Nine Rabbits
Published by Black Balloon Publishing
Copyright © 2014 by Virginia Zaharieva
Translation © 2014 by Angela Rodel
All rights reserved
First published in English by Istros Books
eBook ISBN: 978-1-936787-14-2
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Designed and composed by Kyle G. Hunter
Cover photograph of the author as a child by Svetlozar Zahariev
I thank my parents for giving me the most precious gift—life in this body.
I thank Angela Rodel for her devotion to this text and for the wonderful translation.
I thank the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for their support for the English edition of this book.
I dedicate this book to Christo.
Contents
Granny Sweetest, Granny Dearest
Siemens and the Counterrevolution
Exodus
Salamander
PART TWO
Corset
Turkey
Fathers and Mothers
Paris
Red Dress
House
Christos
Siamese Cats in Brocade Jackets
Russian Bath
Photograph
Osaka
Journey in the Garden
Mask
Diary
Nobody
PMS
Ash Rose
Love
Alone
Wedding
Symphonia globulifera
Red Dress 2
The Mad Hatter
Dragons
Steam
At 46
Deer
Calligraphy
Finale
I turned up in the seaside town of Nesebar—an inconvenient four-year-old grandchild. My grandmother was raising the last two of her six children, putting the finishing touches on the house, ordering the workmen around, and doing some of the construction work herself. Thank God for this, as it used up some of her monstrous energy. Otherwise who knows what would’ve become of me.
Klement and Maruna, the runts of the litter, were rarely at home, since they went to boarding schools in Burgas. My aunt studied agriculture, while my uncle was at the nautical school.
Whenever I disappeared for long stretches somewhere inside the house, you could bet that I was in the attic, where there were a dozen big chests full of shoes, dresses, and all sorts of accessories brought from Czechoslovakia, where the family had prospered. Grandma Nikula and Grandpa Boris—“the Czechs,” as they were called—had worked in the glass factories of Bohemia between 1948 and 1958, during the most optimistic years of the Klement Gottwald regime.
Nikula’s father had been a cloth trader, so she had an eye for materials and colors. In Czechoslovakia she had sewn dresses for herself and her daughters and had even managed to marry off her oldest girl in Prague at the age of eighteen.
Nikula truly did dress with taste, although she only did so now when we went to the movies or when she stumped for the Communist Party’s Fatherland Front in the nearby villages.
She took me with her. Where could she leave me? I stood in front of the podium and watched her. When she got up in front of the masses, my grandmother was very beautiful and convincing. I was proud of her; she always managed to slip in something from her own heroic biography that made her speech entertaining. For example, when she was eight months pregnant with my uncle, she helped