Angels and junk: it takes an unusual mind to bridge the gap. But Magdalena Miteva certainly has that. She is involved in many projects: she puts on puppet theatre for adults, a somewhat neglected art in Bulgaria, makes lamps and decorates clubs and cafeÅLs with her ideas.
When I travel in a bus, I avoid reading, because it makes me ill. Only I don't feel sick when I peep over at the magazine of my neighbour sitting diagonally across the aisle or at the exceptionally stupid newspaper of the passenger next to me. If the newspaper were mine – not that I would have bought it, never ever! – but if it were mine, I wouldn't have read any of its articles. And anyway, furtively, I don't manage to read even one, and I'll never find out what happens to the woman who has married one and the same man for the fourth time, or even whether Marek FC will qualify for….
his transparent skin
that is me,
his seed – that is
me
I am sketching myself
I kiss my orange lips.
I was the red one,
Him – was it him?"
Men Like Colours
Every day I think that he still exists somewhere out there, within the borders of this town, in the streets of this town, and we don't meet. But he's out there and breathes, and eats, wakes up, even goes to the toilet. Sometimes I wish I was a ghost so I could come right up to his back, peep from behind his ear, while he doesn't know and laughs.
"I don’t even get a song?" Dolman said. "After all that work."
Ten minutes. Sometimes five. That's how long his rapture lasts. From the beginning in the Prologue, his look is somehow solemn, joyful, his glances over there, where he expects her to appear, register things as he wants them: the street, its mood suffused by a recent shower, which will set the scene of hands sinking into each other, intimately. The reflection of buildings on her photochromatic lenses and later – their paling in the shade of the room where her eyes will appear, black as cherries, enough to lose a man in their blackness, sweet, melting.
"Nice thing he's doing, serving the country like that. Now Mitchell here ain't got much patriotism, we've had many a-talks about it. It ain't his fault, really, it's a generational thing. But I believe in this great nation, son. Can't take it for granted. We could be in a bread line with a buncha commies somewhere, instead of right here in the greatest country the earth has ever known." Pops grins and gazes fondly across his muddy, shit-stained yard. "The land of milk and honey." He turns to me. "Y'know," he says, "I served in 'Nam."
"Yeah?"
From morning until evening he was walking up and down between the tables with some old rubber galoshes that he had from his village, he was cursing reedily and he was always finding something about which to argue with Elvis Presley. However Elvis Presley did not pay any attention to him, at every brickbat he replied: "That ain'ta word!" and most of the time he was playing backgammon with a guy from Yambol. The man also cursed, but in another manner.
It was called The Church of the Assumption – a typical Orthodox construction from the early nineteenth century, looking more like a large chapel.
"This is the oldest church in the region, that's why it's the main one," Victor clarified. "Correct, Father?"
One of the shifts that has been slowly taking place in Bulgaria since "The Changes," as most Bulgarians refer to the collapse of Communism 20 years ago, has been the re-emergence of an independent Bulgarian literary tradition. Not that it had disappeared. Simply that it had been quieted. There was once a time when merely to distribute self-published poetry or fiction among friends would have been punished by the thought police. Yet now Bulgarian writers are finding their voices again, and finding an audience, both in their country and abroad.
The sun was slowly reaching its zenith, but the streets and the squares of Samarkand were still cool. This coolness, coming from the gardens and the vineyards, from the channels crossing the town with their emerald waters, was what the Iranians, the Turks, the Maures, the Arabs, the Armenians, the Greeks and the Jews breathed in, in order to fill with their shrill cries the Sand Place or Registan, as they called the cloth market in the ancient part of town.