Maria Genova - Communism, Sex and Lies

We talked, drank and danced all night. He looked at me almost hypnotically with his emerald green eyes. While we danced, I smelled his skin for the first time. The smell was so pure and masculine that I could imagine I would enjoy being intimate with him.

At about 4 a.m. I decided it was time to go to bed. I had to sleep for a few hours, because I had a rescue skiing competition the next day, which consisted of a number of intense components. The most intense was the slalom, where we had to transport a wounded skier on a sledge between the flags in as short a times as possible. The course was at the top of a steep black run, which sometimes got pretty icy. However, that didn’t bother me as much as the orientation test in the woods. Luckily one of the other girls in the team was handy with a compass. If we followed her blindly we usually reached the target without missing any checkpoints.

I was disappointed that Frank couldn’t come and watch the competition. He had booked a daytrip to Plovdiv to admire my city’s old architecture.

‘I would very much like to see you again,’ he said. ‘Shall we meet tonight in the same bar?’

‘I think you’ll be too tired, because it’s quite a long journey. Going back and forth on one day is pretty exhausting.’

‘I’ll be there at 10 p.m., dead or alive.’ Frank smiled. His teeth were just as white as his shirt.

The next morning I heard the voice of our trainer, but I didn’t want to get up. Was it that time already? How long had I slept?

He gave me a shove. ‘Did you spend too much time last night drinking?’ His remark startled me and I opened my eyes. He smiled. It was just a joke. As usual he had no idea that I left the building after I had put on my pyjamas and pretended to sleep. He never checked twice and I could spend as much time in the discos as I wanted until my legs started hurting.

I pulled on my white ski pants and instinctively thought of Frank’s clean white shirt. I was surprised at my own association. Why did I keep thinking about him, when he wasn’t my type? Frank had a certain charm, with which he made you feel at ease and yet he didn’t bear any resemblance to the prince Charming from my fantasies. Although he was tall and slim, and he looked muscular, his shoulders just weren’t broad enough for my taste. And his haircut wasn’t really trendy, despite all that gel in his hair.

At the sound of the starting pistol I tensed my muscles. I had to give it my all to win this competition. We were the favourites. Last year we had just missed out by mission the last slalom gate, but we now had a real chance.

My alcohol driven engine worked that good that my team mates could hardly keep up with me during the first part, cross country skiing with special broad ski’s. The other components also went well, even though I kept on feeling my heart in my mouth. We had the best time at the finish, but we had to wait for the score of a few other teams. When the other team missed a slalom gate, we knew for sure: we had won the national title for rescue skiing!

‘Do you know if you’re going to go on your date, because it’s 10 p.m. already,’ my teammate Snezana said. She already knew Frank wasn’t my type based on the way he looked, but that I hadn’t laughed as much as last night.

‘I’m not sure. What’s the point of flirting with someone whose leaving for a far-away country the next morning? It can’t work out. If I go to him, I might miss out on my prince Charming tonight.’

‘The chance you’ll meet your prince Charming tonight, is almost nihil,’ Snezana assured me with the emphasis on the word nihil. ‘You’ve been on the lookout for him since you joined the team. Go and see Frank. At least you’ll have a nice evening, if you ask me.’

I nodded in agreement and went to make myself up. After taking every item of clothing out of my suitcase, putting them on and taking them off again, I stuck to a sexy shirt with a deep cleavage and a tight skirt.

‘Isn’t that too much?’ I asked Snezana.

‘No, go, because it’s nearly 11 p.m. I doubt he’s still waiting for you.’

When I entered the disco I nearly bumped into Frank, who was making his way to the exit.

‘It’s you,’ he said surprised. ‘I was about to leave. Why are you so late?’

‘I wanted to test how much you liked me. If a man leaves after just half an hour, then he’s not too keen on the woman he’s waiting for.’

‘Aha,’ Frank nodded at my theory. It didn’t sound like agreement, but the rest of the evening he didn’t talk about time at all. Until it was nearly morning and he had to catch the bus to the airport. That was the first time he looked at his watch again. The hours had flown by in chatting and dancing more and more intimately. The last tune the DJ played was ‘I’ve Been Thinking About You’ by London Beat.

The chorus ‘I’ve been thinking about you’ echoed repeatedly through the speakers. It couldn’t have been more apt, so soon before our definite goodbyes.

‘I’ll write to you and phone you,’ Frank said and gave me some tapes with Dutch music as a memento. ‘I hope you’ll think about me every now and then when you listen to the music.’

‘I imagine I will, because I don’t know any other Dutch people,’ I smiled.

‘I love you,’ he whispered in my ear.

‘I’m not in love yet, but I do think you’re very sweet,’ I whispered back and gave him a going-away kiss. Somewhere in the background we could still hear London Beat’s song:

The next few months I received many cards with hugging bears, kissing giraffes, joined hearts and many more kitschy images. I jumped at every ring of the phone and ran towards it. If it was Frank, then my day couldn’t get any better. He always talked so sweet and used such loving words, that I stopped doubting if he was truly my knight in shining armour who I had been waiting on for so long. There was just one practical problem: my knight was separated from me by 2500 km.

In the meantime, everything in Bulgaria was changing. There were less and less things which reminded people of life during communism. The large red star on the roof of the party building had been taken down and a start was made with the mass destruction of communist monuments. The smaller statues of Lenin and Stalin were destroyed by hand, there was lots of dynamite needed for the medium-sized ones and the largest just fell into disrepair because the government knew it would cost millions to remove them. Where they used to have giant paintings of hardworking labourers hanging in the main streets, now there were adverts for whisky, surrounded with beautiful half-naked women or fast cars, which were also advertised by half-naked women.

The people had also changed in a short time. They were deeply disappointed in the new reality, which provided no security. During communism, there hadn’t been enough jobs for everyone, but everyone had a job. You only realised the true size of hidden unemployment after the mass lay-offs after the revolution. Suddenly this unknown luxury had been done away with, because everything had to be reformed to fit the Western model.

We were clearly playing catch-up. The scarcity of tropical fruit was solved in no time. We could no longer imagine that during communism the queues for bananas had been so long that they would pass through several streets. I could vaguely recall that my sister and I had waited in line for hours without exchanging a word because someone might tell the saleswoman that we were sisters. Then we wouldn’t be allowed to buy one kilo each, but just one kilo for the entire family. The bananas they sold were always green and we would eat them straight away because we couldn’t wait until they ripened. Some of my friends didn’t even realise they turned yellow.