A Day in Constanta

The Father from Plovdiv

Chapter I – A day in Constanta

- Est-ce que tu connais quelqu’un qui a vendu ses chaussures deux fois? Tu voulais écrire un roman et voulais avoir du matériel pour ça. Donc, dis-moi, est-ce que tu connais quelqu’un qui a vendu ses chaussures deux fois ?

- Tu veux dire quoi exactement ? I asked Regis as we were sitting at a bar overlooking the beach in Constanta. Regis was a Frenchman who had spent 17 years in Dobrich Bulgaria very much to the surprise of the customs officers at the Bulgarian-Romanian border who spent about 20 minutes pondering over his passport which apparently represented one of the greatest mysteries of Southeastern Europe. Just why he had spent those 17 years in Bulgaria is a long story. Suffice it to say that as a result he had ended up divorced from his Bulgarian wife but in love with Bulgaria in general and Dobrich in particular. Chaque fois que je quitte Dobrich j’ai mal au cœur. He told me one day of many revelations. With him we usually spoke in French and from time to time in Bulgarian. He would sometimes use Bulgarian in a rather funny way, which added a unique flavor to the enchanting stories he told of himself. It seemed he was the only true globe trotter I knew personally. He had been to 60 countries and around the world twice and during one of his trips he had sold his shoes.

- Mais c’est ce que je t’ai déjà dit. Je les ai vendues deux fois et c’étaient les chaussures que je portais aux pieds.

- Vraiment ? I was aware of the fact that there would be no expression in French that I would know which could express to the full extent how puzzled I was to hear that.

- Mais oui. La première fois il s’agit d’une histoire qui s’est produite à Yalta. Je me promenais dans une rue. A cette époque j’étais marin. J’étais célibataire et je prenais plus soin de moi.

Maintenant je suis célibataire encore mais ce n’est pas pareil. J’étais jeune et évidemment attirant pour les femmes. Je portais de très belles chaussures bleues. Je les avais achetées en Angleterre et elles étaient à la mode alors. Bon, il y a un gars qui me voit et qui me dit – donnez moi vos chaussures. Je me retourne et je le vois comme il me suit. C’est un gars de 20 ans ou un peu prés qui me voulait les chaussures. J’accélère mais il me suit et il continue en courant presque. J’arrête et je lui demande – mais vous êtes fou ou quoi ? Comment est-ce que je pourrais vous donner mes chaussures ?- Donnez-les et moi je vais vous donner les miennes. Apres il me dit – je peux vous aider à trouver une belle fille. Croyez-moi. Donnez-les. Vous ne le regretterez pas. J’y réfléchis et après je dis mais bon et je lui donne les chaussures. Il m’a amené sur une colline. Tu sais a Yalta il y en a plein et on s’est trouvé dans un bar prés du bord de la mer. Je m’assois et le gars me demande – qu’est-ce que vous pensez à elle ? Je regarde autour de moi et je lui dis mais laquelle ? Il n’y a personne. Et il me dit – бе сервитьорката бе. Je la regarde et vraiment elle est la et elle me sourit. Elle s’appelait Katya. Elle me dit – ça va vous coûter 20 dollars mais si ça vous plait vous pourriez m’en donner plus. J’ai fini par la payer 30 dollars. Elle m’a plu énormément. Elle était gentille et bien élevée…

Apparently he had noticed what he must have taken for a bewildered expression on my face for he said, - Mais que-est-ce que tu veux? J’étais marin et je me sentais seul. Truth be told, I was rather amused. I was eating the spaghetti Bolognese I had ordered and he was sipping from his coffee. The café itself was rather shabby looking with old wicker chairs and dusty tables and a rather aging waitress obviously very different from the heroine of Regis’s paramour in Yalta. We were in Constanta not Yalta and also much later than the days of Regis’s romantic adolescence. The purpose of our visit to Constanta was a rather prosaic one, too. We wanted to get to the School Inspectorate and ask for jobs for English and French teachers. I personally had had enough of Bulgaria and was ready to leave it at the first really good opportunity knocking at the door. Regis himself had even bigger reasons than mine to want to leave it but he had some rather romantic notions of the country and being unable to make a single move without doing a romantic deed all along, he had sent a letter from Constanta to the last girlfriend he’d had in Dobrich, who had dumped him some weeks before. Surprisingly, it seemed that she just wanted him as a lover whereas he wanted to live with her and as this juncture didn’t suit either, she had stopped seeing him.

