Street Without a Name (28 page)

This spirit of refinement vanishes later that night when the mehana downstairs turns into a thumping
chalga
club. The entire nation has
come to party, with their children. The grossest of ‘retro’
chalgas
, meaning from the nineties, is pumping through mega-speakers. It’s called ‘100 Mercedeses’, and it’s sung by a fully lobotomized fake blonde called Tzvetelina who wants 100 Mercedeses and 100 men – though presumably in the reverse order, or else how will she get the Mercedeses? I lie in the dark and think misanthropic thoughts.

In the morning, I come out to find that Ruse’s plump, cake-shaped buildings are gripped by a fairy-tale whirlwind of white pollen. The streets are carpeted with fluff and people paw across the sleepy weekend, from shop to café to park bench.

Amazingly, many buildings are renovated. The city fathers sit stonily atop banks, and grotesque faces leer from baroque façades. New-Romanticism, Secession and Art Nouveau chatter to each other over the heads of passing townsfolk. You could be in a tiny Vienna or Paris, which was precisely the idea.

The energetic crudeness of Communist town planning didn’t manage to mar Ruse’s elegant past. Its stately centre of squares and cupolas live in a parallel world of
fin-de-siècle
Europe. What eventually dragged this princess city into the mire of the late twentieth century was the mega-pollution wafting in from the sodium and chlorine plant across the river in friendly Romania. It became so bad that people walked around with masks, despite which they developed strange respiratory diseases.

My one and only visit as a child took place before the plant started leaking. My parents were witnesses at some relative’s wedding. My sister and I wore bridesmaid dresses made by our mother from medical gauze bought in a pharmacy, the closest she could find to tulle. The bride and groom looked grotesquely old to me, he with his receding hair, she with her thick waist. In fact, they were only in their twenties.
The wedding cake was five-layered, a thing of wonder, and we danced into the small hours to a live band playing top of the pops like ‘Yes, that’s how it is in the small town’ and ‘We’ll meet again in twenty years’.

Out of four town clocks, the one in the main square is showing the current time. Its inaudible ticking is reassuring. Danubian time hasn’t stopped completely.

Ruse may not be the most exciting place to be now, but it used to be. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while Sofia was still a muddy Turkish vilayet, Ruse-Rustchuk grew fat on international trade and looked to Vienna for ideas. Bulgaria wasn’t on the map of Europe yet, but at least Ruse put together the first map of the country and the first newspaper. The paper was initially printed in Strasbourg because Ruse didn’t have its own press. Soon it did, and the press was followed by the first bank, the first chamber of commerce, the first meteorological station, the first Navy School, the first pharmacy, the first professional theatre, the first film screening, the first railway… You get the idea. Ruse left the rest of the country practically nothing to pioneer.

And, since I’m walking past the mute Catholic Church of St Paul the Crucified, here is the country’s first church organ. The 700-pipe beast is apparently still played on Sundays, but either I’ve missed the moment or the Catholics of Ruse have lapsed. Or, quite possible in my current unreliable state of mind, it isn’t actually Sunday.

In another first, Ruse built and lavishly inhabited the first urban houses in Mitteleuropean style. The town planning was revolutionized by giving streets names and houses numbers. It might seem a tiny revolution, but it was a step away from the feudal lifestyle of the Ottoman provinces and a step towards Europe. The credit for this
goes, ironically, to the local Turkish governor Mithad Pasha. The Pasha was a cosmopolitan reformer and, like many of Ruse’s elite, a Mason to boot. He did everything in style, even his affairs: he fancied the Prussian consul’s wife, the mellifluously named Kaliopa, so much that in 1865 he gave her a house on the river bank.

This is where I’m standing now, in the cream-coloured, wood-panelled, Levantine-style House of Kaliopa. I touch the exquisite draperies, the furniture, the porcelain. I lean to examine a hairbrush. Is that a blonde hair I see? Beside the grand Viennese piano (Bulgaria’s first, of course), I smell the faded face powder of society balls. I hear the murmurings of city intrigues and shady deals between merchants, canny consuls making a buck on the side, and slick-haired, eagle-eyed international opportunists whose names read like a roll call of the Foreign Legion. I brush up against the starched consuls and their crinolined wives, the groomed officers of the Lloyd Triestino Line eyeing up the ladies on the evening promenade. The studio Photographie Parisienne receives a family in Sunday-best clothes from the ‘Spanioli’ district of the Sephardic Jews, where the Nobel Prizewinning author Elias Canetti was born. The girls at the French school are chatting in a shady courtyard, and the pastry chef at the oriental patisserie is waxing the end of his moustache. I spy the bearded Mithad Pasha in his fez, glancing coldly across a ballroom at the Russian consul. In only a few years, Russia and Turkey would be at war. Ruse would be free, Bulgaria’s richest city for decades to come. Such wealth doesn’t go away overnight. Ruse was the kind of city where fortunes and mansions were gambled away in a night’s game of poker.

