Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria
348
Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628730364 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 348 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Peach Street
The Émigré returns
Where do nations begin? In airport lounges, of course. You see them arriving, soul by soul, in pre-activation mode. They step into no man's land, with only their passports to hold onto, and follow the signs to the departure gate. There, among the impersonal plastic chairs and despite themselves, they coalesce into the murky Rorschach stain of nationhood.
At Gate 58 of Frankfurt Airport, the Sofia flight is delayed, and then delayed again. The passengers sit in plastic chairs, patiently squashed by the intimacy of their fellow passengers. I sit next to a hunched boulder of a man with builder's hands and the cigarette-ash stubble of defeat. I look for the word gastarbeiter tattooed across his forehead.
I'm trying to dial a Bulgarian number on a borrowed mobile, and failing. I turn to him for help.
'Do you dial the zero?' I ask, cringing at the sound of my expat's voice. Expat voices are always slightly off-key, like an instrument that hasn't been tuned for years.
He smiles shyly with a mouth like a bombed-out village, and shrugs his great sad shoulders: 'I don't know about Bulgarian GSMs either, I haven't lived there since 1991.'
And he returns to his timid wait, like everyone else in the lounge. Nobody is complaining. They are used to waiting: in state hospitals, shop queues, immigration offices, visa departments ...
Three Germans are standing in a small cluster, complaining loudly about the delay and glancing conspicuously at their gold-plated watches. They are instantly marked out by ruddy faces and expensive leather shoes, but also by their self-confidence. Investors on the Black Sea coast?
The Bulgarians sit in silence, their wide, lived-in faces and rounded shoulders matched by their battered luggage. The women have slapdash manicures and their hair is dyed either blonde or jet-black, with the odd root showing here and there.
The Germans are now laughing, slapping each other's backs with blond hands. At any other boarding gate I wouldn't mind them or even notice them, why would I? But here, at Gate 58, among these cowering fellow expats, I resent them. Here at Gate 58, and despite myself, I'm part of the Rorschach stain.
Are they sneering at us, the last passengers at the EU gates? Are they in fact laughing with perfect teeth as we run along the speeding bullet-train and wave our tattered bundles desperately, smiling to show that we mean well? Wait, we cry over the whistle of the train as the sausages in our bundles begin to fall out. Wait, don't leave us behind. We too are Europe!
But this is a borrowed 'we'. I left Bulgaria when I was a seventeen-year-old East European, and I am now, by all appearances, a 34-year old 'global soul'. But everybody needs a 'we' from time to time, even a global soul. And after half a lifetime and several other countries, the Bulgarian 'we' is still the only honest 'we' I have. And despite my apparently confident country-hopping lifestyle, this semi-genuine 'we' instantly makes the likes of the three well-fed Germans a 'them'.
Finally, we're gliding over the folding ranges of Vitosha Mountain, crisp with fresh snow. The young woman in the next seat-a nurse in Frankfurt – gazes out of the window and wipes tear after tear from her cheeks. Her face is otherwise impassive. The gastarbeiter in the next aisle peers down at the native landscape with some dim stirring of emotion on his face, his rough hands inert on his thighs. The plane touches ground smoothly and the passengers applaud, an old custom at Sofia airport. Bulgarians know not to take anything for granted. The Germans exchange looks of disdainful hilarity. Smooth landings are their birthright.
And now our Rorschach blur spills into the building of the world's worst-named airport, Vrajdebna. It means 'hostile'.
Inside Airport Hostile, we are collectively gripped by the confused emigrant syndrome. Hung over with culture jet lag, we queue up in the 'Non EU' line at Customs and study the try-hard advertisement posters:
Use Bulphone!
The Bulgarian word for goodbye is ciao
The Bulgarian word for thank you is merci
'Such optimists,' says one man to his friend, 'Already sounding European.'
'Why not? Watch this, I'm already one foot in the EU.'
And his mate steps into the EU queue, brandishing his Bulgarian passport and grinning sheepishly. Everyone smiles and looks away, embarrassed. After all, it's mid-2006 and the final green light for the EU hasn't come yet from the sphinx-like HQ in Brussels. What if it doesn't? What if we're not good enough?
