The now archaic expression “Where's the key to the shed?” figuratively means: what's the trick to cracking the mystery? In this story the expression is also used in the quite literal sense.
When my wife and I turned 50, we bought a house with a yard in a village in the Kazanlak region. I took some leave and went there to give our property a welcoming look. Two colleagues and I loaded the spare furniture from our flat in Sofia into a lorry. We unloaded it into the “lean-to” in the yard and they went home. There was only one socket in the house, and the most urgent job was to put in electrical wiring built into the walls, then paint everywhere. I decided to draw up a schedule of the work ahead and brought a chair, a table, a sheet of paper and a pen out onto the terrace. At that moment, from the yard next door, a couple of about 65 appeared, carrying a bowl of salad, a bottle of rakia, little glasses and cutlery.
I had two more chairs and invited them to sit with me. They wanted to welcome me and get acquainted. After the toast and the exchange of names, their curious questions came pouring down: did I have a family and children, where was I from, how much had I paid for the property and was I planning to build anything in the yard. I started with the fact that I was married with two children. So far, so good, but even though an acquaintance of mine had advised me never to say I was from Sofia when asked where I was from in the provinces, I went and confessed it in all sincerity.
A shadow passed over their faces. The neighbour's wife reacted: “Ah, never mind, never mind!” Perhaps she wanted to reassure her husband that I was, after all, a Bulgarian. After mentally knocking 40% off the price I'd paid for the property, I told them, and the two of them were decidedly outraged. Evidently I should have knocked off even more. There began a long tale of theirs, studded with dates and the names of witnesses, about what a crook the previous master of the place had been. They took turns, and I watched them as if at a tennis match and nodded.
An hour later they wrapped up the subject with the conclusion: “Well, you had the money – you paid it,” which was a kind of reproach, and I hurried to answer their last question too:
“I'm planning to build a wall between our yards – the kind allowed by law. I'll do it at my own expense, I won't ask you for anything.”
I filled the neighbour's glass and after a while he held out his hand. I held out mine too, to seal the deal, but he took his glass, drank it down and stared darkly at the ground. His wife also seemed worried to me, even though, in my view, their reaction should if anything have been joyful – I wasn't committing them to anything. I withdrew my dangling hand and wondered what I'd got wrong this time. In the awkward silence I asked them whether they had children. The neighbour wasn't in the mood for that and dozed off, but his wife perked up, and after another hour it was abundantly clear to me that their son Lalyu was studying to be a vet in Stara Zagora and in a year would become a “graduate”.
She enquired about my education. My answer that I was an electronics engineer left her unclear as to whether it meant I was a graduate. I confirmed it, and she added that nowadays graduates are ten a penny, but if you're a vet, you carry responsibility as well. Especially if you get something wrong and do in somebody's “stock” (livestock). I told her quite sincerely that this was indeed so. She seemed to be satisfied and told her husband it was time to go home. He half woke up and mumbled with a frown:
“The previous master of your place took my sadat, and I need it. It's probably in your shed. And he did me over for other things too!”
I asked him to repeat exactly what he wanted to take, to be sure I'd heard correctly. I didn't dare ask what on earth this “sadat” was – in general, not specifically his. He'd have had me down as a dim Sofia townie far too early on. He rumbled something else, and I answered evasively:
“All right, but right now I want to have lunch. Come over towards evening and take it!”
His wife led him off for a nap, and I was in no mood at all for food – I had to think. If the two of us went into my shed and he started rummaging about, whatever he declared to be his “sadat”, even several things as a set, I would just nod. Worse still, I hadn't been given a key to the shed_._ But what if it didn't even lock? I ran over to it. The door wouldn't budge, and its lock was like something out of “Under the Yoke”.
The key ought to be big, like the key to the gates of some town, but nowhere nearby did I spot one. I was depressed at the thought that the neighbour would certainly never believe I didn't have a key. I remembered that the man who sold me the house had proudly declared at the end that everything in it was wherever it was “most to hand”. He kept screwdrivers in the kitchen cupboard, too, because its hinges often needed adjusting. Under the sink there were spanners, and in the bathroom a pipe wrench. He'd leave them here for me, if I upped the price. I checked – they weren't there now, perhaps so they'd be to hand for him again. He'd done me over on other things too. Even if I'd had his phone number, I wouldn't have rung him. I had to deal with the mystery myself, and very soon at that. To a certain extent it would also help to know what “sadat” meant.
