Street Without a Name

by Kassabova, Kapka

  ‘Stop it,’ my grandmother snaps at him harshly. She’s displeased that he’s upset her favourite grandchild. ‘You’re not going to bring her back.’

  Heartless, I think, but then she’s jealous. She too wants thirty-eight years of happiness. I realize that I’ve never seen her cry.

  My most recent visit to Suhindol. The creaky wooden gate opens to a vine-shaded courtyard. Auntie is bedridden. ‘She gets drowsy’ is the operational term, which in this family could mean anything from tired to comatose. But this also helps Uncle maintain the illusion that she will get better.

  ‘Come come, we’re waiting for you.’ He hugs me hastily and shuffles ahead. He’s so bent over his chest is parallel to the floor. The favourite brown suit jacket looks oddly lopsided. I am unprepared for what I find. Auntie is not drowsy, she is a living corpse. She is paralysed and has dementia. She doesn’t recognize me at all. I remember how she whispered, in that Chernobyl summer ‘the worst, the worst might happen’. But death is not the worst.

  ‘Look who’s here,’ Uncle says tenderly, stroking her hair. But I’ve come too late.

  Over the next days, while my own sanity crumbles, I discover that Auntie has two main states: howling like a wounded dog, and catatonia. Occasionally, she comes to and utters coded messages from some place halfway between this room and the grave.

  ‘Leave me alone, what do you want from a dead person?’

  ‘What are you going to have for dinner? Get some take-away grill. What do you mean, they’re not open on Sunday? And they call that commerce!’

  ‘You’re too late! You’re too late!’

  Every time she says something, Uncle lights up. ‘Did you hear that? She’s coming to. You’ll see, I’ll get her up again.’

  After a day, she recognizes me. ‘Kapka, is that you? Where are the others?’

  Then we lose contact again. Dobrinka is still helping them after work, acting as nurse, cleaner, and gardener. She has a teenage daughter I haven’t met yet.

  One day, we go together to the local store to buy a frozen chicken and pallid tomatoes for dinner. We walk across the deserted village-town, past the culture hall named ‘Sobriety’, circa 1871. Someone has renovated and repainted it. There is hope.

  I ask Dobrinka about her daughter Vera.

  ‘She went to Germany this year and got sold. She’s back now.’

  ‘She got what?’

  ‘Sold. For 1,000 euro.’ Dobrinka laughs at my dumb expression, but it’s not a cheerful laugh. ‘As soon as she arrived. Thank God she could think on her feet. I’ll send her to you, she can tell you herself. Do you know German? Because they sent her letters from court, and we don’t know anyone in town who speaks German. They’ve been sitting there for months…’

  When Vera arrives with the letters still in their envelopes, I sense I’ve seen her before. It takes me a moment to rewind, and when I do, I see the angelic face and the muddied cow. ‘Where are you going?’ Nowhere. Nowhere is Vera’s destiny – no father, no education, no prospects, and this destiny she tried to challenge with her trip to Europe. What happened in Germany?

  ‘I know this guy from the village down the road, he said I’ll give you a ride to Germany, I know some people who can give you work in a bar.’

  Vera was warmly welcomed by a Macedonian man who put her up and took her passport. On the second day, she found herself in a Frankfurt bar with three men and an Albanian girl with a bruised face. The helpful acquaintance from the village down the road had vanished. The men spoke Turkish, and she knew enough to understand what they spoke about: her price.

  One thousand, one man said. Too much, another protested. She’s young and fresh, the first man said, you’ll get a lot out of her. The Albanian girl sat there like a zombie. Sensing imminent doom, Vera asked in Bulgarian if she could go and call her mother. For some reason, they let her. She stepped outside the bar, and grabbed the first Turk that came her way – thank God there are so many Turks in Frankfurt, she chuckles – for she spoke no German. She begged him to call the police on his mobile, and within ten minutes the three men in the bar were in handcuffs.

  Vera and the Albanian girl, who had been immediately raped and forced into prostitution, were given translators and asked to testify. Then the police escorted them back to their countries. ‘I felt like a criminal,’ Vera says sullenly. ‘I only wanted to work in a café and earn euros.’

