From the Journal of Ben Swift
Kranevo. The Black Sea. 1:15 a.m. May—what is today, anyway?—1999. Left L.A. 5/17 arr. Sofia 5/18, start road trip 5/19? So it’s the 21st?
After a long lazy afternoon on the beach here, dinner tonight at an outdoor café. Kroum (pronounced “Kroom,” name of some ancient Bulgarian khan) orders grape rakia, fills my shot glass. “Thanks, Kroum,” I say, “but I don’t drink.”
“How is it possible? How can a man not drink?”
“Maybe I’m not a ‘man.’ ”
“You must be kidding.” (Picked up from American kids at that school in Switzerland where he and Eva met a thousand years ago?)
Reaction shot: Eva, wary, listens.
“I mean it. Bad stuff happens when I drink. And you don’t want to see it.”
“On the contrary, I do!”
“Look, I drank in order not to be there. I wasn’t really present in the lives of my wife and kids.” (American psychobabble, must sound like Martian to him.)
“Smart guy,” he says. “Why would you want to give that up?!”
“Because my drinking became a sickness.”
“We have a saying here: all diseases are the result of irregular drinking!”
“Until regular drinking turns into a disease.”
He doesn’t insist, but goes right ahead and gets absolutely wasted. We’re eating spicy meat patties and fries and salads, and Kroum digs right in along with us, but having started with rakia, he moves on to the first of three enormous pitchers of beer. Mug follows mug follows mug until his speech slurs to gibberish. The guy is fucking hammered.
Later, Eva and I lock our arms under his and tow him back to the hotel through the Kranevo crowds while he belts out some hundred-year-old song about a hero named Popyordanov, who, Eva explains, was a guerrilla in VMRO, i.e., the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Wounded he’s lying, O woe he’s dying, his old mother’s grieving, etc. Eva says: when people get together in Bulgaria they sit around the table and eat and sing sad old songs about heroes who died fighting against the “Turkish Yoke.” (Memo: Yesterday’s visit to Shipka Pass. Site of huge battle 1877–1878, Russians and Bulgarians, who, when out of ammunition, heave gigantic boulders down the mountain onto stealthily climbing bayonet-and-scimitar-wielding Turks; would make a terrific scene in a movie.)
The Kranevo crowd here is mostly college-age—easily ten years younger than Harry would have been by now—and nobody pays the slightest attention to our sloshed Kroum, whose doleful ballad is in any case drowned out by relentless disco music throbbing from every café, restaurant and bar. This morning, over coffee, when I remark that this nonstop disco roar is almost all American, Kroum says, with a tight smile, “Of course. We are a shitty little unimportant outpost of your empire. And if we refuse to take orders you will bomb us the way you’re bombing Serbia.” Again, he’s surprised when I don’t disagree. Even though he knows I’m a communist he keeps expecting me to be a knee-jerk pro-American asshole.
Back in their room, we put him to bed. He’s so sunburned from the day on the beach he looks boiled.
“What’s with him?” I ask Eva at the door.
“Bitter disappointment.”
“Didn’t he vote for the ‘Democratic Changes’?”
“He did. But democracy here has turned out to be a big fat lie.”
“And that’s a reason to get drunk?”
“One reason out of a thousand.”
Now I’m in my room, next to theirs. Have walked and fed Kroum’s sweet old German shepherd, Romy Schneider. I keep waiting for the jet lag to lift but it’s too soon. I’m still goofy and loopy. The disco stuff could wake the dead.
If only.
4:20 a.m. Restless, wakeful (jet lag, of course) after sleeping a couple of hours. Wondering: what the hell am I doing here? My pixilated cousin Eva, after thirty years and more of absolutely no contact whatsoever with her ninth-grade Bulgarian beau at that fancy school they went to in Geneva (her father an infectious disease expert with the WHO, his father with the UN), gets back with him about three years ago after they reconnect through the school’s alumni email list. Lo and behold they’re both divorced and passion rekindles. So she starts coming here every summer, where they play house for three months and she paints and then in late August she goes home and starts teaching again. Eva and I have been pals forever and she knows me, and so we’re on the phone five or six months ago and she says, knowing I’m stuck (that’s putting it mildly), come stay with us for three months. You can visit all the old commie monuments and Kroum has a project you can help him with.
