THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 53
accent that made him distant with me,
I thought, though maybe it was un-
charitable of me to assume he shared
the views of his colleagues, or some of
his colleagues, like the priest who had
called, the previous summer, for all de-
cent people to line the route of the Pride
parade and throw stones at the queers.
I took advantage of the pause to
check my phone again. We were tak-
ing a break, that was how R. had left
things, but though I tried not to think
it I knew the break was final. For the
past two weeks we hadn’t had any con-
tact, stopping our Skype chats and
e-mails, which had become essential to
the structure of my day, even as they
had also begun to seem like a trap, tak-
ing me away from writing, keeping me
up too late. He never wanted to hang
up, I’ll be so bored, he would say, I’ll
be so lonely, and the next day I would
struggle to make it through class. They
had come to feel like a trap but with-
out them I found the evenings intol-
erable, there was too much time for
thinking, too much time for remorse.
It wasn’t really true that we had no con-
tact, we still looked at each other’s Face-
book pages; the night before I had
posted photos of the drive from Sofia
to Sozopol, of our group beside the sea,
probably that was what had spurred
him to send, very early that morning,
the message I had worried over all day.
It was full of regret and self-recrimi-
nation, I’ve broken the best thing, he
wrote, he didn’t know why he had done
it, it was just the same thing again and
again, he said, it’s like I hate my own
happiness, which was a phrase I had
repeated to myself all day. This had
been the worst part about distance, the
helplessness I felt when he was anx-
ious or sad, as he often was, when noth-
ing I could say would comfort him. Sex
could comfort him, or just the presence
of my body beside his, he wanted phys-
ical comfort, and it was terrible to think
of him in his room alone. I know I can’t
fix it, he said, I know it’s too late, we
can’t go back, he spoke of it as if it were
the distant past, and this made me angry,
since what was the point of his mes-
sage then, why had he sent it to me,
why had he drawn me back to him,
drawn me back but only so far.
The priest had finished making his
rounds, he had emptied one bottle and
carried another that was half full, which
he lifted to his mouth and drank from
deeply, thirstily. He started singing as
we walked on, following the road as it
opened up, past the houses of the old
town, into a kind of plaza beyond which
extended a tree-lined avenue up to the
highway. I couldn’t understand the
words of his song but the melody was
familiar, and after a moment I realized
it was the anthem of one of the foot-
ball teams, I had heard groups of men
singing it in the streets, Bulgarian flags
draped across their shoulders. No one
else took it up now, though he didn’t
seem bothered, he walked ahead sing-
ing, swinging the wine bottle to punc-
tuate his phrases.N.
stepped onto a bench at the edge
of the plaza, trying to get our at-
tention. Dami i gospoda, he said, repeat-
ing it in English, ladies and gentlemen,
and we gathered around him, except
for the priest, who kept walking into
the darkness, singing his song, until the
Bulgarian woman ran to catch him by
the shoulder and turned him back to
us. Oh, he said, dipping his head in
apology, and then he took a place at
the back of the group, his hands crossed
at his waist, holding the bottle low, an
image of meekness. Ladies and gentle-
men, N. said again, spreading his arms
wide like a politician and making all
of us laugh. He was from Burgas, a city
some twenty or so kilometres away, and
of all the Bulgarians he knew Sozopol
best. I worked as a tour guide here when
I was young, he said, and now I would
like to tell you, American friends, a few
things about my country. This is the
most old town in our country, he said,
its name is Greek, it means—and here
he paused, groping—spasenie, at which
a couple of the Bulgarians said salva-
tion, which he repeated, nodding, sal-
vation. Once this was Greek, there are
still many Greeks here, they build many
little churches we still have, and it was
true, everywhere you looked there were
tiny chapels, places to pray for fisher-
men out at sea. There was one of these
across from our hotel, facing the water,
and I had entered it very early that
morning, as I set off to stroll through
the town on my own. It had been re-
stored, every inch of the walls had been
covered in bright blues and golds, por-traits of the Virgin, the saints, and on
the ceiling a large, intricate painting of
the sun, multiple spoked disks laid atop
one another like a complicated set of
gears. The remnants of candles stuck
up from trays filled with sand in front
of the image of the Virgin; a pile of
these candles, very long and thin, sat
next to a donation box at the door.
There’s a feeling such places accrue, a
residue of use, and I considered taking
one of those candles and saying a prayer
of my own, something to do with R.,
that he be happy, that we both be happy,
together or apart. Now, in the plaza, as
N. continued to speak I looked at the
priest, who stood quietly, still calm, his
hands crossed at the waist, the bottle
dangling, his head slightly bowed. He
could almost have been praying him-
self, though he wasn’t praying, he was
drunk, or maybe he was praying too, I
don’t know. It was a posture—the bowed
head, the apparent meekness—I re-
membered from the man I had got to
know that year in Boston, the priest in
whose office I had sat nearly every week;
it was the posture with which he met
my zeal or desire for zeal, which seemed
to bemuse him, as if he found it both
sincere and unreal, which it was. I don’t
recognize the person I was then, when
I read my journal from that time, or
the handful of poems I wrote. I wanted
to unmake myself, it seems to me now,
I wanted to fit my life into a system
that would deform it so entirely it would
be unrecognizable.
But now N. interrupted his lecture,
saying here he was, explaining the town
to us, it was hard work, and he was
a professional, he shouldn’t work for
free. I want money, he said, making us
laugh, American money, does some-
one have a quarter, and someone did,
it was fished out of a pocket and handed
over. George Washington, he cried, a
sudden change of tone, I love George
Washington, he is my favorite person.
We laughed again and he looked up,
Why are you laughing, he asked, which
made us laugh more. Look, he said,
holding up the coin, it says here Lib-
erty, it is the most beautiful thing,
most beautiful word, it is for this I love
George Washington. He fights for free-
dom, like us, Bulgarians fight for free-
dom too. For five hundred years we are
slaves to Turks, but now we are free. It