by Maria Genova
We didn’t sleep all night. Rivers of desire streamed through our bodies and kept on looking for ways to come together. The game had made us so honest and open with each other that nothing could go wrong. Not even losing my virginity, but Bojan didn’t go through with it. He seemed to realise I was still unsure and didn’t want to force anything.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come inside me?’ I asked when it was almost light.
‘I do, but you don’t,’ he replied. ‘And I don’t mind at all. This was a night to remember.’
In love with a corpse
I was almost 18 years old and in love. I was in love with him, like my peers were in love with footballers, actors and singers. Unfortunately, I couldn’t show off my idol. He was a dead author, who most likely had also been gay. But I didn’t care: I’d rather have a platonic relationship with Oscar Wilde than a passionate relationship with the prettiest guy in town. I hadn’t only fallen for this English author’s charming quotes, but also fallen in love with the bourgeois’ lifestyle that he described and was so abhorred in communist times. His works were not dry philosophical works on love and life. They were pearls of competing and provocative thoughts.
My circle of friends did not show any interest for Oscar Wilde’s literature. Except for Anton. That was no coincidence because his courtliness and good manners made it seem like he was partly living in the 19th century. Anton was very smart, so smart that he didn’t have to prove himself to anyone. ‘Extremely smart people seem difficult, but you can actually control them better than stupid men,’ Olga had once told me. I didn’t doubt that. Stupid men always wanted to prove themselves, which always caused problems. Smart men knew what they were made of and didn’t need to rub your nose in it.
I was torn by an inner battle. I wanted to have an intelligent husband. Anton was the only one my parents would approve of and yet I was hesitant. What worried me was that I couldn’t picture my friend as a passionate lover. He brought me red roses, gave me nice compliments and always came when I needed him, but it seemed to be more courtesy than passion. He never showed in any way that he fancied me. We only looked each other deep in the eyes when we had passionate discussions.
Anton knew that I was constantly on the lookout for new adventures. Why did I deliberately choose to ignore an intelligent and charming man and throw myself in the arms of men I knew beforehand wouldn’t be right?
As usual I found the answer in one of my idol’s books. ‘Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.’ Even though it was strange, I did not regret any of the mistakes I had made. And if I did, I could again find solace in Wilde’s literature: ‘It is not a bad thing to regret the things you have done every now and then. At least it is better than regretting the things you did not do. ´
Towards the end of my grammar education communism started to show visible cracks. The regime was a bit less strict. The national school uniform was suddenly done away with. Our Director immediately introduced a new one, to emphasize that we were an elite school. But no one commented if you shortened your long skirt. One friend of mine cut it that short that it became a mini skirt.
Most of us didn´t dare go that far. I was happy that I could wear larger earrings and that I had no longer had to see the Director to explain why I wasn´t wearing a bra. I was certain that my breasts didn´t need any support, because I used Anton´s ´pencil method´. If the pencil that I had placed under my breasts fell on the ground, then they were still fine. If the pencil stuck, then my breasts were saggy.
Our many years of friendship kept on balancing on the edge of intimacy, even when Anton started a steady relationship. Nothing pointed to the situation changing, until one night when we were playing chess and enjoying a good bottle of wine. I was winning and when I managed to promote a pawn to a queen, the outcome was obvious. He sighed and shook my hand.
´It´s as if I see you on the chess board, Mer.´
I looked at him questioningly, but suddenly I realized what he meant. Anton had seen me change from a girl to a lady in the course of time. Not that I considered that to be a compliment, because that was a natural development, but I did like to hear that I had turned into a lady.
´Do you want to play another game?’ I proposed.
‘No, I would rather chat with you on the sofa,’ Anton replied.
He suddenly put his arms around me and tried to find my lips. I wanted to pull back just as much as I wanted to taste him. My mind hung somewhere undecided in mid-air.
‘Don’t you have a girlfriend?’ I mumbled.
‘We ended our relationship a few days ago,’ he said without any emotion in his voice.
I didn’t have much time to think. I had to make a quick decision whether I wanted to jeopardize our friendship. Could someone who had been a good friend for so many years suddenly become a lover? Was that a smart move or a stupid one? I would have rather had a few more minutes to think things over, but Anton pulled me towards him. His tentative kiss made me dizzy. The cogs in my head were working overtime, but the whole thing only lasted two minutes before I pulled away. The kiss was a big mistake. It was just strange that it didn’t feel like a mistake.
Anton also took a breather. For the first time, I noticed how sexy my friend of many years was: his expression, his muscular body, his obvious bulge in his tight trousers. My body trembled with lust, but my brains were still protesting.
‘This is happening too quick,’ I said, although that cost me a lot of willpower. ‘Maybe you are my true love, but you need to prove it first.
Anton didn´t answer. Instead he dropped his trousers and underpants in one fluid movement. I stood still and stared at his perfect masculinity. I felt a shiver rush through my body when I stroked his muscular chest down to his flat stomach. He stroked my hardened nipples, wet them and softly blew on them. I gasped in surprise at this new sensation. In self-defence, I grabbed his penis tightly. His groaning told me he was losing self-control. My heartbeat was galloping away. Was there no middle ground between the mind and emotions?