Next door to Kaliopa’s House is the House of Baba Tonka, the symbolic mother-fighter of unfree Bulgaria. It makes perfect sense that the houses are so close together. Because while Kaliopa’s House
echoed with waltzes and chiming crystals, next door a revolution was fomenting.

Baba Tonka’s four sons and one daughter were all involved in revolutionary committees in Bulgaria and Romania, and the Ruse cell operated out of her house. In the bloody wake of the April Uprising, Tonka’s children were all killed or exiled to Asia Minor. Her son Nikola was paraded around Ruse by Mehmet Pasha’s government, with his sentence – jail for life – around his neck. But he was lucky. Two years later came independence, and a jubilant Nikola returned to his home town to rebuild free Bulgaria. He lived to the age of ninety, and died just in time not to see what happened to his only daughter.

Her name was Tonka, after her illustrious grandmother. In 1944, less than a century after Baba Tonka’s struggle for a free Bulgaria, Tonka Junior and her husband were branded ‘enemies of the people’. The reason: her husband, director of Ruse’s Boys Gymnasium, had reprimanded a teacher for boasting to his students about visiting brothels. The teacher, who knew the right organs of power as well as the right organs of brothels, wrote a little ‘report’. It took as little as that in the murderous 1940s. The organs worked fast and without trial, and the director was executed together with his wife Tonka.

One of their daughters died soon after, and the other one, Liliana, became lifelong muse to one of the country’s great post-war artists, Nenko Balkanski. Despite his dark, individualist style, Balkanski somehow gained the double title of People’s Artist and Hero of Socialist Labour – whether he wanted it or not. Nenko and Liliana’s grandson, called Nenko after his illustrious grandfather, is about my age and paints churches. The story of modern Bulgaria in a nutshell.

And here, across from Kaliopa’s House and Baba Tonka’s House, is the monumentally ugly high-rise of the Hotel Riga. It’s been
refurbished, and every room looks over the Danube. But this is beside the point.

The point is that Kaliopa’s House was Bulgaria’s gateway to Europe, Baba Tonka’s House was Bulgaria’s gateway to the nation-state, and Hotel Riga is the back door of both. You wonder who will come through that door.

‘Let’s hit the town, guys! Have you got the map?’ A group of chirpy young Brits with narrow blond faces emerge from the Hotel Riga and head uptown.

A historical turnaround has occurred here, and to reverse it would involve acrobatics too complex and too tied up with money for us to ponder now. Elias Canetti became one of the cultural barometers of twentieth-century Europe, and he first took Europe’s temperature here. But he left Ruse-Rustchuk, and only remembered the town of his childhood in the portentous autobiographical sentence: ‘Everything I lived through later had already happened some time in Rustchuk.’

And after everything Ruse has lived through, I want to believe that while the best is probably over, so is the worst.

The bus from Sofia to Vidin treats the unfortunate passengers to a scenic, bowel-rearranging drive along roads forgotten by the transport ministry. Vertical cliff faces peer down at us.

We pass Vratsa, the mini-Siberia of our family. This is where in the mid-seventies my father wore a brown uniform and crawled in the mud for two years that felt like two hundred. But I can’t see how the military Vratsa of family lore is the same place as this little mountain town pressed against the Vrachanski Balkán ranges and choked with greenery and oblivion. Oblivion is the keyword. Let Vratsa sleep here, in this impenetrable mountain. It’s an ideal place for the past.

Vidin sits in a bend of the river at the very western end of Danubian Bulgaria, on the bare bones of its arse. It makes Silistra look plump with wealth. Ruse is practically Vienna. Vidin’s past and present, on the other hand, have endured a divorce so bitter that it’s hard to believe they were ever married.

