The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  We passed roadside donkeys, a goat, some fruit stands, a town that seemed to specialize in selling bits of gnarled stone, and several of those generic communist monuments to workers and World War II that have surely aged as quickly and dramatically as any monumental art in history. Once we descended into the farming plains, there were a few miles of roadside prostitutes, pacing the truck pull-offs in tight jeans, heeled boots, and puffy parkas, shivering and pecking at their cellphones.

  Cvelin was not much of a talker, and I put on a Fresh Air podcast in which Terry Gross interviewed a former Mormon missionary. Mormons were ubiquitous in Siberia and Mongolia, and I asked him if they showed up in Bulgaria.

  “Not really,” he said. “Who is everywhere is the Hare Krishnas. I played a festival last year, and like eighty percent of the people were Krishnas. They were running classes. We said, next year we’re going to run a class on how to cook meat.”

  When I’d asked Yana for directions to the tourist sites of central Sofia, she said, “If you want my real opinion, leave early tomorrow and do tourism in Ruse.” Ruse too claims the title “Little Vienna,” for its architecture and wide central square. As the last Danube city before the river empties into the Black Sea, it is here that the epithet most overstates its case.

  The outskirts were a mess of empty industrial buildings, remnants of the communist industry that had made Ruse one of Europe’s most polluted cities by the end of the 1980s. The central square was alive with all the vital activities of a provincial city on a Friday night on the verge of spring: cackling old men with Jimmy Durante noses; worn-out old ladies with troubled dye jobs; an amplified Peruvian pan piper straight from the New York City subways; young couples snuggling on park benches; young men in threes and fours drinking beer, trying to make eye contact, and then trouble. There was a political rally of some sort in the corner of the park. On the edge of the gathering, one teenage boy with jeans tucked into his combat boots and his skinhead friend waved a purple-and-black flag advertising the nationalist Bulgarian National Movement. This was a right-wing party claiming descent from the infamous revolutionary terrorist organization IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), which in the late nineteenth century fought for independence from Turkey, then pivoted to anti-Yugoslav terrorism aimed at uniting Macedonia with Bulgaria. They became, according to West, the Fascist Party of Bulgaria, a paid-for proxy front for Italian fascist meddling in the region, and finally a kind of mafia whose “chief resource was its ruthlessness, which . . . made Bulgarian political life a shambles.”

  My Ruse host Elisa was from Florence, tall, high-cheekboned, and stylish with short, curly hair. She left Italy and lived in Berlin for nearly a decade, then got a master’s degree in Sofia and a job in Ruse running arts and cultural activities for the Elias Canetti Centre, named for the writer, Nobel laureate, and Ruse native. (Canetti’s best-known work, Crowds and Power, was an investigation of mob psychology and its uses and abuses by populists and demagogues.) Ruse, which the Turks called “Ruschuk,” or “little Russia,” was, Elisa explained, arguably the most important Bulgarian city after its independence from Turkey in the late 1800s. Just downstream from Vienna and the other Danube capitals, it was a major trading center and the site of many Bulgarian firsts: the first bank, the first railway line, the first movie theater. The town center, of course, was built in a miniature imitation of the ornate Viennese style. But after the fall of the Hapsburgs, the two Balkan Wars, and two World Wars, the merchants left and the once-elegant houses fell into decay, their pastel facades peeling and gray.

  I walked up to the Pantheon of National Revival Heroes, a blocky 1970s monument and ossuary for which a church was bulldozed. Thirty years later, a cross was apologetically added. Teens sat and drank beer, and a dad and a handful of kids played soccer on the small plaza. I walked over to the river as the sun set, past a store called Al Bundy Shoes and something designated on the map, with admirable literal-mindedness, as “Profit-Yielding Building.” Aside from a graveyard of rusting propellers and a few cargo boats, both the Bulgarian and Romanian riverbanks were mercifully undeveloped. I got the impression of a nation in the wake of empires, still awash in the detritus and seaweed left after the tide goes out, the sediment left by the waves as they crash.

