I escaped from all this in the usual manner: by watching fantasy films like The Neverending Story and Return of the Jedi and re-reading fantasy books like André Maurois’s Impossible Worlds, carefully translated as The Country of a Thousand Wishes. In that country, the little girl called Michèle had dresses made out of the night sky. ‘With or without cloud?’ the heavenly seamstress asked. ‘Without,’ Michèle and I answered.
But as soon as I looked away from the book’s pages, I noticed that bad things continued to happen. Someone had opened Pandora’s box and emptied its contents over our family. Uncle Kolyo in Suhindol died suddenly, my parents’ relationship was breaking down, and our flat became a building site. For months, while our bathroom was being renovated, as soon as you ventured out of your bed, you walked over rows of tiles and bags of cement from which a white dust rose and entered your mouth, where it turned to paste. Over the barricades, my sister and I dodged the crossfire of my parents’ fights. They were now quarrelling incessantly – mostly about tiles and cement, it seemed – and each night my sister and I lay in bed in quiet depression as my father hurled abuse at my mother and she hurled back books with hard covers: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Maxim Gorky’s Collected Works, Montaigne’s Essays. Classics and cement: that was the stuff of our lives.
One day, the cement was gone. My sister, aged seven, triumphantly went to test the shower in the new bathroom. The new ceiling came crashing down, all of it, missing her by a few seconds. That night, as a special concession, my parents called a temporary ceasefire.
In the summer of Chernobyl, I was desperately clinging to something slippery which was drifting away. In retrospect, it was childhood. Here was life with the thighs of an Exemplary Young Woman, with the black of mourning and nuclear fear, with the sound of my parents hurting each other through clouds of cement dust. Here was life without Richard Chamberlain (he’d recently died in The Thornbirds) and without my grandmother Antastassia, whose black and white face now smiled from an anonymous necrolog, like the ones we read at the bus stop. I started having nightmares in which she came back and laughed, her gold tooth flashing with mirth. She took off her wig, and there was her real hair. She’d never been dead at all. I’d wake in the middle of the night in the empty silence of the Youths and wonder which was worse – sleeping or waking, life or death.
But soon, these existential worries were put into fresh perspective when I was struck down with a bizarre auto-immune disease. It filled all my joints with fluid and slowly blew me up into something resembling a Michelin man. Rheumatic fever, the doctors said, and wheeled me off to the 2nd Regional Children’s Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, where I spent my second worst summer looking out from behind window bars at a squat, impersonal monolith called Russian Monument and, next to it, a faceless high-rise called Hotel Motherland.
At least there were no cakes to tempt me. In fact, there was no edible food at all at the hospital canteen. My mother and Keti brought me jars of mushed-up food to stop me from floating away, because by now I was entirely made up of joint fluid. The toilets were purgatory, so all the kids – four of us – suffered from constipation.
In the large, empty hospital, it seemed that the four of us had been forgotten. It was urgent to perform tests in order to diagnose and treat the Michelin man disease but everyone was on holiday. The only staff around were young nurse apprentices who practised freely on me. For some reason, they needed to take half a litre of blood every second day. After a week of blood-letting, I began to feel like one of Dr Moreau’s experiments in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, which I’d just read. They came to me, all sharp nails and blue eye-shadow, and I followed them to the blood-letting room, an obedient zombie. Five of them searched the blue-black surfaces of my skin for a healthy vein that hadn’t already collapsed. Eventually, only one foot of useful veins was left, and when they broke the last vein there too, my slipper filled with blood. This annoyed them, because it was wasted blood, and they shouted at each other. Too dazed to protest, I apologized for being such a nuisance – my parents had taught me good manners.
My mother, however, lost her own good manners after the clinic’s creepy head doctor (my Dr Moreau) informed her that my condition was untreatable. It wasn’t rheumatic fever, it was worse. But they didn’t know what it was. They could do nothing except monitor me, and my parents should expect ‘the worst’. The medical folder was slammed shut like a slap on the face.
My mother used all available connections in the medical world to arrange private appointments with expensive specialists, those who weren’t on holiday. Then she arranged more expensive private tests to rule out horrific degenerative diseases which the first set of expensive specialists had suggested I might have.
Meanwhile, life in the 2nd Regional Children’s Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases wasn’t all gloom and doom. There were good times too. I made three friends. Stocky Valentin, fifteen, had been training to be a weightlifter when he was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis, a misfortune which he bore with dignity. Marko was a spunky sixteen-year-old Gypsy with Elvis Presley hair and raging rheumatic fever. Kiki was an enterprising fourteen-year-old girl, who got into bed with Marko one night, leaving me with Valentin whom I didn’t fancy. It didn’t matter though, because we didn’t do anything. We just lay next to each other in our pyjamas with the lights off, and talked about the great things we would do when we got out of hospital (become a wrestling champion and play the piano). But word of our escapades reached the hospital authorities and we were reprimanded for immoral behaviour, driving our already frantic parents that bit closer to the edge.
