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Authors: Miroslav Penkov
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through.”
•
What Grandpa had been through was basically this:
The year was 1944. Grandpa was in his mid-twenties. His face was tough but fair. His nose was sharp. His dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. He was poor. “I,” he often told me, “would eat bread with crabapples for breakfast. Bread with crabapples for lunch. And crabapples for dinner, because by dinnertime, the bread would be gone.”
That’s why when the Communists came to his village to steal food, Grandpa joined them. They had all run to the woods where they dug out underground bunkers, and lived in them for weeks on end—day and night, down there in the dugouts. Outside, the Fascists sniffed for them, trying to hunt them down with their Alsatians, with their guns and bombs and missiles. “If you think a grave is too narrow,” Grandpa told me on one occasion, “make yourself a dugout. No, no, make yourself a dugout and get fifteen people to join you in it for a week. And get a couple pregnant women, too. And a hungry goat. Then go around telling everybody a grave is the narrowest thing on earth.”
“Old man, I never said a grave was the narrowest thing.”
“But you were thinking it.”
So finally Grandpa got too hungry to stay in the dugout and decided to strap on a shotgun and go down to the village for food. When he arrived, he found everything changed. A red flag was flapping from the church tower. The church had been shut down and turned into a meeting hall. There had been an uprising, the peasants told him, a revolution that overthrew the old regime. While Grandpa was hiding in the dugout, communism sprouted fragrant blooms. All people now walked free, and their dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. Grandpa fell to his knees and wept and kissed the soil of the motherland. Immediately, he was assimilated by the Party. Immediately, as a heroic partisan who’d suffered in a dugout, he was given a high position in the Fatherland Front. Immediately, he climbed further up the ladder and moved to the city, where he became something-something of the something-something department. He got an apartment, married Grandma; a year later my father was born.
•
I arrived in Arkansas on August 11, 1999. At the airport I was picked up by two young men and a girl, all in suits. They were from some sort of an organization that cared a whole lot for international students.
“Welcome to America,” they said in one warm, friendly voice, and their honest faces beamed. In the car they gave me a Bible.
“Do you know what this is?” the girl bellowed slowly.
“No,” I said. She seemed genuinely pleased.
“These are the deeds of our Savior. The word of our Lord.”
“Oh, Lenin’s collected works,” I said. “Which volume?”
•
My first week in America unfolded under the banner of International Orientation. I made acquaintances from countries smaller than my own. I shook hands with black people. Those of us for whom English was a second language were instructed what to expect when it was fixin’ to rain. What “yonder” meant, and how it was “a bummer” to be there “yonder” with no umbrella and it “fixin’ to rain.”
Every English word I knew, I had once written at least ten times in notebooks Grandpa brought from the Fatherland Front. Each page in these notebooks was a cliff face against which I shouted. The words flew back at me, smashed into the rock again, rushed back. By the end of high school I had filled with echoes so many notebooks they towered on each side of my desk.
But now in America, I was exposed to words I didn’t know. And sometimes words I knew on their own made no sense collected together. What was a hotpocket? I wondered. Why was my roommate so excited to see two girls across the hallway making out? What were they making out? I felt estranged, often confused, until gradually, with time, the world around
•
What Grandpa had been through was basically this:
The year was 1944. Grandpa was in his mid-twenties. His face was tough but fair. His nose was sharp. His dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. He was poor. “I,” he often told me, “would eat bread with crabapples for breakfast. Bread with crabapples for lunch. And crabapples for dinner, because by dinnertime, the bread would be gone.”
That’s why when the Communists came to his village to steal food, Grandpa joined them. They had all run to the woods where they dug out underground bunkers, and lived in them for weeks on end—day and night, down there in the dugouts. Outside, the Fascists sniffed for them, trying to hunt them down with their Alsatians, with their guns and bombs and missiles. “If you think a grave is too narrow,” Grandpa told me on one occasion, “make yourself a dugout. No, no, make yourself a dugout and get fifteen people to join you in it for a week. And get a couple pregnant women, too. And a hungry goat. Then go around telling everybody a grave is the narrowest thing on earth.”
“Old man, I never said a grave was the narrowest thing.”
“But you were thinking it.”
So finally Grandpa got too hungry to stay in the dugout and decided to strap on a shotgun and go down to the village for food. When he arrived, he found everything changed. A red flag was flapping from the church tower. The church had been shut down and turned into a meeting hall. There had been an uprising, the peasants told him, a revolution that overthrew the old regime. While Grandpa was hiding in the dugout, communism sprouted fragrant blooms. All people now walked free, and their dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great and profoundly world-changing. Grandpa fell to his knees and wept and kissed the soil of the motherland. Immediately, he was assimilated by the Party. Immediately, as a heroic partisan who’d suffered in a dugout, he was given a high position in the Fatherland Front. Immediately, he climbed further up the ladder and moved to the city, where he became something-something of the something-something department. He got an apartment, married Grandma; a year later my father was born.
•
I arrived in Arkansas on August 11, 1999. At the airport I was picked up by two young men and a girl, all in suits. They were from some sort of an organization that cared a whole lot for international students.
“Welcome to America,” they said in one warm, friendly voice, and their honest faces beamed. In the car they gave me a Bible.
“Do you know what this is?” the girl bellowed slowly.
“No,” I said. She seemed genuinely pleased.
“These are the deeds of our Savior. The word of our Lord.”
“Oh, Lenin’s collected works,” I said. “Which volume?”
•
My first week in America unfolded under the banner of International Orientation. I made acquaintances from countries smaller than my own. I shook hands with black people. Those of us for whom English was a second language were instructed what to expect when it was fixin’ to rain. What “yonder” meant, and how it was “a bummer” to be there “yonder” with no umbrella and it “fixin’ to rain.”
Every English word I knew, I had once written at least ten times in notebooks Grandpa brought from the Fatherland Front. Each page in these notebooks was a cliff face against which I shouted. The words flew back at me, smashed into the rock again, rushed back. By the end of high school I had filled with echoes so many notebooks they towered on each side of my desk.
But now in America, I was exposed to words I didn’t know. And sometimes words I knew on their own made no sense collected together. What was a hotpocket? I wondered. Why was my roommate so excited to see two girls across the hallway making out? What were they making out? I felt estranged, often confused, until gradually, with time, the world around
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