The plane lands softly, followed by the passengers’ inevitable applause. Some foreigners, unused to this ritual, always look around rather puzzled at that moment. The woman next to me starts clapping, too.
Be careful, the pilot might take that as a plea for an encore and take off again, I joke.
Over the loudspeaker they welcome us to Bulgarian territory with pride, inform us of the outside temperature, and play the song “One Bulgarian Rose” by Pasha Hristova, who died, by the way, in a plane crash on this same airline at this same airport.
2.
The jostling and cutting in front of the passport control booths is something of a trademark for this place. Luggage delivery will take forever, then the taxi driver won’t return your greeting and will drive off angrily, the pedal to the metal, once he realizes that the address you give him is not on the other side of the city. He’ll crank up the music and light up a cigarette.
And yet this time there is something I wasn’t expecting. The first driver I head toward is wearing a wide red sash around his waist, a white shirt with a vest over it (in complete contrast to his Bermuda shorts below), and the handle of a dagger peeks out of his sash. Things have really gone too far—too far back, that is. I think how much better suited that costume would be to a horse cart or a carriage with two and not ninety horsepower, which is how much the secondhand Korean Daewoo he’s driving is. At the last moment I decide not to take the cab (taxi drivers with daggers have never been a weakness of mine) and turn toward the neighboring taxi stand. There at least the drivers are dressed normally. I open the door of the first car and ask whether the cab is free. It’s free, the driver says with a laugh, and while I’m still getting settled in he says: You’ve heard that old joke, right, where back in the day a Cuban student in Sofia would stop taxis, open the door, ask if they were free, and when they’d say they were, he’d just shout: “Long live freedom!” and send them on their way. I chuckle, even though, yes, I had heard it before.
Something is a bit off with this car, too, but I only figure out what it is as we drive off. As we slowly pull away from the airport, I see that all the cars are from the socialist era.
Moskvitch, I nearly shout, in a tone that combines a question, suspicion, sincere surprise, and confusion.
Moskvitch, the driver proudly confirms, a twelve. It’s forty years old, but a solid machine. They don’t make ’em like they used to, he says, starting up the car on the second try, which for a car of this venerable age is a brilliant start(er). It reeks terribly of gas, clearly the insulation has long since given up the ghost.
I recall that my uncle used to have a Moskvitch like this. He said it with the accent on the first syllable because he thought it sounded more Soviet that way. If we truly have body memory, then my body from 1975 surely remembers even now how the seat dug into me, that stink of gas and vomit. I always traveled with a plastic bag. I feel sick now even thinking about it. I also note the small portrait of Stalin above the rearview mirror.
It’s my buddy on the night shifts, the driver says, catching my gaze. Old Uncle Dinko is all for the 1950s.
I remember how at one time all the buses had photos of Stalin—both before and after the cult of personality, they never disappeared from the drivers’ cabins. Even later, in the ’80s, those Georgian mustaches would be peeking out from beneath Sandra and Samantha Fox’s full-color breasts.
Do you remember Samantha Fox? I suddenly ask.
Ooh, I think I’ve got a lighter with her on it somewhere here, I collect them, he says, reaching over and opening up the glove compartment, where at least a dozen different lighters and as many boxes of matches are rolling around inside. I prefer these. He takes out a Zippo engraved with Che Guevara. But otherwise these girls are mighty fine, too. He lowers the sun visor and on the back beam the Golden Girls of Bulgarian rhythmic gymnastics from the ’70s, who were part of our very own permanent and always permanently suppressed adolescent sexual revolution.
Leaving Sofia Airport in the puttering Moskvitch, the last thing I notice is an enormous billboard for one of the leading mobile operators. They offer a patriotic package with thirteen hundred free minutes—one for each year since the country’s founding—access to all Bulgarian historical films, and a portable flag with a collapsible handle, which will fit easily into your toiletries case.
3.
Just like every time I come back, melancholy inevitably settles in. Before, the sorrow was lighter, like a walk through a sparse forest in which invisible cobwebs sparkle. I loved walking through the park, in the upper part, passing by the lake with the lilies. The time I spent there so many years ago in some other life has melted away without a trace. Is the light still the same, at least? The leaves on the trees, which I waded through in late October with a certain girl, strange that I remember only autumns, anyway, those leaves had already turned at least thirty times since then. Do things remember us at all? That would still be some sort of compensation. Does the lake, with every frog and lily in it, preserve our reflections somewhere? Has the past itself—have our younger selves—turned into frogs and lilies?
I didn’t find the answer that afternoon. I found only late yet tolerable melancholy and cold April air. For a moment I felt like calling that girl. Then I imagined her—with two kids and a husband; a woman who has long since tucked our story away somewhere on the top shelf between the empty spice jars and a notebook full of recipes from her mother. What would I actually want from her—reconstruction, reenactment, recollection? A recollection of what—the elusive color of her eyes? Or was the desire more egocentric—to make sure that I had existed, so she could tell me what had happened to us, a few memories, nothing more? To give back to my memory a few walks, a few words we had laughed over back then. Souvenirs of the past. The dark entryways we hid in. The park. That one time behind the monument to . . . who was it commemorating again? The city suddenly transforms, it has a different topography for lovers . . . We imagined an apartment for ourselves, which didn’t really exist. We fantasized what would happen to us there, how we’d come home to it. Yesterday I stopped by there, she would write to me on my old Nokia, and I forgot my sweater. Let it stay there and remind you of me. Did you water the orchid? They are very fussy. The cat and I are alone, come on over . . .
Can a person be gathered up like that, piece by piece, through the memories of others, and what would you get in the end? Would some Frankensteinian monster emerge from all that? Something patched together from absolutely incompatible memories and ideas from so many people?
. . . Well, you were always laughing . . . You were totally antisocial, sometimes you’d go days without saying anything (that’s my wife, I recognize her voice) . . . You were so sweet, so, how can I put it . . . romantic, we’d lie on benches and imagine how we would get to be a hundred years old, like turtles, and we’d still be together, in a house with light blue shutters, by the sea . . . Jesus Christ, how you could curse, when you got pissed off, watch out . . . Skinny, super-skinny . . . You got to be pretty heavy . . . I was always asking you not to walk so fast . . . You limped . . . Tall . . . Hunched over . . . And when I saw your blue eyes . . . hazel or green, they changed their color depending on the season . . . in a red jacket . . . That green leather jacket . . . You were always forgetting names, and once . . . You always had a lit cigarette in your hand . . . I can’t imagine you ever smoked . . . There were a few words you never remembered, and when you’d be telling a story and get stuck on something, I’d list them off for you . . . Spaced out, very spaced out . . . A person who never wasted any time . . . Then you saw some book on my bed, that very first night, we had just gotten undressed, you turned around and said no way, I’ve got to go, I can’t sleep with someone who reads Coelho, and it was a completely different author, a Portuguese guy with a similar name, we had a good laugh about it then . . . You were gentle . . . A bit rough in bed . . . We had such nice pillow talk afterward . . .