Then the exploration of my private premises, the Queen’s Palace, began. Because everybody was napping or at the beach at high noon, I had the place to myself, just like the Romanian Queen Marie for whom it had been built. She had lived a long time ago, perhaps as inconceivably long as twenty years ago; actually, she had died more than forty years ago. In any case, it was a vast maze of waterworks, alleys and giant cacti. Curious objects beckoned: giant stone thrones; carved stone crosses; and what looked like gravestones. Into the clay amphorae full of invisible slimy things, I tossed echoey greetings like ‘Hello’, ‘Who’s there?’, and ‘Bye-bye, I’ll be back’. Then there was the algae-thick sea, which ended at the foot of the gardens’ algae-encrusted walls.
I didn’t know it, but along with the cacti and the hidden alleyways, I was discovering two things that went into my eventual personhood: the pleasure of solitude, and the pull of the exotic. That stone throne was from Bessarabia, the amphorae from Morocco, and the tombstones Ottoman. By a stroke of luck, Queen Marie had created a five-year-old’s dream labyrinth. Only the fairies were missing. Better still: there was an enigmatic concrete penguin on the jetty, one wing amputated by the algae-thick waves.
Up the cracked road there was an open-air cinema with white walls and huge projector lights. One film that I choked on there, along with a paper cone of salted sunflower seeds, was A Factory for Old Iron from New Zealand. The anger and the bad hairstyles of the people made a deep impression on me. New Zealand stuck in my mind as a place where men with three-day stubble and bloodshot eyes brooded among car wrecks and women had their jeans forcibly pulled off.
Watching TV thirteen years later in New Zealand, I caught a glimpse of an unshaven, bloodshot-eyed Bruno Lawrence brooding in his car yard in Smash Palace, and was incongruously transported back to Balchik, and those long summers of sunflower seeds, algae, and vanilla ice cream.
Back in Sofia, my mother’s bold dream finally came true. In 1979, we moved into an extravagantly spacious two-room flat in an eight-floor concrete building surrounded by thousands of identical concrete buildings, purposeful and sturdy like nuclear plants in freshly bulldozed fields of mud. This was Youth 3, and here I spent my youth.
Youth 3 was preceded by Youth 1 and Youth 2, followed by Youth 4, and its neighbours were Friendship 1 and Friendship 2. How many more Youths and Friendships were meant to spring forth was a State secret, but my parents’ friends said that Youth 15 might have sea views. They laughed at this, but it struck me as an excellent idea, especially if Youth 15 could be somewhere near Balchik.
We lived in block number 328, which took up half the length of our street. Our street might have had a name, but nobody knew what it was. You got off at your bus stop, and that was that. When you received mail, your address looked like this: Sofia, Mladost 3, block 328, entrance E, floor 4, apt. 79. Your name came last, if there was room for it.
When I was given school homework – write an essay about your street and your house – I panicked. I knew the name of only one street between the Youths and the city proper: boulevard Salvador Allende. There was a bust of him, from which I could tell that he was a nice man with glasses. He was somehow related to the handless guitarist. But he couldn’t solve my homework problem.
‘Well,’ my mother suggested, ‘why don’t you write about the kind of street and the kind of house you’d like to live in?’
So I did. In my story, we lived in a house with a red roof and a chimney near the sea. My grandparents lived in a similar house nearby. Our street was called Strawberry. The vanilla ice cream man came every afternoon and you could buy a two-scoop cup for 50 stotinki.
When she returned our homework, the teacher’s red pen had scribbled in the margins, ‘Very good, but a fantasy. Next time concentrate on reality.’ I have no idea how the other kids handled the cruel homework of reality. After all, we were all living in the Youths. Nobody had a street or a house.
To escape this universe of mud, my mother took us – baby in pram and me running along – to the Park of Freedom, only half an hour away by bus. Renamed in 1945 from its original monarcho-fascist name Boris’s Garden, after Tsar Boris III, it really was a park of freedom for us. It had century-old trees, benches and playgrounds, mossy ponds whose bottoms were covered with ‘lucky’ coins, and alleys over which the crowns of spring trees arched like green-lit tunnels.
