I was cold all the time, shook like an aspen tree and hated the wind’s guts. And right I was! It blew great guns, and the climate was a son of a bitch, the month of July rainy all over the place. I said to Miss Dana, “Miss Dana, something’s eating my blood. I’m sure something’s gone terribly wrong with my red blood cells. Take me to Doc Gospod.”
“Something’s gone terribly wrong with your head,” she said.
“It blows great guns all over the place all the time,” I explained to her. “And I’m always cold.”
“Isabella, you’ve got a bee in your bonnet, girl. Where’s the wind, tell me. Blizzard the bitch nearly had heatstroke yesterday, and I thrust her into the barrel of cold water to cool her off. I put on wet T-shirts and Tano huffs and puffs….”
“Tano always does huffing and puffing.”
“I pushed him into the barrel, too. The lake is as warm as mulled wine, like the one you and I love drinking at Christmas. You’re not all there, Isabella, the field cleaves with heat.”
“Didn’t I tell you I’m not all there? I’m seriously ill.” I said to her. “Take me to Doc Gospod, Miss Dana.”
“Okay, I will,” she said. “Let me bring you the Fritzes wine first. We’ll drink a bottle each, and you’ll be as good as new. Do you want me to knead your back for you?”
“I am not that crazy, Miss Dana. Last time you kneaded my back, the bruises you gave me were as deep as the British Channel. Let’s down a bottle each as becomes gentle and intelligent ladies.”
“Who will keep an eye on Mumma and Kalcho?” Miss Dana wondered.
“Why on earth should you ask? Tano will. He teaches them to spit into an empty yogurt cup, but the kids don’t care about it. I’ll make him read fairytales to them.”
“You brain is totally off the track, Isa, totally and thoroughly. The man stutters even when he doesn’t read, and when he reads he chokes. Then the kids scream at night during sleep.”
“Don’t I know how they scream at night?” I told her. “Last week, it was my turn to look after them and they slept in my room. They shrieked and whimpered, asked me to give them water seven times each! Tano, the imbecile, read a tale to them, something about Sue, the blood sucking dragon. ‘Isa, dearest, there’s bloodsucking dragon in the cupboard,’ little Mumma sobbed. “May I come and sleep in your bed?’ Kalcho screamed, ‘Isa, Isa, the dragon is hiding in the corner. I, too, want to sleep in your bed with you and Mumma.’ You can’t imagine what happened, Miss Dana. Kalcho was pulling my left ear, and Mumma tugged at my sleeve. I broke my back singing lullabies, sons of bitches slumber lyrics all of them.”
“Which lullabies did you sing to them, Isabella? You go to sleep before the lullaby starts, and you never wanted me to sing anything to you. You sleep like a log.”
“Are you implying that I am a log?” I was outraged indeed. “Who breathes close to your head, driving away your bad dreams, eh? I do. Who breathes for little Mumma and Kalcho, kicking Sue, the bloodsucking dragon, in the ass? I do. You are a log, Miss Dana. I breathe like a swan for you to calm down and sleep well.”
“Okay, I agree I’m a kind of a log. Okay? Which song did you sing to help the kids fall asleep?”
“Don’t you know? Fairyland, of course! First, I didn’t feel like singing at all. And I was cold like a January night. Then I downed one of our bottles, the ones you and I drink as all intelligent ladies do, and then the kids and I danced the waltz.”
“And the kids fell asleep?”
“Not at all. We danced Lambada, the three of us, and then we opened our mouths, the three of us, and an awesome Fairyland did we thunder in the night, driving crazy all bloodsucking dragons in the cupboard. I don’t remember what happened next. At a certain point, the kids were lulling me to sleep, singing Sleep My Little Baby. You’re an incompetent instructor, Miss Dana. I tell it to your face. How could you teach these lovely kids to sing Little Baby so flat and off key? Their tune turned my spinal cord inside out! I made up my mind to teach the little angels to sing properly and suffer no longer harm and musical distress under your guidance. But you know me: I sleep like a log. At a certain point, I perceived that they were covering me with a blanket and then both Mumma and Kalcho cuddled by my side.”
