Street Without a Name (20 page)

I hike out to a place grandly named the Institute for Rose Research and Rose Museum. Tramping along the hot dusty road, I have fantasies of sticking my face in rose-petal jam and pots of rose creams – the next best thing to rolling in the rose fields of June or whirling in a wine-fuelled Orphic feast. These florid thoughts quickly wilt when I reach the Rose Museum. For some reason – Thracian tomb imitation? – it’s located in a dank basement. A basement that stinks of leaky sewage pipes which might well date back to the Romans.

‘The museum has had extensive repairs,’ the bemantled attendant
informs me. She stands behind a counter strewn with faded goods: pallid soaps; forlorn creams; last bottle of rose liqueur. I wonder how it was before the extensive repairs: raw sewage in the corridors perhaps. Clearly, this is a State museum. If it were private, smiling maidens would be greeting you with rose jam, selling you your own grandmother made from rose petals and charging you the earth.

‘We have plenty of visitors,’ the hostess tells me proudly. She’s right to be proud: it’s a remarkable achievement to take something as romantic as rose oil, distil pure drabness from it, and still have visitors from Japan beating the doors down.

I spend a night in the boutique Hotel Rosa, musing on private versus state-owned business, while gorging on fruit. The watermelon slices are on ice. There are three varieties of grape. The internet is free. The breakfast could be a Thracian wedding feast. I’m tempted to take up permanent residence in the Hotel Rosa, but as a three-star hotel it’s three stars over my budget. Besides, I have the Balkán ranges to cross.

Our bus is winding through the precipitous Shipka Pass, along the road from Edirne in Turkey to Ruse on the Danube. It’s a glorious ride, but I’m too worried about our driver to enjoy it. Facial hair creeps up to his eyes from all sides, and a poster of a naked silicone diva covers most of his front windscreen. His eyes are in direct contact with the diva’s pubic hair. I hope he’s made small holes in her genital region to see through, otherwise we’re in trouble.

The sky suddenly darkens over the sea of green ranges, and the bus stops for a cigarette break next to something that used to be, according to the chipped lettering, the Shipka Hotel. The Shipka Hotel now looks like a small nuclear reactor after a big accident. The passengers
spill out and greedily begin to suck on their cigarettes as if plugging themselves into a life-support machine. The hirsute driver unwraps a greasy pastry. Our summer jackets are too thin for the mountain chill, and we shiver by the dusty bus with that peculiar, threadbare Balkan miserableness most noticeable at border crossings. And the Shipka Pass is a kind of historic border.

It’s where Bulgaria passed from being an Ottoman backwater to being an independent backwater, thanks in part to a series of battles on Shipka Peak in the Russo-Turkish War. We look up that way, instinctively, to where we know a modest monument sits atop 894 steps. There, in the crushing August heat of 1877, 5,000 under-armed and overwrought Russians and Bulgarians fought off the 30,000 Turks of Süleyman Pasha, first with ammunition, then with rocks and finally with their dead mates’ bodies. That the Slavs had found themselves in such straits was one of the many strategic blunders of a war some described as waged ‘between the one-eyed and the blind’. But Süleyman Pasha was the blind one, and the Shipka battle became a turning point in the Russo-Turkish war.

‘The Volunteers at Shipka’ was the first epic poem we had to learn by heart at school, and the ‘white bones and bloody moss’ of Shipka are part of my mental furniture. So are the opening lines about Bulgaria’s image in Europe as an oriental backwater: ‘shame on our forehead, marks of the whip, signs of bondage, no place in history, our name a tragic one’.

But wait, our name wasn’t always a tragic one.

We reach Veliko Tarnovo and I’m standing at the gates of the medieval citadel Tsarevets, watching a puppet show. There is a choice of Bulgarian or English, and I join a group of elderly American evangelists for the English version. Through the life-size puppets of
the tsar, tsaritsa, and court jester, the puppeteer ventriloquizes the story of Tsarevets, glorious city of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom. He lists all the devious enemies and traitors punished by the equitable Bulgarian monarchs. For example, the self-proclaimed Latin emperor of Byzantium Baldwin I of Flanders who spent some time as a prisoner here before Tsar Kaloyan executed him in a paroxysm of rage. ‘And the rest of Europe looked to the Bulgarian kingdom with envy and fear,’ the jester concludes and bursts into neurotic laughter.

