‘Though the world may be crowded the mind is spacious. Thoughts coexist without effort, but objects collide painfully in space.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Friedrich Schiller.’
I squirmed. It was now painfully clear that Aba was getting on my nerves. What a know-all!
‘Let’s carry on to the beach. I can hardly wait to see the sea!’ I hissed.
‘Varietas delectat!’ she announced cheerfully and got up from the table.
I didn’t recognise the entrance to the city beach either. The building we used to go through to get to the strand had melted like ice cream. The terrace, with the year 1926 carved in it, was paved in stones from which steps led down to the sand.
‘That is the year my mother was born.’
‘I know,’ she said.
Wow, you know even that! I huffed to myself and felt the swell of misery and despair rising. We passed by a row of cabins and came out on the strand. The sandy beach which had seemed endless to me before was now cluttered with ramshackle stands and plastic awnings. Everything was a jumble, with no order, as if all this was detritus tossed up on the beach by the waves. Apart from an old fisherman and the two of us, there was nobody there. The sea and sky poured into dark-grey stains. Two tankers floated motionless, off on the horizon, tiny as a child’s toys. Nervous seagulls zigged and zagged across the sky in sharp flight.
The entire landscape was taut with suppressed anxiety. While I searched for a consoling detail, Aba, having held on to the kebab purchased for the purposes of photography, fed it to a stray dog.
There were sudden strong gusts and the sky grew darker still. We hurried to catch a taxi. As soon as we got into the cab, big drops of rain began pounding on the windscreen. The looming billboard BULGARIAN PROPERTY DREAM, like some obstinate mystical signal, stared at me through the foggy glass. This city was not my property, but my mother’s, I thought. Property, which she had given over, like Grandmother’s grave, to others. Nothing here was hers any more, except the dream, and it had faded over the years. Why had the feeling of despair grown in me so and filled me like beer foam in a mug, I wondered. Was it because I had taken it upon myself to be my mother’s bedel?
5.
A powerful storm blew in. I watched through the window as the wind snapped the tree branches. White plastic bags flitted through the air like little phantoms. The rain whipped the windowpane so powerfully it seemed likely to smash the glass. The hotel room was freezing cold. I started shivering. I pulled on a sweater. I wrapped myself in my blanket, and finally, teeth chattering, slid into bed.
‘Could you please go down to the main desk and ask them for extra blankets? And ask them to turn the heat on!’
Aba decided she would turn the heat on herself. She spent ages fiddling with the heating unit in the wall, but to no avail. Then she searched every corner of the room to find extra blankets. She threw her own blanket over me. It didn’t help. I was still shivering. I was certain that her reluctance to go downstairs lay in the prospect of a confrontation with the hotel staff, a vestigial reflex from communism, the fear that they would dismiss her out of hand, the potential for humiliation. Hence her exultant expression when she came back. No one had hurt her feelings, and furthermore she had come through victorious: she was carrying two woollen blankets, and a young man came in behind her who turned on the heat.
‘Is that better?’ she asked, all important.
Warm air soon began to flow from the heater and I – grumbling that I would be getting out of this hostile, stormy place as soon as I could the next day – dropped off to sleep.
When I woke up I saw Aba sitting before the mirror, massaging lotion into her hair. The storm was still raging outside, but the rain had stopped.
‘Aba?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is Lili Ivanova still alive?’
‘Yes, she is. Why do you ask?’
‘I just thought…’ I muttered.
‘Whatever made you think of her?’
‘When I was a teenager she was the biggest Bulgarian pop star.’
I sat up. It was like a steam bath in the room. Aba had little bottles, tubes, lotions piled on the table in front of her.
‘What are you doing?’
‘My hair has been falling out lately.’
‘It couldn’t be.’
‘It really is.’
‘You seem to have plenty of hair.’
‘Well, I used to have more.’
‘Have you been to see a doctor?’
‘What can a doctor do for me? It’s falling out, that’s all. I rub my scalp with lotions and take vitamins B and E.’
‘Things like this may be due to stress. But it will grow back, I am certain of that. Only ageing women go bald.’
‘I am an ageing woman.’
‘You are just a baby still.’
‘Babies are ageing women.’
‘OK, so you are a bald baby. Could there be anything nicer?’
‘Yes, there could.’
‘What?’
‘A baby with long pigtails.’
She was not without a sense of humour, when she felt like it. I glanced at my watch. It was eight thirty. I wondered how we would get through the evening. I got up and looked out the window. Going out was not an option. Unless we dashed to the restaurant just around the corner.
‘Are we really going back tomorrow?’ she asked me as we surveyed the menu. She was insisting again on that plural of hers.
‘No point in me staying on here,’ I answered in the emphatic singular, ‘the weather being as it is.’
‘Perhaps the sun will shine tomorrow.’
‘Very little likelihood that the sun will shine tomorrow.’
Aba had pulled a black woollen cap over her head to hide her greasy hair. When she took her glasses off for a moment, I noticed that her eyebrows met in the middle. She had something around her neck, a leather thong with a round grey pebble hanging from it.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, nothing. I found the pebble with a hole in it somewhere and strung it on the leather.’
I ordered warm cheese and honey pastries, lamb stew served in a little ceramic pot and feta cheese baked in parchment. The storm was raging outside, the restaurant was cosy, and my firm resolve – especially at the prospect of jouncing for eight hours back on the bus – began to weaken.
‘Aba, do you have a boyfriend?’
Again I was forcing the conversation. This was the kind of question with which doltish adults ply children. I used the word gadzhe for sweetheart, old-fashioned slang that had been current back in my teenage years.
Aba grinned.
‘Don’t people say gadzhe any more?!’
‘No, no, they still say it.’
‘So, do you have a gadzhe?’
‘May I tell you a story?’
‘A real story?’
‘Yup.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘There is a Russian fairy tale in which the Tsar-maiden and Ivan, the merchant’s son, fall in love.’
‘The Tsar-maiden?’
‘Yes, that is what the story is called, ‘The Tsar-maiden’. So every time the two of them are supposed to meet, Ivan botches it by dropping off to sleep like a log. Ivan has this evil, jealous stepmother. She knows a trick: when she pricks Ivan’s clothes with a needle, he falls asleep. The Tsar-maiden is angry and returns to her empire, far away beyond seven hills, seven mountains, and…’
‘Seven seas!’
‘Ivan goes off after the maiden. He travels and travels, and finally reaches her, but not her heart. To reach her heart, Ivan still has to cross the sea. On the other shore grows an oak tree, in the oak there is a box, and in the box is a rabbit, and in the rabbit is a duck, and in the duck there is an egg. In that egg is hidden the love of the Tsar-maiden.’