Street Without a Name (6 page)

I was officially enrolled in the children’s music school Flag of Peace, which meant that I initially had my lessons with Keti in one of the Youths’ Cultural Centre premises. The space allocated to us was a squat, concrete trafopost which consisted of two rooms: a tiny room with a piano, and a larger room for cultural activities like concerts by the Centre’s pupils. The heating inevitably broke down in winter, and Keti wore her coat and shawl, her throat constantly tickled by a bohemian smoker’s cough. The massive electricity transformer was right next to us, humming its industrial radio-magnetic noises, driving my teacher mad with tinnitus, and chipping away at our immune systems.

Keti seemed to have stumbled into the Youth world of panels, overcrowded buses and nervy working families by mistake. She belonged to another era or another country, and yet here she was, sitting with me and the electricity transformer, patiently nurturing my musical efforts from scales all the way to Beethoven.

‘
Moderato!
Slow down, are you late for an appointment or something?

‘Well, if he could hear this, uncle Mendelssohn would turn in his grave.’

Over time, my parents befriended her, and she would join other family friends at our birthday parties, the only arty person in a crowd of ‘poor engineers’, mathematicians and physicists. One night, she drifted away from the adults who were talking and chain-smoking in the living-room, into the kitchen where we kids were playing. ‘This is
a great party,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful to feel part of the family.’ Her eyes were bloodshot, she was a bit drunk, and a pang of sadness went through me, for her or for me, I didn’t quite know. I wanted her to be part of the family, but I knew that we were far too ordinary for her, and at the end of the evening, she would always walk off into the blackness and the late-night buses alone.

Some afternoons, I went to see her play at the plush café of the National Palace of Culture, the epicentre of all things luxurious. In the café, bigwigs and State-approved artistes sipped cocktails and nibbled complicated cakes. Official guests were brought here to admire the dramatic view of Vitosha Mountain. Jaws clenched, fingers steady, Keti accompanied a violinist. Afterwards, proud and nervous, and introduced to everyone as her star pupil, I sat with the musicians who smoked, drank heavily, and laughed at cryptic jokes. She spoilt me with cakes, but ate nothing herself. The tension in the smoky café was palpable, and I always felt on edge. I put it down to feeling an outsider among the artistes. But with my childish antennae, I also sensed that Keti was grappling with something in the shadows that only she could see.

Gradually, as we got to know each other well, she started sharing with me scraps of horror which jarred with her glamorous persona.

‘If I sound a bit funny today, it’s because I had a tooth extracted yesterday. The dentist was a charming man, didn’t give me anaesthetic. Fortunately I fainted, so I don’t remember much.’

‘A sewage pipe burst in our building last week. I had to wade ankle-deep in excremental matter trying to fix it. Eventually the plumber came. A day later. Ah, what an interesting life we have! OK, Hungarian Dance number five. Let’s hear it.’

I hummed Mozart sonatas to myself, trying to block out these black
visions, which she had dragged out of some garbage dump. I attempted to push them back, desperate that they wouldn’t engulf Keti and her piano. Because if she succumbed to the forces of darkness, what hope was there for the rest of us?

Keti’s hopes for my musical career ended when my parents decided that I should apply for a language college. A State education in music or any of the performing arts – or anything else prestigious – involved either genius or heavy connections, and I had neither. My parents were humble technocrats, and although we managed to dig up a distant relative who was a famous composer, it just wasn’t enough. It didn’t help that I suffered from crippling stage fright, and the sight of any audience bigger than my parents and Keti made me forget my own name along with Dvořák’s Hungarian Dance number five. But Keti continued to give me lessons, now privately, in her central city apartment, where I drugged myself on the heady scents of perfume, cats, and old velvet upholstery, while she treated me to hot chocolate and petits-fours.

