Back to the Mountains

Now I’m re-established in the cottage in the Rhodopes, having driven up yesterday with my redoubtable landlord, Radoslav, and I’m pleased to say that the place is just as I remember it.

A fire is crackling away in the wood-burning stove, which looks as old and decrepit as ever. I’m sipping hot strong coffee made on the place’s greasy, antique-looking gas burner. Beyond the living room window the sky is grim and cold-looking, the bare black branches of the beech trees in the yard imprinted upon it like the cover of a gothic novel. I’m still trying to find Radio Edno, or Radio One, on the dial of the car radio on the shelf, but it’s only a matter of time before I zero in, whereupon the picture will be complete. Otherwise I can report that all is calm and quiet in Potom (the means ‘a hidden place’), although a minute ago when I went outside I heard the dog of Lazar, my only neighbour, barking down the way a bit. 

Ah, I’ve just found my station and it sounds like not much has changed there, either. In fact, not only is the playlist still dominated by old chestnuts from the eighties and nineties. They are actually playing the very same songs that I remember from this time last year. Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’, ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ by Yes and, last but certainly not least, Billy Idol’s ‘Rock the Cradle of Love’, played one after the other, testify to either a determinedly retrograde philosophy or a seriously limited budget. Either way, I find it endearing.

To say I feel pretty good about things would be an understatement. It’s still early days but I feel happy and comfortable here, out in the wilds, – almost, dare I say it, like I’ve never been away – and am very much looking forward to the weeks and possibly months to come. Last year, in case you don’t know, I spent the entire winter up here writing and walking in the forest and enjoying a simple life stripped back to the essentials. Funnily enough, considering I was in the middle of nowhere, there was never a dull moment. The chimney leaked great globs of smelly black tar, the water froze in the pipes, I often went without electricity for days on end and once I almost burnt the place down when an old-fashioned eiderdown caught fire while I was looking the other way.

Through one near disaster after another, I learned that, while rustic and charming, the cottage was the sort of place where nothing worked quite the way it was supposed to. As someone who hasn’t always hit the nail directly on the head in life, this was something I could relate to.

To my delight, little about the cottage has changed. Radoslav has painted the walls in the living room, covering up the tar stains from the chimney leak. He has also removed much of his mother’s clutter, the dusty jars of pickled gherkins and peppers and the pureed tomatoes that filled the shelves in the kitchen, and disposed of most of the junk outside in the annex, while the lights seem to work a little better, but that’s about the extent of it. The same faded rug covers the floor in the hallway, holy books fill the shelves and the cottage still creaks like a ship in a storm each time the wind gets up. Perhaps the furry, sage-coloured lichen that beards the cherry trees outside has grown a bit.

‘The cottage has lost a little of its character, I’m afraid, but perhaps that’s a good thing,’ Radoslav said yesterday evening, referring to the changes, while we went around opening the window shutters, erecting the solar panel and hooking up the twelve volt battery that supplies the cottage with power. Radoslav showed me where the water main was located and I found my beechwood walking stick and the battered pink foam box in which I had kept my perishables last winter. (I told you nothing has changed, he said.) The firewood supply, I noticed, stacked in the usual place beside the house, was distinctly low. Clearly I was expected to organise my own, an arrangement which suited me perfectly.

I wrote yesterday, while still in Sofia, that everything felt different to last year. This was mainly on account of the weather, which was clear and unseasonably warm – a far cry, in other words, from the snow and dark and polar temperatures that heralded my arrival in Bulgaria last winter. Radoslav picked me up at midday and we drove southeast, across the epic Plain of Thrace, in bright sunshine that fell gently upon fields that looked fresh and green and conspicuously untouched by snow. To the south, bluish mountains loomed against a sky that shimmered alluringly with a golden autumnal haze. The few people we saw, truck drivers mostly, walked with a spring in their step. It was all very nice but personally I missed the low grey sky, the sere-coloured fields swathed in mist, the sense, which I had felt very keenly, of the year drawing to an end. Even the historical resonances – armies traipsing back and forth over the centuries across this natural land-bridge linking Europe and Asia – seemed less compelling in the innocuous sunshine.

