Come to Me (Bulgarian Literature) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Bogdan Rusev graduated from the University of Sofia in 1999 with a degree in English and American Studies. He is the author of three novels, two children’s books, and several story collections. He also has translated into Bulgarian the works of Charles Bukowski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and China Mieville. He lives in the Bulgarian village of Rouen with his wife and son.

Ekaterina Petrova is a writer and translator. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded an Iowa Arts Fellowship. She lives in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

My father says he named me the way he did because back when I was born, that was the only way to get the communist authorities to spell the word Bog, or “God,” with a capital letter.

My father, of course, says a lot of things. Like most men in my family, he lives to tell stories. According to family lore, he and my uncle spent their childhood causing constant mischief along the narrow streets of Veliko Tarnovo’s Old Town, bathed in the long afternoons’ mellow golden light, like in some socialist equivalent of an early Fellini film. But to me, these tales always seemed a little too well composed, filled with too many surprising twists, and a little too suspiciously devoid of an instructive ending in favor of an impressive punch line, for them to be true.

Take, for example, one of his favorites, which took place sometime in the ’50s: my father and his little brother decided to steal some watermelons from the back of an open truck parked in front of the old post office. My dad, undoubtedly dressed in shorts and leather sandals and already wearing glasses, climbed into the back of the truck and tried to pick out a ripe watermelon by lifting the green cannonballs one by one, pressing his ear to their warm, smooth bark, and knocking on them with his finger. My uncle, dressed in my father’s clothes from the previous year, stood behind the truck and waited for his brother to toss the ripest watermelon down. Of course, that was exactly when the truck driver appeared, climbed into the cabin without noticing them, and drove off at full speed. The truck headed down the street and toward the outskirts of the city, past the heap that was the Tsarevets Fortress (had it even been built by then?), maybe to the village of Arbanasi, beyond the dusty hills with their medieval names. Screaming in his little kid’s voice, my uncle took off running after the truck, while my father―who was older and kept his cool―started throwing watermelons at him, but “the pathetic little kid” (it’s my father telling the story, after all) failed to catch every single one, letting the ripe fruits fall and explode on the hot pavement.

Or another story from when they were a little older: one day, my dad and my uncle ran a wet comb through their hair, straightened the collars of their short-sleeved shirts, and started going from house to house down their street with all the touching earnestness they could muster. This happened sometime in the ’60s, and the two boys went around asking their neighbors for spare change, which they claimed they were collecting for an initiative to change the name of their street from Dr. Long (an American pastor and one of the founders of the Methodist Church in Bulgaria) to the much trendier and far more inspiring Yuri Gagarin (who had recently become the first man to travel into outer space). The carefully planned scam, of course, was quickly discovered―after all, at that time their father, my grandfather, was working at the local paper and would’ve probably been among the first to know if such a name change was really happening. As a result, the boys were forced to give all the money back and apologize, then sent to bed with no supper. (My father, who always hated his mother’s cooking, didn’t mind at all.) Or―an alternative ending―the scam wasn’t discovered, so the brothers went to the Turkish pastry shop next to the boys’ high school and used the money to buy a whole tray of syrup-soaked tulumba, which they then shared with the rest of the other characters who regularly feature in their childhood tales: the lanky basketball player known as Popa, or “the Pope,” who eventually became a surgeon, got married, and moved to the city of Plovdiv, and who now rolls his cigarettes with the help of a clever little contraption; the sneaky numismatist Forie, who after the fall of communism joined the Democratic Party and got himself a job as the head of the local archeology museum, under whose term the biggest coin robbery from the museum’s treasury took place, which remains unsolved until today; and the slight and lazy Chocho, who got divorced five or six times and became such a pathological liar that when he says “Good day,” you have to look up at the sky and make sure it’s not actually nighttime.

Or the story about the theater and the curtain, which went like this: one day, all the students at my father’s school got rounded up and taken to the theater en masse to watch some glorious historical play about the fall of the Second Bulgarian Empire or perhaps the Tarnovo Music Theater’s legendary production of The Gypsy Princess―a kind of local version of Les Misérables, which had been put on every single week since the theater was founded and by this time was so well rehearsed that the actors and singers could perform their roles even while completely drunk, which they often did. So, my father and Popa―being the charming rascals that they were―decided to slip out and shoot some hoops while the rest of their clueless classmates sat there and died of boredom under the history teacher’s vigilant gaze. In order to avoid getting caught, the two boys decided to slip out not through the theater’s central foyer, but through some back door, which may even have had a sign that said “Unauthorized Entry Prohibited,” then started feeling their way down a dark hallway. A minute later, naturally, the curtain went up and the lights came on, revealing the comically frozen figures of none other than my dad and the Pope in the middle of the stage, applause, thank you very much.

The next time my dad went up on stage sounds just as implausible. Already in high school, he became the youngest member of an amateur theater group that only accepted him because he was tall, lanky, and had striking sideburns and thick, dark curls, which made him especially well suited to play any romantic roles. (For his part, my father’s sole reason for signing up was the fact that the theater group’s members often got to miss school and travel around the country with a blue Chavdar bus owned by the theater.) In his first play, my father only had one line―wearing a butler’s livery and carrying a silver tray, he had to come onstage and, upon seeing the mistress of the house sprawled on the ground, he had to drop the tray and . . .

BUTLER (frightened): Madam?

The same actually goes for Dad’s later stories, from when he was already studying Bulgarian Philology at the Veliko Tarnovo University, but still rocking the sideburns mentioned earlier, though they were now supplemented by some rebelliously long hair, a mustache, and bell-bottom jeans. He regularly listened to “illegal” radio stations while skillfully managing to avoid falling into the claws of the moral militsiya officials (whom I’ve always imagined looking like the policemen from The Troops of St. Tropez), who lurked around every corner, stamping the bare thighs of girls who dared to wear miniskirts, slitting “unwholesome” jeans into shreds with scissors, and cutting the hair of anyone who wore it long, right then and there, with the aforementioned scissors. Back then, my father was so skinny that even I don’t fit into the leather jackets he used to wear. Once, he was eating a pastry and leaning against the wall at the university cafeteria when Bogdan Bogdanov walked by―this was probably 1970, and the man I’d eventually be named after, though he wasn’t aware of it at the time, was still a young assistant professor of ancient Greek literature at the Veliko Tarnovo University―and, feigning cool surprise, he exclaimed:

“Borislav? You’re actually consuming food?”

* * *

Mom used to tell a different story. According to her version, an old Renault ground to a halt in the center of the Borovets mountain resort on a sunny day sometime in the late ’70s. Its door opened. One long, elegant leg topped by an absurdly short miniskirt...