So why have I come? To get the hell out of an America I hate more and more every day, and to find out if, maybe, the “actually existing socialism” they supposedly had here between 1944 and 1989 in fact actually existed.
Still, now that I’m here, I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know what wanting is anymore. I want to want—but what? I don’t know who the hell I am and by that I don’t mean some cornball middle-aged identity crisis crap.
Harry’s father? It feels like that’s the only definite thing I am. Or was. That’s not something I can run away from or even want to run away from, unbearable as it is. But what am I running away to?
The dog’s ears twitch as I write and she opens her eyes and looks at me. I can almost hear her saying, Go back to sleep, you dope. It isn’t morning yet. If I can sleep through the disco cacophony, so can you.
Dimitrovgrad, May 23?, 1999, 1:20 a.m.
From Kroum’s car radio: yesterday NATO bombs accidentally killed dozens of Albanians in Kosare. Fucking idiots, even though I can’t stand the KLA thugs. When I say this or “Humanitarian intervention my ass,” Kroum looks at me in utter amazement. He just can’t get it into his head that I’m a Yank and against this war.
Up at 6 a.m. yesterday. Over coffee I tease Kroum: He looks like the Platonic form of Hangover. Bloodshot lizard eyes, hair one big cowlick, face puffy. But he’s an old hangover pro and orders shkembe chorba—a milky soup with chunks of chewy tripe, sprinkled with vinegar and paprika. Not bad at all and by God it seemed to revive him.
Driving south along the coast, the sea a deep blue (it’s called the Black Sea because of fierce winter storms), we pass Golden Sands, where Kroum spent a priapic teenage summer working as a waiter and “chasing Swedish blondes,” Eva remarks sotto voce. In one of our long phone conversations after she got back with him she told me he’s always been successful with women but also that he really does “fall in love”—for me always a foreign language and complete disaster. (Thoughts of Jeanie. Boy, I really fucked that one up. So what if I already had two kids? Would it have been so hard to give her what she wanted and have a couple more? Selfish bastard.)
Then through Varna: faded pastel apartment buildings, wrought-iron balconies, the traces of tsarist-era refinement. During Communism Varna was called Stalin, not Stalingrad. Name changed back to Varna 1956, soon after the Khrushchev speech (boy, they didn’t waste any time, did they). Funny thing here about changing names: when Bulgaria was an ally of the Nazis, one boulevard in Sofia was changed to Adolf Hitler, then during communism to Klement Gottwald, and now it’s named for some Bulgarian philanthropist. “No one,” Kroum says, “is fooled by these changes except the people who order them. They think they can just erase the history.” (Memo: Bulgarian uses definite articles where we don’t.)
• • •
Lunch about 2 in Nessebar, an ancient port town. Old churches, walls of brick and mortar mixed with shards of tile and colored glass. Too many tourists. Still, maybe Herodotus passed through? My aborted classics major keeps pointing an accusing finger at me (one of many).
After lunch we stop to refuel at a super-modern Shell (!) station. A brief explosive fight between Kroum and Eva about his having to explain for the umpteenth time how he fills the car with both “benzene,” i.e., gasoline, and “gaz,” that is, vapor, and has a mechanism for switching between the two he wants her to know how to use. He snarls, she scolds, I tune out, stroke Romy between the ears, hating couples’ fights, wishing I’d just taken off for Cuba or Vietnam instead of coming here. When he returns from paying inside he’s holding an ice cream cone and feeds it to Eva bite by bite, kisses her.
Sudden desolation. Scratch the dog between the ears. Tear up. No talent for love. No fun being a third wheel. Not sure how long I’ll stay here except that I’m OUT of the lousy USA. They don’t know and nobody else knows either but I’m gone. For good. Never going back.
On the road again Romy and I fall asleep. Her head in my lap. When I wake up it’s almost five, inland, sea long gone. On both sides of the road acres and acres of sunflowers. They look at you as if they’re psychiatrists. Or FBI agents.
A sudden catch in my throat, a dry tickle, and I’m just about to make a major public announcement that I’ve caught an airplane cold when Eva coughs and Kroum coughs and Romy coughs. Kroum pulls over. We get out of the car. Eva gives water to the dog. We had come to the Black Sea through the Balkans. Now we’re in the Thracian Plain far to the south, and both to our left, in the distance, and now, to our right, up in the Sredna Gora, or “Middle Mountains,” the sky overhead an evil gray-orange, the sun a sickly blur, and clusters of billowing flame.
