Street Without a Name (8 page)

Their son Jurg was a friendly giant. Taller than his father, plumper than his mother, his face erupting with adolescence, he banged his head on the doorframe and spilled into our apartment which suddenly
felt like a real doll’s house. A race of aliens had invaded our home.

I knew no English and, to my relief, neither did Jurg, who specialized in silent friendliness. I instantly liked him. Hans and Hannah told my parents about their traumatic experience at a campsite on the outskirts of Sofia called the Black Cat. The toilets were unusable, they said, and there was rubbish and dogs everywhere. It was a dump, not a campsite. And they charged them double. My mother disappeared apologetically into the kitchen to prepare lunch, and my father laughed, embarrassed.

In the kitchen, Hans produced a bloody parcel.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said to my mother, unwrapping the meat, ‘we buy it from the shop, and they did not package well.’

My mother looked stressed already. But it wasn’t the meat – of course she was used to the bloody meat – it was the Russian tent situation.

‘I think we can safely forget about the military tent,’ she whispered to my father. He chuckled mirthlessly and surrendered. We would rent a room instead.

The next day, we departed in a slow convoy: the little orange Skoda followed by the giant white campervan. I was proud to be seen by the whole neighbourhood. We didn’t just have shiny Dutch objects at home, now we had shiny Dutch people too. For some of the journey my sister and I travelled with them in the campervan.

Everything glittered inside, everything was in different colours: their clothes, their toys, their food. They ate constantly. They ate chocolate-coated biscuits out of a large, elaborate tin that looked fit for a museum display. They ate gelatinous bear-shaped sweets out of another tin. They drank juices from cartons through little straws. They chewed gum, and then they ate again. I had never seen
chocolate-coated biscuits, jelly bears, or carton juice. Everything in Bulgaria came out of green bottles or drab plastic wrapping that fell apart the moment you opened it, and sometimes even before. My sister and I sat very still on the padded seats and chewed the jelly bears in awed silence.

Our mountain adventure was fraught with crises. The Dutch parked themselves in a mountain campsite some way above the town of Bansko, and we rented a room in Bansko in the house of a local family. In retrospect, perhaps the alpine ranges of Pirin, the highest in the Balkans, weren’t the best introduction to mountainous scenery for people who had never actually seen a mountain. Holland was completely flat, my parents explained, like a plate.

On the first day, we went up in gondola cabins and halfway up the electricity stopped. Elke became hysterical in Dutch, and her mother soon joined her in broken English. It’s true that we were hanging above a vertical cliff face, but that’s just the way mountains are, and besides, the electricity often stopped on these lifts.

Now I realize that it wasn’t simply a fear of heights, but a fear of things breaking down in Bulgaria. If meat came wrapped in brown paper, the campsites were rubbish dumps, and everybody was driving a Trabant, then what was to stop the gondola cabins from plummeting? They didn’t want to die on a godforsaken Bulgarian mountain whose name they couldn’t even pronounce.

On the second night, the Dutch decided to have a barbecue at the campsite. We have the meat, they said, you just bring some potatoes from the village. My parents went looking frantically for potatoes in Bansko. There was only one shop in town, and all it sold was cigarettes and a few jars containing mystery pickles. In despair, my parents turned to our hosts. They laughed.

‘Of course you won’t find potatoes in the shop. Or anything else. This is the province, not Sofia. But don’t worry, we’ve got potatoes to feed all of Holland.’

They gave us two kilograms of potatoes from their own garden, which my parents triumphantly delivered to the campsite. Hannah was delighted.

‘People in the West say that the East is poor,’ she chattered happily as we sat around the fire, munching. ‘That is not true. There is everything. Yes, OK, the choice is little, but why do we need all these things in Holland? Ten varieties of potato? And this potato is so delicious.’

My parents exchanged looks and said nothing. It was too complicated to explain about the potatoes.