At night, while Kiki slept, I listened to the traffic, gazed at the grubby stars through the window bars, and composed rhyming couplets about eternity and my mother. I was terrified of somehow losing her in this labyrinth of hospital corridors, blood tests, and ominous whispers. And I read the highly strung poetry of Petya Dubarova, the girl prodigy from Burgas who had killed herself at seventeen in protest against the school authorities.
I listened on my portable cassette-player to The Eagles, which a friend of my mother’s had managed to tape from an imported record. ‘Hotel California’ was my favourite. Although I didn’t understand a word of it except ‘Welcome to the Hotel California’, I tried to sing along to ‘such a lovely place, such a lovely place…’. I listened to it over and over, in a trance, trapped in this place I would never leave.
It was my parents’ angry despair that saved me. After a month, they took me out of hospital on signature, which meant that Dr Moreau was no longer in charge. It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to say goodbye to my cell-mates. Valentin’s parents had connections, and he was taken to France to be treated. Marko didn’t have connections, and stayed behind with Dr Moreau. Kiki was moved to a hospital for heart diseases.
Once out of hospital, I was in the private care of a famous old professor of immunology who came to our flat. Private practice was of course illegal, and both he and my parents risked getting into trouble if the other turned out to be an informer. He refused the extra cash my desperate parents kept offering him and took only the small, State-fixed rate.
The professor suggested that my disease might be related to that nuclear incident the previous year. By now, he said, many children were suffering from freak diseases, and the word Chernobyl was whispered in hospital corridors. I thought of the enormous lettuces and the watermelons at Auntie’s house, the peaches and the honey. During my hospital confinement, I had become allergic to every food under the sun except, it seemed, rice.
My father drove me everywhere by car, to protect me from infections on the crowded buses. I observed this strange new world of healthy people from inside our orange Skoda, like a Party functionary gazing through the tinted windows of a limousine.
The Michelin man had deflated and come back to earth, and the earth looked a changed place. It was a place without my third favourite person in the world, without piano lessons, without the
guarantee that bad things wouldn’t happen again. Childhood was a distant memory.
6 Winds of Change
Perestroika in the air
When I turned thirteen, the time came to say goodbye to the Unitary Secondary Polytechnic School 81 and begin a new life at a specialized college. I decided I would be a scholar of archaeology and ancient cultures. There were rumours that senior students went on archaeological trips to Egypt, Italy and Greece. That in itself was sufficient incentive. I spent the summer swotting for the entrance exams at the prestigious College for Classical Studies and Antique Languages.
I liked to lose myself in the illustrated Classic Greek Myths and Legends, the further removed from the present, the better. I knew the extended family trees of all the gods and heroes, including disputed parentage. But it soon became obvious that all this wouldn’t get me into the Classical College.
What would get me in was to demonstrate, in written and oral form, a thorough knowledge of Bulgarian history. That meant medieval history, history of the National Revival period, and last but by no means least the history of the International Communist Movement in general and the Bulgarian Communist Party in particular. So I gritted my teeth and picked up the badly misnamed Brief History of Bulgaria which was 500 pages long and written by the world’s dullest historian. I struggled to overcome my confusion in the face of medieval history (who can remember the order of all the tsars and who blinded whom and for what reason?), my catatonic boredom with the National Revival period and its endless pantheon of moustachioed heroes who died young, and the sudden narcolepsy I experienced at the mention of such key figures from the Communist martyrs’ roll-call as ‘the five from the Revolutionary Youth Union (RMS)’. They were presumably known as ‘the five’ because no one could remember their names – no one except the examiners, that is.
Education, like medical care, was free. But only if you were happy to rot away at School 81, with Comrade Gesheva breathing down your neck. The words prestigious and elite were never mentioned, but if you – and your ambitious parents – had your sights on a prestigious and elite school, you had to take private lessons with privately paid school teachers and university professors who set you sample essay topics. I was already paired up with a literature teacher, who was pleasant enough, but more importantly happened to live in the same ‘cooperation’ as Bulgaria’s top pop singer Vassil Naidenov, also known as Vasko ‘the trainer’. Vasko was sexy, he wore trainers, he sang about ‘telephone love’, and I nearly fainted when I passed him once in the staircase. Nobody had told me he was gay, because of course there was no such thing.
As the exams got closer, my parents’ historian friends found me a private history teacher too. He was in fact a teacher at the Classical College, and on the examination board – how handy! He wasn’t going to teach me history, as such – that was my responsibility – no, he would just test-examine me, as it were, run me through things, give me an inkling of what the exam questions might be. In return for a hefty fee.
I recoiled from him the moment I saw him. He had a slimy smile and, worse, a slimy, drooling son who was also ‘applying’ to get in; and it didn’t have to be spelt out to me that the son was already running ahead of me in the race. And he wasn’t the only one. Many comrades’ children and grandchildren were among the aspiring classic scholars at the gates. In fact, some Party Fighters in the Struggle against Fascism and Capitalism adopted their own grandchildren on just such occasions, because the right surname could open the heaviest doors.
My parents’ and grandparents’ names counted for nothing in the world of humanities, and even less in the world of Party Fighters. They were only ‘poor engineers’, and there wasn’t a single Fighter in the Struggle against Fascism and Capitalism in the family.
