Street Without a Name (7 page)

The world was a geography lesson to us. Clusters of sounds. Coloured patches in the atlas. Radio static. But the order of things was permanently upset in 1984, when my father was granted permission to spend six months as a research fellow at the University of Delft in faraway Holland. It was his first trip west of the Berlin Wall. It was the longest we had been separated as a family since his two-year military service. My mother pined for him, and because he couldn’t afford to call us and we couldn’t call abroad, we sent him a voice-letter on a cassette, via an acquaintance who was also Holland-bound. My mother recorded her messages late at night, and although she stoically didn’t cry, her voice sounds strangely broken on that tape.

He sent back photographs of futuristic-looking buildings, and
brick houses along grey canals, and bikes, forests of bikes. He sent photos of friendly-looking people of different races – the other visiting fellows – whose curious names he wrote on the backs of photos. He was cheerfully waving at the camera, looking very thin in his big horn-rimmed glasses.

Here he was, my own dad, blending in with these Westerners, these people who had stepped off the pages of my atlas and somehow ended up in Delft, to become his friends. Just like that. I was at once proud and troubled. Proud that we were no less than them. Troubled by the thought that if it was so easy, so natural, if the people on the other side were so friendly, then what exactly was the Wall protecting us from?

It was protecting us from ourselves, as it turned out. That summer, amazingly, my mother was granted permission to visit my father in Holland. It was her first time West of the Berlin Wall, if we don’t count a few visits to Yugoslavia – which, according to the atlas, was east of the Berlin Wall, but for some reason more to the west than East Berlin. It was complicated.

After months of nerve-fraying bureaucratic delay, my mother’s travel visa finally arrived and my sister and I were packed off to spend the summer with our paternal grandparents, Kiril and Kapka, in the provincial town of Pavlikeni.

As far as I was concerned, Pavlikeni had nothing going for it. It had no mountain, no sea, no historic houses, just a factory on the outskirts which made spare parts for trains. It also had a park where the blossoming trees gave me hay fever, and a zoo with scabby animals. The most interesting fact I knew about Pavlikeni was that one of the zoo bears had chewed the fingers of a little boy who had fallen into its cage. The boy had survived, and so he joined the handless Chilean guitarist in my imagination.

Nothing ever happened in Pavlikeni’s huge, empty square, purpose-built for official parades where dignitaries and citizens gathered on days like 9 September, the anniversary of the day in 1944 when the Soviet Army had liberated us from ourselves. The town had one shop, the half-empty Central Universal Store, which sold desolate things like extra-large cotton underpants, brown pantyhose for women with vein problems, and industrial proletarian bras made not so much for women as for female units. My grandmother bought these things, and I felt both ashamed and sorry for her.

From Pavlikeni, Holland seemed like another planet. My parents may as well have gone into space. What if we never saw them again? It didn’t even occur to me to wonder why we, the kids, couldn’t go with them. Everybody knew that you couldn’t very well come and go as you pleased. After all, once an entire family was in the West, they might like it too much. They might want to stay. And everybody knew this was something defectors did. We weren’t defectors, God no! We didn’t even know any defectors.

Meanwhile, in Delft, my father had lost half his body weight saving from his meagre university allowance in order to buy luxury goods for the family. In his little campus flat, he’d been living on fried eggs and filter coffee for six months. A contributing factor to this diet was that fried eggs and coffee were the only things he could actually make. But for my mother’s arrival, he’d prepared a feast: pork chops and salad, and even a bottle of cheap wine.

As a fellow computer specialist, my mother visited the university. And it was here, in the university toilets, that she broke down. It wasn’t the supernaturally clean streets, the tidy bike lanes, the smiley people, but the university toilets that tipped her over from stunned awe into howling despair.

Now, there is something I must explain about Bulgarian public toilets. First, they were generally a hole in the floor, Turkish-style. Secondly, and more importantly, they were the ante-chambers of Hell. Wherever you were, however desperate your bladder and bowel situation, you held it in. You didn’t eat, you didn’t drink, you didn’t go, until such time as a home toilet became available. At school, at university, at work, in hospital, and especially at railway stations, toilets were for dire emergencies only. And it showed.

