Street Without a Name Read online

  We have also landed among drug-traffickers of select Balkan nationalities. Just the other day, there was a shooting in the courtyard of our building. Masked men shot and wounded four people, including a baby.

  I let myself in and walk over the tiled floor of the family apartment. In the bedroom, I discover that the floor has risen into a large bump, as if a family of busy moles is living inside the cement. I lift the carpet. The tiles are broken from the pressure and underneath, I can see cement. A bomb? A gunshot? I don’t know who lives downstairs, and after the recent events, do I dare find out? I don’t. I drop the carpet quickly, and with a nervous whistle I step outside on the unswept balcony overlooking the courtyard. A fleet of four-wheel drives with tinted windows is parked in the courtyard, ready for the next drug safari.

  I cross the flat and go out on the other balcony, overlooking the street. I instantly make eye contact with a swarthy worker from the construction site next door. He’s hanging in a harness at the level of our balcony, having a smoke. ‘Good afternoon,’ he says. ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘OK,’ I say, ‘I think.’ And under his amused gaze I go back inside.

  I examine the dusty interior. Our family apartment’s riches consist of several hundred books printed before, during, and after Communism, and a half-broken Phillips TV from 1984 which brings back the first wave of memories. After six months of thrift and self-starvation at a Dutch university campus, my father’s research visit culminated in the triumphant purchase of this TV. When we left Bulgaria, the TV went to my grandfather Alexander’s apartment, on the edge of Sofia, where he sat in a rocking-chair by his window, looking out on the looming blue bulk of Vitosha Mountain. He used to peel apples, then offer the thinly sliced rounds to us on the tip of a blunt knife. We were his only family. When we left for New Zealand, he continued to peel apples, the TV turned up to maximum. On each of our birthdays, he bought a good book and inscribed it in his pedantic accountant’s handwriting, to mark the occasion. He couldn’t afford to send it or call us long distance. On my thirtieth birthday, he marked the occasion differently: by jumping out of a seventh-floor window to his death. The window was in the bedroom where he had slept with my grandmother Anastassia. My mother sold his apartment where, unsurprisingly, none of us wanted to go again, and this new flat in Peach Street replaced it.

  The eyes of my Macedonian grandmother Anastassia, aged twenty-something, follow me around the room from a spookily lifelike oil painting. She died in the year of Chernobyl, when I was twelve, but she seems to recognize me now, and she seems to be saying something important from behind layers of oils, in a language incomprehensible to the living. It’s all a bit too much.

  I don’t want to be left alone with her in this unfamiliar room, and since I don’t have any luggage to unpack, I turn on the TV. Here’s an ad. A manicured female hand holds a credit card to the sound of some breezy classical music. A treacly male voice says: ‘What is the difference between a good man and a perfect man? Five centimetres.’ The TV is so decrepit it only broadcasts two channels. Next, Big Brother, the local version. It features a chalga, or folk-pop sensation with silicone lips and breasts and the obligatory bleached hair, a footballer with blond highlights, a pop-singer and a general celebrity about town with a tiny forehead and even more modest talents. Their conversations go like this: wow man, no babe, yeah babe, wicked shit, check it out, no way! I can feel my brain cells dying by the millions.

  I turn the TV off, and turn the radio on. It’s talk-back and the subject is orgasm. A thick-accented man of few words is calling from an unnamed town and treating us to his liberal opinion on how he doesn’t mind when his girlfriend does it with other men. What’s your profession? the talk hostess asks. I’m a pimp, he says matter-of-factly. I’ve seen her do it with many others. I don’t really care. Girlfriends come and go, but the main thing is that I’m free to live wherever I want because I’m financially independent.

