if you could see
The Empire Strikes Back
and
Return of the Jedi
for the third time. The trade in Turbo chewing-gum wrappers reached a frenzy, and my bookmarks now consisted of wrappers with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Lea gazing across distant galaxies. If my schooling under Gesheva was a long ideological battle, it was my decadent Western fantasies that triumphed in the end.
The year was 1986 and our primary school class now dissolved into the big bad world of secondary education. As some stayed behind and others went to specialist schools, all of my classroom friendships, except Esther, ended with School 81 and the onset of pubescence (Toni, lying: I’m screwing girls. Me, jealous: I bet they have syphilis). But my non-school friends, the kids of my parents’ friends, were there to stay. After all, our parents shared the same world: a world where political jokes and birthday parties were the norm, and you were united by a distrust of the idiots in the brown suits.
Thanks to my mother’s unfulfilled childhood dream to learn the piano, I was also about to discover the existence, right there in the Youths, of a parallel world of the muses and music, a world away from the stiff ranks of the Pioneers, and the utilitarian ways of Comrade Gesheva.
My piano teacher Keti Marchinkova was exotic in every conceivable way – foreign name, blonde face, husbandless, and childless. Her grandmother had been German. She lived with her mother in a central city apartment. It was an enchanted place: cats in the communal courtyard; giant plants inside the darkened, carpeted rooms smellingof cigarette ash, perfume, and closeted bourgeoisie. Keti’s red lipstick left sensuous traces on the edge of glasses. The scent of exotic flowers enveloped the piano while her sturdy fingers worked miracles in C minor.
I was officially enrolled in the children’s music school Flag of Peace, which meant that I initially had my lessons with Keti in one of the Youths’ Cultural Centre premises. The space allocated to us was a squat, concrete trafopost which consisted of two rooms: a tiny room with a piano, and a larger room for cultural activities like concerts by the Centre’s pupils. The heating inevitably broke down in winter, and Keti wore her coat and shawl, her throat constantly tickled by a bohemian smoker’s cough. The massive electricity transformer was right next to us, humming its industrial radio-magnetic noises, driving my teacher mad with tinnitus, and chipping away at our immune systems.
Keti seemed to have stumbled into the Youth world of panels, overcrowded buses and nervy working families by mistake. She belonged to another era or another country, and yet here she was, sitting with me and the electricity transformer, patiently nurturing my musical efforts from scales all the way to Beethoven.
‘
Moderato!
Slow down, are you late for an appointment or something?
‘Well, if he could hear this, uncle Mendelssohn would turn in his grave.’
Over time, my parents befriended her, and she would join other family friends at our birthday parties, the only arty person in a crowd of ‘poor engineers’, mathematicians and physicists. One night, she drifted away from the adults who were talking and chain-smoking in the living-room, into the kitchen where we kids were playing. ‘This isa great party,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful to feel part of the family.’ Her eyes were bloodshot, she was a bit drunk, and a pang of sadness went through me, for her or for me, I didn’t quite know. I wanted her to be part of the family, but I knew that we were far too ordinary for her, and at the end of the evening, she would always walk off into the blackness and the late-night buses alone.
Some afternoons, I went to see her play at the plush café of the National Palace of Culture, the epicentre of all things luxurious. In the café, bigwigs and State-approved artistes sipped cocktails and nibbled complicated cakes. Official guests were
The Empire Strikes Back
and
Return of the Jedi
for the third time. The trade in Turbo chewing-gum wrappers reached a frenzy, and my bookmarks now consisted of wrappers with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Lea gazing across distant galaxies. If my schooling under Gesheva was a long ideological battle, it was my decadent Western fantasies that triumphed in the end.
The year was 1986 and our primary school class now dissolved into the big bad world of secondary education. As some stayed behind and others went to specialist schools, all of my classroom friendships, except Esther, ended with School 81 and the onset of pubescence (Toni, lying: I’m screwing girls. Me, jealous: I bet they have syphilis). But my non-school friends, the kids of my parents’ friends, were there to stay. After all, our parents shared the same world: a world where political jokes and birthday parties were the norm, and you were united by a distrust of the idiots in the brown suits.
Thanks to my mother’s unfulfilled childhood dream to learn the piano, I was also about to discover the existence, right there in the Youths, of a parallel world of the muses and music, a world away from the stiff ranks of the Pioneers, and the utilitarian ways of Comrade Gesheva.
My piano teacher Keti Marchinkova was exotic in every conceivable way – foreign name, blonde face, husbandless, and childless. Her grandmother had been German. She lived with her mother in a central city apartment. It was an enchanted place: cats in the communal courtyard; giant plants inside the darkened, carpeted rooms smellingof cigarette ash, perfume, and closeted bourgeoisie. Keti’s red lipstick left sensuous traces on the edge of glasses. The scent of exotic flowers enveloped the piano while her sturdy fingers worked miracles in C minor.
I was officially enrolled in the children’s music school Flag of Peace, which meant that I initially had my lessons with Keti in one of the Youths’ Cultural Centre premises. The space allocated to us was a squat, concrete trafopost which consisted of two rooms: a tiny room with a piano, and a larger room for cultural activities like concerts by the Centre’s pupils. The heating inevitably broke down in winter, and Keti wore her coat and shawl, her throat constantly tickled by a bohemian smoker’s cough. The massive electricity transformer was right next to us, humming its industrial radio-magnetic noises, driving my teacher mad with tinnitus, and chipping away at our immune systems.
Keti seemed to have stumbled into the Youth world of panels, overcrowded buses and nervy working families by mistake. She belonged to another era or another country, and yet here she was, sitting with me and the electricity transformer, patiently nurturing my musical efforts from scales all the way to Beethoven.
‘
Moderato!
Slow down, are you late for an appointment or something?
‘Well, if he could hear this, uncle Mendelssohn would turn in his grave.’
Over time, my parents befriended her, and she would join other family friends at our birthday parties, the only arty person in a crowd of ‘poor engineers’, mathematicians and physicists. One night, she drifted away from the adults who were talking and chain-smoking in the living-room, into the kitchen where we kids were playing. ‘This isa great party,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful to feel part of the family.’ Her eyes were bloodshot, she was a bit drunk, and a pang of sadness went through me, for her or for me, I didn’t quite know. I wanted her to be part of the family, but I knew that we were far too ordinary for her, and at the end of the evening, she would always walk off into the blackness and the late-night buses alone.
Some afternoons, I went to see her play at the plush café of the National Palace of Culture, the epicentre of all things luxurious. In the café, bigwigs and State-approved artistes sipped cocktails and nibbled complicated cakes. Official guests were
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