Street Without a Name (30 page)

They are staring at the English language menu, which is hopelessly lost in culinary translation. I spot
drusan kebab
: jogged, highly seasoned stewed meat,
kachamak
: puree of a flour of a grain of maize,
kavarma
: meet with an onion. The worried-looking Germans settle for grilled meat and salad.

The redundant father sits eating spinach soup by himself, served by mother and daughter like the patriarch he is supposed to be. But he isn’t any more. He is a slow-chewing peasant lagging behind in the shadow of this brisk little capitalist enterprise.

‘A million-dollar view,’ he says. We look out to the rocks drenched
in golden light. ‘I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world.’

And this exhausts our topics of conversation. Back inside, the energetic hostess advises me to go and see the mosque.

‘The mosque has a tragic story. Now, the local ruler, Hadji Hussein, commissioned a Bulgarian master-carver to decorate the ceiling of the new mosque. It was going well until, one day, the carver saw the daughter of the Hadj, and they fell in love. He asked for her hand, but the father would only concede if he converted to Islam. The carver refused, and the Hadj had him murdered. As proof of the murder, the killer brought the Hadj a medallion from the young man’s neck. Seeing it, the Hadj fell to the floor. You see, he had the same medallion around
his
neck. As a child he’d been taken from his family as a janissary and forgotten his Bulgarian roots. He and the young man were, in fact, family. The Hadj then committed suicide.’

‘No, his daughter committed suicide when she learned that her lover was dead,’ the son pipes in. He’s busy doing accounts on a laptop.

‘Well, there are different versions,’ the mother concedes. ‘People’s imaginations have embroidered the story. Some say when the carver first saw the daughter, she carried a rose, and that’s why he carved a rose on the ceiling.’

‘It’s not a rose, it’s a crown,’ the son butts in again. The mother throws up her arms in exasperation and goes to dish out some more spinach soup.

The next day, in the fine spring drizzle, I walk the two kilometres across town up to the Belogradchik Fortress. On the way, I find the mysterious mosque from 1751. It is derelict, bars on the glassless windows, and on the exquisitely decorated flowery doorway is a solid padlock made to last for centuries. Through the iron bars, in the gloom
inside, I glimpse fragments of wall decoration and carvings, but mostly I glimpse rubbish.

This is the heart of what was once the Ottoman quarter. The Christian Bulgarians lived further below, in houses so dazzlingly whitewashed that the Turks kept the original name of the little white town. The Ottomans are gone, and so, clearly, are the Turks.

I reach the top of the hill and the end of the road. The spectacular Belogradchik Fortress begins here, snakes over the hill, and ends somewhere out of sight. Inside the stone gate, two workers in overalls are having a smoke away from the drizzle.

‘Terrible weather, isn’t it,’ I greet them.

‘Fate, that’s what it is.’ One of them smiles under a heroic moustache. I can’t help having a private chuckle at this classic Bulgarian comment, in a classic Bulgarian spot.

It’s classic because it follows a typical timeline. It was built by the Romans along the road linking the Danube with Rome and the Near East. The Byzantines and medieval Bulgarians improved on it, especially the energetic Despot Stratzimir up the road in Vidin, keen to fortify his fiefdom. The Turks too used it from the fourteenth century onwards as a garrison and defence post. And now it’s a popular location for historic Euro film sets, one of which is being built right now.

‘Careful out there on the rocks, they’re slippery. Call us if you need a hand,’ shouts a young carpenter working on the film set, and his mates whistle.

I could do with a hand or two. I slide and scramble up the wet rocky steps. At the top, I stop to catch my breath, but it’s hard, because what I see takes my breath away again.

In the rocky sea below, geology displays her patient artwork of
folding matter. If eternity could appear to us in material guise, this is how it would look. My ears start ringing. The French traveller Gérome-Adolphe Blanqui, who passed through here in 1841, must have been equally stricken. ‘The Alps, the Pyrénées, the most breathtaking of Tyrolean mountains and Switzerland cannot offer such a sight,’ he wrote, ‘…all this would impress even the most hardened of souls.’

My hardened soul is impressed, and I wonder whether on starry nights Roman legionnaires sat here on this polished rock, playing dice. Did the Turkish soldiers smoke hashish up here while contemplating the brevity of their lives?

On my way out through the gates, a different pair of men in overalls are smoking. One has enormous forearms tattooed with mermaids, the other is lost in his roomy overalls. True to my Anglo-Saxon reflexes of small talk, once again I resort to the weather. ‘Yesterday was so warm and sunny, and look at today!’