There are only five people in the EU queue: the three Germans, and a sun-baked, middle-aged Austrian couple who clutch their designer cabin luggage with pinched mouths. The woman looks like powdered Habsburgian royalty touring the servant quarters.
At passport control, the attractive thirty-something officer with the face of a philosophy graduate who couldn't find another job looks at my photo, then at me.
'Where are you returning from?'
Returning? I hesitate for a second, then I go along with him.
'Scotland,' I lie. He flicks through the virgin pages of my Bulgarian passport.
And I suddenly want to be returning, to be welcomed home by his depressive, familiar face. I don't want to be just visiting. I want my name to be easily pronounced by clerks and written down correctly in a flash without having to spell it ten times. I want to stop explaining where I come from to the well- and notso-well meaning. (Bucharest is the capital of Romania. Well, Bulgaria hasn't been communist for seventeen years. My English is good? Thank you, that's very kind.) But I know this is only a moment of inattention, a lapse, like the mechanical, quickly suppressed tears of the Frankfurt nurse.
'Where's your UK visa?' he breaks the spell, 'There's nothing here.' So I produce the other passport, the real one.
My luggage has been missing every single time I've landed in Sofia, and this time is no exception. Planes take you to places fast, but some parts of your travelling ensemble take longer to arrive.
There are two desks in the Lost Luggage office, and one is occupied by a ravaged-faced man who's arrived from 'Amerika'. He has an American girth and his gouty feet are bursting out of delicate whiteleather moccasins. He can't decide what language to speak. His American has a heavy Bulgarian accent, and his Bulgarian comes out in small, involuntary spasms of village dialect.
'Forty five years I live there,' he points his thumb in the direction of Amerika, 'Now first time I come back. First time!' The impeccably groomed young woman across the desk smiles like a Vogue cover and hands him a form to fill out in duplicate.
My sun-tanned, middle-aged Lost Luggage officer startles me with a dazzling smile. 'Welcome home for the Easter holidays!' and he hands me the same form in duplicate. 'The skiing has been spectacular this year.'
I thank him for the tip, and for tracking down my missing luggage, which is for some reason stuck in Paris. Easter and skiing are the last two things on my mind as I step out of the booth and collide with the sweaty émigré from Amerika. He's having another crisis.
'Oh my gawd, I forgot about the levs,' he smacks his forehead with a hand like a red steak. 'Bulgaria don't have euros! Oh my gawd. I brought a pile of euros! What I'm gonna do now?'
But nobody's paying attention to him. He reels towards the 'nothing to declare' exit, empty handed. In the arrivals hall, he's greeted by a small bevy of beefy relatives who clasp him weepily to their bosoms. No such luck for me: between flight delays and lost luggage I am three hours late, and the friend who was meant to wait for me has given up. I feel slightly bereft in the taxi by myself, away from the huddling community of Gate 58.
'Next week Bulgaria will gift Europe one Bulgarian word,' announces a manically cheerful radio host, 'Suggestions from listeners are welcome, especially from children.'
I can't tell if this is some kind of bad joke, and I don't dare ask the young taxi- driver for fear of betraying myself as a clueless expat and getting ripped off at the end of the ride.
'How about "membership"?' I suggest to test him. He sniggers.
'Sounds ugly. There are so many beautiful Bulgarian words we could gift them. Gypsy words even. All of them short and to the point.' He examines me in the rear-view mirror while I stare at the peeling period buildings along the potholed Tsarigradsko Road, exactly the way you don't stare at things when you're a local.
'It's all good, it's all good,' he goes on with a magnanimous handwave. 'Because we are Europe, we've always been Europe, and now finally they remembered that.'
At that point, a black Mercedes with tinted windows overtakes us. The neckless driver, who has the body shape of a toad, sticks out a hairy arm with an extended middle finger. Digging into his thick wrist is a martenitsa, the little thin red-and-white woollen thread with which the Bulgars have always marked the coming of spring. Come March and April, the entire nation wears them, but on this gangsterish wrist it's an odd sight. Like seeing the Godfather with a string of garlic around his neck.
