, people raised… and there was no blood and no destruction. Because the good won.
In the morning, he ran to the kitchen, bare-footed and told his mother his dream. She smiled, as she stood at the stove and brushed a strand off her forehead.
‘That’s right, my boy. The good might often be weak, but in the end, they turn out to be right. Even when they are killed, even when they are tortured…‘
‘Don’t you fill the child’s head with nonsense!’ came the voice of his father behind the kitchen sink. He was shaving; one half of his face was lathered when he appeared with a razor in his hand.
‘Don’t you scare him! I’m forbidding you!’ his mother flared up.
‘I want him to know the truth!’ his father said sharply and went to the sink again.
From all people who came to listen, bending their heads to the radio, he liked best uncle Pancho. He used to exclaim, enraptured:
‘The end of the yoke is close! The Czechs might be crushed, but the world will know! The world opinion will be raised and the executioners will be branded!’
‘The world gives not a dime for the Czechs!’ his father broke in sharply.
‘God sees!’ the priest Sava persistently reminded.
‘Your God seems to choose what to see, father!’ his father said spitefully.
‘The world is different now!’ Pancho uttered with inspiration, as if reciting a poem. ‘This is the beginning of the end! Mark my word! They will be mopped up by history!’
‘Amen!’ priest Sava exclaimed and lifted his glass, giving his father a wink. Why did he do that?
He understood when one evening Pancho left earlier. His father uttered through his teeth:
‘Dirty informer!’
‘What is an ‘informer’, daddy?’ the boy asked immediately.
The faces of everyone in the room fell. The first to react was priest Sava. He stretched out his hand and caressed his thin small neck:
‘A sinner, son, that’s what ‘an informer’ means!’
His father was silent, and was looking down, but suddenly he burst out:
‘I’m ashamed of the kid!’
‘Well… you might tell him… you know, not to come and…’ stammered, as always, Toncho the neighbor.
‘Leave him be!’ said his father and ordered firmly to his son ‘And you go to bed now!’
The boy obediently left the room and his mother followed.
The huddled together in the bed and she explained to him for a long time that there were such weak people that listen to what the other would say and make notes.
‘Pancho is not a bad man, he’s been forced…’
He did not understand her completely, but he believed her.

After the Change his father returned shocked when he read his file and he stood for a long time in the room, smoking, near the old radio that they sill kept there. It was not listened to for long, near it a new stereo has taken proudly its place, but they kept it – as a monument, or as a memory – they didn’t know… At last the old man reached out for his son, who moved his eyes away from the computer and saw his father speaking excitedly:
‘Pancho was really an agent of national security but he had been having them on… he wrote about me that I am… let me remember the exact words! Ah, here it is: ‘completely devoted to the communist ideas’ The damned Pancho! I hated him so and despised him so…’
His mother dropped his knitting and clapped her hands:
‘Didn’t I tell you the good people are those who decide our destiny!’ she put down her glasses and wiped her tears.
He was watching the two old people, smiling slightly: it had started all over again.
‘Blah-blah!’ his father burst out ‘If you only knew what informers we had!’
‘They must have been weak…’ the old woman shook her head stubbornly, just like she did in all those years and stole a glance towards the icon of Virgin Mary, as f searching for some support from her again. ‘God, he knows his work!’
‘You and your God! Why don’t you quit it!’ the father wheezed and started coughing.
The priest Sava had long ago moved to another world where there were no tanks chasing helpless Czechs and he couldn’t enter, as before, and say: ‘Don’t be blasphemous, Costa!’ to turn to his mother and bless her: ‘And you pray, Catherina, just keep praying! God helps all – Czechs, Bulgarians even the miserable Russians because they are only a passing weapon in the hands of Satan.’
The village had vanished. There were only a hundred of old people left. And though it looked seclude, as it had been once, life was boiling in it, because now he heard astounded his father’s voice:
’You could be right, you could…’ and, immediately after, the shrewish remark: ‘But not that much, because just like in 1968 when the West did not help the Czechs, we are perishing now in a new slavery, of our own kind!’
‘God!..’ started the mother.
The son, the former boy stood up and silently walked out of the room.
He had already learned life’s alphabet from those very people and it all had started in the summer months of that prominent 1968, when several Bulgarians in a godforsaken village tried feverishly to work out the hypocrisy and magnitude of history.
And they led, at those times, as well as nowadays, though humble, still a life worth of remembrance.