I tried to say something again, but Anton claimed my lips.
‘I like women who kiss, because then they have to be silent,’ he whispered.
I silently thumped him in his stomach, but I instinctively realized there was no point in fighting him. My body was apparently following a different logic from my mind. His experienced hands blocked every escape route.
The next few days we spent enjoying every nuance of desire, as if we were swept away by a wild river of passion. Every nerve in our bodies vibrated from excitement and the journey always ended in a waterfall, in a spectacular fall in the depths. Anton always waited until I had lost control before he let himself go. He had surpassed my expectations and I had no regrets at all that we have turned our friendship into pure lust. In the meantime, we tried every possible position from the Kama Sutra book, but then without the accompanying penetration. Some complicated positions gave us cramp, a stiff neck or the giggles.
Even though I was nearly 18 years old, my mother wouldn’t let me wear make-up. She called that natural beauty. Natural no way! My beauty had to be emphasized and if I got spots, the blemish had to be covered up.
One day I left home and walked towards a parked car as usual to put on my make-up in front of the wing mirror.
‘You don’t need that.’ The window suddenly rolled down and I was startled that there was someone in the car, and I hadn’t seen them.
‘Oh yes, I’ve heard that before. You sound just like my mother,’ I cheekily retorted.
‘Is that why you don’t put on your make-up at home, but use my mirror instead?’
The man’s voice sounded familiar. I looked at his face and opened my mouth in surprise when I recognized Trajan. Was this really the man I had fallen for a few years ago, and whom my parents wouldn’t let me see again? He had changed so much. His boyish features now had an attractive masculine app
earance.
‘Do you recognize me?’ I suddenly asked as if I doubted it was really him.
‘How could I forget the only woman who has ever shot me?’ he said with a charming smile. ‘If you’re not seeing anyone, then maybe we could have a drink?’
I stared at him, with half my make-up on and seemed to have lost my voice.
‘So, what do you think?’ Trajan asked when he thought I had been silent long enough.
‘I need to finish putting on my make-up first.’
He waited patiently and then we walked to the closest bar. I was usually not attracted to men that my parents didn’t approve of, but Trajan still formed the exception to this unwritten rule. The next few weeks I spent looking forward to our secret rendezvous.
Trajan was a proper gentleman. He always let me go first, helped me into my coat, opened all the doors and even kissed my hand a few times. Very old-fashioned, but it made me feel like a real lady. In the end love is not only content, but also form. Trajan obviously thought about his tactics carefully, because he gave me many gifts, but never that many that it seemed like he was bribing me. Besides he always kept enough distance to be desirable. He was a dream guy and I was happy that my dreams had not be censored by my parents, because in reality I knew it would never work out. My parents wouldn’t allow someone who tried to earn a living selling paintings to get involved with their daughter.
In the end, I had to tell a white lie to get rid of Trajan, because I didn’t want to hurt him. All sorts of thoughts whirled in my head and bumped into each other.
‘The best lie is the truth,’ my sister advised me when I confessed my innermost feelings in the evenings.
‘He won’t accept that,’ I replied after some thought. ‘Theoretically we live in a classless society. You explain to him that the literati consider themselves to be a better class. We’re actually snobs, it’s all for the sake of appearances. I have to be dating a professor at least to meet my parents’ expectations. Where am I supposed to find someone like that, who was young and besides just as charming and handsome as Trajan?’
My sister shrugged her shoulders.
I knew she couldn’t help me, because she was also looking for love. She was in love with a man who was ten years older than her. My parents said this made him a selfish person who was trying to ruin their daughter’s violin career and didn’t let him go until he left our house in tears and promised to leave my sister alone.
My feelings for Trajan became stronger and that confused me. My friends and family would not accept him, so there was no point in staying together. My heart ached at the thought of letting him go, but I did not want to disappoint my parents. They had invested so much time and energy in me with the hope that someday I would match their expectations.
I knew by now that honesty was not always served with the truth and yet I gambled incorrectly by telling him the truth.
‘What did you want from me? Just a piece of fun between the sheets?’ His pretty eyes had changed into dark pools of hate and incomprehension.
‘I never promised you a serious relationship,’ I muttered.
‘I don’t like games, Mer. I gave you my soul and the whole time you used it to brush up your vanity.’
‘I simply couldn’t resist you because I liked you so much. I thought the intensity of our attraction would decrease in time and that we would each go our separate ways. I didn’t want to mislead you. When I was with you I always thought of the present, the future just didn’t interest me because the present was so fantastic. And if you still think I was playing games: I soon realized I was losing.’
‘And because you don’t like to lose, you decided to dump me?’
I ran to the bathroom and washed my face with cold water. I tried in vain to sort out the chaos of thoughts that flooded me.
