This is where I’m standing now, in the cream-coloured, wood-panelled, Levantine-style House of Kaliopa. I touch the exquisite draperies, the furniture, the porcelain. I lean to examine a hairbrush. Is that a blonde hair I see? Beside the grand Viennese piano (Bulgaria’s first, of course), I smell the faded face powder of society balls. I hear the murmurings of city intrigues and shady deals between merchants, canny consuls making a buck on the side, and slick-haired, eagle-eyed international opportunists whose names read like a roll call of the Foreign Legion. I brush up against the starched consuls and their crinolined wives, the groomed officers of the Lloyd Triestino Line eyeing up the ladies on the evening promenade. The studio Photographie Parisienne receives a family in Sunday-best clothes from the ‘Spanioli’ district of the Sephardic Jews, where the Nobel Prizewinning author Elias Canetti was born. The girls at the French school are chatting in a shady courtyard, and the pastry chef at the oriental patisserie is waxing the end of his moustache. I spy the bearded Mithad Pasha in his fez, glancing coldly across a ballroom at the Russian consul. In only a few years, Russia and Turkey would be at war. Ruse would be free, Bulgaria’s richest city for decades to come. Such wealth doesn’t go away overnight. Ruse was the kind of city where fortunes and mansions were gambled away in a night’s game of poker.
Next door to Kaliopa’s House is the House of Baba Tonka, the symbolic mother-fighter of unfree Bulgaria. It makes perfect sense that the houses are so close together. Because while Kaliopa’s House echoed with waltzes and chiming crystals, next door a revolution was fomenting.
Baba Tonka’s four sons and one daughter were all involved in revolutionary committees in Bulgaria and Romania, and the Ruse cell operated out of her house. In the bloody wake of the April Uprising, Tonka’s children were all killed or exiled to Asia Minor. Her son Nikola was paraded around Ruse by Mehmet Pasha’s government, with his sentence – jail for life – around his neck. But he was lucky. Two years later came independence, and a jubilant Nikola returned to his home town to rebuild free Bulgaria. He lived to the age of ninety, and died just in time not to see what happened to his only daughter.
Her name was Tonka, after her illustrious grandmother. In 1944, less than a century after Baba Tonka’s struggle for a free Bulgaria, Tonka Junior and her husband were branded ‘enemies of the people’. The reason: her husband, director of Ruse’s Boys Gymnasium, had reprimanded a teacher for boasting to his students about visiting brothels. The teacher, who knew the right organs of power as well as the right organs of brothels, wrote a little ‘report’. It took as little as that in the murderous 1940s. The organs worked fast and without trial, and the director was executed together with his wife Tonka.
One of their daughters died soon after, and the other one, Liliana, became lifelong muse to one of the country’s great post-war artists, Nenko Balkanski. Despite his dark, individualist style, Balkanski somehow gained the double title of People’s Artist and Hero of Socialist Labour – whether he wanted it or not. Nenko and Liliana’s grandson, called Nenko after his illustrious grandfather, is about my age and paints churches. The story of modern Bulgaria in a nutshell.
And here, across from Kaliopa’s House and Baba Tonka’s House, is the monumentally ugly high-rise of the Hotel Riga. It’s been refurbished, and every room looks over the Danube. But this is beside the point.
The point is that Kaliopa’s House was Bulgaria’s gateway to Europe, Baba Tonka’s House was Bulgaria’s gateway to the nation-state, and Hotel Riga is the back door of both. You wonder who will come through that door.
‘Let’s hit the town, guys! Have you got the map?’ A group of chirpy young Brits with narrow blond faces emerge from the Hotel Riga and head uptown.
A historical turnaround has occurred here, and to reverse it would involve acrobatics too complex and too tied up with money for us to ponder now. Elias Canetti became one of the cultural barometers of twentieth-century Europe, and he first took Europe’s temperature here. But he left Ruse-Rustchuk, and only remembered the town of his childhood in the portentous autobiographical sentence: ‘Everything I lived through later had already happened some time in Rustchuk.’
And after everything Ruse has lived through, I want to believe that while the best is probably over, so is the worst.
