Neither Here Nor There (33 page)

It took me most of the afternoon to discover that there were no buses to Sofia. My best hope was to take a bus to Niš and another onward to Dimitrovgrad on the Bulgarian border, and hope that I could find some kind of transport the last forty miles to Sofia. It would take three days at least, but I was so eager by now to get out of Yugoslavia and into any other country that I bought a ticket to Niš for $12, pocketed it and trudged back up the long hill to the Sputnik office.

I arrived two seconds after the stroke of four. A new girl was seated at the airline reservations computer. I told her the situation and she looked through the standby list for my name. After a moment she informed me that my name was not on the list. I looked at her with the expression of a man who has lost his job and had his car stolen and now has learned that his wife has run off with his best pal. I said, ‘What?’

She said it didn’t matter because there were still plenty of seats left on the evening flight.

I said, ‘What?’

She looked at me with manifest indifference. A ticket to Sofia would cost $112. Did I want one?

Did I want a ticket? Is the Pope Catholic? Is Betty Ford a clinic? ‘Yes,’ I said. She did some tinkering with the computer and at length issued me with a ticket. A wave of relief washed over me. I would be in Sofia for dinner – or at least for a late snack. I was getting out of Belgrade. Hooray!

I went outside and hailed a taxi. ‘Take me to the airport!’ I said to the driver, falling into the back as he shot away from the kerb. Pulling myself upright, I discovered he was young and cheerful and wore his cap at a rakish angle. He drove like a lunatic. It was great.

I was looking forward to Bulgaria. It had been easily the most interesting, if not the most comfortable, of the places Katz and I had visited.

I remembered Sofia as being a city of broad boulevards so empty of traffic that people walked down the middle of them, stepping aside only to make room for the occasional black Zill limousine carrying Party functionaries to some dark, Orwellian ministry or other. I have never been in a more timeless city. It could have been any time in the last forty or fifty years. There were simply no clues to suggest what decade it was; the shape of the few cars on the road, the clothes people wore, the looks of the shops and buildings were all curiously uninformed by fashion.

Sofia had a dark and enormous department store called TSUM, at least as big as Selfridges in London, spread over five floors and containing not a single product that appeared to have been produced more recently than 1938 – chunky Bakelite radios, big stubby black fountain pens that looked like something Lord Grade would try to smoke, steam-powered washing machines, that sort of thing. I remember standing in the television and radio department in a crowd of people watching some historical drama in which two actors wearing beards that were hooked over their ears sat talking in a study, the walls of which were clearly painted on canvas. The television had – no exaggeration – a four-inch circular black and white screen and
this
was attracting a crowd.

I spent almost a whole day in TSUM, wandering in amazement, not just because the products were so wondrously old-fashioned but because whole families visited it as if it were some sort of marvellous museum of science and technology. I hoped things hadn’t changed.

I arrived at Sofia Airport a little after nine. The foreign-exchange office was closed and, as you cannot get Bulgarian money outside of the country, I was effectively penniless. I woke a sleeping cab driver outside the front entrance and asked him if he would take me into the city for dollars. This is illegal, and I had visions of him reporting me to two guys in trench coats, but he was only too pleased to get his hands on hard currency and took me the nine miles into the city for $10. The cab, an ancient Moskvich, was propelled by a series of smoky blue explosions from the exhaust. It would move ten feet, pause and then lurch another ten feet with the aid of a fresh explosion. We were almost the only car on the streets.

He dropped me at the Sheraton on Lenin Square, quite the grandest hotel I had stayed in on this trip, but I had been told that it was the
only
place to stay in Sofia. Until a couple of years earlier it had been the Hotel Balkan, but then Sheraton took it over and the company has done a consummate job of renovating it. It was all shiny marble and plush sofas. I was impressed.

The girl at the check-in desk explained the hard currency system in operation at the hotel, which was very confusing. Some of the hotel’s restaurants, bars and shops accepted only hard currency and some accepted only Bulgarian leva and some accepted both. I didn’t really take any of it in.

