LITMIR.BIZ

      Designed and composed by Kyle G. Hunter

      Cover photograph of the author as a child by Svetlozar Zahariev

      I thank my parents for giving me the most precious gift—life in this body.

      I thank Angela Rodel for her devotion to this text and for the wonderful translation.

      I thank the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for their support for the English edition of this book.

      I dedicate this book to Christo.

       Contents

PART ONE

Dresses

Potatoes

Granny Sweetest, Granny Dearest

Baked Rabbit

Gnomes and Gardens

Leftovers

Fried Chicken

Cherry Stain

Dolphins and Lemon Cream

Blood

Tomatoes

Money

Yellow Roses

Nettles

       Siemens and the Counterrevolution

       Exodus

       Salamander

       PART TWO

       Corset

       Turkey

       Fathers and Mothers

       Paris

       Red Dress

       House

       Christos

       Siamese Cats in Brocade Jackets

       Russian Bath

       Photograph

       Osaka

       Journey in the Garden

       Mask

       Diary

       Nobody

       PMS

       Ash Rose

       Love

       Alone

       Wedding

       Symphonia globulifera

       Red Dress 2

       The Mad Hatter

       Dragons

       Steam

       At 46

       Deer

       Calligraphy

       Finale

Part One

Dresses

      I turned up in the seaside town of Nesebar—an inconvenient four-year-old grandchild. My grandmother was raising the last two of her six children, putting the finishing touches on the house, ordering the workmen around, and doing some of the construction work herself. Thank God for this, as it used up some of her monstrous energy. Otherwise who knows what would’ve become of me.

      Klement and Maruna, the runts of the litter, were rarely at home, since they went to boarding schools in Burgas. My aunt studied agriculture, while my uncle was at the nautical school.

      Whenever I disappeared for long stretches somewhere inside the house, you could bet that I was in the attic, where there were a dozen big chests full of shoes, dresses, and all sorts of accessories brought from Czechoslovakia, where the family had prospered. Grandma Nikula and Grandpa Boris—“the Czechs,” as they were called—had worked in the glass factories of Bohemia between 1948 and 1958, during the most optimistic years of the Klement Gottwald regime.

      Nikula’s father had been a cloth trader, so she had an eye for materials and colors. In Czechoslovakia she had sewn dresses for herself and her daughters and had even managed to marry off her oldest girl in Prague at the age of eighteen.

      Nikula truly did dress with taste, although she only did so now when we went to the movies or when she stumped for the Communist Party’s Fatherland Front in the nearby villages.

      She took me with her. Where could she leave me? I stood in front of the podium and watched her. When she got up in front of the masses, my grandmother was very beautiful and convincing. I was proud of her; she always managed to slip in something from her own heroic biography that made her speech entertaining. For example, when she was eight months pregnant with my uncle, she helped

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