  Painstakingly, with Uncle’s 1960s dictionary, I decipher the three letters from the German court. They didn’t mess about. Within weeks, the three men were tried and convicted to fifteen years on numerous charges of human and drug trafficking. Vera was only the latest hapless girl from Eastern Europe to be lured by a Euro-job ‘in a bar’. The names of the three men are Turkish, but they come from Bulgaria, Macedonia and Turkey. Nations once at war, and now, a century later, peacefully united by international trade.

  ‘It’s all very well,’ Dobrinka clatters in the kitchen. ‘But what happens when they come out? They can track her down and kill her, and they wouldn’t bat an eyelid. How can I protect her against those criminals? I’m on my own.’

  Vera is embarrassed by her mother’s anxiety. ‘My boyfriend will protect me.’ she smiles confidently. Her boyfriend is a local Turk from ‘down the road’.

  ‘He’d better marry you if he wants to protect you,’ her mother snaps. Later, Vera tells me that her boyfriend wants to take her abroad to earn euros, but her mother won’t let her. ‘I can understand your mother,’ I say. Boyfriends of village girls have been known to become pimps. I wonder if I can say this without hurting her feelings. I can’t. I ask Vera about the local contact who so helpfully drove her to Germany. Why wasn’t he arrested?

  ‘Oh, but he just drove me there,’ she says. ‘He drives to Germany all the time for errands.’

  Errands. I stare at her. In the angelic cherry eyes, I glimpse the true depths of provincial innocence. It’s the innocence of Suhindol, the village of old people and children. The same innocence that stopped Uncle and Auntie from adopting ‘foreign blood’ for fear of being judged. The same innocence that makes Uncle believe that Auntie will get better, and that made them squander everything so that now they are destitute. An innocence that springs from the poisoned village-well of ignorance, conformity and fear.

  When I am about to leave, Uncle opens the wardrobe and extracts the obligatory small gifts. Among them is an ancient compass on a leather strap. ‘Now, this is from my father, a quality compass. You’re a modern traveller, I know. Still, you never know when you might need a compass, it’s good to have one just in case. Let’s see, does it fit your wrist? Oh, excellent.’ The compass must have sat in this wardrobe for sixty years – Auntie and Uncle never travelled.

  Auntie is not there to say goodbye. She is transfixed by something on the wall.

  ‘She’s drowsy,’ Uncle explains. ‘We’ll let her rest.’

  He sees me off outside the house. A burly local man nicknamed the Lump comes to pick me up in his taxi. Taxi is an overstatement: it’s just his old car. There are no taxis in Suhindol. Dobrinka is here too. In a pitiful last attempt at being helpful, I tell her to send Vera to nearby Veliko Tarnovo, not Germany again. She smiles with a golden tooth the innocent smile of Suhindol that breaks my heart.

  I hug Uncle and his voice fails him. Mine too, so I just give him the cheeriest smile I can manage, and we drive away. I wave, although I know he can’t see me, until we turn onto the Emmental strip of the main road. Then finally I do what I’ve wanted to do since I arrived. Icry.

  ‘Good people, the Kassabovs.’ The Lump clears his throat, embarrassed by this show of emotion. ‘Are you related?’

  ‘Yes,’ I croak, snot running over my lip, ‘I’m their granddaughter.’

  A year later, Auntie has died. I am already too late for the funeral, so I make a slow pilgrimage back to Suhindol, travelling up through the Balkán and giving myself time to prepare for the sight of Uncle alone in the big house. Again I have a backpack th
at will be too small to accommodate any gifts. But this time I’m carrying the ancient compass. Every now and again, passing through the familiar rocky landscapes, in a world forever empty of Auntie, I consult its gently flickering hands. I don’t know what I expect to see there, but it gives me a strange comfort.

  I pass through the small town of Karlovo in a taxi owned by the Balkán’s most garrulous taxi-driver.

  ‘On each side of Karlovo, there’s glacial wind, but Karlovo’s protected, and its temperature is five degrees higher than elsewhere. Where are you from? The people in this part of the country used to be hopeless. God saw their plight and out of pity he gave them the town of Karlovo. A gay English couple live here, nice guys. Where did you say you were from?’

  Karlovo’s main distinction, apart from the God-given climate and surreal 2,000-metre-high peaks looming at it doorstep, is that it is the birthplace of the national hero Vassil Levski who, before losing his head, spearheaded the national liberation movement.

