I saw him again. At the new bookstore on Slavyanska St. Prizewinner! I wanted to shout. It’s me!
It was the fifth time in the last two weeks we’ve seen each other. Well, that I’ve seen him. I’m pretty sure he has never seen me.
I was all alone and further away from the neighborhood where I’d usually run into him. I convinced myself I needed to get out of the house and go walk or something. I’m here in Sofia for five months on a scholarship to teach and write poetry.
But so far, I haven’t taught much and haven’t written much poetry. Or at least not any poetry I like. Not because of a lack of effort. I sit here every day feeling like a complete failure and wonder why anyone would have given me a scholarship.
Before the Prizewinner became a prize-winning novelist, he was a poet. In fact, the first thing I ever read by him was a poem. I’d go as far as to say that I actually prefer his poetry. It is the kind I like, clear and straightforward, with a little humor while his novels can be complex, overly full of references to mythology and history.
I wrote a novel once. I wrote three, actually. The first two were practice. The third one was published by a small press, and it came out during the pandemic. Nobody read it. Okay, a few people did. My friends, mostly. But not even all of them. Some lied and said they read it, but didn’t. I spent years of my life on it. I think it turned out okay. Maybe I’ll write another one if poetry fails me. Why not write a second novel for nobody to read?
At the bookstore, the Prizewinner wore his long black coat that looked exactly like the one I was wearing. But that’s the only thing similar about us. Although my wife Diliana says I kind of look like him. I don’t really see the resemblance. Does he have a wife?
It was still cold in Sofia even though it was April. It snowed only a few days before. As someone from LA, the first few months of snow charmed me, but I was ready for a change. Diliana, who grew up here and had just left to go back to LA after visiting for ten days, said this was unusual weather for April.
Of course, he’s at the bookstore. I texted her when I saw him.
*****
When she was here, Diliana had been the first to notice him in the neighborhood. He was seated at this dessert place on Ivan Asen St., a place I pass by every day, usually on my way to the Tokyo bar across the street, where I drink beer and stare at my phone. I saw a man and woman sitting at a table, and the woman was eating a dessert, some kind of mascarpone cake I was admiring, when Diliana nudged me. And that’s when I saw the Prizewinner sitting with the woman.
The second time, he was walking down the street with a bag of oranges. Of course he was. Just like a prizewinner to be healthy, I later joked, as I opened a second bottle of wine in the kitchen. That night, Diliana’s sister was over, staying with us for a few days, and we were all sitting around my dining room table, having a laugh. Mostly, they were making fun of my attempts to speak their language. The one-bedroom apartment I rented for five months felt full. And crowded. At the time, I remember thinking it felt chaotic to have two other people in my little sanctuary. After all, how was I supposed to get any work done?
I admit, I’d gotten used to my solitude, which isn’t to say I hadn’t missed my wife. For almost two months, I’d existed entirely in my head. I missed her, of course, but I also needed to write. We joked that she arrived like an “agent of chaos,” upsetting the orderly universe I’d created. Then she invited her sister to join us for four days. I could have gone to one of the many cafes in this city or to my temporary office at the university, but I didn’t. Instead, I used it as an excuse not to do anything.
The next time we saw him, I’d been joking with Diliana as we walked down the street, “So where are we going to see the Prizewinner today?” and the minute I said it, swear to the International Booker Prize committee, we turned and looked inside a café, and he was standing in line for a coffee. It was a new place in the neighborhood. It’s called Stories. Of course it is.
At that point, I became convinced maybe the Prizewinner was stalking me. There’s no reason I shouldn’t talk to him, Diliana suggested. “You should just come here and hang out until he shows up.” “And say what? Hi, I don’t know you, but I’m a writer too.” A normal person might, she says. An annoying person might also.
I did go into Stories once. A misunderstanding led them to charge me extra for the espresso in my cappuccino, which, last time I checked, I’m pretty sure comes with cappuccino. The guy asked me what kind of espresso I wanted, and I had no preference and didn’t realize he was asking if I wanted an extra shot of espresso. Just to appease him, I chose one from Mexico, maybe out of some kind of homesickness for LA. At first, I thought maybe there was confusion because of the language barrier, but later realized the whole exchange had been in English.
Next time, the Prizewinner was coming out of a market, again on the same street, Diliana was still here, and he looked straight at us and made a face, not sure what kind of face exactly, the face of recognition, the face of disappointment, the face of why are these nonimportant people looking at me? Worse, he no doubt wasn’t thinking any of that stuff. He was probably thinking about the next prize-winning novel he was going to write or about that time he met the pope, which he’d recently posted about on Facebook.
*****
Ten days went fast.
Diliana’s visit had come to an end, and she had an early departure to Frankfurt, where she’d catch her flight to LA. We took a cab to the airport at 4 in the morning. Coming back, I’d decided to wait it out in the terminal until the subway opened at 5:26 am to be exact. It wasn’t that I was too cheap to take a cab; it’s that it can sometimes be a little intimidating trying to explain to the driver in a foreign language exactly where I live. And it can also be that sometimes taxi drivers try to rip you off.
