Street Without a Name (24 page)

The scenic river is the natural boundary between the two countries
and precisely where we want to go. But we can’t argue with Antonio Banderas and his boss.

We leave the car next to a parked blue Lada in a vast clearing at the start of the village. From here, spectacular hilltop vistas open up over the blue and green ranges of Turkish Strandja. It’s the mountain doing its own thing, mindless of borders, languages, and history.

Slivarovo (number of residents: ten) is green and creaking with abandoned houses and plum trees. As soon as we step on the village path, clouds of tiny flies encase our heads. The quiet is thick and oppressive, like walking through syrup. I feel like a First World War correspondent in the Balkans walking into a border village a day after the enemy army has passed through. I almost expect to see pigs feasting on unspeakable things.

Instead, we see three middle-aged locals talking in hushed voices, as if the open spaces might magnify their words. As if the hills have ears. We greet them, our voices loud and hollow, and they nod and examine us with a circumspect eye before muttering something that might be a greeting.

Next, we spot a man in a worker’s overalls, and a squat, grey-haired woman with bosoms the size of small Strandja hills. She moves very slowly, as if stirring cement. She is, in fact, stacking up logs against a wall. The man is chopping them up in a primitive outdoor summer kitchen. A brew of aromatic mountain herbs bubbles in a tin on the stove. They’re startled by the visitors, but when they get over the initial shock they loosen up.

‘Yes, I grew up here,’ the man tells us in a regional accent so thick that at first I think he’s clearing his throat. ‘There were a thousand people here. Houses there, there, there.’ He points to the wild bush. ‘This was my school.’ It’s the gutted, windowless house next door.
‘Some Sofianites bought it and they’re gonna do it up.’

‘And do you live here?’ I ask the bosomed woman.

‘I live on the coast. But I’m doing up this house.’ She smiles sheepishly. ‘I want to get away from the coast, it’s become a madhouse. Hotels and tourists everywhere. Are you out for a walk? Enjoy.’

We walk on. So far we’ve met five out of the ten residents.

‘We might even be eleven since I retired here a couple of years ago,’ smiles a rotund man in a woollen hat. He’s fixing an antiquated scooter outside his house. ‘I was a miner. And a bus driver. Mm, that’s right. I know Strandja inside out. Do you want some of my honey?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Michael says in Bulgarian, which pleases the miner no end.

‘My man.’ He shakes Michael’s hand, his round face grinning like a full moon on a clear night. ‘Where are you from? New Zealand! You know, many years ago, in the sixties, a guy from this village ran away to New Zealand. Mm, that’s right. He and some other lads from nearby villages managed to sneak across the river down there. Then from Turkey into Greece, and somehow he ended up in New Zealand.’

‘Did he come back?’ Michael wants to know.

‘He never came back. Never. He died there recently, we heard. Mm, and now, you know, now that we’re in the EU, they’re talking of pulling down the barbed wire. And just having a few border patrols here in Slivarovo. Mm, we’re becoming an open door… Fifteen Kurds crossed the river last year. Refugees. They caught them.’

I ask him if he’s heard of any shootings of runaways in the old days.

‘Well, there were lots of young people down at the International Youth Centre in Primorsko. Germans, Poles, Czechs, Russians…
Some wandered down this way, mm… it’s possible. Anything is possible.’

At this point, the muttering trio down the path call out for him to come over. They’ve been listening to our conversation. The hills do have ears. He waddles off in their direction. When he passes us later on his scooter, he doesn’t smile at us any more, as if under instructions from the vigilante team.

Resident number seven is Bai Kolyu, a switched-on pensioner with rubber boots and a camouflage cap who retired to his home village to rear goats and churn butter. He is appalled at my suggestion about border police abuses in the old days.

‘It’s out of the question. Some young people would have been caught trying to sneak across, but that’s all. There was respect for life back then. Everybody knows how difficult it is to bring a child into this world… You don’t remember the old system, of course…’

‘But I do!’ I protest. ‘I grew up in the old system.’

‘Ah, so you did, but you’re too young to remember everything. Many things have been exaggerated about the old system.’

So he’s an old-timer. ‘Well, it’s nice that borders are now opening up, relaxing…’ I offer breezily. Then I see his pained face. ‘But there are other problems, of course,’ I add.

‘Serious other problems. The young people of Bulgaria must think about it very hard. See.’ He points at the spilling ranges with a twig. ‘That’s occupied Strandja. Bulgarian lands lost to us for ever. But watch out. Just as the Turks colonized us before with brute force, they’re colonizing us now with assimilation. Yes, with their birth rate. By buying up property. The entire coast is bought up by Turks.’

