The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  The other opening act was Cvetan’s uncle Neven, a stocky, gregarious middle-aged man with a shaved head, a goatee, and a shiny lavender headscarf. As a matter of fact, he was playing all my Bulgarian shows. “Man, I’m shutting down my festival,” Cvetan had told him. “This is your last chance to play your nephew’s thing.”

  I met Nikolai—Nicky—the local rock booker, the first guy I had e-mailed looking for Bulgarian dates. He and his girlfriend were drunk and cheerful and poured us a round of shots.

  “Are you going to Greece on this tour?” he asked.

  “I think they don’t have any money.”

  “Man, we don’t have any money! Greeks are always complaining about not having any money, but they are putting on big bands on a Tuesday.” He shook his head. Macroeconomics is best judged in one’s own sphere. “Where were good shows for you?”

  “Well, the best guarantees were in Poland.”

  “Yes, the Polish played their entry into the EU the best. All the young people are getting money from the government, and the Germans and the British. They are smart, Poles. . . . Have you heard the one, what is the biggest Polish city? Chicago! Ha ha ha ha. . . .”

  The Dylan-looking kid was playing, seated, with his shades on, singing with a high tenor. “It’s not easy doing shows in Plovdiv,” said Nicky, sounding the universal refrain. “Because we have Sofia right here, an artificial city, and if you don’t have shows Friday or Saturday you don’t get the people who work in Sofia. But still, shows in Plovdiv are better.”

  The uncle was surprisingly good at scatting (“I told you I had some gypsy in me!” said Cvetan) and, drunk, wanted to accompany me on cajón, which he did from the floor with mixed results. While the closing band ran through ska punk versions of “Land Down Under” and “Too Drunk to Fuck,” he held court at a private table with a rowdy crew of middle-aged women, passing around bottles of homemade liquor—one rakiya, one belin. “Two kinds of wine and twenty herbs,” he explained. “Good for . . . everything!”

  “Good for human soul,” said Cvetan.

  The next morning Cvetan was hungover, and in no mood to get up early to join my Plovdiv sightseeing. We’d spent the night at a small, three-unit hotel. The owner-proprietor watched black-and-white television in the tiny lobby.

  “Is the hotel owner a friend?” I asked. It wasn’t as if the place, nestled in the warren of the Old Town, were the closest to the venue, the most comfortable, or the easiest to find.

  “He’s good at making the receipts a little extra,” Cvetan said, so that when Cvetan got reimbursed by the radio station, he could use the extra money.

  The Bulgarian ethnicity—part Turkic steppe people, part Slav—is a striking one and produces men with the handsome combination of worn-leather skin and silver hair and women who are slim and tall with jet-black curls and favor tight pants and high boots. Their features range from the Persian to the practically Bangladeshi, and they age pale and dramatically, faces stretched taut and slashed with Cruella De Vil lipstick.

  Plovdiv is one of the world’s oldest cities—and, Kostya added, “the most relaxed city in Bulgaria. Lazy!” Named Philippopolis by Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, and known by that name into the twentieth century, it was a place where one glance encompassed the communist post office surrounded by the ruins of the Roman odeon and the modern-day street grid, the Thracian fortress, the Roman amphitheater, and the fourteenth-century mosque with a striking pattern of red brick framing stone masonry. A black-robed monk in a stovepipe hat strolled past a sixteenth-century bathhouse, and there was incense in the crisp mountain air. Two gypsy (for lack of a better word) musicians, old men in flat caps and long woolen coats, sat down on a corner of the mosque, then thought better of it and moved along, an uncased accordion on one man’s shoulder, a fiddle case with an improvised strap on the other’s.

  “Plovdiv has a problem,” Cvetan said. “It has all these beautiful old buildings, and they are falling apart because no one takes care of them.” This reminded me of the Tomsk arsonists, and Cvetan said that would probably happen here if the buildings were made of wood. The old town is a warren of cobblestones atop one of the small, steep hills that outline the city. The second stories of the houses are wider than the bases, supported by reverse-buttresses of curved wood. This is, Hoffman explained, “what is known as the National Revival style of architecture. This aesthetic was a rather self-conscious child of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the reawakening of Bulgarian identity, after its long dormancy. And since Bulgarian identity didn’t have many avenues of expression aside from the arts, these became infused with all kinds of folk-national implications. The National Revival houses, usually built by wealthy merchants, tried to synthesize various elements of native arts and crafts,” and now they were alternately renovated or repurposed as museums and tourist attractions.

