Komsomolska Street was a cross street of 9th Of September Boulevard and was located in the heart of our small provincial town.
During the first years following the Red Army’s invasion in Bulgaria and the “victory” of the September Revolution that followed it, the state underwent a frenzied transformation, heavily influenced by the Soviet model. A mass exodus from rural areas swelled the cities, where new housing projects sprang up – all sorts of residential projects, from single-family homes and mid-sized housing cooperatives to towering apartment blocks and dormitories. Everyone craved to have access to the amenities that those new homes provided. The entire state, so to speak, had already switched the railway tracks, changed direction, but the final destination was still out of sight, at least at that time.
Following that pattern, Komsomolska Street rose quickly, lined on both sides with brand new apartment buildings built by housing cooperatives. Back then, the City Council used to seize the land for the new housing developments, while the rightful owners could choose an apartment in the new building which was about to be built on the same spot, or another one, somewhere nearby, or they were simply given some financial compensation. This land plot was then typically given to people with connections to the party, who would build cooperative housing buildings there, six to nine families in each. The apartments in these cooperatives were all identical, and the buildings themselves were practically twins: brick structures built on sturdy foundations, three or four stories tall, no elevator.
The construction of the cooperative at 3 Komsomolska Street followed a similar path, but with one key difference. Unlike its neighbors, this building housed the city’s Communist Party leaders and the top brass of the People's Militia . It boasted only three floors, yet each floor held two spacious apartments. These featured three bedrooms apiece, a living room, a separate dining room, and a bathroom with its own boiler. For its time, that building was the epitome of a perfect residence, and it proudly displayed a plaque on its entrance door reading “A Model Home”, an honor bestowed by the Municipal Council on new cooperative housing properties of that level.
Work on the building had begun way back in 1965, but a lack of modern machinery meant the whole project dragged on for several years. While it was under construction, the future residents would often drop by to check out the unfinished cooperative and marvel at the floor plans. Annoyingly, some of them were demanding to change the interior layout, which caused extra headaches for the builders who were already struggling to meet deadlines.
The way the apartments in the cooperative housing on number 3 were awarded, once it was finally finished, was quite interesting. The system followed the hierarchical order of the time, with the high-ranking party officials getting right of first choice on the apartments. The second floor ones were the most hankered after, followed by those on the third floor, while the first floor apartments were the least attractive. One thing was clear to everyone in the city: the future inhabitants of this building would be all but ordinary ones.
Once the new owners moved in, time continued its relentless march and the years rolled by. Eventually, communism crumbled, and the country entered the course of democracy.
And so, forty years later, on a sunny day in September of 2008, an old, hunched man was sitting on the bench in front of the cooperative at 3 Komsomolska Street. The old man had rested his chin on his cane and watched the passersby thoughtfully. He wore massive shell glasses with thick lenses, which made his eyes look huge. He was dressed in a hand-knitted brown vest and cheap gray cotton pants.
Around noon, while the old man was still watching the passersby, an elderly woman in a faded yellowish dressing gown appeared on the terrace of the second floor and called out to him angrily:
‘Ponko, it’s lunchtime already! You’ve been hanging out down there all day! Do come upstairs already!’ And without waiting for his reply, she turned and slammed the terrace door shut.
Ponko did not respond. He never did. He would go upstairs for a half-hour lunch, and then come right back down to sit on the bench in front of the apartment building, where undisturbed he would lose himself in his thoughts. People would walk past him on the sidewalk, and rarely did anyone greet him. Eighty years old, he had become a stranger to his fellow citizens. Forty years since the building went up, most of the original owners were gone, while their children and grandchildren had moved away – some to the capital, others to Europe or America.
Ponko used to spend hours on the bench in front of his home, often reminiscing. His thoughts were flitting through various topics in his head, but never lingering on any particular memory for too long. This was how he was spending his days throughout the summer and the autumn. Only the winters’ cold kept him indoors for longer, but when spring returned, he would once again take up his regular watch on the bench.
