Street Without a Name (11 page)

We knew, even in the torpor of our ignorance, that the long holiday of our compatriots was no holiday. It was a purge. And there was nothing anybody could do except shake their head and whisper ‘the worst, the worst is happening’.

Around that time, a strange little piece by a young writer appeared in the satirical paper
Wasp
. It started with the sentence ‘I dream that I’m living in a stupid joke’, went on to tell a black parable about a
neurotic man who is building a fence to protect himself from his friendly Western neighbours, and ended with the sentence ‘Why the hell do I live in such a stupid joke? Why am I not in control of my dream? No, I can’t take this anymore. I go to sleep again.’ This publication was either a momentary lapse on the part of censors or a signal that there was no turning back.

One night at the Opera, an old radio colleague of my grandmother Anastassia approached us. Would my mother like to join their group which met in private to discuss ecological matters? My mother wouldn’t. She was too scared.

She was right to be scared. When the underground movement Eco-Glasnost emerged from their secret meeting places, they huddled together with their placards in the Artists’ Garden near the Communist Party HQ. They were a crowd of artists, intellectuals, and men with beards, and they were dispersed, beaten by militiamen, and loaded onto army trucks. But by now it was obvious that the Human Face of Socialism was twitching with panic.

But all this happened on the periphery of my life. In the centre were the torments and thrills of adolescence. One such thrill was my membership of the literary journal for young people
Mother Tongue
, which was edited by a brooding, bearded poet with dark circles around his eyes and dark thoughts in his clever head. He dynamited my imagination with an epic poem about
Pygmalion
which I barely understood and which was full of coded imagery of art, obsession, and erotic love.

From my early light verse about summer crickets, the sea, and the moon, heavily influenced by the playful style of Bulgarian writer Valeri Petrov, I moved onto dead-serious poems about time, the universe, and the meaninglessness of life, heavily influenced by my
reading of Italian inter-war poets like Umberto Saba, Giuseppe Ungaretti and especially Eugenio Montale (‘This alone is what we can tell you today/that which we are not, that which we do not want’). That was us!

The magazine published my poems – the absolute pinnacle of my literary aspirations – and I started turning up for semi-clandestine evening discussions with playwrights and poets who seemed to be borderline dissidents. In any case, they had beards. My crush among the young poets was a bespectacled seventeen-year-old who wrote complicated metaphysical poems about cats. Cats were decadent and mysterious in the dead heat of the afternoon. Cats were the agents of time.

I wasn’t entirely clear about the cats, but
Mother Tongue
was definitely the agent of change in my inner world. It showed me that it was possible to put inexpressible things into words, and then share the results with brooding, like-minded people. This offered me an escape from the social pressures of the French Lycée. At
Mother Tongue
, you didn’t have to have a particular look, smoke, act deliberately dumb, or lose your virginity at short notice with a random person – you just had to write or say something interesting to be part of the crowd.

Then, one day, browsing in the school library, I found
The Outsider
by Albert Camus. Here was a book about how I felt: disconnected and numb, and yet full of unexpressed emotion. Here too was a new object of impossible love: Albert Camus. And being dead made him the ideal lover, because he couldn’t run away to the West.

One day, while I was re-reading
L’Etranger
at the local bus stop in Youth 3, someone asked me in butter-smooth French, ‘Do you like Camus?’

A stunning Arab with small round glasses was standing next to me.
He was quite old – perhaps thirty – but his
café-au-lait
skin, tight black curls and dazzling smile took my breath away, along with most of my brain. The remaining parts were trying to form a clever sentence in French. I had never actually spoken French to anyone other than Madame Mathieu and Monsieur Laroche.

‘
L’Etranger
is set in Algeria,’ the apparition continued. ‘I come from Algeria.’

This stunned me. I had assumed that, like any French book,
L’Etranger
was set in France.

‘I have a classmate who lived in Algeria,’ I said, blushing the deepest hue of crimson.

‘Ah, you must be from the French School.’ He gifted me with a white-toothed smile. ‘If you like, we can meet again and talk about Camus.’

By the end of our romantic Francophone bus ride, Fadhel had told me that I had beautiful eyes, and I had given him my phone number. That weekend, without telling my parents, I went on my first date.

He took me to a fancy café-bar in Vitosha Street, the epicentre of Sofia, where I had an enormous installation of ice cream and he an enormous cocktail. Fadhel was studying engineering in Sofia. He took off his glasses, folded them up in his pocket, and kissed me. I went straight to heaven and back. He held the door for me. Fadhel was clearly a gentleman.

