From the Other Side

Martina made her small discovery about Stella’s eyes on one afternoon when the entire village was asleep. It was August. The heat hung over the yards, motionless and invisible, and no one passed along the road. In her grandmother’s house the curtains were drawn. Her grandfather was snoring softly in the little room where they kept the jars and the old wicker basket of walnuts from the previous fall, and her grandmother lay in the bedroom with a wet cloth on her forehead. Before falling asleep, she had told Martina that she was not allowed to go outside until a shadow fell across the doorstep. She had locked the front door, but Martina climbed through the window.

A wire fence separated the two houses. Beside it, in Stella’s yard, grew two enormous red currant bushes, and next to them an apricot tree with a whitewashed trunk. Its branches cast dappled shade over the bushes. Several rows of vines stretched behind the apricot tree and the currants. Stella’s yard sat a little higher, and from her own side of the fence, Martina could see Stella’s legs between the bushes.

“Can I come over?” Martina whispered.

“Only if you keep quiet.”

Stella was sitting on an overturned bucket, stripping the red berries off by the handful. She wore her cousin’s faded yellow T-shirt, which hung almost to her knees. Her hair was tied up messily, and a thin scratch ran across one cheek.

She pushed aside a board at the bottom of the fence with her foot. The wire mesh was loose there, leaving a wide gap. Martina lay down on her stomach, wriggled through, and stood up in the other yard, her elbows caked with dirt. Stella didn’t help her. She handed her a branch heavy with berries.

They ate without speaking. The currants were warm from the sun, and the tart juice stung their tongues. By the third handful, they could no longer taste anything, only the crunch of the tiny seeds between their teeth. Red juice ran down their fingers, bright and sticky.

Through the fence, Martina spotted a berry-laden branch reaching into her yard. She slipped back through, picked a few berries, and peeked at Stella through the leaves. Stella’s eyes looked perfectly blue—pale, with tiny dark flecks around the pupils. Then Martina crawled back through the gap, because the berries on that side were bigger after all. The sunlight fell across Stella’s face, and her eyes suddenly turned green.

“How do you do that?” Martina asked.

“Do what?”

“That thing with your eyes. From over there, they’re blue, but from here, they’re green.”

Stella squinted, as if trying to tell whether Martina was making fun of her.

“Nonsense.”

Martina lay down on her stomach again and wriggled under the wire. She peeked through the leaves from her side. Now Stella’s eyes were blue again. Then she crawled back over to Stella. Green.

“It really is true.”

“You’re always staring at me like a puppy,” Stella said.

Then she laughed and tossed a squashed berry at her. The currant stuck above Martina’s eyebrow. Martina laughed too. She didn’t know whether “puppy” was an insult. If Stella was laughing, it probably wasn’t.

Stella was four years older and knew all the rules.

Once, Stella let her hold her new bracelet of colorful plastic rings while they played dodgeball. Martina clutched it in her hand and watched from the sidelines. When she finally gave it back, the rings had left little circles all over her palm. It felt like real proof that she and Stella were friends.

But at noon, while the grown-ups slept, there were no other kids around—only Martina. They ate currants, lay under the apricot tree, and told each other what they’d become when they grew up. Stella would paint pictures as big as the walls of the village hall. Martina would live in America, though she didn’t yet know why it had to be there. She’d seen New York only on the tin of cookies the neighbors’ son had brought the previous summer—tall buildings, lights, and water in which the city repeated itself upside down.

“Everyone there is rich,” she said.

“Not everyone,” Stella replied. “Someone has to clean up after them.”

Martina felt ashamed, though she hadn’t said she was going to be rich. Then Stella showed her how to draw an eye—two curved lines, with a small circle between them, tucked partly under the upper lid. She drew it with a stick in the dirt. Martina bent so low that her hair touched the ground.

“It can’t be a full circle,” Stella said. “Otherwise the person will look scared.”

To Martina, the eye in the dust was green—she knew it was Stella’s eye.

⁂

After eighth grade, Stella barely came to the village anymore. She had drawing classes in the city, then got into a high school for the arts. For another two years, Martina continued to sit by the fence alone, without admitting to herself that she was waiting. The apricot tree withered; Stella’s grandfather cut it down, leaving behind a thick stump, brown and as hard as bone.

Stella got into the National Academy of Art. A few years later, Martina left to study in America. Stella’s grandmother died, followed a year later by both Martina’s grandparents. The houses stood locked for several years, thick black plastic sheeting over the windows, weeds overtaking the old garden beds, and wormwood growing knee-high. Eventually, the heirs sold both properties to the same man. He tore down the barns first, then the two old houses. The wire fence between the yards remained among the ruins a little longer, though it no longer divided anything.

⁂

At thirty-four, Stella had several group shows and two solo exhibitions. Her friends still called her “promising”, and it no longer sounded like a compliment.

One evening, while she was spending the evening alone in her small studio above an auto-parts store on the outskirts of Sofia, Stella saw a photo of the two yards in a social media group for the village. Someone had taken it from the road. Where the houses had stood was leveled ground, a pile of roof tiles, and a cement mixer.

Stella zoomed in on the photo with two fingers. At one edge, she could make out part of the fence and a bare stump—maybe the old apricot tree. The red currant bushes were gone.

She looked Martina up that same evening. She found her, even though Martina now went by her husband’s last name and lived in New York. In her professional headshot, she wore a navy suit, sleek shoulder-length hair, and a small, restrained smile. She worked as a broker on Wall Street. There were photos from charity galas, ski vacations, and a terrace overlooking a river.

Stella opened a message window.