“Pozhari,” Kroum says.
“Fires?” asks Eva.
He shakes his head: a Bulgarian yes. (For no you jerk your head upward. Go figure it.)
“And do you know what causes these fires?” Kroum shouts, startling both Eva and me, his face contorted with fury. “These are forest fires that someone deliberately makes to destroy the trees. This is how it works now in this ‘democracy’ that is so fuckin.”
“So that’s why there are no storks this year,” Eva says. She coughs and turns to me. “Usually you see them all over Bulgaria this time of year. They build nests on village roofs. People say they bring good luck. But this spring I haven’t seen even one.”
Inside the car Kroum starts the engine. “You see how it is? They burn the branches and the leaves, and the skin”—“Bark,” Eva interjects—“but not the trunks. These they cut down and sell.”
“Wait,” I say. “So what’s the story?”
“When any mutra—that’s a mafia guy, Ben, a criminal—who calls himself a ‘businessman’ can hire some starving Gypsy to set a forest on fire, that is the story. Some gangster wants a burned forest because it will be cheaper. Or someone wants to destroy the forests to get the land to build new houses with, what do you call it—‘washed’ money.”
“Laundered,” Eva says.
“This is the deliberate, planned destruction of the Bulgarian economy, done on orders to prove to the Western masters we will be reliable slaves if they let us join the EU. And all we have to do is commit economic suicide, and let Western Europe fuck us in the ass.”
“Whose orders?” I ask.
“You can very well guess yourself.”
“The U.S., you mean?” His innuendos are exasperating.
“Of course the U.S. The IMF and the World Bank also follow the orders of the U.S. ruling elite.”
“The ‘ruling elite’ again!” Eva says. “You and your tired old commie-speak. Anyway, why would people here agree to their own economic suicide?”
“Because, my naive American darling,” he answers, as his Lada Samara grinds its way through the smoky haze, “the shits in control here think only of themselves and their personal profits. They sell off the government enterprises for ridiculous amounts and the IMF looks the other way and meanwhile these mutri guys give the enterprises to their twenty-two-year-old whores who are listed as the CEOs of fake companies while the criminal oligarchs put not millions but billions in their pockets and the U.S. ambassador congratulates them and says, ‘Oh, very good, my dear neoliberal children, you are doing such a fine job privatizing everything!’ and, ‘Ooh, aah, how you are creating such a wonderful free-market economy! Now to prove yourself even more you must throw the people out of work and punish them for communism and teach them the magnificent ways of glorious capitalism!’ which as you very well know is nothing but economic rape and thievery.”
“And how,” I say. Maybe this time he sees I mean it.
Our lovely apolitical Eva looks out at the fields on both sides of the road, dabbing her eyes and nose with Kleenex. “Um, guys,” she says, “I read somewhere about a family that was incinerated in their car when they drove over a tiny cinder from a forest fire.”
“That’s not going to happen, darling.” He reaches his hand over and squeezes the back of her neck.
I can still see flames. She’s right to worry.
“Poor storks,” she says. “Where do they go?”
“They die,” Kroum says. “That’s all. They die.”
Finally, maybe fifteen, twenty miles later, the air begins to clear. The light is fading. This is such an old, old country. Who knows, maybe it was along this road that Thracian tribes or Roman legions built campfires and rested for the night. Somehow a comforting thought. A country that has outlasted everything perhaps?
I bought a tourist book on Bulgaria before I left L.A. and when I got to the part about Dimitrovgrad (named for my Reichstag-trial hero Georgi Dimitrov, yes!), it said that the city hasn’t changed since the communist time and is so dreary and depressing you should just skip it.
Ah, my kind of town . . .
We get there around nine. Kroum disappears into a café and a few minutes later comes out with this tall guy, Niko, who speaks no English. He gets into the car with us and in seconds we’re at one of these big concrete apartment “blocks” exactly like the ones Kroum showed me on the way from the Sofia airport to his house in the suburb of Boyana. Niko takes us up to a two-bedroom apartment he owns (?), and we dump our stuff. Then we all go back to the café where we’d picked him up and eat grilled sausages with lyutenitsa, a savory sauce made of red peppers and tomatoes.
