Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

by Kapka Kassabova

But why come all the way here to build a house, among the derelict army buildings and rusty Soviet trucks, on top of that forgotten hill? The Belgian Irishman shrugged. ‘Because it’s beautiful. Besides,’ he said in his Belgian–Irish English, ‘once you lose your roots, it doesn’t really matter where you go, does it.’ He looked at me with momentary

interest. ‘And what are you doing here?’ I shrugged. It’s precisely when you have lost your roots that everywhere you go matters hugely. But he had moved on with his sons.

That although I no longer belonged here, in the broken country of my youth, it was where I secretly belonged the most. That I fancied myself as an observer, but even after twenty years away, I was still a participant and always would be. That I had no distance from anything and cared too much about the doomed.