‘I used to be an artist. Not any more. The muse died.’ He burps and waves a vague, heavy arm: too complicated. The fly of his trousers is undone.
‘I’ve lost my hotel,’ I decide to confide in him. ‘Can you help me find D— Street?’
‘D— Street? Ah, that one changed. What’s it called now? Street names have changed all over, one doesn’t know any more where one is walking.’ And he turns the corner, gesturing for me to follow. I follow. And there, to my relief, I see a flickering neon HOTEL sign. I leave him leaning on a wall to steady himself, his chest wheezing like an old accordion. I wonder how many degrees he has. I wonder what he painted before the muse left him.
I lie on the hard bed in my dark room, and listen to the rain outside, the distant thumping of the disco, an ambulance siren, the dripping faucet in my bathroom.
I know, it’s probably just the sudden rain, the demise of my favourite cake shop, and the HOTEL neon sign flickering outside my window like an SOS signal, but tonight, despite the jazz festival and the singers in Shiroka Laka’s new cultural hall, I feel isolated and lonely. Something has eluded me here. The Rodopi don’t reveal themselves fully to smiling outsiders in rented cars.
All you can hope for is a shadow that will follow you from the underworld, like Eurydice followed Orpheus. But as soon as you turn to look at it, it vanishes. All I have succeeded in doing is to tune into the discordant growl of the land, crouching fawn-like, in some ancient Orphic curse that can’t be broken.
12 Into the Memory Hole
Bulgaria, Turkey, and the Death Strip
In an Istanbul hotel, I am carefully mispronouncing the Turkish for ‘thank you’ to the hotel cleaner, when suddenly she speaks crystalline Bulgarian and puts me out of my misery. She is strangely pleased to see me, like long-lost family from back home. Except that Bulgaria isn’t back home for either of us, and we’re not family.
We stand on the landing, her bucket and broom between us. The French and Spanish guests of the hotel file past on their way to the breakfast terrace, trying to work out whether we are speaking Turkish or something even weirder.
‘We’re from a village near Burgas on the coast,’ she says. ‘We moved here in 1989, you know, with the name changes and all that… It was hard, but we’ve carved out a decent life. You can make a good living if you work hard. Even so, my husband keeps going back to Bulgaria. He doesn’t work, he just collects the rent from our house over there. I don’t know, he misses it a lot, his friends, the town. He can’t get used to things here after all this time… He says he’s going to retire there, on the Black Sea. I say forget Bulgaria. But he’s stubborn, Bulgaria this, Bulgaria that. That’s where all my memories are, he says. And his brother’s family is there.
‘Our youngest daughter,’ the cleaner continues, ‘she didn’t want to come at the time. She hid at some friends’ place for a week, we had to drag her out kicking and screaming.’ She shakes her head. ‘And now it’s him that wants to go back. Go figure.’
Her family were in the convoy of Bulgarian Turks who went on that ‘long holiday’ courtesy of the State in the eighties. They had suddenly found themselves living collectively in Room 101 of the Ministry of Love. There, pregnant women were told that they couldn’t give birth in the local hospital until they changed their names. People whose parents had just died couldn’t bury them in the family plot because the family tombstone with the name Ahmed was translated overnight to Assen. Those same people had to confirm, on revised birth certificates, that their great-grandfather hadn’t been called Hassan, but Ivan. Graduates who had the misfortune of being called Selin found that their diplomas were suddenly invalid, until they became Svetla. School kids had their certificates burned – since Aishe didn’t exist, it wasn’t possible that Aishe had passed from grade four to grade five. So Aishe disappeared from school for a week or so, and when she reappeared, the teacher told the class her new name: Ana. Ana-Aishe burst into tears at the sound of her new name.
Blind spots appeared everywhere, while people disappeared into piles of forms, militia headquarters, prisons, forests and border zones where they were sometimes arrested or shot for trespassing. The State’s objective was to erase all traces of Bulgaria’s Muslim past, present, and future (he who controls the past…). The State’s method was to shove a million people into a giant memory hole. The State, in the words of Brecht, was dissolving the people and electing another people.