Too tired for more, conking out.
Boyana. Tues., May 25, 1999—I think. Just past midnight. The “Old Little House.”
Yesterday NATO bombed Serb power grids. Blackouts in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Nis. Millions without water or electricity. Kroum says don’t believe what they say about thousands of Albanians being expelled and disappearing. “It’s all lies and propaganda to justify the bombing.”
To pick up where I left off: In Dimitrovgrad we join Niko’s entire clan (mother, sister, uncles, et al.) for breakfast at his apartment, in another high-rise block. Kroum takes me aside. “I am very sorry, Ben, but we are trapped. We will not be able to leave until very late today.” He looks so grim I nearly burst out laughing.
“Rules of Bulgarian hospitality,” Eva whispers to me.
But, for me, serendipity: Kroum wastes no time telling Niko (an old friend from university), who relays it to his uncles, that I’m “a real American communist.” They have never met an American before, much less an American communist. They shake their heads like crazy, all the while smiling. Ben Swift the white Bengal tiger.
After breakfast, we drive with Niko to a hilly area within the city where the two uncles (on Niko’s dead father’s side) have gone ahead and are waiting for us. They are now in their late seventies or early eighties and “pensioneers,” Kroum says, but years ago they built their side-by-side houses with their own hands. Traditional Bulgarian design: red tile roofs, white walls, brown wood trim, the second floor jutting out over the first.
Behind the houses, and parallel with them, twin gardens, where the uncles and their wives grow what must be every fruit and vegetable known to man. Beyond the gardens a sublime industrial vista like a Sheeler painting: cylinder after cylinder, miles of interconnected tubes and pipes. But only a few spout vapor and smoke.
The brothers’ adult children and grandchildren live in cities (Sofia and one called Haskovo, I believe). As we talk the wives appear with orange juice, a bowl of sugar, and cookies. We all spoon the sugar into the OJ (my fillings ache!). Both women buxom, blocky, with muscular arms and strong wide backs like rafts you could float down the Mississippi on. The old guys are lean, tan, spry, wear immaculate jeans and running shoes. One is taller than the other; both still have a lot of hair, thick and white. The tall one chain-smokes.
With Kroum interpreting I ask questions. “Under democracy, how are you doing?”
“Not well. Bread keeps going up. Electricity too. We can’t afford medicines. We never go to doctors now.”
It’s everything Kroum’s been saying.
We sit on the back porch of the taller brother’s house. Eva sketches the two gardens.
Under communism, they say in answer to more questions, they had good wages. Free education and medical care. The promise of a comfortable old age. No fear. Dignity and purpose: they were building socialism.
They both retired in the late eighties, just before the Changes. Until then the shorter one had worked in a cement factory. The tall one and both wives had worked at a chemical fertilizer plant (a Dimitrovgrad specialty). Today both factories are closed.
And what about now? The brothers both say the same thing: “We were lied to. Democracy has made our lives very uncertain. It is counterrevolution and a catastrophe.”
As the two old guys take turns talking, unsmiling Niko says nothing, looks bored, glances at his watch.
The shorter one asks Kroum to ask me, “So, how does a communist live in the United States?”
My answer: “Now that the Cold War is over they think of you as a kind of harmless fossil. They used to think you were the devil out to destroy ‘the greatest country on earth.’ Now they say, like idiots, ‘We won! We won!’ ”
With this the brothers burst out laughing and slap me on the back.
The taller brother asks me about my family. I keep it short: I’m divorced, have a daughter in her late twenties, a dancer. “I had a son, but he died.” Sudden silence, solemn faces. I tell them how beautiful their gardens are, sip my sugared OJ.
“Oh, Ben, you’re such a red romantic,” Eva says to me on the way back to the car. “These two guys walk right out of a Socialist Realism poster and you love them for it, don’t you?”
“Why not? Communism worked for them.”
“You really believe that?”
I have the weird feeling that it’s someone else, a past me, who could get into a big argument with her, but all I do is nod: an American yes. I no longer have the energy for arguing. I’m still a communist (aren’t I?) but no longer feel married to communism. Or anything else for that matter, though these old guys would be great subjects for a documentary film. Will I ever make another? It seems like somebody else made my own (including the one about Harry).
