by Maria Genova
There were also a large amount of book stalls, were they displayed philosophical books next to science fiction novels and magazines with busty blonds lay next to the Bible. There was also a lively trade in military items in the city centre, gold coins, army uniforms and souvenirs with communist images, which mostly attracted the tourists.
Western chains like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut had also got foot on the ground. The customers poured in. Everything that was Western was trendy and money played no role in these cases. Prices had seemed to have lost their grip on reality anyhow and the economy was more out of control than ever. No one could live on a normal monthly wage, but most people earned on the side and managed this way. Only the small towns were in dire straits after the crash of the state monopoly because of the complete lack of job opportunities. In such desolate places, Greek and Turkish businessmen set up sewing workshops with working conditions which dated from the last century. No windows, no ventilation, poor lighting, ban on union membership and compulsory overtime. Yet no one complained. The communist unions had more or less been dismantled and the employees themselves were too afraid of losing their jobs.
When I read the latest of Frank’s letters my heart started to beat faster: he was coming to Bulgaria to see me again. I didn’t expect my parents’ blessing, but they agreed to let him stay at our home.
My heart skipped a beat when I saw Frank walk through the sliding doors. A little while later he pressed me against his hard chest. It felt so right, even though I hardly knew him. I mostly knew him from his letters, in which he had written that he missed me every second and it was as if I could feel that yearning when he held me in his arms.
Frank was surprised at the changes around him.
‘Has anything stayed the same in my absence?’
‘Yes, our prejudices,’ I grinned, thinking back to our conversation in which Frank tried to break my glass tower or prejudices. He was dismayed with how much contempt we treated the gypsies.
‘Just imagine you had been born a gypsy. Would you like it if everyone treated you like trash?’
‘Frank, you don’t understand. They are lazy, thieves and they smell. Just go and stand next to a gypsy in packed bus.’
‘They are poor and they can’t have a shower every day like you can.’
‘I don’t think they even have a shower in their slums.’
‘That’s even worse. But surely they can’t help being born poor gypsies in a ghetto?’
It was true about the ghetto. I hadn’t realised there was a ghetto on the outskirts of my city until I once got lost in my car and ended up there. It was so surreal: muddy streets with potholes, naked children running through the puddles, men with no teeth, women without decent clothing, houses that were disintegrating. Even though I had locked all the car doors, I felt so scared in this miserable environment that I had tears in my eyes. I was scared they would wreck my car. A few gypsy children ran after the car for a while, but they didn’t throw stones or anything else. Perhaps they had wanted to do some begging.
I drove shivering out of the ghetto. I had lived in this city for 18 years and I had considered such scenes impossible. This was a hermetically isolated world, even though it was not surrounded by a wall.
I remember my parents trying to teach me manners by threatening me with this ghetto: ‘You can’t sing at the table, otherwise you will marry a gypsy,’ they said each time I hummed a song. Even though that sounded like a serious threat at the time, it only now got through to me the ghetto was worse than even my most distressing representation.
‘Aha, your prejudices!’ Frank said in a neutral tone of voice.
We both knew there was no use in discussing this again, because even sensible arguments would not take away the stubborn prejudices about gypsies that every Bulgarian had been raised with. Now that the communists no longer had work for the gypsies, the cheeky minority would steal all the manhole covers to sell them as scrap metal. You had to watch out if you didn’t want to break your neck.
The gypsies hadn’t just targeted state-owned facilities, but also those privately owned. They took down the chicken wire on a large plot of ground we had been given back by the government. They even took the dirt grid away that we used to wipe our feet on. My parents decided not to get a new one, because they knew it would be gone the next day.
The communist ideal had made room for traders and millionaires with no education and the gypsies apparently wanted to keep up in this respect. They profited from the fact that the almighty party no longer controlled the lives of its citizens and in a smart way played to their uncertainty about the future. Because who was better at predicting the future than the gypsies? I was approached on a daily basis by dark-skinned fortune-tellers and palm readers. That usually went according to a standard procedure. In first instance, they would hint that they only had good predictions for me. When I politely refused, they would follow me for a while and they eventually went on the lookout for a new victim. But not before they had cursed me such as: ‘May you remain an old spinster and may you never have any children’. Of course, time would tell, but seeing as several cursed girlfriends had been both marriage material and fertile, I wasn’t that worried.
Frank and I walked along the streets that were filled with free entrepreneurs. One sold sunflower seeds, the other had placed a set of scales on the pavement to get people to weigh themselves in exchange for money, a third had opened a repair shop in his garage. A large sign hung across his door: ‘We fix everything. Knock hard, because the doorbell doesn’t work.’
The best thing about free entrepreneurship was that everyone tried their hardest to look like a Western businessman. More and more English signs appeared in hotels, restaurants and shops. I laughed at their broken English: ‘Women are asked not to have any children in the bar.’ In a hotel, I saw another gem: ‘Toilet out of order, please use the floor below.’
