But as you sit in the tiny fishing harbour at dusk, crunching in your mouth those tiny salted fried fishes appropriately called tsa-tsa, you feel nostalgic even without memories. Sozopol gives you its own memories. It’s that kind of sea town. The fishing boats are all named after women of vague eras and nationalities: Victoria, Susana, Tetis. Old women sell fig jam and lace on small tables along cobbled streets, and the seagulls cry out with human voices.
The marketplace behind the beach was already happening 3,000 years ago, when merchants traded olives, textiles, wine, and honey with the rest of the known world. In medieval times, the bodies of dead sailors were displayed before burial in the small kiosk by the Town’s Beach. As a child, I thought it was a public toilet because it was always locked. It’s, in fact, the medieval Chapel St Spas, named after the protector – clearly ineffectual – of all seamen.
But right now, in the marketplace I stop at the stall of a soft-bodied man in sandals that have seen happier summers. He is selling fake Gucci glasses, leather wallets from a ‘Collection’ without a name, and bright seashell necklaces of dubious provenance. Is this coral I see?
‘From Thailand.’ The seller shrugs his big, defeated shoulders. He has a soft accent. ‘I just take what they send me. I don’t even know what it is. Might be coral, might be plastic…’
It’s no wonder he doesn’t know coral from plastic: he’s a mechanical engineer. He and his wife emigrated here from Armenia fifteen years ago. Bulgaria wasn’t doing great, but Armenia was much worse. He got a job, but then the factory closed and he found himself unemployed. ‘I never imagined I’d be a trinket seller. But what else is there?’
Go back to Armenia? He nods a Bulgarian no.
‘Armenia is still worse off than Bulgaria. True, they make it hard for immigrants here. We still don’t have passports, after fifteen years. And every year we have to pay huge amounts to have our visas renewed. Crazy. But what can you do?’
The only thing I can do is buy a wallet from the nameless Collection, and a coral-plastic necklace. The engineer is thrilled to have a paying customer. All this activity has attracted other women so I bid him goodbye and he shakes my hand with an optimistic smile.
Armenian migrants like him don’t enjoy the concessions their ancestors did. In Burgas, at the feet of the Balkantourist sphinx that is Hotel Bulgaria, stands a wizened Armenian dwarf of a church called St Hach. In the small church courtyard, a stone memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide is livened up by a plastic half-bottle of garden flowers.
St Hach must have been particularly crowded in the first half of the twentieth century when the survivors of the genocide poured in their tens of thousands into Bulgaria via the port of Burgas. They were followed by the elite of Armenian society in the wake of the collapsed Armenian Republic. Then arrived the Armenian refugees from the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe in Turkey and Greece.
In fact, it seems that the only kindness the Armenians enjoyed in the twentieth century was to be granted instant citizenship by little Bulgaria. Like the Jews, the Armenians were seen here as fellow sufferers from the Judeo-Christian world. Indeed, the numerous Armenians have been to Bulgaria what the numerous Jews were to other European nations – artistically gifted, financially smart, socially mobile, generally enterprising, and slightly exotic, a bonus of a minority. Fortunately, Bulgaria has been wise enough to realize this and embrace the Armenians instead of throttle them. Even if the engineer-turned-trinket seller doesn’t have a passport yet, and the coral-plastic necklace crumbles in my hands the next day.
But, more importantly, the Apollonia Art Festival is in town. Actors, musicians, and literary types sashay along cobbled streets on their way to some last play premiere or jazz quartet. New-agers can be traced by the notices posted around the old town, the writing blurry like the content:
To all participants in Apolonia. Tomorrow, at dawn, there will be a general good vibe gathering at the rocks. All welcome to charge up with the mystic energy of the sea.
I charge up with the mystic energy of the sea by booking myself into a light-filled room in a wooden house right on the sea promenade of the old town. The house only looks old: it is, in fact, a brand-new hotel. So new that it has no name. After the nameless hotel in Plovdiv, I begin to see a theme here. The only entrance is via an abandoned construction site next door, whose cement base is studded with random iron rods like a giant bed of nails. I picture drunk hotel guests stumbling home at night and ending up decorating the site with their impaled bodies. To access the promenade down below, the hotel guest (me) must climb down the old fortification wall, which is only slightly less hazardous than the nail bed. Oh, and they don’t have towels yet.