Keti and I were forced apart the year after Chernobyl, when I went into hospital with a rare auto-immune disease. She brought me rich home-made desserts which I was too sick to eat. I was grateful that she still wanted to see me despite my abject failure not only as her star pupil but as a pianist altogether. When I finally came out of hospital, Keti treated me to a celebratory dinner at a swanky restaurant in town. It wasn’t actually swanky, and it was more akin to a canteen than a restaurant, but I was impressed. There were only a few restaurants in Sofia, and I’d only been out to dinner once before, to The Hungarian Restaurant where my father had come to blows with a rude waiter in a greasy waistcoat over some meatballs.

Now it was just me and Keti, and for the first time she invited me to call her simply Keti instead of Comrade Marchinkova. The pork
chops and mashed potato was the
plat du jour
and the only
plat
, and I was puffed up with the adult luxury of it all. But as I sipped my yellow lemonade, I sensed that something had shifted in her diva universe. Or was it that the hospital ordeal had relieved me of my childish illusions and now I saw her through different eyes? Either way, Keti was no longer the princess of Bohemia. She had put on a lot of weight, and her fair complexion had gone grey, with dark rings around her green eyes. She chain-smoked and didn’t touch her pork chops. She talked nervously, racked by that deep smoker’s cough that no longer sounded romantic.

‘Life doesn’t always turn out the way we want,’ she said, blowing rings of smoke away from the table. ‘I never thought I’d be a piano teacher, for example. I was already started on a piano concert career at the Conservatory. Then I broke my wrist, and thanks to our wonderful doctors, it never healed properly. So that put me out of circulation as a pianist, and I had to fall back on the flute as my second-best instrument. But I didn’t love the flute. I didn’t love it.

‘Sometimes life just happens to you. Don’t let it happen to you, Kapka. And don’t let other people dictate their terms to you. When I got pregnant, my husband asked me to abort. Then he left me to run away to the West, but that’s another story. The abortion was botched up, illegal doctors and… Anyway, you’re too young to know such things. I couldn’t have children after that. But it was my mistake, I was young and stupid. I could have had two girls like you and your sister, someone to love…’

I couldn’t think of any grown-up response to this, so I said, ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ She wasn’t. She was fed up with pork chops and with life. She gave me her dinner and I ate it with a heavy heart, so I wouldn’t have to speak.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost Keti. I had lost her to that unnamed darkness that slowly drains luminous people first of their dreams, then of their beauty, and finally of their lifeblood. Keti was too refined for our lumpen world of humming trafoposts, burst sewage pipes, and dentists who pulled out teeth without anaesthetic. Between the garbage dump and her piano, the battle was cruelly unequal. I went home on the bus that evening, sick with pork chops and with the awful knowledge that something was very wrong.

Not just with us, as I had thought until now, but with our world. And somehow, it was worse this way, much worse. It meant that to survive and thrive, you had to be more like Comrade Gesheva and less like Keti. And I wanted to be like Keti.

This was the last time I saw her. Several years later, when we emigrated to New Zealand, she wrote, saying how happy she was that we were in paradise, asking if I could still play Dvořák’s Hungarian Dances. I wrote back, lying, awkward, finding little to say.

In 1997, news reached us that she had died of lung cancer. She was fifty. I didn’t even know she’d been ill. In the excitement and trauma of immigration, I’d almost forgotten her. And to my lasting regret, I had never found a way to thank her for lighting up my ugly Youth with the sparkling gifts of music, beauty, courage and laughter.

The poor cousin syndrome

When my father was eighteen, his school band unwittingly revolutionized the provincial town of Pavlikeni by playing a Beatles song at a school festival. Someone, somehow, had got hold of the music sheets and the lyrics. The four teenagers, including my father on accordion and my uncle on the guitar, accompanied the singer who shyly mouthed the lyrics to ‘And I Love Her’, without understanding a word, because the approved foreign languages at school were German and French. So they strummed their guitars, and avoided
making eye contact with the local Party functionaries in the audience. The reason why such brazen display of Western decadence didn’t lead to any punishment was that nobody, including the local Party functionaries, knew what The Beatles actually sounded like. After all, they were banned.

