Street Without a Name (29 page)

From the top of a watchtower reached by a wooden ladder in the last stages of rot, successive rulers surveyed their domain. Stratzimir became despot of the city-state Bdin and, like Pazvantogğlu four
centuries later, minted his own coins. But the Bdin city-state only lasted for thirty-two years until the Ottomans arrived. Before they did so, from up here Stratzimir saw a busy trade crossroads, caravans and ships coming and going from Dubrovnik and Ungro-Wallachia.

Pasha Pazvantogğlu saw a skyline pierced by ship-masts and minarets. What do I see, before I fall through the rotten floorboards and give the nice ticket-man downstairs a heart attack? I see a town that desperately wants to belong to the rest of a country and a river that has forgotten its existence. The Danube lies inert and swollen, and Romania’s cargo ships in Calafat look just a short swim away. In a few years’ time, they’ll be just a short stroll down the new bridge, if the two countries don’t fall out in the meantime.

The wooden planks through which I can see the next landing down are covered in the inscriptions of students brought here on educational school trips. ‘YANKO from class 10C, 29.VIII.69’ was here, and so was, at an unknown time, BOJKO MAKARONA. Someone else shouts in thick felt pen: ‘Me too! I too was here.’

On the pebble strip that passes for a beach, two teenage lovers are lying atop each other in the sun in the form of a cross. I have clearly reached the end of something, an eerie blind alley. It feels as if I’ve reached not just the far end of Bulgaria, but also of history itself.

Perhaps, as with Silistra’s flooded ruins, what I’ve reached is also the beginning of history. A whirlpool where the river bends around a sharp corner, and anything could happen.

On the empty train south, I have company in the compartment: a woman in her fifties with a handsome face and eyes blue and pure
as mineral. She starts eating a banana. I look at her hungrily.

‘Would you like some?’ she offers.

‘No, thanks,’ I lie.

‘I’m a diabetic. I have to eat complex carbohydrates every two hours to keep my blood sugar up.’

Ill health: the older Bulgarian’s second-favourite topic of casual conversation after money problems.

‘It must be difficult,’ I say.

She shrugs, and delicately lays the banana skin on the torn seat beside her. ‘It’s the least of my problems.’ Then she adds, ‘It’s all from the camps.’

‘Which camps?’

‘Skravena, mainly.’

In the annals of Communist labour camps, Skravena is second only to Belene on the Danube. My grandparents had a friend called Mats who’d done time in Belene. When Mats laughed, his face looked strangely lopsided. Years later I learned that they’d broken his jaw in Belene.

‘When were you in Skravena?’ I ask.

‘My first ten years,’ the woman says breezily. ‘I was one of the 1,643 babies and children in labour camps at the time.’ She sounds almost proud. ‘Did you think they only interned adults?’

‘Well, I… didn’t know. Why were you there?’

‘I was there with my mother and my grandparents. And they were there because of my father. My father was the one supposed to be deported, but he did a runner on the eve of our arrest. Went across the border into Yugoslavia, and then to Germany.’

‘And they deported you instead?’

‘The whole family went on the trains,’ she says with grim relish.

‘Actually, I’m lucky to be alive. Because at the train station, on the way to the camp, some commissar picked me up from my mother, I was a year old, and tossed me into a barrel of dirty water on the platform. Kids were a nuisance at the camps. My mother begged them, but they bundled her onto the train, and she thought that was it. But another commissar picked me out of the water, he had a bit of humanity in him. And he made sure I was sent onto Skravena.’

We trundle past a giant disused factory with broken windows, crouching in the empty field like a dying dinosaur at the end of the cretaceous period.

‘What was it like living there?’

‘Have you seen films about the Nazi concentration camps? Like that, more or less. I saw a man eaten alive by pigs. They tied him up. I remember one night, I must have been six or seven, finding myself outside among lots of stripped bodies. My mother was there too. I thought she was dead. They had left us for dead, you see. And the dogs were eating the fingers of the dead. Crunch, crunch, I can still hear it. That’s why I can’t stand bones in meat, and dogs. Whenever I see a dog, I hear that awful sound, crunch, crunch. But my mother was alive. And there were good moments too. Kids’ birthdays for example, mothers tried to organize cakes. It wasn’t like a normal party, obviously, because we had rations…’

‘What happened to your father? Did you ever see him?’

