Dimitar seemed shocked at this unexpected revelation. He had misjudged me and felt tricked.
‘So, you don’t want to have sex with me?’ he asked to be sure.
‘I certainly won’t lose my virginity to a playboy,’ I smiled innocently.
‘Then I can’t have a relationship with you.’
‘As if I would want that. It was all a game from the start. A kind of bet with not too high a stake,’ I blurted out.
‘Did you bet on whether you could chat me up?’ he asked with a wave of disbelief in his voice.
‘Something like that.’
‘With whom?’
‘With myself.’
‘And who else?’
‘With one of the girls whose heart you broke.’
‘And now?’
‘The game is up.’
I put my clothes back on and blew him a kiss. Dimitar was glued to the ground. He could not believe that I would just leave him there. I could hardly believe it myself, because if anyone turned me on, it was him.
‘2-1. Mission accomplished,’ I mumbled to myself, while I walked home. I had given him a taste of his own medicine, but I did not get much joy from my victory. Dimitar was cute, sweet and romantic and I had turned him down. My body still trilled from excitement, it was as if it was also protesting.
Lies
My father travelled through America, Germany, Colombia, Argentina and the rest of the world to promote the rich Bulgarian culture through communist plays. Every time he would come back with interesting stories and presents.
A video recorder was so unique that some ‘friends’ only came around to watch Western movies and illegal MTV clips. Zapping through Bulgarian channels was a disappointing pastime: you could only choose from two Bulgarian and one Russian station, which were all rather similar. Friends joked that if you tried to zap further, the head of the secret service would appear on the screen warning: ‘Stop zapping. It is a criminal offence to search for Western channels.’
There was no clear line between what was forbidden and what was allowed. We often knew instinctively what went against party expectations, even though that was not written down anywhere. Everything that was not explicitly allowed, was forbidden. However, nothing was impossible, you just had to find a way to reach your target without taking too much risk.
Nobody knew exactly how the Western films were smuggled into the country, but the quality was awful. We often watched a copy of a copy of a copy. The variation in genres was limited to bloody action movies, slapstick comedies and cheap porn. Compared to the respectable Bulgarian and Russian movies we were usually served; the Western videos were particularly mind-blowing. Especially the porn, because we never got to see naked people. Every time Anton brought along one of those tapes, we would watch the very revealing images wide-eyed and provide personalized commentary.
‘Those two are using a creaky bed. Probably also imported from Russia? She’s good looking, but he’s so pale, he looks like a corpse.’
‘Perhaps that’s why he can’t get it up. Have you ever seen a corpse with a hard-on? Oh, it’s flipped out again.
Anton grinned. ‘That is why you should never make your hobby your work. Look, a new guy had joined. Jeez, he’s all shiny with body lotion. Apparently, that’s not a waste of money in the West.’
‘It’s not here either, because you can’t buy any in our country.’
‘Ach, we’re not that pathetic. We can always rub ourselves in with vegetable oil,’ Anton suggested.
‘And then my mother will surely ask what happened to her vegetable oil. Will you stand in the queue for an hour to get another bottle?’
I had to laugh at my conversations with Anton, but I was irritated by the poor quality of the videotapes he brought along. Once he invited me to his house to watch Rambo. Whether it was the fault of his video recorder, I’m not sure, but there was no sound. That was weird: having Sylvester Stallone beat people up and firing guns without us hearing it. At a certain point, Anton came up with the bright idea of putting on the washing machine. That thing shook, rumbled, banged and made so much noise that Rambo no longer looked like a silent movie. It was a blessing that he still had such an old Russian washing machine. Ours was much quieter, but I immediately recognized the sound because our spin drier was the same Russian make. Even though I tried my best to ‘centre’ the washed clothes in the middle of the drum, the spin drier would rumble, rattle and bang each and every time. If I did not hold onto it during its spin cycle, then the machine would ‘walk’ from one end of the bathroom to the other and usually did not come back on its own.
Because many friends visited our house to watch Western video’s, I sometimes got the feeling that I was running an illegal cinema. When my parents went away for the weekend to our villa in the mountains, our city home would turn into a disco. Thanks to my father’s modern equipment they were all great parties.
Anton wanted to borrow the giant speakers for his birthday. It was Friday the 13th.
‘Don’t give him the speakers,’ Olga said. ‘A day like today can only mean accidents will happen.’
‘Nonsense.’ I retorted. ‘I don’t know who made that up, but there’s no truth in it. You are so superstitious that you believe you’ll have an accident if you walk under a builder’s ladder.’
‘It did happen once.’
‘Did you distract him so much that he fell on top of you with his ladder?’
‘Never mind, you don’t believe me anyway. Do what you want, but if your friends damage the speakers, don’t come running to me. I warned you.’
I thought about it. Friday the 13th. If you believed in that, then accidents will surely happen. My sister was born on Friday the 13th. She was very happy. And it was because she did not believe in superstition or religion, from which the unlucky number came in the first place. If you were not raised with religion, then you had no reason to believe that twelve apostles were better than thirteen at the Last Supper. Judas would have betrayed Jesus another time. The fact that Jesus was crucified on a Friday was just coincidence. And even if it wasn’t, why should that influence my life? It was unbelievable that so many people in the world paid attention this unlucky day. My father told me after his tour in America that even hotel rooms skipped the number thirteen and sometimes even an entire thirteenth floor.
‘And, are you going to do it?’ Olga interrupted my musings.
A little while later we carried the giant speakers through the park. How we managed to get these monsters at their destination without inflicting any damage was a miracle. Luckily, we didn’t damage them, otherwise my punishment would have been severe. Friday the 13th seemed to be my lucky day.
The party was great. The music boomed out the giant speakers and we unsociably let the entire neighbourhood enjoy it with us.
‘Maybe we should turn the music down,’ the host said at about 2 a.m., after the neighbours had complained. That didn’t work, because everyone knew how to turn up volume, even the police, who came to check on us at 3 a.m. We eventually sent them home happy with a bottle of whisky. The system of corruption worked to everyone’s advantage, just like the system of thinking everything over twice. Even at parties we didn’t say what we thought or thought what we said, especially when it came to politics.
We were prisoners in time and didn’t know for how long. The West watched passively from the side-line and washed its hands in innocence. England even managed to give the Romanian leader Ceaușescu a knighthood, even though he was the cruellest of all communist leaders. Not only did he have his political adversaries assassinated, but he also carried out a disastrous economic policy which made Romania the poorest country in Europe. My grandmother would tell me in disgust about the scenes she had seen travelling through Romania. Straight on arrival she was besieged as a ‘rich foreigner’ by begging children who tried to get anything from her: from pens to sweets. I could hardly believe that our Romanian brothers were in such dire straits, because all communist countries helped each other. The Russians tried to steer the mutual relations as much as possible. Of course, this meant that things could go wrong, because there were 90 million people in total from seven different countries living under the influence of the Soviet Union. Romania apparently had the bad luck of going unnoticed in a severe spiral of poverty.