Neither Here Nor There (34 page)

I went too to the National History Museum and the Alexander Nevsky Memorial Church and the National Archaeological Museum and one or two other diversions, but mostly I just went for long walks and waited for evening to come.

Evening was kind to Sofia. When the shops were shut the queues vanished and people took to strolling on the streets, looking much happier. Sometimes there were small political gatherings outside Dimitrov’s tomb and you could see that people were enjoying the unaccustomed luxury of being able to talk freely. One evening outside the old royal palace somebody set up along a wall an arrangement of photographs of the exiled royals, King Simeon and his family. Crowds pressed to see the pictures. I thought it odd at first, but you can imagine what it would be like in Britain if the royal family had been banished forty years ago (now there’s a thought for you) and people had been denied any official information about them. So suddenly now the Bulgarians could see what had become of their equivalent of Princess Margaret and the Duke of Edinburgh and all the others. I had a look myself, rather hoping to discover that King Simeon was now managing a Dairy Queen in Sweetwater, Texas, but in fact he appeared to be living a life of elegance and comfort in Paris, so I declined the invitation to sign a petition calling for his reinstatement.

Every evening I went looking for the Club Babalu, a nightclub where Katz and I hung out every night of our stay. That wasn’t its real name; we just called it that because it looked so much like Desi Arnaz’s Club Babalu on
I Love Lucy.
It was like something straight out of the early 1950s, and it was
the
hot spot in Sofia. People went there for their anniversaries.

Katz and I sat nightly in a balcony overlooking the dance floor drinking Polish beer and watching a rock ’n’ roll band (I use the phrase in its Bulgarian sense) whose enthusiasm almost made up for its near total lack of talent. The band played songs that had not been heard in the rest of the world for twenty years – ‘Fernando’s Hideaway’, ‘Love Letters in the Sand’, ‘Green Door’ – and people our age were dancing to them as if they were the latest thing, which I suppose in Bulgaria they may have been. The best part was that Katz and I were treated like celebrities – American tourists were that rare in Sofia then. (They still are, come to that.) People joined us at our table, bought us drinks. Girls asked us to dance with them. We got so drunk every night that we missed a dozen opportunities for sexual gratification, but it was wonderful none the less.

I so much wanted to find the Babalu again that I looked all over the city and even strolled out to the train station, a long and unrewarding walk, thinking that if I retraced the route Katz and I had taken into the city, I might kindle my memory, but no such luck. And then on a Friday evening, as I was strolling past the restaurant of the Grand Hotel for about the twentieth time that week, I was brought up so short by the sound of tinny guitars and scratchy amplifiers that I actually smacked my nose against the glass in turning to look. It was the Club Babalu! I had walked past it again and again, but without the awful music I hadn’t even noticed it. Now suddenly I recognized every inch of it. There was the balcony. There was our table. Even the waitresses looked vaguely familiar, if a tad older. Happy memories came flooding back.

I went straight in to order a Polish beer, but a guy on the door in an oversized black suit wouldn’t let me enter. He wasn’t being nasty, but he just wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t understand why. You get used to not understanding why in Bulgaria after a while, so I continued with my walk. About twenty minutes later, after my nightly circuit of the dark hulk of the Nevsky church, I ambled back past the Grand and realized why I had been denied entrance. They were closing. It was nine-thirty on a Friday night and this was the liveliest place in town. Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.

I was lucky that I could retreat whenever I wanted to the luxurious sanctum of the Sheraton, where I could get cold beers and decent food and watch CNN on the TV in my room. I cravenly took all my meals there. I tried hard to find a local restaurant that looked half-way decent and could not. Sofia has the most unlively bars and restaurants – plain, poorly lit, with maybe just a factory calendar on the wall and every surface covered in Formica. I did stop once at a place out near Juzen Park, but the menu was in Cyrillic and I couldn’t understand a thing. I looked around to see what other people were eating, thinking I might just point to something on someone else’s table, but they were eating foods that didn’t even look like food – all gruel and watery vegetables – and I fled back to the hotel, where the menu was in English and the food was appealing.

