Inside the bare-stoned, high-domed church, a gaggle of downy-faced black-clad seminaries, as young as the presidency guards, chant the prayers of eastern orthodoxy around a pulpit. They take turns reciting the self-deprecating words in their unformed, timid voices. ‘God instil me with fear of your heavenly might, I who am unworthy and unholy, your everlasting slave…’
The people standing in the audience cross themselves repeatedly and bow down to the floor. Searching for symbols of identity and nationhood, post-Communist Bulgaria is clinging to the beards of eastern orthodoxy. These days every public occasion is accompanied by an overweight priest in embroidered robes, swinging an incense-burner, and every politician, from the Socialist president to his contender in the far right party Ataka, makes sure that they are photographed kissing the hand of some gilded patriarch, either here or, even better, in brotherly Russia.
A woman with a careworn face wipes quick, mechanical tears and mumbles desperate prayers with pale lips. Her two young daughters, dressed in jackets and trousers they’ve outgrown, imitate her movements. All three cross and bow, cross and bow. It’s not so much a prayer as a lament.
An angel from the ninth century gazes down on us from the dome way up above our heads, with something like pity on what remains of his face.
It’s hard to believe that the busy American Bar and Grill was formerly The Hungarian Restaurant that provided both my first experience of dining out and a fight scene involving my father, a rude waiter and a plate of meatballs. Now, waitresses in mini-skirts and dyed hair smile ‘enjoy’ as they serve steak and fries.
My grandfather Alexander liked the American Bar and Grill – he liked the bland food and the waitresses in mini-skirts. He brought me here for my twenty-ninth birthday lunch, and we were joined by Auntie Lenche and his best surviving friend, Ljubo. Ljubo gave me a book of his mother’s poems translated into English. My grandfather gave me a synthetic fur coat, to keep me warm in the future winters of my life.
Just across the road is a tinted-glass pavilion. It used to be the War Veterans’ Canteen. At exactly twelve o’clock every day, my grandfather, Ljubo, and Nikolai Gaubich met here for chicken soup. They were all snappy dressers. In their beige coats, scarves, leather gloves, berets over silver hair, and gentlemanly manners, they were the last messengers from the old Sofia of the 1940s, before the new Sofia was hammered out on the anvil of Communism. After lunch, they would sit on the benches outside the canteen, bask in the afternoon sun, and talk politics.
Ljubo was the only son of Bulgaria’s first famous woman poet and independent spirit, Elissaveta Bagryana. Tall and classy, he liked wearing gloves and telling naughty jokes. He had been a career officer in the King’s Army, and had got as far as occupying the coveted Macedonia to the west before the tide changed and Bulgaria declared war on Germany – while briefly remaining at war with the Allies. Not bad for a little country with everything to lose.
My grandfather Alexander had been a reserve officer until the Red Army absorbed the Bulgarian Army in 1944, at which point his unit was dispatched to rout the Nazi occupier in Macedonia – except the Nazi occupier had been helped by the Bulgarians until now. Either way, to Alexander the war was an extended holiday from adulthood. It sounded as if they spent their short time in Macedonia looting houses and getting drunk. Some of his soldiers were so dense that one time when looting a wealthy house with a piano in it (without his authorization, my grandfather stressed), they wrenched the lid off and made a bench out of it, hilarious fun. ‘They’d never seen a piano before, can you imagine, they looked at it and they saw wood!’
If grandfather was the episodic soldier, Nikolai Gaubich was the artiste of the three. A renowned opera singer in his day, he had toured the world, and spoke a smattering of languages. He conducted an elegant, old-fashioned correspondence with me, the way he had corresponded with my grandmother Anastassia during trips abroad. His letters started or ended with ‘ma chérie’, and were accompanied by an epigrammatic poem. His wife had died of cancer years ago, and his only son was killed in a car crash. Towards the end of his life, his poems turned maudlin and I filed them away in a drawer. Nikolai’s sudden death was a shocking blow to my grandfather. The countdown had begun.
I take a long walk by South Park, along the boulevard whose length I travelled a hundred times on the buses of my childhood, because at the end of the bus line was Emil Markov and my favourite place in Sofia – my grandparents’ apartment.
