Post by Guest on Jun 25, 2010 0:27:44 GMT
Approved at Serzhant as requested.
If you have any questions that you cannot find answers to in the "Beginner's Guide" please feel free to ask a staff or veteran member.
Welcome to Issuing Orders
-JT
Account E-Mail: The account is under the name eva
Name: Nevena Grosdova
Nationality: Bulgarian
Character History:
The townsfolk of Dobrich always recalled with a taint of curiosity or disturbance how Nevena Grosdova had always been an enigma within their ranks, a riddle they could not solve. Taciturn and difficult to approach, she would be remembered by the locals for her mysterious ways, her appealing and tolerant temperament and quietly observing disposition, hardly betrayed by the rise of her temper which she always knew how to be in command of in the presence of other people whenever she showed them her first face; she had two faces: one for the world, and one for God. The face she held for the world was one of deceptive charm, consideration, goodwill and concern, passionate proclaiming of her beliefs and maturity beyond her age. There was no reason why people should not open up to her; she was chillingly intelligent for her young, undeveloped age, able to grasp concepts many adults could not even fathom, and understood perspectives even though they related to situations distant to her personal experience; she was kind, she was understanding, modest, poor but bright, introverted but compassionate, and looked like an angel. What was there not to trust? Everything. For beneath the kind eyes of emerald green – the face she had for God – rippled the dark waters of the river Styx.
It was in the rather cold winter of 1920 that Snezhana Svetkova, the good for nothing only daughter of Bulgarian tailor, Gergana Krumova, met Javor Ivanovic in a rather accidental and unforeseen incident, when the jobless Serbian, a useless wandering charlatan who had wasted all of his parents’ income in his sordid whimsicalities, visited the town on his tour during one of his annual gambling games around the Balkan countries in the hopes of winning extra money and spending it all on drink, gold, women and bribery. After the brief time the two of them had spent Snezhana discovered she had been expecting and, disgusted, attempted to self-abort the fetus during the first days through the means of a pump and a hose, at a high risk of inflicting severe and irrevocable damage to herself at best, or perish at worst. Her mother, Gergana, whose husband, Damyan Svetkov, had been killed during the first Balkan War in 1912, absolutely forbade her daughter to proceed to such measures despite the shame an extramarital pregnancy would bring to their close community, but Snezhana, overwhelmed with sheer disgust, revulsion and hatred, followed through her plans and almost destroyed herself – but the abortion was successful only halfway through as the fetus was only harmed on a proportionally small level. With an unsuccessful abortion, Snezhana was forced to stay inside the house for the months to come to avoid public outcry and outrage, on the excuses of her ‘not feeling rather well’.
The young woman, in her mid-twenties, never wished to speak to her mother again, although rigorous fighting would often break down from that moment onwards as Snezhana would disregard common rules of pregnancy by taking hard medication, drinking and smoking heavily as well as overstretching her nerve system with constant shrieking, not once failing to make very clear to her mother how she had been the one to have destroyed her life. Gergana ignored such foolish, derogatory blame from her daughter’s part and strictly disallowed her of leaving the house. One night, however, Snezhana craftily sneaked away from the house and walked down the empty road, and came across a fortune teller who happened to be wandering around Dobrich at the time in search of food and a place to rest; curious and superstitious a creature that she was, Snezhana offered the woman a few levs to rent a room in the local inn in exchange of her services in being told the tarot cards. Though the fortune teller agreed, the results were not to pacify her mind. The Hangman. The Moon. The Devil. Snezhana threw the cards away in anger, much to the fortune teller’s dismay, and stormed away from the inn, neglecting to cover her face with the hood, and as a result, several townspeople recognized her; her sudden appearance was the talk of the town for the next few days, and the source of further arguments with her mother. Nevertheless, when the time came to give birth, Gergana took her daughter deep into the forest in order not to arise suspicion and unnecessary intrusive questions from the screams of anguish that would be impossible to be kept within the house only. On June 1st, in the late warm afternoon, and while Rusalka Week was being celebrated by the townsfolk, Nevena Grosdova was born under the influence of the Mercurian skies. After the birth, Snezhana, embittered, depressed and furious, carelessly and shamelessly abandoned her newborn daughter and her mother, leaving Dobrich for good. She was not to be seen again.
Gergana refused to submit to the shame of raising a bastard child and instead fashioned a new name for the newborn, telling the townsfolk she had found the girl abandoned in the forest, alone and neglected, and in danger of being prey to the wolves. She called her Nevena, the name of the marigold in South Slavic, due to both the woman’s religious fervour and the fact the orange and white flowers had been fully blossoming in all of their eternal glory during the summer season around the area Snezhana had given birth; the flower of the Virgin Mary, but also the flower of the dead. She named her Grosdova when she realized the girl’s liking for purple grapes. In the same way the vast majority of the population living in the region of Southern Dobruja felt, Nevena grew up harbouring a distaste bordering on ethnic hatred for the Romanian people as the Treaty of Bucharest of 1913 with which Bulgaria’s fate was sealed as the losing side in the Second Balkan War allowed Southern Dobruja to be incorporated in Romania for a period that would last for the next twenty seven years, throughout which the region would be referred to as Bazargic by the others, but to the locals it would always remain Dobruja. Be that as it may, they had to live with Turkish, Romani, Tatar, Muslim and Romanian populations amongst them in what was considered a very conflicted familial situation.
