‘I am sitting in your chair,’ she’d say, referring to my desk chair, ‘and looking at the flowers on the balcony and thinking of you. If you could only see how the flowers are blooming! It’s as if they’re weeping because you left.’
And then, as if shaken by her giddy sense of freedom, she would add in an unnaturally bright tone,
‘Goodness, how empty my life is!’
She had snapped shut almost all of her emotional files. One of them was still slightly open: it was Varna, the city of her childhood and youth. That is why she let the unknown woman from Bulgaria into her realm with such ready warmth.
Mother’s Bedel
1.
Everything was badly organised. Contact with the organisers of the literary gathering ‘Golden Pen of the Balkans’ in Sofia had reached a dead end. They left me to make the reservations and buy the plane ticket myself. At least Aba responded to my emails. The real goal of my trip was to visit Varna. My participation in ‘Golden Pen of the Balkans’ had simply been a handy excuse. Aba replied quickly that she would join me, if I didn’t mind; she had a cousin in Varna she hadn’t seen for years and several friends. I didn’t mind.
Mum wound me up and set me moving in the direction of Varna; she guided me by remote control like a toy, dispatched me to a place she could no longer travel to on her own. Centuries ago the wealthy would send someone else off on the hajj or to the army in their stead, as a bedel, a paid surrogate. I was my mother’s bedel. She said I must look up Petya, her closest friend from childhood and her teenage years. Petya had been stricken by Alzheimer’s, and to make matters worse she was being looked after by her son, an alcoholic. Petya’s address, however, had vanished, strangely, from Mum’s address book.
‘Ask the police,’ Mum insisted.
‘And Petya’s last name?’
‘Well, her husband’s name was Gosho.’
‘His surname?’
A shadow of distress flitted across her face.
‘Fine, I’ll enquire with the police; they will be sure to know,’ I hastened to add.
She did not ask me to seek out my grandmother’s grave. Grandma and my mother’s sister were both buried at the city cemetery in Varna. At one point Mum had let Grandma’s friends also use the gravesite. Graves were, apparently, expensive, and there had been a lot of deaths.
‘I am so foolish. I let them use the grave, and later none of them thanked me,’ she complained.
Neither did she mention Grandpa’s grave. She couldn’t. She didn’t know where exactly he was buried. She had received the death notice too late. Those were hard times, two different countries, there wasn’t much she could have done about it. Except for Petya, who had sunk into dementia, there was no one left in Varna. The main task of my mission as bedel was to take photographs of Varna and show the pictures to Mum on my new laptop. It was my idea to take the pictures, and for that purpose I had purchased a little digital camera.
I asked Aba to reserve a ticket for my flight. At the Bulgarian Airlines office in Amsterdam they explained it would be cheaper to buy the ticket for Varna in Sofia. Aba replied that the flight was very expensive and suggested we go by train. I refused; I had heard all kinds of stories about dilapidated old Bulgarian trains plagued by thieves. I insisted on the plane. Who could bear the prospect of jouncing for seven or eight hours in a bus from Sofia to Varna! She answered politely that the plane would be too expensive for her. She would take the bus, but she had reserved a plane ticket for me. She put me to shame. I agreed, of course, to take the bus, why not. The hours of trundling through the late autumnal Bulgarian countryside would certainly have their charms. We sparred over the hotel. Aba suggested several less expensive versions. I immediately envisioned rundown communist hotels, with broken heating systems, and answered that I preferred a decent hotel in the centre of town and that I didn’t care about the price.
‘I can hardly wait to meet you, you have no idea how much your books have meant to me,’ she added in her email. She insisted she would meet me at the airport. ‘There is really no need, I’ll take a taxi to my mother’s relatives,’ I wrote back. ‘No, no, I will be there to welcome you. You wrote somewhere that a foreign country is a place where there is no one to greet you when you arrive.’ I could not recall where I might have written such a thing, or whether I had, indeed, written those words – even if I had, they now sounded alien to me.
