Street Without a Name (5 page)

‘Number Sixteen,’ the teacher snapped, breaking her ruler on the desk after I made a mess of the genitive case at the blackboard yet again, ‘you have no respect. You should be ashamed of yourself.’ And I was. Because I could see that deep down the Russian teacher was a nice woman, and it wasn’t her fault that she had to teach a language nobody wanted to learn. But soon I began to see some practical advantages to linguistic excellence.

In November 1981, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died and our school had a morning of mourning. We stood in the yard in neat, frozen units, listening to giant speakers thunder out recorded Soviet Army songs like ‘
Vstavai strana ogromnaya
’ (‘Rise, oh Mighty Country’), a motivational anti-Fascist war song from the 1940s.

The school director Comrade Geshev, a dour apparatchik in a brown suit, gave The Speech. All his speeches were identical and all we heard was a continuous drone. The Russian teacher stood on the platform next to him, in place of honour, weeping into her fringed shawl. She was dressed in black, like the grieving woman on the second floor of our apartment block. It was, she told us through a microphone, a sad day for everyone in our two brotherly countries. I wondered how you could be sad for someone you didn’t actually know, but I knew there were questions you didn’t ask. When we were finally released and allowed inside, I saw that Brezhnev’s bushy-eyebrowed portrait was guarded outside the director’s office by star pupils who stood erect and proud. Had I tried harder at Russian, I too might have had that honour, I reflected, and been discharged from Russian classes. At last, a reason for genuine sadness.

A reason for geniune interest in Russian came in the form of a pop song, ‘A Million Scarlet Roses’. It was performed by none other than
the rising star of Soviet pop music Alla Pugacheva, who sang it with glossy lipstick, white furs, soulful eye-shadow, and enormous hair. The only bit of the song I could understand was the refrain (‘millions, millions, millions of scarlet roses’) and one evening, when the glittery Alla was on TV, I asked my mother to translate the song for me.

And here was the story – a true story, my mother said – of a poor painter who loved an actress so much that he sold all his paintings to buy her a sea of roses. When she woke up and opened her window, she thought she was dreaming: the street was all awash with roses. She wondered who this fabulously rich admirer was. And down in the street – my mother stifled a sob – stood the ruined painter. It was romance on a grand scale, and it was like nothing else we had in our lives. It was also proof that Russian songs could be more personal than the military choir of ‘Rise, oh Mighty Country’.

Around that time, I also became infatuated with Pushkin’s novel in verse,
Evgenii Onegin
. The story of the noble Tatiana and the tormented Evgenii in nineteenth-century Russia was worlds away from grammatical cases at the blackboard. Here were deadly duels, impossible love, philosophical musings about happiness, and amazing clothes. And it was all in couplets. I suddenly saw the point of learning the genitive case. The Russian teacher started smiling at me, and calling me Kapka instead of Number Sixteen.

A good young citizen excels not only in the classroom, of course, but also outside, and our extra-curricular activities were just as important as lessons. On Civil Defence days, we were taken into the city centre and down into a stuffy, claustrophobic underground bunker. There, we saw horrific photographs of devastated places called Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of people wearing gas-masks. The masks themselves were there too, and we all had to put one on, to
get used to it, for the day when the Fascist-imperialist enemy attacked our Fatherland with a nuclear bomb. The scenario was deadly serious, but practising in masks with elephant-like trunks at the front was hilarious – until you couldn’t breathe any more and the mask had to be removed by a teacher.

Then there were the visits to the mausoleum of our Great Leader Georgi Dimitriov. In the arctic chill and silence of the marble tomb, I stood in line behind my comrades for a peek at the great man. I wondered if the two young guards who stood, stiff and unblinking, on each side of the display cabinet were in fact frozen solid. The Great Leader had a slightly more relaxed air, but only because he was horizontal. He lay in a glass box, dressed in a suit, and looked like he was made of plastic.

The good citizen must also be a good Pioneer. The Pioneers’ uniform was white shirts, navy-blue pleated skirts or trousers, and red polyester tie-scarves soaked in the blood of dead partisans. The Pioneers took over from the youngest comrades, the blue-scarfed Chavdars, who had to recite the following programmatic lines:

The little Chavdar works hard.
At home and in school
the little Chavdar is number one.
He knows: he’ll be a Pioneer soon.

