Public Republic

Zdravka Evtimova

Photo: megyarsh

Shon didn’t have enough money. All his friends had forgotten him. He couldn’t pay his sex tax and that meant that he could no longer be a man. He’d be processed into a stone, and he knew he’d be deaf and blind dust. Each particle of the dust he would turn into would be listening to her steps, Eya. How could he forget her? He’d been a stone several times for her.

Her family would never agree to pay his sex tax. They didn’t want him around; they were heaps of brown stones around her and he had to climb and crawl to surmount them. He had to endure in order to reach her. They were endless hard sharp crags closing in on him, encircling Eya. When finally he managed to pay his tax her father told him she had been processed into sand or a heap of stones. Shon went looking for her. How could he be sure she was the gray rock jutting like a knife into the sky? He believed he’d know, he’d been dust, lowly powder without form of its own, and he’d been a rock, so he knew: a rock would recognize if another rock was Eya.

She used to be a small island lost in the sea, then she was a dune. She was a hillock of sand and he was the wind in the night that touched it gently, very carefully. He loved her so much he wanted to be dust all his days without her. Shon had been sandstone and granite. He’d been patient. He’d been mud. And he had been a digger for years and years. Diggers were the sexless workers who cut the stones and carried the bags of sand with which other diggers built houses. He had been a stone and a bag of sand and other diggers had built a house with him. He mixed with other stones and he couldn’t pay his sex tax to become a man. He had remained a wall of a house forever, rubble in the base of a mausoleum, a tile on its roof, a chimney dead with smoke. He could not become a man until the house crumbled, until the roof disintegrated and the chimney melted away.

The diggers were losers, the despicable riff-raff that lived to grab money. They were happy when they stole small change or killed other diggers for small change. They were no men or women; they were bad eggs that had no embryos in them. After ages of building houses and making roads they could finally pay to be men or women for a day. Shon knew very well what it felt like to be a digger. He had built a garden amidst a desert for a newlywed couple. He watched as they kissed and he was there while they made love. His task was to bring them water and food. They liked his docility and paid him well.

Even while he was a digger he never forgot. He didn’t know where Eya was. He hoped she was not a digger like him. He hoped he could earn enough to buy her off, to pay her sex tax. Her parents could pay any price and she could remain a girl all her life. Her parents could find a different man for her every time she was a woman, but Eya…

Shon remembered…

“You are my bread and you are my hunger,” she had said. “I don’t want anybody else. I’d rather be a digger all my life… or a house that will never collapse if you are not with me.”

Shon didn’t want any other girl. He could afford to be a man an hour every year. There would be women for him. He could find a sweetheart and she’d love him; being a woman was a short-lived bliss and every second was a treasure. It was a common sight to see a man caressing a peace of stone: his woman had no more money to pay her sex tax and her time as a girl had passed. Sometimes a woman held a pebble in her hand; that was the man she had kissed a minute before.

Shon knew what happened after the kiss. Women threw the pebbles away and rushed to find other men. Every second counted. Every heartbeat was a rewarding. Men got rid of the stones that had been the love of their days. No one wasted time.

Eya was in his dreams. On the day he was a man, one short winter day in the endless year, he didn’t look for another girl. He wanted Eya. “You are my shore and my infinity,” Eya had said. Eya, his Eya.

“He’s sick,” the diggers said. “He’s deranged. He’s a stone that has crumbled the wrong way.” But Shon was not a stone that had crumbled the wrong way. He hoped Eya was a pebble he could press to his heart.

“I’ll pay the digger to carve your name on me, after he processes me into a stone, Shon,” she had said. “And you’ll know where I am. You’ll find me.”

Your parents won’t let you be a stone. They’ll find someone for you.”

“No,” she said. “I will not be a woman for anybody else!”

He could not find her.

He’d been an outcrop of granite for all eternity before he made enough money to become a man again. He paid a digger to carve her name on the gray rough rock he had turned into. It cost him all he had earned while he was sand, and what he had saved up while he was dust and mud. The digger that had carved Eya’s name on him could afford to remain a man for an interminable week on Shon’s money.

Shon waited. He was a granite block. Winds hit him and the mist slept on him making his surface slippery and freezing cold. Birds perched on him and moss grew on him, destroying his crystals. Shon made money by slowly dying. He hoped the moss had not covered Eya’s name. He prayed it remained cut deep and sharp into him.

One day Eya came. She touched the moss that grew on his surface. She dug carefully, very slowly the mist that enveloped him. She cleared the leaves of the trees that had been falling onto him for years. “Shon,” she said. “Dearest Shon!”

A stone cannot feel, Shon had been told that many times. A stone is dead. A stone cannot love the summers and the winds. Shon knew all that. But that was not true. There she was, his Eya. You are my bread and my hunger. You are my eyes. You are my mist, and my birds, Eya. He understood her words. He could feel her touch. He had been a sexless digger so long, and he had loved her. He had been dust, the storms had scattered him all over the world, and he’d loved her. He had been a road of stones that her parents destroyed, and he’d loved her.

