Neither Here Nor There

by Bill Bryson

  He dropped me at the Sheraton on Lenin Square, quite the grandest hotel I had stayed in on this trip, but I had been told that it was the only place to stay in Sofia. Until a couple of years earlier it had been the Hotel Balkan, but then Sheraton took it over and the company has done a consummate job of renovating it. It was all shiny marble and plush sofas. I was impressed.

  The girl at the check-in desk explained the hard currency system in operation at the hotel, which was very confusing. Some of the hotel’s restaurants, bars and shops accepted only hard currency and some accepted only Bulgarian leva and some accepted both. I didn’t really take any of it in.

  I went straight out for a walk, eager to see the town. I was delighted to find that I remembered so much of it. There across the square was the big statue of Lenin. Facing it was TSUM, as vast as I remembered it and still clearly in business, and around the corner was the Place 9 Septemvri, a boulevard paved in golden bricks and dominated by the massive headquarters of the Communist Party, soon to be sacked by a mob and nearly burned down. I walked down it now and plunged off into the dark and narrow streets of the downtown.

  Sofia must be one of the darkest cities in the world. Only the occasional lightning flashes of a tram at the far end of a street revealed the full outlines of the buildings. For the rest there were just weak pools of light beneath the well-spaced lampposts and a little seepage of illumination from the few bars and restaurants that were still open and doing, without exception, a desultory business. Almost every shop window was dark. None the less the streets were crowded with people, many of them evidently having just concluded a night out and now standing in the road trying to flag down the few cabs that flew past.

  I made a lazy circuit of the downtown and emerged in front of TSUM. The goods in the darkened windows looked to be distinctly more up to date than on my previous visit, but at least it was still in business. This, I decided, would be my first port of call in the morning.

  In the event, TSUM wasn’t open when I hit the sunny streets, so I walked instead up a long straight avenue called Vitosha where most of the other main stores seemed to be. None of them were open yet either, but already long queues were forming at most doors. I had read that things were desperate in Bulgaria – that people began queuing for milk at four-thirty in the morning, that the price of some staples had gone up 800 per cent in a year, that the country had $10.8 billion of debt and so little money that there were only funds enough in the central bank to cover seven minutes’ worth of imports – but nothing had prepared me for the sight of several hundred people queuing around the block just to buy a loaf of bread or a few ounces of scraggy meat.

  When they opened, most shops posted some beefy sour-puss in the doorway who would let the customers in one at a time. The shelves were always bare. Things were sold straight out of a crate on the floor by the till, and presumably when the crate was empty the door was locked and the rest of the queue was sent away. I watched one woman come out of a baker’s with a small loaf of bread and immediately join another long queue at a butcher’s next door. They must have to do this every day with everything they buy. What a life.

  It had been nothing like this in 1973. Then the shops had been full of goods, but no one appeared to have money to buy them. Now everyone was clutching fistfuls of money, but there was nothing to spend it on.

  I went into one shop called 1001 CTOK?. There was no orderly queue, just an almost incredible crush of people around the door. I didn’t so much enter of my own volition as get swept in. Inside there was a mob of people around a single glass display case, waving money and jockeying for attention. All the other cases in the shop were empty, though there were salespeople still posted behind them. I slid through the crowd to see what it was the people were so eager to buy and it was just a pathetic assortment of odds and ends – some plastic cruet sets, twenty long-handled brushes with no identifiable function, some small glass ashtrays, and an assortment of tin-foil plates and pie dishes such as you get free in the West when you buy something to heat in the oven.

  Clearly people weren’t shopping so much as scavenging for purchasable goods. Again and again, as I ventured up Vitosha, I would peer into the impenetrable gloom of shop windows and discover after a moment that I had attracted a small crowd looking over my shoulder to see what I had spotted. But there was nothing to spot. One electrical shop I passed had three Russian hi-fi systems, two stereo and one mono (when was the last time you saw a mono hi-fi?), but they all had knobs missing and didn’t look as if they would last five minutes.

