Street Without a Name

by Kassabova, Kapka

  But I also felt bereft. They were going back to where we couldn’t follow. They had packed up the world and taken it with them. They had given us a chocolate biscuit from that tin, and then put the lid on.

  In my eleven-year-old bones, I now understood why after Holland my father was so thin and my mother so sad. I understood the exchange of ignorance for Western goods. And that understanding hurt like hell.

  5 Chernobyl Summer

  Life and death in the provinces of Socialism

  Three things happened in the year of Chernobyl: my grandfather died of heart failure, my grandmother died of breast cancer, and I grew up.

  In the spring of 1986, a rumour circulated that there had been a nuclear incident somewhere in the Soviet Union, in a grim-sounding place that translated meant something like ‘Black Place’. Later, much later, the State issued a statement that there was no cause for alarm. To be alarmed was to give in to Western propaganda against the Brotherly Soviet Country.

  But Toni’s father next door was a physicist at the Academy of Sciences. His job was to measure radiation levels and he was alarmed, very alarmed. He told my parents to stay away from fresh food that year. My parents’ life took on fresh new meaning: to source rare foods like powdered milk and tinned feta cheese.

  Four days after Chernobyl, on 1 May, Day of Socialist Labour, a festive radioactive rain fell on Sofia. The nation came out for the May Day parade to rejoice and wave carnations and little red flags at the row of Politburo comrades who stood under black umbrellas. My parents went too – the rejoicing was compulsory. But they didn’t take us with them this time. My mother had a bad feeling about the rain.

  Many people said ‘What radioactivity? I can’t see anything.’ Many people also became suddenly ill and died that year, and in the years to come. One of them was my paternal grandfather Kiril, who died suddenly a month later. The word the family used to describe him was ‘short-tempered’, shorthand for a one-man terror regime. He and my grandmother, Kapka, were the ones who lived in Pavlikeni, an Exemplary Socialist Town, where my grandfather worked as a vet.

  A nameless brown river ran outside my grandparents’ ‘cooperation’, as small apartment blocks were called. They lived in a dark, two-bedroom ground-floor apartment with creaky furniture from the sixties and ambiguous wallpaper. I liked the apartment because it was big and old-fashioned, and I liked grandmother Kapka, although she smelt of Valium and was a little erratic. I could see why: forty years of co-existence with my grandfather Kiril had destroyed her personality. I pitied her so much that often pity became affection.

  Grandma Kapka didn’t have time for things like cleaning. She was too busy lying in bed trying to meditate back to some semblance of mental health. Despite the filth, the operational phrase in that household was ‘sterile cleanliness’ – a term that fitted with the ideal of Exemplary Socialist Homes. My grandparents flung ‘sterile cleanliness’ at you with such conviction that it left you stunned and, they hoped, blind to the truth.

  Grandfather Kiril kept everybody within shouting range in a constant state of alert. When he ran out of insults for his wife, her family, my mother, and my mother’s family, he moved onto the neighbours and, when necessary, to passers-by. From the mosquito-netted ground-floor window where he stood like a bulldog at the kennel’s door, he greeted them with a sour smile, then as they moved out of earshot, he held forth on their suspect spouses and scrofulous children, and the illnesses which they deserved.

  It was simple: everyone who wasn’t of his blood was an enemy, and women were doubly so. Women were the fertilizer from which sons grew in order to continue the bloodline. His own mother, also married to a ‘short-tempered’ man, had tried to drown herself in the nearest river no less than three times, and each time she’d been dragged back – after all, who would cook and clean for the men?

  The only person Kiril seemed to like was my younger cousin. The reason was that my younger cousin was male, and carried my grandfather’s name. He was clearly destined for great things. My sister, my elder cousin and I were girls, but we were also of grandfather Kiril’s blood, which presented him with a dilemma. He tried to be nice to us. He once took us along on one of his veterinary calls. It was an educational visit – get the city kids familiar with the animal world. After years in Youth 3, I couldn’t tell a lamb from a dog. But I could tell a pig when I saw one, and that one was huge. He injected the beast with some drug, and it squealed and kicked so violently that I ran, in the grips of my first phobia. After that, the fear of the pig and the fear of my grandfather Kiril somehow became confused. The very word ‘veterinary’ still carries, irrationally, the piggish weight of his contempt for the world of humans.

