Street Without a Name (22 page)

‘No.’ The dessicated waiter nods negatively. ‘We don’t offer it by the piece. You can order it for the next day and our chef can make you a tin of it.’

‘Do I have to eat the whole tin?’ I joke. But he isn’t laughing.

‘Well, you don’t have to eat it all if you don’t want to. But you have to buy all of it.’

I stare at the ‘Rodopean pumpkin pie, 300 g, 3 lev’ in the menu. How much for the whole pie, then?

‘Let’s see,’ the waiter calculates. ‘There are about five pieces in a tin. So that’s 15 lev.’ And no discounts for ordering in bulk? No, this is not ‘bulk’, he explains, this is just a tin. Just a tin with 1.5 kilograms of pumpkin pie that I must eat by myself. To hell with it, I’ll take it.

‘OK, I shall tell the cook to start hunting for a pumpkin,’ the waiter says, and I almost get my first smile. Almost.

My cupboard looks out towards the local culture hall which has proudly hung out two flags from its windows: Bulgaria and the EU. In the evening, its windows light up and the squeal of bagpipes lures me in. All the locals under the age of fifty are on stage, rehearsing for the hall’s grand opening at the end of the week. Those over fifty are in the audience.

‘It’s been derelict for twenty years,’ a flushed old woman tells me, and hands me the script for the play, like a menu. I almost look for the price. It’s a folksy comedy written by a teacher in the 1930s and based around a village gathering. ‘It’s being played by several generations of locals,’ the woman informs me, as if she’s running me through the
specialties of the house. ‘And we’re finally opening our doors again. I didn’t think I’d live to see it!’

During the rehearsals, a few Gypsy kids sneak into the hall to watch. They are well groomed but their faces are prematurely stamped with dejection. They smile at the slapstick and watch in awe the young women in jeans singing folk songs and the chubby young bagpipe player squeezing his goat skin to release Olympian sounds. A couple more kids come into the hall, and what they do takes me aback: they hug the Gypsy kids. It’s an unusual sight, to see a Bulgarian and a Gypsy holding hands, even if they are twelve. Later, I learn that they are all from the local orphanage.

Over the next few days, I see the young faces from the stage at cafés in the morning and cheap mehanas at night, smoking in tight-knit cliques. They are here for the public holidays, otherwise they all work out of town. The orphans are too young to work, and hang around the single main street, looking bored and lost already.

‘We’re the only village in this region which has been 100 per cent pure Christian Bulgarian for ever. We have two Gypsy brothers, builders. But they’re completely integrated,’ the retired old nurse in the new pharmacy briefs me sweetly while selling me some mountain tea that treats everything from dry coughs to menstrual cramps. And, presumably, intolerance.

‘You know in the seventies when I was a nurse at the local Mother and Child Home—’ the generic name for orphanages in Bulgaria has always struck me as odd ‘—conditions were so basic that we’d sometimes have to ride a mule through the snow to reach Gela village six kilometres up the hill. Those who couldn’t ride walked. Even so, in the old days, under Socialism, there was no ethnic distinction. Turks, Gypsies, Bulgarians, everybody got the same deal.
We cared for everyone. Nobody suffered privations like today. There was no hatred. It was a more humane system. Today it’s man eat man.’

I’ve heard this one before, but who am I to contradict her? She is telling the truth, or some version of it anyway.

‘Take me, for example. I’ve given forty years of my working life to the State. What did I get when I retired? A 100 lev pension. That’s why I’m working here. This would never happen in the old system.’

She asks me where I live. I tell her the truth, some version of it anyway.

‘See, you and your family, you too are victims of the new system. If it hadn’t been for this man-eat-man society, you would’ve stayed. But you’ve been deprived of a homeland.’

I don’t point out that it was the previous system, the humane system of man spy on man, that had made me want to leave in the first place.

‘One teaspoon per litre of boiling water,’ she instructs me with care. ‘And don’t forget Bulgaria. It needs you.’

Does it? Shiroka Laka doesn’t give the impression of needing anybody. It would be easy to feel that even if no tourist set foot here again, the village would plod on and endure, stubbornly, ox-like, as it has always done. But the difference between now and when I visited three years ago is everywhere: in the revived culture hall; the spruced-up houses; the new mehanas; even this new pharmacy. Shiroka Laka needs me and other tourists despite all appearances.