Born in a village, years before the “victory” of communism, Ponko was a boy just like all the others. From quite an early age, he had started working in the fields and only scraped by in school until eighth grade. Truth be told, he hardly ever went to class. Sometimes he just had not enough time to spare, other times he just was not interested. Ultimately, he never really mastered any of the subjects in school. The teachers did notice, of course, but they were not very zealous either. He did learn to read and write, but as far as books go – he never cracked one open in his entire life.
On the other hand, in his teenage years, he got a touch of some unusual vanity that would later come back to haunt him. He was quite meticulous about his appearance and soon he began to slick back his blond hair. However, since at that time, in the villages, it was difficult to find brilliantine or something similar, Ponko decided to use simple soap for that purpose. Once, however, while walking around with his friends, it started to rain, and the soap on his slicked-back hair began to lather so much that it started running down his face and stinging his eyes. His friends wasted no time and promptly gave him a nickname – “Soaps”. This rather mocking nickname quickly spread throughout the village, and from then on, everyone knew him as Ponko Soaps.
Overall, Ponko preferred to keep a distance from his friends and relatives. His personal life was a sort of a private domain. The only exception there was a friend of his, just one, coming from the same village, with whom he had served his time in the army. That friend’s name was Stoycho, and in the autumn they both used to fill the wine barrels together, while the rest of the year they would go hunting.
After he was discharged from the army, Ponko married his neighbor, in a wedding that was both a love match and an arrangement between their parents. Stoyana, as the bride’s name was, knew that Soaps had a difficult (or as they say in the countryside: “stubborn”) character, but her time for marriage had come, and she was running out of options. The wedding was a modest affair, without much fuss. No white dresses, no expensive suits.
Ponko and Stoyana were people with strong leftist convictions. This was instilled in them by their families, who during the war secretly rooted for the Soviet victory. They attended organized meetings with the village youth, and at one such event Stoyana had a red scarf tied around her neck. That incident left a deep mark on her rustic mind, and that made her later see herself as a major player in the fight against fascism. In fact, one time, much later, she would even ask Ponko if she could claim official credit for her anti-fascist activities – after all, at that time, they were both candidate members of the early Komsomol, and they did tie a red scarf around her neck. This had infuriated Ponko, who looked at her and just gritted out through his teeth:
‘Just look after your kids, woman!’
With that, Stoyana’s aspirations had come to an end. It’s worth mentioning that at that time they already had a son and a daughter.
Times were changing fast. After the “victory” of communism, the life of the whole country went into a completely new direction. With his rustic shrewdness, Ponko sensed the coming change and quickly moved to the nearby town, where he applied for a job in the militia. Soaps knew that a policeman would always get fed, while he also fancied the idea of being in charge of something. His entire childhood had been spent toiling away on the fields and among the livestock, so he invested all the strength and stamina he had, determined never to return to where he had come from. And he got it all.
Without a hitch, he passed the mandatory background check for joining the militia and thanks to the endorsements by some influential comrades, he was appointed a militia officer. After finishing a driving school, he was also assigned a brand new car – a red government Moskvich , with the caption “People’s Militia” written on the side. That very day, his self-esteem soared. He used to sit in the car with a stern expression on the face, maintaining the public order, always clean-shaven, with his hair inevitably combed back, to which he had added a thin, well-trimmed moustache. In short – this was a new, even reborn, Soaps.
To say that the police work satisfied him would have been an understatement. No, it did not simply satisfy him; it gave meaning to his otherwise empty life. And that was exactly the kind of people the new government was looking for – true believers, die-hard loyalists. They were the government’s number one priority, at that stage way more important than people having proper education. In short, ideological tempering was the determining factor.
Soaps had become a staunch communist for a long time already. Joining the Communist Party had skyrocketed his career. In a short time, he rose to the office of head of a department in the militia. He worked day and night, relentlessly hunting down enemies of the state and anyone who dared disrupt the public order. It did not take him long to become known throughout the city as a man of unrelenting character who would not compromise with the law.
