Street Without a Name (14 page)

The Synagogue gate is locked, and when I buzz the bell, a middle-aged guard opens it. ‘We always lock it, you know how it is these days.’ He’s glad to have company in his solitary kiosk. On the little table is a notebook in which he has scribbled Hebrew words with Bulgarian translations.

‘I’m not Jewish,’ he catches my glance, ‘but I meet so many Jews that I became interested in their culture and thought I’d learn some Hebrew to pass the time. They come from everywhere, you know, America, Australia, Israel. Some tell me incredible stories. Some grew up here. They say they’ll always be grateful to their fellow Bulgarians, even if they can’t speak Bulgarian any more.’

‘So why did they leave?’

‘Ah, well, because they could. Israel was a better place to live than Bulgaria in the sixties and seventies, wasn’t it? And maybe even in the eighties and nineties…’

He buzzes in another visitor: a dazed-looking Italian with a cloud of frizzy hair. The Italian stops dead in his tracks and points at my wreath. He speaks Italian only. The guard and I manage to explain in a mixture of pidgin Italian and English that this is a pagan Bulgarian festival. When the guard gives him a kippah to wear inside the Synagogue, he seems surprised and questions it with wild gestures. ‘For respect,’ says the guard in English. The Italian shrugs and stumbles into the Synagogue. Inside, we discover – or I do anyway – that the century-old Synagogue has been wrenched out of disrepair with donations from Jewish foundations, mainly in Israel. The largest Sephardic synagogue in the Balkans is splendid, and splendidly empty.

The Jews – the 2,500 who remain in Sofia – are fairly invisible. It was partly this invisibility and lack of enviable financial success that made them indistinguishable from their average struggling countryman, and meant that when anti-Semitic propaganda infected Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, Bulgaria remained largely immune. After all, Bulgarians had plenty to worry about, for example recovering from the First World War, during which they fought on the losing side at the cost of nearly two hundred thousand lives. As well as coping with Macedonian terrorists, Communist terrorists, and the police terror of the tsarist government. Really, Bulgaria was psychologically booked up far in advance, there was no room for anything more.

So when the rest of Europe was dispatching its Jews to the trains, and Hitler was putting pressure on the government of Tsar Boris III to join in, city Jews were displaced to the countryside and forced to wear the Star of David while doing heavy labour on roads and railways. But when the trains and boats were prepared, public figures and ordinary people stood up against the deportation.

In a curious triple stroke of ignorance, self-deprecation, and Semitic apathy, Bulgarians don’t celebrate – or often even know – the fact that all 58,000 Jews in the country were saved thanks to letters and public speeches from progressive and sometimes Communist politicians. The Metropolitan of Plovdiv vowed personally to lie on the rails if the trains left. And so the trains of the Holocaust never departed, although it was a close brush. Later on, the trains of emigration did depart, leaving behind only 16,000 Jews.

The dazed Italian and I walk to the Hali market together. Our language barrier is too great to explain ourselves to the other, but I manage to establish that he is from Bologna and he’s here on a three-day holiday. What makes an Italian from Bologna come to Sofia for a
three-day holiday? He shrugs his shoulders, as though he’s surprised to be here himself. What else should he see? I point to the big blue mountain looming over the city. Vitosha, I say. ‘Vitosha,’ he memorizes. He kisses my hand with a florid gesture, and extracts from his trouser pocket the kippah he has nicked from the Synagogue. He waves it at me with an impish wink as he walks away, and I wish I could speak Italian. Now I’ll never know whether he’s newly released from a psychiatric ward, won a trip for two to Sofia but had no one to take along, or wants to invest in property.

The neo-Byzantine Hali is a covered market that sells Greek olives, oriental pastries, Bulgarian honey by the vat, German delicatessen items, Italian clothes made in Turkey and Greece, domestic appliances made in Spain… It’s clean and tidy like the Central Universal Store, and not nearly as smelly and exciting as it was in its early days in the 1900s. Nobody is shouting or proudly slapping the carcasses hung from hooks. The butcher used to hack off the chosen part, then make a finger-sized hole in it. The customer departed with a piece of meat hanging from his index finger, brushing away the flies.

For a taste of good old squalor, I drop in to see the much cheaper Old Wives’ Market behind the Synagogue. There’s no meat, but the mountains of fruit and veg, the string of nargile shops, the sellers gossiping on low stools and eating sunflower seeds is the closest you can get to old Sofia’s oriental vibes.