I went straight out for a walk, eager to see the town. I was delighted to find that I remembered so much of it. There across the square was the big statue of Lenin. Facing it was TSUM, as vast as I remembered it and still clearly in business, and around the corner was the Place 9 Septemvri, a boulevard paved in golden bricks and dominated by the massive headquarters of the Communist Party, soon to be sacked by a mob and nearly burned down. I walked down it now and plunged off into the dark and narrow streets of the downtown.

Sofia must be one of the darkest cities in the world. Only the occasional lightning flashes of a tram at the far end of a street revealed the full outlines of the buildings. For the rest there were just weak pools of light beneath the well-spaced lampposts and a little seepage of illumination from the few bars and restaurants that were still open and doing, without exception, a desultory business. Almost every shop window was dark. None the less the streets were crowded with people, many of them evidently having just concluded a night out and now standing in the road trying to flag down the few cabs that flew past.

I made a lazy circuit of the downtown and emerged in front of TSUM. The goods in the darkened windows looked to be distinctly more up to date than on my previous visit, but at least it was still in business. This, I decided, would be my first port of call in the morning.

In the event, TSUM wasn’t open when I hit the sunny streets, so I walked instead up a long straight avenue called Vitosha where most of the other main stores seemed to be. None of them were open yet either, but already long queues were forming at most doors. I had read that things were desperate in Bulgaria – that people began queuing for milk at four-thirty in the morning, that the price of some staples had gone up 800 per cent in a year, that the country had $10.8 billion of debt and so little money that there were only funds enough in the central bank to cover seven minutes’ worth of imports – but nothing had prepared me for the sight of several hundred people queuing around the block just to buy a loaf of bread or a few ounces of scraggy meat.

When they opened, most shops posted some beefy sour-puss in the doorway who would let the customers in one at a time. The shelves were always bare. Things were sold straight out of a crate on the floor by the till, and presumably when the crate was empty the door was locked and the rest of the queue was sent away. I watched one woman come out of a baker’s with a small loaf of bread and immediately join another long queue at a butcher’s next door. They must have to do this every day with everything they buy. What a life.

It had been nothing like this in 1973. Then the shops had been full of goods, but no one appeared to have money to buy them. Now everyone was clutching fistfuls of money, but there was nothing to spend it on.

I went into one shop called 1001 CTOK?. There was no orderly queue, just an almost incredible crush of people around the door. I didn’t so much enter of my own volition as get swept in. Inside there was a mob of people around a single glass display case, waving money and jockeying for attention. All the other cases in the shop were empty, though there were salespeople still posted behind them. I slid through the crowd to see what it was the people were so eager to buy and it was just a pathetic assortment of odds and ends – some plastic cruet sets, twenty long-handled brushes with no identifiable function, some small glass ashtrays, and an assortment of tin-foil plates and pie dishes such as you get free in the West when you buy something to heat in the oven.

Clearly people weren’t shopping so much as scavenging for purchasable goods. Again and again, as I ventured up Vitosha, I would peer into the impenetrable gloom of shop windows and discover after a moment that I had attracted a small crowd looking over my shoulder to see what I had spotted. But there was nothing to spot. One electrical shop I passed had three Russian hi-fi systems, two stereo and one mono (when was the last time you saw a mono hi-fi?), but they all had knobs missing and didn’t look as if they would last five minutes.

Another shop sold nothing but two kinds of tins – yellow tins and green tins, stacked in their hundreds in neat pyramids on every shelf. It was the only well-stocked shop I saw all day. I have no idea what was in the tins – the labels gave no hint – but I can only assume that it must have been pretty dire or they would have sold out long ago. It was the most depressing morning I have spent in a long time.

I went to TSUM fearing the worst and found it. Whole departments were stripped bare, including my beloved TV section. The premier department store in the country couldn’t offer its customers a single television, radio or other electrical item. In some departments three salespeople stood by a till with nothing to sell but perhaps a small stack of tea towels, but elsewhere there would be a lone desperate salesgirl trying to deal with throngs of people because a shipment of something desirable had just come in. At one counter on the third floor a big cardboard box full of socks had just arrived – hundreds and hundreds of socks, all an identical mustard-brown colour, all in thin cotton in the same size and all in bundles of a dozen – and people were buying double armloads of them. I suppose you buy what you can and think about what you are going to do with it afterwards – give some to your father-in-law for Christmas, swap some for a hunk of meat, reward a neighbour for queuing for you.