Huge lunch, back at Niko’s. An incredible spread, all of it whipped up by his mother after this morning’s huge breakfast. Of course when I refuse the rakia the old men look at me in disbelief. “Help me out here, Kroum,” I beg him, and though I can see that in front of these old guys he’s itching to tease me about not drinking, he tells them simply that we’re going to share the driving back to Sofia and so we both have to abstain. DUI laws here are very strict, apparently.
Afterward, in the high dry heat, all I want to do is sleep, but Kroum, who seems, like Niko, anxious and impatient, says there’s work to be done. So after parking Eva and Romy with Niko’s sister, a woman in her early forties who can speak some English and whose very black hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail, Kroum, Niko and I drive a couple of streets away to a little almost bare white office Niko rents while he tries to make a go of it in the life insurance biz. According to Kroum he isn’t doing very well. Most people in this city are out of work. They can’t afford to live, much less die.
A few minutes later the two nice old uncles show up and stand around kibitzing as we schlep three pairs of boxed PCs from the office to Kroum’s old Lada Samara. While he fits two pairs of computers in the trunk and one in the back seat, Kroum explains that he’d originally brought the computers to D. because he and Niko were going to be partners in a computer club right where Niko now has his office. After months of silence from him, Kroum learned that Niko had never gotten around to setting up the club. So we’ve come to retrieve the computers because Kroum is going to open his own computer club, and very soon, in a couple of days. Hearing this jolts me out of the muzziness of jet lag. What had I been thinking? That he and Eva had nothing better to do than drive me around the country and take me to the beach? This has been a business trip.
Niko edgy, thin, round-shouldered, very short salt-and-pepper hair. Gives off a hyperactive desperation. Some kind of hustler? As we load the car he keeps going into his office to make phone calls to “klienti.” The big-shot “entrepreneur.”
A little past five we’re done and Kroum is eager to hit the road, but, eyes glazing over, he tells me we’re expected to stay for an early supper—one last gargantuan feast. We go back to Niko’s place, which is on the ground floor of the high-rise block and has a nice porch with a grape trellis, and Kroum and I take brief sitting-up naps on the sofa. I wake up to what I now can identify as the characteristic smell of this country: roasting peppers, and it’s delicious.
Just when Niko’s mother calls us to the table, who should appear from out of nowhere but Eva, all decked out in what she tells me is a traditional Bulgarian women’s outfit: white linen shirt with long embroidered sleeves, under a heavy wool dress with embroidery and trim in a lot of bright colors. Also a red-checked linen apron and a wide sash.
Kroum stares at her with an expression I’d have to call astonished, admiring and amused; the outfit looks good on her but he so thoroughly sees her as American that he’s obviously never imagined her in a peasant getup like this. Niko’s sister stands beside Eva, with an odd fixed smile. “I give this national dress to my new friend Eva,” she says to me and Kroum, in English, “to remember us and our city Dimitrovgrad. This belong before to one good friend. She die few years ago—cancer from the fertilizers factory—and before she die she give me this dress, which belong to her mother in the near-to-here village of Rakovski.”
“Thank you, Biliana, really, it’s a wonderful gift,” Eva says. It’s very hot and in the heavy wool dress she’s flushed and sweating.
“And I am so sorry, Eva, if I offend you by what I say about the Jewishes. I do not know you is a Jewish,” she says, taking Eva’s hand, smile gone, eyes brimming.
Whoa, what’s this?
Eva looks at me as if to say, Uh-huh, you heard that right. Kroum, lighting one of his infernal cigarettes, looks up at the two women.
“It’s okay, Biliana,” Eva says. I sense she’s being extremely careful. “A lot of people have this idea about us . . .” she begins. (Can’t help it but here’s a horrible pun: Jewishes my command. Ouch.)
“Yes!” says the sister, eyes now bright and eager. “That the Jewishes are behind the financial manipulatsia of the world.”
“Well, as I said to you, Biliana”—Eva puts her arm around the sister—“don’t believe everything you hear!” A forced smile and a kiss planted on Biliana’s cheek. Kroum has turned to stone.
“Now, my brother Niko—” Biliana jerks her head toward her brother, who has just come in and has the pissed-off, running-on-empty look of someone who has failed to complete even one single economic transaction so far that day—“has many books against the Jewishes. He is—what you call it?—a real anti-Semite. Yes, Niko?” I can clearly hear the word anti-seMEET. She says something to him in Bulgarian.