Gergana’s upbringing of Nevena was one characterized by austerity and severity, often administering good beatings in the hopes not of inflicting pain but of exercising teahing through the means of physical punishment; even though the old woman loved the girl, she knew not how to show it in ways that were affectionate and kind; she was motherly and always tending to her needs, but years of tolerating her daughter’s pathetic existence, suffering through her husband’s loss and subsequent poverty, and as combined by the physical exertion from aging, had further sharpened the already brisk woman who in her youth had been a fine, boisterous and hard-working young girl, as the locals would remember. Nevertheless, Nevena never felt she could turn to her whenever she was facing internal problems, and thus from nature became introverted, closed to herself and spoke around her presence only when necessary; she was fond of Gergana and trusted her with her life because the woman she had been taught to call ‘baba’ was indeed made of steel and iron, and yet such strength of character notwithstanding, Nevena crawled inside the depths of her soul for comfort in times of agony, much to Gergana’s consternation, whose conscience was put to test every day from the bitter regret and pain of being unable to tell her own flesh the truth of their relation. One day when Nevena was five years old, and after receiving snide remarks and intrusive questions by some other children, she approached the old woman while she was making the dough in the kitchen table and quietly but curiously asked her why she had no parents like the rest of the children in the town did, and whether she was alone because they had not loved her and had wished to discard of her. Gergana would remember this moment for the rest of her life, how her heart had been slashed to hear such words leave the child’s mouth, frighteningly acute for her age, and to realize that despite all her strife to save that child from the condemnation of public outrage, Nevena still believed herself to be ‘alone’ in this world. Gergana tried to explain to the child that life did not always function in anticipated results, but Nevena had interrupted her sharply by claiming the old woman was making excuses and lying to her, before she quickly turned around with a furious frown and left the kitchen in a determined stride, leaving behind a rather troubled Gergana. If there was one thing Nevena detested, it was being lied to. After that incident she abandoned all endeavours to find the truth from her ‘baba’ and instead resolved to discover the truth of her existence on her own, building walls of defense against Gergana which the old woman could never penetrate.
At the age of seven Nevena began to think her thoughts were not private; she began to feel there was someone else sharing them, something which she knew not whence it came from, nor what its intentions were, benevolent or not, but it scared and angered her, and so she resolved to bury her thoughts deep into her Ego, the poor creature not quite suspecting she was only further feeding the monster within that was still at birth, still embryonic and which would develop and escalate in the following years into something uncontrollable by the force of nature and catastrophic. Not yet having reached the age to attend grammar school, she locked herself to her room and buried her mind in large, leather-bound and old books that spoke of adventures, stories that narrated brave deeds of heroes and heroines, poems that reached through her heart and calmed her tempestuous soul, that sent her dancing in clouds of various shapes in countries she had never been before, and then language books she would absorb herself into, decoding the meaning of words, studiously widening her capacity of knowledge, a true chameleon that could absorb information and store them within her convoluted mind, books borrowed from the local library, or from neighbours. It was during such times of ultimate devotion that her concentration was dead-on at her given task, otherwise progressively impaired when she was out in the world, often having the impression there were certain moments in which she could not remember her actions or thoughts.
She did not make friends throughout her time spent in Bulgaria, or at least in the intimate way childhood friendships are supposed to be created, but she did spend considerable time around the other children, enough to know them, to feel them, to control them. They would gather around and sit down upon the green leaves of the forest as she would hold a flashlight at neck length and tell them horror stories of the most wild, unexplored and sickening imagination, horrendous tales of night-time terrors and shocking them to death, but little did she know these stories were more than a simple figment of her imagination … The years passed, and Nevena went to school, her softness of manners and passionate spirit, as contradicting as that combination may have been, immediately charming the teachers and earning their trust, for she was rather adept at altering her self-presentation for the purposes of manipulation, growing this ability gradually in what she would be a master of in the near future. Certain unfortunate events that took place within the school boundaries could have been attributed to the girl, but she was careful, she was shrewd, astute and the teachers dismissed ideas of her involvement; and thus always went unpunished. The scope of such incidents widened, now taking place around the town, and, funnily enough, Nevena always seemed to be near the crime place at the given time, and yet always mysteriously succeeded in twisting everyone around her little finger despite the arousal of suspicions. By the time she had reached twelve years of age, she had completely and utterly driven Gergana away from her, disregarding the old woman’s orders and wishes, whatever childhood fondness there had once been having now eclipsed. Early in the year 1932 Gergana passed away.
The neighbouring family wished to provide for Nevena, and did not fail to mention how her grandmother had spoken to them of distant relatives she had in good old sister, Russia. This item of news immediately sparked interest within the girl’s heart of eventually discovering the truth of her roots and after making a ruckus inside the house in search of any documents that would relay information on the relatives, she burst open drawers, cupboards, wardrobes, threw off bed covers and turned the house literally upside down, until she found a well-kept pile of old, yellowed letters stashed inside Gergana’s bedroom, underneath the floor on a creaking spot. The Zdravkov family. She set out a map to travel to Russia on train, but the neighbours, the Liapchev family, kind-hearted and sensible people, laughed at such ideas, thinking it impossible for a girl of her age to complete such a long journey on her own unscathed, even though at such times children were often left abandoned to cater for their own; some of them survived, some perished. It was the cruel law of nature that the strong would survive. Petya Liapcheva requested of her younger son, Deyan, to accompany Nevena on the train journey to Russia for at least three quarters of the way; he was to go and fetch his older brother from Poland, save him from the webs of a woman that only meant harm for him under the commands of his mother, and would thus stop at Gdansk, while Nevena would continue the journey across the Belarusian borders and to her final destination, Rostov.
