Vagabond E-Book

Jeremy James

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 375

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The journey starts when author and long-rider Jeremy James buys two horses from gypsies at a fair in southern Bulgaria. He and his long-suffering friend Chumpie then set off on horseback, winding northwards to Berlin, and on the way they encounter a marvellous array of local characters from all walks of life as they ride from Bulgaria to Berlin, via Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.     On a low budget, they are sustained by local fire-water, indigestible food and the forceful personalities of their horses who steal, run away, misbehave or suddenly comply at will and add a whole new dimension to the experience of travel. After five long months, they finally reach their destination. It has taken Jeremy through an Eastern Europe full of surprises, which, with the collapse of communism, has almost disappeared today.

Leseprobe

Vagabond

A horseback adventure from Bulgaria to Berlin

Jeremy James

Contents

Foreword by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Off

The Official Spy

Strawberry Roan

Dancing Bears

Gypsy Horse

Golden Orioles

The Reservoir

Kondoms and Oboriste

A Peculiar Theft

Farewell to a Friend

Karo

Valley of Roses

The Balkans

Runaway

Cut-throat

Across the Danube

Reflections

Stallion Man

The Road to Bābāiţa

The Bandit

Submerged

André and Puşa

Puşa

One Hot Slog

The Good Life

Birthday Kiss

His Saddle Slung Over His Shoulder 108

Bedfellow

Horse Talk

Ursa

Hungary

Blind in a Flatland

Hitch-hiker Csabika

Of Crooks and Goblins

A Train Journey

The Last Fart of the Ferret

Up Between the Toes

Gavin

Knight

A Promise

Rafał

Posse of Angels

The Gunnery Range

Vagabond

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Jeremy James’s easy-going style – as informal as chat leaning on the bar of a wayside drinking hall with a weather-eye for his grazing horse – is so much more often hit than miss that one can’t help suspecting, after a time, that the philistinism or the pretence of it, that he scatters about his pages is a tease. He lets give-away sparks of cultivation escape. The oversights may make an aesthete moan, but the insights are instinctively sound and perceptive, always warm and generous and, again and again, extremely funny. He is particularly adept at piecing together the companionable blinds and hangovers of one’s youthful travels in wild places but the heroes of the book are neither the author, nor the denizens of south-eastern Europe, nor the landscape but the two steeds he bought off the gypsies in Bulgaria and Rumania.

These pages are hard to beat and, here and there, the reader’s eyes prickle as though we were reading Black Beauty for the first time, in the gorges of the Great Balkan Range, or in the Carpathian uplands or on the Puszta.

We are carried in his wake across the Puszta, through Slovakia and the plains of Poland and through Eastern and Western Germany at a time of great political change. There are moments of doubt and acute anxiety, but by the time he is safe home in the Welsh mountains all early reservations have vanished and the author has us eating out of his hand.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Now a horse is a fine lady among animals, flighty, timid, delicate in eating, of tender health: he is too valuable, too sensitive to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow galley-slave: a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, he’s an uncertain and exacting ally and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of the voyager...

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

Robert Louis Stevenson

Off

‘I’m sorry to telephone you on a Saturday afternoon but my friend has done good work in Sofia and has found you two horses, one black, one white.’ It was Mr Popof from the Bulgarian Embassy.

I’d asked for black and white horses: that is to say, piebald.

‘Ah.’

‘The white one is eight years old, the black one is also eight years old.’

‘Ah.’ ‘You can BUY them in Sofia and the price is – how can I say? – the price is – er I cannot think – the price is, must be, let me see, with all saddles and bridles and everything – all you need is riding boots and breeches!’

‘Ah.’

‘The price is very good, what is? Hello? – maybe, well, maybe ... about ... 5 or maybe 8,000 dollars ... Hello? Hello? Mr Dchames? Hello? Of course these figures can be discussed and you can … in Sofia ... Hello? Mr Dchames? Hello?’

‘Strewth.’

‘See you in Heathrow Mr Dchames?’

‘Strewth.’ And outside the sun was roaring away, bulbs in the garden were exploding, a thrush was singing and lambs were bawling their heads off. I didn’t have 5 or 8,000 dollars. Not any more. I did, once, for a while: a short while, just after Pelham gave it to me. But what with one thing and another it’d gone. Advances are like that. Now you have them, now you don’t. Now I didn’t. What could I do?

This was serious worrying time: a bit of a jam. Thing was, I didn’t want to go anyway, not with all that sunshine and spring.

Then a thought occurred: I thought maybe, maybe the money, or lack of it, was the way out. Maybe I’d just have to go to Bulgaria, then ring Roger in Pelham to tell him I couldn’t do this ride because it was too expensive and he’d say ‘OK, forget it’ so I could come back and loaf around here all summer instead.

