Free East of the West by Miroslav Penkov Page A

decision; in fact, he was thinking of Grandma and the rain on their first meeting. And indeed, communism in Leningrad blossomed.
    Grandpa and the villagers decided to salvage every Communist artifact remaining in Bulgaria and bring them all to Leningrad: to the living museum of the Communist doctrine. Monuments chiseled under the red ideal were being demolished all over the country. Statues, erected decades ago, proudly reminding, glorifying, promising, were now pulled down and melted for scrap. Poets once extolled now lay forgotten. Their paper bodies gathered dust. Their ink blood washed away by rainwater.
    Once the two years of silence was broken by our call, Grandpa began to write me letters. I was amazed, but not surprised, to learn that, now back in Leningrad, he’d still not given up on his ideas. In one of his letters, Grandpa told me that the villagers had convinced a bunch of Gypsies to do the salvaging for them. “Comrade Hassan, his wife and their thirteen Gypsy children,” Grandpa wrote, “doubtlessly inspired by the bright Communist ideal, and only mildly stimulated by the money and the two pigs we gave them, have promised to supply our village with the best of the best ‘red’ artifacts that could be found across our pitiful country. Today the comrade Gypsies brought us their first gift: a monument of the Nameless Russian Soldier, liberator from the Turks, slightly deformed from the waist down, and with a missing shotgun, but otherwise in excellent condition. The monument now stands proud next to the statues of Alyosha, Seryoja and the Nameless Maiden of Minsk.”
    •
    I made a point of talking to Grandpa twice a month. At first we spoke of little things. He told me of rearranging his collection of Communist artifacts, of reading The Modern Woman at Grandma’s grave. For thirty years, he said, she had received this magazine once a month and he didn’t want to break the cycle.
    “Although,” he told me once, “I’m slightly tired of weight loss diets and relationship advice. Three rules for dating, three steps to getting slim. Nowadays, Grandson, there are three easy steps for everything under the sun.”
    I asked him if this meant he no longer read Lenin.
    “I thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Listen,” he said, “I have been thinking. Why don’t I recommend a book for you?”
    I begged him not to start again.
    “I’ve failed you,” he said. “Sometimes I think you went away just to spite me.”
    I told him that, contrary to what he thought, he was not the center of the world. I got along with my American friends handsomely, I felt at home.
    “Bullshit,” he said. “You hate it there.”
    My loneliness rose up in me like steam over a barren field. I choked with rage. Surely he had no way of knowing that these friends I spoke of did not exist? That I hadn’t left my room in days?
    “You are a stubborn mule, Grandpa,” I declared. “Give up already. Burn your collection of artifacts, your books. The past is dead.”
    “Ideals never die,” he said.
    “But people do. Or what, you think you’ll live forever?”
    I knew it was wrong of me to say such things, but I wanted to hurt him. And when he laughed, I knew I had.
    “I think you’re jealous,” he said. “As jealous as a one-legged maiden before the village dance. You can’t stand the thought that your grandpa is happy and you are not.”
    “I can’t stand the thought that my grandpa is crazy. That he has filled his life with chaff.”
    “A steady job? A loving wife? A son I managed to send to college? Is all this chaff to you?”
    I must have kept silent for quite some time. At last he spoke. “My boy, do you remember the parades? I think about them often. You were so I little, I’d let you sit on my shoulders and we’d march together with the crowd. I’d buy you a red balloon, a paper flag. You’d chant for the Party and sing the songs. You knew them all by heart.”
    “I remember,” I said. But it was not