When I arrived at the airport I didn’t see her at first. I looked everywhere in the waiting area, hung around for a while, stood in line to change my euros into levs, then made my way through the waiting area once again, and finally caught sight of a diminutive girl standing pressed in a corner, clutching a nosegay of flowers, watching each passenger coming through the exit gate. At last she caught sight of me. She dashed over and kissed me warmly on the face. Oh, how stupid, I must think she is a total idiot, but she was so sure it would work best to stand right on that spot, because if she were to move, I’d come out and she’d miss me, and from there she had absolutely had the best view, she had sussed it all out, and she couldn’t work out how she’d missed me.
She was petite, slender, so thin that she was slightly hunched over. Her over-sized glasses with frames too large for her tender face (a book worm!) were the first thing to notice on her. She had a spotty complexion masked by a thick layer of foundation, her hair was shoulder length, with a reddish L’Oreal glow. She had an unusually disarming smile. All in all, a little girl, a little Bulgarian girl. I could see at once why my mother had taken such a liking to her.
She immediately asked about Mum, how she was doing, what she was up to, were the pelargoniums on the balcony still blooming? (So, they had planted flowers together on the balcony!) And then she said we must give my mother a call and send her a postcard. We? I was a little startled by her use of the plural. She added that my mother was a marvellous person, that she was the only warm, human contact Aba had had while she was in Zagreb, and she had spent two months there! The young Bulgarian woman was very young, or at least looked young. She could have been my daughter. Her questions about my mother sounded sincere enough, and for that reason she aroused my suspicions all the more. What she had had in common with my ailing old mother puzzled me.
We took a cab. She insisted on seeing me off to my mother’s relatives. She insisted on paying for the cab.
‘And you, where are you going after this?’ I asked her.
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll go on home.’
She seemed reluctant to leave, as if she didn’t know where she was going.
‘I’ll give you a call tomorrow morning. We can discuss what happens next,’ I said, slammed the taxi door, and immediately felt a dull stab of guilt. The taxi moved away. She waved. She was still holding the nosegay of flowers she had clearly forgotten to give me.
2.
‘The hotel is in the centre of town,’ she said confidently.
‘The hotel is next to the train station,’ said the taxi driver.
‘Well, the station is in the centre,’ she added.
The hotel was called the Aqua, and judging by the little map printed on the hotel card it was indeed very close to the train station. Aba, who had obviously failed to inform her cousin or her friends that she was coming, waited quietly by the front desk while I made the arrangements for the room, as if this was something to be expected. This made me bristle, but I had nowhere to go with it. She had me over a barrel, and she made no effort to apologise. She has a cell phone, damn it, I muttered to myself, why doesn’t she call that cousin?
We brought our things up to the room, pulled the joined single beds apart. I pulled back the curtains. Black shadows of loading cranes were outlined against the dark sky. We must be near the port, I thought, but I couldn’t visualise where the port was and where the train station was. I suggested to Aba that we take a walk and find a place to eat. The man at the main desk warned us it was late, and that we’d be hard pressed to find a place to eat so late. I looked at
my watch. It was only ten p.m.
* * *
We wandered through the empty streets. She had no idea where we were either. I began to seethe: everything was wrong. We had travelled for eight hours instead of six, with only one stop along the way. The bus was admittedly a nice one, with screens, and there were movies showing which were not half-bad. I spent the whole ride with my eyes glued to the screen. Aba stared out at the yellowing late-autumn scenes gradually slipping into dusk and ultimately fell asleep. She woke up just as we were arriving in Varna.
The wind was gusting outside and rubbish tossed around on the streets. The town was nightmarish. It bothered me that I hadn’t recognised a single detail. Then we finally caught sight of a little restaurant with lights on so we went in and sat down. I was tired, I wanted us to get something to eat as soon as possible and go back to the hotel. I had decided I’d change hotels the next day, and presumably Aba would go looking for her cousins and friends.
