‘So what is simmering these days in the author’s kitchen?’ she asked suddenly.
The wrong tone, again she went for the pretentious tone.
‘Soup with pudgy little children’s fingers floating in it,’ I said, feigning severity, and summoned the waiter so we could pay.
She grinned. She wasn’t hurt that I had evaded her question.
We must have looked odd on the street, the two of us. In a city abandoned by tourists we set out with our cameras on the lookout for interesting shots. I was looking for my subjects, or rather ones I thought my mother might like, while Aba was looking for – mine. I took a picture of the display window at a restaurant that announced they served two roasted suckling pigs on Tuesdays, and on Thursdays two roasted lambs. Now that would give Mum a chuckle, I thought. Aba took pictures of the same display. I took a picture of a bakery where there were trays of fresh burek cheese pies, gevrek, boiled or baked, with or without sesame seeds, cheese crescents, mekitsa and banitsa cheese pastries. Aba took pictures of them, too. I took pictures of sad elderly people selling whatever they had on the pavement, to earn a little loose change: knitted slippers, homemade honey, a basket of apples, a few cucumbers, a head of cabbage, a bunch of parsley. Aba, too, snapped a picture of the scene. I took a picture of a kebab shop with the large-sized Bulgarian kebab in the window. Aba purchased a kebab. I took a picture of Aba holding the kebab. I snapped a shot of peeling pastel paint on a building. Aba also found the peeling façade intriguing. ‘Stuck like glue, stuck on you,’ I muttered to myself, the girl was suffering from ‘mental echolalia’, and I happened to be her victim.
We strolled along Knyaz Boris Street, heading for the beach. The street was crowded with stands selling all sorts of things. We turned into Slivnica, the street that came out at Morskata Gradina and the city beach. The ugly concrete building of the Black Sea Hotel, formerly a luxury hotel under the communists, was now plastered with billboards. The hotel had obviously been occupied by people who were not troubled by the aesthetic of communism: transition thieves, thugs, criminals, smugglers and prostitutes. Their bodyguards were dressed, just like policemen, in ‘uniforms’. They strutted around the expensive cars in front of the hotel in their black suits, black t-shirts, black glasses, decked out in gold chains, cell phones and ear buds, slender wires dangling from their ears. A persistent advertisement for a real estate agency, Bulgarian Property Dream, followed us from the peeling façade to the entrance to Morskata Gradina.
Along the way we stopped in at a cafeteria.
‘This is so awful. Is it a lack of cash that has made them plaster the buildings with billboards?’ I asked, staring at a façade which was as flashy with ads as a porno website.
‘Well, New York is one big advertisement!’ said Aba, following my gaze.
I was certain she had never been to New York.
‘Yes, but everything developed there at a natural pace,’ I said.
‘And so it will here as well.’
‘This used to be a lovely town. But now it has been turned into a way station for transition gold diggers. Everything is falling apart, abandoned, it all looks so vulgar.’
‘It is the transition that is vulgar,’ she said assertively.
Her certainty was aggravating. Especially because I was in bad shape myself.
The waitress, having brought the coffees and a pastry for Aba, demonstrated a new brand of ‘have a nice day’ courtesy.
‘Kak ekler no vkusnee!’ Aba declared in Russian and thrust her fork into the elongated pastry covered in chocolate sauce and filled with confectionary cream. She had quoted me again. I had used that line in one of my essays. Apparently this was her way of trying to coax me into a better mood. I pretended not to notice. I unwrapped my kastmetche.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘De nihilo nihil fit. Xenophanes. What did you get?’
‘Though the world may be crowded the mind is spacious. Thoughts coexist without effort, but objects collide painfully in space.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Friedrich Schiller.’
I squirmed. It was now painfully clear that Aba was getting on my nerves. What a know-all!
‘Let’s carry on to the beach. I can hardly wait to see the sea!’ I hissed.
‘Varietas delectat!’ she announced cheerfully and got up from the table.
I didn’t recognise the entrance to the city beach either. The building we used to go through to get to the strand had melted like ice cream. The terrace, with the year 1926 carved in it, was paved in stones from which steps led down to the sand.
‘That is the year my mother was born.’
‘I know,’ she said.
Wow, you know even that! I huffed to myself and felt the swell of misery and despair rising. We passed by a row of cabins and came out on the strand. The sandy beach which had seemed endless to me before was now cluttered with ramshackle stands and plastic awnings. Everything was a jumble, with no order, as if all this was detritus tossed up on the beach by the waves. Apart from an old fisherman and the two of us, there was nobody there. The sea and sky poured into dark-grey stains. Two tankers floated motionless, off on the horizon, tiny as a child’s toys. Nervous seagulls zigged and zagged across the sky in sharp flight.
The entire landscape was taut with suppressed anxiety. While I searched for a consoling detail, Aba, having held on to the kebab purchased for the purposes of photography, fed it to a stray dog.
