This Translation Tuesday, Asymptote presents a tale of parental love from Bulgaria, written by Nevena Mitropolitska and translated by Zlatomira Terzieva. Neda’s grandfather, a woodcarver, has always prided himself on his ability to carve whatever birthday gift his granddaughter asks for—but on her seventh birthday, she makes an unexpected request, one that tests the limits of what he can give. What follows is a touching story that is as much about class and art in late communist Bulgaria as it is about the love between a grandparent and grandchild, about the hope that our descendents will have more than what we were given. Read on!
Everything started with a question. On the eighteenth of October, nineteen seventy-eight, exactly three months before Neda turned seven years old, her grandfather, as he was sitting in front of the TV in his rocking chair and stroking its scuffed armrest, asked her what kind of present she wanted for her birthday. That wasn’t an ordinary question, but a ritual, which repeated itself every year on the same date. He needed three months to get ready. Whatever she wished for, her grandpa would create out of wood. Had she purchased a piece of clothing, he would have carved that too. He would find a large piece, he would lock himself down in his small basement workshop, full of odd chisels, and the place would buzz with activity. When he formed his creation, he would paint all over it with thin brushes and he would varnish it. She could watch for hours how his coarse fingers lovingly danced on the wood and breathed form, feelings, and even movement into it. For her fourth birthday, she had chosen a baby doll—he had made it with a hole in the mouth so she could put a pacifier inside. For her fifth birthday—a house—complete with everything—with a chimney, with two windows (they had no glass, he covered them with nylon), with a door that could be opened and had a painted handle, and inside—a miniature bed. For her sixth birthday, she received a small table with four small chairs, and she sewed a green tablecloth together with her grandmother. And on that eighteenth of October, three months before her birthday, as he was asking her the fateful question, her grandpa was already delightfully anticipating—even his mustache was trembling from excitement, the joy of his unity with the wood. This time, however, Neda was going to surprise him.
A few weeks before that, on a rainy Sunday, she was glued to the TV for an unusually long time. Magic unfolded before her eyes, which, at that moment she couldn’t even name, but would later call it “ballet.” She was standing in the middle of the living room, gaping, staring at the graceful as snowflakes older girls—how they jump and turn, how they sashay, as if in the air, she would sway to the beat, she would tiptoe, she would spread her legs from time to time in an attempt to do the splits and she would dream of breaking into the TV and into that magical world. The performance ended, some show whirred in its place, but she didn’t move for a long time, and the fairies with white dresses and puffed-out skirts were soaring before her eyes. From then on out, whenever there was aged music (that’s what she called classical music) on the radio, she would turn the volume up, she would slip into her mother’s room, put on one of her transparent overalls, tie a belt, and start dancing. And when on that eighteenth of October her grandpa asked her the fatal question, her answer had already been thought out: she wanted him and her grandmother to take her to a real ballet performance. He, however, had not been ready to hear that. His hand was instinctively stroking the armrest, and his face was changing his expressions: from amazement, through disappointment, to dejected resignation.
As always, he fulfilled her wish. Only at the beginning did he try to get out of it, pushing for her and her grandmother to go by themselves. Neda, however, was unbending: she wanted to go with both of them. And because her grandpa didn’t get that ballet stuff at all, he asked their neighbor Peppa for help—she worked as a hairdresser on Dondukov Boulevard and was in the know about the “Sofia shindigs” as he called the cultural events in the capital. He gave her money and she got them tickets to “Giselle.” The performance fell on her birthday—on a chilly, gloomy Saturday.
And so, on the eighteenth of January, with stuffed bellies from the banitza with leek and the pumpkin pastry for Neda’s seventh birthday, the three of them headed towards the railway station in what her grandmother thought were their most presentable clothes. Despite her frantic protests, snot, and tears, Neda slipped into her woolen brown trousers under the blue and pink knitted dress—in her grandmother’s words, the only way she wouldn’t freeze in the cold, and they were getting to be fashionable anyway. Her grandfather had fixed himself up with his gray trousers with a crease from his daughter’s wedding, in this case it was heavily let out in the waist. He had dangled his long-ago dead pocket watch with a fob from his father and the chain rattled festively. Her grandmother had dolled herself up with the outfit she used for the agricultural cooperative’s banquets when celebrating the eighth of March—a black skirt and a green knitted cardigan with embroidered flowers on the collar. Upon entering the opera house and seeing the marble columns, the murals, the huge crystal chandeliers, the silk, and the velvet, they felt like flies, having wrongfully landed on a foreign planet. They asked the usher three times about their seats and at last, she quit what she was doing and, with a sigh, personally took them there. As they were making their way there, her grandpa was limping breathlessly and was thumping along with his cane on the floor, and Neda, shaking from shame, was giving him signs to hurry up. (She still went back to that moment and was unable to forgive herself.) When they sat in their seats, he sent her to get a “booklet,” the programme, to be precise, and he managed to read the plot to her before the show. Then the lights went down, the music filled up the concert hall, and all else lost its meaning.
