Street Without a Name (12 page)

But my parents had other things to deal with. For example, the fact that my mother was suddenly diagnosed with a tumour and dispatched to hospital for emergency surgery. We didn’t know whether the tumour was benign or not, and the hospital used newspapers (
The
Worker’s Deed
, presumably) instead of sheets in the consultation rooms. The patients had to bring their own soap and towels.

I went to see my mother after the operation, but the hospital staff told me she was in no shape to receive visitors. I walked out a blubbering mess, my world flaking away like a house of cards in a nuclear gale. But everybody else’s world was falling apart too, so nobody took any notice of me. Except a bedraggled homeless dog outside the hospital, who stopped her aimless trot and gazed at me pitifully. A pink, skinned rat hung from her mouth. We looked at each other for a while, then I ran.

As the power went out over the Youths, and we were plunged in darkness, my father sat in the kitchen by candlelight and filled in endless emigration papers in triplicate, while his hair turned grey. He was forty-three, and I had never seen him so old and so lost.

My mother miraculously survived the hospital ordeal, thanks to the wads of banknotes that changed hands between my father and the head doctor.

Meanwhile, Youth 3 had embraced capitalism. It had turned from the wild East into the wild West and it was hard to say which was worse. Tiny cafés and shops had mushroomed among the panels. People sold contraband cigarettes and suspect alcohol mixtures straight from their underground cellars. The elder Mechev son was a racketeer. He was charging people for parking their cars in our communal car park. But it’s always been free, the bewildered neighbours protested. We’ve parked our Moskvich here for years. ‘Well, things have changed. Pay up or piss off.’ And he cracked the joints of his enormous fists. My once self-appointed protector was finally getting to rearrange people’s faces. Yesterday’s bully was today’s entrepreneur.

My parents’ friends were being laid off or were subsisting on salaries dwarfed by mega-inflation. My classmate Tedy was selling pantyhose at a street stall because her parents had lost their jobs. Beggars appeared on the streets. They were somebody’s parents and grandparents. They were teachers, musicians, factory workers. I saw a dishevelled woman in the street, muttering to herself with a lunatic grin, and with a shudder of horror recognized a former teacher from the French Lycée.

And then there were the new rich. They were the kids of the old rich, but now they drove black Mercedes and called themselves businessmen. One thing was clear: money was king. Education, culture, and the life of the mind were for sissies, and sissies sold pantyhose on the street, walked the streets with a lunatic grin, starved to death, and were run over by speeding black Mercedes.

Real men, collectively known as
mutri
(gangsters) put together racketeering businesses, bought up government factories for small change and turned them into private businesses, trafficked drugs, weapons and women, laundered money, and felt like the winners they really were – until a rival racketeer shot them in the face. Real women, collectively known as
mutresi
, sold themselves to real men and rode in the passenger seats of the black Mercedes, wearing Gucci and a silicon pout.

The era of the gangster had dawned. Everyone else was drowning in a bloody sunset. It wasn’t clear where exactly we would fit in this picture, except right outside the frame. Already the great mass exodus had begun. Everybody with a degree was filling in emigration papers.

Meanwhile, my sister was back at School 81, after two years in an
English school. And because academic standards in England had been much lower, she was now behind in every subject except English. Sensing the general climate of disaster, she did her best not to add to it with her school worries. She knew that we couldn’t afford any more crises.

Just then, Jimmy arrived, bright and laden with gifts in the dirty snow of Sofia, like Father Christmas from a far-away land of plenty. In the dead of the Balkan winter, Jimmy heroically fought a blizzard from Youth 3 to the Central Post Office, to buy Christmas cards for home. If Jimmy was shocked at the misery of Sofia, he didn’t say so. He was a proponent of the stiff upper lip, except when we had to say goodbye two weeks later. I’ll see you soon, we kept saying at Sofia Airport. I’ll see you soon, and we floated on a luxurious sea of eighteen-year-old tears.

The Home Office continued to consider our papers with such care that ten months rolled by, and our English future retreated further away, while our present remained suspended. Bored and depressed, I enrolled in a Spanish course, and sat there, conjugating the verb ‘to go’.
Yo me voy, tu te vas, él se va, nosotros nos vamos, nosotros nos vamos, nosotros nos vamos
. Then one day I stopped eating. It was a protest – against what, I didn’t quite know, but clearly something had to be done. And if you can’t do anything to the world around you, you do it to yourself. I discovered that my cousin, the one who’d kept me company in the Suhindol fat farm that Chernobyl summer, had adopted the same strategy. We met from time to time, to discuss what had fewer calories: an apple, or a cup of coffee.