The scenes that followed three years later heralded the ethnic purges in Yugoslavia: families ripped apart as some wanted to go and others stay; children lost in the melee; furniture piled up in trucks; people running in tears after the cars of departing neighbours; pets released into the wilderness.
When we say goodbye, the cleaner holds my palm between her rough hands, wishing me all the best things in the world, and I thank her, in Bulgarian this time. I thank her for bothering to distinguish between people and ideology. A distinction Mature Socialism didn’t bother to make.
The next day Michael and I leave Turkey. Between Istanbul and the border the bus gradually fills with Bulgarian Turks. Behind us is seated a tiny, toothless woman in faded black, no bigger than a child, travelling from some previous century with her two great-grandchildren. She wears a headscarf with the ends undone and hanging around her squashed face. She chews soft pastry with her gums, listens with dismay as Michael and I speak a strange foreign tongue, and stares at people’s faces with the vacant eyes of history’s unwitting survivor. Next to us is a smiley teenage girl who speaks broken Bulgarian. ‘I was only a year old when we left Bulgaria,’ she says, chewing gum. ‘I don’t remember anything.’ The middle-aged woman next to her smiles timidly, avoiding our eyes, remembering everything, and saying nothing.
As we get close to the Bulgarian border, the driver stops the folksy Turkish tape that has been playing for hours, and puts on a Bulgarian tape. The popular, vulgar pop-folk known as chalga is the ideal musical switch from Turkey to Bulgaria. Chalga is derived from a Turkish word derived from Arabic, and the result is Bulgarian turbo-folk with Middle-Eastern embroideries. Now, unfortunately, I can understand when the crooner Azis wails ‘How it hurts, how it hurts’. The moustachioed twins in front of us, sunburnt to a crisp on some Turkish beach, sing along, loving it.
At the border the merriment quickly dies down. A thick-set border guard clambers onto the bus and collects everybody’s passports. He doesn’t miss the opportunity to abuse the Bulgarian Turks who twitch defensively by an old reflex. The uniform of officialdom can’t disguise the fact that here is just a timeless common or garden Balkan thug, the type that in his twenties might have been among the ‘official organs’ of the Revival Process, reviving people with his fists.
He turns to the gummy old woman. ‘Where is your Turkish passport?’
She produces her second passport, muttering Turkish curses.
‘Speak Bulgarian, grandma,’ the guard grumbles. ‘You have a Bulgarian passport.’
The old woman resentfully shrinks into her headscarf. An unhappy silence hangs over the bus. Border crossings in the Balkans haven’t been friendly places since the Ottoman Empire dissolved into a mess of cocky nationalisms, and people began to be herded across new borders like cattle. In a historical sense, the Ottomans only really left yesterday, which is why this thug is bullying their descendents.
The guard turns to me: ‘You have another passport?’
‘Yes. From New Zealand. Do you want to see it?’
‘No, that’s OK.’ He waves me away. ‘You can keep your New Zealand passport.’
He glances at Michael, as if to say, And your New Zealand lover too. Slut.
We are kept waiting for an hour, although there are no other buses at the checkpoint. The passengers smoke and bask in the sun. A Kontiki tour bus heaves out of the Bulgarian side, full of young Western travellers. They study us from the height of their superior vehicle like Sunday strollers watching flea-ridden animals in the zoo. Their passport checks are over in five minutes, and their
bus continues on its picturesque journey.
Until seventeen years ago, this checkpoint was the most forlorn spot in the country. The only traffic was black Volgas with diplomatic number plates and tinted windows. Then suddenly, in 1989, 300,000 refugees flooded the gates: the first mass displacement since the Second World War, and the first exodus wave from the burst dam of Mature Socialism.
Finally, our mild-mannered Bulgarian-Turkish driver comes back with the passports and calls out each name. All names except mine and Michael’s are Turkish. And one other traveller who doesn’t make it across. It’s the nervy, unshaven man in a threadbare jacket at the back of the bus. The driver shouts at the man in harsh Turkish and throws his tatty bag out of the luggage hold. The wretch catches the bag, slings it over his shoulder, and without a word turns back the way we had come.
