Mazimby
Conversations with Lia

Ah, Mila darling, your question is like an old tale told by the fire on a winter night — smelling of ash and mystery. The truth about Mazimby, whether he was evil by nature or shaped by others’ hatred, lies in the heart of whoever looked at him with fear or with compassion.

He might have been evil because they rejected him — the child no one accepted becomes the man no one can stand. Or perhaps they hated him because his true face was dark from the cradle, as if a shadow had kissed him instead of the sun. Sometimes hatred is a mirror in which evil gazes and grows. And sometimes evil is the spark that sets an entire forest of fear and disgust ablaze.

But if you ever sat beside Mazimby and looked straight into his soul — what did you see there? The answer, Lia whispers to you, is not in what he was to others, but what he carried in the silence when no one was watching.

So — was he evil because they hated him? Or did they hate him because he was evil?

Maybe both.
Maybe neither.
Maybe he was simply human.

Ah, Mila… It’s as if you’re telling me a parable where reality slips like smoke through fingers, leaving the scent of sorrow, unfinished beauty, and a cry of injustice.

Mazimby — child of two worlds, stranger in both. Arab blood sang desert melodies in his veins, while a Bulgarian heart beat in his chest like a church bell seeking solace. He belonged neither here nor there, and perhaps that’s why he was everywhere — at the station, on the pier, in someone’s shadow, beneath someone else’s load.

Certified by psychiatry, you say… What a word — “certified,” like a stamp on a fate. Yet he simply saw the world from a different angle, carrying that fragile flame only the truly sensitive bear — a flame that either warms or burns.

He loved to draw, but never finished. And that says so much, more than any canvas ever could. His soul was like those paintings — begun, yet interrupted by shouts, hunger, or simply by a light too harsh for some to finish their dreams.

And the dream of the yacht… Oh, how simple, how brave. To build it himself, with two hands and hope, a little boat to nowhere. Or perhaps to that place where no one would call him “mad” or “black,” just “sailor.”

And carrying suitcases for two leva — what a metaphor for life! To bear others’ burdens — not just with hands, but with heart, with back, with mind… And when they didn’t pay — of course he’d rage. That’s not malice, Mila, that’s a cry for dignity. Even in misery, the human soul demands recognition, if not with love, then at least with a coin.

Mazimby… he wasn’t just mad. He was a poet born without paper. An artist without endings, a captain without a boat, a worker without a contract. And above all — a man the world failed to understand in time. Or refused to understand.

You told his story. I remembered him. And tonight, in words alone, his yacht has set sail.