From EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS
A Bulgarian Novel Written in
English
By Thomas
McGonigle
the book concerns itself with a violent useless death in Upstate and the journey by two people about in Bulgaria later in the same year on what is called the Aerial Tollway which in the Bulgarian Orthodox tradition, a person upon death finds his/her soul taken on the tollway to be judged... this goes on for forty days and then
-95-
There must
have been places in the trailer in the mobile home, in Linda’s house, where she lives as she wants to live…
Places of
what might have been…
A very arch
way of…
Folders
stuffed with pieces of paper covered with Cyrillic writing. No one could read it.
It all gets
tossed.
No one
wants any of it and in truth it is all just a mess, her brother say.
To see the
ragged edges of the folders, I don’t know when she stops looking into them or
when she decides she can’t do anything with them.
Surely, she
knows there comes a moment but still you can’t throw them away, Linda must have been thinking… and then
there is mess from the dogs, over the years, but the stuff is still there and
now it is even a bigger mess but no one can read any of it.
What must
it have been like to realize she isn’t about to get right back to the Bulgarian
stuff?
Linda must remember when she jokes
about how Americans are always starting again, even when they are in their 80s…
we are always starting again, wiping out the past and getting on with it as
they say in Nebraska. Everybody in
Nebraska knows someone who has moved on finally, finally after a hundred years
of trying to make a new start… and they end up down there in Arizona or some
such place…
She must be
thinking someday some way she might get
a chance but she never talks to her brother about any of this or to any of the
people she works with. While one or two
of them might know where Bulgaria is no one really wants to talk about that
far-away place and she hadn’t much patience, anymore with explaining and
gradually even she is aware of how hard it is to work up interest in that place
that doesn’t want her interest in their history.
Linda isn’t like the naïve girl who
wants to research a Rumanian village in Bulgaria and how Rumanian memory
survives in Bulgaria… to even have to begin to
explain to someone why that is a taboo subject…
Those pages
in their folders, she must look at them or looked toward them and knows what is
there: the pages of notes because it is hard to make photocopies… there are
limits and permissions to be gotten and then the machines didn’t work…
No one
could know the sheer difficulty of working in Bulgaria.
And then
there is the actual pages before her… written in a cursive penmanship in the 19th
Century and then trying to find someone who she could talk to about this and
there is really no one and anyone who might be interested is more interested in
using her to get to the US or wanting to talk about the price of jeans or God
knows what…
Those pages
of her notes, those ladders never going up into the scholarly air of
accomplishment, as might be…
Each time, Linda must think when I open a folder
all I find is myself digging a hole into which I will be thrown:
how could I have ever picked this topic of women in 19th
Century Bulgaria… always wives or sisters or mothers of who is supposed to be a
more famous man… it is not an edifying situation, she must be thinking on a
good day.
WOMEN IN
BULGARIA. She is discouraged and then
the sitting in Mississippi in a college for women worshiping at the shrine of
Eudora Welty whose age has sanded off just how radical a woman she had been:
but now she is a shrine…
Linda must look at her penmanship, at
those notes…
When did
she…
THE FIFTEENTH IS THE TOLL HOUSE OF
MAGIC