“Giselle.” The most amazing story which she had ever been told. Neda was supposedly sitting in her seat on the third balcony between her grandma and grandpa, but she was in fact somewhere near the Rhine. When the beautiful village girl popped out of the little house and started joyfully jumping around and turning, Neda fell in love with her in no time. Giselle danced and Neda danced, as if having melted into her body. She was breathing the aromatic air, the birds were chirping, the sun was caressing her face, and the cheerful beats got her blood flowing. When the beautiful Albert appeared on stage, she fell in love with him as well; her heart started pounding and she even managed to forget he was actually a prince, engaged to a princess, and that he was pretending to be a villager so that Giselle would like him. She was annoyed by the jealous forester Loys and even though her grandpa had read to her what was to happen, she prayed for a miracle: that he wouldn’t come to know Albert’s secret and he wouldn’t betray it to Giselle. And when that happened nevertheless and Giselle went mad and died, it was as if the whole world collapsed around Neda, as if all of its darkness poured into her soul. She spent the intermission without moving an inch from her seat, without raising her head, without uttering a word. Only her tears were running down her cheeks, and her grandmother, unusually hushed, was wiping them with a tissue and caressing her. And when after the intermission Giselle appeared again and started dancing, bathed in bluish light, Neda both knew this was her spirit, and at the same time had the faintest glimmer of hope that she could have misunderstood, that her grandpa could have misread, that it was possible Giselle was still alive.
While they were waiting for the tram home on Slaveykov Square, she asked her grandpa, “Grandpa, is it still my birthday?”
He stared at his watch under the light of the nearest streetlamp (not the dead one with the fob, but the ordinary one on his wrist) and he mumbled, “Yes, it’s still your birthday.”
“Can I ask for one more gift? For my next birthday, but, if it’s okay, now.”
“Tell me, my girl. What do you want? Just don’t make me dance ballet.”
Neda bore her gaze into the coolly flashing rails next to her feet, squeezed her thumbs through her gloves, took a deep breath, and said, “I want you to sign me up for ballet.”
“You’ve completely blown your top, Nedo!” Her grandmother got herself worked up. “Won’t you look at those puny ballerinas. Is that life—you can’t eat your fill. And don’t you even think you’re going to be cavorting there in front of people so that your underwear would be visible.”
“Please,” Neda uttered. Her head grew heavier.
“There is no one that could take you,” her grandmother snapped. “I have to work, and your grandpa has his sickly legs—”
“Do you want to dance like that Giselle, pup?”
He leaned down towards her, stroked her cheek, and raised her face. Her blue eyes were shining in the darkness.
The streetlamp behind him framed his figure in a radiant halo. Tousled hairs stuck out from his head, all in gold.
Neda nodded her head; two teardrops rolled down her cheeks.
“I’m sure that you’ll play that Giselle very well,” he mumbled and wiped her cheeks with his glove.
“What kind of a man are you, Tosho, you’re letting a child lead you by the nose. It won’t happen. Don’t promise her anything, so she won’t hope in vain,” her grandmother snarled and waved her finger threateningly at him.
Still, no matter how much her grandmother foamed at the mouth, there wasn’t anything she could do anymore. Her grandpa had promised her. Because at that age, and with that hard life, even after all this repeating, he also hadn’t believed that not all that glitters is gold.
Not long after, Neda started going to ballet. Her grandpa insisted that she be in the best place—not in Pernik, but in Sofia. Once again, Aunt Peppa came to their aid—she asked her clients and they told her that the Pioneer Palace was the place to go. One of them even used her connections and they quickly signed her up. And so, her grandpa, despite his arthritic knees, took it upon himself to take her there every Tuesday. And her grandma—believe it or not, sewed her a costume out of her mother’s wedding dress; the future Giselle would dance around in it for hours against the background of “aged” music. Neda started living her dream—from Tuesday to Tuesday, at home she used to practice again and even though the steps on the barre were a long way from the magic of the stage, she knew they were going to take her there. She was happy; she smiled at everyone. The world rang with promise and joy.
