Street Without a Name (17 page)

These days Melnik is a tourist destination, but right now it’s the off-season. We know it from the eerie emptiness of the main and only street. The local madman, a gentle muttering soul, wraps himself softly like a carpet over an iron press-up bar. Invisible cats mew with human voices. The river is thin, and the strange natural sandstone pyramids called
mels
lean over the huddled houses from the top of the hills, breathing raspingly in the dusk like asthmatics. Houses along the river greet us with signboards: ‘Rooms to sleep’, ‘Rooms for sleep’ and ‘Sleeping rooms’.

Rado and I take two sleeping rooms at Complex Trayan. Trayan himself is oppressively chummy, and tells us that we can have fifty showers if we want to, because the water never runs out. And would we like dinner, they’ve just spit-roasted a tender little lamb.

Over tender little spit-roast lamb, Rado proceeds to get drunk on three ‘single’ rakias, which come in water glasses and together amount to half a bottle. I look at him aghast and he laughs it away. ‘I’m a budding alcoholic, I know. No need to lecture me. Anyway, where are we at?’

Last time we saw each other, he was living with his Scandinavian girlfriend in France and studying law. With his eloquence and
charisma, he was cut out to be a defence lawyer. I was going through bad relationships like bouts of flu, living in stark solitude, and making myself unemployable by writing a novel in Auckland. Five years later, Rado is going through a painful divorce from his Scandinavian wife, and working as an insurance broker after discovering that only French citizens are allowed to practise law – something foreign students of law in France are left to discover in their own time. He is now, finally, a French citizen, but it’s too late. I’ve moved countries three times, found love, and become completely unemployable.

‘Seeing you makes me feel seventeen again,’ Rado says. ‘Lately I’ve aged, emotionally and in every way. I mean, I’m thirty-two, and it’s happened so suddenly, don’t you find? Jesus, my friends are disappearing into nappies and mortgages, never to emerge again. I feel as if I’ve bungee-jumped into a world of grown-ups where I don’t belong. No time of grace in the middle, no golden age.’

‘Maybe our golden age is yet to come,’ I offer.

He laughs cynically. ‘I love your optimism. But I don’t share it. No, I think our golden age was then. Of course we didn’t know it, we never do. But think about it, it was simple. We knew what we didn’t have, we knew what we wanted, and we went to get it. We wanted the world. We wanted to go and speak our languages. We wanted carnal knowledge. And now we’ve done all this and complicated our lives beyond repair… Now we’ve lost our innocence. Oh, I don’t know…’ He prods furiously at the rice-stuffed lamb.

‘And now we don’t know what we want,’ I offer.

‘I don’t know what I really want. Do you?’

But we don’t have time to ponder this, because our host Trayan plonks himself down at our table with a glass of rakia and treats us to a salty portion of politics.

‘You are young people, and you should know some history. We are in Pirin, Macedonia. Ah, but we gave away our other Macedonian lands, idiots that we are, dumb idiots, slaves to the end…’

‘Ah, but we didn’t exactly give them away,’ Rado interrupts. ‘We fought for them and lost them because our army was pitted against the Serbs, Greeks and Romanians. It was a tad uneven. Besides, the Bulgarians attacked first and sparked off the Second Balkan War…’

But our host is not interested in military facts.

‘How could we give away this land to the Greeks!’ he bangs his fist on the table. ‘Never! I’d give my last drop of blood to hold onto what’s mine. Now they come here like kings with their euros, and throw money at us. No, I won’t let my people go across to work in Greece and be Greek slaves! Over my dead body!’ His face darkens, his mouth froths at the corners. He reminds me of someone, but I can’t place it. ‘I’ll pay them double, but I’ll keep them working here, not working like slaves abroad, like second-class citizens. We are a people of slaves, five hundred years of slavery, I tell you. Letting ourselves be crushed like fleas!’ He crushes an imaginary flea into the folkloric tablecloth with his thumb. ‘I won’t let it happen! I won’t be a flea!’

‘No!’ Rado agrees gleefully. ‘Over my dead body will you be a flea!’

I laugh at Rado’s mock-concerned face, but Trayan doesn’t. Next thing, we’re watching the news on the mehana’s – or taverna’s – TV, and we hear about a Bulgarian girl who was sex-trafficked in provincial Greece. When she managed to escape and drag herself to the police, the five policemen on duty gang-raped her. They will be sacked but not prosecuted. The Bulgarian ambassador in Greece makes a po-faced statement about trafficking being under control and working closely with the Greek police. After all, she was only a whore, runs the text between the lines.