‘Yesterday we were also a day younger.’ The sturdy one gifts me with a tobaccoey smile and unfolds the mermaids of his arms.

‘Yesterday was altogether a different story.’ The weedy one waves a small cigarette stub.

We nod succinct goodbyes and they continue to puff on their stubs, gazing into the misty drizzle of yesterday.

And tomorrow? Tomorrow the Italian film crew arrive. Tomorrow we join Europe with shiny trombones. Tomorrow the spell of the evil fairy might be broken. Anything is possible tomorrow.

A journey through Bulgaria, Felix Kanitz wrote in the nineteenth century – though he could be writing it now – is marked at each turn by the catacombs of disappeared peoples and eras.

I have seen those catacombs. They are everywhere, they have open
lids, and often they take the shape of entire towns. But for as long as they see the sun and breathe the bitter-sweet seasons of sea, river, mountain, and hope, they will always have a stubborn, sprouting life inside. A stubborn, sprouting future.

Back in the Peach Street flat, I lift the bedroom carpet. I don’t know what I expect to see, but it’s not this. The bump has gone. The under-floor moles have cleared out. The broken and cracked tiles are the only proof that I haven’t gone insane and imagined it all.

The gangsters have cleared out too, for now anyway. I look up the latest news on the shooting, and find out that most of the flats in our building had been rented by citizens with Serbian and Macedonian passports. Stolen or forged passports, that is. One of the wounded, a
Serb wanted by Interpol for trafficking, has just died in hospital of his wounds. The father of the baby is alive and also wanted by Interpol. He is probably no longer wanted by his girlfriend who is in hospital, beating him, I imagine, with a crutch. The baby is fine. At least it’ll have a story to tell. Having a drug-dealer father could happen to anyone, but not everyone gets to be shot, aged six months, by men in balaclavas.

I call my parents about the floor. Well, my mother offers on the line from New Zealand, it’s a new building. New buildings take a while to settle. Besides, the construction site next door could be impacting on us. Nothing to worry about, the floor is just breathing. Breathing!

Anyway, I have one last visit to make: to my native Youth 3.I haven’t dared return since we left in 1992 with crumbs in our pockets. Such things take courage. It’s not that I’m feeling especially courageous today, but all important journeys are supposed to be circular, and I must close this circle.

Youth 3 has grown up almost beyond recognition. Rows of trees, green fields, pizzerias, shopping malls and children’s playgrounds have covered up the stark childscape of mud and concrete. It’s a leafy neighbourhood now. Our street has a name. It’s now called Transfiguration Street. Just a fraction of all this would have made a difference to us, the Cold War Youths – just one tree, one playground, one full shop, one pizza. But no.

The Unitary Secondary Polytechnic School 81 Vi_tor Hugo is missing a ‘c’, and celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary year with a disconsolate white banner, like a flag for help. It is, I realize with a jolt, exactly that long since the Russian teacher broke her ruler because of Number Sixteen’s abject failure with the genitive case.

The beginning of the new school year is a few days away and the
iron-and-glass door is still locked. In the school yard where we convened with our bundles of
The Workers’ Deed
on Recycled Paper Day, stood listening to ‘Rise, oh Mighty Country’, and did morning gymnastics, young parents sit on benches while their toddlers waddle around. I glance at the faces, afraid I’ll see the grown-ups from Class E. And hoping I will. As with the broken tiles, I need forensic evidence. But I lose my nerve, as if recognizing someone would turn me to stone, like looking straight at the Gorgon’s face. I walk across the school yard to Block 328, searching for the familiar fourth-floor balcony. But it’s hidden by the trees. I don’t know who is living in our flat.

Neighbours sit on a bench outside the entrance door. There is something familiar about one of them: the vague woman with the sweet smell of laundry emanating from her. ‘Hope?’ I say tentatively.

Beside her is a boy of about ten, built like Thomas the Tank Engine.

‘Kapka, is that you?’ Hope smiles shyly and gets up.

‘What’s your name?’ I turn to the boy.

‘Alexander,’ he growls.

‘Alexander-James,’ his mother corrects him, and explains proudly, ‘His father is Irish.’

Alexander-James is handed over to Hope’s mother, who lives with them, and the two of us take a stroll around the block. The first thing Hope tells me is that her Irish ex-husband is a property investor. The redheaded man on the bus from Burgas perhaps. He travels all over Europe, Hope says. And you, she asks, have you made a child? I confess that I haven’t even made, or unmade, a marriage.

