Life and Death in My (Adopted) Bulgarian Village

My husband comes into the living-room, sits in an easy chair and looks me straight in the eye.

“There’s no good news. My father died last night at 9:15.”

Our flight would have been circling over Sofia, waiting for permission to land on Bulgarian

soil. He had tried to wait for us. He expected us.

Tetcho, my husband’s cousin, and his wife Dora had met us at the airport and bring us to our

apartment in Lovech. The next morning they returned to take us to my husband’s village 15

km out of town, but there was this bad news for them to deliver first.

From our bag of gifts, I had just selected an orange battery-operated fan to give my father-in-

law. A little piece of plastic with lights that changed their pattern as the soft plastic blades

spun and brought a breeze to the face of the person holding it. I thought it would amuse my

father in-law. I thought it might bring him some pleasure in his sick-bed on these hot summer

days. It was something he could use without assistance of any kind.

“Oh honey, I’m so sorry,” I say, reaching for my husband’s hand. He doesn’t take it. Instead

he stood up, his face absolutely inexpressive.

“The funeral is scheduled for 1:30 today in Gostinia. You can stay here with the baby or you

can leave him with Tetcho’s daughter,” my husband says. “There are a lot of things to be

done.”
The things to be done have been carefully written on a long list sent from the village with

Tetcho. A list of tasks for an only son to perform to prepare for his father’s funeral, a list of

tasks any Canadian would have left to a funeral director.

“Stop,” I want to tell him. “Slow down. We can’t just leave Brian with Mimi. He hasn’t seen

her in a year. He won’t remember her. He won’t understand that she’s family.”

My thoughts are running through a list as if I am the one with so much to organise. The more

my husband feels any emotion, the more business-like he becomes. He is not unique among

men in this way. I’ve seen the response before and know I should keep my comments short if

they were to register.

“In my family, children come to funerals,” I say.

“Look, it’s impossible,” he snaps. “There’s nothing for him to do there. I don’t want him to

see his grandfather’s corpse. It isn’t like your family in Canada.”

Of course, in Bulgaria nothing happens exactly like it does in Canada.

Boris Balev, my father-in-law, was known for being soft-spoken. He was also known for his

shyness, but that was a quality he could overcome when he needed to. He used to see a pretty

young woman from the next village on the bus into town every day. One day, he gathered

enough courage to speak to her. “Will you marry me?” were the first words Boris spoke to

Nadeshda.

She said no, of course, but not persistently. Boris was a handsome man in his youth.
Before I got used to him, my husband was shockingly good looking. When we met, I had

lived in Toronto for almost all of my adult life. I had seen specimens of humanity from

around the globe and had been long lulled into a poetic but ambivalent acceptance of all the

beauty around me. Individual looks had long ceased to impress me. I’d never met a Bulgarian

before.

As happens so often after meetings like these, this one also culminated in a wedding. And, in

marriage, I also got Bulgaria. It became more than a section of the red swath that extended

from Russia to China on my elementary school’s pull-down map. Six months after our

wedding, we flew over so that I could meet his family.

That time, as the plane circled over Sofia, I saw the Communist-era apartment blocks

crumbling in the distance.

"Is your family's apartment like that?" I asked Vanyo.

"Ours is better," he replied, but he hadn’t seen it for three years.

In the taxi to the bus station, we passed a donkey cart. Garlands extended along the bed of the

cart and ended in a red tassel perched just above the donkey’s muzzle.

"Is that traditional cart, or is it just a tourist attraction?" I asked my husband.

"A tourist attraction? That?" My husband was insulted. The driver had taken a shortcut

through the Romany (Gypsy) neighbourhood where evidence that Sofia is a modern capital

city as developed as any other, is not clear.

“What are those? Wanted posters?” I asked, pointing at the circulars with photographs that

were pasted all over the bus station ticket kiosks.

“Oh no,” Vanyo laughed. “Those are obituaries.”

I was deeply relieved that Bulgarian criminal gangs were not primarily composed of old men

and women.

On the bus, we shared the road with the occasional herd of goats and flocks of geese walking

home from pasture. I hadn't even known that geese grazed.

"Look, look!" I said with excitement upon each animal spotting. The teenage boys ahead of us

laughed unkindly.

Two hours later, we arrived in Lovech, my husband's hometown. I met my mother-in-law

with her freshly dyed hair. It was a shade between brown and purple. Their home was in a

crumbling apartment block just like the ones I’d seen from the plane, but inside it was clean,

serene and comfortable.

Through our bedroom windows I heard the bullfrogs singing in the river, the lion roaring for

his supper in the zoo, the stray dogs howling at the moon. The symphony lulled me to sleep.
In the morning, I smelled the country before I’d left my bed. It was all the softness of spring

air and the scent of lilac blossoms.

According to the traditions of travel literature, the spell of the exotic should have been broken

in the hours following my honeymoon night. That disappointment was not to come. Instead

we went to Gostinia, the ancestral village of my husband’s family.

