A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  The heat was thickening. Just outside Dolina, Jamie dropped a large bottle of water, spilling half its contents. Further on, feeling dehydrated, he flung his bicycle to the ground and flopped down under a tree on a scrubby piece of no man’s land at the edge of Cervenți. I fed him biscuits until his head stopped reeling and we could carry on to the village shop. We bought supplies and sat down next to a large concrete building that also seemed to function as some kind of Communist-era municipal hall. At another village we rested outside a municipal building that was a clone of the one in Cervenți – with the same large windows upstairs, presumably serving as a function room. Male youths loitered round the shop, looking bored: unemployment was high in this part of Bulgaria.

  With relief we reached the town of Vetrino, where there was a bank in the dug-up square – we were almost out of cash. Every village or town in Bulgaria seemed to have a square that, like the municipal halls, had a disproportionate sense of importance in an otherwise ramshackle settlement. We lingered for fridge-cold drinks and ice cream. I didn’t have the energy to cycle any further, but there was no accommodation here, so we pushed on to higher ground where we knew there was a guesthouse in the village of Nevsha, stuffed into the hole of a hillside. It didn’t matter that it was eight miles off our route, and that we’d have to cycle up into the hills, it was still preferable to wild camping.

  Jamie took a left turn onto a narrow lane that climbed steadily, table-top escarpments stepping the plains in the distance. Beyond, the land fell away to Varna and the Black Sea. As the sun dropped through the sky, its low-level rays washing the countryside in a dusty grey-white, we followed the road along the base of the hillside, asphalt giving way to the scrubby fields below. There was no sound as we pedalled other than the rustle of vegetation. It felt as if we had left civilisation far behind – until we heard the hum of traffic and crossed the A2 motorway leading to the coast. Finally, the road curved and dropped steeply to reveal Nevsha.

  There was nothing to indicate a guesthouse – just a few houses hidden behind high walls and single-storied houses of exposed brick and breeze block and sagging roofs, mingling with more pristine paint-fresh homes. We asked a couple where the guesthouse was. The man searched in his mobile and shook his head. We continued steeply downhill into an increasingly dilapidated village devoid of life. Some buildings were collapsing into the earth, while others lay shuttered, or half-abandoned, roof tiles gathered at their feet like a discarded slip. ‘Are you sure it was this village?’ I asked Jamie. It was beginning to look like we’d have to find a sheltered spot on the hillside.

  We turned our bikes and climbed back up through the upper part of the village. A man appeared from a house further up the hill and pointed to a high wall near the crest of the hill. We weren’t hopeful, but when we reached the wall and pushed open a door and shouted hello, a small rounded woman with raven hair bounded out of the outdoor kitchen terrace, closely followed by a Labrador with matching black coat. She strode across the lawn of the garden, wiping her hands on her sides before stretching out a hand. ‘Welcome. Yes indeed, this is Villa Elma. Yes, we have rooms free. Please, sit down. Have a drink first and we’ll show you the rooms.’

  I sat down at the table under the covered terrace and breathed out.

  *

  ‘You have to come and look,’ said Martin, our Dutch landlord and a farmer who owned the guesthouse with his Bulgarian partner, Amelia. ‘He just left everything behind. Everything!’

  Martin limped across the lawn, slightly bent despite his strong build, one shoulder ahead of the other as if he’d lifted one too many potato sacks in his life. He moved with an impressive pace and energy in spite of it. Martin had a finger in all sorts of agricultural business pies (or fields), including a farm in Zeeland, as well as consultancy and investment work. He had lived in Bulgaria for years, working with various ex-Soviet countries in farming, and he spoke Russian. Martin met Amelia through an online dating agency and they were well matched, for she was also a successful businesswoman and accountant. The guesthouse property in Nevsha had been another investment. They’d bought the house, built by an Englishman, and the grounds that came with it, in order to build a larger villa alongside the original house. Martin and Amelia lived in the Englishman’s house and rented out the tastefully furnished rooms in the new villa.