“Da,” he says, curtly, it seems to me, and, unsmiling, says something else to his sister in Bulgarian.
Niko’s mother again calls everyone to the table, where the uncles and their wives are already sitting.
“You see,” the sister says, her weird smile now reckless, “he say he cannot stand the Jewishes.”
“It’s JEWS,” Eva says. “Not Jewishes.”
“Because he say they are swindlers—moshenitsi. But I tell him you is a Jewish and your cousin here is a Jewish—”
“No,” Eva says. “My cousin is not a Jew. I am, he’s not.”
The sister stares for a moment at me. She has no idea what to make of this.
“—and that you is very nice. You see”—her eyes fill again—“he is not tolerant but I am tolerant. My brother act like a cretin,” which she pronounces in a sort of French way—cre-tanh. “When you say you is a Jewish and I say the Jewishes are the ones who do the financial manipulatsia, I see you face become sad, and I think you is going to make apology for the Jewishes, and so I see is not possible that you is one of the ones who do this manipulatsia.”
“You think, Biliana, that I am going to apologize to you on behalf of the Jews?” Eva doesn’t sound angry. Just flabbergasted.
My guess is that Kroum, seated beside me, is silently begging her not to lose her cool. She doesn’t. On the contrary, she looks as if she’s trying not to laugh.
At this point the mother comes in and speaks sharply to Biliana. Eva disappears and comes back in a minute in her jeans and T-shirt, the national outfit put away in a plastic shopping bag. Kroum and I and she and Biliana join everyone at the table. Niko seems to have disappeared.
No doubt he has important deals to make at his office.
What Eva tells me later is that Biliana reports on the democratically wrecked Dimitrovgrad economy for a newspaper in Sofia. From Niko she has “learned” that America, which is “owned by the Jewishes,” is responsible for the destruction of Bulgaria and that “the Jewishes are trying to establish world domination.” While Kroum and Niko and I were loading up the car, Biliana was asking Eva if she had ever read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, showed her a copy of the book in Bulgarian, and recommended it highly. At that point, Eva told me, she lost it, and said “Surely you don’t believe that absolute shit!” whereupon Biliana burst into tears and started apologizing and made her try on the peasant dress.
The really odd thing is that Eva had told me over the phone a year or so after she started coming here how Bulgaria saved its Jews—well, most of them—in World War II, and that Kroum had told her there’s no anti-Semitism here. Now I thought of that old saying “An anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than necessary.” Niko, then, but maybe not hapless Biliana?
The hot, heavy meal, late in the hot afternoon, is like a drug. I’m almost stuporous and feel like passing out right at the table. Then comes baklava oozing with honey, and lokum (Turkish delight), very sweet, with powdered sugar, reminding me maybe even more than the visit to Shipka Pass that Bulgaria was under the Ottomans for five hundred years.
Though the drive back to Sofia is going to take at least four or five hours, we just can’t up and leave. Finally, to appease the gods of hospitality, Kroum takes a shot of rakia, to the great joy of the uncles. As we’re downing multiple tiny cups of sweet Turkish coffee—I swear to God I don’t know what came over her—perhaps it’s because she’s by nature a peacemaker—Eva, who has been to these kinds of feasts here before, says to Kroum, “Why don’t we have some singing!” Kroum relays her request in Bulgarian to everyone at the table, but Niko’s old mother, who had been nearly invisible cooking all day, and had said nothing during the meal except to encourage everyone to eat more, throws Eva a stern look and says (I learned later), loud and clear, “We do not sing when they are bombing our Slavic brothers.” (“Which,” Kroum also tells me later, “made me want to laugh because between the Serbs and the Bulgarians there is a lot of bad blood.”)
Eva’s Bulgarian is good enough by now to understand immediately what the old lady has just said, and again she turns as red as one of those hot little Bulgarian chili peppers. She puts her hand to her heart and says, in English, as Kroum translates, “Forgive me. I meant no disrespect. You are of course right. There should be no singing. Both my cousin and I feel nothing but shame at what our country is doing to Serbia. We are completely against this criminal NATO war.”