Because of lack of money all shops sold ‘original copies’ of the well-known brands. Most salespeople didn’t even want to admit that they were counterfeit goods and all those people that bought Nike sneakers, Chanel perfumes and Ray-Ban sunglasses, it didn’t matter.
The memories of the past disappeared just as quickly as the largest part of the Berlin Wall.
Before we left Sofia, I wanted Frank to meet my cousin. I was curious how Julia as a city girl had settled in her husband’s small village. My aunt told me the military factory where her husband worked had switched from producing weapons to making consumer products and that their income was eaten away by the sky-high inflation. Now they could no longer survive just on his salary, they had to grow potatoes, vegetables and fruit in their vegetable patch around their house. They had also acquired a few chickens for the eggs.
Julia’s parents, who drove us to the village, were clearly still not happy that their only daughter had married a farmer. They had exchanged the rickety Trabant for a Fiat, but there was no progress to be seen in the village. The third hand Fiat sounded like it needed to be repaired, but at least they drove in style in a Western car.
On the bendy road to the village my uncle tried some time to overtake a tractor. That failed at each attempt because of his wife’s instructions. Long live emancipation! We finally ended up in a herd of sheep that was crossing the road and we had to stop. That brought back the calm in the car.
Fifteen minutes later we were once again behind the tractor’s smelly exhaust fumes. This time our driver made a decisive turn of the steering wheel. A car coming from the opposite direction signed with his lights. Driven by a primeval instinct, my uncle slammed the brakes. Frank had no idea what was happening, but every Bulgarian knew this was a warning for a police control. About 100 metres along the road a car with radar equipment was parked in the bushes. Once he was out of sight of the policeman my uncle also used his headlights to warn other road users for the impending danger. Together secretly against authority, this was the best remnant of communism. It was nearly the only form of solidarity that stil
l existed in a society that was trying its best to become a copy of the West.
Julia looked like a real farmer with her blue overalls and freshly picked green beans in her hands. I hardly recognized her when I saw her for the first time in her vegetable patch. Her husband arrived in a rusty Russian Lada. They were happy it still drove, because they did not have any money for a new car. Julia told us excitedly about her new life. She sometimes found the village boring, but something great was about to happen: she was pregnant. Her husband was just as silent as when I had met him first. His lagging behind with regards to the latest fashion had only increased.
Frank thought it was interesting to walk around a real Bulgarian village, but I couldn’t wait to leave. The next two weeks we focused on our young love, which took place under the all-seeing eyes of my parents. We longed for a little bit of privacy, but we weren’t allowed any. After some tears and begging we were finally allowed to spend one week together with just the two of us. The next day we took the train to the Black Sea, afraid my parents would change their mind. ‘If you come back pregnant you can find somewhere else to live,’ my mother said when we left.
The next morning Frank brought me breakfast in bed, completely naked, but wearing a tie. I thought that was both funny and sexy at the same time. I couldn’t resist a romantic stuck inside the body of a playboy. After the breakfast, he turned the uninviting bathroom into a room full of candles and filled the bath with champagne. It was the first time that I had literally and figuratively got drunk from pleasure.
While I dried myself, Frank pressed my back against the wall. I shivered from excitement by the power he exuded. The hard ground under my feet turned into quick sand. His stubble grated against my cheeks with tender determination. The next moment his sensual tongue weakened all my muscles. He pushed his tongue teasing and tasting my mouth, as if he was suggesting that he could do the same to me elsewhere. My fingers moved in slow motion along his firm thighs towards his swollen penis. I felt dizzy with desire. He pressed his muscular thigh between my legs and that brought out such a sensual feeling in me that things seemed to speed up. My muscles were overwhelmed by an endless wave of contractions.
After we had experienced how much our bodies enjoyed being together, we couldn’t stay away from each other. Yet I still didn’t want to give up my virginity. Why would I risk my parents kicking me out of the house if we also fulfilled our needs this way?
If a fortune teller had predicted that I would fall in love with a foreigner and that I would follow him to a country that I hardly knew anything about, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it. I was about to go to university, I had my pick of boyfriends and since the new government had started to return expropriated properties our family belonged to the nouveau riche. We suddenly owned a shop, a wine cellar, stately homes and a lot of land, which meant that after university I could live on the profits of the inherited possessions. This was also the reason all my friends said I was being foolish when I told them I was moving to the Netherlands.
It didn’t worry me, because after the romantic weekend at the Black Sea I no longer doubted that I had met my knight in shining armour. My heart had already travelled a long distance and I thought it was natural for my body to follow my heart. To my great surprise my parents didn’t object to my emigrating that much. My mother did warn me that I would be disappointed.
‘You don’t know the language, you have no friends and no work. You are kidding yourself that your love for this man will make everything all right, but it will be a question of survival. And what happens if you two fight? You don’t know what he’s like when he becomes angry.’
‘You’re right, I don’t know, but I’m not afraid of that. You once said yourself that a fight in a relationship is like the herbs in a dish: it makes it spicy and exciting. Besides you can always make up after a fight. Sometime not with words, but it always works out in bed.’