And so, it all continued until that sunny March day, when, coming back home, they were getting off the train in Pernik—her grandpa missed a step and collapsed on the platform. It turned out he had broken his hip joint and they took him to the hospital. But before that, when they came to drive him with the ambulance, they had to fight with Neda so they could loosen her grip on him. They handed her off to a policeman and then her grandma went to take her home. In the beginning, no matter how hard she begged, no one wanted to take her to see him. They would enter and exit the house—her grandma, her mother, neighbors, and relatives, always serious, she would ask them how he was, she would cry so they could let her see him, they would mumble something under their breath and then would hurry out of there. Not a trace of her former life remained. She would wander the familiar rooms, touch the familiar objects, but without her grandpa everything seemed foreign, even the toys he had crafted. She was sure she was never to hear about ballet anymore. But they soon mentioned it. Two times at that.
The first time was, when, at last, three weeks after his fall, they took her to see her grandpa. When she glanced at him from the door, she lowered her gaze and couldn’t bring it up anymore (she was unable to forgive herself that either)—he had lost so much weight and gotten so old, as if he’d been drained from his life, and death showed through his thinned-out skin. Her grandma grasped her hand and dragged her beside his bed. His voice had become frail and shaky and that didn’t startle her any less than his appearance. “You still go to ballet, don’t you, Nedko?” he asked.
She didn’t know what to say back, she hid her face in her grandma’s lap and started weeping.
“Don’t cry, poppet,” she heard him gulp painfully. “I want you to become a ballerina, to play the role of that Giselle. I know this is your dream. You’ll become the best Giselle. Work hard for it and you’ll see.”
Neda broke away from her grandma, collapsed on the floor next to his bed, and tried to tell him through her sobs that she just wants him to come back. She didn’t think they understood her. Her grandmother helped her up, hugged her, took her out of the room, and then embraced and caressed her for long. She never saw him again. They buried him a week later. They didn’t bring her to the funeral—they let her stay at home alone. She had hidden an obituary with his image, she watched it and begged him to come back. When the adults came back home, they mentioned ballet to her for the second time since his fall. Her mother, dressed in a black blouse and skirt, burst in last, slammed the door, fell into the chair next to the cast iron fireplace, threw a brief glance at Neda, and grunted, “If it weren’t for your ballet, he would have been alive.”
Neda started going to the Pioneer Palace again. Despite her frenzied resistance, her grandmother’s will prevailed, reinforced by the powerful argument that this had been her grandpa’s last wish. Years later, Neda found out that her grandma had notified her workplace that she was going to retire ahead of time so she could take her granddaughter to ballet. Then her boss, struck by this urge for art and worried he would lose his best milkmaid, found a substitute for her during the hours she would be missing.
It was the eleventh of January, nineteen eighty-one, a week before her ninth birthday when her grandmother asked her what she wished to receive. “Nothing,” replied Neda and continued doing her homework. And it’s not like she didn’t dream of having a doll like Vercheto’s, and it’s not like some new trousers would be unnecessary, or that her ballet slippers hadn’t shrunk. No, nothing of the sort. It was just that she had received the present that would last her for all her birthdays until the end of her life. Her grandfather had given it to her. His last gift.
Translated from the Bulgarian by Zlatomira Terzieva
Nevena Mitropolitska (1969) is a researcher and librarian, author of three novels: Anna and the Mountain (2015), The Gift (2019) and Along the Tracks (2021). She has degrees in Russian and English literature from Sofia University and in Library and Information Science from Université de Montréal. Since 2002, she has been living with her family in Montreal, Canada. Having lived in Bulgaria, Russia and Canada, Nevena is deeply interested in issues such as immigration and intercultural relations: topics that keep resurfacing in her works. In 2022 her novel Along the Tracks received the Peroto national award for contemporary Bulgarian fiction and was shortlisted for the Helikon literary award.
Zlatomira Terzieva (1999) is a Bulgarian translator into the English language. She is one of the winners of the PEN/Heim 2024 Translation Fund Grant for her translation of The Other Dream by Vladimir Poleganov. She has loved literature ever since she was in school, which led her to study it in depth during her English Philology degree. Her devotion to literary texts inspired within her the strong desire to be able to transform literary pieces into English for others to enjoy. Translation has been a way for her to both create and recreate, while, at the same time, indulging in her passion of reading.