  One was now a small museum of icons in tempera and gold leaf on wood, some with hammered-silver headdresses bolted in the appropriate place, whose style changed not at all from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth. A “Jerusalemiad,” according to the museum labels a kind of guidebook writ large and for the illiterate, indicated holy sites for pilgrims to visit in Jerusalem. A St. George demonstrated some exotic ordeals, like “the torture of the ox tendons” and “the torture of the glowing boot.”1

  Philippopolis was for some time in the tenth centuries the center of a proto-Protestant sect called the Paulicians, who, among other beliefs, rejected transubstantiation, the virgin birth, relics, icons, saints, angels, and the Old Testament. Originally from Armenia, the Paulicians were eventually scattered throughout Europe, where for some time “Bulgarian” was used as an epithet for followers of variations of their heresy.

  Orthodox churches are by no means as grand in scale as Western cathedrals and are in fact often quite humble in size, but it’s easy to forget that when faced with the overwhelming density of their interior decoration. West observed, “The Orthodox Church conceived that its chief business is magic, the evocation by ritual of the spiritual experiences most necessary to man . . . the Christians liked their churches dark, as good hatching-places for magic.” The effect, emotionally, is as large as any Polish cathedral: the incense and the glittering iconostasis, the fruit left in front of the icon, still in its plastic mesh straight from the grocery.

  Children scrambled over the ruins of the Nebet Tepe, the Thracian fortress that constitutes the high point of the town. It gave a panoramic view of tiled-roof houses, the minaret of the mosque, the three rocky hills on one side of the river and housing projects and glass skyscrapers on the other, the Rhodope Mountains behind, and the silhouette of the Roman amphitheater. “It is one of the disharmonies of history,” said West, “that there is nothing that a Roman poet would have enjoyed more than a Roman ruin, with its obvious picturesqueness and the cue it gives for moralizing.”

  It was a charming city, and no small part of my excitement stemmed from the fact that summer seemed finally to have arrived.

  “Maybe here,” said Cvetan. “Through the tunnels”—that is, on the Sofia side of the mountains—“it’s always different.” (Indeed, no sooner had we crossed back than it started to rain.)

  When I got back to the hotel a little after noon, I found Cvetan sitting in the lobby hitting the half-bottle of wine I had left over from the night before. As we drove, he cradled the bottle in his lap in the passenger seat. He had polished it off by the time we arrived in Sofia.

  Cvetan was deaf in his left ear after a childhood flu complication. Since I was driving, his bad ear faced me, so our car conversation was stilted by repetition. He’d been a Zappa fan as a child, which led him to Eugene Chadbourne via Jimmy Carl Black, and thence to Tzadik Records and the late 1980s Knitting Factory world. He told me a story of journeying via four bus transfers to see John Zorn in Slovenia. His radio show airs twice a week, nine thirty to eleven p.m., “but there are five guys, and some of them don’t want to do i
t every week, so if I need more money I can be in every night.”

  After tomorrow’s show in Ruse, not far from his hometown, he would take the train back to Sofia. “It’s cheap, seven euros, and sometimes it is totally empty” except in the summer, since it’s the route from Sofia to the Black Sea beaches. “And a lot of Romanians—it is still cheaper for them to come here” instead of their own Black Sea coast.

  What did I think of Romania? he asked. I mentioned the abandoned nuclear plants in the Romanian north, and he told me about Pernik, a former mining town west of Sofia that has become a byword for hulking, rotting postindustrial buildings.

  “The people from there, there are lots of jokes and stories about them, that they are really rude and rough.” A common rural regional dish is meat and rice wrapped in a cabbage leaf, “and the joke goes, what is Pernik sushi? Canned fish in a cabbage leaf.”