One side of the apartment looked towards Vitosha Mountain and the outlying houses of the village where the Fighter for Freedom Emil Markov was shot by the Monarco-Fascists. I mean, when the Communist terrorist Emil Markov got shot by the police.
The other side looked out onto a green children’s playground, where my grandmother Anastassia sat on benches chatting to neighbours who would ask me with greasy smiles, ‘Who do you love more, Mummy or Granny? Granny or Grandad?’ I suspected these were trick questions, so I always replied, just in case, ‘I love everybody equally,’ which didn’t satisfy the neighbours at all.
On my thirtieth birthday, which I celebrated in New Zealand, my grandfather was preparing for the arrival of his daughter, my mother, for her annual visit. His life had become narrower and lonelier since she had been there last. He was a cautious man. He disliked travel, change, noise, and risk, which in the end meant human company. He had stopped going to the War Veterans’ Canteen because he was afraid of slipping on the winter roads. Besides, there was no one left to talk to – Gaubich was dead, Ljubo in hospital. Grandfather maintained order at home, read a lot, and wrote his comments in the margins of books. A professional accountant to the end, he loved organization. But now there was nothing left to organize.
The neighbourhood was quiet that morning. He stood in his old rubber flip-flops, leaning out of a window to shake the dust off some blankets. Perhaps his thoughts wandered across to the visitor on her way from Singapore. He was a tall man. Perhaps he slipped and the weight of the blanket pulled him out. Or at least he had planned it to look that way – a well-organized death, an accountant’s death. They would arrive on time to bury him. He would not become a burden to his only daughter abroad. Either way, he fell from the window with the blanket, like a flying man in a Chagall painting. A child found him lying on the pavement seven stories down, carefully covered by the blanket, his flip-flops still on his feet.
A day after his death and my thirtieth birthday, in far-away New Zealand, he appeared to me in my troubled dreams. ‘Stop worrying about me.’ He waved his hand irritably. ‘I’m fine where I am, things are simple now. You think about yourselves now, your lives are complicated.’ The subconscious was fixing the conscious.
But now, standing underneath the balcony, by the bench where my grandmother had sat, in the spot where my grandfather had been found, conscious and subconscious merge into two horrible human-shaped stains of absence. I quickly start walking away and soon break into a run. Two stray dogs stir from their afternoon nap among the spilling rubbish containers and bark after me, bedraggled, homeless creatures from the underworld of the past.
When exhaustion finally stops me, I find myself outside a ‘2 to 200 lev’ shop. I go in. It sells packets of soap bars, threadbare towels, and plastic flowers. Three men in socks and rubber slippers sit on low stools around a small fold-up table, drinking tea and speaking Arabic. I reach for the most accessible things on the crammed shelves – a packet of pegs and a small glass teapot in a plastic frame.
‘Very beautiful when tea is inside pot.’ The youngest of the men gets up from the small table and wraps my loot in newspaper. Where are they from? They are Syrians.
‘We have childrens here,’ says the young man by way of explaining the strange phenomenon of three Syrians in Sofia. ‘We are marry to Bulgarian women.’ I compliment him on his fluent Bulgarian. How long has he lived here?
‘Nine,’ he says, and grins mysteriously with a golden tooth. His T-shirt says ‘You are not alone,’ the motto of the campaign
in support of the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor in Libya condemned to death, for nearly nine years now, on false charges of infecting children with HIV.
My purchases cost me a grand total of 4 levs. Just as well, because the moment I try to use them on the balcony’s clothes line, every one of the pegs breaks, and as soon as I pour tea into the glass pot, it shatters on the bench-top and hot water floods the kitchen floor. Incongruous tears fill my eyes, as if this crappy pot was a family heirloom. We don’t have an heirloom. And right now, it feels as if we hardly have a family. My parents are in New Zealand. My sister is in London.
Grandmother Anastassia fixes me with a Gioconda smile from the folds of her pink shawl. How did that saying go? The living close the eyes of the dead, and the dead open the eyes of the living. In any case, she knows something I don’t.
I should have bought some plastic flowers instead, I say to her, vengefully dumping the teapot, the ridiculous gift-wrapped soap, and the wilted pagan wreath in the bin.
