‘Come on, let’s leave our things up in the room, and then we can get a cup of coffee somewhere. We need to pick up a map of the city, too,’ she said.
I snorted. Her use of the plural infuriated me. And her ‘we need to pick up a map of the city’ grated on my ear. Wasn’t she at home here? Why would she need a map?!
4.
We sat in a restaurant next door to the hotel and had coffee. The restaurant was part of a new chain, with fast and tasty food, something like a superior Bulgarian take on McDonald’s. We were served a Bulgarian version of Chinese ‘fortune cookies’ with our coffee. They were the fortunes without the cookie, advertising Lavazza. The new advertising gimmick was called kastmetche – a little fortune.
For her fortune Aba had got a quote from Winston Churchill, which sounded like a verse from some turbo-folk song. Never, never, never, never surrender.
‘And what does yours say?’
‘Know that only matchstick boats sink in a tempest in a tea cup.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Kukishu.’
‘Who is he?’
‘No idea. A Japanese writer, maybe?’
I watched her. She smoked a cigarette with the gestures of an adult, self-confident woman. We conversed in Bulgarian. True, my Bulgarian was awkward, the way I’d picked it up as a teenager when I spent my summers here. Her Bulgarian seemed, rightly or wrongly, a little hobbled. With her language, as if with a wooden clothes peg, she was holding together bits and pieces that were jostling and bumping against each other. The bigger picture was eluding me.
‘So what is simmering these days in the author’s kitchen?’ she asked suddenly.
The wrong tone, again she went for the pretentious tone.
‘Soup with pudgy little children’s fingers floating in it,’ I said, feigning severity, and summoned the waiter so we could pay.
She grinned. She wasn’t hurt that I had evaded her question.
We must have looked odd on the street, the two of us. In a city abandoned by tourists we set out with our cameras on the lookout for interesting shots. I was looking for my subjects, or rather ones I thought my mother might like, while Aba was looking for – mine. I took a picture of the display window at a restaurant that announced they served two roasted suckling pigs on Tuesdays, and on Thursdays two roasted lambs. Now that would give Mum a chuckle, I thought. Aba took pictures of the same display. I took a picture of a bakery where there were trays of fresh burek cheese pies, gevrek, boiled or baked, with or without sesame seeds, cheese crescents, mekitsa and banitsa cheese pastries. Aba took pictures of them, too. I took pictures of sad elderly people selling whatever they had on the pavement, to earn a little loose change: knitted slippers, homemade honey, a basket of apples, a few cucumbers, a head of cabbage, a bunch of parsley. Aba, too, snapped a picture of the scene. I took a picture of a kebab shop with the large-sized Bulgarian kebab in the window. Aba purchased a kebab. I took a picture of Aba holding the kebab. I snapped a shot of peeling pastel paint on a building. Aba also found the peeling façade intriguing. ‘Stuck like glue, stuck on you,’ I muttered to myself, the girl was suffering from ‘mental echolalia’, and I happened to be her victim.
We strolled along Knyaz Boris Street, heading for the beach. The street was crowded with stands selling all sorts of things. We turned into Slivnica, the street that came out at Morskata Gradina and the city beach. The ugly concrete building of the Black Sea Hotel, formerly a luxury hotel under the communists, was now plastered with billboards. The hotel had obviously been occupied by people who were not troubled by the aesthetic of communism: transition thieves, thugs, criminals, smugglers and prostitutes. Their bodyguards were dressed, just like policemen, in ‘uniforms’. They strutted around the expensive cars in front of the hotel in their black suits, black t-shirts, black glasses, decked out in gold chains, cell phones and ear buds, slender wires dangling from their ears. A persistent advertisement for a real estate agency, Bulgarian Property Dream, followed us from the peeling façade to the entrance to Morskata Gradina.
Along the way we stopped in at a cafeteria.
‘This is so awful. Is it a lack of cash that has made them plaster the buildings with billboards?’ I asked, staring at a façade which was as flashy with ads as a porno website.
‘Well, New York is one big advertisement!’ said Aba, following my gaze.
I was certain she had never been to New York.
‘Yes, but everything developed there at a natural pace,’ I said.
‘And so it will here as well.’
‘This used to be a lovely town. But now it has been turned into a way station for transition gold diggers. Everything is falling apart, abandoned, it all looks so vulgar.’
‘It is the transition that is vulgar,’ she said assertively.
Her certainty was aggravating. Especially because I was in bad shape myself.
The waitress, having brought the coffees and a pastry for Aba, demonstrated a new brand of ‘have a nice day’ courtesy.
‘Kak ekler no vkusnee!’ Aba declared in Russian and thrust her fork into the elongated pastry covered in chocolate sauce and filled with confectionary cream. She had quoted me again. I had used that line in one of my essays. Apparently this was her way of trying to coax me into a better mood. I pretended not to notice. I unwrapped my kastmetche.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘De nihilo nihil fit. Xenophanes. What did you get?’
‘Though the world may be crowded the mind is spacious. Thoughts coexist without effort, but objects collide painfully in space.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Friedrich Schiller.’
I squirmed. It was now painfully clear that Aba was getting on my nerves. What a know-all!
‘Let’s carry on to the beach. I can hardly wait to see the sea!’ I hissed.
‘Varietas delectat!’ she announced cheerfully and got up from the table.
I didn’t recognise the entrance to the city beach either. The building we used to go through to get to the strand had melted like ice cream. The terrace, with the year 1926 carved in it, was paved in stones from which steps led down to the sand.
‘That is the year my mother was born.’
‘I know,’ she said.
Wow, you know even that! I huffed to myself and felt the swell of misery and despair rising. We passed by a row of cabins and came out on the strand. The sandy beach which had seemed endless to me before was now cluttered with ramshackle stands and plastic awnings. Everything was a jumble, with no order, as if all this was detritus tossed up on the beach by the waves. Apart from an old fisherman and the two of us, there was nobody there. The sea and sky poured into dark-grey stains. Two tankers floated motionless, off on the horizon, tiny as a child’s toys. Nervous seagulls zigged and zagged across the sky in sharp flight.
The entire landscape was taut with suppressed anxiety. While I searched for a consoling detail, Aba, having held on to the kebab purchased for the purposes of photography, fed it to a stray dog.
There were sudden strong gusts and the sky grew darker still. We hurried to catch a taxi. As soon