The laughter is, of course, not the puppet’s but the puppeteer’s, who like me cringes at this historical flexing of long-expired muscles. True, Bulgaria’s medieval history is impressive. But I know, and the puppeteer knows, that today the rest of Europe looks to the Bulgarian ‘kingdom’ with either indifference or condescension. Still, the American evangelists are impressed.

‘We love East Europe,’ the cheerful pastor enthuses as he drops some coins for the puppeteer. ‘It’s so romantic.’

Over the road from Pip’s Bar, where the English-speaking expats hang out, is Shtastlivetsa Restaurant, famed for its enormous pizzas. Shtastlivetsa is named after Aleko Konstantinov, Bulgaria’s first travel writer and the creator of the devastating Bay Ganyu satire in which a hairy, grunting upstart with dubious hygiene goes abroad to trade in rose oil and happily embarrasses himself in every conceivable way, before he returns home to become a reactionary politician. Aleko Konstantinov wrote satirical columns about everything that was wrong with newly liberated Bulgaria (quite a lot), dubbed himself Shtastlivetsa or the Happy Man, and died aged thirty-four a most unhappy death. He was ‘accidentally’ assassinated by tsarist police. It was a symbolic death heralding what was yet to come: Bay Ganyu killing his creator. The philistine killing the cultured.

The two florid-faced, middle-aged Englishmen I’m sharing a table with must wonder why a retro-style portrait of a man with a goatee is overlooking us. But there is no time to explain about the Happy Man. They are busy celebrating the purchase of a local house. The proud new proprietor explains in great, tedious detail and a midlands accent where the house is and how cheap it is. (Somewhere near Veliko Tarnovo. Cheap as chips.)

‘A bargain!’ He leers euphorically. ‘And the workmen too. I can pay them as little as £15 a day!’

The English Bay Ganyu’s friend is more socially aware, or less drunk.

‘He has four kids and his wife is on sickness benefit. Imagine a holiday house for them in Britain, no chance. Now they can enjoy real summers…’

‘And the women are pretty!’ The father of four nudges his friend. His friend nods at his stew. He already has a house or three here. Or five. An investment, he says, and glances at his gold-plated watch. It turns out he runs an online estate agency business for Brits buying Bulgarian property. They’re not friends but client and agent, which explains the gold-plated watch. Selling property to foreigners is good business, because they make up a massive thirty per cent of all buyers. And most of those are British or Irish. That’s entire villages.

Across the street, in a guesthouse called ‘The House’, my next-door neighbours are an Irish couple from the west coast. They’ve just bought an apartment in a building that’s not yet built and a vineyard that’s not yet planted. They find the language impenetrable (three genders and two verbal modes!), their only friend here is a British estate agent, and they’re moving to Veliko Tarnovo now with their newborn. So what’s wrong with Ireland?

‘Oh, we luv Ireland. We just don’t wanna live there. Bulgaria reminds us of Ireland thirty years ago, so we don’t feel that far from home. This is a land of opportunity, like Ireland was.’

In other words, their euros go a long way here. I wish them luck and promise to come back and try their wine in five years’ time.

There’s one more place I want to see in the medieval capital: the ancient Forty Martyrs Church, now reopened after forty years of restoration. One of the stone columns that prop up its ceiling bears a curiously existential ninth-century inscription in old Greek, from the time of the Bulgar Khan Omurtag: ‘Even if a man lives well, he dies and another one comes. Let the one who comes later upon seeing this inscription remember the one who had made it.’

The column’s fate, I like to think, reflects the inscription: from the Bulgar royal town of Pliska, it was taken to the Forty Martyrs Church here in the medieval capital. When the Turks arrived, they turned the church into a mosque, but kept the supporting columns. I fancy that one fine summer evening, some time between 1400 and 1800, a philosophically-inclined imam sat with his worry beads to contemplate Omurtag’s poignant message from the ruins of the Bulgar empire, written in the language of the ruined Byzantine empire.

This reminds me that it’s time to go and pay my respects to Auntie. I flag down a taxi. It’s a wreck of a Warburg, and the driver is unimpressed when I ask him to stop by the Roman town of Nikopolis ad Istrum.

‘Nikopolis? The road there is like the surface of the moon.’ And so it is. Every time we go inside a crater, it feels like the Warburg has deconstructed and we’re sitting among its debris.