True, they are hideous, but they last for ever. You can’t ask for everything.
9 Freedom, Perfection or Death
Macedonian misadventures
In an old box of photographs at Peach Street, I find a photo of an exotic-looking woman with black hair, dressed in oriental garb and reclining on cushions. Someone has scribbled on it ‘Ohrid, 22 April 1943’. This is my grandmother Anastassia, aged nineteen, at a costume party in her Macedonian home town, where she could have stayed and enjoyed a comfortable provincial life. But history and personality interfered.
It all started when, in 1932, in the lake-town of Ohrid some 300 kilometres from Sofia, a tailor called Kosta Bahchevandjiev got into a spot of trouble with the police. This was my great-grandfather. On a moonless night, he smuggled himself in a boat across Lake Ohrid and into Albania. From the Albanian coast, he sailed across to southern Italy, and after travelling the length of the country, he entered Austria, then Hungary, then Romania. It took him a couple of years, but he finally reached his end destination: Sofia.
Why this insane itinerary when he could have just crossed the border into western Bulgaria in a matter of hours? Because he was on the run. He was a man wanted for multiple debts, a man facing gaol. In Ohrid between the two world wars there was only one way to get out of paying yours debts: become a Serb and stick ‘ich’ at the end of your surname. If you insisted that you were Macedonian (-evski) or Bulgarian (-ev), you faced several options starting with gaol, and, if you really insisted, ending with murder. Kosta insisted, and then got the hell out of there.
It so happened that Ohrid, and all of today’s Republic of Macedonia, had been annexed by Greater Serbia following victory against an aspiring Greater Bulgaria in the First World War. Bulgaria under Tsar Ferdinand had sided with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the hope of regaining western and Aegean Macedonia. These were historically seen – by Bulgaria, not by her neighbours of course – as Bulgarian lands. Why?
In the 1877 Russo-Turkish war, Bulgaria was liberated from the Ottomans. But before the news had time to sink in, this longed-for independence was cleaved in two by the Great Powers with one neat stroke of the pen. The ‘big four’ swiftly drew up the new borders of the Balkan region well before they invited the Balkan nations to the Congress of Berlin.
In the fateful and hateful Treaty of Berlin, independent Greater Bulgaria was dismembered and large chunks of it given back to the Ottomans: Vardar Macedonia (today the Republic of Macedonia); Pirin Macedonia (the south-west); and the whole of the south. With just a few signatures overseen by the dyspeptic German Prince Otto von Bismarck – who referred to the Balkans as ‘places of which no one has heard’ – the Great Powers made sure that the Balkans became places of which much would be heard in the following century.
So in the First World War, the Bulgarian army occupied and reclaimed all Macedonian lands, but the tide turned and it had to withdraw. The tide turned in such a way that, far from regaining anything, Bulgaria lost even more land, sustained the highest per capita casualty rate in Europe, and was left bleeding and deranged with loss. In other words, it was set to make new Macedonia-bound grabs in the next world war, which it did, also with disastrous results.
Meanwhile, great-grandfather Kosta saw himself as a Bulgarian, and viewed the brisk Serbianization of Macedonia as a crime. He resented his children going to Serbian school, and he resented people being imprisoned for refusing to say they were Serbs.
So did his wife, the switched-on and buttoned-up Ljubica, from one of Ohrid’s prominent families. The personal motto of her famous relative, writer and educator Grigor Prlicev, was ‘Perfection or Death’. Ljubica applied this principle in her own life with alarming energy. But now, in the wake of Kosta’s desertion, Ljubica had more prosaic worries, such as how to feed her three children. Families were suffocatingly close knit, but once you were married, you were your husband’s problem. Ljubica put on a widow’s black frock to mark her husband’s fiscal death, just in time for her own parents’ real deaths which left her with nothing. After all, she was only a girl. Out of the inheritance her two brothers shared, they magnanimously gifted her a sewing-machine. This way, she could at least make clothes for Ohrid’s bourgeoisie, to which she no longer belonged.
Three years later, she and the three kids joined Kosta in Sofia. He tried to set up a tailor’s shop, but times were hard and they had no family to help them out, and now lacked even a sewing-machine. They lived in Banishora, a notoriously poor quarter near the railway station where tens of thousands of Macedonian refugees from across the border lived in cramped misery.