However, everybody knew what the dissident cult Russian song-writer Vladimir Vysotsky sounded like, although he too was officially banned. It was from him that my father took his cue on the guitar. Vysotsky died of alcoholism and exhaustion in 1980, but I didn’t realize this because my father, together with the entire Soviet Union and a large part of the Russian-speaking Soc Camp, went on listening to his records well into the nineties. It wasn’t just the minor-key chords that touched a chord in my father’s guitar. It was the fact that Vysotsky’s bilious, ironic lyrics told the story of the ordinary Socialist citizen.

One of my parents’ favourites was ‘Moscow–Odessa’, where the singer is stuck at Moscow airport as his flight to Odessa is cancelled. All other routes are open – Leningrad, Tbilisi, Paris, London, Delhi – places where the sun shines and tea grows – but no, he must go to Odessa where heavy snowfall is expected for the next three days. Finally, in despair, he decides to hell with it, he’s getting on the next plane, no matter where it’s going.

To me, all his songs sounded the same: an angry guy shouting musically in Russian. But for my parents, the song was rife with metaphors of frustrated escape in general, and escape from Moscow in particular.

Both my parents went on occasional work trips to Moscow. My mother and her colleagues visited some sort of sister Central Institute for Computational Technology where Bulgarian-made computers were tested and sold.

To the vast wasteland of Soviet Russia, little Bulgaria was a sunny, friendly back garden of agricultural plenty and shops semi-full of goods. So some of the institute’s more enterprising employees snapped into action and took along bagfuls of Bulgarian-made trainers and proto-jeans. In the parks of Moscow, they sold them surreptitiously to passers-by, at top rouble. With the proceeds, they bought Yunost TVs and whatever else was for sale that week in Moscow.

In my mind, there was a black hole to the east of Bulgaria, an anti-place where things and people got lost. That was Moscow, and Moscow appeared to be in the centre of an even bigger black hole, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was officially referred to as ‘the big Soviet land’, ‘our big brother’, and ‘the Brotherly Soviet Country’, appellations that for some reason sounded funny in the mouths of my parents and their friends.

From my parents’ accounts of their work trips, the Brotherly Soviet Country sounded to me like a very cold Bulgaria on a massive scale, but without the watermelons and tomatoes, the skiing, the sea, the people I knew, and with the addition of six grammatical cases. Moscow was a place with shops even emptier than ours. A place where women wore heavy-duty fur hats in winter, and didn’t remove them indoors all day long, so as not to show their ruined hairdos. A place which contained Siberia and Stalin. A place where people queued up for kilometres without knowing what they were buying because anything was good – if they already had it, they could trade it for something else later. It was a place where people didn’t live in their own apartment, but rented, because ownership was a capitalist crime. A place where people ate desperate things like black bread and black caviar, and drank vodka, and froze to death in the icy streets. A place from which all my parents’ nice Russian friends had obviously
escaped. A place from which my parents were always grateful to return.

One night, I woke up to the sound of my parents talking. My father was back from Moscow. We crawled out of bed to see him. ‘I’m home, I’m home,’ he kept saying. He looked slightly unhinged, his hair dishevelled, his horn-rimmed glasses misted over. He smelt of foreign winter. ‘Now calm down,’ my mother was saying, but she wasn’t that calm either. She looked upset, as if he almost hadn’t made it.

Which was exactly right. That night, his return flight from Moscow had been cancelled due to an engineering fault. He was facing a night on a park bench: no hotel would take him in after his official visitor’s permit had expired. Officially, he’d be an over-stayer and could even be arrested. The other Bulgarians on the flight were in the same plight. They remonstrated with the staff of Balkan Airlines until the harassed Bulgarian pilot came out and explained the situation. One of our two engines is faulty, he said, that’s why the flight is cancelled. We could still fly, but with one engine it’ll be at your own risk. Do you still want to fly tonight? The vote was unanimous and jubilant: a quick death was better than another night in Moscow.