  Another shop sold nothing but two kinds of tins – yellow tins and green tins, stacked in their hundreds in neat pyramids on every shelf. It was the only well-stocked shop I saw all day. I have no idea what was in the tins – the labels gave no hint – but I can only assume that it must have been pretty dire or they would have sold out long ago. It was the most depressing morning I have spent in a long time.

  I went to TSUM fearing the worst and found it. Whole departments were stripped bare, including my beloved TV section. The premier department store in the country couldn’t offer its customers a single television, radio or other electrical item. In some departments three salespeople stood by a till with nothing to sell but perhaps a small stack of tea towels, but elsewhere there would be a lone desperate salesgirl trying to deal with throngs of people because a shipment of something desirable had just come in. At one counter on the third floor a big cardboard box full of socks had just arrived – hundreds and hundreds of socks, all an identical mustard-brown colour, all in thin cotton in the same size and all in bundles of a dozen – and people were buying double armloads of them. I suppose you buy what you can and think about what you are going to do with it afterwards – give some to your father-in-law for Christmas, swap some for a hunk of meat, reward a neighbour for queuing for you.

  The saddest department was the toys – one shelf full of identical, ineffably cuddly teddy bears made out of synthetic wool, two dozen identical plastic toy trucks with bowed wheels and peeling, crooked labels, and fourteen metal tricycles all painted the same shade of blue and every one of them scraped or bashed in some way.

  On the top two floors were whole departments full of boxes of unidentifiable odds and ends. If you have ever taken apart some mechanical contraption – a doorbell or a washing-machine motor – and had it all spring loose on you and 150 mysterious pieces have gone bouncing in every direction, well, those pieces are what they sell upstairs at TSUM – springs and cogs and small oddments of shaped metal that look as if they must fit together in some way. Scores of people were gravely picking through the boxes.

  The busiest department was on the ground floor in what I suppose you would call the notions department. It was like a crowd scene in a Godzilla movie after the news has got out that the monster is on his way to town. All they seemed to sell was buttons, wristwatch straps and ribbons, but then I saw that what everyone was queuing for was a freshly arrived consignment of alarm clocks. They were just simple, cheap-looking plastic alarm clocks, but the shoppers were clearly ready to kill to get one. The department was run by two of the most disagreeable-looking women I ever hope to see. I watched with a kind of dumb fascination. A shy-looking young man whom I took to be North Vietnamese finally reached the till and they ignored him. He held out a wad of money with an entreating look and they just dealt with the people behind him. I don’t know why. Finally one of the salesladies pushed his money away and told him to clear off. The man looked as if he could cry. I felt almost as if I could too. I don’t know why they were so nasty to him. But he put his money in his pocket and melted into the crowd.

  Imagine living like that. Imagine coming home from work and your partner saying, ‘Honey, guess what? I had the most wonderful day shopping. I found a loaf of bread, six inches of ribbon, a useful-looking metal thingy and a doughnut.’

  ‘Really? A doughnut?’

  ‘Well, actually, I was lying about the doughnut.’

  The odd thing was t
hat the people looked amazingly stylish. I don’t know how they manage it with so little to buy. In the old days the clothes on all the people looked as if they had been designed by the manager of a Russian tractor factory. People constantly came up to me and Katz offering to buy our jeans. One young guy was so dementedly desperate for a pair of Levi’s that he actually started taking his trousers off on the street and urging us to do likewise so that we could effect a trade. Katz and I tried to explain that we didn’t want his trousers – they were made out of, like, hemp – and asked him if he had anything else, a younger sister or some Cyrillic porno, but he appeared to have nothing worth swapping, and we left him desolate on a street corner, his heart broken and his flies gaping. Now, however, everyone was as smartly dressed as anywhere else in Europe – actually more so, since they took such obvious care and pride in their wardrobe. And the women were simply beautiful, all of them with black hair, chocolate eyes and the most wonderful white teeth. Sofia has, without any doubt, the most beautiful women in Europe.