In the spring, I ran into Nikifor. I hadn’t seen him since he disappeared into the Corrective Labour School. He had changed from
a feral, snotty brat into a handsome man. A handsome one-armed man. We drank Nescafé in a basement and talked for the first time. What had happened to his arm?

‘An accident.’ He scratched his shoulder stump. ‘When I was fifteen. I was in the factory where they made us work, and this guy pushed me. The last thing I remember before I passed out was seeing my arm on the floor. I had to relearn everything. I was right-handed, and now I’m left-handed. And what happened to you? Why are you so skinny? I heard you were in England.’ And he added in English, ‘Do you speak English?’

But there was no irony in his voice, and no bile in his heart. He was still living with his mother, who was still an alcoholic. ‘It’s a mess,’ he said apologetically as he pushed open the front door of their apartment to reveal a humble one-bedroom dwelling. Full ashtrays and empty bottles everywhere. ‘I’m the only person who cleans this place,’ he said.

I remembered Jimmy’s stoned friend raging against his parents in that town-on-the-sea, and I suddenly felt angry at everyone in Colchester, even Jimmy, who hadn’t done anything wrong. But something was definitely wrong with the fact that they had castles to house their misery in, while Nikifor lived – literally – in a dump, and had nothing except one arm, a packet of cigarettes, and his stolen youth.

These days my school friend Rado was a full-time Metallica fan. He too was in a hateful mood. We walked together in the Park of Freedom, now renamed again Boris’s Garden, and held hands as he quoted suicidal lyrics in an American accent.

Meanwhile, my classmates at the French Lycée, from which I had dropped out, were graduating. Rado, starched, polished and on his
best behaviour, escorted me to the seventh form ball, where everyone looked grown up and serious. Grégoire, Maxim, Rado and many others were talking about studying law or medicine in France. Law and medicine scared me witless, but what if England didn’t work out? I was then stuck with France, and maybe it took law and medicine to get there.

But it never came to law, medicine, or France. The Home Office finally remembered us. The passports arrived, three of them with visas, one without – the one that belonged to the eighteen-year-old in our family, no longer ‘a legal dependent’.

My parents announced that they were not going to England without me. We were going to New Zealand instead. ‘Where is that?’ I asked. ‘Near Australia,’ they said. I fainted on the kitchen floor. It helped that I hadn’t eaten for six months.

I would never see Jimmy again. I would never go to Leeds University. I consulted my world atlas, and there was New Zealand, two small accidental splashes of land at the bottom of the world, just above Antarctica. There was only one alternative: staying behind. Should I cut my veins now, or wait until we arrived in New Zealand?

‘Go, for heaven’s sake,’ Rado said, ‘And don’t look back. It’s the chance of a lifetime. I don’t intend to hang around much longer either.’

‘New Zealand?’ Maxim said. He was going to study economics in Sofia. ‘Classy. The further away from here, the better. And they speak English. Very classy.’

Jimmy maintained his stiff upper lip and vowed to emigrate to New Zealand as soon as possible. But something told me that he wouldn’t.

Tedy was practical about it. ‘You always wanted to be somewhere else. Just don’t forget your friends.’ How could I – it’s not as though I had any friends in New Zealand. Did anybody live there?

Grégoire thought they spoke Dutch in New Zealand. ‘So you’ll have to learn a new language,’ he said, ‘but it could be worse. I’ll write to you from France, I promise.’ He didn’t intend to hang around much longer either.

Nikifor was not surprised to see me go – nothing surprised Nikifor – and promised to write. ‘I’ve heard they have penguins there,’ he said. ‘Send me a photo.’

Esther said, ‘I wish I could go too…’ and then, quoting from
The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
, ‘But don’t let me depress you.’

Our luggage took up the trunks of two Skodas – ours and my uncle’s – but when we arrived at the airport with my uncle and his family, somehow, in the chaos of tearful goodbyes, the keys to the second car were lost.

We missed our plane to New Zealand, and drove back to the empty Youth 3 apartment with its disconnected phone and empty bookshelves, where we holed up for two days in suspended animation, living out of suitcases, avoiding the people we’d said goodbye to, eating Ordinary Biscuits, and repeating something that closely resembled the carrot dialogue from
Waiting for Godot
. I’m hungry. Do you want a biscuit? No, thanks, I have some breadcrumbs in my pocket.