  Sofia was the westernmost station on the massive Soviet train maps that still dominated the central station halls in places like Saint Petersburg. “Now they are a real tragedy,” Cvetan said. “There used to be fifteen trains a day to where I grew up; now there are two or three. They are a state business, and every person who is put in charge of the trains is busy with a private business, and [the trains] are rotting from the inside. You know what is worse is the Greek trains. They think they are in a crisis, so they sold the trains to a private company. They are going to fix them up, they say, but it’s going to take five or six years, and cost twice as much, and in the meantime there are no trains from here to Greece. And especially in southern Bulgaria a lot of people were going to Greece to work.

  “Now we’re at the city limits, so watch out for police. If the signs says eighty and you’re going eighty-two, they gonna pull you over for sure, ’cause they’ll see you’re a foreign car and want to get some money.”

  For the first time in the five weeks I’ve been in Europe, I stayed at a genuinely nice hotel, a multistory cylinder in Sofia’s ambitious outskirts. Bulgarian National Radio had a deal to put up artists there, and I was giddy with gratitude as the concierge ran down his checklist. “Sir, so you know, the minibar is complimentary.”

  “I put a Mexican hardcore band in there once,” Cvetan said with pride. “They couldn’t believe it.”

  “Plovdiv is usually the first hitchhike of the year for people from Sofia,” said Yana, a radio colleague of Cvetan’s. “Spring comes there sooner, and winter later.” A pixie with one long dreadlock, Yana was born and raised in Sofia, a city girl—“a downtown girl,” she emphasized. “Living in Sofia, you know everyone. You’re always saying hello.” She proved the point as we went for dinner.

  Ready-to-eat soup restaurants were all the rage in Sofia, and maybe Plovdiv too—the Dylan kid had been keen to take me for soup the night before. Yana lived around the corner from the place we went. “It’s cool because when there are protests, I can hear them from my window and go downstairs and join in!”

  There had been massive protests a month ago. They had in fact toppled the government, though it happened only a month before the already scheduled election. Electricity prices went up drastically in midwinter, and people took to the streets against the trio of companies that control the market. “Actually,” Yana explained, “the money doesn’t even go to them, it goes to the state electric company, which is not the state company anymore. . . . Anyway, we actually toppled the government . . . or did we? All of our last five governments were obvious criminals, but this one was also. Rednecks. You know, I am university-educated, and I want a government who is smarter than me. We had a minister of culture—actually, he is a very popular sculptor—but he can’t speak! It’s more than a dialect, he doesn’t know how to talk. . . . Anyway, the protests were good, just we had those right-wing assholes who always want to show up at the protests so they can throw rocks. And of course they are the ones who end up on the TV.”

  She asked me about my vegetarianism and whether I was going to raise my kid vegetarian. I said we hadn’t actually discussed it yet, but maybe.

  “What about in kindergarten, when everyone is getting the same lunch, and they are forced to eat it?”

  “We can give them a bag lunch. Don’t you do that here?”

  She shook her head. “I think every Bulgarian has a shared trauma of being forced to clean their plate. Everyone has one food” to which they have an irrational reaction. “They held my nose closed so I’d open my mouth.”

  The show in Sofia was at a metal (in both senses) bar decorated in gleaming chrome, and it would be broadcast live on national radio. Kostya had been dismissive of my attempts to see the Sofia sites, so I grabbed a tourist map from the hotel and snuck out after soundcheck for a rapid-fire circuit of the churches of the city center. The club itself was across from the beautiful-outside, dingy-inside Russian Orthodox church, with the inevitable bust of Pushkin in the park behind. At the nearby and majestic Nevsky Cathedral, built by the Bulgarians in gratitude for the role of the Russians in their liberation from Ottoman rule, a trio of men sang Mass, in what West rhapsodized as “the gentle lion roar of hymns sung by men of a faith which has never exacted celibacy from its priests nor pacifism from its congregations.” One church had been blown apart in 1925 by communists trying to kill the king. Another was an eleventh-century den tucked in the middle of a subway station entrance, near excavations of historical Roman streets, and full of junk like a walk-in closet (West described “the Serbo-Byzantine architecture which burrows to find its God . . . small, it might be the lair of a few great beasts”). Then the relatively humble red-brick St. Sophia, for which the city is named. It was founded in the fourth century in what was then Roman Serdica, where in 311 Galerius issued the Edict of Toleration, which decriminalized Christianity, in advance of Constantine’s legalization two years later. Tucked around back were three stele memorializing the regionally unique Bulgarian state and episcopal role in rescuing the country’s Jews in World War II: Kaplan called it “the cleanest Holocaust record of any nation in Nazi-occupied Europe—at least within its own borders.” While Misha Glenny noted that “admiration for Bulgaria’s record should be tempered” by the acknowledgment that King Boris of Bulgaria was using the issue as a piece in a complex game of international relations, the deportation of Jews was vehemently rejected by partisans and elites, marked by “an absence of popular anti-Semitism, and defiance among the Jews.” The three marble stele are unequivocal, trilingual (Bulgarian, English, and Hebrew), and have the stony permanence of historical, if ungrammatical, judgment: “In the year 1943, while the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews was reaching its peak, a unique phenomenon occurred in Bulgaria. Eminent leaders of the Bulgarian people, the heads of the church, enlightened public servants, writers, doctors, lawyers, workers, ordinary citizens and the royal family. They all stood together and succeeded to rescue all of the Bulgaria’s 49,000 Jews from deportation to the death camps. The great majority of Bulgaria’s Jews immigrated to Israel in the years 1948–1950 and took an active part in the rebirth of the Jewish state.”

