MILAN TODOROV: LOVE AND LIES

Milan Todorov

LOVE AND LIES

I was five years old when the first woman kissed me—aside from my mother and my cousin.

She was a candy seller in the village shop. She must have been around thirty. She had two children and was divorced. My uncle was interested in her.

“What do you think?” he asked me.
“She’s beautiful,” I said.
“That doesn’t count. Maybe she’s too experienced?”
I didn’t know. I was inexperienced.

She worked in the candy shop both at noon and in the evenings—second shift. My uncle drank boza, two or three liters every evening. He would order it from the candy shop in small half-liter jars. He liked, he told me, women with sexual experience.

My uncle always wore black. He had black eyebrows as well. He was the goalkeeper for the local football team. He believed he was well known.

Meanwhile, the candy seller didn’t react to the two small children. I was already thinking about running away. Everything felt confused.
The strangest thing was that I began to believe I was my uncle.

During that period of growing up, I didn’t know who I was. I had the impression that the more I behaved like my uncle, the more I resembled him.

“I love how she smells when she brings the boza,” my uncle said.
“Me too.”
“What about you? You still drink your mother’s milk,” he teased.

Still, we started sharing, invisibly, the lovely candy shop.

My uncle was possessive. He wanted the candy shop to belong only to him.
“You’re a clown. Wait your turn. Everyone has their moment.”

I was quietly encouraged that I had become a competitor to my uncle in such an important matter for a man.

It should be said that the candy seller barely paid attention to us. She had her children, cooked and washed for them, worked late into the night. She had, of course, her first love, and later a husband she could not be with. All of this left traces on her psyche.

Nothing we did succeeded. It’s always like that with desires: the more you want, the less success you have.

My uncle was a passionate cyclist. He offered the candy seller, whom, if it even mattered, was called Lucretia, a ride home after her evening shift—on a bicycle.
“Bicycles,” he told her, “have a frame like male energy. You sit on it, I’ll ride. Everything will stay clean, maybe a little touch of my and your breath.”

Lucretia laughed. “I know. I’ve ridden a man’s bike before. No thanks.”

We lifted our hands off the candy shop. One summer day we set off to the edge of the world. From the village to a small town on the riverbank—it was about fifteen kilometers.

I sat on the frame. My uncle pedaled. I felt his breath behind my ear. We left the village quickly. It was a small descent past gypsy huts on the hill. Then empty plains of the Pannonian region unfolded. Flat land with sugar beet fields. No tall trees. No fences. Two horses and geese. No people.

My uncle pedaled diligently as if the road were smooth and relatively good. I cursed the frame on the bike. Mostly we were silent, but it was very likely we were both thinking of the divorced candy seller.

We were close to our destination. Only two or three kilometers left.
Along the road, sunflowers grew. Yellow, heavy, facing the sun. They were rotting. Their smell was full of heavy oil, burnt oil.

Riding the Premix brand bike was easier. My uncle hopped on the saddle. In one curve, he almost lost control of the large bike, but he quickly grabbed the frame and we continued.

We were near the river. At the end of the street, I could see it. It was the main street, and a thin asphalt strip led quickly to the water. There was a bridge. At the time, there was no other road surface on the opposite bank.

I told my uncle to brake, but he just looked at the white clouds gathering in the sky. The brakes did nothing. They looked like feathered storks. I felt myself pressed closer to him.

We reached a sign that read River Tisa. Before we even touched the yellow water of the Tisa, my uncle shoved my tongue into my ear.

We didn’t drown. Not entirely. My uncle admitted he was half mad for the candy seller.

An older man, who rescued us from the river with a long rod with an iron spike, said we were lucky. In the reeds, coming from Hungarian and Romanian waters, huge rats appeared that would eat everything the water brought.

I’m not sure we survived in the true sense of the word. I floated like a corpse into another river called the Danube.

Later I heard that the candy seller married an old widower who died two months after their wedding. My uncle also died under unknown circumstances, and his body was never found.

I slept by the open windows of the house, lying down to harden myself and show her.

One night, after she had put the children in the bathtub to sleep since they couldn’t leave, we found ourselves in her bed. In the flower pots, on the other side, sunflowers grew. Between them, I saw my uncle’s silhouette being searched for. He rode his silver Premix bike with a new boy on the frame.

He was handsome. Thin, like glass. He saluted me with a raised finger in solidarity, interrupting our pleasure.
“It’s a shame a man has to lie even when he loves someone,” she said.

I didn’t know what to think. She looked at me as I dressed, and I looked at her.
“Everything around us is a pile of lies,” she added.
Because of that, a woman must be very careful with men.