‘Towels and TVs are for next year.’ The sun-wilted manageress who camps in the room next door smiles apologetically. ‘When we have more money.’ She gives me a fluffy towel out of the goodness of her heart, but soon it transpires that I won’t be needing it, not all of it anyway: the sparkling new shower tube instantly splits at the base, and I get a face full of hot water.
But the room is cheap and clean, and underneath my romantic balcony is the blue sea and a ripe fig tree which I must remember to raid first thing in the morning, instead of buying those plastic cups of figs at 2 lev a pop. Of course I don’t. I end up buying a plastic cup of figs for 3 lev from an old woman in black. It’s my penitence for not paying to examine those agricultural tools in Brushlyan.
In the evening there is a big concert. The world music star Ivo Papasov and his Wedding Orchestra are in town, and that’s an event I don’t want to miss, mostly because Ivo Papasov is a legend, but also because I need to check whether his belly really is as pregnant as it looks on photographs.
It is – about eight months gone – but the heavenly sounds he produces with his clarinet balance out the extreme gravity of his earthly form. All the virtuosos in the band are of Gypsy or Turkish origin or, like Ivo himself, both. Fidgeting in front of me are a Gypsy man and his teenage son. They’re friends or relatives of the virtuoso kaval-player in the band, and so excited to see him on stage, they wave the entire time, hoping he’ll notice them and wave back. But he can’t – his hands are busy holding the kaval. At one point, the father walks onto the stage to shake hands with the musician. His teenage son looks as embarrassed as the musician, who is just then in the middle of a tricky solo piece.
The open-air amphitheatre of Sozopol is packed, and when Ivo and his people strike up a juicy Thracian horo, people get up to weave some complicated steps. Soon the wooden stage darkens with thick coils of dancers jumping up and down.
‘That’s it, that’s it,’ Ivo coughs into the microphone. ‘Now the TV cameras are gone, we can all relax, like at home. And now we’d like to finish with a real Gypsy number. And happy anniversary, of course! That’s right, for me it’s still an anniversary. I like to celebrate all anniversaries, ’cause you never know these days. But let’s not get started on politics, ’cause it’ll get ugly…’
The audience cheer. Music must be the only occasion when an audience cheers a band of Gypsies.
‘What’s the date today?’ I ask the Gypsy teenager in front of me. ‘The ninth of September,’ he says blankly. Of course! The ninth of September (1944), the day when the Soviet army liberated us from ourselves. And the day on which three generations of little Chavdars and Pioneers marched every year and waved red flags at the comrades under black umbrellas. But to the teenager here, it’s just a meaningless date.
Most people go back to their seats for the ‘Gypsy number’, but a few of us, young enough not to be threatened by oriental vibes, remain on stage to celebrate the Soviet army – both its arrival and its departure – with a good old belly-shaking Gypsy kuchek.
Later that night, I sit on my romantic balcony with a throbbing head, hoping for a bit of soothing sea silence. Tough luck: the open-air café-bar under the fig tree is celebrating too. The nerd at the bar has downloaded the golden hits of Soviet pop music from the 1980s and is gl
eefully playing them at full blast.
A table of his thirty-something friends are knocking back vodkas like there’s no tomorrow (perhaps there isn’t – look what happened to yesterday) and singing along ironically to the melodies of their childhood.
To crown the evening, the nerd treats us to none other but Alla Pugacheva and her ‘Million Scarlet Roses’. I now know that the song which moved my childish imagination into learning the genitive case was written by the poet Andrei Voznesensky. The story behind it is real, and slightly different from the poem.
When the primitivist Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani fell in love with a flower-loving French dancer visiting Tbilisi, he sold everything he owned. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to cover the square in front of her hotel with roses. But they didn’t marry and live happily ever after because he was now a pauper and she wanted a millionaire. She left and he drank himself to death before anybody noticed his talent. ‘But in his life,’ the song goes, ‘remained that square full of roses.’ Millions, millions, millions of scarlet roses.