  ‘This way,’ Martin said, leading me past the swimming pool and into the older house. He beckoned me into the living room and swept his arm around the room. ‘All of this belonged to the Englishman. Every piece of furniture, even the contents of the drinks cabinet here.’ He opened it up to show me the rows of spirits and pulled out a bottle of brandy. ‘Would you like it?’

  I wondered if Martin offered all his guests a gift from the previous owner.

  He opened a drawer in the dated wall cabinet. ‘Look, here. All these CDs are his! He didn’t even take his music collection.’

  ‘Why did he leave so suddenly?’

  ‘I think he was ill. He just left with two suitcases and the clothes on his back. Maybe there’s more to it. Perhaps he’d been unlucky in love. Who knows.’ Martin closed the drawer again. ‘I contacted him to ask if he wanted any of his stuff. He wrote back and said he had no need for any of it – that I could do with it as I wanted.’ Martin grinned. ‘So we just live with all of the Englishman’s belongings. It’s like living in someone else’s house … or in a museum.’

  *

  Jamie and I spent a second day in the villa. Even at this higher altitude, the heat was intense. I sat on a sun lounger and watched house martins glide over the surface of the swimming pool, searching for insects. They swooped low over the water, both precision-bombers and ballerinas of the sky. Their wings, feet and beaks barely disturbed the surface, only occasionally causing a delicate ripple as they snatched at the flies hovering over the pool.

  Observing the birds, I recalled the house martins at Oxford Island beside Lough Neagh. I’d gone there with my father just after the chironomid flies had hatched in their thousands, maybe millions. The midges were notorious around the Lough. In the breeding season, they swarmed the shores of the water, driving the Lough folk insane. I’d run through the insects screaming, causing them to rise up in a cloud of dizzy black. I learned to shut my mouth after swallowing a mouthful of the tiny creatures. They were harmless though, for the unfortunate mouthless insects could neither bite nor feed and were doomed to a handful of mating days before perishing.

  On that visit with my father, there had been an infestation of the midges. I had never seen anything like it: the sky was black, while the surfaces of information boards and bird hides were covered in the writhing insects. The air was thick with house martins, too, swooping and bombing – a flash of black, a swipe of underbelly white. What a banquet for the house martins – more food than they could ever gorge on. Later, I’d returned there with Tom, the eaves of the newly built Kinnego Discovery Centre drooping nests made from mud pellets and compacted together with grass, hair and feather found by the industrious house martins.

  After my father had moved into the care home, I’d taken him back to the Lough. ‘What’s that bird?’ I’d asked him, wanting to rouse him from his inner world. He shifted his head slowly as if the weight of his thoughts were too heavy for his body and answered in a flat monotone voice before retreating again. Not long after, the psychiatrist called me into his office.

  ‘It’s not looking good for your father. There are some quite serious issues here.’ He pushed a piece of paper over to me. ‘Look at this clock I asked him to draw for me. The numbers are muddled – back to front, mixed up. This should be a simple exercise.’

  I recognised the light, economical pen marks as my father’s. He’d drawn pictures for me when I was small: sketchy, three-dimensional houses, birds and animals. Cats. He had the makings of an artist, but he never did much more than doodle. After his depression set in, I gave him paints and an art pad for Christmas, hoping they would help to bring him back to life. Bu
t they sat on the living room sideboard untouched. I felt angry he had chosen to leave us, despite all our efforts. As if there had been a choice for him – I, of all people should have understood this.

  ‘It’s not safe for him to be at home,’ the psychiatrist had said. ‘There are parts of the brain that are damaged beyond repair, dead.’ He spoke with a clinical precision, his voice cold. ‘Some of his behaviour is bizarre, anti-social – that part of the brain is badly damaged. He needs to be in permanent care.’

  Now, here at Nevsha, the house martins skimmed elegantly over the water. My father would have enjoyed these streamlined birds when he was still strong and bright and flawed and human – before he began to fade in and out, becoming increasingly distant. We first lost him the year Tom and I got married, when depression shut him down completely. The hospital staff told us the shock treatment would jumpstart him back to life. It didn’t work, although they promised us it would; promised us that even though it was an extreme treatment, and yes, seems cruel, it would bring him back to us.