But it wasn’t that easy.

Thing was I’d gone and committed myself in other ways: like Gonzo, my horse, for instance. I’d found him another home. And Dolly my Welsh pony and Punch my bull terrier, they’d got homes.

I set out to ride Gonzo to Norfolk to the ILPH (International League for the Protection of Horses) but sixteen miles down the road wound up in Jane Lennox’s place and Jane wound up with Gonzo. Sixteen miles.

Dolly went home to Alan Watkin, her rightful owner – just across the fields from here – and Punch was in Devon with Mark Alderson, and Mark was going through this divorce business, hadn’t got himself a house sorted out and already had a bull terrier anyway. And what worried me about it was Mark knew Punch, and knew about his funny little habits, so why did he agree to it? I mean why did he want to look after him? I know about Punch’s funny little habits too. I have to pay for them. I had to pay for a new seat for Sid’s motorbike, and for his tractor door, and for Sue’s sofa to be restuffed and for her feather cushions to be restuffed and her elderly teddy bear to be restuffed. I just knew if I went away I’d come home to a massive restuffing bill. But it was done now, and he was in Devon, Gonzo was with Jane and Dolly was across the fields.

So, with all my animals gone, and air tickets bought, I was badly committed and everybody was expecting me to go.

Jeff Aldridge was expecting me to go. He said so one night when I was at his place round about closing time, down at The Crown. He got quite interested in me going. He said so. In fact he got very excited about it.

‘Go away!’ he said, ‘Go on! Get out! Go away! And don’t come back for six months!’

He even helped me to the door.

Who can resist encouragement like that?

So there I was mooching around in the garden one Saturday afternoon in all this sunshine and missing my animals when Mr Popof rang, which seemed to put the lid on everything, so I locked up the cottage, slung the saddles and saddlebags in the car, and went down to the Cotswolds to Chumpie, who was coming along. So she thought.

I drove a glorious sunny two hours to Gloucestershire and arrived to find her faffing about in a pile of saddlery, organising what looked like a major cavalry campaign, with sutures, syringes, bandages, whipping cord, needles, blood transfusion things, little boxes of gut-rot pills, water purification tablets: all the kind of stuff I wouldn’t have bothered with. And she was babbling on about visas for Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and what made me so sure I’d get into East Germany? And to tell you the truth, I’d only got a couple of visas because it’s such a drag trying to get hold of them and there are a million things I’d rather do than write tedious letters off to dusty embassies asking about visas. Besides I didn’t want to do any of this trip and had this secret plan of ringing Roger from Bulgaria to tell him it was all off. But I could hardly let on to Chumpie, could I?

So just to make a show of things I set about shoving the saddles into their bags, which was about as much fun as pushing calves back into cows, then burst all the citronella bottles and got so angry I felt like ditching the whole lot in the Windrush, going to get all my animals and pushing off back home, and to hell with the consequences.

Anyway, I won’t bore you to death with any more of that, or what it was like hanging around at Heathrow in blazing sunshine waiting for a plane which I hoped had conked out somewhere, and wandering around trying to find Mr Popof.

‘When he does turn up I expect he’ll just pop-off the other end,’ Chumpie said.

When he arrived he introduced himself straightaway, and once on the plane had the sense to sit with a friend, so sparing us the agony of having to talk.

Three and a half hours later we came barrelling in over the Balkans in a storm, landing with a big bounce in Sofia airport in pouring rain, got collected by Penko Dinev, a friend of Julian Popof’s, in a rattling gas-propelled Moskovitch, were driven through gloomy backstreets, arriving some time later halfway up a mountain, at a small private hotel where the bog was reluctant and the washing arrangements shared.

But it did.

It did better than dinner in the local restaurant where we sat on chintz chairs in a room lit by a single dying neon light and where a grubby, bleary-eyed waiter appeared swaying about in front of us to announce that liver was off.

‘Anything else?’

‘Chicken.’

‘Fine.’

When the liver arrived it was cold.

But the wine was good.

When we got outside, it was pitch black, still pelting with rain, so Penko drove us to our little hotel, off some back road somewhere above Sofia on the slopes of Mount Vitosha, which all felt like a trip from heaven to hell by way of Balkan Air.

The Official Spy

Once we’d arrived I felt differently about things. It had been such an effort getting there, the idea of reversing everything and doing it all backwards just to get home and back to normality seemed a bit pointless. I decided not to ring Roger but rather wait and see what we could make of it all. Somehow, the money I had would have to stretch.

