We moved slowly along Tsar Osvoboditel. We had already passed the university, where in the laps of the statues of the founding brothers, scholarly and distinguished in their chairs, protesters had placed identical OSTAVKA signs. Skaters sloped up and down metal ramps in the Knyazheska Garden, and behind them rose the monument to the Soviet army, at the top of which huge cast-iron soldiers raised their rifles to the sky. It was pure Communist kitsch but for all that impressive, especially with the light waning, the mountains a jagged dark ring at the horizon, it was one of my favorite views in Sofia. The chants were starting up in earnest, they began at the front of the march and traveled backward, almost antiphonal, the three syllables of ostavka moving up and down the line. There was an angrier chant aimed at the socialists, cherveni boklutsi, red trash—there was a coalition government but the socialists had taken the brunt of the protesters’ anger, as they usually did; they weren’t really socialists at all, I’d heard people say, they were just the Communist Party rebranded. But each time this chant rose up it died down quickly, it couldn’t get any traction. S. told me that his sign was inspired by this chant, which sometimes became cherveni pedali, red faggots, among the angrier groups of protesters, he had heard it almost every night he had marched. But the mood now wasn’t angry at all, people passed bottles of wine and beer over the heads of children. I said goodbye to S. and the others, wishing them luck, and drifted among the crowd, which was easy to do, little groups of friends hung together but otherwise there was plenty of space between marchers. The protests were organized online, on Facebook and Twitter, and many of the signs were marked with hashtags, #ostavka and #mirenprotest, peaceful protest, giving me the eerie sense of being on- and offline at once. JOURNALISTS! one sign read in English, TELL THE WORLD WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE. A sense of bewilderment and grievance had grown as the days passed; how is this not news, my students asked me, why doesn’t anyone care, and I was at a loss to answer them, except that it was the season of uprisings, of the Arab Spring and Taksim Square, protests that were larger and more violent. There was only so much attention to go around, I supposed, it ran out before it could reach Bulgaria.
At Orlov Most, the protesters turned onto the boulevard that runs alongside the canal. This left much of the bridge free, and protesters had set up a little carnival there, coloring with chalk on the pavement, painting flags on children’s cheeks. At the far end of the bridge a man with a tuba played a jaunty bass line as another man, in a T-shirt and jeans and an NYC baseball cap, chanted or sang; I couldn’t quite catch the words, but whatever they were they made the people gathered around him laugh and cheer. I paused to watch them, leaning against the rail of the bridge (the Perlovska passed a couple of meters below, a muddy stream), when I felt a hand tentative on my shoulder. I startled a little, I had been lost in my thoughts, and M. smiled at me apologetically when I turned. But I was happy to see her, I surprised myself by greeting her with a hug, though I almost never hugged my students; I could see that she was surprised too, surprised and pleased, she was smiling when I pulled away. She was a senior, a short, lovely girl with auburn hair that hung in curls around her cheeks, a serious student, though she didn’t care much for literature; her heart was in science, she said, in the laboratory, in arcane things I couldn’t begin to understand and that she would study next year in Berlin. Gospodine, she said to me now, isn’t this amazing, and she made a gesture that took in everything, the marchers, the tuba, the gray of the bridge, the slow trudge of the Perlovksa, it’s so good that you’re here. The crowd of protesters flowing past the end of the bridge had thinned, and as we approached them to join the march again M. pointed down the stretch of Tsar Osvoboditel we had walked up, where now three figures with push brooms were gathering litter into large plastic bags, which they piled at each corner for pickup. Can you believe it, she said, they’re making sure the city doesn’t have anything to complain about, have you ever seen the streets so clean? It’s so inspiring, what they’re doing, she said. We joined the march again, which was quieter here in the back; most of the shouting was ahead of us, the drums at the front of the crowd were a distant sound. The tuba on the bridge blurted a few last notes, then stopped. I’ve come here every day, M. said, walking beside me, it makes me so happy to be here. Some people walking nearby began shouting Ostavka, picking up a chant that had migrated from the front of the march, and M. joined them for a few rounds, looking at me a little sheepishly. I didn’t join in, I hadn’t joined in any of the chants, even though I felt moved to; it wasn’t my country, I kept saying to myself, it wasn’t my place, but I was sorry when M. fell silent too. We walked a little faster, moving back into the middle of the boulevard, headed toward NDK, the Palace of Culture. One side of the street was lined with apartment buildings, the gray of their façades broken by large flags draped from the balconies, on almost all of which people stood watching, elderly men and women, many of them waving, as if to say they would be with us if they could. On the other side of us the trees lining the canal were catching the last of the light, the new leaves incandescent, Sofia was more beautiful to me then than I had ever seen it.
