Street Without a Name (21 page)

And at this point, I finally zoom in on the fuzzy space that is this woman. She has no emotional life. Emotion was wiped out at some distant moment in time, by an unknown evil hand. This is how she has survived everything life served her, and outlived her peers.

‘You know that Malina has had two kids now,’ she moves on. ‘Two lovely blond kids. She’s in the cooperation across the street now. Oh, and Ivo died last year. Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’

I choke on the salad while she continues to chew pastry with the callous self-regard of old age, focused on her own survival.

Ivo’s familiar cheery face smiles at me from the notice pinned to Malina’s door. The
necrolog
is freshly printed for the first anniversary of his death. I think of our dance across that carpeted floor, our shy embrace, our socked feet. It’s as if my own youth has suddenly dropped dead.

Malina recognizes me instantly, although we haven’t seen each other since 1986. She smiles and I see the downy girl with grazed knees peeking from behind the woman’s heavy body. Her white-blond children float around us as she tells me how Ivo died.

‘It was a year before they diagnosed him. They’d been treating him for sinusitis. They still could’ve saved him, but you know our hospitals. The radiation machine in Sofia was broken. He actually died of meningitis in the end. It was the hottest summer I remember. Like hell.’

Malina is working as a supervisor at a local boarding school. She graduated in Bulgarian literature and has been earning a meagre salary. Her husband runs a bookshop.

‘At first, he wanted it to be a proper bookshop. But soon it became obvious that people don’t read apart from the tabloid
Shock
. So he got rid of the books and started selling stationery. It’s the only way to survive. Under Socialism, whatever else was wrong, at least we read. Now I see fifteen-year-olds who can’t read.’

We pledge to stay in touch and I step outside, dazed. I still can’t believe that Ivo is dead. The woman from the corner shop shakes her head and adjusts rotisserie chickens on a grill.

‘People are falling like flies. It’s not normal. Ivo worked in a factory for faience. Run with American technology, but rumour has it that it wasn’t safe. Maybe they poisoned him there. Or else it was Chernobyl. I think it all boils down to Chernobyl. Their father too, those years ago…’

The last thing I see from the bus leaving Pavlikeni is an English graffito sprayed on the wall of a cooperation: BRUTALITY IS MY REALITY.

To cheer myself up, I call Uncle on his new mobile phone. He doesn’t pick up. I call his landline.

‘I was waiting for the ringing tune to finish, it’s such a nice tune I didn’t want to interrupt it,’ he explains. ‘But by the time I answered, you were gone… Now, the fortune-teller told me where the papers might be. I told you, she knows these things. But I can’t find them because I’ve lost my glasses… Now, I’d prepared some tomatoes for you. You left with empty hands again.’

On the bus back to Sofia, three loud men get on and spread out on the seats in front of me. Actually, only one of them is making all the noise, enough for three. He wears wrap-around sunglasses and swings a string of worry beads menacingly.

Speaking to strange men on buses is not the local feminine thing to do. You pout, look pissed off, or flirt. But you don’t make conversation, which is why they’re dumbstruck when I do. The boisterous one is the first to recover.

‘Stoyan.’ He shakes my hand. ‘Pleasure. You speak good English. I heard you on your mobile before.’

I explain that I live in Scotland.

‘I’m Ahmed.’ A sunburnt freckly face smiles at me. Ahmed
could be only forty but his side-teeth are missing.

‘Scotland,’ Stoyan says. ‘Cold up there, but stay there. My sister’s in Italy. She calls and goes, I’ll never come back. And I agree. If I leave, I’d never give this rotten country a thought. Look at it, seventeen years, and what has changed?’

He swings the worry beads furiously. The other two are quiet.

‘I think quite a lot has changed,’ I offer. ‘Besides, fifteen years is not such a long time.’

‘You have a point,’ Stoyan agrees. ‘I lived abroad too, I’ve been everywhere.
Gastarbeiter
. But without a language, it’s hard. I always come back.’

‘I’ve been around too.’ It’s Ahmed’s turn now. ‘Ten years in Greece, Istanbul. But I always return, I don’t know why.’

‘You don’t feel yourself abroad,’ Stoyan agrees. ‘Even if you meet good people, it’s not the same.’

‘We’ve been friends for ten years,’ Ahmed says. ‘The three of us. You don’t get that easily.’

They work in a factory for processing gold. They must have lots of it, then.

‘Do we look rich? We don’t get a gram of gold for ourselves.’ Ahmed laughs.

‘Not even a milligram,’ the third one mutters.

When we arrive in Sofia, Ahmed gives me his sister’s number.

‘I’ll be here for a week. Please call. We can have a drink, talk more, just talk. Women here are so demanding, they look at your wallet and that’s it. It’s not often that you meet a woman you can talk to.’