  I spent the better part of a week just walking around. Sofia is full of monuments with crushingly socialist names – the Stadium of the People’s Army, the Memorial of the Antifascist Campaigners, the National Palace of Culture – but most of these are contained within some quite lovely parks, with long avenues of chestnuts, benches, swings, even sometimes a boating lake, and often attractive views of the green, hazy mountains that stand at the city’s back.

  I saw the sights. I went to the old royal palace on Place 9 Septemvri, now the home of the National Gallery of Painting and Sculpture, where I suddenly understood why I was unable to name a single Bulgarian artist, and afterwards crossed the street to have a look at the tomb of Georgi Dimitrov, the national hero – or at least he was until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Now the Bulgarians appeared not to be so certain. There was some minor graffiti on his mausoleum – unthinkable even a couple of months before, I would wager – and you could no longer go in and look at his body, preserved under glass in the fashion beloved of Communists. I remember when Katz and I went to see it in ’73, Katz leaned close to the case, sniffed in an obvious manner and said to me in a slightly too-loud voice, ‘Something smell a bit off to you?’, which nearly got us arrested. Dimitrov was treated like a god. Now, with Communism crumbling, people didn’t even want to see him any more.

  I went too to the National History Museum and the Alexander Nevsky Memorial Church and the National Archaeological Museum and one or two other diversions, but mostly I just went for long walks and waited for evening to come.

  Evening was kind to Sofia. When the shops were shut the queues vanished and people took to strolling on the streets, looking much happier. Sometimes there were small political gatherings outside Dimitrov’s tomb and you could see that people were enjoying the unaccustomed luxury of being able to talk freely. One evening outside the old royal palace somebody set up along a wall an arrangement of photographs of the exiled royals, King Simeon and his family. Crowds pressed to see the pictures. I thought it odd at first, but you can imagine what it would be like in Britain if the royal family had been banished forty years ago (now there’s a thought for you) and people had been denied any official information about them. So suddenly now the Bulgarians could see what had become of their equivalent of Princess Margaret and the Duke of Edinburgh and all the others. I had a look myself, rather hoping to discover that King Simeon was now managing a Dairy Queen in Sweetwater, Texas, but in fact he appeared to be living a life of elegance and comfort in Paris, so I declined the invitation to sign a petition calling for his reinstatement.

  Every evening I went looking for the Club Babalu, a nightclub where Katz and I hung out every night of our stay. That wasn’t its real name; we just called it that because it looked so much like Desi Arnaz’s Club Babalu on I Love Lucy. It was like something straight out of the early 1950s, and it was the hot spot in Sofia. People went there for their anniversaries.

  Katz and I sat nightly in a balcony overlooking the dance floor drinking Polish beer and watching a rock ’n’ roll band (I use the phrase in its Bulgarian sense) whose enthusiasm almost made up for its near total lack of talent. The band played songs that had not been heard in the rest of the world for twenty years – ‘Fernando’s Hideaway’, ‘Love Letters in the Sand’, ‘Green Door’ – and people our age were dancing to them as if they were the latest thing, which I suppose in Bulgaria they may have been. The best part was that Katz and I were treated like celebrities – American tourists were that rare in Sofia then. (They still are, come to that.) People joined us at our table, bought us drinks. Girls asked us to dance with them. We got so drunk every night that we missed a dozen opportunities for sexual gratification, but it was wonderful none the less.

  I so much wanted to find the Babalu again that I looked all over the city and even strolled out to the train station, a long and unrewarding walk, thinking that if I retraced the route Katz and I had taken into the city, I might kindle my memory, but no such luck. And then on a Friday evening, as I was strolling past the restaurant of the Grand Hotel for about the twentieth time that week, I was brought up so short by the sound of tinny guitars and scratchy amplifiers that I actually smacked my nose against the glass in turning to look. It was the Club Babalu! I had walked past it again and again, but without the awful music I hadn’t even noticed it. Now suddenly I recognized every inch of it. There was the balcony. There was our table. Even the waitresses looked vaguely familiar, if a tad older. Happy memories came flooding back.