‘We went to the furniture store in Youth 3, near your apartment,’ Hannah continued. ‘It is not empty. There are some nice bookshelves, and beds on display.’

My parents exchanged looks again. The furniture on display was just that – on display. Those shelves and beds were samples. If you actually wanted to buy something, you signed up at the shop and joined a waiting list. Then a few weeks or months later, you snuck out to the store in the dead of night, to queue up as they unloaded furniture from trucks, and fought tooth and nail for your precious bookshelves. Just because your name was on a list, it didn’t guarantee anything. But again, it was too complicated to explain.

Hannah had been for many years a housewife, a profession I’d never heard of before. But now the kids were older, and she was working again. She ran a small kindergarten in their house outside Delft.

‘I buy this campervan with money I earn from the kindergarten,’ she said.

‘I’m very proud with her.’ Hans patted her chubby thigh affectionately.

‘Yes, it’s very beautiful campervan.’ My father nodded blankly, looking preoccupied.

‘Very beautiful, yes,’ my mother repeated, and stared at the fire with a polite smile.

I knew that smile. Each time it said something different, and each time it made my heart sink. This time, it said: I have studied and worked my whole life. I didn’t take enough time off work to look after my kids because that’s the way it is. We don’t have housewives here, but I have effectively been a housewife all my life, while also having a full-time career. My husband never says that he’s proud of me. Hannah is a woman without university education and without a career. She is happy with her campervan and her husband is happy with her. This campervan is worth about twenty years of my income. We are twenty years behind them. No, forty.

‘I want to lose weight,’ Hannah chirped on. ‘But not here, I cannot lose weight here. This food is too delicious.’

By now I was madly in love with Jurg, but I sensed that something was definitely wrong that summer night around the crackling fire, under the mountain stars. An invisible army of shadows was tugging at us, at everything.

On the last day, we went off-track and got lost. After many hours of scrambling down a sea of boulders, underneath which gurgled glacial rivers, we made it back to the campsite, sunburnt, dehydrated, and delirious.

The Dutch finally left in their not so shiny campervan. We waved from the pull-up bar outside Block 328, and sighed a collective sigh of relief. And no doubt they did too.

But I also felt bereft. They were going back to where we couldn’t follow. They had packed up the world and taken it with them. They had given us a chocolate biscuit from that tin, and then put the lid on.

In my eleven-year-old bones, I now understood why after Holland my father was so thin and my mother so sad. I understood the exchange of ignorance for Western goods. And that understanding hurt like hell.

Life and death in the provinces of Socialism

Three things happened in the year of Chernobyl: my grandfather died of heart failure, my grandmother died of breast cancer, and I grew up.

In the spring of 1986, a rumour circulated that there had been a nuclear incident somewhere in the Soviet Union, in a grim-sounding place that translated meant something like ‘Black Place’. Later, much later, the State issued a statement that there was no cause for alarm. To be alarmed was to give in to Western
propaganda against the Brotherly Soviet Country.

But Toni’s father next door was a physicist at the Academy of Sciences. His job was to measure radiation levels and he was alarmed, very alarmed. He told my parents to stay away from fresh food that year. My parents’ life took on fresh new meaning: to source rare foods like powdered milk and tinned feta cheese.

Four days after Chernobyl, on 1 May, Day of Socialist Labour, a festive radioactive rain fell on Sofia. The nation came out for the May Day parade to rejoice and wave carnations and little red flags at the row of Politburo comrades who stood under black umbrellas. My parents went too – the rejoicing was compulsory. But they didn’t take us with them this time. My mother had a bad feeling about the rain.

Many people said ‘What radioactivity? I can’t see anything.’ Many people also became suddenly ill and died that year, and in the years to come. One of them was my paternal grandfather Kiril, who died suddenly a month later. The word the family used to describe him was ‘short-tempered’, shorthand for a one-man terror regime. He and my grandmother, Kapka, were the ones who lived in Pavlikeni, an Exemplary Socialist Town, where my grandfather worked as a vet.

