In her latest translated volume of collected short fiction, Rumena Bužarovska delivers more of what established her as “one of the most interesting writers working in Europe today.” Already a bestseller across her native Macedonia, I’m Not Going Anywhere is an unsentimental and hyperrealist collection in which Macedonians leave their country of origin to escape bleakness—only to find, in other locales, new kinds of desolation in theses dark, biting, and utterly absorbing stories.
In her latest translated volume of collected short fiction, Rumena Bužarovska delivers more of what established her as “one of the most interesting writers working in Europe today.” Already a bestseller across her native Macedonia, I’m Not Going Anywhere is an unsentimental and hyperrealist collection in which Macedonians leave their country of origin to escape bleakness—only to find, in other locales, new kinds of desolation in theses dark, biting, and utterly absorbing stories.
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Overview
In her latest translated volume of collected short fiction, Rumena Bužarovska delivers more of what established her as “one of the most interesting writers working in Europe today.” Already a bestseller across her native Macedonia, I’m Not Going Anywhere is an unsentimental and hyperrealist collection in which Macedonians leave their country of origin to escape bleakness—only to find, in other locales, new kinds of desolation in theses dark, biting, and utterly absorbing stories.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628974546 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Deep Vellum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2023 |
| Series: | Macedonian Literature |
| Pages: | 226 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Steven Edgar Bradbury is a recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship, and two Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowships. His translation of Hsia Yu's Salsa (Zephyr Press, 2014) was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Prize, and His Days Go by the Way Her Years (Anomalous Press, 2013), a chapbook of the poetry of Ye Mimi, was a finalist for both the Lucien Stryk Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. Bradbury taught poetry, translation, and American literature for 18 years at the National Central Universityin Taiwan, and has published over 250 translations in journals and anthologies. Bradbury lives in Ft. White, Florida, near the headsprings of the Ichetucknee River.
Read an Excerpt
“The Vase”
They want to give us the grand tour of the apartment, that’s how Tanya and Kire put it. “We just moved in last week and we’re almost done with everything,” Tanya is speaking so loudly into the receiver I have to hold the phone away from my ear. I can hear Kire yapping in the background. Here’s something I really hate: I’m on the phone and someone can’t stop yammering and doesn’t give a shit that I’m trying to have a conversation. “Have them come early, before it gets dark!” Kire barks, which is swiftly followed by Tanya’s loud repetition, “Yes, come early, come at seven, before it gets dark!”
Nino is sitting next to me, puzzling through a crossword puzzle. I nudge him and roll my eyes. He shrugs and then finally sniffs. “Alright then, we’ll see you soon!” I say, happy to hang up.
“God,” I groan. “She must’ve ruptured my eardrum. You could hear her, right?”
Nino nods.
“I hate housewarmings. Nino, are you listening? We need to get them something. It’s tomorrow.”
“Well, you know, we’re not exactly swimming in money,” he says without taking his eyes off the puzzle. The reading glasses he bought at a stall at the farmer’s market a month ago were poised at the tip of his nose. He only wears them at home because he didn’t want people to know he was growing old.
“I know,” I say, thinking of the thousand-denar bill I kept hidden in the side pocket of my purse in case I need to go for a drink or have the urge to buy something. And, of course, there are those three hundred euros I’ve set aside in a separate account. You never know what can come up. Nino doesn’t think about these things. Sometimes I wonder if he does know I’ve set aside a little something and is at ease because he believes this money is for the two of us, for hard times, God forbid. “This means we’re going to have to tighten our belts,” I add.
I wince at the thought of all the potato-stew, beans, and lentil soup we’ll be forced to eat for days on end. And there’ll be no more going out for drinks or coffee, even on the weekend, which is just around the corner. And we can’t invite anyone over for drinks, unless they brought their own liquor, which we could never ask them to do, because it would be so embarrassing. Not that any of our friends are much better off. Sometimes I feel they only want to come over to get a free drink.
We sit there in silence until I blurt, “But we’ve got to get them something.”
“Do we have to?” Nino asks. I’ve always found his disregard for social conventions annoying.
“Yes, we have to. We could drop by JYSK tomorrow on the way to their place,” I say, knowing the store is on the pricey side. But the fact is, I just want to go there. I dream of the day when I will be able to purchase those fluffy pillows, those colorful doormats, those elegant bathroom soap dispensers and toothbrush holders, which I don’t really have any place to put because our sink is so wobbly.
“So what do they need?” he asks, filling in the crossword puzzle with his big, messy letters sprawling out of the boxes. He presses the pen so hard, he sometimes rips the page with its tip, making a pop that gives me goosebumps.