There’s never been anything like this, M. said then, I mean maybe in 1989 but nothing I’ve ever seen. Something’s really happening, I feel like I’m part of something, not just here but something bigger. It’s the same as what’s happening in Taksim Square, in Brazil, the Arab Spring, something is happening, something real, I think there’s a chance for things really to change. I felt this too, it wasn’t to challenge her that I asked what she thought that change would be. She shrugged. I’m not sure, she said, but I feel like we’ll figure it out. She paused. I feel powerful in a way I never have before, she said, and then she glanced at me and laughed, I feel like one of the opalchentsi on Shipka. These were Bulgarian volunteers who fought with the Russians against the Ottomans, there was a poem about them by Ivan Vazov that every Bulgarian knew; I had heard a poet declaim it once, drunk at a dinner party, the room quiet with reverence. I feel the power of the people, she said gingerly, cringing at the cliché. Then she laughed again, pointing, and I saw that ahead of us a group of women were dancing on the sidewalk, their hair wet, their sundresses clinging to their bodies, and several stories above them an elderly man, shirtless and bald, his skin hanging loose around his frame, held a garden hose, pointing it up and half blocking the end with his thumb so that water fell down like rain. It was his gift to us, a chance to cool down, though most of the marchers avoided it, leaving it to the young women, who would be cold soon enough; the heat was fading, even on warm days the nights could be cool. It was an instant allegory, youth and age, Hephaestus and the Graces. And then my mind shuffled to the side a step and I thought of the water cannons in Taksim Square, of the luck that had held here so far. M. turned her head as we passed them, then looked back at me, smiling. My parents don’t like that I come, she said, they don’t like the government but they’re afraid of violence, they’re afraid I’ll get in trouble with the police. But it’s not like that at all, she said, people aren’t angry, there’s so much joy here, she said, they don’t understand that, have you ever seen so much joy? It makes me wish I weren’t leaving, she went on, my whole life I’ve been dying to get out of here and now I feel like I want to stay. This made me remember the taxi driver and what he had said about the Changes, how he had wasted his life for an idealism that had curdled, but I didn’t say this, I put my arm around her and squeezed her shoulder, another breach of decorum. I mean, look at that, she said after I dropped my arm, and she pointed at a sign being carried by a man just in front of us. The crowd had bunched and slowed as people climbed the stairs that led from the boulevard up to the plaza at NDK. I almost never came to NDK this way, I always circled around to the other side. I only climbed these stairs once a year, I realized, for the Pride march, when the organizers used the stairs for a security check; we opened our bags and showed our IDs and had colored plastic bands attached to our wrists, so that the police could tell us apart from
the protesters who would line our path. M. was pointing at a poster that showed a bearded man’s face, and beneath it in block letters the name Vazov, the writer who had given M. her opalchentsi, and beside that another face, this one labeled Botev, another beloved poet. There was a whole group of them marching together, each with the face of a writer: there were Elin Pelin and Petko Slaveykov, and my favorite of the classic writers, Yordan Yovkov, the most elegant, he should be better known in English. Isn’t that beautiful, M. said, tell me, where else do they march with their poets, and I had to admit that I didn’t know, certainly not in America, I said, that’s something you would never see there, and she smiled, I could see this gratified her.