  I turn off the radio and turn to the bookshelves for therapy. I start picking up books at random. There are three generations of books here, with all sorts of forgotten inscriptions. My grandfather Alexander’s hand: ‘1990, the first truly democratic Bulgarian elections this century.’ A book for my father, inscribed on pencil lines by the diligent hand of some young Party commissar: ‘for outstanding contributions to the Comsomol’. A book for my mother from my father before I was even a squeak in the bed springs: ‘with love on her 21st birthday’. A book for grandmother Anastassia from an opera singer friend who always signed off in French: ‘Voilà, ma chère’. A book to me from some long-forgotten classmate in 1981, with the official Socialist child’s birthday wish: ‘Happy Birthday dear Kapka, I wish you health, joy, and high grades in school.’

  And suddenly, without warning, I turn into the gouty airport émigré from Amerika. Stupid tears burn my eyes, I can’t form thoughts or even feelings, and the fat of elapsed decades begins to suffocate me. In a fit of Proustian apoplexy, I grab handfuls of books from the shelves, open them at random, sniff them, search inside for signs and clues. Something, anything to tell me what went on in those distant, blurry years that I have so carefully forgotten.

  I pile them up on tables and chairs, on the floor. I dig deeper into the cupboards, knocking over old knick-knacks, photographs pressed under glass, and more books.

  And sure enough, every book causes a vague stirring. Dry Ordinary Biscuits and rosehip marmalade, a whiff of Nivea sun lotion on a German beach towel sniffed from a distance, the bracing tune of ‘We were born of the red flag’, the snowdrops of March, the ski-lift between the legs, the wail of alarms during Civil Defence school trips, roast peppers in the neighbourhood: a ghostly tidal wave of yearnings, fears, and adolescent sorrows submerges me and leaves me choking.

  Dusk spills inside the Peach Street apartment, the chill of the Balkan night stabs at my Scottish boots and New Zealand scarf, and the cherry-black eyes of the painting are fixed on me.

  I suddenly see that I have sleepwalked through my life between then and now. Between the hazy eighties and these grown-up days, there is a void. And in this void I see a familiar figure running frantically between continents, not knowing what it’s running from. Just contemplating the tiny wretch tires me.

  Since leaving Bulgaria, I have gone backwards and forwards across the world several times, propelled by a slightly manic energy. I managed to convince myself that I’d left Bulgaria behind for good. I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from? they ask. Does it matter? I answer.

  But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other places and people, if you don’t even know where you come from?

  PART ONE

  Childhood

  We are three sisters.

  The eldest is Struggle.

  The middle one is Victory.

  The youngest is Faith.

  All born under Socialism.

  And it really really shows.

  Borba Brumbashka, from ‘I Lived Socialism’, Sofia 2006

  2 In the Students’ Town

  Flawed beginnings

  I come from Sofia. I was initially happy, then with the onset of consciousness unhappy, then with the advent of adolescence wretchedly miserable, and finally, in the last throes of my domestic incarceration, convinced I was born in the wrong place and had to escape at all costs. In other words, an ordinary childhood followed by an ordinary adolescence, followed by an ordinary emigration – more or less.

  But Sofia was not an ordinary place. Drab and unlovely – yes, like the regime that had planted its lardy apparatchik’s behind in its centre. In many ways, Sofia was a fitting capital of the Socialist Camp, or Soc Camp, as we called it. Oddly, the grimly accurate overtones of the word ‘camp’ were ignored by its very inmates.

  Like all self-respecting Cold War cities, Sofia had two official faces. The brave new world of its concrete ‘residential complexe
s’ on the outskirts was built to house those from the Province, the Workers, and Young Families (us). The old Sofia with turn-of-the-century buildings and leafy parks was for old Sofia families, the Privileged and the Connected (them).

  There was a strict State quota on everything, from apartments and cars, to female sanitary pads and sunflower margarine. You couldn’t just go and buy what you felt like, whenever you felt like it – that was capitalism. No, the State provided everything, and by the time you got it, you had waited so long that it felt like a small miracle – and you felt relief mixed with gratitude.