  “I hope you brought warm clothes,” said Elisa. The show was in the stripped interior of the house where Canetti’s uncle had run his business. Across the street stood a statue of a man holding a handgun in a dueling stance—an anti-Turk revolutionary named Angel Kanchev. Renovations had been put on hold for years while Canetti’s daughter and the municipality fought for ownership of this house and Canetti’s birthplace. It was a bare brick and concrete warehouse that felt like a refrigerator, some fifteen degrees colder inside than it was on the sidewalk. Usually when the crowd at a show streams onto the street between sets, it’s because the atmosphere is so stifling inside. Here they went outside to try to warm up.

  “Making culture here is more like social work than presenting big exhibitions,” said Elisa. There was money coming into Ruse for renovations of the downtown and for cultural revival, German and Austrian money flowing downstream in service of a concept of the shared cultural heritage of the community of Danube cities. The Goethe Institute funded both her position and the Canetti Centre itself. She’d had a lunch meeting the day before with German developers looking to invest in Ruse. “It’s a little like colonialism,” she said, “but it’s the only way, I think.”

  Elisa spoke at least four languages—Italian, German, English, and Bulgarian—and seemed so foreign to this part of the world, a representative of a pan-European, cosmopolitan cultural elite, that I wondered aloud what was in it for her, wet-nursing the cultural infancy of a provincial city. “Bulgaria teaches you to be more relaxed than in Italy,” she replied.

  “Italy is pretty damn relaxed,” I offered.

  “Well, I was living in Germany for twelve years.”

  Cvetan was harried and late (“When I first met him,” Elisa said, “I thought he was on coke”), arriving with some members of the opening act a half hour after their scheduled set time. The police pulled up not long afterward, during Cvelin’s duo drone-jam set. Elisa went to palaver with them, and I prepared to pack up and make a run for it.

  “The police are here,” she told me when she returned. “They want to know if you need any help.”

  At the end of the night, I realized I would be crossing back into Romania the next morning, and that Kostya had predictably disappeared into the Sofia night without giving me my goddamned thirty euros. I generally attempt a performative geniality with the people who pass through my life intensely, daily, and ephemerally on tour, to the point where I’ve acquired a not entirely deserved reputation as a friendly guy. But I can be roused to what is certainly disproportionate anger by two things: first, imposition on my alone time; and second, those who try and hustle me for what are invariably minuscule amounts of money, be it fifty bucks off the guarantee or half off the merch. It is enough merely to recall the persons or the setting—details that never leave me—for my blood to rise. In the absence of Kostya himself, I took it out on the nearest available bystander.

  “What the fuck,” I raged at Cvetan, “with your fucking hustler buddy?”

  “Can I PayPal you the money?” he offered.

  “The number of times in my life,” I replied, “in which a promoter has said they’ll PayPal me the money later and has done so is zero.”

  “Maybe you want beers instead?” He gestured lamely at the case of—naturally—Fucking Hell beer he was selling off the folding table.

  “The one thing I never have to worry about on tour,” I snarled, “is free beer.”

  He turned to Elisa. “Can I borrow thirty euros?” he pleaded. “I’ll send it to you later.”

  She nodded, and the deal was done.

  “Good-bye, in case I don’t see you again,” said Cvetan. “I’m never gonna promote shows again. It’s not ’cause of you,
just the end of a long story . . .”

  It wasn’t the end of my currency troubles, but it was the end of my self-righteousness. The Bulgarian leva is pegged to the euro, but it is nonconvertible outside the country, and I had a stack equivalent to several hundred U.S. dollars. I hadn’t exchanged it the day before because I had been waiting for the last night of merch sales and show pay. But I was leaving Bulgaria at seven a.m. on a Saturday morning, when neither banks nor gray marketeers keep hours.

  Elisa asked how much I had and produced enough euros from her purse to cover the exchange. When I found another wad in a different pocket, though, I had no choice but to leave it all with her, secured only by an e-mail address, a brief introduction to PayPal, and the memory of my rant against faithless PayPalers.

  It was a foggy morning by the pipelines over a particularly patchy stretch of the Danube. A horse and some goats grazed on rubble, and gnome-like ladies in kerchiefs passed in and out of the mist on their bikes. Three crows built a nest over a roadside meat stand. I could do a steady fifteen miles per hour amid the trucks, diesel fumes, stray dogs, and potholes. I dodged a horse cart as a man ran across the highway clutching a chainsaw. I stopped at a light across from a storefront with the intriguing sign “Totalcrap.ro” (I checked, it’s defunct) and caught a glimpse of a squeegee man. There was a bridge without grace, over a river without beauty, into a city without charm.