  As I walked back from my mini-tour of the spiritual centers of the city, a slim man in a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses, carrying a briefcase, asked me the time. I told him and walked on. A minute later, he eased up behind me, smiling and proffering a business card. “Excuse me—I thought you might be interested in this: we have nice girls, they will come to your hotel room.” He gave me an ingratiating smile, and, not sure where to go with the conversation, I crossed the street. I looked at the card. “Perfect: The most beautiful girls in Sofia!” it said. “Would you like a pretty girl for pleasure at a place convenient for you? The Best Service!” One side quoted 50 euros for an hour and 190 for the night; the prices on the other side, offering, “If you would like a beautiful top model at a place of your convenience,” were 80 and 290. Sofia is for hustlers.

  Back at the venue, Uncle Neven had again set up a station with his herbal wine concoction and started jamming along with my set on his cajón. He missed m
y suggestion that maybe his contribution was misplaced tonight, and Cvetan eased him back to his booth. His guitar had an unusually thick neck. At first, I thought it was a twelve-string with every other string skipped. As it turned out, it was a homemade six-string with a twelve-string neck, because “I am carpenter, and my fingers are too thick!”

  Kostya came to lurk around the merch desk. “How about that thirty euros you owe me?” I asked him.

  He grinned. “I don’t have it right now. I gotta go out and . . . meet up with some people. I’ll have it for you later.” He disappeared for the rest of the night.

  The road to Ruse runs through the Stara Planina (“Old Mountain”) or Balkan (Turkish for “mountain”) Mountains, historically the home of the peninsula’s haidouks—outlaws, brigands, and guerrillas. Once again I went to pick up Cvetan at the radio station. As I pulled up to the curb in traffic, he hopped the fence. Instead of getting in himself, he shoved into the car a thin metalhead with a disappearing chin, a waist-length ponytail, and a leather motorcycle jacket covered in pins: AC/DC, Black Sabbath, a Confederate flag guitar, a bottle of whiskey. He was sweating cigarettes and carrying an open beer.

  “I’ll ride with my uncle,” Cvetan yelled through the window. “This is Cvelin. He’s playing tonight as well.”

  A bass player (seven-string fretless, as it turned out), Cvelin had cut his teeth on Metallica but had branched out since then. His current project was a “punk jazz” band with bass, sax, violin, and a female singer.

  “That’s a lot of melody instruments,” I observed.

  “Yes,” he said. “We had a piano player, but he quit when I told him not to use his left hand.”

  After the mountain passes, there was a new and distinctive kind of tree—dogwood?—covered with small, white blooms. On the highways, outside the mountain tunnels, crashed cars were mounted on concrete pedestals as a kind of memento mori and cautionary example. I mentioned to Cvelin that the mountains reminded me of the American West. He told me that the Bulgarian president, giving a kind of state-of-the-union televised speech, projected photos behind him. As he waxed poetic about “our beautiful mountains,” they clicked to a stock photo of a snowcapped range—in Colorado. “It was a scandal.”