A nameless brown river ran outside my grandparents’ ‘cooperation’, as small apartment blocks were called. They lived in a dark, two-bedroom ground-floor apartment with creaky furniture from the sixties and ambiguous wallpaper. I liked the apartment because it was big and old-fashioned, and I liked grandmother Kapka, although she smelt of Valium and was a little erratic. I could see why: forty years of co-existence with my grandfather Kiril had destroyed her personality. I pitied her so much that often pity became affection.

Grandma Kapka didn’t have time for things like cleaning. She was too busy lying in bed trying to meditate back to some semblance of
mental health. Despite the filth, the operational phrase in that household was ‘sterile cleanliness’ – a term that fitted with the ideal of Exemplary Socialist Homes. My grandparents flung ‘sterile cleanliness’ at you with such conviction that it left you stunned and, they hoped, blind to the truth.

Grandfather Kiril kept everybody within shouting range in a constant state of alert. When he ran out of insults for his wife, her family, my mother, and my mother’s family, he moved onto the neighbours and, when necessary, to passers-by. From the mosquito-netted ground-floor window where he stood like a bulldog at the kennel’s door, he greeted them with a sour smile, then as they moved out of earshot, he held forth on their suspect spouses and scrofulous children, and the illnesses which they deserved.

It was simple: everyone who wasn’t of his blood was an enemy, and women were doubly so. Women were the fertilizer from which sons grew in order to continue the bloodline. His own mother, also married to a ‘short-tempered’ man, had tried to drown herself in the nearest river no less than three times, and each time she’d been dragged back – after all, who would cook and clean for the men?

The only person Kiril seemed to like was my younger cousin. The reason was that my younger cousin was male, and carried my grandfather’s name. He was clearly destined for great things. My sister, my elder cousin and I were girls, but we were also of grandfather Kiril’s blood, which presented him with a dilemma. He tried to be nice to us. He once took us along on one of his veterinary calls. It was an educational visit – get the city kids familiar with the animal world. After years in Youth 3, I couldn’t tell a lamb from a dog. But I could tell a pig when I saw one, and that one was huge. He injected the beast with some drug, and it squealed and kicked so
violently that I ran, in the grips of my first phobia. After that, the fear of the pig and the fear of my grandfather Kiril somehow became confused. The very word ‘veterinary’ still carries, irrationally, the piggish weight of his contempt for the world of humans.

Grandmother Kapka took me and my sister on therapeutic walks. We went mulberry-picking in the park, to see the scabby animals in the zoo, and to the pine forest above town. Grandmother Kapka often seemed absent, as if she existed somewhere on the periphery of her own life. As if, like her mother-in-law, she could drift off into the nearest river any day. Sometimes, in these soul-mending moments, she picked up the pieces of her tattered self. We played card games on benches, ate the greasy pastries and meatballs she had made at home, and gossiped about the town people – who’d married, who’d died – while she knitted endless, shapeless doilies for our dowries.

We often took along my best and only Pavlikeni friend, the blonde and downy Malina. She was from the same ‘cooperation’ and I had a crush on her brother Ivo. Malina’s father, the director of a local factory, had just died of cancer. Malina and I hung out in the communal vegetable garden, and in between the tomato vines we spied the young army recruits lodging in a warehouse building next door. I was sometimes allowed to visit Malina’s apartment, which was an oasis of calm voices. We sipped Coke, listened to cool Western music, ate cake, and, once, Ivo and I danced in our socks to ‘Nights in White Satin’. He held me delicately and my heart was in my throat. He was a staggering four years older than me.

That summer of Chernobyl, Grandfather Kiril died of a heart attack, no doubt in the middle of a shouting fit. At the wake in the Pavlikeni flat, the stuffy living-room was full of half-rotten flowers and melting chocolates. He lay in an open coffin in a dark suit, his flesh
risen like dough. Grandmother Kapka, her head covered in black lace, flung herself on top of him with tearless wails. Public grieving was expected of a dutiful wife, and she had always been dutiful.

