I am going now, and I know never to disturb the natural laws of that country where the people we used to be stroll along the fault lines of a white-cliffed town, eating vanilla ice cream in the slightly odd, slightly otherworldly September light.
14 Danube Terminus
Just a tourist
It’s just as well that I come to the Danube last, because – blissful relief – I have no memories here. Along the Danube, I tell myself, I can be just a tourist.
Danubian Bulgaria is a Sleeping Beauty: cursed, unloved, waiting for a miracle to happen.
And flooded. In the last two weeks, the Danube has risen by a spectacular eight metres. I’m standing on a narrow promontory, water lapping at my feet. On that side of the brown, swollen Danube is Romania’s coast. On this side, bunches of men and boys are fishing. Hundreds of startled little fish jiggle at the end of lines and slap onto the concrete to agonize before their last breath.
It’s hard to imagine that Silistra was the Roman Empire’s easternmost town in Europe, and that it flourished under Marcus Aurelius in the second century. The Romans went to town in their usual way: opulent public baths; mansions; and basilicas.
Today, united under the water lie former enemies: a Roman fortress wall; a tenth-century Orthodox patriarchal residence turned Episcopal basilica under the Byzantines; and the more ‘recent’ Ottoman quay wall.
At just about every point in its history, Silistra was a more happening place than today. Under the tiled central square and wide pedestrian avenues leading towards the Danube lurk the stony vias of Durostrum. The ruins in the lush ground were the foundations of the city walls. If I look at them long enough, I begin to see the ghostly outlines of Roman villas and baths. I see the patricians in their togas and sandals, sailing along in the warm river breeze, plump with all the time and slaves in the world.
And behind the brightly painted belle époque buildings, I see the stately houses of Danubian aristocracy of the 1920s and ’30s.
Down the streets pass gaggles of bored youths munching popcorn. The women selling it stare into the still mid-afternoon while their corn pops. Time has stopped in Silistra, and everyone moves slowly, carefully, as if in a spell they are afraid to break.
Outside the museum, kids play on top of medieval tombs, using them as stepping stones for a skipping game. The well-groomed girls smile and hug each other for a photo. The boy, snotty-nosed and hostile, wants to be photographed by himself and stands with legs planted apart, staring point blank at the camera. Clearly, he is destined for great things.
There is a Roman tomb around here, with stunning murals. How can I see it? The depressed history graduate who acts as a museum guide shakes his head.
‘The director is away. You could call him next week.’
He shuffles ahead of me and the other two visitors, switching on the lights and unlocking the treasury, then observing us with a mournful expression. Like many other provincial museums stuffed with riches, they can’t afford to keep the lights on all day.
‘But it’ll be no use anyway,’ he continues with the same mournful tone. ‘The tomb is only opened for official visits or large groups. For conservation reasons. Otherwise the murals get damaged. I’m sorry.’
He looks as if he’s about to cry, and I feel like telling him to get the hell out of here, go to Sofia, but then he’s one of the few young people I’ve seen in town. What good would it do little Silistra if he too deserted?
‘We’ve always been forgotten by the world up here in the corner,’ complains a taxi-driver with a large gold crucifix on his hairy chest. ‘Always fallen by the wayside somehow. There’s eighty per cent unemployment here. All the young people have gone, abroad or to bigger towns. You know, this was Romania between the world wars. It’d be good if Romania took us back, they want us anyway. As a Bulgarian town, it couldn’t get any worse, I tell you.’
‘I think it’s a lovely town,’ I say lamely. It’s a lovely town but I’d rather lie at the bottom of the Danube with a millstone around my neck than live here.
Back at the flooded promontory, two fishermen hand me a plastic bag of fresh fish.
‘Thanks, but I don’t have a kitchen to cook it.’ I shrug.
‘Are you visiting? Have you come to see our Danube rising up to swallow us?’
It’s the younger man speaking, with a not entirely sane smile on his introverted face. The older man has a resigned air and a yellowish hepatic tinge.
‘You know that this flood was predicted, everything has been predicted,’ the hepatitis patient says. ‘It’s the Last Judgement coming, and you must save yourself now, while you still can.’
‘I’d love to,’ I say brightly. ‘How do I do that?’