‘Aba, what is the origin of your name?’
She perked up. Her mother had been a fan of the Swedish pop group Abba, which had not been easy in communist Bulgaria; there were many shortages at the time, and one of them was vinyl LPs. Aba was born just when Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Anni-Frid were performing for the last time, perhaps it was at the very moment when they were belting out their last ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ on a stage somewhere in Japan. She was born in March 1980 and her mother chose to call her Aba. They wrote the name with a single ‘b’ in the Registry of Births, which they would have done anyway, with her mother’s intervention or without it. Her father was a Hungarian by background, but her parents had long since divorced.
‘If Mum had been into Nabokov instead of Abba, I’d be Ada now, not Aba.’
‘They both sound perfectly fine to me,’ I said.
The Nabokov thing touched me; it was a naively pretentious comment. I smiled. And she smiled. Without a smile on her face she looked older and darker. Her smile, clearly, was her strong point. Yes, she could have been my daughter. Back then I, too, had had a weak spot for Abba.
‘What are you engaged in at present? Any employment?’ I said, rather stiffly.
‘Why so formal?’ she asked, edgily. ‘Aren’t we friends?’
‘Are you a student at the Slavic Department?’
‘Oh, no. I’m finished!’ she said, importantly.
‘What are you pursuing now?’
‘You’ll never guess!’ she said.
We could not get beyond the stiltedness.
‘You were saying?’
‘Just now I’m deep into folklore studies.’
‘And the doctorate and all that? You’ve completed it?’
‘Piece of cake!’ she said.
If there was something I could not abide, it was folklore and the people who studied folklore. Folklorists were inane, they were academic infants. They snuggled into their academic nooks and crannies, quiet, in nobody’s way. In my day, through all those zones so rich in folklore – Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania – it was mostly folklorists nosing around. They were interested in only two things: folklore and communism at the level of folklore (political jokes, chastushkas, ganga singing, communist legends). These days I could no longer swear that there was anything more to it, but at the time their interest struck me as intellectually second-rate. Domestic folklorists were generally closet nationalists, as became abundantly clear later on, once the hatred had surfaced. Then the war came. Foreigners, western Europeans and Americans imposed their academic colonialism without risk: there was no danger that the ‘natives’ would boil them and eat them for dinner. That is why so many foreigners, despite the rich pickings of Renaissance literature, the baroque, Modernism, the allure of the Avant-garde, even Postmodernism, latched on to folklore and would not let go. When Yugoslavia came undone, there were many disappointed, perceiving the collapse as a plot levelled against them, personally. The lively international meetings suddenly vanished, where the šljivovica had flowed in streams and the lambs had turned blithely on the spit; there were no more embroidered towels, naive painters, fervent circle dances, ethno-souvenirs and chatty local intellectuals who always had time for every one and every subject. Once the war had erupted, there were new ‘folklorists’ who hurried to this new zone, and the hatred became an engaging field for study in anthropology, ethnology and folklore. From the legend of Kraljević Marko, they moved on to the latter-day legends of murderers, criminals and mafia bosses, the Serbian hero Arkan and his maiden Ceca, and the Croatian hero and playboy Ante Gotovina. The victims were of little interest to anyone.
‘Well, folklore studies certainly are a discipline,’ I said, to be kind.
I had her pegged, she was a bookworm, she had finished her university studies and earned her doctorate in record time. Maybe one day she would become Bulgarian minister for culture. When the need arises in countries like this, folklore scholars are at the top of the list, I thought.
‘Where do you work?’
‘I’m in transition at the moment,’ she said, placing special emphasis on her answer. It was a little signal to me, as if she were cajoling me with the quote. In one of my texts I had spoken of the newly coined euphemisms of our age. To be in transition meant to be out of work. I pretended not to notice. These occasional quotes of hers grated on my ear. She was using the wrong tone.