When I returned to the room, Trajan had disappeared. My emotions again came to the forefront. I felt a slight disappointment, but also a certain relief. We didn’t need to talk any further and I didn’t need to try to cover up my true feelings for him. Maybe it was better this way, for both of us.
From communism to capitalism
At the start the Bulgarian communists did not embrace glasnost or perestroika. Some Russian newspapers and magazines were taken off the shelves, because they printed too many truths. If a neighbour renovates his house, that doesn’t mean we have to do the same, the part leaders must have thought.
During my school years, the party dictatorship was so matter of course that no one even tried to conspire against them. Besides we had been lucky with our dictator, because at least he had a sense of humour. Party leader Zjivkov turned his pockets inside out during a conference on required investments, with the statement: ‘Look for yourself. I’m broke and I have no money for investments.’
That incident didn’t surprise me, because I was certain that he had deposited the stolen millions in foreign bank accounts. This way our leader could turn his pockets inside out without any problem and reduce himself to one of us. He was really a simple soul who had come to power by accident because he was at the right place at the right time. If Russia didn’t support him, this balding man would never have climbed into the engine of our history and certainly not sat behind the control panel for so long.
We were secretly jealous of the Russians because of the glasnost in their country. Olga even circulated the joke that the Bulgarian government was planning to invade the Soviet Union to save communism.
The reality of course was a little bit different, because the East-European countries didn’t dare to do away with communism for fear of military reprisals from Russia. In 1989 the satellite states realized they no longer had to be afraid. Gorbachev allowed them to more or less form their own future. The Hungarians carefully started to cut away the barbed wire on the border with Austria. In just a few months’ time 200.000 East German citizens fled via Hungary to West Germany. The communists had to find some way to stop the massive exodus from the worker’s paradise before it was too late.
The only peaceful solution for the East German government was to open the borders. That happened on 9 November 1989 and we watched incredulously and surprised at the euphoria of the Germans. One of the most iconic images in history, the German-German border, no longer existed. The East Germans could get into their Trabants and simply cross the border. It seemed surreal that just recently there were wooden structures on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate, from which you could look out on the enemy. Sometimes two groups of people would simply stare at each other. And now that was all over, as if such scenes had only existed in the lively fantasies of writers. Would we ever be able to travel freely to the West? I wondered. The answer to that question came sooner than I thought.
Olga called me the next day to tell me that the leader of the Bulgarian communist party had been removed from power. I thought it was a silly joke, but within a few hours the whole city was buzzing with rumours. We almost talked in a whisper, because just imagine it wasn’t true and someone from the secret service was listening to us! Normally we weren’t afraid that someone was eavesdropping, but this was a serious matter. Removing a communist leader from power was tantamount to a revolution. A revolution without a drop of blood being spilled. It sounded too good to be true.
It wasn’t completely true. There had been a change in leadership. A communist minister replaced our party leader, who was sent for a well-earned pension after many words of thanks. Of course, it was involuntary, but during communism hardly anything was on a voluntary basis. You could see on the television images that our happy dictator could hardly believe the news himself. His surprised expression spoke volumes. Everything was possible now, because if someone could replace the most powerful party leader, then it was possible to do that to his replacement also.
The euphoria spread like a forest fire in a country where it hadn’t rained in years. We were no longer controlled by fear. The violence could no longer be hidden behind lies, while the same lies were defended with v
iolence. The previous generations had been prepared to sacrifice their present for the future. We weren’t any longer.
The communist ideal was corrected itself by reality. It was too good to be true that everyone was equal and no one was unemployed. Apparently, this didn’t work out in real world. The party had discovered the holy grail: if you create equality in poverty, then no one feels poor. We considered the hunger in some African countries to be poverty and not the lack of luxury articles on the Bulgarian market.
We were breathing the air of freedom and could hardly imagine that we had been silenced just a few months before. Should I blame myself and my generation for swallowing the party’s complete nonsense at face value instead of revolting against it? We were simply scared for an elusive higher power. We were trapped in a vicious circle, which we could hardly break through with our own strength. Only the higher power, the party, could do that. Even though this scenario seems completely unbelievable, a miracle had happened. The communists thought the change in leader would make them stronger, but all of a sudden out of nowhere small opposition groups were set up. The floodgates had been set open.
We were finally free and that meant real elections. The competition was between the reds, the communists, and the blues, a conglomeration of various anti-communist parties and groups. I was 18 years old, I was allowed to vote for the first time and for the first time there was a choice. My Dalmatian dog had a blue balloon fastened to his collar, the colour of the opposition. When my grandparents saw that they threw the door shut in my face. That was how awful they thought my anti-communist provocation was. I heard they cried together after that incident, because they loved me and didn’t want to push me away. Yet at this point in time there were more important things than my grandparent’s sorrow. I had to participate in a large manifestation to show my support for the opposition.
We cut open the many years of silence with the scissors of the first massive protest. It was a celebration to be able to shout ‘Long live the communist party, but only in our memories’. Some of my peers had made banners with texts such as ‘Hurray, our teachers no longer have to twist the truth’ and ‘Lies have short legs, the communists only have toes’.