‘What did I say! The filthy Greeks, they think we’re trash!’ Trayan cries out to us and the other customers, two local men who smoke in silence. They shake their heads and look into the ashtray, lost for words. Trayan disappears into the kitchen, swearing under his breath.

Rado and I continue drinking, he especially. ‘Ah, the filthy Greeks.’ Rado grinds his teeth, and we laugh. We feel rotten for that girl, but we don’t want to side with Trayan and foam at the mouth. We are so far above his neurotic patriotism we’re practically from another country. But which country is that exactly?

‘It’s funny,’ Rado says, ‘I can only be Bulgarian when I’m in France. Here, I’m semi-French. Everything is funny and bizarre, and I laugh like someone watching a Beckett play. Except I’m a Frenchman with Bulgarian memories. I remember being inside that Beckett play. In France, I’ll never be a Frenchman, despite my accent-free French. I’ll always be
Rado le Bulgare
to them. At work, they think it’s exotic, which is why I bedded all my female colleagues at my last job without moving my little finger. Flowers all around! OK, I know you don’t approve, it’s just an example. But I’ll never be one of them. Ah, the filthy French!’

We laugh ourselves into a nervous exhaustion, and I retreat to my room, where I discover the meaning of the fifty showers Trayan promised: they’re of the cold water variety, all fifty of them. In the morning, when Rado emerges, looking heavy-lidded, we inspect some local jams and peanut butter displayed at Trayan’s ‘mini market’. Trayan himself hasn’t calmed down at all. He seems to live in a permanent state of patriotic paroxysm.

‘This is fig jam,’ he explains. ‘The dumb foreigners don’t know what jam is. Do you know that the French don’t have a word for jam?
Confiture
, they say.
Confiture
, my arse. It’s jam, jam, but they
don’t understand. The English don’t have a word for jam either!’

‘They do,’ I say. ‘It’s jam.’

‘No they don’t!’ Trayan shouts, raining spittle on us. ‘They’re a hundred years behind us in some ways. No, damn it, two hundred!’

‘Make it five.’ Rado winks at me and we collapse mirthfully.

‘Five hundred.’ Trayan agrees. Suddenly I realize who he reminds me of.

A sweat-stained, pot-bellied Greek man called Alexandros, with a gold medallion on his hairy chest and a long nail on his little finger, that’s who. The medallion was in the shape of Alexander the Great’s head, and Alexandros was the owner of a squalid one-star hotel in Thessaloniki (Greek Macedonia) where I once stayed for a week. Alexandros was given to pounding tables and shouting things like, ‘Makedonia always Greek! Alexandros is Greek, Philippos is Greek. Four thousand years Greek civilization in Makedonia! We are childrens of Alexandros!’ He was also given to referring to my family in the Republic of Macedonia as ‘Skopjan Gypsies’.

Trayan and Alexandros don’t know it, but they are brothers in chauvinism. The only thing that divides them is the wretched border.

We buy some fig jam, and get out of Trayan’s spitting range. Despite Rado’s hangover, we must do what everyone does in Melnik – taste the local wine. This, and the sandstone
mels
, is Melnik’s reason for being.

Shestaka’s Winery is perched picturesquely above the village, near the dreamy
mels
. We enter cool, dark caves full of wine barrels. Shestaka puts on some folk music for us and proudly answers my questions. Of course they serve meze with the wine, how can you drink wine on its own? He puts out a platter of sausage and home-made cheese. I glance
at his hand for the six fingers that have given him his nickname. Shest means six.

A Bulgarian couple come in, the man long-haired, with a stud in his ear. ‘Do you make rosé?’ he asks.

‘We don’t consider rosé to be wine. It’s water,’ says the plucky Shestaka, his hands moving too quickly between bottles and plates for me to count the fingers.

‘In Belgium, they drink rosé with their soup,’ announces the visitor.

‘They can do what they like in Belgium.’ Shestaka is a stocky man with a face almost handsome in its rare moments of repose. ‘They make raddish soup too, and they can have it with rosé all they like. Here, we drink real wine.’

I ask about the famous Melnik grape. And do they have other types of wine from around the country? I ask dimly, insensitive to local pride.

‘No, there’s only red Melnik wine here, you confuse things. And you don’t even drink wine!’ He flashes me a disapproving look. It’s true, I’m allergic to red wine. I’m pretending to drink, but the wine is thick and rich like ox blood. It’s only eleven in the morning and even Rado is restrained.