So much for the East. The West, however, was the stuff of exotic rumour and fantastic legend. Occasionally, it reached us in the shape of glossy objects. My mother’s cousin, for example, lived in friendly Libya for many years, where he built dams in the desert. His family lived back in Sofia, and they had a magnificent VCR with a remote control. My atlas confirmed that Libya was technically in Africa, which was in the south, but judging from the lavish things the cousin brought us, it was also somehow in the West.

He showered us with gifts like oval Lux soap bars with women
smiling on the packets, colourful panties for the girls in packs of threes, chocolate bars in shiny foil wrappers which I smoothed out and kept between the pages of books, roll-on Nivea deodorants the likes of which I’d never seen. These objects were like messages in a bottle from the other side of the divide, but I couldn’t tell whether they were friendly or not. They seemed coded, sealed inside their smug luxury.

Occasionally, the West assumed a human face and upset the order of things. On the Black Sea coast where we went for our summer holidays, the West became flesh and blood – and occasionally bare breasts, the prerogative of their decadent society. But you knew better than to stare at their bodies, clothes, towels, and bright Nivea bottles. You pretended you weren’t impressed by them and just spied on them from the corner of your eye, fascinated, while reading your school-prescribed summer titles, and hoped that one of the blond boys would notice you.

One summer, one of them did, and we spent two weeks sending surreptitious, unspoken messages of lust and longing across the beach, while our parents dozed in the sun, dull and oblivious. One day, he stood behind me in the ice-cream queue, causing me to seize up with excitement and nearly faint. That’s as close as we got. I never found out where he was from, I didn’t care, and it didn’t matter: he was out of reach, they would soon fold up their beach umbrella and leave my world. Pretending to sleep, I drenched my pillow with bitter tears every night in the darkness of our single rented room. One night, my parents had had enough and told me off, and bawling my eyes out under the full moon, I started walking towards the hotel where I knew the object of my desire was. My father ran after me and brought me back to our room, but I resented him even in his kindness. I resented them both for sharing the prison of our single concrete room without
privacy, for having no choice, no foreign friends, and no Nivea bottles.

But we did have foreign friends of sorts. My father’s Technical Institute ‘Vladimir Ilich Lenin’ had regular visitors from abroad, mainly France and Japan. And because my father couldn’t afford to invite them to a restaurant, he invited them home. My mother would rush from work with bags of shopping, while my father turned up at the last moment, escorting the guest. After all, a foreigner would never find Block 328, or even Youth 3, unaided.

The foreigners were always extremely friendly in their lightly textured foreign clothes and shoes. They laughed with my parents, and expressed their appreciation of the food and wine, and especially of Rila Monastery where my parents would always take them, because that’s where you took foreign visitors to show off our heritage. And after they left, the foreigners sent us exquisite cards from the other side. For a moment, you could even think we were equal.

But we knew, and they knew, that we weren’t equal. Behind the laughter and the wine, I sensed my parents’ permanent nervous cringe. They knew the foreign guests saw the ugly panels, the cramped apartments, the mud, the overflowing rubbish bins, the stray dogs, the empty shops, the crappy cars, the idiots in the brown suits, and they were ashamed.

Some of my parents’ friends learnt to overcome the cringe by rationalizing it.

‘Ashamed? I have nothing to be ashamed of,’ my mother’s cousin said. She was a medical journalist, and had a big, sensuous mouth that laughed a lot. ‘On the contrary, I’m proud. Yes, we live in a shitty one-bedroom flat with a cat and an occasional grandmother, and I know exactly when my neighbour has diarrhoea. Even so, I have a medical degree, a journalism degree, a PhD, and three languages. My children
are well brought-up and well-dressed despite the empty shops, and I can make a birthday cake without flour, sugar, baking powder, or milk. If anyone should be ashamed, it’s
them
, not us!’