‘You need to put your fate into God’s hands. That’s what we’ve done, and we feel the difference. But you need to act fast.’
‘You know, I think it’s too late for me.’ I beat a careful retreat, trying not to fall into the stagnant flood waters which have already swallowed an entire basilica. On my stroll back through the mellow river park, golden with sunset, a teenager crouching by the ruins offers me yet another bag of fish.
‘The nets on the Romanian side have broken.’ He grins. ‘We got tons.’
I wish he’d invite me round to his family’s place for grilled fish and baklava, but this is no Devil’s Bridge. In fact, the closest bridge is downstream in Ruse. It was built in 1954 with Soviet funds, and like most things made of steel and concrete back then it’s called the Bridge of Friendship.
Such is the friendship between Romania and Bulgaria that along a 470-kilometre-long border, this is the only bridge. Although the dictator Jivkov had a special wing in his residence for the Ceauşescus, the friendliness traditionally consists of peering over the Danube to make sure the other is doing worse – which they often are. Both countries squirmed when they were bundled together on the late steamboat to EU membership. But they were wrong to squirm. Now, after years of sulking about it, the two countries have started building a second bridge, in Vidin and Calafat, some 260 kilometres upstream from Friendship. I just hope they don’t call it Youth.
Everyone has now gone from the riverside, which is when I notice the swanky new Hotel Drustur. Its gilded faux baroque lobby shines implacably, and snooty young staff in stiff uniforms stand around like mannequins. I can’t see any visitors in this futuristic temple to tourism. I’m tempted to book a room, but Hotel Drustur costs lots of euros, so I brace myself for the return to the Socialist-era Golden Dobrudzha Hotel.
The name refers to the fertile Dobrudzha plains in the northeast, known as the granary of Bulgaria, but there is nothing fertile about the hotel. It’s cheap and nasty. Part of it has been renovated, but I’m staying in the other part because it’s cheaper. Everything in my single room is excrement-brown and comes straight from the sixties. The reception desk is huge and unloved like a demilitarized zone, and the receptionist informs me that if I want information about boat cruises I must speak to the director, who is on the second floor and can be found tomorrow between 9 and 12.30, and between… This sounds familiar. I’m sure I’ve heard about the absent director before.
Then the bad news comes: the closest place to eat is the hotel’s restaurant, also fully decorated in brown, except for the tablecloths which are a uniform navy blue. I sit at an oversized table by myself, and with fake cheer order cabbage and carrot salad and a kavarma. You can’t go wrong with a baked casserole dish and fresh veg, I think. How wrong I am. The salad is so wilted it’s almost pickled, and the tough meat and glum potatoes slump in an impersonal sauce. I complain, friendly to the point of obsequiousness, and the equally wilted waitress with blue eye-shadow whisks it off with an accusatory hand.
And if there was any doubt that I have stepped into a time-loop, a plump chanteuse with greasy lipstick, and a keyboard player with glasses bigger than his face bounce onto the musical platform. And with no warning or anaesthetic, they catapult me straight into the eighties with the song ‘We’ll
meet again in twenty years’.
I’m made of strong stuff, but I have no resistance against 1980s pop ballads about small towns where there’s nothing to do except fall in love, about the impermanence of first snow, about last summer’s sandcastles, about ‘telephone love’. A lump gathers at the back of my throat, and it’s not the pork. Dams the size of Koprinka – with Seuthopolis submerged at the bottom – threaten to burst out.
No, I resolve, not here, where Politburo commissars have sung drunkenly, slammed their meaty palms on greasy tablecloths, pinched waitresses’ bottoms, and toasted the Party. No way is this canteen going to break me.
To distract myself, I look at my neighbours. A fat-necked man in a short-sleeved shirt is knocking back small Fanta bottles like vodkas. A group of musty men in half-undone ties and polyester suits smoke around a table, stab at the tired salad, and talk business: yesterday’s Politburo commissars, today’s businessmen. Nobody makes eye contact. Cigarette smoke descends on the room like smog from the past, blurring all reason. I look at my watch but it’s no use. What year is it?
Between Hotel Drustur and the Golden Dobrudzha, I have walked exactly five minutes and twenty-five years.
