‘The Volunteers at Shipka’ was the first epic poem we had to learn by heart at school, and the ‘white bones and bloody moss’ of Shipka are part of my mental furniture. So are the opening lines about Bulgaria’s image in Europe as an oriental backwater: ‘shame on our forehead, marks of the whip, signs of bondage, no place in history, our name a tragic one’.
But wait, our name wasn’t always a tragic one.
We reach Veliko Tarnovo and I’m standing at the gates of the medieval citadel Tsarevets, watching a puppet show. There is a choice of Bulgarian or English, and I join a group of elderly American evangelists for the English version. Through the life-size puppets of the tsar, tsaritsa, and court jester, the puppeteer ventriloquizes the story of Tsarevets, glorious city of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom. He lists all the devious enemies and traitors punished by the equitable Bulgarian monarchs. For example, the self-proclaimed Latin emperor of Byzantium Baldwin I of Flanders who spent some time as a prisoner here before Tsar Kaloyan executed him in a paroxysm of rage. ‘And the rest of Europe looked to the Bulgarian kingdom with envy and fear,’ the jester concludes and bursts into neurotic laughter.
The laughter is, of course, not the puppet’s but the puppeteer’s, who like me cringes at this historical flexing of long-expired muscles. True, Bulgaria’s medieval history is impressive. But I know, and the puppeteer knows, that today the rest of Europe looks to the Bulgarian ‘kingdom’ with either indifference or condescension. Still, the American evangelists are impressed.
‘We love East Europe,’ the cheerful pastor enthuses as he drops some coins for the puppeteer. ‘It’s so romantic.’
Over the road from Pip’s Bar, where the English-speaking expats hang out, is Shtastlivetsa Restaurant, famed for its enormous pizzas. Shtastlivetsa is named after Aleko Konstantinov, Bulgaria’s first travel writer and the creator of the devastating Bay Ganyu satire in which a hairy, grunting upstart with dubious hygiene goes abroad to trade in rose oil and happily embarrasses himself in every conceivable way, before he returns home to become a reactionary politician. Aleko Konstantinov wrote satirical columns about everything that was wrong with newly liberated Bulgaria (quite a lot), dubbed himself Shtastlivetsa or the Happy Man, and died aged thirty-four a most unhappy death. He was ‘accidentally’ assassinated by tsarist police. It was a symbolic death heralding what was yet to come: Bay Ganyu killing his creator. The philistine killing the cultured.
The two florid-faced, middle-aged Englishmen I’m sharing a table with must wonder why a retro-style portrait of a man with a goatee is overlooking us. But there is no time to explain about the Happy Man. They are busy celebrating the purchase of a local house. The proud new proprietor explains in great, tedious detail and a midlands accent where the house is and how cheap it is. (Somewhere near Veliko Tarnovo. Cheap as chips.)
‘A bargain!’ He leers euphorically. ‘And the workmen too. I can pay them as little as £15 a day!’
The English Bay Ganyu’s friend is more socially aware, or less drunk.
‘He has four kids and his wife is on sickness benefit. Imagine a holiday house for them in Britain, no chance. Now they can enjoy real summers…’
‘And the women are pretty!’ The father of four nudges his friend. His friend nods at his stew. He already has a house or three here. Or five. An investment, he says, and glances at his gold-plated watch. It turns out he runs an online estate agency business for Brits buying Bulgarian property. They’re not friends but client and agent, which explains the gold-plated watch. Selling property to foreigners is good business, because they make up a massive thirty per cent of all buyers. And most of those are British or Irish. That’s entire villages.
Across the street, in a guesthouse called ‘The House’, my next-door neighbours are an Irish couple from the west coast. They’ve just bought an apartment in a building that’s not yet built and a vineyard that’s not yet planted. They find the language impenetrable (three genders and two verbal modes!), their only friend here is a British estate agent, and they’re moving to Veliko Tarnovo now with their newborn. So what’s wrong with Ireland?
‘Oh, we luv Ireland. We just don’t wanna live there. Bulgaria reminds us of Ireland thirty years ago, so we don’t feel that far from home. This is a land of opportunity, like Ireland was.’
In other words, their euros go a long way here. I wish them luck and promise to come back and try their wine in five years’ time.
