Street Without a Name (16 page)

If Anastassia ever felt that the blue-eyed man she’d chosen had dragged her into the shallow abyss of mediocrity, she never let anyone know. He was not the knight in shining armour she had dreamed of, that much was clear even to her. He was an accountant from a sensible peasant family. She chose to see his emotional incompetence as a ‘bedrock of strength’ and wrote him poems, but he never found it in him to bring her a flower for her birthday. She yelled at him in fits of jealousy, and he slammed the door in boorish silence. He had no taste for drama – or affairs, for that matter. She wrote radio plays, and he could only sing one tune, the painfully simple hymn of the peasant: ‘When I was a shepherd/and grazed my sheep/I was grateful for my lot/though I was a poor sod.’

But when, aged fifty-something, she fell into the abyss of illness, he followed her there loyally, like a humble, voiceless Orpheus in the underworld. And when Hades swallowed her, like a mute shadow he wandered the world of the living, until his own demons devoured him.

After several hundred euros’ worth of border levies, Rado makes it to Sofia in the new Peugeot. He brings me flowers – real, not plastic – and we assure each other that we haven’t changed since we last met five years ago. Or even fifteen years ago. I tell him many things, but I don’t tell him that I still keep the first – and last – letter he sent me after I left Bulgaria. It was for my nineteenth birthday. I was by then moving slowly, skeletally, in an arctic chill of the soul at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island, which was inhabited, but only just.

‘For your birthday,’ he wrote, ‘I booked two tickets to a screening of
The Wall
. The cinema was packed. Only one seat was empty, the
one next to me.’ Then he had signed off with a stanza from Metallica’s latest hit ballad about trusting who we are and how nothing else matters. I didn’t know who or where the hell I was, but I kept the letter, a message from a far-off land.

The next day, we borrow his father’s beat-up old Renault, and head out of town for a few days. Cultural objective: to have a look at Pirin Macedonia in southern Bulgaria. Personal objective: to meet again and find out who we have become.

We are now standing outside the huge gates of Rila Monastery, where our bespectacled family was photographed a dozen times in the eighties alongside grinning French, Dutch and Japanese scientists in horn-rimmed glasses. Rila was the number one officially sanctioned attraction to show visitors from abroad. True, it was a monastery – slightly awkward for an atheist regime – but as the largest monastery complex in the country, it was also ‘a cradle’ of Bulgarian identity.

‘The object is observed by cameras,’ a typed-up sheet in a plastic pouch greets us. Rado finds this sign so amusing he wants to get photographed with it. Inside the courtyard, the gallery vaults explode in a symphony of colours. The velvety ranges of Rila rise on all sides. It’s heart-stoppingly beautiful, but we are distracted by the frescoes. They are the work of nineteenth-century artist Zahari Zograf who painted half of Bulgaria’s monasteries. Here, he has drawn graphic scenes from purgatory, replete with hairy devils and round-bellied sinners. On another side of the church, every sin is scrupulously depicted and defined in old Bulgarian, for example ‘Sodomites or those who sin with man or woman unnaturally’.

‘Beware sodomites,’ Rado warns the courtyard, and people turn to look at the madman in denim jacket and dark glasses. I suddenly see
that in the seventeen years I’ve known him, he has grown into a Clive Owen lookalike – dark, deadpan, destructively attractive to women. But blink again, and he is seventeen, awkwardly rocking along with Metallica in his fake denim jacket.

We’re told that Father Varlan is responsible for the ‘reception’ at the monastery. Three humble provincial women pilgrims with battered travel bags stand in the courtyard patiently, waiting for him. Father Varlan appears on the third-floor veranda, his black cassock sweeping behind him. He’s a young bearded priest with a businesslike manner. The three pilgrims speak up timidly from the ground. They’d like a couple of rooms for the night, please, father. ‘Yes, yes.’ He waves them away. ‘I’ll come down in a moment. Yes, back up those files and download the images,’ he yells across the courtyard to another monk and vanishes into a cell, not to be seen again. Rado’s guess is that he is surfing the net between the four bare walls of his cell.

Bearded priests in black cassocks shuffle around with a purposeful air. I ask one of them, a chubby-faced man with bug-eyed glasses, when the ethnographic museum will open. He stares at me myopically. The two villagers he is talking to also stare. ‘Will it be open soon?’ I repeat.

‘No,’ he nods, baffled by my impertinence. ‘They’re renovating it.’

‘Yes, but when will it reopen?’ I insist.

‘Whenever they finish renovating it.’ He shrugs self-evidently, astonished as much by my vulgar directness as by my ignorance. I thank him and move on to another priest who hovers around the gates.