  As a child, four things struck me about Levski. One, the perfectly mnemonic dates of his birth and death – 1837 and 1873 – as if planned so that school kids could remember them. Two, he was so dedicated to the national struggle that he had neither a home nor a girlfriend. Three, the physical resemblance between him and Luke Skywalker, especially the nostrils. But when it came to courage and moral fibre, Luke was a pushover next to Levski. Four, his gnomic sayings, for example, ‘If I win, so do the people. If I lose, I only lose myself’. In vain, I tried to work out whether he and the people had lost or won when he was hanged and when, three years after his death, the national April Uprising against the Ottomans was drowned in the blood of the people. Or ‘Time lives inside us and we live inside time’ – I pondered this one for years. But one key idea of his that school kids weren’t and aren’t given to chew over is ‘In a free republic, everyone shall live together as equals, regardless of nationality or faith’. Somehow, this is unbecomingly pluralistic for a national hero.

  Many thousands of words later, the happy driver drops me off in the country’s geographic heart: the Rose Valley. Much of the world’s rose oil is extracted here from Rosa damascena petals every June. For one kilogram of rose oil, which costs three times more than a kilo of gold, 1,300 blossoms are steam-distilled. As if these aromatic facts weren’t enough, the Valley has recently been dubbed the Valley of the Thracian Kings thanks to the lucky archaeologists who keep digging up sensational Thracian tombs.

  But when I arrive in the laid-back regional town of Kazanlak, this floral and antique state of affairs isn’t immediately apparent. I’m told that most of the tombs in the region aren’t open for visits and, anyway, their contents are displayed at the local history museum.

  The local history museum, ‘Spark’, looks like a concrete bunker. A beefy security guard gallantly holds the door open for me, and the two women in the front kiosk rush to turn on the lights for the small bevy of visitors – me and two others.

  We are led inside by an affable man with sweat stains under his arms. He is excited to have company. And we are excited to see the awesome regal gold-leaf wreath, found in 2005. Its delicate leaves cast a dazzling aura of light across its twenty-five centuries. The wreath belonged to King Seuth III whose curly-bearded bronze head was found at the entrance of his tomb. The Thracians knew how to have fun both with the living and the dead.

  After Seuth III’s death, they ritually beheaded his statue and buried the head alone, to ensure its smooth passage from the realm of the living to the afterworld. In a catacomb reached through a 13-metre-long corridor, they placed all the riches a man needs when dead: full body armour; amphorae full of wine; gold and silver dishes. There is no mention of his wife; perhaps he didn’t value her enough to have her entombed with him, as was the custom. Then they sealed off the tomb complex, thus ensuring that something would survive of their greatest – and only – united Kingdom of Odryssian Thrace.

  Because if Seuth’s head has finally emerged from this fertile valley, his capital Seuthopolis hasn’t. It lies 20 metres under water, at the bottom of a dam. The guardians of the British heritage industry would have a collective heart attack if it were suggested that Hadrian’s Wall be flooded by a dam. And I suspect the archaeologists who in 1948 found Seuthopolis, Europe’s best-preserved Thracian city, experienced a few pangs too. They were allowed to pick up whatever they could from the city remains, before the valley was flooded by the new dam. Communism wasn’t about the past, it was about the future. Seuthopolis found itself at the bottom of the aptly named Georgi Dimitriov Dam.

  But wait, there’s hope: plans are afoot for revealing Seuthopolis in the middle of the dam and making it an attraction – boatfuls of tourists, hanging gardens, glass lifts, a Thracian Disneyland. The cost: 50 million euros. I must remember to look it up in 50 million years, when Bulgaria can afford such cultural indulgences. It’s unfortunate that unflooding ancient cities costs so much more than flooding them.

  None of this is explained by our sweat-stained guide, who avoids the painful fact of Koprinka Dam, and keeps pointing at the fabulous diagram of a Thracian Disneyland. This way, his pointing finger says, this way to the future, forget the past.

  The second visitor in our group – who is a translator for the third visitor who is Dutch – can’t think of the English for ‘dam’. Dam, I prompt, and she explains about Koprinka and Seuthopolis. The Dutch tourist blinks with his white eyelashes, bewildered. He can’t see why an ancient city was sacrificed for a dam. He thinks there’s something lost in translation.