There’s one more place I want to see in the medieval capital: the ancient Forty Martyrs Church, now reopened after forty years of restoration. One of the stone columns that prop up its ceiling bears a curiously existential ninth-century inscription in old Greek, from the time of the Bulgar Khan Omurtag: ‘Even if a man lives well, he dies and another one comes. Let the one who comes later upon seeing this inscription remember the one who had made it.’
The column’s fate, I like to think, reflects the inscription: from the Bulgar royal town of Pliska, it was taken to the Forty Martyrs Church here in the medieval capital. When the Turks arrived, they turned the church into a mosque, but kept the supporting columns. I fancy that one fine summer evening, some time between 1400 and 1800, a philosophically-inclined imam sat with his worry beads to contemplate Omurtag’s poignant message from the ruins of the Bulgar empire, written in the language of the ruined Byzantine empire.
This reminds me that it’s time to go and pay my respects to Auntie. I flag down a taxi. It’s a wreck of a Warburg, and the driver is unimpressed when I ask him to stop by the Roman town of Nikopolis ad Istrum.
‘Nikopolis? The road there is like the surface of the moon.’ And so it is. Every time we go inside a crater, it feels like the Warburg has deconstructed and we’re sitting among its debris.
The iron gates are locked, so I do the obvious thing and climb over. Inside Nikopolis, I walk on Roman streets made of giant stone slabs. It’s eerie. Half-temples point at the sky with the stumps of their columns, half-agoras open up, half-streets end suddenly. Emperor Trayan built this town in 102 after his victory against the Dacians, and named it City of Victory on the Danube. For centuries, nobody took notice of this incongruous stone town in the middle of a field, until the Austro-Hungarian ethnographer Felix Kanitz found it in the 1860s. A few years ago, a gate went up, but by then the locals had already incorporated Nikopolis into their houses. We drive past holiday houses, and I swear I see a Latin inscription over a colonnaded doorway.
‘It’s called recycling,’ the driver says. ‘If the government doesn’t care, why should we? Besides, if I didn’t get a few stones for my house, the neighbour would’ve helped himself anyway.’
You can’t argue with that.
It’s exactly ten days after Auntie’s death. The house seems derelict without her. Uncle is bereft and disoriented, and keeps looking for things – his glasses, his keys, his slippers – to distract himself from the ultimate, unacceptable loss that has made all other losses insignificant.
We pour crosses of red wine over the fresh soil of Auntie’s grave, light long candles and wait until they burn down. There is little left to say but Uncle is trying to keep busy with constant talk of houses and wills. The house belongs in effect to Auntie’s family. Uncle is terrified that he might be left without a roof over his head. After fifty years of prodigious accumulation and equally prodigious waste, Uncle has nothing, at least not on paper.
‘We have no claims on the house,’ I say, hoping to reassure him. I have the opposite effect. Uncle is hurt.
‘What do you mean, no claims?’ he exclaims, his dentures clattering indignantly. ‘Fifty years we’ve been improving this house. And now you don’t have claims! Now, where did I put my glasses?’
Uncle is raiding wardrobes and cupboards for Auntie’s will. Then he has a brainwave.
‘I’ll call the village fortune-teller, she’ll tell me where the papers are! Last time we lost those coins, we called her and bingo. Who knows, maybe I’m walking past Auntie’s will every day.’
/> We sit in the vine-shaded yard, and eat roast peppers and watermelon. Dobrinka is here too. ‘Cheers,’ I say and my voice is hollow.
‘You don’t say “Cheers” when there’s a dead person,’ Dobrinka says in her matter-of-fact way. ‘You say “May the earth rest lightly upon her”. You know, just before she died, Auntie wanted to tell me something. I waited for hours, but nothing came out. She couldn’t say it.’
‘Once,’ Uncle rejoins, chewing soft bread, ‘I said to her, “Can you hear me, that I’m crying for you?” She said, “I hear you, and it makes me sad.” She understood everything right until the end. I knew she did.’
Dobrinka nods. ‘She did.’
Uncle wipes tears with his arthritic hand. I can’t bear this, so I turn to Dobrinka. ‘How’s Vera?’
‘Vera? She picks them up, I tell you. First that Turkish guy last year, then the Gypsy and his clan… All the hoodlums in the world, it’s like they’re lining up for her outside. At first I worried myself sick. But if I’d kept worrying, I’d have been buried long before Auntie.’
