Shadows of Invisible Dogs

By Danilo Peshikan

Peshikan’s characters in Shadows of invisible dogs are strange and unconventional. The shadows of their ‘own muddled life’ remain simply in some ‘happy afternoon’ (Shadows of invisible dogs). The questions put forward are global, universally human questions: ‘What is that power which, in its mindless greed destroys those over whom it rules?’ (From top to bottom) Or:‘For how many of us, who semantically suckled at the freedom’s frequent yet feigned arousing disrobements, the future is no longer what it once was, nor will the past gets any better?... While we are waiting for the new Godot, however, why do we not finally grow up? ... Let us quietly shut our book of quotes and turn our souls, those weather-beaten gloves, to the living word, the only one that senses the irregular pulse of our human situation... It does not matter that the present situation in which we believe is not always genuine, that what we delight in is not necessarily good and that all these questions, from the beginning of time, are still awaiting their answer’ (Variation on the subject of Freedom).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Danilo Peshikan
• Release date: Jun 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370058754

Danilo Peshikan

Danilo Peshikan is the author of short stories, which have been published in the literary magazines of his home country and anthologized. While overseas, he worked as a special correspondent for the Literary Forum, a newspaper issued by the Union of the Bulgarian writers. Danilo lived in Paris and taught for three years at the University of Zimbabwe before moving with his family to Australia. A collection of his novellas saw the light of day in the 90’s. Filiad is Danilo Peshikan's first and last novel written in English. He started it with the ambition to produce a masterpiece of undisputable value and artistic merit. It was supposed to be the book of his life, his magnum opus. Danilo Peshikan once said: When I speak it is to say something essential—my hopes, my human experience, my feelings, philosophy etc.—themes that have rarely been spoken about by one human to another.... To become a Stranger for someone else’s soul and to be for it what He has been for me throughout all these years, and every lonely person at every occasional meeting has woken up the hope... It is of no importance, even if all this lasts just for an instant, as long as at this very moment I am immortal at last. Filiad was completed shortly before he died in 2010. The inscription on Danilo's grave is taken from Filiad: The sky showed no rally of cawing ravens or gathering gods, no gam of killer clouds frolicked about, no poetic thunder-head swelled with Shakespearean curses.

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Shadows of Invisible Dogs

And other stories

By Danilo Peshikan

Translated by Dorothy Borisova

Text copyright 2016 Danilo Peshikan

All rights reserved

Smashwords Edition

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Other books by Danilo Peshikan

Filiad, novel

Stranger, short stories

Contents:

Title

The wooden memory keeper

The white cottage

Benkovsky from the band Benkovsky

Everyone’s war against everyone

From top to bottom

Shadows of invisible dogs

Variations on the subject of freedom

About the Author

The wooden memory keeper

1

I only have to close my eyes…

It stands quietly at the back of the hallway leading to the yard. Always there. On the right, beneath the French doors with the marigold-coloured curtains that scatter an orange glow in summer. It is fully made of wood, very light wood with knots on the lid, and two serpent-shaped hooks in place of a keyhole. Its handle, metal like all other suitcases of that time, painted white.

If I squeeze my eyes tightly, I can also see the sunbeams. Some street… I struggle to retain its image as this must be my earliest memory.

Our horde of children was raising dust on Kitchevo Street. Now it falls away as if I am in an aeroplane gaining altitude: at its origin gleam the shops along the train station, with a bend in the road leading to Haylaz garden. The street crawls further: on the right, it follows the creek up to the brewery; and on the left are the Macedonian club and the patchwork of huts and their gardens (our house is at number 16) all the way to the livestock market, multi-coloured and glittering in the sun. The square in front of the station is deserted. It is still early for evening festivities. The garden, where young people held their rendezvous… At its far back rises Enijeh Vardar factory, but if I look hard, further up I might make out the dark red façade of the Modern Theatre Cinema. On the right of the train station, amidst the greenery, rests a mass of ramshackle houses from the Manyov district. They must have demolished them long ago. All of them? At night, the whole valley used to twinkle with their lights.

Beyond the brewery, the children look around. No sign of anything. Only the distant hazy silhouette of the Kaponov factory in the evening swelter. The livestock market. In front of the bawdyhouse tavern, tarrying bargirls pace in the shade of a locust tree sheltering several unhitched horses. I see the dust on the leaves, shimmering with a pink lustre. The slanting sunbeams…

The older ones are already at the windows of the tavern. ‘M-m-make way!’ One boy clambers up the vines. Behind the curtains, dancing shadows, exclamations. A golden-haired figure clad in emerald passes under the locust tree and for a moment, the sun blinds me. The smallest boy catches up to her and she hands him a white envelope. My heart stops: last evening, the same youngster had also brought her my letter: Dear Janna. I am always waiting. At night I send you off, you are the loveliest. Take me with you. I am always waiting. Vanya.