  Grandmother Kapka took me and my sister on therapeutic walks. We went mulberry-picking in the park, to see the scabby animals in the zoo, and to the pine forest above town. Grandmother Kapka often seemed absent, as if she existed somewhere on the periphery of her own life. As if, like her mother-in-law, she could drift off into the nearest river any day. Sometimes, in these soul-mending moments, she picked up the pieces of her tattered self. We played card games on benches, ate the greasy pastries and meatballs she had made at home, and gossiped about the town people – who’d married, who’d died – while she knitted endless, shapeless doilies for our dowries.

  We often took along my best and only Pavlikeni friend, the blonde and downy Malina. She was from the same ‘cooperation’ and I had a crush on her brother Ivo. Malina’s father, the director of a local factory, had just died of cancer. Malina and I hung out in the communal vegetable garden, and in between the tomato vines we spied the young army recruits lodging in a warehouse building next door. I was sometimes allowed to visit Malina’s apartment, which was an oasis of calm voices. We sipped Coke, listened to cool Western music, ate cake, and, once, Ivo and I danced in our socks to ‘Nights in White Satin’. He held me delicately and my heart was in my throat. He was a staggering four years older than me.

  That summer of Chernobyl, Grandfather Kiril died of a heart attack, no doubt in the middle of a shouting fit. At the wake in the Pavlikeni flat, the stuffy living-room was full of half-rotten flowers and melting chocolates. He lay in an open coffin in a dark suit, his flesh risen like dough. Grandmother Kapka, her head covered in black lace, flung herself on top of him with tearless wails. Public grieving was expected of a dutiful wife, and she had always been dutiful.

  But there was something stranger than my grandmother’s wailing. It was the sorrow of the man who had been a chauffeur at the veterinary clinic. He stood at the back of the small congregation, raked by silent sobs, black mascara running down his cheeks. Nobody commented. That’s the way grandfather Kiril would have liked it – a show of sterile cleanliness.

  It took me many years to understand that he had been a deeply unhappy man. That he victimized those weaker than him not only because of his tyrannical character, inherited from his father’s tyrannical character, but because he too, in his own unnamed way, had been a victim of something bigger than him. After all, there was no homosexuality under Socialism.

  Another thing that didn’t exist under Socialism was terminal illness. My other grandmother Anastassia had been wearing a wig for some years now, and I sensed that there was a breast missing somewhere, but the word cancer was never uttered. And because I loved her second best after my parents, I preferred to pretend that she would get well again. But I knew, from the way my mother waved from the bus to the two figures on the seventh-floor balcony, one of them half-blind, her wig slightly askew, and from the way my mother then wept inconsolably like a grown-up child, that she wouldn’t get better.

  When grandmother Anastassia had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer four years before, she never heard the oncologist’s diagnosis. Eventually, my grandparents must have grasped the truth, but it was never spoken.

  Lies, big and small, nibbled at the fabric of our lives like moths. But the truth could be so cruel – remember the Dutch – that it wasn’t cl
ear which was worse. So when in doubt denial did the trick. If the Politburo comrades were heroes of the anti-Fascist resistance, if the labour camps were for enemies of the people, if after Chernobyl there was no cause for alarm, if grandfather Kiril’s special friend was just his chauffeur, well, then perhaps cancer was just a lump that would go away.

  It didn’t go away. After Chernobyl, grandmother Anastassia took a sudden turn for the worse. We didn’t visit her any more. My mother and her father became full-time nurses at home. Since terminal illness didn’t exist, neither did hospital wards for the terminally ill, nor palliative care for the dying. A nurse came by once a week to bring morphine, and my mother slipped her some cash.

  We hardly saw my mother these days. From work, she went straight to my grandparents’ place. Or accompanied my grandmother to the hospital. Once, I picked up the phone and called grandfather Alexander at home. ‘I’m alone,’ I said. ‘I’m alone too,’ he said, and started to cry. I held the receiver against my face, and eventually hung up. I knew what this meant. Grandmother Anastassia would never return to us. We’d never go to the seaside with them again. And I didn’t know who I felt most sorry for – my mother who was being worn down by exhaustion and grief, my grandmother who was dying horribly, or my grandfather who couldn’t live without her.

