Street Without a Name (10 page)

And the Francophones had to be little, because the president himself was also little. At 1.67 metres tall, I was instantly disqualified. This was obviously upsetting for any aspiring presentable girl at the French Lycée, but I recalled the portrait of Comrade Brezhnev in School 81, and pulled myself together. Diminutive French presidents and dead Soviet leaders were not going to be the measure of my linguistic worth.

By the end of year two, I could discuss in French the phosphate resources of the Balkan region, molecules with triple valence, and the Bulgarian National Revival struggle for self-determination against the Ottoman yoke. I took perverse pleasure in speed dictation, full of
tricky-to-spell words that no modern French person would dream of using – like
bruissements innouïs
, inaudible murmurs.

We also listened to French songs by people like hoarse, angry Renaud:

Putain qu’il est blême, mon HLM!
(How it sucks, my council block of flats!)

Or sexy Michel Sardou who wrote acerbic social lyrics, like ‘
J’accuse
’. Every song with a political message resonated with us. It didn’t matter what the original meaning of the message was. We were so hungry, so alive, and so isolated that the mere bones of a human voice thrown from the outside fed us. And we grew stronger with the certainty that we lived behind a wall. A wall that didn’t protect us from anything any more, except from the things we wanted.

We didn’t realize that many of these songs came from the early eighties and even from the seventies. They may have come from Europe’s recent past, but they played in our present. Nobody told us that singers like Renaud and Michael Sardou were permitted to circulate in the language school precisely because of their politics: they were Socialist rebels raging against the capitalist machine. But to our ears, there was only one machine to rage against, and that was Socialism with a Human Face.

So, in a sublime twist of irony, these angsty rebels’ voices against the West sang especially for us, the angsty adolescents of totalitarianism’s twilight years.

Alongside the political rock, there were hormonal passions. The two came together in the form of Maxim, the school’s number one heart-throb. Maxim was ultra-cool, ultra-ironic, and in addition to attending the Lycée was studying at the English College as an external
student. He also spoke Russian as a mother tongue, thanks to his Russian mother. Maxim mocked students and teachers alike in a mixture of four languages, and always got away with it. His polished good looks of a matinee idol helped. He cultivated anti-establishment stubble as soon as he physically could, played the guitar, and sang in a velvety voice at school concerts.

Maxim sat on the podium with his guitar, jeans tight around his crotch, and sang Michel Sardou’s ‘
Je vais t’aimer
’. It described in poetic hyperbole and twelve erotic stanzas all the ways in which he was going to love some lucky girl. This blatantly decadent eroticism was tantamount to a political statement and, sure enough, Maxim got reprimanded afterwards by the school director. But Maxim had the last word, because while he sang, every budding woman in the Lycée was gripped by spasms of nameless longing, including, I suspected, some of the female teachers, who sat there flushed with disapproval and pleasure.

At camp that summer, Maxim did love a couple of girls, but only for a night or two. You knew from the way they looked miserable the following days and weeks: they were discarded tunes in Maxim’s poetic repertoire. As for me, I knew I was too nerdy for Maxim, and even if I had been ‘easy’, he’d use me and discard me along with the rest. From time to time he pressed his erection against me, to let me know that he wasn’t entirely indifferent. But it was an impossible love, and I suffered in stoic silence.

In the meantime, I took comfort in my friends Tedy and Grégoire. Tedy now had a boyfriend: a very polite boy called Bogdan who was just back from Algeria. His father was a diplomat. After years in Algiers, Bogdan spoke flawless French and even looked Arabic with his dark skin and fierce facial hair. I didn’t fancy him, except for the fact that he’d lived abroad.

His extrovert, freckled, gum-chewing friend Kaloyan had also lived abroad and became my boyfriend by escorting me home on the bus one night, and sticking his tongue in my mouth. I didn’t fancy him either, but I hadn’t had any tongue offers before and having no one to kiss was surely worse than having to kiss Kaloyan. Kaloyan and I parted ways after it dawned on him that I wouldn’t have sex with him at very short notice, and it dawned on me that he wasn’t interested in music, books, me, or even French, which he already spoke. He was only interested in sex. So was I, but not with him. Even if he’d been to Algeria and wore French eau de cologne.

