The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (30 page)

As I walked back from my mini-tour of the spiritual centers of the city, a slim man in a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses, carrying a briefcase, asked me the time. I told him and walked on. A minute later, he eased up behind me, smiling and proffering a business card. “Excuse me—I thought you might be interested in this: we have nice girls, they will come to your hotel room.” He gave me an ingratiating smile, and, not sure where to go with the conversation, I crossed the street. I looked at the card. “Perfect: The most beautiful girls in Sofia!” it said. “Would you like a pretty girl for pleasure at a place convenient for you? The Best Service!” One side quoted 50 euros for an hour and 190 for the night; the prices on the other side, offering, “If you would like a beautiful top model at a place of your convenience,” were 80 and 290. Sofia is for hustlers.

Back at the venue, Uncle Neven had again set up a station with his herbal wine concoction and started jamming along with my set on his cajón. He missed my suggestion that maybe his contribution was misplaced tonight, and Cvetan eased him back to his booth. His guitar had an unusually thick neck. At first, I thought it was a twelve-string with every other string skipped. As it turned out, it was a homemade six-string with a twelve-string neck, because “I am carpenter, and my fingers are too thick!”

Kostya came to lurk around the merch desk. “How about that thirty euros you owe me?” I asked him.

He grinned. “I don't have it right now. I gotta go out and . . . meet up with some people. I'll have it for you later.” He disappeared for the rest of the night.

The road to Ruse runs through the Stara Planina (“Old Mountain”) or Balkan (Turkish for “mountain”) Mountains, historically the home of the peninsula's
haidouks
—outlaws, brigands, and guerrillas. Once again I went to pick up Cvetan at the radio station. As I pulled up to the curb in traffic, he hopped the fence. Instead of getting in himself, he shoved into the car a thin metalhead with a disappearing chin, a waist-length ponytail, and a leather motorcycle jacket covered in pins: AC/DC, Black Sabbath, a Confederate flag guitar, a bottle of whiskey. He was sweating cigarettes and carrying an open beer.

“I'll ride with my uncle,” Cvetan yelled through the window. “This is Cvelin. He's playing tonight as well.”

A bass player (seven-string fretless, as it turned out), Cvelin had cut his teeth on Metallica but had branched out since then. His current project was a “punk jazz” band with bass, sax, violin, and a female singer.

“That's a lot of melody instruments,” I observed.

“Yes,” he said. “We had a piano player, but he quit when I told him not to use his left hand.”

After the mountain passes, there was a new and distinctive kind of tree—dogwood?—covered with small, white blooms. On the highways, outside the mountain tunnels, crashed cars were mounted on concrete pedestals as a kind of memento mori and cautionary example. I mentioned to Cvelin that the mountains reminded me of the American West. He told me that the Bulgarian president, giving a kind of state-of-the-union televised speech, projected photos behind him. As he waxed poetic about “our beautiful mountains,” they clicked to a stock photo of a snowcapped range—in Colorado. “It was a scandal.”

We passed roadside donkeys, a goat, some fruit stands, a town that seemed to specialize in selling bits of gnarled stone, and several of those generic communist monuments to workers and World War II that have surely aged as quickly and dramatically as any monumental art in history. Once we descended into the farming plains, there were a few miles of roadside prostitutes, pacing the truck pull-offs in tight jeans, heeled boots, and puffy parkas, shivering and pecking at their cellphones.

Cvelin was not much of a talker, and I put on a
Fresh Air
podcast in which Terry Gross interviewed a former Mormon missionary. Mormons were ubiquitous in Siberia and Mongolia, and I asked him if they showed up in Bulgaria.

“Not really,” he said. “Who is everywhere is the Hare Krishnas. I played a festival last year, and like eighty percent of the people were Krishnas. They were running classes. We said, next year we're going to run a class on how to cook meat.”

When I'd asked Yana for directions to the tourist sites of central Sofia, she said, “If you want my real opinion, leave early tomorrow and do tourism in Ruse.” Ruse too claims the title “Little Vienna,” for its architecture and wide central square. As the last Danube city before the river empties into the Black Sea, it is here that the epithet most overstates its case.

