In fact, when I look at the latest map of Sofia, I find all sorts of strange new names replacing the strange old names. First to go were street names like Machine-building Street, Hammer and Sickle Street, 11th Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party Street, The Great Turning Point Street, Socialist Victory Street, Barricade Street, Heavy Tank Street. Next to go were the names of Communist Fighters and Heroes. Many street names are now prefaced with Prof., Dr, Gen., Tsar, Princess, etc. Some of them I’ve never heard of, because they have been resuscitated from the pre-Communist pantheon. Some of them used to be Fascists, Monarchists, Capitalists and Enemies of the People not so long ago.
In the renamed streets of central Sofia, orange trams and red buses lurch along a patchwork of old and new buildings. They’re overshadowed by giant posters of sultry goddesses advertising perfumes, ‘mobiphones’, leather sofas, and bio-active yogurt. The façades of belle époque buildings peel like damp wallpaper.
Down on street level, Sofia’s women are thoroughly epilated, manicured, hair-dyed, tailor-dressed, perfumed, and pouting.
I am taking a tram to the National Palace of Culture. A bird-like woman with a messy nest of shopping bags looks me straight in the eye and smiles beatifically before she gets off at her stop, ‘This weekend there’s a convention for people who believe.’
‘For people who believe in what?’ I ask, helping her with the shopping bags.
‘In God, of course. A belief that there is a better life than the one we have here. Do come if you can.’
And all these years I thought the misguided belief in a better life was simply called emigration.
‘Thank you,’ I lie, a bit disturbed that of all the people on the tram she chose me.
Ah, the National Palace of Culture! It squats across the tram line, its black and white eighties design blurred into dirty grey. It’s the biggest convention centre in the Balkans, and perhaps the ugliest. I spent many happy formative hours there, gaping at festival films and classical concerts, and there is, of course, the plush café where Keti played the piano. The National Palace of Culture is approached through a gloriously long row of malfunctioning fountains, punctuated by a giant grey wreck of a monument originally called ‘1300 Years of the Bulgarian State’. Now it’s known by various less stately monikers, including ‘The Fallen Messerschmitt’. It was supposed to resemble a flag, but it always resembled a chunk of asbestos encased in granite. It was built in record time in 1981 for the 1,300th anniversary of Bulgaria’s founding. And in record time, only a month later, letters started falling from the poetic quotes glued around its girth. Today, only one word remains, ‘reborn’, from a nineteenth-century song line about identity and revival: ‘Go, reborn people, go towards the bright future!’
And here, in the bright future, the reborn people (pensioners) sit in the shadow of the fallen Messerschmitt by a mural of exploding graffiti art, complaining about their blood pressure and the price of bread. Next to them mothers with babies talk about poos and manicurists.
I sit beside them and wonder: Who do I call? Who is there left to see? What has become of my old friends?
Toni is married, with two daughters. Like his father, he is a physicist at the Academy of Sciences. I’m a coward, I know, but I don’t call him from fear that we’ll have nothing meaningful to say, except, ‘Do you remember Comrade Gesheva…?’
Nikifor is married, and has two offspring. I’m relieved for him, but I’m also relieved that I don’t have his phone number. What would we have to talk about? We had written a few letters, then stopped because he couldn’t afford the stamps to New Zealand, and I didn’t have a camera to take that penguin photo for him.
Tedy is an optometrist. The country is full of diabetics, she tells me, and many of them are going blind. Although we don’t have much in common, over the years we have never missed each other’s birthdays.
Maxim is an investment banker who lives between Paris and London. His languages and his brains served him well. He married a French woman, developed an expensive-looking bald patch, and rarely goes back to his home country. Every few years, we catch up in Paris or London and swap sardonic notes on our lives.
Boris is an underpaid surgeon in Sofia and thinking of emigrating to Canada. His time in the morgue across the road wasn’t wasted.
Esther’s mother died of cancer soon after we said goodbye, and Esther emigrated to Canada where she now lectures in literature and hopes for tenure. She returns to Bulgaria once every few years. ‘I’ll never feel particularly Canadian,’ she emailed me, ‘but I’ll never go back to Bulgaria, and after ten years away, in what way am I actually Bulgarian?’