But there was something stranger than my grandmother’s wailing. It was the sorrow of the man who had been a chauffeur at the veterinary clinic. He stood at the back of the small congregation, raked by silent sobs, black mascara running down his cheeks. Nobody commented. That’s the way grandfather Kiril would have liked it – a show of sterile cleanliness.

It took me many years to understand that he had been a deeply unhappy man. That he victimized those weaker than him not only because of his tyrannical character, inherited from his father’s tyrannical character, but because he too, in his own unnamed way, had been a victim of something bigger than him. After all, there was no homosexuality under Socialism.

Another thing that didn’t exist under Socialism was terminal illness. My other grandmother Anastassia had been wearing a wig for some years now, and I sensed that there was a breast missing somewhere, but the word cancer was never uttered. And because I loved her second best after my parents, I preferred to pretend that she would get well again. But I knew, from the way my mother waved from the bus to the two figures on the seventh-floor balcony, one of them half-blind, her wig slightly askew, and from the way my mother then wept inconsolably like a grown-up child, that she wouldn’t get better.

When grandmother Anastassia had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer four years before, she never heard the oncologist’s diagnosis. Eventually, my grandparents must have grasped the truth, but it was never spoken.

Lies, big and small, nibbled at the fabric of our lives like moths. But the truth could be so cruel – remember the Dutch – that it wasn’t clear which was worse. So when in doubt denial did the trick. If the Politburo comrades were heroes of the anti-Fascist resistance, if the labour camps were for enemies of the people, if after Chernobyl there was no cause for alarm, if grandfather Kiril’s special friend was just his chauffeur, well, then perhaps cancer was just a lump that would go away.

It didn’t go away. After Chernobyl, grandmother Anastassia took a sudden turn for the worse. We didn’t visit her any more. My mother and her father became full-time nurses at home. Since terminal illness didn’t exist, neither did hospital wards for the terminally ill, nor palliative care for the dying. A nurse came by once a week to bring morphine, and my mother slipped her some cash.

We hardly saw my mother these days. From work, she went straight to my grandparents’ place. Or accompanied my grandmother to the hospital. Once, I picked up the phone and called grandfather Alexander at home. ‘I’m alone,’ I said. ‘I’m alone too,’ he said, and started to cry. I held the receiver against my face, and eventually hung up. I knew what this meant. Grandmother Anastassia would never return to us. We’d never go to the seaside with them again. And I didn’t know who I felt most sorry for – my mother who was being worn down by exhaustion and grief, my grandmother who was dying horribly, or my grandfather who couldn’t live without her.

My sister and I were evacuated to Suhindol for the summer. Suhindol, or Dry Vale, was half an hour’s drive along a potholed road from our paternal grandparents’ house in Pavlikeni. It was where my grandparents’ competition lived: great-Uncle and Auntie.

My sister and I stood outside their peeling yellow house on the edge
of the village, silently grateful for grandfather Kiril’s death – it meant that now we got to stay here, and not there. True, the outdoor latrine in the courtyard stank and buzzed with fat flies, but it was an honest peasant latrine.

The creaky wooden gate opened to a vine-shaded courtyard where cheerful lettuces and radishes greeted us from a moist dark patch. Uncle rushed out of the house with alarmed cries – he was always alarmed, his nerves were weak – to greet us. Auntie sat in her cooking chair by the stove, regally fat in a printed cotton gown, stirring heavenly broths. ‘Hungry? Auntie will feed you up.’

