by Maria Genova
I felt so bad for my grandmother, because I knew she had lovingly deposited the money in the bank account each month in the hope that years later I could buy myself something nice. I couldn’t come home with a toaster. My grandmother would be ashamed that she hadn’t saved more money, even though she hadn’t eaten expensive bananas for years but saved the money for me instead. I couldn’t find the words to say how much I appreciated it, even though the savings were of no value.
During my final year at grammar school I earned a lot of money as a private tutor for English and German. From the moment that it was no longer forbidden to travel to the West, everyone wanted to travel and speak foreign languages. I had that many customers that I could have opened my own school. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to get rich quick, because this final year at school was very important for my further career. I had to get the highest grade for nearly all my subjects, if I wanted to guarantee myself a place at university.
I never had much chance to spend my savings, since my parents bought everything for me and my dates paid all the restaurant bills. A woman was never allowed to pay the bill, because the men were immediately insulted if you proposed this. So, I diligently deposited all my money in a bank account, until I heard rumours that most banks were about to go bankrupt. I went to withdraw my money straight away. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one who thought it was safer to put your money in an old sock. It was like mass hysteria: hundreds of people stood in line waiting to withdraw their savings. Some people in line claimed the cash registers were almost empty. I wondered if there was any point in waiting. At least I had made up a good excuse why I urgently needed the money.
After waiting for hours, it was my turn. The counter clerk looked at me gravely.
‘Everyone has a reason, but we do not have any more cash.’
‘You can’t be serious. Look, I have it in writing how much I have deposited in my bank account and that I can access this any time I want.’
‘I’m not blind, but you’re not getting your money. At least, not for the time being. Next in line please.’
I sighed and backed off. These types of scenes belonged to communism and not to capitalism. Who had promised us it would all get better? Only the rewriting of history had had a positive outcome, because now no one had to fear those ridiculous political exams, in which they asked for all the ins and outs of the communist party. Yeltsin, the first Russian President after the revolution, gave a typical example of the questions we were asked in his biography.
The examiner: ‘On which page and in which part of Das Kapital does Marx talk about the commodity-money relations?’
Yeltsin: ‘I was absolutely certain that he had never even read Marx and didn’t know on which page and which part it was mentioned and even had no idea what commodity-money relations meant, so I replied half-jokingly, half seriously: in the second part, page 387. I said it without thinking.’
‘Great, you have an excellent knowledge of Marx,’ the examiner said and Yeltsin was admitted to the local party committee.
We no longer had to know about Marx, but instead about survival techniques. Suddenly there were shortages in everything, even the daily groceries. Luckily, we were no longer prohibited from travelling to the West and my mother would bring back butter and cheese from France when she toured as a manager with her folk dance group. Otherwise we had to wait in endless queues.
Do you know what democracy is? You can choose which queue to wait in,’ Olga joked. Unfortunately, we were already familiar with that freedom. I would have preferred for something substantial to have changed and preferably right now.
I was too impatient to waste my time standing in queues and tried a different approach. A new admirer who worked in a small supermarket was prepared to save anything I wanted behind the counter. My parents considered this to be a creative solution until they saw my boyfriend.
‘He has no brains and his legs are too short,’ was my mother’s commentary.
I usually paid no attention to her scathing remarks, but this time it made me think. She couldn’t have assessed that he had no brains that quickly, but his legs were indeed very short. It was strange that I hadn’t noticed that before. I especially abhorred his smoke-stained teeth and didn’t want to kiss him for that reason. When I confessed this to him, he turned up the next day with teeth so white that I couldn’t believe my eyes. They had been whitened by a dentist with a super modern laser machine. What was the next step? A prosthetic leg? I thought he was coming dangerously close and ended the relationship. There was no point starting something with a man my parents didn’t approve of in a country where family always came first.
The next day I joined a long queue for groceries.
A glass tower of prejudices
Materialism and individualism were the new magic words of the post-communist society. You hardly ever saw propaganda images of Bulgarian workers gratefully shaking the hands of Russian soldiers. The facades were painted and draped with advertising, which played to a completely different set of emotions. Not to brotherhood and solidarity, but to satisfying material desires. We no longer swam like a school of fish towards the clear light of communism. Everyone went their own way.
I had no idea that the moment for a radical change in my life had nearly arrived. I could only see what was happening within the limits of my own horizon, but the change came from far away.
I met him during that disastrous post-communist period, marked by scarcity, unemployment and insecurity. I fell for his white shirt, which shone so brightly in the black lights at the disco. I was also wearing a pristine white top and it seemed to attract him as if I was the only ray of light in the dark. At first glance, he didn’t seem to be my type, but our shirts were in some strange way attracted to each other. He came closer and started to dance across from me. His sharp jawline exuded masculinity, his moves were sexy and his tight bum caught the admiration of a few other women. He asked if he could buy me a drink. I wanted to say ‘no’, but funnily enough I landed next to him on a bar stool. Had I gone crazy: I was following a luminous shirt, while the man who wore it wasn’t my type?
