Atanas had a great childhood and he would always go back to his parents’ home. He taught English in a middle school so he often needed a change. Only last week one of his students asked him what squids mean and Atanas couldn’t think of anything to make up. Eventually he said it was a special kind of pear, orange, and sweeter than regular pears. He wanted to tell them how a squid is almost as sweet as the pears he used to steal as a child, only bigger. But he stopped just in time.
Later that day he looked the word “squid” in the dictionary. So it was a small fish, like the ones his neighbors used to have in the little pool in the garden. Atanas couldn’t remember if the little pool was a pool or a well, and why its waters were always murky. Or maybe there were no fish in the pool at all, and the well was right next to the small pool. The phone rang and Atanas picked up and talked to his friend while still trying to remember the objects in the neighbors’ garden. He knew the path and the row of cabbage but somehow everything became unclear once he got to the pool. Some tools and the grapes got him all confused, he couldn’t remember any further so he stopped.
His one good friend was on the phone, inviting him over to have dinner with him and his wife. Atanas could never remember the wife’s name, he never did like her too much, but Jan has been his friend for a long time now, and he wanted to see him. But even if he goes he won’t get to talk to Jan, the wife alone will speak the entire time about her books and music. He shouldn’t go, he told Jan he couldn’t come, he had to go home, his dog was sick, Jan knew how much he liked that dog, he really couldn’t come, they should go sometime next week to the pub. So he lied about the dog, but that woman was hard to stand, she ranted about literary critics, she started every sentence with “you know, the sound of the machine;” she coughed and ate and talked a lot, and she just wouldn’t stop.
The dog was fine, he hoped, but he would still go back home at the end of the week. Or maybe even call in sick and leave on Friday. The students wouldn’t miss him, and he could use the day off. It took an eight hour train ride to get to his hometown and the fifth, sixth and seventh hour always put Atanas’ inner life to a terrible test. And Atanas’ inner life always failed the test. He had no difficulty in spacing out during conversations, or when he graded papers, when he ate, slept, taught. But he couldn’t help paying attention to everything inside or outside the train, since there was nothing there that demanded, allured or shouted for his attention. He needed an extra day to make this journey, which turned out to be no different from all the rest. No ingredient was missing: the semi-privacy, the boring book, the regret for not buying any magazines in the train station (Atanas was cheap), and the short uncomfortable naps. This time, as always, he woke up just seconds before inertia pushed him forward and the train stopped with a screech.
On his way home from the train station Atanas had a déjà vu. He noticed a playing-card on the street, looked closer, and saw it was a black queen of something. He could have made a grand bet that the same card was in the same spot on the street years ago, in his childhood, and that it was just as new and dirty then as it was now. He thought the brilliant thought: “Funny things happen to time,” and left the card there. Later that day a dog would pee on the card, another dog would come and smell the first dog’s pee, a hen would rummage next to the card, and a car would come, lifting the card a little till a breeze in the wind would get hold of it and take it across the river Poz, in the gipsy neighborhood.
Atanas thought nothing of where the playing-card would go, and what lands it would encounter. He just kept walking the sandy street till he got to his parents’ home. The Atames’ fence and house had soft edges, blande and tamed. Atanas never realized before that they were so. He paused for a second and looked at the gate.
He couldn’t find the door bell. He had keys but they were somewhere in his bag. He found it. Rang twice. Doors opened and closed, but it took his mom a while to open the gate. She was older than how he remembered her the last time he’s seen her, she always was a little older. He hugged her, her face shone and her eyes teared, like always. Except that she was wearing dark rimmed glasses now. Where were her usual glasses? Where was dad? The song on the radio stopped.
“What a drag it is getting old” Atanas remembered the song, of course, it was new, his dad would listen to all the new songs. He was coming slowly. Atanas could never tell if his dad was trying to go slower than he could or if the leg actually bothered him a little. His dad knew he was in the spotlight and was taking his time. This explanation never occurred to Atanas before and now he was very proud that he had it all figured out. Outside the lamp horn turned on. Atanas noticed for the first time in his life that it was a dark street his parents were living on. His dad stopped telling him how he spent his day and told Atanas to close the gate and get inside.
Inside, they all had dinner together. And talked for a long time. Atanas told his parents all about Tomas Wit, who was a very fashionable painter, earning lots of money in Germany from his paintings. This Tomas Wit went to the school where Atanas was now teaching, and because he had such fond memories of it, gave money to renovate the ceiling. The school made May the 15th an honorary Tomas Wit day, and that’s how Atanas could come a day earlier. They talked and talked even further, and wondered upon Tomas Wit’s origin and style, life and spirituality. Outside the night peaked dark and started flooding the walls with its presence. Atanas was the last to realize it was time to stop talking.
“Africa, Africa” His dad started watching, and Atanas felt a compulsion to go somewhere else. No drums ever moved Atanas’ heart by themselves. There should have been a nice setting to the documentary, a lively city. New York, and a crazy African dancer, with one foot in the air, wearing a brown short African skirt. He would stand perfectly still in the middle of the flowing crowd, people dressed in suits, and Cary Grant movies hats and shiny shoes. His heart would move to the beat, but Atanas could see the African dancer standing perfectly still at all times. Atanas could see himself as the African dancer, and, for a second, think that he had yet another vision. A vision of perfect equilibrium. Atanas smiled, looked around, his mother was cleaning the table, there was no dessert left. He turned on the lamp and stopped dreaming for the time being.
