Rosko Iliev Tzolov
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Welcome to my corner of the World Wide Web. I hope you stop,
delve into the cobwebs and pick some stories that will linger with you
Stories and tales
There were three of them—two in their early forties and a younger one, about twenty. They were huddled together in the tavern, warming themselves by the stove and with a bottle of vodka, passing it from one to another. On the counter beside them stood another bottle—already empty.
“Damn cold,” said one of the older men. He was tall, with a beard and what appeared to be a knife scar on his forehead. “There’s never been cold like this in mid-September.”
“It’s been holding on for a whole week now,” said the other, forty years old, shorter, a dark-skinned man. “You’d think snow was about to fall. Hey, Vladi, my boy, easy with the bottle. I want a drink too.”
“You pretty much drank the last one all by yourself,” Vladi said, but handed him the bottle anyway.
“I’ve had two, three sips at most. You and Sava drank too.”
Sava slapped him on the back of the head.
“Come on, Dad, let’s get into the ocean. Just one more time,” George wheedled.
“That’s enough, kiddo. When we have a little rest, we’ll go in again,” his father answered. He lay on his back, and his big belly was showing. It was even a little funny. A young man with such a big belly. It was good that the beach was empty, and there was no one around, not that his father cared much.
“Oh,” George sighed. He was eight years old, blond, had cheerful green eyes, and was a bit short for his age.
He thought they had come to the seaside for the sea, but his mother and father just lay on the sand under the umbrella all the time! However, George did not find the sand that interesting. He wanted to be in the water. He could not get enough of it. The waves, the foam, the mussels, and the crabs. The sea that stretched before him was blue, deep, reaching the horizon—it was probably endless. However, his parents did not let him go in the water alone, and he was a little afraid to do so on his own.
The man with the graying hair, rocking back and forth, toward a foretold fate. Is this how you will live your life, old man—sitting on your porch, counting the people who pass along the sidewalk, or the cars, or the flies buzzing in front of you? Do you measure the seconds, the minutes, the hours by the rocking of your chair—creak-crash, again and again—like a dancer without legs, while you drink beer, smelling of alcohol and cigarettes, smelling of sweat?
You live across from me, across the busy little street. I see you rise from your chair and pace your yard. We never talk. Do you have much to tell—how your day went?
I graduated in biochemistry, and quickly discovered that companies were looking for people with experience. Still, I managed to work for a while as a lab technician at a small company. All day long, I fed water samples into a large machine and recorded the impurity results in a database. Besides being boring, the job didn’t help me make friends with my coworkers. I took stock of my life up to that point and decided that this kind of work wasn’t for me. I didn’t feel like studying more either—it seemed that people did the interesting work in biochemistry with PhDs, and I didn’t want to invest another five years into something I might or might not end up liking. So I took a break and found a job as support staff at a psychiatric hospital. My job title was therapeutic aide—basically an orderly who kept patients occupied, took them for walks, and performed similar tasks. It seemed like an easy job, the pay wasn’t bad, it covered my student loan payments, and in my free time, I planned to think about what changes to make in my life
He hurt. He was sick. Something ached like a rotten tooth, deep inside. He was drinking. He thought it would dull the pain, but it didn’t. He and his girlfriend had broken up temporarily, but she found someone else. She didn’t hurt him. He didn’t care. Only one thing mattered—to make the ice-cold thing in his chest stop hurting.
The pain had appeared months ago. At first, he barely noticed it, but over time, it grew stronger. He went to therapy. Nothing. The psychiatrist gave him medication. It didn’t help; it only made the pain worse. He lived as if in a half-dream. He couldn’t find a place for himself; this thing, whatever it was, gnawed at him from within.
Andrey often dreamed of flying.
He would stand on the ground, spread his arms, and take off. Other people longed to dream of flying, but he had the same dream again and again. He worked as an engineer at a small company, had a wife and two children, and a small house—too small, really. His sons were seventeen and fourteen and shared one room. At one point, he had thought about expanding the house, but he never had the money or the time. His car was a twenty-year-old red Volvo—the family called it “The Beast.” It still ran and needed a few repairs. He wondered where he would find the money when the Beast finally died.
I’ve always had this urge to move forward… Ever since I entered college, my horizons expanded. I had energy, a desire to conquer the world. College was tedious. I learned some things, but my education was something I could have acquired on my own. I took what mattered — a diploma, a few meaningless friendships, a few meaningless relationships, and after a few years, I was knee-deep in the ocean of life. That energy, that drive of mine, kept pushing me forward.
