Issue 66

We sat in a side room of the British residence in central Sofia a day after someone had broken the window of Jonathan Allen's Landrover and stolen his GPS. Of course, this could happen anywhere, Allen laughed, noting that his car has been broken into three times in five months, the other two in the UK. The Bulgarian police were very efficient, he told me. "At the end of the report-filing procedure – I did learn some new vocabulary, ogled – the policewoman said, because you are a foreigner we will have to inform your embassy. OK, I said, I am well connected with the British Embassy."

Tomas insists the new exercises will help.

"Come on!" he yells, "like a clam! Clam!"

And even though his arm movements suggest the opening and closing of a shell, it takes me a moment to understand what he's saying. With his accent, I keep hearing "klum." I lie on my side and, with feet together, very slowly begin to lift my top leg, forming a greater-than sign.

"Come on," he says, "this is not geriatrics. Higher."

"Tomas. It's worse this time."

One day Cupcake stopped showing up altogether. For the last few months they'd seen him less and less oft en on his favorite bench, and when he did turn up, he more or less behaved himself. Finally he disappeared entirely. Had the neighborhood thugs beaten him up? No, they hadn't, or at least nobody had run into him on the street with a black eye or a broken nose, not for months now. Th e neighborhood started getting used to the idea that Cupcake had settled down, that he was sitting at home with his Mattie the Fatty and sobering up.

It was, however, completely ignored by Qatar's business community, as no Qatari entrepreneur bothered to even show up at a state-sponsored and much-trumpeted Bulgarian "business forum" there in March.

Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who appears to be increasingly desperate to retain his image as an omniscient and omnipotent strongman, was furious – and reacted in his usual way, by putting the blame on someone else and instantly sacking some of his ministers.