‘A Romanian.’ The driver spits out a fat globule of phlegm. ‘Trying to sneak in. With an invalid passport.’
The Romanian shuffles down the dusty road of no man’s land, his tracksuit pants fluttering around his ankles. The hills rise forbiddingly on every side like walls of dark velvet. There isn’t a village for miles either side of the border crossing, just mountain, dust, and road.
Only seventeen years ago, the sneaky Romanian might have been arrested or shot by a Bulgarian border patrol on sight. Many were. In the Cold War, this border zone in Strandja National Park was known as the Death Triangle. The Death Triangle was where the Fatherland and the entire Warsaw Pact bloc was protected by ever-vigilant patrol guards against the capitalist-imperialist enemy: Turkey and its NATO allies. Should Turkey attack, the soldiers would fire from their permanently entrenched positions and hold out until the Soviet army rushed to the rescue.
No civilians were allowed here, and the patrol guards had instructions to shoot any moving target, which usually assumed the form of young Bulgarians, Romanians and East Germans. The moving target believed, wrongly, that the border zone here wouldn’t be as scrupulously guarded as the Berlin Wall. The moving target was bright, naïve and indestructible with youth, and the last thing he or she saw was the barrel of a gun. The body of the now-still target was relieved of its meagre possessions and dumped into an unmarked grave. If the moving target was an East German, the Stasi were informed by the Bulgarian State Security about the tragic accident: a drowning at the beach, a road accident, a heart attack, it’s unfortunate that young people are so reckless. The Stasi passed on the news minus the body bag to the family, who had no choice but to accept it. It’s not as if they could file a complaint. The number of East Germans who were killed along this border is higher than all other East German victims of border crossings put together.
The number of dead Bulgarians is unknown because no one has bothered to find out. And, anyway, now the files can’t be found, and the comrades who gave the orders from above are too amnesic or too busy elsewhere to remember where they put them. When a German author recently asked for cooperation in his research for a book about these ad hoc executions, the Interior Ministry – an updated version of the old Ministry of Truth – kept silent. Perhaps it never happened. Without evidence, nothing can be proved.
I wonder who among those glamorous beach foreigners I spied from the corner of my eye were also spied on by the special coastal agents of Bulgarian State Security and the Stasi. Who among them threw themselves onto the barbed wire of the Soc Camp. Who is lying inside these hills, their youth buried twice: once by soldiers following orders, once by the slumber of this grass full of rusty tanks and memory holes.
Meanwhile, Michael and I begin to wonder why the only traffic we see on the lush back roads of Strandja is us. One reason is that the potholes are so big you could disappear inside them and never be found. Another reason is that even seventeen years after the Death Strip was deactivated, it still casts a long, barbed shadow. Villages here still bear bizarre names like Bones and Border Patrol.
We drive through a ghost town with the name Little Star and panoramic views over folding dark ranges and chipped, concrete apartment buildings purpose-built for the hundreds of border patrols once stationed here with their families. When Bulgaria joined NATO a few years ago, they went home, and the light of Little Star went out. I go into the town’s only shop, to buy a credit voucher for my mobile phone. There are three people inside, and seemingly three people in the village altogether: a surprised shop assistant; a lurching drunk who’s buying cigarettes; and a Gypsy teenager in a flamenco skirt who’s grinning at nothing in particular with what appear to be several rows of dazzling white teeth.
The village of Brushlyan or Ivy has an ivy-clad charm about it. But beneath the ivy lurks the rot of depression. The houses are spruced up, mostly because they offer guest rooms. But what would guests do here? See the museums. One of them is the ‘cell school’ where nineteenth-century kids learned to read and write in sand-boxes while seated on animal hides on the floor. It was a primitive affair because Strandja, like the whole of southern Bulgaria, remained under Ottoman control until the First Balkan War wrenched it from the Turks. The First World War a few years later herded Bulgarians, Greeks and Turks across new borders. There is a charge of 1 lev for the cell school museum, but the sad thing is that you can see all there is to see – yes, a room with rugs and sand-boxes – from the doorway.