Right now, that’s a question I can’t answer for her, or even for myself. Right now, my deep suspicion is that it’s possible, perhaps even inevitable, to live between – no, among – nationalities. It’s a bit like wearing different suits, all of them the wrong size, all of them slightly ridiculous, either too baggy or too tight. They don’t make the right size any more, it’s been discontinued. But I also suspect that the Bulgarian suit was never the right fit for me, or for Esther.
Fortunately, I have more urgent things to do than navel-gaze or gaze at the remnants of the fallen Messerschmitt. I’m catching up with Grégoire, who lives in France and is briefly in town to see his parents. Will we recognize each other?
Eight years ago, at the luggage belt of Sofia Airport, I instantly recognized Grégoire among the cluster of bedraggled émigrés disgorged by Air France. We were both visiting for the first time since emigrating. That winter in Sofia was glum and slushy, and I was glad to have a return ticket.
‘Do you remember that time when I asked you out?’ he said. I did. ‘You saved me then by turning me down. I was so relieved when you said no. Because at that point I realized that I would never be attracted to girls. It was a turning point in my life.’
L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. Finally, it made sense.
‘If only Bulgaria would have me back, I’d return,’ Grégoire continued. ‘I’m sick of French prejudice. I can’t get a job in dentistry, despite my qualifications. I’m not making many French friends. My boyfriend is a Moroccan. But I can’t return to live in Bulgaria until I’m thirty, because of national service in the army.’
Now we are over thirty, the sun is out, the trams creak towards a blue Vitosha Mountain, the chestnuts are blossoming, the beautiful people strut their backsides and fake Gucci sunglasses along Vitosha Boulevard, and Sofia looks decidedly liveable. Grégoire is sitting in an outdoor café by the tram line: a chubby, bespectacled Gregorian monk sipping an espresso.
There are so few moments in my life when the past and the present connect in the right place that I am overcome by a grinning happiness at the sight of Grégoire. But he isn’t grinning.
‘All the good men in Paris are taken, or don’t fancy me. I’m on anti-depressants which make me drowsy. Paris is not a city, it’s a meat-grinder. I yearn for Bulgaria. When they show a programme about Bulgaria on French TV, I bawl my eyes out like an idiot. But how can I come back? The gay scene here is all transvestites and freaks. And I still can’t tell my parents. They still ask about girlfriends. Hello, I’ve never had a girlfriend! If I came back, I’d be coming back to a lie.’
‘Remember how much we wanted to go to France?’ I try to cheer him up. ‘I was even prepared to study law or medicine!’
‘Well, I did, and look where that got me.’
Along the chestnut-lined Boulevard Patriarch Evtimii, we’re getting closer to the French Lycée. Time shrinks buildings and people, everybody knows this, but I’m still shocked by how tiny the Lycée looks. On the front steps, the new generation of French students smoke in morose silence or mutter sweet nothings into their mobile phones. They are fully occupied with the vanities of adolescence. I remember how that felt. We go inside to have a look.
‘Yes?’ a doorman greets us inside. ‘Can I help you?’
‘We’re former students, we just want to have a look,�
� I say.
‘OK, no problem.’ He waves us in.
We look into the common room and the teachers’ rooms. A teacher we don’t recognize is marking student papers at one end of a long Politburo-style table, tapping his cigarette in a giant, fag-filled glass ashtray.
‘We’re looking for Madame Taleva,’ I say. ‘She was our French teacher.’
‘Madame Taleva? Never heard of her. How many years ago is this?’
He laughs. ‘Are you kidding me? Fifteen years ago I was a university student.’
We walk back down the stairs. The faded, bare-breasted Liberty is still on the wall, leading a faded people. The guard looks up from the pastry he’s busy eating and wipes his mouth with a tissue.
‘So, did you find what you were looking for?’
We shake our heads, then nod – yes, no, da, ne – confused by two different body languages and the tricky question.
Then we go stand in the Lycée courtyard, where the latest graffiti art greets us: ‘2006: Tits and Joints’. I look up to the classroom where we sang ‘Ma Normandie’ with the now vanished Madame Taleva. ‘C’est le pays qui m’a donné le jour…’ There is a broken window.
