Glory Ho

We actually found a place called Amsterdam in Bucharest. There was something about the French music and the natural light and the big windows and the burgundy velvet curtain around the doorway and the saxophones and trumpets and teapots and cameras being sold second hand across the street that really worked. A man with a fauxhawk served us black tea on plates in the shape of a wave. I took notes on a napkin. These are the places a grey day is made for, I tell Michael. Who needs that silly old sun anyway?

In Bucharest, Michael taught me about photography. I think, sadly enough, that what I’ve been doing most of my life is actually called “documentation”. Not that I ever called myself a photographer. And there’s nothing wrong with documentation. But still. Sad. To make it an art form, he tells me, you must see the world in shapes. Look for lines between the light and the dark. Mix modes and swirls and blurs. Create your own masterpiece from a candy wrapper. I feel as though I am now searching for a new dimension at any given moment. Wow.

Alex ran his little villa like a house. Any question posed seemed to be answered with a Why not? So we used the computer, the laundry line, the towels and the kitchen with ease. We made our own tea and poured our own wine. The door was always unlocked. Alex slept in one of the 10 Euro rooms himself. The bathrooms were only as clean as you would expect a fifty year old man to be. The dorms had thick comforters, scary murals, wooden bunk beds and that morning breath smell, which seems to haunt every hostel. Room lights flickered like a disco long before guiding your way. There was a recipe for polenta, which is really just a fancy word for corn mush, painted on the kitchen wall. Polenta is actually Italian, but in a common form of what I call national-dish-sampling (something I sampled from the music industry’s now habitual practices) countries are always claiming other country’s food as their own. Alex kept the sugar in an old blue German tin, which reminded me of something my Grandma Enright used to do.

We couldn’t help but compare Bucharest to Sofia. It’s why we came. We wanted to see a country, which, from a global and journalistic perspective, was continuously lumped together with Bulgaria. Everything looked similar on the surface. Grey buildings, a lot of graffiti, the occasional attractively-pillared architecture, and an ugly assortment of imitation Times Square signs sat on stilts atop every roof. McDonalds signs bursting through in Technicolor. Very few smiles. Poor service.

But that where it ended. Compared to Sofia, the city of Bucharest maintained a much wiser use of space. Someone had known how to create a town square, tree-lined paths to greatness, manicured parks, a traffic circle with a center worth going around. Everything had been built on a grander scale. Buildings towered higher and could be seen from a distance. Fountains lounged lavishly for penny-throwers. Restored architecture, clever Christmas lights and modern cafes were plentiful. EU Celebration was everywhere. Bucharest had been imitating Western Europe for quite some time. That was obvious. Sofia, in contrast, was behind. While much cozier, it was constantly tripping over itself. Too, Bucharest was more on the ball with infrastructure. Instead of haggard female brutes beneath of cloud of smoke, the train station employed polite, uniformed clerks. Buses boasted electronic signs to announce stops prior to arrival and trams were less like squeaky train cars and more like airport monorails.

But it’s all about history, as usual.

Romania had been a kingdom, served by Ceausescu and his wife, an anti-Soviet, totalitarian team, who were inspired by the sweeping squares of communist North Korea and China to build their own capital in a similar style. They also wasted a whole lot of the public’s lei on structures which included helicopter pads and life-size megalomaniacal portraits. So, when Romanian rebels finally tired of the bread lines, taxes on childless individuals, massive debt and Stalinist style of control, and executed the couple (him, at this point delusional enough to be singing their national anthem and her screaming at everyone to go to hell) there was, amid confusion and fear, at least a small sense of triumph. This all happened back in 1989, the year that Seinfeld premiered and my husband graduated from high school.

The problem is that this kind of thing never happened in Bulgaria. There WAS no revolution. Bulgarians, for some reason, rarely formed rebel groups or staged uprisings. As a result, no one automatically qualifed by merit of their past actions or beliefs, to take on the new democratic roles and therefore, they remained open to anybody, including former agents and spies, who gradually became active in fund-smuggling.

For the fifty-seventh time, we realized that Bulgaria was different. A little more in the dark. A little less happy. A little more behind.

Hmmm.

In the countryside, a similar pattern. As we bolted through their plains on the snake-shaped spaceship they called a train, old people stared with wonder and spite. Every scene that was Romania, seemed Bulgaria, too. Green gates, rocky roads, scarfed babas, grey train stations, tired donkeys, littered ditches, empty trees, broken benches. A sadness we knew well. But then, the differences broke through. Haystacks, just like you might picture, along with their needles, were everywhere. Houses, medieval, massive and pointy, like a queen’s fingernails, “ta-da”-ed from country cliff-sides.

And as I watched out the window, I caught a glimpse, a flash, a moment the size and shape of a dream. One you try and paste to the wall inside your head, because you know that it will soon fade away. An old man—how do I know he was old? I couldn’t see his face. I just knew. He wore a long, grayish-blue trenchcoat and a fedora. Next to him, stood a five year old boy with a puffy winter coat. A hundred yards back from the tracks, in an empty, dirt field, they stood next to each other, both feet apart, like a photo that had already been taken.

They were waving at the train.

I shot my hand up, a little late. I hope they saw me. But it doesn’t even matter. They were waving at strangers, assuming they were friends. They were exuding positive energy into this cruel world. In the Balkans, it was a rare and startling gesture.

But it happened to me. I saw it. I swear I did. And I’m holding onto that, scratching to keep a grip with the few fingernails I’ve got left.