Sometimes they had nothing to eat. Ljubica, always one to keep up appearances, laid the table at dinner time, to give the landlady the correct impression. But the plates were empty. Kosta would get drunk and aggressive on just one glass of cheap wine. The more helpless he felt, the more he drank. Once, while Ljubica was in hospital, Anastassia came home and informed her father that she’d been diagnosed with malaria. This distressed him so much that he hit her on the face, knocking her to the floor where she remained for some time.
Every family must have its bleak winter, and this winter in Sofia was theirs, just as 1991 was ours sixty years later. Anastassia and her younger brother Slavcho amassed so much hunger and misery in those years that they spent their adult lives eating themselves into oblivion.
And now the dark vortex of European politics was churning, and Bulgaria was being sucked in, dragging the Bahchevandjiev family with it. In Banishora, Macedonian families like them endured brisk midnight visits from unshaven men with small foreheads and pulled-up collars. They were ‘collecting funds’ and they were the foot soldiers of the VMRO or Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which has the distinction of being Europe’s first terrorist group. Actually, there were lots of groups, all at war with each other over the fate of Macedonia, and they operated on the principle of the mafia’s state-within-a-state. This many-headed political monster was the offspring of the Treaty of Berlin. Their banner read ‘Freedom or Death’ and depicted a crossed dagger and gun, with a bomb for good measure. By the mid-1930s, the VMRO were responsible for 1,000 political murders, including two Bulgarian prime ministers and King Alexander I of Yugoslavia. In Sofia, Macedonian became synonymous with violence, conspiracy, and sinister disappearances, and the saying went:
Where is Mitre the Macedonian?
The moon swallowed him.
Great-grandfather Kosta was an urban Socialist and a nationalist, and it’s certain that he sympathized with the VMRO cause. What is not so certain but quite possible is that he was a VMRO agent. A killer he was not, this much we know. There were plenty of angry young men for that. All we have is his disgusted mumblings, later in life, about the savagery of VMRO’s ‘punishments’ of ‘traitors’ which featured removing the heart of a living man.
Meanwhile, on her street in Banishora, seventeen-year-old Anastassia met a dashing blue-eyed man called Alexander. He spotted her jumping over a pud
dle, and exclaimed ‘Whoops!’ – clearly a winning chat-up line. She looked at him, he had a nice blond face, and the rest is history. Actually, the rest was the Second World War.
As war broke out, the Bahchevandjiev family left Sofia and went back to Ohrid, now safe for them courtesy of the occupying Bulgarian army. It looked set to become part of Bulgaria once more. But the family’s hopes were dashed when the town was retaken by Yugoslavia a few years later.
Kosta kept a low profile now. He was too old to die for lost causes. Finally exhausted of his political fervour, he was once again a small-town tailor. Ljubica continued to read the papers and talk politics, but in public they kept their mouths shut, so as not to injure their children who were making their way in life as young Yugoslavs.
Their plates were full, but their spirits were broken: Bulgaria and Macedonia were now living separate lives and would never be reunited. Until the end, Kosta continued to hum a dismal little song that went like this:
From the top of Pirin Mountain
I hear a sorrowful voice.
Macedonia is crying:
Be damned, oh Europe,
Babylonian whore,
bloodsucker of Macedonia.
The French, the English, the Italian, the German
Want us to be slaves.
He replaced Italian with Serb to keep with the times – after all, the song had been written in the wake of the Treaty of Berlin a century ago, and a few things had changed. But in this family, as in many others, the song seemed timeless. Even grandmother Anastassia used to hum it in her homesick moments when the shadow of the Yugoslav border loomed darkly.
The orphans of political divorces are always people. And in the Bahchevandjiev family, that person became Anastassia. In the mid-1940s, Anastassia was one of Ohrid’s prettiest eligible young women. She was Sofia-educated, vivacious, olive-skinned, and strong-willed. She looked like a movie star. But she wasn’t a movie star, she was a bored school teacher, and Ohrid was a claustrophobic little town where the gentry’s eyes were always on you. Having tasted the excitement of Sofia, Anastassia felt that her life was on hold here.
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