5.
A powerful storm blew in. I watched through the window as the wind snapped the tree branches. White plastic bags flitted through the air like little phantoms. The rain whipped the windowpane so powerfully it seemed likely to smash the glass. The hotel room was freezing cold. I started shivering. I pulled on a sweater. I wrapped myself in my blanket, and finally, teeth chattering, slid into bed.
‘Could you please go down to the main desk and ask them for extra blankets? And ask them to turn the heat on!’
Aba decided she would turn the heat on herself. She spent ages fiddling with the heating unit in the wall, but to no avail. Then she searched every corner of the room to find extra blankets. She threw her own blanket over me. It didn’t help. I was still shivering. I was certain that her reluctance to go downstairs lay in the prospect of a confrontation with the hotel staff, a vestigial reflex from communism, the fear that they would dismiss her out of hand, the potential for humiliation. Hence her exultant expression when she came back. No one had hurt her feelings, and furthermore she had come through victorious: she was carrying two woollen blankets, and a young man came in behind her who turned on the heat.
‘Is that better?’ she asked, all important.
Warm air soon began to flow from the heater and I – grumbling that I would be getting out of this hostile, stormy place as soon as I could the next day – dropped off to sleep.
When I woke up I saw Aba sitting before the mirror, massaging lotion into her hair. The storm was still raging outside, but the rain had stopped.
‘Aba?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is Lili Ivanova still alive?’
‘Yes, she is. Why do you ask?’
‘I just thought…’ I muttered.
‘Whatever made you think of her?’
‘When I was a teenager she was the biggest Bulgarian pop star.’
I sat up. It was like a steam bath in the room. Aba had little bottles, tubes, lotions piled on the table in front of her.
‘What are you doing?’
‘My hair has been falling out lately.’
‘It couldn’t be.’
‘It really is.’
‘You seem to have plenty of hair.’
‘Well, I used to have more.’
‘Have you been to see a doctor?’
‘What can a doctor do for me? It’s falling out, that’s all. I rub my scalp with lotions and take vitamins B and E.’
‘Things like this may be due to stress. But it will grow back, I am certain of that. Only ageing women go bald.’
‘I am an ageing woman.’
‘You are just a baby still.’
‘Babies are ageing women.’
‘OK, so you are a bald baby. Could there be anything nicer?’
‘Yes, there could.’
‘What?’
‘A baby with long pigtails.’
She was not without a sense of humour, when she felt like it. I glanced at my watch. It was eight thirty. I wondered how we would get through the evening. I got up and looked out the window. Going out was not an option. Unless we dashed to the restaurant just around the corner.
‘Are we really going back tomorrow?’ she asked me as we surveyed the menu. She was insisting again on that plural of hers.
‘No point in me staying on here,’ I answered in the emphatic singular, ‘the weather being as it is.’
‘Perhaps the sun will shine tomorrow.’
‘Very little likelihood that the sun will shine tomorrow.’
Aba had pulled a black woollen cap over her head to hide her greasy hair. When she took her glasses off for a moment, I noticed that her eyebrows met in the middle. She had something around her neck, a leather thong with a round grey pebble hanging from it.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, nothing. I found the pebble with a hole in it somewhere and strung it on the leather.’
I ordered warm cheese and honey pastries, lamb stew served in a little ceramic pot and feta cheese baked in parchment. The storm was raging outside, the restaurant was cosy, and my firm resolve – especially at the prospect of jouncing for eight hours back on the bus – began to weaken.
‘Aba, do you have a boyfriend?’
Again I was forcing the conversation. This was the kind of question with which doltish adults ply children. I used the word gadzhe for sweetheart, old-fashioned slang that had been current back in my teenage years.
Aba grinned.
‘Don’t people say gadzhe any more?!’
‘No, no, they still say it.’
‘So, do you have a gadzhe?’
‘May I tell you a story?’
‘A real story?’
‘Yup.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘There is a Russian fairy tale in which the Tsar-maiden and Ivan, the merchant’s son, fall in love.’
‘The Tsar-maiden?’
‘Yes, that is what the story is called, ‘The Tsar-maiden’. So every time the two of them are supposed to meet, Ivan botches it by dropping off to sleep like a log. Ivan has this evil, jealous stepmother. She knows a trick: when she pricks Ivan’s clothes with a needle, he falls asleep. The Tsar-maiden is angry and returns to her empire, far away beyond seven hills, seven mountains, and…’
‘Seven seas!’
‘Ivan goes off after the maiden. He travels and travels, and finally reaches her, but not her heart. To reach her heart, Ivan still has to cross the sea. On the other shore grows an oak tree, in the oak there is a box, and in the box is a rabbit, and in the rabbit is a duck, and in the duck there is an egg. In that egg is hidden the love of the Tsar-maiden.’
‘And then?’
‘That is still not enough. The maiden must eat the egg. Once she eats it, the love for Ivan will return to her heart.’
‘So, does she eat this egg?’
‘She does. She is tricked into it, of course.’
‘Jesus! Who could walk that vast distance, then cross a sea, and then climb an oak. And then the egg! Hardboiled, no less? Ugh!’
‘Precisely. That is the whole point,’ said Aba, with a wry smile.
‘Now I know what this folklore of yours has taught you!’
‘What?’
‘High standards!’
We both burst into giggles. I liked the way she had packaged her answer. For the first time the conversation between us relaxed, and the whole situation acquired a rosy hue like a girl’s school excursion. Perhaps the unexpected weather contributed to this as well, perhaps