Otherwise, I had a steadfast admirer who was more sophisticated than Kaloyan and nicer than Maxim. Boris was interested in books, music, French, and me, and he was a gentleman who would hold out a hand when you stepped off the bus, and walk on the outside of pavements to protect you from traffic. He brought you flowers on International Woman’s Day on 8 March, and let you stand in front of him in the canteen queue without pressing his erection against you. All this should have made him the ideal first boyfriend.

But something told me that there was an unwritten law of wretchedness in the world, according to which you never fancied the people who fancied you, and vice versa. Boris and I went out a few times, and he impressed me with tales of his evening job at the hospital morgue across the street. He worked there not because they paid him – they didn’t – but because he wanted to study death close up. Death was honest, he said, unlike life. Bound together by this metaphysical insight, we held hands and kissed when he saw me home on the bus, but there was no chemistry – or perhaps there was the wrong chemistry. He was intellectual, sensitive and good looking, but he had the pallor and chill of the morgue about him. Soon, it was over. Boris
snapped into action and threatened to commit suicide. Knowing his intimate relationship with death, I became worried. His father was worried too and met my mother to discuss these delicate matters. Although I was absolved of responsibility, the guilt of Boris’s suicidal threats haunted me for a long time, especially when I looked out of the school’s windows into the basement of the hospital across the road, where fresh corpses were laid out on slabs.

One day, on the way to the bus stop, Grégoire adjusted his glasses on his chubby face and said, ‘If I asked you to be my girlfriend, would you agree?’

I squirmed with awkwardness. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I think it’s better if you don’t ask me.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘That clarifies things.’

It didn’t clarify anything for me, but he looked relieved, and this squirmy episode was never mentioned again. For my fifteenth birthday, Grégoire gave me a plush teddy bear and a card in which he’d written a quote from Saint Exupéry’s
Little Prince: ‘l’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux
’, the most important things are invisible to the eyes. I wondered if this was a covert love declaration, or a declaration of something else, or a coded warning. I didn’t find out until ten years later.

In my third year at the Lycée, I started attending the new lunchtime philosophy classes which somehow managed to pitch camp on the periphery of the school curriculum. There were no exams, no grades, it was just for the interested. There was only a handful of the interested. The idea, as far as I could tell anyway, was to demonstrate how the philosophy of Hegel had led to Marxism and Communism, and how French existentialism was an extension of those. It was all very complicated, but Sartre’s ‘existence before essence’ – or was it
‘essence before existence’? – provided me with new questions to ponder. And a new object of impossible desire.

The thirty-something philosophy teacher had the absent look of someone who was either about to go or had just returned from somewhere dangerous. He also had the red-veined nose and trembling hands of the alcoholic. I gazed adoringly at him, transfixed by Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and lived for the moment when his eyes met mine. But he had other things on his mind, in particular the married geography teacher. She had a cloud of gorgeous red hair and one leg shorter than the other. She dutifully took us through the phosphate resources of the Balkan region, but from the way she often limped to the window and looked out, I could tell that she had other things on her mind too. I saw them smoking in the teachers’ corridor, briefly locked in the unmistakable embrace of clandestine lovers. And then, one day, they disappeared. The rumour went that they had deserted to the West. Clearly, she knew her geography well. The philosophy classes were suddenly over. I felt abandoned, but like everybody else I was also silently cheering for the escaped lovers. They had made it, and that was a sign of something important.

And so was the autumn of 1988, when TV’s most beautiful presenter, Tatiana Titianova, disappeared from the screen. The rumour was that some comrade in the upper echelons had censored her out once and for all because she had become inconvenient. She’d been too beautiful and too public for her own good. The official version was that she’d thrown herself from her block of flats. Nobody believed it. Disbelieving the worst was suddenly a luxury we couldn’t afford any more. And so the body of the tragic Tatiana kept falling endlessly, in slow motion, from the top of that collective block of flats where we all huddled in fear. Nobody knew who might be suicided next.

