Her voice clatters along with the train and rattles inside the cold compartment like broken furniture. After the Woman of the Camps, I have exhausted my daily quota of empathy. Nobody asks me about my problems!
‘Why are you telling me?’ I say plaintively. ‘Do you think I can help?’
‘I’m telling you so that if you work for a newspaper you can write about it, about people like me who gave twenty-five years to this State, working in heavy conditions and poisonous fumes, only to be living now on 80 leva a month. My daughter went to Italy to work, she earned euros. But she came back, she was homesick, she suffered there. Why should our children be made to suffer abroad, feel like second-class citizens, when they want to be here with their families? Tell me, why?’
She is gesturing with her maimed hand, on the verge of angry tears.
I too am on the verge of something angry or tearful. Kremikovtsi was always there, in the sky, when you looked up. And when you looked down from the pristine top of Vitosha Mountain, Sofia was hidden behind a thick layer of smog. If you felt unwell in Vitosha’s clean air, they said, you should be placed under the nearest exhaust pipe to recover. I think of all the cancerous factory people I knew: Auntie Petrana’s husband; Auntie Petrana; Malina’s father in Pavlikeni; Malina’s brother Ivo. Especially Ivo.
‘I don’t work for a newspaper,’ I say. ‘But things have to change. When we join the EU in a few months, things will change. Pensions and employment will rise.’
‘Let’s hope so.’ The woman wipes her eyes with her mangled hand. ‘We have to live with hope, don’t we.’
We do. I live with hope that I won’t meet anybody else today with a ghastly story to tell.
At Oreshets station, the three of us get off. Cargo trains rust in the drizzle. We must wait for the mini-bus that will take us to Belogradchik, my last destination.
Three young Gypsy men drink espressos in plastic cups in the platform café. In the café I buy a plastic cup of herbal tea, which in my distress I spill on a couch and on myself. The smoking men timidly offer a paper napkin, without a word. The old man at the counter pours me another tea, also without a word, and waves my proffered money away.
And we sit in a cloud of cheap tobacco smoke and silence. The resigned old man in an ancient ski-jacket, the three young Gypsies with battered shoes and faces, me with tea-wet trousers and ears ringing with voices. Outside, two figures stand on the platform. They are blurry around the edges like ghosts, but I know who they are: the Woman of the Camps and the Factory Woman.
And we wait for someone to remember us, the last passengers of Danube Terminus.
Belogradchik, literally the ‘little white town’, is both little and white, and dwarfed by a petrified landscape of giant, reddish rock formations thirty kilometres long. Sedimentary rock and red sandstone mingled and eroded to form a fantastical landscape of shapes where you can imagine all sorts of life forms, depending on your mood and your drug-taking habits.
Two hundred million years ago this was the bottom of a sea. And as far as the tourist industry is concerned, it still is.
In the town’s main and only square, a festival is on. White-and-red-costumed girls are dancing on a podium under the national tricolour. A brass band of men in poppy-red shirts blow into shiny trombones. Families mill about with popcorn and soft drinks. I ask a bent-over old woman if this is some local festival.
‘It’s the ninth of May!’ She is incredulous at my ignorance. ‘Europe Day.’
So it is. I’m incredulous at my own ignorance. Europe Day is the opposite of a local festival. It’s a national dream. Dancing and blowing shiny trumpets on our way to Europe – finally, finally. A group of middle-aged men at an outdoor table overhear this exchange, and raise their beer glasses.
‘To Europe!’ they shout. ‘Take some.’ They point to the huge bag of popcorn in the middle of their table. I reach to take some popcorn, but they collectively gather it up and hand me the whole bag. ‘Be our guest,’ says a white-haired man with round John Lennon sunglasses. ‘You’re from Sofia, aren’t you? We like to have visitors from afar. Even journalists.’
It’s hard to protest convincingly when your mouth is full of popcorn, so I just accept the now familiar well-meaning insult. In the valley behind the dancing girls and men with trombones, the petrified rock sea begins. I try to make out the best known rock formations: the Schoolgirl; Adam and Eve; the Bear; the Dervish. It’s a surreal landscape in the declining light of late afternoon.
