She was also in love. The blue-eyed man from Sofia started writing to her at the end of the war. Her yearning to be with him merged with the urgent need to discard her small life in Ohrid for bigger and better things. She couldn’t set foot on the town’s cobbled streets without stirring gossip: that hothead Kosta has been shuttling the family across the border for twenty years now. Like father like daughter. Such a pretty girl, so many suitors, but no, it won’t do. God help her. But unlike her mother, Anastassia didn’t care about God or public opinion. She didn’t care about reality either.
In the box with the photo, I also find a typed letter addressed to Anastassia, dated September 1947, months before she crossed the border and threw in her lot with a man she hardly knew. The letter is from that man, and it is chilly enough to freeze the blood of the most inflamed romantic. Over two pages, he convincingly lists all the reasons why she should forget about him instantly:
We have had permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Directorate of the Militia for your visa. In two days, we will also have the decision of the Balkan Commission.
I received your two letters and the photo, full of hope and love. You remain an idealist, unwilling to consider the ugly side of our decision.
Your arrival won’t be greeted by anything pleasant. You will find me completely unprepared for marital life, morally and materially. There is love, but will love be enough to shelter us from the dark forces of dire need and privation? I think not.
My salary is decent, but not after you take out my expenses for cigarettes (two packets a day) and pubs. You see, in the years we haven’t seen each other, the war has changed me for the worse. The irregular and miserable life I have led has given me every imaginable vice. I drink heavily, and knowing of your bitter experience with this in your own family, I shudder to think of what awaits you here.
It is up to your feminine artfulness, perseverance and selfless love, strengthened by the legal bounds of matrimony, to make our marriage bearable, to shelter me inside it. It is a heavy chore, but once you have taken it upon yourself, you must bear it without complaint and regret. Don’t misunderstand me: I am writing this in all honesty, as I do not wish to be accused, one day, of being the coward who dragged you into the abyss of his own life. Think carefully, objectively and sensibly before you take the fatal step.
Anastassia, aged twenty-three, thought carefully, objectively and sensibly, as you do when you’re twenty-three. Two months later, she took the fatal step. After all, her interpretation of the famous family maxim was ‘Romance or Death’. Never mind if the man she had chosen didn’t have a single romantic bone in him.
In drab, impoverished post-war Sofia, where you bought everything with coupons and even coupons were in short supply, she had no money, no friends, no family, and no way back. All she had was her high-maintenance new husband who was a good man, but after four years of war he was a good man with a stomach ulcer, one deaf ear, a taste for drinking, and a cynical outlook. Now she discovered how painfully honest that letter was.
They lived in a house previously owned by a wealthy banker. That banker was now an Enemy of the People and pounding rocks in a labour camp. His house was turned into a tenement and rented out to the People. The young couple had a room, and shared a communal toilet with other families. There was no bath, so once a week they made a trip to the flat-roofed Mineral Baths, courtesy of the Romans. In their street was a row of bombed-out houses, courtesy of the Allies. Soon, a baby was born, which quickly proceeded to develop a pre-tubercular cough, followed by kidney disease. This was my mother.
But Anastassia was blessed and cursed with a surplus of romanticism. My mother, when asked by people whose child she was, was instructed to reply ‘a child of love’. Anastassia lived simultaneously in the wrong time and the wrong place. She was a summer thunderstorm in a dark winter of the soul. Her taste for drama, her exotic looks and poetic notions of life clashed with a singularly unpoetic era. The regime strived to maul precisely such people and spit them out as ‘work cadres’.
In the 1950s, Anastassia became a cadre at Radio Sofia, where she broadcast a programme for the Macedonians in Yugoslavia. The idea was to remind them of their true (Bulgarian) heritage, and it was blatant revisionist propaganda by the State. In the sixties, in yet another bewildering about-face, the State decided that the Macedonians didn’t exist at all (because they were in fact Bulgarians), and the programme was scrapped. Now she broadcast a programme for ‘Bulgarians living abroad’.
As relations between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria soured, the border was sealed off. Propagandist murals appeared on Sofia’s buildings, featuring a fat-faced ogre in black holding a cleaver dripping with blood: Tito. Anastassia couldn’t see her family, and in the space of twenty years she only called them three times: when her brother got divorced; when an earthquake flattened Skopje; and when her father died.