For a thousand years, Vidin was one of the Danube’s biggest ports and the medieval hub of the whole region. Over the centuries, Vidin was broken off from the rest of Bulgaria by a succession of energetic brutes. The most interesting of those was an eighteenth-century janissary by the name of Osman Pazvantogğlu. Osman carved out a name and a fortune for himself after seceding from the Sultan’s administration and declaring Vidin and the north his own district. To ward off the Sultan’s army, he gathered a motley crew of cut-throats: rag-tag mercenaries, fellow janissaries, and the dreaded marauders known as
kirçali
.
Kirçali
meant literally field brigands, and their reign over large swathes of land meant figuratively that the Sultan’s empire was in a bad way.

This chapter in Bulgaria’s history became known as the time of the
kirçali
. From Pazvantogğlu’s base in Vidin, his army from hell terrorized the Bulgarians on this side of the Danube and the Wallachian Romanians on the other. ‘Who needs leprosy,’ the Romanian philosopher Cioran wrote, ‘when the fate that roused you to life also placed you in Wallachia?’ During the time of the
kirçali
, and on many more occasions thereafter, Bulgarians shared that leprous fate with their neighbours across the ditch.

Though I wouldn’t volunteer to live in Vidin at the turn of the nineteenth century, at least it wasn’t dull. Today, a broken fountain made of three plaster graces receives the cigarette butts of three Gypsy brothers in identical shirts and with blond highlights in their
hair. Drowsy locals sip coffees in plastic chairs and fiddle with their mobiles. The pedestrian mall is lined with pretty turn-of-the-century façades, and trodden by locals who move in a kind of slow motion trance, like denizens in the kingdom of Sleeping Beauty after the evil fairy’s spell has taken effect.

In the main square, the Turkish fourteenth-century Stambul Kapiya gate stands in a permanent face-off with the monolithic Communist Party building on the other side of the square. I take a walk through the green, tranquil riverside park. It’s empty save for a giant stone monument to the Russian army generously defaced with a huge splash of red paint.

A beautiful, derelict Sephardic synagogue stands in a deserted street beside the park. Its chewed cupolas circled by black crows remind me of abandoned maharaja palaces and resident vultures. The blue sky peers through the missing roof, and I stand on the chipped floor mosaic, looking up, for a minute or an hour, caught in the spell.

The synagogue is at the heart of Kaleto district, and Kaleto was the heart of the old fortified town. At the turn of the twentieth century, many Jews populated Kaleto with their trades, European-designed houses, and names that fluttered with exotic plumage, like birds that brought glad news of the world. Here were the houses of printer Finto Alhalel, trader Moreno Pinkas, architect Mayer Aladjemov, the philanthropists brothers Haim and Chelebi Pisanti. Even the cobbler’s shop was called Paris, and the tailor’s Milan. The Communist regime, like its Fascist cousin, found cosmopolitanism deeply suspect. In the 1950s the Jews left en masse. Israel was a construction site, but a construction site was better than a back yard, which was what Vidin had become. As the old-time residents moved out, the Politburo comrades moved in.

I step out of the synagogue, and continue through the river park to Vidin’s famous landmark: the Baba Vida Fortress. Legend has it that the fort was built by Vida, one of the three daughters of a medieval Bulgarian boyar, or nobleman. Her two sisters Kula and Gumza married unwisely and squandered their father’s fortunes. But Vida defended her land, and the locals named the fort Grandma Vida in her honour. Except Vida was nobody’s grandma, because she remained celibate.

Sandbags are piled around the mighty walls to stop the river. An old man in a sleeveless cardigan emerges from the ticket-house at the entrance, blinking in the bright sun, startled by the lone visitor.

‘You’re lucky.’ He points at the water forming a thin film over the access bridge. ‘See the moat bridge? Until yesterday, it was all under water, you couldn’t go in.’

I browse the shop’s stock of cards and brochures. They’re all from the seventies, faded buildings in faded light, faded people in bell-bottomed trousers. The kind man spots my disappointment.

‘They’re old. We need new ones, but with what money?’

I go inside and for an hour I spook myself thoroughly. I imagine crowds of ghostly barracks men – Roman, Bulgarian, Turkish, Romanian – in various states of wretchedness, drunkenness, and cheer, rushing through the empty courtyards. In a dark cell I see a hunched human, and scream. On closer inspection, it’s a waxy blacksmith and this is the armoury. There’s no one to hear me anyway, except the guard who can hardly move.