There were sudden strong gusts and the sky grew darker still. We hurried to catch a taxi. As soon as we got into the cab, big drops of rain began pounding on the windscreen. The looming billboard BULGARIAN PROPERTY DREAM, like some obstinate mystical signal, stared at me through the foggy glass. This city was not my property, but my mother’s, I thought. Property, which she had given over, like Grandmother’s grave, to others. Nothing here was hers any more, except the dream, and it had faded over the years. Why had the feeling of despair grown in me so and filled me like beer foam in a mug, I wondered. Was it because I had taken it upon myself to be my mother’s bedel?
5.
A powerful storm blew in. I watched through the window as the wind snapped the tree branches. White plastic bags flitted through the air like little phantoms. The rain whipped the windowpane so powerfully it seemed likely to smash the glass. The hotel room was freezing cold. I started shivering. I pulled on a sweater. I wrapped myself in my blanket, and finally, teeth chattering, slid into bed.
‘Could you please go down to the main desk and ask them for extra blankets? And ask them to turn the heat on!’
Aba decided she would turn the heat on herself. She spent ages fiddling with the heating unit in the wall, but to no avail. Then she searched every corner of the room to find extra blankets. She threw her own blanket over me. It didn’t help. I was still shivering. I was certain that her reluctance to go downstairs lay in the prospect of a confrontation with the hotel staff, a vestigial reflex from communism, the fear that they would dismiss her out of hand, the potential for humiliation. Hence her exultant expression when she came back. No one had hurt her feelings, and furthermore she had come through victorious: she was carrying two woollen blankets, and a young man came in behind her who turned on the heat.
‘Is that better?’ she asked, all important.
Warm air soon began to flow from the heater and I – grumbling that I would be getting out of this hostile, stormy place as soon as I could the next day – dropped off to sleep.
When I woke up I saw Aba sitting before the mirror, massaging lotion into her hair. The storm was still raging outside, but the rain had stopped.
‘Aba?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is Lili Ivanova still alive?’
‘Yes, she is. Why do you ask?’
‘I just thought…’ I muttered.
‘Whatever made you think of her?’
‘When I was a teenager she was the biggest Bulgarian pop star.’
I sat up. It was like a
steam bath in the room. Aba had little bottles, tubes, lotions piled on the table in front of her.
‘What are you doing?’
‘My hair has been falling out lately.’
‘It couldn’t be.’
‘It really is.’
‘You seem to have plenty of hair.’
‘Well, I used to have more.’
‘Have you been to see a doctor?’
‘What can a doctor do for me? It’s falling out, that’s all. I rub my scalp with lotions and take vitamins B and E.’
‘Things like this may be due to stress. But it will grow back, I am certain of that. Only ageing women go bald.’
‘I am an ageing woman.’
‘You are just a baby still.’
‘Babies are ageing women.’
‘OK, so you are a bald baby. Could there be anything nicer?’
‘Yes, there could.’
‘What?’
‘A baby with long pigtails.’
She was not without a sense of humour, when she felt like it. I glanced at my watch. It was eight thirty. I wondered how we would get through the evening. I got up and looked out the window. Going out was not an option. Unless we dashed to the restaurant just around the corner.
‘Are we really going back tomorrow?’ she asked me as we surveyed the menu. She was insisting again on that plural of hers.
‘No point in me staying on here,’ I answered in the emphatic singular, ‘the weather being as it is.’
‘Perhaps the sun will shine tomorrow.’
‘Very little likelihood that the sun will shine tomorrow.’
Aba had pulled a black woollen cap over her head to hide her greasy hair. When she took her glasses off for a moment, I noticed that her eyebrows met in the middle. She had something around her neck, a leather thong with a round grey pebble hanging from it.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, nothing. I found the pebble with a hole in it somewhere and strung it on the leather.’
I ordered warm cheese and honey pastries, lamb stew served in a little ceramic pot and feta cheese baked in parchment. The storm was raging outside, the restaurant was cosy, and my firm resolve – especially at the prospect of jouncing for eight hours back on the bus – began to weaken.
‘Aba, do you have a boyfriend?’
Again I was forcing the conversation. This was the kind of question with which doltish adults ply children. I used the word gadzhe for sweetheart, old-fashioned slang that had been current back in my teenage years.
Aba grinned.
‘Don’t people say gadzhe any more?!’
‘No, no, they still say it.’
‘So, do you have a gadzhe?’
‘May I tell you a story?’
‘A real story?’
‘Yup.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘There is a Russian fairy tale in which the Tsar-maiden and Ivan, the merchant’s son, fall in love.’
‘The Tsar-maiden?’
‘Yes, that is what the story is called, ‘The Tsar-maiden’. So every time the two of them are supposed to meet, Ivan botches it by dropping off to sleep like a log. Ivan has this evil, jealous stepmother. She knows a trick: when she pricks Ivan’s clothes with a needle, he falls asleep. The Tsar-maiden is angry and returns to her empire, far away beyond seven hills, seven mountains, and…’
‘Seven seas!’
‘Ivan goes off after the maiden. He travels and travels, and finally reaches her, but not her heart. To reach her heart, Ivan still has to cross the sea. On the other shore grows an oak tree, in the oak there is a box, and in the box is a rabbit, and in the rabbit is a duck, and in the duck there is an egg. In that egg is hidden the love of the Tsar-maiden.’