The bus from Sofia to Vidin treats the unfortunate passengers to a scenic, bowel-rearranging drive along roads forgotten by the transport ministry. Vertical cliff faces peer down at us.
We pass Vratsa, the mini-Siberia of our family. This is where in the mid-seventies my father wore a brown uniform and crawled in the mud for two years that felt like two hundred. But I can’t see how the military Vratsa of family lore is the same place as this little mountain town pressed against the Vrachanski Balkán ranges and choked with greenery and oblivion. Oblivion is the keyword. Let Vratsa sleep here, in this impenetrable mountain. It’s an ideal place for the past.
Vidin sits in a bend of the river at the very western end of Danubian Bulgaria, on the bare bones of its arse. It makes Silistra look plump with wealth. Ruse is practically Vienna. Vidin’s past and present, on the other hand, have endured a divorce so bitter that it’s hard to believe they were ever married.
For a thousand years, Vidin was one of the Danube’s biggest ports and the medieval hub of the whole region. Over the centuries, Vidin was broken off from the rest of Bulgaria by a succession of energetic brutes. The most interesting of those was an eighteenth-century janissary by the name of Osman Pazvantogğlu. Osman carved out a name and a fortune for himself after seceding from the Sultan’s administration and declaring Vidin and the north his own district. To ward off the Sultan’s army, he gathered a motley crew of cut-throats: rag-tag mercenaries, fellow janissaries, and the dreaded marauders known as kirçali. Kirçali meant literally field brigands, and their reign over large swathes of land meant figuratively that the Sultan’s empire was in a bad way.
This chapter in Bulgaria’s history became known as the time of the kirçali. From Pazvantogğlu’s base in Vidin, his army from hell terrorized the Bulgarians on this side of the Danube and the Wallachian Romanians on the other. ‘Who needs leprosy,’ the Romanian philosopher Cioran wrote, ‘when the fate that roused you to life also placed you in Wallachia?’ During the time of the kirçali, and on many more occasions thereafter, Bulgarians shared that leprous fate with their neighbours across the ditch.
Though I wouldn’t volunteer to live in Vidin at the turn of the nineteenth century, at least it wasn’t dull. Today, a broken fountain made of three plaster graces receives the cigarette butts of three Gypsy brothers in identical shirts and with blond highlights in their hair. Drowsy locals sip coffees in plastic chairs and fiddle with their mobiles. The pedestrian mall is lined with pretty turn-of-the-century façades, and trodden by locals who move in a kind of slow motion trance, like denizens in the kingdom of Sleeping Beauty after the evil fairy’s spell has taken effect.
In the main square, the Turkish fourteenth-century Stambul Kapiya gate stands in a permanent face-off with the monolithic Communist Party building on the other side of the square. I take a walk through the green, tranquil riverside park. It’s empty save for a giant stone monument to the Russian army generously defaced with a huge splash of red paint.
A beautiful, derelict Sephardic synagogue stands in a deserted street beside the park. Its chewed cupolas circled by black crows remind me of abandoned maharaja palaces and resident vultures. The blue sky peers through the missing roof, and I stand on the chipped floor mosaic, looking up, for a minute or an hour, caught in the spell.
The synagogue is at the heart of Kaleto district, and Kaleto was the heart of the old fortified town. At the turn of the twentieth century, many Jews populated Kaleto with their trades, European-designed houses, and names that fluttered with exotic plumage, like birds that brought glad news of the world. Here were the houses of printer Finto Alhalel, trader Moreno Pinkas, architect Mayer Aladjemov, the philanthropists brothers Haim and Chelebi Pisanti. Eve
n the cobbler’s shop was called Paris, and the tailor’s Milan. The Communist regime, like its Fascist cousin, found cosmopolitanism deeply suspect. In the 1950s the Jews left en masse. Israel was a construction site, but a construction site was better than a back yard, which was what Vidin had become. As the old-time residents moved out, the Politburo comrades moved in.
I step out of the synagogue, and continue through the river park to Vidin’s famous landmark: the Baba Vida Fortress. Legend has it that the fort was built by Vida, one of the three daughters of a medieval Bulgarian boyar, or nobleman. Her two sisters Kula and Gumza married unwisely and squandered their father’s fortunes. But Vida defended her land, and the locals named the fort Grandma Vida in her honour. Except Vida was nobody’s grandma, because she remained celibate.