After the Pioneers came the Comsomol at high school, culminating in full-blown Communist Party membership, which was optional. Being a Pioneer wasn’t. It was indistinguishable from going to school. To be thrown out of the Chavdars/Pioneers/Comosomol was a rare but complete social disgrace, and could end with a Corrective Labour School.

Each class was a Unit, and each Unit had its Pioneer committee: the Unit Leader was responsible for the overall excellence of the Unit, followed by a Unit Secretary who handled the funds, a Cultural Officer responsible for events, and the lesser posts of Physical Education Officer and Recycled Paper Officer, who was only activated on Recycled Paper Day when each Unit competed for the top quota in accumulated used paper. The bulk of used paper was supplied by
The Worker’s Deed
to which some parents subscribed. Mine didn’t, so my quota of used paper usually consisted of my parents’ old maths manuals. Turning up empty-handed was a disgrace for your Unit.

My default career as a Pioneer started with the post of Cultural Officer, which I did resentfully. I didn’t want to be organizing the Unit’s cultural events, I wanted to be organizing my own culture. But the Unit had to be present at key cultural moments, such as the ‘Flag of Peace’ Assembly on the outskirts of the Youths. There, we posed for class photographs in a concrete, open-air complex called The Bells. The Bells featured the national bell of every country in the world, and after the photos and the speeches we were allowed to toll the bells and have a picnic on the grass.

The idea of the Bells and the Assembly came from the Minister of Culture, Lyudmila Jivkova, daughter of Comrade Jivkov. She was an enigmatic woman who wore an eccentric Eastern turban. The intention was to unite all the children of the world – white, black, yellow, red – in an assembly of peace and comradeship. Surrounded by 120 national bells, in my red Pioneer scarf, I wondered when the colourful children of the world would finally arrive.

They never did, and Lyudmila died suddenly and mysteriously, aged thirty-nine. Her death, like her life, was a State secret. Now we
know that the autopsy report was signed by eminent professors who were not there. Speculation abounded and still abounds today: illness; accident; suicide; KGB-inspired murder. After all, the Soviets had issued several warnings about her internationalist projects, her interest in mystic teachings and unorthodox faiths, and her promotion of modern and ancient cultures. She created hundreds of art museums, opera houses, concert halls, and Sofia’s most prestigious humanities college for classical studies. She was a follower of Agni-Yoga teaching and made regular trips to India. In short, she was straying from the ideological struggle of Mature Socialism in its most advanced stage. After her death, an official cult of her person was loudly proclaimed, but her progressive cultural initiatives were quietly strangled.

Around that time, I was relieved of the Cultural Officer post, and suddenly promoted to the terrifying heights of a Unit Leader. Whenever Class E was called out by the school officials, I would step forward, sick with stage fright, with my right arm lifted across my face in the Pioneer salute, a salute separated from its Nazi cousin only by a fold in the elbow, to report to the more senior Brigade Leader.

Brigade Leader: ‘Unit ready?’

Unit Leader (me): ‘Always ready!’

It wasn’t clear to me what exactly we were ready for, but I was certainly always ready to step back into the ranks of my unit and fade away from the spotlight.

In the classroom, though, it was less easy to say your lines and disappear, especially with the arrival of our new Class Supervisor, Comrade Gesheva. She was short and neckless, with bulldog jowls. For a while we thought she was Comrade Geshev’s wife, a match made in comrades’ heaven, but they only shared a surname and an ideology.

Unfortunately, Comrade Gesheva was a teacher of literature, my
favourite subject. She wore a worker’s buttoned mantle over her civilian clothes, as if she was in a factory. And as far as she was concerned, she was: School 81 was a factory for education. There were two ways with Comrade Gesheva: public praise or public humiliation.

She couldn’t stand ‘hooligans’ and ‘retards’, which meant anyone who was late for class or slightly dim. Her favourite method of discipline was to attack the top of your head with the blunt end of a key that she always carried in her mantle pocket, or to pinch your ear lobe with her sharply manicured nails. If you weren’t on the receiving end of her corporal punishment, she tried to make you complicit in inflicting them on others.