The mosque of the Baths, Banya Bashi, is just across from the Hali. A Turkish boy wraps me in a green mantle and flicks the hood over my head. I rejoice in my religious promiscuity. Inside the carpeted mosque, a single man reads the Koran, back against the wall. The mosque is bare and minimal, with the predictable orange and blue Koranic flower motifs. Until the early twentieth century, Sofia was an
Ottoman backwater with muddy streets, oriental markets, and dozens of mosques, but Banya Bashi is the only surviving memento of those times.

Outside, a well fed, middle-aged Arab addresses me in Bulgarian. He looks familiar. Then I remember.

‘You are Abdel,’ I say.

‘Yes, Abdel. How do you know?’

I know his name because I met him here two years ago. He came from beneath the oak shade to chat to me outside the mosque. He told me he was Palestinian, but had a Bulgarian wife, a Bulgarian passport and a Bulgarian business – ‘import-export’ – here in Sofia, which wasn’t doing so well. He was thinking of leaving, for Switzerland or Italy.

But now he doesn’t remember me.

‘How’s your business going?’ I ask.

‘Business is OK. Better with European Union now.’

‘And you’re still living here…’

‘Ah, still living here. I love Sofia too much. But maybe I go Switzerland, Italy…’

‘Abdel,’ I say. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth trying. ‘Do you know a man called Fadhel? Algerian. Must be about your age now.’

‘Fadhel? How he looks?’

‘He looks… good. With glasses.’

He blinks.

‘I know Fadhel in Lyon.’ Abdel looks at me. ‘With glasses. He have three childrens. He live in Sofia before. You know him?’

It must be him. How many bespectacled Fadhels from Algeria have lived in Sofia?

‘But he not looking so good.’ Abdel mimics a paunch bigger than
his own. ‘I looking better.’ He laughs and pretends to smooth his thin grey hair. Then he points at my wreath. ‘All Flowers Day,’ he declares, and shakes my hand. The conversation is terminated, and he returns to his job as a full-time dweller in the oak shade of the mosque. I walk away in a daze, my delicate memory of Fadhel dislodged collectively by the paunch of an Arab in Lyon, three teenage kids, and a wife with a covered head.

A mellifluous chant distracts me from these thoughts. Actually, it’s two chants. The muezzin is calling for prayer, and someone else is calling from loudspeakers behind the Sheraton Hotel across the road.

I peek into the excavated courtyard where some of Sofia’s Roman life lies scattered about. The voices of angels are coming out of the pink-hued St George Rotunda. It’s evening vespers. I walk down a white-tiled street towards the church, the only remaining street from Serdica, the Roman city that stood here.

They found Roman Sofia in the 1950s, when the authorities decided to remove the old heart of the city, with its narrow streets and bazaars, and erect a brave new centre in its place. This would have giant modern buildings, like the Party HQ and the Central Universal Store, which was built on the site of a flea-market and a popular Bohemian hang-out, the Armenian Café.

The only building they spared was the Mineral Baths, with its medicinal healing waters. In the course of the digging, the workmen hit a mineral water spring which burst onto Vitosha Street and flooded it. It was the middle of winter, and all along the city’s main artery, the Gypsies of Sofia removed their shoes, rolled up their trousers, and paddled in the warm water.

The St George Rotunda is not quite as old as the Roman ruins – it’s
from the sixth century. In the sixteenth century, the Turks under Sultan Selim painted over the Christian saints and angels with flowers, and called it the Rose Mosque. Three centuries later, the Bulgarians stripped the Koranic motifs to reveal the saints and angels again. The result is a piece of layered time-art.

Inside the bare-stoned, high-domed church, a gaggle of downy-faced black-clad seminaries, as young as the presidency guards, chant the prayers of eastern orthodoxy around a pulpit. They take turns reciting the self-deprecating words in their unformed, timid voices. ‘God instil me with fear of your heavenly might, I who am unworthy and unholy, your everlasting slave…’

The people standing in the audience cross themselves repeatedly and bow down to the floor. Searching for symbols of identity and nationhood, post-Communist Bulgaria is clinging to the beards of eastern orthodoxy. These days every public occasion is accompanied by an overweight priest in embroidered robes, swinging an incense-burner, and every politician, from the Socialist president to his contender in the far right party Ataka, makes sure that they are photographed kissing the hand of some gilded patriarch, either here or, even better, in brotherly Russia.