And appearances are of an enclave bookended by small bridges arched like the backs of cats. Beyond each bridge is a densely folded land of canyons, caves, mosques, and women in baggy trousers. I decide to rent a car and explore.

At the end of the road to the south-west is Trigrad, the last big
village before the border. The village shop sells everything from salami to shampoo and sunglasses, and the mehana is owned by a man so hairy he seems wrapped in a brown rug. He wears an intensely cartographic T-shirt of Greater Bulgaria
circa
the Middle Ages. ‘Bulgaria on three seas!’ it screams, the refrain of the nationalist revisionist, while its owner explains amiably why he has overcharged me for my sausage lunch. It’s because in the menu the sausage is priced by the 100 grams, you see, and, without realizing, I’d greedily eaten the 200 grams they’d served me. It’s the pumpkin pie all over again.

When I spot a lone minaret standing in a pile of rubble across the road, my first thought is that the Bulgarian on the three seas must have taken a bulldozer to the mosque.

A pockmarked man is chainsawing the wood from the mosque. A woman is working alongside him. I approach and they turn off the chainsaws. I ask when the mosque came down.

‘Three days ago,’ the man says, gruff and wary of the nosy city person.

‘Ah, so recently,’ I say, trying to sound neutral.

‘Yes, but they’re putting up a new, bigger one,’ the man explains, examining my face for signs of bias one way or the other. Or maybe I’m examining him. ‘A church on one side, a mosque on the other. And they’ll keep the minaret.’

‘Wow, that’s very democratic!’ I say. He blinks at me.

‘We’re like that here,’ the woman joins in with a smile. ‘We get on well in this village. There’s no tension. Why should there be? The main thing is that people believe. Everybody should be a believer.’

‘I’m not a believer,’ I say. There’s a pause of disapproval. ‘But I believe that people should get on regardless,’ I hasten to add.

‘That’s right,’ the woman agrees, relieved.

‘Where are you from?’ the man asks, still suspicious. He can smell a Sofianite when he sees one. I confess.

‘Sofia for you, here for us, that’s the way we like it,’ he declares, and starts up the chainsaw again to make a point. But then he turns it off again. He prefers to chat. I ask about the logs.

‘We’re cutting these up, then we’ll sell them to old people as firelogs. I work for a construction company, I do this sort of thing all the time.’

‘And I work for the local forestry. We have to live somehow.’ The woman smiles again. It’s a smile that’s quite happy with its lot, a rare sight in the countryside. A rare sight in this country altogether.

‘I’ll let you get on with it,’ I say.

‘That’s fine. We don’t mind, we have time here. Not like Sofia.’ He smiles gruffly and puts on his ear-muffs. We’ve made peace. They start up the chainsaws again.

I stroll around Trigrad, greeting the gentry who are busy sunning themselves on benches, watering vegetables, feeding pigs, and gossiping: old men with walking canes; women in flower-printed headscarves and trousers under their blue work mantles. They squint, smile and nod greetings. White crags and pine forests rise on all sides.

The villages around here have palpable names like Chestnut, Pear, Leather, Strawberry, Dragon, Thunder. All the geopolitical and ideological brutalities of the last century haven’t managed to whitewash the colours of the Rodopi or violate its mysteries. After all, humans of one belief or another have lived in the caves and river canyons of the Rodopi for as long as there have been humans at all. What are a hundred years? Not even enough time for the stalactite and the stalagmite to complete that marble kiss.

A hundred years is also how long it takes me to reach my
destination. It’s in a deep canyon at the eastern end of the Rodopi, and it’s called the Devil’s Bridge.

I can see why: the devil’s road leads down to it from a tiny village called Grandpas. The grandpas have clearly died off because the village looks derelict. But before Grandpas, I stop in the town of Ardino. I stop because I need to check that I’m still in Bulgaria.

The central square of Ardino is dominated by a huge, pigeon-covered mosque, travel agencies advertising in Turkish, and a loungy café called Bosforus where idle youth with sleek hair sip fruit cocktails. Everybody speaks Turkish. The slow-moving woman in the grocery shop seems lethargically surprised either by my purchase of a packet of Turkish-delight-filled Armenian sweets, or by the fact that I purchase them in Bulgarian. I have heard rumours that in some Turkish-majority towns down here, you won’t be served unless you speak Turkish. You might even be attacked if you don’t. I must admit I’m a little uneasy, both because of the rumours which I desperately want to prove wrong, and because I feel like a foreigner here.