I like Ahmed but I squirm. Stoyan presses his much-worried worry beads into my hand.

‘Have it. My lucky charm. To remember crazy Stoyan on the bus.’
He overrides my protestations. ‘No, please. I’ll get another one in Greece next time I emigrate.’

‘And remember me too.’ Ahmed smiles. ‘Though I haven’t got anything of mine to give you.’

I keep the number for weeks before I discard it. Ahmed and I inhabit different worlds. All we share is a bus ride through the Balkán, there’s no point pretending.

But it feels somehow wrong, almost a self-betrayal. It feels like throwing out much more than a phone number. It feels like rejecting Uncle and Auntie’s last parting gift. Like saying goodbye to the Balkán.

At least I have the ancient compass with its live, flickering hands and its worn leather strap. Come to think of it, it’s the only thing of theirs that I have.

A Rodopean story

Just as I’m about to conclude that the long-delayed bus from Plovdiv has fallen into a river, it shows up. Slowly, we wind our way up and down the narrow mountain road. We are in a realm of forests dripping with chlorophyll and legend.

The Rodopi Ranges are the country’s most mysterious region. Pirin, Rila and the Balkán have higher peaks, but the Rodopi breathe with a strangely zoomorphic energy. Entering this brooding landscape is like entering a dark, enchanted labyrinth of live flesh.

At Smolyan’s bus station, listless Gypsy men in soiled tracksuits smoke cheap tobacco and gaze at nothing in particular. A dull, habitual despair hangs around them together with the reek of unwashed bodies.

Smolyan is the Rodopi’s regional centre but it doesn’t look like a place bustling with job opportunities. In fact, it’s sunk into a scenic slumber. The most interesting fact about it is that it’s the country’s longest and thinnest town. Ten kilometres long, to be precise. But precision is no use here, and everything in the Rodopi has more dimensions than meets the eye and the foot.

For example, Smolyan looks like a new town, thanks to the monstrous construction boom of the 1960s. But beneath the brick and concrete lies another story. In the seventeenth century, violent Islamizing campaigns swept the region and, like many villages in the Rodopi, Smolyan rose from its ashes. It was rebuilt from scratch by Islamized Bulgarian survivors (those who didn’t get beheaded in
Time of Violence
) and named Pashmaklu. After Liberation in 1878, the Turkish name was replaced with the proudly Slavic Smolyan. And later still, the seventeenth-century buildings were replaced with proudly concrete houses.

I’m standing on the balcony of one such house which the enterprising owner has turned into a B&B and called ‘The House of the Three Fir Trees’. The three fir trees are strategically placed to disguise the house itself, but not obstruct the view to the crags up above the town, one of which is called The Bride. In local lore, this is where a maiden betrothed to a
haiduk
(mountain rebel) jumped off before the local Turkish bei could take her for a bride.

The Bride joins a teeming population of ghosts in the busy hereafter that is Rodopean folklore. Rodopean ballads are surreal and existential – dramatic monologues, wrenching farewells, maidens
plummeting from rocks, mothers who weep to the grave, shepherds swallowed by mountains, doomed lovers, floating brides, and yet more weeping mothers.

The ghosts live alongside another population in the Rodopean towns and villages. They wear brightly coloured shalvars, and they are the Islamized Bulgarians collectively known as Pomaks. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Pomaks were the first batch of Bulgarian Muslims to have their names ‘voluntarily’ changed.

But the Rodopean story doesn’t begin or end with a medieval clash of civilizations. It begins, and hopefully ends, with a marriage of civilizations. The oldest of those were the Thracians, and the most enduring Thracian is, of course, the mythical singer Orpheus. He came from the Rodopi and his preternaturally beautiful voice haunted these parts, just as his doomed bid to save his beloved dead Eurydice from the underworld has haunted the imagination of the Western world.

Even Mature Socialism couldn’t remain indifferent to Orpheus, and here I am, sitting by a fine specimen of proletarian plastic art at its most romantic. A rudimentary, seated Orpheus is plucking a string-less lyre and gazing to the heavens. An angular-featured Eurydice sits at his feet, leaning on his sinewy thigh and also gazing to the heavens – or is it the Bright Future? They look like Comsomol youth at rest during a dam-building brigade. It’s amazing the artist didn’t replace the lyre with a Russian accordion.

On the bench opposite me sit two old men with felt hats and rolled-up newspapers. It’s late afternoon: gossip time.

‘Do you know,’ says one, ‘there are 250,000 couples in the country who live together, kids and all, and unmarried?’

‘No way!’

‘I swear. Marriage is becoming an anachronism. It’s not important any more. That’s the way of the future.’

‘My word.’ The other one shakes his head.

‘Let’s ask this young lady here. Are you married to your boyfriend?’ The extrovert turns to me. ‘I assume you have a boyfriend…’

‘Stop flirting,’ his friend interrupts, flashing a golden tooth.

