Illusion (Илюзия)

Berin Aptoula

I’m in the glass jar sun with eccentric boys and bizarre women.
          One night in April of 2020, I was picking up donuts for my cousins Ami and Memo, but mostly for Memo to satisfy his sweet tooth. Waiting, I looked past the disheveled cashier to the window behind her and saw that the sky was black. The streetlights were flickering; all but one stopped working. Once I was well away from the shop’s illumination, I felt for trees and fences to get to Ami’s building.
          When I got to his apartment, he led me to a dim living room where I sat down, entertained by the cracked mirror in the corner. It gave me an extra set of eyes and another mouth, like it was compensating for my poor eyesight and thin lips. As I peered, I saw my uncle’s face, all red and plumped. When I pushed myself against the couch to get a better view of his face, he leaned back so I wouldn’t see him. When I leaned in, he also leaned in. I heard him guffawing from his bedroom; it was that loud, boisterous, from-the-gut kind of laugh. I got up, but we were—suddenly—on the Q-train at Newkirk Plaza. My uncle was yelling at Ami, clutching his chest as he howled the last word. I asked if he was alright. I didn’t expect him to come with us. You have a car, I told him. Why are you taking the train?
          Later, he and I were sitting on my bedroom floor, fixated on one of Memo’s puzzles. I asked him if he remembered how he used to yell at Ami every day after he got home from school. He looked down. I didn’t understand why he looked sad. Yelling is what he did, he didn’t know how to show love in any other way. Their relationship reminded me of the boy and his father in “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, that it could be interpreted in two ways: out of affection or violence, of fear or love, or both.
          He looked back up, said nothing. He never spoke back to me, but he did to everyone else. My dad told me I was the exception as the first real American of the family, the pioneer.
          Of course, these encounters never happened. My uncle died in March 2019.
          But I kept coming across him, people who looked like him, and a strange young woman on the elevator in my cousin’s building. She was tall and lacked the so-called elegance of a girl. On one of those days, she cornered me near the elevator’s buttons, telling me she had a Volga full of spiders, and asked if I’d like to see it. Her breath smelled of dark rye bread.
          I left without saying anything.
          The next day, I went back and saw a stout man in the lobby wearing a navy baseball cap and a Metallica shirt. He had a newspaper lodged underneath his armpit and was waiting for the elevator. I walked up to him and jeered, You’re not my uncle. He stood there, his beady eyes gleaming. I left for the back entrance because it led to an alleyway, and it was quicker to get home that way.
          As I went the usual route past the church, I saw an oblong mirror leaning against one of its fences. It was beautiful with its thick gray ridges, and it didn’t have any cracks. It made me look even thinner, paler too. A few words were written on its back.

“DANCE WITH ME” (Alphaville) / “ALWAYS” (Erasure) / “SHE DRIVES ME CRAZY” (Fine Young Cannibals) / “СЛЕД ДЕСЕТ ГОДИНИ (SLED DESET GODINI – AFTER TEN YEARS)” (FSB)

These were my uncle’s songs. I needed a mirror in my room; I wanted to take this one with me, but my mom told me to never take a stranger’s mirror.
          I left it there and returned to my building. Rent envelopes were lodged into every apartment door except for 3G’s. The tenants had moved out months ago, and the door was unlocked. They were odd people. Loud people. Turkish too. Their apartment was just a white room with a red ceiling. One of the windows led to a fire escape. I heaved the frame and was greeted with jars lined up like Soviet soldiers.
          Kompot!
          Strawberries, peaches, cherries, apricots, cranberries, pears. I wanted to drink it all, but none of the lids budged. I haven’t had a good one since Baba Anne died in 2013. My dad and I couldn’t make it like she could; we never got the amount of fruits or sugar right. Sometime in the summer of 2017, my dad and uncle were talking loud as usual on the phone, that Berin hasn’t had any good kompot for years. Fortuna Market doesn’t import the good ones, and we sure as hell can’t make it.
          I didn’t know she liked Mother’s kompot that much, I heard him say.
          Two days later, he sent Ami to our house with a bag containing two large mason jars. One jar had strawberry kompot, the other peach. I finished the strawberry one in a day but saved the peach one for the next day.
          Next day turned into next week,
                                                                   next month,
                                                                                   next year,
                                                                                                 two years.
          It was still in the fridge when my uncle died. My dad told me we should drink it for him, but it was the last thing made by his hands. I told him we should keep it for another two years, that kompot doesn’t expire till four. He opened it anyway.
          Yet now I smelled malted flour. Barley.
          I turned to look at the window.
          The strange woman from the other day stood with a wide stance, murmuring something about plucking my memories like figs and adding those figs to my kompot. Baba Anne and my uncle never added figs, they added white sugar. Who drinks kompot with figs? I walked past her, left her standing there.
          I was back in the living room, debating on going to the basement to check for kompot I could open. It was my uncle who found his dad hanging from the ceiling in their building’s basement, back in their home in Bulgaria on January 28, 1989.
          A looming specter of the past, he was a man who came from a village, went to school without shoes, had a drunk as a father, and killed himself on Baba Anne’s—his wife’s—birthday. He was always referred to as my dad by my dad and uncle and never as your grandpa; not like how my mom refers to her parents as your grandparents. I don’t call him grandpa.
          Regardless, I went down to the basement.
          There was no kompot. There wasn’t a body either.
          Maybe I could try making kompot again. I decided to head back to my apartment.