It transpires that Vera had taken up with a Gypsy ‘down the road’. But when she tried living with his family, they mistreated her and she went back to her mother. Disaster struck during the funeral lunch for Auntie in the village restaurant. Dobrinka called the restaurant from home, hysterical: ‘The Gypsies are at the door with pitchforks, they want to kill Vera!’
The Gypsy clan were indeed at her door, ready to claim the errant bride-to-be. What could the village men do but defend her honour? Spearheaded by my Uncle Vanyo, the bride-saving party got up from the funereal feast, removed the napkins from their distended bellies, picked up a few logs, and went to face the Gypsy clan at the village outskirts. The attackers fled and Vera was saved without bloodshed.
‘You know…’ Dobrinka’s handsome face cracks into a smile, the smile of the unsung woman survivor. ‘You travel the world for stories. And it’s all here in Suhindol. You don’t have to go looking any further.’
But I do: Pavlikeni awaits. Grandmother Kapka is living alone after the death of her companion.
‘Do you miss him?’ I ask in the kitchen while we pick at a suspect salad. She is surprised by the question. Come to think of it, emotions always surprise her.
‘He was useless.’ She looks blankly at the plastic tablecloth. ‘I had to cook, ensure there was sterile cleanliness in the house.’
‘So you don’t miss him,’ I conclude.
‘Nope,’ she nods, and with startling speed of reflex, she picks up a plastic swatter and stuns a fly dead on the table. She briefly examines it, then brushes it off and onto the grubby lino floor.
And at this point, I finally zoom in on the fuzzy space that is this woman. She has no emotional life. Emotion was wiped out at some distant moment in time, by an unknown evil hand. This is how she has survived everything life served her, and outlived her peers.
‘You know that Malina has had two kids now,’ she moves on. ‘Two lovely blond kids. She’s in the cooperation across the street now. Oh, and Ivo died last year. Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’
I choke on the salad while she continues to chew pastry with the callous self-regard of old age, focused on her own survival.
Ivo’s familiar cheery face smiles at me from the notice pinned to Malina’s door. The necrolog is freshly printed for the first anniversary of his death. I think of our dance across that carpeted floor, our shy embrace, our socked feet. It’s as if my own youth has suddenly dropped dead.
Malina recognizes me instantly, although we haven’t seen each other since 1986. She smiles and I see the downy girl with grazed knees peeking from behind the woman’s heavy body. Her white-blond children float around us as she tells me how Ivo died.
‘It was a year before they diagnosed him. They’d been treating him for sinusitis. They still could’ve saved him, but you know our hospitals. The radiation machine in Sofia was broken. He actually died of meningitis in the end. It was the hottest summer I remember. Like hell.’
Malina is working as a supervisor at a local boarding school. She graduated in Bulgarian literature and has been earning a meagre salary. Her husband runs a bookshop.
‘At first, he wanted it to be a proper bookshop. But soon it became obvious that people don’t read apart from the tabloid Shock. So he got rid of the books and started selling stationery. It’s the only way to survive. Under Socialism, whatever else was wrong, at least we read. Now I see fifteen-year-olds who can’t read.’
We pledge to stay in touch and I step outside, dazed. I still can’t believe that Ivo is dead. The woman from the corner shop shakes her head and adjusts rotisserie chickens on a grill.
‘People are falling like flies. It’s not normal. Ivo worked in a factory for faience. Run with American technology, but rumour has it that it wasn’t safe. Maybe they poisoned him there. Or else it was Chernobyl. I think it all boils down to Chernobyl. Their father too, those years ago…’
The last thing I see from the bus leaving Pavlikeni is an English graffito sprayed on the wall of a cooperation: BRUTALITY IS MY REALITY.
To cheer myself up, I call Uncle on his new mobile phone. He doesn’t pick up. I call his landline.
‘I was waiting for the ringing tune to finish, it’s such a nice tune I didn’t want to interrupt it,’ he explains. ‘But by the time I answered, you were gone… Now, the fortune-teller told me where the papers might be. I told you, she knows these things. But I can’t find them because I’ve lost my glasses… Now, I’d prepared some tomatoes for you. You left with empty hands again.’
On the bus back to Sofia, three loud men get on and spread out on the seats in front of me. Actually, only one of them is making all the noise, enough for three. He wears wrap-around sunglasses and swings a string of worry beads menacingly.
