Jimmy lived with his mother in a semi-detached house which was almost as opulent as Helen’s. His father worked in Birmingham as an engineer and was never home. He’d lost his job in Essex ten years ago, Jimmy explained, and was forced to take up work in the north, and all this had something to do with Margaret Thatcher. Now, as far as I knew, Margaret Thatcher was anti-Communist, so how come her policies resulted in Jimmy’s father having the same crappy lifestyle as, say, the Mechevs above us in Youth 3? But Jimmy and I had better things to do than talk about politics.
For instance, Jimmy listened to a deathly pale singer called Morrissey, and a band called The Smiths who didn’t exist any more. They specialized in a faux cheerful drone and their lyrics – often about accidents and Armageddon – seemed to be written in code. Jimmy was particularly enamoured of a song where each stanza ended with ‘And heaven knows I’m miserable now’, to which he sang along with an ironic expression; but somehow, I sensed that, deep in his bones, heaven knows he was miserable.
What was going on, why the misery? They had everything in Colchester. Jimmy had two guitars, hundreds of records, two pairs of pointed boots, and he could go anywhere he liked with his British passport. He didn’t even have to learn Russian, he was doing it for fun. He didn’t have to fear anything except the likes of Jamie.
But I was already beginning to suspect that material possessions and political freedom only brought you so much happiness. That, in fact, they could bring you unhappiness too.
When I went out with Jimmy and two friends, we sat in a pub and shouted over loud music all evening. They did something called rounds, which was a kind of drinking competition. At the end of the night, everybody won, and they vomited all the way home.
Another time, Jimmy took me to spend a weekend with a friend of his in one of the tidy nearby seaside towns, all of which ended with-on-Sea, as if you might miss that fact otherwise: Clacton-on-Sea, Frinton-on-Sea, Holland-on-Sea. His friend lived in an enormous Georgian mansion. We had a huge double room to ourselves and this was where we camped after it became clear that the rest of the night would be dedicated to something called tripping. This meant snorting cocaine. Jimmy wasn’t into hard drugs, but his friend was. He could afford it, Jimmy said, they were filthy rich. But Jimmy was also worried that, despite being filthy rich, his friend might commit suicide one of these days. His friend seemed very unhappy. He spoke of that bitch his absent mother, of that bastard his absent father, and he said this Town-on-the-Sea was a miserable dump and he might as well shoot himself.
This threw me. I’d never heard anybody speak of their parents that way, not even Nikifor at School 81 whose parents hadn’t done anything for him except land him in a Corrective Labour School.
Like Morrissey, Jimmy’s friend evidently spoke a different language. Dump didn’t mean there was rubbish lying around. As Grégoire had written in that birthday card, ‘l’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux’. Jimmy’s friend lived in a castle but his future was a dump. I couldn’t figure out how Jimmy and his filthy-rich friend had got to this point, but that’s where they were, and I felt sorry for them.
Soon, I started feeling sorry for myself too. Even before I had proper answers to the complicated questions of happiness versus over-abundance, The Smiths had infiltrated me. I took to trawling the second-hand music stores of Colchester, trying to acquire every one of their albums. Even though the lyrics continued to mystify me, the more I listened, the more I became permeated with a damp, English despair.
After losing our virginity together – not pleasant, but a relief to have it over and done with – Jimmy and I became inseparable. If we ever parted, I knew I would cut my veins lying in a bath, to the soundtrack of Morrissey at his most miserable.
At the end of the school year disaster struck. Our visas to the UK expired. We had to go back and wait for new ones. At first, the separation from Jimmy seemed almost bearable, because like him I had already been accepted into Leeds University, my father had been offered a permanent job in a northern city called Hull, and anyway, there was no going back to our previous life now. You don’t go from riches to rags.
So it was just a matter of weeks. Four weeks at the most, the Home Office said, and we packed up our two-bedroom house in Colchester, I said goodbye to Helen, Angelica, and Jimmy, and we went back to the cramped life of Youth 3.
