Ripples
This is a story about time, among other things, and how it is measured, and an instrument which measures it - a watch, which I notice on Boris’s wrist as he pours tea for me. I am in Rousse, a city on Bulgaria’s Danube coast, sitting with Boris at a metal table on the balcony of his family home, a red-brick merchant’s house which was built in 1904. The date, with the arm of the “1” for some reason reversed, is written over the door to the balcony in stone. A pigeon cooes gently in the background from a 250-year-old mulberry tree. The tree was already old when the house was built, and Boris tells me that the width of the facade of the house was determined by the position of the tree, which could not be removed. The house was built by Boris’s great-grandfather, Hachadur Sarkissyan, who was born in 1870. He had intended the house to have the possibility of the addition of a second storey, but that alteration never occurred, and so the house continues to this day to maintain its squat, squarish elegance, with the tree located at the 8 o’clock position and the balcony at twelve, when looking at the facade of the house within its grounds.
Hachadur’s father had been an Armenian who had come to Bulgaria from Turkey, a member of a community which had had a long history in eastern Anatolia until political instability, harsh economic conditions, and ethnic tensions forced their emigration from their homeland to seek refuge in Europe and other countries in the Middle East. The young Hachadur grew up and eventually formed a couple with a girl called Vartuhi, who was born in 1880. They had a family of four children, a boy and 3 girls. Hachadur died in 1937, some twenty-three years after the last daughter was born, and his death was followed soon after in 1938 by that of Vartuhi, his wife, with their son tragically following some months later. The eldest daughter was Berdjuhi, who lived all her life in Rousse, but doesn’t figure in these events. She was followed by two more daughters: Madeleine, who later married Mirjan, a watch- maker, and went to live in Varna; and by Anitsa-Repega, born in 1914, who after her marriage to Nikola Dalbokov, (b.1908, d.1998), had two children, the second of whom she named after her sister Madeleine; this younger Madeleine was Boris’s mother. The elder Madeleine was thus his grand aunt.
Hachadur Sarkissyan, the patriarch of this Rousse family, was a good businessman and owned a change bureau at 148 Aleksandrovska, the main street of the town. He was a trader in silk also, and knew a number of languages. The wealth which he obtained from this trinity of talents enabled him to build the house at 50 Dondukov- Korsakov, where I am sitting on the balcony with Boris. In 1918 after the Russian revolution, the currency which he had in Imperial Roubles lost value and he became almost bankrupt, but according to Anitsa-Repega he had some gold with which he succeeded to pay his debts and so escaped destitution. Others were not so lucky, and for many the shame was so great that they committed suicide. Hachadur succeeded in keeping his house, but remained very poor, his fortune lost.
Boris had taken me to the small house, now in tumbling ruins, where in 1908 Nikola Dalbokov was born, near the meteorological station in Rousse. Even when inhabited and maintained it can’t have offered more than basic shelter. It was rented from the owners of a larger, grander house, had been built in the grounds of the same, and had its own yard which took about a fourth of the area of the larger demesne. Nikola’s father had been an accountant working for one of the factories in the area, so Nikola received a good education, and trained as a cabinet maker, eventually renting his own workshop.
It was in the unfolding of the timeline of events between Nikola’s birth in 1908, the very year of the declaration of the Third Bulgarian Kingdom, and the abolition of the same monarchy by the occupying forces of the USSR in 1946, that Nikola and Mirjan separately grew from childhood into adulthood, learned their respective crafts of cabinet-making and watch-making, fell in love with the two sisters, Anitsa-Repega and Madeleine, became through their respective marriages brothers-in-law, and nurtured their own families and businesses. Mirjan, Nikola’s brother-in-law through his marriage to the elder Madeleine, plied his trade as a watchmaker in Varna, on the Black Sea, 200km south-east of Rousse. His house was near the cathedral, and he lived there with his wife and two children. He lost his watch-making business to the Communist Party’s nationalisation programme post-1946. Private businesses being banned, many individual craftsmen who worked alone as self-employed artisans had their businesses taken from them and now worked instead under the 5-pointed red star of the communist state. Mirjan, however dubiously, continued to work in his workshop in Varna. Likewise, Nikola, married to Anitsa-Repega, worked away on his furniture in his cabinet-making workshop at 5 Hristo G. Danov in Rousse, until after the communist takeover, when he lost it, or rather, it was taken from him, and he was appointed instead to be the director of, of all things, the lemonade factory, a well- known and popular employer in the town. Communist Party membership was expected, especially for someone, like Nikola, in a managerial position.
