Waking up begins with breathing in and out. One lets out a content, hoarse hum and smiles, creasing the crust of dried drool on one’s cheeks. One resumes the morning by rubbing the puss from the corner of one’s eyes as if to spread the glowing balm of swell sleep across one’s face. While pushing oneself in an upright position, one ought to flamboyantly swing the blanket up and let it land like a curtain falling at showtime, then push one’s arms up outstretched to draw a half-circle in the air and wink at the gawking audience and savour the sun mischievously peeking through the blinds and tease the audience with a smile, barely visible through the insufficient lighting. And finally exit the bed to tread one’s hour upon the stage, demanding respect, enforcing attention, attracting admiration. One ought to strut to the front on tiptoe, undressed, imagining stilettos under one’s feet and signal a powerful elegance with each step until one reaches the edge to face the white eyes of a house packed in grey anonymity. Scanning the rows, one detects judgement. Some squint their eyes slightly and pull their lower lip down in disgust. Others suppress smirks locking both lips tightly as they move their gaze from the player’s effeminate hairstyle to his seemingly female hips. And as one stands there, one ought to deflect the negativity by putting one’s hands on those meaty hips and exclaim, ‘I am who I am! I am gay and I am happy!’ to silence the audience. After this act of self-assertion, one ought to balance on one foot – preferably the left – and launch a pirouette to turn and face one’s bed again. One returns to it with a more powerful step than that of the morning, for one is now charged with the electricity of emancipation. One shows one’s bare cheeks, playfully shifting from side to side with every step. When one eventually reaches the edge of the bed, one ought to daringly look at the audience once more, barely containing one’s pride, to finally jump onto the mattress, grab the blanket and launch that curtain up again. And as it flies up to the stage frame, one breathes out through one’s mouth like a suffocating man, imagining claps for every crack of the vocal folds.

But one doesn’t. And neither does Georgi Sokolov. When Georgi wakes up, he has breakfast. Two cups of coffee, black, drip coffee. Plus some digestive biscuits. He puts on the navy suit, white shirt and auburn-red tie he ironed yesterday. He likes to cover himself in anonymity. He scans his studio apartment, its off-white, stucco walls and carpeted, musty floors for the handouts he prepared for today’s class. He finds them on the floor beneath the closed, shabby fold-out dining table. It must have clasped shut in the night. He retrieves the mess of copies from the floor, shakes them into a somewhat neat stack and shoves everything into his briefcase.

Standing in the hallway, he pauses in front of the mirror. He forces a smile and practises losing it as quickly as possible. Contracting and relaxing, contracting and relaxing his face, disarming and arming, disarming and arming his gaze. He stares at the moustache he never thought he would have to grow to compensate for the hair he never thought he would lose.

He slaps his cheeks twice. Snap out of it. Go!

[…]

On the train, Georgi wonders what to pay attention to in order to distract himself from the looks. There are rap beats leaking from a moody teenager’s headphones, a piercing stench of sweat and jasmine perfume fighting for domination. A mother is pulling faces at her child to make it laugh.

Georgi tries to savour each of these impulses. He listens and smells with great attention but almost never looks. Looking would only confirm that, while trying to distract himself, everybody is in fact focused on him. On his chest, or rather, what should be on it. There is no dangling cross. Whenever he did look, Georgi saw their eyes grow, and their mouths open slightly in disbelief, in muted indignation. When he would then lock eyes with a spectator, they would always find something else to do instead with great urgency, patting their empty pockets or glancing at bare wrists.

They don’t know however, that Georgi did bring a cross. Georgi would always keep it in his back pocket. No need to pretend just yet.

‘Next station: National Palace of Culture’, is proudly called out in a buttery American accent, feeding into illusions of grandeur and lost historic splendour.

[…]

Georgi pauses in front of the classroom door. He fixes his frizzy hair in the faint reflection of the small, square glass window. He prepares himself for the pool of murmuring youngsters he is s about to step into. Pulling out the cross necklace from his pocket, he pretends his mother was right, teaching is like theatre.

He looks at the wooden cross in his hand for a while to calm his racing mind. He tries to overwrite a mental narrative. You’re not an actor. You’re a clown. Stop trying to become an actor because you’ll make such a fool of yourself. I think you’d make a terrific teacher. And all that acting training won’t have gone to waste, as you’ll need to perform in a way too. I just want you to be happy.