‘Well,’ I search for the right words here, ‘Bulgaria has always had a large Turkish minority. It’s just part of our heritage. And there were
never any problems with them until our own moronic government chased them away in the eighties…’

Bai Kolyu disagrees. ‘Most of them left of their own choice. Nobody chased them, nobody forced them. Now they have two passports and they use them well. There are illiterate Turks who vote in the Bulgarian elections, under instructions…’

Some of this is true. Bai Kolyu is a gentle soul and it’s clear to both of us that it’s time to move onto more neutral themes, for example the climate and topography of Slivarovo, where two currents combine, Bai Kolyu explains, to create a uniquely pure air.

‘That’s why I came back to live here. Away from newspapers with bad news. I milk the goats and feel better. More people should milk goats… You know, the EU inspector for veterinary health came to inspect us here. Because we’re the southernmost village of the EU. I made him cappuccino, with goat milk. He liked it very much.’

We don’t get to meet the remaining three residents, but we come across the first couple again. How can we get down to the river? we ask.

‘Keep your voice down,’ the woman hisses. ‘Just go.’ She points with her chin to the eastern end of the village. ‘Go quietly and don’t ask anybody. It’s better not to ask.’

The last inhabited house in the village features a small, shy, slightly soiled Bulgarian flag, and a barking dog. We hear muffled male voices inside. Perhaps this is where the ‘boss’ camps when he comes to Slivarovo. We tiptoe past the dog and the voices, and plunge into a sun-spotted world of high grasses, butterflies, and fresh goat droppings. Down in the green ravine, the Resovska River gurgles invitingly: it’s the natural divide between two countries, and it doesn’t know it. But I do. I can almost hear the furtive steps and stiffled giggles of twenty-year-olds with bell-bottomed trousers and ridiculous
sideburns. They were the lucky ones who made it. By now, the danger of the barbed-wire zone would have been over. They could relax.

But I can’t. Descending into the river gully feels like walking straight into the sights of a Kalashnikov. ‘What if they’re patrolling the river?’ I whisper and clutch Michael’s arm. What I really want to say, but don’t because I know it’s absurd, is, I don’t want to die here.

‘They’re not,’ he says breezily, but puts his camera away. We may not look like we’re about to cross the border illegally, but we definitely look like we’re taking extensive photographic records of the border area.

I start walking back, almost running. A quiet hysteria grips me. But to Michael such old-world, cold war paranoia is completely foreign. He tries to wind me up.

‘If the border patrol sees us in the village, how do we prove that we didn’t cross from Turkey?’

But I am not amused. My heart is in my throat. And guilty and tremulous like real fugitives, we tiptoe back into the village. This time we avoid the house with the male voices and squeeze through a small, scratchy orchard.

‘Ah, you’re back,’ Bai Kolyu greets us. One of his goats comes with familiar nonchalance to chew my bag, and he shoos it away. ‘I’ll walk you up to the top.’

We reach the high clearing where his Lada and our battered rented car are basking in the setting sun. He wipes his hand on his jumper to make sure it’s clean of goat, and shakes our hands.

‘It was a pleasure to speak with two intelligent young people. If you were staying overnight, I’d make you cappuccino, with goat milk.’ He shrugs. ‘But you’re leaving. Go well and come again some time. Me and the goats, we’ll be here. We’re not going anywhere.’

Today, I arrive alone at Shumen bus station. This area in the north-east has a large Turkish minority, and I’ve never been here before. I’ve come to see the Shumen fortress and the ruins of the early medieval capital Veliki Preslav.

Unshaven men with bad teeth and worn-out jackets smoke outside the station, waiting. They all look like Vladimir from
Waiting for Godot
– nobody will ever come for them. I almost expect to hear ‘Do you want a carrot?’

It’s hard to imagine that a tsar’s city stood here once. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that anything at all stood here, other than these men inside this rusting bus station.

‘Are you looking for a taxi?’

The man is bearded and middle aged, and holds a sodden cigarette.

‘Yes, are you a driver?’

‘I’m a driver in the sense that I have a car. Where are you going? I’ll give you a good rate, I won’t skin you like the taxi fellas over there. twenty leva. But…’

I knew there was a catch.

‘You see, I’m waiting for someone on the next bus. Ten, fifteen minutes? Let’s make it half an hour. Go and have a coffee, I’ll be here.’