And let’s face it: since arriving a few weeks ago, I haven’t been myself. A few weeks alone in the country of your childhood wreaks havoc on your imported adult personality.
Every morning, I wake up alarmed. Where is my passport? Can I leave the country? Where is everyone? And who is everyone? I’m sure there’s a word in psychiatry to name this state. I don’t know the word, but I know how it feels: like psychic jet lag.
My mental furniture is not in its usual place. The walls have gone, all defences have broken down, wild growth creeps in. The door is the window. The window is showing weird fragments, like in a Dali painting. My head is screwed on the wrong way.
I flee from the treacherous restaurant, leaving behind my favourite New Zealand scarf in the rush, the only beautiful item in my pragmatic luggage. I lie in the mean single bed under a mean single blanket and inhale the cocktail of fragrances: the stale ash smell of the brown Balkantourist carpet; the mouldy, sewagey stink of the Balkantourist bathroom.
How wrong I was about being just a tourist, about putting myself back together. How naïve not to understand the basic mechanics of time-travel. Because it turns out that’s what travel is, in Bulgaria. You may consult the latest bilingual map all you like, but one way or another, you always end up somewhere else. Somewhere like here.
I fear that I’ll never emerge from this bed. That I’ll be stuck in the expired Golden Dobrudzha for ever, an oversized grown-up squeezed into a twilight world of vinegary salads and slightly off-key Ionica keyboards. A guest from the future petrified in the amber-brown time of a Balkantourist holiday.
The bathroom tap drips. It’s as if the whole building, the whole flooded town, is weeping rusty tears.
Things dramatically improve in Ruse, when I sit down to a crisp tomato salad and a lentil soup in a courtyard mehana. Above the courtyard, I’ve rented a spotless room with a polished floor. The new bathroom sparkles furiously and hurts my eyes.
I’m overjoyed to have made it here, after scare reports of the road between Silistra and Ruse going under the ever-swelling Danube. The Danube withdrew politely just on time for our bus, and I am now sitting beside a rumbling courtyard fountain, opposite a middle-aged German with the intriguing leathery look of an arms dealer. We agree to speak French.
‘La soupe est bonne?’ He has pushed aside his steak. ‘I’m too tired for meat. I feel just like what you’re having, comfort food.’
He orders a soup from the German-speaking waiter and tells me about his clothes business with shops all over the Balkans. That’s why he’s often on the road. I try not to show my disappointment.
‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ He smiles. ‘Clothes, that’s my trade. I always rent the same rooms in Sofia, Istanbul, Thessaloniki. It’s like coming home. I like it.’
I ask about doing business in Bulgaria.
‘The Bulgarians are very nice people, civilized, gentle. They really are the Prussians of the East as they say, hard-working, unfussy. But they’re fatalistic, resigned. They always shrug their shoulders philosophically, as if things are foretold. The Greeks are quite different. Also nice, but more arrogant. They can really say no. And you know how they say “never do business with Greeks”? It’s true!’ He laughs. ‘I mainly deal with Armenians in Greece, they’re more trustworthy. The Turks… nice people on the whole, but too nationalistic. Look what they did to the Armenians, and they still refuse to admit it.’
His French is faultlessly melodious.
‘I can’t stand nationalism, it’s ugly,’ he continues, on a roll. ‘Turkey shouldn’t be let into the EU. Not in the next fifty, hundred years. Islam is a big problem, the way they treat women. Bulgaria, Romania, they’ve always been part of Europe. It’s the Turks that prevented them for so many centuries, pulled them to the East, and then of course the barbarism of Communism… There’s no question that right now we’re in Europe. But Turkey is another story.’
He looks at me, it’s my turn to express an opinion.
‘That’s right,’ I say quickly. It is another story. But the truth is, I don’t know whether I support Turkey in the EU or not. It’s a question so vast it swallows me up as soon as I think about it. We slurp our lukewarm lentil soup, and he lights a cigarette.
‘Food is never piping hot in Bulgaria, have you noticed?’ I say apologetically. Am I fatalistic and resigned, a typical Bulgarian? And what exactly am I doing now – apologizing to the foreigner as a Bulgarian, or complaining under the false guise of a foreigner? How tiring, this business of national self-consciousness.