The saddest department was the toys – one shelf full of identical, ineffably cuddly teddy bears made out of synthetic wool, two dozen identical plastic toy trucks with bowed wheels and peeling, crooked labels, and fourteen metal tricycles all painted the same shade of blue and every one of them scraped or bashed in some way.

On the top two floors were whole departments full of boxes of unidentifiable odds and ends. If you have ever taken apart some mechanical contraption – a doorbell or a washing-machine motor – and had it all spring loose on you and 150 mysterious pieces have gone bouncing in every direction, well, those pieces are what they sell upstairs at TSUM – springs and cogs and small oddments of shaped metal that look as if they must fit together in some way. Scores of people were gravely picking through the boxes.

The busiest department was on the ground floor in what I suppose you would call the notions department. It was like a crowd scene in a Godzilla movie after the news has got out that the monster is on his way to town. All they seemed to sell was buttons, wristwatch straps and ribbons, but then I saw that what everyone was queuing for was a freshly arrived consignment of alarm clocks. They were just simple, cheap-looking plastic alarm clocks, but the shoppers were clearly ready to kill to get one. The department was run by two of the most disagreeable-looking women I ever hope to see. I watched with a kind of dumb fascination. A shy-looking young man whom I took to be North Vietnamese finally reached the till and they ignored him. He held out a wad of money with an entreating look and they just dealt with the people behind him. I don’t know why. Finally one of the salesladies pushed his money away and told him to clear off. The man looked as if he could cry. I felt almost as if I could too. I don’t know why they were so nasty to him. But he put his money in his pocket and melted into the crowd.

Imagine living like that. Imagine coming home from work and your partner saying, ‘Honey, guess what? I had the most wonderful day shopping. I found a loaf of bread, six inches of ribbon, a useful-looking metal thingy and a doughnut.’

‘Really
? A doughnut?’

‘Well, actually, I was lying about the doughnut.’

The odd thing was that the people looked amazingly stylish. I don’t know how they manage it with so little to buy. In the old days the clothes on all the people looked as if they had been designed by the manager of a Russian tractor factory. People constantly came up to me and Katz offering to buy our jeans. One young guy was so dementedly desperate for a pair of Levi’s that he actually started taking his trousers off on the street and urging us to do likewise so that we could effect a trade. Katz and I tried to explain that we didn’t want his trousers – they were made out of, like,
hemp –
and asked him if he had anything else, a younger sister or some Cyrillic porno, but he appeared to have nothing worth swapping, and we left him desolate on a street corner, his heart broken and his flies gaping. Now, however, everyone was as smartly dressed as anywhere else in Europe – actually more so, since they took such obvious care and pride in their wardrobe. And the women were simply beautiful, all of them with black hair, chocolate eyes and the most wonderful white teeth. Sofia has, without any doubt, the most beautiful women in Europe.

I spent the better part of a week just walking around. Sofia is full of monuments with crushingly socialist names – the Stadium of the People’s Army, the Memorial of the Antifascist Campaigners, the National Palace of Culture – but most of these are contained within some quite lovely parks, with long avenues of chestnuts, benches, swings, even sometimes a boating lake, and often attractive views of the green, hazy mountains that stand at the city’s back.

I saw the sights. I went to the old royal palace on Place 9 Septemvri, now the home of the National Gallery of Painting and Sculpture, where I suddenly understood why I was unable to name a single Bulgarian artist, and afterwards crossed the street to have a look at the tomb of Georgi Dimitrov, the national hero – or at least he was until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Now the Bulgarians appeared not to be so certain. There was some minor graffiti on his mausoleum – unthinkable even a couple of months before, I would wager – and you could no longer go in and look at his body, preserved under glass in the fashion beloved of Communists. I remember when Katz and I went to see it in ’73, Katz leaned close to the case, sniffed in an obvious manner and said to me in a slightly too-loud voice, ‘Something smell a bit off to you?’, which nearly got us arrested. Dimitrov was treated like a god. Now, with Communism crumbling, people didn’t even want to see him any more.