He doesn’t bear your name, but he carries your gait.
When you walk, you shake the world around you, like you were shaking the floor of our house.
Sometimes I think that if one day you step beyond this country, you will see it and recognize it by the gait.
I’m not writing this to you to blame you.
You made your own choices.
I – mine.
I keep these photos here, in the oven, because I don’t want to take them where they might be thrown into the fire without knowing what they are burning.
If you find them – know that you have a life that you have not lived.
G.”
Hristo’s hands were shaking as he folded the letter back.
“You have a son” – two words that in Strandzha can be a blessing, they can be a curse. Having a son somewhere “over the border” in the 80s was not just a family drama. It was almost a political issue.
He looked at the photo again – the man with the rifle, the woman next to him, the two children of the fallen trunk.
“Am I that?” he wondered.
A person changes his face over the years, but the gait remains. In the photo the man stood as Hristo stood – slightly weighted on one leg, his shoulder out.
“If that’s me…” he thought, “that means these two children…”
You didn’t finish the thought.
There was another picture next to the letters – a newer type of paper, colored, from the end of the 70’s. On it – a boy about 15 years old, in front of some foreign houses that did not look like Bulgarian. At the bottom – a forest, but not Strandja. The boy stood with his hands in his pockets, leaning against a fence, his face was serious, but there was something familiar in him.
Eyes.
Stefan – the son of Hristo, my husband – later said to me: “The same eyes as his.”
Hristo picked up the photo, brought it closer to his face, as if looking for common features. Two realities collided inside it:
