MILAN TODOROV: THE YARD

 Milan Todorov

THE YARD

It could be said that he had a happy childhood. There were, of course, trials. But who doesn’t have them while growing up?

He encountered the inconsistency of human nature early on, although at the time—ten or eleven years old—he was not yet aware of its reasons.

Now everything is different. Now, when he occasionally sees Zvezdan, once the most handsome boy in elementary school; Zvezdan’s small, hunched wife who, frightened by who knows what, always holds his hand; and Ćora, who on Saturdays sells small, muddy winter potatoes in front of the market.

His mother—the heroine of this story—who guided him through life with her reason and her love, has long been gone.

The incident happened unexpectedly. In the yard of the elementary school, which back then was not fenced as it is now, the local toughs—older than the pupils—would come in, sit on the rickety wooden benches by the handball court where they had P.E., and watch the girls just beginning to bud.

They were mostly bony, only a few fuller, with promising breasts beneath white T-shirts and thin legs in red gym shorts. They—girls and boys alike—were, as the saying goes, still green. But all of them were healthy, firm, and—strangest of all—never sweaty. On the contrary, they smelled of freshly washed linen, of fruit, of something unknown and lovely that could be imagined as change: for now diffuse and not yet fully recognized, but certainly an important change in the time to come.

The unfenced playground stretched toward the park, and between them stood a half-abandoned church, with a foolish and odd young priest.

The boys played with a soccer ball at one end, the one closer to the park, while the girls skipped rope at the other.

One entirely accidental kick sent the ball toward the girls, and two boys ran after it—one of them the most handsome in the class.

Ćora was sitting on a bench, calmly observing everything, until a scuffle broke out between the two boys. Then he stood up, approached the group, snatched the ball from the boy’s hands and gave it to Zvezdan—in whom, of course, it was then impossible to discern the short, stocky, aging bank clerk who now walks through that same park with his small wife, stopping every so often because of weak knees.

Although the boy was withdrawn and mild, he felt that an injustice had just occurred—the kind that later becomes a reconciliation with the inexplicable manners of endurance he had observed in his parents as well.

To make matters more dramatic, when he protested, Ćora casually rose again from the bench and, with a single kick aimed at the boy’s backside, flipped him onto his back and then, to the applause of the girls, kicked him across the park grass.

The boy lived close to the school. He ran home and told everything to his mother, who was just cooking lunch for them and for the owner of the other half of the house—a man who had lost his first wife, while the second had broken her hip and become almost completely immobile.

It was a moment that could be called, at the very least, unfortunate.

His mother decided to stop cooking for the old neighbor, because, as she said, he was an unsung miser.

“He buys me,” she said, “only half a kilo of meat and expects me to be a sorceress and—adding everything else, potatoes, onions, carrots, flour, spices—make a royal meal.”

When she saw the boy’s tearful eyes, she turned off the gas on the stove, tossed aside her apron, spoon, and ladle, and went with her son to settle accounts with Ćora.

She was resolute. She told her son not to interfere. She would handle everything herself.

When he saw the enraged mother, Ćora stood up and began to retreat toward the church. The children had already gone back into the school building.

Separated from an audience, Ćora was weak.

The boy’s mother showered him with a torrent of threats.

“Lay a hand on my child one more time,” she said, “and you’ll spend your whole life in a wheelchair, like your poor sister.”

Ćora smiled sourly.

Behind his mother’s back, the boy bent down and picked up a stone. He threw it toward Ćora and split his head open.

“Let’s go,” his mother said. “That’s for everything.”

They went home, both feeling they had freed themselves from a scourge on either side.

The boy remembered it for the rest of his life.

Yet neither then nor later, in adulthood, was it clear to him what expectation or motive had placed Ćora on the side of the acknowledgedly more handsome—and thus stronger—in the childish, still narrow world that, muddied by the first serious conflict, was from that moment unfolding into the world of adults.

And how was it that, under his feeble blow with a stone and his mother’s rebuke, Ćora—a big, limping, almost grown man—had recoiled?

The boy did not know then. Now everything is different: now he sees the world as through transparent ice, as a grown, already somewhat old man, and he knows—or suspects he knows—the true reason.

It was not his mother’s skill in defending him with a ferocity previously unseen in her. Nor was it his belated, futile courage under the wing of parental love.

Perhaps there are no tangled answers at all.

The figures who inhabit our first world, the world of growing up, are mostly not those to whom—and to whose actions—we can surrender without hesitation. The entangling and disentangling of events is preparation for the effort and sacrifice that will inevitably come one day.

Only whether you will be strong in those moments depends on how many privileges you had early on. If there were too many, you will be weak for anything else, at any time.

Only later did he realize that, in the shadow of the half-abandoned church, stood that foolish, odd young priest as well.

He said nothing, nor did he approach.

He was known to be gravely ill.

He watched that conflict as life itself—thin, full of various thin bright and less bright glimmers.