The iron gates are locked, so I do the obvious thing and climb over. Inside Nikopolis, I walk on Roman streets made of giant stone slabs.
It’s eerie. Half-temples point at the sky with the stumps of their columns, half-agoras open up, half-streets end suddenly. Emperor Trayan built this town in 102 after his victory against the Dacians, and named it City of Victory on the Danube. For centuries, nobody took notice of this incongruous stone town in the middle of a field, until the Austro-Hungarian ethnographer Felix Kanitz found it in the 1860s. A few years ago, a gate went up, but by then the locals had already incorporated Nikopolis into their houses. We drive past holiday houses, and I swear I see a Latin inscription over a colonnaded doorway.

‘It’s called recycling,’ the driver says. ‘If the government doesn’t care, why should we? Besides, if I didn’t get a few stones for my house, the neighbour would’ve helped himself anyway.’

You can’t argue with that.

It’s exactly ten days after Auntie’s death. The house seems derelict without her. Uncle is bereft and disoriented, and keeps looking for things – his glasses, his keys, his slippers – to distract himself from the ultimate, unacceptable loss that has made all other losses insignificant.

We pour crosses of red wine over the fresh soil of Auntie’s grave, light long candles and wait until they burn down. There is little left to say but Uncle is trying to keep busy with constant talk of houses and wills. The house belongs in effect to Auntie’s family. Uncle is terrified that he might be left without a roof over his head. After fifty years of prodigious accumulation and equally prodigious waste, Uncle has nothing, at least not on paper.

‘We have no claims on the house,’ I say, hoping to reassure him. I have the opposite effect. Uncle is hurt.

‘What do you mean, no claims?’ he exclaims, his dentures clattering
indignantly. ‘Fifty years we’ve been improving this house. And now you don’t have claims! Now, where did I put my glasses?’

Uncle is raiding wardrobes and cupboards for Auntie’s will. Then he has a brainwave.

‘I’ll call the village fortune-teller, she’ll tell me where the papers are! Last time we lost those coins, we called her and bingo. Who knows, maybe I’m walking past Auntie’s will every day.’

We sit in the vine-shaded yard, and eat roast peppers and watermelon. Dobrinka is here too. ‘Cheers,’ I say and my voice is hollow.

‘You don’t say “Cheers” when there’s a dead person,’ Dobrinka says in her matter-of-fact way. ‘You say “May the earth rest lightly upon her”. You know, just before she died, Auntie wanted to tell me something. I waited for hours, but nothing came out. She couldn’t say it.’

‘Once,’ Uncle rejoins, chewing soft bread, ‘I said to her, “Can you hear me, that I’m crying for you?” She said, “I hear you, and it makes me sad.” She understood everything right until the end. I knew she did.’

Dobrinka nods. ‘She did.’

Uncle wipes tears with his arthritic hand. I can’t bear this, so I turn to Dobrinka. ‘How’s Vera?’

‘Vera? She picks them up, I tell you. First that Turkish guy last year, then the Gypsy and his clan… All the hoodlums in the world, it’s like they’re lining up for her outside. At first I worried myself sick. But if I’d kept worrying, I’d have been buried long before Auntie.’

It transpires that Vera had taken up with a Gypsy ‘down the road’. But when she tried living with his family, they mistreated her and she
went back to her mother. Disaster struck during the funeral lunch for Auntie in the village restaurant. Dobrinka called the restaurant from home, hysterical: ‘The Gypsies are at the door with pitchforks, they want to kill Vera!’

The Gypsy clan were indeed at her door, ready to claim the errant bride-to-be. What could the village men do but defend her honour? Spearheaded by my Uncle Vanyo, the bride-saving party got up from the funereal feast, removed the napkins from their distended bellies, picked up a few logs, and went to face the Gypsy clan at the village outskirts. The attackers fled and Vera was saved without bloodshed.

‘You know…’ Dobrinka’s handsome face cracks into a smile, the smile of the unsung woman survivor. ‘You travel the world for stories. And it’s all here in Suhindol. You don’t have to go looking any further.’

But I do: Pavlikeni awaits. Grandmother Kapka is living alone after the death of her companion.

‘Do you miss him?’ I ask in the kitchen while we pick at a suspect salad. She is surprised by the question. Come to think of it, emotions always surprise her.

‘He was useless.’ She looks blankly at the plastic tablecloth. ‘I had to cook, ensure there was sterile cleanliness in the house.’

‘So you don’t miss him,’ I conclude.

‘Nope,’ she nods, and with startling speed of reflex, she picks up a plastic swatter and stuns a fly dead on the table. She briefly examines it, then brushes it off and onto the grubby lino floor.