Stranger

By Danilo Peshikan

The Stranger, ‘what was he to me, this phantom enshrouded in visions, sinking further away as the years went by, deeper and deeper into a reality, which I could but hate? What did his appearances and exits forebode? I still do not know...
I would run into him on multiple occasions and in different circumstances. Besides, all these encounters coincided with major events of my life, though most of them had sunk into oblivion and now only his ghostly appearances on this stage, passing by and beyond, illuminate those rare moments.
‘Was he simply the good or the evil prophet? Even such discrimination was beyond my power to discern from the complicated night spirals he had woven into my path.’

‘The atmosphere in these stories is somehow reminiscent of Patrick Modiano – a fog in which every detail is distinct and crystal-clear, yet we have no idea where we are. And we wander and jostle against each other like in a crowded aquarium, making heroic existential efforts to find out how and why we are there, and who is watching from outside?’ – Literary Forum

• Language: English
• Publisher: Danilo Peshikan
• Release date: Jul 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370931095

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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Stranger

And other stories

By Danilo Peshikan

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

Shadows of invisible dogs, short stories

Contents:

Title

The street

Ljilja

The garden floor

The city’s face

Waking up in the morning

Three weeks

Stranger

About the Author

The street

They were coming from the square, out of the fog.

Semi-frozen gutters furrowed the steep slope leading to Krivolak Street, where the vault of bare, wet branches dripped. Huge, ice-cold drops. Further down, smoke crept in from Tsanko Tserkovski Street as if gipsy fires smouldered at its end.

The steep Smirnenski Street with its formerly impressive spine, the uneven paving stones stretching to the sky… Now, the tanner’s shop, the shoemaker’s, Uncle Marco’s shabby workshop and the lottery kiosk looked like dollhouses. Because of the height and the fleecy fog, the domes of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral resembled glittering gold ornaments amid waves of white Christmas calico.

Standing at the window of the haberdashery shop, he could see them wading closer through the fallen leaves muffling their footsteps. Nestled in the arms of the taller woman (her stepdaughter, the man thought), the shorter one walked with great difficulty. They came straight towards him but were still far away; he had just enough time to duck behind the baker’s window, shining faint blue across the street. He wore a raincoat, which sagged below his knees, silhouetting him against the deserted afternoon street.

In the depths behind the haberdashery window, the brassieres glowed softly in the dark. He examined his reflection, raised his hand and felt the loosed, the constantly dry skin under his eyes: You look just like your father! The chills that suddenly numbed his spine brought back a long forgotten feeling. It was as if he gazed at someone else’s face.

Every night, as soon as she put him to bed and turned off the light, he would fasten his eyes on the shadow on the opposite wall. Beams from passing cars swept the ceiling, the chandelier flickered and the black frame loomed darkly in its reflections; the shadow within fluttered like a giant eyelid. Wrapped in the cold, slippery sheets, he babbled like a baby in the darkness ‘One, five, one…’ and waited for sleep to come.

‘One, two, one…’

The light would gush in suddenly. He blinks but the eye is still there, above his bed, staring at him. Two hands grab him and yank him out. With a desperate effort, sobbing in terror, he pulls the sheet over his head; sometimes, she would have to struggle long and hard to unwrap him.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she whispered furiously. ‘Tell me! Speak up!’

He relaxed for a moment. The eyes that looked at him were as pale as the wall.

‘Come on! Won’t you say something?’

She was so close to him that he had to assemble her image bit-by-bit.

‘Speak!’ she yelled and shook his shoulders, enraged at his silent stare. The bile rose in his throat and choked him but he could not take his eyes off hers, pale and helpless.

‘You are the same! The same! Just like your father! You took after him!’

The light withdrew into the chandelier’s glass. Alone in the gloom once more, he turned around; the eye on the wall could still see in the dark. He knew it was watching him, and cold shivers crawled down his spine.

Staggering, the two women trudged along the steep incline. They wobbled in rhythm – teetering to the listless fences, tottering to the lifeless road – gradually, painfully, as if in a slow-motion cadence. She must have changed, the man in the wrinkled raincoat decided. Only her hair is waving even though there is no wind…

He saw her again, her hair streaming behind her as she came from the dark corridor to her room. Huddled in the recess between the sofa and the standing snakes on the telephone table, he waited. When the phone rang, he reached over, grabbed the receiver and asked who wants to speak with her. Then, he turned and called to the empty corridor beyond the gaping door some name, a man’s one. Under his breath he muttered ‘One, two, three, eight... ten!’ and then replied ‘She’s not here.’ Sometimes, he heard the lock click; her figure slowly emerged and grew until her small, tight stomach finally halted in front of his eyes and then darkness took over.

