Olga sold train tickets. At the central station in Plovdiv it was a mass of people coming and going. A train ticket did not cost much at all and it looked like for that reason everyone had taken to travelling. Olga was usually busy, but sometimes there were times when she did not have anything to do. This was when she would polish her long nails and if, at that moment, a customer would want to buy a ticket then he would have to wait until her nails had dried. During such a beauty break her eyes rested on someone who made her pulse go quicker.
‘He sat on a bench across from my counter and each time I did not have a customer I would hold his gaze’, Olga said. ‘Then I placed the ‘closed’ sign on the counter and walked past him provocatively.’
Olga knew how to do a sexy walk: straight back, breasts stuck out and swaying the hips so that her bum would draw the attention of a blind man. ‘Men look at us to see us, but we look at men to be seen,’ was Olga’s motto.
The attractive man looked at her in admiration and asked if he could buy her lunch.
‘I suggested that instead of lunch, we could smoke a cigarette together in the toilets, because I did not want my new supervisor to see me smoking. That was, of course, a trap, because once we were in the toilets we made love, ‘she told me without a hint of embarrassment.
This incident did not surprise me at all. Olga had a license for love at first sight and did not worry herself if it flourished the same day. Sex had become an outlet for her, because sex was the only thing the communists could not control. Only this way could her free spirit be expressed. Her life existed solely of commitments and paying attention to what she could and could not say, but in love she could be herself, she could turn it to her advantage, she could experience the strength of her own mind and the freedom of her fantasy.
The lucky man found her behind the counter quite often the coming weeks. They had been an item for quite a while, even though they did not know anything about each other. I couldn’t imagine Olga enduring the stinking toilets for so long. The rows of people waiting at her counter grew longer, but she did not need to worry about this. In a communist country, you don’t get the sack easily. Olga shrugged her shoulders with the words: ‘They pretend to pay me and I pretend to work.’ The customers didn’t dare to think about complaining that the counter was closed during opening hours.
‘Aren’t you curious if the man of your dreams is already married?’ I asked her, after I had tried to understand my friend’s relationship without much success.
‘That’s not going to help me, Mer.’
‘Then you know if you have a future with him or not.’
‘I don’t want to know. I am enjoying the moment. Such an all-consuming passion is the best thing that can happen to you. Most women could only dream of this. Thank you for your concern, but I know what I’m doing.’
I was worried about Olga. She had had enough problems in the past since the day her uncle fled to America. He was one of the few Bulgarians who wanted to see the West with his own eyes. Once he had crossed the border such traitors could not even think of coming back to their father land. Their whole family was targets as ‘enemy of the people’, even though they had nothing to do with it. Olga’s father was jailed and interrogated several times each year. The officers threatened him that they would open up a secret hatch under his feet so that he would disappear under the ground and never see his daughter again. He just had to give them some details about this brother’s flight to the West, details that he did not know.
Olga was therefore an ‘enemy of the people’, even though she could not do anything about her uncle fleeing to the West. When she was still at school she knew this would impact greatly on her future career. Some teachers always gave her lower grades because she did not come from an impeccable communist family. Olga has resigned herself to this fact, because she knew the bad grades were not due to her intelligence level, but due to the bias of teachers who had read the information in her file. In the end. she was not allowed to go to university and she had to settle for a job as a clerk.
I hoped she would have better luck since then, but I feared the worst. I was almost sure that Olga’s lover was married. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but there were so many men that did not wear a ring when looking for an adventure. If he was not married, then he would have invited her round to his place ages ago. Instead they had quickies in stinking toilets. Did Olga not realize this? Perhaps she did, but she cherished her illusions for as long as they lasted.
A packet of butter
‘May I have a packet of butter?’ I asked after waiting for a while at the counter of the grocery store.
The saleswoman pointed to the telephone. Of course, I had seen that she was on the ‘phone, but from what I heard it did not seem that important. She continued her telephone call without batting an eyelid and turned her back to me. The salespeople had become so powerful in Bulgaria because of the scarcity of products that they could afford to do anything.
To kill time, I studied the products on display, one by one. They all had boring packaging with a simple caption. Rows of green bottles with washing up liquid, white soap, boxes full of laundry detergent, milk in plastic bags (which I always found difficult to open). Not one thing on the half-empty shelves looked particularly attractive and yet all these products sold well. The secret of the planned economy of the communist party. The party that thought they could predict the needs of the consumer and in turn produced just as many products as they thought were necessary. Usually the prediction was on the low side and the products sold without any problems. Unlucky people who came too late had to do without or borrow from the neighbour.
I never managed to fathom the logic behind our planned economy. Why were staplers on sale everywhere, but not the staples? I stared for a while at the grey floor in the grocery store, at the beige walls, at the yellowed white ceiling with fluorescent lighting which only seemed to add to the cold atmosphere. I only knew of one store which looked even worse: the large children’s store in the city centre. The salespeople never smiled and they stood like soldiers to guard the toys. The little one were not allowed to touch anything. The grumpy salespeople only allowed the parents to hold the toys for a little while before buying them.
After I realized from the saleswoman’s voice that she still had no intention of hanging up the ‘phone, I tentatively asked again: ‘May I have a packet of butter?’.
The older, rather stout woman, had apparently had enough of my moaning. With a gracious turn, she put a sign saying ‘closed’ in front of me. I would not have sought such graciousness behind her blunt exterior. I felt completely powerless. I had been stupid. If only I had stared at the walls and floor longer, I would have been holding the packet of butter now.
I left the store with my head bowed and sauntered home. I felt terrible, even though I didn’t really know why. The rudeness of the saleswoman was after all not that uncommon. All the other salespeople were also rude to their customers. They were not paid to be polite. Some of them explicitly tried their best to chase the customers away, because the less customers they had, the quieter their day. That way they could read a book and at the end of the month they received just as much money.
Being a salesperson was actually not a bad job, but I suspected this was not meant for me. My parents had raised the bar for my future much higher than that. They left it for me to decided what I wanted to become, but this meant hundreds of jobs could be discarded right away. In any case I was expected to make a career and find employment in which I could intellectually develop myself. To be honest at the time I did not understand why I could not be a saleswoman. That way I would have lots of time every day to telephone them and the other hours I could of course spend on reading books and other forms of intellectual development.