There were six of us cousins – four boys and two girls – living in Nadezhda, a suburb on the edge of Sofia.
Our yard was about 100 metres long and 15 wide. The fronts of two of the houses faced the street – a “Fruit and Veg” shop and a “Dairy”.
Early in the morning the lorries that supplied them carted away the empty packaging piled up in our yard, and for a short while there was more room in it, but soon the mountain of crates, tins, barrels, basins etc. rose again almost to the rooftops.
The shopkeepers had the yard bins overflowing by the morning. Into the drain in front of the tap they tipped sauerkraut, rotten lettuces and tomatoes, and milk and cheese no longer fit for sale.
The drain often got blocked, but even when it didn't, it was the centre of a stench and huge swarms of flies and wasps. Until about 11 o'clock our grandfather battled the mess around it, and after that our outdoor toilet in the yard as well. He burnt the paper from the bins, sloshed buckets of water about and often whitewashed its walls and doors, but the fresh smell of lime was quickly lost among all the other smells.
I had the feeling that those of us who lived in the yard carried its aroma around with us even after a bath, which back then was a once-a-week affair.
During a family celebration Grandpa had shared his great sorrow:
“My father and I built the houses in this yard. We even made the bricks ourselves. In the old days two families lived in two of the houses, and the other two we rented out to shops, which brought us good money. Now they're state-owned, and for them I get 3.40 leva a month in total – the price of a kilo of cheese. On paper I'm still the owner of the houses, but I'm not allowed to throw them out, even though there are now four families of us with six children and we're cramped. Is that what I built the houses for those shops to sprawl about in – so that I can clean the yard every day to stop them burying it completely under their rubbish? Call that a life!”
When we children were in years 3 to 6, we all ended up on the morning shift at school. One afternoon it occurred to us to turn the little shed at the back of the yard, which nobody needed any more, into “our office”. We cleaned it out and arranged it with “furniture”. It was out of the grown-ups' sight, and in it we felt big. In one conversation we came to the conclusion that all the misfortunes and smells in our yard were down to the shops, and we had to try to drive them out. That way we'd have more room to live, and Grandpa wouldn't have to slave away because of them either. In those days the word “enemy” was often mentioned in our country, and we'd found ourselves one too.
My big brother, being the eldest, suggested that we arrange things so that when the inspectors came to the shops, they'd “find them short”. We gaped at him blankly, and he had to explain that the inspectors checked whether the money recorded matched the goods received. We'd stitch up the shopkeepers if we nicked a bit of stock from them now and then. His idea struck us as really cool, and we also worked out the tactics for our punitive raids – two would act and four would keep watch and warn them of danger:
“Pear – hide!” – the way we did when playing hide-and-seek.
Our first raid was to carry a crate of oranges out of the “Fruit and Veg” cellar, which we hid in the “office”. It was silly to let them go off, so we ate them. After a few more crates there was no reaction from the family who worked in the shop, nor from the police.
Encouraged by this fact, we also swiped a tin of jam, about 5 kg, which we also quickly got sick of. We stung the “Dairy” too. Every morning they had aluminium trays of yoghurt delivered and left some of them in the shade in the yard.
On our way back from school we'd secretly take one. The “dairymen” sold the neighbourhood children, even us, their own little landlords, only the “whey” – the cloudy, runny bottom part of the tray – and the rest to the grown-ups, so they wouldn't moan at them.
In “our” trays the top was thick yoghurt with a layer of cream. We ate it like starving savages, then we'd secretly tip the rest into the drain and prop the tray up with the others. As well as the oranges and the jam, we went off the yoghurt too. We also dragged off a tin of cheese, which we nibbled at a little so that we wouldn't then be unable to eat our supper. It started to smell treacherously, and we hid it in the next-door yard. Behind its fence on our side there was an empty plot.
One evening our cousin Ani summed up what we'd done:
“Our aim was to punish the shopkeepers and make Grandpa's work easier. Well, have we succeeded? He's doing the same work, and we're squandering the stolen stuff without even eating it!”
My big brother snapped at her that the inspectors still hadn't come to either shop and that we had to carry on to the bitter end. The end justified the means of achieving it. So some saint called Loyola had said.
That freed us from any unnecessary pangs of conscience, and we started dragging more things into the yard next door. We nibbled at them only enough to stop Ani saying we were wasting food. After about a month, the long-awaited sign went up on the door of one shop, and a few days later on the other: “Stocktaking”.
To our surprise, they opened again that very same day. If the shopkeepers had been found short, the stocktaking would have gone on at least until they were replaced with new ones. Somehow they'd outwitted the inspectors, and it seemed it would have been the same even if we'd carried off tonnes of produce.
To this sad realisation was added the fact that even if they had been found short, the state was hardly going to throw them out and tell Grandpa he could do as he pleased with his houses. My big brother was the most upset of all and pronounced another of his pearls of wisdom – that we had been fighting for a causa perduta, that is, in vain. We needed a new goal to devote ourselves to, even if it too turned out to be a c_ausa poduta /_as we had remembered the phrase/.