‘He settled in Frankfurt. In the sixties I was barred from university here, as the daughter of an enemy of the people, but I was given special permission to visit him in Germany. They didn’t mind if enemies of the people left the country for good. So I went to university there, my father paid for me.’

‘Why didn’t you stay there?’

‘Well, I stayed for a while. Then I came back. I’ve been trying to get compensation for the last fifteen years, since they opened up the secret files. Still haven’t got it, but I’m determined. I went to court and you know what they said? There’s no compensation for minors, because we were too young to experience the effects of the repression. Too young! But I’m not letting this pass. We have an organization, Children of the Camps, and we’ll get our way. Justice is on our side.’

‘You know,’ she says suddenly, ‘I mentioned the Nazi camps just to give you an idea. But, of course, the whole thing with the Jews is exaggerated.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘They didn’t kill six million or whatever they claim, it’s exaggerated. They killed some, but the whole thing is blown out of proportion. The Holocaust is a Zionist conspiracy…’

I stare at her for an incredulous moment. She’s been shopping from that ‘Buddhist’ bookseller in Sofia. The inevitable vile argument follows. I accuse her of being brainwashed by neo-Nazi propaganda, and she hits back with, ‘And what did Communism teach you, huh? You and your whole pathetic generation who were brainwashed by it, huh?’

The argument ends when she offers me one last chance. ‘Why are you so worried about the Jews anyway? I don’t understand. Are you Jewish or something?’

I try to convince myself that her traumatic childhood stunted her emotionally, made her unable to empathize with anybody other than herself and her kind, the 1,643 Children of the Camps. Or perhaps her father was a Nazi.

Or perhaps, after an extraordinary childhood, she is now an
ordinary woman, ignorant and keen to swallow any piece of information banged out loudly enough – and the voices of revisionists are loud. Am I sitting here with Mrs Middle Bulgaria: damaged, self-obsessed, provincial, hardened, handsome of face, blinkered of thought, selective of memory?

No, this is not my country. I won’t allow it. Someone please hand me a gun, I’ll shoot myself. But first I’ll shoot the Woman of the Camps.

Maybe I just need a cup of tea and a lie down. This has been a long journey.

We sit in squalid silence for a while, then I get up and move to another compartment.

A swarthy middle-aged woman is already sitting there with two stuffed bags. Unfortunately, she has some emotional baggage too. Without any preamble, she pounces on me with a litany of woes.

‘Twenty-five years in the Kremikovtsi Factory, in the dirtiest department, that’s me. Twenty-five years, and an accident. Look at my hand. A work hazard, they said. But I went on working. When they closed Kremikovtsi, they kicked us out, and didn’t offer anything. That was it, and do you know how much my pension is? Eighty leva, minimal pension. I can buy a loaf of bread after I’ve paid for heating, water and medication. And my son? Unemployed. Can’t find work. So I have to help him and his family too. With 80 leva.’

Her voice clatters along with the train and rattles inside the cold compartment like broken furniture. After the Woman of the Camps, I have exhausted my daily quota of empathy. Nobody asks me about my problems!

‘Why are you telling
me
?’ I say plaintively. ‘Do you think I can help?’

‘I’m telling you so that if you work for a newspaper you can write about it, about people like me who gave twenty-five years to this State, working in heavy conditions and poisonous fumes, only to be living now on 80 leva a month. My daughter went to Italy to work, she earned euros. But she came back, she was homesick, she suffered there. Why should our children be made to suffer abroad, feel like second-class citizens, when they want to be here with their families? Tell me, why?’

She is gesturing with her maimed hand, on the verge of angry tears.

I too am on the verge of something angry or tearful. Kremikovtsi was always there, in the sky, when you looked up. And when you looked down from the pristine top of Vitosha Mountain, Sofia was hidden behind a thick layer of smog. If you felt unwell in Vitosha’s clean air, they said, you should be placed under the nearest exhaust pipe to recover. I think of all the cancerous factory people I knew: Auntie Petrana’s husband; Auntie Petrana; Malina’s father in Pavlikeni; Malina’s brother Ivo. Especially Ivo.

‘I don’t work for a newspaper,’ I say. ‘But things have to change. When we join the EU in a few months, things will change. Pensions and employment will rise.’

‘Let’s hope so.’ The woman wipes her eyes with her mangled hand. ‘We have to live with hope, don’t we.’

