Free East of the West by Miroslav Penkov

dream the dreams of other people, others to dream my dreams. I went to sleep hoping to dream vivid, transcendental symbols.
    Today , I wrote in a little journal, I dreamed of Father on the sofa, peeling sunflower seeds, his socks pulled off halfway like donkey ears .
    I dreamed of Mother spooning yogurt from a jar .
    I dreamed of Grandpa, waiting in the hallway to trip me up with his cane .
    It was after this particular dream and after two years without Grandpa’s voice that I finally picked up the phone, on the eve of Fourth of July, and dialed.
    I tried to imagine him, out in the yard, straining his eyes to read in the dusk. He would hear the ringing phone, and slowly, with pain, make his way into the house. I tried to see his face, so old and terrifying that I graced it with an imaginary beard to hide its age. The beard must be white, I thought. No, yellow from nicotine. A lion’s mane, angry and wild, which had consumed the face. Two fiery eyes peered out from the mane, burning with Lenin’s words. Electrification plus Soviet power equals Communism. Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever . I waited, petrified, for his incinerating voice to turn me to ash, for his brimstone breath to scatter me like wind.
    “Grandpa,” I said.
    “Sinko.”
    I shivered so bad the cord between us crackled. I was afraid he’d hung up already.
    “Grandpa, are you there?”
    “I’m here.”
    “You’re there,” I said. I said, “Grandpa, there is so much water between us. We are so far apart.”
    “We are,” he said. “But blood, I hope, is thicker than the ocean.”
    •
    After Grandma’s funeral, Grandpa had refused to leave the village. In one year he’d lost everything a man could lose: the woman of his heart, and the love of his life—the Party.
    “There is no place for me in the city,” I remember him telling my Dad. “I have no desire to serve these traitors. Let capitalism corrupt them all, these bastards, these murderers of innocent women.”
    Grandpa was convinced that it had been the fall of communism that had killed Grandma. “Her cancer was a consequence of the grave disappointments of her pure and idealistic heart,” Grandpa would explain. “She could not watch her dreams being trampled on so she did the only possible thing an honest woman could do—she died.”
    Grandpa bought a village house so he could be close to Grandma, and every day at three o’clock in the afternoon he went to her grave, sat by the tombstone, opened volume twelve of Lenin’s collected works and read aloud. Summer or winter, he was there, reading. He never skipped a day, and it was there, at Grandma’s grave, that the idea hit him.
    “Nothing is lost,” he told me and my parents on one Saturday visit. “Communism may be dead all over this country, but ideals never die. I will bring it all here, to the village. I will build it all from scratch.”
    On October 25, 1993, the great October village revolution took place, quietly, underground, without much ado. At that time, everybody who was sixty or younger had already left the village to live in the city, and so those who remained were people pure and strong of heart, in whom the idea was still alive and whose dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. Officially, the village was still part of Bulgaria, and it had a mayor who answered to the national government and so on and so forth; but secretly, underground, it was the new Communist village party that decided its fate. The name of the village was changed from Valchidol to Leningrad. Grandpa was unanimously elected secretary general.
    Every evening there was a Party meeting in the old village hall, where the seat next to Grandpa was always left vacant, and water was sprinkled from a hose outside on the windows to create the illusion of rain.
    “Communism blossoms better with moisture,” Grandpa explained, when the other Party members questioned his