From the novel YOZHI LIVES HERE by Nadya Radulova, translated by Ekaterina Petrova
Stranger in the Light
Mommy, when will I be big again,
and you’ll be little?
(Elena, 5 y.o.)
Sometimes she feels like stepping into a snow bank once again, just to hear the crunching of the snow beneath her rubber boots.
She’s become tiny, much tinier than a tiny ant’s breath, but she still retains a sensory memory of the big things. She remembers the aroma of the cupboard where her grandma keeps the bread. Her nonexistent skin is tickled by the wind that unexpectedly sweeps down through the stooping cherry trees at five in the afternoon on the day before harvest. Her nonexistent toes and heels bristle, tickled by the crumbs under the children’s small table, by the fine Black Sea sand, they recoil from the hot stone slabs in the yard, tingle from the coolness of the midnight bed sheets. Her voice is sprinkled with the hissing and sibilant sounds that rock her baby cradle. And in it, in her voice, the tender and proud stalks of her early words will soon sprout, piercing through the humus of speechlessness.
But she remembers other things, too: the scorching splashes of desire shooting to the floral garden below her window, and in their wake—the inevitable ash. She remembers that one birthday when her body split into two and never became whole again. Sealed inside her now imaginary sinuses, the intoxicating waves of hyacinths and lavender linger, but also the Tramadol and the Lidocaine; in her exploded heart, all her incurable sadnesses pulsate arrhythmically; over her tongue, that muscle of intellect and imagination, a streak of dew drops, tears, sweat, unrecognizable gunk crawls, followed by the words that name them, then the impossibility for words. And she doesn’t need to remember anything, because it’s all inside her, permanently awake, gurgling, now painful, now tickling, wide-eyed, fluctuating, sly, and alive.
As she roams around the cosmic gardens, she feels that same excitement which a hundred years ago used to make her face burn like a peony whenever she entered the small provincial park with the rusty swing for two and the pair of bronze deer. Or the first schoolyard with the peeling benches and the poplars exhaling celestial fluff. Or the first huge darkness, where her shadow suddenly vanished, the walls and the ceiling pulled away, and the thought of death pierced right through her solar plexus, leaving her breathless. Or the first huge light, where her scream of ecstasy crashed into the edge of the universe, echoing as if against the dome of a cathedral.
But now she’s as alone as no one among the living could imagine. Over an endless stretch of timeless time, she is flying along the icy slides of Saturn and Jupiter, riding the comets, catching the falling stars and releasing them, then wrapping herself in the Milky Way’s shimmering mantle, and ascending her lunar throne for yet another night. Sometimes, amidst the cosmic silence, she thinks about her babies, the unborn and the born. About her mother and father, her grandmas and grandpas. About all the beloved bodies and souls. About those before her who embraced her like nobody else. About her children who swam and breathed underwater, spoke with animals, stopped the rain, and flew without wings, heard and saw into the earth and ahead into the future. But the grief for them all has remained far back, in life, and settled in that body of hers which is already just a memory. Now the thought of her loved ones is simply a clear streaming light.
And yet, while flying aimlessly around the stars, she sometimes passes close to the Earth and feels the waft from its dark craters like open sores. In moments like these, she only wishes for one thing: to go back, immediately and as far back as possible, to where her memory hasn’t been completely erased. Not to change anything, but to live through it once again, before forgetting the most important thing: that in the end, all ends come undone in the light. She simply wants to sneak through the window of a midsummer room at the end of July and whisper it to the woman currently writing all this while sitting on the green sofa. In the end all endings come undone in the light.
Naturally, that woman won’t hear her but the screen before her eyes will flicker, and her fingers will rise from the keyboard in expectation. Maybe for a bolt of lightning to cut across the sky. Or for a new thought to change what she has written so far. Or for just a few more moments of daylight, so she can finish writing it before night falls.
By Nadya Radulova
Translated from the Bulgarian by Ekaterina Petrova
An excerpt from the novel YOZHI LIVES HERE
by Nadya Radulova
published by Janet 45 (2023)
Nadya Radulova is an award-winning Bulgarian poet, fiction author, literary translator, and editor. She has written six poetry books, including Tongue Tied Name (1996), Albas (2000), Cotton, Glass And Electricity (2004), Bandoneon (2008), When They Fall Asleep (2015) and Little World, Big World (2020). The novel Yozhi Lives Here (Janet 45, 2023) is her most recent title. Her work has been translated into English, Spanish, German, Romanian, Greek, and Turkish.
Ekaterina Petrova holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her translations and her nonfiction writing have appeared in various Bulgarian and English-language publications, including Asymptote, Words Without Borders, European Literature Network, and Reading in Translation. Her translation of Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, for which she received a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2026.
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