Back in Sofia, things were grim, very grim. The euphoria of democracy and blue badges was gone, and what we had now was chaos, crime, and deficit. The only attempt at order was the coupon system. My mother had resigned her job at the Central Institute for Computational Technology, and her days now consisted entirely of queuing up with coupons to buy bread, sugar and petrol, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. One day she joined a queue for petrol and vanished. She returned with a tank full of petrol a day and a night later. She’d waited for thirty-five hours.
It made no sense. Before, under Socialism with a Human Face, we had semi-empty shops. Now we had democracy and not much else. Even the last of the electricity was gone. Hot water – what’s that? Toilet paper – what’s wrong with newspapers? The Worker’s Deed newspaper was a particular favourite in Sofia’s toilets.
And there were rumours, conspiracy theories and sick jokes. One spring day we were at my uncle’s flat in Youth 2. The satirical programme Cou-Cou was on TV. We were just tucking into roast chicken when, suddenly, the programme was interrupted by breaking news. An alarmed-looking presenter announced: ‘There has been an industrial accident at the nuclear plant Kozloduy on the Danube. Citizens are advised not to leave their homes, and await further news. Radioactivity levels are being measured. We repeat: a serious accident has occurred at the nuclear plant Kozloduy. Citizens are advised…’
‘Shut the windows!’ everybody cried. Already there seemed to be a radioactive haze in the dead afternoon heat of the Youths. There was frantic discussion. Do we load up the cars now and drive across the border into Macedonia? Do we stay put? Do we stock up on tinned foods, like with Chernobyl? No, not another Chernobyl!
An hour and a collective mini-nervous breakdown later, the presenters of Cou-Cou gleefully informed us that the Kozloduy plant news had been a practical joke. Ta-da! It was, after all, 1 April. ‘Bastards!’ My uncle thumped the TV. Meanwhile, many people had got into their cars and sped towards the nearest border. Several people died of heart attacks, and at least one woman had a miscarriage. Our chicken was cold.
It was now six months later, with still no word from the Home Office. Clearly, they were considering our papers very carefully. My father went back to his job at the Technical Institute, which was no longer called Lenin. His monthly salary was almost enough – but not quite – to pay for a phone call I made to Jimmy in Colchester. What did I care for vulgar things like money when I had true love to deal with?
But my parents had other things to deal with. For example, the fact that my mother was suddenly diagnosed with a tumour and dispatched to hospital for emergency surgery. We didn’t know whether the tumour was benign or not, and the hospital used newspapers (The Worker’s Deed, presumably) instead of sheets in the consultation rooms. The patients had to bring their own soap and towels.
I went to see my mother after the operation, but the hospital staff told me she was in no shape to receive visitors. I walked out a blubbering mess, my world flaking away like a house of cards in a nuclear gale. But everybody else’s world was falling apart too, so nobody took any notice of me. Except a bedraggled homeless dog outside the hospital, who stopped her aimless trot and gazed at me pitifully. A pink, skinned rat hung from her mouth. We looked at each other for a while, then I ran.
As the power went out over the Youths, and we were plunged in darkness, my father sat in the kitchen by candlelight and filled in endless emigration papers in triplicate, while his hair turned grey. He was forty-three, and I had never seen him so old and so lost.
My mother miraculously survived the hospital ordeal, thanks to the wads of banknotes that changed han
ds between my father and the head doctor.
Meanwhile, Youth 3 had embraced capitalism. It had turned from the wild East into the wild West and it was hard to say which was worse. Tiny cafés and shops had mushroomed among the panels. People sold contraband cigarettes and suspect alcohol mixtures straight from their underground cellars. The elder Mechev son was a racketeer. He was charging people for parking their cars in our communal car park. But it’s always been free, the bewildered neighbours protested. We’ve parked our Moskvich here for years. ‘Well, things have changed. Pay up or piss off.’ And he cracked the joints of his enormous fists. My once self-appointed protector was finally getting to rearrange people’s faces. Yesterday’s bully was today’s entrepreneur.
My parents’ friends were being laid off or were subsisting on salaries dwarfed by mega-inflation. My classmate Tedy was selling pantyhose at a street stall because her parents had lost their jobs. Beggars appeared on the streets. They were somebody’s parents and grandparents. They were teachers, musicians, factory workers. I saw a dishevelled woman in the street, muttering to herself with a lunatic grin, and with a shudder of horror recognized a former teacher from the French Lycée.
