to me,’ I said.
The Nabokov thing touched me; it was a naively pretentious comment. I smiled. And she smiled. Without a smile on her face she looked older and darker. Her smile, clearly, was her strong point. Yes, she could have been my daughter. Back then I, too, had had a weak spot for Abba.
‘What are you engaged in at present? Any employment?’ I said, rather stiffly.
‘Why so formal?’ she asked, edgily. ‘Aren’t we friends?’
‘Are you a student at the Slavic Department?’
‘Oh, no. I’m finished!’ she said, importantly.
‘What are you pursuing now?’
‘You’ll never guess!’ she said.
We could not get beyond the stiltedness.
‘You were saying?’
‘Just now I’m deep into folklore studies.’
‘And the doctorate and all that? You’ve completed it?’
‘Piece of cake!’ she said.
If there was something I could not abide, it was folklore and the people who studied folklore. Folklorists were inane, they were academic infants. They snuggled into their academic nooks and crannies, quiet, in nobody’s way. In my day, through all those zones so rich in folklore – Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania – it was mostly folklorists nosing around. They were interested in only two things: folklore and communism at the level of folklore (political jokes, chastushkas, ganga singing, communist legends). These days I could no longer swear that there was anything more to it, but at the time their interest struck me as intellectually second-rate. Domestic folklorists were generally closet nationalists, as became abundantly clear later on, once the hatred had surfaced. Then the war came. Foreigners, western Europeans and Americans imposed their academic colonialism without risk: there was no danger that the ‘natives’ would boil them and eat them for dinner. That is why so many foreigners, despite the rich pickings of Renaissance literature, the baroque, Modernism, the allure of the Avant-garde, even Postmodernism, latched on to folklore and would not let go. When Yugoslavia came undone, there were many disappointed, perceiving the collapse as a plot levelled against them, personally. The lively international meetings suddenly vanished, where the šljivovica had flowed in streams and the lambs had turned blithely on the spit; there were no more embroidered towels, naive painters, fervent circle dances, ethno-souvenirs and chatty local intellectuals who always had time for every one and every subject. Once the war had erupted, there were new ‘folklorists’ who hurried to this new zone, and the hatred became an engaging field for study in anthropology, ethnology and folklore. From the legend of Kraljević Marko, they moved on to the latter-day legends of murderers, criminals and mafia bosses, the Serbian hero Arkan and his maiden Ceca, and the Croatian hero and playboy Ante Gotovina. The victims were of little interest to anyone.
‘Well, folklore studies certainly are a discipline,’ I said, to be kind.
I had her pegged, she was a bookworm, she had finished her university studies and earned her doctorate in record time. Maybe one day she would become Bulgarian minister for culture. When the need arises in countries like this, folklore scholars are at the top of the list, I thought.
‘Where do you work?’
‘I’m in transition at the moment,’ she said, placing special emphasis on her answer. It was a little signal to me, as if she were cajoling me with the quote. In one of my texts I had spoken of the newly coined euphemisms of our age. To be in transition meant to be out of work. I pretended not to notice. These occasional quotes of hers grated on my ear. She was using the wrong tone.
‘And now you’re looking for a job?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘In Sofia?’
The question was pointless; I was stretching the conversation out like chewing gum. Luckily the dish we’d ordered had arrived. I noticed that Aba had ordered the same thing I ordered.
On our way out of the restaurant I recognised where we were. An empty square with a fountain in the middle stood before us. I hadn’t noticed it at first, probably because I was so tired. There was a theatre on the square and some ungainly exemplar of communist architecture, the municipal offices, or something similar. My eye caught sight of a neon sign for the City Hotel and I hurried over to it. The entrance to the hotel was from a side street.
‘Have you any rooms available?’ I asked the young receptionist.
‘Yes, we do.’
‘Do I need to make a reservation tonight if I need a room tomorrow?’
‘No.’
‘Tomorrow I’ll be back,’ I said.
The receptionist nodded courteously, from right to left, as the Bulgarians do.
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
