By SOFI STAMBO
Excerpted from A Bunch of Savages, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.
Baba Borka
I absolutely have to go to Coney Island every weekend. People think that’s strange. Luckily, lately I don’t care if people love me, like I did before. I used to suffer and blush and stay home and cry. Not anymore—I grew up and out of this. One day I woke up and realized that it doesn’t matter if I am well-liked or not. What matters is to get up at six, go to work, calculate for fifty hours, get yelled at, watch people get bullied, stay calm, and not kill anyone.
I can definitely do this, but with huge quantities of Coney Island.
I need to step into this postcard image of sea, sand, salt, and seagulls. This is my comfort zone. I don’t need anything else. Unless we are going for perfect, then maybe a peeled peach, and my grandmother to peel it.
Summer always starts with her glittering, gold-toothed smile. In the morning, the night train from the capital arrives at the old station in Varna. My small grandmother and huge grandfather are running toward us, they always ran, with bouquets for my mother, my sister, and me. These dahlias have been planted, watered, and weeded months ago for us. They’d been cut an hour before. The seagulls scream, it smells like sea, the station shines wet from the fog and bright from the sun and the smiles of my people.
In the evening, my grandmother pours cold water on the balcony to cool the air. She puts all three of us in the huge bed, asks us what we want for breakfast, and strokes our faces, our noses, eyes, eyebrows and hair. “Massage the face to soothe the brain,” she would say. She had a lot of those wisdoms you could see written on buildings or carried on posters at the manifestations. “A good word will get you far,” “Never do to people what you don’t want done to you,” “United company can move a mountain.”
Her hands smell like parsley and dill, and the room smells like wet warm concrete. She is retelling the movie Les Misérables with Jean Gabin, or the Indian musical The Elephant, My Friend. Or she is singing an old song about the maiden Todora, who has fallen asleep. Or she is making up a story about my brother, and how he will grow up to be a sailor and travel the world to see where his luck will take him. But he will always come back with presents for his sisters and stories about foreign lands. All the interesting things happened in foreign lands. The fairy tales started past nine mountains, on the tenth, and past nine countries, in the tenth. Naturally one day my brother and I left to see where our luck will take us. It took us past many mountains and an ocean to New York.
In the morning the smell of her zeppole would wake us up. She would leave them on the balcony railing to cool and would guard them from the seagulls, waving a white dishtowel. Other grandmas from other balconies were waiving towels over other kids’ breakfasts. We head to the beach. My grandmother, sister, brother, and I would hold hands and march in one straight row like on a socialist manifestation. We sang loudly, “Five kilometers on foot, without sitting, without eating.” My grandmother was also at that stage of her life where she didn’t particularly care what people said. And what would they say? People must have liked manifestations since we had one every other month.
They are called protests in America but we couldn’t protest so we agreed and thus had happiness marches.
We would pass by the neon green barbershop covered with photos of Jean Gabin, Alain Delon, and other French actors. They took us there for the only hairstyle the barber knew: à la garçonne. If there was one thing we didn’t like about Varna, it was the à la garçonne. But if we don’t look at the left side of the street, the neon green barbershop doesn’t exist. So we look down.
The street to the beach has two narrow steps and then three wider ones. We usually jump those or slide down the ramp for strollers. From looking down so much when passing the barbershop, we knew every centimeter of that block’s sidewalk. We knew the different patterns of the tiles and which ones were broken. We knew the order of people’s basement windows, arranged like storefronts, vases with flowers on hand-knitted lace, then statuettes on lace, then seashells on lace. We passed by the window where they sell figs and blueberries—borovinki. My grandfather calls my grandmother Borovinka, his nickname for her long and serious name Borislava, which means Fight and Glory. The word borovinka has the same root bor, from borba, which means fight but with rounder edges, melted into a sweeter meaning—blueberry.
We were expected to call grandma maminka. This is what you call grandmothers in eastern Bulgaria. I couldn’t do it, though, because it sounded softer and nicer than what I called my mother. I used the generic maika—mother. One degree nicer was mama, and even more tender was mamichka— “dear, sweet mommy”—which I never even called my mother. The most tender of them all was maminka—meaning “dear, sweet, lovely mommy, my favorite person in the world, hands down.” We in western Bulgaria didn’t operate on those levels of love.
We buy a cup of blueberries and share it brotherly, like we do everything else, like the entire country does. We always go through the underpass and never cross the highway. “Better five minutes late than a whole life earlier,” Baba Borka repeats this slogan pretty much every time we wait to cross a street. In the underpass we sing loudly because of the echo. Her voice is the loudest.