More surreal yet is the derelict, chipped Balkantourist hotel on the side of a road that plunges into a green valley. And suddenly I recall a musty, threadbare-carpeted room I once stayed in there.
It was the year of waiting for British visas. My parents brought us here one weekend. I can see us, wandering among the rocky creatures: a tiny family in shorts, holding onto each other in the freefall of post-Communism. The miniature figures are climbing and descending, climbing and descending. They look at the rock formations and they see the Schoolgirl, Adam and Eve, the Bear, the Dervish, the Passport Official, the supplicant Migrant, the British Home Office Clerk…
Who could have thought, in those bare-bone survival years, that little Belogradchik would blow trumpets on the way to Europe? The Balkantourist hotel had sweeping views over the rocks, but all I saw from the window was the terraced brick houses and lasciviously bulging shops of England. That’s where I wanted to be, not at the bottom of a petrified ocean.
Despite the stupefying rocks and the festival, there are no other obvious tourists in town and only one place to stay: the Madonna Hotel. Climbing up a steep street, I catch up with a young couple pushing a toddler in a buggy. I ask them about the abandoned Balkantourist Hotel. The guy shrugs.
‘Who knows? It’s been sitting there for ages. Somebody bought it two years ago, some work started on it, then stopped…’
He probably wouldn’t mind terribly if the Balkantourist hotel never reopens, because, as it turns out, he owns the Madonna Hotel.
It is the family house, and the entire family is involved in running it. The mother is the homebody, the son is the business brain. The daughter, a slow-moving, thick-waisted girl of few words and few facial expressions, is the decoration. She waits monosyllabically on a pack of unwashed, wolf-hungry German rock climbers who occupy a table with a sweeping view down to the rocks.
They are staring at the English language menu, which is hopelessly lost in culinary translation. I spot drusan kebab: jogged, highly seasoned stewed meat, kachamak: puree of a flour of a grain of maize, kavarma: meet with an onion. The worried-looking Germans settle for grilled meat and salad.
The redundant father sits eating spinach soup by himself, served by mother and daughter like the patriarch he is supposed to be. But he isn’t any more. He is a slow-chewing peasant lagging behind in the shadow of this brisk little capitalist enterprise.
‘A million-dollar view,’ he says. We look out to the rocks drenched in golden light. ‘I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world.’
And this exhausts our topics of conversation. Back inside, the energetic hostess advises me to go and see the mosque.
‘The mosque has a tragic story. Now, the local ruler, Hadji Hussein, commissioned a Bulgarian master-carver to decorate the ceiling of the new mosque. It was going well until, one day, the carver saw the daughter of the Hadj, and they fell in love. He asked for her hand, but the father would only concede if he converted to Islam. The carver refused, and the Hadj had him murdered. As proof of the murder, the killer brought the Hadj a medallion from the young man’s neck. Seeing it, the Hadj fell to the floor. You see, he had the same medallion around his neck. As a child he’d been taken from his family as a janissary and forgotten his Bulgarian roots. He and the young man were, in fact, family. The Hadj then committed suicide.’
‘No, his daughter committed suicide when she learned that her lover was dead,’ the son pipes in. He’s busy doing accounts on a laptop.
‘Well, there are d
ifferent versions,’ the mother concedes. ‘People’s imaginations have embroidered the story. Some say when the carver first saw the daughter, she carried a rose, and that’s why he carved a rose on the ceiling.’
‘It’s not a rose, it’s a crown,’ the son butts in again. The mother throws up her arms in exasperation and goes to dish out some more spinach soup.
The next day, in the fine spring drizzle, I walk the two kilometres across town up to the Belogradchik Fortress. On the way, I find the mysterious mosque from 1751. It is derelict, bars on the glassless windows, and on the exquisitely decorated flowery doorway is a solid padlock made to last for centuries. Through the iron bars, in the gloom inside, I glimpse fragments of wall decoration and carvings, but mostly I glimpse rubbish.
This is the heart of what was once the Ottoman quarter. The Christian Bulgarians lived further below, in houses so dazzlingly whitewashed that the Turks kept the original name of the little white town. The Ottomans are gone, and so, clearly, are the Turks.
