52 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
walking with another American, a grad-
uate student in a program he hated in
the South. He was younger than I was,
and fit; in the mornings he ran along
the sea, on the path that led to the new
town, where the shops were open, he
said, it was a real city, not just a mu-
seum. He was friendly and I tried to
match his friendliness, it was why I was
here, I told myself, to meet people, to
make friends. But I didn’t trust myself,
I was too eager, I caught myself look-
ing at him, at almost every man I passed,
with a kind of hunger R. had shielded
me from, I mean the thought of R. It
might be possible, I thought about the
other writer, he looked at me some-
times in a way that made me think
maybe I could have him, or he could
have me, we could have a little romance,
though really that wasn’t what I wanted;
I wanted something brutal, which was
what frightened me, I wanted to go
back to that world R. had lifted me out
of. It was a childish feeling, maybe, I
wanted to ruin what he had made, what
he had made me, I mean, the person
he had made me.
We were trailing behind the others,
we could hear them ahead of us in the
dark, their occasional bursts of laugh-
ter. We were walking up Apolonia, the
main thoroughfare, though it wasn’t
until we reached the center of town
that there were any real signs of life,
some open shops, a restaurant, a man
at a table outside, hunched over a slice
of pizza. We caught up with the oth-
ers in front of a convenience store, and
waited until N. and the priest emerged
with new bottles of wine and a stack
of plastic cups. N. handed these out as
the priest busied himself with one of
the bottles, cutting the foil at the neck
with a pocketknife attached to his keys,
working at it slowly, with the deliber-
ateness of drunkenness. He had arrived
after the rest of us, driving in from Ve-
liko Tarnovo. We had all been curious
to meet him, but there was nothing es-
pecially priestly about the man who
appeared dressed all in black, not in a
cassock but in jeans and a T-shirt he
wore tucked in, tight on his thin frame.
He had a young man’s beard, scraggly
and unkempt, a sign of laziness more
than devotion, I might have thought.
Only his hands marked him out, the
fingers long and thin, a scholar’s hands,
with the weird sliding grace of some-
one accustomed to ritual. Or maybe I
had this impression because of the way
I had seen him raise his hand to a man’s
lips earlier in the evening, when the
distinguished Bulgarian writer, elderly
and reclusive, asked for a blessing be-
fore he read. He had become priestly
in that moment, he had stood solemn
while the writer pressed his lips to the
third joint of the second finger of his
right hand, and then he made the sign
of the cross over the writer’s bowed
head. It had surprised me, it was a ges-
ture I hadn’t seen in years, not made in
earnest, not since the year I had played
at conversion in graduate school, when
I had made it myself or had it made
over me at the rail of a church in Bos-
ton, where I stood with my arms crossed
over my chest, my mouth sealed by my
disordered life, as I thought of it then.
There was nothing solemn aboutthe priest now. Once he had opened
the bottle he made a direct line for D.,
the youngest American, who from the
first had been the object of greatest in-
terest for the Bulgarian men. This was
especially true of the priest, whose at-
tentions had gone quickly from charm-
ing to comic and then, as they persisted,
become disquieting. For most beauti-
ful first, he said, pouring wine into her
cup, his English almost nonexistent,
and she smiled and looked away, cring-
ing a little. He came around to each of
us then, gallant as he filled our cups,
though he refused to meet my gaze, as
he had all day, my attempts to speak
with him defeated by the odd way he
spoke Bulgarian, very fast and with a
tripping enunciation that made him
impossible for me to understand. It
was the accent of his region, one of the
other Bulgarians said to me, selski ak-
sent, a village accent. But it wasn’t hisAFTER BEING ASKED IFI WRITE
THE “OCCASIONAL POEM”
After leaving Raxruhá, after
crossing Mexico with a coyote,
after reaching at midnight
that barren New Mexico border,
a man and his daughter
looked to Antelope Wells
for asylum and were arrested. After
forms read in Spanish
to the Mayan-speaking father,
after a cookie but no water, after
the wait for the lone bus
to return for their turn, after boarding,
after the little girl’s temperature spiked,
she suffered two heart attacks,
vomited, and stopped breathing. After
medics revived the seven-year-old
at Lordsburg station, after she was flown
to El Paso, where she died,
the coroner examined
the failed liver and swollen brain. Then
Jakelin’s chest and head were stitched up
and she returned to Guatemala
in a short white coffin
to her mother, grandparents,
and dozens of women preparing
tamales and beans to feed the grieving.
In Q’eqchi’, w-e means mouth.—Kimiko Hahn