We do. I live with hope that I won’t meet anybody else today with a ghastly story to tell.

At Oreshets station, the three of us get off. Cargo trains rust in the drizzle. We must wait for the mini-bus that will take us to Belogradchik, my last destination.

Three young Gypsy men drink espressos in plastic cups in the platform café. In the café I buy a plastic cup of herbal tea, which in my
distress I spill on a couch and on myself. The smoking men timidly offer a paper napkin, without a word. The old man at the counter pours me another tea, also without a word, and waves my proffered money away.

And we sit in a cloud of cheap tobacco smoke and silence. The resigned old man in an ancient ski-jacket, the three young Gypsies with battered shoes and faces, me with tea-wet trousers and ears ringing with voices. Outside, two figures stand on the platform. They are blurry around the edges like ghosts, but I know who they are: the Woman of the Camps and the Factory Woman.

And we wait for someone to remember us, the last passengers of Danube Terminus.

Belogradchik, literally the ‘little white town’, is both little and white, and dwarfed by a petrified landscape of giant, reddish rock formations thirty kilometres long. Sedimentary rock and red sandstone mingled and eroded to form a fantastical landscape of shapes where you can imagine all sorts of life forms, depending on your mood and your drug-taking habits.

Two hundred million years ago this was the bottom of a sea. And as far as the tourist industry is concerned, it still is.

In the town’s main and only square, a festival is on. White-and-red-costumed girls are dancing on a podium under the national tricolour. A brass band of men in poppy-red shirts blow into shiny trombones. Families mill about with popcorn and soft drinks. I ask a bent-over old woman if this is some local festival.

‘It’s the ninth of May!’ She is incredulous at my ignorance. ‘Europe Day.’

So it is. I’m incredulous at my own ignorance. Europe Day is the
opposite of a local festival. It’s a national dream. Dancing and blowing shiny trumpets on our way to Europe – finally, finally. A group of middle-aged men at an outdoor table overhear this exchange, and raise their beer glasses.

‘To Europe!’ they shout. ‘Take some.’ They point to the huge bag of popcorn in the middle of their table. I reach to take some popcorn, but they collectively gather it up and hand me the whole bag. ‘Be our guest,’ says a white-haired man with round John Lennon sunglasses. ‘You’re from Sofia, aren’t you? We like to have visitors from afar. Even journalists.’

It’s hard to protest convincingly when your mouth is full of popcorn, so I just accept the now familiar well-meaning insult. In the valley behind the dancing girls and men with trombones, the petrified rock sea begins. I try to make out the best known rock formations: the Schoolgirl; Adam and Eve; the Bear; the Dervish. It’s a surreal landscape in the declining light of late afternoon.

More surreal yet is the derelict, chipped Balkantourist hotel on the side of a road that plunges into a green valley. And suddenly I recall a musty, threadbare-carpeted room I once stayed in there.

It was the year of waiting for British visas. My parents brought us here one weekend. I can see us, wandering among the rocky creatures: a tiny family in shorts, holding onto each other in the freefall of post-Communism. The miniature figures are climbing and descending, climbing and descending. They look at the rock formations and they see the Schoolgirl, Adam and Eve, the Bear, the Dervish, the Passport Official, the supplicant Migrant, the British Home Office Clerk…

Who could have thought, in those bare-bone survival years, that little Belogradchik would blow trumpets on the way to Europe? The Balkantourist hotel had sweeping views over the rocks, but all I saw
from the window was the terraced brick houses and lasciviously bulging shops of England. That’s where I wanted to be, not at the bottom of a petrified ocean.

Despite the stupefying rocks and the festival, there are no other obvious tourists in town and only one place to stay: the Madonna Hotel. Climbing up a steep street, I catch up with a young couple pushing a toddler in a buggy. I ask them about the abandoned Balkantourist Hotel. The guy shrugs.

‘Who knows? It’s been sitting there for ages. Somebody bought it two years ago, some work started on it, then stopped…’

He probably wouldn’t mind terribly if the Balkantourist hotel never reopens, because, as it turns out, he owns the Madonna Hotel.

It is the family house, and the entire family is involved in running it. The mother is the homebody, the son is the business brain. The daughter, a slow-moving, thick-waisted girl of few words and few facial expressions, is the decoration. She waits monosyllabically on a pack of unwashed, wolf-hungry German rock climbers who occupy a table with a sweeping view down to the rocks.