What had once been a charming little street with cosy houses and gardens was no longer recognisable. The street had become a construction site; new homes were sprouting on all sides. I walked around the school, found the entrance and bumped into a man and two women in the corridor. I explained that I would like to see the yard, and had tried to let myself in, but it was locked.
‘Why are you interested in the yard?’ the man asked.
‘My grandparents used to live there years ago.’
‘You cannot go in. The furnace for the school is there.’
‘I would just like to peep into the yard for a moment.’
‘Madam, there is no yard there! There is nothing there! It’s the furnace for the school. And it has always been there as far as I know.’
The women agreed and nodded, right to left, as the Bulgarians do.
* * *
I left the school building and went back to the green gate. It was standing there in front of me like a forgotten password. If I could only open the gate a crack, I thought, everything would come back to me. Some images were surfacing: the dynamic figure of my grandmother, who was always busy with something – cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing – and the static figure of my grandfather, who sat in the school yard and smoked. Everything else tumbled and mixed in the furnace behind the green gate.
I looked over at the little house across the way, which, sur prisingly, was still standing. My grandmother died in that house while she was over visiting her friends, who, themselves, are no longer alive. They were watching television together, Grandma, suddenly agitated, asked, ‘Why did it get so dark?’ and then she died. That was Mum’s most recent version of Grandma’s dying words.
Gulping breaths of air I went back to the main street and there I flagged down a taxi that saved me. The ride was an instant sedative. I decided to take the route of this pointless and troubling pilgrimage all the way to its end.
‘Can you take me to the old train station by the lake?’ I said.
‘Why?’ The taxi driver was astonished. ‘There is nothing there!’
Beyond the tangle of rusty tracks, in front of me stood the lake. It stood – precisely that and nothing more. The sky was intersected by electric wires, the tracks were covered in grass. The grass was a dark green, the sky and lake a greyish blue. The place was ugly, but not entirely without appeal. The appeal lay in the sense of total desertion that radiated from all sides. I turned around. Across, on the other side of the road, where the house with the garden was supposed to have stood, the one we’d never gone to see, there was a slope with a few run-down little houses along the top. The slope was dangerously eroded, so much so that the little old houses looked as if they might come tumbling down at any minute. At the foot of the hill, along the road, were more run-down buildings with advertisement signs: Car Mechanic, We Change Oil, and so forth.
‘Love, I told you there is nothing here but ghosts! Unless you are looking for a part for a car. And a very old one at that!’ the taxi driver said kindly.
When we turned around to return to the centre of town, I looked back once more at the lake. It seemed as if I could see a barely visible bluish shimmering, ghosts shimmering in the air over the lake.
7.
Walking towards the hotel, I saw Aba standing by the fountain, feeding seagulls. The water spraying in spurts behind her looked a little more lively than it had that morning. Lit by sunshine that was breaking through the clouds, the jets of water glistened in all the colours of the rainbow. And the seagulls, it was as if the gulls had gone mad: they swooped in great loops in the air, flapped their wings and then slowly, like parachutes, they descended to Aba’s interlocked open hands and they pecked at the crumbs of bread.
Passers-by stopped and watched the scene: there was something marvellously acrobatic and, at the same time, natural in Aba’s performance. Aba inscribed herself perfectly into the space. This time there was no ‘wrong tone’. If Aba was sending a message, that message was not directed at those of us who were watching her on the square, I was sure of that.
I did not go over to her. I loathe feathered creatures. I watched the scene from the side. She caught sight of me, tossed the rest of the bread into the air, clapped her hands together to wipe off the crumbs and came over to me.
We brought out the bags that had been left at the main desk that morning. While we waited for the taxi in front of the hotel, I asked her how she had spent her time.
‘Nothing much, I wandered around town a bit.’
And then she looked at me carefully, and said,
‘Ah, yes, I went over to your grandmother’s – Dospat Street, n’est-ce pas?’
She had deliberately stabbed me in the flesh with her sharp little claw, there could be no doubt. Fury bubbled up in me in an instant. I quietly sucked the blood from the invisible wound and said,
‘Why? There is nothing there!’
At that moment the taxi arrived.
As They Came, So They Went Away
‘I can hardly wait for you to come to Zagreb and tell me all about how it was in Varna! I can hardly wait,’ she repeated excitedly during every phone conversation. I could recognise in her voice the routine excitement she always expressed the same way: I can hardly wait.
I rehearsed versions of my report in my mind. Maybe it would be better to tell her I had stayed in Varna for two days, that the weather had been bad, which was true, and that I had hardly seen anything. Or should I tell her that with the help of a kind Varna policeman I had been able to locate her Petya, who looked well, beautiful in fact, had sent her regards, but, unfortunately, couldn’t write, because she was having difficulties writing. Her son, Kostya, who, by the way, had stopped drinking, was looking after her with genuine devotion. And Varna, Varna was so wonderful, but I hadn’t brought her any pictures because I pressed the wrong button on that new digital camera.
‘I don’t recognise anything here,’ she said, peering at the images on my computer screen. ‘Is that Varna?’
She was surprisingly cool and collected. Of the wall that separated the school yard from the street, she said, ‘No, that wall wasn’t there before. Something new.’
Amazingly she was not as disappointed by the grey scenes of the city beach as I had been.
‘That city beach was never very nice. Do you remember how we always preferred to go to Asparuhovo and Galata? The water was cleaner there.’
When I next visited I urged her to look at the photographs again. She seemed to have forgotten she’d seen them the first time. Her comments were identical, and her indifference troubled me. I had not received the anticipated ‘payment’ for my service as a bedel, the emotional reciprocation from her end. Then again, maybe I hadn’t deserved it. I had clearly done the job badly. I had brought back nothing from my pilgrimage, and received nothing in return. I can’t tell whether she had erased the Varna file in her memory, or had saved it somewhere else, but I was sure that neither she nor I would be opening it again any time soon.
This time I noticed that she had changed the way she walked. She was trying to stand a little straighter when she pushed her walker, and to lift her feet a little more with each step.
‘That is what Jasminka told me, to lift my feet.’
Jasminka was her physiotherapist.
We went, as usual, to her favourite café at the marketplace for coffee.