I reach the top of the hill and the end of the road. The spectacular Belogradchik Fortress begins here, snakes over the hill, and ends somewhere out of sight. Inside the stone gate, two workers in overalls are having a smoke away from the drizzle.
‘Terrible weather, isn’t it,’ I greet them.
‘Fate, that’s what it is.’ One of them smiles under a heroic moustache. I can’t help having a private chuckle at this classic Bulgarian comment, in a classic Bulgarian spot.
It’s classic because it follows a typical timeline. It was built by the Romans along the road linking the Danube with Rome and the Near East. The Byzantines and medieval Bulgarians improved on it, especially the energetic Despot Stratzimir up the road in Vidin, keen to fortify his fiefdom. The Turks too used it from the fourteenth century onwards as a garrison and defence post. And now it’s a popular location for historic Euro film sets, one of which is being built right now.
‘Careful out there on the rocks, they’re slippery. Call us if you need a hand,’ shouts a young carpenter working on the film set, and his mates whistle.
I could do with a hand or two. I slide and scramble up the wet rocky steps. At the top, I stop to catch my breath, but it’s hard, because what I see takes my breath away again.
In the rocky sea below, geology displays her patient artwork of folding matter. If eternity could appear to us in material guise, this is how it would look. My ears start ringing. The French traveller Gérome-Adolphe Blanqui, who passed through here in 1841, must have been equally stricken. ‘The Alps, the Pyrénées, the most breathtaking of Tyrolean mountains and Switzerland cannot offer such a sight,’ he wrote, ‘…all this would impress even the most hardened of souls.’
My hardened soul is impressed, and I wonder whether on starry nights Roman legionnaires sat here on this polished rock, playing dice. Did the Turkish soldiers smoke hashish up here while contemplating the brevity of their lives?
On my way out through the gates, a different pair of men in overalls are smoking. One has enormous forearms tattooed with mermaids, the other is lost in his roomy overalls. True to my Anglo-Saxon reflexes of small talk, once again I resort to the weather. ‘Yesterday was so warm and sunny, and look at today!’
‘Yesterday we were also a day younger.’ The sturdy one gifts me with a tobaccoey smile and unfolds the mermaids of his arms.
‘Yesterday was altogether a different story.’ The weedy one waves a small cigarette stub.
We nod succinct goodbyes and they continue to puff on their stubs, gazing into the misty drizzle of yesterday.
And tomorrow? Tomorrow the Italian film crew arrive. Tomorrow we join Europe with shiny trombones. Tomorrow the spell of the evil fairy might be broken. Anything is possible tomorrow.
A journey through Bulgaria, Felix Kanitz wrote in the nineteenth century – though he could be writing it now – is marked at each turn by the catacombs of disappeared peoples and eras.
I have seen those catacombs. They are everywhere, they have open lids, and often they take the shape of entire towns. But for as long as they see the sun and breathe the bitter-sweet seasons of sea, river, mountain, and hope, they will always have a stubborn, sprouting life inside. A stubborn, sprouting future.
Epilogue
Back in the Peach Street flat, I lift the bedroom carpet. I don’t know what I expect to see, but it’s not this. The bump has gone. The under-floor moles have cleared out. The broken and cracked tiles are the only proof that I haven’t gone insane and imagined it all.
The gangsters have cleared out too, for now anyway. I look up the latest news on the shooting, and find out that most of the flats in our building had been rented by citizens with Serbian and Macedonian passports. Stolen or forged passports, that is. One of the wounded, a Serb wanted by Interpol for trafficking, has just died in hospital of his wounds. The father of the baby is alive and also wanted by Interpol. He is probably no longer wanted by his girlfriend who is in hospital, beating him, I imagine, with a crutch. The baby is fine. At least it’ll have a story to tell. Having a drug-dealer father could happen to anyone, but not everyone gets to be shot, aged six months, by men in balaclavas.
I call my parents about the floor. Well, my mother offers on the line from New Zealand, it’s a new building. New buildings take a while to settle. Besides, the construction site next door could be impacting on us. Nothing to worry about, the floor is just breathing. Breathing!
