Street Without a Name

This is a work of non-fiction. Nothing here is invented, in the sense that everything I describe happened. But the way I have described it is highly personal, and in that sense, not highly reliable. Those looking for a travel guide could use my slightly more reliable
Globetrotter’s Guide to Bulgaria
. Those looking for a history book could go to the history section in their local library, where they will find one very reliable recent history of Bulgaria.

All names save those of public figures have been changed to protect people’s privacy, with the exception of the author’s family who aren’t so lucky, and a few people who are no longer among the living – and I hope if they are looking down from heaven, they wouldn’t mind.

Prologue

‘I went into the woods…’

As children growing up in Communist Bulgaria, we played a pantomime game called ‘I went into the woods’. It goes like this: I went into the woods, I shuffled the leaves, I found a picture of… Then you mime the thing that you found, and the others have to name it. Simple yet devilishly hard. Because anything could lurk under the leaves, from a mushroom to a dead body, and usually, it did.

Totalitarian regimes are not interested in personal stories, they are
interested in the Party, the People, and the Bright Future. Nor are post-totalitarian democracies. They are too busy staying alive.

Equally, in the West there hangs about a vague idea of collective life behind the Iron Curtain, and life after it, but there are surprisingly few personal stories to go with the idea. There ought to be more. After all, half of Europe lived on ‘the other side’ for half a century. And perhaps half of that half (by my own rough estimate) still feels as if it’s living on the other side of something in the shape of a wall. The ghost of the Wall won’t go away until it is laid to rest. This book is, among other things, my own act of exorcism.

In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I left Sofia for Britain, New Zealand, and again Britain, occasionally stopping in France and Germany for a year or so. In the process, I acquired lots of visas, one passport, some half-wasted lives, and an impressive collection of delusions.

My chief delusion was that by becoming deeply absorbed by every other country on the planet except Bulgaria (which I carefully tiptoed around as if it was a ticking bomb in the shape of a country ready to detonate at the slightest touch of memory) I could get rid of two things. One, my Bulgarian past, which was not of the miserable variety but bothered me nevertheless, like an infirm relative calling out from a darkened room at the back of the house. Two, the need to answer directly the question nice people ask when they meet you: so, where are you from?

Bulgaria. Capital: Bucharest. Uncle Bulgaria. A yogurt bacillus called
bulgaricus
. A republic of the former Soviet Union. The Bulgarian umbrella murder. Wrestlers – or was it weightlifters. Men – and women – with moustaches. And, lately, the place from where swarthy folk will come beating down the doors of the European Union
with their plumbers’ tools. A cheap place-in-the-sun property paradise – or was it skiing – about which we know that… well, it’s cheap.

In the Western mind Bulgaria is a country without a face. It appears in English language literature as a chapter – the shortest one – which begins with an edifying sentence about the unjust obscurity of Bulgaria in the Western mind. Or as an appendix, a kind of afterthought.

In the last century, several clever travellers had a go at Bulgaria, but the country proved only partially penetrable for them. It remained the shortest chapter in their books. The last person who truly wrote and drew Bulgaria into existence was the Austro-Hungarian ethnographer Felix Kanitz. That was in 1860.

So it’s probably time for a modern take. I know that Bulgaria has many faces – I have seen them – so I decided to write my own Bulgaria into being, as a preventative antidote to future appendixes. Have I got it dead right? I’m sure I have got it dead wrong, in places. But what I really wanted to do was write an interesting story about the drama of the place and its people. That’s the most any travel writer or memoirist can wish for.

And the only authentic way to do this was to tell the story of growing up and coming of age in the not altogether sane last decade and a half of the Cold War, about scurrying to the coveted West in the chipped shadow of the Berlin Wall, and about returning sixteen years later, a changed person to a changed country.

The portrait I sketch of modern Bulgaria, then and now, is almost always personal and almost never flattering. It had to be this way if I wanted to be truthful to the times in which I was growing up, and the times in which Bulgaria is growing up today. And I wanted to be. Beauty might be more important to the ego of countries, but truth is more important to me.

Travelling around the country where you grew up, lost some of your virginity and a few of your illusions, acquired some lasting neuroses, and then left in a hateful mood, is a slightly schizoid experience. You are at once an outsider to the present and an insider of the past. Or perhaps the other way round.

Which is a way of saying that I grew up, went back into the woods, shuffled the leaves with my walking stick, and here are the pictures I found.

1 Peach Street

The émigré returns

Where do nations begin? In airport lounges, of course. You see them arriving, soul by soul, in pre-activation mode. They step into no man’s land, with only their passports to hold onto, and follow the signs to the departure gate. There, among the impersonal plastic chairs and despite themselves, they coalesce into the murky Rorschach stain of nationhood.

At Gate 58 of Frankfurt Airport, the Sofia flight is delayed, and then delayed again. The passengers sit in plastic chairs, patiently
squashed by the intimacy of their fellow travellers. I sit next to a hunched boulder of a man with builder’s hands and the cigarette-ash stubble of defeat. I look for the word
gastarbeiter
tattooed across his forehead.

