Street Without a Name Read Free

workmen glance at me but don’t ask questions. Eventually, the key works. I climb up the three floors. Again no numbers, so I try every lock until the key turns. The family’s new apartment has an industrial-sized, bomb-proof double door fit for the Pentagon. Expat apartments are particularly attractive to burglars. The neighbours, who aren’t even expats, have a similar Pentagon door. They’ve been burgled twice. But then they have, or at least had, priceless paintings and antiques. Somehow, we have landed among the new rich.
    We have also landed among drug-traffickers of select Balkan nationalities. Just the other day, there was a shooting in the courtyard of our building. Masked men shot and wounded four people, including a baby.
    I let myself in and walk over the tiled floor of the family apartment. In the bedroom, I discover that the floor has risen into a large bump, as if a family of busy moles is living inside the cement. I lift the carpet. The tiles are broken from the pressure and underneath, I can see cement. A bomb? A gunshot? I don’t know who lives downstairs, and after the recent events, do I dare find out? I don’t. I drop the carpet quickly, and with a nervous whistle I step outside on the unswept balcony overlooking the courtyard. A fleet of four-wheel drives with tinted windows is parked in the courtyard, ready for the next drug safari.
    I cross the flat and go out on the other balcony, overlooking the street. I instantly make eye contact with a swarthy worker from the construction site next door. He’s hanging in a harness at the level ofour balcony, having a smoke. ‘Good afternoon,’ he says. ‘How’re you doing?’
    ‘OK,’ I say, ‘I think.’ And under his amused gaze I go back inside.
    I examine the dusty interior. Our family apartment’s riches consist of several hundred books printed before, during, and after Communism, and a half-broken Phillips TV from 1984 which brings back the first wave of memories. After six months of thrift and self-starvation at a Dutch university campus, my father’s research visit culminated in the triumphant purchase of this TV. When we left Bulgaria, the TV went to my grandfather Alexander’s apartment, on the edge of Sofia, where he sat in a rocking-chair by his window, looking out on the looming blue bulk of Vitosha Mountain. He used to peel apples, then offer the thinly sliced rounds to us on the tip of a blunt knife. We were his only family. When we left for New Zealand, he continued to peel apples, the TV turned up to maximum. On each of our birthdays, he bought a good book and inscribed it in his pedantic accountant’s handwriting, to mark the occasion. He couldn’t afford to send it or call us long distance. On my thirtieth birthday, he marked the occasion differently: by jumping out of a seventh-floor window to his death. The window was in the bedroom where he had slept with my grandmother Anastassia. My mother sold his apartment where, unsurprisingly, none of us wanted to go again, and this new flat in Peach Street replaced it.
    The eyes of my Macedonian grandmother Anastassia, aged twenty-something, follow me around the room from a spookily lifelike oil painting. She died in the year of Chernobyl, when I was twelve, but she seems to recognize me now, and she seems to be saying something important from behind layers of oils, in a language incomprehensible to the living. It’s all a bit too much.
    I don’t want to be left alone with her in this unfamiliar room, and since I don’t have any luggage to unpack, I turn on the TV. Here’s an ad. A manicured female hand holds a credit card to the sound of some breezy classical music. A treacly male voice says: ‘What is the difference between a good man and a perfect man? Five centimetres.’ The TV is so decrepit it only broadcasts two channels. Next,
Big Brother
, the local version. It features a
chalga
, or folk-pop sensation with silicone lips and breasts and the obligatory bleached hair, a