Street Without a Name

by Kassabova, Kapka

  A good young citizen excels not only in the classroom, of course, but also outside, and our extra-curricular activities were just as important as lessons. On Civil Defence days, we were taken into the city centre and down into a stuffy, claustrophobic underground bunker. There, we saw horrific photographs of devastated places called Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of people wearing gas-masks. The masks themselves were there too, and we all had to put one on, to get used to it, for the day when the Fascist-imperialist enemy attacked our Fatherland with a nuclear bomb. The scenario was deadly serious, but practising in masks with elephant-like trunks at the front was hilarious – until you couldn’t breathe any more and the mask had to be removed by a teacher.

  Then there were the visits to the mausoleum of our Great Leader Georgi Dimitriov. In the arctic chill and silence of the marble tomb, I stood in line behind my comrades for a peek at the great man. I wondered if the two young guards who stood, stiff and unblinking, on each side of the display cabinet were in fact frozen solid. The Great Leader had a slightly more relaxed air, but only because he was horizontal. He lay in a glass box, dressed in a suit, and looked like he was made of plastic.

  The good citizen must also be a good Pioneer. The Pioneers’ uniform was white shirts, navy-blue pleated skirts or trousers, and red polyester tie-scarves soaked in the blood of dead partisans. The Pioneers took over from the youngest comrades, the blue-scarfed Chavdars, who had to recite the following programmatic lines:

  The little Chavdar works hard.

  At home and in school

  the little Chavdar is number one.

  He knows: he’ll be a Pioneer soon.

  After the Pioneers came the Comsomol at high school, culminating in full-blown Communist Party membership, which was optional. Being a Pioneer wasn’t. It was indistinguishable from going to school. To be thrown out of the Chavdars/Pioneers/Comosomol was a rare but complete social disgrace, and could end with a Corrective Labour School.

  Each class was a Unit, and each Unit had its Pioneer committee: the Unit Leader was responsible for the overall excellence of the Unit, followed by a Unit Secretary who handled the funds, a Cultural Officer responsible for events, and the lesser posts of Physical Education Officer and Recycled Paper Officer, who was only activated on Recycled Paper Day when each Unit competed for the top quota in accumulated used paper. The bulk of used paper was supplied by The Worker’s Deed to which some parents subscribed. Mine didn’t, so my quota of used paper usually consisted of my parents’ old maths manuals. Turning up empty-handed was a disgrace for your Unit.

  My default career as a Pioneer started with the post of Cultural Officer, which I did resentfully. I didn’t want to be organizing the Unit’s cultural events, I wanted to be organizing my own culture. But the Unit had to be present at key cultural moments, such as the ‘Flag of Peace’ Assembly on the outskirts of the Youths. There, we posed for class photographs in a concrete, open-air complex called The Bells. The Bells featured the national bell of every country in the world, and after the photos and the speeches we were allowed to toll the bells and have a picnic on the grass.

  The idea of the Bells and the Assembly came from the Minister of Culture, Lyudmila Jivkova, daughter of Comrade Jivkov. She was an enigmatic woman who wore an eccentric Eastern turban. The intention was to unite all the children of the world – white, black, yellow, red – in an assembly of peace and comradeship. Surrounded by 120 national bells, in my red Pioneer scarf, I wondered when the colourful children of the world would finally arrive.

  They never did, and Lyudmila died suddenly and mysteriously, aged thirty-nine. Her death, like her life, was a State secret. Now we know that the autopsy report was signed by eminent professors who were not there. Speculation abounded and still abounds today: illness; accident; suicide; KGB-inspired murder. After all, the Soviets had issued several warnings about her internationalist projects, her interest in mystic teachings and unorthodox faiths, and her promotion of modern and ancient cultures. She created hundreds of art museums, opera houses, concert halls, and Sofia’s most prestigious humanities college for classical studies. She was a follower of Agni-Yoga teaching and made regular trips to India. In short, she was straying from the ideological struggle of Mature Socialism in its most advanced stage. After her death, an official cult of her person was loudly proclaimed, but her progressive cultural initiatives were quietly strangled.

  Around that time, I was relieved of the Cultural Officer post, and suddenly promoted to the terrifying heights of a Unit Leader. Whenever Class E was called out by the school officials, I would step forward, sick with stage fright, with my right arm lifted across my face in the Pioneer salute, a salute separated from its Nazi cousin only by a fold in the elbow, to report to the more senior Brigade Leader.

  Brigade Leader: ‘Unit ready?’

  Unit Leader (me): ‘Always ready!’

  It wasn’t clear to me what exactly we were ready for, but I was certainly always ready to step back into the ranks of my unit and fade away from the spotlight.

  In the classroom, though, it was less easy to say your lines and disappear, especially with the arrival of our new Class Supervisor, Comrade Gesheva. She was short and neckless, with bulldog jowls. For a while we thought she was Comrade Geshev’s wife, a match made in comrades’ heaven, but they only shared a surname and an ideology.