Nevena, having at the age of thirteen been developed prematurely, endowed with sandy hair, emerald green eyes and a palest face, had grown into a distant young girl, with rapid changes in attitude and sudden mood shifts, prone to impulsivity and sudden, inappropriate anger – and yet most of the times mustering to control such slowly developing traits. Little did she know twenty-year-old Deyan harboured feelings for her that were disconnected with sentiments of brotherly affection, but the covert glances he would throw at her while sat next to each other in the train sparked within him an inappropriate longing that was displaced and miscalculated. Hateful over the fact she had to be accompanied, and so much more by a male who was only causing her inconvenience, preferably being alone in this journey of self-discovery, she kindly requested of him with an innocent smile during one of the stops in Gyor, Hungary, whether he would fetch her a beautiful blue rose proudly standing on top of the mountain, in all of its beautiful and wild glory, a flower of youth, a source of unsatisfied hunger and despair. She asked of him to bring it down to her if he indeed loved her, and he agreed with all of his heart. She watched from down below with eyes blazing as she struggled through the thorny bushes, amidst the rocks and tall trees, to reach the rose and give it to her. She watched and waited calmly, the sun shining down upon her with angelic light, and she looked so serene. In torment he was climbing the mountain, but disregarded the slippery pathways, the aggressive bushes, and the mist. And he almost made it, but then a rock broke through his boots and the sudden scream that pierced that beautiful morning felt sharp, until there was silence. And then she felt serenity.
Disappointment broke through her heart upon arriving in mother Russia once she realized the relatives were not at all keen to have her stay at their home, for they had too many mouths to feed, too little money, and not to load of patience to begin with; to make matters worse, they had absolutely no idea who she was, for Gergana Krumova had never made mention of Nevena’s existence to them. It was the crushing point; so her life was insignificant to her dear deceased baba, and her upbringing throughout all these years had been based on nothing but lies and deception. Of course, the truth behind Gergana’s actions lay not in such sick thoughts and wild fantasies, but on practical terms: she had merely wished to protect Nevena from finding out the hurtful truth and destroying her childhood, to protect her from other people’s outrage over the fact she had been nothing more but an extramarital off-chance, and ultimately, to avoid the incident in which Nevena would accidentally learn from the Zdravkov family the truth, and as such, had kept her existence a bitter secret. Nevena understood nor this, nor any other explanation. She wandered around the streets of Rostov, an embittered and impassioned child, and soon came to know Varya Gaznayeva, a prostitute, a kind woman who took Nevena under her wing, opened the door of her small apartment for her and happily invited her in, gave her food, gave her part of the money she earned through the means of work for which she was not proud of, but which was necessary to ensure her survival. People would do anything for their survival; even stoop as low as disregard their own self-respect and morals. Nevena began to love her, living with her through the harsh Russian lifestyle as it had developed after the Bolshevik Revolution, staying with her and helping her for the following months and until the year 1934, when suddenly Varya was murdered by one of her lovers in cold blood inside her own house, Nevena having hid herself and watched the crime and the sin in secret.
The return journey to Bulgaria in late 1934 was met with her determined silence. By this time Nevena had picked up on other languages besides English, French and German – Russian, primarily. She survived through the means of forging false papers, thieving, skilful at using her charm and purity of face in deceptive ways that only served to manipulate the other person’s mind, so that she could twist words and intentions and curl them around her finger, make them believe what she wanted them to believe, trust in her, be fond of her, even love her; she allowed them to live in her lair, and in the darkness would consume them, feed from them, let them submit to her. These unfortunate events in her early life notwithstanding, Nevena was determined to continue her life in Bulgaria and start over with a smile and sunshine in her eyes, yet the strange accidents did not seem to lessen with her arrival on the town. Though a part of her wished to forget her obsession over her family, another part of her, a secret one crawling in the dark reaches of her mind never succumbed to the calls of surrender, always researching, always dying to know the truth. She need not wait long. In 1935, on the Thursday of the Dead, during the holy celebration of Easter, the events that followed at her fifteen years of age would open her eyes to the truth and build a pathway towards her own declivity.
Traumatized by the events, by how mother Bulgaria had hurt and betrayed her, one day in early 1937 she took the train and travelled around Europe in a holy mission to right what was wrong. The outbreak of the war found her fighting by the Russian side in her personal struggle to rid the world of evil, and to finally see everyone rest in peace and harmony, which she herself never had the chance to enjoy.
Military Rank: Serzhant
Writing Sample:
The local inn in the small Russian town was crowded with all sorts of people, soldiers crushing their glasses of vodka against one another’s or playing cards, women looking at them with cheap lust in their hideous eyes, young girls serving, old men smoking their pipes and even a small child, a boy that could not have been more than six years old, sat in the corner, slightly worried but curious all the same, staring at the strong, burly men as they laughed, and jeered, and shouted their tough words. “Evgeny, another round of the good old! We will be fighting tomorrow for the Motherland, is this all we are worth of?” one of the soldiers cried. “Dmitriy, I thought we were drinking for Ivan,” one of his friends drunkenly intervened. “Yes, my newborn son, and for Mother Russia, they are both as good as, I think!” Dmitriy laughed at the inn keeper, who chuckled under his breath and bent over behind the bar table to fetch the large bottle of vodka and refill the men’s glasses. As he finally walked over the wooden tables on his way to the group of men, he noticed the young woman sitting by herself in a table by the corner, having emptied a plate of canned beef and roast potatoes and quietly observing the room; he furrowed his eyebrows silently as he stared after her before he turned over and reached the men’s table, overfilling the men’s glasses with the burning liquid as they laughed and whistled happily.