  My twenty-something parents waited their turn for an apartment for years, meanwhile renting a minuscule studio flat on the eleventh floor of a high-rise in the Students’ Town. My mother quickly learned to keep the windows shut, after she caught me in the nick of time, on the point of crawling out of the window to explore the world below. We shared a bathroom and a kitchen with a whole floor of young ‘student’ families. Children’s birthdays were celebrated in the common room, which was always semi-dark and smelt sterile and vaguely official, like a dentist’s waiting-room. On the long Politburo-style table we blew out our birthday candles and smeared our carefully ironed clothes with the small sandwiches carefully made by our mothers. Our crayon masterpieces decorated the grim walls. My hopeful depictions of springtime as a series of unlikely princesses with flowers sprouting from their heads were on display even in winter.

  My mother had recently ceased to be a student and was now gainfully employed in a giant Central Institute for Computational Technology full of machines that spewed out tons of coloured perforated cards with tiny numbers on them. The institute buildings looked like the HQ of a nuclear power station. The floors, corridors and open-plan offices inside them were so immense that I couldn’t understand how my mother didn’t get lost every time she opened a door.

  Going home on the overcrowded bus, my mother would look up at the lit-up windows of proper apartment buildings and think, Why, why can’t there be a lit-up window for us too? From time to time, she would also have a sudden attack of nerves, and run down the eleven floors to get away from the claustrophobic little family stuffed inside the single room. Meanwhile, inside the room, my father typed up his mathematics PhD thesis on a noisy typewriter. When the last page landed on the neat pile, ending three years of hard work and paving the way to his compulsory military service, his first critic was already there: a one-year-old sitting on the table, peeing over his manuscript.

  Thanks to the army, my father missed the second and third years of my life. He was sent to a place called Vratsa in the north, where the brand-new doctor of maths crawled in the mud towards the Western capitalist decadent enemy, and wrote rhyming couplets about a toddler running barefoot in summer grass somewhere far away. My mother became a single parent with no income and a sickly child that would regularly wake in the middle of the night and threaten to die from asthma attacks. The sickly child didn’t die, but my mother nearly did, from insomnia and nervous exhaustion.

  From time to time, she went to Vratsa to wait at the winter gates of the barracks for my shorn, emaciated father to appear, like the political prisoner that he really was, then waited some more at the railway station for the unheated train ride back to Sofia. When my father eventually returned home, I didn’t recognize him, and resented having this shaven-headed, hungry stranger insinuate himself into our lives as if he belonged there. To prevent this, I insinuated myself between my parents as soon as they were within a metre of each other.

  Then came the ordeal of kindergarten, where I discovered that Hell is indeed other people. And other people’s cooking. Three things terrorized me at kindergarten: the food; compulsory afternoon naps; and the snotty-faced, rough-and-ready girl who had a vocabulary of sexual obscenities rich beyond her years, and took to singing a song about someone called Victor Jara, who played the guitar without hands in some stadium.

  ‘That’s not true!’ I protested, holding back tears, already too impressionable at four. ‘You can’t play guitar without hands!’

  ‘You can, like this!’ She mimicked hand-stumps with her sleeves, grimacing all the time.

  I asked the teacher about Victor Jara. My teacher looked like a Modigliani painting – tall, oblong-faced, doe-eyed and, on closer inspection, horse-toothed. Like my drawings, she was an unlikely princess, with her long glossy hair and her exotic Vietnamese husband who spoke a close approximation of Bulgarian.

  ‘He was a musician from Chile,’ she explained. ‘Fascists in Chile killed him because he sang songs about the people.’ I didn’t dare enquire about the hands. The raw horror of the handless guitarist lives on in my mind thirty years later, next to the photograph of a young Chilean woman whose fire-melted face looked out of a magazine of the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency. Chile was clearly a place where for some reason it was OK to set people’s faces on fire and cut off their hands. To be precise, the reason was the existence of countries like Bulgaria, where the Reds had taken over, and what could possibly be worse than that? In turn, all those grisly goings-on in distant South America were the Communist government’s dream, and in this case the anti-Fascist propagandists didn’t even have to make it up.