  They were wrong.

  My father came and went like the martins, communicating less and less as the years went on, becoming as dull as tarnished silver. Once, quite unexpectedly, he’d said, ‘That shock treatment: I shouldn’t have had it. My brain doesn’t work properly any more. It’s made me stupid.’

  All afternoon I sat by the pool, watching the house martins flittering in and out of my vision. I had experienced my father’s depression. I could see what it does to a person. I still had to fight the shadows. When I was outside, the darkness slipped away. My depression was diagnosed as moderate, downgraded to mild (by my own reassessment). Now it was barely detectable – but always lurking in the background, threatening to creep up from behind when I thought it gone for good. I’d thrown the pills away and allowed the outdoors to heal me. But I couldn’t spend the rest of my life on the road, could I?

  While the open road was my saviour, my father turned his back on the outside world and his birds. He sat in the shadows, even clothed himself in them. He stopped going out. But it wasn’t a choice. I saw that now. Severe depression is a much greater beast to fight. My father, the man who hated hospitals, realised how desperate things were when he checked himself in. There was nowhere else to go.

  As the sun dropped through the Bulgarian summer sky, I idly wondered what Jamie was doing. I imagined he was indoors, crouched over his phone, lost in his own electronic world. Jamie, my constant companion for this entire spring and summer, would soon be going off to university. When this trip was over, he would dip in and out of my life like the martins by the pool. I had lost my father bit by bit, and I would lose Jamie too. But that was okay. He would migrate south with the house martins, albeit only as far as Wales, not Africa. Life is coming and going, ephemeral and transient. Nothing remains the same. And I knew now I was wrong to reduce my father to one dreadful night in our kitchen that had taken place so long ago.

  8. Stranded in the Balkan Mountains

  The sun was a blood-orange segment on the crest of the hill as we cycled out of Nevsha; its rays a blush spreading out across the curve of the hill as it welcomed another day. At the junction of the slip road it was tempting to drop onto the A2 motorway. After all, the sign forbad tractors, not bicycles, and it would cut down the distance to Provadia. There wouldn’t be much traffic at six in the morning and we could cycle on the hard shoulder. I hesitated, then cycled on, my law-abiding self resisting the temptation.

  In the early morning half-light, we stopped at a village fountain to fill up our water bottles, slyly observed by an elderly man in black trousers and a grey-washed, collarless shirt. He leaned casually against a stone wall, watching us with a mixture of curiosity and wariness, his small eyes almost lost in the bulge of skin above his cheekbones and a half-smile playing across his face. He didn’t speak – and neither did we. It was as if the stillness of dawn demanded the reverential quiet of a dimly lit church.

  As we cycled towards Provadia I was lost in the rhythm of the horse-pulling cart ahead of us when I heard a sharp, metallic clatter that echoed round the hillside. A man flew down the hill, shuddering on a clapped-out bike.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Jamie said, looking after the cyclist in astonishment.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘There were no tyres on his bicycle! He was riding on the metal wheel rim!’

  We settled into a topographic pattern: rise, plateau and drop. The downhills were ecstasy, a respite from the heat – a flow of oxygen that cut through the thick treacle of hot air. And on the plateaus, we could spin the wheels hard enough to at least agitate the atmosphere. But the long slow inclines pushed our body temperatures up, and my face turned an inelegant scarlet.

  We stopped in a layby near Komarevo to eat crisps, replenishing the salt we had lost sweating up the hill, gratefully resting in the shade from the pines at the side of the road. As we stood on the melting tarmac, a puppy emerged from the trees, followed by a second. Then a kitten slipped out from the undergrowth, and another and another, until we were surrounded by skinny cats and the two dogs. The cats meowed and sniffed around the crumbs of crisps that had fallen from our shared bag, disdainful of our unintentional offerings in spite of their hunger. I looked around but could see no buildings – just woodland and fields. Was there a farmhouse hidden from sight? Had the animals been dumped here, unwanted? We would never know.