He pushes his head through the bead necklace in a ceremonial slowness. He tries to channel his inner tyrant and searches for a latent fury, a force that is controlled but clearly visible so that it forces respect and obedience onto whoever notices it. He pulls his shoulders back, raises his chin, clenches and unclenches his fists, testing their agility, contracts and relaxes his face, hardening and hardening his gaze. Callous.

Mr Sokolov pulls the doorknob down abruptly and throws the door open. The murmuring stops.

Catching a few students racing to their desks in the corner of his eye, he walks slowly and in a straight line to the front of the class, his boots clicking in an ominously regular manner, unpredictable like corrective ruler slaps. He turns to face his pupils. They are all standing with their hands on their backs and have fixed their gaze on him, waiting for his signal. He contemplates them, evenly scattered and identically positioned like pillars in a temple.

As Mr Sokolov raises his right arm, the students follow him. They touch their foreheads, chests, left and right shoulders before they exclaim in unison, ‘Amen’, and he tells them to be seated. Georgi consoles himself, I am performing, I am performing, I am performing…

He watches the obedient boys carefully rummaging in their backpacks for the right notebook. And they believe me.

Mr Sokolov turns around and reaches for a piece of chalk in the ledge under the blackboard. He raises it and is halted by faint giggling behind his back.

He looks over his right shoulder and spots David in the back of the class making faces at his neighbour, suppressing a smirk. David, swinging his arms sharply, seems to be pretending to scold him. With his shoulders pulled back, he rests his finger under his nose and mouths a tirade shaking the other finger furiously. Georgi is impressed by his expressivity and the ease with which he embodies that caricature (presumably one of Mr Sokolov himself), but he doesn’t show it. Mr Sokolov is offended. He flicks the piece of chalk onto David’s cheek. The boy winces and turns away.

‘The drama department is two floors down.’, Mr Sokolov says coolly, continuing, ‘As you can’t help expressing yourself, you will read out the passage we’ve planned to discuss today.’

David listlessly pulls the book out of his bag and thrusts it onto his desk with great pomp, locking eyes with the teacher in front of the class. He starts to flick the pages one by one.

‘Page 114, David. We haven’t got all day.’, Mr Sokolov exclaims folding his arms. Right then, David retrieves his bookmark and swings the book to the page of today’s passage. He glances at Mr Sokolov, before fixing his eyes on the book for a while.

‘I am so glad.’, he begins, yelling, turning every period on the page into an exclamation mark, every exclamation mark into a roar. ‘One must keep them at due distance for fear of losing one’s authority’ he reads, banging his fist on his desk. The boy is absorbed by what’s in front of him and seems to absorb it too. He reads life into the text.

[…]

He stretches out his arms and then quickly yet gracefully collects them on his chest infusing his words with warmth, passion and vulnerability, ‘I shall be quite gay.’, he concludes, and Georgi would’ve paid him a compliment for his reading. Mr Sokolov however asks, ‘What do you make of it?’

‘I mean, it’s not bad, but-I don’t know. Everything just feels kind of old.’

‘You can’t blame a book for being written two centuries ago.’, Georgi replies.

‘I know, and I guess it reads well, but something just kept bothering me.’

‘What bothered you, David?’

‘Like…I don’t know. The words the author uses… They don’t make sense. It’s like she doesn’t know their true meaning.’

Mr Sokolov braces himself. ‘What doesn’t make sense to you?’

‘Like, for example the use of the word gay. What business does Mrs Fairfax have in calling herself gay? I mean, I’m pretty sure she isn’t, right?’

‘What does gay mean, then, David?’

‘I- I don’t know, it seems like the author uses it to say she’s happy, but we all know that can’t be right.’

‘What do you think it means?’, Mr Sokolov asks in a stern tone. Boy, if only you were more cautious.

‘Wouldn’t gay mean that she loves girls?’

And for a while, nobody says anything. You start to notice things in these silences, like the constant buzz of the emergency exit sign above the door, or the flow of heat from the scorching radiator next to you. But this noisy underbelly of the world is drawn out just as quickly as it reveals itself by a scathing laugh that interrupts your static daydreaming. It grows louder and louder but stops just before it can reach its true acme.