Every day of quarantine, I dreamt things so real that it fooled me into thinking I lived it.

1. I HAD DREAMS OF FRIENDS I HAVEN’T SEEN SINCE VALENTINE’S DAY:
We were at a diner in Park Slope. I heard a man warn his date, The chamomile tea is syrupy, the meringue tart is bitter. He clanked his fork against the plate, going around the inner ring, touching anything but the tart.
          That small thing’s a fiver, my friend said. If he’s not going to eat it, I will.
          But we looked to see if the woman across him was enjoying the latte and the crêpe she ordered. She had full lips, and they opened wide between bites. Foam masked her upper lip; bits of the burnt crêpe made her teeth look chipped. My friend said, She’s real pretty, because he loves unconventional girls.
          The man pressed the napkin against his mouth, looking up at her hat. We looked too. It was a striking peacock hat, like the feathers were plucked straight from the peacock itself. It swooped so low that we and the man couldn’t see her eyes. I couldn’t see my friend’s eyes either, his curtain bangs were covering his face. I signaled the waiter and asked him if they had any kompot I could drink. Preferably strawberry, I added.
          It’s compote, he told me. You eat it. This is a French diner.

2.CONVERSATIONS WITH NUMBERS I’VE NEVER CALLED:
Girl from Liverpool, hello. It’s me, I said. I just found your number in my other wallet.
          My goodness, I thought you’d never call, she said in that Scouse accent of hers. I thought you were hung up—
          Hung up? I interrupted. From where? I don’t have a ceiling to do that.
          I was going to ask if you’ve kept up with theatre after our two-fourteen class.
          Yes, I have.
          I haven’t. I only took that class to fulfill a prerequisite. Sorry, Girl from Liverpool.

3. DANCING AT BALKAN DISCOTHEQUES:
First day of high school, design foundation class, period three.
          I feared icebreakers. I didn’t know how to describe myself. To make it fun, the teacher told us to pick a word based on the first letter of our name. Forgetting every other b-word out there, I said, Blissful Berin. Three tables away, I heard, Eve Eve, yeah, like Eve in “Adam and Eve”? The teacher hesitated but then moved on to the next student. 
          In spring 2014, Eve Eve and I were standing in the tenth-floor hallway full of whooping teens. I was going to chemistry and she to geometry. She gave me a box of chocolate and left a pink mark on my cheek. To celebrate our friendship, she said. From class to class, I walked without knowing her kiss mark was still there. I never knew if she liked me. No American friend kisses your face and neck like that. I didn’t like anyone that way, but I promised her we’d dance at prom.
          Tonight, Eve Eve and I danced. I stepped toward her, raised my arms around us and snapped my fingers. I asked the DJ to play “Hey Hey Guy” by Ken Laszlo. We didn’t dance to songs I wanted at prom, the real prom, because I couldn’t find a way to dance to trap hop remixes.
          My uncle was a Euro disco king, said that disco cures the boring.

4. FIXING CARS:
But only Soviet ones. Lada, Volga, ZiL, Moskvitch.
          I rolled out from a Lada in this one. Pin-up girls smiled from the walls. There was a mechanic lady for every month, in every uniform color, in every pose.
          One summer, I went to an auto shop in Bulgaria. My grandpa’s car wouldn’t stop sputtering. The poster ladies there didn’t act very mechanic-like; they weren’t using the hammers and screwdrivers the way they were supposed to be used. My dad’s dad probably could’ve fixed it; he knew how to disassemble and reassemble car engines. He also knew how to restore television antennae and revive busted radios. Momche, said a stubbled man. Get out of your dyado’s car, will you? I shuddered at the thought of that man looking at those girls.
          I pushed myself under the car but was pulled back out by a coworker. Do you know what you’re doing? he asked. You ain’t dealing with a toy. Take a break, go look at one of our girlie mags.