‘I’m not married,’ I admit.

‘Ah, there you are,’ the champion of the unmarried triumphs. ‘Marriage is a thing of the past.’

‘It is,’ I agree. ‘It’s love that matters, not marriage.’

‘Ah, thank you!’ He turns to his friend, beaming. ‘Did you hear that? Love is what it’s about, not some stupid paper, rings, vows, all that rubbish. I can’t get my ring off any more, it sinks into the flesh like a slave’s collar.’ He pulls at his wedding ring theatrically. ‘They’ll bury me with this piece of metal, like they used to bury the Thracians with their treasures. Take Orpheus and Eurydice here, were they married? Who cares? That’s not what remains after us.’ He punctuates the air with his rolled-up paper.

‘True true,’ I say. It’s not often that you find octogenarians right on your wavelength. Even if they read that lowest of tabloids
Shock
. I glance at a headline: PRIEST CONVICTED FOR ARROGANT HOOLIGANISM REFUSED TO OFFER LAST RITES TO A DECEASED MAN AND BEAT UP A POLICEMAN.

‘There you are.’ He nods at me. ‘And I hope that you always have plenty of it.’ I hope he means love.

The other old man grins indulgently at Orpheus and Eurydice, at the dark mountains rising on all sides, at his friend, at me, with a mouth full of golden teeth.

I spend a day with a local taxi-driver who doesn’t even try to rip me off. His name is Angel and it suits him. Angel is thirty-five, single, chubby, his fringe carefully slicked to one side. Diligent glasses complete the choirboy look. The Rodopi might be fitness freak heaven, but Angel mostly treks from his parents’ fridge to the car and back.

We drive through Pamporovo, the winter sports resort of the Rodopi, where I learned to ski and later survived a spectacular ski-fall which nearly relieved me of my brain. Now it’s all luxury hotels and fresh construction sites for more luxury hotels gnawing at the flesh of the forest like tumours. One sign at the edge of the forest proudly announces ‘Hotel Extreme’.

‘Extreme greed, that’s what it is. Ever bigger, ever more luxurious. You know that all these hotels are owned by
mutri
big and small,’ Angel says quietly, without anger. He doesn’t do anger. ‘So-called developers. Like at the seaside. Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Turkish developers, some Westerners too. Greed, sheer dumb greed will eat the heart out of our beautiful country and then it’ll be too late to be sorry.’

As if to match our mood and the increased elevation, the darkened sky suddenly begins to shed enormous rags of snow. In this fairy-tale blizzard, we reach the deeply fissured Trigrad Canyon. Giant cliffs hang over the road.

‘I avoid coming here.’ Angel adjusts his glasses nervously. ‘I feel hemmed in. These rocks oppress me. The entire Rodopi oppress me. It’s too much for me. I like the sea, more gentle landscapes…’

You definitely couldn’t accuse the western Rodopi of gentleness. The river has dragged all manner of detritus along its distended bed: rags; stones; entire trees. The road has been patched up after the river ripped it up last year.

‘You should have seen the river last spring. It swallowed a whole Mercedes, near the bus station. The owner didn’t move it in time, too lazy. Then one day it just drifted away. He waded into the river shoulder-deep, hanging onto his Mercedes like a madman. They showed him on local TV. Later, the river spat it up, all twisted up like wet laundry. And he was crying like a baby that’s just lost its mother.’

We stop at a deep abyss cave which enjoys not one but two hellish names: Devil’s Gorge and Gate to Hades. And with good reason. Legend has it that this was the gate to the underworld through which Orpheus passed to look for Eurydice. Two divers in a 1970 expedition also passed through here but, unlike Orpheus, they were looking for the bottom of the abyss and, unlike him, they never came back.

Angel has never been to the cave before and he’s not exactly thrilled to be inside a dripping, slimy, tomb-like world, deafened by a waterfall 40 metres high. It enters the cave from one end and comes out the other, and the fact that we hear it but can’t see it makes it even more menacing. The Thracians who lived around here for thousands of years would throw their dead chieftains’ bodies into the river, and since nothing comes out the other end except crystal-clear water, the bones remained inside.

I can’t imagine why anyone who isn’t unhinged by grief would dive voluntarily into this thundering, chthonic darkness, and, judging by Angel’s steamed-up glasses, neither can he. This is simply not a human realm.

And yet, in a dripping alcove, a tiny icon of the Virgin Mary is overlooked by a faint stone relief of Orpheus with his lyre. Coins for good luck have been deposited all over the wet altar, and spring
water leaks from the rock beneath Orpheus’ feet. The red and white threads of
martenitsi
, deposited for health, add to this eclectic altar of paganism, Christianity, superstition, and simple hope in the ante-chamber of Hades.