Sandbags are piled around the mighty walls to stop the river. An old man in a sleeveless cardigan emerges from the ticket-house at the entrance, blinking in the bright sun, startled by the lone visitor.
‘You’re lucky.’ He points at the water forming a thin film over the access bridge. ‘See the moat bridge? Until yesterday, it was all under water, you couldn’t go in.’
I browse the shop’s stock of cards and brochures. They’re all from the seventies, faded buildings in faded light, faded people in bell-bottomed trousers. The kind man spots my disappointment.
‘They’re old. We need new ones, but with what money?’
I go inside and for an hour I spook myself thoroughly. I imagine crowds of ghostly barracks men – Roman, Bulgarian, Turkish, Romanian – in various states of wretchedness, drunkenness, and cheer, rushing through the empty courtyards. In a dark cell I see a hunched human, and scream. On closer inspection, it’s a waxy blacksmith and this is the armoury. There’s no one to hear me anyway, except the guard who can hardly move.
From the top of a watchtower reached by a wooden ladder in the last stages of rot, successive rulers surveyed their domain. Stratzimir became despot of the city-state Bdin and, like Pazvantogğlu four centuries later, minted his own coins. But the Bdin city-state only lasted for thirty-two years until the Ottomans arrived. Before they did so, from up here Stratzimir saw a busy trade crossroads, caravans and ships coming and going from Dubrovnik and Ungro-Wallachia.
Pasha Pazvantogğlu saw a skyline pierced by ship-masts and minarets. What do I see, before I fall through the rotten floorboards and give the nice ticket-man downstairs a heart attack? I see a town that desperately wants to belong to the rest of a country and a river that has forgotten its existence. The Danube lies inert and swollen, and Romania’s cargo ships in Calafat look just a short swim away. In a few years’ time, they’ll be just a short stroll down the new bridge, if the two countries don’t fall out in the meantime.
The wooden planks through which I can see the next landing down are covered in the inscriptions of students brought here on educational school trips. ‘YANKO from class 10C, 29.VIII.69’ was here, and so was, at an unknown time, BOJKO MAKARONA. Someone else shouts in thick felt pen: ‘Me too! I too was here.’
On the pebble strip that passes for a beach, two teenage lovers are lying atop each other in the sun in the form of a cross. I have clearly reached the end of something, an eerie blind alley. It feels as if I’ve reached not just the far end of Bulgaria, but also of history itself.
Perhaps, as with Silistra’s flooded ruins, what I’ve reached is also the beginning of history. A whirlpool where the river bends around a sharp corner, and anything could happen.
On the empty train south, I have company in the compartment: a woman in her fifties with a handsome face and eyes blue and pure as mineral. She starts eating a banana. I look at her hungrily.
‘Would you like some?’ she offers.
‘No, thanks,’ I lie.
‘I’m a diabetic. I have to eat complex carbohydrates every two hours to keep my blood sugar up.’
Ill health: the older Bulgarian’s second-favourite topic of casual conversation after money problems.
‘It must be difficult,’ I say.
She shrugs, and delicately lays the banana skin on the torn seat beside her. ‘It’s the least of my problems.’ Then she adds, ‘It’s all from the camps.’
‘Which camps?’
‘Skravena, mainly.’
In the annals of Communist labour camps, Skravena is second only to Belene on the Danube. My grandparents had a friend called Mats who’d done time in Belene. When Mats laughed, his face looked strangely lopsided. Years later I learned that they’d broken his jaw in Belene.
‘When were you in Skravena?’ I ask.
‘My first ten years,’ the woman says breezily. ‘I was one of the 1,643 babies and children in labour camps at the time.’ She sounds almost proud. ‘Did you think they only interned adults?’
‘Well, I… didn’t know. Why were you there?’
‘I was there with my mother and my grandparents. And they were there because of my father. My father was the one supposed to be deported, but he did a runner on the eve of our arrest. Went across the border into Yugoslavia, and then to Germany.’
‘And they deported you instead?’
‘The whole family went on the trains,’ she says with grim relish.