“How would I know? I just don’t get it. You go to somebody’s home for the first time and you’re supposed to bring a housewarming gift, but you have no idea what to get them because you’ve never been there before and you don’t know what they’re missing, and of course you can’t ask them what they need, because they’ll just lie and say, we don’t need anything! Stupid phony Macedonian humility, that’s all that is,” I grumble.
“M-hm,” Nino peers at me over the rim of his glasses, which is his way of saying he agrees. Then he takes them off and becomes lost in thought. “Yes,” he finally says, and falls silent again. It always takes him ages to say what he’s thinking. At the beginning of our relationship, his pauses impressed me, especially considering the words simply tumble out of my mouth as fast as I can think them up. But after a few years together, the silences are really starting to get on my nerves. “Yes,” he repeats. “You remember when we moved in here, and Tom and Lydia gave us that vase?”
We both look at it, which is easy in a living room as small as ours. The one big wall is barricaded by a block of square white cabinets with round brown handles. Some of the handles have fallen off, and the holes they’ve left look just like a pig’s snout. Several cabinet doors are loose, exposing threads of cheap plywood. Whoever designed this place had two shelves cut into the wall, which is where we keep our books. These are mostly books from our childhood, sets of Serbian translations we took from our homes. We don’t have a lot of new books. Because you know, we’re always saying Macedonian translations are so crappy, and the Serbian versions are so expensive, that there’s nothing to read anyway. The shelves used to have glass doors but for some reason the landlord took them off. In the middle of the wall there is a deep hole meant for a TV set. Ours is pretty small, albeit large enough for a room like this, so we put Tom and Lydia’s vase beside it. This vase, the nicest thing we own.
It’s a classic Greek-style amphora. Not those that are long and narrow, but with a fat belly, smaller than the ones you typically see in museums. It’s not brown and doesn’t have any Greek motifs. Rather, it’s a deep vibrant green. In fact, if you look up close, it’s got a mixture of different shades of green that all blend into each other and a fine web of thin cracks that give it a kind of rough texture, as if it were made of stone. Looking at this vase calms me. They gave it to us about a year ago, and come to think of it, we haven’t gotten together with them since. Even when we’re watching TV I’ll glance at it. Then I’ll think of Tom and Lydia and a warm feeling comes over me.
I probably get this feeling because of their perfumes. It’s not that they wear a lot, but every time Lydia would swish her scarf or Tom came up close, the fragrance would hit me: his sharp, yet fresh, hers more flowery, more like the smell of some expensive hand cream. Lydia always smells like all the women with painted nails and jangling bracelets who used to come over to our house when I was a child and stroke my hair and pinch my cheeks. Tom is the kind of guy you could easily fall for, with his olive skin and hazel eyes, sitting elegantly in his chair with his legs crossed, one athletic arm dangling from the armrest, the other holding a perpetual cigarette in its hand.
“Jade-colored,“ that’s what Lydia said as she removed the vase from the box to present it to us. Jade. I didn’t really know what color jade was, but I liked the sound of it.
“It’s our housewarming gift,” said Tom in his husky voice.
“But dis is not our apartment,” Nino explained in the hard Slavic accent he was not the least ashamed of.
“Well, think of it as a step in the right direction,” said Lydia as she gently held it out to us. The textured gold rings on her strong and slender pianist fingers stood out against the vase’s deep greens. I thanked them in my somewhat broken English, trying to echo Tom and Lydia’s perfect British accent, knowing full well I overextend my vowels and sometimes confuse the “th” sound with “d” and “t.” I explained that what Nino meant was this was not our permanent home. We were only living here until we got back on our feet, until we settled some inheritance issues. They didn’t say a word, seeing I’d delved into waters they were not prepared to swim in, at least not while they were sober. It annoyed me that I was making more excuses than Nino. But nonetheless I kept digging myself deeper into a hole, saying the apartment was much too small for us, it was very old. But the location was great—
“Yes, it’s a fantastic location!” Tom chimed in, happy to change the subject.
“And new location of dis beautiful vase is?” Nino asked, returning attention to the gift, for which I was grateful. But my gratitude was short-lived. Because all this did was make Tom and Lydia look around the apartment and realize we were barricaded by cabinets, that the sofa and armchairs we were sitting in were old and mismatched and camouflaged by decorative covers, and that the stained and beat-up coffee table crammed between them barely left room for our legs.
“We’ll find a good place for it,” I said, just before Lydia suggested, “Maybe you could put it in the bedroom?” not knowing that we didn’t have one, that we slept on the two-seater sofa bed we could barely open even after wedging the coffee table into the corner of the room, so I just pretended I hadn’t heard what she’d said and asked, “Is it from Greece?”
