Street Without a Name Read Free Page A

footballer with blond highlights, a pop-singer and a general celebrity about town with a tiny forehead and even more modest talents. Their conversations go like this: wow man, no babe, yeah babe, wicked shit, check it out, no way! I can feel my brain cells dying by the millions.
    I turn the TV off, and turn the radio on. It’s talk-back and the subject is orgasm. A thick-accented man of few words is calling from an unnamed town and treating us to his liberal opinion on how he doesn’t mind when his girlfriend does it with other men. What’s your profession? the talk hostess asks. I’m a pimp, he says matter-of-factly. I’ve seen her do it with many others. I don’t really care. Girlfriends come and go, but the main thing is that I’m free to live wherever I want because I’m financially independent.
    I turn off the radio and turn to the bookshelves for therapy. I start picking up books at random. There are three generations of books here, with all sorts of forgotten inscriptions. My grandfather Alexander’s hand: ‘1990, the first truly democratic Bulgarian elections this century.’ A book for my father, inscribed on pencil lines by the diligent hand of some young Party commissar: ‘for outstanding contributions to the Comsomol’. A book for my mother from my father before I was even a squeak in the bed springs: ‘with love on her 21st birthday’. A book for grandmother Anastassia from an operasinger friend who always signed off in French: ‘
Voilà, ma chère
’. A book to me from some long-forgotten classmate in 1981, with the official Socialist child’s birthday wish: ‘Happy Birthday dear Kapka, I wish you health, joy, and high grades in school.’
    And suddenly, without warning, I turn into the gouty airport émigré from Amerika. Stupid tears burn my eyes, I can’t form thoughts or even feelings, and the fat of elapsed decades begins to suffocate me. In a fit of Proustian apoplexy, I grab handfuls of books from the shelves, open them at random, sniff them, search inside for signs and clues. Something, anything to tell me what went on in those distant, blurry years that I have so carefully forgotten.
    I pile them up on tables and chairs, on the floor. I dig deeper into the cupboards, knocking over old knick-knacks, photographs pressed under glass, and more books.
    And sure enough, every book causes a vague stirring. Dry Ordinary Biscuits and rosehip marmalade, a whiff of Nivea sun lotion on a German beach towel sniffed from a distance, the bracing tune of ‘We were born of the red flag’, the snowdrops of March, the ski-lift between the legs, the wail of alarms during Civil Defence school trips, roast peppers in the neighbourhood: a ghostly tidal wave of yearnings, fears, and adolescent sorrows submerges me and leaves me choking.
    Dusk spills inside the Peach Street apartment, the chill of the Balkan night stabs at my Scottish boots and New Zealand scarf, and the cherry-black eyes of the painting are fixed on me.
    I suddenly see that I have sleepwalked through my life between then and now. Between the hazy eighties and these grown-up days, there is a void. And in this void I see a familiar figure running frantically between continents, not knowing what it’s running from. Just contemplating the tiny wretch tires me.
    Since leaving Bulgaria, I have gone backwards and forwards across the world several times, propelled by a slightly manic energy. I managed to convince myself that I’d left Bulgaria behind for good. I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from? they ask. Does it matter? I answer.
    But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other places and people, if you don’t even know where you come from?

PART ONE
Childhood
    We are three sisters.
    The eldest is Struggle.
    The middle one is Victory.
    The youngest is Faith.
    All born under Socialism.
    And it