I'll admit it: when we're flying, I panic if we're not at check-in an hour and a half before the flight. Emo feeds this state of mine all the way up to hysteria. Systematically. Every time I travel with Emo, precisely an hour and a half before the flight, he's off somewhere washing his car, or polishing some invisible scratch on it. The suspense is thickened further by the fact that this "somewhere" is always far away, usually on the outskirts of Sofia.
On these occasions I ring him, leaning on my tightly packed suitcases, passport in hand, hissing through my teeth: "Where are you, Emil? We should be at the airport by now!"
His answer is invariably an indignant: "Chill, I'm five minutes from home. Stop being hysterical! There's nothing I hate more than someone rushing me." And at the very moment he's telling these whopping lies, he's actually in Voluyak, in the yard of a bloke who's brought in some really good scratch-polishing paste from Italy. The two of them calmly carry on polishing the car's surface until the invisible scratch becomes invisible even by their standards.
You'll say, "Let the lad look after his car," and I agree that people should do the things that make them happy. But my question is: why does a substantial part of this pampering have to happen during the time when we're supposed to be boarding a plane?
I have two theories as to why it has to happen at the last minute:
1/ if the car is parked in the garage as late as possible, the least amount of dust will settle on it before we get back;
2/ if the car is parked in the garage as late as possible, the agonising parting between it and its owner will be as short as possible.
So achieving one of these two goals (and quite possibly both at once) is my husband's priority, which he tries to impose as a family one. But somehow he still hasn't managed to convince me that the three thousand leva spent on plane tickets, which will go up in smoke if we miss the flight, is an acceptable price for the peace of mind I'll feel knowing that my husband's car was parked in the garage at the last minute, all spruced up and shiny.
And just how high Emo's car is on his list of priorities, I'll illustrate with one simple episode. When he went abroad on a training course for a whole six weeks, the words he murmured to me as we parted were "Look after her." Looking after "her" included the strange activity of driving to work in "her" once a week, so she could "stretch her legs".
And so I did. One day, shortly before Emo was due back from his course, taking a little bend on the way to work, I lightly scraped the car's paint. The scratch (or, as Emo calls it, the "gouge") was imperceptible to the female eye. A white "gouge" on a white car – not much of a contrast, I reassured myself. I parked in the company yard with a heavy heart. I tried to convince myself that if I needed a magnifying glass and the exact coordinates of the scratch to see it, the same would go for all other human beings. The optimism I was trying to fool myself with was refuted at once by two human beings of the male sex. These were the owners of the company, who, as usual, were heading off somewhere as a set. Without responding to my respectful "Hello", they pounced straight on the invisible scratch.
"Is this new? It wasn't there last week. Has Emo declared it on the insurance report?"
I start wondering what my place in this world is – a world in which half of humanity notices and remembers that a week ago some car that isn't even theirs didn't have a scratch invisible to the naked eye. While I'm pondering the question, having found out that the scratch in question was made by me on Emo's car, my bosses at the time are already firmly convinced that I have no place in this world. They even know exactly how I'm going to part with it:
"Emo is going to KILL you," the two of them inform me in unison, while one of them thoughtfully feels the roughness and depth of the gouge.
I know Emo has comprehensive insurance to cover the damage. In principle, I could probably find his policy number and file a claim. But when the claim gets approved and the money lands in Emo's account, he'll uncover my crime anyway. …..You can imagine what's in store for me, given that I'd rather pay out of my own pocket to avoid the situation. I ring Our-Car-Man!
Normally, no matter how urgent the repair, I always have to wait at least a week for Valyo (the Car Man) to take the car in. "I've got loads of clients," he explains, "there's no point bringing it in earlier, because I won't start on it before such-and-such a day." Nothing can break him. Nothing, except one case of force majeure: A-Gouge-on-Emo's-Car. When he learned of this tragedy, the Car Man was moved. He asked simply:
"When's Emo back?"
"In three days!"
"Toniii, Pepiii, cancel everything else! Tomorrow we're doing Emo's Audi!"
"Otherwise Emo will KILL you right there at the airport," the Car Man explained to me with concern. For the first time I saw a spark of humanity in him. I don't remember how much I paid, but I know it was the best-spent money of my life, since thanks to it I went on having a life at all.
Speaking of Emo and the airport… Back to the beginning of the Brazilian trip. I finally manage to wrench him out of his car's embrace, and we check in just as they're closing the desk for Rio. At security they make a fast-track lane for latecomers, we take off our belts and run to the gate with no shoes on. In the second before they disconnect the jet bridge from our plane, I hurl myself into it. On the move, I manage to grab Emo by the collar – he, meanwhile, with unshakeable calm, as if he had all the time in the world, had set off to buy himself some food at the kiosk by the gate. I fling him into the jet bridge with me. Yes, I'm as strong as Baron Munchausen. The jet bridge closes behind us, but we're already on the plane.
Emo is outraged that I didn't let him buy crisps, given the price of food on planes. For him, time and space are relative concepts, unlike the price of in-flight sandwiches. I remind him that food is free on transoceanic flights. That calms him down.
The next morning we're already in our Airbnb flat on Ipanema beach.
The first few days we get used to the proverbial term "Brazilian bum". Here is the collection of Brazilian landmarks that Emo kindly provided me with from his personal archive.