As we drove along Radoslav filled me on recent developments. His mother was well and now taking insulin to help her cope with her diabetes. Her boyfriend Mitko, who last winter was in poor shape after suffering what Radoslav’s wife Zori described as a ‘brain attack’, had improved considerably and was now speaking again, although not quite like he used to. Radoslav had had a few people to stay at the cottage over summer and autumn, including a young English Pakistani who spent two and a half months there studying biology and philosophy and, my landlord said, generally trying to find himself. The young man had been irritated by the flies and midges and other bugs he’d encountered, which amused Radoslav who wondered what he expected to find in a forest in mid-summer. Equally quaint were the young German couple who had been dismayed to find that there was no mobile network in the vicinity of the cottage. The woman, Radoslav said, had become quite upset. 

Alas, the relationship with the neighbour, Lazar, about whom Radoslav had always been guarded, had gone downhill further when Lazar spirited away the old wreck of a car that had stood propped up on logs outside the cottage. The story as Radoslav told it sounded quite fantastic. It appears that Lazar had blatantly stolen the vehicle, which, Radoslav admitted, wasn’t good for much but was nonetheless his; he and Mitko, he said, used to collect firewood in it. At one stage Lazar had virtually admitted to having taken it, only to change tack on a later occasion, maintaining that he knew nothing about the car’s disappearance. The incident had, understandably, created a good deal of ill feeling between the pair but, after considering numerous means of revenge, Radoslav said that he had decided against it because going down that road would only diminish himself as a person. He added that he didn’t mind how I approached Lazar because his own problems with him had nothing to do with me.

The afternoon was well-advanced by the time we drove into Pazardzhik. The former Ottoman market town was as chaotic and diverting as ever, with rubbish dumped by the roadside and gypsies in horse-drawn wooden carts mingling with the traffic on the roads. We stopped at the Billa supermarket so I could stock up on groceries. A pre-Xmas crowd flocked the aisles but I soon managed to gather vast supplies of olive oil, butter, vegetables, tinned sardines, almonds, walnuts and sunflower seeds and several containers of yogurt, along with two three-litre boxes of red wine which I figured would at least get me started. In purchasing the latter we asked the opinion of a passing gentleman who, in true Bulgarian fashion, immediately pointed out the wine with the highest alcohol content, a whopping 14.5% (which I naturally purchased). My good fortune continued at the checkout where I achieved something I’d long wanted to do, enlisting Radoslav’s help in gaining myself a much-coveted Billa discount card. Suddenly, with this little talisman in my pocket, the sky was the limit.

Afterwards we stopped at a butcher shop where I paid eight euros for a kilo of pork chops. Then outside town we pulled up outside a modern warehouse-like hardware complex where I bought two spare blades for my beloved Stanley bow saw and a fancy new frying pan. Radoslav was amused and impressed that I had the measurements for the blades written down in an exercise book. ‘I like people who are organised,’ he said, whereupon I admitted, laughing, that such exactitude was very much a recent development, borne of having consistently fucked up in such matters throughout the course of my life.

At last we left messy, noisy, beguiling Pazardzhik and headed out into the countryside, driving towards a blue line of mountains that rose steeply from a patchwork of green and brown fields. The sun had set and the light was fading. We drove down the avenue of walnut trees, their bare and twisted branches meeting above our heads, and through the village of Debrashtitsa. I recognised the good ol’ boys outside the garishly neon-lit frontage of the village shop, rugged up in jackets and beanies, their gloved hands cupping tins of beer and foam cups full of rakija. Shortly afterwards, the village petered out in densely wooded foothills and, quite abruptly, the road began to climb.