The geek conducts with his pudgy fingers, the computer screen lighting up his bespectacled face like a halo. At the refrain, I join the drunk choir from my balcony, ‘Milion, milion, milion alyuh roz…’
We are singing an ironic but secretly nostalgic serenade to our communal lost youth of red armies, red scarves, red boots, red flags, and red stars. Here, a shot of vodka and a bouquet of a million radioactive red roses!
The year of ‘Million Scarlet Roses’ was when my grandmother Anastassia became very ill and our summers in Balchik ended. But Balchik is miraculously preserved in the pickle of memory. Which is just as well, because it turns out that it isn’t preserved anywhere else.
It has now been twenty years, and if, back then, Balchik had one foot in the sea, the evil twins of time and erosion have ensured that it is now splashing in it.
After paying a hefty entrance fee to the Queen’s Gardens, I discover that the waterfalls are rather thin, and the Queen’s palace is a very non-palatial house with a bizarre minaret. I go to peer inside the giant amphorae and check if my childhood promise ‘Bye-bye, I’ll be back’ is still there, but a group of Germans with well-cooked skins are in my way. They are tossing up whether to hit the beach or not. The beach?
I look down. Yes, where the jetty with my broken penguin stood before, lashed by algae-thick water, now there is a beach. A sprawling beach with umbrellas and people. The slimy green wall that stopped the sea from invading the gardens has collapsed, like a dam against time that could no longer hold out. Only the giant, furry cacti loyally stand up for the past.
And this is just the beginning of the horror-tour. I look up to the limestone cliffs, searching for the hillside villas of Dobrich. But there are only cheap, ugly new hotels and wild overgrowth. I ask the sellers at the souvenir stalls outside the gardens, but they nod no, they’ve never heard of the villas of Dobrich. I search their sunburnt faces and feel a strange void. We share nothing except a language. My Balchik is not their Balchik. I’m a ghost from the past, but it isn’t their past.
Finally, I try a driveway leading up the hill and, sure enough, I recognize the warden’s kiosk. An old man in tatty clothes is sleeping outside on a shady bench.
Where are the villas? They’re still here but I can’t see them for the jungle that has grown around them. The whole complex has slipped downhill, just as people predicted twenty years ago. The whitewashed houses are cracked like sandcastles dried in the sun. The alleyways along which I tested my new sandals have split open and vicious bramble bushes grow from the crevices and scratch my legs. I stubbornly beat my way through this desolate jungle, determined to find the house of my childhood. It’s a bit like pushing your way back into the birth canal. It’s a painful business.
I find ‘our’ house, or at least something that looks like it. It’s unlocked, and when I step inside I see that everything has been gutted. The mattresses from the beds, the light bulbs from the ceiling, the door frames from the walls, even the sinks have been ripped out. The three empty iron bed frames – me, my grandmother and my grandfather – stare at me like eyeless sockets. How could anyone have been happy here?
But we were. We played dominoes on the veranda and turned red in the sun. We blew up rubber balls and washed the sand off with water hoses. I watched sunsets and wrote mystical poems about moonlight and eternity, so mystical that even I didn’t know what they meant. We got bitten by mosquitoes and applied lavender spirit.
The playground is overgrown and strewn with garbage. I sit on a low, rusty swing and feel as if I’m about to be sucked into a plug hole. I struggle to remember other places, other people, other happinesses, but it’s no use. Right now, my whole life amounts to this cemetery of childhood slipping into the drain of the sea.
‘Hey, what are you doing here?’
The old man outside the kiosk has woken up and is calling out to me while tucking in his short-sleeved shirt. He smells of old age.
‘I used to spend my summers here,’ I croak dustily, ‘with my grandparents. My grandfather worked for Dobrich.’
‘Ah, of course! I remember those days.’ He waves vaguely. He is glad to have company.
‘Perhaps you remember him. Atanasov was his name.’
