Meanwhile, in Delft, my father had lost half his body weight saving from his meagre university allowance in order to buy luxury goods for the family. In his little campus flat, he’d been living on fried eggs and filter coffee for six months. A contributing factor to this diet was that fried eggs and coffee were the only things he could actually make. But for my mother’s arrival, he’d prepared a feast: pork chops and salad, and even a bottle of cheap wine.
As a fellow computer specialist, my mother visited the university. And it was here, in the university toilets, that she broke down. It wasn’t the supernaturally clean streets, the tidy bike lanes, the smiley people, but the university toilets that tipped her over from stunned awe into howling despair.
Now, there is something I must explain about Bulgarian public toilets. First, they were generally a hole in the floor, Turkish-style. Secondly, and more importantly, they were the ante-chambers of Hell. Wherever you were, however desperate your bladder and bowel situation, you held it in. You didn’t eat, you didn’t drink, you didn’t go, until such time as a home toilet became available. At school, at university, at work, in hospital, and especially at railway stations, toilets were for dire emergencies only. And it showed.
If public toilets could be considered barometers of national self-esteem, then it was safe to say that the nation had none. But if they could be considered yet another tool of the State apparatus, it is safe to say that the State didn’t like its citizens enough to clean the citizens’ public toilets. It wanted its citizens to be publicly smeared with private shame. It wanted to break you with sheer excremental brutishness.
My mother had experienced the toilets of hospitals after giving birth, during kidney surgery, during her mother’s hospitalization with cancer. She had endured the toilets at the Central Institute of Computational Technology, and the toilets at freezing railway stations. And now there she stood, in the sparkling, perfumed, pink-toilet-papered, flower-arranged, mirrored, white marble toilet of Delft University, clean as a surgery theatre, gilded as an opera hall, bigger than our apartment in Youth 3, and she cried.
My father’s Dutch colleague, who was waiting for her in his office, became worried after a while and knocked on the door. ‘Are you OK?’ She wasn’t. But even with enough English, she couldn’t have explained her particular affliction to the well-meaning Dutchman in corduroy trousers.
Her next nervous collapse occurred in a department store, where she and my father had gone to buy things for us, the kinds of things that in Sofia were only available in Korekom, special dollar shops frequented by foreigners, Party officials, and those with connections. My sister and I only ever enjoyed one thing from Korekom: a small chocolate egg each on the occasion of having our tonsils removed.
A note about Bulgarian shops in the seventies and eighties: they weren’t actually shops, not in the conventional sense of the word. They were unheated ground-floor rooms with shelves on which something may – or may not, depending on the day – be displayed, and perhaps even sold, if you could bear to queue up, fight with other citizens, and emerge battered but triumphant, clutching a pair of shoes, a kilogram of Cuban oranges, or a tub of margarine. This is why my mother became, early on, an expert tailor. She made most of our clothes, and her own. She couldn’t bear to dress us in what she described as ‘orphanage clothes’. But some things she couldn’t make – shoes, for example, or knitwear.
Shopping, like most unpleasant things except fixing leaky cars and tiling bathrooms, was a woman’s job. As a result, my father couldn’t understand why I sometimes wore ugly black shoes with laces, fit for a senior Party functionary, instead of something more girly and cheerful; why my sister wore a coat a size too big one winter; why my mother gave him, just before Holland, a fuzzy red jumper the colour of a road accident. It’s not as if she didn’t have taste. It’s not as if they didn’t have money.
No, it was the shops that had neither taste nor money, just like the State that owned them and kept them half-empty. That way, the citizens were grateful when something – anything – was released. The operational phrase was ‘let out on the market’. They have let out Cuban oranges this week! They have let out men’s jumpers! They have let out red children’s boots in the Central Universal Store!