She quietly spoke into the receiver; he fiddled with some toy or sat motionlessly, his head tucked between his shoulders. Her skirt brushed against his face.

He could not understand a single word but her laughter, sharp and unexpected, startled him and he wanted to see it – his neck even arched, but he dared not raise his head. He only remembered it by the changes of the light: the colour of the day – pale pink like her face, or like the evenings – deep, hoarse, full of shadows. Sometimes, her laughter gleamed, with an indeterminable light colour, like her hair – soft, so soft, even though he had never touched it. He had only seen it waving at the slightest puff of air from a slammed door.

Sometimes, her voice dropped to a low chuckle, fading away – then he knew she was watching him. He held his breath and could no longer amuse himself while the conversation lasted.

He could already make out the cream-coloured stripes of her fur coat. The women had stopped in front of the tanner’s shop. The man turned his face back to the lingerie display and peered again at his reflection. ‘Well, now, I am not so old...’ If only it was not for this pain, shooting from his waist and worming its way towards his heart, crucifying him. He lifted his hand and brushed it across the twitching muscles on his face.

Ever since the telephone terrors, he had fallen into the habit of examining himself in mirrors, dark windows, wherever he happened upon a polished surface. Did he really look like the photograph on the wall – that narrowed eye, the nose resembling a lion’s nostrils like the drawing in his children’s books, and those tiny teeth, barely noticeable amid the angular jaw? Were they just like his own?

At the end of one winter afternoon echoing with the cannonade of some radio drama, he climbed up onto the sofa and turned the black-framed photograph to face the wall. The shots from the play were still thundering inside his head as he lined up his toys on the floor with trembling hands, and fixed the nibs into the pens. All the while, he whispered the phrase that his mind had filtered out of the chaos of the play: Shishkov, get on the machine gun!

Out of the countless commands called out, only this one had reached him, magnetically drawn to the last link of the world of imagination developing in the darkness beneath his skull. Click! The connection was sealed hermetically.

He re-enacted the battle on the carpet with the blasts of exploding grenades, whizzing shells, and most graphically of all – the moans of the soldiers pierced by the nibs. The mountains, valleys and forts were clearly distinguishable. The pen nibs sank into the pink dog-shaped candy boxes and the soft Santa dolls; they gutted the wool from the stuffed squirrels and wolves and pierced the frogs’ rubber eyes. He no longer whispered the command, but turning to a plump little plastic lemon, he made it scream shrilly ‘Shishkov, get on the machine gun!’

Shishkov raised his sights quite frequently; he aimed the gun’s nib-shot at the wooden back of the photograph on the wall as if it was a distant, strategic target.

He had no idea how long she had stood, leaning against the door and watching him: two pale eyes!

‘Shishkov…’ He did not finish his sentence; he dragged himself to the telephone table, crouched in the recess as usual and lay low, waiting.

How long would she press him with her stare? Just like your father!

One of the nibs detached from the photograph and clanked among the disfigured toys. He cowered deeper in the narrow recess. She approached and he could hear the hissing sound of her skirt.

He thought he could hear their distant shuffling steps. A late leaf landed on his shoulder. He carelessly slapped it away. You are just like your father! That was all he ever heard. Not rebuke, not encouragement... That was it!

Yet he was Shishkov on the machine gun.

At night, he had held the round plastic lemon under the covers and stroked it, pressed it to his face, having finally found his last bastion against her hostility. This went on for years. Shishkov, get on the machine gun was something he could say even in his sleep. (Until he turned eighteen, this was the only sentence he could silently say to himself without moving his lips.)

It is incredible, the man recalled bitterly. It seems that this affected her. What was their connection? Was it the shared distrust, their shared telephone duties, or the shared horror at his growing natural resemblance to the man in the photograph (as perverse for him as it was uncanny for her)? Either way, the empty plastic little roly-poly, which battled against the world, drove them apart. Thus, the empty bottle of lemon extract once again filled with the quintessence of their mutual estrangement. Still, was it not the photograph, so often turned to the wall – the target of their arrows – that connected them?

Amid all these things inverted and reduced to something else, they both turned against each other long before the deceptively gentle eyes, the wolfish nose and the heavy jaw in the photograph forever became his own.