Luckily this Dutch tourist didn’t turn out to be a pushy and conceited macho. Frank seemed to be more of a charmer with a see-through shirt: he gave a piece of himself bare, but not completely. That made him interesting, just like his smile and sense of humour.
This was Frank’s first time in Bulgaria and all his friends thought he was mad to travel to an unknown country for winter sports, since he had always skied in France and Austria.
‘But it’s not so bad here, even though I’ve experienced a few strange things,’ he said. ‘Our airplane had to divert to an airport on the Black Sea because of fog. We slept in a hotel with broken windows and no water, about 300 km from our travel destination. The hotel was actually closed and not prepared for visitors in the winter. We were picked up by a shoddy bus the next day. After driving for hours we were allowed to stop for some fresh air, because the driver had to repair one of the parts. We took photos of him lying under the bus doing his repairs. After a few hour’s delay, we finally arrived at our winter sports destination. The skiing is perfect, but I keep on being harassed by strangers wanting to exchange dirty money and by prostitutes in the hotel. One even had the audacity last night of knocking on my door. I was half asleep when I opened the door. She asked if I wanted sex straight away.’
We talked, drank and danced all night. He looked at me almost hypnotically with his emerald green eyes. While we danced, I smelled his skin for the first time. The smell was so pure and masculine that I could imagine I would enjoy being intimate with him.
At about 4 a.m. I decided it was time to go to bed. I had to sleep for a few hours, because I had a rescue skiing competition the next day, which consisted of a number of intense components. The most intense was the slalom, where we had to transport a wounded skier on a sledge between the flags in as short a times as possible. The course was at the top of a steep black ru
n, which sometimes got pretty icy. However, that didn’t bother me as much as the orientation test in the woods. Luckily one of the other girls in the team was handy with a compass. If we followed her blindly we usually reached the target without missing any checkpoints.
I was disappointed that Frank couldn’t come and watch the competition. He had booked a daytrip to Plovdiv to admire my city’s old architecture.
‘I would very much like to see you again,’ he said. ‘Shall we meet tonight in the same bar?’
‘I think you’ll be too tired, because it’s quite a long journey. Going back and forth on one day is pretty exhausting.’
‘I’ll be there at 10 p.m., dead or alive.’ Frank smiled. His teeth were just as white as his shirt.
The next morning I heard the voice of our trainer, but I didn’t want to get up. Was it that time already? How long had I slept?
He gave me a shove. ‘Did you spend too much time last night drinking?’ His remark startled me and I opened my eyes. He smiled. It was just a joke. As usual he had no idea that I left the building after I had put on my pyjamas and pretended to sleep. He never checked twice and I could spend as much time in the discos as I wanted until my legs started hurting.
I pulled on my white ski pants and instinctively thought of Frank’s clean white shirt. I was surprised at my own association. Why did I keep thinking about him, when he wasn’t my type? Frank had a certain charm, with which he made you feel at ease and yet he didn’t bear any resemblance to the prince Charming from my fantasies. Although he was tall and slim, and he looked muscular, his shoulders just weren’t broad enough for my taste. And his haircut wasn’t really trendy, despite all that gel in his hair.
At the sound of the starting pistol I tensed my muscles. I had to give it my all to win this competition. We were the favourites. Last year we had just missed out by mission the last slalom gate, but we now had a real chance.
My alcohol driven engine worked that good that my team mates could hardly keep up with me during the first part, cross country skiing with special broad ski’s. The other components also went well, even though I kept on feeling my heart in my mouth. We had the best time at the finish, but we had to wait for the score of a few other teams. When the other team missed a slalom gate, we knew for sure: we had won the national title for rescue skiing!
‘Do you know if you’re going to go on your date, because it’s 10 p.m. already,’ my teammate Snezana said. She already knew Frank wasn’t my type based on the way he looked, but that I hadn’t laughed as much as last night.
‘I’m not sure. What’s the point of flirting with someone whose leaving for a far-away country the next morning? It can’t work out. If I go to him, I might miss out on my prince Charming tonight.’
‘The chance you’ll meet your prince Charming tonight, is almost nihil,’ Snezana assured me with the emphasis on the word nihil. ‘You’ve been on the lookout for him since you joined the team. Go and see Frank. At least you’ll have a nice evening, if you ask me.’
I nodded in agreement and went to make myself up. After taking every item of clothing out of my suitcase, putting them on and taking them off again, I stuck to a sexy shirt with a deep cleavage and a tight skirt.
‘Isn’t that too much?’ I asked Snezana.
‘No, go, because it’s nearly 11 p.m. I doubt he’s still waiting for you.’
When I entered the disco I nearly bumped into Frank, who was making his way to the exit.
‘It’s you,’ he said surprised. ‘I was about to leave. Why are you so late?’
‘I wanted to test how much you liked me. If a man leaves after just half an hour, then he’s not too keen on the woman he’s waiting for.’