5. WEDDINGS THAT GUESTS LEFT BECAUSE WE RAN OUT OF OLIVE OIL:
The feminine Frenchman and boyish Russo-girl were friends for years, but they ended up not getting together. The Russo-girl liked him, but the Frenchman didn’t like her back. The girl was leaving for Russia to study astronomy, the man was staying in Brooklyn to work at his dad’s record store. That’s the life I gave them. Yet today I was at their Franco-Russian wedding in Brighton serving shepherd’s salad with no olive oil. Characters from my other stories got angry, called me an awful writer, and left me with the newlywed couple. I sat in one of the chairs and watched the two scream at each other for not bothering to grocery shop for the biggest day of their lives.

6. GETTING BEATEN UP BY RUSSIAN MEN:
Still, the alleyway is the fastest way to get home, but my foot got stuck in one of the potholes on the eighth visit to my cousin’s apartment. I didn’t want to scuff my boots, so I tried slinking my way out.
          I heard a shimmy, leaves rustling, clunky footsteps.
          Bodies towered over me. Look at this pretty boy, said one. His voice was bold in timbre, controlled in intonation. The others crowed.
          My boot was off, I was free, but now in the grasp of a jacked man. Why the feathered hair? he asked. You think you’re in the 80s? You look like that shithead from Modern Talking.
          Which one? I asked. There’s two men in Modern Talking.
          He kissed his right fist and knocked me out.

7. DRIVING ON A HIGHWAY AT GUNPOINT:
The gunman told me my name. In this car, you’re Mikhail.
          Misha. Mishka. Bear. Bear in the car. Bear. In. Bear-in.
          Berin.
          He was good-looking for a gunman: svelte, sleek red hair, fervent pair of grays for eyes. That’s what I got from his black ensemble. He cocked his gun against my head, said I was damn plain for a girl and to keep my eyes on the road.

8. GETTING KNIFED ON THE STEPS OF DUNKIN DONUTS:
Memo rung me up, said he was having puzzle troubles and wanted me to help. I ran to their building. 
          Where’s the puzzle? I asked. He handed me a box with clouds on the front. I whistled. Two-hundred pieces, yeah? We finished it in thirty minutes.
          As I was leaving, he bawled, Why did you forget my donuts?
          Now I’m here to pick up a bag of donuts. On the way up the steps, a woman behind me wailed. It made my ears ring. She wasn’t the strange woman from earlier, but a woman with teased blonde hair and a fake tan. I looked at the baby stroller in front of her, but there was no baby in it. Bereft blue. In one quick swoop, she pulled a knife out of its canopy and lodged it into the right side of my head.
                              When I woke, I had a migraine, and my right eye was swollen. 

