Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova Read Free Book Online Page A

towards the Ottomans to liberate Bulgaria. Coming out of the Olympiad, I looked at the statue, and saw with a sinking heart that far from charging, the horse had all its hooves planted on the ground. I’ll never know whether this small glitch separated me from a medal but, as I said, in the general scheme of ambitious Sofia parents and child-geniuses, we were very low key.
    By age ten, I had learned several vital lessons.
    One (Literature): streets in the West crawl with drug addicts, criminals, and capitalists. Nobody protects you there. This was confirmed by my reading of a magnificently illustrated
David Copperfield
, where the evil Uriah Heep had red hair and a crooked nose, and every woman wore a different-coloured fabulous dress. The editor’s postscript to the book read: ‘Every morning thousands of children in England and the entire capitalist world disappeared into dark mines and factories. This is the dreadful legacy of capitalism.’ You couldn’t argue with that.
    Whereas we luckily had the Mother-Party:
She watches over us each day
like a mother tender and dear.
At school, at work, at play,
She gives us strength and cheer.
    Two (History): in the history of humankind there are several progressive stages of socio-political order – Primitivism, Slavery, Feudalism, Fascism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. Capitalism is only slightly better than Fascism. After Communism, there is nothing except the blinding light of the Bright Future, and this is what we aspire for. We’re not quite there yet, but we are pretty close.
    Three (general knowledge): the nuclear family is the smallest structural unit in the Mature Socialist Society. Children from broken homes become delinquents and anti-social elements. They go to Corrective Labour Schools where they are corrected through labour.
    Four (an unsettling gut feeling): at School 81 you have roughly three options – excel and be noticed at your peril, blend in and be safe, or rebel and be broken. I wasn’t sure which option I should take. But before I had time to figure it out, I experienced a further clarification: I had little choice in the matter. I was to excel and be noticed at my peril.
    My first experience of the dilemmas of School 81 came at age eight, which was when we started learning Russian. I had already decided not to bother with Russian. I just couldn’t see the point. It was a compulsory subject, and therefore one of life’s tedious musts, like algebra and chemistry, and it sounded too similar to Bulgarian to be of any obvious use. All the Russians I knew – my parents’ friends – were married to Bulgarians and already spoke perfect Bulgarian. For some reason, though, the Russian teacher decided from day one that I was going to excel in her subject, whether or not I wanted it.
    ‘Number Sixteen,’ the teacher snapped, breaking her ruler on the desk after I made a mess of the genitive case at the blackboard yet again, ‘you have no respect. You should be ashamed of yourself.’ And I was. Because I could see that deep down the Russian teacher was a nice woman, and it wasn’t her fault that she had to teach a language nobody wanted to learn. But soon I began to see some practical advantages to linguistic excellence.
    In November 1981, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died and our school had a morning of mourning. We stood in the yard in neat, frozen units, listening to giant speakers thunder out recorded Soviet Army songs like ‘
Vstavai strana ogromnaya
’ (‘Rise, oh Mighty Country’), a motivational anti-Fascist war song from the 1940s.
    The school director Comrade Geshev, a dour apparatchik in a brown suit, gave The Speech. All his speeches were identical and all we heard was a continuous drone. The Russian teacher stood on the platform next to him, in place of honour, weeping into her fringed shawl. She was dressed in black, like the grieving woman on the second floor of our apartment block. It was, she told us through a