The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (28 page)

“Will it be easier for you after Bulgaria joins the Schengen zone?” I asked.

“I have a UK passport. I am speaking metaphorically. . . . I just feel oppressed by the way things are done here. Under forty-five years of communism, people learned to be cheaters—everyone had a job, but they had after-hours jobs too. Because you made the same as a street sweeper as you did as a writer. Now it is vile capitalism, but the habits are the same. . . . There are no societal classes here. No one has any respect. They talk the same to a professor as they would to a streetwalker.

“There is one good thing about Bulgaria,” he conceded when I told him about getting robbed in France. “No one would steal your things. Because of communism, we have a respect for possessions.”

We found an off-brand exchange kiosk and joined the scrum. “Give me the cash,” said Kostya and stuffed it in his pocket. We had to duck to speak to the woman behind the scratched and opaque Plexiglas, and she and Kostya exchanged a complicated combination of dinars, euros, and leva. “Here,” he said, handing me a pile. Then he thought better of it and took thirty euros for himself. “Remind me to pay you that back.”

We ran into a friend of his who played in a popular “Balkan beat” band and realized we had some mutual friends—the DJ Joro-Boro, the band Balkan Beat Box, and Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello, for whom he used to promote shows. One of my favorite musicians is the Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov. When I was just out of college, I had a cubicle job at a failing advertising concern working with my college friend Eric, of the avant-jazz band Gutbucket. Their drummer had come across a bootleg cassette of Papasov in the course of his job at the public radio station WNYC. We dubbed the cassette onto CD on the agency machines and passed it around like samizdat, trying to count the time-signature changes.

“I did a show for him once,” said Kostya. “I saw him smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in ten minutes after he got offstage. He has gotten a big beer belly. It's like a table—when he sits down, he can arrange all his supplies, ashtray, drink, papers for rolling a joint, on the belly.”

We stopped into a tailor shop with my ripped pants. A half-dozen older women were seated behind sewing machines. The first we approached, white-haired with irregular swatches of henna, said she couldn't do the repair before tomorrow. OK, we said, we'll go elsewhere. She yelled across the room. Another woman waved us over, grabbed the pants, and told us to go get a coffee.

We took a walk around the market: three or four blocks of tarps and tin with merchants hawking vegetables, dried fruits and nuts, plumbing supplies, used cassette boom boxes twenty-five years old, chainsaws, and a dangerous contraption for heating water that involved a coil of electrified wire you drop in the tank and plug in.

“These are all gypsies, you see, with the . . . chocolate faces and Indian hair. Everyone is renting the stall by the month, and everyone is trying to cheat each other.” We crossed a street. “This is the ‘hygienic' side of the market. Look at that.” Kostya pointed at a pile of severed pigs' ears the size of baseball gloves. “I love to come here and watch the faces.” Hoffman quoted one of her interviewees on the subject of Sofia: “Sofia is in the middle of the world, and of the wonderful faces one sees here, created by centuries of cultural intermingling . . . you can trace the continuity of culture from India to here in the various shades of blue along the old silk road.”

I asked Kostya about the ongoing, sometimes quite heated, debate about the use of the term “gypsy,” as opposed to the more politically correct “Roma.”

“Well, there are seventeen tribes of them in Bulgaria. Some of them, the ones that are baptized and they want to live partly in society, they call themselves ‘Roma' and they think ‘gypsy' is offensive. But other tribes, they say, ‘We are gypsies, we are not Roma.'”

The pants were done and cost three leva, or about a dollar and a half. It was raining, and we both had soaked feet. Kostya texted payment for another hour of parking and suggested we retire to the apartment for a nap.

“I was up until three talking to people in Canada. I am making a deal to import iPhones, you know, from China, with the iPhone certificate, but not real iPhones, you know? At a tenth of the price. There is a market for them here. . . . It is just a problem because we don't have all the money right now, because people owe us money.”

While we were walking around the town center (“walking” is a relative term; objectively we were moving at a near run),
Kostya was making me see Sofia through his conspiratorial eyes: everyone began to look like a huckster or a thief or on the make, engaged in some sort of low-stakes but high-stress single combat of wits, chicken, and street-level capitalism.

He stopped in a storefront for coffee, and, when I didn't have the coins, got the hostess's assent to pay her later. “I have, like, credit there. I'm always coming in, and tipping a lot. I have paid for this coffee five times over. . . . You see those guys sitting in front?” He gestured to a handful of overweight men sitting around a plastic table. “They are the Black Lottery mafia. You know this? They run the gambling on sports. They sit there all day and figure out their schemes.”

We crossed a square and found ourselves in the path of a black-robed priest with a large silver cross around his neck who was a dead ringer for Seth Rogen. “See that statue?” said Kostya. It showed six figures with their hands crossed in front of their waists and celebrated the 1,300th anniversary of the Bulgar conquest of the region from the Slavs. “It's called the six angels and the six wankers.”

“You're a good driver,” he offered after our respective nap-times, as I ferried him to some sort of business lunch/coffee/hand-to-hand combat.

I should be, I said. I'm doing it five or six hours a day on tour.

“I see—so you're a professional driver and part-time musician. You should be picking up hitchhikers and asking them for money too.”

I'm not really supposed to have taken the rental car to Bulgaria, I said, so I can't afford to have anything unexpected happen.

“Ah,” he said dismissively. “You can just tell them you were kidnapped.”

I picked up Cvetan at the radio station. He had edited a phone interview I'd done with him from Berlin for air the next day. We headed south to Plovdiv. There was just one road, so it was easy to find. In Russia, people giving directions like this always said “
priamo, priamo, priamo
” (“straight, straight, straight”)—a word that, in Bulgarian, Cvetan says, means “honest,” in the sense, I suppose, of a straight shooter.

