Читать книгу Nine Rabbits - Virginia Zaharieva - Страница 20

Yellow Roses

I was lying in the cellar. That’s where we lived when there were vacationers in the house. Through the ground-level window I could see my mother’s feet when they were going to or returning from her job at the health clinic. Her beautiful feet, shod in light beige shoes, so low-cut that you could see the base of her toes, with little doodads on the side and low square heels, a thin strap and open backs. I had already fallen asleep when she burst into the half-darkened room.

I sank into her soft, rustling embrace. How nice she smelled. She was wearing her favorite olive green dress with huge yellow roses and a plunging neckline, fitted at the waist and flared out below her knees. I loved that dress so much that I had once cut out one of those yellow roses, but Mama’s seamstress had cleverly sewed it back on and it didn’t show at all. I took a beating for that, of course.

“My dearest, sweetest little girl,” my mother whispered. “What has my crazy mother done to you? Does it hurt?”

I snuggled up to her. My whole body shook with sobs. I begged her not to leave me with Nikula, to take me with her. But she couldn’t. She worked in Vlas at a clinic for people with bone diseases. She was pulling double shifts in order to pay the lawyers to fight for me.

My paternal grandfather, an influential Sofia attorney, had been suing my mother for years to take away her parental rights and bring me back to Sofia. In front of the judges, he made her out to be the worst woman in the world—with the help of false witnesses. That’s what Nikula said.

“Who bandaged you up?”

“Mother Efrosinia.”

My mother hugged me and started to cry. It got really warm there pressed to her chest. It was so sweet to be together again. At that moment I caught sight of my grandmother’s feet, and seconds later she burst into the room. She took one look and set upon us, trying to pull us apart. She always did that when Mama cuddled me.

“That’s enough, now! That’s enough mollycoddling her!” Nikula pulled at us, but we clung together. “That’s why she’ll never amount to anything!”

Grandma stalked around the cellar. When her conscience pained her, she would go around straightening things up, and that gave her the courage to dig in her heels all the more.

“Mother, quit hurting her. You can’t treat her like this. She’s only a child!”

“This is my house and my discipline. I’m not going to look after thieves. She comes in here, drags home some money, I have no idea where from.”

“Fifty cents. I found it.”

“Silence!” Nikula swatted with her heavy hand. “Don’t you give me that cheeky look from behind your mother’s back. If you run away one more time, I’ll strangle you with my own bare hands and I’ll do the time for it, if I have to. Making me go around the streets hollering like a lunatic all night! The whole town knows our business!”

My mother shielded me with her arms. “Don’t you dare touch her. I won’t stand for that.”

“Well, if you don’t like it, you’re both free to leave!”

“There’s nowhere for us to go.”

“If you’d put up with your husband, you’d have a home in Sofia.”

“No. I’m not going to put up with it. I’m never going to put up with that again. You put up with it if you want.”

“I do put up with it, as you can see. Which is the only reason you have a roof over your head.”

“Which you are kicking us out of. I forbid you to torment her!”

“That’s my way of disciplining her. You never should have had her, since you don’t have time for her.”

“She would never have been born if you hadn’t forced me to get married. My life would have been completely different.”

At that point, they looked at each other and continued their row in Czech, as they usually did so I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. But I had begun to understand that language better than they suspected. That’s how I found out how my mother had come to marry my father.

“Nobody forced you into anything. You just sat there silent all night at the table when he came to ask for your hand.”

“Have you forgotten that when it was almost morning,” my mother hissed, “you said, ‘Since you’ve been silent for so long, I’ll take that as a yes.’ And you told him, you told him that I accepted. I kept quiet. Nine months later this poor little wretch was born.” My mother pointed at me.

The story of their marriage that I later heard from my father (always referred to in that house as “The Freak from Sofia”) was that, as a veterinarian sent by the government to work on the seaside, he once went to the movies in the old town of Nesebar with a local colleague. When they took their seats, his friend waved to a pretty girl up in the balcony. My father turned around and was completely bowled over by my mother’s beauty. At that moment he felt that she was the woman for him. He had never seen such beauty. She was green-eyed with short red hair, cut into a bob. He asked his friend to introduce him to her.

At that time, my mother was driving the local bachelors wild. She wore stylish flowered dresses and the European spirit of her Czech education. She had just finished nursing school, she rode horses, played accordion, drew, and sang. She dreamed of becoming an opera singer.

Luckily for me, she really was the most beautiful and intelligent of Grandma’s daughters. She took after my grandfather in spirit; she had his eyes and smile, but got her slender figure from my grandmother. Red hot!

A week after he first saw her, my father turned up at the house and asked for her hand. Grandpa was surely gone yet again. The prospective suitor was a veterinarian from Sofia. Nikula was, in any case, at her wits’ end trying to figure out how to safeguard her crazy daughters’ charms. Having educated, honest, and prestigiously married girls—that was her idea of parental duty well-fulfilled. That was why my mother’s return to Nesebar and the end of her marriage was seen by my grandmother as a shameful failure for the whole family.

“You’re the wretch, since you can’t even keep a family together,” spat out my grandmother. “Your head is full of singing, having fun, just like that miserable Sersemin, your father. So you’re gonna be an opera singer now, are you? Just shut your mouth and don’t you give me any lip!”

My mother sobbed and hugged me, and we sank into her yellow roses together. Tears silently flowed from her eyes. I wiped them away and stroked her hair. I remember that I then wished with my whole heart to build a big beautiful house when I grew up, where the two of us could live and nobody would ever throw us out. As if reading my thoughts, my mother calmed down, snuggled up to me, and soon fell asleep. Nikula slammed the door and left, muttering, “Just wait till I get my hands on you when we’re alone.”

Rose Jam

Take five ounces of rose petals. Prepare a thin syrup from half a quart of water and two pounds of sugar, boiling it until it thickens slightly; add the rose petals and simmer for a bit. When the mixture thickens, add one teaspoon of citric acid mixed with a small amount of lukewarm water. After five minutes, remove the jam from the heat and pour into warmed jars.