Hello Troj , livre ebook

Hello Troj
Y ou C an l eave n ow
Iva Troj
Austin Macauley Publishers
2022-11-30
Hello Troj About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgement 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
About the Author
Iva Troj is an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She studied art and design in the US and Scandinavia before establishing an art practice in the United Kingdom in 2012.
“Hello Troj” is based on her experiences growing up as a young protege during the last decade of Communism in Eastern Europe.
Iva Troj is a PhD and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her work is in private and museum collections in the UK, France, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, China, United States, South Africa, South Korea and Japan.
Dedication
This book is for my late brother Troj whose presence in my life gifted me with just the right amount of magical thinking to fuel the rise above mediocrity my favorite author Kazuo Ishiguro so passionately writes about. Whatever foolish mess I got myself into, it was my late brother who kept me sane and gave my identity purpose. Communism, Cold War, poverty, walls, glass ceilings, misogyny, really poor taste in men, crossing borders that should not be crossed and burning bridges underneath my very feet, it all became manageable because Grief somehow made the seemingly impossible unavoidable.
Copyright Information ©
Iva Troj 2022
The right of Iva Troj to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of the author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781398472815 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781398472822 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published 2022
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd ® 1 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5AA
Acknowledgement
I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to the people that came before me. They are the unsung heroes in my family who built homes and ploughed the earth, who fought the wars of others because they believed in a just future, who dug holes in the ground to hide partisans and Jewish refugees. Like my grandfather Troj who saved the lives of hundreds, was caught and tortured by the fascists more than once but continued fighting until Hitler was beaten and the war won. Like my grandmother Kerana who shaped me more than I can possibly know. This voice in my head that makes me uniquely me is as much hers as it is mine. This book is for all of them. I’m regifting their fates to the world because the world needs it.
1
Some stories are like tinnitus, they ring, buzz, hum, grind, hiss, and whistle in one’s ear. One might think that telling them would make them go away, but no, they somehow manage to get louder and more persistent with time. Troj’s story is like tinnitus with a loud choir on the side, like a Brecht play, choral interventions and all. Sometimes there are two stories colliding. One story circles around the circumstances surrounding Troj’s death. The other story is the tinnitus that never goes away because it doesn’t make any sense to anyone else but me.
My earliest memories of Troj come in bursts, with minutes, hours or days missing in-between.
I must be about six years old. I am sitting breathless and the street below me is blurred. I can smell my father’s shaving cream in the drops of sweat on his back where my cheek is resting. My dad’s back is rock-hard and difficult to cling to. I feel the memory of sharp pain in my ribs as Troj’s fingers are sinking deeper and deeper into my waist. The color of my father’s motorcycle is…I want to say blue, but that would be too matchy with the light-blue shirt and even lighter blue summer shoes. Bulgarian fathers didn’t color coordinate in the ’70s, it was against all rules of masculinity. The street noises are loud and the swishing sound of the wind makes them almost unbearable. Troj is hurting my ribs to a point where I have only two options: scream and get smacked or keep quiet and accept pain forever and ever, every day of the rest of my sweaty loud life. I scream.
Minutes missing.
Troj has red ears.
Minutes missing.
My father looks like a movie star with the sun shining behind him. He picks me up and carefully places me on the sidewalk beside the school fence. Troj is left behind at a nearby kindergarten amongst women in white coats and the occasional smelly cat with no name. I think of that all the way across the vast paved schoolyard. I fear for him before I enter the classroom and forget about him the second I see my friend Dina.
Hours missing. Motorcycle again. It is definitely light-blue. We are picking up Troj soon, but for a brief moment, I’m free to lift my head, look around and feel the wind in my hair. I see white coats and I smile wide. Who cares about the pain in my ribs? Troj is here.
To those of you who immediately thought that I was the sister of a mentally challenged child kept in an institution, I say: You should know better! Communist countries in the ‘70s were all about uniforms. Every profession had a uniform assigned to it and for the sake of effectiveness and expectations management, most uniforms were derivative of the lab coat. My school uniform was a dark-blue version of the lab coat and my only way to ’express’ myself was a white detachable collar. Some kids had white embroidered collars (colorful things like flowers would have been unthinkable) and others had little pearl buttons. I expressed myself by not washing the dumb thing and letting it go grey.
Second memory.
We are in the gigantic corridor that separates the one-bedroom flats where almost everyone we know lives. Troj is watching a funny-looking small kid with big ears and his shiny new blue mini car. He is obviously envious of the kid, but there isn’t much he can do, except hope for a turn in the car just for the sake of temporary friendship. Troj is a couple of years older and very much aware that his cuteness is starting to wear off so he makes himself as visible as he can. I understand his dilemma. He knows that he is a ‘batko’–a Bulgarian word that means ‘big brother’. ‘Batko’ is similar to the word ‘kaka’, which in Bulgarian means ‘big sister’ and is used to manipulate children into accepting a forever growing responsibility for slightly younger children so that adults don’t have to. In this particular case, a ‘batko’ worth his title should not karate-kick little funny-looking boys out of their shiny new cars no matter how much they want to.
I am even older than Troj so I walk away and resume harassing my parents with my chatterbox ways.
Hours missing.
Later that night, as we get ready for bed, Troj folds his pocket knife and puts it in his pyjama pocket. Yes, our pyjamas had pockets. When you wear a dark-blue lab coat with a stupid collar all day, pyjamas trousers become a symbol of free thought. The pocket knife makes me anxious until Troj winks at me. We giggle for a while thinking ‘sweet shenanigans’ and start making our bed.
Our bed is not really a bed but a very hard kitchen sofa that can barely fit an averagely large drunken man. We have seen many a drunken man toss and turn on our sofa. It makes us happy to think that our bed somehow ‘rejects’ all the other people that try sleeping in it. We talk about it often.
Days missing.
Our mother has left us breakfast on the table and we wake up to the smell of chicken soup and pancakes. The kitchen sofa that we sleep in has a plywood back with a cherry-colored top. Underneath the top, I can see that Troj has used his pocket knife to carve the word ‘granmass’, which I assume is a new nickname for one of our grandmothers, our father’s mother Ivanka. Ivanka is not a large woman so it’s probably not about her ‘grand mass’. I focus on the ‘ass’ aspect of the new word and start giggling. Troj is looking very pleased.
We both know that our mother is working this weekend. Our mother knows that we know. Nevertheless, she leaves a small note stating her working hours and explaining that there is chicken soup on the table and pancakes in the oven. Our sofa is about twenty centimetres away from the table so we can both see and smell the food. We read the note, fold it carefully and leave it on the washing machine just in case we need it later.
Hours missing.
Although I want to tell this story, death makes certain parts quite painful. Thinking about the mere frequency of vicious physical combat occurring on home alone days is making my stomach turn. It’s like listening to a sermon about the suffering of Jesus and clearly remembering nailing his feet to the cross. Every time somebody utters the words ‘all siblings fight’, I think to myself, ‘yeah, but yours didn’t die’. The only thing that keeps me from wallowing in despair is remembering some kind of weird enjoyment in the kicking and screaming. I saw my little brother as an extension of my body and if I wanted to hurt myself, who was to stop me. Fighting provided much-needed relief in times when nobody listened to us or cared about our feelings. I can never be sure, but I think that Troj felt the same way. After threatening and hitting each other for a while, we would call it quits and go on with our usual business like nothing had happened. In any case, I don’t remember any pain and I have no bruises from those fights. Non