It was a relief to have a sense of breathing space in the landscape again and to see forested land. Croatia, Serbia, and Hungary were either flat farmland or denuded hills. Here we had true peaks, fuzzy with pine, then a wide valley in green and purple, and the blue-gray thrust of the Balkan Mountains themselves. Once again, it reminded me of Montana. In fact Montana was a nearby place-name (as of 1993, after spending a few decades named Mihaylovgrad for the communist insurgent Hristo Mihaylov), and Cvetan said that a village near his hometown shares the name too. “There was a Roman town called Montanesium. I don't know why they just didn't call it that. I guess in the nineties an American name sounded cooler.”

He grew up in the Danube flatlands east of Ruse. “I was a shy kid, antisocial, just reading and writing short stories.” His grandfather was “Afro-Bulgarian—he had the African face and round eyes and curly hair. My mother had African straightened hair too. In the old [Ottoman] days, you know, they were using Egyptian, Somali, soldiers to guard this frontier.”

Shy he may have been, but one day, as a teen, he took some of his stories to the local newspaper office. He rang the wrong button, though, and ended up in a radio station owned by the same
guy. “Hey kid,” they more or less said, “you talk pretty well. This guy just quit his radio show, you want to take over?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Right now or next week?”

“Right now.”

He had ended up on national radio, which in his telling was about as formal in its hiring and budgetary practices as American college radio. By then he had moved to Sofia. “I didn't have a phone or anything, and I was at a friend's house, and someone called her phone and asked for me. I don't know how he knew I was there. He said, ‘Get down to the radio station right now.' They wanted someone to do little spots, analytical things, like five minutes about New Model Army, or West African songs post-revolution, and he knew I knew about music.” He has had a regular gig ever since.

I asked him about Papasov. “Ivo Papasov is a real, tortured artist—he's calm, you know, and he's good at the fast stuff. But then I heard him play a slow song, and I was like, wow! Like Charlie Parker. . . . Some of the other guys in his band, they are . . . not so subtle.”

One side of the southbound road from Sofia (the accent is on the first syllable if you mean the city, on the second syllable for the woman's name) featured a combination of hulking and abandoned communist buildings (“publishing, mostly,” said Cvetan) and new, half-built, and glass-fronted office blocks and luxury hotels, none in working order.

I commented on the confused state of the architecture in the Sofian sprawl. “Have you been to Skopje?” Cvetan asked. “Their new ultra-nationalist government decided to build, like, two hundred monuments, but right next to each other, and all in
different heights and sizes. Like, you have a forty-meter statue of one shared hero, and then a five-meter statue of someone from a different era completely, and so close you can't walk between them! It's pure kitsch. Like a Serbian guy who moves to the U.S. and becomes a mafia boss and buys all this stuff for his house.”

Skopje was hit with a devastating earthquake in 1963 that destroyed 80 percent of the city, which meant that, like in Normandy after World War II, there was a near-blank slate for architecturally adventurous local pols. Ever since the earthquake, Cvetan said, Macedonians have felt a special kinship with the seismic travails of Japan and send aid after every Japanese earthquake. But, he added, Skopje was the most vibrant place for the arts in the Balkans.

“Often,” I said, “places that are in economic or political turmoil are good for the arts.”

“Yes, but here it's not happening. Bulgarians are not curious about the larger cultural world. It used to be even under censorship, there was some great novels, cinema, even poets—now, very little.” Like Kostya, he spoke in terms of trying to educate or lead the country to the cutting edge of global culture.

The Balkan Mountains receded to the east, and we passed through rocky, dry, scrubby hills, descending into a wide and colorful plain and thus into Plovdiv. It was a small Mediterranean city. The venue was a basement bar on a quiet residential street. A loud and tight Balkan heavy rock band was rehearsing as we loaded in. Cvetan took my leopard-print merch suitcase. It had been drawing comments and derisive laughter all tour long, but, as Maria pointed out, with a black suitcase, you can leave it in any corner of any club and forget it—this one, I would never leave behind.

“What do people think of this design in America? Like, what associations?” he asked.

“Probably sexy underwear or strippers.”

“Here we associate it with a particularly cheesy kind of turbofolk. With, you know, big-breasted women singing and wearing dresses with this print.”

A pair of teenage girls, hippiefied in not-quite plaid, striped hoodies, and bandannas, giggled over my merch table. A thin and sensitive-looking twenty-three-year-old with a
Don't Look Back
thatch of black hair sat in the corner of the club, wearing faux Ray-Bans and brooding self-consciously. He was the opening act and got the assignment to take me out for Italian food.

His English was superb—he was raised in Vancouver from age two to twelve, before his parents moved back to Plovdiv. He taught English, of course, but to one- and two-year-olds. “Their parents are maybe too ambitious for them,” he said. “One of [the children] is there every day, four hours.”

As someone with a functional, if shallow, comprehension of Ukrainian, I found the Bulgarian language reassuringly familiar. “I think the pronunciation is similar,” said Cvetan. “All the Ukrainians who live here, unlike the Russians, they speak perfect Bulgarian, with no accent.” It was here that the Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the ninth century and from here it was spread, “making Bulgaria, more than any other land,” wrote Kaplan, “the birthplace of Slavonic languages and culture. To this day, Bulgarians consider their native tongue the Latin of Slavic languages.”

After dinner, the Dylan-manqué gave me walking directions to the town's sights—the oldest mosque in Europe, a Roman amphitheater, the “old town”—and we headed back to the club.
“There's the post office,” he pointed out as we crossed the square. “The old communist building. They only use about 15 percent of it. The rest is just—empty. I talked to a really old lady, like ninety-seven, who said they used to use the basement for torturing people.”