He shot up prematurely but only in bones and not in strength. He was rather tall, with a man’s body but lacking the grit to so much as clench a fist. The first time he struck someone, he did not dare use his bare hand but pulled a wooden ruler from his schoolbag and rained blows on the sobbing face before him, until a heavy mass collapsed at his feet. The victim was a girl from the lower grades, ‘The Forty-Year-Old’, about whom floated whispers kindling the imagination. Hey, you, Beanpole! You are such a joke! She had mocked him at the volleyball court, showing off to the grinning boys who flocked around the sensual bliss of her skirt.

He saw it all once again as if that moment had never ended. Him – bent over the motionless body, whose skirt had lifted after the fall – forever transfixed by the tiny scarlet flowers on the exposed underwear. It was not the blood or the ashen skin, but the delicate flowers of this innocent embroidery that had revealed to him the long-kept secret of the flesh – its vulnerability. After that, he did not remember where he was taken or what the shouting voices asked him; his legs were numb and he only knew he was being taken away. He sighed in his loneliness; flowers danced before his eyes.

After the incident, a string of piercing eyes followed him everywhere. That day the pale eyes had met him at the doorstep. The same, the same monster, she had whispered as she served dinner. At least, he did it at war.

Poor woman. She had to get him out of that mess with the help of cologne-drenched men from her work circles who constantly surrounded her. Outwardly, the two of them still met for an hour of one-on-one silence in the gloomy sitting room, which tied their fates. At the end of the month, he saw the pile of unwashed clothes in the closet and realised that after the incident with The Forty-Year-Old she had cut him out of her life forever.

Years later (at the end of his marriage with I., when he closed the kiln, leaving the figures to dry in their earthen colours), he tried to understand that person frozen in his memory like a fly in amber – the person still waving the bloody ruler over the twisted body on the pavement. He knew now: weapon or tool – his weakness was that hand, bursting from water and clutching at anything for support. Yes, that was it! He had always dreamt about being armed. Shishkov had his machine gun. Shishkov, on the machine gun!

They were approaching. The street was strangely deserted. He noticed a shadow of a smile on her face and cringed. In the past, this shadow from the protruding cheekbones had appeared only in the evenings, when they sat at the table and the light streamed down over their heads. How many times this ghostly, non-existent smile deceived him! He dreamt of it, year after year, under the lights that swept the ceiling. One such light swept away the child, on one of those nights. The next one illuminated the bed with the man lying there, motionless beneath the covers.

During his years in the army, which he entered with a relief, he was nicknamed ‘Gentle Death’. For a time, a group of people scattered around the country would not forget that name, least of all ‘Sandanski’, the guy from the lower bunk, who had hauled the howitzer with him. You are going to be miserable, the man had said in farewell, and you are the one that goes looking for the misery, nobody else is going to hand it to you. That is where your misery will be.

When the military service ended, he went back to her and the silent evenings in the dark sitting room with the old photograph hanging on the wall. All his efforts had been in vain – it now looked like a portrait of himself He met her pale eyes waiting at the far end of the corridor, then her bedroom door creaked and despite the two walls between them, he listened to the distant sobs on that first afternoon of his civilian life.

At dinnertime, she came out of her room and gestured with her palm. You have become a man; you can look after yourself now! He remained bowed over even after she withdrew her hand. At the end of the evening, which passed as silently as ever, she asked him to find his own place. Poor woman, she cannot even bear to look at me, he realised landing back in reality after his musings.

He moved out at the onset of spring; as he crossed the sitting room from his childhood one last time, for a moment his gaze hovered over the recess by the telephone table and tears blurred his vision. It was raining outside; the spring night dispersed towards the invisible sky along the striped, glowing kilometres of asphalt.

The man grimaced in pain; it felt as if splinters stabbed his pelvis. He twisted his arm around and gently placed a hand on the spot until the spasm subsided into his habitual heaviness – something he was accustomed to, like a mountaineer carrying his pack. Twenty metres down the road, the two women had stopped again, in front of the shoemaker’s window.

He saw her again at the end of his university studies. He worked in the laboratory of the Veterinary Institute and one evening, as he was walking home alone on the thundering expressway, he passed her, but she did not recognise him. He was surprised to see her on the muddy sidewalk, wrapped in her coat of fox fur, so out of place amid the crude noise and the stench of automobiles. Where was she hurrying? he wondered, listening to the soft clatter of her heels fade away behind him.

His wife had left him that day. He was in a hurry to get home, eager to lock himself in the basement, to be alone at last among his figures.

He had used his savings to build a small kiln in which he baked the clay. The figures he made were identical – one-legged, with large heads and short bodies, stretching their arms towards the sky. Instead of eyes, they had two gaping holes, carved out from their faces to the back of their heads, through which the wall was visible. Every night he made one – red, cracked from the heat