Free Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova Page B

place or even a symbol any more. It was a collective state of mind, and there is something cosy, something reassuring in all things collective. Even a prison.
    Alexanderplatz, the favourite meeting place in East Berlin, was vast and it had the World Time Clock. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, mesmerized by the wild possibilities it suggested: that the places shown on it – Rome, Paris, London – also had a local time, just like us. They had a local time and a local life, so clearly, in some way, they were like us. This was strangely disturbing.
    It was much safer to know the world in an abstract way. That way, you didn’t have too many doubts. And it’s not as if we were ignorant, no. One of my father’s educational games on the nine-hour drives to the seaside was ‘capitals of the world’. He would say an obscure country, and my sister and I would come up with its capital. Mongolia: Ulan Bator. Angola: Luanda. Chile: Santiago. Uzbekistan: Tashkent – or was it Yerevan? No, Yerevan is Armenia. My father prided himself on knowing every single capital city in the world. My favourites were capitals that sounded the same as their countries: Mexico-Mexico, Panama-Panama, Algeria-Algiers. Those were the most honest never-never-lands.
    The world was a geography lesson to us. Clusters of sounds. Coloured patches in the atlas. Radio static. But the order of things was permanently upset in 1984, when my father was granted permission to spend six months as a research fellow at the University of Delft in faraway Holland. It was his first trip west of the Berlin Wall. It was the longest we had been separated as a family since his two-year military service. My mother pined for him, and because he couldn’t afford to call us and we couldn’t call abroad, we sent him a voice-letter on a cassette, via an acquaintance who was also Holland-bound. My mother recorded her messages late at night, and although she stoically didn’t cry, her voice sounds strangely broken on that tape.
    He sent back photographs of futuristic-looking buildings, andbrick houses along grey canals, and bikes, forests of bikes. He sent photos of friendly-looking people of different races – the other visiting fellows – whose curious names he wrote on the backs of photos. He was cheerfully waving at the camera, looking very thin in his big horn-rimmed glasses.
    Here he was, my own dad, blending in with these Westerners, these people who had stepped off the pages of my atlas and somehow ended up in Delft, to become his friends. Just like that. I was at once proud and troubled. Proud that we were no less than them. Troubled by the thought that if it was so easy, so natural, if the people on the other side were so friendly, then what exactly was the Wall protecting us from?
    It was protecting us from ourselves, as it turned out. That summer, amazingly, my mother was granted permission to visit my father in Holland. It was her first time West of the Berlin Wall, if we don’t count a few visits to Yugoslavia – which, according to the atlas, was east of the Berlin Wall, but for some reason more to the west than East Berlin. It was complicated.
    After months of nerve-fraying bureaucratic delay, my mother’s travel visa finally arrived and my sister and I were packed off to spend the summer with our paternal grandparents, Kiril and Kapka, in the provincial town of Pavlikeni.
    As far as I was concerned, Pavlikeni had nothing going for it. It had no mountain, no sea, no historic houses, just a factory on the outskirts which made spare parts for trains. It also had a park where the blossoming trees gave me hay fever, and a zoo with scabby animals. The most interesting fact I knew about Pavlikeni was that one of the zoo bears had chewed the fingers of a little boy who had fallen into its cage. The boy had survived, and so he joined the handless Chilean guitarist in my imagination.
    Nothing ever happened in Pavlikeni’s huge, empty square, purpose-built for official