Speaking to strange men on buses is not the local feminine thing to do. You pout, look pissed off, or flirt. But you don’t make conversation, which is why they’re dumbstruck when I do. The boisterous one is the first to recover.
‘Stoyan.’ He shakes my hand. ‘Pleasure. You speak good English. I heard you on your mobile before.’
I explain that I live in Scotland.
‘I’m Ahmed.’ A sunburnt freckly face smiles at me. Ahmed could be only forty but his side-teeth are missing.
‘Scotland,’ Stoyan says. ‘Cold up there, but stay there. My sister’s in Italy. She calls and goes, I’ll never come back. And I agree. If I leave, I’d never give this rotten country a thought. Look at it, seventeen years, and what has changed?’
He swings the worry beads furiously. The other two are quiet.
‘I think quite a lot has changed,’ I offer. ‘Besides, fifteen years is not such a long time.’
‘You have a point,’ Stoyan agrees. ‘I lived abroad too, I’ve been everywhere. Gastarbeiter. But without a language, it’s hard. I always come back.’
‘I’ve been around too.’ It’s Ahmed’s turn now. ‘Ten years in Greece, Istanbul. But I always return, I don’t know why.’
‘You don’t feel yourself abroad,’ Stoyan agrees. ‘Even if you meet good people, it’s not the same.’
‘We’ve been friends for ten years,’ Ahmed says. ‘The three of us. You don’t get that easily.’
They work in a factory for processing gold. They must have lots of it, then.
‘Do we look rich? We don’t get a gram of gold for ourselves.’ Ahmed laughs.
‘Not even a milligram,’ the third one mutters.
When we arrive in Sofia, Ahmed gives me his sister’s number.
‘I’ll be here for a week. Please call. We can have a drink, talk more, just talk. Women here are so demanding, they look at your wallet and that’s it. It’s not often that you meet a woman you can talk to.’
I like Ahmed but I squirm. Stoyan presses his much-worried worry beads into my hand.
‘Have it. My lucky charm. To remember crazy Stoyan on the bus.’ He overrides my protestations. ‘No, please. I’ll
get another one in Greece next time I emigrate.’
‘And remember me too.’ Ahmed smiles. ‘Though I haven’t got anything of mine to give you.’
I keep the number for weeks before I discard it. Ahmed and I inhabit different worlds. All we share is a bus ride through the Balkán, there’s no point pretending.
But it feels somehow wrong, almost a self-betrayal. It feels like throwing out much more than a phone number. It feels like rejecting Uncle and Auntie’s last parting gift. Like saying goodbye to the Balkán.
At least I have the ancient compass with its live, flickering hands and its worn leather strap. Come to think of it, it’s the only thing of theirs that I have.
11 The Curse of Orpheus
A Rodopean story
Just as I’m about to conclude that the long-delayed bus from Plovdiv has fallen into a river, it shows up. Slowly, we wind our way up and down the narrow mountain road. We are in a realm of forests dripping with chlorophyll and legend.
The Rodopi Ranges are the country’s most mysterious region. Pirin, Rila and the Balkán have higher peaks, but the Rodopi breathe with a strangely zoomorphic energy. Entering this brooding landscape is like entering a dark, enchanted labyrinth of live flesh.
At Smolyan’s bus station, listless Gypsy men in soiled tracksuits smoke cheap tobacco and gaze at nothing in particular. A dull, habitual despair hangs around them together with the reek of unwashed bodies.
Smolyan is the Rodopi’s regional centre but it doesn’t look like a place bustling with job opportunities. In fact, it’s sunk into a scenic slumber. The most interesting fact about it is that it’s the country’s longest and thinnest town. Ten kilometres long, to be precise. But precision is no use here, and everything in the Rodopi has more dimensions than meets the eye and the foot.
For example, Smolyan looks like a new town, thanks to the monstrous construction boom of the 1960s. But beneath the brick and concrete lies another story. In the seventeenth century, violent Islamizing campaigns swept the region and, like many villages in the Rodopi, Smolyan rose from its ashes. It was rebuilt from scratch by Islamized Bulgarian survivors (those who didn’t get beheaded in Time of Violence) and named Pashmaklu. After Liberation in 1878, the Turkish name was replaced with the proudly Slavic Smolyan. And later still, the seventeenth-century buildings were replaced with proudly concrete houses.
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