This struck me as a clever argument. But it didn’t help my mother. In fact, it made it worse. It confirmed that we were living in a banana republic, but minus the bananas. It confirmed that the more languages you spoke, the more cakes without ingredients you made, the more political jokes you told, the more wretched you were.

My first real encounter with the outside world occurred at age nine, in Macedonia across the border. The prosperous veneer of people and things there stunned me. They spoke almost the same language as us, and looked the same as us, but ate chocolates with hazelnuts and peaches without down. And bananas. I had never seen bananas before. They sat in a bowl on my uncle’s table. I didn’t dare touch them. ‘Are they plastic?’ I whispered to my mother. They were real. My cousins overheard us and laughed. I was mortified. Everybody gave me chocolates and patted me on the head. It was obvious that we were the poor cousins.

The reason why we went to Macedonia – which was also inside Yugoslavia – was that my grandmother Anastassia (she of the seaside holidays) came from a small lake town called Ohrid. From there, we could see the hazy Albanian mountains. They looked no different from our mountains, but apparently they were.

My uncle, a fat, jolly professor of physics, had been to Albania’s Tirana University many times, and he told us how the shops in Tirana had nothing except loaves of bread piled up on the floor. He told us how the border guards each time unlocked the eagle-embossed gates at the border, let my uncle and his driver in, and then locked them again. He told us that the people of Albania weren’t allowed to go anywhere,
not even to the Brotherly Soviet Country. It sounded like a terrible place. So despite the humiliation, it was better to be the poor cousin and enjoy the perks than to have poor cousins yourself.

Two years later, we went to East Berlin, invited by one of my father’s colleagues, a university professor called Wolf. The city looked bright and glitzy, a kind of dress rehearsal for a Western city. The large avenues and buildings, the blond people and
wurst
stalls, the foreign language, it all appeared festive and exotic to my eyes. Even the Wall, when we glimpsed it, was exciting, because on the other side was the West. We could almost hear the other side, almost see it. It was a mind-blowing concept, being so close, and I held my breath.

My parents and Wolf stood by the Brandenburg Gate barricades, their backs to the Wall and its armed guards. They didn’t say much, they just stood there, as if paying their respects in a graveyard. Wolf’s parents were on the other side, and I wondered why, but I knew this was one of those questions you didn’t ask.

My sister and I ate sandwiches with salami and gherkins. It was like picnicking on the outer edge of our world. We’d gone as far as we could safely go.

That’s right, we were safe on our side – safe from the stresses of alien worlds. Perhaps, thanks to the Wall, I would never leave the Soc Camp – and perhaps it was better that way.

After the picnic, we walked back along Unter den Linden, in the deep shadow of the Soviet Embassy, which was the size of a football stadium. I was happy. Like most people on our side, I had internalized oppression. The Wall was already inside me, the bricks and mortar of my eleven-year-old self. The Wall wasn’t a place or even a symbol any more. It was a collective state of mind, and there is something cosy, something reassuring in all things collective. Even a prison.

Alexanderplatz, the favourite meeting place in East Berlin, was vast and it had the World Time Clock. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, mesmerized by the wild possibilities it suggested: that the places shown on it – Rome, Paris, London – also had a local time, just like us. They had a local time and a local life, so clearly, in some way, they were like us. This was strangely disturbing.

It was much safer to know the world in an abstract way. That way, you didn’t have too many doubts. And it’s not as if we were ignorant, no. One of my father’s educational games on the nine-hour drives to the seaside was ‘capitals of the world’. He would say an obscure country, and my sister and I would come up with its capital. Mongolia: Ulan Bator. Angola: Luanda. Chile: Santiago. Uzbekistan: Tashkent – or was it Yerevan? No, Yerevan is Armenia. My father prided himself on knowing every single capital city in the world. My favourites were capitals that sounded the same as their countries: Mexico-Mexico, Panama-Panama, Algeria-Algiers. Those were the most honest never-never-lands.