For some reason, my parents didn’t grasp this, and when Fadhel called again, inviting me to his place to watch videos, it was over my parents’ dead bodies – both of them. He just wants to use you, my mother said, can’t you see? What’s he doing with schoolgirls anyway, my father frowned, he’s obviously a pervert. He wants to lure you with his videos and then have sex with you, my mother said. That
didn’t strike me as such an unpleasant proposition; in fact, watching home videos and having sex with Fadhel was pretty much my idea of bliss. I didn’t know anybody who had a VCR, except my mother’s cousin, the one who built dams in Libya. But there was no way to put this into words without sounding to everyone I respected like an under-age slut ready to sell herself to the first Arab who came along waving a remote control.

It didn’t help that my new school friend Rado teased me for using with Fadhel the word
engagée
, busy. It makes you sound like a prostitute who’s booked up, he said gleefully. I desperately hoped that Fadhel would still find a way to see me, at least to have that conversation about Camus – I wanted to discuss
Le mythe de Sisyphe
in particular – but he never called again.

Rado was the biggest alpha male around. He was a year behind me, and he shook his big wild head to the nihilistic screams of AC/DC and Metallica. We became platonic friends. He lent me his prized Metallica cassette
Fade to Black
, which I hated, and I lent him Sartre’s
Nausea
, which he hated. They were, of course, about the same thing: rejecting the ugly world we lived in.

We were ironic, we believed in nothing that was on offer to us, and we wanted everything that wasn’t. We dressed in dark colours, and we had two main emotional states – sad or angry. I was mostly sad, and Rado was mostly angry. Why, we couldn’t quite say.

While Rado roared darkly with Metallica, I frowned at the world, nauseated with Sartre, estranged with Camus, and lovesick for Fadhel. We delighted in small things, however, for example a flash-looking record of the Scorpions’ he brought back from a trip to Belgrade, which featured a screaming man with bandaged head and talon-like forks digging into his eyes. He felt our pain.

The biggest hits at school were no longer the wishy-washy Michel Sardou and Renaud – no, that stuff was for little preps – but the more hard core Pink Floyd and the Scorpions. Someone had spray-painted ‘THE WALL’ over the wall of the school courtyard.

We had come of age.

Rado had occasional parties in his parents’ apartment, where he played seminal progressive rock, such as the Scorpions’ ‘Still Loving You’. We sat on the floor by candlelight, smoking and heavily doused with our mothers’ Libyan perfumes and our fathers’ Russian eau de cologne, in dark clothes decorated with home-made badges of Pink Floyd and ‘glasnost’. We drank vague, diluted alcohols which scrambled our already confused brains. We played kissing games, with tongues. And we listened to words we didn’t understand very well (we were from the French school, after all). But we knew those words were important by virtue of being English and sad – or angry. They seemed to express the Zeitgeist of longing and disillusion of our life and times.

Then, on the way home in a taxi, driving through the semi-dark desert of the Youths, I would cry for nothing in particular. Because my mind had overgrown my body, or my body had overgrown my mind, I wasn’t quite sure. Because I wanted a boyfriend but didn’t have one. Because the philosophy teacher and the geography teacher had run away to the West. Because I too wanted to go places or at least
know
that I could, but couldn’t. Because I was, we were, almost on the brink of something, but I didn’t know what it was, and what was going to happen.

What happened was that the Berlin Wall fell. It was November 1989.

At first, like Chernobyl and the murder of the TV presenter, it was a rumour. But we knew that kind of rumour could only be the truth.
Not least because the next day, the TV news presenter announced that Comrade Todor Jivkov, Head of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, had resigned. In other words, there had been a bloodless coup inside the Party.

‘I don’t believe it,’ my mother kept saying, staring at the screen of our Dutch TV. ‘It can’t be true. They’re lying to us again. I don’t believe it.’

‘Maybe they’re staging a coup,’ my father said. ‘To keep up with what’s happening in Berlin.’

‘Exactly, they’re staging it,’ my mother said. ‘They stage everything. It’s all a theatre of the absurd, with props and actors. It’s not for real.’

But it was. The Communist Party would stay in power for another few months, but it was obvious that Socialism with a Human Face had permanent egg on it. And when you’re sixteen, there’s no going back.

Now it was normal to see people on buses and in waiting-rooms chuckling to themselves or grinning madly. Strangers talked feverishly in shop queues.

Now, at school, alongside our Pink Floyd and Scorpions badges, some of us wore blue badges with ‘DEMOCRACY’ and ‘SDS’ on them. The SDS were the Union of Democratic Forces, a rag-tag opposition party made up of those intellectuals and people with beards who had recently dared to demonstrate in the Artists’ Garden. Eco-Glasnost had come of age and become a political party.