Evgeny Stanchinsky, the proprietor, then walked towards the young woman’s direction, looking at her kindly, albeit with a curious expression on his face. “Can I bring you anything else, malyutka?” the grey-haired man asked her in a fatherly tone, but she did not seem to have heard him, lost in her own thoughts and with her concentration impaired as only her own little heart knew what bothered her mind at the given time. She had barely noticed his arrival, until she suddenly looked up at him, an expression of mild bewilderment in her pale face as her eyes glinted brightly with a benevolent touch, appearing kind but also enquiring. The proprietor repeated the question, this time slightly frowning, to which she responded with moments of initial silence as she glanced at him curiously. Then she broke her inconvenient silence. “Can I have a glass of milk?” she asked him in a voice that could best be described as whiskey being poured down bed sheets of velvet, soothing and calm, almost airy and breathy, with the appropriate touch of slight hoarseness in the edge, enough to counterbalance the deep softness of her tone. Evgeny Stanchinsky was caught off-guard by such an unusual request, and remained in his position, silent, a deadpan expression written across his surprise and looking into her honest, innocent eyes. “Yes, of course, malyutka,” he kindly responded, and quietly stepped away from her table; the men opposite her, however, had heard her words and burst into tears of laughter, pounding hard on the table with their fists and looking at her derogatorily. “I didn’t know this was a nursery, Stanchinsky, but do bring her a glass of … milk. I’ll even pay for her biscuits,” Dmitriy said in a mocking tone, a smirk woven across his filthy watery lips and pierced his brown eyes unto her own green.
Something clicked inside those dark green eyes, and the expression changed, it became colder but also the eyes no longer bore the innocent glint of purity; something had altered within for she returned the glance with an equally contemptuous stare that taunted and sneered at him. “At least I can have peace of mind knowing my son isn’t a bastard product of my wife and best friend’s little get-together,” she hissed in a ringing force, her eyes narrowing, as a mocking grin spread across her lips; such words were immediately met with a frown from the man’s part, as he turned over his shoulder and looked at the other man with surprise in his eyes, appearing to be in disbelief and easily dismissing such slander, and yet the suspicion could not help but be revealed in his eyes. He turned around and scoffed at her in disbelief, while his friend looked a little uncomfortable and preferred instead to down his glass of vodka. “Or else what do you think he was doing, staying back in Mother Russia while you were away fighting against the fascists? I’m certain you don’t have to worry about your family’s safety tomorrow. They’ll be taken good care of … as always,” she poisoned the air, spreading her disease; at which point the lights within the room flickered. Everyone looked around them in surprise but for her; she kept her eyes transfixed on both men while the proprietor having just walked back to her table placed amidst the darkness the glass of milk on top of her table along with the bottle of vodka he had also carried with the intention to refill the men’s glasses a third time, before he carefully made his way back into the room behind the bar to fetch a candle and examine the electricity problems that had most certainly occurred from the imminent downpour.
“It must be hard … loving a child that is not your own,” she whispered maliciously and her grin widened as fists were exchanged between the two men and the situation escalated into something uncontrollable as the lights flickered – she stretched out her hand and snatched the bottle of vodka, in a smooth move tilting her head back as she drank from the liquid that quickly burned through her flesh like lava, and then turned her hungry eyes towards the marvelous spectacle before her – now everyone had involved themselves in the fighting, even the women had jumped into the table to pull the two men apart as the noises of grumbling, threatening words and glasses being broken filled the air – and the lights flickered again – her eyes turned more hungry, her expression became wild like that of a she-wolf which had been craving for a meal for a long time – and the lights clicked on and off again – and her smile widened, as a cackle heartily escaped her throat and poisoned the surrounding atmosphere – the lights flickered once more, and then became steady as the proprietor appeared from behind the room with his tools, and the two men were eventually pulled apart by their fellow comrades, now calming down from the previous moment of wartime madness, breathing heavily, not quite sure of what happened apart from stress taking them over. The young girl in the corner of the room looked at them curiously, even strangely through her innocent clear green eyes. Then she stretched out her hand and drank from her milk.
*
The morning sunlight, though it may have been feeble, appeared through the cracks of the leaves from the tall trees of the forest and shone down on her sandy hair. Breathing heavily as she supported herself against the tree trunk, she scanned the surrounding area for any human presence, though there was none to be found. It was a long way to get back to the frontlines, that much she knew. She pulled the rifle across her shoulder and slowly walked across the endless wilderness of snow in the bombarded Russian forest, leaving footprints along the way, her heart racing fast and her mouth half-open, half-closed as her wide open eyes surveyed the area carefully, slowly, for any sign of the enemy. A crack, a noise – but it was only a bird that swiftly flew off from the branch of a tree and into the skies, disappearing behind the clouds in despair, so that whatever bit of living creature had once existed within her close proximity had at this point gone extinct. Her breath was suddenly cut short by the sound of something – someone – coming near, and she could not help but harbour the idea whatever it was, they were being dragged along the snow forcefully judging by the sounds made in the near distance. Soon enough, a male body – what might have passed as a carcass as seen from the blood in which the soldier was drenched all over him and the rotten brown flesh in certain parts of his body – was dragging himself across the snow, grunting, grumbling and crying in pain, hands reaching out and supporting his weight as he pulled his body across, and then his eyes met hers.
She did not move, but merely stood there in dead silence, watching him closely, unable to tell in whose side he was fighting on considering he was wearing civilian clothes and crying out words which she could not decipher from that distance; it only took her a moment further to realize there was a wolf following the man in the deadly Russian winter, her green eyes diverting towards the majestic animal and shining brightly, dilating, as she stared at its grey and white fur, the ice-cold, steel-blue eyes, and the beautiful grace with which the animal walked closer towards the man, who began to tremble. He pointed at the wolf, then at her rifle, and back at her, speaking incomprehensible words and whining over his fate, his lower part having unquestionably been severely damaged by shrapnel and other parts of his body torn away in animalistic force – and she knew what had to be done. Swiftly pulling the rifle into her hands, she cocked the gun and aimed it at the wild beast. There was nothing else for her but dead silence that separated her from the animal that was now looking at her with a curious expression on its deep, ice-cold eyes, as it stopped from following the man and instead focused its attention on her. The crisp air flew through her ears and numbed her mind, her right eye shut as she peeked through from the weapon, her fingers tightly but slowly touching the trigger, ready to fire. Her heart stopped for a second, the pulse ceased and her mind went numb as the trigger was pulled, and the man’s head fell flat on the snow, dead.