“I know the way they cuddle. They do it to me, too. And they pull my ears. But I don’t let them blackmail me with Sue, the blood sucking dragon.”
“You’re so strong, Miss Dana, that a dragon is a louse compared to your fists,” I pointed out. “And if you dance Lambada with the kids, you’ll step on their toes. They don’t have iron thread reinforced shoes like me. You remember the pair you bought me from Milan, Italy?”
“I don’t let them lead me by the nose and I don’t dance Lambada with them!” Miss Dana said filled with indignation. “I’m not as nutty as you are.”
“Oh, you are nutty as a fruitcake,” I said honestly. “After you down a bottle from the special ones you and I drink like intelligent ladies, come and see what happens! The lake is insufficient to please your ambition. You cut dry beech trees like a lumber-mill.”
“Hello! Are you suggesting I am lumber? I take offence at it, you know.”
“Of course you are not,” I lied to her. “Tano will stay with the kids. He’ll take them quail hunting or might teach them to pump on a swing. Well, Kalcho doesn’t like the swing and hates hunting. He sits across from Mumma, watching her. If she nods, he nods, if she sneezes, he sneezes too.”
“Stop prattling, Isabella, it won’t help you feel warmer. Here is wine and aspirin for you. Are you Okay?”
“No, I’m not. I’m cold.”
“Do you want me to sing to you? Or perhaps we should dance Lambada, what do you say?”
“No offense, Miss Dana, but you dance like a steam shovel. Last week, you stepped on my toes ten times when we danced the waltz. My toenail is still bluish-green. And when you sing… Oh, I feel like cutting my own ears, frying and eating them. You are a very bad singer, I tell you the truth.”
“What shall I do then? Shall daub some brandy on your neck?”
I knew her daubing well: she pressed your neck hard then made you run like a jackal, telling you stories so that your poor skin would absorb the brandy more quickly. Quickly my foot! Oh gosh, arguing with Miss Dana was the same as teaching a worm the Theory of Relativity. She took to daubing my neck with brandy, then opened her mouth and sang like Sue, the bloodsucking dragon, screeching as if she were swallowing hazelnuts together with their shells.
“I feel much warmer now,” I told her. “Stop singing,” but she suspected me of cheating on the spot.
“I suspect you!” she said. “You don’t feel warm enough. I can’t leave you exposed to danger like that. I’ll sing the song to the end. Get up. I can see you are still cold. We’ll dance Lambada. Its rhythm is full of ambition.”
Ambition is a son of a bitch. I hated ambition. Miss Dana stepped on my toes again. But it was very perspicacious of her to make me put on my reinforced shoes beforehand. In Milan, Italy, metallurgy workers wore reinforced shoes, fearing that a metal rod would fall on their feet. Miss Dana declared she couldn’t be sure where she’d step while we were waltzing. She forked out a lump sum for my safety and my feet were no longer badly bruised. Each shoe weighed a ton, and I despised the footwear industry altogether for the sake of this nasty pair. When I wore my reinforced shoes, I felt like tangoing: didn’t move at all, jutted out like a lamppost, and if Miss Dana wanted to lift or put me somewhere else she was welcome, since I could hardly budge in my cumbersome brogues. After I imbibed a certain quantity of the Fritzes wine, a drastic change in my behavior occurred: I gamboled, frolicked and hotly admired Miss Dana’s song, responding with thunderous applause and multiple shouts “Encore! Encore!”
“That’s a great girl! Great Isabella!” Miss Dana sighed happily. “You regained your health and now you’re as fit as an iron rod. It’s good I didn’t take you to Doc Gospod. I’d have made her do all sorts of tests, A—Z, to check for your medical conditions.”
The two kids slept soundly, and I was amazed when Miss Dana said, “Hey, Isabella, why don’t I marry you off to some handsome guy? I know you can’t stand Sto the policeman; every time you utter Space the forest ranger’s name, your lips turn blue. That guy makes your mouth grow small and dark. We have to attract somebody, you and I. I’ll give him a cash prize, if he marries you. Look at you. How pretty you look! Give birth to a kid. I’ll raise him to be smart and tough: I have very rich experience and I can teach the lad to shoot hawks, to fell oaks…”
“Come off it, Miss Dana! If you sing the kid a lullaby to the end, you’ll frighten the poor midget out of his wits.”