Someone had spray-painted ‘DEMOCRACY’ in blue over the wall of the school’s back yard. Soon, we’d be listening to the Scorpions’ mega-hit hit, ‘The Winds of Change’. It seemed to be about what was happening to our world, even though I only understood four words: ‘Gorky Park’ and ‘like brothers’.

The nation’s new year present was the televized execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu by a three-man firing squad. It wasn’t quite as good as having our own Todor Jivkov shot in the head, but it was better than nothing. As the Ceauşescus fell, bloodied, to the ground, Bulgaria cheered at the TV screens.

‘Kids, don’t look!’ my mother warned us half-heartedly, but it was too late. Besides, I had long stopped being a kid.

‘That’s it!’ my father kept repeating in front of the TV, dazed. ‘That’s it, that’s it, it’s over. It’s over!’

That was it, then, that was the last act in the 45-year-long theatre of the absurd that had been our lives.

Emigration

Before we knew what had hit us, my father found himself on a two-year university fellowship in a place called Colchester. Soon, my mother and my sister followed, while I stayed behind to finish my year at the French College. Grandmother Kapka came to live with me. She soon gave up any pretence of cooking, cleaning or exercising authority, and lay down with her Valerian drops, while I went out to parties and literary discussions veiled in cigarette smoke.

Colchester was in England, which was inconvenient, because my
French would be of no use. But England was where The Beatles were from, and I had
Best of The Beatles
to help me. I applied myself to deciphering, with a dictionary, the lyrics of ‘And I Love Her’, ‘In My Life’, and the more problematic ‘Yesterday’, which drove me to floods of tears every time. Yesterday, all my troubles were so far away. Now the Wall was down, my family were in England, I was sixteen and probably the last virgin at the French Lycée, and I had to learn a language that was full of phrasal verbs like ‘turn up’ and ‘turn in’ that made no sense.

When I arrived in Colchester in the summer of 1990, hyper-ventilating with excitement, I looked like an impersonation of Madonna in her ‘Like a Virgin’ video clip from 1984, which of course I hadn’t seen. Clad in a leather mini-skirt made by my mother and a leather jacket sourced by my grandfather Alexander from his leather factory, I wore an enormous coiffure of gelled hair atop a blurry face exploding with lipstick and hormones. To my amazement, nobody in Colchester looked like this. This was confusing. Wasn’t this the West? They could wear anything they wanted. Why didn’t they?

My sister was already speaking English with the local Essex accent (ei’ o’ clo’ for eight o’clock). This sounded very different from both The Beatles and the Scorpions. In fact, I understood almost nothing, except the endless thank you, please, and sorry that the polite people of Colchester specialized in.

My sister, eleven, was already writing mini-essays in English. Her latest homework was ‘Write about your house’. She did. The teacher very nicely corrected her English. Your parents’ bedroom can’t be in the living-room, she said. A bedroom is where we sleep. We don’t sleep in the living-room. But my parents do, my sister said. And when my grandmother comes to visit, she sleeps in the kitchen. It was like
explaining about potatoes to the Dutch. Even in fluent English, some things about our lives were inexplicable.

Soon, I realized that the polite people of Colchester didn’t know where or even what Bulgaria was. This was confirmed by a multi-choice quiz in a tabloid paper, where I found the following:

Bulgaria is a) a character in a children’s story; b) a Soviet republic; c) a country in south-east Europe; d) a wild river in Mexico.

And then there was the shock of discovering that England was like a giant Korekom mall. There were nostalgia shops that specialized in teddy bears and antique dolls; music shops where all the records of the Scorpions and Bryan Adams could be purchased at once; and glossy chemists like Superdrug which dazzled with rows of roll-on deodorants just like the ones from Libya.

When the new school year started, I found myself at Colchester’s Sixth Form College with rudimentary English. What subjects do you study in an English Sixth Form College when you want to hide your rudimentary English? French and Russian of course.

In the French class, I made my only two friends: Angelica, who had grown up in France, and Helen, who was black. I had never had a black friend before. The only other races in Sofia were construction workers from Vietnam, university students from friendly African countries, or Arabs like Fadhel. Diversity didn’t exist in the glossary of our lives. Helen didn’t seem to have many friends at the college, which in turn didn’t seem to have any other black kids, and she took me under her wing, for which I was speechless – literally – with gratitude. At lunchtime we ate our sandwiches and packets of crisps. Helen talked at breakneck speed, while I desperately clutched at words, trying to work out what she was saying.

