‘The ancient Macedonians of Alexander were proto-Slavs, and thus ancestors of today’s Macedonians,’ he explained.
I pointed out that the Slavs arrived several centuries after Philip and Alexander died, and that grandmother Anastassia would have laughed at this theory.
‘Ah, yes.’ He became rueful. ‘I adored my sister, she was a very intelligent woman, but on this point she was wrong. She was a bugaromanka, a Bulgarian supporter, and so were our parents. But now we know who we are. We are descendants of Alexander and Philip, and the Bulgarians are, well… with all due respect, descendants of some Barbarian tribes from Mongolia.’
‘Uncle, are you saying that you and I are ethnically different?’
‘Well…’ he waved his fork vaguely and reached for a second piece of baklava ‘… we are different in some ways, not exactly ethnically, but historically speaking. Still…’ he patted my hand reassuringly ‘… the Macedonian blood flows in you. Look at you, so clever, and your hair is like Sijka’s. And see how well you speak Macedonian.’
I was in fact speaking Bulgarian with a few tweaked words, but perhaps some forms of madness are better left undisturbed. This new Macedonian revisionism reminded me of the Soviet engineering of history. By Stalin’s decree, all the richly mixed, migrating populations of central and eastern Europe from 1000 BC onwards had been ‘proto-Slavs’. The writer Neal Ascherson calls this revisionist construction ‘a skyscraper of chauvinist imbecility’. And it’s a skyscraper because so many, across so many borders, are perched on top of each other, trampling those below, reaching for the stars of an imaginary national greatness.
The Macedonian region has been a hotchpotch of cultures for many centuries, and today one-third of Macedonia the country is Albanian. But in their frantic effort to create a new national consciousness, the new Macedonians have engineered themselves a glorious history, to replace the bizarre tragedy of their past. A century ago Bulgarians, Macedonians, Serbs and Greeks were oppressed peoples united against the Ottomans. That day, in my Uncle Slavcho’s kitchen, we made peace over baklava and Turkish coffee. But I didn’t point out any of this, in case he saw me as a threat to national security.
In Ohrid, everybody in my family bent over backwards to make my stay pleasant. When someone mentioned in passing Anastassia the ‘bugaromanka’, I kept smiling benignly, thinking that if she were alive now, this new travesty of identity would be enough to kill her.
Rado and I begin our journey back. We pass villages chewed up by last year’s flood, half-houses missing here and there, but many lovingly rebuilt. Dogs and old folk stop in their tracks, startled by the passing car. Rusted signs from Communist times greet us eerily from the walls of houses, placed there thirty years ago for some visit from a Party official:
Let us give a true Socialist aspect to our settlement by ensuring exemplary cleanliness.
Observing personal and public hygiene is a sign of high culture.
Greetings from the Central Committee of the Communist Party!
We drive past the town of Bansko, once the plumpest wool-trading town in the region, and now Europe’s fastest growing ski resort. Mushrooming from the small cobbled lanes of Bansko’s centuries-old heart is a giant construction site of hotels and apartment complexes for sale to foreigners and entrepreneurs.
Here is the ugly, brave new Bulgaria, dwarfing the rural charms of old Bulgaria. Here is the young, ravenous capitalism, hungry for a quick buck, chomping into the mountain forests which are this country’s deepest wealth, nibbling at the Pirin biosphere with a hungry maw, not looking back. Chomp chomp, go the cranes and lorries.
Behind us, the snowy peaks of Pirin stand like a family of white-aproned giants. They have seen it all: Bulgarian armies; Greek armies; Turkish armies; Macedonian rebels; caravans of wine, tobacco and wool trotting along on the European road of prosperity. And now this sweeping grab for quick dosh. Chomp chomp.
‘Forget Freedom and Perfection,’ Rado mutters. ‘This is Profit or Death.’
10 Balkan Blues
Surviving in the Balkán
The map of Bulgaria looks like an animal hide spread out, with the head end looking to Europe and the rear end sitting at the Black Sea.