If you have any questions that you cannot find answers to in the "Beginner's Guide" please feel free to ask a staff or veteran member.
Welcome to Issuing Orders
-JT
Account E-Mail: The account is under the name eva
Name: Nevena Grosdova
Nationality: Bulgarian
Character History:
The townsfolk of Dobrich always recalled with a taint of curiosity or disturbance how Nevena Grosdova had always been an enigma within their ranks, a riddle they could not solve. Taciturn and difficult to approach, she would be remembered by the locals for her mysterious ways, her appealing and tolerant temperament and quietly observing disposition, hardly betrayed by the rise of her temper which she always knew how to be in command of in the presence of other people whenever she showed them her first face; she had two faces: one for the world, and one for God. The face she held for the world was one of deceptive charm, consideration, goodwill and concern, passionate proclaiming of her beliefs and maturity beyond her age. There was no reason why people should not open up to her; she was chillingly intelligent for her young, undeveloped age, able to grasp concepts many adults could not even fathom, and understood perspectives even though they related to situations distant to her personal experience; she was kind, she was understanding, modest, poor but bright, introverted but compassionate, and looked like an angel. What was there not to trust? Everything. For beneath the kind eyes of emerald green – the face she had for God – rippled the dark waters of the river Styx.
It was in the rather cold winter of 1920 that Snezhana Svetkova, the good for nothing only daughter of Bulgarian tailor, Gergana Krumova, met Javor Ivanovic in a rather accidental and unforeseen incident, when the jobless Serbian, a useless wandering charlatan who had wasted all of his parents’ income in his sordid whimsicalities, visited the town on his tour during one of his annual gambling games around the Balkan countries in the hopes of winning extra money and spending it all on drink, gold, women and bribery. After the brief time the two of them had spent Snezhana discovered she had been expecting and, disgusted, attempted to self-abort the fetus during the first days through the means of a pump and a hose, at a high risk of inflicting severe and irrevocable damage to herself at best, or perish at worst. Her mother, Gergana, whose husband, Damyan Svetkov, had been killed during the first Balkan War in 1912, absolutely forbade her daughter to proceed to such measures despite the shame an extramarital pregnancy would bring to their close community, but Snezhana, overwhelmed with sheer disgust, revulsion and hatred, followed through her plans and almost destroyed herself – but the abortion was successful only halfway through as the fetus was only harmed on a proportionally small level. With an unsuccessful abortion, Snezhana was forced to stay inside the house for the months to come to avoid public outcry and outrage, on the excuses of her ‘not feeling rather well’.
The young woman, in her mid-twenties, never wished to speak to her mother again, although rigorous fighting would often break down from that moment onwards as Snezhana would disregard common rules of pregnancy by taking hard medication, drinking and smoking heavily as well as overstretching her nerve system with constant shrieking, not once failing to make very clear to her mother how she had been the one to have destroyed her life. Gergana ignored such foolish, derogatory blame from her daughter’s part and strictly disallowed her of leaving the house. One night, however, Snezhana craftily sneaked away from the house and walked down the empty road, and came across a fortune teller who happened to be wandering around Dobrich at the time in search of food and a place to rest; curious and superstitious a creature that she was, Snezhana offered the woman a few levs to rent a room in the local inn in exchange of her services in being told the tarot cards. Though the fortune teller agreed, the results were not to pacify her mind. The Hangman. The Moon. The Devil. Snezhana threw the cards away in anger, much to the fortune teller’s dismay, and stormed away from the inn, neglecting to cover her face with the hood, and as a result, several townspeople recognized her; her sudden appearance was the talk of the town for the next few days, and the source of further arguments with her mother. Nevertheless, when the time came to give birth, Gergana took her daughter deep into the forest in order not to arise suspicion and unnecessary intrusive questions from the screams of anguish that would be impossible to be kept within the house only. On June 1st, in the late warm afternoon, and while Rusalka Week was being celebrated by the townsfolk, Nevena Grosdova was born under the influence of the Mercurian skies. After the birth, Snezhana, embittered, depressed and furious, carelessly and shamelessly abandoned her newborn daughter and her mother, leaving Dobrich for good. She was not to be seen again.
Gergana refused to submit to the shame of raising a bastard child and instead fashioned a new name for the newborn, telling the townsfolk she had found the girl abandoned in the forest, alone and neglected, and in danger of being prey to the wolves. She called her Nevena, the name of the marigold in South Slavic, due to both the woman’s religious fervour and the fact the orange and white flowers had been fully blossoming in all of their eternal glory during the summer season around the area Snezhana had given birth; the flower of the Virgin Mary, but also the flower of the dead. She named her Grosdova when she realized the girl’s liking for purple grapes. In the same way the vast majority of the population living in the region of Southern Dobruja felt, Nevena grew up harbouring a distaste bordering on ethnic hatred for the Romanian people as the Treaty of Bucharest of 1913 with which Bulgaria’s fate was sealed as the losing side in the Second Balkan War allowed Southern Dobruja to be incorporated in Romania for a period that would last for the next twenty seven years, throughout which the region would be referred to as Bazargic by the others, but to the locals it would always remain Dobruja. Be that as it may, they had to live with Turkish, Romani, Tatar, Muslim and Romanian populations amongst them in what was considered a very conflicted familial situation.