The lamp flickered twice, his dad quickly turned his head and seeing it was just the lamp turned his head back, slowly this time. Again the lamp flickered twice and Atanas remembered his childhood friend and vile conspirator Eduard Luma. Eduard Luma, the name alone would born Arabian nights, pirates and magic wands into anyone’s mind. And sometimes it did so to Atanas’ mind as well. But more often Atanas was robbed of the enchanting powers of his friend’s name, as Luma was thin, short and dark. He had small eyes, always alert, and he would mention every five sentences how much he liked Italian women. But Atanas never knew how Italian women look like, he asked Luma, but Luma never told him. The only way he could imagine Italian women was by thinking of Marie, but even that, only later on, as she grew up. He liked her lips and her hair and the way she looked, and a little older, she was all Italian, no doubt about it. When Marie was moving, she was the living breathing tip of Atanas’ meaning of life arrow. His goal in life was to have her image never vanishing, preserved into some sort of eternal mold and seeing her again and again always the same was for Atanas, his goal in life walking the earth in a merry embodiment. But the music stopped, Marie vanished from his mind, his dad turned off the TV, and said Goodnight.
Atanas was left alone. The room was small and dark as always. Atanas turned off the lamp to look out the window. Outside the moon was full and there was no evil. Or maybe the evil was invisible. Atanas had never seen evil around his parents or around the house. The only place he’d seen it was a dark corner in the far end of the garden and he’d only seen it once, a long time ago, while learning to whistle with his good friend Luma. Always afterwards he wondered how come there was evil if there was music, but he never asked no one, and he saw the evil again only once. The evil was on the street, outside the school he taught, on the giant large street with no end. The evil came to him as an unsuspecting woman with dark hair and a carare on the middle. She was coming straight towards him, when she turned her head and stopped, all of a sudden.
The evil came as her laughter. Atanas didn’t know what she was laughing at, but in the disfigured face, he could see the evil, meandering. Hypocrisy or an ample absence of kindness? It was evil, so who’s to say what were the causes. There were no roars, and that was strange. The giant crowded street was completely silent, the people were completely silent, and a heavy metaphysical burden descended over Atanas. On that giant street there was no one else who saw the evil. The burden descended over Atanas as fog descends over a summer night. A chill crossed his spine, a cloud covered the moon, and Atanas realized for a second that he was looking at the dark. In the dark the realization got lost, the past thought flew away, and the memories stopped flowing.
The only way to wash away metaphysical burdens, illusions and disillusions, Atanas knew, was to sleep. Sleep came easily, as shadows of sadness, metaphysical or otherwise, usually exhaust Atanas quickly. Every morning Atanas wakes up in a state of perfect balance. He is absolutely unsure whether he would want to get up or not. If a scale could measure his desire to get up, the scale wouldn’t be tilted in any direction. Still, somehow, always he gets up, but that’s beside the point. The point is that today Atanas’ scale of getting up was tilted. It was tilted in the positive direction. Atanas was eager to get up, and there were no nightmares pushing him out of his bed, and no waves of heat coming over his sheets. He was eager to wake up due a mysterious impulse, otherwise referred to as young age, an impulse Atanas didn’t experience too often. In the virtue of this impulse Atanas jumped out of his bed as though pushed by a thought, he opened the door, but then suddenly stopped, as the thought seemed nowhere to be found.
Atanas headed for the kitchen, greeted his mother, ate a big breakfast, got dressed and went for a walk. While walking he remembered that there was a thought which pulled him irresistibly toward the door of his room and into the kitchen. He tried to conjecture on the thought, and, as any reasonable man, assumed the thought to involve his friends, and a great deal of past joys, potent again in the garden, on the top of the wall, sitting crossed legged in the middle of the path, in the shadow. The branches were moving up and down, everything was green like always, like before. Atanas could never picture in his head the garden during winter or spring. The garden was green, dirtier, and sometimes suffocating during the summer. It was almost as though its beauty didn’t matter anymore, and Atanas needn’t look at it, but could sort of have a proper conversation, as the garden was smart and easy to approach. This is not to say that Atanas ever talked to the garden, ever since he was a child, he was quite a reasonable man, it was more a feeling of easy going hanging out in the air and in the trees. The neighbors’ garden had plenty of vegetables, and produced plenty, one had no good hiding spots, which made the hiding game more exciting, and one could play cards on top of the tools hut. The neighbors’ garden was a playground, very useful in such a function. His parents’ garden he could hang out with, which was different, but also, less fun, he had to admit. Why did he get up from his bed in the first place? Atanas used to be good at tracing his thoughts, but not anymore. The empty moments, when he would space out, and pause his thoughts (or his memory, who’s to say?), appeared more and more often, as he would grow more and more detached.
The thought that made him get out of his bed was the conviction that he and his friends could play cards again together today on the top of the hut, at around 5 or 6, with the sun coming down, and the hut being warm. That conviction was synonymous to young age and infinite amounts of satisfaction. It was sad that after a while playing cards got boring and Atanas never climbed on the straight roof of the tool house again. It was even sadder that at any exciting moment in his adult life Atanas would go back to one particular time when they were playing cards, and compare and contrast. That particular time Atanas still wanted to win the game, and found satisfaction in it, but he was also enjoying the warmth of the sun on the roof, and the warm old stone. Atanas never did trace back his thoughts to the thought of playing cards with his friends, again, on the top of the hut. He spent Saturday and Sunday eating and walking around, and he left on Sunday evening.