Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

I was suddenly awash with relief. It was as if only now – once I’d finally got rid of Aba’s presence – I had arrived in Varna. I set off down Vladislav Varnenchik street (was this what the street had been called before?), trying to retrieve a living image from memory. This was the route I used to take to the city beach and I would come back, sun-burned and groggy, dragging my feet on the hot asphalt. The only place I recognised, however, was the main post office. Everything else seemed confused. My grandparents lived on Dospat Street, one of the smaller streets off to the left. Earlier they had had a house of their own with a garden by a lake just outside of Varna. That is where my mother spent her childhood and early youth. There was a train station there on the lake, long since abandoned, where Grandpa had worked. Mum remembered the station with special tenderness. During summer evenings the neighbourhood children gathered there. We’d meet down at the station in the evening, after all the trains had passed… I remembered that phrase – in the evening, after all the trains had passed – because she must have repeated it. Having adopted the phrase, I further embroidered it with my own colours. Dusk, fireflies, a quiet train station, the warm tracks gleaming in the dark, croaking frogs, a moon in the sky – and my mother’s young, eager heart pounding with excitement.

Now I wondered why it was that although we had come to visit my grandparents so many times, we never went to see the old abandoned train station and the house they’d lived in. When Grandpa retired, my grandparents moved to a school where they lived as custodians. They stayed in a little house in the school yard. The house had only two rooms, but the yard was large and part of it was covered, so we were out all day during the summer, even when it rained. The school was empty over the summer; there was plenty of space.

I found the school. The gate was locked. I hadn’t remembered a brick wall, it must have been built since then. I remembered an iron gate with bars. The gate was painted an ugly green colour. The word Kotelno, ‘furnace’, was written on it in black. I tried the handle. It was locked. This was upsetting. A familiar sense of panic swelled in me, a feeling I sometimes have when I can’t get out of a place. I stood there at the door as if hypnotised. How small everything looked! The roof of the little house by the wall was dilapidated, the wall on the outside was cracked, damp stains spread along its base. And the yard – that spacious sunny yard with the vast piece of blue sky – how tiny it had become! How did all of us fit here? Dad, Mum, my brother and I? Had my grandparents slept at the home of friends across the way during the times when we visited? Or in one of the classrooms in the school building on improvised beds?

What had once been a charming little street with cosy houses and gardens was no longer recognisable. The street had become a construction site; new homes were sprouting on all sides. I walked around the school, found the entrance and bumped into a man and two women in the corridor. I explained that I would like to see the yard, and had tried to let myself in, but it was locked.

‘Why are you interested in the yard?’ the man asked.

‘My grandparents used to live there years ago.’

‘You cannot go in. The furnace for the school is there.’

‘I would just like to peep into the yard for a moment.’

‘Madam, there is no yard there! There is nothing there! It’s the furnace for the school. And it has always been there as far as I know.’

The women agreed and nodded, right to left, as the Bulgarians do.

* * *

I left the school building and went back to the green gate. It was standing there in front of me like a forgotten password. If I could only open the gate a crack, I thought, everything would come back to me. Some images were surfacing: the dynamic figure of my grandmother, who was always busy with something – cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing – and the static figure of my grandfather, who sat in the school yard and smoked. Everything else tumbled and mixed in the furnace behind the green gate.

I looked over at the little house across the way, which, sur prisingly, was still standing. My grandmother died in that house while she was over visiting her friends, who, themselves, are no longer alive. They were watching television together, Grandma, suddenly agitated, asked, ‘Why did it get so dark?’ and then she died. That was Mum’s most recent version of Grandma’s dying words.

Gulping breaths of air I went back to the main street and there I flagged down a taxi that saved me. The ride was an instant sedative. I decided to take the route of this pointless and troubling pilgrimage all the way to its end.

‘Can you take me to the old train station by the lake?’ I said.

‘Why?’ The taxi driver was astonished. ‘There is nothing there!’