If Anastassia ever felt that the blue-eyed man she’d chosen had dragged her into the shallow abyss of mediocrity, she never let anyone know. He was not the knight in shining armour she had dreamed of, that much was clear even to her. He was an accountant from a sensible peasant family. She chose to see his emotional incompetence as a ‘bedrock of strength’ and wrote him poems, but he never found it in him to bring her a flower for her birthday. She yelled at him in fits of jealousy, and he slammed the door in boorish silence. He had no taste for drama – or affairs, for that matter. She wrote radio plays, and he could only sing one tune, the painfully simple hymn of the peasant: ‘When I was a shepherd/and grazed my sheep/I was grateful for my lot/though I was a poor sod.’
But when, aged fifty-something, she fell into the abyss of illness, he followed her there loyally, like a humble, voiceless Orpheus in the underworld. And when Hades swallowed her, like a mute shadow he wandered the world of the living, until his own demons devoured him.
After several hundred euros’ worth of border levies, Rado makes it to Sofia in the new Peugeot. He brings me flowers – real, not plastic – and we assure each other that we haven’t changed since we last met five years ago. Or even fifteen years ago. I tell him many things, but I don’t tell him that I still keep the first – and last – letter he sent me after I left Bulgaria. It was for my nineteenth birthday. I was by then moving slowly, skeletally, in an arctic chill of the soul at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island, which was inhabited, but only just.
‘For your birthday,’ he wrote, ‘I booked two tickets to a screening of The Wall. The cinema was packed. Only one seat was empty, the one next to me.’ Then he had signed off with a stanza from Metallica’s latest hit ballad about trusting who we are and how nothing else matters. I didn’t know who or where the hell I was, but I kept the letter, a message from a far-off land.
The next day, we borrow his father’s beat-up old Renault, and head out of town for a few days. Cultural objective: to have a look at Pirin Macedonia in southern Bulgaria. Personal objective: to meet again and find out who we have become.
We are now standing outside the huge gates of Rila Monastery, where our bespectacled family was photographed a dozen times in the eighties alongside grinning French, Dutch and Japanese scientists in horn-rimmed glasses. Rila was the number one officially sanctioned attraction to show visitors from abroad. True, it was a monastery – slightly awkward for an atheist regime – but as the largest monastery complex in the country, it was also ‘a cradle’ of Bulgarian identity.
‘The object is observed by cameras,’ a typed-up sheet in a plastic pouch greets us. Rado finds this sign so amusing he wants to get photographed with it. Inside the courtyard, the gallery vaults explode in a symphony of colours. The velvety ranges of Rila rise on all sides. It’s heart-stoppingly beautiful, but we are distracted by the frescoes. They are the work of nineteenth-century artist Zahari Zograf who painted half of Bulgaria’s monasteries. Here, he has drawn graphic scenes from purgatory, replete with hairy devils and round-bellied sinners. On another side of the church, every sin is scrupul
ously depicted and defined in old Bulgarian, for example ‘Sodomites or those who sin with man or woman unnaturally’.
‘Beware sodomites,’ Rado warns the courtyard, and people turn to look at the madman in denim jacket and dark glasses. I suddenly see that in the seventeen years I’ve known him, he has grown into a Clive Owen lookalike – dark, deadpan, destructively attractive to women. But blink again, and he is seventeen, awkwardly rocking along with Metallica in his fake denim jacket.
We’re told that Father Varlan is responsible for the ‘reception’ at the monastery. Three humble provincial women pilgrims with battered travel bags stand in the courtyard patiently, waiting for him. Father Varlan appears on the third-floor veranda, his black cassock sweeping behind him. He’s a young bearded priest with a businesslike manner. The three pilgrims speak up timidly from the ground. They’d like a couple of rooms for the night, please, father. ‘Yes, yes.’ He waves them away. ‘I’ll come down in a moment. Yes, back up those files and download the images,’ he yells across the courtyard to another monk and vanishes into a cell, not to be seen again. Rado’s guess is that he is surfing the net between the four bare walls of his cell.