‘Were they happy years, do you think?’ I ask Grégoire.
‘Well, if I’m not happy now, I must have been happy then. When I was at the Lycée, I wanted to be in France, to be free, to be myself. Now that I’m in France, I wish I could come back here, to be at home again. I feel more connected with the past than with the present. Is that normal?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Probably not. But at least you feel connected with something.’
We hug and he waves as he disappears into a chipped underpass.
For now, I feel connected with hunger, and I drop in to see one of my closest remaining relatives in Sofia, hoping to get fed.
Auntie Lenche still lives in her darkened ground-floor apartment, just off Vitosha Boulevard. Across from her is a modelling agency called Visage. Three years ago, a small bomb went off outside the ‘agency’: one bunch of ‘businessmen’ blowing up another. The bomb was small but Auntie Lenche’s kitchen windows shattered. She had to pay for her own repairs, of course.
‘But we haven’t had any problems since then,’ she tells me cheerfully. ‘I just stand at the window and enjoy the nice-looking girls and boys who go in and out of the agency doors. You know, two of them were kissing outside the other day. They saw me looking and became shy. I shouted to them, “Kiss away while you’re young. Look at me, old and useless!” They liked that.’
Auntie Lenche’s hair is thick and white like sheep’s wool. She went white at the age of twenty-five, long before her life was blighted by an unpleasant husband and the terminal illness of her daughter, Pavlina.
Pavlina died twelve years ago. Auntie Lenche stopped wearing lipstick and fortune-telling with coffee cups. Now she is kept company by friends and neighbours, and a nameless turtle in a tank on top of her fridge. She opens the fridge and begins to extract salad, goat’s milk, crumbly white cheese.
Auntie Lenche graduated from an American college in Sofia, but can’t remember any English, except ‘Would you like some tea?’ It was all several lives ago, before the Communists, before the war.
She has always been religious. She stood her ground, even in the early 1980s when young thugs working for the secret police stopped her on the street at Easter and demanded, ‘Hey, comrade, where are you carrying this candle?’ ‘To church,’ she said. ‘We advise you to put it out,’ the thugs said. ‘Is it illegal to carry a candle? If it’s not illegal, then I’m not going to put it out,’ she said. ‘Now excuse me, comrades, but I have things to do today.’ The thugs couldn’t think of anything to say and let her pass.
Auntie Lenche has a corner of the dead in her chilly living-room. There she lights candles and gazes at the portrait of the smiling Pavlina in private moments so far down in the pit of grief that it’s hard to imagine how she ever crawls out into the light. Her life revolves around death anniversaries and religious festivals. Yet she is the least morbid person you’ll meet. ‘God and the Virgin look over me,’ she explains matter-of-factly, the way she does everything. ‘Now, I’ve made lamb soup, your favourite.’
At this point, Auntie Petrana arrives. She is my grandfather Alexander’s sister. Even after sixty years in Sofia, she remains a quintessential Bulgarian peasant: energetic, pushy, free of self-pity and complications. She has a house in her native village, where she goes every other weekend, and brings back for Auntie Lenche fresh milk, a chicken or two.
Auntie Petrana and her husband were proper peasants in a past life but, like the Mechevs in Youth 3, they were proletarianized and forced to work at Kremikovtsi Factory near the Youths, for decades exposing themselves to noxious substances. This resulted in her husband’s early death from cancer and Auntie Petrana’s close brush with the same fate. She partially lost the use of her right arm after surgery for breast cancer, but this doesn’t stop her from cooking.
Today, she has brought an enormous tin of mince-stuffed pastry.
‘Auntie’s child.’ She gives me a tearful, bristly kiss. ‘It’s been so long. Your Auntie Petrana made you a mince pastry, let’s see if you like it.’ And she wipes her tears and sweat with a large man’s hankie.
I’ve forgotten that she’s deaf, and that she sometimes speaks of herself in the third person. We eat salad and mince pie and, without further ado, Auntie Petrana downs half a water glass of home-made rakia, strong enough to knock out a herd of bison.
‘Here’s to the child’s visit!’ She suddenly gets tearful again. ‘Ah, your grandfather Alexander, how I miss him! How I miss my brother!’