The outskirts were a mess of empty industrial buildings, remnants of the communist industry that had made Ruse one of Europe's most polluted cities by the end of the 1980s. The central square was alive with all the vital activities of a provincial city on a Friday night on the verge of spring: cackling old men with Jimmy Durante noses; worn-out old ladies with troubled dye jobs; an amplified Peruvian pan piper straight from the New
York City subways; young couples snuggling on park benches; young men in threes and fours drinking beer, trying to make eye contact, and then trouble. There was a political rally of some sort in the corner of the park. On the edge of the gathering, one teenage boy with jeans tucked into his combat boots and his skinhead friend waved a purple-and-black flag advertising the nationalist Bulgarian National Movement. This was a right-wing party claiming descent from the infamous revolutionary terrorist organization IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), which in the late nineteenth century fought for independence from Turkey, then pivoted to anti-Yugoslav terrorism aimed at uniting Macedonia with Bulgaria. They became, according to West, the Fascist Party of Bulgaria, a paid-for proxy front for Italian fascist meddling in the region, and finally a kind of mafia whose “chief resource was its ruthlessness, which . . . made Bulgarian political life a shambles.”

My Ruse host Elisa was from Florence, tall, high-cheekboned, and stylish with short, curly hair. She left Italy and lived in Berlin for nearly a decade, then got a master's degree in Sofia and a job in Ruse running arts and cultural activities for the Elias Canetti Centre, named for the writer, Nobel laureate, and Ruse native. (Canetti's best-known work,
Crowds and Power
, was an investigation of mob psychology and its uses and abuses by populists and demagogues.) Ruse, which the Turks called “
Ruschuk
,” or “little Russia,” was, Elisa explained, arguably the most important Bulgarian city after its independence from Turkey in the late 1800s. Just downstream from Vienna and the other Danube capitals, it was a major trading center and the site of many Bulgarian firsts: the first bank, the first railway line, the first movie theater. The town center, of course, was built in a miniature imitation
of the ornate Viennese style. But after the fall of the Hapsburgs, the two Balkan Wars, and two World Wars, the merchants left and the once-elegant houses fell into decay, their pastel facades peeling and gray.

I walked up to the Pantheon of National Revival Heroes, a blocky 1970s monument and ossuary for which a church was bulldozed. Thirty years later, a cross was apologetically added. Teens sat and drank beer, and a dad and a handful of kids played soccer on the small plaza. I walked over to the river as the sun set, past a store called Al Bundy Shoes and something designated on the map, with admirable literal-mindedness, as “Profit-Yielding Building.” Aside from a graveyard of rusting propellers and a few cargo boats, both the Bulgarian and Romanian riverbanks were mercifully undeveloped. I got the impression of a nation in the wake of empires, still awash in the detritus and seaweed left after the tide goes out, the sediment left by the waves as they crash.

“I hope you brought warm clothes,” said Elisa. The show was in the stripped interior of the house where Canetti's uncle had run his business. Across the street stood a statue of a man holding a handgun in a dueling stance—an anti-Turk revolutionary named Angel Kanchev. Renovations had been put on hold for years while Canetti's daughter and the municipality fought for ownership of this house and Canetti's birthplace. It was a bare brick and concrete warehouse that felt like a refrigerator, some fifteen degrees colder inside than it was on the sidewalk. Usually when the crowd at a show streams onto the street between sets, it's because the atmosphere is so stifling inside. Here they went outside to try to warm up.

“Making culture here is more like social work than presenting
big exhibitions,” said Elisa. There was money coming into Ruse for renovations of the downtown and for cultural revival, German and Austrian money flowing downstream in service of a concept of the shared cultural heritage of the community of Danube cities. The Goethe Institute funded both her position and the Canetti Centre itself. She'd had a lunch meeting the day before with German developers looking to invest in Ruse. “It's a little like colonialism,” she said, “but it's the only way, I think.”

