In the village I always wake up at first cockcrow, long before daylight.
In Sofia the noise of the early trams and the traffic doesn’t bother me until about 10 in the morning, but here the crescendo of the cockerels, mixed with dogs barking after the pitch-black silence of the night, gives me such a start that I hurry to jump out of bed, hoping that thanks to the clean air and the closeness of nature I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
I had come here alone with the sole task of tidying up the yard a bit. I made myself a coffee and then another one, since it was 6 o’clock and it still wasn’t light. It was a weekday. In town my plan for the day would have been clear, but here I didn’t know where to begin. The yard was full of household rubbish in sturdy black bags, the cuttings from the vine, and the dried branches and leaves I had abandoned in the yard the year before.
I had tried to throw them into the municipal bins, but as soon as I got near one, somebody’s curtain would twitch, and even if the bin was empty, someone behind the window would wag a finger at me or, worse still, come out and give me a dirty look. However many bags I set off with, I came back with the same number.
Seen from the outside, I was a peculiar type who liked taking his bags for a walk. Once, in desperation, I had dumped two bags in the middle of the night in a bin far from my house. The next morning it turned out that someone had thrown them back over the wall into my yard, even though I had taken great care not to be seen. I had complained to the mayor that I paid the rubbish tax too, and he had replied that he understood me, but for several years now he hadn’t received the extra bins he had personally requested. And the villagers considered the bins near them their own.
This time I made an executive decision – everything would disappear in one go, and the way to do it was to find a man with a horse and cart who would do the job for 20 leva, what was there to think about. It was only 7 in the morning. The cockerels were crowing hoarsely and more quietly by now, and the sun had shyly peeped out.
The swallows under my eaves had flown off and the day promised to be a fine one. Some disappointed readers will rightly ask: We were supposed to be reading something about love, and this fellow is going on about rubbish! Please be patient a little longer.
I’ll get to the love, and mixed with animal sex at that.
Firmly resolved to find a man with a cart, I went to the square. In the smoky pub, a café in the mornings, I asked around. In the end they gave me directions:
“See that fat one outside with the stick? Ask him, he’s the boss round here!”
I told the boss what I needed. He raised the stick – a conductor’s baton – and at once a young Roma lad popped up in front of him and was ordered to fetch Ali. Five minutes later a cart “parked” in front of us, Ali got down from it, and the boss introduced him to me as the man who would do the job for me. Ali took me on the cart and we stopped in front of my yard. He looked around inside, listened to me and asked:
- “How much are you paying?”
- “Taking away bags of rubbish, stumps and the vine cuttings – 20 leva.”
- “OK, mate, but I can’t today! I’ll come tomorrow at 9 in the morning!”
The nationalists will have to forgive me, but with a Roma like this one, about 25 years old, and though probably not funded by any European integration programme, you could obviously come to an arrangement, if you handled things delicately! I looked around the yard. Tomorrow it would be fit for a photo to send to my wife.
Until 9 the next morning I was calm. I polished off two crosswords, a trip to the toilet, and even swept the area in front of the house, where the pile under the swallows’ nest had reached 10 cm. I kept looking at the wide-open gate of the yard, through which Ali was due to appear at any moment with his little cart and his horse.
If it took a dump in my yard /the horse, not Ali/, I would make him clear it up – Ali, that is. Around 9.30 a few Roma passed by – did I want them to do any odd jobs here? I said no. By 10 I already regretted it. There was no sign of Ali. I nervously started on a third crossword. I couldn’t even get the most elementary clues, like: “Person who writes books”. At 10.15 I set off angrily for the centre to complain to the hefty manager. When I saw him, I was softer:
- “Look, your man was supposed to come round to mine with the cart at 9, and he’s still not here!”
- “Which man of mine?”
- “Ali!”
- “Which Ali?”
- “The one with the cart, who was supposed to do a job for me today!”
- “Well, the other Ali’s got a cart too!”
I was about to leave in silence, with my crest all red. He stopped me:
- “Wait, I’ll get them here for you right now! Just point out which one is your Ali!”
The Head of “Logistics” for the “Manager” – the young Roma lad – dashed off, and five minutes later there were two carts and two Alis in the square. I “recognised” mine. He took me on his cart and we shot off towards my yard. He said I shouldn’t have dropped him in it in front of his boss, and reminded me that yesterday we had agreed on 30 leva. I objected that our arrangement had been 20 leva and that he would come at 9, and it was already 10.30.
Ali asked: “What, are you haggling now? Just so you know, I don’t like being gypped!”
Two options were taking shape in my head: with Ali1 or with Ali2. The other one might still be in the centre, waiting for orders from the “manager”. And yesterday the boss had said that with him everything ran like clockwork. It seemed more acceptable to me for my Ali1 to do the job, but only if he admitted he had been late. I didn’t like being gypped either. I asked him why he had been held up. Whether I sent him packing and resorted to the Ali2 option depended on his answer. I looked at him with a frown, expecting him to get tangled up in lies and naive explanations. But I hadn’t expected him to surprise me with an almost love story.