'I saw the bastard,' the driver mutters, 'I kept an eye on him, he's been tail-gating me for a while. But my colleagues and I have made a decision, 80 kilometres on the open road, maximum 90. We're still in the city, for Christ's sake. See this corner? There was an accident here last night. A car sped into a truck at 160 kilometres per hour. The truck was stationary. The car driver died instantly and the man in the passenger seat was beheaded.'
I try to resist wishing the toad in the black Mercedes the same fate. We listen to talk-back radio. The condemned Bulgarian nurses in Libya come up. 'I know they're homesick', the radio host concludes cheerfully, 'and here's a song for them.'
Deposited in Peach Street and sweating in my Scottish layers, I slalom along with my suitcase, picking my way between muddy holes.
I'm walking on the street because the pavements are occupied by parked cars. Between a convertible BMW and a Hyundai jeep, rubbish containers overflow. A building site has spewed mud and debris onto the pavement. A huge tangle of undeveloped film snakes in the mud, and the faces of holidaying strangers smile up at me in negative.
An old village house with a crumbling brick roof sits squeezed among the ambitious additions of the late twentieth century. On its rusty garden door hangs crookedly a hand-written sign – KNIFE SHARPENER – and behind it I see a small rose garden. The red and pink roses are in bloom.
Peach Street is in a posh central neighbourhood. At the far end of Peach Street, I see the blue bulk of Vitosha Mountain, crisp in the spring air like a giant poster photograph.
But more importantly, our family's new apartment is somewhere here, but I can't find it. The numbers on the entranceways of Peach Street are sporadic, and I start trying all the locks with the unfamiliar bunch of keys. Some workmen glance at me but don't ask questions. Eventually, the key works. I climb up the three floors. Again no numbers, so I try every lock until the key turns. The family's new apartment has an industrial-sized, bomb-proof double door fit for the Pentagon. Expat apartments are particularly attractive to burglars. The neighbours, who aren't even expats, have a similar Pentagon door. They've been burgled twice. But then they have (or at least had) priceless paintings and antiques. Somehow, we have landed among the new rich.
We have also landed among drug-traffickers of select Balkan nationalities. Just the other day, there was a shooting in the courtyard of our building. Masked men shot and wounded four people, including a baby.
I let myself in and walk over the tiled floor of the family apartment. In the bedroom, I discover that the floor has risen into a large bump, as if a family of busy moles is living inside the cement. I lift the carpet. The tiles are broken from the pressure and underneath, I can see cement. A bomb? A gunshot? I don't know who lives downstairs, and after the recent events, do I dare find out? I don't. I drop the carpet quickly, and with a nervous whistle I step outside on the unswept balcony overlooking the courtyard. A fleet of four-wheel drives and jeeps with tinted windows is parked in the courtyard, ready for the next drug safari.
I cross the flat and go out on the other balcony, overlooking the street. I instantly make eye contact with a swarthy worker from the construction site next door. He's hanging in a harness at the level of our balcony, having a smoke. 'Good afternoon,' he says. 'How're you doing?'
'OK,' I say, 'I think.' And under his amused gaze I go back inside.
I examine the dusty interior. Our family apartment's riches consist of several hundred books printed before, during, and after Communism, and a half-broken Phillips TV from 1984 which brings back the first wave of memories. After six months of thrift and self-starvation at a Dutch university campus, my father's research visit culminated in the triumphant purchase of this TV. When we left Bulgaria, the TV went to my grandfather Alexander's apartment, on the edge of Sofia, where he sat in a rocking-chair by his window, looking out on the looming blue bulk of Vitosha Mountain. He used to peel apples, then offer the thinly sliced rounds to us on the tip of a blunt knife. We were his only family. When we left for New Zealand, he continued to peel apples, the TV turned up to maximum. On each of our birthdays, he bought a good book and inscribed it in his pedantic accountant's handwriting, to mark the occasion. He couldn't afford to send it or call us long distance. On my thirtieth birthday, he marked the occasion differently: by jumping out of a seventh-floor window to his death. The window was in the bedroom where he had slept with my grandmother Anastassia. My mother sold his apartment where, unsurprisingly, none of us wanted to go again, and this new flat in Peach Street replaced it.
