Street Without a Name

by Kassabova, Kapka

  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.

  4 East and West

  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.

  The world was a geography lesson to us. Clusters of sounds. Coloured patches in the atlas. Radio static. But the order of things was permanently upset in 1984, when my father was granted permission to spend six months as a research fellow at the University of Delft in faraway Holland. It was his first trip west of the Berlin Wall. It was the longest we had been separated as a family since his two-year military service. My mother pined for him, and because he couldn’t afford to call us and we couldn’t call abroad, we sent him a voice-letter on a cassette, via an acquaintance who was also Holland-bound. My mother recorded her messages late at night, and although she stoically didn’t cry, her voice sounds strangely broken on that tape.

  He sent back photographs of futuristic-looking buildings, and brick houses along grey canals, and bikes, forests of bikes. He sent photos of friendly-looking people of different races – the other visiting fellows – whose curious names he wrote on the backs of photos. He was cheerfully waving at the camera, looking very thin in his big horn-rimmed glasses.

  Here he was, my own dad, blending in with these Westerners, these people who had stepped off the pages of my atlas and somehow ended up in Delft, to become his friends. Just like that. I was at once proud and troubled. Proud that we were no less than them. Troubled by the thought that if it was so easy, so natural, if the people on the other side were so friendly, then what exactly was the Wall protecting us from?

  It was protecting us from ourselves, as it turned out. That summer, amazingly, my mother was granted perm
ission to visit my father in Holland. It was her first time West of the Berlin Wall, if we don’t count a few visits to Yugoslavia – which, according to the atlas, was east of the Berlin Wall, but for some reason more to the west than East Berlin. It was complicated.

  After months of nerve-fraying bureaucratic delay, my mother’s travel visa finally arrived and my sister and I were packed off to spend the summer with our paternal grandparents, Kiril and Kapka, in the provincial town of Pavlikeni.

  As far as I was concerned, Pavlikeni had nothing going for it. It had no mountain, no sea, no historic houses, just a factory on the outskirts which made spare parts for trains. It also had a park where the blossoming trees gave me hay fever, and a zoo with scabby animals. The most interesting fact I knew about Pavlikeni was that one of the zoo bears had chewed the fingers of a little boy who had fallen into its cage. The boy had survived, and so he joined the handless Chilean guitarist in my imagination.

  Nothing ever happened in Pavlikeni’s huge, empty square, purpose-built for official parades where dignitaries and citizens gathered on days like 9 September, the anniversary of the day in 1944 when the Soviet Army had liberated us from ourselves. The town had one shop, the half-empty Central Universal Store, which sold desolate things like extra-large cotton underpants, brown pantyhose for women with vein problems, and industrial proletarian bras made not so much for women as for female units. My grandmother bought these things, and I felt both ashamed and sorry for her.

  From Pavlikeni, Holland seemed like another planet. My parents may as well have gone into space. What if we never saw them again? It didn’t even occur to me to wonder why we, the kids, couldn’t go with them. Everybody knew that you couldn’t very well come and go as you pleased. After all, once an entire family was in the West, they might like it too much. They might want to stay. And everybody knew this was something defectors did. We weren’t defectors, God no! We didn’t even know any defectors.