I saw my mother freeze. Even the tiniest of sexual hints made her restless. She gave up, probably out of fear of possible details how to solve a fight with seduction.
Dog food and diaries
I don’t know how my parents felt when they finally let me go to the Netherlands. Perhaps they were relieved that they had got rid of their rebellious and unpredictable daughter or perhaps they hoped that after my three-month visa expired I would come to my senses and come home.
Frank loved his independence too much to just give it up and I didn’t have to try getting my own way. Using the motto of ‘We do things this way and that way in the Netherlands’ I was virtually gagged. Our fights were usually settled in bed and then discussed them. Both of us didn’t actually mind fighting because we knew what they led to. Making love to him for the first time made me think of my bungee jump from the hot air balloon: it was very liberating; the feeling of fear had gone. Our bodies moved in the fluid magical rhythm of ebb and flow. His kisses electrified my senses and the excitement spread in shockwaves through my body. My lips trembled, my hair whirled around my face at every boisterous movement and I flowed like an uncorked bottle of champagne.
In my eyes, the Netherlands was a country of dolls houses with neat gardens, in which the growth of the violets was observed by gnomes. The first time I went to school to learn Dutch, I couldn’t find the way back home, because all the streets with their terraced houses looked so much alike. There was nothing left for me to do to admit my defeat and call Frank to come to pick me up.
On the way back I saw a sign with ‘poor road surface’. I instantly thought of the enormous holes in the Bulgarian roads and slammed the brakes so hard that Frank was thrown forward. It turned out to be a barely perceptible bump. It surprised me that someone would have thought it necessary to place such a deceiving sign.
I also thought it was strange that I had to buy a ticket for the dunes. Walking in the countryside was free-of-charge in Bulgaria. You hardly had woods surrounding Amsterdam and if you wanted to go for a walk in the woods, you also had to pay for it! I missed Bulgaria’s mountains and the wilderness. Here everything was signposted with automobile association signs, wooden benches were placed all over the place and asphalt roads went through the dunes. There were no woods to be found without information signs, because just imagine you didn’t learn anything about nature! Every now and then I saw edible mushrooms but Frank wouldn’t let me pick them. I was only allowed to admire them from a distance. Dutch wildlife in a display case: you could look, but not touch. In Bulgaria, we considered nature to be an endless food factory: blueberries, chanterelle mushrooms, prunes, wild strawberries, hazelnuts: we always came home with bags full of food. Here I would sit down on a forestry bench with a sigh to look at the pretty mushrooms. I would have preferred to enjoy them with my mouth instead of my eyes, but being able to control your natural instincts was part of a successful integration.
Life behind the dykes still had some big surprises in store for me, like an indoor ski slope, not far from our house. People skied on a kind of rolling carpet. A little bit further up a former rubbish tip had been covered up with an industrial building. Inside you could ski on fake snow. That gave a more authentic feeling than a dry slope or a magic carpet. For kids that is, because the short slope made an adult feel like a midget.
I didn’t feel at home either in other places in the Netherlands. Like at the unemployment office, that wanted to keep me registered no matter what, even when I had embarked on a study. In Bulgaria I would have been written out straight away, but in the Netherlands this wasn’t possible. Here it wasn’t the people who made the rules, but the computers who refused to remove someone from the system. Luckily, I could put things in perspective by reading the newspapers. A resident of Heerlen had received 83 letters from a benefits agency. One on day, to be clear. My correspondence with the unemployment office paled into insignificance.
Of all the agencies, I feared the immigration police the most and especially the arrogant attitude of the officers who had to decide about my residency permit. The first t
ime, Frank had brought all possible paperwork such as pay slips and mortgage papers to show that he could afford a foreign bride. If someone didn’t meet the income requirements, then his love was sent home with hesitation. That is why there were probably so many men showing off their Thai, Russian or Filipino women: not everyone could afford a foreign bride.
I was allowed to stay, but the officer warned Frank in my presence to watch out for East-European women who were after his money. I couldn’t believe that the officer said that, while I was there. As if I was some cheap prostitute. I was raging and secretly hoped that the officer would marry a Dutch woman who would leave him and make him pay alimony for years to come.
At parties and birthdays people always asked me what I thought of the Netherlands. I didn’t get the feeling anyone was really interested in my opinion. Everyone wanted to hear the standard story: that I enjoyed living in such a prosperous country. The Dutch were convinced from the outset that I must be happy to have escaped the poverty in Bulgaria. They presumed that everyone there was poor, even though they had never been there. One acquaintance claimed that you could get your driving license in the Eastern Bloc by driving around a banana tree a few times. My counter argument that there were no banana trees in Bulgaria he rejected as ‘weak’.
The eating habits at birthdays were new to me. In Bulgaria, no matter how rickety the table was it was always stowed with food and treats. In the Netherlands, the hostess would go around the group with a tray filled with small bites to eat. Nodding meant ‘yes’ here, in Bulgaria it meant ‘no’. Shaking my head to say ‘yes’ had become such a habit that at the start I was often passed over.