And then there were the new rich. They were the kids of the old rich, but now they drove black Mercedes and called themselves businessmen. One thing was clear: money was king. Education, culture, and the life of the mind were for sissies, and sissies sold pantyhose on the street, walked the streets with a lunatic grin, starved to death, and were run over by speeding black Mercedes.
Real men, collectively known as mutri (gangsters) put together racketeering businesses, bought up government factories for small change and turned them into private businesses, trafficked drugs, weapons and women, laundered money, and felt like the winners they really were – until a rival racketeer shot them in the face. Real women, collectively known as mutresi, sold themselves to real men and rode in the passenger seats of the black Mercedes, wearing Gucci and a silicon pout.
The era of the gangster had dawned. Everyone else was drowning in a bloody sunset. It wasn’t clear where exactly we would fit in this picture, except right outside the frame. Already the great mass exodus had begun. Everybody with a degree was filling in emigration papers.
Meanwhile, my sister was back at School 81, after two years in an English school. And because academic standards in England had been much lower, she was now behind in every subject except English. Sensing the general climate of disaster, she did her best not to add to it with her school worries. She knew that we couldn’t afford any more crises.
Just then, Jimmy arrived, bright and laden with gifts in the dirty snow of Sofia, like Father Christmas from a far-away land of plenty. In the dead of the Balkan winter, Jimmy heroically fought a blizzard from Youth 3 to the Central Post Office, to buy Christmas cards for home. If Jimmy was shocked at the misery of Sofia, he didn’t say so. He was a proponent of the stiff upper lip, except when we had to say goodbye two weeks later. I’ll see you soon, we kept saying at Sofia Airport. I’ll see you soon, and we floated on a luxurious sea of eighteen-year-old tears.
The Home Office continued to consider our papers with such care that ten months rolled by, and our English future retreated further away, while our present remained suspended. Bored and depressed, I enrolled in a Spanish course, and sat there, conjugating the verb ‘to go’. Yo me voy, tu te vas, él se va, nosotros nos vamos, nosotros nos vamos, nosotros nos vamos. Then one day I stopped eating. It was a protest – against what, I didn’t quite know, but clearly something had to be done. And if you can’t do anything to the world around you, you do it to yourself. I discovered that my cousin, the one who’d kept me company in the Suhindol fat farm that Chernobyl summer, had adopted the same strategy. We met from time to time, to discuss what had fewer calories: an apple, or a cup of coffee.
In the spring, I ran into Nikifor. I hadn’t seen him since he disappeared into the Corrective Labour School. He had changed from a feral, snotty brat into a handsome man. A handsome one-armed man. We drank Nescafé in a basement and talked for the first time. What had happened to his arm?
‘An accident.’ He scratched his shoulder stump. ‘When I was fifteen. I was in the factory where they made us work, and this guy pushed me. The last thing I remember before I passed out was seeing my arm on the floor. I had to relearn everything. I was right-handed, and now I’m left-handed. And what happened to you? Why are you so skinny? I heard you were in England.’ And he added in English, ‘Do you speak English?’
But there was no irony in his voice, and no bile in his heart. He was still living with his mother, who was still an alcoholic. ‘It’s a mess,’ he said apologetically as he pushed open the front door of their apartment to reveal a humble one-bedroom dwelling. Full ashtrays and empty bottles everywhere. ‘I’m the only person who cleans this place,’ he said.
I remembered Jimmy’s stoned friend raging against his parents in that town-on-the-sea, and I suddenly felt angry at everyone in Colchester, even Jimmy, who hadn’t done anything wrong. But something was definitely wrong with the fact that they had castles to house their misery in, while Nikifor lived – literally – in a dump, and had nothing except one arm, a packet of cigarettes, and his stolen youth.
These days my school friend Rado was a full-time Metallica fan. He too was in a hateful mood. We walked together in the Park of Freedom, now renamed again Boris’s Garden, and held hands as he quoted suicidal lyrics in an American accent.