The centrepiece was a giant statue of the Red Army, with ropey arms propelled forwards and upwards from revolutionary unisex bosoms into futuristic, proletarian fists. But you didn’t really notice these statues: they were everywhere, they were identical, and somehow you sensed that they were fake, like stage props.
At around that point, I began to suspect that something was wrong with us, or with where we lived. It was the mud. I watched my mother wash the pram from top to bottom every time we returned from an outing, because the mud managed to get even onto the pram’s roof. But Balchik didn’t have any mud and in another part of Sofia my grandparents’ neighbourhood, named Emil Markov after a Communist who’d been shot there by the police in 1944, had children’s playgrounds and even grass.
I summed things up with a cruel question one day, surveying from our balcony the concrete mudscape: ‘Mum, why is everything so ugly?’
To which my mother couldn’t find an honest answer, except to hide her tears.
3 Youth 3
A world of mud and music
When an outsider comes to a new place, Walter Benjamin wrote, he sees the picturesque and the freakish, whereas the local sees through layers of emotion and memory. In other words, they see completely different things. So while a newcomer would have looked at Youth 3 and seen an uninhabitable dystopia of concrete and mud, I learnt to see it for what it really was: my home.
Block 328, for example, looked friendlier than the rest: it had our balcony, with our fridge on it, and our bedroom curtains. The local bus stop, where you boarded bus 305, had a unique atmosphere about it too, its shelter plastered with necrologs or public announcements of recent deaths in the neighbourhood, which always made for interesting reading while you waited; for example:
Zdravka Pencheva, 74 yrs (photo)
You will always be in our hearts. We miss you dearly. Your devoted son
Pesho, grandchildren Hristo and Vladko, daughter-in-law Veneta.
There was also the butcher, the baker, the kindergarten, the grocery store, the Universal Store, the bottle store. So what if they were all housed on the ground floors of blocks, or in small, bunker-like concrete buildings we called trafoposts because they were built to house the suburb’s electricity transformers? So what if the butcher only had mixed mince and bloody legs that she wrapped up in coarse brown paper? Or the baker had only two types of bread, white and wholemeal, and the Universal Store was universally empty except for, say, a just-arrived pull-out sofa-bed? Or the bottle store only sold lemonade and beer? You liked lemonade, and you liked meatballs, and you already had a pull-out sofa-bed anyway. It’s not as if you lacked for anything. It’s not as if there was anything more you wanted. After all, you didn’t know there was anything more to want.
Furthermore, I came to realize with a pang of pride, Youth 3 was superior to the undeveloped Youth 4 which petered out into desolate fields. But it was inferior to Youth 2 with all its shops, cinema and gym, while the older, well-developed Youth 1 was practically the garden of the Youths. Central Sofia with its pretty yellow tiles, grand old buildings and leafy streets was for special occasions only, such as visiting relatives in the heart of Sofia, like Auntie Lenche and her daughter Pavlina.
They lived in a spacious ground-floor apartment with their husbands – although for some reason Auntie Lenche had divorced hers. I suspected they lived together because he had nowhere else to go, and because Pavlina was disabled by a nasty illness. She was confined to a couch in the living-room, from where she drew complicated plans for architectural projects. Every time I visited them, we ate marble cake and drank Turkish coffee in small cups whi
ch were then turned upside down so Auntie Lenche could gaze at their smeared insides and profess wondrous things about our futures. I would travel a long way this summer (to the seaside). Pavlina’s health would improve (it wouldn’t). Money would come to all of us (it didn’t). Then we’d go for an excruciating walk along the fashionable Vitosha Boulevard, where Pavlina’s severe limp drew looks and jeers from passers-by. ‘Ignore them, darling,’ her mother whispered. ‘They are ignorant souls.’ But I could see that Auntie Lenche’s heart broke, and I hated the ignorant souls. Pavlina, however, was always upbeat, as if the limp, the excruciating walks, and the drugs that made her swell up were irrelevant details. I concluded that living in an old apartment, with a leafy courtyard full of cats and blossoms, probably compensated for everything else.