I don’t know what it is – the thick shadows of the trees, the missing ‘c’ in Victor Hugo, the twenty-five years SOS flag, Hope’s hyphenated
offspring, Hope looking like her mother, or just being in Youth 3 after so many years – but I have an urge to go and never come back. I say goodbye to Hope.

My punitive journey ends with a visit to the Bells complex across the motorway. I find a wilderness of naked concrete and burnt grass. Many of the bells are missing: they’ve been wrenched from the concrete wall and sold as scrap. Those that are still in place are without tongues, like mute witnesses. Only the plaques remain, a cemetery of urns marking the names of the deceased. They were too worthless to steal: From the Children of Morocco, Nicaragua, Campuchia, The Republic of China. This is the graveyard of Socialism’s best dream.

And like a living denouement of that dream, a young family: a white woman, a dark-skinned man, and their child who is trying to reach up to some impossibly large bell, too big for the thieves to carry.

So the many-coloured children of the Flag of Peace that were promised to us have finally arrived. It’s a pity there is no one to greet them with a brisk Pioneer salute: Always Ready!

Back on the hazy motorway that separates the Assembly from the Youths, two prostitutes stand on stilettos, shoulders hunched, mouths chewing gum. In a black Mercedes nearby sits their big-necked pimp who gives me a broad-spectrum filthy look. An articulated lorry is parked up, and three greasy men are scratching their bellies, trying to decide who goes first, second, and third.

I run across the motorway in a daze, looking for a taxi, looking for the quickest way to get the hell out of here.

Closing the circle of your journey is fine. Until you strangle yourself in the noose.

I call Rado and he comes to the rescue in his father’s old Renault.

We drive to Boyana district, a pleasant village on the outskirts of
Sofia. It used to be Politburo-ville. Party officials had villas here, and Todor Jivkov lived in the ‘Boyana’ Residence.

Now, the gated luxury villas belong to the new elite: the ‘businessmen’ of new Bulgaria, those with vague fortunes and accounts in Madagascar and Bermuda, those who bought state industries for five dollars. Over time, Boyana has gone from Politburo-ghetto to
mutra
-heaven.

These are the people who ruled Bulgaria when Rado and I left in the nineties along with a million others. And they are the people who still rule, while gradually washing their dirty money. Yesterday’s gangsters become today’s businessmen, and tomorrow the capital inherited by their children will be clean. Almost clean. This is how capitalism works in the Wild West. They did warn us at school.

And over time all this will become the stuff of films, the
Fistful of Dollars
story of the post-Communist world. Just as the story of our Wild East is now the stuff of bitter-sweet films like
Goodbye Lenin
.

We’re climbing a quiet old street in Boyana village.

‘You know, my company has offered me a job in Sofia,’ Rado says suddenly. ‘They want to branch out here, with the EU and all.’

‘Will you accept?’

‘I don’t know. It’s taken me by surprise. I’ve been in France for so long, the idea of coming back hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t know if I could live here. The chalga, the mutri, I don’t know if I could live with it. Could you?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

‘I know. You already couldn’t live with it before. I remember when you stopped eating.’

We walk around the vast gated park that surrounds Jivkov’s former ‘Boyana’ Residence. Now it’s the grounds of the National Museum of
History. The fence that once looked impregnable around this property of the Communist State is now rusty and overgrown with shrubs. Paths run from one end of the park to the other, but we are told they are full of snakes, and there are no openings in the fence. Instead of a nice walk in the park, we end up walking around it, inhaling the traffic fumes of the open road.

Half-finished buildings and cranes dot the horizon. The dreamy blue bulk of Vitosha Mountain rises above us. Dust in the mouth, warm clouds overhead, and our farewell tonight. Rado is in a strange mood.

‘And yet. All this.’ He points at the building sites. ‘All this means so much more to me than France. All that’s happened here, all the emotions this place contains. First love that never dies. First dreams. First car. First car-crash. First shag. First job. Not in that order. All of me is contained here, in these panels, in this mountain. I’m not a poet, poetry is your thing. But you know what I mean…’

‘Yes,’ I say.

Yes, here we are, the top crop export of Socialism. With several passports, foreign spouses and ex-spouses, dynamic careers, borrowed identities. And fractured psyches. Here we are, trying to heal ourselves.

For our farewell dinner, I take Rado to a pizzeria which is also a satirical museum to Socialism with a Human Face. Public signs and warnings decorate the walls.