  I remembered how my father had taken a sack of newborn kittens to the stream at the bottom of the field nearby, grimly pushing the writhing creatures under the water until their mewing ceased. At home, the mother had roamed from room to room, crying in distress as she searched for her babies. I too had felt distressed. ‘Why?’ I had asked my father, but he hadn’t answered. And I’d puzzled over his cruelty, knowing his love for animals. It was the first crack in the harmony of my childhood.

  At the crest of the hill, we stopped on the sweep of a bend to take in the meadow and dark copses that dropped away to Tsonevo Reservoir in the distant haze. The pale body of water curled through the hills, our end-point for the day. We could see our route mapped out in front of us in three dimensions. If we had been birds, we could have swooped down in minutes – or so it felt. As it was, we flew down the hill on our bicycles and on into Dalgopol.

  It seemed nothing could stop us that day as the wheels of our bikes spun through the hills in spite of the heat, but just as we were approaching the reservoir, we heard a sound we knew only too well: the quiet, high-pitched ping of a broken spoke. We thought of returning to Dalgopol to look for a bike shop but our hotel was tantalisingly close. Alternatively, we could forge on through the Balkan Mountains to the town on the other side, less than thirty miles away. After all, Jamie had cycled a good distance with a broken spoke in Romania. Plus, there was a better chance of finding a bike workshop in the bigger town of Aytos. Since it was unlikely there’d be a bicycle repair store in the handful of mountain villages we were cycling through, it would be a risk. Nonetheless we decided to cycle on.

  It was a foolish decision.

  *

  The two sisters at the reservoir hotel filled our palms with fruit from the garden – plums, peaches and pears.

  ‘For you and your son,’ the older sister said.

  ‘For the journey through the mountains,’ the younger sister said, tipping more fruit into our hands. A darker, sharper, sticklike version of her plump sister, she darted around us in tiny birdlike movements, watching to ensure we did not bruise the fruits as we packed them into the panniers of our bicycles.

  Beyond the garden, splashed with blood-red oleander, the early-morning milk of the Tsonevo Reservoir glowed pale in the hills. And, on the skyline, a buttery dawn spread across the Stara Planina, the Old Mountain – the first of the Bulgarian Balkans, where we were heading. As we prepared to leave, the stillness of the waterside garden was only broken by the zing of mosquito and the murmur of distant Bulgarian. Not many passed this way, just a handful of travellers and the
occasional fisherman who preyed on the bream, perch and catfish lurking in the depths of the Tsonevo.

  With the panniers secured, the sisters took it in turn to have their photograph taken with us, then clutched our hands like a pair of fussing grandmothers. They were still shouting their good wishes for the journey as we wheeled our bikes up the stony lane and out of sight.

  On the main road, Jamie nursed his bike around the pot-holes that pocked the tarmac, the wheel delicate and slightly wobbly. To make matters worse, my brake had started to rub against the front wheel. I unclipped it: somehow, I’d manage with just the back brake. I’d have to go easy on the downhills – unfortunate, as there was the long, steep descent into Aytos. To compound all this, I discovered my lowest gear wasn’t working, not great either for the biggest climb of our journey since leaving Rotterdam.

  A defective wheel, brake and gear: it wasn’t the best time to be heading into the Luda Kamchia Gorge and over the Aytos Pass, a wilderness broken only by a handful of scruffy mountain villages. Our mechanical problems, however, were quickly forgotten as we crossed the causeway that sliced above the Tsonevo Reservoir. The sun had just broken the crest of the mountain ridge, flood-lighting the limestone that flanked the reservoir. Beneath us, the banks of the Tsonevo cut a line of symmetry, inverting the sun-warmed limestone in a glassy film of water. The shadows lay deep, the light sharp.

  We cycled on, the loftier railway bridge on the right drew a parallel line with our road, while on the left, chalk-white columns of limestone rose from the far bank of the Tsonevo like giant stalagmites. The ascent was still easy, the air holding onto the moisture from last night’s rainstorm. Thick vegetation dripped dewdrops. I felt the mountains drawing me on, even as I feared the ascent with the Tank.