Street Without a Name (13 page)

‘Here’s to the child’s visit!’ She suddenly gets tearful again. ‘Ah, your grandfather Alexander, how I miss him! How I miss my brother!’

‘I miss him too,’ Auntie Lenche says. ‘He used to come every day, after lunch at the Veterans’ Canteen. We had coffee and discussed the
Healer
newspaper. I subscribed to it, and he came to read it. We were like brother and sister.’

‘Why did he do it, huh? Why did he have to do it?’ Auntie Petrana cries out, her eyes red.

‘An accident, it was a tragic accident,’ Auntie Lenche hurries to say. In her Christian world, suicide is not an option. I’m about to join in the tearful chorus, but Auntie Petrana has moved on.

‘They showed New Zealand on TV,’ she goes, ‘and it’s all water. By God, nothing but water! How does your foot ever get a grip on dry land, tell me? And I look at the houses there, and I go, that’s where my family are, in that nice house!’ And she smiles at me with a couple of random teeth.

‘Auntie,’ I say, ‘what happened to your teeth?’

‘Ah, don’t talk to me about that! I’m so mad at my dentist. She took 200 lev, and gave me a set of teeth big enough for a horse, I can’t put it in! A horse, I tell you, a bloody horse.’

‘Now.’ She turns to me. ‘When are you going to give birth.’ It’s not a question, it’s an accusation. ‘It must be about time, how old are you now? Twenty-five? Twenty-eight?’

I choke on my meat pie with laughter.

‘Leave her alone!’ Auntie Lenche protests. ‘It’s her business if she wants to have kids or not. The main thing is to be healthy.’

‘Ah, ah, that’s right,’ Auntie Petrana shouts. ‘It’s time to think about these things. I want great-grandchildren before I die. Don’t you wait for me to die!’

‘The mince pie is delicious, Auntie,’ I say.

‘That’s right, don’t you wait for me to die!’ She wags a finger at me and downs another half-glass of rakia, then reaches for the wine bottle. Auntie Lenche sighs and looks at me.

‘She’s deaf and stubborn like a mule. But she’s the only friend I have left. All my friends have died.’

‘What?’ Auntie Petrana leans across the table in a cloud of booze. ‘Speak louder, I can’t hear!’

‘I say you are my best friend,’ Auntie Lenche shouts.

‘Ah, ah, good. I’m glad you like it.’ She pats her on the arm and peace is made.

In the afternoon, I go to browse books in Slaveikov Square. The book market here is encircled by trams, and flanked by shopping streets. The ‘American Embassy’, as it’s known here, displays its scarily grinning red-and-yellow clown and Makд
OH
aπдc sign.

On the book stands, vintage porn mags rub naked shoulders with foreign dictionaries, classic novels,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
,
Kama Sutra
, Secret Societies and Underground Movements, Dan Brown, John Grisham, illustrated recipe books and – at a stall manned by a lank-haired bookseller – a toxic collection of anti-Semitic literature. After an unpleasant exchange in which the man accuses me of being brainwashed and tells me that, actually, he’s a Buddhist, I move on and another bookseller mutters to me, ‘He’s selling rubbish. It lowers our standards.’ His own stall offers an extensive selection of Bulgarian
Playboy
back-issues, including the inaugural one, featuring an astonishingly smooth-bodied sixty-year-old Lili Ivanova, Socialism’s greatest pop star, naked apart from a fake tan and some strategically placed roses.

I step into a shady courtyard and discover a huge antiquarian bookshop. This is where I have my first taste of the expat’s rip-off. It’s about time anyway. The shop is piled with the literatures of lapsed eras and discarded schools of thought, and overstaffed by unshaven men
with bursting shirt buttons who sit on plastic stools and exhale cigarette smoke.

But the main operator here is a middle-aged woman with a hawk’s eyes. She spots me fingering a book by an Italian academic about the salvation of the Bulgarian Jews.

‘A rare book,’ she says. ‘You’ll be hard pressed to find it elsewhere. Twenty-five lev.’

This is about three times the price of a regular book. When I protest, she protests back that it’s the only such book on the Bulgarian Jews. I protest that it’s not. Dimitar Peshev, one of the key public figures at the time, wrote about the anti-deportation campaign in his memoirs. Tsvetan Todorov too…

‘And who is he?’ she asks lethargically. He’s one of France’s foremost modern thinkers, I say patronizingly, and he’s Bulgarian.

