And so the Gypsies camped among us, unloved and unwelcome, forcefully urbanized, living their parallel life of parties, violence, reproduction and animal-slaughter. But despite the blood and the animal guts, they weren’t the scariest of our neighbours.
On floor two, in darkened rooms, lived an old woman and her disabled son. She always wore black, either mourning her husband’s death or, I thought, preparing for her son’s. She scared me, as if her grief was contagious. Sure enough, her son’s necrolog appeared on their door one day, and I never saw her again.
Next to her lived my parents’ friends: a bald vet and an engineer with the soft accent of my father’s town in northern Bulgaria. They had two daughters who wore ugly cardigans knitted by country grandmothers, and always smelt musty because their apartment was never aired out, from fear of catching cold. Every day, the vet travelled two hours on buses to get to work. The engineer worked in my mother’s Central Institute for Computational Technology.
On floor three, beneath us, dwelled a psychopath who wore braces and a stained wife-beater singlet, although he was a bachelor. When a large white Czech piano, purchased with my parents’ entire savings, was put in our bedroom and I started playing scales, he launched a violent, sustained protest. He bashed his ceiling with what could only be a very large hammer whenever I played. Sometimes, he bashed away in the middle of the night. My father duly braced himself to protect his brood, and went down to ‘sort him out’, but only got screamed at every time. ‘I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna gut you like a pig!’ he yelled, while my sister and I cried upstairs. When my parents called the local militia (the police was a term associated with the pre-1945 monarcho-fascist government), two lethargic militiamen came, talked to him, issued a warning, and left us exactly where we were before: a floor above the psycho. After all, he was retired militia himself.
On floor six lived my friend Hope who was shy, sweet, and thin as a stick-insect. Hope didn’t have a father. She lived with her mother and her grandmother: soft-bodied, slow-moving women who floated in and out of my world like bundles of laundry.
On floor five, right above us, were the Mechevs, comprising a crane-driver, a worker in the nearby Kremikovtsi Factory, and their two offspring. The name Mechev meant something like ‘bear clan’. Whenever I ran into mother-bear, she slapped my cheek and said, ‘You need to put on some weight, luv, your glasses are falling off.’ The elder Mechev son, who felt sorry for me, Hope and everyone smaller than him, which was most kids, personally offered us his bodyguard protection against potential aggressors in the neighbourhood: ‘Just show us who’s bothering you, and I’ll rearrange his face, no problem.’
The Mechevs lived in a one-room apartment, known as a ‘garçonniere’, even smaller than ours. Father-bear would pop in uninvited some evenings, to watch TV or simply enjoy sitting in a larger room. ‘Come on, bring out the meze,’ he’d say as he plonked on the table a bottle of village home-made rakia that might have killed off an entire colony of cockroaches. My father preferred reading his computer manuals or helping us with maths homework, and my mother didn’t have many common topics of conversation with Comrade Mechev. Besides which, he filled out the living-room, effectively ejecting the rest of us. But you didn’t want to appear snobbish. It was already bad enough to be an ‘intellectual’. It was better just to put up with it once in a while. After all, the proletariat were the ruling class, weren’t they.
Yes, but who were the proletariat? Not the Mechevs. They were proletariat only under duress. In truth, they came from generations of land-owning peasants. Had it not been for the destruction of agriculture and the birth of the Youths and Friendships, and monster factories like Kremikovtsi which bellowed perpetual black clouds over us, the Mechevs would be enjoying the self-sustained lifestyle of pig-farming and potato-growing. They were really just commuting to the outskirts of Sofia. Every weekend they squeezed into their clapped-out Moskvič, which seemed to be held together by twine, and off they went, back to the village.
The tiny apartments in the residential complexes tried to make ‘citizens’ out of the peasants and the Gypsies. Citizen, how proud this sounds, to paraphrase Gorky. But what they actually made was dispossessed peasants and displaced Gypsies. And in a double whammy, the native citizens, like my mother who was born and raised in central Sofia, were turned into ‘workers’ with no access to the pleasures of city life. Youth was not a city. It was citizen storage.