The Balkán ranges are the spine, running from Cape Eminé on the sea side to the border with Serbia. This is the country’s historic heartland, where medieval tsars reigned, revolts were fomented, revolutionary guns fired, cliff-top monasteries built, independent Bulgaria got its first constitution, and the peninsula got its name. Bulgarians call the ranges, and mountains in general, simply Balkán, with a stress on the second ‘a’. Their fondness for mountains in general and the Balkán in particular is summed up in the saying: ‘The Balkán gives birth to people, the plain gives birth to wheat.’
Which is not a nice way to talk about my family, who happen to live in the plains just north of the Balkán. There is nothing grain-like about them.
Uncle and Auntie arrive in their Moskvic from Suhindol to pick me up at the railway station. It is 1999. Auntie has squeezed herself into the rusty husk of the car. She puts the gear into second for Uncle, and he presses on the accelerator. We go in second gear all the way. Donkey carts piled up with hay and kids overtake us. Uncle manages to drive into all the potholes in the road, which is not difficult since the road is like Emmental cheese. All is well while there is no other traffic, but as soon as a car shows in the distance, Uncle snaps into action and goes straight into the oncoming traffic lane.
‘Christooo!’ Auntie shrieks. ‘What are you doing, you want to kill us!’ And she fumbles with the steering-wheel. They have always driven in tandem. I close my eyes and pray for us not to die here, on this godforsaken road.
Auntie’s white hair is a cloud of petulant authority, though her legs are dead. Uncle’s 1970s brown suit is missing a button or two, and he has a three-day stubble, or is it a week’s? Hair grows more slowly when you’re old, he says. We stop at a petrol station and when I insist on paying for the expensive petrol, a quarter of their monthly pension, Uncle protests, then gives in dejectedly.
‘We always wanted to provide for you kids.’ Tears leak from his eyes. ‘I never thought it would come to this.’
After dinner, with a heavy heart which might just be a heavy stomach, I go for a walk in the village. The inhabitants are bored children and hairy-chinned old people. The handsome, peeling, turn-of-the-century houses in the main square have been returned to their original owners, but there is no one with the money to restore them. Gypsies are squatting in the house of great-grandfather Nikola Munkov. Literally squatting: the stench of latrine is overpowering when I step into the courtyard. Nikola’s daughter, grandmother Kapka, now owns the house, but she lives a few miles away in Pavilenki, and it’s too expensive to do this place up just to rent it out.
Nikola had several houses. In the early 1900s young Nikola spent ten inebriated years in Heidelberg studying viticulture. On his return to Suhindol, he sobered up and helped set up one of the first wine cooperatives: Gumza. The wine industry boomed, the region thrived, workers flocked to Suhindol’s vineyards, and Nikola became mayor. But when the People’s Courts came into power in 1944, Nikola became an Enemy of the People. His lands and houses were nationalized and he spent his last twenty years living with his widowed elder daughter in a small apartment in Sofia, stripped of income and pension but counting his blessings for not ending up in a labour camp or an unmarked grave.
The streets are busy with animal traffic. A girl with the face of an angel, dressed in a rough sweater and tracksuit pants, is herding a cow with a muddied rump. I look for wings behind her shoulders.
‘Is this your cow?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’ Her eyes sparkle unnervingly.
‘And where are you going?’
‘Home.’ She looks at my long city coat and finds me entertaining.
‘Where are you going?’ Her tone suggests that she knows the answer. The cow turns around and trumpets out a bored ‘moo’.
> ‘Nowhere.’ I shrug. ‘Just wandering.’ And off we wander into the muddy sunset.
A few years later, I stand again outside the peeling yellow house. This time I have brought Michael. The creaky wooden gate opens to a vine-shaded courtyard. It’s very quiet. The grapevines are ripening. Inside the house, they greet us with feeble cries of joy. Auntie has become completely crippled. Uncle is bent over in his favourite brown suit. A young neighbour called Dobrinka comes to help every day, and she giggles nervously over the stove when I introduce ‘the foreigner’.
This is the first time I have brought along a boyfriend to meet them. The names of foreign boyfriends have circulated in the family over the years like rumours of exotic diseases; nobody knew how they manifested themselves.
‘Go down in the basement,’ Uncle says, fluffing about in his trademark ineffectual style, ‘show Michael, what we have, the potatoes, the wines, see what you can find. Take what you want. Where did I put the torch?’
