I call Rado and he comes to the rescue in his father’s old Renault.
We drive to Boyana district, a pleasant village on the outskirts of Sofia. It used to be Politburo-ville. Party officials had villas here, and Todor Jivkov lived in the ‘Boyana’ Residence.
Now, the gated luxury villas belong to the new elite: the ‘businessmen’ of new Bulgaria, those with vague fortunes and accounts in Madagascar and Bermuda, those who bought state industries for five dollars. Over time, Boyana has gone from Politburo-ghetto to mutra-heaven.
These are the people who ruled Bulgaria when Rado and I left in the nineties along with a million others. And they are the people who still rule, while gradually washing their dirty money. Yesterday’s gangsters become today’s businessmen, and tomorrow the capital inherited by their children will be clean. Almost clean. This is how capitalism works in the Wild West. They did warn us at school.
And over time all this will become the stuff of films, the Fistful of Dollars story of the post-Communist world. Just as the story of our Wild East is now the stuff of bitter-sweet films like Goodbye Lenin.
We’re climbing a quiet old street in Boyana village.
‘You know, my company has offered me a job in Sofia,’ Rado says suddenly. ‘They want to branch out here, with the EU and all.’
‘Will you accept?’
‘I don’t know. It’s taken me by surprise. I’ve been in France for so long, the idea of coming back hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t know if I could live here. The chalga, the mutri, I don’t know if I could live with it. Could you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘I know. You already couldn’t live with it before. I remember when you stopped eating.’
We walk around the vast gated park that surrounds Jivkov’s former ‘Boyana’ Residence. Now it’s the grounds of the National Museum of History. The fence that once looked impregnable around this property of the Communist State is now rusty and overgrown with shrubs. Paths run from one end of the park to the other, but we are told they are full of snakes, and there are no openings in the fence. Instead of a nice walk in the park, we end up walking around it, inhaling the traffic fumes of the open road.
Half-finished buildings and cranes dot the horizon. The dreamy blue bulk of Vitosha Mountain rises above us. Dust in the mouth, warm clouds overhead, and our farewell tonight. Rado is in a strange mood.
‘And yet. All this.’ He points at the building sites. ‘All this means so much more to me than France. All that’s happened here, all the emotions this place contains. First love that never dies. First dreams. First car. First car-crash. First shag. First job. Not in that order. All of me is contained here, in these panels, in this mountain. I’m not a poet, poetry is your thing. But you know what I mean…’
‘Yes,’ I say.
Yes, here we are, the top crop export of Socialism. With several passports, foreign spouses and ex-spouses, dynamic careers, borrowed identities. And fractured psyches. Here we are, trying to heal ourselves.
For our farewell dinner, I take Rado to a pizzeria which is also a satirical museum to Socialism with a Human Face. Public signs and warnings decorate the walls.
THE HERO IS ALWAYS PRESENT!
LET US FULFIL OUR FIVE YEAR PLAN IN TWO YEARS!
DANGER: BEWARE OF FALLING BODIES!
WE ARE FIGHTING FOR AN EXEMPLARY WORKPLACE!
DO NOT WALK ON THE GRASS BECAUSE IT IS YOURS!
Rado jots these gems down on a paper napkin for me.
‘I’ll remember them,’ I reassure him.
‘You won’t. You forget everything. You’re so focused on the present, on your itinerary, on tomorrow. And you’re right.’ He crumples the napkin in his fist. ‘Maybe I just can’t let go. I hold onto these things like a drowning man.’
It’s true: while I have partial amnesia about the eighties, Rado remembers every incident from the Lycée, every schoolmate, everything we said. I couldn’t bear to remember that much.
We stand outside the building in Peach Street, a puddle between us.
‘You’re the only person in the whole world who understands how I feel here,’ Rado says. ‘You realize how much this means to me.’
Me too, I want to say, me too. But I don’t, the words remain lodged in my throat. We make squirming attempts at saying goodbye. We try humorous, casual, mock-sentimental, we try to predict the next time, maybe soon in Sofia for the fifteen-year reunion of the French Lycée, maybe in France. We give up. It’s an impossible farewell, and, in the end, before he walks away in his trademark bear-awkward style, Rado says, ‘I’ll see you in five years.’
I drag the suitcase back over the potholes of Peach Street and wave goodbye to the man up in the harness, hoping that he won’t break into the flat and steal the TV from 1984 while I’m gone.
The Gypsy taxi-driver tosses out a half-smoked fag and takes off with a screech. He then treats me to the second most hair-raising ride in my life, after that last one with Uncle and Auntie. He either wants to prove that he can get me there for the cheapest possible fare, or is running late for a date with death. I grope for seat belts but they have been ripped out, like most of the car’s interior. The driver looks as if something has been ripped out of him too. His face is wilted with tobacco and hardship.