“Okay. I’ll pay a professor from the Conservatory of Music in Sofia to come and get your baby to sleep.”
I thought that Miss Dana and I were just shooting the breeze, but the truth was different. She’d got it into her head to marry me off. I had to only choose a guy and I’d have him no matter how much it cost. The issue would be settled within a week. Then we had to wait for the baby to start kicking in my stomach, and Doc Gospod would take care of the rest. Miss Dana would buy orchids for me, and the two of us would swear at them together; she’d rub grease into the skin of my belly and make fresh-squeezed orange juice for me. She’d make me swim in the son of a bitch lake, so the kid would love to swim after he was born. Well, if the baby was a girl, we wouldn’t fret, not in the least. She’d become Kalcho’s wife. If I gave birth to a son, perfect again. He’d be Mumma’s fiancé, although the kid would be a couple of years her junior. This fact was of no consequence nowadays. Today the world didn’t care about one’s brains and intellect, Miss Dana concluded. Intelligent ladies like me and her were comparative rarities.
I exerted myself to explain to Miss Dana that as a matter of priority, I ranked men as valuable as the mud under my reinforced shoes; the best thing you could do was to chuck your fiancé to our bitches Fury and Blizzard and have his neck bitten off.
“If I had wanted a man, Miss Dana, all guys in Sofia, from the bigwigs down to the shabbiest pauper, would have left Sofia to settle in Radomir, Arch district. Moreover, they would have learned to speak Italian in order to win my heart. You didn’t throw caution and money to the wind, Miss Dana, when you sent me to Milan to study Italian culture. I parlare Italian perfetto, and a guy who doesn’t speak la lingua ltaliana doesn’t stand a chance with me. But even if the bloke was born in Rome, he’d hit a snag in my case. Miss Dana, a man holds no surprises for me. Guys are drawers under a kitchen sink. You could find only junk and rubbish there. Men are the rugs on which you step to clean your reinforced shoes. What does a guy give you—flea infestation and nauseating smells, neither more nor less.”
Then I asked her, “For example you, Miss Dana, what do you see in Tano? A mangy mutt is a higher being than him.”
“No way,” she exploded. “He’s no mutt. He’s my man.”
I had a lot of other issues to clarify, so I gave Miss Dana more roasted chicken to eat, I gobbled some, too, otherwise the wine would drive its alcoholic teeth into my brains, throwing me off balance like a corpse by the empty bottle box. Miss Dana went to bring two more veal sausages for us.
At that point, we heard voices: the first one as thin as a stem of a cherry: a low and very familiar child’s voice. If I hadn’t paid such close attention to the sausages, I’d have guessed earlier who spoke in this thin cherry voice. I knew right away the other voice, sweet as honey, rich and warm. The wine that cut the Fritzes in two halves even before they removed the stopper from the bottle evaporated in a flash from my head, leaving me stunned and speechless. What was this honey voice looking for in our house?
In front of us, in a green Italian dress from Milan, the most truly Italian attire I had given somebody in my life, Anna stood. I stared at her and stopped breathing, gasped for air, but the air was a heap of stones. So gorgeous she looked, magnificent in the Italian dress and Italian shoes. But neither the dress nor the shoes could compare to the thinnest of her eye-lashes, to the dust under her heels, to her pinkie nail. Oh, my God, why couldn’t I think that she too was a drawer under a kitchen sink! She held her youngest child by the hand, the Italian schmuck’s daughter, a tot as small as a paving stone, in a dirt cheap pinafore like the ones I’d seen in the Radomir Forward discount store. Anna had three more children, boys all of them. Neighbors said she gave birth to the first one when she was fourteen, after a year had another one with a tramp, a suspicious character even in Radomir, Arch district. Anna was not sure whose spawn was responsible for her third offspring. Does it make any sense to remember a guy’s name? No, sir. A guy’s cheaper than a doormat. You could give your dog a doormat to sleep on, so the beast wouldn’t freeze in February. Could you do a useful thing with a guy? They all wanted one thing, then took to their heels, didn’t even say “Good bye”, and you howled like a dog, no money, no bread, a new baby in your lap.