Meanwhile, my sister was befriended at her school by a little boy from Cameroon. They were the only foreign kids at an all-white, all-English school, which explained why nobody else wanted to befriend them. One day, the boy said to my sister, ‘Assia, I really like you.’ My sister, gripped with nameless feelings, spat back, ‘And I hate you,’ and ran away in tears. What she really meant to say but couldn’t was that she was lonely, and that she didn’t want to feel like a freak from a country that nobody could find on the map, just like him.

Helen invited me to her house for the weekend. It was a palace. Each kid had their own room, their parents slept in a proper bedroom, and no grandmothers camped in the kitchen. Helen’s dressing-table was filled with the entire contents of Superdrug and Boots. I couldn’t comprehend how it was possible to live in such opulence when her father was a self-employed electrician and her mother a secretary. It looked as if the revolution of the proletariat had failed in Bulgaria, but somehow succeeded in England. It was very odd.

Unfortunately, taking A-level languages meant that I also had to take a GCSE in English. It was terrifying. It didn’t help that in the English class, the kids were ultra-cool and not interested in learning anything. The chief heart-throb, Jamie, was also the chief bully. He had wavy blond hair and a rugby-player’s jaw, and presided over a court of lackeys who laughed at his jokes.

He didn’t miss the opportunity to point out that I came from a country that wasn’t a real country, but a character in a children’s story called
The Wombles
. In Phys. Ed., Jamie mocked my cheap canvas sports shoes from the height of his bouncy Puma trainers, ‘Are these made in Russia? They look like shit.’ Jamie’s lackeys sniggered. They all wore trainers like him.

‘I’m not from Russia,’ I said, ‘I’m from Bulgaria.’

‘Same thing.’ Jamie said.

I remembered how chuffed I had been with these canvas shoes just a year before. Now I went home and threw them in the bin. I begged my parents to buy me Puma trainers, but they had no money for such whims. I dropped out of Phys. Ed.

In one of the first English classes, the teacher told us that he’d just seen a production of Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. Had anyone heard of this play? Nobody had, or if they had, they weren’t going to admit it. They chewed gum and didn’t give a shit.

‘It’s a funny play, isn’t it?’ the teacher tried to involve them. I had just seen
Waiting for Godot
in a Sofia theatre, three times in a row. I knew the carrot dialogue by heart. In Bulgarian.

‘It’s not funny.’ I ventured to speak for the first time. ‘It’s very sad.’ All heads turned towards me. Jamie whistled. I wished the floor could open up.

‘Ah.’ The teacher smiled enigmatically with blue eyes. ‘Thank you. But you see, in English, funny means two things: funny ha-ha, and strange. It’s a funny language, English.’

In the Russian class I met my first proper boyfriend. Jimmy was tall and bespectacled, played the guitar, wore pointed boots like his hero the electric guitarist Joe Satriani, spoke crystal-clear English, and never laughed at the clothes I wore or the mistakes I made.

Jimmy lived with his mother in a semi-detached house which was almost as opulent as Helen’s. His father worked in Birmingham as an engineer and was never home. He’d lost his job in Essex ten years ago, Jimmy explained, and was forced to take up work in the north, and all this had something to do with Margaret Thatcher. Now, as far as I knew, Margaret Thatcher was anti-Communist, so how come her
policies resulted in Jimmy’s father having the same crappy lifestyle as, say, the Mechevs above us in Youth 3? But Jimmy and I had better things to do than talk about politics.

For instance, Jimmy listened to a deathly pale singer called Morrissey, and a band called The Smiths who didn’t exist any more. They specialized in a faux cheerful drone and their lyrics – often about accidents and Armageddon – seemed to be written in code. Jimmy was particularly enamoured of a song where each stanza ended with ‘And heaven knows I’m miserable now’, to which he sang along with an ironic expression; but somehow, I sensed that, deep in his bones, heaven knows he
was
miserable.

What was going on, why the misery? They had everything in Colchester. Jimmy had two guitars, hundreds of records, two pairs of pointed boots, and he could go anywhere he liked with his British passport. He didn’t even have to learn Russian, he was doing it for fun. He didn’t have to fear anything except the likes of Jamie.

But I was already beginning to suspect that material possessions and political freedom only brought you so much happiness. That, in fact, they could bring you unhappiness too.

When I went out with Jimmy and two friends, we sat in a pub and shouted over loud music all evening. They did something called rounds, which was a kind of drinking competition. At the end of the night, everybody won, and they vomited all the way home.