Besides, I wasn’t going to get on that aeroplane again. Not after that landing. No doubt the take-off would be worse and it’d be safer riding home anyway. So I thought, well, there’s nothing else to do, temporarily forgot about Gonzo and Punch and Dolly and, with a big heave, got on with it.

Now the first impression I had of the Bulgarians was that they were a brown-eyed and black-haired people, a bit Latin, but, of course, Slav. Chumpie, on the other hand, thought they were fair haired, European, not Latin or Slav at all.

Their writing is Cyrillic which is illegible unless you’re some sort of a swot, and so any sign, menu or anything that needs reading is unreadable. The language is impossible too unless you’ve spent half your life there. But we tried.

The first thing we learned to say was, ‘Does it always rain at this time of year?’

We discovered it did. All day. Nevertheless, we were taken to Sofia by Penko and Julian Popof next morning, to the riding federation to have a look at these expensive horses.

We went through Sofia.

I’d been to a communist city before – to Moscow, also to look at horses – and what strikes you about a communist city is it’s sort of bald-looking because it doesn’t have any pizazz. Half the street lights don’t work, all the cars are conked out, the shops look about as jolly as dungeons and it all gives you the impression of being really dead-beat: which it is. But in a funny way, because there are no advertising hoardings or glossy neon lights, it’s refreshing. It’s good to be able to look at a building uncluttered by posters. The snag is you quickly spot that this is no accident, but a design, and only when you wander into a shop to find it bare do you realise you’ve hit half a century of totalitarian oppression and it’s a shock. There isn’t anything to buy. Even if there was, there isn’t the currency to buy it, and even if you had the currency to buy it, to get anything of any sort of quality, you have to go to the hard currency shop – foreign exchange shop, the dollar shop – and buy western goods at silly prices because most communist goods are dodgy. Accordingly, western goods have social cachet, and things like deodorants, bars of soap or empty bottles of whisky decorate cabinets like ornaments, because they imply that someone in that household has had access to western cash, and that has clout.

But in spite of the gloominess, old Sofia manages to be a grand city somehow, with wide traffic-free boulevards cobbled in honey-coloured brick, and lined with municipal buildings, colonnaded and tall. Here the domes of Aleksander Nevski Cathedral and the gold multi-onioned domes of the Russian Orthodox church are a blazing contrast to the boarded-up, potholed and ramshackle poured-concrete monsters on the outskirts of town, the nastiest reminder of communist flair at its architectural best, hurling up the kind of buildings it believes a good communist ought to make himself content in. And, if you are a good communist you’ll probably be a party member and that means you’ll get a house for being a good worker somewhere out in the country, which you can go to in your communist car, your Moskovitch, Skoda, Dacia or Lada, or your Trabant – small, two-stroke engined things that wheeze along all over the road, gassing the pedestrians. The biggest cars are Russian Zils, which you get if you’re a real big shot in the party, and we saw a thundering cavalcade of these burning past, scattering Trabants like plates of sprats. We were told it was party officials going home for lunch.

When we were in the city, there was talk about elections, it sounded like things were going to change, communism was going to get the boot. It felt positive.

That’s what it felt like. I was to discover the reality later – straight from the horse’s mouth.

And it was a horse’s mouth I was staring into at the riding federation when told one of the white Arabs – of which there were four – was eight years old.

‘Eleven,’ I said.

Mr Pesev, the boss, hoofed it. Maria, our translator, said he’d gone off to find out the horse’s age. He came back and said the horse was nine and a half. I didn’t look in the black horse’s mouth. I was staring at the Arabs. I wouldn’t have given 800 dollars for the lot.

Julian Popof and Penko were hanging about looking bored and it wasn’t long before they left.

‘Pop-off,’ Chumpie said.

‘What about village horses? Gypsy horses?’ I asked. Maria tried it on Mr Pesev. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What about village horses?’

‘Can’t I buy village horses?’

‘No. Village horses are no good. And anyway they have no papers and you can’t export horses if you buy them in leva [the currency of Bulgaria] and you, as a foreigner, can’t buy horses or anything from a villager with dollars.’

‘Gypsy horses?’

‘All gypsy horses are bad.’

Snookered.

And although I’ve never had much luck with them before, we made for the British Embassy, just in case someone could help, but we had to be quick because it was Friday.

Taxis are a cinch in Sofia, and since the exchange rate was good for tourists, the taxi we took was cheap. We rattled through the town, over tramlines where dilapidated old trams lurched and clattered about, we hurtled over cobbles, through streets of baroque peeling buildings worn out and grey behind budding trees.

When we got to the embassy we were let in and hung about for a while with a group of people trying to get visas for England when the vice-consul, Bob Gordon, introduced himself asking what he could do for us. We told him. He looked at his feet.