  Bucharest was not even appealing as a grotesque, neither especially dirty nor rundown. Much of the old city was bulldozed under Ceaușescu, and the modern city has a functional, rather than aesthetic, energy. I had a nine-hour drive to Timișoara, but I wanted to see the Palace of the Parliament, otherwise known as the Ceaușescu Palace. It remains the largest and most expensive administrative building in the world and one of the great wonders of contemporary folly. It stands in a country which, according to a 2010 Economist summation of a University of Pennsylvania study based on the ratio of life satisfaction to per capita income, was “the saddest place in the world.”

  Once a cautionary tale, the palace was now simply a fact. An auto show filled its plaza with pounding dance music. The complex, with its facing buildings topped with faux-Roman arches, couldn’t be more removed from the picturesque and colorful clutter of Romanian village life. They looked like nothing so much as pretentious, tacky, and cheap shopping malls. There was no sign of pedestrian traffic: the area, as befitted its inhuman aura, was neither secured nor populated.

  V.

  Don’t Bring Your Beer in Church (Bucharest to Vienna)

  My impression of a country’s economic development is heavily influenced by whether they have divided highways (and whether the town dumps are located on the hillsides facing the roads that they do have). By that metric, Bulgaria (highways, if unevenly maintained) trumps Romania (few highways, all heavily potholed). That said, Poland, widely considered the most cosmopolitan of the Eastern European region and having “played the game well” vis-à-vis EU funding (“Well, they are right next to Germany,” said one Bulgarian), didn’t have highways until the rush to prepare for the Euro 2012 soccer tournament.

  I had hours of driving to get to the western Romania city of Timișoara, through baking farmland, rust-roofed villages, and painted gates. The village houses in this stretch of southern Romania were one-story instead of the Bulgarian standard two. In the center of one village was mounted an army-green fighter plane with a bull’s-eye painted on the tail in the Romanian tricolor. Outside another, Dolj, were parked a handful of decommissioned biplanes. A scooped horse cart sat on car wheels, next to a pair of dead dogs and a string of fish hung to dry.

  I saw a church with its frescoes on the outside walls, facing the cluttered graveyard, and brash with the national blues, reds, and yellows. The “painted monastery” was a style native to the medieval Moldavian state, which comprised a region covering what is now Bucovina and eastern Romania, Moldova, and southwestern Ukraine. Robert Kaplan wrote that the fifteenth-century Moldavian king Stephen the Great had churches decorated with paintings of didactic and moral fables, saints and prophets, clad and painted in the local styles, to teach religion to the illiterate locals.

  In a town called Balș, I passed two overloaded gypsy carts, and then in Craiova a nuclear plant that was actually open and functioning. A woman knelt to light a candle in a roadside shrine in front of an acres-wide abandoned industrial site, across from a mile of rusting railway cars.

  I entered a wide, flooded valley where the Motru River was dammed, and drove past a small field of blue and white oil derricks and through a village with triple-gabled pagoda roofs and pink and aqua gates. Old couples sat and watched traffic while a young boy filled plastic bottles of drinking water at the town pump. Passing through Orșova, on the eastern Serbian border, I followed the Danube for a few last miles, where a small bay was clogged with barges loaded with scrap iron.

  I turned north, back into the hills and the Timiș region. Any central authority was represented alternately by omnipresent speed traps and the ambulances that necessarily roam the roads in anticipation of frequent car accidents.

  Somehow, I was not surprised to find Timișoara also claims the title “Little Vienna.” It once adjoined, and was named for, the Timiș River (the name means “fortress of Timiș), which runs south from the Banat region to meet the Danube in Serbia. Due to various engineering projects over the centuries, though, the river now runs some miles away from the city. The urban center of western Romania, it has a legitimate reputation as the country’s original revolutionary town, the place where, in the wake of the internal exile of an antigovernment Hungarian preacher named László Tőkés, protests led quickly and bloodily to the end of the Ceaușescu regime.