Indeed, it was. They had bought it from a “perfectly charming” little shop in one of those picture postcard villages with the whitewashed houses and blue-shuttered windows, the balconies draped with bougainvillea, and narrow, cobbled lanes that meandered to hidden squares lined with cafes where one can have a cool glass of water and savor a spoonful of homemade preserves.
The vase was made by a local but internationally acclaimed artist. “The certificate is inside the box. You can read more about her later,” Tom cut in, eager to tell us about their Aegean island cruise, about the fresh octopus they had grilled, the dolphins leaping around the prow of their boat. The crystal-clear blue of the deep sea where you can bathe nude. Where the water is so salty it seems to lick your skin. (“It makes love to you!” Lydia exclaimed and her head nearly lolled back in ecstasy.) And then once again about the dreamy little villages. The hospitality of the locals. The homemade specialties they had tasted. “The moussaka!” Lydia sighed.
“Svetlana makes very good moussaka,” Nino said, clambering to his feet. We hadn’t yet offered them anything to drink. “But for food we have only meze with cold homemade rakija or white wine,” Nino stooped as he was offering these “homemade specialties,” as Tom and Lydia later dubbed the tomatoes, peppers, cheese, and liquor Nino had lugged back from his uncle’s village.
“I wouldn’t drink whiskey or eat seafood while I’m in Macedonia,” Lydia said as she savored a pepper. Even the homely pepper looked distinguished between her elegant fingers.
We’d heard Lydia play once. She had stopped performing a while back, but agreed to give a recital. Tom was an art historian visiting on a university research scholarship and, without a job of her own, Lydia had little to do. Despite Nino, who works at the National Opera and Ballet, I know next to nothing about classical music, and really, it’s not something he enjoys either.
Regardless, I was enchanted by the way she moved her body as she played: her elbows flaring, her back arching with the rhythm and the music, her torso swaying in circles, her head turned so that her silvery hair hung across her eyes. She had striking fingers: strong, angular, nimble as a spider. I became so enthralled I clapped when I wasn’t supposed to. The elderly lady I sat next to shush me angrily. We were in the first row and Lydia must have noticed, Tom too.
I was just as embarrassed as we sat in our tiny living room, crowded with cabinets. It seemed like Nino didn’t give a damn. He kept topping up his glass of rakija and sweating since it had gotten so stuffy. We opened the balcony door leading to the miniature kitchenette, but we still couldn’t get a breeze. It was hot and the four of us were smoking, I more than ever, nervous that I had invited Tom and Lydia to this dump. I shifted my foot to cover what looked like a crusty ketchup stain on the carpet which I hadn’t noticed before. My embarrassment grew with the increasing realization of how stupid it was to invite them over. But we had no money and we wanted so much to hang out with them. We were flattered that they wanted to drink with us and tell stories about their dazzling past. We were flattered they chose us as their audience, flattered by how they looked, long and lean, in loose white flannel that outlined their sinewy figures and highlighted their sun-bronzed skin.
We’re not too bad ourselves. Maybe our apartment is awful, maybe we don’t have the money to move into a better one, but we look impeccable, especially me. That evening, even as I covered up the carpet stain I could not help but admire how beautiful my heels were, how my sandals complemented my slender feet, how my red toe-nails glittered like wild strawberries. I was sure that we also smelled good and that if anyone came into the room, they’d notice the crisp mix of the fragrances we wore and the aroma of the cigarettes we smoked. But Nino had started to sweat. Beads had formed on his forehead and there were big wet patches under his armpits. He was clearly drunk and wouldn’t shut up.
“We’re working towards saving up to get a bigger apartment. We’d like to have children. We’re trying,” he said, his eyes a little crossed from all that rakija.
“We don’t have any children either,” Tom said, his head cocked back as he took a dramatic puff of his cigarette. “We don’t know why. It was nature’s way. We never bothered to get it checked out.”
“Some people are so inconsiderate,” Lydia added, “they’ll ask you right up front: what’s wrong with you? I remember this particularly brazen couple who asked me that and I said: what, do you mean physically or mentally?”
We tsk-tsked and then fell silent. I could tell Nino was getting emotional, like he always does when he’s drunk. He slapped both palms on his knees, as if finally mustering up the courage to do something grand: “Can I play someting?” he asked. Tom and Lydia shifted excitedly.
“Of course! Why in the world didn’t we think of that sooner… what a pleasure that would be,” their voices overlapped. Nino took out the violin from the case he kept behind the door.
“Someting traditional,” he announced, leaving room for Tom and Lydia’s sighs of satisfaction. He then improvised a jazzed-up version of Kaži, kaži, libe Stano, tears welling up in the corners of his eyes. To my taste, this song was too slow and sad, and it had too many grace notes. Honestly, I thought it was trite, but at the end of his little recital, Tom and Lydia gave him an encouraging applause.