‘Atanasov… You know, so many people passed through. And I wasn’t working here at the time, I’m just watching it now, to make sure there’s no vandals…’
What, to take the slates from the roofs? The berries from the bushes?
‘What’s going to happen to it?’
‘A foreigner, an Englishman, I think, bought it. He’s going to convert it, pull down the bungalows, build a new hotel…’
I already hate that Englishman.
‘How long has it been like this?’
‘Oh, years. It’s been bush and snakes for years. It’s the erosion. Watch where you step.’
No, it’s not the Englishman’s fault, it’s not his fault at all. He’s just an investor. It’s everything else. The dismal Socialist construction, cancer, erosion, and just dumb old time passing. I shouldn’t have come here at all. Alice must never go back to Wonderland once she grows up. I hate being grown up.
The old man takes pity on me, and says softly, ‘Pass the camera, I’ll take a picture of you before they tear it all down.’
Snap. He hands me the camera back. His hand is rough with calluses. I want to ask him what his life is like, what it used to be like, I want to hang around here and chat, and pretend everything’s fine. But he understands the nature of my visit and wisely wants to stay out of it. He waves me away with ‘Go well, girl’, and returns to his shady bench.
Along the main road, the erosion bumps are as big as that molehill in the bedroom of Peach Street. I weave my way around them to the open-air cinema where I’d had that first clueless glimpse into my Kiwi future.
The whitewashed cinema façade is standing defiantly, and, behind it, a pile of rubble. There is an evil stench. A Gypsy couple crawl out of the ruins with post-coital flushes – or have they been… no, I don’t want to know. They adjust their belts, and greet me sheepishly with ‘Good afternoon’.
‘What happened to the cinema?’ I ask. Not the smartest of questions, and I get the answer I deserve.
‘Oh, it’s all ruined now,’ the woman says. ‘It’s just used as a toilet.’
And they scurry off down the road, getting smaller and smaller and disappearing into the cracked asphalt like something out of a David Lynch nightmare.
Across the road there is a tennis court, and in the middle a topless man with a toasted belly sits on a plastic chair, watering the sandy ground with a hose. Watering the ground. I think I’m losing my mind.
I walk in a stupor by the sea, to the old town at the far end of the cracked road. But what is this? The shore is lined with fish restaurants and brightly painted new hotels with cheerful names like Helios, Jupiter, Sunshine Pearl, Holiday Beach. I don’t remember any of it, and for a good reason: none of i
t was here.
But the grubby, old, poor Balchik is still here, like an ancient ant heap, and I climb the steep streets to the old town. Village houses and courtyards hung with washing, pot plants and miniature gardens, open rubbish tips, dirt roads winding into nothingness. Kids pedal on rickety bicycles, dogs bark in the distance, chickens peck at the remains of the afternoon, and the limestone cliffs peer down at us, slipping invisibly. Another twenty years and…
A fine warm rain begins to fall, and a bearded goat that looks like a Biblical old man, possibly Moses, is watching me critically from a small rubbish mound. I’m not feeling that good, I say to the goat, and dust comes out of my mouth. If the goat weren’t busy chewing something, I’m sure it would say, ‘It wasn’t that smart to come here in the first place. Now you’re going to miss your bus, and then you’ll be sorry.’
I bid the goat goodbye and crack on to the top of town, to the bus station. The bus station consists of a vast, empty parking space with a big puddle in the middle and a vast, empty building entirely made of rust. It looks like the last time a bus passed through here, by mistake, was in 1965, and even then it didn’t stop. Five other lost souls are sitting on the broken bench, waiting. We are all amazed when the bus appears thirty minutes later. It seems to be the one from 1965.
I try to catch one last glimpse of Balchik. But the bus windows are so grimy that all I see is a kind of milky mist where the sea, the houses, and the limestone cliffs are all blurred.
So it turns out that the past isn’t just another country. It is another country where someone like us, but not us, lives, a queen of a distant domain. It turns out we must pay dearly when we try to enter the enchanted garden, greedy for magic, yearning to make contact with its resident ghosts who hide behind the giant cacti, at the bottom of the amphorae, down the plug hole.
Street Without a Name Page 26