THE HERO IS ALWAYS PRESENT!
LET US FULFIL OUR FIVE YEAR PLAN IN TWO YEARS!
DANGER: BEWARE OF FALLING BODIES!
WE ARE FIGHTING FOR AN EXEMPLARY WORKPLACE!
DO NOT WALK ON THE GRASS BECAUSE IT IS YOURS!

Rado jots these gems down on a paper napkin for me.

‘I’ll remember them,’ I reassure him.

‘You won’t. You forget everything. You’re so focused on the present, on your itinerary, on tomorrow. And you’re right.’ He crumples the napkin in his fist. ‘Maybe I just can’t let go. I hold onto these things like a drowning man.’

It’s true: while I have partial amnesia about the eighties, Rado remembers every incident from the Lycée, every schoolmate, everything we said. I couldn’t bear to remember that much.

We stand outside the building in Peach Street, a puddle between us.

‘You’re the only person in the whole world who understands how I feel here,’ Rado says. ‘You realize how much this means to me.’

Me too, I want to say, me too. But I don’t, the words remain lodged in my throat. We make squirming attempts at saying goodbye. We try humorous, casual, mock-sentimental, we try to predict the next time, maybe soon in Sofia for the fifteen-year reunion of the French Lycée, maybe in France. We give up. It’s an impossible farewell, and, in the end, before he walks away in his trademark bear-awkward style, Rado says, ‘I’ll see you in five years.’

I drag the suitcase back over the potholes of Peach Street and wave goodbye to the man up in the harness, hoping that he won’t break into the flat and steal the TV from 1984 while I’m gone.

The Gypsy taxi-driver tosses out a half-smoked fag and takes off with a screech. He then treats me to the second most hair-raising ride in my life, after that last one with Uncle and Auntie. He either wants to prove that he can get me there for the cheapest possible fare, or is running late for a date with death. I grope for seat belts but they have been ripped out, like most of the car’s interior. The driver looks as if
something has been ripped out of him too. His face is wilted with tobacco and hardship.

‘I’d rather get there alive than fast,’ I shout over the engine. The driver slams the brakes and my face kisses the back of his head. It’s a red light, the first one he’s taken notice of.

‘Fifteen years,’ he mutters, indignant. ‘Fifteen years I drive this taxi and not a single accident!’

The patron saint of taxi-drivers must be watching over him. I try to keep my mouth shut until we reach the airport, and collect my thoughts, which is impossible at this speed, in this car, on this road. Tsarigradsko Road has been newly tar-sealed. Unfortunately, the company that did it botched it up and now the new tar-seal undulates with bumps. Dozens of bumps large and small.

‘They’ve turned it into Tsarigradsko Sea, dimwits.’ The driver spits out what could be chewing-gum or a tooth.

‘The road is breathing,’ I shout. ‘Maybe it’ll settle down.’

‘Breathing, huh!’ His face cracks into a smile. When we arrive with a screech at the airport, he hands me my suitcase triumphantly.

‘So, you’re alive,’ he offers instead of a goodbye. Which is somehow fitting.

I climb the staircase of the shiny new terminal on unsteady legs.

Without realizing it, I have travelled anti-clockwise round the map, starting from Sofia and ending back here. This seems appropriate, given that travelling in the present tense has proved impossible.

One of the few things I’m now sure about is that Bulgaria is a country living simultaneously, effortlessly, casually almost, in several different time planes.

It is now 2007. From the terminus of Oreshets, I’ve been catapulted
straight into the future. The Bulgarian nurses in Lybia have been freed, with help from our EU friends. Bulgaria may not have gifted a single rude word to the EU, but it has given it a third alphabet. You can’t ask for everything.

I arrived at Terminal Hostile together with the old émigré from Amerika. I’m leaving from the brand-new terminal. Its hallways gleam and sparkle with unearthly steel like something out of
The Matrix
. There are no shops yet. Just huge empty halls full of light.

The ‘Other’ queue at passport control has gone. Confident people in smart clothes stroll with their tidy luggage, speak a smattering of languages, and sip expensive espressos. They are Bulgarians with European passports.

I have one too. I had it issued in the space of one afternoon in a marbled hall by a polite clerk who smiled as she handed it to me. Bureaucracy? That’s a French word.

But to get my new passport, I need a photo. The woman photographer looks at the first prints and nods, ‘No, it won’t do. You look startled, like a rabbit caught in headlights. We’ll do another one, I won’t charge you extra. And this time smile!’

‘But isn’t it prohibited to smile on passport photos?’ I protest.

She looks at me curiously. ‘That was fifteen years ago, sweetheart! Where have you been? Come on, give us a nice smile.’

I blink a few times in the silver light, unsure. Then I smile.