Free Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova

Moscow.
    So much for the East. The West, however, was the stuff of exotic rumour and fantastic legend. Occasionally, it reached us in the shape of glossy objects. My mother’s cousin, for example, lived in friendly Libya for many years, where he built dams in the desert. His family lived back in Sofia, and they had a magnificent VCR with a remote control. My atlas confirmed that Libya was technically in Africa, which was in the south, but judging from the lavish things the cousin brought us, it was also somehow in the West.
    He showered us with gifts like oval Lux soap bars with womensmiling on the packets, colourful panties for the girls in packs of threes, chocolate bars in shiny foil wrappers which I smoothed out and kept between the pages of books, roll-on Nivea deodorants the likes of which I’d never seen. These objects were like messages in a bottle from the other side of the divide, but I couldn’t tell whether they were friendly or not. They seemed coded, sealed inside their smug luxury.
    Occasionally, the West assumed a human face and upset the order of things. On the Black Sea coast where we went for our summer holidays, the West became flesh and blood – and occasionally bare breasts, the prerogative of their decadent society. But you knew better than to stare at their bodies, clothes, towels, and bright Nivea bottles. You pretended you weren’t impressed by them and just spied on them from the corner of your eye, fascinated, while reading your school-prescribed summer titles, and hoped that one of the blond boys would notice you.
    One summer, one of them did, and we spent two weeks sending surreptitious, unspoken messages of lust and longing across the beach, while our parents dozed in the sun, dull and oblivious. One day, he stood behind me in the ice-cream queue, causing me to seize up with excitement and nearly faint. That’s as close as we got. I never found out where he was from, I didn’t care, and it didn’t matter: he was out of reach, they would soon fold up their beach umbrella and leave my world. Pretending to sleep, I drenched my pillow with bitter tears every night in the darkness of our single rented room. One night, my parents had had enough and told me off, and bawling my eyes out under the full moon, I started walking towards the hotel where I knew the object of my desire was. My father ran after me and brought me back to our room, but I resented him even in his kindness. I resented them both for sharing the prison of our single concrete room withoutprivacy, for having no choice, no foreign friends, and no Nivea bottles.
    But we did have foreign friends of sorts. My father’s Technical Institute ‘Vladimir Ilich Lenin’ had regular visitors from abroad, mainly France and Japan. And because my father couldn’t afford to invite them to a restaurant, he invited them home. My mother would rush from work with bags of shopping, while my father turned up at the last moment, escorting the guest. After all, a foreigner would never find Block 328, or even Youth 3, unaided.
    The foreigners were always extremely friendly in their lightly textured foreign clothes and shoes. They laughed with my parents, and expressed their appreciation of the food and wine, and especially of Rila Monastery where my parents would always take them, because that’s where you took foreign visitors to show off our heritage. And after they left, the foreigners sent us exquisite cards from the other side. For a moment, you could even think we were equal.
    But we knew, and they knew, that we weren’t equal. Behind the laughter and the wine, I sensed my parents’ permanent nervous cringe. They knew the foreign guests saw the ugly panels, the cramped apartments, the mud, the overflowing rubbish bins, the stray dogs, the empty shops, the crappy cars, the idiots in the brown suits, and they were ashamed.
    Some of my parents’ friends learnt to overcome the cringe by rationalizing it.
    ‘Ashamed? I have nothing to be