‘That’s why I’m asking you questions.’ I smile, determined to break him with sheer psychopathic friendliness, like a Jehovah’s Witness. I can afford to be friendly, I don’t live here, I reason callously.

‘You’re a journalist.’ the Bulgarian woman turns her beaky face to me accusingly. ‘Journalists twist facts. I don’t trust that stuff they show on TV.’ She sits down righteously.

Rado and I thank Shestaka profusely and head out.

‘You’re very welcome.’ He sees us off with a flourish, softened by our admiration for his wine. ‘Come again.’

‘You have to be nice to these guys,’ I explain to Rado outside. ‘They’re jumpy like that because they’re insecure. It’s the region’s history. It’s not easy living here. Trayan needs…’

‘What Trayan needs is fifty cold showers,’ Rado wraps up.

From the lookout point above town, we survey Melnik’s memento mori. The wilderness at the end of town conceals the thousands of wealthy houses from the bustling eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their ruins now overgrown. Then there’s the Roman bridge, the ruins of the Turkish baths, the medieval ruins of the
bolyarska
house where the powerful ruler despot Slav lived. Of the seventy churches, only three are still standing. Even in times of peace, even on a fine spring day, border towns in the Balkans are ambiguous with melancholy.

The passing armies for some reason spared the Kordopoulova House, the largest Balkan private home of its time. But Turkish soldiers slaughtered the last Kordopulos descendants, ending the region’s viticultural happiness. The elderly caretaker in a knitted shawl gives us handfuls of postcards and begs us to bring more visitors.

‘This is one of the most beautiful houses on the Balkans, but we need more visitors to keep it going, to keep the town going.’

Inside the creaking house, an ambitious motto startles us from our seediness: TO LIVE MEANS TO STRUGGLE: THE SLAVE FOR FREEDOM, THE FREE MAN FOR PERFECTION.

The author is Yané Sandanski, a Macedonian freedom fighter from one of the VMRO factions, who gave his name to the magical white town of my childhood, and his blood to lofty ideals like freedom and perfection.

‘I guess I’m not a free man,’ Rado observes darkly, ‘because I’m
nowhere near perfection. I’m not even sure I’m striving for perfection. Are you?’

‘I think I’m still striving for some sort of freedom. That makes me a slave, technically.’ And an unworthy descendent of Ljubica’s family, where striving for perfection was obligatory.

‘But only technically.’ Rado raises a cautionary finger.

We lunch in a riverside restaurant on a ‘pork-made dish’, eat the meaty Bulgarian tomatoes known as ‘ox hearts’ drizzled with Greek olive oil, drink Turkish coffee; and a fine, indiscriminate Balkan rain accompanies our meal instead of wine.

Large, comical
kratunki
, gourds, hang from house porches – a local souvenir. ‘Want a
kratunka
?’ Rado offers, and before I say no, he’s buying in bulk from a hunched old man in rubber loafers. He smiles toothlessly and waves goodbye from his gate as if we were his long-lost grandchildren finally come to visit from the city.

We head up the hill loaded with fig jam,
kratunki
, and a peculiar Melnik blues that throbs in the head like a historic hangover.

The Sandanski trail takes us up to Rozhen Monastery, rich with a history of multiple sackings and burnings since its beginnings in the early thirteenth century. And a view as surreal as its history: in the foreground, a ring of golden-white sandstone
mels
, in the background, the snowy peaks of Pirin. And before the monastery, the tomb of the flamboyant Yané Sandanski, which may or may not contain his remains.

Sandanski was the Balkan Che Guevara; he even looked the part, with his spatula-shaped revolutionary beard. He is now a Macedonian national hero, and even pops up in the anthem of the Republic of Macedonia. He is also, naturally, a Bulgarian national hero, though the Bulgarian anthem wisely avoids names.

Sandanski led one major faction of the VMRO, but he differed from his brothers in terror. He supported the Young Turk Revolution and believed in a brotherly Socialist Balkan federation where all ethnic groups would be equal. In other words, he was a tragic utopian. But he was also a kidnapper. In what became known as the infamous Miss Stone Affair, Sandanski scored two firsts: the first kidnapping of an American citizen for political reasons; and the first recorded case of Stockholm syndrome. After the ransom was paid and the staunch protestant maiden Miss Stone was released, she became an ardent supporter of the Macedonian cause against the Ottomans, something that caused the American government acute embarrassment.