‘When do the monastery gates close, Father?’ I ask. He gives me a mistrustful glance.

‘When the sun goes down,’ he mumbles, slipping away from my obnoxious presence. ‘Or later.’

We drop into the monastery museum to stare at the Rila cross, a minutely wood-carved cross with 1,500 tiny figures that took a devout monk called Rafael twelve years to carve with a needle, and then took his eyesight. We also find an original document from 1378, the monastery’s charter, written in the hand of Tsar Ivan Shishman, the last king before the Ottomans decapitated the Bulgarian state. At the mere mention of Ivan Shishman, I hear the soothing radio voice at 7.15 a.m., ‘Bulgaria: Deeds and Documents’, and feel a wave of sleepiness wash over me.

In vain, we look for the monastery’s famous relic: the hand of the eccentric Ivan Rilski, the tenth-century founder of the monastery. Turns out it’s been put safely away since a particularly devout pilgrim a century ago tried to bite off a chunk. Not surprising – Ivan Rilski tried to embalm himself while still alive by drinking special potions, and his disciples were so impressed by this, they believed his dead body to have healing properties.

‘Still, I wouldn’t go so far as to take a bite,’ Rado remarks, earning an unsympathetic look from the heavyweight female museum guard.

Inside the church, which implodes with exquisite walnut-carved iconostases, more fabulous frescoes, and countless priceless icons including a reportedly miraculous one of the Virgin Mary, we spot the tomb of Tsar Boris III. Well, tomb is not quite the word – because here, underneath the sand, is buried a jar containing his heart, his only physical remnant. After being buried here at his own request in 1943, only two years later the tsar’s body was disinterred, and the floor tiles of the church hurriedly rearranged. This brainwave emanated directly from the Great Leader Georgi Dimitriov who wanted to ensure that the popular tsar’s tomb didn’t become a site of pilgrimage.

In the same wave, and seemingly unaware of the undercurrent of
saintliness they were allowing to run between saint and tsar, the authorities tried to remove Ivan Rilski’s hand from the monastery grounds. But the lorry ‘miraculously’ didn’t start on that occasion, and the hand stayed put inside the monastery. The tsar didn’t, and his remains, together with the truth about his death, were lost in the shifting shadows of post-war conspiracy. Some believe he was poisoned by Hitler for being too soft on the Jews, others that he died of a heart attack. Some say that his ashes were scattered in a gorge, others that he was buried at his Vrana Palace outside Sofia, then disinterred. By then the new royals of the day were already living it up at Vrana Palace, and they might well have liked to dance over the dead body of a decadent monarcho-fascist. Either way, in the 1990s the heart was ‘accidentally’ found and reburied here.

But the most haunted place in the entire monastery is the refectory. Soot-blackened chimney, giant cauldrons, stone ovens. It’s a medieval hovel of hunger and warmth. I smell the thousands of litres of bean soup, the tons of soda bread. I hear the crackle of candles burning, the bubbling of wild boar stew, the rustle of cassocks and scratching of itchy beards, the slurping and toying with worry beads, the long, holy silences. No downloading of files, no intrusive visitors with cameras. Just God, the sun rising behind the velvety mountain, and the Turks lurking outside the gates.

Outside the gates, Rado opens the car trunk to reveal a whole crate of sandwiches made by his mother, and enough fruit provisions for a month. We picnic heartily and then, fortified like plump monks, we wave goodbye to the humble pilgrim women who are still waiting in the courtyard, and trek up a tranquil wooded path to a well-groomed grave.

James Bourchier, Balkan correspondent for
The Times
for thirty-
three years, peace activist, and defender of the losing side in the Balkan Wars (Bulgaria) and in the First World War (Bulgaria), asked to be buried in Rila. Unlike the other distinguished dead around here, he had the good fortune not to be dragged away posthumously in an army lorry. During his twenty-odd years in Bulgaria, he often came to walk in Rila, in the company of Tsar Ferdinand, Boris III’s father, the man who loved Bulgaria and especially Greater Bulgaria so much that he dragged it into two catastrophic wars. I wonder what Bourchier, an Irishman, would make of the plaque at his grave, which carefully explains in Bulgarian that he was a ‘great English friend of the Bulgarian people’.

We drive south along the straight, empty highway to Greece, and soon we enter the landscape that Tsar Ferdinand’s army had so bitterly fought for. The snow-capped, jagged peaks of Pirin Mountain shimmer in the blue distance like a mirage. Our next stop is near the Greek border, at the foot of Pirin.