I want new boots, my five-year-old sister declared, sick of wearing my old clothes and shoes, so off we went, to buy boots for Assia. The Central Universal Store was not universal, but it was central, and it was, occasionally, a store. It stood in a massive, multi-storeyed stone building, next door to the Communist Party HQ. The avuncular portraits of Lenin and Georgi Dimitriov looked down disapprovingly on the materialistic mothers of Sofia who flocked here desperately whenever something was let out. The State only let out a limited number of each item, and you had to fight for it.
That day, half of Sofia’s mothers fought for red boots while a handful of distressed-looking militiamen tried to hold the crowds back from the shoe counter, to prevent small children being crushed to death. By the time we arrived, children were already crying, scared for their dishevelled mothers and sensing disappointment on the boot front. My mother took one look at this scene, and quietly told Assia that she might have to do without new boots that winter. But luck was on our side: a woman had grabbed two different sizes for her child, just in case, and gave my mother the spare one, just the right size. My sister – who still remembers those boots twenty years later – walked out in her red boots, along with several hundred other children. Together, they formed a rag-tag army of little red-booted soldiers marching across the empty parade square between the Central Universal Store and the Party HQ.
Which is why, when my mother stood in the children’s section of the departmental store in Delft, and saw shelf upon shelf of children’s boots, all different colours and shapes, sizes for everybody, and not a single harassed woman or sobbing child in sight, she suddenly felt unwell.
And when she stood in the men’s clothes section, where jumpers of every colour under the sun were folded and stroked by the pale hands of shop assistants, and she remembered her triumph with that fuzzy-red jumper wrenched from the clutches of some greedy woman buying in bulk, and then the quiet distaste of my father with his ugly present, she suddenly felt like throwing up.
My father, also overcome by this orgy of abundance, and sweating in his fuzzy-red jumper, helped her down the escalators and out of the store, and they stepped into the tidy street where people on bicycles breezed past them, and they held each other for a while.
My parents returned home triumphant and laden with presents. It looked like they’d smuggled back the entire contents of Holland’s department stores. Our apartment in Youth 3 was transformed into a Dutch doll’s house: canvas blinds in our bedroom, printed with little pig-tailed girls. Pink pens and pencils on our desks. In the living-room, an enormous silver Phillips TV with a remote control and a matching silver Phillips stereo with a double cassette-player. What’s this? My five-year-old sister picked up the remote control. My father showed her the plus and minus volume buttons, and said ‘this one is for fat, and this one is for thin’. My sister kept pressing on the plus button. It doesn’t work, she declared, it’s not making me fat.
They brought records of Western pop music you couldn’t buy in Bulgaria, like Barry Manilow and a two-record album The Best of The Beatles – finally, twenty years late, my father could listen to his favourite band. A pair of tiny wooden clogs, a gift from my father’s Dutch colleague, which took pride of place in our living-room. A tin of salted, peeled peanuts. We had peanuts, of course, but they were unprocessed and sold on street stalls. Someone in Holland had shelled, peeled and salted these peanuts especially for us. A giant packet of raisins. There were no raisins in Bulgaria, only grapes. Next, an electric blue T-shirt for me with a girl doing aerobics printed on it, and orange trousers with multiple pockets, in which I felt ultra-cool. In fact, wearing these clothes made me feel so obviously Western that I imagined the envious eyes of all Sofia were on me.
/> My parents had bought nothing for themselves except the records, but they looked happy to be back – at least my father did, even if he was very thin. My mother seemed a bit sad, a bit subdued, which I assumed was my father’s fault, as usual. ‘So what is it like there?’ I asked them.
‘It’s another world,’ my mother said.
‘But it’s not that much better,’ my father added cheerfully. ‘They’re just normal people. OK, they have more material things than us, but otherwise their lives are not that different.’
‘Of course they are,’ my mother insisted. ‘Whether we like it or not, they are different. They think differently. They take so many things for granted. They have rights, they demand things… They live in another world.’
I realized that it wasn’t my father’s fault; it was Holland that had made my mother sad, despite all the beautiful things they had bought there.