That is, “the key to the shed” lay in the word “sadat”, so mysterious to me. My thoughts went round and round in a vicious circle. Old Grandpa Vazov had put it well in his day: “From nowhere does the despairing gaze see help.”
“God, how clever I am!” I exclaimed a little later, when I remembered that among my still unpacked luggage there was also the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language” by the once famous Mr Danchov.
How had it even occurred to me to bring it? To my surprise, there was no “sadat” in it. Our linguist, considered a luminary, went down a notch in my eyes.
I went for a coffee at the village café-patisserie, or rather pub. The coffee was awful. I was sipping the warm murky brew when two locals sat down at my table and I listened in on their conversation:
“I kept telling bratat not to plant valerian, but him – no and no!”
I'd been wrong about the coffee. My half-awakened mind reacted immediately. Maybe in the village the object of a sentence, if it's masculine, still takes the full definite article?
Brat – bratat, sad – sadat. That is, sadat could be the noun sad.
At home I threw myself at the explanatory dictionary again. There was no sad either, but I found “sadya” – a verb with the following definitions, which I quote word for word:
- To bury the root of a plant in the earth so that it may grow.
- To place eggs under a domestic fowl so that young may hatch; to set.
- To set a hen. E.g.: People no longer set hens, everyone buys chicks.
Once again the explanatory dictionary had failed to answer my question and had left me sitting on a clutch of duck eggs. I hadn't buried any roots in the earth or set any hens. Still, “sadya” was some kind of lead. The only flower bed in my yard was between the outside loo and the shed. I looked around more carefully and, from my new point of view, spotted something like an auger or a corkscrew, 30 cm wide, about a metre tall, with two handles, propped against the wall of the loo, opposite the bed. This, it seemed, was the cursed “sadat”.
I was now convinced it must always be pronounced with the full article. From its handles hung a string with a long key, with which I unlocked the shed.
Towards evening the neighbour and I went in there and he was delighted when he saw it. He needed to bore deep holes to plant saplings. He carried it off and came back with his wife, who in turn recognised in my shed various boring tools of her own, and he – his ladder, wheelbarrow and spade. By now I couldn't care less.
Since in their eyes I was an outsider, a mug and maybe a crook as well anyway, at least they'd stop bothering me. But after their raid on the shed they came round again with salad and rakia.
They launched into various stories – how in some people's gardens in the village the “tomatas” were wilting, because their neighbours had put up high walls. And alongside a wall only vines and pumpkins thrive. Their hint was clear, but this time I'd had a drop for courage and confirmed that I would build the wall. They went home with drooping shoulders. When I went to bed, I settled down to read the book “Life and Soul of Our People” by Ivan Hadzhiyski, which it turned out I'd brought as well. It described the Bulgarian's deep bond with the land, and it became clear to me why the neighbours were against the wall – because of the shade. It crossed my mind that it would also get in the way of their visual contact with us, which over time I became convinced mattered to them no less. A month later the renovation of the house and the wall were a fact, and I went back to Sofia satisfied.
Whenever my wife and I went there, which we did rarely, some tree in our yard close to the neighbours' had always been cut down, clean as if with a saw, by a “storm”, the “starlings” had eaten the fruit of the cherry and the cornel trees, and our vines along the wall had withered.
The wall was by now also casting the shadow of doubt into our souls as the logical cause of these natural disasters. With our urban way of life and soul, and as mountain walkers too, we used the house only as a base camp for hikes in the nearby mountains, which we jokingly called “our estates”. We had no wish to wage neighbourly wars – we were there only now and then, and the yard was not a priority for us at all. When our grandchildren had grown a bit, we started taking them to the village. They liked the mountain walks, but not the yard, and we set about sorting it out a bit.
The neighbours' granddaughter made friends with ours, and the three of them seemed to “knock down” the wall that until recently had been an obstacle to our relations. Ivan Hadzhiyski's book also spoke of the Bulgarian's strong bond with his kin. The new generation, for whom land was more of a plot, was coming along, and walls were once again becoming part of the natural order of things, as they once had been in Zheravna, Koprivshtitsa and goodness knows where else. The wall didn't stop our grandchildren from being friends at all, and there was a “komshuluk” in it as well – a door to pass through freely. I'll only mention that on their side there was a bolt, and on ours – not. That is, they came over to us whenever they liked, and we to them – if they hadn't shot the bolt.
All the same, thanks to the grandchildren, we grew closer to the neighbours again.
