After this conversation Hristo said one more thing:
– The box is in the basement. After I’m gone, if you want, open it again. Decide for yourself what to do. But remember that every “knowledge” carries weight. If you lift it, you will carry it.
Stefan went down to the basement the same day.
The cupboard was there, the box at the bottom, just as his father described it. The metal was rustier, but still held. Open it up – everything was the same inside. Photos, letters, the handwriting of Gina.
He took them home, put them on the table. I sat across from him, looked at the face of young women and men I had never seen, and tried to imagine what it was like to learn that your father had a “parallel” life he had never talked about.
Stefan could have done what his father wasn’t – to go looking.
To try to find Gina – if she is alive.
To look for the son – if he exists.
To write in groups, to search by surname, by year, by old addresses.
She could connect with people who deal with “lost relatives”, turn the story into a media sensation, talk about “son across the border”, “secret from Strandja”, “disappeared first love”.
When I asked him what he was going to do, he said,
– For now… nothing.
– Why? –
– Because it’s not my secret – he replied. – It’s my father’s secret and the secret of a woman I’ve only seen in a photo. If I make it mine, I’ll have to live with the consequences. And maybe I’m not ready.
The box remained in our country, in a cupboard in the bedroom, away from the basement, but still closed between two worlds.
Sometimes in the evening we take it out, look at the boy’s face in the photo – the possible brother – and ask ourselves questions:
What is he doing now?
Is he alive?
Does he know that somewhere in Strandja is buried a box that says th
at he has a father forest?
Gina wrote, “You have a life you haven’t lived.”
Christo took it literally. He didn’t go to live it. He left it on paper, in a box, in an oven.
We are the generation that holds this life in our hands, not knowing whether to open it.
My husband sometimes stops in front of the mirror, looks at his face, his gait, his eyes, and asks himself:
“I am the only son of my father. Or am I one of two?”
I think of my father-in-law – about the other day in Strandja, about the fog, about the furnace, about the hand he pulled back, as if he had touched something alive.
And I understand:
He really caught something alive.
He has touched a life – a stranger, his own, unlived.
What he found there wasn’t just a box of papers. It was a mirror of a choice:
to stay here, with the “forests”, with the official family, with the state.
