Nine Rabbits - Virginia Zaharieva

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to make them smile. The baking principle is the same as with arse-end potatoes. Afterward, it’s like eating Bibles: with your fingers, page by page-the scent of a shrine, of holiness.

      At sundown, after yet another work-filled day, Grandma would sit down to read—usually War and Peace by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. She would read through a big magnifying glass, quietly pronouncing each letter separately and then the whole word strung together one more time. Her red, cold-curled hair extended like antennae from the strain. As she read, she would become small, studious, and not the least bit terrifying, like in the poem by Dora Gabe:

      Mum said Granny was once a little girl,

      with long hair braided down her back,

      going off to school, notebook in hand.

      Good God, it’s so funny to imagine

      my granny so old and gray,

      with a notebook, in a short dress,

      Granny sweetest, Granny dearest!

      Nikula lost her mother when she was two years old, and her father remarried a wicked stepmother. Grandma was put to work at a young age, she had an amazing voice, and she was pretty—the only thing missing was the fairy godmother. My grandfather showed up instead and stole her away. He came from a family of gardeners, and like his father before him, he soon left to work in gardens in Hungary, Austria, and Germany. He would come back now and again, make another child and then go back to his tomatoes. My grandmother brought up her children alone with the money he sent her. She worked in strangers’ fields and stored up intense rage toward him, since he wasn’t around to witness her heroics. Her rage, hard-set with the years, would liquefy in the evenings, when the day was on its way out and she—in Czech or Bulgarian, depending on the holiday-maker’s nationality—would complain about my grandfather for hours. In these stories, Grandpa Boris went by the name of “Sersemin”—in Turkish sersemin means “scatterbrained.” The Sersemin this, the Sersemin that, while she was the long-suffering heroine. It made you wonder why she kept having his kids. For many long years, I have tried to shake off that whining.

      Despite the fact that he no longer travelled abroad, Boris rarely put in an appearance during the years when Nikula looked after me because they always needed cash. The house was gluttonous, and on top of that I don’t think he felt like hanging around at home with my grandmother. At one point, he worked in the mines in Madzharovo, since surely there was no longer much money in gardening. Sometimes my grandma and I would take the train and embark on the long journey to visit him. My grandfather was a cheerful person who looked like Jean Gabin. He had a flair for entertaining people, for telling endless stories from his travels, and when it came to belly dancing and playing the tambourine, no one could hold a candle to him. He would have whole wedding parties howling. My grandmother hated him most of all for that—for the fact that he had never stopped having fun, while she had stuffed her joy down a rabbit hole when she was still a child so that there would only be room left for useful things! I only rarely heard her sing. For her, dancing and craziness didn’t have any use, so she treated them with scorn—or rather, with the envy of her punished soul. Although on the occasions when we did go wild, she would laugh along with us. She envied my grandfather for another thing as well: for his gift for making money from everything. Even during the winter, when he stayed home, he would weave baskets and jugs from willow boughs, so sturdy and beautiful that the housewives would fall all over themselves to buy them. In principle, the housewives were always falling all over themselves for him anyway because he made them laugh, flirted with them masterfully, and knew exactly what to say to each one of them—which especially aggravated my grandmother. Later, when he was too old for the mines, he donned a dark blue uniform with yellow epaulets for his job as doorman at the Hotel Burgas in Sunny Beach. His cheerful blue eyes and mischievous mastery of Hungarian, Czech, Russian, and German frenzied whole flocks of female fans. They filled his wallet with generous tips, and these windfalls trickled down to me, too.

      I liked my Uncle Klemo much better than my Aunt Maruna, who really annoyed me. Klemo took after Grandpa, he’d inherited his blue eyes and he and my mom were a team. When he and Maruna came back on weekends from the boarding school in Burgas, we’d go to the movies, not that there was any great selection. They always showed Mr. Pitkin, Parts 1 and 2. It was a comedy, and the only part I remember is the scene where Mr. Pitkin dresses up as a nurse and tries to walk in high heels. Dressed up in my mother’s nursing coat and her size 41 clodhoppers, my uncle would imitate that scene so brilliantly. We’d roll on the ground, stomping our feet and peeing ourselves with laughter. Grandma, too. It was funnier than in the film.

      At that time, Klemo and Maruna had just taken up smoking. When they came back home, they would sneak cigarettes amongst the cornflowers at the far end of the yard near my turtles. I kept their secret, but blackmailed them into buying me candied fruit. Once, Rufi and I found a kitten and secretly kept it up in the attic because Grandma didn’t want us coddling any animals inside the house—she’d had enough with my grandpa’s stupid wolfhounds. I showed the cat to my uncle, and he grew silent and angry. He told me to forget about the kitten and took it away to Burgas. There was no one I could complain to, but he made me so mad that I tattled on him to Grandma for smoking.

      God, all hell broke loose the next time he came home. The whole house shook with their stomping and shouts. Grandma chased him with a dustpan; you could hear the dull ring of metal hitting bone. Klemo howled, while Nikula’s voice pierced the din.

      “You worthless brat, yesterday’s turd. So you’re smoking on me, are you? Just like that rapscallion, your father! I raised you from a mere slab of flesh,” she screamed, laying into him. “Now you’re gonna poison yourself. Once you’re earning your own money, go ahead and buy shit for all I care, but don’t you dare buy tobacco with my money!”

      I listened to the uproar with satisfaction, since for once somebody besides me was getting a thrashing, but I soon felt sorry for my uncle and began to get scared. It was dangerous to unleash Nikula’s fury. I had just breathed a sigh of relief that the attack seemed to be tapering off when the dustpan came down hard on my back.

      “Whyyyyyy,” I screamed as I writhed at her feet.

      “So you learn not to tattle, you worthless brat!”

      Thus my grandmother concluded our lesson for that evening and disappeared behind the curtain by the kitchen sink, where she rattled the dishes around for quite some time. After such campaigns, she would let off steam with cleaning.

      After a week, I made up with my uncle. I apologized for ratting him out and he told me the following story. Once, in Czechoslovakia, after many unsuccessful attempts, he finally managed to sweet-talk Nikula into letting him adopt two small kittens. They named them Topsy and Mopsy, and they soon grew into magnificent cats, everybody’s darlings, especially Nikula’s. They adored her and would wallow in her lap for hours in the evening. For Christmas, the family slaughtered a pig, made sausages, and put them in the cellar to ripen. Somebody left the cellar door open, and Topsy and Mopsy snuck in, gobbled up whatever they could, chewed on the rest and then escaped.

      Nikula discovered the damage but didn’t say anything, which wasn’t a good sign. Instead, she threw away the remains of the sausage and rattled around the kitchen, sunk in a deep silence. Topsy and Mopsy were nowhere to be seen. The next day, the whole family gathered for dinner. The delicious aromas of baked rabbit and apricot dumplings wafted from the kitchen.

      This fragrant dinner lightened up the gloomy atmosphere of the preceding days. They ate and drank, and at one point Boris asked: “Well now, woman, where are Topsy and Mopsy?”

      “How should I know? They ran away, like the devil’s spawn they are. How could they dare come back now,” my grandma replied angrily.

      Boris pushed the food around

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