But I paid for my comfort with a twice-daily dose of guilt. Each time I dined in the Sheraton, I was glumly aware that I was eating better than nine million Bulgarians. I found this economic apartheid repugnant, if irresistible. How can you have a country in which your own citizens are forbidden to go into certain places? If a Bulgarian was by some miracle of thrift and enterprise sufficiently well-heeled, he could go into two of the hotel’s restaurants, the Wiener Café and Melnik Grill, but the entrances were on a side street. You couldn’t get to them through the hotel. You had to go out of the front door and walk around the corner. Common people couldn’t come into the hotel proper, as I could. Hundreds of them must walk by it every working day and wonder what it’s like inside. Well, it’s wonderful – to a Bulgarian it would seem to offer a life of richness and comfort almost beyond conception: a posh bar where you could get cocktails with ice cubes, restaurants serving foods that haven’t been seen elsewhere in the country for years, a shop selling chocolates, brandy and cigarettes and other luxuries so unattainable that the average Bulgarian would be foolish even to dream of them.

It amazed me that I didn’t get beaten up every time I emerged from the hotel –
I’d
want to beat me up and I know what a sweet guy I am – but no one showed me anything but kindness and friendship. People would come up to me constantly and ask if I wanted to change money, but I didn’t, I couldn’t. It was illegal and besides I didn’t want any more Bulgarian money than I had: there was nothing to buy with it. Why should I stand in a queue for two hours to buy a pack of cigarettes with leva when I could get better cigarettes for less money in ten seconds in my own hotel? ‘I’m really sorry,’ I kept saying, and they seemed to understand.

I began to get obsessed with trying to spend some money, but there was nothing to spend it on, nothing. One of the parks, I discovered one Sunday morning, was full of artists selling their own work and I thought, Great! I’ll buy a picture. But they were all terrible. Most of them were technically accomplished, but the subjects were just so awful – vivid sunsets with orange and pink clouds, and surreal, Salvador Dali-like paintings of melted objects. It was as if they were so far out of touch with the world that they didn’t know what to paint.

The further you roam in Sofia the better it gets. I took to going for day-long walks out into the hilly districts on the south-east side of the city, an area of forests, parks, neighbourhoods of rather grand apartment buildings, winding tranquil streets, some nice homes. As I was walking back into the city, over a footbridge across the Slivnica River and down some anonymous residential street, it struck me that this really was quite a beautiful city. More than that, it was the most European of all the cities I had been to. There were no modern shopping centres, no big gas stations, no McDonald’s or Pizza Huts, no revolving signs for Coca-Cola. No city I had ever been to had more thoroughly resisted the blandishments of American culture. It was completely, comprehensively European. This was, I realized with a sense of profound unease, the Europe I had dreamed of as a child.

It is hard to know what will become of Bulgaria. A couple of weeks after my visit, the people of the country, in a moment of madness, freely voted for a Communist regime, the only country in eastern Europe to voluntarily retain the old form of government.

This was 1990, the year that Communism died in Europe, and it seemed to me strange that in all the words that were written about the fall of the Iron Curtain nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know Communism never worked and I would have hated living under it myself, but it seems to me none the less that there is a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appears to work is one based on self-interest and greed.

Communism in Bulgaria won’t last. It can’t last. No people will retain a government that can’t feed them or let them provide toys for their children. I’m certain that if I come back to Sofia in five years it will be full of Pizza Huts and Laura Ashleys and the streets will be clogged with BMWs, and all the people will be much happier. I can’t blame them a bit, but I’m glad I saw it before it changed.

Katz and I went from Sofia to Istanbul on the Orient Express. I had thought that it would be full of romance – I rather imagined some turbanned servant coming round with cups of sweet coffee and complimentary hot towels – but in fact it was awful in every way: hot, foetid, airless, threadbare, crowded, old, slow. By 1973, the Orient Express was just a name on a rusty piece of metal on the side of any old train between Belgrade and Istanbul. A couple of years later it was discontinued altogether.