‘I don’t know where to get horses, but I can give you a bit of paper which will set you on your way,’ he said and an hour later we were handed a document, written in Cyrillic, translated for our benefit, and that piece of paper was worth it. He set a precedent which was followed by all the other embassies and now I’ve got a collection of these letters which say I can ride horses all over everywhere, all because of Bob Gordon.

I told him we had permission from the Bulgarian authorities but hadn’t, actually. All I’d done was mention the idea to Mr Popof who waved his arms around vaguely and said yes, yes, he’d see, and that was the extent of my enquiries. Sorry about that, Bob. But it seemed to do the trick, didn’t it?

Bob’s letter quoted what I told him, which was that the Bulgarian authorities had agreed. I didn’t expand on it and nobody questioned me.

He added we should see Colonel Ivan Dimitrovitch Zvegintsov.

Colonel Ivan Dimitrovitch Zvegintsov?

I didn’t want to: he’d ask questions. I wanted to avoid people who’d ask questions. Colonel Ivan Dimitrovitch Zvegintsov sounded like a man who didn’t like woolly-headed ideas. I expected he could get us thrown out of the country. He was a big wheel, knocked about with all the top brass, was friends with all the generals and brigadiers and ministers. I didn’t rate our chances with Colonel Ivan Dimitrovitch Zvegintsov, I didn’t rate them at all. I didn’t have any plans, no idea where we were going, didn’t speak the lingo, only had a tourist map of the country and not the vaguest outline of a route.

‘If you come down to the bar,’ Bob said, ‘at one o’clock since it’s TGIF, there’s a chance he might come down as well.’

‘TGIF?’

‘Thank God It’s Friday.’

‘Ah.’ And Colonel Zvegintsov? In the bar? What? What was this Russian doing in the British Embassy bar?

He held out his hand.

‘Zog Zvegintsov,’ he said.

He was very direct.

‘Zog: I’m the official spy. You’re the horsey people I hear. I think I can help you.’

Colonel Ivan Dimitrovitch Zvegintsov, born in India, English public school, Oxford, Coldstream Guards, was the British Military Attaché in Bulgaria at the time, and he and his wife Carrie set us on our way on horseback through some of the most lovely country I have ever ridden, and a bag of experiences I don’t want to repeat.

Strawberry Roan

Over lunch, Zog told us a joke. He’d heard it from a Bulgarian general. He tried it on us: it goes like this.

Three people, a Russian, an Englishman and a Bulgarian were the only survivors of an aircraft that crashed onto a desert island.

They found themselves surrounded by cannibals.

One of the cannibals was more educated than the others, and stepped forward. Seeing three big dinners arrive in front of him, he reckoned two of them would do for the pot and the other could go free. He came up with an on-the-spot game.

‘Aha!’ he roared, ‘I am a just and merciful man. Now if any of you have come from a country I have heard of, then I shall spare him!’

The Englishman pushed forward.

‘Britain!’ he exclaimed, ‘I come from Britain! The Queen! Lords! Lloyds! All the pink on the map! The British Empire! Victoria! Rolls Royce! Cucumber sandwiches! Tea!’

The cannibal shook his head. The Englishman was tossed into the pot.

The Russian grinned. ‘I am from Russia! From Moscow! Kirov! Lenin! Trotski! One fifth of the world’s surface! And Tchaikovski! Dostoievski! Stalin! Vodka! Uri Gagarin! The Red Revolution!’

The cannibal shrugged his shoulders and the Russian joined the Englishman.

By this time the Bulgarian was walking toward the pot tearing off his clothes.

‘Wait!’ cried the cannibal, ‘You have not had your turn! Speak!’

The Bulgarian continued tearing and carried on walking.

‘Bulgaria ...’ he mumbled.

‘What was that? What was that?’ the cannibal shouted, ‘Bulgaria? Bulgaria? Sofia? That’s where I went to university! It’s where I read geography!’

‘They’re a great lot,’ Zog said, ‘Anyone who’s got a sense of humour like that has to be. Get them on the subject of national heroes; they’ll keep you in stitches for hours.’

Lunch ran to dinner and Zog related how he had been offered a T 34 Russian tank for a British museum. By the time dinner was over, the tank was pink, had a bunch of flowers up the barrel and Zog was driving it back to England. What with peace breaking out all over the place it seemed a marvellous plan.

‘Of course you’ll need a hell of a lot of political goodwill to go round chewing up tarmac with a T 34,’ he said, ‘but I daresay it could be swung.’

The pink and the flowers were Chumpie’s embellishments. I’m not sure if Zog really took to them.

