Everything Happens as It Does by Albena Stambolova Page A

just discovering how much she needed him. But her need made him panic. While these complex states were evolving, no decision could be taken and the baby was born—to everyone’s relief.
    Maria offered to take them home, both Valentin and Raya. Raya said no, Valentin said no. Raya continued to live with her parents, with the baby. Unsurprisingly, her parents accused Valentin of being irresponsible, he stopped going there and the first few years were a nightmare. Later Raya started working and moved with her daughter to a place of her own. She did something Valentin had dreamt about doing with her, back then when the time had been right.
    Every now and then both reassured themselves that all was well, time was passing, things were fine. But whenever they met, the space between them filled with strange ambiguity, a thick cloud annihilating all possibility for shared thrills and desires. When either of them managed to pierce through the cloud, as now with the plush Christmas monsters, both behaved like amateur actors unexpectedly forced into an unfamiliar play. They tried to guess what their lines should be, to keep things from falling completely apart. At least that was what her father thought. And Raya’s father was no ordinary man. He was a bigshot. Apart from the fact that he looked like Jeremy Irons, he had the capacity of gathering the world around him and twisting it around his pinky. And the world was happy. Well, such people existed, nothing to be done about that.
    Valentin vaguely suspected that Raya’s father played a significant role in the whole misunderstanding, even if only in accepting the baby with open arms, as if it were one of his own. He had even heard him say “the children of my children are also my children,” with such boundless, yet exclusive generosity. At least that was how Valentin felt about the situation. But he could never talk about it to anyone.
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41.
In the Fog
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    Valentin went back to his room and hurled himself onto the bed, covering his head with a blanket. Something was knocking on the door of his mind, but he had no desire to let it in. His thoughts kept crashing against the same words, “once the decision taken…” His daughter’s age, the years, like the beginnings of a bridge extending from one side of the river, but with no support, like a floating arch over the water, and every Christmas he was adding to it. But what was he adding? Length? He was just making it more fragile. Did he have any chance of reaching the opposite bank?
    You could look at it the other way—the bridge, once built in its entirety, was blown up on the opposite side of the river, so that whatever was left stood hanging on this side, as if by magic, like the bridge in Avignon.
    He let the images flow, drifting with them, half-seeing, half-hearing, giving in to the tingling in his stomach, like a child in its cradle, swinging down into an abyss with squeals of delight. One of the last half-formed tendrils of thought he felt before falling asleep was that he needed to write something, to glue some pieces together…
    He woke up with the image of Raya’s face in his dream. He could not remember anything except her face. She had accompanied him to the gates of the waking world as if not allowed to cross over. He sat up in his bed and propped his back against the wall. He could hear the blood pounding in his head. He closed his eyes and tried to descend back into the sensation of his dream and elicit its unarticulated meaning. It held a key to something. But his mind had never been able to roam freely and he soon became angry with the futility of his attempt.
    Things can be thought about. Valentin believed that every equation led to a solution. The problem was that he was not very good at math. States of mind such as this indefinite, wandering sensation exhausted him. How strange that all of these things, decided upon a long time ago, kept hovering about,