On the morning of 12.04.1961 the radio was thundering with the news that the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had flown into space, orbited the Earth and landed successfully. By the time we were walking home from school, the newspaper kiosks had pictures of him, which were selling like hot cakes. We expected a chiselled face like a present-day superman to be looking at us from them, but it was the face of an ordinary, sweet and friendly man. Cosmonaut mania broke out across the whole country.
People were flying in Space, and what about us? On television they often showed how the Soviet cosmonauts trained in some kind of chamber where they were spun round to get them used to weightlessness.
We tried spinning round on the spot, but we immediately got dizzy and started feeling sick. One afternoon we boys decided unanimously that we had to take up cosmonaut training, which the girl cousins backed with enthusiasm. My big brother came up with another of his brilliant ideas:
“See those big empty barrels from the Fruit and Veg? We'll use them as training chambers, instead of just letting them stink and get in our way here!”
We rolled one into the middle of the yard. Inside it was a bit grubby, but we gave it a once-over with the packaging paper strewn around the shops, after which he announced:
“I'm getting in. I'll brace my arms so I don't rattle about, and when I tell you I'm ready, you tip the barrel over and start rolling it. If I feel sick, I'll shout for you to stop.”
We started pushing the barrel with the cosmonaut candidate back and forth along the yard path, paved with big stone slabs. My big brother and my older cousin lasted only a short while. Even for a first attempt, their achievements, timed on a watch by the girl cousins, were not encouraging.
According to those being rolled, we had to slow down when going over the gaps between the slabs. Otherwise it was no use – it jolted too much and their backs started hurting even before they got dizzy. The hoops on the barrel had shifted and it was threatening to fall apart. We carefully propped it up where it was and took the next “chamber”, but that one came loose too.
We decided to level the yard so that it would jolt less, both for the cosmonauts and for the barrels, and we worked really hard at it. In the evening our efforts were appreciated by our parents, and above all by Grandpa.
A few days later, by which time we'd wrecked the other barrels too, as they were rolling me round and I was gritting my teeth, the rolling suddenly stopped. The shopkeeper from the “Fruit and Veg” leant over the opening and yelled at me to get out, twisting my ear. It hurt, but at least I stopped feeling sick.
He was screeching that we'd ruined his stock and that our parents would have to pay for it. Grandpa had overheard him, even though it was time for his afternoon nap. He came out, gave the shopkeeper a resounding slap and said to him in his booming voice of a hero of the Balkan War:
“Hey, you fool! I'll mend your barrels, but from now on, before you leave here, I want you to clean the drain in the yard and tidy up your packaging!”
He showed him how to mend barrels, then called the other shopkeeper too and explained to both of them how not to clog the drain and how to look after our toilet as well, which they used too.
He looked angry, and they didn't dare argue with him, seeing his big moustache trembling with rage. At the end of every working day the shopkeepers left only after they'd sorted out their mess in our yard, which lasted only as long as Grandpa was alive.
After that they let things slide again, and so did those living in the yard, and it soon came to look like the one next door. When I got my first girlfriend, I decided to take her home. Just inside our yard gate she had held her nose, and I had made some excuse to her so sheepishly that I didn't believe it myself.
Many years later I read about “the Butterfly Effect”. According to the American scientist Edward Lorenz, who first used the expression in 1972, the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.
That is, small differences in the initial conditions could cause seriously different outcomes in the system as a whole.
It was one of those “winged phrases” that appealed to a lot of people and fired their imagination. And so I, too, as a man now well advanced in years, inclined to rummage through his memories for something more significant he has done, let my imagination run away with me: without our “ants' revolt”, unsuccessful though it was, things would hardly have come to Grandpa “putting the shopkeepers in their place”, despite the “umbrella” held over them by the inspectors and the state.
I went on with considerably more global musings: “And why not even suppose that we prompted Gagarin himself to fly into Space, that later the Americans left Vietnam, that the Berlin Wall fell, and that the world is no longer the same?”
In mathematics there's a fundamental concept – “a necessary but not sufficient condition”. According to this Lorenz, the necessary condition in this case was for the butterfly to flap its wings.
And with his whole phrase he may have wanted to challenge probability theory where it applies to society, and to encourage even the most ordinary little folk that what they do does matter to the system as a whole.
I started musing about the life cycle as well: egg – larva /caterpillar/ – pupa – butterfly, in which over the years I had gone backwards and was flapping my wings like a butterfly again, something I hadn't done for a long time and had definitely missed.
In the surge of spirits that came over me, I raised my eyes to the sky and asked Grandpa what he thought about all these questions. He, perhaps busy with heavenly matters, hadn't answered me, but I hastened to assume that he had nodded approvingly and given a twirl to his big moustache, which at that moment looked to me like a butterfly's wings.
In my dreams that night, for the first time, everything was colourful and optimistic.
