“Will you go to Marra’s again?”
her mother asked her more than a year ago.
“Yes,” Veta said and went out.
That
was how her fib-telling started and she’d kept it up ever since. There was no
Marra . She named her loneliness Marra so her mother did not worry that Veta
was alone all the time. Most often she remained in the library where the air
smelled of beautiful paper dust, of poems which slept between the pages, of
writers, forgotten long time ago between the thick dusty covers of the books.
Veta knew them all. Her loneliness waited for her in the park, too; it was
tucked down the long alley that started from Lolita café and lead to the
railway station: a very insignificant railway station where the fast trains
from Sofia to Greece didn’t stop, only the slow ones did, once a day. The
trains rocked their wagons like dark clouds that moaned under the burden of
human electricity. The alley was lined with poplar trees, their branches thick
with ravens: black rivets that nailed the afternoon shut. She often walked
along the narrow platform, sat on the bench on which dozens of guys had
scrawled dirty words, and many “Ivan + Tanya = love”, but Veta didn’t read the
dirty remarks and didn’t calculate who plus who made love. Her loneliness was
soft and quiet, there were ravens and sun in it and warm empty rails that
reached the end of Bulgaria, and went on to the clouds in Greece. She called
her loneliness Marra after that thin, black-eyed girl from second grade who she
thought back to at school.
The
girl still couldn’t read. She managed to spell and utter only the short
three-letter nouns but Veta loved the fairy tales the girl made up, tossing and
pulling at those short, short words. Veta told the child, “Read this.”Marraspelled out: “horse”, “child”, “moon” and the horse suddenly learnt to
fly. After a minute it hurtled off to the moon, where a little naughty child
lived in a very peculiar house: its roof was built of sun’s rays and its walls
were white clouds. Veta’s
loneliness was a soft summer afternoon with rain in it, a small railway
station, dark poplars, and ravens that knit in the clouds terrific nets of
courage with their black wings. “My
mother is in Italy,” the girl told her one day. “She takes care of an old woman
there. My grandmother is here, in Bulgaria, and she looks after a toddler boy
in Sofia. Listen, I hate the long words,” Marraadmitted. “The letters are too heavy for them and they can’t run. I forget
what they are up to while I spell them. That’s why I can’t read long words: I
hate to wait for them while they linger in their places and can’t move on. They
have letters of stones - you can take my word for that.” “I
wish I had grandchildren,” Veta’s mother often said. She had never married. She
was a pediatrician in the small provincial hospital in Pernik and took care of
the newborn babies. Many winters ago, a one-year old girl, Veta by name, was
dying from viral pneumonia. The doctor didn’t go home until the toddler
gradually stopped running temperature and started sipping at its milk. Before
the doctor adopted the child, she called her own loneliness Sofia after the
capital of Bulgaria. After work, she went to the cinema or to theatre in Sofia,
or simply mooned around the streets till after dinnertime.
“Perhaps
we could think of somebody… a man you’d love to see or talk to,” the
pediatrician said to her daughter. “The management appointed a young
neurologist in the hospital a couple of moths ago. We could invite him to
dinner.”
Of
course, they invited him to dinner but the man could stand neither the ravens
nor the railway station. He adored long words that had many letters in them and
couldn’t run at all. His mouth transformed them into threatening diagnoses
which could kill anybody. In the middle of the dinner Veta excused herself and
left her mother and the young neurologist with their beefsteaks and sauté
potatoes. “Why
did you do that?” her mother asked her in the morning. “It was not polite to
run away on Doctor Tomov like that. You insulted him. Well… Don’t repeat my
mistake, please. A woman should have a child. You simply… Listen, find somebody
for several weeks. Later you can go away. You and I will take care of the
little one together.”
“But…”Veta
began. “No. I wouldn’t like that.”
“You
call your loneliness Marra ,” the doctor said. “You’ve learnt that from me.
I’ll ask Doctor Ivanov to dinner tomorrow. He’s divorced.” “I
won’t be at home tomorrow in the evening,” Veta said.
In
the afternoons she remained in the teachers’ room with Marra . The two of them
read fairytales from Marra ’s ABC book or solved problems about trains and
sparrows.
“Miss
Toneva,” Marrasaid once. “You’d better
have your own child because I learned to read long words. They are no longer
full of stones. I even think some of them taste of chocolate. You can teach
your child when you have one. What do you think?” “It’s
not that easy…”
“Yesterday
your Mom came to see me at school,” the girl interrupted her. “Is it true you
go to that small railway station every day? Why? The fast trains don’t stop
there and the canteen selling chocolate wafers is never open.” “I
like the poplar trees,” Veta said.
“Your
Mom asked me to find a guy who liked poplar trees and ravens for you,” the
child added. “That
would be silly,” Veta said. “Now let’s solve the problem about the two boats on
page 67.”
“Listen,
I know such a guy. He’s very tall. I’ll show him to you.Your Mom says she wants you to have friends.
Look at me, I have many friends and I’m Okay. Come on, I’ll solve the problem
about the two boats by myself. If it’s too difficult, Grandma will help me.
Look, is it true that you call the ravens, the station and the poplar trees
after me? You can’t call a raven Marra , and you can’t call the rails Marra .
Call them simply “station”, “rails” and “ravens”. Come with me.” Marrawho looked small for her seven years and her
teacher started off down the alley that went to Lolita Café. “Here
he is,” Marra said and pointed at the newsstand. A very tall man stood behind
the heaps of bright pictures and titles of the newspapers. The girl rushed to
him and said, “Here she is. She likes ravens like you.”
The
man fumbled in his pockets and gave the child a candy bar.
“No,
I don’t want it,” the girl declared. “I love her. I didn’t bring her here for
your candies. I don’t want her to stay alone with the rails. She’d better stay
with you - never mind you are so tall.”
Veta
turned around and walked away down the alley.
“Hey!”
The
man left his newspapers, caught up with Veta, reached for her arm and said,
“That child’s been telling me you like ravens. She’s been repeating this for
two months now.”
“I
have to hurry,” Veta said.
“I
love the railway station where you go every day. I’ve seen you there.”
“I
haven’t seen you,” Veta said.
"Marra
offered to give me her box of crayons if I asked you out on a date. She said,
'You are very tall, but she'll like you all the same.' She also said you knew
words that could fly."
Veta was about to leave when the newsagent added,
"I want you to know that I need a box of crayons badly."
She turned around and looked at him, not knowing what
to say. The sky was thick with spring winds and the river flowed quietly not
far away from the road.
"I wonder if I could buy you a cup of coffee this
evening," the man went on. "If you are busy, I can wait."
His face waited. The winds and the spring waited, too.