  But another Thracian discovery survived the manly decade of dam-building. While digging in Kazanlak’s Tyulbe Park, some soldiers hit upon the entrance to a small tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a small chamber. They lit up some newspapers and squinted in the sepulchral darkness, as I’m squinting now under the artificial lights in the humming stone silence. A procession of toga’d people and chariots snakes around the vault in bright mineral colours. In the centre, a man and a woman sit around a low table, their faces mellow. Their contrasting wrists – his dark, hers white – are entwined in a poignant gesture. This became known as the Kazanlak Tomb. Some believe the scene is a funerary feast, others see a wedding feast. Either way, the couple were buried here together, and the sad expression on her face could be as much sorrow for her beloved as sorrow for her own imminent slaughter. I think of Uncle and Auntie. How will he live without her? Perhaps, when you’ve been with someone for sixty years without a single day apart, and even driven in tandem, there’s something to be said for joint burial.

  I hike out to a place grandly named the Institute for Rose Research and Rose Museum. Tramping along the hot dusty road, I have fantasies of sticking my face in rose-petal jam and pots of rose creams – the next best thing to rolling in the rose fields of June or whirling in a wine-fuelled Orphic feast. These florid thoughts quickly wilt when I reach the Rose Museum. For some reason – Thracian tomb imitation? – it’s located in a dank basement. A basement that stinks of leaky sewage pipes which might well date back to the Romans.

  ‘The museum has had extensive repairs,’ the bemantled attendant informs me. She stands behind a counter strewn with faded goods: pallid soaps; forlorn creams; last bottle of rose liqueur. I wonder how it was before the extensive repairs: raw sewage in the corridors perhaps. Clearly, this is a State museum. If it were private, smiling maidens would be greeting you with rose jam, selling you your own grandmother made from rose petals and charging you the earth.

  ‘We have plenty of visitors,’ the hostess tells me proudly. She’s right to be proud: it’s a remarkable achievement to take something as romantic as rose oil, distil pure drabness from it, and still have visitors from Japan beating the doors down.

  I spend a night in the boutique Hotel Rosa, musing on private versus state-owned business, while gorging on fruit. The watermelon slices are on ice. There are three varieties of grape. The internet is free. The breakfast could be a Thracian wedding feast. I’m tempted
to take up permanent residence in the Hotel Rosa, but as a three-star hotel it’s three stars over my budget. Besides, I have the Balkán ranges to cross.

  Our bus is winding through the precipitous Shipka Pass, along the road from Edirne in Turkey to Ruse on the Danube. It’s a glorious ride, but I’m too worried about our driver to enjoy it. Facial hair creeps up to his eyes from all sides, and a poster of a naked silicone diva covers most of his front windscreen. His eyes are in direct contact with the diva’s pubic hair. I hope he’s made small holes in her genital region to see through, otherwise we’re in trouble.

  The sky suddenly darkens over the sea of green ranges, and the bus stops for a cigarette break next to something that used to be, according to the chipped lettering, the Shipka Hotel. The Shipka Hotel now looks like a small nuclear reactor after a big accident. The passengers spill out and greedily begin to suck on their cigarettes as if plugging themselves into a life-support machine. The hirsute driver unwraps a greasy pastry. Our summer jackets are too thin for the mountain chill, and we shiver by the dusty bus with that peculiar, threadbare Balkan miserableness most noticeable at border crossings. And the Shipka Pass is a kind of historic border.

  It’s where Bulgaria passed from being an Ottoman backwater to being an independent backwater, thanks in part to a series of battles on Shipka Peak in the Russo-Turkish War. We look up that way, instinctively, to where we know a modest monument sits atop 894 steps. There, in the crushing August heat of 1877, 5,000 under-armed and overwrought Russians and Bulgarians fought off the 30,000 Turks of Süleyman Pasha, first with ammunition, then with rocks and finally with their dead mates’ bodies. That the Slavs had found themselves in such straits was one of the many strategic blunders of a war some described as waged ‘between the one-eyed and the blind’. But Süleyman Pasha was the blind one, and the Shipka battle became a turning point in the Russo-Turkish war.