We had a compartment to ourselves as we left Sofia, but about two stops later the door slid brusquely open and an extended family of noisy fat people, looking like a walking testimonial to the inadvisability of chronic inbreeding, barged in laden with cardboard suitcases and string bags of evil-smelling food. They plonked themselves down, forcing me and Katz into opposite corners, and immediately began delving in the food bags, passing round handkerchiefs full of little dead fish, hunks of dry bread, runny boiled eggs and dripping slabs of pungent curdled cheese whose smell put me in mind of the time my family returned from summer vacation to discover that my mother had inadvertently locked the cat in the broom cupboard for the three hottest weeks of the year. They ate with smacking lips, wiping their stubby fingers on their shirts, before sinking one by one into deep and spluttering comas. By some quirk of Balkan digestion, they expanded as they slept, squeezing us further and further into our respective corners until we were pressed against the wall like lumps of Blu-Tack. We had twenty-two hours of this to get through.

By this point on our trip Katz and I had spent nearly four months together and were thoroughly sick of each other. We had long days in which we either bickered endlessly or didn’t speak. On this day, as I recall, we hadn’t been speaking, but late in the night, as the train trundled sluggishly across the scrubby void that is western Turkey, Katz disturbed me from a light but delirious slumber by tapping me on the shoulder and saying accusingly, ‘Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’

I sat up a fraction. ‘What?’

‘Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’

‘I don’t know, the lab report’s not back yet,’ I replied drily.

‘I’m serious, is that dog shit?’

‘How should I know?’

Katz leaned far enough forward to give it a good look and a cautious sniff. ‘It
is
dog shit,’ he announced with an odd tone of satisfaction.

‘Well, keep quiet about it or everybody’ll want some.’

‘Go and clean it off, will ya? It’s making me nauseous.’

And here the bickering started, in intense little whispers.

‘You go and clean it off.’

‘It’s your shoes.’

‘Well, I kind of like it. Besides, it kills the smell of this guy next to me.’

‘Well, it’s making me nauseous.’

‘Well, I don’t give a shit.’

‘Well, I think you’re a fuck-head.’

‘Oh, you do, do you?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact. You’ve been a fuck-head since Austria.’

‘Well, you’ve been a fuck-head since birth.’

‘Me
?’ A wounded look. ‘That’s rich. You were a fuck-head in the
womb,
Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head.’

And so it went. Istanbul clearly was not destined to be a success for us. Katz hated it and he hated me. I mostly hated Katz, but I didn’t much care for Istanbul either. It was, like the train that took us there, hot, foetid, crowded and threadbare. The streets were full of urchins who snatched anything you didn’t cling to with both hands and the food was simply dreadful, all foul-smelling cheese and mysterious lumps of goo. One night Katz nearly got us killed when he enquired of a waiter, ‘Tell me, do you have cows shit straight onto the plate or do you scoop it on afterwards?’

One of the sustaining pleasures for Katz in the later stages of the trip was talking candidly in this way to people who could not understand him, making smiling enquiries of a policeman concerning the celebrated tininess of his penis or telling a surly waiter, ‘Can we have the bill, Boris? We’ve got to run because your wife’s promised to give us both blow jobs.’

But in this instance it turned out that the waiter had worked in a little place off the Tottenham Court Road for thirteen years and he understood Katz’s question only too well. He directed us to the door with the aid of a meat cleaver, making wholly justified remarks about the nobility of Turkish cuisine and the insolence of young tourists.

With this final pleasure denied him on the grounds of prudence and a sincere threat from me that I would kill him myself if an English-speaking Turk didn’t do it first, Katz spent the remainder of our time in Istanbul in a moody silence, except for growling at touts in the Grand Bazaar to fuck off and leave him alone, but this I excused on the basis of justified provocation. We had reached the end of the road in every sense. It was a long week.

I wondered now, as I rode a taxi in from the airport through the hot, airless, teeming streets of Istanbul, whether my attitude would be more receptive this time.