We enter the Sea Garden, or the Bulgarian Coney Island. The old man with the scale measures our weight for five pennies and checks our muscles for free. We always buy only one scoop of ice cream and Baba Borka says the mantra, “Take a little, because it is tastier.” She uses this wisdom for food and non-food situations.
We go to Eva’s Beach, where we can bathe naked if we want to. This way one can get maximum sun exposure to vitamin D or E, we can never remember. Baba Borka is a biology teacher and uses every opportunity to educate us about life in all its manifestations, especially in the human body. We change in the huge undressing area where our clothes are put in lockers by an army of babas, who carry rings of fifty keys each. They wear white overalls, unbuttoned, like the doctor’s, but they are naked underneath. We are always amazed by their shamelessness. They proudly expose their old bodies with big bellies, sagging breasts, misshapen feet, and white hair under their arms and between their legs. The unusual darkness of their skin makes them look beautiful. They have reached the limit of darkness a Bulgarian could. This color will be our benchmark every summer.
We refuse to undress completely. I even keep my socks on until we go and sit at the very edge of the beach where the water can touch our feet. There we breathe deeply, because we want to get all the iodine from the air into our lungs. We hear Russian and Polish and we feel cosmopolitan now. Here we are with people from foreign lands, socialists, but foreign nevertheless. They have paid money to come and see us, which makes us puff with pride like zeppoli.
We go for a swim and run back to Baba Borka and she awaits us with her arms spread for a hug, holding a big white sheet. We hug her and she wraps us in it to dry and warm us. Then we lay for fifteen minutes on each side and to entertain us she tells us a movie. She also peels peaches and puts the small pieces directly in our mouths, so we don’t have to touch them with our sandy fingers. Then we bathe with sun water, which is in our huge red bucket full with seawater left for a few hours in the sun to get warm. We, like the entire Varna population, believe in the healing powers of that water. Baba Borka brought the red bucket from Romania, the only foreign land she saw.
So I lie now on the beach at Coney Island between dark Russian babas. I listen to the sea and the seagulls’ and children’s screams, and I am back there. I breathe huge breaths of iodine and absorb enormous quantities of vitamin D, or E. I close my eyes and put a piece of peeled peach on a toothpick in my mouth, thus avoiding the sand and pretending that I am not holding it with my fingers and may be someone else is. Then I synchronize my mantra with the rhythm of the waves: “Maminka Borka, Maminka Borka, God bless Maminka Borka.”
Jaguar
We all call him Jaguar, I forgot why. I write a note to myself on a Post-It to ask him, but then I pile new notes on top of the old ones and it all becomes one big pile of things that will stay forgotten. The name fits him, he is tall, good-looking and moves gracefully. He is probably dangerous when he gets angry, but he never does.
He comes from China, where he was a professor at the art academy. Here he is a production artist in our company and paints religious murals. He is working on Jesus’ face now, trying to make it look calm rather than tired. We all laugh because Jesus looks a little like he is on drugs. He looks as if he doesn’t care anymore, and some of us feel that’s kind of true, which makes the painting realistic. Others feel that Jaguar still needs to paint Jesus as if he cares a little.
“Jesus! He’s cross-eyed,” someone says, heading to the bathroom. The office people need to pass though the painting studio to get to the bathrooms in the back. Jaguar doesn’t understand the word “cross-eyed,” so I take my glasses off and cross my eyes. I don’t like to do it, but I want to help. When we were little, my sister and I crossed our eyes a lot at each other. Mom scolded us not to do it, because if someone startled us, we would remain cross-eyed. Jaguar starts to laugh at me. Now I’m not sure if he understood that my example meant “please fix Jesus’ eyes,” or more like, “everyone is crazy here, they feel they know Jesus personally and have the right to advise.”
Jaguar laughs a lot and in general doesn’t care about the small things in life. There are two kinds of people: “Some people are good lucky, and some people are bad lucky.” He says we are all good lucky, because we are in Amer’ka now, he calls it Amer’ka. We know that we are. His whole manner is straightforward and to the point. Most of the unnecessary words or last syllables get dropped in the storm of the storytelling, and a lot of gesticulating substitutes words that were never learned. Who has time to go to work and then go to English class? Who’s going to cook the dinner then? Jaguar cooks in his house. Twice a week he also cooks for the neighbor next door, who recently lost his wife and is d’press. “Sorry, it is Chinese food, we don’t know how to cook Amer’can.”
Leka is from Albania. He explains that Albanians don’t call Albania “Albania,” they call her Shqipëria. “What does it mean?” I ask. He starts to tell me the entire Albanian history and how it was Great Albania before the Turks came. We like to do the Balkan historical review at least once a week. People walk away because they don’t know or care where these places are or what happened there. I tell Leka the abridged history of The Great Bulgarian Kingdom, before the Turks came.