‘And then?’
‘That is still not enough. The maiden must eat the egg. Once she eats it, the love for Ivan will return to her heart.’
‘So, does she eat this egg?’
‘She does. She is tricked into it, of course.’
‘Jesus! Who could walk that vast distance, then cross a sea, and then climb an oak. And then the egg! Hardboiled, no less? Ugh!’
‘Precisely. That is the whole point,’ said Aba, with a wry smile.
‘Now I know what this folklore of yours has taught you!’
‘What?’
‘High standards!’
We both burst into giggles. I liked the way she had packaged her answer. For the first time the conversation between us relaxed, and the whole situation acquired a rosy hue like a girl’s school excursion. Perhaps the unexpected weather contributed to this as well, perhaps it was I, not she, who had been tense to begin with, insisting on the rules of a ‘genre’ that I had defined in advance, and so forced her to adopt. Lord, she was so young! I tried to put myself in her shoes: yes, the ‘little girl’ had been adapting all the while to me, and truth be told, had been handling the situation with more style than I had. A girl’s school excursion, why not: when had I last had a chance to do something like this?! Perhaps I should stay on a day or two longer? After all, the ‘Golden Pen of the Balkans’ didn’t start for another few days.
‘And so. Tomorrow our story ends,’ she said, with a touch of irony.
The ‘our story’ rang like a shattered glass. She had used the Bulgarian phrase nashiyat s tebe roman. Russians say the same. The word roman can mean two things: the novel as a literary form, or a romantic liaison, an affair. The phrase to have a story with someone means to be in love. This was an awkward moment on her part: she had wanted to use a pun, she meant to use both meanings ironically, or maybe, who knows, had simply hoped to say something witty. I could understand all of that, the semantic overtones didn’t bother me. Something else was grating on my ear. That tone. Ding- ding-ding – dong! That tone.
* * *
It was the ring of hunger. I recognised that brand of hunger. She had a hunger for kindness that clung like a magnet to a kindred hunger for kindness and fed on it; a hunger for attention which attracted the same sort of hunger for attention; a blind hunger which sought to be led by the blind; a crippled hunger which sought an ally in the crippled, the hunger of a deaf mute cooing to a deaf mute.
Aba had stumbled onto the truth by chance: yes, she was an ageing little girl. She was born with the invisible mark of the unloved child on her brow. It made no difference whether they’d really loved her or not, would love her or not; the hunger was born with her, and with her it would vanish. There was little that could assuage that hunger; many had worn themselves ragged trying. Was it this, rather than genuine hunger, that punished mythical Erisychthon, who ended up gnawing at his own bones?
Aba found a common, secret language with my mother immediately. Perhaps they were made of the same stuff, and recognised each other without realising they had. They were bound by the same fear of vanishing, an unconscious desire to leave their mark behind them, to inscribe themselves on the map. They did not choose the means or the map in the process; it could have been the skin of their own children, the hand of a stranger. It was not their fault, nor was it anything they had done wrong. As if a capricious and thoughtless fairy had branded them at birth and made them think they were invisible. The sense that they were invisible acted on them like stomach acid and made them hungrier yet. There was nothing to assuage a hunger like that, not a giant magnifiying glass, or powerful spotlights, or the lavishing of attention. The hunger whimpered in their stomachs like a stray dog. This was a cunning hunger, gluttonous, capable of proudly refusing food, a sly foe able to hide and keep from being discovered, a tremulous foe who dared not raise a hand against itself, a lying and cheating foe, who knew how to make its whimpering sound like a siren song and left its saliva.
I looked at her. The kind face shaded with melancholy, which immediately provoked a feeling of guilt in the onlooker. She did everything she could to get others to like her. She loved her parents, if she had them, her friends, which she most certainly had. Because she was the one who never forgot a birt
hday, she was the one who sent courteous notes, postcards and emails, she was the one who was always first to pick up the phone and dial the number. She had never harmed anyone else; she had never kicked anyone in the shins; she never cheated in school; she was always a good pupil and a good student; she helped others; she never, or almost never, lied; she was kind to everyone; and in her bartering with emotions she always felt the loser. She watched me. She was interested in figuring out how the wheels and gears of my clock worked, and for the sake of discovery she was prepared to take the clock apart. Because why was it that everyone else in this world ticked and tocked so regularly, while only she was on the wrong beat?
I recognised the seductive whimper. I had been feeding my mother’s hunger for too long. After all, wasn’t I serving one of them here as a bedel, and the other as a potential morsel? Yes, love is on the distant shore of a wide sea. A large oak tree stands there, and in the tree there is a box, in the box a rabbit, in the rabbit a duck, and in the duck an egg. And the egg, in order to get the emotional mechanism going, had to be eaten.
6.
The next morning dawned a quiet, grey day. I learned that the storm the night before had wreaked terrible damage, brought down electric lines, roofs had been ripped from houses, some of the local roads were blocked.
I kept to my decision to leave. The afternoon bus was going to go at four thirty.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.) Page 5