Bearded priests in black cassocks shuffle around with a purposeful air. I ask one of them, a chubby-faced man with bug-eyed glasses, when the ethnographic museum will open. He stares at me myopically. The two villagers he is talking to also stare. ‘Will it be open soon?’ I repeat.
‘No,’ he nods, baffled by my impertinence. ‘They’re renovating it.’
‘Yes, but when will it reopen?’ I insist.
‘Whenever they finish renovating it.’ He shrugs self-evidently, astonished as much by my vulgar directness as by my ignorance. I thank him and move on to another priest who hovers around the gates.
‘When do the monastery gates close, Father?’ I ask. He gives me a mistrustful glance.
‘When the sun goes down,’ he mumbles, slipping away from my obnoxious presence. ‘Or later.’
We drop into the monastery museum to stare at the Rila cross, a minutely wood-carved cross with 1,500 tiny figures that took a devout monk called Rafael twelve years to carve with a needle, and then took his eyesight. We also find an original document from 1378, the monastery’s charter, written in the hand of Tsar Ivan Shishman, the last king before the Ottomans decapitated the Bulgarian state. At the mere mention of Ivan Shishman, I hear the soothing radio voice at 7.15 a.m., ‘Bulgaria: Deeds and Documents’, and feel a wave of sleepiness wash over me.
In vain, we look for the monastery’s famous relic: the hand of the eccentric Ivan Rilski, the tenth-century founder of the monastery. Turns out it’s been put safely away since a particularly devout pilgrim a century ago tried to bite off a chunk. Not surprising – Ivan Rilski tried to embalm himself while still alive by drinking special potions, and his disciples were so impressed by this, they believed his dead body to have healing properties.
‘Still, I wouldn’t go so far as to take a bite,’ Rado remarks, earning an unsympathetic look from the heavyweight female museum guard.
Inside the church, which implodes with exquisite walnut-carved iconostases, more fabulous frescoes, and countless priceless icons including a reportedly miraculous one of the Virgin Mary, we spot the tomb of Tsar Boris III. Well, tomb is not quite the word – because here, underneath the sand, is buried a jar containing his heart, his only physical remnant. After being buried here at his own request in 1943, only two years later the tsar’s body was disinterred, and the floor tiles of the church hurriedly rearranged. This brainwave emanated directly from the Great Leader Georgi Dimitriov who wanted to ensure that the popular tsar’s tomb didn’t become a site of pilgrimage.
In the same wave, and seemingly unaware of the undercurrent of saintliness they were allowing to run between saint and tsar, the authorities tried to remove Ivan Rilski’s hand from the monastery grounds. But the lorry ‘miraculously’ didn’t start on that occasion, and the hand stayed put inside the monastery. The tsar didn’t, and his remains, together with the truth about his death, were lost in the shifting shadows of post-war conspiracy. Some believe he was poisoned by Hitler for being too soft on the Jews, others that he died of a heart attack. Some say that his ashes were scattered in a gorge, others that he was buried at his Vrana Palace outside Sofia, then disinterred. By then the new royals of the day were already living it up at Vrana Palace, and they might well have liked to dance over the dead body of a decadent monarcho-fascist. Either way, in the 1990s the heart was ‘accidentally’ found and reburied here.
But the most haunted place in the entire monastery is the refectory. Soot-blackened chimney, giant cauldrons, stone ovens. It’s a medieval hovel of hunger and warmth. I smell the thousands of litres of bean soup, the tons of soda bread. I hear the crackle of candles burning, the bubbling of wild boar stew, the rustle of cassocks and scratching of itchy beards, the slurping and toying with worry beads, the long, holy silences. No downloading of files, no intrusive visitors with cameras. Just God, the sun rising behind the velvety mountain, and the Turks lurking outside the gates.
Outside the gates, Rado opens the car trunk to reveal a whole crate of sandwiches made by his mother, and enough fruit provisions for a month. We picnic heartily and then, fortified like plump monks, we wave goodbye to the humble pilgrim women who are still waiting in the courtyard, and trek up a tranquil wooded path to a well-groomed grave.