Gergana’s upbringing of Nevena was one characterized by austerity and severity, often administering good beatings in the hopes not of inflicting pain but of exercising teahing through the means of physical punishment; even though the old woman loved the girl, she knew not how to show it in ways that were affectionate and kind; she was motherly and always tending to her needs, but years of tolerating her daughter’s pathetic existence, suffering through her husband’s loss and subsequent poverty, and as combined by the physical exertion from aging, had further sharpened the already brisk woman who in her youth had been a fine, boisterous and hard-working young girl, as the locals would remember. Nevertheless, Nevena never felt she could turn to her whenever she was facing internal problems, and thus from nature became introverted, closed to herself and spoke around her presence only when necessary; she was fond of Gergana and trusted her with her life because the woman she had been taught to call ‘baba’ was indeed made of steel and iron, and yet such strength of character notwithstanding, Nevena crawled inside the depths of her soul for comfort in times of agony, much to Gergana’s consternation, whose conscience was put to test every day from the bitter regret and pain of being unable to tell her own flesh the truth of their relation. One day when Nevena was five years old, and after receiving snide remarks and intrusive questions by some other children, she approached the old woman while she was making the dough in the kitchen table and quietly but curiously asked her why she had no parents like the rest of the children in the town did, and whether she was alone because they had not loved her and had wished to discard of her. Gergana would remember this moment for the rest of her life, how her heart had been slashed to hear such words leave the child’s mouth, frighteningly acute for her age, and to realize that despite all her strife to save that child from the condemnation of public outrage, Nevena still believed herself to be ‘alone’ in this world. Gergana tried to explain to the child that life did not always function in anticipated results, but Nevena had interrupted her sharply by claiming the old woman was making excuses and lying to her, before she quickly turned around with a furious frown and left the kitchen in a determined stride, leaving behind a rather troubled Gergana. If there was one thing Nevena detested, it was being lied to. After that incident she abandoned all endeavours to find the truth from her ‘baba’ and instead resolved to discover the truth of her existence on her own, building walls of defense against Gergana which the old woman could never penetrate.
At the age of seven Nevena began to think her thoughts were not private; she began to feel there was someone else sharing them, something which she knew not whence it came from, nor what its intentions were, benevolent or not, but it scared and angered her, and so she resolved to bury her thoughts deep into her Ego, the poor creature not quite suspecting she was only further feeding the monster within that was still at birth, still embryonic and which would develop and escalate in the following years into something uncontrollable by the force of nature and catastrophic. Not yet having reached the age to attend grammar school, she locked herself to her room and buried her mind in large, leather-bound and old books that spoke of adventures, stories that narrated brave deeds of heroes and heroines, poems that reached through her heart and calmed her tempestuous soul, that sent her dancing in clouds of various shapes in countries she had never been before, and then language books she would absorb herself into, decoding the meaning of words, studiously widening her capacity of knowledge, a true chameleon that could absorb information and store them within her convoluted mind, books borrowed from the local library, or from neighbours. It was during such times of ultimate devotion that her concentration was dead-on at her given task, otherwise progressively impaired when she was out in the world, often having the impression there were certain moments in which she could not remember her actions or thoughts.
She did not make friends throughout her time spent in Bulgaria, or at least in the intimate way childhood friendships are supposed to be created, but she did spend considerable time around the other children, enough to know them, to feel them, to control them. They would gather around and sit down upon the green leaves of the forest as she would hold a flashlight at neck length and tell them horror stories of the most wild, unexplored and sickening imagination, horrendous tales of night-time terrors and shocking them to death, but little did she know these stories were more than a simple figment of her imagination … The years passed, and Nevena went to school, her softness of manners and passionate spirit, as contradicting as that combination may have been, immediately charming the teachers and earning their trust, for she was rather adept at altering her self-presentation for the purposes of manipulation, growing this ability gradually in what she would be a master of in the near future. Certain unfortunate events that took place within the school boundaries could have been attributed to the girl, but she was careful, she was shrewd, astute and the teachers dismissed ideas of her involvement; and thus always went unpunished. The scope of such incidents widened, now taking place around the town, and, funnily enough, Nevena always seemed to be near the crime place at the given time, and yet always mysteriously succeeded in twisting everyone around her little finger despite the arousal of suspicions. By the time she had reached twelve years of age, she had completely and utterly driven Gergana away from her, disregarding the old woman’s orders and wishes, whatever childhood fondness there had once been having now eclipsed. Early in the year 1932 Gergana passed away.
The neighbouring family wished to provide for Nevena, and did not fail to mention how her grandmother had spoken to them of distant relatives she had in good old sister, Russia. This item of news immediately sparked interest within the girl’s heart of eventually discovering the truth of her roots and after making a ruckus inside the house in search of any documents that would relay information on the relatives, she burst open drawers, cupboards, wardrobes, threw off bed covers and turned the house literally upside down, until she found a well-kept pile of old, yellowed letters stashed inside Gergana’s bedroom, underneath the floor on a creaking spot. The Zdravkov family. She set out a map to travel to Russia on train, but the neighbours, the Liapchev family, kind-hearted and sensible people, laughed at such ideas, thinking it impossible for a girl of her age to complete such a long journey on her own unscathed, even though at such times children were often left abandoned to cater for their own; some of them survived, some perished. It was the cruel law of nature that the strong would survive. Petya Liapcheva requested of her younger son, Deyan, to accompany Nevena on the train journey to Russia for at least three quarters of the way; he was to go and fetch his older brother from Poland, save him from the webs of a woman that only meant harm for him under the commands of his mother, and would thus stop at Gdansk, while Nevena would continue the journey across the Belarusian borders and to her final destination, Rostov.