Three days later, the two-car procession and the tearful goodbyes were repeated. My cousin, who was ahead of me in the self-starvation race and had graduated to a skeleton, waved wanly from the other side of the glass pane separating the lucky departures from those who stayed behind. My uncle, always the cheerful macho, was crying, his
bespectacled face smeared on the other side of the glass. I was completely numb. A sick, dumb relief was all I felt.

That was it, then. Goodbye England. Goodbye France. Goodbye Bulgaria. Goodbye Youth 3. I don’t know where the hell I’m going, but I never want to come back.

Getting reacquainted

And here I am again, fourteen years after that decisive farewell, waiting for the tram and inhaling the mountain air of Sofia, thick with pollen and pollution. Nothing is quite so decisive any more. In fact, since leaving, life has been a series of indecisions.

I have lived in France and in reunified Berlin, I am living in Britain as a putative New Zealander, and I haven’t listened to Morrissey for a long time. But I also haven’t felt settled anywhere since we left Youth 3. Someone else lives there now, and someone else lives in my
grandparents’ apartment in Emil Markov, which is no longer called that, of course.

In fact, when I look at the latest map of Sofia, I find all sorts of strange new names replacing the strange old names. First to go were street names like Machine-building Street, Hammer and Sickle Street, 11th Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party Street, The Great Turning Point Street, Socialist Victory Street, Barricade Street, Heavy Tank Street. Next to go were the names of Communist Fighters and Heroes. Many street names are now prefaced with Prof., Dr, Gen., Tsar, Princess, etc. Some of them I’ve never heard of, because they have been resuscitated from the pre-Communist pantheon. Some of them used to be Fascists, Monarchists, Capitalists and Enemies of the People not so long ago.

In the renamed streets of central Sofia, orange trams and red buses lurch along a patchwork of old and new buildings. They’re overshadowed by giant posters of sultry goddesses advertising perfumes, ‘mobiphones’, leather sofas, and bio-active yogurt. The façades of
belle époque
buildings peel like damp wallpaper.

Down on street level, Sofia’s women are thoroughly epilated, manicured, hair-dyed, tailor-dressed, perfumed, and pouting.

I am taking a tram to the National Palace of Culture. A bird-like woman with a messy nest of shopping bags looks me straight in the eye and smiles beatifically before she gets off at her stop, ‘This weekend there’s a convention for people who believe.’

‘For people who believe in what?’ I ask, helping her with the shopping bags.

‘In God, of course. A belief that there is a better life than the one we have here. Do come if you can.’

And all these years I thought the misguided belief in a better
life was simply called emigration.

‘Thank you,’ I lie, a bit disturbed that of all the people on the tram she chose me.

Ah, the National Palace of Culture! It squats across the tram line, its black and white eighties design blurred into dirty grey. It’s the biggest convention centre in the Balkans, and perhaps the ugliest. I spent many happy formative hours there, gaping at festival films and classical concerts, and there is, of course, the plush café where Keti played the piano. The National Palace of Culture is approached through a gloriously long row of malfunctioning fountains, punctuated by a giant grey wreck of a monument originally called ‘1300 Years of the Bulgarian State’. Now it’s known by various less stately monikers, including ‘The Fallen Messerschmitt’. It was supposed to resemble a flag, but it always resembled a chunk of asbestos encased in granite. It was built in record time in 1981 for the 1,300th anniversary of Bulgaria’s founding. And in record time, only a month later, letters started falling from the poetic quotes glued around its girth. Today, only one word remains, ‘reborn’, from a nineteenth-century song line about identity and revival: ‘Go, reborn people, go towards the bright future!’

And here, in the bright future, the reborn people (pensioners) sit in the shadow of the fallen Messerschmitt by a mural of exploding graffiti art, complaining about their blood pressure and the price of bread. Next to them mothers with babies talk about poos and manicurists.

I sit beside them and wonder: Who do I call? Who is there left to see? What has become of my old friends?

Toni is married, with two daughters. Like his father, he is a physicist at the Academy of Sciences. I’m a coward, I know, but I don’t
call him from fear that we’ll have nothing meaningful to say, except, ‘Do you remember Comrade Gesheva…?’

Nikifor is married, and has two offspring. I’m relieved for him, but I’m also relieved that I don’t have his phone number. What would we have to talk about? We had written a few letters, then stopped because he couldn’t afford the stamps to New Zealand, and I didn’t have a camera to take that penguin photo for him.

Tedy is an optometrist. The country is full of diabetics, she tells me, and many of them are going blind. Although we don’t have much in common, over the years we have never missed each other’s birthdays.