I’m sixty years old, and I own a law firm on the 36th floor of one of those glass skyscrapers in New York. I’ve been married twice — two divorces and four children who became collateral damage of my career. I’ve had my victories and losses — more victories than losses; I suppose I can say I’ve achieved more in life than most people my age could even imagine.
I walked out of my personal doctor's office eeling upbeat. I was glad that he had found me to be completely healthy. I had some chest pain, but the doctor listened to my heart, tapped here and there, looked at my lab results, and decided that everything was fine. He asked if I smoked, and I admitted it. Normally, I’d answer “no” to such a question because I only smoked occasionally, and I didn’t want anyone to see in my doctor's report that I was a smoker.
"Cigarettes kill," my doctor joked, which of course wasn’t just a joke.
As I was leaving the office, I passed b a woman whom I took for a beggar. She was elderly—about seventy—with messy gray hair. She was sitting on a small, wooden, three-legged stool with a tiny table in front of her, on which there were cards. Across from her, there was another small stool. I felt a little sorry for her. It was a hot afternoon, and although she had found some shade, it was still quite warm, even under the building I had just left.
I dreamt that strangers were living in my home,” the man said. “I felt so terribly alone among them. I couldn’t find a place to sleep—every bed was taken. The apartment was larger than in real life, cold and unwelcoming. I kept wondering whether I even had a bed of my own, whether it was really my apartment at all. I lay down in the hallway. My eyes kept closing, but the strangers walked past me—again and again—waking me every time. With their pale, unblinking eyes… I was so tired. At one point someone I recognized appeared, but he, too, stepped right over me, just like the others. I don’t know why, but it made me so sad. I cried. Have you ever cried in your sleep?”
He sat in a booth across from a beautiful brunette. He was dark-haired himself, with sunken brown eyes behind glasses. Middle height. A bit heavy. A mole on his right cheek.
I am dining at my favorite café on the main street of town. It’s a gloomy autumn day outside, but the café is a cozy cocoon. I am alone, with only the glowing screen of my phone to keep me company. I browse the internet, log onto Facebook, exchange messages with friends. Suddenly a woman’s raised voice snaps me out of the virtual reality in which I have lost myself. I look around. The café is almost empty. A couple sits two tables away from me, a single man further away. The woman in her thirties who raised her voice is accompanied by a five-, six-, or seven-year-old boy; they sit at the table next to mine.
Almost everyone in the café has taken out their phones and we are all fidgeting with them. The only one without a phone is the little boy. He is seated in front of a half-eaten piece of chocolate cake. After his mother scolds him for whatever small transgression he has committed, she goes back to her phone. The boy happily returns to his cake. Once he finishes eating it, he starts playing with it.
After a grueling flight from Sofia with an eight-hour layover in Istanbul, at 6:30 P.M., I landed at JFK airport. Passing through customs control and catching the Air train to the subway station took me about half an hour. Then I took the subway train with the intended final stop the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It took me four hours to get there. I took a nap – not having had any sleep for 32 hours, and missed my stop, then transferred to another train, fell asleep again and missed the Bus Terminal again, instead of that, waking where I started from – the airport. I took another train and forced myself to stay awake. When I finally arrived at my stop it was 11:30 P.M. so I bought a bus ticket for 9 A.M. next morning to Binghamton and got out of the Terminal.
I didn’t feel like spending the night on an uncomfortable bench in the stuffy Bus Terminal, neither renting a hotel room for the night. It would be more interesting to take a walk around Times Square, which is a block away from the PABT. Thus, I could see that emblematic place at night for the first time.
Mr. Rin-ti-tin was a depressing geezer. He was nicknamed so, because of the scraping sound his walker was making when he was pushing it down the sidewalk. Or maybe the nickname came up because anyone whose gaze fell on the small, bent-over man would not but imagine him falling down a staircase bouncing off every step like a tin can making sounds like that of the nickname. Who cares that the name had once belonged to a particular dog? Students from the university in town lived in the neighborhood, and one of them had recently given the geezer his nickname, which was clever and humorous and, of course, carried a specific dose of malice, fitting the story we tell.