  The city’s name became a watchword and chant during the eight days between the beginning of the protests and the execution of Ceaușescu and his wife. It is also, deservedly, considered the capital of Romanian punk—they claim the first Romanian punk band, Chaos.

  “I know those guys,” said Casian. “But the singer, he has a kid now, and they don’t have a drummer, so you know . . .”

  Casian had a seven- and a four-year-old himself and was winding down his career as a promoter (with a special passion for psychobilly). A dark-featured, heavy-browed man, he worked for the local waste-treatment company, a public-private partnership that I’m now not surprised to learn involved a German investor. “I used to be at the sorting plant, but now I’m in the office doing contracts. It’s a boring job.”

  One of the other promoters on this swing had mentioned that he knew Casian—Paul from Cluj, maybe?

  “Well—we are like enemies, or competitors,” Casian corrected me. No country is too big or too small to avoid the dreaded “scene beef.” “He wanted to have a monopoly of promoting in Romania, and I was doing these psychobilly shows. He was yelling at me—well, not yelling, on the Internet. Anyway, it’s his problem, not me.”

  Atelier DIY was in an industrial park, on the second floor of a warehouse, above a front-end loader and pallets of what felt like cat litter. The room looked and smelled like a basement rehearsal space. The walls were covered with 4″ × 6″ snapshots of hardcore shows and old posters for the same. I’d played a similar venue in Caen, France, but in place of that show’s arty hipsters, the scene tonight was a small crew of middle-aged rockabilly fanatics. The opening band was called Graves for Sale, billed as “Romania’s first surf band.” (As it turned out, they were the Joe Meeks of space-age surf, with a guy twiddling electronics and cueing sound effects and clips of film dialogue.)

  I shared a dirty couch with a hyperactive and hyperverbal man, tall and broad. He had a soul patch and a hand-rolled cigarette clenched between his teeth. His name was Marco: “Like Marco Polo! Half Serb, half Hungarian.” He asked after my own roots, and when I told him I had family from the region, he exclaimed and threw an arm around me. “Ah! You are Banatian! Not American! You are one of us!”

  His bandmate offered me a clear liquid in a plas
tic water bottle. “Belenka!” he said, with enthusiasm. “It is plum brandy, or apricot, or cherry. But always belenka!”

  “I love ska, I love psychobilly, I love stoner rock,” said Marco. “The cat has nine lives, but I do not have enough lives to listen to all the music I love!” His legs fell asleep under him while we talked. “Aah! I feel the termites!” He shook his legs. “It’s like Tom and Jerry. You remember Tom and Jerry? Not like cartoons now. They are trying to imbecile our kids! Not like the Road Runner and the Willy the Coyote! I have a disk of fifty episodes of Willy Coyote. Not this Bob the Sponge, Bob the Fuck, Bob the blah blah blah.”

  They were another crowd of friendly hecklers: when I sang the line in the coda of my song “The Hearts of Boston” that quotes Cole Porter—“Which is the right life, the quiet life or the night life?”—someone yelled, “How about a quiet nightlife?”

  “You must stay and drink!” said a five-foot lady with a red streak in her hair. “Romanians become more affectionate when we drink.”

  The after-party was a jam session that featured the knob-twiddler from the surf band freestyling in English. I was staying with Noemi, the lady with the red streak, and her partner Tibi, the drummer from Graves for Sale. Noemi had a classic Romanian face—high, soft cheekbones and jet-black hair—and sported a classic goth-punk style: a Cobra Skulls T-shirt, skull earrings, a hoodie, and a motorcycle jacket. Tibi had a gray pompadour and a coffin belt buckle. They, like their friends, were crazy about psychobilly, and we sat up in their kitchen drinking and watching YouTube videos. I showed them Speed Crazy and Bob Log III. They showed me a laughable redneck named Bob Wayne, whom they’d befriended at a festival in the Czech Republic. Noemi’s thirteen-year-old son from an earlier marriage was asleep in the next room. Tibi was also divorced—he had a fourteen-year-old daughter who lived with her mother—and there was a carefree hedonism to their relationship. Tibi started the next morning by pouring belenka shots for both of us, and then, as I drove us to the center for some sightseeing, offered me one of the beers he’d brought.