The next day, Chumpie and I left our little private hotel and moved in with him, saddles, bridles, girths and saddlebags. With us we brought the smell of mud and leather and then found out that Carrie – his wife – was allergic to horses. Even so, next day she drove us out on the plains surrounding Sofia to look at village ponies.

We went to a fair, where there were ducks, chickens, pigs, cattle and horses and the one I fell for because she was the prettiest colour I have ever seen was a beautiful 12-hand strawberry roan. If I’d had a truck I would have taken her there and then: as a child’s pony she would have been wonderful: for us, she was too small. The others we looked at were passable, mostly bay, except one placid old chestnut mare whose hind legs were longer than her front ones.

‘Fine,’ Chumpie said. ‘Good for going uphill.’

But we left her, despite it being uphill all the way to England, so Carrie reckoned. Then there was this argument about whether we should really take good horses from good homes. Was it right? Could we export them from Bulgaria if we bought them in leva? Could we buy them in leva? Were they the right price anyway at 5,000 leva each – about £375 pounds at the tourist rate? In any event, the price was a sight better than 5,000 dollars, and things started to look up.

It was during this time too we encountered our first dissident who came up to talk to us in the street one afternoon in Sofia and started waffling on about how polluted Sofia gets in hot weather because it lies in a basin. He asked us round to his house later on, which turned into a tense evening. I’d better not tell you the name of this man since there is still a state secret police force in Bulgaria, and he’d spent time in one of the labour camps. He showed us scars, told us stories of privation, of starvation. These labour camps were where dissidents were whipped off, and he had been in the worst, in Belene, an island on the Danube. He wasn’t certain how many of these camps still existed at the time of our meeting but told us there were fifty before 10 November 1989, when Todor Zhivkov fell from power. Indeed, we came across election slogans which were little more than maps pointing out the whereabouts of each of these labour camps, and there are no prizes for which political party found mileage in that line.

As we sat with him, the television news came on. He translated for us. A few members of the communist party were standing outside a newly decorated church admiring the fresh paintwork. They were telling the camera that good communism included religion and how they had been responsible for keeping it alive for the past forty years. Our host just managed to prevent himself from shoving his boot through the screen before snatching the plug out of the wall and extinguishing any further viewing at a stroke. He went on to explain how the communists had thrown his father out of the house they were in, had stolen his business, that there had never been an ounce of compensation and that in order to try to keep the house they’d rented parts out and now lived in two poky rooms on the top floor. He hated communism with a passion, and like Zog, predicted their win at the June elections, because ‘there are one million members of the communist party in this country and if you add all their families together then practically everyone is a communist or certainly influenced by someone in the family who is a direct agent.’ He added that the Turks needed kicking out of Bulgaria, that Macedonia rightly belonged to Bulgaria as well as parts of Serbia, and that all land south of the Danube is also rightly theirs. Lastly, he thought the gypsies needed sterilising.

Then he told us a joke.

‘Lateral thinking joke,’ he said, with a wink. ‘A trainload of young pioneers – that is communist elite youth – were on a train heading for Varna. Ten got off in Plovdiv, ten in Sofia, three in Velika Turnovo, twenty-one in Ruse, and twelve got on in Sumen. The question is, how old is the general secretary of the communist party?’

With that we left, dazed.

In the meantime we had still been keeping an active interest in developments at the riding federation and had actually put in a bid on the two Arab horses of 1,000 dollars apiece, which made me feel ill. That was two-thirds of my entire capital.

But our saddles fitted them: they fit any horse. I had been given them by Keith Bryan of Walsall to test. They’re called ‘Pathfinder’ endurance saddles, and they really are the best long distance saddles I’ve come across. They’ve got a deep gullet, are well stuffed and they fitted the witherless Arabs equally well as fat village ponies – and I’m fussy about what saddle fits what horse. The headcollar bridles didn’t fit the Arabs’ small heads, so we would have to do something about them. And there was another problem.

I had had a running battle with the old codgers who fed the horses at the riding federation, who were shovelling oats down them, making them mad.

‘No oats!’ I cried, and they nodded. Now this was extremely confusing. In Bulgarian a nod accompanied by a ‘ne’ means no. And a shaking of the head, what we understand to mean no, in Bulgarian means yes. So when I told the old boys to stop cramming oats into the horses and they nodded, I couldn’t work out if they’d said yes or no, so said it again and they nodded again, and I was none the wiser.

That afternoon the horses were fed full rations: oats.

‘No oats!’ I cried again.

‘Ne!’ they chimed, nodding.

Next morning, all horses, full rations.

‘If you give these horses oats again I will not buy them.’

‘Ne!’ they said, and nodded.