  My sister and I were evacuated to Suhindol for the summer. Suhindol, or Dry Vale, was half an hour’s drive along a potholed road from our paternal grandparents’ house in Pavlikeni. It was where my grandparents’ competition lived: great-Uncle and Auntie.

  My sister and I stood outside their peeling yellow house on the edge of the village, silently grateful for grandfather Kiril’s death – it meant that now we got to stay here, and not there. True, the outdoor latrine in the courtyard stank and buzzed with fat flies, but it was an honest peasant latrine.

  The creaky wooden gate opened to a vine-shaded courtyard where cheerful lettuces and radishes greeted us from a moist dark patch. Uncle rushed out of the house with alarmed cries – he was always alarmed, his nerves were weak – to greet us. Auntie sat in her cooking chair by the stove, regally fat in a printed cotton gown, stirring heavenly broths. ‘Hungry? Auntie will feed you up.’

  Uncle was grandfather Kiril’s brother, but they might as well have never met. All they had in common was a handsome nose. Auntie, twice the man Uncle was, had the strength of a bull and the cheekbones of a Tatar. She came from a line of sturdy, wealthy, educated peasants. She knew how to cook, toil in the field, run a big house, and make you feel loved. At high school, thanks to her busty, hippy measurements, Auntie had been named Exemplary Young Sports Woman. Fashions had changed since then, but she lived with the pride of those days and kept up her high-calorie diet. I wondered exactly what sports she had done – perhaps discus- or javelin-throwing.

  But Auntie and Uncle were childless. All their lives, they had tried to make up for this terrible Socialist failure – statistic imperfection – by giving everything they had to my father and his twin brother, treating them and us as their own children. Auntie and Uncle had a field where the biggest, juiciest watermelons and tomatoes in Europe grew, and their house overflowed with great excesses of cooked and stored food, crates of soft drinks which Uncle called ‘beverages’ and drank instead of water, stacks of boxes of chocolates which Uncle ‘disclosed’ after every meal, and chickens that were slaughtered as soon as we arrived. They never left their village except for short trips to Sofia. They lived the same life in the same house for half a century: she an accountant at the local council, he an accountant for the local wine cooperative, and in their spare time they toiled in their allotment.

  That summer, our two cousins were there to keep us company. The matter of grandmother Anastassia’s imminent death was never explicitly named, which allowed me to pretend that I was too young to understand what Auntie meant when she said, sorrowfully shaking her leonine head, ‘the worst might happen’.

  Activities for children in depressed downtown Suhindol were limited. At night, we watched The Thornbirds and fell in love with Richard Chamberlain. In the afternoon, we would drop into the only store for a few bottles of fizzy yellow ‘beverages’. The store didn’t sell much else, but it did sport a faded red banner which fluttered despondently in the wind while entreating us, ‘Let us Construct Socialism with a Human Face!’

  This was a motto we had seen elsewhere and even a twelve-year-old could spot the implications: a) Socialism with a Human Face did not occur naturally, it had to be constructed like so many blocks of flats; and b) there was also Socialism with an inhuman face. But such things were difficult to talk about, a bit like ‘the worst’ and the private chauffeurs of vets.

  Another activity was visiting our other great uncle, Uncle Kolyo, who lived in one wing of a vine-shaded house that smelt of roses, yellowed newspapers, and old people’s cardigans. Uncle Kolyo was a white-stubbled bachelor, and he specialized in two things: slapping you on the cheek affectionately with a shaky hand, and making fish soup with coriander and fish heads which he sucked on avidly, while we looked on, transfixed. Despite his feeble physique, he had been quite the lad in his youth, and there were even whispers about some tragic love that was nipped in the bud, just as he now nipped the bad buds in his rose garden. The reason for the romantic nipping was that the girl he fancied happened to be the sister of a boy who’d helped drown Uncle Kolyo’s elder brother in the Danube. But that’s another story.