If public toilets could be considered barometers of national self-esteem, then it was safe to say that the nation had none. But if they could be considered yet another tool of the State apparatus, it is safe to say that the State didn’t like its citizens enough to clean the citizens’ public toilets. It wanted its citizens to be publicly smeared with private shame. It wanted to break you with sheer excremental brutishness.

My mother had experienced the toilets of hospitals after giving birth, during kidney surgery, during her mother’s hospitalization with cancer. She had endured the toilets at the Central Institute of Computational Technology, and the toilets at freezing railway stations. And now there she stood, in the sparkling, perfumed, pink-toilet-papered, flower-arranged, mirrored, white marble toilet of Delft University, clean as a surgery theatre, gilded as an opera hall, bigger than our apartment in Youth 3, and she cried.

My father’s Dutch colleague, who was waiting for her in his office, became worried after a while and knocked on the door. ‘Are you OK?’ She wasn’t. But even with enough English, she couldn’t have explained her particular affliction to the well-meaning Dutchman in corduroy trousers.

Her next nervous collapse occurred in a department store, where she and my father had gone to buy things for us, the kinds of things
that in Sofia were only available in Korekom, special dollar shops frequented by foreigners, Party officials, and those with connections. My sister and I only ever enjoyed one thing from Korekom: a small chocolate egg each on the occasion of having our tonsils removed.

A note about Bulgarian shops in the seventies and eighties: they weren’t actually shops, not in the conventional sense of the word. They were unheated ground-floor rooms with shelves on which something may – or may not, depending on the day – be displayed, and perhaps even sold, if you could bear to queue up, fight with other citizens, and emerge battered but triumphant, clutching a pair of shoes, a kilogram of Cuban oranges, or a tub of margarine. This is why my mother became, early on, an expert tailor. She made most of our clothes, and her own. She couldn’t bear to dress us in what she described as ‘orphanage clothes’. But some things she couldn’t make – shoes, for example, or knitwear.

Shopping, like most unpleasant things except fixing leaky cars and tiling bathrooms, was a woman’s job. As a result, my father couldn’t understand why I sometimes wore ugly black shoes with laces, fit for a senior Party functionary, instead of something more girly and cheerful; why my sister wore a coat a size too big one winter; why my mother gave him, just before Holland, a fuzzy red jumper the colour of a road accident. It’s not as if she didn’t have taste. It’s not as if they didn’t have money.

No, it was the shops that had neither taste nor money, just like the State that owned them and kept them half-empty. That way, the citizens were grateful when something – anything – was released. The operational phrase was ‘let out on the market’. They have let out Cuban oranges this week! They have let out men’s jumpers! They have let out red children’s boots in the Central Universal Store!

I want new boots, my five-year-old sister declared, sick of wearing my old clothes and shoes, so off we went, to buy boots for Assia. The Central Universal Store was not universal, but it was central, and it was, occasionally, a store. It stood in a massive, multi-storeyed stone building, next door to the Communist Party HQ. The avuncular portraits of Lenin and Georgi Dimitriov looked down disapprovingly on the materialistic mothers of Sofia who flocked here desperately whenever something was let out. The State only let out a limited number of each item, and you had to fight for it.

That day, half of Sofia’s mothers fought for red boots while a handful of distressed-looking militiamen tried to hold the crowds back from the shoe counter, to prevent small children being crushed to death. By the time we arrived, children were already crying, scared for their dishevelled mothers and sensing disappointment on the boot front. My mother took one look at this scene, and quietly told Assia that she might have to do without new boots that winter. But luck was on our side: a woman had grabbed two different sizes for her child, just in case, and gave my mother the spare one, just the right size. My sister – who still remembers those boots twenty years later – walked out in her red boots, along with several hundred other children. Together, they formed a rag-tag army of little red-booted soldiers marching across the empty parade square between the Central Universal Store and the Party HQ.

Which is why, when my mother stood in the children’s section of the departmental store in Delft, and saw shelf upon shelf of children’s boots, all different colours and shapes, sizes for everybody, and not a single harassed woman or sobbing child in sight, she suddenly felt unwell.

And when she stood in the men’s clothes section, where jumpers of
every colour under the sun were folded and stroked by the pale hands of shop assistants, and she remembered her triumph with that fuzzy-red jumper wrenched from the clutches of some greedy woman buying in bulk, and then the quiet distaste of my father with his ugly present, she suddenly felt like throwing up.