“Anna,” I had asked her one day. “How can you be so pretty after you gave birth to four kids?”
“And how can you be so pretty,” she asked me back, “After you gave birth to none?”
“Listen, Dana,” Anna said.
The Italian dress that I had bought for her from Sofia was beautiful like a jewel on her. I was feeling pretty peeved. Couldn’t she say, “Hi, Isabella, the children and I were happy when you bought us a bag of sausages and cheese. We didn’t go hungry two long days. Thank you.”
She didn’t even look at me. I had bought her Italian shoes, too. She was looking Miss Dana in the eye. “Barren Dana, don’t just stand there, gaping at me. Listen to what I say.”
“Why should I listen to you?” Miss Dana said, a bludgeon shaking in her voice. It happened like that every time she got mad. Miss Dana’s anger was rapid and black. It thrust its way into her voice first. I had to do something, had to save Anna from the black pit in Miss Dana’s voice.
“I’m leaving for Italy, Dana,” Anna said. “I’ll be picking olives like the rest of them.”
“I don’t care if you’ll pick olives or pockets,” Miss Dana said, the bludgeon between her teeth already clobbering Anna on the head. But Anna didn’t give a damn. She was not scared of bludgeons. Wasn’t I proud! This woman didn’t frighten easily.
“The boys will come with me. I leave tomorrow.”
She’s leaving. She’ll go tomorrow. I… What will I do? Where will I go? Her Italian dress glows and her skin glows too. Anna goes away tomorrow. What will I do?
“I’ll leave my daughter Monique with you, Dana. Isabella will take care of her. You’ll take care of her, Bella, will you? You’ll take care of Monique together with Dana’s kids.”
Miss Dana was so amazed that she almost choked. I thought I knew what had astounded her: Anna’s insolence. I suspected Miss Dana had bitten her tongue.
The backyard was as smooth as the bottom of a frying pan, we had mown the grass and everything was clean and gleaming. Most beautifully gleamed Anna’s dress and Anna was leaving for Italy. Anna was leaving for Italy and I had to live without her. The world went deaf. I went blind.
“I’m not Monique,” shouted the voice as thin as a stem of a ripe cherry. I remembered. A searchlight swept back and forth in my mind and I knew: in a thin cherry language spoke Anna’s only daughter, her youngest child. Anna had had her with an Italian thief. The idiot hadn’t bothered to travel to Radomir to see his little princess, the shabby Italian wretch!
“Child, how come you are not Monique?” Miss Dana asked. There was no bludgeon, not even a wood splinter in her voice now. She spoke as if she was giving Mumma and Kalcho a glass of milk to drink at breakfast. Whenever this woman saw a child, she grew totally weak in the head. “You are Monique. Why can’t you remember your first name?”
“I’m not Monique,” the cherry voice insisted. “My name is Toast.”
The kid’s mind must have become unhinged by hunger. I liked the girl, she was Anna’s child, and half of the little one’s blood was Anna’s. The father, the lousy Italian… God knew where the wind had dumped him, the mean rat.
“Are you hungry, Monique?” Miss Dana asked. “I’ll give you a big sandwich, kid. Just wait a sec.”
“I am not hungry, Dana,” the girl said. “Don’t you understand that my name is not Monique? My name is Toast. Don’t make me angry. Or I’ll steal everything from your castle, to the last grain, even the hairs in your head. Do I make myself clear?”
While the kid was giving Miss Dana that stuff and nonsense, Anna, his mother, threw herself at me. She kissed me, not on the lips, she kissed me on the cheek, and her face was wet. Was I whimpering like a puppy, or had she started crying? She pressed her cheek against mine, and I could not imagine how I would live without her.
I’d be always cold. The winter would never go away from my bones.
“Bella! Bella, dearest!” three tiny voices suddenly rose in the air, as thin as cherry stems all of them.
Kalcho and Mumma had rushed to me from the meadow and grabbed hold of my trouser legs.
“Isa Bella, Bellissima!” shouted the thinnest voice, the one of the smallest cherry. “Tell them my name is Toast. I am Toast. Let them remember this!”