‘Th-they’re on th-their kn-n-nees a’ain!’ announces the lad from atop the vine. His favourite word was again (a’ain). He does not stutter on it.

‘She’s un-n-d-dressing… t-turn-ning ’round… Once m-more! A’ain!’

The youngster scurries over with the envelope before dashing to the windows. I take out the card; on it, two faces pressed against each other look out from some beach with cabins, a violet sky and an alley. A tunnel of greenery. On its back are the words: My dear child! I cannot do as you ask. I am not able to explain. Kisses from JANNA. Five capital letters. My breath ceases at the curling line of text filling the sheet, and I do not yet know that the most beautiful moment of my childhood has passed.

The image dissolves. Kitchevo Street, the brewery, the blue skies…

I see it once more. In a cluster of sunbeams. The wooden suitcase.

Strange, but it is still engraved on the very front cover of my memory. Our family went away with it, came home with it and left it back there – beneath the garden window. I think it was with the wooden suitcase that Nevena first arrived, then Nikola, her son, took it and hit the road, and when Nevena married my father, her younger sons Gosho and Tosho came home with it from the Turnovo orphanage where they had been ‘raised under the auspices of the Bishop Stefan’. Then once again, it took up its post in the hallway.

But why do I think I remember the wooden suitcase from much earlier? Yes, it must have been so… For once I had learned to walk I dragged it off behind the shed in the yard and Mara, my older sister, fought in vain to take it from me. I remember her too, standing at the door with a bitter smile, breathless: Whatever you get your hands on, Vanya, you just will not let go! No time passed and we sent Mara away to the Alexandrovska Hospital; with the wooden suitcase, we put her on the train to Sofia, with the same, we brought her beret from the funeral, and my father stood it up in its place again, for the next in turn.

Now it gives me my bearings. I start down the hallway towards that bright patch. Should I glance into the two rooms of our old house on 16 Kitchevo Street? The same marigold curtains, the same fake flowers. Beyond the window are the dry well and the mulberry whose twigs found their way into our beds in the summer. However, all this quickly fades away.

2

They say that the seventh wave returns the debris back to the sea; seven years later, the scene of the past returns to my memory, and these are the dreams that go on if we fall back asleep. It was summer and there was a war. I longed to go to the Young Ladies’ High School, but it was either the factory (with Nevena) or the Mara Pesheva sewing school that awaited me.

At dusk, melodies drifted on the wind, coming from the hill overlooking the winding path to the cemetery. One song played every evening, mingling with the fragrance of the Haylaz garden lindens: Raindrops spilling down, the sky is streaming tears…

I remember others too – Youth lasts but a season… Enveloped in melancholy as in a lace glove, they seemed translucent. I could see the violet sky, the bay, cabins on a beach that shone through the leaves of the laurel trees. Who was up at this late hour? Whose was this distress and sorrow? Sorrow for what? I curled up in the darkness, I put a hand to my forehead; I thought, something must finally take place, because… because I am always waiting!

A mossy pump protruded in front of the station, I would go there for water in the evening. Then I dropped by to see Vutsa, the Romanian girl, with whom I shared a desk at school. We would lose ourselves in conversations in the shade of the cherry trees. Girlish chatter, from which only a mist remains, but years later, it brings to mind a certain pair of eyes, charming or devilish. One summer’s eve…

‘Yani is in love with Zorka! And you knew it too, didn’t you?’ she hurled at me.

I did not even know who Yani was. I felt weak.

‘Which Zorka?’ I asked.

‘The one from our class, Vanya! Yani follows her every night. As far as her house. He’s… in love!’ sobbed Vutsa.

Zorka, daughter of the textile-mill owner, and Veneta, daughter of the apothecary, were ‘misses’. Instead of yes, they used ‘naturally’; new clothes, nose in the air, a flounce in their step. Zorka I knew, but who was Yani?

‘Oh, Yani Mikov? Who does not know him! He came from Sofia… from the boy’s school, the most… the most… and he looks like Rossano Brazzi!’ she wailed.

‘The one who lodges with uncle Neno the Cinematographer?’ I was astonished.

Yani proved to be the slight, dark boy who shuffled at uncle Neno’s heels. Winter and summer, he wore the same patched white suit on his back.

‘But that Yani looks like…’ I almost said a gipsy.

‘Like Rossano Brazzi,’ wailed Vutsa. What was happening to her?

‘Vutsa, how do you know that… that… he’s after Zorka?’

She tossed her braids, a gesture I liked.

‘At first, he only went out to the station to buy a newspaper. Two Sundays already, he waits for her in front of the Braytchev photo booth, and once she comes by, after her he goes! All mo-o-ooney-eyed, trudging along the road and his eyes on the ground.’