James Bourchier, Balkan correspondent for The Times for thirty-three years, peace activist, and defender of the losing side in the Balkan Wars (Bulgaria) and in the First World War (Bulgaria), asked to be buried in Rila. Unlike the other distinguished dead around here, he had the good fortune not to be dragged away posthumously in an army lorry. During his twenty-odd years in Bulgaria, he often came to walk in Rila, in the company of Tsar Ferdinand, Boris III’s father, the man who loved Bulgaria and especially Greater Bulgaria so much that he dragged it into two catastrophic wars. I wonder what Bourchier, an Irishman, would make of the plaque at his grave, which carefully explains in Bulgarian that he was a ‘great English friend of the Bulgarian people’.
We drive south along the straight, empty highway to Greece, and soon we enter the landscape that Tsar Ferdinand’s army had so bitterly fought for. The snow-capped, jagged peaks of Pirin Mountain shimmer in the blue distance like a mirage. Our next stop is near the Greek border, at the foot of Pirin.
As we approach the border, bilingual signs begin to appear on roadside cafés and shops. We stop at a stall selling jars of home-made ewe and ox yogurt, and green, translucent fig jam. A soft-bellied waiter stands by the stall, a napkin folded over his forearm.
‘Is there any goat’s yogurt?’ I ask him.
‘It exists,’ he says gravely, gazing into the distance. ‘But it’s runny, you can’t cut it with a knife. Ox is better.’
‘So where can we find goat’s yogurt?’ I insist.
‘You’ll have to ask the people with goats.’ He shrugs in that deeply Bulgarian way – resigned, fatalistic, almost mystical – and waves vaguely towards the hills, his stained tea-towel flapping in the breeze. We pile back into the Reunault.
‘Where are the people with goats?’ Rado wants to know, but before we work out this riddle we reach Sandanski, world famous in Bulgaria for its medicinal air and mineral springs.
As an asthmatic child, I spent holidays here with my grandparents, Anastassia and Alexander. I ate salty corn on the cob in a wondrous white town with a chatty fountain in the middle. Sandanski is also allegedly the birthplace of the Thracian gladiator and slave leader Spartacus. When in the eighties Hollywood’s Spartacus was screened on TV, no doubt because the broadcasting censors saw in him a worker fighting against the capitalist-imperialist machine, I gaped adoringly at the muscular Kirk Douglas. Why, he was almost from Sandanski. He was almost one of us, with a delay of about two thousand years.
We stop in the middle of town and buy food from the street stalls: dried cherries from Iran; dates from Turkey; cashe
ws from India. Apart from the crunchy sesame seed bars and the fig jam, there is hardly anything local for sale here, despite the fertile soil. But luckily, a National Fair of Manufacturers has set up camp in the chipped Socialist-era cultural centre in the main square, and we browse the cheap clothes, shoes and cosmetics. ‘Fancy some boots?’ Rado picks up a stilettoed, fake snakeskin creation. ‘When in Rome, you know…’ And it’s true, when we see the locals passing down the long, leafy pedestrian street leading to the park, they are dressed up to the nines in fake brands, every woman teetering on high heels.
The alpine flanks of Pirin rise on the edge of town like a tidal wave of memories. A small, broken fountain sits dejectedly in the main square. This is it, this is the magical white town. In a sudden lurch of vertigo, I sit on the edge of the chipped fountain and fixate on the tidal wave in the distance. Inside it, I see swirling my clueless asthmatic childhood, my glamorous grandparents Alexander and Anastassia, a blue Skoda, an orange Skoda, my scattered family, and fragments of things I can’t quite make out. The chipped, monolithic Balkantourist hotel overlooking the square is where we stayed.
‘Cheer up,’ Rado says. ‘Look how chirpy the locals are in their stilettos, eating their corn on the cob.’
We climb into the car and leave Sandanski behind, to fester with memories.
We nibble salty, firm-fleshed corn while we drive through dirt-poor villages without a soul on the potholed streets.
‘Doncho for sale,’ announces a scribbled sign pinned on a cart in the deserted village of Hotovo.
‘Who or what is Doncho, I want to know?’ Rado chuckles. ‘Is it a donkey or an unwanted grandson?’
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