“Marti, I found out today that they’d torn down both houses. It made me think of the currants. Do you remember crawling through the fence and claiming that my eyes changed color?”

She read it over several times. “Claiming” sounded condescending, so she changed it to “saying.” Then she put “claiming” back because that was how it had first come out—better to leave it as it was. Finally, she clicked “Send.”

The message was read the next day at 2:17 p.m. Bulgarian time.

Martina didn’t respond.

⁂

In New York, it was 7:17 in the morning. Martina saw the message in the elevator as she rode down to the lobby of the apartment building where she lived. She’d only put on one earring. In her other hand, she carried her shoes, because her daughter was asleep and the heels would have clicked against the hardwood floors.

Stella’s name appeared on the screen beside a small round photo—a face Martina recognized at once, though she hadn’t seen it in some fifteen years. At first, she felt an utterly childish and unabashed surge of happiness that Stella had reached out to her. Then she read the message a second time.

On the ride into Manhattan, she opened Stella’s profile. She saw photos of paintings, a studio with a peeling wall, an invitation to an exhibition at a small gallery, and a review on an arts website with three comments underneath. There was also an old post about a project Stella had been trying to fund. “Every share helps,” she’d written. In another photo, she stood beside a painting holding a plastic cup with red wine. Her coat looked threadbare.

Martina hit “Reply.”

“Stella, sweetie! What a surprise…”

Then she went back to Stella’s profile and looked through it again. She knew how conversations like this began. First came the shared memory, then the question of whether she knew anyone in New York—a gallery owner, a collector, someone with space to spare, someone with money. Or a request to buy a painting. Or to help with a visa, a letter of invitation, or a recommendation. People back in Bulgaria rarely wrote to her simply because they’d thought of her. Even her relatives started with small talk, and then by the third sentence they got to the real reason they’d reached out.

She deleted the message and locked her phone. She put on her other earring while waiting at a red light.

At work, the screens lit up one after another. Prices moved, phones rang, and someone behind her swore because his order had been executed one second too late.

Around noon, she remembered Stella’s message again. That evening, she checked again, but Stella hadn’t sent anything else. Not the next day, either. A week later, Martina archived the conversation.

⁂

Stella waited two days. On the third, she deleted the app from her phone, then reinstalled it because she needed it for something else. She didn’t send a second message.

For months, Stella painted the vanished village from memory: wire fences, shadows cast by grape leaves, cracked troughs, children’s knees on dusty bricks. In one painting, a clothesline stretched between two mulberry trees, but the house behind it was crumbling and empty. On another canvas, a hand held a key in front of a door with grass growing tall around the threshold.

She called the series The Yards That Are Gone.

Stella saved the currant painting for last. She laid the large canvas on the floor, sat on a low stool beside it, and leaned over the white surface. First she painted the wire—black and so close that its diamond shapes sliced the canvas. Then came the leaves, broad and jagged, sunlight running along their veins. Stella’s face appeared behind them: her cheek, the corner of her mouth, one eye. The other eye was hidden by a leaf. At the bottom of the canvas were Martina’s knees and her hand, her fingers stained red with currant juice.

Stella painted the scene as Martina had seen it—from the ground, through the currant leaves. She didn’t realize this right away. It only became clear when she painted the small crescent below the left knee—the scar Martina had gotten after falling from the rusty swing behind the village hall. Stella remembered washing away the blood with water from the village fountain, then telling her not to cry because the others would think she was a baby.

Stella painted over the scar. The next day, she painted it back in. The painting remained untitled until the exhibition opened. The gallery owner insisted that every piece have a title.

Stella stood before the canvas, looking at the eye between the leaves. One half of the iris was blue, the other green.

“From the Other Side,” she said.

⁂

At first, the exhibition changed nothing. Two smaller paintings sold. Then an independent curator from Vienna saw Stella’s work and wanted to include From the Other Side in a group exhibition about the memory of Europe’s vanishing places. From Vienna, the painting traveled to New York. An American critic wrote that in the painting, childhood wasn’t a refuge but a system of boundaries that people continued to carry within them even after the fences were gone.

Stella read the sentence three times. She wasn’t sure she understood it, but she liked it very much. The New York Times ran a photograph of Stella beside the painting—wearing a loose black shirt and silver rings, her hair pinned casually at the nape of her neck. She had the calm expression of an artist in demand.

⁂

After finishing the financial news, Martina turned the page and saw the currant bush. She recognized her knee first. The scar was small, rendered in two pale brushstrokes, but it was hers. Then she saw the hand, the wire, and Stella’s eye among the leaves. The painting had been done from the spot where Martina had once stood—down low, on the other side of the bush, her face almost in the dirt.

Martina set down her cup. For a long time, she gazed at the painting reproduced in the newspaper. The article discussed the villages abandoned in the wake of Eastern Europe’s post-communist transition, the loss of community, childhood preserved in women’s memories, and the Bulgarian artist who’d transformed a private past into a universal image. Martina’s name, of course, wasn’t there. All that remained of her in the painting were her knees and one hand. Stella’s eye was visible among the leaves.

Stella had taken Martina’s point of view, placed it on a huge canvas, and once again left her face outside the picture.

Martina found their old chat thread. The message was still there, unanswered. She read it again: “Marti, I found out today that they’d torn down both houses. It made me think of the currants. Do you remember crawling through the fence and claiming that my eyes changed color?”

She wrote back—several years too late:

“I remember. From the other side, they were blue.”

⁂

Stella received the message at the opening of her next exhibition. Around her, people held glasses of champagne and talked about the art prices. The phone buzzed in her purse.

She read the message twice and held the screen for another moment. Then she locked the phone and slipped it back into her purse.