He tells me that Albanians have a saying: “Wherever the Turks pass, grass doesn’t grow.” I tell him we have the same exact saying. He tells me how they lost Kosovo and Macedonia where people speak Albanian. I tell him that we also lost our Macedonia, where people speak Bulgarian. Me and Leka, we’ve never had a Macedonian problem, we respect each other and agree that there can be two Macedonias, which can be peacefully divided between him and me, and they are. Leka tells me about Skanderbeg and all his heroic actions, and his eyes water. Mine water too when I tell him about Levski, our national hero, the name deriving from lion, because of the lion jump he once made to escape the Turks. Needless to say, the lion is our national symbol. So when I ask Leka what Shqipëria is, he says that it is very hard to explain; you just have to feel it. Since I don’t, he struggles to explain and finally says that the closest English equivalent he can come up with is eagleness.
I forgot to mention Arkady, the Russian guy, who would be the two-headed eagle. Leka and Arkady have this tender father-son, or long-lost brother thing going on. They go to the cooler to drink water together at 10:30 every day. Leka calls him bogorosh, Arkady responds with krasavjec. It means “handsome” in their respective languages. Once they invited me to come to the cooler with them for a drink of water. I was honored, but said I felt uncomfortable. We would be one too many and it would look like we were having a revolt.
And so life goes—we come here every day and work next to each other, Leka’s eagleness, Arkady’s double-headed eagle, my lioness, and Jaguar’s jaguarness peacefully coexist. More than that, I feel we are friends, like animals in a fairytale. We are together in this adventure to earn a dollar and somehow get to the American dream, which allegedly awaits at the end of the story.
Jaguar starts with another of his adventures, but we can’t hear it very well, because he wanders off to the other end of the studio. Me and Leka work back to back. He paints Michael, the angel of death. I am working on the immaculate heart of Mary, stabbed with a knife in the middle, bleeding next to Jesus’ heart, wrapped in thorns. Finally I understand all those tattoos that gypsies had on the skin between their thumb and index finger. “Georgy 1973” or “Peter 1988” and a heart with a knife or an arrow through it and a few drops of blood. It was a token of the beginning or the end of a love affair, a jail sentence or a life. Now I see the Mother of God symbol, which definitely adds a layer of protection.
My father has a strong aesthetic aversion to tattoos, and also earrings. He feels it’s savage to scratch anything with a needle and ink on your God-given body. He also condemns all the mothers who pierce their baby girls’ ears and put in the only type of golden earrings to be had—snowflakes, which trembled all the time, called tremblers. People would pierce their kids’ ears to protect them from the evil eye, the belief that people with light blue eyes could steal your vitality by looking in your eyes. Dad says we are not barbarians, but Christians, and as such we shouldn’t believe in the evil eye. His father though, my granddad, had both of his ears pierced. Out of respect I never inquired further.
We only hear Jaguar’s signature transitional words “Something, something,” and “whatever, whatever,” which he uses when he lacks the words to say that time passed in the story and nothing much happened from point A to point B. Leka yells to himself “And so what?” copying Jaguar’s intonation. This is another universal expression he uses a lot. Relation-shapes is our favorite Jaguar word. He likes to talk about them. When he isn’t talking about propaganda in China.
Jaguar’s father is Mongolian. He was high up in the Chinese party and very respected. When he died, Jaguar went back to China, and when the funeral procession got up a hill, there were two rows of horsemen on black horses, showing their respects. He tears up when he tells this story, everyone tears up a little. We know for a fact that there won’t be men on horses when we die. We don’t even know where we’re going to be buried, we don’t even understand how a 401K works. So we prefer not to talk about it.
“Let me tell you,” Jaguar says when he wants to tell you a story. He is a man of few words, so he skips the word “story” since it’s obvious. What else is there to tell?
He was waiting at a red light once in his white second-hand Toyota and a homeless guy stopped and waved a dollar in his face. “Can I buy a cigarette from you?” Jaguar glanced at his three-year-old daughter, sleeping in his wife’s lap in the back of the car, gathered all his strength, and said,
“I don’t smoke.”
He does.
“You do,” the guy got angry. “You are Chinese, you all smoke. Fucking Chinese!”
“I’m not Chinese, I’m Mongolian.”
“Fucking Mongolian then!” Jaguar laughs and repeats the punch line a few times. He always laughs at how strange people are.
“Jaguar, speak up, I want to hear the story,” I say.
“Something, something and whatever whatever . . . relation-shapes!” Leka warmheartedly summarizes it for me.
