Читать книгу Nine Rabbits - Virginia Zaharieva - Страница 10

Granny Sweetest, Granny Dearest

At sundown, after yet another work-filled day, Grandma would sit down to read—usually War and Peace by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. She would read through a big magnifying glass, quietly pronouncing each letter separately and then the whole word strung together one more time. Her red, cold-curled hair extended like antennae from the strain. As she read, she would become small, studious, and not the least bit terrifying, like in the poem by Dora Gabe:

Mum said Granny was once a little girl,

with long hair braided down her back,

going off to school, notebook in hand.

Good God, it’s so funny to imagine

my granny so old and gray,

with a notebook, in a short dress,

Granny sweetest, Granny dearest!

Nikula lost her mother when she was two years old, and her father remarried a wicked stepmother. Grandma was put to work at a young age, she had an amazing voice, and she was pretty—the only thing missing was the fairy godmother. My grandfather showed up instead and stole her away. He came from a family of gardeners, and like his father before him, he soon left to work in gardens in Hungary, Austria, and Germany. He would come back now and again, make another child and then go back to his tomatoes. My grandmother brought up her children alone with the money he sent her. She worked in strangers’ fields and stored up intense rage toward him, since he wasn’t around to witness her heroics. Her rage, hard-set with the years, would liquefy in the evenings, when the day was on its way out and she—in Czech or Bulgarian, depending on the holiday-maker’s nationality—would complain about my grandfather for hours. In these stories, Grandpa Boris went by the name of “Sersemin”—in Turkish sersemin means “scatterbrained.” The Sersemin this, the Sersemin that, while she was the long-suffering heroine. It made you wonder why she kept having his kids. For many long years, I have tried to shake off that whining.

Despite the fact that he no longer travelled abroad, Boris rarely put in an appearance during the years when Nikula looked after me because they always needed cash. The house was gluttonous, and on top of that I don’t think he felt like hanging around at home with my grandmother. At one point, he worked in the mines in Madzharovo, since surely there was no longer much money in gardening. Sometimes my grandma and I would take the train and embark on the long journey to visit him. My grandfather was a cheerful person who looked like Jean Gabin. He had a flair for entertaining people, for telling endless stories from his travels, and when it came to belly dancing and playing the tambourine, no one could hold a candle to him. He would have whole wedding parties howling. My grandmother hated him most of all for that—for the fact that he had never stopped having fun, while she had stuffed her joy down a rabbit hole when she was still a child so that there would only be room left for useful things! I only rarely heard her sing. For her, dancing and craziness didn’t have any use, so she treated them with scorn—or rather, with the envy of her punished soul. Although on the occasions when we did go wild, she would laugh along with us. She envied my grandfather for another thing as well: for his gift for making money from everything. Even during the winter, when he stayed home, he would weave baskets and jugs from willow boughs, so sturdy and beautiful that the housewives would fall all over themselves to buy them. In principle, the housewives were always falling all over themselves for him anyway because he made them laugh, flirted with them masterfully, and knew exactly what to say to each one of them—which especially aggravated my grandmother. Later, when he was too old for the mines, he donned a dark blue uniform with yellow epaulets for his job as doorman at the Hotel Burgas in Sunny Beach. His cheerful blue eyes and mischievous mastery of Hungarian, Czech, Russian, and German frenzied whole flocks of female fans. They filled his wallet with generous tips, and these windfalls trickled down to me, too.