What a calamity! In this news about Yani and Zorka, there really was something which made one want to give up on life.

‘You’ve got to help me,’ Vutsa mumbled almost imperceptibly.

That night, I did not sleep a wink until morning. Between Tosho and me, little Lalka was choking in her sleep. From atop the hill, someone incessantly played the song of the tears, but rather than exotic images, before my eyes hovered only Vutsa’s small face and bowed nape beneath the cherry trees. It seemed to me that I understood this boundless grief, this cosmic anguish.

At dawn, Vutsa was already waiting in our nook and looked at me out of eyes sunken within deep purple shadows.

‘We’ll write him a letter!’ I quickly blurted out.

‘A letter?’ Vutsa sniffed. ‘No way!’

‘Not that kind of letter, Vutsa. A fabricated letter.’

She listened, flabbergasted and finally agreed with a compliant smile.

That blustery summer morning, seated on the grass, we composed the letter on a sheet torn from a school notebook. When I finished, Vutsa perked up, giggled into her fists and made me read the letter aloud:

To Yani Mikov from Zorka Hadjikoleva: A LETTER!

Why are you following me and even spying? Are you so stoopid that you cant see who I am and who you are! Dont you see my clothes? Im a proper Uropean gal. And you with that suit, does it never see a washing in winter or summer? I bet your just a gipsy, go fry your brains, youuu! Shoo! Zorka

We dropped off the letter in uncle Neno the Cinematographer’s mailbox. Next evening at five, we were already watching the house from behind a pile of crates where Vutsa dragged me. Yani appeared towards six o’clock. In the same white suit, slicked black hair. He looked up and down the street and made for the station. Vutsa whimpered with joy; the photo booth was in the opposite direction.

We trailed him from afar. A strange, tentative gait. Head down. A swarthy complexion but delicate, girlish features, betraying an unusual weariness. He got a newspaper from Chani’s kiosk. He stopped nowhere. The white speck of his figure was coming back. Ever so slowly, cautiously, as if the road were crawling with vipers. The blame for a part of that desolation lay on me, I thought. It was mine.

Before we parted, Vutsa kissed me, averting her eyes. The following night in the garden, under the cherry blossoms she confided to me, between laughter and sighs, that she would be entering high school. She looked fully well again.

‘Let Yani gloat now!’ Vutsa twirled. ‘What about you?’

I watched her dancing beneath the old tree and dared not move.

‘The servant school…’ That was what everybody called Mara Pesheva School.

Twice or thrice more Vutsa wanted us to trace Yani Mikov’s evening walks, but he did not go after Zorka again.

3

By the end of that volatile summer, the war was felt everywhere. Radio broadcasts. Noisy military groups. In Sofia, governments were switching up but back home, I led another war: over my entrance into high school. Either she or I was the position of my rival, my stepmother Nevena. To speed up the resolution, she even moved out into the shed in the yard. She took her marigold curtains, her fake flowers… I feared her from the time she came to our house and spent one night in the mulberry tree. She explained then that she went after a flock of glowing chicks, which had alighted on the dry well, then, the glowing ring, had flown to the mulberry. Every time she climbed the tree, my father carefully followed her and stroked her face.

In the shed, Nevena neglected her housekeeping. She left us at times without lunch, at others without dinner. Increasingly regularly, we could see her white nightgown tangled in the branches. My father climbed up. Wrapped her in his cloak and talked to her… The summer grew cool in its passing.

I decided to take over Nevena’s housekeeping. My father finally had to choose: her, who slept in trees and neglected us or… I cornered him on his way out one morning: for lunch, there would be banitsa! He only nodded. I prepared the bread troughs in the yard; Nevena could surely see me as a crawling ant from the top floors of the factory. Towards noon, she appeared like a ghost; I turned and saw her standing at my back.

‘This dough you’re kneading, worms will eat it.’

She had let her tresses fall loosely to the ground, barefoot… Woe!

I dashed away with the risen dough and hurled it into the privy pit. When I returned, the yard was already deserted. From over by the dry well, it seemed like someone was struggling to wind up the rusty coil. I bolted and locked myself in my room.

At lunchtime, my father and Nikola collapsed at the table.

‘Bring out the banitsa!’ groaned my father.

What could I tell him? In the privy pit, that was where the dough was.

‘Whaaat?’ my father leapt up and his chair clattered to the ground, broken.

I hid my head and awaited the blows. The door slammed. When I opened my eyes, we were alone in the room and he towered over me. Outside, as if miles away, rang the cries of the jays.

‘Now speak!’ He had closed his eyes and his face blazed.

‘She… she…’ I screamed, ‘Mother!’ At that word, I burst into tears. What mother? There was