I wonder whatever happened to that guy, I think as I curse inwardly. Shouldn’t I call the phone number to check? This isn’t just a want ad, it’s a cry for help. It’s the end of April. Not a single one of the tabs at the bottom with the phone number has been torn off. I go back to Sofia that same afternoon.
6.
I don’t have anyone to call, so I’m wandering through the windy streets of Sofia. I stop in front of a pet store.
During my first year at university a friend of mine and I bought a pair of parrots as a present for this girl in our class. But won’t they be squawking all day? I asked. What do you care, my friend said, you’re not gonna live with them, right? The birthday party that night was dreadful, some sort of row erupted, it even came to blows, her ex-boyfriend was pounding on the door—the 1990s . . . I remember clearly that as I slunk away I said to myself: Now there’s one woman I’ll never live with. A year later I was standing in that same room, changing the parrots’ water as they screeched hideously. In the mornings we’d throw an old towel over them so they’d think it was nighttime and we could get at least an hour of peace. We named the female parrot Emma Bovary—at that time we were reading Flaubert at the university—while we called the male one Pechorin, who knows why. Emma was constantly attacking him, and poor Pechorin, who supposedly had all sorts of Princess Marys wrapped around his little finger, would just sit there disheveled and pecked, pressed against the thin bars of the cage.
I now realize that I’ve never had as many friends as I did then. That studio apartment was always full of people. I remember how one night, in the wee hours around four a.m., when everything had been drunk and smoked up, we suddenly got ravenously hungry. There was nothing in the refrigerator; those were the hungriest days of the 1990s. I went out with two of the other guys to look for something, as if we could kill a rabbit or doe in the empty city. It was dark, formless, and empty, only packs of dogs roamed the streets. And then, like a miracle, a white Nissan puttered up, stopped nearby, unloaded three crates of yogurt in front of the local store, and drove off. Our generation hated yogurt (on principle), because that’s what they used to make us eat every morning for breakfast as kids. We looked around, nobody showed up, so we grabbed two cartons of yogurt apiece, left all the change we could find in our pockets, and ran back home.
Everybody was waiting for us, starved. I will never forget that picture, the empty bottles and cups on the table, ten identical little nickel-silver bowls set out in front of each of us, all of us twenty-odd years old, and slurping up our yogurt like angels. I don’t know whether angels eat yogurt, but that’s how I’ve remembered us, with white yogurt mustaches, happy and innocent . . .
Soon after that we would go our separate ways, grow cold, forget one another; the rebels would grow tame as teaching assistants in the universities, the sworn bachelors and party animals would be pushing baby carriages and zoning out in front of their TVs, the hippies would get regular haircuts at the local barbershop. The parrot Pechorin would die one morning, and Emma Bovary would shriek and hurl herself against the bars, crazed with grief. She wouldn’t outlive him by a week. The other Emma (yes, that really was her name) and I would break up a few months later. Neither of us would die of grief. I would start my first novel, so I would have somewhere to go home to when I was going crazy, a novel about homeless people.
The truth is, there is no way I can call any one of those erstwhile angels, not even Emma, especially not her. It’s awful that I can’t forget them and (I would never admit this to them) that I miss them. I miss myself, too.
7.
The two big rallies for the primary political forces are scheduled for the last Sunday before the referendum. Bulgaria is abuzz with all kinds of movements championing the various decades. Their arguments range from free medical care to the taste of tomatoes and grandma’s chicken stew. I doubt that the referendum will bring back the taste of stew. It’s as if some people think that bringing back the recent past will also automatically take them back the age they were then. The red light goes on and suddenly you are fifteen or twenty-seven again.
All of that feeds into the propaganda, of course. In the end most of the polls show two main movements to be considerably ahead of the rest. On the one hand, there is the Movement for State Socialism (SS), which holds echoes of State Security, but was better known in short as Soc—which wanted to bring back the time of mature socialism, more specifically the 1960s and ’70s. At its core stands the Socialist Party, even though the Soc movement’s supporters in the referendum outnumber the political party’s shrinking ranks by several orders of magnitude. In that sense it would be truer to say that the party itself is trying to get an infusion of fresh blood from the movement.
The other movement, whose results are projected to be almost neck-and-neck with the SS, is officially named Bulgari-Yunatsi, the Bulgarian Heroes, known colloquially and unofficially as simply the Heroes. It’s difficult for them to point to a specific period, to the decades they would like to return the nation to, since mythology can’t be split into years. Great Bulgaria is an eternal dream and reality, at least according to their speeches. Since, according to the guidelines of the referendum, the earliest possible time frame is the beginning of the twentieth century, the Heroes, illegitimately expanding this deadline, have chosen a late, idealized Bulgarian Revival Period, whose apex is the April Uprising of 1876.*
Can an uprising that never fully happened become sublime and emblematic? Actually, what could become sublime and emblematic but the unhappened? Is this not the only thing that has the potential to happen and to create things as we would like them to be, unimpeded by facts? To be reenacted, as it were, on the basis of memory and imagination? Here everyone is born with (or inherits) the experience of the unhappened.
I wonder which of these two straws—Soc or Heroes—our man with the rakia, rakiaman, would clutch at. Between this Scylla and Charybdis, the little boats of the smaller movements tried to survive.
8.
Meeting with K.
Unlike my previous, almost anonymous visits here, which were tied mainly with the clinic, this time I want to talk to someone about the situation. I finally call a friend from my university days, who has become a professor in the meantime. We haven’t spoken in several years, I don’t even know if his phone number is still the same. I am about to hang up when his sleepy voice says, “Hello,” into the receiver . . .
It seems to me that, besides surprise, his voice also holds a certain joy. That rush of joy when you see or hear from someone you haven’t run into in a long time is not a given in Bulgaria. I remember during my first couple visits back here when I’d meet a friend or acquaintance on the street, I’d rush to hug him, and he would look at me bewildered and grunt out something along the lines of, Oh, hey, what’re you doing here? What’s more, K. himself suggests we meet up this evening at a pub on the roof of the State Archives. Here in Bulgaria you can still make plans for the same day.