My father, also overcome by this orgy of abundance, and sweating in his fuzzy-red jumper, helped her down the escalators and out of the store, and they stepped into the tidy street where people on bicycles breezed past them, and they held each other for a while.

My parents returned home triumphant and laden with presents. It looked like they’d smuggled back the entire contents of Holland’s department stores. Our apartment in Youth 3 was transformed into a Dutch doll’s house: canvas blinds in our bedroom, printed with little pig-tailed girls. Pink pens and pencils on our desks. In the living-room, an enormous silver Phillips TV with a remote control and a matching silver Phillips stereo with a double cassette-player. What’s this? My five-year-old sister picked up the remote control. My father showed her the plus and minus volume buttons, and said ‘this one is for fat, and this one is for thin’. My sister kept pressing on the plus button. It doesn’t work, she declared, it’s not making me fat.

They brought records of Western pop music you couldn’t buy in Bulgaria, like Barry Manilow and a two-record album
The Best of The Beatles
– finally, twenty years late, my father could listen to his favourite band. A pair of tiny wooden clogs, a gift from my father’s Dutch colleague, which took pride of place in our living-room. A tin of salted, peeled peanuts. We had peanuts, of course, but they were unprocessed and sold on street stalls. Someone in Holland had shelled, peeled and salted these peanuts especially for us. A giant packet of
raisins. There were no raisins in Bulgaria, only grapes. Next, an electric blue T-shirt for me with a girl doing aerobics printed on it, and orange trousers with multiple pockets, in which I felt ultra-cool. In fact, wearing these clothes made me feel so obviously Western that I imagined the envious eyes of all Sofia were on me.

My parents had bought nothing for themselves except the records, but they looked happy to be back – at least my father did, even if he was very thin. My mother seemed a bit sad, a bit subdued, which I assumed was my father’s fault, as usual. ‘So what is it like there?’ I asked them.

‘It’s another world,’ my mother said.

‘But it’s not that much better,’ my father added cheerfully. ‘They’re just normal people. OK, they have more material things than us, but otherwise their lives are not that different.’

‘Of course they are,’ my mother insisted. ‘Whether we like it or not, they
are
different. They think differently. They take so many things for granted. They have rights, they demand things… They live in another world.’

I realized that it wasn’t my father’s fault; it was Holland that had made my mother sad, despite all the beautiful things they had bought there.

It was almost as if my parents had traded something in, as if they had crossed some Styx to reach a mythical land, and brought back otherworldly gifts. But in return they had left behind their shadows. And even if my father pretended otherwise, I knew there was something wrong with this exchange. But what was it?

I found the terrible answer to this question the following year, when my father’s well-meaning Dutch colleague in corduroy trousers
brought his family to visit us. They wanted to see the Bulgarian mountains, they declared on the phone, they wanted to go camping with us.

Feverish preparations began. My parents took time off work. My mother bought provisions. My father lay under the Skoda for an entire weekend, fixing a leak. They started asking around for a tent. A colleague of my father’s offered them his. It’s small and not very pretty, he said apologetically. It’s actually a Russian military tent. Black. Oh it’ll be fine, my parents said, it will do the trick. After all, the Dutch will be in a tent too.

But they weren’t. They arrived in an enormous, brand-new white campervan. The neighbourhood kids surrounded it, not daring to touch it, their mouths agape. Their fathers came out from beneath their Trabants to gaze sorrowfully at this bird of automobile paradise. A UFO had landed in Youth 3.

The Dutch emerged from their vessel. They were bright, happy people in pastel colours, bouncing in squeaky new Adidas trainers. My father’s colleague Hans was enormously tall and white-blond from his eyebrows down to the hairs on his hands. His wife Hannah was plump and practical-looking, like a milkmaid with a crew cut. Their daughter Elke was tall and spindly, with tooth-braces – like my sister – and long blonde hair, unlike anybody I knew. She played with pink and blue rubber horses that had long blond hair too. She gave my sister a rubber monkey, again with blond hair. In return, we gave her the most prized specimens from our paper napkin and stamp collections. There was nothing else we could give her without losing face.