Nevena, having at the age of thirteen been developed prematurely, endowed with sandy hair, emerald green eyes and a palest face, had grown into a distant young girl, with rapid changes in attitude and sudden mood shifts, prone to impulsivity and sudden, inappropriate anger – and yet most of the times mustering to control such slowly developing traits. Little did she know twenty-year-old Deyan harboured feelings for her that were disconnected with sentiments of brotherly affection, but the covert glances he would throw at her while sat next to each other in the train sparked within him an inappropriate longing that was displaced and miscalculated. Hateful over the fact she had to be accompanied, and so much more by a male who was only causing her inconvenience, preferably being alone in this journey of self-discovery, she kindly requested of him with an innocent smile during one of the stops in Gyor, Hungary, whether he would fetch her a beautiful blue rose proudly standing on top of the mountain, in all of its beautiful and wild glory, a flower of youth, a source of unsatisfied hunger and despair. She asked of him to bring it down to her if he indeed loved her, and he agreed with all of his heart. She watched from down below with eyes blazing as she struggled through the thorny bushes, amidst the rocks and tall trees, to reach the rose and give it to her. She watched and waited calmly, the sun shining down upon her with angelic light, and she looked so serene. In torment he was climbing the mountain, but disregarded the slippery pathways, the aggressive bushes, and the mist. And he almost made it, but then a rock broke through his boots and the sudden scream that pierced that beautiful morning felt sharp, until there was silence. And then she felt serenity.
Disappointment broke through her heart upon arriving in mother Russia once she realized the relatives were not at all keen to have her stay at their home, for they had too many mouths to feed, too little money, and not to load of patience to begin with; to make matters worse, they had absolutely no idea who she was, for Gergana Krumova had never made mention of Nevena’s existence to them. It was the crushing point; so her life was insignificant to her dear deceased baba, and her upbringing throughout all these years had been based on nothing but lies and deception. Of course, the truth behind Gergana’s actions lay not in such sick thoughts and wild fantasies, but on practical terms: she had merely wished to protect Nevena from finding out the hurtful truth and destroying her childhood, to protect her from other people’s outrage over the fact she had been nothing more but an extramarital off-chance, and ultimately, to avoid the incident in which Nevena would accidentally learn from the Zdravkov family the truth, and as such, had kept her existence a bitter secret. Nevena understood nor this, nor any other explanation. She wandered around the streets of Rostov, an embittered and impassioned child, and soon came to know Varya Gaznayeva, a prostitute, a kind woman who took Nevena under her wing, opened the door of her small apartment for her and happily invited her in, gave her food, gave her part of the money she earned through the means of work for which she was not proud of, but which was necessary to ensure her survival. People would do anything for their survival; even stoop as low as disregard their own self-respect and morals. Nevena began to love her, living with her through the harsh Russian lifestyle as it had developed after the Bolshevik Revolution, staying with her and helping her for the following months and until the year 1934, when suddenly Varya was murdered by one of her lovers in cold blood inside her own house, Nevena having hid herself and watched the crime and the sin in secret.
The return journey to Bulgaria in late 1934 was met with her determined silence. By this time Nevena had picked up on other languages besides English, French and German – Russian, primarily. She survived through the means of forging false papers, thieving, skilful at using her charm and purity of face in deceptive ways that only served to manipulate the other person’s mind, so that she could twist words and intentions and curl them around her finger, make them believe what she wanted them to believe, trust in her, be fond of her, even love her; she allowed them to live in her lair, and in the darkness would consume them, feed from them, let them submit to her. These unfortunate events in her early life notwithstanding, Nevena was determined to continue her life in Bulgaria and start over with a smile and sunshine in her eyes, yet the strange accidents did not seem to lessen with her arrival on the town. Though a part of her wished to forget her obsession over her family, another part of her, a secret one crawling in the dark reaches of her mind never succumbed to the calls of surrender, always researching, always dying to know the truth. She need not wait long. In 1935, on the Thursday of the Dead, during the holy celebration of Easter, the events that followed at her fifteen years of age would open her eyes to the truth and build a pathway towards her own declivity.
Traumatized by the events, by how mother Bulgaria had hurt and betrayed her, one day in early 1937 she took the train and travelled around Europe in a holy mission to right what was wrong. The outbreak of the war found her fighting by the Russian side in her personal struggle to rid the world of evil, and to finally see everyone rest in peace and harmony, which she herself never had the chance to enjoy.
Military Rank: Serzhant
Writing Sample:
The local inn in the small Russian town was crowded with all sorts of people, soldiers crushing their glasses of vodka against one another’s or playing cards, women looking at them with cheap lust in their hideous eyes, young girls serving, old men smoking their pipes and even a small child, a boy that could not have been more than six years old, sat in the corner, slightly worried but curious all the same, staring at the strong, burly men as they laughed, and jeered, and shouted their tough words. “Evgeny, another round of the good old! We will be fighting tomorrow for the Motherland, is this all we are worth of?” one of the soldiers cried. “Dmitriy, I thought we were drinking for Ivan,” one of his friends drunkenly intervened. “Yes, my newborn son, and for Mother Russia, they are both as good as, I think!” Dmitriy laughed at the inn keeper, who chuckled under his breath and bent over behind the bar table to fetch the large bottle of vodka and refill the men’s glasses. As he finally walked over the wooden tables on his way to the group of men, he noticed the young woman sitting by herself in a table by the corner, having emptied a plate of canned beef and roast potatoes and quietly observing the room; he furrowed his eyebrows silently as he stared after her before he turned over and reached the men’s table, overfilling the men’s glasses with the burning liquid as they laughed and whistled happily.