The typical day of the young citizen began at 6.30 in the morning, a bleak and inhuman hour that seemed manufactured by the State in order to crush all intelligent thought. My mother woke me up for school, and we had breakfast in the kitchen. The radio was always on, purely to keep us awake, since listening to the news was pointless. We already knew it by heart:
The Head of State and Chief Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party Comrade Todor Jivkov yesterday received Comrade Erick Honecker, Leader of the German Democratic Republic, on an official State visit. At Sofia airport, Comrade Honecker was cordially greeted by the comrades…
‘Listening’ to the news was like ‘reading’ the paper The Worker’s Deed, which was the only national paper, and seemed to simply rearrange the same content on its pages from day to day, year to year.
On a normal day, the young citizen drank her hot chocolate and chewed her slice of honeyed bread at 7.15 to the heavy-hearted tune of a folk song about Tsar Ivan Shishman’s heroic army facing the Ottoman Turks in 1393. Shishman was defeated and Bulgaria fell into Ottoman hands for the next five centuries – but the song ends before disaster strikes. As the music faded out, the daily documentary feature began: ‘Bulgaria: Deeds and Documents’. It traced, in carefully staged episodes, Bulgaria’s modern history, which began by means of a giant leap of about four centuries from Tsar Ivan Shishman to the National Revival in the 1800s. Narrated by a velvety male voice, it seemed specifically designed to send you back to sleep. And it went on for years. How could there be so many deeds and documents within just a century and a half?
Later in the day, when I returned from school, the radio treated us to bitter-sweet Italian pop tunes, and I tried to sing along, parroting the strange sounds: Toto Cutugno (‘Lasciatemi cantare con la gitarra in mano, lasciate mi cantare, una canzione piano piano’), Adriano Celentano (‘Susanna, Susanna, Susanna Susanna mon amour…’) and Al Bano and Romina Power (‘Felicita, felicita…’). Now that was cool.
Otherwise, foreign radio stations like Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America and Deutsche Welle were deliberately fuzzed with the help of electro-magnetic contraptions in the countryside, especially installed to interfere with radio signals. We passed them on our way to the seaside. They looked like something out of War of the Worlds.
This was how the world sounded: pop music and static noise pierced by distant, distorted voices. The very keen managed to tune in with the help of special equipment. But for the vast majority, including my parents, it just wasn’t worth the trouble. It’s not as if it would change anything.
In between ‘Deeds and Documents’ and the Italian radio songs, the young citizen attended school. My school, the Unitary Secondary Polytechnic School 81, was ambitiously named Victor Hugo. It was across the road from us, a smaller, squatter version of the residential blocks. It was a primary and secondary school in one, but the secondary grades were only really for kids who weren’t bright enough, ambitious enough, or well-connected enough at age thirteen to get into the specialized colleges.
Does anybody ever manage to purge their system of their school? I envy them. The black iron-and-glass-panelled entrance doors, wide staircases, semi-dark corridors, vast courtyard where we formed neat rows every morning for organized gymnastics, and rooms haunted by the spectre of Comrade Gesheva, are with me to this day.
Like Block 328, our Class E was a social experiment. If Block 328 was a microcosm of the Socialist worker’s world, Class E was a dress rehearsal for that world. Class E consisted of thirty-two kids who were alphab
etically numbered, and I was Number Sixteen.
Here were kids with ‘intellectual’ parents like mine. Kids like smug Penka, whose father was a director of a factory and clearly a big-shot (my parents: Careful what you say in front of Penka). Kids like overfed, aggressive Kiril, who lived with his grandparents and was cut out to be a factory director one day. Kids like mathematical wunderkind Sergei, whose mother was a Russian ‘intellectual’. Kids like my brainy best friend Esther, whose unusual name suited her appearance of an androgynous visitor from outer space. Her physicist parents lived in a bare apartment and never hosted birthday parties; stranger still, her father had a beard, the sure sign of the dissident. Kids like overachieving Dima, whose ambitious parents had drilled her to come top in every subject and avoid anybody with low grades.