But although the Bulgarian I hear is slightly accented, the ethnic Turks look indistinguishable from their swarthy Bulgarian cousins, and the vibes – if we can speak of vibes in a comatose mountain town on a public holiday – are benign. And since this is a marble quarry region, I’m definitively reminded of my whereabouts by a small marble slab resting in a garden next to the mosque. It’s inscribed in gold letters:

01.01.2007
BULGARIA IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

I imagine the unveiling to general cheer by the smiling Turkish mayor. I wonder if anyone else has noticed that it’s only the small gold
stars encircling the letters that save the slab from looking like a fresh gravestone.

But on to Grandpas, and off down the devil’s road. It’s ten kilometres of steep, rocky whiteness plunging into the canyon of Arda River. The owners of private cars are easy to spot: they are walking; their hair isn’t standing on end like mine; and they’re not muttering through gritted teeth, ‘This bridge had better be worth it.’ By the time I reach the river, I’m as wrecked as the rented car. But one look at the river confirms that it was worth it.

A dream-like, three-arched stone bridge rises to twelve metres. It is so stupendously curved that it actually peaks at the top. Not a stone has fallen out of it since it was built – not by Romans, Byzantines, or the Devil himself, as some locals fancy, but by the Ottomans. On closer inspection, I find one possible reason for this endurance, locked in a hexagonal keystone in the centre of the bridge. This is what was known to alchemists as Solomon’s seal, a symbol of earthly and heavenly vision popular with every major faith.

It was especially popular with Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. Speculation about the date of the bridge’s construction wanders wildly between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, but it’s very possible that it was built in the 1500s under the Magnificent one. The central stone then makes perfect sense. The Magnificent one liked to stamp himself messianically onto buildings with all available symbols of earthly and heavenly power, especially Solomon’s seal which had both.

It also makes perfect superstitious sense. The seal protected you from evil, and since the bridge was used by camel caravans carrying cotton, wool, tobacco, rose oil and other earthly delights, travelling all the way from the Thracian plains to the Aegean in the south, you
really needed supernatural protection to survive. Because the various bands of hirsute brigands operating in the mountains were enemies in theory, but united in practice by a desire for self-enrichment.

A gunshot startles me from my reverie. After I check that I’m not bleeding anywhere, I locate two teenagers further down the bridge, with an airgun. They flip-flop back to the wooden shelter on the edge of the river, where their fathers whack them edifyingly on the neck and beckon for me to join them.

Soon I’m putting away quantities of barbecued chicken, water-melon and baklava, overseen by an extended family of Bulgarian Turks – mute grandma in a headscarf, men in tracksuit pants, teenagers, and younger women in jeans who talk little but smile a lot.

‘We often come here for picnics,’ one of the fathers says, ‘and now we have family over from Turkey.’ The woman at the barbecue shakes hands with me. She doesn’t speak Bulgarian, and giggles delightedly when I thank her in mangled Turkish for the second portion of chicken. They ask me which part of Sofia I’m from. Youth 3, I lie. Ah, the woman who made the baklava says, my sister lives there. Her brother, a man of few words, has worked in Sofia too.

‘We all work in construction,’ the more extrovert husband adds. ‘But now there’s more work here, and we won’t have to go far any more. It was quite depressed before, but things are picking up.’

We chat for a while, and finally I manage to casually slip in my burning question: what happened to them in the eighties, during the Revival Process? There is a painful pause. Even the relative from Turkey seems to understand and freezes up, barbecue prod in hand. Then the extrovert father waves it away with an uneasy smile.

‘Ah, it’s all water under the bridge now…’

‘We came back but some of the family stayed in Turkey,’ the
woman with the baklava tries, but her husband cuts her off.

‘It’s all water under the bridge. Forgotten. Why talk about it now?’

She doesn’t insist. Embarrassed, I quickly say the first thing that comes to my mind – what’s the baklava recipe? She starts listing the ingredients (which include yogurt, of all things) and everyone relaxes. Then they load me up with one last lot of chicken, and I scramble back up to the car.