I move closer to listen to Jaguar telling the story of how he found a kitten at the subway station, small and black. It was afraid of everyone but let Jaguar pet him between the ears. Jaguar shows how that was done by petting his thick silver hair behind one ear. Then the cat followed him, he shows how by marching with arms and legs, head bent down. When they got to the highway where cars were going, “fiew, fiew fiew,” the cat got too scared to follow him any longer. He went home and told his wife about it. “You want it to take it?” It started to rain. When it stopped, he decided to go back outside, and if the cat was still there, to take it home. The next day they were playing with it in the yard “blah blah blah, blah blah blah,” he waves his hands in the air showing how you play with a kitten, maybe he threw a ball, maybe he didn’t. But a car made “boo noise,” and the kitten got scared and ran away. “No more!”
Jaguar went to the neighbor. “Find anything?”
“No.”
But when Jaguar came back, the kitten was waiting for him. They called it Friday, because that’s when they found it. He shows me a picture of it on his cell phone. He hits his chest pretty hard, smiles, and says, “secondhand father.” I say that this reminds me of Robinson Crusoe, who also called his savage friend Friday, because that’s when he found him. Jaguar says “yes, yes, yes,” he always says that no matter what. I go back to Leka, who repeats the refrain, “And so what?”
“A relation-shape story,” I explain.
Zuzev and Tzutzeva
I call him Zatzko, Tzutzko, or Zuzev; he calls me Tzutzeva, Tzutza, or Zuze. So Tzutzev insists on staying at JFK while I wait in the long line at security to get to the plane to Bulgaria. I have separation anxiety and can’t stand farewells. He knows that, and I also told him so ten times already. I’m not going to a war, but to see my father who got sick. I’ll be back in five days.
We kissed and kissed for a good seven minutes, brushed away tears, I blew and blew my nose. Then we waved, and then I mustered the strength to turn my back to him. I discovered I had pretty strong will in the Russian Language High School, they trained that more than anything else. When the line made the first turn (there were about 6 more turns left), he was still there, smiling.
“OK, you leave now,” I mouthed the words and waved. It’s very unnatural to me to wave. At school, we waved on communist parades by moving the wrist forty-five degrees to the left and then to the right. I still find it a very party-demonstration/eighties type of gesture. I prefer to swivel the wrist as if turning a light bulb, the way the queen of England waves, screwing and unscrewing it because she doesn’t know how that’s done, since there are people who do it for her. So this is her way to announce to the world, “I can’t do anything in the house, even if my life depends on it.” Which is my situation exactly. I can’t screw in a light bulb because I don’t know which way (lefty-tighty?), can’t fix the toilet when it leaks, and if the fuse box goes down I will continue to live in the dark, cooking sausage in a pan on top of a candle, the way we did with my sister when we used to live alone. One needs a man in her life. My daughter argues that one doesn’t.
So waving like the queen is aristocratic, but if you do it too quickly it actually becomes the Bulgarian sign for “that person is crazy,” something is loose and unscrewed in their head. The English translation is when you screw your index finger left and right to your temple. For goodbye, I also send air kisses. That one is straightforward and universal.
Zutzko is 230 pounds by the way, brown hair, used to be long in Bulgaria, now it’s short in America, and a beard. So he leans calmly, heavily, on the column and I know no one can move him out of there without a crowbar until he decides to leave, which will probably be after I fly away. We never separated again after that first six-month period when I arrived here. It was bad. We don’t function well separately. We married very young and developed this twin mentality, everything that happens needs to be discussed with the other in order to make it an official experience. There is no point in watching a movie alone or going on a walk by yourself. I can’t quite explain. It’s like why bother, it’s not a real walk if you’re alone. You need to be able to share it. That’s why I tell all my friends at work, everyone should be married, no exceptions. Life is worth twice as much if you have someone to share it with.
So he leans on the column, crossed legs and arms, and he’s just looking at me straight in the eyes, smiling this smile. I feel uncomfortable looking back at him. I am used to walking with him next to me so we both look in the same direction. Or he sits at the table on my left side so we look at each other in profile. When we kiss we close our eyes, so I discover I am not good at just looking him in the eyes and holding my gaze there. We used to do this back in Bulgaria. When you liked someone you looked at them for a while across the street or the room. That’s how you found lovers. I had forgotten that. People in New York rarely look you in the eye. They look somewhere seventeen inches away from where your eyes are.
