Maria Genova - Communism, Sex and Lies

At Easter, we bent over to walk under Jesus’ coffin, which had been placed on two tables. I’m not sure that this symbolic activity meant, but I was excited each time. Just like the candle that you lit in the church and took home while it was still burning. If the candle went out on your way home, that was a bad omen. It was quite a feat to protect the candle from the wind and that made the ritual especially exciting.

After the fall of the Wall, all kinds of Western religion and sects got a foot on the ground. I had found myself an explanation why all of Bulgaria had thrown itself to God. As long as everything was going well, we didn’t need him, but in these uncertain times the Prophet was suddenly very welcome.

To me, such faith had a taste of hypocrisy. People who are happy, don’t often believe in God, but if their life has a dramatic change, then they start to read the Bible. If they are healthy, they don’t need the Lord, but if they are ill, old and rickety, then they bless themselves in church.

It was actually not that strange that the non-religious Bulgarian people had suddenly stormed the churches en masse. Over the last few the years the communists had created a kind of religious mood, a feeling of obedience and admiration, which slotted perfectly into the ambience of the church. And this way all non-believing Bulgarians were converted from one day to the next.

Religion had become so cool that if I got lost in the city, I daren’t ask my way any longer. In no time a number of people would show me the right way. To the Redeemer, to be clear. I could not explain that I hadn’t lost my way in life, but just my way on the map. After we had said goodbye to dictatorship, none of the maps made sense. All the street names that sounded communist in some way had been changed. Sometimes three times in a row, because some new names had stigma attached to them.

Some of my peers had become so religious that I couldn’t hold a normal conversation with them. They constantly pointed me to God, because they could always solve their problems in a chat with him. I thought it would be a wonderful idea to be able to do that also. No more worries, no unanswered questions and if you did something wrong, you blamed God for not protecting you from doing it.

I tried my hardest to become religious: I visited different churches, sang Psalms and read the Bible. But I remained doubtful. If there was an Almighty God, then this meant he was inside me and made mistakes with me.

Perhaps I didn’t need to worry about his existence, because eventually he would forgive me my sins. After all, that was his job. Apparently, my unbelieving brain needed a more robust approach. Via a friend, I came to a church that would exorcise the devil out of me. The faithful made a circle and placed me in the middle, together with a few other strangers who had not yet seen the light. A little while later we were forcefully swung back and forth. The shouted out incomprehensible words that sounded like magical spells. I thought it was both funny and frightening at the same time. I didn’t think about the light, but about the bruises I would be left with.

After the session, the faithful asked me straight away if I had seen the light. Sure. I was finally certain: I’m no longer going to search for God. If he wants me, let him give a sign. For someone who is almighty, that shouldn’t be a problem. Besides, they say it’s never too late to believe in God. In that case I was going to wait a while longer and intensify my search for a knight in shining armour. I thought the least God could do was arrange this for me, seeing as I had tried too hard to believe in him.

And God sent Anton. I could hardly believe that my old friend had turned to religion, just like that. He was totally changed and was just as intriguing and secretive as a Chinese hieroglyph. I still recognised his charming behaviour and his intellect, but our conversations were now focused on God, because he had become a true emissary of the Lord.

The fact that Anton didn’t want to surrender himself so easily, sharpened all my senses. I usually didn’t dream about men, but for him I made an exception. In my dream, he was a priest in a pretty church. There was no one else there and I went to confess my sins to him. I told him that I recklessly flirted with men and that I regretted it. He pulled me into his strong arms and offered me consolation. Then he pressed his face in my hair and whispered softly: ‘Perhaps you haven’t met the right man. Let it come to you. The Lord will send him to you.’

Those were prophetic words. Under his fine robe, I felt his warm muscular body. His passionate kiss was like a bomb with a delay mechanism. I didn’t know if he had set the timer, but I was certain the bomb would explode quickly. Anton moved his hands kneading and caressing over my upper body. His touch felt like the gateway to paradise. He kneeled in front of me, slid his tongue along my thighs and upwards and grabbed a piece of skin between his lips. I shook like an aspen leaf. My thighs were separated like they were begging him to discover their warmth and arousal. I felt like an opened packet of fireworks, in which someone had accidentally thrown in a sparkler. An explosion spread at the speed of light through my body and contracted all my muscles.

Daylight poured into the room. I was alone in bed. Reality was a downer after this super sensual experience, I thought to myself. Nice dreams can be deceiving. When you wake up, you are confronted with reality straight away, which puts your nice dream in a different perspective. In this regard, it might have been better to wake up from a nightmare. Then you appreciated reality all the more, because it did not resemble your nightmare in any way.

‘Mer, I’ve seldom caught you with an optimistic thought,’ Olga said when I told her about my dream and my suspicions. ‘Sometime reality can be much better than the nicest dream.’

I wanted to see it before I could believe it, just like God. It took nearly two weeks to make a hole in the wall surrounding Anton’s controlled sexuality. One night when we were alone in his house, he suddenly started to explore my body with the nervous hands of a novice sculptor. I felt Anton’s wet mouth close around my nipple. I shivered on the edge of discharging and secretly hoped that our bodies would find the point where time stood still. We hadn’t even fully unclothed when he reached that point alone.

It seems a dream was better than reality.

While the uncertain existence of God tormented my mind, societal development followed quickly one after the other. Reality was just like a kaleidoscope: each time you looked at it from a different point of view, you saw something different. For me the worst thing about the post-communist era was the resulting division. The party leaders had always hidden their riches from the eyes of the people with high fences, but the new rich didn’t do that. They actually showed off their Rolexes, their villa’s and their expensive cars.

Under the reign of the communist party, which had given itself the new name ‘socialist’, Bulgaria embraced the worst sort of capitalism that existed. The entire social support system fell away to make place for a Darwinist survival principle. It was an unmistakable paradox: during communism, most people had enough money, but could hardly buy anything with it, now the stores were full of Western products, but most people had no money. Prices had risen so much that the Bulgarian currency, the Lev, had become worthless. My grandmother had been saving her whole life assuming that I could buy myself a washing machine or other expensive appliance. The extortionate inflation meant that all savings disappeared like snow melting in the sun. It had been deposited in a bank account, but yet it had disappeared. The only thing I could buy was a toaster.