It was almost as if my parents had traded something in, as if they had crossed some Styx to reach a mythical land, and brought back otherworldly gifts. But in return they had left behind their shadows. And even if my father pretended otherwise, I knew there was something wrong with this exchange. But what was it?
I found the terrible answer to this question the following year, when my father’s well-meaning Dutch colleague in corduroy trousers brought his family to visit us. They wanted to see the Bulgarian mountains, they declared on the phone, they wanted to go camping with us.
Feverish preparations began. My parents took time off work. My mother bought provisions. My father lay under the Skoda for an entire weekend, fixing a leak. They started asking around for a tent. A colleague of my father’s offered them his. It’s small and not very pretty, he said apologetically. It’s actually a Russian military tent. Black. Oh it’ll be fine, my parents said, it will do the trick. After all, the Dutch will be in a tent too.
But they weren’t. They arrived in an enormous, brand-new white campervan. The neighbourhood kids surrounded it, not daring to touch it, their mouths agape. Their fathers came out from beneath their Trabants to gaze sorrowfully at this bird of automobile paradise. A UFO had landed in Youth 3.
The Dutch emerged from their vessel. They were bright, happy people in pastel colours, bouncing in squeaky new Adidas trainers. My father’s colleague Hans was enormously tall and white-blond from his eyebrows down to the hairs on his hands. His wife Hannah was plump and practical-looking, like a milkmaid with a crew cut. Their daughter Elke was tall and spindly, with tooth-braces – like my sister – and long blonde hair, unlike anybody I knew. She played with pink and blue rubber horses that had long blond hair too. She gave my sister a rubber monkey, again with blond hair. In return, we gave her the most prized specimens from our paper napkin and stamp collections. There was nothing else we could give her without losing face.
Their son Jurg was a friendly giant. Taller than his father, plumper than his mother, his face erupting with adolescence, he banged his head on the doorframe and spilled into our apartment which suddenly felt like a real doll’s house. A race of aliens had invaded our home.
I knew no English and, to my relief, neither did Jurg, who specialized in silent friendliness. I instantly liked him. Hans and Hannah told my parents about their traumatic experience at a campsite on the outskirts of Sofia called the Black Cat. The toilets were unusable, they said, and there was rubbish and dogs everywhere. It was a dump, not a campsite. And they charged them double. My mother disappeared apologetically into the kitchen to prepare lunch, and my father laughed, embarrassed.
In the kitchen, Hans produced a bloody parcel.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to my mother, unwrapping the meat, ‘we buy it from the shop, and they did not package well.’
My mother looked stressed already. But it wasn’t the meat – of course she was used to the bloody meat – it was the Russian tent situation.
‘I think we can safely forget about the military tent,’ she whispered to my father. He chuckled mirthlessly and surrendered. We would rent a room instead.
The next day, we departed in a slow convoy: the little orange Skoda followed by the giant white campervan. I was proud to be seen by the whole neighbourhood. We didn’t just have shiny Dutch objects at home, now we had shiny Dutch people too. For some of the journey my sister and I travelled with them in the campervan.
Everything glittered inside, everything was in different colours: their clothes, their toys, their food. They ate constantly. They ate chocolate-coated biscuits out of a large, elaborate tin that looked fit for a museum display. They ate gelatinous bear-shaped sweets out of another tin. They drank juices from cartons through little straws. They chewed gum, and then they ate again. I had never seen chocolate-coated biscuits, jelly bears, or carton juice. Everything in Bulgaria came out of green bottles or drab plastic wrapping that fell apart the moment you opened it, and sometimes even before. My sister and I sat very still on the padded seats and chewed the jelly bears in awed silence.
