We all know that some people suffer from inferiority complexes. Below I'll tell a story from my childhood in which I describe the consequences of the opposite complex, which doesn't lead to anything good either.
Even before I started school, I often found myself thinking what a wonderful creature I was.
One day I asked Mum how she had managed to give birth to someone so clever, handsome and good. "Ask your father!" I asked him. "Ask your mother!" At that moment they were having a row and had no time for my older brother and me. Besides, in those days parents rarely praised their children, so as not to spoil them. I wasn't upset by their reaction – in fact, I didn't need anyone's confirmation at all that I was something "a bit special", and it was probably daft to ask a question whose answer I knew perfectly well.
Somewhere around fourth year my superiority complex deepened. I was a straight-A pupil, the full package. Not full as in fat, but someone with top marks in everything; I even played the accordion and was inside left on our class football team. Not to mention that I was also the Pioneer squad leader, i.e. socially active. I ought to have been proud of these things, but instead I started to worry.
It was the period of the Cold War and the world was divided into two hostile camps – East and West. We had good reason to hate those in the West, but instead of learning from our experience how to live happily like us, they were spiteful, envious and plotting fiendish plans day and night to screw us over.
They had a military alliance called NATO, in which the most ferocious were America and West Germany. In the cartoons in our newspapers the American was drawn as a certain Uncle Sam – tall and bony, with a goatee and a top hat on his head with a big $ on it, meaning dollars. He usually held a sack with rockets peeking out of it, and not the kind for space, the ones with USSR written on them. In America the war plans were dreamt up by the Hawks of the Pentagon, and in West Germany by the Revanchists of the Bundesfer, depicted in our newspapers as an evil fatso with a helmet with two horns on top jammed on his head and big fangs sticking out over a mouth twisted with malice. Good thing the Westerners didn't dare attack us – clearly they were afraid that we had bombs and rockets too and would pay them back with interest.
The grown-ups at home were worried that some kind of world-wide kerfuffle might break out. They often said that the Westerners were sending us Spies and Saboteurs with the aim of exterminating us one by one. Being very calculating, they'd decided that this would work out cheaper for them. With everything, they first thought about whether the sums added up. I imagined all this rather vividly – a Gang of Uncle Sams in the gloomy Pentagon and a Pack of Revanchists with long fangs in the sinister Bundesfer, locked up in there for years and, for lack of air and sunshine, gone completely round the bend. And what else could you expect from people in their position? I admit I felt no compassion for them whatsoever.
For us children it was dead easy which direction of the world was which, especially when it came to East and West. We often played the children's game in which one of us, having caught a ladybird flying about or crawling on the ground, would start up the little song: "Ladybird, ladybird, show me where I'll go to wed…" It was a huge embarrassment if your ladybird flew West. Just try explaining afterwards that soon after taking off it had corrected its course. It seemed the ladybirds too had been driven daft by the Cold War and flew either East or West. Only the birds carried on flying North or South every spring and autumn.
Thoughtful as I was, I came to the conclusion that sooner or later the imperialists would figure out that it would work out cheaper for them to eliminate not random people from our world, just like that, willy-nilly, but mainly the "flower of our nation". From that point of view, in my opinion, those people over there had no interest in my staying alive.
A thought that left me slightly flattered, but much more – scared. Perhaps they'd already sent one of their snipers to shoot me. He'd surely want to do it after dark, while I was going to the outdoor loo, which was about 20 metres from our house. I avoided going there at that hour, but if I had to, I ran to it in a zigzag so he couldn't get me in his sights. In the loo I felt calmer, knowing that Westerners were also rather squeamish.
When, after long hesitation, I worked up the courage to come out of it, I shot out like a cork and ran back in an even crazier zigzag. Entering the house happily alive, I would perform in front of the window a sort of merry dance, accompanied by suitable monkey business and cries along the lines of: "Nyah-nyah, nyah-nyah!" aimed at their sniper, who hadn't succeeded that day either. I was convinced he was hiding somewhere behind the crates piled up in our yard by the nearby "Fruit and Veg" shop and was at that moment bursting with rage. Who knows how he'd make his excuses over his radio afterwards. And they'd give him a right roasting for having paid him for nothing yet again today.
Behind the window I felt safe. He wouldn't dare shoot at me, even with a silencer, because the glass would clatter and the militiamen would nab him straight away – their station was right next to us. In my opinion, however calculating the imperialists were, there was one thing they hadn't foreseen at all – my zigzag running, with which I had definitely outfoxed them.
I imagined how in their newspapers, always hungry for sensations, a front-page article would appear: "Bulgarian Child Outwits the Pentagon", accompanied by a photo of me in my red Pioneer neckerchief. But what if in that same article they went and announced a "reward for my head" – "WANTED"? Greedy for money as they were over there, soon more snipers would come flocking into the yard and put me in a crossfire. Despite my zigzag, someone would hit me sooner or later, although they might also end up shooting each other, serve them right. At night I found it harder and harder to fall asleep. I even started crossing myself – I'd turned devout.
I didn't share these worries of mine – hardly anyone would have understood me. But the strain began to weigh on me and I started envying the weaker pupils, who were happily ambling through life without a care. In sixth year I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to live peacefully like them, I'd have to spoil my marks a bit. And also stop the accordion, which I was fed up with anyway. I also gave up football training at "Lokomotiv" Sofia. I hoped that at the Pentagon they'd understood all these things and had already called back their superfluous expense – their sniper.
I was pleased with the decision I'd made, but I was also ashamed that, purely because of my funk, the talents in our Motherland had been reduced by one, and the swine had achieved their aim with my help. A year later puberty shifted the focus of my attention in a completely different direction, for which I'm very grateful to it, but not for the spots it had gifted me, perhaps to remind me of the cowardice I'd shown before the Westerners.
Even now, at a venerable age, I trot to an outdoor toilet in some village in a zigzag, especially after dark, just to feel calmer. How should I know whether that sniper hasn't come back to our country, this time as a welcome guest, but obsessed with taking personal revenge on me for his failure back then. Not that I was thinking about it, but my survival instinct kept on working out of sheer inertia.