Compared to Dima’s parents, my own were apathetic slobs. However, on the one occasion that I got a four in a maths test, instead of the usual five or top six as befits the child of ‘engineers’, my mother impressed upon me, with the help of tears and broken plates, that if I continued in the same vein I would end up washing dishes in some dismal kitchen, married to a truck-driver who would beat me. I was nine.
Now, if my mother’s reaction seems neurotic, it was appropriately neurotic. Because what could an educated person hope for their child to be, except educated? To have special privileges, money and status, you had to be a big-shot factory director like Penka’s father, and that was a rather vulgar, social climbing thing to be in the eyes of my parents and their friends. Besides, you had to be already connected. We weren’t.
So all you were left with was education. It gave you an inner world and the company of other educated people. It gave you an inhabitable space in the uninhabitable Youths. It gave you the possibility to emigrate ‘internally’. It gave you the chance to subvert the Marxist motto which proclaimed that the Exemplary Socialist Citizen’s existence determined his conscience. The trick then was to make your conscience determine your existence, because it was the only act of freedom left to the Citizen. Otherwise you were stuck with the mud, the psychopath downstairs, and the bear clan above.
Until that traumatic four, maths had left me cold, but the threat of that truck-driver husband propelled me to sudden mathematical heights. Within a year, my father had revived my interest in maths with home-made problems to solve. This beat the textbook maths problems (Sample: ‘A record-breaking truck-driver transported fifteen tons of grain in one year. If his productivity increased two-fold every year, how many tons of grain would he transport in five years?’) Soon I was ahead of Dima and duly attending maths and physics Olympiads along with the more obvious literature Olympiads.
The Olympiads were academic marathons separated from exams only by their seemingly voluntary nature. You could decline to participate in an Olympiad, but that would mark you out as suspiciously unambitious. So you went voluntarily. At the Olympiads you, the bespectacled pride of ambitious parents, sat for half a day with an exam paper, and composed essays or solved advanced mathematical problems. The idea was to identify the most gifted kids in each subject, starting with your school, then your district, and ending with city-wide, national and international Olympiads. Why? For the same reason that the State generously sponsored athletes who then went on to demonstrate to the world the explosive muscular power of Socialism.
So here was a regime where the head of state and his cronies were, in my mother’s whispered phrase, ‘idiots in brown suits’. A regime where intellectual, bourgeois, elite, and individualistic were dirty words. But where, at the same time, academic, sporting and musical achievements were state-encouraged, state-sponsored, and even state-imposed.
People were too preoccupied by the chore of daily survival to notice this brisk irony. And if they did, like my parents they kept their insights to themselves. You never knew who might be listening.
If you came top at the Olympiads, you could even end up travelling abroad or winning a medal. I made it only to the Sofia Literature Olympiad, where I wrote an essay on the topic of ‘Sofia: she grows but never ages’. The fatal crunch came when I wrote, in inspired prose, about the heroic mid-flight stance of the horse of the Russian Tsar Liberator statue outside the Assembly Hall, as he charges towards the Ottomans to liberate Bulgaria. Coming out of the Olympiad, I looked at the statue, and saw with a sinking heart that far from charging, the horse had all its hooves planted on the ground. I’ll never know whether this small glitch separated me from a medal but, as I said, in the general scheme of ambitious Sofia parents and child-geniuses, we were very low key.
By age ten, I had learned several vital lessons.
One (Literature): streets in the West crawl with drug addicts, criminals, and capitalists. Nobody protects you there. This was confirmed by my reading of a magnificently illustrated David Copperfield, where the evil Uriah Heep had red hair and a crooked nose, and every woman wore a different-coloured fabulous dress. The editor’s postscript to the book read: ‘Every morning thousands of children in England and the entire capitalist world disappeared into dark mines and factories. This is the dreadful legacy of capitalism.’ You couldn’t argue with that.
Whereas we luckily had the Mother-Party:
She watches over us each day
like a mother tender and dear.
At school, at work, at play,
She gives us strength and cheer.
