The fun and games continued the following evening when I finally met my neighbour. With aging good looks, thinning, slicked-back hair and pepper-and-salt beard Lazar reminded me of a cross between John Steinbeck and Waylon Jennings, right down to the deep, mellifluous voice and slightly louche charm. He appeared outside the cottage around nightfall, ostensibly to check the nearby spring which was frozen solid but also curious I sensed to meet me and find out what I was up to in this part of the world. After our initial greetings it quickly became apparent that neither of us could understand a single word of what the other said, but Lazar’s suggestion, conveyed by hand signals, that we sit down and drink rakija together at his place seemed like a step in the right direction.
The mercury had fallen to minus eight by then and I couldn’t help but shiver as we trudged down the track in the snow. Clouds filled the sky apart from here and there where they fell asunder to reveal fathomless voids of night sky lit by radiant gatherings of stars. There wasn’t a sound apart from the crunching of our footsteps on the frozen ground and the eerie hooting of an owl far off among the trees. Upon arriving at his house Lazar flung open the door and I was surprised to see, sitting at a table, a blond woman in her sixties smoking a cigarette. Radoslav had told me when he drove me up here that Lazar lived on his own, his wife choosing to reside in the lowlands at Pazardzhik, but clearly this wasn’t the case. The woman appeared as surprised to see me as I was her but got to her feet with a smile and held out her hand as Lazar introduced her as Jana.
A chair was brought and while I sat down at the table the pair of them swung into action. While Jana filled bowls with pickled vegetables from a vacuum-sealed stainless steel container, Lazar decanted rakija from a large bottle into a smaller one from which he filled a pair of curiously ornate glasses, like miniature flasks, almost to the brim. In the midst of this activity a large black and white tomcat, whom Lazar introduced as ‘Murray’, emerged from a hidden corner and dashed for the door. Clearly he wanted out.
Meanwhile I observed my surroundings. The room in which I sat had the feel and dimensions of a caravan, right down to the low ceiling and pop-out Perspex window that gave on to a similar room next door. Just inside this second room – the door hung with an oversized calendar adorned with a voluptuous bikini model, the girl looking fetchingly over her shoulder at the camera while taking an outdoor shower – a fire crackled in a wood-burning stove but sadly the heat from the stove didn’t make it to the outer room which was decidedly chilly. It was also rather empty apart from the table at which I sat, a pile of firewood stacked against one wall, a bag of cat food and a shovel, a pick and an axe stacked by the door. The walls were made of thin, untreated plywood except for the end one which was of opaque plastic sheeting. When out of curiosity I poked my finger through the curtains above the table I found – not entirely to my surprise – that the window beyond them was composed of the same flimsy substance.
Given the polar chill in the air the rakija was more than usually welcome. The first time round Lazar and I emptied our little glasses in unison and with an appropriate measure of solemnity, raising our glasses to each other saying, ‘Na zdravie!’ or ‘To your health,’ while exchanging meaningful looks across the table. But after these had been refilled we each took a more independent course, sipping the rakija at our own pace, Lazar in the meantime taking time out to show me a photograph of his granddaughter on his phone and then call up a friend who lived, he said, in Debrashtitsa and was a mighty hunter. As he talked Jana, who was drinking her rakija out of a water glass and appeared to be putting away more than either of us, dragged a gas burner into the middle of the room and began frying pork chops in a blackened pan. She served these in an unappetising-looking gravy that was the colour and consistency of wet cement and embedded with little brown and green specks which I told myself were herbs. Both Lazar and his wife belonged to that extraordinary group of people who smoke the whole time, including while they’re eating, which left me struggling for breath as the cold air around me turned a beguiling shade of blue.
By the time dinner was finished I was getting the hang of Bulgarian, at least up to the point where I no longer looked blankly back at them whenever my hosts addressed me. Lazar took this as a sign that it was time to start showing me a few things beginning with some photographs of he and a friend posing in full military gear, then moving on to his collection of ancient coins. The latter consisted of a number of small bronze discs that were burred around the edges and had turned green with verdigris, displaying on one side the ghostly image of some long-ago emperor in low relief. Along with the coins he brought out a large white catalogue book in which, leaning over my shoulder, he identified the specimens that I held in my hands. ‘Rim,’ he said, ‘Rim,’ tapping his forefinger against individual photographs and in his enthusiasm blowing billows of cigarette smoke in my face.
‘Rim’ of course meant Rome and I beheld a wonderful image in my mind’s eye of Lazar roaming with his metal detector over the Capitoline Hill, happily oblivious of the tourists milling around him. But he quickly made it clear that he had unearthed these treasures locally, conveying through a combination of meaningful looks and hand signals the existence of a number of Roman roads within walking distance of where we sat. In conveying this information he repeatedly used the word ‘Potom’, which I only discovered a couple of days later was the name of the valley where we lived. The word in Bulgarian means ‘hidden place’ which seemed to me entirely appropriate.
Meanwhile my appreciation of his archaeological finds was sufficient to encourage Lazar to bring out yet more of his toys. After topping up our glasses for the umpteenth time and while Jana looked on blissfully smiling he disappeared into the room next door, returning a moment or two later with a small canvas knapsack from which, like rabbits out of a hat, he extracted a series of fearsome-looking weapons.
First he took out what looked like a sacrificial knife. It was roughly ten inches long with a sleek pointy blade, a double hilt of gleaming silver and a handle of some kind of smooth black stone, just the thing in fact to plunge into the neck of some quivering victim. Next up Lazar produced a more conventional hunting dagger, both the ivory handle and long curving silver blade of which were elaborately engraved with the images of viciously snarling eagles with wings outspread and talons poised for attack. Seeing my stunned expression Lazar paused momentarily, with a manic grin contorting his handsome features, before holding up for my admiration the crowning glory of his armoury. This was a long-barrelled silver six-shooter, the chamber of which my neighbour casually flipped open to reveal that it was fully loaded with bullets.
‘Matchka,’ he replied, when I asked him what all this hardware was for. ‘Bears.’
Yikes!
By now I was beginning to suspect that my only neighbour – the only other man in the valley, in fact – was a bit of a nutter. However the idea soon became irrelevant in the uninterrupted flow of rakija and conversation, to say nothing of the cloud of cigarette smoke that engulfed us. Our talk was as varied as it was garbled, ranging through topics as diverse and entertaining as the corruption of the Bulgarian government, the matchless beauty of the mountains, the undesirability of running into a bear in the forest and the unparalleled evil of ‘Tsigani’, Gypsies, whom both Lazar and Jana vehemently agreed were a menace to society who deserved to literally be shot on sight. Lazar went so far as to aim an imaginary rifle and, simulating the pulling of a trigger, said, ‘BOOM!’ When I made it clear that I thought this was going a bit far my host resolutely shook his head.
It was hot on the heels of this that Lazar made his final disclosure. Summoning me to my feet he led me into the adjoining room, past the bikini model on the door and the wood-burning stove and on down to the end where there was a double bed that extended to almost the full width of the room. Probably by this stage I was ready for anything and so was neither surprised nor alarmed when my host pointed out the six-foot wooden bow hanging on the wall above the bed, alongside a quiver full of steel-tipped arrows. I mumbled my appreciation, whereupon Lazar with a gleam in his eye reached under a blanket that adorned the head of the bed and pulled out a double-barrel shotgun. Needless to say this too he flipped open so that I could see that both chambers were primed.
It was the crowning act of an extraordinary evening. Shortly afterwards I said my farewells and stumbled back out into the snow.
Recent Comments