Buying Lenin
Story Excerpt
You can hear Salman Rushdie speak briefly of my story on the Leonard Lopate
Show.
You can also read my brief essay on how I wrote
"Buying Lenin" published at the end of the Best American anthology.
WHEN GRANDPA LEARNED I was leaving for America to
study, he wrote me a good-bye note. “You rotten capitalist pig,” the note
read, “have a safe flight. Love, Grandpa.” It was written on a creased red
ballot from the 1991 elections, which was a cornerstone in Grandpa’s communist
ballot collection, and it bore the signatures of everybody in the village of
Leningrad. I was touched to receive such an honor, so I sat down, took out a
one dollar bill, and wrote Grandpa the following reply: “You communist dupe,
thanks for the letter. I’m leaving tomorrow, and when I get there I’ll try to
marry an American woman ASAP. I’ll be sure to have American children. Love,
your grandson.”
My senior year in high school, while most of my peers were
busy drinking, smoking, having sex, playing dice, lying to their parents,
hitchhiking to the sea, counterfeiting money, or making bombs for soccer
games, I studied. English. I memorized words and grammar rules and practiced
tongue twisters, specifically designed for Eastern Europeans. Remember the
money, I repeated over and over again down the street, under the shower, even
in my sleep. Remember the money, remember the money, remember the money.
Phrases like this help you break your tongue. Develop an ear.
I lived alone in the apartment, because by that time almost everybody I’d
loved had died. First Grandma. Then my parents. Grandpa had moved to the
village of Leningrad and stubbornly refused to come back and visit. I must
have said some pretty bad things on a few occasions, especially when we had
that big fight, and he was acting offended.
So I decided to seek my fortune elsewhere.
Early in the spring of 1999 I got admitted to the University of Arkansas and
received a free ride –full scholarship, room and board, even a plane ticket. I
called Grandpa.
“My grandson, a capitalist!” he said. “I can’t believe you’d
do this to me. Not when you know what I’ve been through.”
What Grandpa had been through is basically this: The year was
1944. Grandpa was in his mid-twenties. His face was tough but fair. His nose
was sharp. His dark eyes glowed with the spark of something new, great, and
profoundly world-changing. He was poor. “I,” he often told me, “would eat
bread with crabapples for breakfast. Bread with crabapples for lunch. And
crabapples for dinner, because by dinnertime, the bread would be over.”
That’s why when the Communists came to his village to steal food, Grandpa
joined them. They had all run to the woods where they dug out underground
bunkers, and lived in them for weeks on end—day and night, down there in the
dug-outs. Outside, the fascists sniffed for them, trying to hunt them down
with their greyhounds, with their guns and bombs and missiles, these bastards,
these tsarist sons of bitches.
“If you think a grave is too narrow,” Grandpa told me on one
occasion, “make yourself a dugout. No, no, make yourself a dugout and get
fifteen more people to join you in it for a week. And get a couple pregnant
women, too. And a hungry goat. Then go around telling everybody a grave is the
narrowest thing on earth.”
“I never said a grave was the narrowest thing, Grandpa.”
“But you were thinking it.”
So finally, Grandpa got too hungry to stay in the dugout and
decided to strap on a shotgun and go down to the village for food. When he
arrived in the village, he found everything changed. A red flag was flapping
from the church tower. The church had been shut down and turned into a meeting
hall. All people walked free, and their dark eyes glowed with the spark of
something new, great, and profoundly world-changing. Grandpa fell to his knees
and wept and kissed the soil of the motherland. Immediately, he was
assimilated by the Party. Immediately, he was given a high position in the
local governing force. Immediately, he climbed further up the ladder and moved
to the city, where he became something-something of the something-something
department. He got an apartment, married Grandma; a year later they had a baby
boy.
“What so terrible have you been through?” I asked him one
day over the phone before I left for America. “You’ve had a good life.”
“I hate the capitalists,” he said. “I love Lenin.”
“Do you love me?”
“You are my grandson.”
“Then come to the city. Live with me in the apartment.”
“I have things to do here,” he said. “I have
responsibilities.”
“You have graves to clean.”
“I can’t come,” he said. “You know I can’t.”
“I know. That’s why I’m leaving.”
...and so the story goes for another ten pages...
Miroslav Penkov
First publishing rights belong to The Southern Review Autumn 2007
Chief Editor: Bret Lott
Associate Editor: Donna Perreault