‘I miss him too,’ Auntie Lenche says. ‘He used to come every day, after lunch at the Veterans’ Canteen. We had coffee and discussed the Healer newspaper. I subscribed to it, and he came to read it. We were like brother and sister.’
‘Why did he do it, huh? Why did he have to do it?’ Auntie Petrana cries out, her eyes red.
‘An accident, it was a tragic accident,’ Auntie Lenche hurries to say. In her Christian world, suicide is not an option. I’m about to join in the tearful chorus, but Auntie Petrana has moved on.
‘They showed New Zealand on TV,’ she goes, ‘and it’s all water. By God, nothing but water! How does your foot ever get a grip on dry land, tell me? And I look at the houses there, and I go, that’s where my family are, in that nice house!’ And she smiles at me with a couple of random teeth.
‘Auntie,’ I say, ‘what happened to your teeth?’
‘Ah, don’t talk to me about that! I’m so mad at my dentist. She took 200 lev, and gave me a set of teeth big enough for a horse, I can’t put it in! A horse, I tell you, a bloody horse.’
‘Now.’ She turns to me. ‘When are you going to give birth.’ It’s not a question, it’s an accusation. ‘It must be about time, how old are you now? Twenty-five? Twenty-eight?’
I choke on my meat pie with laughter.
‘Leave her alone!’ Auntie Lenche protests. ‘It’s her business if she wants to have kids or not. The main thing is to be healthy.’
‘Ah, ah, that’s right,’ Auntie Petrana shouts. ‘It’s time to think about these things. I want great-grandchildren before I die. Don’t you wait for me to die!’
‘The mince pie is delicious, Auntie,’ I say.
‘That’s right, don’t you wait for me to die!’ She wags a finger at me and downs another half-glass of rakia, then reaches for the wine bottle. Auntie Lenche sighs and looks at me.
‘She’s deaf and stubborn like a mule. But she’s the only friend I have left. All my friends have died.’
‘What?’ Auntie Petrana leans across the table in a cloud of booze. ‘Speak louder, I can’t hear!’
‘I say you are my best friend,’ Auntie Lenche shouts.
‘Ah, ah, good. I’m glad you like it.’ She pats her on the arm and peace is made.
In the afternoon, I go to browse books in Slaveikov Square. Th
e book market here is encircled by trams, and flanked by shopping streets. The ‘American Embassy’, as it’s known here, displays its scarily grinning red-and-yellow clown and MakдOHaπдc sign.
On the book stands, vintage porn mags rub naked shoulders with foreign dictionaries, classic novels, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Kama Sutra, Secret Societies and Underground Movements, Dan Brown, John Grisham, illustrated recipe books and – at a stall manned by a lank-haired bookseller – a toxic collection of anti-Semitic literature. After an unpleasant exchange in which the man accuses me of being brainwashed and tells me that, actually, he’s a Buddhist, I move on and another bookseller mutters to me, ‘He’s selling rubbish. It lowers our standards.’ His own stall offers an extensive selection of Bulgarian Playboy back-issues, including the inaugural one, featuring an astonishingly smooth-bodied sixty-year-old Lili Ivanova, Socialism’s greatest pop star, naked apart from a fake tan and some strategically placed roses.
I step into a shady courtyard and discover a huge antiquarian bookshop. This is where I have my first taste of the expat’s rip-off. It’s about time anyway. The shop is piled with the literatures of lapsed eras and discarded schools of thought, and overstaffed by unshaven men with bursting shirt buttons who sit on plastic stools and exhale cigarette smoke.
But the main operator here is a middle-aged woman with a hawk’s eyes. She spots me fingering a book by an Italian academic about the salvation of the Bulgarian Jews.
‘A rare book,’ she says. ‘You’ll be hard pressed to find it elsewhere. Twenty-five lev.’
This is about three times the price of a regular book. When I protest, she protests back that it’s the only such book on the Bulgarian Jews. I protest that it’s not. Dimitar Peshev, one of the key public figures at the time, wrote about the anti-deportation campaign in his memoirs. Tsvetan Todorov too…
‘And who is he?’ she asks lethargically. He’s one of France’s foremost modern thinkers, I say patronizingly, and he’s Bulgarian.
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