‘And now you’re looking for a job?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘In Sofia?’
The question was pointless; I was stretching the conversation out like chewing gum. Luckily the dish we’d ordered had arrived. I noticed that Aba had ordered the same thing I ordered.
On our way out of the restaurant I recognised where we were. An empty square with a fountain in the middle stood before us. I hadn’t noticed it at first, probably because I was so tired. There was a theatre on the square and some ungainly exemplar of communist architecture, the municipal offices, or something similar. My eye caught sight of a neon sign for the City Hotel and I hurried over to it. The entrance to the hotel was from a side street.
‘Have you any rooms available?’ I asked the young receptionist.
‘Yes, we do.’
‘Do I need to make a reservation tonight if I need a room tomorrow?’
‘No.’
‘Tomorrow I’ll be back,’ I said.
The receptionist nodded courteously, from right to left, as the Bulgarians do.
Aba and I went back to Hotel Aqua. Stray dogs wandered through the poorly lit streets. Aba stopped from time to time to pat one. The dogs licked her hand obediently. I trembled, partly from fear, and partly from exhaustion.
3.
The next day we moved over to the little hotel on Independence Square. I couldn’t recall whether this was a new name for the square, or if it had been called that before. Again I took a room with two beds. Standing to one side, as if she was a policewoman who had had me brought to the hotel, Aba silently left me to see to all the formalities at the front desk. Again she showed no inclination to call her cousin or friends. I was furious, but I could not bring myself to spit out the sentence: ‘Isn’t it time you called that cousin?’ Or: ‘Your friends must be concerned that you haven’t called them yet, since they know you are in Varna.’ I was less bothered that she would be sharing the room with me, and least of all that she hadn’t offered to shoulder her part of the expense. Maybe she had no friends, maybe there was no cousin, maybe she had never been to Varna, maybe she was broke, maybe she had made it all up so she could travel with me. All of that would have been fine. It was her constant presence that grated on me, and that she had not been clear about when she would be detaching herself from me next. What was I doing going everywhere with this child!? Where was the cousin, damn it, where were the friends?! I was here on my own ‘special mission’ – I muttered to myself – and under your watchful gaze I cannot recall a single detail of a city where I spent so much time! True, I was a teenager back then, but I’d crossed this damn Independenc
e Square dozens of times! And that washbasin of a fountain, which looks as if someone abandoned it years ago in the middle of the square, it worked back then with those same jets of water every bit as weak and erratic as they were now!
‘Come on, let’s leave our things up in the room, and then we can get a cup of coffee somewhere. We need to pick up a map of the city, too,’ she said.
I snorted. Her use of the plural infuriated me. And her ‘we need to pick up a map of the city’ grated on my ear. Wasn’t she at home here? Why would she need a map?!
4.
We sat in a restaurant next door to the hotel and had coffee. The restaurant was part of a new chain, with fast and tasty food, something like a superior Bulgarian take on McDonald’s. We were served a Bulgarian version of Chinese ‘fortune cookies’ with our coffee. They were the fortunes without the cookie, advertising Lavazza. The new advertising gimmick was called kastmetche – a little fortune.
For her fortune Aba had got a quote from Winston Churchill, which sounded like a verse from some turbo-folk song. Never, never, never, never surrender.
‘And what does yours say?’
‘Know that only matchstick boats sink in a tempest in a tea cup.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Kukishu.’
‘Who is he?’
‘No idea. A Japanese writer, maybe?’
I watched her. She smoked a cigarette with the gestures of an adult, self-confident woman. We conversed in Bulgarian. True, my Bulgarian was awkward, the way I’d picked it up as a teenager when I spent my summers here. Her Bulgarian seemed, rightly or wrongly, a little hobbled. With her language, as if with a wooden clothes peg, she was holding together bits and pieces that were jostling and bumping against each other. The bigger picture was eluding me.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.) Page 4