‘They only need hay! They’re impossible to handle! It’s the oats! Oats have a funny drug in them which makes horses crazy!’

‘Da,’ they agreed shaking their heads.

Next afternoon, all horses, full rations.

Exasperating as it was, we attempted to ride the horses, two quite pretty Arabs, but the gelding was totally insane. The mare, whom we called Epsibar, was a sweet young filly, but had a bad rope burn on her offside hind leg and was impossible to shoe. Blood samples had been taken but not resolved, the whole thing was beginning to look so disorganised and the horses so dodgy, we finally chose to pull out of further dealings with the riding federation and, in a vague attempt to save face, bailed ourselves out with a sprinkling of dollars.

A day later we were sitting in the car with Carrie and her allergy to horses, on our way out once again to the villages.

‘Talk about the blind leading the blind,’ she murmured as we whisked through the gathering spring on the road to Kovachevski. Here the landscape was gullied and twisted, with red pantile roofed villages, where cows mooched about in the road and donkeys stood in harness beneath trees and blue denimed old men chatted over bundles of freshly cut lucerne. The road wound on up through the fringes of Vitosha National Park and we gazed down on villages crouching in valley bottoms, quarry brick coloured, a mixture of traditional housing and new concrete, sharp edged and formless.

In Kovachevski, Carrie pulled up, got out of the car and addressed the first pair of cow-smelling, grey-stubbled, podgy-blue pig-clutchers that shambled past. She was instantly surrounded. One of the pig-clutchers pulled a badge out of his pocket and yelled ‘Margaret Tatcherrrr!!’ and Carrie translated his tirades.

‘They’re all going to vote democratic in this village. No communists here,’ and then one of the old boys led her away. She looked tiny in amongst all those gumboots and denim. Chumpie meanwhile got herself tied up photographing gypsies and Carrie disappeared, reappearing twenty minutes later out of breath.

‘They thought I said icon,’ she said puffing. ‘I’ve been looking at icons.’

‘Icons?’

‘Icons. “Ikon” is “icon”, and “kon” is horse. They couldn’t believe I wanted to buy horses and thought I wanted icons.’

‘What about the icons?’ Chumpie enquired, wide eyed.

‘Do you want to see?’ Carrie was catching her breath.

Then another blue-denimed old man appeared from behind a clump of bushes, flagged us towards him and led us in silent procession across the street past decaying wattle and daub ultramarine blue barns into his yard. It was small. A playful puppy threw itself around, chickens, not unlike Exchequer Leghorns picked about in the manure heap: wood was neatly stacked in a pile by the doorway and an aged Mrs Blue Denim was spinning wool just inside what I took to be a kitchen.

We were all told to sit on the log in front of the dung heap, which we did, swatting flies. The old boy then disappeared into a shed, bringing out behind him a gentle lolloping old white-socked chestnut horse who looked as though he and the old man were part of one another.

‘Well?’ Carrie asked. I wondered if she was about to burst out in spots and rashes.

‘Er ... yes ... but, he’s only one, we need two.’ The price was right. 3,000 leva: about £214. Carrie caught the old man’s eye.

‘Due koni ... drug eta?’ She turned to us. ‘I hope he isn’t going to dig out more icons.’

He shook his head.

‘Damn,’ I thought.

‘Right!’ Carrie said and got up.

‘What now?’

‘He’s got another,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you see him shake his head?’

Further down the village we met another old fellow who showed us a bright young horse, but since we had neither saddles nor bridles nor anything with us, resolved to leave the whole thing and come back a few days later to try them and buy them, and so we all went back to Sofia, where I had a dreadful haircut, which together with an awful hat I bought on the cheap in Oxford made Chumpie remark that I looked like Benny Hill on holiday.

Dancing Bears

During the following few days we wandered about Sofia, and saw the gypsies and their dancing bears, which are at once a colourful and wretched sight. The gypsy wears bright clothing and with his bear on a short chain attaches him to his wrist, then plays a kind of one stringed violin and the bear rolls and writhes to the music. The bears are tethered by their necks or noses and the whole performance, though exotic, just left me feeling sorry for the bears.

The circus we gave a miss too. I can’t cope with circuses.

But the gypsies themselves, the ones I saw in the market, the brightly dressed girls and their sun-brown children, they attracted me, and I found myself drawn to them and knew in time I should be amongst them, because secretly, in my heart, it was from the gypsies I intended to buy the horses. The gypsies were one of the reasons for my being there, yet I found myself afraid of meeting them face-to-face.