The eyes of my Macedonian grandmother Anastassia, aged twenty-something, follow me around the room from a spookily lifelike oil painting. She died in the year of Chernobyl, when I was twelve, but she seems to recognize me now, and she seems to be saying something important from behind layers of oils, in a language incomprehensible to the living. It's all a bit too much.
I don't want to be left alone with her in this unfamiliar room, and since I don't have any luggage to unpack, I turn on the TV. Here's an ad. A manicured female hand holds a credit card to the sound of some breezy classical music. A treacly male voice says: 'What is the difference between a good man and a perfect man? 5 centimetres.' The TV is so decrepit it only broadcasts two channels. Next, Big Brother, the local version. It features a chalga, or folk, pop sensation with silicone lips and breasts and the obligatory bleached hair, a footballer with blond highlights, a pop-singer and a general celebrity about town with a tiny forehead and even more modest talents. Their conversations go like this: wow man, no babe, yeah babe, wicked shit, check it out, no way! I can feel my brain cells dying by the millions.
I turn the TV off, and turn the radio on. It's talk-back and the subject is orgasm. A thick-accented man of few words is calling from an unnamed town and treating us to his liberal opinion on how he doesn't mind when his girlfriend does it with other men. What's your profession, the talk hostesss asks. I'm a pimp, he says matter of factly. I've seen her do it with many others. I don't really care. Girlfriends come and go, but the main thing is that I'm free to live wherever I want because I'm financially independent.
I turn off the radio and turn to the bookshelves for therapy. I start picking up books at random. There are three generations of books here, with all sorts of forgotten inscriptions. My grandfather Alexander's hand: '1990, the first truly democratic Bulgarian elections this century.' A book for my father, inscribed on pencil lines by the diligent hand of some young Party commissar: 'for outstanding contributions to the Comsomol'. A book for my mother from my father before I was even a squeak in the bed springs: 'with love on her 21st birthday'. A book for grandmother Anastassia from an opera singer friend who always signed off in French: 'Voilà, ma chère'. A book to me from some long-forgotten classmate in 1981, with the official Socialist child's birthday wish: 'Happy Birthday dear Kapka, I wish you health, joy, and high grades in school.'
And suddenly, without warning, I turn into the gouty airport émigré from Amerika. Stupid tears burn my eyes, I can't form thoughts or even feelings, and the fat of elapsed decades begins to suffocate me. In a fit of Proustian apoplexy, I grab handfuls of books from the shelves, open them at random, sniff them, search inside for signs and clues. Something, anything to tell me what went on in those distant, blurry years that I have so carefully forgotten.
I pile them up on tables and chairs, on the floor. I dig deeper into the cupboards, knocking over old knick-knacks, photographs pressed under glass, and more books.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Street Without A Name"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Kapka Kassabova.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
DISCLAIMER,
PROLOGUE - 'I went into the woods ...',
1 Peach Street - The Émigré returns,
PART ONE - Childhood,
2 In the Students' Town - Flawed beginnings,
3 Youth 3 - A world of mud and music,
4 East and West - The poor cousin syndrome,
5 Chernobyl Summer - Life and death in the provinces of Socialism,
6 Winds of Change - Perestroika in the air,
7 And Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now - Emigration,
PART TWO - Other Midadventures,
8 She Grows but Never Ages - Getting reacquainted,
9 Freedom, Perfection or Death - Macedonian misadventures,
10 Balkan Blues - Surviving in the Balkán,
11 The Curse of Orpheus - A Rodopean story,
12 Into the Memory Hole - Bulgaria, Turkey, and the Death Strip,
13 In the Enchanted Garden - On the Black Sea,
14 Danube Terminus - Just a tourist,
EPILOGUE,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,