But it soon became obvious. In an attempt to distract the nation from the winds of change blowing across the Big Soviet Country, the regime organized a mass campaign cheerfully called the Revival Process. It aimed to revive the true roots of citizens of other ethnicities, namely the Turks and the Gypsies. This involved them ‘remembering’ their Bulgarian names and denying the Muslim names and customs which they had accidentally or forcibly acquired in the Ottoman past. Identity forms were distributed throughout the country, to help revive citizens. Ahmed remembered that his Bulgarian name was Assen. Ayshe remembered that hers was Ana. People also had to remember their dead parents’ and grandparents’ Bulgarian names, as though they had lived in a state of amnesia their whole lives.

Around this time, a new historical film about Bulgaria’s Ottoman past was released at the cinemas. It was called
Time of Violence
, and the violent timing was flawless. In the story, based on a historic novel, a janissary called Karaibrahim comes to a seventeenth-century village in the Rodopi mountains to convert the locals to Islam, or else torture and slaughter them. Over the space of two instalments and four horror-drenched hours, this is what happens – conversion, or torture and/or extermination, and all the characters you like die. Schoolchildren and students were encouraged to see it although there were scenes of mass rape, slaughter, beheadings, and impalement. My parents barred me from seeing part two. Too late: I was already traumatized out of my wits by part one, which was precisely the idea. Because the next thought you were supposed to have – which I did – was this: how could you compare mere name changes with mass rape and impalement? You couldn’t. The Ottomans had brutalized Bulgarians for five centuries, so why not brutalize their distant descendants just a bit too? It was apparently that simple.

People like my parents suspected that terrible things were happening to the ethnic Turks, but it was all rumour. The State controlled the media, and the media controlled our ignorance. He who controls the present controls the past, went the official motto of the Revival Process. And, by extension, the future.

Nobody stood up for the Turks because only a handful of very brave souls stood up for anything under the low ceilings of Socialism with a Human Face, and most of them had already had a spell of breaking rocks in labour camps.

Spontaneous ‘manifestations’ were staged in Sofia by student activists and other upright citizens my mother described as ‘idiots in brown suits and their idiot children’. They waved indignant placards with ‘Bulgaria for Bulgarians, Turkey for the Turks’. They were few in number, but they were loud. Comrade Jivkov made a televized statement declaring that the border with Turkey was open and those citizens who really liked Turkey would be issued with international passports so they could visit it. They did: about half a million of them. The roads were clogged with endless caravans of carts and clapped-out cars hurriedly borrowed or bought from neighbours in exchange for entire houses.

The country was now full of empty homes where photographs, dowries, livestock, and family treasures accumulated over generations were left for the taking by the executives of the Revival Process. The citizens had departed voluntarily, just as they had changed their names and religion voluntarily.

The ethnic Turks were the tobacco-growers, the agricultural workers, the humble workforce that buzzed away in the background, propping up the diseased body of the State. There was no official acknowledgement that the Turkish exodus had dealt a deadly blow to
the already decrepit economy, but it soon became obvious. The power-cuts and water shortages became so frequent that we now did our homework by candlelight and filled buckets with water every time they ‘let it out’ of the taps. The fields remained unharvested, the tobacco rotted away, entire villages were deserted, schools, hospitals and shops closed down. This was yet another act of provocation from our compatriots of Turkish origin. They had deliberately undermined the great five-year plan.

The Worker’s Deed
informed us that our compatriots had taken a holiday in Turkey. A long holiday. An irresponsibly long holiday. They were irresponsible citizens. They had always been suspect anyway, the fifth column of American imperialism whose nearest gateway was Turkey.

We were living inside George Orwell’s
1984
but we didn’t know it because it was on the list of banned books. Nobody had heard about the Ministry of Truth where lies are the only currency, the Ministry of Information which specializes in disinformation, the Ministry of Plenty whose only product is reports of ever-increasing productivity, and the Ministry of Love where people are tortured with their worst dream until they are broken. But although we had no names for them, these were the ministries from which our lives were made and, increasingly now, unmade.