We had talked about those writers in one of my classes earlier that week. It was a conversation class, which the Ministry required though it was useless for our students, who were fluent and spoke English all day; we only met for an hour once a week, but it was a struggle to fill the time. I had asked a few of them to choose a short video, anything they wanted, something they could talk about and get the class talking too. We had just watched something about Bulgaria, a promotional clip from the tourism board, which had sweeping aerial shots of mountains and countryside, of fields of sunflower and lavender, and then curious historical reenactments, men in medieval armor riding on horseback, women in nineteenth-century folk dress dancing the horo, all of it to a soundtrack of bagpipes and drums. It makes me feel proud, the student who brought it in said, there are so many problems in Bulgaria, but this, I don’t know, it makes me feel proud for my country. She sat down then, quickly, relieved—she wasn’t in my regular English class, I taught her that single period and didn’t know her well, and she was quiet, one of the students I had to encourage to speak. She had barely settled in her chair when another student started talking, a girl I knew well and whom I never had to encourage; it was the opposite with her, I had to rein her in at times, which was my only job in that class, to hold the reins, not to steer them in any particular direction but to try to equalize engagement. This student was bursting to speak, it was all she could do not to interrupt. I’m sorry, she said, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to diss your video—her English was the best in the class, she was a hair’s breadth from sounding like any American kid—I don’t mean to diss your video, but I’m so sick of this nostalgia bullshit. Sorry, she said, glancing at me, though she knew I didn’t care if they cursed in class, sorry, but all this men-on-horseback crap, what does that have to do with Bulgaria, I mean with Bulgaria now. The hair’s breadth made a difference; there’s a kind of uncanny valley in language, competency can overshoot the mark, so that however perfectly we speak a foreign language speaking it too casually feels like imposture, I don’t know why. I like horses, a boy interjected, getting a laugh, and she rolled her eyes. No, really, she said, this is the problem, when we want to be proud we think of the natsionalno vuzrazhdane, or we think of Bulgariya na tri moreta, we think of Tsarevets. She was right, I thought, though I didn’t say anything; they were at the core of what my students thought of as their national identity, the nineteenth-century liberation and Bulgaria’s medieval greatness, when its borders had touched three seas, tri moreta, a phrase the far right used to stoke nationalist feeling and that adorned tourist T-shirts at every cheap souvenir shop. But that doesn’t say anything about how we live now, she said, it’s all just Kill the Ottomans, it doesn’t tell us anything about what it means to be Bulgarian now. The temperature rose a little at this; some of the students leaned forward in their seats, which were situated around a group of desks we had pushed together to make a kind of conference table, I wanted them to look at each other as they spoke. What does, then, a boy asked, what do you think does tell us about Bulgaria now, and another boy said Berbatov, the soccer star, which made half of the class laugh and the other half groan. Nothing, my student said, raising her voice, nothing does, that’s our problem, that’s why the protests won’t go anywhere, we have no idea how to be Bulgarian in the real world, we have no idea how we should be. The temperature rose still further at this, a number of voices spoke at once, making noises of protest or skepticism, come on, I heard, and gluposti, nonsense, and then my student started to speak again in defense. I had let the reins go too slack, though I wanted to watch things play out the conversation was too hot, a couple of students were looking my way, I needed to intervene.