A woman with a careworn face wipes quick, mechanical tears and mumbles desperate prayers with pale lips. Her two young daughters, dressed in jackets and trousers they’ve outgrown, imitate her movements. All three cross and bow, cross and bow. It’s not so much a prayer as a lament.

An angel from the ninth century gazes down on us from the dome way up above our heads, with something like pity on what remains of his face.

It’s hard to believe that the busy American Bar and Grill was formerly The Hungarian Restaurant that provided both my first experience of dining out and a fight scene involving my father, a rude waiter and a plate of meatballs. Now, waitresses in mini-skirts and dyed hair smile ‘enjoy’ as they serve steak and fries.

My grandfather Alexander liked the American Bar and Grill – he liked the bland food and the waitresses in mini-skirts. He brought me here for my twenty-ninth birthday lunch, and we were joined by Auntie Lenche and his best surviving friend, Ljubo. Ljubo gave me a book of his mother’s poems translated into English. My grandfather gave me a synthetic fur coat, to keep me warm in the future winters of my life.

Just across the road is a tinted-glass pavilion. It used to be the War Veterans’ Canteen. At exactly twelve o’clock every day, my grandfather, Ljubo, and Nikolai Gaubich met here for chicken soup. They were all snappy dressers. In their beige coats, scarves, leather gloves, berets over silver hair, and gentlemanly manners, they were the last messengers from the old Sofia of the 1940s, before the new Sofia was hammered out on the anvil of Communism. After lunch, they would sit on the benches outside the canteen, bask in the afternoon sun, and talk politics.

Ljubo was the only son of Bulgaria’s first famous woman poet and independent spirit, Elissaveta Bagryana. Tall and classy, he liked wearing gloves and telling naughty jokes. He had been a career officer in the King’s Army, and had got as far as occupying the coveted Macedonia to the west before the tide changed and Bulgaria declared war on Germany – while briefly remaining at war with the Allies. Not bad for a little country with everything to lose.

My grandfather Alexander had been a reserve officer until the Red
Army absorbed the Bulgarian Army in 1944, at which point his unit was dispatched to rout the Nazi occupier in Macedonia – except the Nazi occupier had been helped by the Bulgarians until now. Either way, to Alexander the war was an extended holiday from adulthood. It sounded as if they spent their short time in Macedonia looting houses and getting drunk. Some of his soldiers were so dense that one time when looting a wealthy house with a piano in it (without his authorization, my grandfather stressed), they wrenched the lid off and made a bench out of it, hilarious fun. ‘They’d never seen a piano before, can you imagine, they looked at it and they saw wood!’

If grandfather was the episodic soldier, Nikolai Gaubich was the artiste of the three. A renowned opera singer in his day, he had toured the world, and spoke a smattering of languages. He conducted an elegant, old-fashioned correspondence with me, the way he had corresponded with my grandmother Anastassia during trips abroad. His letters started or ended with ‘
ma chérie
’, and were accompanied by an epigrammatic poem. His wife had died of cancer years ago, and his only son was killed in a car crash. Towards the end of his life, his poems turned maudlin and I filed them away in a drawer. Nikolai’s sudden death was a shocking blow to my grandfather. The countdown had begun.

I take a long walk by South Park, along the boulevard whose length I travelled a hundred times on the buses of my childhood, because at the end of the bus line was Emil Markov and my favourite place in Sofia – my grandparents’ apartment.

One side of the apartment looked towards Vitosha Mountain and the outlying houses of the village where the Fighter for Freedom Emil Markov was shot by the Monarco-Fascists. I mean, when the Communist terrorist Emil Markov got shot by the police.

The other side looked out onto a green children’s playground, where my grandmother Anastassia sat on benches chatting to neighbours who would ask me with greasy smiles, ‘Who do you love more, Mummy or Granny? Granny or Grandad?’ I suspected these were trick questions, so I always replied, just in case, ‘I love everybody equally,’ which didn’t satisfy the neighbours at all.

On my thirtieth birthday, which I celebrated in New Zealand, my grandfather was preparing for the arrival of his daughter, my mother, for her annual visit. His life had become narrower and lonelier since she had been there last. He was a cautious man. He disliked travel, change, noise, and risk, which in the end meant human company. He had stopped going to the War Veterans’ Canteen because he was afraid of slipping on the winter roads. Besides, there was no one left to talk to – Gaubich was dead, Ljubo in hospital. Grandfather maintained order at home, read a lot, and wrote his comments in the margins of books. A professional accountant to the end, he loved organization. But now there was nothing left to organize.