When I was a little girl I constantly asked my father to tell me fairytales. He was tired most of the time; he was an electrician and worked ten hours a day. Our neighbors often asked him to repair their electric cooking stoves, their refrigerators or vacuum cleaners, and he didn’t have much time for me. One day he took a sheet of paper and started writing as a watched, very quiet, by his side.
“What is this, Dad?” I asked.
“This is the Bulgarian alphabet, my girl,” he answered.
“Why are you writing this?” I asked very disappointed. “You promised to tell me a fairytale, Dad, and not to write the alphabet for me. I want a tale about a beautiful princess. Why are you doing this?”
He smiled quietly, slowly, his smile as warm and bright as a spring day.
“Because the Bulgarian alphabet knows all the fairytales in the world, my little one,” he said and I believed him because he had never lied to me before.
“Then teach me the alphabet, Dad!” I cried out. I was three years old.
When I was four I could read the shorter words and I invented the meaning of the longer ones. My mother, a mathematician and economist, was very angry with me. But it the big warm smile of my father that encouraged me to go on inventing stories. When I liked the way a letter in a book of fairytales was printed I made a story about it. When I heard a sentence in a conversation, which I particularly liked, I made a story about the man or the woman who had said it.
“You must grow up an honest person. You should not make up things,” my mother said. “We hate lies in our family.”
“These are not lies, woman,” my father said to her. “She just tells you stories. Some of them are really beautiful.”
“My daughter must become a doctor of medicine to save human life,” my mother objected. “We work so hard to earn money for her education. Stories will bring her nowhere.”
“You are wrong this time,” Father objected. “Often, stories can save human life better than anything else.”
I was 25 years old when my first short story collection “Stories against loneliness” was published.
I did not study medicine; I instead of preparing for the examinations in chemistry and biology, I studied Bulgarian and English and I was overjoyed when I was accepted as a student of Bulgarian and English philology.
My mother was sorely disappointed. My father was exhilarated. He treated all his friends to the most expensive plum brandy in the pub – he was deeply content his only daughter would study the Bulgarian language that knew all fairytales in the world.
After my first short story collection was published he said, “I am the happiest man in the world. Now I know my daughter can hear tales no one else can. I have always wanted to write, my little one. I always did. But I had to work hard. You have to work hard. It is only by working hard, by helping people that you will learn to hear stories, which can make wounds heal. Remember, my little one, the Bulgarian alphabet I taught you. Use it in your stories in a way that will make your readers stronger and better men after they finish reading what you’ve written.”
“Rubbish, man!” my mother said. “Learn English, girl. Learn hard, learn all day long. If you can’t live without books, translate books. This is Okay. You’ll have money in your purse, and you can take care of me when I grow old. Well, your short story collection is nothing. It won’t put much bread on the table.”
My short story collection won a minor literary prize and Mother said, “What did I tell you. It’s no good. If the stories were good, you would have won the big prize, and we could have bought a big TV Set.”
“Your stories are good, my little one,” Dad said. “They are about our village and about the Srtuma River in which I taught you to swim. They will tell all men in the world there is a beautiful river in Bulgaria.”
“Who cares about the river,” Mother said. “There are bigger and more beautiful rivers in the world than the Struma.”
“Yes,” Dad agreed. “But I met you by the Struma River, my pretty woman.”
For the first time Mother had nothing to say.
She was happy I had son. Now he’s grown up and he is a doctor.
He loved the Bulgarian alphabet that knew all tales in the world, but he was my mother’s favorite grandchild. Ever since he learned to walk and speak she told him about medicines and doctors. She was the happiest woman in the world when he graduated medicine in Germany two years ago. She treated all her friends and relatives to plum brandy and the whole neighborhood was drunk and was singing for a week. My son too wrote short stories. Every time she found out he had written a short story, she cried bitterly, she came to me and said, “Please, tell him to stop. Don’t let him become like you. You are constantly writing. You waste your life. Don’t let him ruin his. ”
“That’s not true,” Father said. “Our daughter is never lonely, her stories keep her company and she’ll live ten times longer than us, because she lives all these years the characters in her short stories live.”
In 2012 my father died. And then I knew my mother was lonely. She was so much accustomed to this dreamy man. He sometimes didn’t have money to put bread on the table, but he knew what flowers said to each other before they burst into blossom, and he knew the stories of all electric bulbs, of the old cooking stove, of the ancient cupboard in the kitchen. Even my eldest son, the one who graduated medicine in Germany, could not help my father. He called me in the evenings and asked me, “Read one of your short stories to me, little one.”
I did and he said, “Remember, if a short story doesn’t make you stronger, if it doesn’t help you endure the pain there is no use writing it.”