‘I’m glad for him.’ She turns away from me and lumbers off. ‘You can take that book or leave it.’ I leave it.

At one end of the square, near the traffic lights, a blind accordionist in an undersized jacket sits on a chair. He is a fitful virtuoso with the keys, and his urgent voice from the past is drowned in the traffic noise of the present. I’ve seen him before, once here, another time in Varna, once even with a blind band. He gets around. Right now, he’s singing ‘Exiles’, a poem by the early twentieth-century poet Peyo Yavorov:

And the time will never come
for us to make it back:
an infinity of water and land,
the world will be a dream to us.

One of the booksellers, a man with a tired pony tail, comes up to him.
‘Uncle, I’ll give you one lev to stop singing these dirges. Sing something cheerful.’

The accordionist smiles with a black mouth, as if to say, ‘I can do that, young man, but you are a philistine’, and changes the minor key to major.

At the other end of the square, an old tramp with plastic bags sits on a bench next to two bronze statues, gentlemen with hats and canes. They are the Slaveikov father and son, two of the classic Bulgarian authors on sale here, and they have the avuncular smirk of historic detachment. What do we care? they are saying. We did our best a century ago, and you went and made dog’s breakfast of this country. Idiots. Now you sort it out.

The tramp next to them mutters in agreement as he crumbles some stale bread for the square’s fat pigeons.

Happy news: today is Palm Sunday. Here it’s called Tsvetnitsa, All Flowers’ Day. People with flower-related names celebrate their name day, and since Kapka means a drop of water, I decide to join them from the more marginal ranks of dew-related names. In the muggy, overcast morning, I head out to Alexander Nevsky Cathedral to watch the festivities.

Several hundred people crowd in the giant gold-domed cathedral underneath enormous crystal chandeliers, while a choir chants mellifluously from the balcony above. The overfed priests in gilded robes, led by a goggle-eyed patriarch, swing incense and chant ‘
Boje pomiluy
’ from atop their luscious beards. ‘
Boje pomiluy boje pomiluy boje pomiluy
.’ God save us. Several women with used-up faces and nervous systems wipe quiet tears.

Everybody carries or wears branches and flowers, and the
enterprising Gypsies outside are doing a roaring trade with all things green. A bunch of Gypsy kids follow me, and ask what’s inside my camera. You, I say, and they collapse into giggles. An old beggar with a long white beard and rags wrapped around his feet is doing an impersonation of a nineteenth-century Russian serf, and small coins fall into his tin from generous festive hands. He mutters something about Judgement Day. I adorn myself with a laurel wreath and take a walk along the yellow tiles of central Sofia disguised as a mad bacchanalian, eyes running with hay fever.

The antiquarians outside Alexander Nevsky are selling painted icons, Soviet-era memorabilia, matrioshka dolls, wild animals skins, wind-up watches, German antique cameras, silver filigree jewellery, Baltic amber necklaces, fur hats, Socialist militia hats, leather cowboy hats, feathered hats for art deco damsels, photographs of smiling black and white people, gramophones from the thirties, and small busts of Lenin.

Behind me is the deafening gong of Alexander Nevsky’s festive bells, all 100 tons of them. Before me is the glittering new Grand Hotel Sofia, and across, the former King’s Palace. And between them is the empty space where the mausoleum of the Great Leader Georgi Dimitriov stood before it was blown up in 1999. Three generations of bewildered school kids passed through the marble catacomb and gazed at the moustachioed mummy lying inside, wondering, like me, if he was plastic. It turns out that sometimes he was.

Every year and a half, the Great Leader would be lowered into an underground laboratory, where he was re-embalmed by a team of experts trained by Soviet colleagues already experienced with Lenin. The Great Leader’s gutted body took a bath in 300 litres of embalming fluid, was stuffed with fluid-soaked towels, and dressed in a new suit
made by his personal tailor. Meanwhile, a plaster dummy was displayed in the cabinet upstairs while the lights were tested. Who knows – and who cares – whether I saw the mummy or the mummy’s dummy.

By 1999, when the mausoleum was dynamited by the army, it had had an eventful series of second lives: as an opera prop for
Aida
, a shelter for drifters, squatters and junkies, a public toilet, and a giant graffiti board. As the mausoleum was prepared for destruction, two astonishing things were revealed.