On the face of it, Nikola accepted his “promotion”, but only up to a point, for he quickly found himself diametrically opposed to the authorities; he couldn’t reconcile his own ideas of communism with those he saw manifested in the Bulgarian Communist Party, and refused to join, with the result that six days after his appointment, he was removed from the post and given a menial position. However, he kept working in secret at home on his cabinet-making business, keeping his activities ticking over, below any level which might arouse the suspicions of the authorities.
Half of the house at 50 Dondukov-Korsakov, which Anitsa-Repega had inherited from her father, had been nationalised by the housing authority, and the house thus divided into two apartments, only one of which she now owned. Nikola and Anitsa- Repega lived in the left-hand side of the house (the side with the mulberry tree), and another family was moved into the right-hand side of the house. The upstairs was sealed and stamped so that it couldn’t be used by anyone. In order to continue his furniture-making, what Nikola used to do after he came home from work at around 7 o’clock, depending on the season, but under cover of darkness, was to climb the mulberry tree to the balcony (the one on which I am sitting as Boris relates this story), and gain unauthorised access to the upper room through the balcony door. Here he would work at night on his private furniture business, as quietly as possible, given the nature of his craft, removing projects in sections as they were completed by lowering them over the balcony, pendulum-like, to a cart which would deliver the work to the client, rolling noiselessly away on rubber wheels so as to neither disturb the neighbours nor alert the authorities.
In Varna, about this time, watch-maker Mirjan was in a similar position with regard to his own business which it was now illegal to pursue - he still had his watches, together with gems and stones, but how long he would get to keep them he couldn’t know. One night he had a premonition of doom which had so unsettled him that the next day he was driven to send a telegram to Nikola in Rousse asking him to come to Varna to take his most precious watches, jewels, and gems in a box and hide them in the house in Rousse on Dondukov-Korsakov. Nikola obliged and took the very next train to Varna, returning that day with a suitcase containing the items. Since Nikola had always been poor and was in a menial job, there would be little suspicion on the part of the authorities that he might be hoarding jewels. Sadly, Mirjan’s premonition proved correct, for one night in Varna there came a knock at the door, and a Party representative backed up by 7 members of the People’s Militia arrested Mirjan under the charge of being “an enemy of the people” and took him away. He was not seen again for some years.
Madeleine the elder had no idea what had happened to her husband. Who can say what pain and anguish she felt, or how hard it was for her as the days turned to weeks, and then months, with no news of his fate? Time, after all, is measured by the events which unfold within its embrace. In the absence of events, time ceases, and becomes a constant purgatory of now. There was no news of Mirjan; no events came to Madeleine’s attention concerning his fate. He had just disappeared, and it took her perhaps nine months or so to accept the possibility that he might be dead. Sometimes she mourned, other times she held hope that he was still alive somewhere, but all the time, time mutely passed her by.
Some years later in Rousse, Anitsa-Repega was busy raising her family. She was in the habit, around ten every morning, of taking young Madeleine for a walk, pushing her in a pram. Often, while her husband Nikola was at work, she would go to visit his parents, whose house was situated at 10 Dunav Square, and her route there took her along a wall by the back of the prison, on a street now called Tsar Kaloyan that is behind what is now the Archaeological Museum on Battenberg Square. The prison is long gone, its site an open area that is a part of the museum grounds, but in the 1950’s it was an imposing ugly off-white building, 70 by 30 metres, surrounded by a 4 metre wall, and its functional brutalism stood in sharp contrast to the grand Viennese- inspired architecture of the buildings which surrounded it. It was built in 1866 under the order of Midhat Pasha, the governor of the region then under the Ottoman Empire. Not a few Bulgarian heroes and fighters for the cause of Bulgarian liberation had been imprisoned there, doing time for their ideals, many dying under the harsh regime. Under the Monarchy, and subsequently under the Communists, the prison had continued to operate, until in the 1960’s it was converted into a shelter for the homeless. It was finally demolished in the 1970’s, the execution of its demolition being too hastily done to allow a letter of reprieve from Sofia, confirming its status as a historically significant building, to arrive in time to save it.