You hear the slow clicks of heels approaching and you dare not move your eyes from the page in front of you, till the menace passes and you let out a hesitant sigh of relief, for it must at some point still return, and who knows who the victim will be then.

Mr Sokolov is standing before David’s desk. He gets down on his level, and says, ‘Gay means happy.’, with a tone on the verge of a whisper but with the timbre of a bear. He smiles menacingly, ‘nothing else. You hear me?’

GEORGI: No, that’s not right.

(Mr Sokolov turns around and looks at Georgi. He can’t believe his eyes. Embarrassed, he approaches Georgi, who is standing on the raised floor in front of the blackboard.)

SOKOLOV: Will you please leave me alone! Let me do my job, Georgi!

GEORGI: You’re betraying yourself. Have you no spine?! No dignity?!

SOKOLOV: I’m just following orders! Will you please just let me do my thing.

GEORGI: I can’t just let you do your thing. You seem to have lost your conscience, your memory. Who were you again, before the crosses and rituals, before the performance?

SOKOLOV: I was nobody. And I was never you. Besides, this here, isn’t me. What I do here isn’t who I am. I am performing!

GEORGI: Performing… It’s not because you walk as another, talk as another and act as another, that you are another and the things you do as the other are absolved once you step into your own skin. Fragmentation is not salvation! Do you hear me?

SOKOLOV: Intimidation is not truth! Leave me be!

GEORGI: No! You leave the boy be! You’re intimidating! What you’re teaching him is false and you know it! Heck, he probably knows it is too! That’s why you have to be such a menace all the time…

SOKOLOV: How did you ever come to be?! You’ve sprung up out of nowhere and you keep nagging in my head like some fucking parasite.

GEORGI: I am not a parasite. You look at me as if I am another to survive, but I’m not. We’re not.

SOKOLOV: So, you blame me for being out of touch? You blame me for adapting instead of revolting?

GEORGI: Yes, I do! You enforce an ideology you never believed in!

SOKOLOV: For which I never voted!

GEORGI: Yet another reason to rebel!

SOKOLOV: Georgi, come on!

GEORGI: You know, by what you’re teaching, you’re going to hell for this.

SOKOLOV: I don’t believe that!

GEORGI: Well, don’t teach it then!

(Mr Sokolov lets out a low roar. He grabs Georgi by the neck and shoves him against the blackboard. Georgi keeps slapping his hands on the green board desperately in need of air, until he strikes Mr Sokolov’s cheek with his fist. Mr Sokolov is on the floor. Georgi looks at him.)

GEORGI: Isn’t it funny? They call themselves the Rebirth! The Renaissance! Vazrazhdane! But all we end up doing is trying to kill each other off.

(Mr Sokolov covers his nose with his mouth. He listens in shock of what he’s done.)

GEORGI: They call us venom, like we’re some kind of active poison in society. They call us a threat to the normal – or shall I say – traditional way of life. They say we’re a project that’s seeking to brainwash kids into condoning paedophilia, meanwhile they speak no word of kids that had to kneel at the altar and cried into priests’ vestments. No! They demand a veil be thrown over it! Hush! Hush! No more of that! Don’t you cry! Come on! Come on! Fall in line! Do your duty! You’re no sissy! …It seems to me they’re not particularly keen on the truth. It seems to me you aren’t either.

(Mr Sokolov looks at his bloodshed hand. He starts to cry. Georgi steps toward Mr Sokolov on the floor and holds him in a long embrace. Mr Sokolov shudders in relief, crying. Georgi lets go, but Mr Sokolov puts his red hands on Georgi’s cheeks and kisses him.)

I am keen on the truth.

Panting, he gazes at his hands. He shakes his head and wipes his nose before getting up.

He stares at a picture of the Lord and Saviour at the back of the class. He reaches for the cross on his chest, takes it off and drops it on the floor.

He looks at David and smiles disarmingly. He takes one step toward him on the sunken floor of the classroom and then pauses. ‘I’m sorry. Gay doesn’t mean happy.’ It ought to. I want it to. Though it might never.

‘So she doesn’t love girls?’, David asks.

Maybe she does. She probably doesn’t. But for all it’s worth, she can’t and if she could, she wouldn’t, for she ought not to.

© 2025 Emil Krastev