Free East of the West by Miroslav Penkov Page B

the parades I thought about.
    •
    When I was still a boy, I spent my summers at the village, with my grandparents. In the winter they lived in Sofia, two blocks away from our apartment; but when the weather warmed, they always packed and left.
    At least once a summer, when the moon was full, Grandpa would take me crawfish hunting. We spent most of the day in the yard, reinforcing the bottoms of big bags with tape, patching the holes from previous hunts. Finally, when we were done, we sat on the porch and watched the sun dive behind the Balkan peaks. Grandpa lit a cigarette, took out his pocket knife and etched patterns along the bark of the chestnut sticks we had prepared for catching the crawfish. We waited for the moon to rise, and sometimes Grandma sat by us and sang, or Grandpa told stories of the days he had been out in the woods, hiding in the dugouts with his Communist comrades.
    When the moon was finally up, shining brightly, Grandpa would get to his feet and stretch. “They are out on pasture,” he would say. “Let’s get them.”
    Grandma made paté sandwiches for the road and wrapped them in paper napkins that were always difficult to peel off completely. She wished us luck, and we left the house and walked out of the village and then on the muddy path through the woods. Grandpa carried the bags and sticks, and I followed. The moon was bright above us, lighting our way; the wind soft on our faces. Somewhere close by the river was booming.
    We would step out of the woods, into the meadow, and with the night sky unfolding above us, we would see them. The river and the crawfish. The river always dark and roaring, the crawfish on the grass, moving slowly, pinching blades of crowfoot.
    We would sit on the grass, take out the sandwiches and eat. In the sharp moonlight the wet bodies of the crawfish glistened like live coal, and the banks seemed covered with burning embers and the hundreds of little eyes that watched us through the dark. When we were done eating, the hunt began.
    Grandpa would give me a stick and a bag. Hundreds of twitching crawfish at our feet: poke their pincers with the stick, and they pinch as hard as they can. I learned to lift them, then shake them off in the bag. One by one you collect.
    “They are easy prey,” Grandpa would say. “You catch one, but the others don’t run away. The others don’t even know you are there until you pick them up, and even then they still have no idea.”
    One, two, three hours. The moon, tiring, swims toward the horizon. The east blazes red. And then the crawfish in perfect synchrony turn around and slowly, quietly, make for the river. She takes their bodies back, and lulls them to their sleep as a new day ripens. We sit on the grass, our bags heavy with prey. I fall asleep on Grandpa’s shoulder. He carries me home to the village. But first, he lets the crawfish go.
    •
    The possibility that I was jealous of my grandfather’s life gave me no rest. At night, hugging the pillow, I tried to picture him my age, remembering vaguely a portrait Grandma had kept on her night stand—handsome face, eyes burning with Communist ideals, lips curved in a smile, a sickle readied for revolutionary harvests, sharp enough to change the world. And what could be said of my eyes and lips?
    I wondered if I had made a mistake resisting him all these years. But then, when I would finally begin to drowse off, Grandma would come to my bed and caress my forehead the way she’d done when I had been sick with fever. “Your grandpa’s dying,” she’d say. “We are expecting him soon. But please, my dear, next time you talk to him, ask him to stop reading Lenin at my grave.”
    •
    “I’m writing my senior thesis on you,” I told him one day in my final year of college.
    On the other end of the line something fell with a deafening bang. Grandpa’s voice seemed to come from a distance across the room, and then, much closer.
    “I dropped the receiver,” he said