As we approach the border, bilingual signs begin to appear on roadside cafés and shops. We stop at a stall selling jars of home-made ewe and ox yogurt, and green, translucent fig jam. A soft-bellied waiter stands by the stall, a napkin folded over his forearm.

‘Is there any goat’s yogurt?’ I ask him.

‘It exists,’ he says gravely, gazing into the distance. ‘But it’s runny, you can’t cut it with a knife. Ox is better.’

‘So where can we find goat’s yogurt?’ I insist.

‘You’ll have to ask the people with goats.’ He shrugs in that deeply Bulgarian way – resigned, fatalistic, almost mystical – and waves vaguely towards the hills, his stained tea-towel flapping in the breeze. We pile back into the Reunault.

‘Where are the people with goats?’ Rado wants to know, but before
we work out this riddle we reach Sandanski, world famous in Bulgaria for its medicinal air and mineral springs.

As an asthmatic child, I spent holidays here with my grandparents, Anastassia and Alexander. I ate salty corn on the cob in a wondrous white town with a chatty fountain in the middle. Sandanski is also allegedly the birthplace of the Thracian gladiator and slave leader Spartacus. When in the eighties Hollywood’s
Spartacus
was screened on TV, no doubt because the broadcasting censors saw in him a worker fighting against the capitalist-imperialist machine, I gaped adoringly at the muscular Kirk Douglas. Why, he was almost from Sandanski. He was almost one of us, with a delay of about two thousand years.

We stop in the middle of town and buy food from the street stalls: dried cherries from Iran; dates from Turkey; cashews from India. Apart from the crunchy sesame seed bars and the fig jam, there is hardly anything local for sale here, despite the fertile soil. But luckily, a National Fair of Manufacturers has set up camp in the chipped Socialist-era cultural centre in the main square, and we browse the cheap clothes, shoes and cosmetics. ‘Fancy some boots?’ Rado picks up a stilettoed, fake snakeskin creation. ‘When in Rome, you know…’ And it’s true, when we see the locals passing down the long, leafy pedestrian street leading to the park, they are dressed up to the nines in fake brands, every woman teetering on high heels.

The alpine flanks of Pirin rise on the edge of town like a tidal wave of memories. A small, broken fountain sits dejectedly in the main square. This is it, this is the magical white town. In a sudden lurch of vertigo, I sit on the edge of the chipped fountain and fixate on the tidal wave in the distance. Inside it, I see swirling my clueless asthmatic childhood, my glamorous grandparents Alexander and Anastassia, a blue Skoda, an orange Skoda, my scattered family, and fragments of
things I can’t quite make out. The chipped, monolithic Balkantourist hotel overlooking the square is where we stayed.

‘Cheer up,’ Rado says. ‘Look how chirpy the locals are in their stilettos, eating their corn on the cob.’

We climb into the car and leave Sandanski behind, to fester with memories.

We nibble salty, firm-fleshed corn while we drive through dirt-poor villages without a soul on the potholed streets.

‘Doncho for sale,’ announces a scribbled sign pinned on a cart in the deserted village of Hotovo.

‘Who or what is Doncho, I want to know?’ Rado chuckles. ‘Is it a donkey or an unwanted grandson?’

Another scribbled sign – ‘2 lv’ – is pinned to the wire fence of an unfinished house sunk in weeds. Rado pulls over and we contemplate it for a moment.

‘They’re selling the house for 2 lev!’ I guess. ‘Bulgarian property prices hit rock bottom.’

‘Or some cunning peasant is renting his rooms for 2 lev. So that when some hardcore backpacker goes back to France or Britain, he can boast that he stayed in a room for 1 euro. Groovy.’

What is happening, of course, is that the few remaining residents of Hotovo are selling their stuff out of desperation, down to their donkey carts.

We arrive in Melnik, endearingly known as ‘Bulgaria’s smallest town’. The river is lined with a hundred handsome stone houses, their upper storeys jutting out, in the nineteenth-century Revival style. It’s all so small that if the snaking river went in a straight line, you could see the far end of it, and it’s not very far. Why not call it a village?

Because this is not just the smallest town, it’s also the saddest. For
centuries, it was a plump wine-trading hub of some 20,000 souls – Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, and Turks – living, drinking and trading in contented prosperity. When the Treaty of Berlin gave this region back to the Ottomans, the new borders cut Melnik off from its trading partners. It was the beginning of the end. In the Balkan Wars of 1912 the Turkish army felt that if they were about to lose the town, they could at least gut it, and gut it they did. Those who weren’t slaughtered fled south into Greece as refugees, and Melnik not only ceased to be a town, it ceased to be altogether.