The second time he sold his shoes off his feet had to do with his encounter with a starving boy in Haiti where he rather gave them away to the boy and then bought himself another pair. I knew he was completely capable of doing such a thing unable to stand suffering on part of the others. We were still eating at the bar and I was still thinking about the mysterious ways you could part with your shoes. It seemed to me that you could do that at any moment if you wanted to save your soul. Of course, you could also exchange them for a favor like Regis had done the first time. In the brittle universe we were living where anything could happen at any moment, losing your shoes then one way or another should be but a matter of course. Immersed in these thoughts I hadn’t noticed the bar manager who was now towering right next to me with a large piece of carton in his hand. He was a gigantic paunchy individual with a rigid expressionless face which reminded me a bit of the rock biter of The Neverending Story.

“Paris,” he said and gave me the piece of carton which on close scrutiny turned out to be his Romanian ID card. He spoke neither French nor English and also seemed to articulate rather slowly so I took a chance and said, “Inteleg pucin Romaneste.” I should have known better than to say that because that started him talking faster. He said many things of which I only understood that his father came from Pirin Macedonia. To find a Romanian who is partially Bulgarian by origin is not unusual in Constanta. After all, the Danube divides Dobrudja into two parts – Southern Dobrudja in present day Bulgaria and Northern Dobrudja in present day Romania. Historically the two regions had been in close contact and they had been very much considered one entity before they found themselves parts of two different countries. Both regions had been at different times part both of Bulgaria and Romania. It’s a pity though that in present times the people living there have lost their roots and don’t often visit their relatives living on the other side of the Danube. One of the reasons for that is the lack of common language of communication. As I was to find out the Bar Manager didn’t know a single word in Bulgarian but, of course, he wasn’t to blame. The same could be said of the residents of Southern Dobrudja. They don’t speak Romanian. The only bilingual inhabitants of both regions were the grandparents who lived both in Bulgaria and Romania as a result of the shift of ownership of Southern Dobrudja. Sadly, all this intercultural heritage is now lost as these people are almost all gone. We spoke a little bit more with the Bar Manager in basic English of which he had but little knowledge and then left to find ourselves some 200 meters from Tomis Mall in downtown Constanta. The Irish Pub was right next to us and some 200 meters below lay the Black Sea lapping gently at the natural rocky piers which formed a number of lagoons on the beach. There were the three of us there, me, Regis and Velichko, a 60-year-old man who had been married two times and had 6 children from both marriages. The active married life he’d led had left him penniless so he had waited for us outside grimly munching on some chunky dry sandwiches while Regis and I had lunch at the bar. Outside the weather was gorgeous. The sun shone hard on us on this late October day and having found the institution in question on the map, we had an hour before we could have a talk with the head of the Inspectorate, a certain Mr. Daniel Corbu. Regis went off to get some Romanian magazines to bring to Dobrich on our way back while Velichko and I went looking for a café where to pass the remaining hour. The next café presented itself before us in the shape of another dusty wooden construction with no one sitting outside so we strolled off to the adjacent building – still another wooden construction where two elderly gentlemen were calmly playing backgammon. I spotted a young girl shivering in an alcove built in one of the walls where eternal shade prevailed. When she saw me she said something in very fast Romanian. I only caught the word vorbesc which means to speak. As I didn’t want to take any chances, this time I said, “Nu inteleg Romaneste.” She nodded and said, “it’s not for sale.” At first I didn’t understand what she meant because I thought she meant the coffee machine which we had no intention of buying anyway but then she continued, “it’s free for old people.” “I guess we’re not old enough,” I said and she nodded again. I was 35 then but obviously not too old. As for Velichko, he was obviously not very young but not old enough, either. I wondered how old you had to be to qualify for free coffee. The gentlemen playing backgammon didn’t seem to be much older than Velichko but were judged eligible. Or was it just for Romanian pensioners and were we witnessing new-born discrimination in Romania only a year after having joined the EU together with Bulgaria. We went back and sat down at the first café we saw which now enjoyed a full table of visitors basking in the generous October sun. I ordered a decaf which cost 6 lei or 3 levs and felt optimistic about our chances to teach English and French there. I had managed to use French just once with a book-store assistant and English with a couple of more assistants at Tomis Mall. English and French were complètement inconnus outside Tomis Mall, which made it about the only place one could ask for directions in the entire city.