Our mountain adventure was fraught with crises. The Dutch parked themselves in a mountain campsite some way above the town of Bansko, and we rented a room in Bansko in the house of a local family. In retrospect, perhaps the alpine ranges of Pirin, the highest in the Balkans, weren’t the best introduction to mountainous scenery for people who had never actually seen a mountain. Holland was completely flat, my parents explained, like a plate.
On the first day, we went up in gondola cabins and halfway up the electricity stopped. Elke became hysterical in Dutch, and her mother soon joined her in broken English. It’s true that we were hanging above a vertical cliff face, but that’s just the way mountains are, and besides, the electricity often stopped on these lifts.
Now I realize that it wasn’t simply a fear of heights, but a fear of things breaking down in Bulgaria. If meat came wrapped in brown paper, the campsites were rubbish dumps, and everybody was driving a Trabant, then what was to stop the gondola cabins from plummeting? They didn’t want to die on a godforsaken Bulgarian mountain whose name they couldn’t even pronounce.
On the second night, the Dutch decided to have a barbecue at the campsite. We have the meat, they said, you just bring some potatoes from the village. My parents went looking frantically for potatoes in Bansko. There was only one shop in town, and all it sold was cigarettes and a few jars containing mystery pickles. In despair, my parents turned to our hosts. They laughed.
‘Of course you won’t find potatoes in the shop. Or anything else. This is the province, not Sofia. But don’t worry, we’ve got potatoes to feed all of Holland.’
They gave us two kilograms of potatoes from their own garden, which my parents triumphantly delivered to the campsite. Hannah was delighted.
‘People in the West say that the East is poor,’ she chattered happily as we sat around the fire, munching. ‘That is not true. There is everything. Yes, OK, the choice is little, but why do we need all these things in Holland? Ten varieties of potato? And this potato is so delicious.’
My parents exchanged looks and said nothing. It was too complicated to explain about the potatoes.
‘We went to the furniture store in Youth 3, near your apartment,’ Hannah continued. ‘It is not empty. There are some nice bookshelves, and beds on display.’
My parents exchanged looks again. The furniture on display was just that – on display. Those shelves and beds were samples. If you actually wanted to buy something, you signed up at the shop and joined a waiting list. Then a few weeks or months later, you snuck out to the store in the dead of night, to queue up as they unloaded furniture from trucks, and fought tooth and nail for your precious bookshelves. Just because your name was on a list, it didn’t guarantee anything. But again, it was too complicated to explain.
Hannah had been for many years a housewife, a profession I’d never heard of before. But now the kids were older, and she was working again. She ran a small kindergarten in their house outside Delft.
‘I buy this campervan with money I earn from the kinderga
rten,’ she said.
‘I’m very proud with her.’ Hans patted her chubby thigh affectionately.
‘Yes, it’s very beautiful campervan.’ My father nodded blankly, looking preoccupied.
‘Very beautiful, yes,’ my mother repeated, and stared at the fire with a polite smile.
I knew that smile. Each time it said something different, and each time it made my heart sink. This time, it said: I have studied and worked my whole life. I didn’t take enough time off work to look after my kids because that’s the way it is. We don’t have housewives here, but I have effectively been a housewife all my life, while also having a full-time career. My husband never says that he’s proud of me. Hannah is a woman without university education and without a career. She is happy with her campervan and her husband is happy with her. This campervan is worth about twenty years of my income. We are twenty years behind them. No, forty.
‘I want to lose weight,’ Hannah chirped on. ‘But not here, I cannot lose weight here. This food is too delicious.’
By now I was madly in love with Jurg, but I sensed that something was definitely wrong that summer night around the crackling fire, under the mountain stars. An invisible army of shadows was tugging at us, at everything.
On the last day, we went off-track and got lost. After many hours of scrambling down a sea of boulders, underneath which gurgled glacial rivers, we made it back to the campsite, sunburnt, dehydrated, and delirious.
The Dutch finally left in their not so shiny campervan. We waved from the pull-up bar outside Block 328, and sighed a collective sigh of relief. And no doubt they did too.
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