Everyone has gone silent. Biliana, who, having made an ass of herself, now understands that Eva has just done so too, shakes her head from side to side and smiles. Then the old mother shakes her head, Kroum shakes his head and I shake my head and the old uncles and their wives shake their heads in a general Bulgarian yes-fest and so Eva redeems herself as an American and even possibly as a “Jewish.” As for me, I just help myself to another couple of pieces of lokum. Eva catches my eye and makes a gesture that, I realize, means that I should wipe the powdered sugar off my face.
It took us about four hours to reach Sofia.
In the late-spring twilight here you don’t see how bad the roads are, how treacherous the potholes, how forlorn the villages with their left-behind old people, empty storks’ nests and ravenous, diseased, homeless dogs.
“Look,” says Eva, “how the shadows overtake the fields and mountains and turn everything into a deepening violet blue.” I think of Harry and how much he liked to listen to her talk about color and light. Remember how, at Dad’s place in Springs, when he was about fifteen, sixteen, before the sickness hit, he and Eva liked to do pastels together late afternoons at the beach? I think Nora still has those drawings. So I’ll never see them again, I guess.
Just as we reach Sofia, huge clouds gather and by the time we get to Boyana a violent thunderstorm unleashes a savage downpour, with lightning and hail. This creates a serious dilemma for Kroum: with so much thievery here, to leave the computers in the car is a big risk, but taking them out and up to safety in the house, which involves climbing a steep incline and a flight of muddy and thus slippery concrete steps, in heavy rain, is perilous. He decides to leave the computers in the car, for now, but says he won’t sleep well because he’ll be worrying all night that they’ll be stolen by Gypsies.
Christ, in one day, a full-blown shot of anti-Semitism, with an anti-Roma chaser.
Time to turn in. Tomorrow we will network the computers and open the club. This is what I need. Something to wake up for.
I can hear the rain clattering on the tin roof of the “Old Little House,” the cottage they’ve given me for as long as I’m here. I asked Kroum if Romy could spend the night in my room and here she is, curled up on the end of my bed.
Later Tues., May 25, 1999. Postscript.
This morning (dry, sunny), after K. and I set up the computers in the space he’s rented for his club, guess what we found: porn sites, dozens of them, on each desktop, not to mention missing and corrupted files galore on the operating systems. Niko hadn’t said one word about any of this. The great “businessman” must have been inviting “klienti” to his office and charging them to look at the porn. Sure beats the life insurance game.
Kroum is beyond furious. “That fucking moshenik! He was my friend! Oh, this rotten democracy! It has brought us nothing but betrayal and degradation!”
So we have our work cut out for us. Some neighborhood boys—very polite—came around this afternoon on their bikes to ask when the club will open. Kroum gave them candy bars and Cokes and orange Fanta from the fridge he’s installed near the front desk and promised them that the computers will be loaded with games and ready for play the day after tomorrow. He told them to bring their friends, their relatives, everyone they know.
Meanwhile, the three of us will be up all night working. I’m about to get Eva, who’s making sandwiches, and drive the Lada over to the club. Kroum is already there.
He’s tried capitalism before. After the Changes he had a shop in Sofia where he sold detergents and “household chemicals,” but there was so much competition from other shops selling exactly the same thing that it failed. He then went into the export electronics business with a couple of friends but one turned out to be thoroughly corrupt and the partnership collapsed. Worst of all, what hard currency he had he lost when the bank he’d put it in supposedly went bust, though what really happened was a scam in which the owners put all the money in untouchable offshore accounts. Nobody was prosecuted, there was no deposit insurance, so Kroum and thousands like him couldn’t get any of it back. When he and Eva reconnected on the alumni Listserv for the Swiss school where they’d met a thousand years ago, he and a pal had a business making car alarms. That too brought in hardly anything. Now he’s about to open the first and, we all hope, the only computer club in Boyana. There’s buzz in the neighborhood, and so he’s almost hopeful.
As for me, well, it’s good for me to have some kind of purpose. Something to wake up for. But the three months till my visa expires is a long time to hang out with a pair of lovey-doveys and their occasional fights. And if I do manage to see the past here, see how it worked? Then what? It’s not coming back, for now—and now may last another couple hundred years. There’s always Vietnam, I suppose, if I decide to just slip away in the night, pilgrim that I am, and poor wayfaring commie stranger.