I’m trying to dial a Bulgarian number on a borrowed mobile, and failing. I turn to him for help.

‘Do you dial the zero?’ I ask, cringing at the sound of my expat’s voice. Expat voices are always slightly off-key, like an instrument that hasn’t been tuned for years.

He smiles shyly with a mouth like a bombed-out village, and shrugs his great sad shoulders: ‘I don’t know about Bulgarian GSMs either, I haven’t lived there since 1991.’

And he returns to his timid wait, like everyone else in the lounge. Nobody is complaining. They are used to waiting: in state hospitals, shop queues, immigration offices, visa departments…

Three Germans are standing in a small cluster, complaining loudly about the delay and glancing conspicuously at their gold-plated watches. They are instantly marked out by ruddy faces and expensive leather shoes, but also by their self-confidence. Investors on the Black Sea coast?

The Bulgarians sit in silence, their wide, lived-in faces and rounded shoulders matched by their battered luggage. The women have slapdash manicures and their hair is dyed either blonde or jet-black, with the odd root showing here and there.

The Germans are now laughing, slapping each other’s backs with blond hands. At any other boarding gate I wouldn’t mind them or even notice them, why would I? But here, at Gate 58, among these cowering fellow expats, I resent them. Here at Gate 58, and despite myself, I’m part of the Rorschach stain.

Are they sneering at us, the last passengers at the EU gates? Are they in fact laughing with perfect teeth as we run along the speeding bullet-train and wave our tattered bundles desperately, smiling to show that we mean well? Wait, we cry over the whistle of the train as the sausages in our bundles begin to fall out. Wait, don’t leave us behind. We too are Europe!

But this is a borrowed ‘we’. I left Bulgaria when I was a seventeen-year-old East European, and I am now, by all appearances, a 32-year-old ‘global soul’. But everybody needs a borrowed ‘us’ from time to time, even a global soul. And after half a lifetime and several other countries, the Bulgarian ‘us’ is still the only honest one I have. And despite my apparently confident country-hopping lifestyle, this semi-genuine ‘us’ instantly makes the likes of the three well-fed Germans a ‘them’.

Finally, we’re gliding over the folding ranges of Vitosha Mountain, crisp with fresh snow. The young woman in the next seat – a nurse in Frankfurt – gazes out of the window and wipes tear after tear from her cheeks. Her face is otherwise impassive. The
gastarbeiter
in the next aisle peers down at the native landscape with some dim stirring of emotion on his face, his rough hands inert on his thighs. The plane touches ground smoothly and the passengers applaud, an old custom at Sofia airport. Bulgarians know not to take anything for granted. The Germans exchange looks of disdainful hilarity. Smooth landings are their birthright.

And now our Rorschach blur spills into the building of the world’s worst-named airport, Vrajdebna. It means ‘hostile’.

Inside Airport Hostile, we are collectively gripped by the confused emigrant syndrome. Hung over with culture jet lag, we queue up in the ‘Non EU’ line at Customs and study the try-hard advertisement posters:

Use Bulphone!
The Bulgarian word for goodbye is
ciao
The Bulgarian word for thank you is
merci

‘Such optimists,’ says one man to his friend. ‘Already sounding European.’

‘Why not? Watch this, I’m already one foot in the EU.’

And his mate steps into the EU queue, brandishing his Bulgarian passport and grinning sheepishly. Everyone smiles and looks away, embarrassed. After all, it’s mid-2006 and the final green light for the EU hasn’t come yet from the sphinx-like HQ in Brussels. What if it doesn’t? What if we’re not good enough?

There are only five people in the EU queue: the three Germans, and a sun-baked, middle-aged Austrian couple who clutch their designer cabin luggage with pinched mouths. The woman looks like powdered Habsburgian royalty touring the servant quarters.

At passport control, the attractive thirty-something officer with the face of a philosophy graduate who couldn’t find another job looks at my photo, then at me.

‘Where are you returning from?’

Returning? I hesitate for a second, then I go along with him.

‘Scotland,’ I lie. He flicks through the virgin pages of my Bulgarian passport.

And I suddenly want to be returning, to be welcomed home by his depressive, familiar face. I don’t want to be just visiting. I want my name to be easily pronounced by clerks and written down correctly in a flash without having to spell it ten times. I want to stop explaining where I come from to the well- and not-so-well meaning. (Bucharest is the capital of Romania. Well, Bulgaria hasn’t been
communist for seventeen years. My English is good? Thank you, that’s very kind.) But I know this is only a moment of inattention, a lapse, like the mechanical, quickly suppressed tears of the Frankfurt nurse.

‘Where’s your UK visa?’ He breaks the spell. ‘There’s nothing here.’ So I produce the other passport, the real one.

My luggage has been missing every single time I’ve landed in Sofia, and this time is no exception. Planes take you to places fast, but some parts of your travelling ensemble take longer to arrive.