By Gesheva’s decree, one of my tasks as the Unit Leader, and the tallest girl in the class, was to intercede in hooligan fights, a manicured index finger helpfully directing me towards the fray. I was also expected to report on my comrades, to her and to their parents. Who was exhibiting signs of being a hooligan or a retard, who had said what about whom, who had behaved badly? It was a daunting task, made more complicated by the fact that one of the two chief hooligans was my friend Toni. Toni, the son of our balcony neighbours with the Lada, had been my best friend since we were seven. He ran a bit wild at school as a result of having a father with great ambitions for his kids, and even greater anger management problems, which resulted in beatings for Toni. My first task as a Unit Leader was to go to Toni’s parents and report his bad behaviour. After several days of anxious procrastination, I finally confessed to my mother, who promptly gave me my first lesson in ethics. It’s not your job to report to anybody, she said. You are his friend.

Comrade Gesheva’s response to my failure revealed that she followed a different ethical code. It came in the form of a brief but
devastating speech in front of the class: ‘The fish starts rotting from the head’ (me), and ‘The class must know that its Unit Leader is a zero. Kapka, you are a complete zero. You must reflect on this very carefully.’

Meanwhile, other girls were throwing Gesheva morsels of information about well-known hooligans like Nikifor. Nikifor had no full-time father, and his mother was an alcoholic. In other words, they were official degenerates, which in a strange way proved useful for Nikifor: he had nothing to lose. He was beyond Gesheva’s terror tactics. He sneered at her and her key, driving her into a frothing rage.

But after a traumatic accident in which the son of a teacher was pushed out of the top-floor window and shattered on the pavement below in a mess of glass, Nikifor disappeared. An awed whisper went around: he had been sent to a Corrective Labour School. It would be years before any of us saw Nikifor again and I imagined his life there, guarded by growling, whip-wielding Cerberuses exactly like Gesheva.

My own fear of Gesheva manifested itself in two ways: in increasingly regular attacks of gastritis and in increasingly escapist books. I was joined in my psychological truancy by Esther, who was congenitally incapable of toeing the official line. We tried to write science-fiction stories which closely resembled the translated books we devoured –
2001: A Space Odyssey
, Isaac Asimov’s
I, Robot
, and Ray Bradbury’s
I Sing the Body Electric!
and
Dandelion Wine
. Our characters had suitably foreign names like Peter and Jack. Esther was a better sci-fi writer than me, which I put down to her otherworldly physicist parents.

We followed fanatically the TV series
Blake’s Seven
, and we played teleporting games where you left behind the mud of the Youths and suddenly found yourself in an invented world, whose small but select
populations spoke like characters from
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and said things like ‘Don’t let me depress you’ or ‘You’re turning into a penguin, stop it immediately!’ Around the same time, we were gripped with
Star Wars
mania. Life was only worth living if you could see
The Empire Strikes Back
and
Return of the Jedi
for the third time. The trade in Turbo chewing-gum wrappers reached a frenzy, and my bookmarks now consisted of wrappers with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Lea gazing across distant galaxies. If my schooling under Gesheva was a long ideological battle, it was my decadent Western fantasies that triumphed in the end.

The year was 1986 and our primary school class now dissolved into the big bad world of secondary education. As some stayed behind and others went to specialist schools, all of my classroom friendships, except Esther, ended with School 81 and the onset of pubescence (Toni, lying: I’m screwing girls. Me, jealous: I bet they have syphilis). But my non-school friends, the kids of my parents’ friends, were there to stay. After all, our parents shared the same world: a world where political jokes and birthday parties were the norm, and you were united by a distrust of the idiots in the brown suits.

Thanks to my mother’s unfulfilled childhood dream to learn the piano, I was also about to discover the existence, right there in the Youths, of a parallel world of the muses and music, a world away from the stiff ranks of the Pioneers, and the utilitarian ways of Comrade Gesheva.

My piano teacher Keti Marchinkova was exotic in every conceivable way – foreign name, blonde face, husbandless, and childless. Her grandmother had been German. She lived with her mother in a central city apartment. It was an enchanted place: cats in the communal courtyard; giant plants inside the darkened, carpeted rooms smelling
of cigarette ash, perfume, and closeted bourgeoisie. Keti’s red lipstick left sensuous traces on the edge of glasses. The scent of exotic flowers enveloped the piano while her sturdy fingers worked miracles in C minor.