Maxim is an investment banker who lives between Paris and London. His languages and his brains served him well. He married a French woman, developed an expensive-looking bald patch, and rarely goes back to his home country. Every few years, we catch up in Paris or London and swap sardonic notes on our lives.

Boris is an underpaid surgeon in Sofia and thinking of emigrating to Canada. His time in the morgue across the road wasn’t wasted.

Esther’s mother died of cancer soon after we said goodbye, and Esther emigrated to Canada where she now lectures in literature and hopes for tenure. She returns to Bulgaria once every few years. ‘I’ll never feel particularly Canadian,’ she emailed me, ‘but I’ll never go back to Bulgaria, and after ten years away, in what way am I actually Bulgarian?’

Right now, that’s a question I can’t answer for her, or even for myself. Right now, my deep suspicion is that it’s possible, perhaps even inevitable, to live between – no, among – nationalities. It’s a bit like wearing different suits, all of them the wrong size, all of them slightly ridiculous, either too baggy or too tight. They don’t make the right size any more, it’s been discontinued. But I also suspect that the
Bulgarian suit was never the right fit for me, or for Esther.

Fortunately, I have more urgent things to do than navel-gaze or gaze at the remnants of the fallen Messerschmitt. I’m catching up with Grégoire, who lives in France and is briefly in town to see his parents. Will we recognize each other?

Eight years ago, at the luggage belt of Sofia Airport, I instantly recognized Grégoire among the cluster of bedraggled émigrés disgorged by Air France. We were both visiting for the first time since emigrating. That winter in Sofia was glum and slushy, and I was glad to have a return ticket.

‘Do you remember that time when I asked you out?’ he said. I did. ‘You saved me then by turning me down. I was so relieved when you said no. Because at that point I realized that I would never be attracted to girls. It was a turning point in my life.’

L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux
. Finally, it made sense.

‘If only Bulgaria would have me back, I’d return,’ Grégoire continued. ‘I’m sick of French prejudice. I can’t get a job in dentistry, despite my qualifications. I’m not making many French friends. My boyfriend is a Moroccan. But I can’t return to live in Bulgaria until I’m thirty, because of national service in the army.’

Now we are over thirty, the sun is out, the trams creak towards a blue Vitosha Mountain, the chestnuts are blossoming, the beautiful people strut their backsides and fake Gucci sunglasses along Vitosha Boulevard, and Sofia looks decidedly liveable. Grégoire is sitting in an outdoor café by the tram line: a chubby, bespectacled Gregorian monk sipping an espresso.

There are so few moments in my life when the past and the present connect in the right place that I am overcome by a grinning happiness at the sight of Grégoire. But he isn’t grinning.

‘All the good men in Paris are taken, or don’t fancy me. I’m on anti-depressants which make me drowsy. Paris is not a city, it’s a meat-grinder. I yearn for Bulgaria. When they show a programme about Bulgaria on French TV, I bawl my eyes out like an idiot. But how can I come back? The gay scene here is all transvestites and freaks. And I still can’t tell my parents. They still ask about girlfriends. Hello, I’ve never had a girlfriend! If I came back, I’d be coming back to a lie.’

‘Remember how much we wanted to go to France?’ I try to cheer him up. ‘I was even prepared to study law or medicine!’

‘Well, I did, and look where that got me.’

Along the chestnut-lined Boulevard Patriarch Evtimii, we’re getting closer to the French Lycée. Time shrinks buildings and people, everybody knows this, but I’m still shocked by how tiny the Lycée looks. On the front steps, the new generation of French students smoke in morose silence or mutter sweet nothings into their mobile phones. They are fully occupied with the vanities of adolescence. I remember how that felt. We go inside to have a look.

‘Yes?’ a doorman greets us inside. ‘Can I help you?’

‘We’re former students, we just want to have a look,’ I say.

‘OK, no problem.’ He waves us in.

We look into the common room and the teachers’ rooms. A teacher we don’t recognize is marking student papers at one end of a long Politburo-style table, tapping his cigarette in a giant, fag-filled glass ashtray.

‘We’re looking for Madame Taleva,’ I say. ‘She was our French teacher.’

‘Madame Taleva? Never heard of her. How many years ago is this?’

He laughs. ‘Are you kidding me? Fifteen years ago I was a university student.’

We walk back down the stairs. The faded, bare-breasted Liberty is still on the wall, leading a faded people. The guard looks up from the pastry he’s busy eating and wipes his mouth with a tissue.