We had a look round the shops and met the mannerless old dragons who run them – why are they so sour? What is it about them? Is there a special school for learning how to be extra acidic to foreigners? There wasn’t one store we visited where the woman behind the counter wasn’t perfectly foul. No, they didn’t have this, no, you couldn’t see that, no, this part of the shop was shut, no, the lights don’t work, no, there isn’t any sugar, no, you can’t go over there and look at that, no, the shop isn’t open tomorrow morning.

The mosque was shut too, so was the Hammam, a nice old building made of white limestone and striped with bands of small bricks, with a grand arched doorway, decorated with relief tiling on a cherry background. It had trees growing out of the gutters.

Just as Chumpie was taking a photograph of Aleksander Nevski Cathedral a young fellow calling himself Lyudmil Spassov pitched up announcing he would be our ‘free guide’. Eighty leva later I wondered about that, but he was nice, and seemed to know what he was talking about, so we took him on.

He told us all about Aleksander Nevski Cathedral, completed in 1912, which was built as a memorial church to the Russians for their part in the liberation of Bulgaria from the five-hundred-year-old ‘Turkish yoke’– sometimes wrongly written with a ‘j’ spelling ‘joke’.

The cathedral, for me, had no great style outside. Inside it was different, with its high domes – a peculiar reminder of the mosques it overthrew. The walls are marble, with small chapels standing on raised marble pedestals supporting smaller, more intricate domes, gilded, echoing the larger. Glorious candelabra hang from the high roof, lighting the icons, the paintings, the onyx, alabaster golds and bronzes.

A service was going on when we were inside, and the singing that heady Russian-like descant which makes the hair prickle on your neck.

Lyudmil chipped in: ‘Aleksander Nevski was a great man, liberator of slaves and saved people from cruel torture from Turkishmen, and he was a noble. Then when he was old he was a greater man even and came to be holy and in the end was the biggest monkey in the church.’

I saw Chumpie bite her lip. I didn’t know where to look: certainly not at her. I gazed into the dome, trying not to imagine Aleksander Nevski swinging about up there, in the chandeliers. Sometimes you can hold things together, sometimes not.

I had to get out.

It took a lot of explaining to Lyudmil, whom we appeased with a meal, a couple of bottles of wine, and a four and a half hour walk round Sofia, visiting every museum, every palace, park and dancing bear. Then he left us, he had to go home, vowing one day to marry a western woman so he could travel, and, no, he didn’t want a Bulgarian wife because they didn’t have international passports. He gave Chumpie a long look, disappeared down a darkening street and we returned to Carrie and Zog’s flat.

Zog had in the meantime returned to England and his daughter Belle arrived, young, pretty, curvy and keen to go and look at horses, adding a fillip to our flagging spirits.

So it was with Carrie and Chumpie and Belle that I sat once more in the creamy sunshine in the tiny courtyard of the old blue-denimed man in Kovachevski. The day was warm and bright and reflected hard on the whitewashed walls; in dark shadows chickens and goats moved in shaded silence. The old lolloping white-socked chestnut was trying to eat my bridle. Both Chumpie and I had ridden him and found him such a docile old horse we couldn’t imagine him fending for himself or having to think his way out of a tricky spot, which a travelling horse must be capable of. The horse was a no-goer.

We went to look at his friend’s horse on whom I put the saddle, realising as I did he’d never been ridden. Unridden horses are no real problem; if you have to make them to the saddle, you have to make them and that’s that. But there was something about this one. I saw it in his eye. There was no way I was going to get on him. But a gypsy did. And he did with the wrong foot in the stirrup and he, horse, saddle and all went screaming off out of sight, vanished over the horizon, and the horse came thundering back ten minutes later, riderless, boiling, pursued by a limping, jangling team of hobbled ponies, rattling in their chains, neighing and whinnying, and darted about by a bevy of kicking foals.

And so it was with Carrie, Chumpie and Belle I sat once more in the creamy sunshine in the tiny courtyard of the old blue-denimed man in Kovachevski, shook hands and pushed off.

We walked heads down through wattled and walled village backstreets, past the bent platinum-toothed old crones crabbing about, sprinkling corn grit to scratching, bare-bottomed bantams, past shuttered, sleepy houses to the car and drove back to Sofia. We drove in silence as the countryside flew past, the rolling blue distance and roadside juniper bushes, the line of poplars along a wandering stream and the mountain stood up high above us, pink in the setting sun.

‘You should go to Samokov,’ Carrie said. ‘If you want to find gypsies, you’ll find them there. And there’s a horse fair.’

Once in Samokov I decided to aim for the gypsy quarter and found it.