‘I’ve noticed,’ he says. ‘But I don’t mind because it’s always good.’
I like him so much I invite him to the symphony concert I’m running late for. But he’s tired and I go alone. The concert is top-notch, but the audience is so sparse I pray that the musicians are all short-sighted so they can’t see how few of us there are. Next to me sit an Englishman in Jesus sandals and a small Bulgarian boy who speaks accented English. They look like uncle and nephew: close, but not quite father and son. Ruse is the kind of city where such cosmopolitan anomalies don’t seem as strange as elsewhere in Bulgaria.
This spirit of refinement vanishes later that night when the mehana downstairs turns into a thumping chalga club. The entire nation has come to party, with their children. The grossest of ‘retro’ chalgas, meaning from the nineties, is pumping through mega-speakers. It’s called ‘100 Mercedeses’, and it’s sung by a fully lobotomized fake blonde called Tzvetelina who wants 100 Mercedeses and 100 men – though presumably in the reverse order, or else how will she get the Mercedeses? I lie in the dark and think misanthropic thoughts.
In the morning, I come out to find that Ruse’s plump, cake-shaped buildings are gripped by a fairy-tale whirlwind of white pollen. The streets are carpeted with fluff and people paw across the sleepy weekend, from shop to café to park bench.
Amazingly, many buildings are renovated. The city fathers sit stonily atop banks, and grotesque faces leer from baroque façades. New-Romanticism, Secession and Art Nouveau chatter to each other over the heads of passing townsfolk. You could be in a tiny Vienna or Paris, which was precisely the idea.
The energetic crudeness of Communist town planning didn’t manage to mar Ruse’s elegant past. Its stately centre of squares and cupolas live in a parallel world of fin-de-siècle Europe. What eventually dragged this princess city into the mire of the late twentieth century was the mega-pollution wafting in from the sodium and chlorine plant across the river in friendly Romania. It became so bad that people walked around with masks, despite which they developed strange respiratory diseases.
My one and only visit as a child took place before the plant started leaking. My parents were witnesses at some relative’s wedding. My sister and I wore bridesmaid dresses made by our mother from medical
gauze bought in a pharmacy, the closest she could find to tulle. The bride and groom looked grotesquely old to me, he with his receding hair, she with her thick waist. In fact, they were only in their twenties. The wedding cake was five-layered, a thing of wonder, and we danced into the small hours to a live band playing top of the pops like ‘Yes, that’s how it is in the small town’ and ‘We’ll meet again in twenty years’.
Out of four town clocks, the one in the main square is showing the current time. Its inaudible ticking is reassuring. Danubian time hasn’t stopped completely.
Ruse may not be the most exciting place to be now, but it used to be. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while Sofia was still a muddy Turkish vilayet, Ruse-Rustchuk grew fat on international trade and looked to Vienna for ideas. Bulgaria wasn’t on the map of Europe yet, but at least Ruse put together the first map of the country and the first newspaper. The paper was initially printed in Strasbourg because Ruse didn’t have its own press. Soon it did, and the press was followed by the first bank, the first chamber of commerce, the first meteorological station, the first Navy School, the first pharmacy, the first professional theatre, the first film screening, the first railway… You get the idea. Ruse left the rest of the country practically nothing to pioneer.
And, since I’m walking past the mute Catholic Church of St Paul the Crucified, here is the country’s first church organ. The 700-pipe beast is apparently still played on Sundays, but either I’ve missed the moment or the Catholics of Ruse have lapsed. Or, quite possible in my current unreliable state of mind, it isn’t actually Sunday.
In another first, Ruse built and lavishly inhabited the first urban houses in Mitteleuropean style. The town planning was revolutionized by giving streets names and houses numbers. It might seem a tiny revolution, but it was a step away from the feudal lifestyle of the Ottoman provinces and a step towards Europe. The credit for this goes, ironically, to the local Turkish governor Mithad Pasha. The Pasha was a cosmopolitan reformer and, like many of Ruse’s elite, a Mason to boot. He did everything in style, even his affairs: he fancied the Prussian consul’s wife, the mellifluously named Kaliopa, so much that in 1865 he gave her a house on the river bank.
Street Without a Name Page 27