If by any chance I catch someone’s eyes at work, we both produce an automatic smile—lips stretch and clench and then we move on. No one is holding anyone’s eyes anymore, at least not in my age bracket. When we first went back to Bulgaria after twelve years, I recognized all the Bulgarians at the Munich Bulgaria Air Terminal, men with heavy eyes, just staring at you. You can’t just snap, “What are you looking at?” because it is in a way a compliment. Someone has noticed you and now is studying you, which is supposed to be a good thing.
So I feel uncomfortable looking into my husband’s eyes, and I look around fake curiously, only occasionally glancing back at him. I pretend I forgot all about him and his stubborn desire to support the JFK column like a Greek god. He has classical beauty that one, he really does. But the column does not need supporting. I’m happy I remembered to put on my new black socks with butterflies. I look good without shoes on now, which is important when security judges your character and your motives to travel. I hope you can’t get any foot diseases through your socks following in the footsteps of humanity. I am willing to bet ten dollars there are people on this line from every single nation, maybe two or three are missing, and only because they got tickets for the evening flight. It’s like we’re getting on Noah’s arc, only I’m not with my male Bulgarian specimen.
This is now getting weird, he is blissfully smiling at me, legs crossed, swinging a bottle of Poland Spring back and forth, as careless as a cowboy, minus the hat and the horse. He drinks the water as if it’s whisky and with every sip his eyes get more intense. It may be from the tears as well. They make your lashes look longer and curlier, as if he used mascara. And he has long lashes to begin with. That’s why he doesn’t like to wear sunglasses, because his lashes brush against the lenses like windshield wipers. He cries more easily than me because he is more sensitive, even though he looks very tough. But when I hand him a tissue from the box-for-tear-wiping, which I make sure is always full and next to the TV, he never takes one. It is manly to cry, but it isn’t manly to wipe your tears in a tissue—that’s the logic for you. You can either wipe them on your sleeve or quickly shake your head left and right several times like wet dogs do. That, as man, you are allowed to do.
He mouths, “I love you” Iin Bulgarian. My father once even asked me, when did we become so Americanized, and why do we use declarations like that. It’s unnatural: if you love someone you just love them, you show them, you don’t need to say it. I told him that I respectfully disagree, and I’m all for saying everything good you can find to say to another person.
My husband and I, we never say “I love you” in English. We speak English to everyone but to each other. Our love is in Bulgarian. It is the secret language we have. Sometimes he says dirty things and I am afraid that other Bulgarians in the subway may hear us and think badly of us. If my father hears that I would die. But there aren’t that many Bulgarians in Manhattan and we don’t go to Queens that often. Anyway, I can’t speak dirty in Bulgarian, because I come from a very good family, and also an elite school. In English, no problem—I don’t feel anything when I say it. In Bulgarian I can’t help but see what I just said and it is embarrassing. I also blush easily, so it’s a whole ordeal. English as a second language doesn’t work on my feelings as strongly as the first one. I can say “Fuck you! Get the fuck out of here! You bitch,” no problem.
I don’t have issues saying curse words that aren’t sexual in Bulgarian, like “shit” and “fart.” Zuzev gets unusually sensitive when I say them and begs me not to, especially in public transportation, sometimes even covers my mouth, embarrassed. And yet he is capable of casually dropping a curse like “In your mother’s molar.” Which I am repeating only in English for the sake of argument here, I can’t repeat it in Bulgarian.
Zuzev spent eighty percent of his childhood on the streets. His grandfather cursed like a carriage driver, which he once actually was. He could also curse in a gypsy language, which was a rare and admirable quality. His grandmother, a sweet, loving creature, also had a foul mouth. Zuzev would be like, “Do you remember what my grandma used to say, ‘Your ass also smells but you carry it around.’” How can I forget.
So I’m saying, for a person who has no problem cursing all day long in a non-repetitive patterns of words, he is strangely sensitive to my gastroenterological terminology.
We complete each other in that way. I like red meat, he likes white. He likes pizza, I don’t. I like chicken skin, he doesn’t—as a result my favorite leftovers always await on the table. So I look back at him and hold his eyes the way I did in college. It’s nice. It’s as if we’re in a movie about lovers who can’t touch, he a dirty-mouthed cowboy, she a shoeless world traveler with butterflies on her socks.
Sofi Stambo has been published by Promethean, Ep;phany, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, New England Review, Stand, American Short Fiction, Guernica, AGNI, Chicago Quarterly Review, Granta Bulgaria, Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Rumpus. She was awarded the 2024 LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction, won the first prize in fiction in the 2015 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International literary contest, was selected by WIGLEAF for their 2016 best flash top list, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018. Her novel All In is a finalist for the LANDO award from The de Groot Foundation 2023. Stambo has a master’s degree in Literature from Sofia University St. K. Ohridski, Bulgaria.
Read more from the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024 Finalists.