I began to feel like a doomed gladiator in the arena, faced with twenty armoured chariots representing Rome, and a whole menagerie of wild animals thrown in for good measure. My parents, who also took an instant dislike to the history teacher and the necessary palm-greasing, pulled me out of the private lessons. I’d just have to go for it, trust my wits, and hope for the best.
I swotted twice as hard, but panic had already crept in. My written exam went well – it was on the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, and somehow I managed to get the order of tsars, religious conversions and blindings right. In the room, among the other kids, I spied the drooling son chewing his pen in bewilderment, and I gloated.
But when I entered the oral examination room, where the teachers were lined up like police commissars and the portraits of ‘the five from RMS’ gazed at me from the wall, I heard the clatter of those chariots and the roar of the lions. Then the fatal question came: in which year was the Fatherland Front established and what were its chief goals? I don’t know if it was nerves or ignorance, but I went blank. I had swotted madly on the ‘five from the RMS’ and the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party, but the Fatherland Front remained a mystery. It was somehow related to the Workers’ Party, which was somehow related to the Communist Party… But this was not an answer. In my despair, I looked up at the five from the RMS, but they gazed at me expressionlessly from the blur of their youthful heroism, and gave away nothing about the Fatherland Front. In silence, the commissars wrote something on their papers, and this concluded the oral examination. I dragged my wounded self outside, and who was waiting in the corridor but my drooling rival who already knew the questions, of course, and the answers.
The countdown to the results began, and my parents, sensing disaster, decided that I should also sit entrance exams to the Language College, just in case. This proved a smart move, because the list of the first lot of successful scholars, posted on the gates of the Classical College, included little Caligula’s name, but not mine. By the time I finally saw my name, near the bottom of the list in the next round of admissions, I knew that a triumphant career in the blood-stained arena came at too high a price.
The only dignified choice was to walk away. So I stood outside the gates of Rome like a latter-day Spartacus, and I said goodbye to Jason and the Argonauts, goodbye to the Byzantine ruins on the Black Sea, goodbye to the archaeological trips abroad. I would never see the pyramids, the Colosseum, or the Acropolis. But I would be free.
I had been accepted into the French College – no history exam there, just good old neutral maths and literature. And instead of Civis romanus sum, I would learn to say the more humble Je parle français.
Et voilà: the yellow building of the French College was smack in the middle of Sofia, which meant that for the first time I had direct access to the buzz of inner-city life. But it also meant that every morning, at the stroke of seven, I boarded the first of two crammed city buses that forty-five minutes later would eject me, harassed and groped, near the school gates.
In the winter, the buses smelt of morning breath and garlic. In springtime, they smelt of morning breath and sweat. They were packed with school kids like me, poor engineers like my parents, and factory workers like the Mechevs. And there was always the panting, fat-fingered middle-aged groper of nubile girls who reached for any palpable breasts or bottoms. I was too well brought-up to make a spectacle of myself, which was exactly what the groper counted on. He groped, and I squirmed in private revulsion, and the people on the bus pretended not to see.
On the first day of the Lycée, before we knew what was happening, our class supervisor Madame Taleva said in Bulgarian, ‘From now, I will only speak French.’
But we don’t speak any, some brave soul piped. His name was Maxim.
‘That’s exactly why. The only way to learn French is to listen to French.’
It was too much for the girl sitting next to me. She started sobbing quietly, then a sudden explosion of unmistakable stench announced to her immediate neighbours that a catastrophe had occurred. Madame Taleva performed her first act of mercy and discreetly asked me to escort the girl to the toilets, which was where she stayed, sobbing, until her mother came to pick her up. I knew how she felt, a
nd I was grateful for the control I had over my own bowels.
Another initiation ritual was entering the Comsomol, which was compulsory. Back at School 81, the Pioneers had seemed deadly serious, but here the Comsomol was a farce. The test was elementary, so much so that jokes about sample questions floated around (Question one: How many are the Five of the RMS? Question two: What’s the name of Todor Jivkov?). Even so, with the ideological fiasco of the Classical College still fresh in my mind, my knees shook outside the teachers’ office when my turn came. Somehow, I got the answers right this time (Five. Todor Jivkov. Or something to that effect.) and was issued with a brand new red Comsomol ‘passport’, which remained empty of activities and distinctions. I had been too clueless to escape a career with the Pioneers, but I knew better now and kept a low profile.
In the first year or ‘année préparatoire’, our grade was known as ‘little preps’. Little preps learnt between fifty and one hundred and twenty new words a day. Life was good. Here was a foreign language that wasn’t Russian, and that promised ferry passage across the Styx that separated us from the West. As the poor cousin, you could perhaps reach the other shore by paying in language units. And so every day I went home and euphorically copied every new word twenty times and deposited it in the hungry piggy-bank of my mind.
Soon, under Madame Taleva’s inspired baton, we were singing French songs like ‘Ma Normandie’, which seemed to be about a mythical place somewhere in France. We already loved la Normandie, even though we hadn’t even seen a picture of it, and at the end of each stanza, we sang at full throttle:
C’est le pays qui m’a donné le jour.
(It is the country where I saw the light of day.)
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