There are two desks in the Lost Luggage office, and one is occupied by a ravaged-faced man who’s arrived from ‘Amerika’. He has an American girth and his gouty feet are bursting out of delicate white-leather moccasins. He can’t decide what language to speak. His American has a heavy Bulgarian accent, and his Bulgarian comes out in small, involuntary spasms of village dialect.

‘Forty five years I live there.’ He points his thumb in the direction of Amerika. ‘Now first time I come back. First time!’ The impeccably groomed young woman across the desk smiles like a
Vogue
cover and hands him a form to fill out in duplicate.

My sun-tanned, middle-aged Lost Luggage officer startles me with a dazzling smile. ‘Welcome home for the Easter holidays!’ And he hands me the same form in duplicate. ‘The skiing has been spectacular this year.’

I thank him for the tip, and for tracking down my missing luggage, which is for some reason stuck in Paris. Easter and skiing are the last two things on my mind as I step out of the booth and collide with the sweaty émigré from Amerika. He’s having another crisis.

‘Oh my gawd, I forgot about the levs.’ He smacks his forehead
with a hand like a red steak. ‘Bulgaria don’t have euros! Oh my gawd. I brought a pile of euros! What I’m gonna do now?’

But nobody’s paying attention to him. He reels towards the ‘nothing to declare’ exit, empty handed. In the arrivals hall, he’s greeted by a small bevy of beefy relatives who clasp him weepily to their bosoms. No such luck for me: between flight delays and lost luggage I am three hours late, and the friend who was meant to wait for me has given up. I feel slightly bereft in the taxi by myself, away from the huddling community of Gate 58.

‘Next week Bulgaria will gift Europe one Bulgarian word,’ announces a manically cheerful radio host. ‘Suggestions from listeners are welcome, especially from children.’

I can’t tell if this is some kind of bad joke, and I don’t dare ask the young taxi-driver for fear of betraying myself as a clueless expat and getting ripped off at the end of the ride.

‘How about “membership”?’ I suggest to test him. He sniggers.

‘Sounds ugly. There are so many beautiful Bulgarian words we could gift them. Gypsy words even. All of them short and to the point.’ He examines me in the rear-view mirror while I stare at the peeling period buildings along the potholed Tsarigradsko Road, exactly the way you don’t stare at things when you’re a local.

‘It’s all good, it’s all good,’ he goes on with a magnanimous hand-wave. ‘Because we
are
Europe, we’ve always been Europe, and now finally they remembered that.’

At that point, a black Mercedes with tinted windows overtakes us. The neckless driver, who has the body shape of a toad, sticks out a hairy arm with an extended middle finger. Digging into his thick wrist is a
martenitsa
, the little thin red-and-white woollen thread with which the Bulgars have always marked the coming of spring. Come March
and April, the entire nation wears them, but on this gangsterish wrist it’s an odd sight. Like seeing the Godfather with a string of garlic around his neck.

‘I saw the bastard,’ the driver mutters, ‘I kept an eye on him, he’s been tailgating me for a while. But my colleagues and I have made a decision, 80 kilometres on the open road, maximum 90. We’re still in the city, for Christ’s sake. See this corner? There was an accident here last night. A car sped into a truck at 160 kilometres per hour. The truck was stationary. The car driver died instantly and the man in the passenger seat was beheaded.’

I try to resist wishing the toad in the black Mercedes the same fate. We listen to talk-back radio. The condemned Bulgarian nurses in Libya come up. ‘I know they’re homesick’, the radio host concludes cheerfully, ‘and here’s a song for them.’

Deposited in Peach Street and sweating in my Scottish layers, I pick my way between muddy holes.

I’m walking on the street because the pavements are occupied by parked cars. Between a convertible BMW and a Hyundai four-by-four, rubbish containers overflow. A building site has spewed mud and debris onto the pavement. A huge tangle of undeveloped film snakes in the mud, and the faces of holidaying strangers smile up at me in negative.

An old village house with a crumbling brick roof sits squeezed among the ambitious additions of the late twentieth century. On its rusty garden door hangs crookedly a hand-written sign – KNIFE SHARPENER – and behind it I see a small rose garden. The red and pink roses are budding.

Peach Street is in a posh central neighbourhood. At the far end of Peach Street, I see the blue bulk of Vitosha Mountain, crisp in the spring air like a giant poster photograph.

But more importantly, our family’s new apartment is somewhere here, but I can’t find it. The numbers on the entrance-ways of Peach Street are sporadic, and I start trying all the locks with the unfamiliar bunch of keys. Some workmen glance at me but don’t ask questions. Eventually, the key works. I climb up the three floors. Again no numbers, so I try every lock until the key turns. The family’s new apartment has an industrial-sized, bomb-proof double door fit for the Pentagon. Expat apartments are particularly attractive to burglars. The neighbours, who aren’t even expats, have a similar Pentagon door. They’ve been burgled twice. But then they have, or at least had, priceless paintings and antiques. Somehow, we have landed among the new rich.

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.

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