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

microphone, a sad day for everyone in our two brotherly countries. I wondered how you could be sad for someone you didn’t actually know, but I knew there were questions you didn’t ask. When we were finally released and allowed inside, I saw that Brezhnev’s bushy-eyebrowed portrait was guarded outside the director’s office by star pupils who stood erect and proud. Had I tried harder at Russian, I too might have had that honour, I reflected, and been discharged from Russian classes. At last, a reason for genuine sadness.
    A reason for geniune interest in Russian came in the form of a pop song, ‘A Million Scarlet Roses’. It was performed by none other thanthe rising star of Soviet pop music Alla Pugacheva, who sang it with glossy lipstick, white furs, soulful eye-shadow, and enormous hair. The only bit of the song I could understand was the refrain (‘millions, millions, millions of scarlet roses’) and one evening, when the glittery Alla was on TV, I asked my mother to translate the song for me.
    And here was the story – a true story, my mother said – of a poor painter who loved an actress so much that he sold all his paintings to buy her a sea of roses. When she woke up and opened her window, she thought she was dreaming: the street was all awash with roses. She wondered who this fabulously rich admirer was. And down in the street – my mother stifled a sob – stood the ruined painter. It was romance on a grand scale, and it was like nothing else we had in our lives. It was also proof that Russian songs could be more personal than the military choir of ‘Rise, oh Mighty Country’.
    Around that time, I also became infatuated with Pushkin’s novel in verse,
Evgenii Onegin
. The story of the noble Tatiana and the tormented Evgenii in nineteenth-century Russia was worlds away from grammatical cases at the blackboard. Here were deadly duels, impossible love, philosophical musings about happiness, and amazing clothes. And it was all in couplets. I suddenly saw the point of learning the genitive case. The Russian teacher started smiling at me, and calling me Kapka instead of Number Sixteen.
    A good young citizen excels not only in the classroom, of course, but also outside, and our extra-curricular activities were just as important as lessons. On Civil Defence days, we were taken into the city centre and down into a stuffy, claustrophobic underground bunker. There, we saw horrific photographs of devastated places called Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of people wearing gas-masks. The masks themselves were there too, and we all had to put one on, toget used to it, for the day when the Fascist-imperialist enemy attacked our Fatherland with a nuclear bomb. The scenario was deadly serious, but practising in masks with elephant-like trunks at the front was hilarious – until you couldn’t breathe any more and the mask had to be removed by a teacher.
    Then there were the visits to the mausoleum of our Great Leader Georgi Dimitriov. In the arctic chill and silence of the marble tomb, I stood in line behind my comrades for a peek at the great man. I wondered if the two young guards who stood, stiff and unblinking, on each side of the display cabinet were in fact frozen solid. The Great Leader had a slightly more relaxed air, but only because he was horizontal. He lay in a glass box, dressed in a suit, and looked like he was made of plastic.
    The good citizen must also be a good Pioneer. The Pioneers’ uniform was white shirts, navy-blue pleated skirts or trousers, and red polyester tie-scarves soaked in the blood of dead partisans. The Pioneers took over from the youngest comrades, the blue-scarfed Chavdars, who had to recite the following programmatic lines:
The little Chavdar works hard.
At home and in school
the little Chavdar is number one.
He knows: he’ll be a Pioneer soon.
    After the Pioneers came the Comsomol at high school, culminating in full-blown Communist Party membership, which was optional. Being a