Elisa spoke at least four languages—Italian, German, English, and Bulgarian—and seemed so foreign to this part of the world, a representative of a pan-European, cosmopolitan cultural elite, that I wondered aloud what was in it for her, wet-nursing the cultural infancy of a provincial city. “Bulgaria teaches you to be more relaxed than in Italy,” she replied.

“Italy is pretty damn relaxed,” I offered.

“Well, I was living in Germany for twelve years.”

Cvetan was harried and late (“When I first met him,” Elisa said, “I thought he was on coke”), arriving with some members of the opening act a half hour after their scheduled set time. The police pulled up not long afterward, during Cvelin's duo drone-jam set. Elisa went to palaver with them, and I prepared to pack up and make a run for it.

“The police are here,” she told me when she returned. “They want to know if you need any help.”

At the end of the night, I realized I would be crossing back into Romania the next morning, and that Kostya had predictably disappeared into the Sofia night without giving me my goddamned thirty euros. I generally attempt a performative geniality with the people who pass through my life intensely, daily, and ephemerally on tour, to the point where I've acquired a not entirely deserved
reputation as a friendly guy. But I can be roused to what is certainly disproportionate anger by two things: first, imposition on my alone time; and second, those who try and hustle me for what are invariably minuscule amounts of money, be it fifty bucks off the guarantee or half off the merch. It is enough merely to recall the persons or the setting—details that never leave me—for my blood to rise. In the absence of Kostya himself, I took it out on the nearest available bystander.

“What the fuck,” I raged at Cvetan, “with your fucking hustler buddy?”

“Can I PayPal you the money?” he offered.

“The number of times in my life,” I replied, “in which a promoter has said they'll PayPal me the money later and has done so is zero.”

“Maybe you want beers instead?” He gestured lamely at the case of—naturally—Fucking Hell beer he was selling off the folding table.

“The one thing I never have to worry about on tour,” I snarled, “is free beer.”

He turned to Elisa. “Can I borrow thirty euros?” he pleaded. “I'll send it to you later.”

She nodded, and the deal was done.

“Good-bye, in case I don't see you again,” said Cvetan. “I'm never gonna promote shows again. It's not 'cause of you, just the end of a long story . . .”

It wasn't the end of my currency troubles, but it was the end of my self-righteousness. The Bulgarian leva is pegged to the euro, but it is nonconvertible outside the country, and I had a stack equivalent to several hundred U.S. dollars. I hadn't exchanged
it the day before because I had been waiting for the last night of merch sales and show pay. But I was leaving Bulgaria at seven a.m. on a Saturday morning, when neither banks nor gray marketeers keep hours.

Elisa asked how much I had and produced enough euros from her purse to cover the exchange. When I found another wad in a different pocket, though, I had no choice but to leave it all with her, secured only by an e-mail address, a brief introduction to PayPal, and the memory of my rant against faithless PayPalers.

It was a foggy morning by the pipelines over a particularly patchy stretch of the Danube. A horse and some goats grazed on rubble, and gnome-like ladies in kerchiefs passed in and out of the mist on their bikes. Three crows built a nest over a roadside meat stand. I could do a steady fifteen miles per hour amid the trucks, diesel fumes, stray dogs, and potholes. I dodged a horse cart as a man ran across the highway clutching a chainsaw. I stopped at a light across from a storefront with the intriguing sign “Totalcrap.ro” (I checked, it's defunct) and caught a glimpse of a squeegee man. There was a bridge without grace, over a river without beauty, into a city without charm.

Bucharest was not even appealing as a grotesque, neither especially dirty nor rundown. Much of the old city was bulldozed under Ceaușescu, and the modern city has a functional, rather than aesthetic, energy. I had a nine-hour drive to Timișoara, but I wanted to see the Palace of the Parliament, otherwise known as the Ceaușescu Palace. It remains the largest and most expensive administrative building in the world and one of the great wonders of contemporary folly. It stands in a country which, according to a 2010
Economist
summation of a University of Pennsylvania
study based on the ratio of life satisfaction to per capita income, was “the saddest place in the world.”