One evening, my mother said, “I read to him one of your stories. It was full of lies, yes, it was. But they were good lies. Just like the thought of Santa Clause. We know he does not exist. But we like the tales about him.”
“You are not right, pretty woman,” my father said. “It is the truth in the stories that eases the pain.”
When I write a story I always imagine that my father will listen to it from somewhere. I was positive he’d search for the truth to ease the pain that the world.
My father’s death was the beginning of my long encounter with 2012. There was a big earthquake in my native town of Pernik. My eldest son, the doctor, came back from Germany and worked as a volunteer helping the injured. My mother gave the persons who had remained without food the canned fruits she herself had prepared last summer. My daughter, who is a student in economy, helped clear the ruined walls; my husband, a machine building engineer, worked for two weeks and took no money repairing the damages in the machine building factory. My younger son, a software developer, bought a computer and gave it to the primary school in our neighborhood.
I thought that was not enough. I thought everybody in Bulgaria had to unite to eliminate the consequences of the earthquake. I spoke on the TV asking for help. I knew that acute crisis raged and people had not much to offer. I knew that very well.
Then we, the women in our part of the town, collected clothes, shoes, blankets, and some books for the pupils, and we stored them in the gym of the local school.
On the second night, someone broke the door of the gym and stole everything – the used clothes that we had carefully washed, the shoes we had polished, and the blankets we had ironed. The only thing that had remained in the gym, were the books. The thieves were not interested in novels and short stories, they didn’t care about the fact the Bulgarian alphabet knew all fairytales in the world. Perhaps they had calculated that they would sell the stolen items and get rich quick.
“You see now that I was right to insist that you become a doctor,” my mother said. “No one cares about books. The only thing people care about now is their bellies.”
She was a stubborn woman, my mother. She didn’t much care about books, but she gave a family whose house had collapsed her only goat.
“They have to live somehow,” she said. “And I have you and your children. You’ll help me.”
My elder son, the doctor, worked during his whole leave from the hospital in Germany as a volunteer at the local Bulgarian hospital in Pernik. My daughter, the other women of the neighborhood and I swept the floors and cleaned the rooms of the local school and kindergarten. My younger son repaired the computer network of the emergency medical unit and refused to get paid.
“You are a writer and I don’t like writers,” my mother said. “Your father spoke about truth…. But there are different truths for one and the same thing. The thief who stole the clothes and shoes from the gym would say, “I was hungry that is why I lifted the things.” That will be true, too. You, writers, don’t’ see this. I can forgive you for being a writer only because of the grandchildren you gave me. You don’t help the homeless people by writing stories. It is by rebuilding their ruined houses that you help them.”
The hardest part of my encounter with 2012 was when we found Grandpa Pavel in his one-room apartment, forgotten by everybody, unable to move. One of the walls had fallen in, and no one had come to check on him. We were cleaning a five story block of flats when we heard faint groaning sounds. It was dangerous to go on working because the roof might collapse but we, three women, went on towards the sound. At first we thought it was a pet, some dog that could not escape from the flat. Then we discovered the man.
‘My son works in Spain. He’s there with his family,” Grandpa Pavel breathed. “If he wasn’t here, I wouldn’t be lying here all alone. My son loves me.”
The old man was paralyzed.
“Your son is not in Spain,” one of the women said. “I saw him the in the supermarket the other day.”
Grandpa Pavel winced.
“What!” he breathed.
His hands shook. A tear rolled down withered wrinkled cheek.
The old man had stayed in his small flat five days. He had drank water and eaten dry bread that a neighbor had bought him before the earthquake.
“Shut up,” my mother said to the woman. “That was not Grandpa Pavel’s son that you saw. Grandpa Pavel’s son is in Spain.”
“But…it was him,” the woman started.
“Don’t worry, old man,” my mother said firmly. “We’ll take care of you. We’ll give you clean clothes. They are Vassil’s. You know Vassil is my late husband.”
“Vassil was my friend,” Grandpa Pavel whispered. ”I know him. Tell me about my son, please. Was he all right?”
In the evening my mother said, “Maybe your father was right. Sometimes words can help a man better than doctors.”
I looked at her, unbelieving.
“Yes, your father was right. The Sruma River is the most beautiful place in the world. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“It’s because I met him by the shore.”
“My little one,” my father used to say. “There are words that can ease any misery matter how black it is. You don’t need to be a writer to find them. You only need to have a good heart.”
My mother is a tough woman. I’ve never heard her complain or whimper.
That night she said, “Little one, how I miss your father.”
A tear rolled down her cheek but she smashed it with her fist.
That was all I remember about my encounter with 2012.
Now I know: you can live a century, you can survive floods and earthquakes, but the most important thing for you is to be able to say you miss somebody – an ordinary man who teaches the other people the alphabet which knows all the stories in the world.