This Translation Tuesday, a literary murder mystery aboard a train carriage reveals the intricacies of expressing a woman’s inner life. Briefly sketched yet drawn with a rich interiority, the Bulgarian writer Ivanka Mogilska’s short fiction is translated by Lora Petrova. Step right onto the crime scene now and find out who’s guilty!
If the cricket that lived in Emilia’s left ear had been less insistent, she would surely have learned the killer’s identity earlier. But he almost never stopped. Most times it was singing with a quiet monotone, making her feel as if she was drifting through a cloud, with a head stuffed full of cotton. The train was wriggling through the valley. The fog was hiding the warning signs on trees about the coming fall. Today, the cricket’s song was especially anxious and Emilia would often have to read the same page twice.
Soon after departure, the frivolous young man in the group of guests staying at Waterby Manor found the hostess dead in front of an old cabinet in the corridor leading to the kitchen. Police arrived quickly and asked the guests to retire to their rooms. The officers inspected the crime scene.
The cricket in Emilia’s ear hit a high note when it turned out that the body was surrounded by poems of an unknown author and the cabinet had hundreds more pages written in the same hand. Poems, poems, poems.
The officers questioned everyone in the library. All the guests had alibis—they had been seated at the dinner table, waiting for dessert. The frivolous young man admitted that he left under the pretext of going to the bathroom, in order to meet one of the chambermaids. All that was left was to question the husband and servants.
The train was mid-journey when it emerged that the husband did not have an alibi. Emilia undid the top button on her white shirt with a cornflower print and puff sleeves.
On the next two pages, Sir Toynbee cried in the library, endlessly repeating that his life was over without his wife. The police officers commiserated, tried to calm him and insisted on finding out what the hostess of Waterby Manor was doing at the old cabinet, filled with poems, while her guests were awaiting dessert, as well as the identity of the poet. Blowing his nose on his handkerchief, he mumbled that his wife had an unhealthy interest in poetry and had once dreamed of becoming a poetess, an ambition unfit the station of any lady. And then he resumed lamenting the remainder of his days without his wife.
This reminded Emilia a lot of her own husband. He caressed her hands, shrunk into himself and remorseful after it turned out that she punctured her eardrum when he shoved her down the stairs. Her plans to become a cardiologist were done. All that was left was to hang on to him, forgive him, not let him go and do what he had wanted, what they both had wanted for some time—have children. It had been thirty years. She straightened her hair, dyed orange, and continued to read.
Over the next few days, the interrogations continued and the guests whispered: “That brilliant society lady with so many duties! Who would have thought? When did she find the time? Are the poems any good? Do you think it was Sir Toynbee? What a stain on that incredible man!” Finally, the lady’s personal maid spoke.
It was just then that the train entered a tunnel. Emilia lay back on her seat and took a deep breath. She did not become a cardiologist. She was a common general practitioner, loved and respected by the people in the small town they lived in. They had children, two of them. Both of them had left the nest. She was going to retire soon, everything was alright.
The train exited the tunnel and it emerged that the lady of the manor did not resist the temptation, continuing to write and collecting the poems in the cabinet, without showing them to anyone. The maid knew that because, at times, the lady and Sir Toynbee would argue, after which she would find the bedroom filled with torn pages and her mistress lying down among them, with a bad bout of migraine. She showed the officers a notebook with poems glued together. Also, a note: “Darling, forgive me, I am a poet confined in an improper body.” Whether “improper” was meant as unsuitable or indecorous, it was not clear.
The cricket’s song in Emilia’s ear was becoming increasingly anxious. Her mind was muddled. She hoped to reach her destination, get off the train, hand the bag to her husband, lean on his shoulder and have him take her home. But that was still some way off.
The cook let it slip that she heard a struggle in the corridor but did not check on the noise because she was busy plating the dessert. Interrogated for the third time, pressed by police officers against the tomes of Byron and Shelley, Sir Toynbee—who took full ownership of the estate only after his wife’s death (they remembered the sad fate of his father, who had wasted away everything but managed, before his death, to wed his son to the lady of Waterby Manor)—confessed. His wife wanted to cause a scandal during the dinner party, show everyone her poems and declare the start of her new life as a free woman, author and poet, because she had discovered his infatuation with the governess. And yet he claimed to be innocent, saying that she slipped awkwardly, with the sheets in her hand, and hit her head on the edge of the cabinet.
The train was slowing down, entering Emilia’s station. She closed the book, she closed her eyes. It was clear who the killer was. She remembered that evening when they were arguing again whether she should pursue a medical specialization. The cricket in her ear once again sang with her husband’s protestations of love, how she was the most important thing in his life and how he could not bear to share her, whether with more studying or her profession for uncounted years, and that he was going to leave. Emilia leaned back on the armrest, just as she had stepped back when he approached her with that oddly determined look on his face back then. One more step by him, one more by her and then, the fall, the tumble, the stairs that her head hit on the way down. The train stopped.
She opened her eyes thinking about the killer and met her reflection in the window. So many years later and she still could not answer the question whether he shoved her or she herself chose to plummet down the staircase.
Translated from the Bulgarian by Lora Petrova
Ivanka Mogilska is a Bulgarian author of poetry, novels, and short stories. Her works, often about the extraordinary life humans live behind the facade of our daily life, have been translated into English, French, Hungarian, Russian, Serbian, Bangla, and Persian.
Lora Petrova is a translator and interpreter from Bulgaria. She holds a degree in Linguistics from New Bulgarian University, where she co-launched a translators’ club for students in the linguistics department. Her translations have been published in The Oceans of the Mind, the semiotics journals of the South-East European Center for Semiotic Studies, and in Bulgarian Jews: Living History (The Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria “Shalom”, 2018).
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