Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova Read Free Book Online

lived in a bare apartment and never hosted birthday parties; stranger still, her father had a beard, the sure sign of the dissident. Kids like overachieving Dima, whose ambitious parents had drilled her to come top in every subject and avoid anybody with low grades.
    Compared to Dima’s parents, my own were apathetic slobs. However, on the one occasion that I got a four in a maths test, instead of the usual five or top six as befits the child of ‘engineers’, my mother impressed upon me, with the help of tears and broken plates, that if I continued in the same vein I would end up washing dishes in some dismal kitchen, married to a truck-driver who would beat me. I was nine.
    Now, if my mother’s reaction seems neurotic, it was appropriately neurotic. Because what could an educated person hope for their child to be, except educated? To have special privileges, money and status, you had to be a big-shot factory director like Penka’s father, and that was a rather vulgar, social climbing thing to be in the eyes of my parents and their friends. Besides, you had to be already connected. We weren’t.
    So all you were left with was education. It gave you an inner world and the company of other educated people. It gave you an inhabitable space in the uninhabitable Youths. It gave you the possibility to emigrate ‘internally’. It gave you the chance to subvert the Marxist motto which proclaimed that the Exemplary Socialist Citizen’sexistence determined his conscience. The trick then was to make your conscience determine your existence, because it was the only act of freedom left to the Citizen. Otherwise you were stuck with the mud, the psychopath downstairs, and the bear clan above.
    Until that traumatic four, maths had left me cold, but the threat of that truck-driver husband propelled me to sudden mathematical heights. Within a year, my father had revived my interest in maths with home-made problems to solve. This beat the textbook maths problems (Sample: ‘A record-breaking truck-driver transported fifteen tons of grain in one year. If his productivity increased two-fold every year, how many tons of grain would he transport in five years?’) Soon I was ahead of Dima and duly attending maths and physics Olympiads along with the more obvious literature Olympiads.
    The Olympiads were academic marathons separated from exams only by their seemingly voluntary nature. You
could
decline to participate in an Olympiad, but that would mark you out as suspiciously unambitious. So you went voluntarily. At the Olympiads you, the bespectacled pride of ambitious parents, sat for half a day with an exam paper, and composed essays or solved advanced mathematical problems. The idea was to identify the most gifted kids in each subject, starting with your school, then your district, and ending with city-wide, national and international Olympiads. Why? For the same reason that the State generously sponsored athletes who then went on to demonstrate to the world the explosive muscular power of Socialism.
    So here was a regime where the head of state and his cronies were, in my mother’s whispered phrase, ‘idiots in brown suits’. A regime where intellectual, bourgeois, elite, and individualistic were dirty words. But where, at the same time, academic, sporting and musicalachievements were state-encouraged, state-sponsored, and even state-imposed.
    People were too preoccupied by the chore of daily survival to notice this brisk irony. And if they did, like my parents they kept their insights to themselves. You never knew who might be listening.
    If you came top at the Olympiads, you could even end up travelling abroad or winning a medal. I made it only to the Sofia Literature Olympiad, where I wrote an essay on the topic of ‘Sofia: she grows but never ages’. The fatal crunch came when I wrote, in inspired prose, about the heroic mid-flight stance of the horse of the Russian Tsar Liberator statue outside the Assembly Hall, as he charges