Poetry! I exclaimed, sitting up straight in my chair, which had the effect I wanted; they all turned to me, silent, less obedient than bewildered. I looked at them a moment, a kind of caesura, and then I repeated it, Poetry, as though it were the obvious answer to a question, the answer they already knew. That’s what poets can do, I said, poets and artists; they give us ideas to buy into, for whole countries to buy into. Like Whitman, I said, whom they had all studied, he was part of the tenth-grade curriculum; my own tenth-graders were reading him now, Song of Myself, and I found it was a different poem because of the protests, which became the context for our reading, though I had read it dozens of times I read it differently now. Think of what he wants to do in that poem, I said, and when the country was at war with itself, absolutely broken; he wants to make an image of America anyone can buy into. Like that miraculous section, and I used that word, miraculous, I was getting excited, I was getting swept up in Whitman as I always did, it was what I loved about him and what I mistrusted, too, the feelings he could arouse that could swamp judgment. That section where all he does is name things, I said, well, not things, people, it’s just a list, he wants it to include everyone, he wants to find a place for everyone. An equal place, I went on, though I was talking too much now, and a place in his affection, too. There are those wonderful moments he puts in parentheses, like a whisper, do you remember, where he tells us he loves the person he’s just named. That’s what he thought democracy was, I said, a poem that named things and made an occasion for you to love them; he wanted to stitch America up, I said, he wanted to break all the divisions down. There’s only one time he does the opposite, it’s in that same list, where he puts a prostitute right next to the president, do you remember? None of them did, but they were paying attention, less interested maybe in the poem or what I was saying than in my excitement, which they observed like some freakish natural phenomenon, I thought. There’s a crowd making fun of the prostitute, I said, and that’s the one time Whitman separates himself, he says they laugh at you, but I do not laugh at you. And that’s the problem, I hurried on, that’s the problem with democracy, the danger of crowds, it’s the problem with the protests, too: how do you take a crowd and turn it into a populace, how do you take the voice of a crowd and turn it into the vox populi, the voice of a people. I glanced at the clock and saw that class was almost over, the bell would ring soon. People have to come together without losing their ability to think, Whitman calls it a “thoughtful merge,” the whole idea of democracy depends on it. And look, I don’t think a poem can do what he thought it could. He wanted his poem to be America, like magic, he wanted his poem to fix everything that was wrong with the country. Which was a lot! I said, trying to lighten the tone, which still is a lot, but what he did was to make an image of America that still feels like something I want to buy into, it still feels like the best image of ourselves. I stopped then, not knowing how to go on, and I was grateful when the bell rang, it let me raise my voice and say So go be poets, which released them from my overheated feeling and gave them permission to laugh.
The sun had fully set now, and between the streetlamps in the park at NDK there was utter darkness. We passed the entrance to the underground passageway, where there was a metro stop now, still new, and also the toilets where men went for sex, where I had spent so many weekend evenings; walking with my student I felt the weird dissonance of my private and public lives. M. had been walking quietly, listening to the sound of the drums that drifted back to us from the front of the march. People weren’t shouting as we walked through the park at NDK, the mood was restrained, contemplative, a little respite from
the noise. Some people had let their signs drop in the dark, tucking them under their arms, but others still held them aloft, and I saw that several people were wearing glow bracelets, little rings of light that hovered over their heads. I asked M. if she usually came with friends, if there were many students marching from the school. Not so many, she said, and not my friends, usually I come alone. Lots of parents are scared, she said, and anyway we have so much work for school, it’s hard to have time for anything else. But this is important, she went on, it’s important for my country, it’s important that the young people are here. I don’t know, she said, some of my friends say it’s stupid to come because we’re leaving so soon, but I don’t feel like that, it’s still my country, she said, even if I’m leaving. Maybe I’ll come back if things get better, I would like to come back. That’s the real problem, I said, agreeing with her, so many people leave, so many of the best people, it’s hard for things to get better when so many people leave. We had crossed onto Vitosha now, where there was more light, I could see her face when she turned to look at me. Do you think we’re wrong to leave, she asked me, do you think we should stay? I hesitated before answering. It wasn’t my place to answer, of course, and I told her this, and also I had left my own country, where there were so many problems, where I had done so little, really, to stand against them. But no, I said finally, I don’t think you’re wrong. You only have one life, I said, and I want you to be happy, I want you to go where you can live most fully, and even as I spoke I could hear the argument against each of my phrases canceling out what I said, I didn’t know what I thought. But you’re going back, M. said, you must be excited about that, to be going home. I’m not going home, I said, what would that even mean, I’m going back to America but I’m not going home. And maybe I won’t stay, I said, I don’t know, I like living abroad. And then I threw up my hands, I don’t know anything, I said, don’t listen to anything I say.
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