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It may be that all borderlands hum with the frequencies of the unconscious; after all, borders are where the fabric is thin.
They were typically women of reproductive age or older, and come May or June, a kind of passionate fit would seize them, a rush of desire for fire. Nothing else would do. Field work, children, and small-town decency were forgotten. They would go stone cold and shivery, their eyes would turn, they would let their hair down, tear their clothes, and rush to the fire with moans of lament and passion. Vuh vuh vuh
Men like him, honest fanatics, Frankensteinian monsters of the totalitarian machine, were cursed to carry the Iron Curtain in their hearts, so that men of leisure could sip whisky and reminisce about the golden days.
The pet name Bulgarian border soldiers gave the electrified, alarmed wall of barbed wire that ran through the forest and sealed off the country from its neighbours. The official name was Saorajenieto, The Installation, and The Installation was ostensibly there to stop enemies from infiltrating. But if you look at the top of the wire, parts of which still stand, you see that it points to the real enemy: inwards.
I picture that man, fallen from the height of power all the way to the damp floor of a prison cell, skinny, riddled with cancer, wearing thick glasses, drawing diagrams of galaxies so that he wouldn’t have to look inside himself.
Under the various covers, he could pursue his true religion: the freedom to roam. To never be pinned down. The price he had paid was to write himself out of all official narratives – the family narrative, the national narrative, the cultural narrative, the career narrative – and to make his own small road stories.
The more I asked, the less talkative the keeper became, not meeting my eyes as if he was trying not to show me his pain; not because so much had happened here, but because it was over. It wasn’t just the family history that was over, but also that chapter in the human history of Black Sea lighthouses, and with it a certain harsh poetry had ended in favour of mundane mechanics that would never make a story.
