I was in there, too, of course. Sometimes she seemed to love our talks on the phone even more than our conversations in person. As if she felt freer over the phone.
‘I am sitting in your chair,’ she’d say, referring to my desk chair, ‘and looking at the flowers on the balcony and thinking of you. If you could only see how the flowers are blooming! It’s as if they’re weeping because you left.’
And then, as if shaken by her giddy sense of freedom, she would add in an unnaturally bright tone,
‘Goodness, how empty my life is!’
She had snapped shut almost all of her emotional files. One of them was still slightly open: it was Varna, the city of her childhood and youth. That is why she let the unknown woman from Bulgaria into her realm with such ready warmth.
Mother’s Bedel
1.
Everything was badly organised. Contact with the organisers of the literary gathering ‘Golden Pen of the Balkans’ in Sofia had reached a dead end. They left me to make the reservations and buy the plane ticket myself. At least Aba responded to my emails. The real goal of my trip was to visit Varna. My participation in ‘Golden Pen of the Balkans’ had simply been a handy excuse. Aba replied quickly that she would join me, if I didn’t mind; she had a cousin in Varna she hadn’t seen for years and several friends. I didn’t mind.
Mum wound me up and set me moving in the direction of Varna; she guided me by remote control like a toy, dispatched me to a place she could no longer travel to on her own. Centuries ago the wealthy would send someone else off on the hajj or to the army in their stead, as a bedel, a paid surrogate. I was my mother’s bedel. She said I must look up Petya, her closest friend from childhood and her teenage years. Petya had been stricken by Alzheimer’s, and to make matters worse she was being looked after by her son, an alcoholic. Petya’s address, however, had vanished, strangely, from Mum’s address book.
‘Ask the police,’ Mum insisted.
‘And Petya’s last name?’
‘Well, her husband’s name was Gosho.’
‘His surname?’
A shadow of distress flitted across her face.
‘Fine, I’ll enquire with the police; they will be sure to know,’ I hastened to add.
She did not ask me to seek out my grandmother’s grave. Grandma and my mother’s sister were both buried at the city cemetery in Varna. At one point Mum had let Grandma’s friends also use the gravesite. Graves were, apparently, expensive, and there had been a lot of deaths.
‘I am so foolish. I let them use the grave, and later none of them thanked me,’ she complained.
Neither did she mention Grandpa’s grave. She couldn’t. She didn’t know where exactly he was buried. She had received the death notice too late. Those were hard times, two different countries, there wasn’t much she could have done about it. Except for Petya, who had sunk into dementia, there was no one left in Varna. The main task of my mission as bedel was to take photographs of Varna and show the pictures to Mum on my new laptop. It was my idea to take the pictures, and for that purpose I had purchased a little digital camera.
I asked Aba to reserve a ticket for my flight. At the Bulgarian Airlines office in Amsterdam they explained it would be cheaper to buy the ticket for Varna in Sofia. Aba replied that the flight was very expensive and suggested we go by train. I refused; I had heard all kinds of stories about dilapidated old Bulgarian trains plagued by thieves. I insisted on the plane. Who could bear the prospect of jouncing for seven or eight hours in a bus from Sofia to Varna! She answered politely that the plane would be too expensive for her. She would take the bus, but she had reserved a plane ticket for me. She put me to shame. I agreed, of course, to take the bus, why not. The hours of trundling through the late autumnal Bulgarian countryside would certainly have their charms. We sparred over the hotel. Aba suggested several less expensive versions. I immediately envisioned rundown communist hotels, with broken heating systems, and answered that I preferred a decent hotel in the centre of town and that I didn’t care about the price.
‘I can hardly wait to meet you, you have no idea how much your books have meant to me,’ she added in her email. She insisted she would meet me at the airport. ‘There is really no need, I’ll take a taxi to my mother’s relatives,’ I wrote back. ‘No, no, I will be there to welcome you. You wrote somewhere that a foreign country is a place where there is no one to greet you when you arrive.’ I could not recall where I might have written such a thing, or whether I had, indeed, written those words – even if I had, they now sounded alien to me.
When I arrived at the airport I didn’t see her at first. I looked everywhere in the waiting area, hung around for a while, stood in line to change my euros into levs, then made my way through the waiting area once again, and finally caught sight of a diminutive girl standing pressed in a corner, clutching a nosegay of flowers, watching each passenger coming through the exit gate. At last she caught sight of me. She dashed over and kissed me warmly on the face. Oh, how stupid, I must think she is a total idiot, but she was so sure it would work best to stand right on that spot, because if she were to move, I’d come out and she’d miss me, and from there she had absolutely had the best view, she had sussed it all out, and she couldn’t work out how she’d missed me.
She was petite, slender, so thin that she was slightly hunched over. Her over-sized glasses with frames too large for her tender face (a book worm!) were the first thing to notice on her. She had a spotty complexion masked by a thick layer of foundation, her hair was shoulder length, with a reddish L’Oreal glow. She had an unusually disarming smile. All in all, a little girl, a little Bulgarian girl. I could see at once why my mother had taken such a liking to her.
She immediately asked about Mum, how she was doing, what she was up to, were the pelargoniums on the balcony still blooming? (So, they had planted flowers together on the balcony!) And then she said we must give my mother a call and send her a postcard. We? I was a little startled by her use of the plural. She added that my mother was a marvellous person, that she was the only warm, human contact Aba had had while she was in Zagreb, and she had spent two months there! The young Bulgarian woman was very young, or at least looked young. She could have been my daughter. Her questions about my mother sounded sincere enough, and for that reason she aroused my suspicions all the more. What she had had in common with my ailing old mother puzzled me.
We took a cab. She insisted on seeing me off to my mother’s relatives. She insisted on paying for the cab.
‘And you, where are you going after this?’ I asked her.
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll go on home.’
She seemed reluctant to leave, as if she didn’t know where she was going.
‘I’ll give you a call tomorrow morning. We can discuss what happens next,’ I said, slammed the taxi door, and immediately felt a dull stab of guilt. The taxi moved away. She waved. She was still holding the nosegay of flowers she had clearly forgotten to give me.
2.
‘The hotel is in the centre of town,’ she said confidently.