Anyway, I have one last visit to make: to my native Youth 3.I haven’t dared return since we left in 1992 with crumbs in our pockets. Such things take courage. It’s not that I’m feeling especially courageous today, but all important journeys are supposed to be circular, and I must close this circle.
Youth 3 has grown up almost beyond recognition. Rows of trees, green fields, pizzerias, shopping malls and children’s playgrounds have covered up the stark childscape of mud and concrete. It’s a leafy neighbourhood now. Our street has a name. It’s now called Transfiguration Street. Just a fraction of all this would have made a difference to us, the Cold War Youths – just one tree, one playground, one full shop, one pizza. But no.
The Unitary Secondary Polytechnic School 81 Vi_tor Hugo is missing a ‘c’, and celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary year with a disconsolate white banner, like a flag for help. It is, I realize with a jolt, exactly that long since the Russian teacher broke her ruler because of Number Sixteen’s abject failure with the genitive case.
The beginning of the new school year is a few days away and the iron-and-glass door is still locked. In the school yard where we convened with our bundles of The Workers’ Deed on Recycled Paper Day, stood listening to ‘Rise, oh Mighty Country’, and did morning gymnastics, young parents sit on benches while their toddlers waddle around. I glance at the faces, afraid I’ll see the grown-ups from Class E. And hoping I will. As with the broken tiles, I need forensic evidence. But I lose my nerve, as if recognizing someone would turn me to stone, like looking straight at the Gorgon’s face. I walk across the school yard to Block 328, searching for the familiar fourth-floor balcony. But it’s hidden by the trees. I don’t know who is living in our flat.
Neighbours sit on a bench outside the entrance door. There is something familiar about one of them: the vague woman with the sweet smell of laundry emanating from her. ‘Hope?’ I say tentatively.
Beside her is a boy of about ten, built like Thomas the Tank Engine.
‘Kapka, is that you?’ Hope smiles shyly and gets up.
‘What’s your name?’ I turn to the boy.
‘Alexander,’ he growls.
‘Alexander-James,’ his mother corrects him, and explains proudly, ‘His father is Irish.’
Alexander-James is handed over to Hope’s mother, who lives with them, and the two of us take a stroll around the block. The first thing Hope tells me is that her Irish ex-husband is a property investor. The redheaded man on the bus from Burgas perhaps. He travels all over Europe, Hope says. And you, she asks, have you made a ch
ild? I confess that I haven’t even made, or unmade, a marriage.
I don’t know what it is – the thick shadows of the trees, the missing ‘c’ in Victor Hugo, the twenty-five years SOS flag, Hope’s hyphenated offspring, Hope looking like her mother, or just being in Youth 3 after so many years – but I have an urge to go and never come back. I say goodbye to Hope.
My punitive journey ends with a visit to the Bells complex across the motorway. I find a wilderness of naked concrete and burnt grass. Many of the bells are missing: they’ve been wrenched from the concrete wall and sold as scrap. Those that are still in place are without tongues, like mute witnesses. Only the plaques remain, a cemetery of urns marking the names of the deceased. They were too worthless to steal: From the Children of Morocco, Nicaragua, Campuchia, The Republic of China. This is the graveyard of Socialism’s best dream.
And like a living denouement of that dream, a young family: a white woman, a dark-skinned man, and their child who is trying to reach up to some impossibly large bell, too big for the thieves to carry.
So the many-coloured children of the Flag of Peace that were promised to us have finally arrived. It’s a pity there is no one to greet them with a brisk Pioneer salute: Always Ready!
Back on the hazy motorway that separates the Assembly from the Youths, two prostitutes stand on stilettos, shoulders hunched, mouths chewing gum. In a black Mercedes nearby sits their big-necked pimp who gives me a broad-spectrum filthy look. An articulated lorry is parked up, and three greasy men are scratching their bellies, trying to decide who goes first, second, and third.
I run across the motorway in a daze, looking for a taxi, looking for the quickest way to get the hell out of here.
Closing the circle of your journey is fine. Until you strangle yourself in the noose.
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