We poke our heads into another open-air museum in a pretty garden. It’s a display of primitive nineteenth-century agricultural tools that elicits pity for both ox and man. It costs only 1 lev, but we decide against it. Agricultural tools are not our thing.
‘Why?’ the disappointed owner protests. ‘Isn’t the gentleman from England? They have a high standard of living there. What is 1 lev to them? Fifty cents.’
I protest that the gentleman isn’t from England and, besides, we are on a budget. But the man doesn’t believe me and sadly shrugs his round shoulders. I sadly shrug mine, feeling mean not to be supporting the agricultural initiative. But Michael takes a pragmatic approach. ‘It’s great that they have business initiative, but isn’t business about selling something that the buyer actually wants. Such museums should be free.’
They should. Brushlyan is trying to survive not on business but on charity without losing face. It’s busking instead of begging. Such museums are free in countries where local government supports local heritage. But here, it’s the mutra from Sofia who supports himself by building a hotel with funny money.
We leave Brushlyan for a border village at the dead end of a dirt road. It’s as close as we can get to the border. But we discover that there is something between us and the fruity-sounding Slivarovo, Village of Plums: the border checkpoint. After kilometres of green wilderness dripping with birdsong, a nasty barbed-wire fence looms suddenly, like a bad memory. It has just enough of an opening for the car to pass. A large black dog barks at us. A smoking soldier pats him calm and steps down from his kiosk.
‘Hi.’ He casually leans on the open-windowed passenger door, and grins with nicotine-yellow teeth, the only flaw in the kind of Antonio Banderas lookalike face you don’t expect to see in this spot.
‘We normally ask for papers, but don’t bother.’ He waves indulgently, amused by the double novelty of a woman driver and a foreign visitor. ‘Drive on. But bear in mind that it’s prohibited to go beyond Slivarovo. We have instructions not to allow people to walk down to the Resovska River. The boss is in the village and he won’t let you…’
The scenic river is the natural boundary between the two countries and precisely where we want to go. But we can’t argue with Antonio Banderas and his boss.
We leave the car next to a parked blue Lada in a vast clearing at the start of the village. From here, spectacular hilltop vistas open up over the blue and green ranges of Turkish Strandja. It’s the mountain doing its own thing, mindless of borders, languages, and history.
Slivarovo (number of residents: ten) is green and creaking with abandoned houses and plum trees. As soon as we step on the village path, clouds of tiny flies encase our h
eads. The quiet is thick and oppressive, like walking through syrup. I feel like a First World War correspondent in the Balkans walking into a border village a day after the enemy army has passed through. I almost expect to see pigs feasting on unspeakable things.
Instead, we see three middle-aged locals talking in hushed voices, as if the open spaces might magnify their words. As if the hills have ears. We greet them, our voices loud and hollow, and they nod and examine us with a circumspect eye before muttering something that might be a greeting.
Next, we spot a man in a worker’s overalls, and a squat, grey-haired woman with bosoms the size of small Strandja hills. She moves very slowly, as if stirring cement. She is, in fact, stacking up logs against a wall. The man is chopping them up in a primitive outdoor summer kitchen. A brew of aromatic mountain herbs bubbles in a tin on the stove. They’re startled by the visitors, but when they get over the initial shock they loosen up.
‘Yes, I grew up here,’ the man tells us in a regional accent so thick that at first I think he’s clearing his throat. ‘There were a thousand people here. Houses there, there, there.’ He points to the wild bush. ‘This was my school.’ It’s the gutted, windowless house next door. ‘Some Sofianites bought it and they’re gonna do it up.’
‘And do you live here?’ I ask the bosomed woman.
‘I live on the coast. But I’m doing up this house.’ She smiles sheepishly. ‘I want to get away from the coast, it’s become a madhouse. Hotels and tourists everywhere. Are you out for a walk? Enjoy.’
We walk on. So far we’ve met five out of the ten residents.
‘We might even be eleven since I retired here a couple of years ago,’ smiles a rotund man in a woollen hat. He’s fixing an antiquated scooter outside his house. ‘I was a miner. And a bus driver. Mm, that’s right. I know Strandja inside out. Do you want some of my honey?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Michael says in Bulgarian, which pleases the miner no end.
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