Something was happening. His surface broke. Deep crevices cut through his cold depth, the moss which grew on him caught fire. He had paid that digger to carve Eya’s name on him. Now, her name was no more. His crystals creaked and shrieked, his granite depth writhed and shook. There was no more strength in him. He was not a stone any more. He was not sand, not even dust. He didn’t know what was happening to him. Then he heard her voice.

“Look!”

“Yes, you were right, my child.”

That was her father speaking. Shon could understand. He recognized the man by his firm touch. Shon had been a stone and her father had kicked him and pushed him hundreds of times.

“Look at it. What a beautiful ruby!” another voice said, a man Shon had never seen before. “You wouldn’t imagine cheap granite could make such a splendid ruby!”

“O, they all do, James,” her father said. “The trick is to make them fall in love.”

“My fiancée is very good at that,” said the man Shon had never seen. “You are unbelievable, Eya. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, James.”

There were no winds and no mist. Shon was not a man and had no heart. Something much more powerful than a heart broke in him.

“Let’s wrench that beautiful ruby from this rubbish heap,” her father said.

“That’s the best gem in your collection, dear” the man she called James remarked as he carefully placed Shon in a box. A dozen of other smaller rubies sparkled momentarily under the thick lid.

The thing that was more powerful than a heart screamed deep inside Shon, You are my bread and my hunger. You are my coast and my infinity. Perhaps Eya did not know that a ruby was a stone that would live longer than the wind.

Interview with Zdravka Evtimova in Fiction Daily Magazine

Where are you from? Why?

I was born in Bulgaria and I think I am lucky that both my father and my mother come from the western part of the country. The town of Pernik, my place of birth, is notorious for its clever hard-drinking men and hardworking beautiful women who are very independent. There is a well known saying in western Bulgaria “A man does not take a cat from Pernik, let alone choose a wife from this particular place.” I like this town very much. The drivers from Pernik used to be very reckless and their notoriety had long ago turned into a persistent myth. I am glad the number plates of the cars have the letters PK on them. It means the car belongs to somebody from “that dangerous place” i.e. it’s better to avoid any discussions with the driver. Now the fines are so exorbitant that the whole of Bulgaria is afraid that the fame of Pernik will vanish into thin air. In my view, there is only one way to keep the myth alive – by writing about the town and its people. In Pernik, every street is a short story, and every man you meet is an unfinished novel. The children are fairytales and women are coded messages. Welcome to Pernik. Well, you’d better look around first. It’s a small place. The first thing a foreigner does on setting foot in Pernik is to fall in love with the town. In my place of birth love and hatred last for good.

Generate a relevant formula.

The formula I reveal has to be followed very strictly in order to acquire the necessary qualities to become famous in Bulgaria: you have to speak as little as possible. That is the reason there are so many writers. No one reads and writers are out of harm’s way. There are, however, magnificent Bulgarian writers Yordan Yovkov, Yordan Radichkov, Vera Mutafchieva. Second, although they try not to show it, Bulgarians are very intelligent. They’ll catch you in a lie the minute you shut your mouth. They won’t show it, but they will leave you in the lurch the minute you need them most. Ergo: do not lie. This will positively impress them. Do not get me wrong: they will never show they like you if you told them the truth. They will inform their friends about how honest you have been and the friends will say “Come off it!” Somebody will write a poem about your honesty and a street will be named after you. To cut a long story short: a Bulgarian will survive hunger, oppression, heat, cold, lies and treacheries and his heart will remain unperturbed. But he will cry with gratitude if a stranger or a neighbor gives him a hand on a black, rainy day without expecting to be paid for his kindness. Kindness is so rare. So the most important component of my formula is kindness. If you see a Bulgarian crying you already know why he’s doing that. Somebody else has been kind to him and he cannot believe this has happened. That is the reason I write about kind-hearted people, I hope I can meet them one day not on the pages of a dusty book. I want to meet them in the street.

A couple I know lived in Bulgaria for a few years. They said the wild dogs are very dangerous in cities and that a pack of them once ate a British woman. What’s it like to live in Bulgaria, and how does your country affect your art?

To live in Bulgaria means to want to write all the time. Yes, there are stray dogs in the streets and a Bulgarian professor in physics invented an appliance called KUCHEGON i.e. an apparatus for driving the dogs away via microwaves. Then the same man founded a shelter for stray dogs. The establishment lasted a couple of months. Angry neighbors destroyed it for it attracted packs of waifs and strays that barked and howled all night long. Now I know that the state has developed a program to deal with that problem, we are trying not be so cruel to the beasts and I know a woman whose son was bitten by a dog and she too founded a shelter for dogs in Pernik. These days a woman was bitten and chased by a bear in the Rhodopi Mountains, so it is an acute problem we face. People are short of money and they throw out their pets. I wrote a short story “Jivil” about a man who drove his old dog deep into the mountains and left him there. And the dog returned home. I still don’t know whom I am sorry for: the man or the dog. I think that Bulgaria is a Klondike for writers. You don’t have to invent, you have to go to a local pub and drink a glass of rakia, that wild Bulgarian brandy, and you’ll go home with a dozen of short stories that will haunt you until you sit down and let them live on paper.

You can read the rest of the interview here.