One, the mausoleum was a labyrinth of corridors, passages and underground shelters as sturdy as the Civil Defence bunker we visited at school, complete with surveillance cameras. It had been built by the army to house the entire Politburo in a nuclear emergency. Just how sturdy it was became clear to onlookers when the same army that had built it had to blow it up not twice or thrice, but eight times, over the space of several scorching August days. As the explosions went on, the surrounding streets struck up a cacophonous orchestra of car alarms, a last salute to all those decades in which school kids had worshipped the mummy of a murderer.

Two, before the army came to remove the body in 1999, the scientist in charge of the mummy surreptitiously extracted the Great Leader’s brain. He wanted to test it for mercury, and the forensic analysis suggested that the Stalinist murderer was likely murdered by Stalin himself. The theory goes that Dimitriov was urgently called up to Moscow in 1949, where he was exposed to mercury fumes. He died in Sofia two months later.

But not before thousands of Sofia’s decadent capitalist bourgeoisie, previously known as the middle class, had been executed at swift kangaroo trials with Dimitriov’s blessing. Thousands more were dispossessed and interned in the provinces: 23,399 people, to be
precise. When the ban on these families was lifted in 1953, they were free to live wherever they wanted. Except in Sofia, Plovdiv, Burgas, Blagoevgrad and Varna (then called Stalin) or any other city. Or anywhere near the borders with Greece and Yugoslavia. This ruled out most places, which was the idea. The lucky ones were allowed to stay in their own homes, which were no longer theirs but the State’s, and pay rent to the State. The luckiest ones were allowed to occupy a single room in their own house, for free, and share the rest with strangers who paid rent to the State.

Could Stalin have killed his protégé Dimitriov for being too soft on enemies of the people? Easily: Dimitrov was just a small squiggle in the grand Stalinist design. And since the Bulgarian State couldn’t investigate its big brother at the time, the awkward question was suspended for fifty years.

Meanwhile, it’s lunchtime, and across the yellow-tiled square outside the Presidency the guard is changing. Two uniformed guards ceremonially march away from the gilded gates, and two fresh new guards march in. I walk past them and look at the four faces squeaky with youth. They were born around the time when East Berliners were pushing their way through the Wall.

For them, Sofia has always been like this: the café over there outside the archaeological museum, charming with ivy and Roman ruins; the gleaming, anatomically explicit, gold and bronze statue of Sofia with a crown bearing the city’s motto ‘She grows, but never ages’; the glamorous shopping arcade opposite. It is still called Central Universal Store but it’s unrecognizable from the store of the children’s red boot stampede. I go in.

It’s a glittering, air-conditioned, clinically tidy emporium with an escalator snaking up its middle. The girls at the perfume stands offer
me the latest Givenchy with toothpaste smiles. Upstairs, in the spot where my sister had put on those miraculous red boots, a shop sells sophisticated natural cosmetics: perfumes in large glass bottles; natural sponges built into translucent soap bars. I buy a bar of soap with rose petals trapped inside. The fragrant shop assistant offers to gift-wrap it. I’m the only customer. When I step outside, I glance back at the Party HQ. The red star and the portraits of Lenin and Georgi Dimitriov are long gone, of course, but the building still looks sinister. I’m not the only one to think so, because for years it’s been empty. They can’t decide what to do with it. Personally, I see a large red KFC sign at the top…

I head for the plump-naved St Nedelya Church to check out the action on Palm Sunday. Among much chanting and swinging of censers, a displeased one-year-old girl in a silk white dress is baptized by bearded priests. Everybody in the baptism party is wearing their finest clothes today, 16 April. But they are glum and sombre with their candles, and they may as well be holding a funeral.

The sixteenth of April is a memorable day. On this date in 1925, a bomb went off right here, in the biggest terrorist attack in the country’s history. Six hundred souls were gathered in the church for the funeral service of a general assassinated two days earlier by a Communist terrorist. The assassination had been only a pretext for the real attack, which targeted the government of Tsar Boris III. The Tsar himself was away that day, attending the funerals of those who had died in the latest attempt on his life, ironic for a man who refused to sign death sentences as the constitution required of him. But the bomb went off anyway, and the collapsed domes of the church buried 150 people, not one of whom was a government minister.

The priest is now sprinkling the ever-more displeased baby with a
gilded cross dipped in holy water. And now exit the baby, the priests, and the candle-carrying believers. I straighten my laurel headdress and follow them out. I’m off to the Synagogue for a change of scene.