At first these bums seem to me like huge rubber monsters that have greedily sunk their teeth into Brazilian women from behind, wobbling after them with a gait and a life of their own. By the end of my stay I've got so used to them that I start feeling ashamed of my own scrawny backside. It's all a matter of perception.
The reason we're in Rio is to celebrate my birthday, for which Emil has booked me on a tour with an organised group. On my birthday we'll go round the city's most famous sights, including the statue of Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf Mountain.
On the morning of my big day we head for the Christ statue, and while we're queuing for tickets, we meet an Asian-American woman, Hillary. By "meet" I mean "Emo starts chatting to her and, since she's on her own, invites her to join us".
After his Audi, what Emo loves most in this world is peroxide blondes, and right after them – Asian women. When Emo dies, his heaven will be an Audi gliding through the clouds, with a bleached-blonde Asian woman sitting in it. And the clouds, like big soft towels, will additionally clean, dry and buff the sweaty Audi & Bleached Asian.
So Emo invites Hillary to join us. Hillary isn't bleached, but she's pretty – slim, with smooth skin. I've long since scanned her from head to toe for some bodily flaw, but I can't find one. It's not only men whose eyes have scanning capabilities. We have them too, but instead of "gouges" on cars, we scan for flaws in other women's looks. And we do it in a hundredth of a second, with a single sideways glance. With Hillary, though, my sideways glance hit a brick wall and ricocheted straight back at me. If I were a man and she were a car, I wouldn't have found a single gouge on her perfect exterior.
Her outer beauty is matched by inner beauty. She's well-mannered enough to make an effort to include me in the cosy conversation Emo is trying to create just for the two of them.
Crushed, I stop looking for flaws in her. But I don't retreat so far as to let Emo have his picture taken alone with her. He sends me off to take a selfie with the Christ statue, since I wanted Instagram followers, didn't I. He wants to neutralise me temporarily so he can have his photo taken with Hillary in peace. Well – the closest he managed to get to a photo of just the two of them, him and Hillary, is this:
Otherwise, Jesus and I had our photo taken separately. Here we are.
The day was already drawing to a close, and at sunset we went up to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain in a sort of cable car.
Emo goes to the loo. Hillary and I are left on our own for just two minutes, but that's enough for an elderly German to join us. And when I say elderly, I mean he could have been my father, but only on condition that he'd made me at a ripe old age. And I was turning 40 at the time. On top of that he wore glasses as thick as magnifying lenses, the seat of his trousers sagged, and he had yellow, crooked teeth. In short – when I die and go to my version of heaven, there'd be no room there for Dieter. Not least because he'd be mercilessly trampled by the waves of fast middle-distance runners racing each other on a track in my heaven. Besides the fact that he's called Dieter, I learn that our new friend's grandchild was born today. Ha! What a coincidence – I'm delighted – I was born today too!
"Are you mad, giving out your personal details to this guy? Can't you see he's a secret agent?"
Emo, who has meanwhile returned from the loo, suffers from occupational deformation. Every time Emo sees a foreigner striking up a conversation with me, spy-film music starts playing in his head. For him, all the foreigners in this world are agents of Mossad, the KGB, MI6, the CIA and so on. If they're Germans over 85, like Dieter – then they're retired Stasi agents. But we all know there's no such thing in this world as a former agent or a former policeman.
What all, all, all these refined representatives of international espionage have in common is that they strike up conversations with me for one single purpose. Which is to exploit my naivety and, through me, try to get their hands on our – Emo's and Nia's – personal details! And our property!
On this particular secret agent, Emo slapped an additional, especially grave charge – namely, that besides our personal details and our property, Dieter is also after our organs (we were in Brazil, after all).
Dieter suggests we have a drink in the nearby bar for the double birthday. Emo curtly refuses. He thwarts Dieter's attempt to slip sleeping pills into our drinks and then drag us off to his laboratory, where he could gut us at his leisure. But the Stasi trained its agents in perseverance. Dieter tells us how he took part in the privatisation of Kremikovtsi! As proof he names two or three Bulgarians along the lines of Ivan Petrov who'd been his colleagues.
With all this talk of how he'd made a pile from the privatisation in his homeland, my husband hates him even more, if that's at all possible. To top it all, Dieter has lived in Rio for years, where he's supposedly a "tour guide", his daughter lives in Singapore, and his son – in Sydney.
Thank God, Dieter and Hillary don't speak Bulgarian, so Emo and I freely discuss the situation out loud:
"How has he managed to set his kids up in these expensive countries? Eh? How?"
"Well, by reselling other people's personal details and other people's property." Emo doesn't catch the sarcasm in my voice.
"Now you're finally thinking. Add organ trafficking to that, Niyo," Emo narrows his little eyes. "He chose Rio because it's one of the centres of organised crime…"
"But of course, Emil – the root of the word 'organised crime' comes from 'organs'…"
"Don't you try to be all funny with me, just get rid of this guy, and right now."
Have you ever thought that something was impossible, absolutely, completely, utterly out of the question, and only an hour later been proved wrong?
Well, that's exactly what happened when I thought Emo had gone paranoid with all his spy stories and secret operations. Because just an hour later, in pouring rain and pitch darkness, Dieter's Audi, its tyres screeching ominously on the bends, was driving our close-knit little group to a nearby military base.
(To be continued….)
