Imagine you are in a restaurant with a Bulgarian friend. The meal is over and you ask how their steak was. Now, anywhere else in the world you would get the answer that the steak was good, or bad, or cold or whatever. In Bulgaria the answer is likely to be: It was better than I expected.
Sounds familiar? This and many other local experiences inspired Randall Baker's new book Bulgariana, a humorous take on life in this country today.
It is August 1999 and Lilyana Ilieva from Varna stumbles through the dark that envelopes the centre of Sofia at night. She reaches a huge ruin and, like several other people, crouches down by the pile of rubble that has spilled out of the mesh fencing surrounding the wreckage. Lilyana chooses a bigger fragment and puts it in her bag. "My father was in the army construction corps in 1949 and took part in the building of the mausoleum. When he learnt I was coming to Sofia, he asked me to bring him a piece of it. It was one of his dreams – to see the building demolished," Lilyana says.
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?"
You thought the KGB in the Soviet Union, the Stasi in East Germany, the StB in Czechoslovakia and the Securitate in Romania were repressive agencies that terrorised millions of their own citizens and that would use every chance to sabotage the West, ranging from propaganda to drugs and arms smuggling? Quite right. All of those were responsible for heinous crimes such as sending innocent people to Communist labour camps as well as organising "wet jobs" such as the 1978 assassination of Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov in London and the 1981 attempt to murder Pope John Paul in Rome.
Bulgarian pensioners in their thousands have become glued to Turkish soap operas and numerous travel firms (presumably unregistered) now offer trips to the colourful locations and sets where these passionate stories are filmed. Each advertisement, of course, hints at the chance of meeting the stars in the flesh.