          There’s no spontaneity these days.
          I put on my mask, tuck my hair back, get a tote bag or two for groceries, and walk along the parkway for an hour and thirty minutes to get the required amount of fresh air. I stop by CVS for cold brew, the Polish deli for a cut of cheese and turkey, the organic market for real, gourmet bagels, and then I go home to do homework and lift weights.
          I lived my undergraduate years in assigned poetry anthologies. Unless it was Stanley Kunitz’s work, I looked past it, but a few poems have stuck with me because I’ve come across them at the right time. In “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” by James Wright, the speaker names Tiltonsville, Benwood, and Wheeling Steel—he’s straightforward in his boredom by describing a place where men drop out of school to work while their women get married and have kids young because that’s all they know. They’re mundane working-class Americans, but the unlikely pairing of words like “ruptured night,” “starved pullets,” “suicidally beautiful,” and “gallop terribly” make their lives sound exciting even with everyday words.
          I thought of the small Bulgarian village my dad’s dad came from, where children grow up on a farm, only given the option of working on the field, becoming a mother, a father, raising kids,
working, 
                    working,
                                                  working, 
dying.
          My dad says it’s funny how the youth dreams to leave, but I wish to go back. It might seem miserable that everyone lives the same life, but sometimes I like to imagine a life of not knowing anything outside the village. You could say “dying for love” resonated differently in quarantine as well.
          After thirty-five pages of analyses on poems my professor wanted, she finally gave us the freedom to pick out a Wright poem ourselves. I was flipping through the book at Roosevelt Island, sitting with February’s breeze, when I came across “Beginning.” Rather than being lyrical, the speaker talks about the world around him, enjoying nature with a comforting silence. As simple as the poem sounds with the moon and its wings, the mention of a slender woman’s figure hint at him grieving over a loved one. I’m still haunted by, “Be still. / Now.,” yet I’m also charmed by it; he’s forcing us to calm down and cope with an unexpected absence, that there’ll be another beginning if we come to accept the new, the strange—a break from the usual.
          While the poem isn’t musical, I couldn’t help but relate it to music. Take legato (smooth, connected in a melody) when reading longer lines such as, “Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow … ” with its alliteration, but also staccato (short, detached in a melody) with lines like “their wings,” “or move,” and “I listen.”
          In combining legato and staccato, the lines turn to syncopation, the accenting of a note at an unpredicted time, with two beats and a weaker beat afterward. Think jazz.
          The last unprecedented interaction I had right before the pandemic, or a semblance of one, was with a Ukrainian guy from one of my classes. He didn’t speak much unless he was asked to. I figured he lived somewhere around Ocean Parkway because that’s where most immigrants of ex-Soviet countries and their kids live, my family and myself included.
          I saw him when I first entered the train station, but I continued walking until I got to the other end. At the time, I thought he seemed familiar without realizing he was one of my classmates. Now he was standing close to the edge, two pillars away from me. The hair on my arms rose, and the back of my neck prickled. It’s strange; I thought he was staring. I’d just gotten out of a 7:00 p.m. class on Romantic literature.
          I was too tired to say anything.
          The F-train came into the station a minute later. I took the first seat I saw, between a woman with a pleated skirt and a suited man. I spent much of my train rides asleep. Tonight wasn’t any different. I closed my eyes, clutched my bag as a pillow,

WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES AND LISTEN TO BULGARIAN ESTRADA, I MAKE UP VIDEOS IN MY HEAD. THIS TIME I BECAME THE

                                                                                             BALKAN VILLAIN

I was on the train; yes, I knew I was approaching my stop. The pleated woman and suited man were gone. Across me and to the left, the Ukrainian guy was still there. We were nearing 18th Avenue.
          As I got up to leave the train, he gave a smile my way. Friendly gestures go over my head, but he looked right at me. I nodded at him from the outside, and the train left. Right before CUNY schools shut down along with the rest of the city, we were only exchanging nods, waves, and smiles. No words, no direct movement in each other’s way, just acknowledging each other. We were train neighbors. I’d like to think it was a sort of camaraderie.
          On the second-to-last day of in-person classes, I saved a seat for him and waited for him to walk in, though he never did. It was just me, my professor, and six other students from a class of twenty-two. After leaving class, the only thing I found was unfair was he knew what stop I got off, but I didn’t know his.
          When I got to the station, I started thinking about Wright again. “Lying in a Hammock” is one of his most well-known poems. It’s in every anthology I’ve bought for my poetry classes, but the questions about it remain the same: why the sudden ending? Is the speaker joking? Bragging? Lamenting? Suicidal? Each line like “bronze butterfly,” “black trunk,” “green shadow,” “empty house,” “cowbells follow,” and “distances of the afternoon” builds up to a grand scene, just for him to end with, “I have wasted my life.” Picture a person in a hammock, commenting on the pasture around them, only for them to lay their head back down and think how much time they’ve lost.
          My dad’s dad wouldn’t spend a lev for himself, saying he was saving up, but my dad and uncle never knew what for. He’d tell them smelling a plate of kebapche was enough, that he didn’t have to eat to satiate himself.
          In the last few years of the Soviet Union, the lev became completely devalued. The money my dad’s dad had been saving for decades suddenly meant nothing, just like how his name given by the Communist government meant nothing. He couldn’t handle change, lasting only four years from December 1984 to January 1989.
          Now we’re looking at the world from our window because we’ve been temporarily displaced. We’re on the weak beat of a syncopated song. Our lives have left the regular meter.

Berin Aptoula is a writer, cartoonist, lecturer, and devout practitioner of the word “Sehnsucht.” Some of her other reveries appear in dreamscapes like Dekopon Magazine, MudRoom, Farewell Transmission, and elsewhere. If you’re ever looking for her, check your local discotheque for an androgyne grooving under the alias BALKAN VILLAIN.

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