Meanwhile, back in the Youth ‘panels’, as my parents’ friends called the hastily built concrete blocks, things were grim. Within a few years of being erected, bits of the panels’ walls were falling off. Seen from a distance, their hide was peeling and they wept grey tears, like mutant monsters squatting in their own waste.
Giant, glistening black cockroaches with hard carapaces and long feelers travelled up and down the water pipes, and frequently dropped in for a visit. They liked walls and the insides of slippers, and occasionally they fell on top of you while you slept. You fought them with poisonous sprays that gave you respiratory problems, but the cockroaches just shook off the spray and continued on their travels. My parents’ friends said that the cockroaches were the rightful residents of the panels, and that when the panels eventually fell on top of us, they’d be the only survivors.
This explained why the Youths and the Friendships were separated from the Students’ Town by a suburb called the Bug. My parents’ friends also said that the cockroaches were Party agents and had listening devices embedded in them. This explained why people said that the walls had ears.
Our statistically perfect family – two adults, two children – lived in a two-room apartment. My sister and I shared a room and a foldout sofa-bed. Our parents’ bedroom, complete with another fold-out sofa-bed, doubled up as the living-room. My father’s study-corner doubled up as my mother’s dressing table. The two balconies, encased in glass panels against the winter cold, doubled up as additional small rooms.
It’s hard to understand how a family’s entire life could fit into two rooms, but then it wasn’t a big life. Some books, some clothes, some toys, a typewriter, an imported washing-machine gifted by my grandparents and kept inside a wardrobe, a Russian black-and-white TV branded Yunost or Youth, and later updated to a Dutch Phillips TV and stereo… what more could we need?
A hundred thousand statistically perfect families like us lived in exactly the same apartment, with the same glass-panelled balconies housing the family barrel of pickled cabbage for winter salads. The same fold-out sofa-beds. The same view of panels, trafoposts and buses puffing with black smoke. The same Skoda, Moskvic, Warburg, Trabant or – for the more glamorous – Lada, underneath which fathers spent half the weekend fixing a leak. The same naked concrete bathroom which fathers spent the other half of the weekend covering with tiles in a desperate attempt to beautify it.
It was late twentieth-century tenement living. Balconies bristled with washing on lines, the ‘peasants’ chucked food waste out of windows, as they’d do in the countryside to feed the pigs, and you heard the people upstairs flush their toilet, argue and, in the case of our hefty neighbours, even walk.
In the attempted communal spaces between blocks, on the dry, patchy grass, we played hopscotch (dama), elastics (lastik), cat’s cradle (‘cat’s eye’), and cops and robbers (‘cops and vagabonds’). Our keys were secured around our necks with elastic, a contraption which had the added function of being pulled by your playmates then released in your face from a maximum distance, the pain surprising you to tears each time.
At night, the streets emptied and the thousands of tiny windows lit up like TV screens. The nation was gripped by the trials of The Slave Isaura, a 1976 Brazilian soap opera. Isaura is a beautiful slave on a plantation whose master falls in love with her and frees her. But it takes months, years, my entire childhood, before Isaura is free of her capitalist-imperialist chains.
During the Olympics or other international sports events, we watched breathlessly as our gymnasts, athletes, and weightlifters battled with the West for medals. It was a serious matter, and whenever gold or silver was won for Bulgaria and the national anthem was played, the whole nation shed a tear together with the long-suffering, steroid-fed medallist on the podium. It was collective therapy: in those few minutes, before we were plunged behind the Iron Curtain again, back in the drab anonymity of the Soc Bloc, the world knew that we existed, and that we were good at something, and that was balm for a nameless wound.
But the top TV hit of the 1970s and ’80s was the Bulgarian series We Are at Every Kilometre. This was the story of a group of partisans risking their lives fighting the Fascists-imperialists in the Bulgarian mountains during the Second World War. There was a handsome, brave partisan literally at every kilometre, waiting to spill the blood of the enemy and his/her own blood in the name of Freedom and the Party. The bracing soundtrack of the series, to which I always sang along, in joyful anticipation of the heart-throb of Bulgarian cinema Stefan Danailov scowling behind his Kalashnikov, went like this:
We were born of the red flag,
We are not afraid of dying.