In the damp darkness of the basement, we find hundreds of dusty wine bottles, some from the 1970s, crates of sugary ‘beverages’ – the reason for Uncle’s dental devastation – and sacks of potatoes, onions, chicken food. It is as if a ten-year-long siege is expected to paralyse Suhindol any day now.
‘Did you see the potatoes, the wine? Did he like the basement?’ Auntie wants to know. Now she can’t cook any more, all she can offer is the basement provisions. Uncle opens a wardrobe and starts extracting old, carefully unopened gifts and laying them out on a bed.
‘Take this,’ he says, ‘and this. We have no use for these things. Look at these teaspoons, they’re excellent. This tea-towel is brand new, what does it say? Is it English, German, I can’t see.’
It says ‘Welcome’.
‘Look, Lux soaps. This flannel, it’s pure cotton, to keep you warm. Look, it fits Michael, excellent!’
Uncle beams. ‘And now,’ he says, ‘let’s disclose a fresh box of chocolates to celebrate your arrival.’
‘Uncle, how are you going to chew them, you’ve got no teeth left!’
‘Aha – I have my denture! But you’re right, these chocolates are not good for the health.’ He chuckles, and proceeds to disclose a box.
In the evening, we watch a documentary about Bulgarians abroad. The director has artfully collated people’s homesicknesses to form a home-affirming narrative.
‘I feel like a nobody here,’ says a woman in Germany. ‘As an immigrant, I’m nothing.’
‘I am invisible,’ sighs a man in Canada.
‘I have been successful here,’ muses a bespectacled scientist in America or Australia, ‘but I miss my language.’ He chokes on his words. ‘What are we without a homeland?’
‘Is that how you feel over there?’ Uncle asks, suddenly worried. ‘Do you feel invisible? Do you miss home?’
‘No, don’t worry. I have a good life there. But of course I miss you and Auntie.’
‘We miss you too,’ Auntie says. ‘Why don’t you come more often, stay longer? We’ll feed you up…’
They have never asked for anything in return for giving everything and, indeed, they have never been thanked. All they want is not to be forgotten – the occasional postcard from an exotic location, the occasional phone call. They never forget our birthdays, and with flawless timing, a month later a formal, old-fashioned card will arrive, handwritten by Uncle over pencil-drawn lines: ‘On the joyful occasion of your birthday…’
Overnight, Michael is eaten by cat fleas, and I lie listening to the crowing rooster. I always shared this huge bed with my sister, cousin, or both. It’s a crossing of time wires. Between the small, confused person who sat here anaesthetizing herself with cakes and the impossibly foreign Richard Chamberlain in The Thornbirds and the grown-up person lying here with a ‘foreigner’ and two passports, there is no common language. They can’t meet in time, they can’t speak, they can only lie in this bed, very still, without touching.
When we leave, we discover that Uncle has prepared a parcel for us – honey, apples, wine, salami. He is distraught when I explain that we can’t fit any of it into our backpacks.
‘I understand you’re modern travellers,’ he says after a brief discussion, ‘but next time come by car so we can stock you up. You can’t leave with empty hands.’
Auntie pulls me to her. ‘Did he like the house? Will he come again?’
There is only one correct answer, of course. I kiss her and she clings to me for a desperate moment, as if drowning. We get into the taxi and Uncle waves to us from the empty street outside the yellow house, pausing to dry his eyes with a crumpled hanky, until he shrinks into a homunculus in the dust.
A visit to Suhindol means a visit to nearby Pavlikeni. At the bus station where the local layabouts wait for something to happen, we are met by grandmother Kapka and her companion. He was my grandmother’s colleague at the local school where she taught German. I’ve never seen her like this: relaxed and flourishing. Her legs form an arthritic arch, and we walk at a snail’s pace. While her companion regales me with tales of his prostate problems, Michael strikes up a conversation with her in German. She is delighted by this and the prospect, finally, of great-grandchildren.
We trudge past the park where we used to pick mulberries. It is overgrown, the swings broken. My grandmother tells me, almost with relish, that it’s full of thieves and stray dogs. The zoo has been closed due to lack of funds. The animals were dying, nobody wanted to work there.