Another time, Jimmy took me to spend a weekend with a friend of his in one of the tidy nearby seaside towns, all of which ended with-on-Sea, as if you might miss that fact otherwise: Clacton-on-Sea, Frinton-on-Sea, Holland-on-Sea. His friend lived in an enormous Georgian mansion. We had a huge double room to ourselves and this was where we camped after it became clear that the rest of the night
would be dedicated to something called tripping. This meant snorting cocaine. Jimmy wasn’t into hard drugs, but his friend was. He could afford it, Jimmy said, they were filthy rich. But Jimmy was also worried that, despite being filthy rich, his friend might commit suicide one of these days. His friend seemed very unhappy. He spoke of that bitch his absent mother, of that bastard his absent father, and he said this Town-on-the-Sea was a miserable dump and he might as well shoot himself.

This threw me. I’d never heard anybody speak of their parents that way, not even Nikifor at School 81 whose parents hadn’t done anything for him except land him in a Corrective Labour School.

Like Morrissey, Jimmy’s friend evidently spoke a different language. Dump didn’t mean there was rubbish lying around. As Grégoire had written in that birthday card, ‘
l’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux
’. Jimmy’s friend lived in a castle but his future was a dump. I couldn’t figure out how Jimmy and his filthy-rich friend had got to this point, but that’s where they were, and I felt sorry for them.

Soon, I started feeling sorry for myself too. Even before I had proper answers to the complicated questions of happiness versus over-abundance, The Smiths had infiltrated me. I took to trawling the second-hand music stores of Colchester, trying to acquire every one of their albums. Even though the lyrics continued to mystify me, the more I listened, the more I became permeated with a damp, English despair.

After losing our virginity together – not pleasant, but a relief to have it over and done with – Jimmy and I became inseparable. If we ever parted, I knew I would cut my veins lying in a bath, to the soundtrack of Morrissey at his most miserable.

At the end of the school year disaster struck. Our visas to the UK
expired. We had to go back and wait for new ones. At first, the separation from Jimmy seemed almost bearable, because like him I had already been accepted into Leeds University, my father had been offered a permanent job in a northern city called Hull, and anyway, there was no going back to our previous life now. You don’t go from riches to rags.

So it was just a matter of weeks. Four weeks at the most, the Home Office said, and we packed up our two-bedroom house in Colchester, I said goodbye to Helen, Angelica, and Jimmy, and we went back to the cramped life of Youth 3.

Back in Sofia, things were grim, very grim. The euphoria of democracy and blue badges was gone, and what we had now was chaos, crime, and deficit. The only attempt at order was the coupon system. My mother had resigned her job at the Central Institute for Computational Technology, and her days now consisted entirely of queuing up with coupons to buy bread, sugar and petrol, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. One day she joined a queue for petrol and vanished. She returned with a tank full of petrol a day and a night later. She’d waited for thirty-five hours.

It made no sense. Before, under Socialism with a Human Face, we had semi-empty shops. Now we had democracy and not much else. Even the last of the electricity was gone. Hot water – what’s that? Toilet paper – what’s wrong with newspapers?
The Worker’s Deed
newspaper was a particular favourite in Sofia’s toilets.

And there were rumours, conspiracy theories and sick jokes. One spring day we were at my uncle’s flat in Youth 2. The satirical programme
Cou-Cou
was on TV. We were just tucking into roast chicken when, suddenly, the programme was interrupted by breaking
news. An alarmed-looking presenter announced: ‘There has been an industrial accident at the nuclear plant Kozloduy on the Danube. Citizens are advised not to leave their homes, and await further news. Radioactivity levels are being measured. We repeat: a serious accident has occurred at the nuclear plant Kozloduy. Citizens are advised…’

‘Shut the windows!’ everybody cried. Already there seemed to be a radioactive haze in the dead afternoon heat of the Youths. There was frantic discussion. Do we load up the cars now and drive across the border into Macedonia? Do we stay put? Do we stock up on tinned foods, like with Chernobyl? No, not another Chernobyl!

An hour and a collective mini-nervous breakdown later, the presenters of
Cou-Cou
gleefully informed us that the Kozloduy plant news had been a practical joke. Ta-da! It was, after all, 1 April. ‘Bastards!’ My uncle thumped the TV. Meanwhile, many people had got into their cars and sped towards the nearest border. Several people died of heart attacks, and at least one woman had a miscarriage. Our chicken was cold.

It was now six months later, with still no word from the Home Office. Clearly, they were considering our papers very carefully. My father went back to his job at the Technical Institute, which was no longer called Lenin. His monthly salary was almost enough – but not quite – to pay for a phone call I made to Jimmy in Colchester. What did I care for vulgar things like money when I had true love to deal with?