Meanwhile, my classmates at the French Lycée, from which I had dropped out, were graduating. Rado, starched, polished and on his best behaviour, escorted me to the seventh form ball, where everyone looked grown up and serious. Grégoire, Maxim, Rado and many others were talking about studying law or medicine in France. Law and medicine scared me witless, but what if England didn’t work out? I was then stuck with France, and maybe it took law and medicine to get there.
But it never came to law, medicine, or France. The Home Office finally remembered us. The passports arrived, three of them with visas, one without – the one that belonged to the eighteen-year-old in our family, no longer ‘a legal dependent’.
My parents announced that they were not going to England without me. We were going to New Zealand instead. ‘Where is that?’ I asked. ‘Near Australia,’ they said. I fainted on the kitchen floor. It helped that I hadn’t eaten for six months.
I would never see Jimmy again. I would never go to Leeds University. I consulted my world atlas, and there was New Zealand, two small accidental splashes of land at the bottom of the world, just above Antarctica. There was only one alternative: staying behind. Should I cut my veins now, or wait until we arrived in New Zealand?
‘Go, for heaven’s sake,’ Rado said, ‘And don’t look back. It’s the chance of a lifetime. I don’t intend to hang around much longer either.’
‘New Zealand?’ Maxim said. He was going to study economics in Sofia. ‘Classy. The further away from here, the better. And they speak English. Very classy.’
Jimmy maintained his stiff upper lip and vowed to emigrate to New Zealand as soon as possible. But something told me that he wouldn’t.
Tedy was practical about it. ‘You always wanted to be somewhere else. Just don’t forget your friends.’ How could I – it’s not as though I had any friends in New Zealand. Did anybody live there?
Grégoire thought they spoke Dutch in New Zealand. ‘So you’ll have to learn a new language,’ he said, ‘but it could be worse. I’ll write to you from France, I promise.’ He didn’t intend to hang around much longer either.
Nikifor was not surprised to see me go – nothing surprised Nikifor – and promised to write. ‘I’ve heard they have penguins there,’ he said. ‘Send me a photo.’
Esther said, ‘I wish I could go too…’ and then, quoting from The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, ‘But don’t let me depress you.’
Our luggage took up the trunks of two Skodas – ours and my uncle’s – but when we arrived at t
he airport with my uncle and his family, somehow, in the chaos of tearful goodbyes, the keys to the second car were lost.
We missed our plane to New Zealand, and drove back to the empty Youth 3 apartment with its disconnected phone and empty bookshelves, where we holed up for two days in suspended animation, living out of suitcases, avoiding the people we’d said goodbye to, eating Ordinary Biscuits, and repeating something that closely resembled the carrot dialogue from Waiting for Godot. I’m hungry. Do you want a biscuit? No, thanks, I have some breadcrumbs in my pocket.
Three days later, the two-car procession and the tearful goodbyes were repeated. My cousin, who was ahead of me in the self-starvation race and had graduated to a skeleton, waved wanly from the other side of the glass pane separating the lucky departures from those who stayed behind. My uncle, always the cheerful macho, was crying, his bespectacled face smeared on the other side of the glass. I was completely numb. A sick, dumb relief was all I felt.
That was it, then. Goodbye England. Goodbye France. Goodbye Bulgaria. Goodbye Youth 3. I don’t know where the hell I’m going, but I never want to come back.
PART TWO
Other Misadventures
‘I love my country. Because
it is small and I feel sorry for it.’
An unnamed Yugoslav child in the 1990s
8 She Grows but Never Ages
Getting reacquainted
And here I am again, fourteen years after that decisive farewell, waiting for the tram and inhaling the mountain air of Sofia, thick with pollen and pollution. Nothing is quite so decisive any more. In fact, since leaving, life has been a series of indecisions.
I have lived in France and in reunified Berlin, I am living in Britain as a putative New Zealander, and I haven’t listened to Morrissey for a long time. But I also haven’t felt settled anywhere since we left Youth 3. Someone else lives there now, and someone else lives in my grandparents’ apartment in Emil Markov, which is no longer called that, of course.
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