Two (History): in the history of humankind there are several progressive stages of socio-political order – Primitivism, Slavery, Feudalism, Fascism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. Capitalism is only slightly better than Fascism. After Communism, there is nothing except the blinding light of the Bright Future, and this is what we aspire for. We’re not quite there yet, but we are pretty close.
Three (general knowledge): the nuclear family is the smallest structural unit in the Mature Socialist Society. Children from broken homes become delinquents and anti-social elements. They go to Corrective Labour Schools where they are corrected through labour.
Four (an unsettling gut feeling): at School 81 you have roughly three options – excel and be noticed at your peril, blend in and be safe, or rebel and be broken. I wasn’t sure which option I should take. But before I had time to figure it out, I experienced a further clarification: I had little choice in the matter. I was to excel and be noticed at my peril.
My first experience of the dilemmas of School 81 came at age eight, which was when we started learning Russian. I had already decided not to bother with Russian. I just couldn’t see the point. It was a compulsory subject, and therefore one of life’s tedious musts, like algebra and chemistry, and it sounded too similar to Bulgarian to be of any obvious use. All the Russians I knew – my parents’ friends – were married to Bulgarians and already spoke perfect Bulgarian. For some reason, though, the Russian teacher decided from day one that I was going to excel in her subject, whether or not I wanted it.
‘Number Sixteen,’ the teacher snapped, breaking her ruler on the desk after I made a mess of the genitive case at the blackboard yet again, ‘you have no respect. You should be ashamed of yourself.’ And I was. Because I could see that deep down the Russian teacher was a nice woman, and it wasn’t her fault that she had to teach a language nobody wanted to learn. But soon I began to see some practical advantages to linguistic excellence.
In November 1981, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died and our school had a morning of mourning. We stood in the yard in neat, frozen units, listening to giant speakers thunder out recorded Soviet Army songs like ‘Vstavai strana ogromnaya’ (‘Rise, oh Mighty Country’), a motivational anti-Fascist war song from the 1940s.
The school director Comrade Geshev, a dour apparatchik in a brown suit, gave The Speech. All his speeches were identical and all we heard was a continuous drone. The Russian teacher stood on the platform next to him, in place of honour, weeping into her fringed shawl. She was dressed in black, like the grieving woman on the second floor of our apartment block. It was, she told us thr
ough a microphone, a sad day for everyone in our two brotherly countries. I wondered how you could be sad for someone you didn’t actually know, but I knew there were questions you didn’t ask. When we were finally released and allowed inside, I saw that Brezhnev’s bushy-eyebrowed portrait was guarded outside the director’s office by star pupils who stood erect and proud. Had I tried harder at Russian, I too might have had that honour, I reflected, and been discharged from Russian classes. At last, a reason for genuine sadness.
A reason for geniune interest in Russian came in the form of a pop song, ‘A Million Scarlet Roses’. It was performed by none other than the rising star of Soviet pop music Alla Pugacheva, who sang it with glossy lipstick, white furs, soulful eye-shadow, and enormous hair. The only bit of the song I could understand was the refrain (‘millions, millions, millions of scarlet roses’) and one evening, when the glittery Alla was on TV, I asked my mother to translate the song for me.
And here was the story – a true story, my mother said – of a poor painter who loved an actress so much that he sold all his paintings to buy her a sea of roses. When she woke up and opened her window, she thought she was dreaming: the street was all awash with roses. She wondered who this fabulously rich admirer was. And down in the street – my mother stifled a sob – stood the ruined painter. It was romance on a grand scale, and it was like nothing else we had in our lives. It was also proof that Russian songs could be more personal than the military choir of ‘Rise, oh Mighty Country’.
Around that time, I also became infatuated with Pushkin’s novel in verse, Evgenii Onegin. The story of the noble Tatiana and the tormented Evgenii in nineteenth-century Russia was worlds away from grammatical cases at the blackboard. Here were deadly duels, impossible love, philosophical musings about happiness, and amazing clothes. And it was all in couplets. I suddenly saw the point of learning the genitive case. The Russian teacher started smiling at me, and calling me Kapka instead of Number Sixteen.
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