- “Look, mate!” he began:
“I’d just set off for yours with the cart at 8.30, when down the next street comes the little mare Trayka. And him, my horse Dorcho, he’s really wild – he jumped straight on top of her, cart and all. I nearly fell off, I’ve been waiting for him to finish all this time.” If I were a painter, I would paint, from my imagination, a picture called “Passion”. In it – in profile: Ali on top of the cart, on the driver’s seat, at a 45-degree angle, his forelock fluttering, wearing a white shirt. The cart, he and the horse Dorcho would blend into one another so much that together they would look like a Centaur. And the little mare Trayka would have a posy of flowers on her forehead. I would abandon the property at once and go back to my studio. With that painting I would surely make crazy money. My runaway city-dweller’s imagination looked over the stallion Dorcho, for whom even a cart on his back was no obstacle to making love. Hats off. But I quickly came back to reality.
I told Ali to come into the yard and take away everything we had agreed. To fill the cart to the top and not talk to me about the number of trips. 30 leva! Full stop. But I felt slightly guilty. His story seemed more and more wonderful to me; I would probably remember it all my life. I began daydreaming about writing at least a short story about the love between Dorcho and Trayka and winning a “Pulitzer” with it.
At that moment he took a dump /the horse, not Ali/. I told him not to worry /Ali, that is/. Not that he was worried. At that moment he was calculating something in his head – our deal, I think. Then he brought the cart into the yard. The horse started munching the grass like a lawnmower. Ali set about throwing the household rubbish onto the cart.
After 15 minutes he came back for the cuttings and the stumps. The village rubbish dump, as far as I knew, was in the back of beyond. If this kept up, he would do the whole job in just 1 hour. My hourly rate as a working engineer back then was 7 leva an hour. I pointed out to him some things to get rid of that I hadn’t mentioned the day before. He shot me a look with his olive-black eyes and I raised the price to 40 leva.
In the end my yard was “sparkling” in under two hours, i.e. his hourly rate was 20 leva an hour. I tickled my social conscience with the thought that I was a generous employer, not like my boss. After all, Ali had no regular clients, and his frisky stallion and the cart needed looking after accordingly. I definitely started to feel pretty cool.
I gave him the money and invited him to have a beer with me on the patio in front of the house. He unharnessed his horse so it could graze and we sat down. His horse started grazing, there was a smell of grass, and the neighbour’s bees came in swarms and joined our company. The sun hid behind the clouds so as not to warm up our beer unnecessarily, and we opened another each, as if intoxicated by nature. We felt no need at all to talk any nonsense just like that, for the sake of some beer. At that moment a little mare appeared from the street, and after a brief hesitation she came into the yard and began munching ever closer to him /to the horse, not to Ali/. I expected Dorcho to jump straight on top of her, but he carried on grazing as if it were me grazing next to him. Ali saw my look and deciphered it instantly:
- “My horse, when he’s without the cart, is very docile. Otherwise he’d have jumped on her ages ago!”
He was definitely reading my mind.
After the third beer I got to thinking. According to Ali, who knew his horse best, he /the horse, not Ali/ wasn’t jumping on her because he was without the cart. Freud had never mentioned the influence of carts on the libido of horses. A whole field of reflection opened up before me. The first and most logical explanation was that his horse, when harnessed to a cart, wondering how to put off the work ahead, jumps on the nearest mare. The second – that Ali’s horse wants to stay faithful to the mare Trayka. The third was that the horse held left-wing convictions and was expressing in his own way his protest against exploitation. I also rejected the hypothesis that the horse felt somehow naked and ashamed without the cart.
My conclusion was – may all horses forgive me – that they feel like men only with a cart.
That was a stroke of genius, I think – I told myself over the fourth beer. Ali left, together with the objects of my reflection. Right after him, the little mare also stopped pretending to graze and swung her hips in vain in the direction of the street.
The bees, which until recently had been buzzing in my yard, also left my yard, disappointed that there was hardly anything interesting left to see here. The sun beat down on my beer and it disgusted me. I closed the deserted yard, swept up the horse droppings and put them in a new black bag. I sent my wife photos of our sparkling yard, in which the bag was not in shot. She replied that I had done a perfect job. I fell asleep at 8 in the evening so as to be ready in the morning for the first cockerels and dogs. All night I dreamt of horses laughing at me with their flared nostrils, for no clear reason.
Some time in the morning, half asleep, the thought flashed through my mind of buying a cart instead of wasting hard-earned money on assorted aphrodisiacs. When the sun laughed in my face too, I drank a coffee and sped off by car for Sofia, to escape my fantasies here.
There, my Trayka might be waiting for me impatiently.