  Unfortunately, Comrade Gesheva was a teacher of literature, my favourite subject. She wore a worker’s buttoned mantle over her civilian clothes, as if she was in a factory. And as far as she was concerned, she was: School 81 was a factory for education. There were two ways with Comrade Gesheva: public praise or public humiliation.

  She couldn’t stand ‘hooligans’ and ‘retards’, which meant anyone who was late for class or slightly dim. Her favourite method of discipline was to attack the top of your head with the blunt end of a key that she always carried in her mantle pocket, or to pinch your ear lobe with her sharply manicured nails. If you weren’t on the receiving end of her corporal punishment, she tried to make you complicit in inflicting them on others.

  By Gesheva’s decree, one of my tasks as the Unit Leader, and the tallest girl in the class, was to intercede in hooligan fights, a manicured index finger helpfully directing me towards the fray. I was also expected to report on my comrades, to her and to their parents. Who was exhibiting signs of being a hooligan or a retard, who had said what about whom, who had behaved badly? It was a daunting task, made more complicated by the fact that one of the two chief hooligans was my friend Toni. Toni, the son of our balcony neighbours with the Lada, had been my best friend since we were seven. He ran a bit wild at school as a result of having a father with great ambitions for his kids, and even greater anger management problems, which resulted in beatings for Toni. My first task as a Unit Leader was to go to Toni’s parents and report his bad behaviour. After several days of anxious procrastination, I finally confessed to my mother, who promptly gave me my first lesson in ethics. It’s not your job to report to anybody, she said. You are his friend.

  Comrade Gesheva’s response to my failure revealed that she followed a different ethical code. It came in the form of a brief but devastating speech in front of the class: ‘The fish starts rotting from the head’ (me), and ‘The class must know that its Unit Leader is a zero. Kapka, you are a complete zero. You must reflect on this very carefully.’

  Meanwhile, other girls were throwing Gesheva morsels of information about well-known hooligans like Nikifor. Nikifor had no full-time father, and his mother was an alcoholic. In other words, they were official degenerates, which in a strange way proved useful for Nikifor: he had nothing to lose. He was beyond Gesheva’s terror tactics. He sneered at her and her key, driving her into a frothing rage.

  But after a traumatic accident in which the son of a teacher was pushed out of the top-floor window and shattered on the pavement below in a mess of glass, Nikifor disappeared. An awed whisper went around: he had been sent to a Corrective Labour School.
It would be years before any of us saw Nikifor again and I imagined his life there, guarded by growling, whip-wielding Cerberuses exactly like Gesheva.

  My own fear of Gesheva manifested itself in two ways: in increasingly regular attacks of gastritis and in increasingly escapist books. I was joined in my psychological truancy by Esther, who was congenitally incapable of toeing the official line. We tried to write science-fiction stories which closely resembled the translated books we devoured – 2001: A Space Odyssey, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, and Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric! and Dandelion Wine. Our characters had suitably foreign names like Peter and Jack. Esther was a better sci-fi writer than me, which I put down to her otherworldly physicist parents.

  We followed fanatically the TV series Blake’s Seven, and we played teleporting games where you left behind the mud of the Youths and suddenly found yourself in an invented world, whose small but select populations spoke like characters from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and said things like ‘Don’t let me depress you’ or ‘You’re turning into a penguin, stop it immediately!’ Around the same time, we were gripped with Star Wars mania. Life was only worth living if you could see The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi for the third time. The trade in Turbo chewing-gum wrappers reached a frenzy, and my bookmarks now consisted of wrappers with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Lea gazing across distant galaxies. If my schooling under Gesheva was a long ideological battle, it was my decadent Western fantasies that triumphed in the end.

  The year was 1986 and our primary school class now dissolved into the big bad world of secondary education. As some stayed behind and others went to specialist schools, all of my classroom friendships, except Esther, ended with School 81 and the onset of pubescence (Toni, lying: I’m screwing girls. Me, jealous: I bet they have syphilis). But my non-school friends, the kids of my parents’ friends, were there to stay. After all, our parents shared the same world: a world where political jokes and birthday parties were the norm, and you were united by a distrust of the idiots in the brown suits.

  Thanks to my mother’s unfulfilled childhood dream to learn the piano, I was also about to discover the existence, right there in the Youths, of a parallel world of the muses and music, a world away from the stiff ranks of the Pioneers, and the utilitarian ways of Comrade Gesheva.

  My piano teacher Keti Marchinkova was exotic in every conceivable way – foreign name, blonde face, husbandless, and childless. Her grandmother had been German. She lived with her mother in a central city apartment. It was an enchanted place: cats in the communal courtyard; giant plants inside the darkened, carpeted rooms smelling of cigarette ash, perfume, and closeted bourgeoisie. Keti’s red lipstick left sensuous traces on the edge of glasses. The scent of exotic flowers enveloped the piano while her sturdy fingers worked miracles in C minor.

  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 wa
s 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.