It was the dying man’s wish that they visit the Black Sea together as a family. Marko’s mom, when she was young, had travelled there annually with her brother and parents. Marko drove in the small car with his mom and his wheelchair. Marko’s grandparents drove in a separate car. His grandmother drove and his grandfather rode as a passenger. There was a lot of concern before departing that the old man would not be up for the long drive—about five hours from their house in Sofia to Sozopol, a small town by the Black Sea.
“Why is he dying?” Marko asked. He was in the back seat with a tower of bags and food beside him, making him feel small. His mom didn’t answer. Perhaps his voice was drowned out by the roar of the tires, the wind around the car. He asked again, louder. She turned her head slightly in his direction.
“Everybody dies,” she said.
“But what’s killing him?” Marko remembered his grandmother telling him that it was cancer. Or, had she said it was something like cancer?
“Living his life is killing him. Dishonesty is killing him.”
Marko considered this answer. He sat back in his seat and looked out the window. It was true that everybody died and that living life for a long time, too long of a time, would kill a person. What Marko was looking for was a medical condition that would be the final cause, but his mother knew that and chose to give him this general and ambiguous response instead.
“He had a small heart attack, I guess. He’s convinced he’ll have another, final one before long,” she said.
Marko didn’t say anything. He found that, more and more, when he could manage to stay silent, more information would leak out of his mother. She would tell him things that she didn’t mean to tell him if he just stayed quiet. Then at some point, she would say, I shouldn’t be telling you this. That was the tactic he’d used on the airplane when she told him so many stories about her childhood and about her brother before he died. Marko. The man he was named after.
The tactic didn’t work this time. His mom stayed silent. Marko thought about the heart having an attack. It was one of the dangers doctors had warned him about for his own heart. Its bovine part could eventually tire or deteriorate to a point that would make him more vulnerable to a heart attack. They’d given him a list of symptoms—warning signs to watch out for.
To pass the time, Marko watched out the window for expressions of the numbers seven and nine. He would count things and divide totals or add digits, whatever he needed to do to get back to either seven or nine. Then they came upon a sunflower field: a rolling sea of yellow that extended toward infinity.
“The literal English translation of the Bulgarian word for sunflower is sun looker,” his mom said as they passed. Marko noticed only then that the sea of yellow was punctuated by small, dark faces: the centers of the flowers all pointing in the same direction.
“Their faces follow the sun through the sky all day, from sunrise to sunset,” she said. “They follow the sun through the sky?”
“Yes.”
“I never knew that.” Marko stared at the sunflowers. How could that be? Was it magnetic and automatic or was there a shared consciousness? Something like intelligence?
“Where do they point their faces at night? Toward the horizon? Waiting for the sun to rise again?”
“Down at the ground?” Marko was shocked.
“Yes,” his mom said and smiled. Marko wondered why the bowed heads of sunflowers in the night would make his mom smile. To him, it seemed depressing.