THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 51
E
ven in the dark I liked to look
at it, though the sea was never
truly dark, even now in the
off-season it caught the light of the
moon, which hung high and almost
full, and of the signs of the few restau-
rants and hotels that were open in the
new town, so that the whole harbor
shimmered with points of light. It had
been months since I had seen the sea,
a year, and I was hungry for it; I had
stepped to the edge of the terrace to
check my phone but found myself star-
ing at the sea instead. You could lose
yourself in it, that was what I liked, it
was beautiful but also it was like look-
ing at nothing, the sight of it drowned
out thinking like the sound of it
drowned out noise, and at first I didn’t
hear the others calling me to join them.
I smiled as I turned, though I resented
being called back, and saw that they
were standing in a circle beside the ta-
bles where they had been smoking and
talking, their glasses empty. Come here,
one of the American writers said, we’re
playing spin the bottle, and I laughed
and took my place. We were choosing
partners; there would be a reading to
close the festival at the end of the week,
and we would read in pairs, one Amer-
ican, one Bulgarian. A Bulgarian writer
held one of the wine bottles we had
emptied; he crouched in the center of
the circle and then stepped back to the
periphery once he had set it spinning,
which it did crazily over the cobble-
stones of the patio. He was the oldest
of us, mid-fifties and handsome, a
champion boxer when he was young
and now a coach of some sort. All the
Bulgarians had other careers, there’s no
such thing as a professional writer in
Bulgaria, and no writing programs, ei-
ther, or almost none; they worked in
business, or as journalists, one ran a sa-
tirical Web site all my students in Sofia
loved, one was a priest. And they had
all published books, some of them sev-
eral, so that though the program was
for emerging writers it was hard to tell
the difference between them and the
writers still inside the restaurant, the
famous writers. That wasn’t true for the
Americans, who were younger and less
accomplished; most were still in grad-
uate programs for writing, or had just
finished. We were boring in compari-
son to them, I thought, as the bottle
came to a stop and, to a chorus of cheers,
the boxer stepped forward and shook
the hand of one of the Americans. There
was something a little sheepish about
the pair of them, maybe the erotic over-
tones of the game caused them to lean
away from each other as they shook
hands, each staying decidedly in his
own sphere. N., who ran the Web site,
took the bottle next. He was a bigger
man, not quite fat, not quite handsome,
the friendliest and funniest in the group;
he had made us laugh to tears over din-
ner and he made us laugh now, when
he took his American partner by the
shoulders and hugged him close, he
was so happy, they would be brothers
forever, a toast, he said, taking him to
the table and its bottle of rakia.
There were six of us left, and we
tightened our circle as another Bulgar-
ian writer, the only woman in their co-
hort, took the bottle and spun it on the
cobblestones. But before it could come
to a stop a voice called out in Bulgar-
ian and then a waitress from inside
stepped in between us, wagging her
finger and snatching the bottle up from
the ground. Chakaite, one of the Bul-
garians said, hold on, we’re almost
finished, but the waitress said Ne, ne
mozhe, it’s not permitted, we were being
too loud, people lived above the restau-
rant, and the bottle, what if it broke,
what a mess, and then she turned and
walked back inside, the bottle cradled
against her chest. We looked at one an-
other, embarrassed, and then the Bul-
garian woman shrugged and turned
back to the table. Most of the others
joined her, one or two went inside
the restaurant, where the writers who
taught the workshops were sitting, one
Bulgarian and one American, we had
had our first sessions earlier that day. I
stepped away again, not wanting to join
them, I pulled my phone out but put
it back in my pocket unchecked. I can’t,
R. had said in one of our last conver-
sations, wiping his face, I don’t think I
can, I don’t know what I feel, I have to
figure out my life. He was sitting cross-
legged on his bed, his computer open
in front of him, he kept leaning toward
the screen and back. But Skups, I said,
using my name for him, our name for
each other, that’s what we’ve been doing,
we’re figuring out our lives, you are my
life, I didn’t say, but I thought it, for
two years he had been my life. Every
couple of months I flew to Lisbon to
spend a long weekend with him, a week;
whenever I had a break I stayed in his
tiny student’s room, we slept together
in the narrow bed he was sitting on
now. I’m trying, I said to him from my
own bed in Sofia, turned toward the
screen so that we were speaking face
to face, as it were; I had been applying
for jobs but there were no jobs, or none
I could get, it was too expensive to hire
Americans, they said, if I had an E.U.
passport it would be different. It’s im-
possible, R. said, you know it’s impos-
sible, we have to accept it, I have to live
my life. I had to live my life too, and I
wanted a different life, not a life with-
out R. but a life in a new place, I couldn’t
keep living the same day again and
again, the hours of teaching, I wanted
a new life too.
O
n the patio a plan was forming to
leave the restaurant and explore
the town. It was a warm night, early
June, still a week or two before the shops
would open for the summer tourists,
with signs in Russian hung out over
cheap souvenirs; we would have the
streets to ourselves. N. made a quick
trip inside the restaurant, to the long
table where food had been laid out, and
returned with a bottle of wine, which
he held low and tight against his body,
hiding it from the waitress. Rations,
he said, very important. The restaurant
was near the hotel, at the tip of the lit-
tle peninsula that formed the southern
side of the harbor, and the street we
walked along was like all the others
in the old town, cobbled and lined on
both sides with unpainted wooden
houses in the National Revival style,
two- or three-story buildings, oddly
off-kilter and asymmetrical, with elab-
orate wooden beams buttressing upper
floors jutting out over the foundations.
They were in varying stages of upkeep,
some renovated, others barely shacks,
even here along the most desirable
streets near the shore, where buildings
jostled for a glimpse of the sea. Most
of them were empty, shuttered hotels
and vacation homes, but occasionally
the sound of a television reached us
from inside, or light spilled through
the slats of the wooden shutters, a few
people lived here all year long. I was
