The Snake

“He who wants everything,” he said, “understands that there is always more.”

And this thought helped him to follow only his own road in life.

But when the time came for Rossitsa to die, Spas Gospodov saw the end of the road for the first time. Their children had grown up, each of them had their own family and they had filled their parents with the joy of their first grandchildren – Spas and Rossitsa. And nevertheless he realized how his father was right: the road, his own road, was crushing him.

He had taken her by the hand, sitting on a stool by her bed, in this way he had spent the whole last week and at the end of it Rossitsa told him: “We do so many things which we don’t want our children to do when they grow up. Why is it so? Does everybody really have an independent road and the companion next to him can’t help him?”

Spas Gospodov closed her eyes, those warm eyes, still in love till the very end, and understood that in love and death man is alone. And however he might howl and bite in this loneliness of his, he cannot get out of it.

“Such is the snake bite!” he said, went out of the town on that same black road to Pazardjik and soon he saw the coiled viper in the sun. He trimmed a stick with his penknife and pressed the snake down skillfully behind its horns. He waited for it to spit its poison into the sleeve of his canvas coat and stepped on it with his shoe until it stopped moving. Afterwards he put it in his pocket and went back to town.

Spas Gospodov began living together with the snake. Every morning he fed it, talked to it and in the evening left it to sleep. Sometimes he told it: “That which doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger, doesn’t it!” and he asked at once: “And that which kills me, what does it make me?” And it was as if he heard it telling him: “Everything that happens to us happens also to another man, but in different way.”

“Does everybody meet the snake on his road?” he continued. And it answered: “Only if he has his own road!”

Sometimes his sons visited him, but Spas Gospodov was most happy with the grandchildren. He showed the viper to them, he made them touch it bravely and ask it for something good. But the kids trembled and thought their grandpa had gone crazy.

“It doesn’t matter, it’s OK,” Spas Gospodov said, “there is time to take your own road, kids. Your grandpa has already reached the end of his.”

He kissed them and gave them each a fiver from his pension. And so until their next visit he remained alone with the snake. 

Spas Gospodov had a lot of questions to ask it. Why did his