Street Without a Name Read Free Page B

really really shows.
    Borba Brumbashka, from ‘I Lived Socialism’, Sofia 2006



2 In the Students’ Town
    Flawed beginnings
    I come from Sofia. I was initially happy, then with the onset of consciousness unhappy, then with the advent of adolescence wretchedly miserable, and finally, in the last throes of my domestic incarceration, convinced I was born in the wrong place and had to escape at all costs. In other words, an ordinary childhood followed by an ordinary adolescence, followed by an ordinary emigration – more or less.
    But Sofia was not an ordinary place. Drab and unlovely – yes, likethe regime that had planted its lardy apparatchik’s behind in its centre. In many ways, Sofia was a fitting capital of the Socialist Camp, or Soc Camp, as we called it. Oddly, the grimly accurate overtones of the word ‘camp’ were ignored by its very inmates.
    Like all self-respecting Cold War cities, Sofia had two official faces. The brave new world of its concrete ‘residential complexes’ on the outskirts was built to house those from the Province, the Workers, and Young Families (us). The old Sofia with turn-of-the-century buildings and leafy parks was for old Sofia families, the Privileged and the Connected (them).
    There was a strict State quota on everything, from apartments and cars, to female sanitary pads and sunflower margarine. You couldn’t just go and buy what you felt like, whenever you felt like it – that was capitalism. No, the State provided everything, and by the time you got it, you had waited so long that it felt like a small miracle – and you felt relief mixed with gratitude.
    My twenty-something parents waited their turn for an apartment for years, meanwhile renting a minuscule studio flat on the eleventh floor of a high-rise in the Students’ Town. My mother quickly learned to keep the windows shut, after she caught me in the nick of time, on the point of crawling out of the window to explore the world below. We shared a bathroom and a kitchen with a whole floor of young ‘student’ families. Children’s birthdays were celebrated in the common room, which was always semi-dark and smelt sterile and vaguely official, like a dentist’s waiting-room. On the long Politburo-style table we blew out our birthday candles and smeared our carefully ironed clothes with the small sandwiches carefully made by our mothers. Our crayon masterpieces decorated the grim walls. My hopeful depictions of springtime as a series of unlikely princesseswith flowers sprouting from their heads were on display even in winter.
    My mother had recently ceased to be a student and was now gainfully employed in a giant Central Institute for Computational Technology full of machines that spewed out tons of coloured perforated cards with tiny numbers on them. The institute buildings looked like the HQ of a nuclear power station. The floors, corridors and open-plan offices inside them were so immense that I couldn’t understand how my mother didn’t get lost every time she opened a door.
    Going home on the overcrowded bus, my mother would look up at the lit-up windows of proper apartment buildings and think, Why, why can’t there be a lit-up window for us too? From time to time, she would also have a sudden attack of nerves, and run down the eleven floors to get away from the claustrophobic little family stuffed inside the single room. Meanwhile, inside the room, my father typed up his mathematics PhD thesis on a noisy typewriter. When the last page landed on the neat pile, ending three years of hard work and paving the way to his compulsory military service, his first critic was already there: a one-year-old sitting on the table, peeing over his manuscript.
    Thanks to the army, my father missed the second and third years of my life. He was sent to a place called Vratsa in the north, where the brand-new doctor of maths crawled in the mud towards the Western capitalist decadent enemy, and wrote rhyming couplets about a toddler