East of the West Read Online Free PDF Page B

jeans?”
    “Nose,” she said, “I love you, but I’ll wear these jeans until the day I die.”
    I tried to look heartbreaking, but she didn’t budge. Instead, she advised me:
    “Ask cousin Vera for a pair. You’ll pay her at the sbor.” Then from a jar in her night stand Elitsa took out a ten-lev bill and stuffed it in my pocket. “Get some nice ones,” she said.
    Two months before it was time for the reunion, I went to the river. I yelled until a boy showed up and I asked him to call my cousin. She came an hour later.
    “What do you want, Nose?”
    “Levis!” I yelled.
    “You better have the money!” she yelled back.
    •
    Mihalaky came in smoke and roar. And with him came the West. My cousin Vera stepped out of the boat and everything on her screamed, We live better than you, we have more stuff, stuff you can’t have and never will . She wore white leather shoes with little flowers on them, which she explained was called an Adidas. She had jeans. And her shirt said things in English.
    “What does it say?”
    “The name of a music group. They have this song that goes ‘Smooook na dar voooto.’ You heard it?”
    “Of course I have.” But she knew better.
    After lunch, the grown-ups danced around the fire, then played drunk soccer. Elitsa was absent for most of the time, and finally when she returned, her lips were burning red and her eyes shone like I’d never seen them before. She pulled me aside and whispered in my ear:
    “Promise not to tell.” Then she pointed at a dark-haired boy from Srbsko, skinny and with a long neck, who was just joining the soccer game. “Boban and I kissed in the forest. It was so great,” she said, and her voice flickered. She nudged me in the ribs, and stuck a finger at cousin Vera, who sat by the fire, yawning and raking the embers up with a stick.
    “Come on, Nose, be a man. Take her to the woods.”
    And she laughed so loud, even the deaf old grandmas turned to look at us.
    I scurried away, disgusted and ashamed, but finally I had to approach Vera. I asked her if she had my jeans, then took out the money and began to count it.
    “Not here, you fool,” she said, and slapped me on the hand with the smoldering stick.
    We walked through the village until we reached the old bridge, which stood solitary in the middle of the road. Yellow grass grew between each stone, and the riverbed was dry and fissured.
    We hid under the bridge and completed the swap. Thirty levs for a pair of jeans. Best deal I’d ever made.
    “You wanna go for a walk?” Vera said after she had counted the bills twice. She rubbed them on her face, the way our fathers did, and stuffed them in her pocket.
    We picked mushrooms in the woods while she told me things about her school and complained about a Serbian boy who always pestered her.
    “I can teach him a lesson,” I said. “Next time I come there, you just show him to me.”
    “Yeah, Nose, like you know how to fight.”
    And then, just like that, she hit me in the nose. Crushed it, once more, like a biscuit.
    “Why did you do that?”
    She shrugged. I made a fist to smack her back, but how do you hit a girl? Or how, for that matter, will hitting another person in the face stop the blood gushing from your own nose? I tried to suck it up and act like the pain was easy to ignore.
    She took me by the hand and dragged me toward the river.
    “I like you, Nose,” she said. “Let’s go wash your face.”
    •
    We lay on the banks and chewed thyme leaves.
    “Nose,” my cousin said, “you know what they told us in school?”
    She rolled over and I did the same to look her in the eyes. They were very dark, shaped like apricot kernels. Her face was all speckled and she had a tiny spot on her upper lip, delicate, hard to notice, that got redder when she was nervous or angry. The spot was red now.
    “You look like a mouse,” I told her.
    She rolled her eyes.
    “Our history teacher,” she said, “told us we were all Serbs. You know. Like, a