Gostinia remains the one place in the world that has ever looked exactly as I envisioned it

would. A trio of old ladies wearing zabratkas to keep their hair clean stood talking in the

village centre. It was the end of the day and the sheep were being driven home through the

narrow streets, vaahing (in Bulgaria, even the sheep have accents), their bells clanging.

“Yes,” I remember thinking. “This is really the old world.”

Now, I am about to see the old world have a funeral. As we approach, I can see from the road

that our house is the centre of village activity. The house is set upon a hill above the road; a

stone wall surrounds the garden; the gate is painted green and a bench sits outside the gate so

that neighbours can stop by to chat in the early evening as the villagers sew buttons, shell

beans, carve wooden spoons or repair tools.

My mother-in-law, Nadeshda, comes almost running to greet us. We fall into each others arms

with grief and relief that we are finally together. My sister-in-law, Velina, sits alone on the

patio under the vines. She has left her daughter with her other grandmother and has been

nursing her father for months. Her pregnant belly is not concealed by her dress, shot through

with black in its pattern. It doesn’t conceal hope, this mourning maternity dress. I press my

hand against Velina’s belly as I hug her. I need to remind myself.

Boris, in a cardboard coffin, is laid out in the garden. He looks like the little bird perched on

his pillow. It has been a long and awful illness. We had known he was very ill from a

distance, but this makes it clear how horrible the ravages of Parkinson’s disease can be.

Flowers from the village gardens, wildflowers from the fields, blue forget-me-knots surround

him. The men and women of the village file by. The men press their hands to his, whisper

good-byes. The women leave their flowers around his head, place freshly ironed

handkerchiefs on his chest and, on top, leave gifts of money and packages of biscuits.

During communism, the village was a working agricultural co-operative. These days, the

people of Gostinia are mostly retirees who have returned from their jobs in the towns to the

homes their parents and grandparents built. Whatever professions the villagers may have

practiced in their earlier days, few of those details remain. While I know there are former

nurses, midwives, medics and autoworkers among the people of Gostinia, more important to

them now are the fields of hay that need to be cut, the cows that must be grazed and milked,

the gardens and orchards that have to be planted, weeded, watered and harvested. They are

peasants again, and proud of it.

I know this, but it still shocks me when the pallbearers come and place the coffin in the back

of the trailer pulled by the cooperative tractor.

“Uncle Peter had a hearse,” Vanyo says.

“It was booked,” Velina tells him.

All of us take to the gravel road and walk up the hill to the village cemetery. This is just the

burial. Our family will make this walk for the next nine days, bringing water and wine, fresh

flowers. We will light candles. For these rituals, our little son and his cousin will come and

look at the photographs of their great-grandparents and great-great grandparents on the

headstones.

Others will come to grieve with us too. Violetta, Vanyo’s cousin whom I have never met,

comes from the seaside during the height of resort season, quitting her job to be with us.

“Ah, I can get another job,” she says. “Easy, easy.”

It has been a long time since she was last in Gostinia.

“Grunge village,” she calls it and I was hurt, even though it is partly true.

“Obeechum Gostinia.” I remind her, in my terrible Bulgarian, that I love Gostinia.

“Da, znam.” I know, she says. “I too.”

At the cemetery, I watch Violetta light a cigarette and put it in the ground of her father’s grave

before lighting her own.

“Just like the Native people in Canada,” I tell her. “They bring a gift of tobacco to their dead,

like you.”
Violetta lives and works on the Black Sea Coast so she has picked up English, German and

some Western ways from the tourists. She nods at me as she exhales. This is remarkable.

Here, shaking the head means yes.

“The death is more simple in Canada, no?” Violetta sighs. “I know, I looking at TV.”

For nine days, we take walks. Our little son is in his element. By Violetta’s side he sings and

splashes by the riverside while the older children, his cousins both near and more distant,

make mud pies from the soft clay of the river bottom. The silt squelches between their toes

and slides between their fingers, down their arms.

If our comfort is in the earth of this place, our grief is shared by the people. On our daily treks

to the river and to the cemetery, we meet others and share the language of loss.

We meet a young widow and a heart-broken mother whose losses were compounded by

unfinished business and the uncertainty of how to go on.

One day we meet Diado Ivan. He is not a relative, but all of the oldest men in the village are

addressed as grandfather. He has lost five relatives over the winter.

“Simeon,” I read slowly, sounding out the Cyrillic script of the obituary pasted to his garden

gate

“Moet sinne,” my son, he says, hitting his chest with his palm, tears coming into his eyes.
“Ima moet sinne, ” has my son, I say, holding Brian out to him, to show I know how so much

of his world has ended.

“Da, da,” he says, shaking his head in affirmation, a gesture that still confuses me whenever I

encounter it. He smiles upon hearing my Bulgarian.

When we meet these other mourners, we give them a gift. Nadeshda holds it out to them, tells

them to take it. It is our duty because our loss is freshest.

In our village, there is a custom of carrying cookies or bonbons to share with those we meet

on the route home from the cemetery. We remind each other that even when life is full of

grief, it has its sweetness. We remind each other to taste it.