The author sat down in front of the computer. He felt like writing. Something like a love story, but also tied to the pressing themes of the day, so to speak, political. But what, what exactly... He ran his fingers over the keyboard, dusted it off, then opened Google Docs. His fingers began to clatter across the keys…
They called him Barry – for simplicity's sake. His real name was Baroye, but the Danes found it difficult to pronounce, whether because it was foreign or they just disliked it; anyway, it stuck as Barry. He didn't mind. He was glad he fit. He had somehow managed to get a visa for Denmark, where he had been studying medicine for years. It was there he met Maraya – she was Palestinian like him, studying at the same university to be a nurse. One thing led to another—they liked each other and soon were dating…
A small stream ran through the valley, humidifying the air and bestowing life on the plants along its banks. Its slow, gentle waters crept forward like a human life — meandering, pausing to form quiet pools here and there, murmuring over stones, bathing the birds, sheltering the fish, and washing the drooping branches of the weeping willows. Swallows chased tiny insects above the water. Magpies and blackbirds strutted proudly through the grass, searching for worms, fluttering to nearby trees when startled by rabbits. The air was heavy and damp.
Then came the sound of human voices.
An older man was walking down the empty street, taking his time. The man was drunk, but it didn’t show much. The street was devoid of people. After the bar closed and he, the last customer, was kicked out, he didn’t meet anyone on his way home. Rarely did a car pass him by. The man chose to walk down the street close to the sidewalk. He didn’t know exactly why he did; it was just an impulse. He liked it that way. Sometimes he came across a parked automobile, which he had to go around. With lazy, curious, and searching fingers, the man was feeling the contours of the cars, brushing the dust off of them.
I love taking evening strolls when the sun sets and the sky darkens, painted in pink and purple, while the clouds turn ashen. Before dinner, I often go out to wander.
The other day, I went downtown again. On Sundays, the sidewalks are empty, and the traffic dwindles. I craved a smoke. I couldn’t buy just one cigarette, but I wanted one. I suppose if I ever develop an addiction, I’ll shamelessly pester people for money because even for something as “innocent” as a cigarette, I’m willing to stop a stranger and ask for one. Well, this time, I didn’t run into any smokers, so I bought a pack. I lit up and sat on a bench in the city square, watching the few passersby.
A little further down, a man in his fifties sat tuning his guitar. It was a perfect scene — the pink and purple sky, the square enveloped in gathering darkness, and the musician preparing to play, as if just for me.
It was noisy in the bar. From the crowd around me, I could make out fragmented voices, and music was playing from a speaker positioned right in front of me. I’m not saying the noise was unpleasant. That’s why I came to the bar—to be among people. Just to talk to someone, for something to happen. What that “something” was, I wasn’t sure. At home, the silence was oppressive. I wanted to talk about something, even if it was nonsense with some drunken fool. To share a story with someone. Unfortunately, there were no drunken fools in this bar. It was a colorful crowd, mostly young, successful professionals. I overheard fragments of conversations about work—topics I couldn’t join. It seemed I wasn’t going to find a kindred soul to talk to heart-to-heart.
Our electric lawn mower broke. I wasn’t expecting that. We had it for more than fifteen years and it had always been reliable. Someone famous once said, “All things break down, even the steam iron. And honestly, I never expected it from the steam iron.” I don’t know who spoke those words, but I also never expected the lawn mower to break. I was mowing the grass in my backyard which consisted of a small area with fruit trees, a few bushes here and there, and I suddenly ran over a peony. The machine got clogged, proceeded to cough and sputter, then died. That was the end of the mower.
I expected my Dad to get upset about it – we were working together in the yard. There was a time, when I was little, when I might have even been spanked for such a deed. It seemed with age, my dad had mellowed. He came to me and surprisingly nodded at the lawn mower, “Eh, what happened to it?” he asked. “It broke. It’s my fault.” I responded. Dad fiddled around with the mower and tried to start it, but he was unsuccessful.
“How about the tires, are they new?” the father, a sixty-year-old man, asked. “Ah, they are alright, almost new, very well preserved,” I lied. I don’t know if he heard me. It was very noisy in the car. We had pulled the windows down so the air could circulate in and out of the coupe. I was also wearing a mask, which muffled my voice. We’re in the middle of a Coronavirus epidemic, after all. We were driving through the dense web of streets on the West Side of Binghamton on a cold and gloomy Tuesday in late October. I was freezing, sitting in the back seat of the Lancer. The man’s daughter, a twenty-year-old blonde who was driving somewhat recklessly, struggled with the manual gears. I felt that was precisely why she had answered the advertisement to sell my old Mitsubishi; she likes a challenge. She was a student at the university in the town, she’d said. The Lancer was a perfect car for her. It would keep going for a year, maybe a couple, but most likely not.
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