However, this much-desired promotion brought along not only satisfaction but also great disturbance and fear in Soaps’ soul. He remained a half-educated man, after all, having never bothered to complete anything more than his eighth grade in school. He made frequent spelling mistakes when preparing his reports, and moreover – even when writing down in his penalty notices the names of citizens, who had violated public order.
That was also a reason to buy a pocket dictionary, which he always carried with him, trying hard to keep it secret. With the little book always at hand, he made sure his spelling was always correct. But no matter how hard he tried to conceal it, his pocket dictionary did not escape the attention of his colleagues in the militia, and they began to mock and ridicule him behind his back. Occasionally, instead of calling him Soaps, they would even call him The Dictionary. All this only made Soaps even more peevish, taking it out on the drivers on the road who he used to stop and fine, as well as on the young people violating public order.
But despite those trifling aspects of our character’s being, the Communist Party knew how to foster its loyal henchmen and take an overall care of them. What mattered most was that such a person just had to be one of ours; lack of education and merit was always excused. Subsequently, a large part of these newly arrived apparatchiks were sent to finish off their secondary education. Such was the evolution case of Soaps as well. For the Party, he was a loyal comrade who should be aided, since people like him were the backbone of communism, as a system.
Meanwhile, his wife Stoyana became a janitor at a school, but then Soaps arranged another job for her at the cannery as a shift supervisor. Stoyana was an industrious woman – that could not be denied. But alas, she lacked intelligence, or rather – education. After her husband got her a good job, she started to earn an even higher salary, which gave her the opportunity to set aside some money in a savings account. This had boosted her self-esteem so much that her colleagues found it difficult to even talk to her. But in Stoyana’s mind, this new perspective was just the normal – even natural - way things should be. After all, she was a boss now, and her husband was a big shot – in the militia, no less.
Still, there’s further room for our family to evolve, Stoyana sometimes thought. The kids are growing up, but we’re still living in a rented apartment. But that was soon taken care of as well. It was not long before she and Soaps bought a two-room apartment, which would do for them for a while. That definitely brought some peace to Stoyana Ponkova’s soul, and she began to feel the satisfaction in her life – imagine where she had come from and where she was now. She also had a posse of friends in the city. And those were not just any friends, but women of her status, wives of high local officials.
By the way, she enjoyed working at the cannery. Unlike her attitude towards her own subordinates, Stoyana knew how to butter up her bosses. So, she got along well with most of the management and even succeeded to get herself a bonus – a free trip to the Soviet Union. She traveled by train to Moscow and while there she bought two watches for her children and an iron for herself. Later, the family also got a brand new black and white TV.
Stoyana was well aware of her husband’s harsh temper, so she always would cover up their children's mishaps. Soaps did not ever have a clue of their poor performance in school until they were already in high school, having established a sustainable pattern of poor grades. Stoyana knew this fact could have infuriated him and even make him beat them or else. But this never happened – Ponko was clueless, like a horse with blinders on. He had ceded everything to his wife – not just raising the kids, but an entire pile of family problems that he did not even suspect existed.
Soaps was completely consumed by his work and had already earned a reputation throughout the town as a stubborn nitpicker officer. All day long, even on weekends, he would lazily drive around town in his government Moskvich, idling on the roads, prowling for and eventually fining the wrongdoers. And that was how he ended up in an incident that would change his whole life.
On a Saturday evening, our character had stopped a truck at the town’s exit. Ponko had noticed a serious traffic rules violation – one of the truck’s headlights was out. Ponko was waving his traffic baton carelessly as he paced back and forth, inspecting the vehicle.
‘Well, well…’ Ponko began carpingly, in a squeaky voice, scratching the back of his neck. ‘That’s not how things happen, comrade! What are you doing driving with only one headlight? That’s utter recklessness of you!’