By 4:55, Diliana was already through security, and I had 31 minutes to go, so I waited in the airport café. I ordered a dulgo kafe, which is a long coffee, but which is still short as opposed to the normale kafe, which is the regular and even shorter. I watched as families came in to Terminal 2, some traveling together, some saying goodbye to individual members just like I had done to Diliana, waving as she ascended the escalator, then disappeared. It was strange, given that I was here in her hometown, waving goodbye as she flew back to my hometown. It felt equally strange when she’d dropped me off at LAX to come to Sofia.
Outside the airport, smokers all huddled in the cold, getting in a last dose of nicotine before they checked in for their flights. Maybe I needed a cigarette. I used to smoke. I made the mistake of quitting last year. Maybe I can’t write well because I’m not smoking. They say that nicotine stimulates the brain, even as it ruins the lungs. Which did I care about more? But the Prizewinner didn’t smoke. All the times we’d seen him, he’d never had a cigarette. Surprisingly, I’d made it two months here without one, which is kind of a miracle in a country that consumes the largest amount of tobacco in Europe. My friend Ninko, who is translating my first book of poems to be published in Bulgaria, handrolls his own smokes and sent me a picture of a tobacco chunk formed into a heart and said, “For all my friends who smoke.” I said I will always have a tobacco heart, but that I hadn’t smoked since I got here. “That explains why I am smoking for two,” he wrote.
As I waited at the airport café with still 28 minutes to go. I read the display with all the departing destinations: London, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Doha, Belgrade. Maybe I should get out of here and go somewhere. But wait, am I not already somewhere else?
On the subway home, it was freezing. I got on about five minutes before departure. Others had boarded. I sat across from an elderly woman wearing a mask next to whom I presumed was her middle-aged daughter, snuggled together with their suitcases in front of them. Along the way, the car filled with workers heading to the city center to pick up trash, or drive buses, or work at the grocery store, or on a construction site, or at the hospital. Real jobs, unlike what I was doing, flopping around the city pretending I was a writer.
At Orlov Most, my stop, I exited then walked through the April snow down my street at 6 in the morning, the only one out. When I got to my apartment, it was dark and empty. Now that Diliana had been here, her absence was prevalent. The solitude I thought I’d missed was replaced by dread and loneliness.
The writing life is a lonely life, says the Prizewinner.
Some days I don’t even open my mouth to speak to anyone. But not only writers are lonely. A lot of lives are lonely. A lot of people come home to dark and empty apartments. It doesn’t take a prizewinner to figure that out. It’s not like writers are special. The crane operating life can be a lonely life. The flight attendant’s life. Scanning items as a clerk at a grocery store can be a lonely life. Emptying bedpans at a hospital. Driving a taxi. Most lives are lonely lives in one way or another. In fact, the writer at least has the advantage of filling up a lonely life by writing. But I was a fool. I wasn’t a writer. An imposter. I had people in my life who loved me. Look at all the time I was wasting by being away from them. For what?
*****
The new bookstore is named Umberto & Co, a play on Umberto Eco. They even have a full statue of the author. The Prizewinner likes him, I’m sure, as he was standing in front of the statue taking a picture of it. I also took a picture right after the Prizewinner; maybe I should have taken a picture of the Prizewinner taking a picture of the other prizewinner.
This time, he was with a woman and a younger girl, maybe his wife, maybe his daughter, maybe a friend, maybe his publisher, maybe his agent. I don’t know anything about his personal life. I care as little about the details of an author’s life as I do his awards. Honestly, I even hate that I noticed him at all. Not once, not twice, but five times. Even though it became a funny joke between Diliana and me. What is it we want from another writer outside of their words? Some kind of assurance? Some kind of company? You feel a connection, of course, because you’ve lounged on the sofa of their imagination for days, even weeks. Sometimes through many books. Maybe I was just looking for a familiar face.
As I left the bookstore, the Prizewinner was at the checkout buying books and smiling and charming all the clerks. I don’t know what he said because despite the classes I’ve taken, I still can’t speak the language, which makes it kind of funny I was there in the first place, since I can’t read any of the books. But I had nothing else to do. If I were the Prizewinner, who obviously not only speaks the language but is a master at it, I’d feel pressured to buy something at the new bookstore too, even if there was nothing I wanted. There must be something annoying about being a prizewinner. The prizewinner’s life is a lonely life too, in a different way. Everywhere you go, the feeling that you have to perform. People who you don’t know, like me, either hate you with jealousy or think they know you and already come with preconceived notions about you. Even when you’re just buying a coffee. Though one of the nice things and maybe one of the curses about being a writer, even the prizewinning ones, is that outside of a small circle, most people don’t know who you are, much less read your books.
But nobody was more anonymous than me at that moment. Just a random stranger in a foreign country. I didn’t feel any pressure to buy or be anything. In fact, it would have been embarrassing to buy a book in a language when I couldn’t even understand the person ringing me up. So I left.
That was two weeks ago. As for the Prizewinner, I haven’t seen him since. Maybe he’s traveling, accepting another award in some far-off place, or hunkered down writing the next prizewinning book. Maybe he’s left town like everyone else to visit family for the Easter holiday. As for me, with nowhere to go and no family here, I plan to take a walk around the empty city. The weather is changing, and it’s getting warmer now, at least.