‘So, did you find what you were looking for?’

We shake our heads, then nod – yes, no,
da
,
ne
– confused by two different body languages and the tricky question.

Then we go stand in the Lycée courtyard, where the latest graffiti art greets us: ‘2006: Tits and Joints’. I look up to the classroom where we sang ‘
Ma Normandie
’ with the now vanished Madame Taleva. ‘
C’est le pays qui m’a donné le jour
…’ There is a broken window.

‘Were they happy years, do you think?’ I ask Grégoire.

‘Well, if I’m not happy now, I must have been happy then. When I was at the Lycée, I wanted to be in France, to be free, to be myself. Now that I’m in France, I wish I could come back here, to be at home again. I feel more connected with the past than with the present. Is that normal?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Probably not. But at least you feel connected with something.’

We hug and he waves as he disappears into a chipped underpass.

For now, I feel connected with hunger, and I drop in to see one of my closest remaining relatives in Sofia, hoping to get fed.

Auntie Lenche still lives in her darkened ground-floor apartment, just off Vitosha Boulevard. Across from her is a modelling agency called Visage. Three years ago, a small bomb went off outside the ‘agency’: one bunch of ‘businessmen’ blowing up another. The bomb was small but Auntie Lenche’s kitchen windows shattered. She had to pay for her own repairs, of course.

‘But we haven’t had any problems since then,’ she tells me cheerfully. ‘I just stand at the window and enjoy the nice-looking girls and boys who go in and out of the agency doors. You know, two of them were kissing outside the other day. They saw me looking and became shy. I shouted to them, “Kiss away while you’re young. Look at me, old and useless!” They liked that.’

Auntie Lenche’s hair is thick and white like sheep’s wool. She went white at the age of twenty-five, long before her life was blighted by an unpleasant husband and the terminal illness of her daughter, Pavlina.

Pavlina died twelve years ago. Auntie Lenche stopped wearing lipstick and fortune-telling with coffee cups. Now she is kept company by friends and neighbours, and a nameless turtle in a tank on top of her fridge. She opens the fridge and begins to extract salad, goat’s milk, crumbly white cheese.

Auntie Lenche graduated from an American college in Sofia, but can’t remember any English, except ‘Would you like some tea?’ It was all several lives ago, before the Communists, before the war.

She has always been religious. She stood her ground, even in the early 1980s when young thugs working for the secret police stopped her on the street at Easter and demanded, ‘Hey, comrade, where are you carrying this candle?’ ‘To church,’ she said. ‘We advise you to put it out,’ the thugs said. ‘Is it illegal to carry a candle? If it’s not illegal, then I’m not going to put it out,’ she said. ‘Now excuse me, comrades, but I have things to do today.’ The thugs couldn’t think of anything to say and let her pass.

Auntie Lenche has a corner of the dead in her chilly living-room. There she lights candles and gazes at the portrait of the smiling Pavlina in private moments so far down in the pit of grief that it’s hard to imagine how she ever crawls out into the light. Her life revolves
around death anniversaries and religious festivals. Yet she is the least morbid person you’ll meet. ‘God and the Virgin look over me,’ she explains matter-of-factly, the way she does everything. ‘Now, I’ve made lamb soup, your favourite.’

At this point, Auntie Petrana arrives. She is my grandfather Alexander’s sister. Even after sixty years in Sofia, she remains a quintessential Bulgarian peasant: energetic, pushy, free of self-pity and complications. She has a house in her native village, where she goes every other weekend, and brings back for Auntie Lenche fresh milk, a chicken or two.

Auntie Petrana and her husband were proper peasants in a past life but, like the Mechevs in Youth 3, they were proletarianized and forced to work at Kremikovtsi Factory near the Youths, for decades exposing themselves to noxious substances. This resulted in her husband’s early death from cancer and Auntie Petrana’s close brush with the same fate. She partially lost the use of her right arm after surgery for breast cancer, but this doesn’t stop her from cooking.

Today, she has brought an enormous tin of mince-stuffed pastry.

‘Auntie’s child.’ She gives me a tearful, bristly kiss. ‘It’s been so long. Your Auntie Petrana made you a mince pastry, let’s see if you like it.’ And she wipes her tears and sweat with a large man’s hankie.

I’ve forgotten that she’s deaf, and that she sometimes speaks of herself in the third person. We eat salad and mince pie and, without further ado, Auntie Petrana downs half a water glass of home-made rakia, strong enough to knock out a herd of bison.