Aba and I went back to Hotel Aqua. Stray dogs wandered through the poorly lit streets. Aba stopped from time to time to pat one. The dogs licked her hand obediently. I trembled, partly from fear, and partly from exhaustion.
3.
The next day we moved over to the little hotel on Independence Square. I couldn’t recall whether this was a new name for the square, or if it had been called that before. Again I took a room with two beds. Standing to one side, as if she was a policewoman who had had me brought to the hotel, Aba silently left me to see to all the formalities at the front desk. Again she showed no inclination to call her cousin or friends. I was furious, but I could not bring myself to spit out the sentence: ‘Isn’t it time you called that cousin?’ Or: ‘Your friends must be concerned that you haven’t called them yet, since they know you are in Varna.’ I was less bothered that she would be sharing the room with me, and least of all that she hadn’t offered to shoulder her part of the expense. Maybe she had no friends, maybe there was no cousin, maybe she had never been to Varna, maybe she was broke, maybe she had made it all up so she could travel with me. All of that would have been fine. It was her constant presence that grated on me, and that she had not been clear about when she would be detaching herself from me next. What was I doing going everywhere with this child!? Where was the cousin, damn it, where were the friends?! I was here on my own ‘special mission’ – I muttered to myself – and under your watchful gaze I cannot recall a single detail of a city where I spent so much time! True, I was a teenager back then, but I’d crossed this damn Independence Square dozens of times! And that washbasin of a fountain, which looks as if someone abandoned it years ago in the middle of the square, it worked back then with those same jets of water every bit as weak and erratic as they were now!
‘Come on, let’s leave our things up in the room, and then we can get a cup of coffee somewhere. We need to pick up a map of the city, too,’ she said.
I snorted. Her use of the plural infuriated me. And her ‘we need to pick up a map of the city’ grated on my ear. Wasn’t she at home here? Why would she need a map?!
4.
We sat in a restaurant next door to the hotel and had coffee. The restaurant was part of a new chain, with fast and tasty food, something like a superior Bulgarian take on McDonald’s. We were served a Bulgarian version of Chinese ‘fortune cookies’ with our coffee. They were the fortunes without the cookie, advertising Lavazza. The new advertising gimmick was called kastmetche – a little fortune.
For her fortune Aba had got a quote from Winston Churchill, which sounded like a verse from some turbo-folk song. Never, never, never, never surrender.
‘And what does yours say?’
‘Know that only matchstick boats sink in a tempest in a tea cup.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Kukishu.’
‘Who is he?’
‘No idea. A Japanese writer, maybe?’
I watched her. She smoked a cigarette with the gestures of an adult, self-confident woman. We conversed in Bulgarian. True, my Bulgarian was awkward, the way I’d picked it up as a teenager when I spent my summers here. Her Bulgarian seemed, rightly or wrongly, a little hobbled. With her language, as if with a wooden clothes peg, she was holding together bits and pieces that were jostling and bumping against each other. The bigger picture was eluding me.
‘So what is simmering these days in the author’s kitchen?’ she asked suddenly.
The wrong tone, again she went for the pretentious tone.
‘Soup with pudgy little children’s fingers floating in it,’ I said, feigning severity, and summoned the waiter so we could pay.
She grinned. She wasn’t hurt that I had evaded her question.
We must have looked odd on the street, the two of us. In a city abandoned by tourists we set out with our cameras on the lookout for interesting shots. I was looking for my subjects, or rather ones I thought my mother might like, while Aba was looking for – mine. I took a picture of the display window at a restaurant that announced they served two roasted suckling pigs on Tuesdays, and on Thursdays two roasted lambs. Now that would give Mum a chuckle, I thought. Aba took pictures of the same display. I took a picture of a bakery where there were trays of fresh burek cheese pies, gevrek, boiled or baked, with or without sesame seeds, cheese crescents, mekitsa and banitsa cheese pastries. Aba took pictures of them, too. I took pictures of sad elderly people selling whatever they had on the pavement, to earn a little loose change: knitted slippers, homemade honey, a basket of apples, a few cucumbers, a head of cabbage, a bunch of parsley. Aba, too, snapped a picture of the scene. I took a picture of a kebab shop with the large-sized Bulgarian kebab in the window. Aba purchased a kebab. I took a picture of Aba holding the kebab. I snapped a shot of peeling pastel paint on a building. Aba also found the peeling façade intriguing. ‘Stuck like glue, stuck on you,’ I muttered to myself, the girl was suffering from ‘mental echolalia’, and I happened to be her victim.
We strolled along Knyaz Boris Street, heading for the beach. The street was crowded with stands selling all sorts of things. We turned into Slivnica, the street that came out at Morskata Gradina and the city beach. The ugly concrete building of the Black Sea Hotel, formerly a luxury hotel under the communists, was now plastered with billboards. The hotel had obviously been occupied by people who were not troubled by the aesthetic of communism: transition thieves, thugs, criminals, smugglers and prostitutes. Their bodyguards were dressed, just like policemen, in ‘uniforms’. They strutted around the expensive cars in front of the hotel in their black suits, black t-shirts, black glasses, decked out in gold chains, cell phones and ear buds, slender wires dangling from their ears. A persistent advertisement for a real estate agency, Bulgarian Property Dream, followed us from the peeling façade to the entrance to Morskata Gradina.
Along the way we stopped in at a cafeteria.
‘This is so awful. Is it a lack of cash that has made them plaster the buildings with billboards?’ I asked, staring at a façade which was as flashy with ads as a porno website.
‘Well, New York is one big advertisement!’ said Aba, following my gaze.
I was certain she had never been to New York.
‘Yes, but everything developed there at a natural pace,’ I said.
‘And so it will here as well.’
‘This used to be a lovely town. But now it has been turned into a way station for transition gold diggers. Everything is falling apart, abandoned, it all looks so vulgar.’
‘It is the transition that is vulgar,’ she said assertively.
Her certainty was aggravating. Especially because I was in bad shape myself.
The waitress, having brought the coffees and a pastry for Aba, demonstrated a new brand of ‘have a nice day’ courtesy.
‘Kak ekler no vkusnee!’ Aba declared in Russian and thrust her fork into the elongated pastry covered in chocolate sauce and filled with confectionary cream. She had quoted me again. I had used that line in one of my essays. Apparently this was her way of trying to coax me into a better mood. I pretended not to notice. I unwrapped my kastmetche.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘De nihilo nihil fit. Xenophanes. What did you get?’