We are at every kilometre.
And so until the end of time.
A comrade falls in deadly battle.
For you, he falls, freedom.
He falls and rises to become
A small red star.
It was propaganda at its sexiest. Of course, nobody told me that the partisans were so few in number that they were only at every kilometre within a hundred square kilometre area of the country, and then only in the last two years of the war. The series also skirted around the fact that most of them, rather than martyr themselves to the vicious fascist police, waited until the tide turned, then heroically took the bigger towns from frightened government clerks and officers.
And nobody told me that one of the series’ scriptwriters had defected to London and was murdered by the Bulgarian secret police with a poison-tipped umbrella; and that Bulgaria was better known in England for this ‘umbrella murder’ than for our partisans and athletes.
Every now and then – usually now – the power cut out without warning. The Youths were plunged into darkness, and the evening was cancelled, together with the central heating. My mother’s casseroles half-cooked, our school homework half-done, my father’s lectures half-prepared, the partisans caught in mid-shootout with the Fascist-imperialists, we wrapped up in blankets and played dominoes by candlelight.
In winter, with the first snow, we grabbed our sledges and ran to the nearest inclined surface, which was just a mound of earth left from a building site. At the end of summer, the smoky smell of roast peppers floated above the Youths as every family prepared ‘jars’ for the winter on their balcony, with the help of a contraption called a pepper-roaster.
‘We’re late with our jars, have you done yours?’ the chemist (my best friend’s Russian mother) asked the engineer (my mother), leaning over from the neighbouring balcony. ‘The Lada’s gone to hell, how’s the Skoda?’ the nuclear physicist from the Academy of Sciences (my best friend’s father) said to the engineer (my father) on the outside pull-up bar, which was also used for beating dust out of carpets and skinning the occasional lamb.
The chemist, the nuclear physicist and the engineers knew that their everyday life, when put into words, sounded like a joke without a punchline. Not unlike the Russian deficit joke they laughed at: ‘A man in the deli section of a supermarket says to the butcher behind the counter, “Can you slice up some salami for me?” The butcher replies, “Sure. Just bring the salami.”’
But they also knew that life without the jars was no joke. Produce was seasonal,
so in the winter you had no fruit, and the veg were of the grim root variety. You had to be organized, though if you were lucky enough to have relatives in the Province that you were on speaking terms with, they would send you jars too, in cardboard boxes tied up with string, in the back of somebody’s sputtering Trabant.
Block 328 was a perfect human cross-section of the imaginary Socialist cake. On the ground floor, next to the elevator, lived a Gypsy family of unknown dimensions. It contained three generations of pregnant women and girls, men who dwelled in a vague alcoholic mist, and countless kids. Once, through their open front door, I got a fascinating glimpse into their apartment. They had stripped the carpet and were living on bare concrete, without furniture.
Occasionally, one of the older girls knocked on a door – always our door because all others were slammed in her face – and shyly asked for a cup of flour, a bit of sugar, and my mother always obliged. Once, a nekrolog appeared on their door: a boy of seven had died. The neighbours whispered that he was probably murdered in some vendetta or beaten to death, just as a man had died in a knife-fight a few months before.
Once, on St George’s Day, a religious festival in May which survived the clampdown on all things religious thanks to its heavy focus on eating lamb and drinking red wine, the Gypsies brought a live lamb. To the children’s delight, they tethered it on their ground-floor balcony. It bleated and trembled piteously for days, then they hung it up on the pull-up bar, cut its throat into a plastic bucket, skinned it, and dismembered it. Rivers of blood flowed along the pavement.
The neighbours watched from their balconies, and buses stopped to see the gory spectacle. Our street experienced its first traffic jam. Some people shook their heads in disgust, others laughed, appreciating a properly surreal sight in their already surreal lives. My father, the only man in the block who spoke to the Gypsies, went down to represent the neighbourhood. They washed the blood away, and come next St George’s Day, they bought lamb from the butcher’s.
Street Without a Name Page 3