‘Aha,’ Frank nodded at my theory. It didn’t sound like agreement, but the rest of the evening he didn’t talk about time at all. Until it was nearly morning and he had to catch the bus to the airport. That was the first time he looked at his watch again. The hours had flown by in chatting and dancing more and more intimately. The last tune the DJ played was ‘I’ve Been Thinking About You’ by London Beat.
We must have been stone crazy
When we thought we were just friends.
‘Cause I miss you, baby.
And I’ve got those feelings again.
I guess I’m all confused about you,
I feel so in love.
Oh, baby, what can I do?
The chorus ‘I’ve been thinking about you’ echoed repeatedly through the speakers. It couldn’t have been more apt, so soon before our definite goodbyes.
‘I’ll write to you and phone you,’ Frank said and gave me some tapes with Dutch music as a memento. ‘I hope you’ll think about me every now and then when you listen to the music.’
‘I imagine I will, because I don’t know any other Dutch people,’ I smiled.
‘I love you,’ he whispered in my ear.
‘I’m not in love yet, but I do think you’re very sweet,’ I whispered back and gave him a going-away kiss. Somewhere in the background we could still hear London Beat’s song:
Suddenly we’re strangers,
I watch you walking away.
She was my one temptation,
Oh, I did not want her to stay
Deep down, I’m still confused about you
…
What good is being here without you?
I’ve been thinking about you…
The next few months I received many cards with hugging bears, kissing giraffes, joined hearts and many more kitschy images. I jumped at every ring of the phone and ran towards it. If it was Frank, then my day couldn’t get any better. He always talked so sweet and used such loving words, that I stopped doubting if he was truly my knight in shining armour who I had been waiting on for so long. There was just one practical problem: my knight was separated from me by 2500 km.
In the meantime, everything in Bulgaria was changing. There were less and less things which reminded people of life during communism. The large red star on the roof of the party building had been taken down and a start was made with the mass destruction of communist monuments. The smaller statues of Lenin and Stalin were destroyed by hand, there was lots of dynamite needed for the medium-sized ones and the largest just fell into disrepair because the government knew it would cost millions to remove them. Where they used to have giant paintings of hardworking labourers hanging in the main streets, now there were adverts for whisky, surrounded with beautiful half-naked women or fast cars, which were also advertised by half-naked women.
The people had also changed in a short time. They were deeply disappointed in the new reality, which provided no security. During communism, there hadn’t been enough jobs for everyone, but everyone had a job. You only realised the true size of hidden unemployment after the mass lay-offs after the revolution. Suddenly this unknown luxury had been done away with, because everything had to be reformed to fit the Western model.
We were clearly playing catch-up. The scarcity of tropical fruit was solved in no time. We could no longer imagine that during communism the queues for bananas had been so long that they would pass through several streets. I could vaguely recall that my sister and I had waited in line for hours without exchanging a word because someone might tell the saleswoman that we were sisters. Then we wouldn’t be allowed to buy one kilo each, but just one kilo for the entire family. The bananas they sold were always green and we would eat them straight away because we couldn’t wait until they ripened. Some of my friends didn’t even realise they turned yellow.
The local market was overrun with unknown products after the collapse of the Wall, such as peanut butter which we didn’t know what to do with because the pot didn’t say you could spread it on bread. The French cheeses were also an attraction. Olga treated me to some brie, but first removed the white layer of cheese under the assumption that this was some kind of soft packaging. Packets of chewing gum with pictures of naked ladies were sold all over the place. They were so hard that you had a s
ore jaw from chewing the rest of the day, but many people didn’t mind because of the surprising pictures in the packets. The entire country seemed obsessed by sex: everywhere on the streets there were people selling erotic newspapers and poor-quality magazines. Some even sold the Playboy, but for people on an average salary this glossy magazine was simply too expensive. Where they used to have pictures of the party leaders hanging in the offices, they now shamelessly hung calendars of naked models. I had to admit they were more photogenic, but I could imagine that the older generation did not appreciate this total lack of morals.
Most Bulgarians had discovered within the year that freedom of speech didn’t help them much, but that free entrepreneurship, which was no longer prohibited, did. Commercial companies shot out the ground like mushrooms. The state run stores were just as empty as they had been previously, but no one minded, because they could find everything they needed in the private mini stores. Because they could not pay the high rent otherwise, most enterprising citizens started out in renovated garages and all kinds of booths. They would pile their goods up in high towers and if you tried to get something, then the whole tower would fall down.
Those who could not afford to rent a unit, could always display their wares on a stall. The whole city had turned into one large market. There was no resting place for the eyes due to the large amount of clothes, cosmetics, shoes and household appliances. The owners of the stalls also tried to display as many products as possible in as small a space as possible. If you wanted to buy Western cosmetics you often had to bend down under a tied piece of string, hung full of bra’s and underpants, to pay for your goods. If it was sexy lingerie, then I didn’t mind so much, but often there were D-cup bra’s and size XXL underpants dangling above my head.