‘I’d rather get there alive than fast,’ I shout over the engine. The driver slams the brakes and my face kisses the back of his head. It’s a red light, the first one he’s taken notice of.
‘Fifteen years,’ he mutters, indignant. ‘Fifteen years I drive this taxi and not a single accident!’
The patron saint of taxi-drivers must be watching over him. I try to keep my mouth shut until we reach the airport, and collect my thoughts, which is impossible at this speed, in this car, on this road. Tsarigradsko Road has been newly tar-sealed. Unfortunately, the company that did it botched it up and now the new tar-seal undulates with bumps. Dozens of bumps large and small.
‘They’ve turned it into Tsarigradsko Sea, dimwits.’ The driver spits out what could be chewing-gum or a tooth.
‘The road is breathing,’ I shout. ‘Maybe it’ll settle down.’
‘Breathing, huh!’ His face cracks into a smile. When we arrive with a screech at the airport, he hands me my suitcase triumphantly.
‘So, you’re alive,’ he offers instead of a goodbye. Which is somehow fitting.
I climb the staircase of the shiny new terminal on unsteady legs.
Without realizing it, I have travelled anti-clockwise round the map, starting from Sofia and ending back here. This seems appropriate, given that travelling in the present tense has proved impossible.
One of the few things I’m now sure about is that Bulgaria is a country living simultaneously, effortlessly, casually almost, in several different time planes.
It is now 2007. From the terminus of Oreshets, I’ve been catapulted straight into the future. The Bulgarian nurses in Lybia have been freed, with help from our EU friends. Bulgaria may not have gifted a single rude word to the EU, but it has given it a third alphabet. You can’t ask for everything.
I arrived at Terminal Hostile together with the old émigré from Amerika. I’m leaving from the brand-new terminal. Its hallways gleam and sparkle with unearthly steel like something out of The Matrix. There are no shops yet. Just huge empty halls full of light.
The ‘Other’ queue at passport control has gone. Confident people in smart clothes stroll with their tidy luggage, speak a smattering of languages, and sip expensive espressos. They are Bulgarians with European passports.
I have one too. I had it issued in the space of one afternoon in a marbled hall by a polite clerk who smiled as she handed it to me. Bureaucracy? That’s a French word.
But to get my new passport, I need a photo. The woman photographer looks at the first prints and nods, ‘No, it won’t do. You look startled, like a rabbit caught in headlights. We’ll do another one, I won’t charge you extra. And this time smile!’
‘B
ut isn’t it prohibited to smile on passport photos?’ I protest.
She looks at me curiously. ‘That was fifteen years ago, sweetheart! Where have you been? Come on, give us a nice smile.’
I blink a few times in the silver light, unsure. Then I smile.
Acknowledgements
I owe this book and my deep gratitude to Laura Barber at Portobello who conceived the idea for it, and patiently nurtured it from bumbling beginnings, through messy incontinence, to its present form.
I have been steadied along the way by the firm hand of my agent Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann, and for this I thank her and count my blessings.
I am grateful to my family for not being a pain and graciously pretending to trust my unreliable vision of things past and present.
In my reading on Bulgaria, I found the following books useful, inspiring, or both: The Iron Fist by Alexenia Dimitrova (Artnik, London, 2005), Az jivyah socialisma edited by Georgi Gospodinov (Janet 45 Editions, Sofia, 2006), The Balkans 1804–1999 by Misha Glenny (Granta, London, 1999), The Miss Stone Affair by Teresa Carpenter (Simon & Schuster, London, 2003), Bulgarski Rodove I and II by Mariana Purvanova (East and West, Sofia, 2005–2006), the lyrics on p. 35 are by Naiden Valchev, Crown of Thorns: the Reign of King Boris III of Bulgaria by Stephane Groueff (Madison Books, Boulder, USA, 1998), Danube by Claudio Magris (Random House, London, 2001). And hats off to Anthony Georgieff of Bulgaria Air and Vagabond for producing and publishing intriguing investigative stories on Bulgaria old and new. They have been an inspiration.
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First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2008
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Copyright © Kapka Kassabova 2008
The right of Kapka Kassabova to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.
Photographs on p.1, p.19, p.30, p.60, p.82, p.141, p.169, p.199, p.253, p.297 © Kapka Kassabova; on p.5 and p.229 © Michael Wilson; on p.98 and p.122 © Bulgarian Broadcasting Agency Agency BTA; on p.278 © Anthony Georgieff; and on p.327 © Catarina Leal. Reproduced by kind permission.
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ISBN: 978-1-74253-900-3
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