‘How are they?’ she asks after Auntie and Uncle. She is gratified to hear that Auntie can’t walk.
At the sepulchral apartment, full of dust, faded photographs, and the smell of old sorrows, she starts pulling crumpled clothes out of a wardrobe and offering them to me. It’s an old trick of hers: recycling as gift-bearing.
‘A lovely dress.’ She holds up something made from toxic green polyester that could be used to frighten small children. ‘Green is back in fashion.’
Then we eat a lunch of meatballs in a cold sauce. She’s been busy all day cleaning the house from top to bottom, she says, and it’s now ‘sterile’. Hearing her churn out the old lies with such conviction, and seeing her presiding over the table while her benign companion chuckles at her musty old jokes makes me happy. Perhaps it is never too late to claim a little bit of happiness.
‘Are you healthy, do you eat enough?’ Grandma Kapka leans over.
‘Yes, Grandma.’ I smile, but her mind is already elsewhere.
‘Do you know that your friend Malina has a lovely child?’
Malina still lives here, but somehow I can’t bring myself to look her up. Then Grandmother suddenly switches to German, for Michael’s benefit, and to practise her German. She has only been to East Germany once, on a school trip in the sixties. She tells Michael about the good old times, when I was little and spoke about myself in the third person. ‘Kapka will now begin to cry.’
And she slaps the table mirthfully, causing the slumbering meatballs to jump in their congealed sauce. Then she shows me her latest collection of epigrams and we laugh some more – she because she thinks they’re funny, and I because I’m so glad for her.
When I visit again two years later, the mood is less mirthful. Her companion has had a stroke and is about to go into a nursing home. She will live out her days alone. We sit in the living-room and I ask to see some photos. I browse black and white pictures of a smiling, full-faced young woman in a beret and tailored coat walking down a street.
‘This is in Sofia. My sister and I lived there with an aunt before the war. I wanted to study German philology in Berlin, but the war came and my father forbade me from going. He was afraid I’d get killed. We had enough bombings in Sofia.’ In another Sofia photo she beams, surrounded by men. ‘Cousins,’ she says vaguely.
‘I had a lot of suitors. But I was stupid. I made a bad choice. This…’ she points at a man in an elegant coat ‘… was my fiancé, an architect. A great love. But a silly misunderstanding drove us apart. Through
the war, we wrote to each other, I waited for him. But when he came back, he saw a photo of a cousin in my room. He thought it was a new man in my life. He didn’t contact me for six months. Then a marriage offer came. A distinguished Suhindol family, a good match. We were betrothed before we even met. A single decision ruined my life.’
She has never spoken openly about this or anything else. She has finally decided that she is too old to be afraid of anything, even the truth. Her companion keeps quiet.
‘Life was difficult. He was a regional vet, I was a teacher. We didn’t have money for heating. Our first baby boy died from the cold at three months old. But soon the twins came.’
I pick up a family album, its leather binding gold-stamped with ‘25 Years of People’s Power’. The photos here were arranged by my grandfather, which explains the absence of women. Two startled boys in identical coats look out from a frozen, black-and-white day. My uncle is chubby, my father thin, a hunted look in their eyes. Their sleeves are too long. They look like underage conscripts in the siege of Stalingrad.
‘He was a very angry man, I could never do right. And he had other proclivities later on. One day I found him fooling around with youths. When I challenged him, he took a knife and stuck it in the kitchen table. Either you get used to my way of life, or you die, he said. And so time went on.’
I look at her companion. But this is no news to him.
‘Well,’ he says gently, ‘everybody knew he had a bad temper. It was obvious that Kapka suffered.’
‘I saw the architect many years later,’ my grandmother continues. ‘He was divorced. Pride, stupid pride, and our lives blighted. We could have been happy.’
‘My wife and I were happy,’ her companion suddenly says, ‘for thirty-eight years and not a bad word between us. One daughter and all we needed.’ Tears spill from his eyes. ‘Then she got cancer. Do you know what her last words were? She said “I love you”. I think of her every day.’ He breaks into big, choking sobs. His tears fall onto his crumpled brown trousers, and my tears fall onto the scary green polyester dress I’m clutching.
Street Without a Name Page 18