Evgeny Stanchinsky, the proprietor, then walked towards the young woman’s direction, looking at her kindly, albeit with a curious expression on his face. “Can I bring you anything else, malyutka?” the grey-haired man asked her in a fatherly tone, but she did not seem to have heard him, lost in her own thoughts and with her concentration impaired as only her own little heart knew what bothered her mind at the given time. She had barely noticed his arrival, until she suddenly looked up at him, an expression of mild bewilderment in her pale face as her eyes glinted brightly with a benevolent touch, appearing kind but also enquiring. The proprietor repeated the question, this time slightly frowning, to which she responded with moments of initial silence as she glanced at him curiously. Then she broke her inconvenient silence. “Can I have a glass of milk?” she asked him in a voice that could best be described as whiskey being poured down bed sheets of velvet, soothing and calm, almost airy and breathy, with the appropriate touch of slight hoarseness in the edge, enough to counterbalance the deep softness of her tone. Evgeny Stanchinsky was caught off-guard by such an unusual request, and remained in his position, silent, a deadpan expression written across his surprise and looking into her honest, innocent eyes. “Yes, of course, malyutka,” he kindly responded, and quietly stepped away from her table; the men opposite her, however, had heard her words and burst into tears of laughter, pounding hard on the table with their fists and looking at her derogatorily. “I didn’t know this was a nursery, Stanchinsky, but do bring her a glass of … milk. I’ll even pay for her biscuits,” Dmitriy said in a mocking tone, a smirk woven across his filthy watery lips and pierced his brown eyes unto her own green.
Something clicked inside those dark green eyes, and the expression changed, it became colder but also the eyes no longer bore the innocent glint of purity; something had altered within for she returned the glance with an equally contemptuous stare that taunted and sneered at him. “At least I can have peace of mind knowing my son isn’t a bastard product of my wife and best friend’s little get-together,” she hissed in a ringing force, her eyes narrowing, as a mocking grin spread across her lips; such words were immediately met with a frown from the man’s part, as he turned over his shoulder and looked at the other man with surprise in his eyes, appearing to be in disbelief and easily dismissing such slander, and yet the suspicion could not help but be revealed in his eyes. He turned around and scoffed at her in disbelief, while his friend looked a little uncomfortable and preferred instead to down his glass of vodka. “Or else what do you think he was doing, staying back in Mother Russia while you were away fighting against the fascists? I’m certain you don’t have to worry about your family’s safety tomorrow. They’ll be taken good care of … as always,” she poisoned the air, spreading her disease; at which point the lights within the room flickered. Everyone looked around them in surprise but for her; she kept her eyes transfixed on both men while the proprietor having just walked back to her table placed amidst the darkness the glass of milk on top of her table along with the bottle of vodka he had also carried with the intention to refill the men’s glasses a third time, before he carefully made his way back into the room behind the bar to fetch a candle and examine the electricity problems that had most certainly occurred from the imminent downpour.
“It must be hard … loving a child that is not your own,” she whispered maliciously and her grin widened as fists were exchanged between the two men and the situation escalated into something uncontrollable as the lights flickered – she stretched out her hand and snatched the bottle of vodka, in a smooth move tilting her head back as she drank from the liquid that quickly burned through her flesh like lava, and then turned her hungry eyes towards the marvelous spectacle before her – now everyone had involved themselves in the fighting, even the women had jumped into the table to pull the two men apart as the noises of grumbling, threatening words and glasses being broken filled the air – and the lights flickered again – her eyes turned more hungry, her expression became wild like that of a she-wolf which had been craving for a meal for a long time – and the lights clicked on and off again – and her smile widened, as a cackle heartily escaped her throat and poisoned the surrounding atmosphere – the lights flickered once more, and then became steady as the proprietor appeared from behind the room with his tools, and the two men were eventually pulled apart by their fellow comrades, now calming down from the previous moment of wartime madness, breathing heavily, not quite sure of what happened apart from stress taking them over. The young girl in the corner of the room looked at them curiously, even strangely through her innocent clear green eyes. Then she stretched out her hand and drank from her milk.
*
The morning sunlight, though it may have been feeble, appeared through the cracks of the leaves from the tall trees of the forest and shone down on her sandy hair. Breathing heavily as she supported herself against the tree trunk, she scanned the surrounding area for any human presence, though there was none to be found. It was a long way to get back to the frontlines, that much she knew. She pulled the rifle across her shoulder and slowly walked across the endless wilderness of snow in the bombarded Russian forest, leaving footprints along the way, her heart racing fast and her mouth half-open, half-closed as her wide open eyes surveyed the area carefully, slowly, for any sign of the enemy. A crack, a noise – but it was only a bird that swiftly flew off from the branch of a tree and into the skies, disappearing behind the clouds in despair, so that whatever bit of living creature had once existed within her close proximity had at this point gone extinct. Her breath was suddenly cut short by the sound of something – someone – coming near, and she could not help but harbour the idea whatever it was, they were being dragged along the snow forcefully judging by the sounds made in the near distance. Soon enough, a male body – what might have passed as a carcass as seen from the blood in which the soldier was drenched all over him and the rotten brown flesh in certain parts of his body – was dragging himself across the snow, grunting, grumbling and crying in pain, hands reaching out and supporting his weight as he pulled his body across, and then his eyes met hers.
She did not move, but merely stood there in dead silence, watching him closely, unable to tell in whose side he was fighting on considering he was wearing civilian clothes and crying out words which she could not decipher from that distance; it only took her a moment further to realize there was a wolf following the man in the deadly Russian winter, her green eyes diverting towards the majestic animal and shining brightly, dilating, as she stared at its grey and white fur, the ice-cold, steel-blue eyes, and the beautiful grace with which the animal walked closer towards the man, who began to tremble. He pointed at the wolf, then at her rifle, and back at her, speaking incomprehensible words and whining over his fate, his lower part having unquestionably been severely damaged by shrapnel and other parts of his body torn away in animalistic force – and she knew what had to be done. Swiftly pulling the rifle into her hands, she cocked the gun and aimed it at the wild beast. There was nothing else for her but dead silence that separated her from the animal that was now looking at her with a curious expression on its deep, ice-cold eyes, as it stopped from following the man and instead focused its attention on her. The crisp air flew through her ears and numbed her mind, her right eye shut as she peeked through from the weapon, her fingers tightly but slowly touching the trigger, ready to fire. Her heart stopped for a second, the pulse ceased and her mind went numb as the trigger was pulled, and the man’s head fell flat on the snow, dead.