  In the other wing of Uncle Kolyo’s house lived a quiet Turkish family. The blue-eyed woman Fatimé covered her head and padded softly in her sun-baked feet, as if stepping on rose petals. Her brother had died mysteriously while serving in the army – a ‘tragic accident’. He had been accidentally beaten to death by fellow recruits, an ethnic Turk among ethnic Bulgarians, at the start of the State’s campaign against the Turks.

  Aside from these attractions, there was nothing to do but eat. In the vine-shaded coma of that white-hot summer of boredom, budding hormones, and waiting for the worst to happen, my first cousin and I spent the days wolfing down ovenfuls of Auntie’s pastries, and reading instructive novels like Wuthering Heights, Captain Blood, and Lorna Doone. Breakfast: slices of warm white bread with thick layers of butter and honey from Auntie’s own honeycomb. We swallowed watermelons the size of small planets, peaches big as heads, lettuces like forests. It was a fertile year, 1986. We competed, under Auntie’s adoring supervision, to see who could eat more pieces of walnut cake in one sitting. Who would have thought that summer was the prelude to our distinguished careers in eating disorders. Only a few years later, we would compete to see who could go longer without food.

  By the end of the summer, my cousin and I were small, round versions of Auntie. The only thing that still fitted was our pyjamas. When my father came to pick us up, he didn’t recognize me. But Auntie was overjoyed to have fed us so well.

  Back in Sofia, in the doorway of our apartment, stood a spectral apparition in black. This was my mother, and she saw that overnight I had risen like dough. Now I suddenly awoke from my Suhindol coma, and I was ashamed. My adolescence had begun in disgrace. I had breasts now, but they were not female breasts, they were porcine pockets of fat. I was a pig who’d spent the summer in Auntie’s kitchen-trough, while my mother had been transformed into a saint. I was so self-disgusted that I forbade myself from being sad about my grandmother Anastassia to whom, there was no denying it now, the worst had happened. Only thin people could have emotions, while porkies like me ate, slept, and wallowed in honey.

  I didn’t allow myself to remember all the seaside holidays and mountain holidays with my grandparents; all the gourmet meals cooked by Anastassia; all the evenings I had spent talking with her about life, French which she spoke, poetry which she wrote, and what I wanted to be when I grew up (a radio journalist, like her). I didn’t think about that last summer holiday with them, when we drove in the blue Skoda and Joe Dassin came on the radio singing ‘Et si tu n’existais pas’ (‘If you didn’t exist’),
the way my grandfather Alexander cried while he drove, and my grandmother pretended not to notice because she loved life even as cancer chomped away at it. It was her favourite song, and for him the words were painfully close.

  I started doing punishing hours of aerobics at home to the sound of ‘Like a Virgin’, ‘Material Girl’, and ‘Flashdance’. These records were licensed and locally released by the Balkanton studios in crumbly rough covers with fuzzy photocopies of Madonna and Jennifer Beals in curls, headbands, and gaiters. This distracted me from having to deal with ‘the worst’.

  My father, who also found emotions hard work, was busy planning an academic visit to the German Democratic Republic. On the morning of my grandmother’s funeral, he had an early flight to Berlin. My mother drove him in the orange Skoda. On the way, there was a crisis: he’d forgotten his passport. We went back for the passport, and my mother was late for the funeral. But there was nothing my mother couldn’t cope with. Not even this. And what choice did she have? After all, nervous breakdowns didn’t exist under Socialism with a Human Face.

  At the funeral, I saw my grandparents’ neighbours. The neighbour from downstairs had run across the city in the forty-degree heat to get a death certificate when my grandmother died, and come back with all his shirt buttons missing, from the mêlée in the buses. Every single button, my mother said. Those missing buttons were a measure of his affection for Anastassia.

  My grandmother’s brothers from across the border in Macedonia were here too. My Uncle Slavcho, the physics professor who had laughed continuously that happy summer in Macedonia, now sobbed continuously, his big body shaking like jelly. I found some consolation in that: evidently, fat people could be sad too.

  My mother spoke to the congregation. I suddenly became aware that she had lost the person who – after me, of course – loved her most. She stood there alone and wasted, and it seemed that we were not worthy of her: me, because of my corpulence; my father, because he wasn’t even there; only my sister twitched impatiently, still uncontaminated, still ignorant of just how ugly we all were.