  Every afternoon, in keeping with the old Bulgarian peasant myth that what healthy children need is lobotomizing amounts of food and sleep, we were put to our bunk-style beds and told not to make any noise, or else. Of course, most kids never slept. But some did sleep, and this was a first inkling of the inherent strangeness of other people. I lay in the enforced silence, listening to the breathing and sleep-talk of others, and counting the interminable minutes until it was time to be taken away from all this.

  Oh, the food. Did anybody enjoy institutional food in the 1970s? The chief offenders were a spectral white soup where the corpses of carrots floated, a wobbling, menacing jelly dessert, and a certain rice pudding which was delicious when your mother made it, but tasted evil in the kindergarten canteen. The only edible thing was the ‘Teddy’ toothpaste which was pink and tasted of gummy strawberries, and which we secretly snacked on in the toilets, preparing our immune systems for Chernobyl.

  It was 1979, the year my sister was born. An annoying, noisy cot was placed next to my bed, instantly dislodging me from my personal space and from my mother’s exclusive affections. My mother now seemed permanently strung out, not surprising considering she’d had a horrific delivery after a difficult pregnancy, which had coincided with my father’s hospitalisation with hepatitis, and featured doctor consultations which went like this: ‘It might be born without a few fingers. If you’re lucky’, ‘It might die in the womb’, ‘Why don’t you abort it? You don’t want an idiot child.’ Abortions were illegal, and those resorting to hurried back-street jobs were often unintentionally sterilized.

  Nineteen seventy-nine was also the year after the assassination by State Security of the dissident writer Georgi Markov in London with a poison-tipped umbrella – Bulgaria’s main claim to fame in the last century, if we don’t count weightlifters with hairy backs. But that year I was preoccupied by a far more momentous event: the kindergarten summer camp.

  The summer camp was like one interminable day at kindergarten, with the accompanying trembling jelly desserts, afternoon naps and group activities on the beach. The toilets were communal and abominable, the sheets and blankets had holes in them, and there was the added degradation of being forced to strip naked on the beach as if we didn’t know boy from girl. Only the teacher’s son was allowed to keep his trunks on, immediately putting him in a position of authority over the timid nudists, and giving me a useful insight into the meaning of nepotism.

  I sat with my legs firmly overlapping, hid under my straw hat, and made desolate sculptures from sand. Fortunately, my best friend was there too, and two bare bottoms are more comforting than one. And mercifully, for the happy group photo in the water, we were allowed to put our swimsuits back on. Then a storm broke out and there were no beach activities for a couple of days. W
e were forbidden from going anywhere near the shore. But, somehow, I sneaked out, and found a demonic grey sea, broken beach-steps and a dead dog washed up on the wet sand – an image that has made itself at home in my adult nightmares.

  And just then, like guardian angels materializing in a cloud of dust, my glamorous grandparents Alexander and Anastassia turned up in their glamorous blue Skoda. They argued with the teachers to be allowed to take me away on a private seaside holiday while I waited outside, ready to burst into tears. Permission was granted, and the other kids watched my triumphant departure, like royalty whisked off in a limousine to some private seaside chateau. And, as it happens, I really did have my very own palace.

  Balchik was a small ancient town on the Black Sea coast near the Romanian border. Its white limestone hills were slipping into the sea and people said that the houses wouldn’t survive another twenty years. I walked over the hot dark cracks in the tar-sealed promenade, flowering like cracked chocolate cake in the oven of summer. I thought about the twenty years. It was clearly an adult trick, a way of saying that something was so far away it would never happen.

  The slate-roofed houses with big verandas where we always stayed were safely away from the sea, up on a hillside. This was my grandfather’s holiday bonus from the smelly leather factory in Dobrich where he worked as an accountant, ensuring that we had the best leather shoes and my grandmother the best leather coats. Every afternoon my grandparents had a nap while I stayed jubilantly awake. I was given a 50 stotinki coin, which I ran down the hill to deposit with the friendly ice cream man who knew how to construct a perfect two-scoop cup (fancy cones came much later). The choice was vanilla.