  I went straight in to order a Polish beer, but a guy on the door in an oversized black suit wouldn’t let me enter. He wasn’t being nasty, but he just wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t understand why. You get used to not understanding why in Bulgaria after a while, so I continued with my walk. About twenty minutes later, after my nightly circuit of the dark hulk of the Nevsky church, I ambled back past the Grand and realized why I had been denied entrance. They were closing. It was nine-thirty on a Friday night and this was the liveliest place in town. Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.

  I was lucky that I could retreat whenever I wanted to the luxurious sanctum of the Sheraton, where I could get cold beers and decent food and watch CNN on the TV in my room. I cravenly took all my meals there. I tried hard to find a local restaurant that looked half-way decent and could not. Sofia has the most unlively bars and restaurants – plain, poorly lit, with maybe just a factory calendar on the wall and every surface covered in Formica. I did stop once at a place out near Juzen Park, but the menu was in Cyrillic and I couldn’t understand a thing. I looked around to see what other people were eating, thinking I might just point to something on someone else’s table, but they were eating foods that didn’t even look like food – all gruel and watery vegetables – and I fled back to the hotel, where the menu was in English and the food was appealing.

  But I paid for my comfort with a twice-daily dose of guilt. Each time I dined in the Sheraton, I was glumly aware that I was eating better than nine million Bulgarians. I found this economic apartheid repugnant, if irresistible. How can you have a country in which your own citizens are forbidden to go into certain places? If a Bulgarian was by some miracle of thrift and enterprise sufficiently well-heeled, he could go into two of the hotel’s restaurants, the Wiener Café and Melnik Grill, but the entrances were on a side street. You couldn’t get to them through the hotel. You had to go out of the front door and walk around the corner. Common people couldn’t come into the hotel proper, as I could. Hundreds of them must walk by it every working day and wonder what it’s like inside. Well, it’s wonderful – to a Bulgarian it would seem to offer a life of richness and comfort almost beyond conception: a posh bar where you could get cocktails with ice cubes, restaurants serving foods that haven’t been seen elsewhere in the country for years, a shop selling chocolates, brandy and cigarettes and other luxuries so unattainable that the average Bulgarian would be foolish even to
dream of them.

  It amazed me that I didn’t get beaten up every time I emerged from the hotel – I’d want to beat me up and I know what a sweet guy I am – but no one showed me anything but kindness and friendship. People would come up to me constantly and ask if I wanted to change money, but I didn’t, I couldn’t. It was illegal and besides I didn’t want any more Bulgarian money than I had: there was nothing to buy with it. Why should I stand in a queue for two hours to buy a pack of cigarettes with leva when I could get better cigarettes for less money in ten seconds in my own hotel? ‘I’m really sorry,’ I kept saying, and they seemed to understand.

  I began to get obsessed with trying to spend some money, but there was nothing to spend it on, nothing. One of the parks, I discovered one Sunday morning, was full of artists selling their own work and I thought, Great! I’ll buy a picture. But they were all terrible. Most of them were technically accomplished, but the subjects were just so awful – vivid sunsets with orange and pink clouds, and surreal, Salvador Dali-like paintings of melted objects. It was as if they were so far out of touch with the world that they didn’t know what to paint.

  The further you roam in Sofia the better it gets. I took to going for day-long walks out into the hilly districts on the south-east side of the city, an area of forests, parks, neighbourhoods of rather grand apartment buildings, winding tranquil streets, some nice homes. As I was walking back into the city, over a footbridge across the Slivnica River and down some anonymous residential street, it struck me that this really was quite a beautiful city. More than that, it was the most European of all the cities I had been to. There were no modern shopping centres, no big gas stations, no McDonald’s or Pizza Huts, no revolving signs for Coca-Cola. No city I had ever been to had more thoroughly resisted the blandishments of American culture. It was completely, comprehensively European. This was, I realized with a sense of profound unease, the Europe I had dreamed of as a child.