Uncle was grandfather Kiril’s brother, but they might as well have never met. All they had in common was a handsome nose. Auntie, twice the man Uncle was, had the strength of a bull and the cheekbones of a Tatar. She came from a line of sturdy, wealthy, educated peasants. She knew how to cook, toil in the field, run a big house, and make you feel loved. At high school, thanks to her busty, hippy measurements, Auntie had been named Exemplary Young Sports Woman. Fashions had changed since then, but she lived with the pride of those days and kept up her high-calorie diet. I wondered exactly what sports she had done – perhaps discus- or javelin-throwing.

But Auntie and Uncle were childless. All their lives, they had tried to make up for this terrible Socialist failure – statistic imperfection – by giving everything they had to my father and his twin brother, treating them and us as their own children. Auntie and Uncle had a field where the biggest, juiciest watermelons and tomatoes in Europe grew, and their house overflowed with great excesses of cooked and stored food, crates of soft drinks which Uncle called ‘beverages’ and drank instead of water, stacks of boxes of chocolates which Uncle ‘disclosed’ after every meal, and chickens that were slaughtered as soon as we arrived.
They never left their village except for short trips to Sofia. They lived the same life in the same house for half a century: she an accountant at the local council, he an accountant for the local wine cooperative, and in their spare time they toiled in their allotment.

That summer, our two cousins were there to keep us company. The matter of grandmother Anastassia’s imminent death was never explicitly named, which allowed me to pretend that I was too young to understand what Auntie meant when she said, sorrowfully shaking her leonine head, ‘the worst might happen’.

Activities for children in depressed downtown Suhindol were limited. At night, we watched
The Thornbirds
and fell in love with Richard Chamberlain. In the afternoon, we would drop into the only store for a few bottles of fizzy yellow ‘beverages’. The store didn’t sell much else, but it did sport a faded red banner which fluttered despondently in the wind while entreating us, ‘Let us Construct Socialism with a Human Face!’

This was a motto we had seen elsewhere and even a twelve-year-old could spot the implications: a) Socialism with a Human Face did not occur naturally, it had to be constructed like so many blocks of flats; and b) there was also Socialism with an inhuman face. But such things were difficult to talk about, a bit like ‘the worst’ and the private chauffeurs of vets.

Another activity was visiting our other great uncle, Uncle Kolyo, who lived in one wing of a vine-shaded house that smelt of roses, yellowed newspapers, and old people’s cardigans. Uncle Kolyo was a white-stubbled bachelor, and he specialized in two things: slapping you on the cheek affectionately with a shaky hand, and making fish soup with coriander and fish heads which he sucked on avidly, while we looked on, transfixed. Despite his feeble physique, he had been quite
the lad in his youth, and there were even whispers about some tragic love that was nipped in the bud, just as he now nipped the bad buds in his rose garden. The reason for the romantic nipping was that the girl he fancied happened to be the sister of a boy who’d helped drown Uncle Kolyo’s elder brother in the Danube. But that’s another story.

In the other wing of Uncle Kolyo’s house lived a quiet Turkish family. The blue-eyed woman Fatimé covered her head and padded softly in her sun-baked feet, as if stepping on rose petals. Her brother had died mysteriously while serving in the army – a ‘tragic accident’. He had been accidentally beaten to death by fellow recruits, an ethnic Turk among ethnic Bulgarians, at the start of the State’s campaign against the Turks.

Aside from these attractions, there was nothing to do but eat. In the vine-shaded coma of that white-hot summer of boredom, budding hormones, and waiting for the worst to happen, my first cousin and I spent the days wolfing down ovenfuls of Auntie’s pastries, and reading instructive novels like
Wuthering Heights
,
Captain Blood
, and
Lorna Doone
. Breakfast: slices of warm white bread with thick layers of butter and honey from Auntie’s own honeycomb. We swallowed watermelons the size of small planets, peaches big as heads, lettuces like forests. It was a fertile year, 1986. We competed, under Auntie’s adoring supervision, to see who could eat more pieces of walnut cake in one sitting. Who would have thought that summer was the prelude to our distinguished careers in eating disorders. Only a few years later, we would compete to see who could go longer without food.