- Tu sais – I turned to Regis as he sat down at our table after getting the newspapers and magazines he wanted. – Constanta me plait énormément. On peut garer sa voiture où on veut à n’importe quelle heure de la journée. I said that watching brand new cars parking about 10 meters away from us in a nearby sea alley.

- Imagine-toi faisant la même chose à Varna ou à Sofia.

- Tout a fait – he said. – En plus, regarde les jolies filles assises sur les bancs à coté de nous. Je crois qu’on pourrait vraiment se détendre ici et si on trouvait du bon travail on serait content.

I had to agree. The pretty girls in question were seated on some inviting wooden benches positioned at the edge of the alley right above the beach. I went over to an empty bench and looked down below. The beach was completely deserted. The three lagoons that could be seen looked lonely and ancient. There wasn’t a single person to be seen there with the exception of a man and a little girl who looked like father and daughter. She frolicked around him on the sandy beach and he followed her trying to prevent her from falling over and hitting herself too hard. Another thing I liked very much about Constanta was the easy accessibility of the beach and the sea. Very much unlike Varna where there would be overbuilt areas all along the stretch of beach so that the only way of going there would be to pass through an eating establishment and pay for it there and then. Ovid may have been right deploring his fate which found him marooned on a bleak beach surrounded by wild people. I felt I would be grateful if the same fate befell me as I was there looking at the languid sea waters breaking gently over the rocks forming the lagoon boundaries. I would be happy to be there and have a lagoon to myself and run on the beach with my little daughter and forget about it all.

I was snapped out of my reverie by a nudge at the elbow so I turned back to see Regis who reminded me that the hour we had had almost passed and we needed to head for the Inspectorate. It was truly a dream in broad daylight and I was still savoring it as I walked in the sun soaked street meandering by the sea. Before long we found the Inspectorate and saw lots of people inside but the door was locked. I suggested entering the building through the open window on the side wall, but after we voted for it I found myself in the minority. Then we looked at the working hours posted on the front door and saw that we should have come the day before. It seemed to me we were pretty much like the three fools by Donyo Donev being at the right place but the wrong time, but then Regis reassured me by saying that it was the right time and that this was juste une promenade de reconnaissance.

On the way back I drove at 150 per hour and covered the distance between Techirgyol and Negru Voda in 16 minutes. I spoke with Velichko who told me about his second wife who was Russian and was back in Russia looking after her blind mother. Regis had meanwhile dozed off on the front seat. Velichko said he was looking to live with his second wife in Doumna which was a small town near Moscow where he hoped to work as a nuclear physicist. He had worked there once but was unsure about his present prospects of finding employment there again.

Three hours later and after work where I had to make some recordings for a Bulgarian course I and a colleague of mine were teaching to some elderly migrants from England who had come to live in Southern Dobrudja, I sat with my wife who was reading Scales by Pavel Vezhinov and she read me the following: it was only now that I realized what bitter mistake we’d made not having children. The more, the better as long as you love them and take care of them. Even if you became besotted overworking yourself and fighting lifelong troubles, you would be saved in the end. The reason why this was so was because you stopped functioning as an egocentric entity. And as a distinct individual, too. You reproduced just like the amoebas for which there is no early extinction or no untimely demise. If we had children maybe we would have no fears throughout our entire lives.

I told her about Velichko and she said he was saved and close to the amoebas.

I felt relieved and went to sleep listening to Pimsleur’s Romanian 1.