‘Actually, I’m lucky to be alive. Because at the train station, on the way to the camp, some commissar picked me up from my mother, I was a year old, and tossed me into a barrel of dirty water on the platform. Kids were a nuisance at the camps. My mother begged them, but they bundled her onto the train, and she thought that was it. But another commissar picked me out of the water, he had a bit of humanity in him. And he made sure I was sent onto Skravena.’
We trundle past a giant disused factory with broken windows, crouching in the empty field like a dying dinosaur at the end of the cretaceous period.
‘What was it like living there?’
‘Have you seen films about the Nazi concentration camps? Like that, more or less. I saw a man eaten alive by pigs. They tied him up. I remember one night, I must have been six or seven, finding myself outside among lots of stripped bodies. My mother was there too. I thought she was dead. They had left us for dead, you see. And the dogs were eating the fingers of the dead. Crunch, crunch, I can still hear it. That’s why I can’t stand bones in meat, and dogs. Whenever I see a dog, I hear that awful sound, crunch, crunch. But my mother was alive. And there were good moments too. Kids’ birthdays for example, mothers tried to organize cakes. It wasn’t like a normal party, obviously, because we had rations…’
‘What happened to your father? Did you ever see him?’
‘He settled in Frankfurt. In the sixties I was barred from university here, as the daughter of an enemy of the people, but I was given special permission to visit him in Germany. They didn’t mind if enemies of the people left the country for good. So I went to university there, my father paid for me.’
‘Why didn’t you stay there?’
‘Well, I stayed for a while. Then I came back. I’ve been trying to get compensation for the last fifteen years, since they opened up the secret files. Still haven’t got it, but I’m determined. I went to court and you know what they said? There’s no compensation for minors, because we were too young to experience the effects of the repression. Too young! But I’m not letting this pass. We have an organization, Children of the Camps, and we’ll get our way. Justice is on our side.’
‘You know,’ she says suddenly, ‘I mentioned the Nazi camps just to give you an idea. But, of course, the whole thing with the Jews is exaggerated.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They didn’t kill six million or whatever they claim, it’s exaggerated. They killed some, but the whole thing is blown out of proportion. The Holocaust is a Zionist conspiracy…’
I stare at her for an incredulous moment. She’s been shopping from that ‘Buddhist’ bookseller in Sofia. The inevitable vile argument follows. I accuse her of being brainwashed by neo-Nazi propaganda, and she hits back with, ‘And what did Communism teac
h you, huh? You and your whole pathetic generation who were brainwashed by it, huh?’
The argument ends when she offers me one last chance. ‘Why are you so worried about the Jews anyway? I don’t understand. Are you Jewish or something?’
I try to convince myself that her traumatic childhood stunted her emotionally, made her unable to empathize with anybody other than herself and her kind, the 1,643 Children of the Camps. Or perhaps her father was a Nazi.
Or perhaps, after an extraordinary childhood, she is now an ordinary woman, ignorant and keen to swallow any piece of information banged out loudly enough – and the voices of revisionists are loud. Am I sitting here with Mrs Middle Bulgaria: damaged, self-obsessed, provincial, hardened, handsome of face, blinkered of thought, selective of memory?
No, this is not my country. I won’t allow it. Someone please hand me a gun, I’ll shoot myself. But first I’ll shoot the Woman of the Camps.
Maybe I just need a cup of tea and a lie down. This has been a long journey.
We sit in squalid silence for a while, then I get up and move to another compartment.
A swarthy middle-aged woman is already sitting there with two stuffed bags. Unfortunately, she has some emotional baggage too. Without any preamble, she pounces on me with a litany of woes.
‘Twenty-five years in the Kremikovtsi Factory, in the dirtiest department, that’s me. Twenty-five years, and an accident. Look at my hand. A work hazard, they said. But I went on working. When they closed Kremikovtsi, they kicked us out, and didn’t offer anything. That was it, and do you know how much my pension is? Eighty leva, minimal pension. I can buy a loaf of bread after I’ve paid for heating, water and medication. And my son? Unemployed. Can’t find work. So I have to help him and his family too. With 80 leva.’
Street Without a Name Page 28