Our next cave, the Yagodina or Strawberry Cave, is more cheerful. It’s 10 kilometres long, but to Angel’s relief, only one-tenth of it is accessible to sedentary bums like us. We are treated to an hour of brisk walking and talking through dripping galleries by a handsome, deadpan cave guide with a face wilted by cigarettes and sunburn, and terrible facial tremors. I wonder if he has Parkinson’s or is simply a nervous wreck.

‘See the Cyrillic alphabet here?’ The guide points shakily to a shallow pool with strange formations. ‘This is evidence that the cave is Bulgarian and not Greek.’

We are only a few kilometres from the Greek border, after all. Which is presumably why he sees fit to tell us a nationalist joke.

‘Now, Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia had earthquakes. They went to God and said, Dear God, can you arrange for the Bulgarians to have an earthquake too, it’s only fair. God said, I’ll see what I can do. And Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia kept having earthquakes. They went back to God and said, Dear God, we asked you to visit earthquakes on Bulgaria, not on us again. God said, Hold on, let me check which map I was using.’

Angel and I laugh politely.

‘This here is the wedding hall,’ the guide runs ahead. ‘We sometimes marry couples here; look, this is the celebrant’s table. Out of nearly 300 weddings, we haven’t had a single divorce. Those who want a divorce are sent straight to the Devil’s Gorge. Now, see this stalagmite and stalactite? We call it the Incomplete Kiss. That’s because they need
another 150 years to meet up and form a stalactone. You’re welcome to pop in then and see it.’

We’d rather pop out into the world of the living, and when we do, there is no trace of the snow. It’s warm and sunny as we arrive in the protected village of Shiroka Laka.

Shiroka Laka was built by Christian breakaways from seventeenth-century conversions, and became a National Revival stronghold with its fortress-like houses and church schools. Last time I stopped here, I was trekking in the Rodopi with Michael. Actually, we weren’t so much trekking as getting hopelessly lost in the hills and we stumbled into Shiroka Laka by mistake, all scratched by brambles, sunburnt, and delirious with thirst. The locals looked at us as if we were devils, or Turks at the very least. We only stayed for a few hours, to admire the fortified, whitewashed houses, but by the time we left, the locals were practically waving strings of garlic and crucifixes in our direction. There were no buses at the end of the day, and we hitched, desperate to get away from the bad vibes. A young army officer from the Alpine division in Smolyan saved us from our predicament and enlightened us.

‘The locals are jumpy these days,’ he explained, ‘because so many foreigners and new rich Sofianites buy up the houses here for a song. They come with their jeeps and arrogance and prance around like they own the place. The locals are proud folk. They feel like they’re being bought out of their own village. They like visitors, but not property buyers. They just want to be left alone.’ We wondered how anybody could mistake bedraggled tourists for property sharks, but it wasn’t that amazing. Most property-buying foreigners first come as tourists, and then return as owners. The most handsomely done-up house in the village bears a wooden sign saying ‘Jack’s House’.

Perversely drawn to the hostility of Shiroka Laka, I have decided to stay for a few days. I’m determined to see at least one person smile.

Angel and I arrive at siesta time, and the only people on the main street are a red-faced policeman fattened by too much rakia and too little work, and two local men with crumpled faces and distended bellies. They’re discussing important matters: the long weekend. More eating and drinking. Angel and I sit down to a meal of smilyanski beans, famous in the Rodopi for their buttery texture. Except they taste like they were genetically engineered and transported from China in the hull of a very slow, damp ship.

‘They probably were,’ Angel says. ‘This is what happens when small producers are bulldozed by big businesses.’ He adjusts his glasses. ‘No more authentic smilyanski beans. But let’s not ruin your short visit. Just breathe in the pure air of the Rodopi because you haven’t been here for ages. Recharge yourself. I haven’t been outside Bulgaria, and I’m sure Scotland has nice air too, but there’s nothing like home.’

And nothing like old-fashioned chivalry. I have hired Angel for the day and expect to cover all expenses, but he insists on paying for lunch. We argue over the bill until I surrender and he proudly picks it up. Only hours ago, he’d told me all about his expenses with the car, the high price of living, the meagre taxi custom in a small town, how he still lives with his parents because he can’t afford his own place. But paying for lunch is another matter altogether.

After the bean soup and saying goodbye to Angel, things begin to go downhill. I discover that instead of the ‘golf course’-sized apartment I was promised by the guesthouse owner on the phone, I’ll be sleeping inside a roomy cupboard. The price, on the other hand, is the same. I politely ask for a cupboard discount, and the guesthouse owner politely tells me that if I’m not happy with the price, he can
show me the door. But he knows, and he knows that I know: it’s a long weekend and there isn’t a free bed in the village. Not even a free cupboard. I decide to calm myself with a piece of sweet pumpkin pie in the folk-themed restaurant downstairs.