Suddenly, the skies open and spew out a violent warm torrent. Within five minutes it’s a biblical flood. I watch the uphill street into town become a river and briefly contemplate abandoning my mission. Small waterfalls are now forming here and there, and on the other bank are lined up yellow taxis. I have five hours before the last bus back to Varna on the Black Sea coast. Meanwhile, my driver has vanished.

And then the rain stops as suddenly as it started. I walk up and
down the street-river to see if the water level is better anywhere. It isn’t, so I just hitch my trousers and wade in ankle deep, the water tugging me downstream. The taxi-drivers contemplate me with detachment from their open car-windows and blow out philosophical ringlets of smoke.

‘Bravo,’ says the first driver in the line and smiles with all the wrinkles of his face. Bingo, he’s the only one not smoking. ‘Crossing like that without a bridge, well done!’ His warm brown eyes have the soft glint of someone who has given up all pretence. ‘I’ll take you there for 15 leva.’

A deal. We plough upstream, water splashing the sides of the car. I close my window.

‘Ts ts ts, look at this river!’ He fumes quietly, ‘A river in the middle of town. You know why? Because the street drains don’t work. They made it especially so it wouldn’t work.’

But he isn’t an angry man, he’s just making small talk. He has a pleasant, soft Turkish accent. His name is Mehmed.

‘Or Mihail. I was Mihail when they changed the names. But nobody called me Mihail, everybody knew me as Mehmet.’

I’ve never talked to a Bulgarian Turk about the Revival Process. I want to ask him questions, but I feel squirmy, uncomfortable.

‘Was your family affected?’ I try cautiously.

‘Well, they changed everybody’s name, if that’s what you mean.’

Mehmet is friendly but guarded, and so we chat about the state of the roads and the recent rains all the way to Veliki Preslav, capital of the First Bulgarian Kingdom.

In old Bulgarian, Veliki Preslav means something like ‘Greatest of the Great’, which it really was for about a century during the Bulgarian golden age, from the late ninth to the late tenth centuries.
Under the unusually enlightened and progressive for his time Tsar Simeon, the kingdom reached the apogee of European medieval culture. It was perhaps the best time ever to be a Bulgarian.

Splendid buildings stood inside the double fortress walls each three metres thick. Simeon’s giant kingdom – incorporating today’s Romania, Macedonia, part of Serbia and Albania, half of Greece, and greedily lurching down to Gallipoli and Constantinople – made the Byzantine emperors very jittery. The life mission of Simeon was to become crowned as a Byzantine-Bulgarian emperor presiding over Europe’s greatest dominion. He almost made it but a heart attack put an end to his grab for Constantinople.

We get out of the car and squelch through fresh mud on the way to the ruins. Mehmet pulls up his wide tracksuit trousers and wades right in. He is wearing battered old shoes without socks.

‘Ts ts ts, and they want tourists to come here in this mud!’

Only the contours remain of the medieval capital, and some rusty signs. We squint to make out the partly missing letters. Mehmet is indignant again, like a true patriot.

‘Ts ts ts, look at this. They should put proper signs. All these riches, this heritage, and all they’ve got is rust.’

We stand haplessly among the ruins, courtesy of the invading Ottomans who razed the place to the ground in 1388. I try, without success, to picture how the Balkans could have been governed from here. With an irony that probably escaped the victorious Turks, they named the village that stood in the place of today’s modern town of Veliki Preslav, Eski Stambolchuk – old Istanbul. Tsar Simeon’s dream of merging with Constantinople had finally, perversely, come true, if only in name.

‘Veliki Preslav isn’t very
veliki
any more,’ Mehmet observes
as a fine rain begins to fall over the ruins and we head back to the car.

We’re driving over potholes again, and before Mehmet gets a chance to complain about the roads, I pick up some courage and try again. ‘Was anybody killed here during the name changes?’

‘No, not here, people just got smacked around, sometimes roughed up, that sort of thing. One guy in a village near by, he got himself killed. Didn’t want to change his name. He said I’ve been Hassan all my life, my mother named me Hassan, and I’ll die as Hassan. And my daughters and my wife are keeping their names too. He wasn’t taking any shit. They messed him up, probably didn’t mean to kill him, but he died anyway. In Isperikh up the road, there was this boy, a famous wrestler, he gathered a band of friends and stood up to the militia. They beat them up, then they sent in the tanks. Ten tanks, twenty tanks, just for a few guys. In another village, the mayor gave the Turks carnations with their new passports – a red carnation for each new Bulgarian name. Or chocolates. Flowers and chocolates from Mother Bulgaria.’ He chuckles.