Soaps pulled out a stack of ticket forms from the Moskvich and casually leaned on one side against the car trunk, propping himself on his elbow.
He lightly spat on his thumb to wet it and flipped open two blank forms, carefully placing an indigo sheet between them. Meanwhile, the truck driver paced anxiously around him, begging Ponko to spare him the ticket.
‘But, comrade officer,’ the driver whined like a kid, ‘I’ve replaced that headlight… I did… just before the trip! I’m telling you the truth! No point lying to you, right?’ he kept on asking rhetorically, hopping around Soaps. ‘No idea why it’s not working.’
But Soaps was inexorable, deaf to the driver’s pleas. Eventually, exhausted, the driver made one last attempt to wangle something:
‘Comrade officer, allow me to go… with one headlight… And tomorrow, first thing in the morning, in the workshop, we’re gonna fix the entire electrical system of that truck.’
These words as if took Ponko out of the meditative trance he had fallen in while filling in the ticket form. He slowly turned around to the driver, giving him the once-over, and replied in his still squeaky voice:
‘Such tricks don’t work on me, comrade. Hand me over your driver’s license and off to home!’
These were the last words that Sopas could later recall of that fateful evening. After he had tucked the offender’s license into his pocket with smug satisfaction, he bent down to get back into the Moskvich. The truck driver seized the moment and slammed a heavy iron crank over his head. Then he snatched his license back and ran away.
Ponko awoke in the hospital the next day, disoriented and initially mistaking the doctor for a restaurant chef due to his white coat. His memories were hazy and took about a week to fully resurface. It turned out that after the driver had fled, passersby found Ponko, lying face down next to the Moskvich, and rushed him to the hospital.
The incident shattered Ponko’s poise. He tried to keep his head up and go about his days like before, but the spark was gone. And then came another blow to his ego – after twenty years of service in the police force, he was retired without even being notified. This was the final straw. He fell into a deep depression and started having a glass of brandy and another glass of wine each and every evening. Forced into retirement far too young, he felt his entire life he had built with such dedication, was ripped away in a heartbeat.
Soaps realized that his time had gone by. His trusty government Moskvich was gone, as was his militia uniform – all the symbols behind his former authority. They did keep him on as a volunteer officer and did not take away his traffic baton, but he was no longer the feared militia officer – he was simply Ponko the pensioner.
In a couple of years certain changes occurred in Soaps’ family. His son got married and then grandchildren came, which briefly pulled Ponko away from his grim reality. It was then that he and Stoyana decided to buy an apartment in the cooperative housing property on 3 Komsomolska Street. They were “expanding”, so to speak.
Back in those days, their daughter secured a job in the capital and then got married there, so her visits became less frequent. Their son continued to live with them, together with his children, but not for long. Following the advent of democracy in the country, he left for Canada with his wife and children, in the very first wave of Bulgarian emigrants.
And so, Soaps and Stoyana were left to spend their retirement together, alone, in their apartment on Komsomolskaya Street, where, one could say, they felt comfortable. And this is the moment to explain a little more about how they had acquired that apartment. A few years before the end of communism, they bought it from Comrade Sivnev, who had also retired already, and – in his day – had been a prominent anti-fascist activist. However, there was a small detail about the purchase that Stoyana kept concealed from her husband – something she did quite often though.
After that incident with the crank and his stay in the hospital, Soaps literally abdicated even the few things he had been involved in at home. He had left everything in his wife’s hands, continuing to play the role of a horse with blinders on, albeit unconsciously. Nevertheless, he had complete confidence in her, never having doubted her actions throughout their marriage.
