Maria Genova - Communism, Sex and Lies

‘I like women who kiss, because then they have to be silent,’ he whispered.

I silently thumped him in his stomach, but I instinctively realized there was no point in fighting him. My body was apparently following a different logic from my mind. His experienced hands blocked every escape route.

The next few days we spent enjoying every nuance of desire, as if we were swept away by a wild river of passion. Every nerve in our bodies vibrated from excitement and the journey always ended in a waterfall, in a spectacular fall in the depths. Anton always waited until I had lost control before he let himself go. He had surpassed my expectations and I had no regrets at all that we have turned our friendship into pure lust. In the meantime, we tried every possible position from the Kama Sutra book, but then without the accompanying penetration. Some complicated positions gave us cramp, a stiff neck or the giggles.

Even though I was nearly 18 years old, my mother wouldn’t let me wear make-up. She called that natural beauty. Natural no way! My beauty had to be emphasized and if I got spots, the blemish had to be covered up.

One day I left home and walked towards a parked car as usual to put on my make-up in front of the wing mirror.

‘You don’t need that.’ The window suddenly rolled down and I was startled that there was someone in the car, and I hadn’t seen them.

‘Oh yes, I’ve heard that before. You sound just like my mother,’ I cheekily retorted.

‘Is that why you don’t put on your make-up at home, but use my mirror instead?’

The man’s voice sounded familiar. I looked at his face and opened my mouth in surprise when I recognized Trajan. Was this really the man I had fallen for a few years ago, and whom my parents wouldn’t let me see again? He had changed so much. His boyish features now had an attractive masculine appearance.

‘Do you recognize me?’ I suddenly asked as if I doubted it was really him.

‘How could I forget the only woman who has ever shot me?’ he said with a charming smile. ‘If you’re not seeing anyone, then maybe we could have a drink?’

I stared at him, with half my make-up on and seemed to have lost my voice.

‘So, what do you think?’ Trajan asked when he thought I had been silent long enough.

‘I need to finish putting on my make-up first.’

He waited patiently and then we walked to the closest bar. I was usually not attracted to men that my parents didn’t approve of, but Trajan still formed the exception to this unwritten rule. The next few weeks I spent looking forward to our secret rendezvous.

Trajan was a proper gentleman. He always let me go first, helped me into my coat, opened all the doors and even kissed my hand a few times. Very old-fashioned, but it made me feel like a real lady. In the end love is not only content, but also form. Trajan obviously thought about his tactics carefully, because he gave me many gifts, but never that many that it seemed like he was bribing me. Besides he always kept enough distance to be desirable. He was a dream guy and I was happy that my dreams had not be censored by my parents, because in reality I knew it would never work out. My parents wouldn’t allow someone who tried to earn a living selling paintings to get involved with their daughter.

In the end, I had to tell a white lie to get rid of Trajan, because I didn’t want to hurt him. All sorts of thoughts whirled in my head and bumped into each other.

‘The best lie is the truth,’ my sister advised me when I confessed my innermost feelings in the evenings.

‘He won’t accept that,’ I replied after some thought. ‘Theoretically we live in a classless society. You explain to him that the literati consider themselves to be a better class. We’re actually snobs, it’s all for the sake of appearances. I have to be dating a professor at least to meet my parents’ expectations. Where am I supposed to find someone like that, who was young and besides just as charming and handsome as Trajan?’

My sister shrugged her shoulders.

I knew she couldn’t help me, because she was also looking for love. She was in love with a man who was ten years older than her. My parents said this made him a selfish person who was trying to ruin their daughter’s violin career and didn’t let him go until he left our house in tears and promised to leave my sister alone.

My feelings for Trajan became stronger and that confused me. My friends and family would not accept him, so there was no point in staying together. My heart ached at the thought of letting him go, but I did not want to disappoint my parents. They had invested so much time and energy in me with the hope that someday I would match their expectations.

I knew by now that honesty was not always served with the truth and yet I gambled incorrectly by telling him the truth.

‘What did you want from me? Just a piece of fun between the sheets?’ His pretty eyes had changed into dark pools of hate and incomprehension.

‘I never promised you a serious relationship,’ I muttered.

‘I don’t like games, Mer. I gave you my soul and the whole time you used it to brush up your vanity.’

‘I simply couldn’t resist you because I liked you so much. I thought the intensity of our attraction would decrease in time and that we would each go our separate ways. I didn’t want to mislead you. When I was with you I always thought of the present, the future just didn’t interest me because the present was so fantastic. And if you still think I was playing games: I soon realized I was losing.’

‘And because you don’t like to lose, you decided to dump me?’

I ran to the bathroom and washed my face with cold water. I tried in vain to sort out the chaos of thoughts that flooded me.

When I returned to the room, Trajan had disappeared. My emotions again came to the forefront. I felt a slight disappointment, but also a certain relief. We didn’t need to talk any further and I didn’t need to try to cover up my true feelings for him. Maybe it was better this way, for both of us.

At the start the Bulgarian communists did not embrace glasnost or perestroika. Some Russian newspapers and magazines were taken off the shelves, because they printed too many truths. If a neighbour renovates his house, that doesn’t mean we have to do the same, the part leaders must have thought.

During my school years, the party dictatorship was so matter of course that no one even tried to conspire against them. Besides we had been lucky with our dictator, because at least he had a sense of humour. Party leader Zjivkov turned his pockets inside out during a conference on required investments, with the statement: ‘Look for yourself. I’m broke and I have no money for investments.’

That incident didn’t surprise me, because I was certain that he had deposited the stolen millions in foreign bank accounts. This way our leader could turn his pockets inside out without any problem and reduce himself to one of us. He was really a simple soul who had come to power by accident because he was at the right place at the right time. If Russia didn’t support him, this balding man would never have climbed into the engine of our history and certainly not sat behind the control panel for so long.

We were secretly jealous of the Russians because of the glasnost in their country. Olga even circulated the joke that the Bulgarian government was planning to invade the Soviet Union to save communism.

The reality of course was a little bit different, because the East-European countries didn’t dare to do away with communism for fear of military reprisals from Russia. In 1989 the satellite states realized they no longer had to be afraid. Gorbachev allowed them to more or less form their own future. The Hungarians carefully started to cut away the barbed wire on the border with Austria. In just a few months’ time 200.000 East German citizens fled via Hungary to West Germany. The communists had to find some way to stop the massive exodus from the worker’s paradise before it was too late.