Was it rough. It stank. It had exactly the same rotten smell about it I’d come across in Saudi Arabia years before when I found a herd of dead camels in the Nafud desert, the same dry, bitter rotten smell. A heaving pile of rubbish straddled half the entrance to the place where a pack of starved, flea-ridden dogs were pulling at a carcase. The houses were squalid little hovels with rags for doors, behind which snotty-nosed, naked children watched olive-eyed and suspicious of this pink tourist looking for a horse.

A crag-faced, gorilla-handed, furtive individual was my guide. And if he was the dirtiest bloke in town, if he stank, if he blew palls of dung-coloured smoke into my face, if he was rude, if he was all the worst things you can imagine, he was also the alivest bloke in town. He laughed and spat, slapped me on the back, roared at his companions, begged for money, took me to every dive he could, scolded me for being foreign, called me ‘gaje’, called me ‘chicho’. Then he felt faint all of a sudden and didn’t want to look for horses anymore, but twenty levas fixed that. Then he had a headache. Another twenty and it vanished. Then he was very weary and had to sit down and complained when I gave him another ten leva that it wasn’t enough and so I gave him another ten, and he complained even louder.

He practically burst into tears when I left him and wrung my hand again and again, and beseeched me to buy his poor, worn, skeleton of a horse for 2,000 dollars. I, in turn, swore at him for treating his horse badly, made signs that he would go to hell if he was cruel to his horse, and when that made him pull faces, made signs that he would go to hell anyway, and he replied he was already there.

We parted friends and enemies because I refused to give him my watch and boots, and refused to spend all my money on a month-long bender with him.

Besides I wasn’t in the mood, even though he was.

I saw him later that day, flat out under a willow. He had flies crawling in and out of his mouth.

He was called Jirim and what was important about him was that he put the word about.

Gypsy Horse

Jirim told me about The Italian.

I know about The Italian. He goes round Europe buying horses and sends them to Italy for salami. He sends them in big trucks and they go all that way without food or water. Those trucks run from Russia to Italy, Poland to Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria – all for salami. All the native horses and ponies are disappearing for salami.

Jirim said if I didn’t buy his horse he’d sell him to The Italian.

If I bought Jirim’s broken-down grey, I knew what he’d think. He’d think he could sell any old mule to any sucker for any price, and never bother to feed his horse again.

I turned him down, and told him I only bought good horses for good money so it would be in his best interest to look after his if he wanted to sell it.

I told him what I thought of him after that and I told him what I thought of The Italian.

Then there was Zhivko. Zhivko had a taxi business and lived in Samokov. He knew most things about the place and said he thought he could help.

Zhivko spoke a bit of English and took us round all the nags in Samokov, screeching to a halt each time we saw a likely one on the road. We even wound up trying to buy an old grey from a butcher who was unloading meat from the wagon into a cold store.

We looked at more pink horses, black stallions, horses fifty kilometres away, we looked in farm yards, backstreets, uptown, downtown in the gypsy quarter and then, one overcast morning, the fair.

I saw Little Pink standing in harness in the shafts of a yellow cart with his head down, under some willow trees. He was maybe 15hh, strawberry roan with a double mane, and he had clean legs, good quarters, a good back and no sores. The gypsy led him out of the shafts with gleaming eyes: here was the tourist with the dollars. A crowd gathered. This was an unridden horse: he’d have to be made. Poor little sod was only three years old but I said I’d buy him for 3,800 leva, knowing damn well that the chances of exporting him were nil, that the horse could well be someone else’s, that he was head-shy, which meant he’d been hit about, that he’d never been out of harness and that he was probably a brute to handle.

I said I’d pay in the morning and that I wanted the horse shod and outside the cafe near the old mosque in Samokov, at eight. Then Little Pink was jammed back into his cart, the gypsy took hold of the reins and he whipped that horse from a dead stop to a gallop and whipped him all the way down the road. If I’d had a rifle then I think I’d have shot that man.

But that was one horse down and I needed another. Chumpie was with Zhivko a little distance off. I could see the look on Zhivko’s face. He disapproved of me buying horses from gypsies, and so did his father, a difficult old man with a pained expression. He definitely thought I was an imbecile, didn’t know what I was doing, should have kept looking, bought horses from the Bulgarians not the Turkish tsigani. He shook his head. He was sure I didn’t know what I was doing. Then up went a shout and the crowd parted. Another gypsy came into the ring riding bareback on a black horse, a biggish black horse, big that is, for a gypsy horse: maybe 14.2hh, 14.3 at a push. The horse had a big head, long body, and uneven feet. He was very poorly shod. The gypsy slipped off. Zhivko handed me a saddle and up I got. The horse was tattooed with a number: 316. Which gypsies tattoo horses? This had to be a stolen horse.

‘Is this a stolen horse?’

Zhivko repeated my question. I rode off from the row that caused.