Therefore, the entire deal for the acquisition of the property on Komsomolska Street was orchestrated by Soaps’s wife. Stoyana was cunning and shrewd enough, so she had sensed early on that Comrade Sivnev, despite his reputation as an honest communist and anti-fascist, was actually quite a greedy and unscrupulous one. Therefore, she had decided to offer him a win-win deal concluded through just a verbal agreement. The idea was to enter only the state-appraised price into the notary act for the acquisition of the property, meaning the money the state would have paid for the specific apartment, which was well below the price that Sivnev actually asked. This way, both parties would avoid paying hefty fees and taxes to the state for the ownership transfer. Afterwards, Stoyana proposed, they would pay off the rest of the money to Sivnev in cash, under the table. When Sivnev, a frail old man by then, heard her proposal, his eyes started gleaming with greed – he did not even hesitate but directly accepted the proposal. After all, both Soaps and Sivnev, and even Stoyana herself, were prominent local communist activists, so no one would even suspect the scam.
And so, it was done. The deal went smoothly, and everyone was satisfied. Soaps and Stoyana would move into a wonderful new apartment, while Comrade Sivnev would line his pockets with some cash. However, after signing the papers at the notary’s office, a week or two went by, but yet, Sivnev did not receive the second half of the money as he had been promised. The old man started to worry, but he told himself that, after all, both parties were good old comrades and communists, so there was no room for worry, he would eventually get the outstanding amount. Except, a whole month went by, and there was still no news from Stoyana. Finally, the old anti-fascist activist gathered his courage and decided to call her to see what was going on and why they were so late with that cash. But alas, when he called, he got stunned. On the phone, Stoyana snapped at him that he had already gotten what he was due and that not a penny more would be paid to him, and then she slammed down the phone receiver. She knew it very well that Sivnev had acquired the apartment at the lower, state-appraised value, and that now he could not complain to anyone, since he himself was involved in the scam. And what was more – from a legal point of view, he would be deemed to have acquired even greater benefits from an actual crime. In short, Stoyana Ponkova did not keep her end of the bargain, and ultimately, she had acquired the apartment at a price significantly lower than the originally agreed-upon. All of this had happened behind Soaps’s back, who had already started drinking heavily and throughout this episode was genuinely happy that they had bought a spacious apartment in a good location at a bargain price.
However, on that very day in September 2008, while Ponko was sitting on the bench to the right of the entrance of apartment building at number 3 on that very same Komsomolska Street, a stranger woman stopped in front of him, greeted him politely, and said in a serious tone:
‘I’m the daughter of Comrade Sivnev, the one that you bought your apartment from. My father passed away but before that he told me how you had deceived him and had not paid him the money for the apartment, as had been agreed – the agreement was only verbal though, so you swindled him, after all. I’ve just come to inform you that he left this world deeply disappointed by you.’
Soaps was staring at her, standing numb in one place. He felt his heart started pounding, and his face flushed while a wave of dizziness washed over him. He tried to stand up, propping on his cane, but failed to do so and sat back down. It was the first time he heard about those things ever. He did not know what to say; it was too much for him to bear. He bowed his head and wept bitterly. He found the strength to only utter:
‘I’m sorry… I … didn’t know…’
But the woman did not wait for his answer and left.
Soaps spent the entire day on the bench, utterly exhausted by the accusations. He felt like he had been tossed aside like garbage. In the evening, he tried to talk to Stoyana about the matter, but she just curtly replied that to pay everything to Sivnev was not a rightful thing to do, that old rogue who had lived off his past laurels all his life, and for sure was not much of an anti-fascist activist after all. Then the old woman quickly left the room and went to wash the dishes.
Ponko Soaps was alone. His aged mind was reeling, flummoxed. It was like his entire life was screened before him, like a movie reel. Memories of the militia, his government Moskvich, the relentless pursuit of injustice and deceit – all came flooding back. And now – at the twilight of his life – he realized that these very evils had been lurking all around him, seemingly invisible but to his eyes only. His entire world – everything he had believed in and fought for – had crumbled in an instant. The foundations of his soul had been shattered. We were supposed to be communists, Soaps thought bitterly. But all along, it has turned out I’ve been nothing but a fool!
