During our university years, four of us fellow students became friends and spent a lot of time together. We often played bridge all night long, and after each deal we discussed our mistakes and our bright ideas. We were ambitious and sometimes got heated, without going to extremes. Once or twice a week we went out together with our girlfriends. Sparks sometimes flew between them, but we didn't take sides. We were guided by the maxim that the greatest danger to male friendship is women.
But, as you'll see below, soon a woman appeared with whom, as circumstances would have it, we spent the whole day, and relations among the four of us got rather tangled. Our girlfriends each belonged to someone in particular, but this woman belonged to nobody. In other words, any one of us could be the first to pull her.
At the end of our third year, as electronics students, the four of us were assigned to a one-month summer work placement. The location was ZEPE – the Plant for Electronic and Semiconductor Components in the Gorublyane district of Sofia.
The workers there, mostly women, had quotas to meet and didn't want us hanging around in their workshops, so we stayed on a bench outside. In the mornings, around 9 o'clock, a man with bushy eyebrows, probably their Party secretary, would come by and tick us off on our attendance sheets. The same thing happened again around 4 in the afternoon. Our placement was simply a matter of waiting for the day to end, something we knew all too well from the army. And yet the plant was modern for its time. It produced quartz resonators – a promising field in electronics. We really wanted to learn something new there.
Soon things changed. The plant appointed a rather glamorous young woman who had just graduated in Physics from Sofia University. The Party secretary, clearly an ex-military man, showed her round the workshops and then introduced her to us as the new Chief Technologist, engineer-physicist Hristina Hristova. She would now also be responsible for us trainees. After these words he went back, visibly pleased, to his office in the administration building.
This Hristina was very surprised when we complained to her that our placement consisted of sitting on the bench outside all day. She declared that this wouldn't stay that way. That very afternoon she scattered us around the workshops and ordered the women workers to train us, and said she would keep an eye on it. At first they looked at us askance, but gradually they started letting us carry out various operations. We tried very hard.
We often overheard all sorts of comments from them about their new boss – a stuck-up Sofia girl, a puffed-up madam, a dolled-up scarecrow and so on. In those days being a worker sounded proud, and if you had a university degree you had to spend a long time pretending to be one of “the people” until “the collective” approved of you.
This girl, however, didn't seem bothered by that at all, and every day she introduced changes to the technology or to a particular operation. Naturally, she met resistance, sometimes not at all silent. As early as the third day she took us trainees to the meeting room, where she gave us a very useful lecture on the technology for producing quartz resonators. To this day, stable-frequency oscillators in electronics are based on them. She explained things clearly, wrote formulas in front of us that we had seen before but seemed to understand for the first time.
She alone had treated us like future engineers, and we wanted her to go on caressing us with her little voice for a long time. But after her lecture she sent us back to the workshops, perhaps so as not to close the distance too quickly.
In such “avant-garde” enterprises back then, weekly bonuses were given for exceeding the plan, and the latest one had been a record. The wagging tongues about her went rather quiet and limited themselves to the subject of her perfume and her grotesque appearance. She really did wear far too much make-up. She always went about in a long skirt, high shoes with thick soles and a pink scarf. After these bonuses, though, the women workers began calling her just “the boss”, almost without malice.
During the compulsory breaks, we smokers were delighted that she joined us. We called her Titi and tried to win her over with witticisms, at which she smiled mysteriously, as if they were childish jokes she had long outgrown. But once she had laughed very heartily. At the time it had been widely announced in the media that Comrade Todor Zhivkov had been admitted to the Government Hospital because he had problems with his prostate gland. Our friend Orlin had said:
“Excuse me, I'm off to the toilet, because like Bai Tosho I seem to be having trouble with my prole-state gland.” Titi had burst out laughing, and her laugh had turned out to be very sexy. We were left with the impression that she was neither a Party member nor an informer, and we were glad. While working, we feverishly ran through in our heads which joke, if we told it to her during the break, she would like more than Orlin's. She also relaxed with us, and after a week she told us:
“It's my birthday today. I'm inviting you round tonight after 7. My address is…..”
That evening we turned up at her flat, each with a present. It was rather luxurious for the times and we felt a bit awkward, but it turned out she had invited only us, which flattered us and gave us hope.
To the blues playing on the stereo we took turns asking her to dance and whirled her about in front of the huge aquarium in the living room like a “sprinkler in a vineyard”. When it got quite late, she announced it was time for us to go. I remember very well that at the door Orlin was standing next to her, his arm round her shoulder as if she were his, and said to us: “Good night, lads.” The three of us tucked our tails between our legs and set off for the tram stop. For once we weren't chatting away; instead we tossed out spiteful little remarks about Orlin, who changed girlfriends often. As if we were genuinely concerned both for them and for Titi. The day had gone pear-shaped, and so had the public transport, so we walked home.
The next day, however, during the “smoko breaks” she didn't so much as glance at Orlin. In the opinion of the other three of us, she seemed to regret her choice of the night before, and we forgave her in our minds, while he quickly went back, scowling, into his workshop. Over the following days, before Titi came out to smoke, Vlado hurried to brag to us about how he and she had talked on the phone for hours the night before.
She, however, showed no sign of being smitten with him and began talking mainly to me and Andro. Soon Vlado stopped pestering us and, like Orlin, isolated himself. After work it was now usually just Andro and me going back together. On the way into town we often commented on the behaviour of our other two friends. We didn't get too carried away, because we sensed that what we were saying sounded like women's gossip, and apparently we were also beginning to feel like rivals who shouldn't show each other too many of their cards. Once Andro, who was generally very direct, said to me:
“Look here, Bogo! You've had a girlfriend for at least six years and you're obviously a stable couple. My problem is different. I'll have to marry Tanya very soon, because she's pregnant. Before that I'd like to have one last fling. Tonight I'm planning to go round to Titi's – wish me luck!”
That evening at home I had brooded for a long time that I'd been one of the stags locking antlers over the doe Titi, and that Andro had pushed me aside, supposedly elegantly but also shamelessly, which did him no credit at all, and I had been seized by impotent anger.
The next day he told me that “last night was really hot”. But his Adam's apple was bobbing and he kept swallowing. I had recently read a little book on human psychology which explained this as behaviour suggesting that someone isn't telling the truth at that moment. During the production breaks it was now just Titi and me smoking, and I began to wonder whether the scales of fate might be tipping in my favour. One day, just as I was about to invite her to dinner at a restaurant, she went back inside, leaving me hanging outside alone like the sword of Damocles.
It stung that she seemed to have just isolated me too. I lit another cigarette and amid the smoke it became clear to me that the four of us had also isolated ourselves from one another. I decided it was high time we came to our senses and drew up a plan for how to make that happen. I didn't hold out much hope, but at least one of us had to try. After the end of the working day I lay in wait for them and invited them round to mine that evening for a game of bridge.
When they arrived, I poured them alcohol and fizzy water and silently dealt the cards for our first game in nearly a month, after which I tossed out casually:
“I slept with Titi last night!” – and “left them to stew in their own juice”.
After we finished the deal, which was a disgrace, instead of the usual analysis I told them the ancient Greek legend according to which Eris, the goddess of strife, tossed to the goddesses Aphrodite, Athena and Hera a golden apple inscribed: “To the most beautiful”, also known as “the Apple of Discord” – the very one the statue of the Venus de Milo held in her missing left hand. As I was telling them this, I noticed their eyes lifting, and at last I said, laughing:
“Well, a minute ago I lied to you that I'd ‘slept’ with Titi last night, but I suggest we forgive each other for letting the worm of doubt eat away at the apple of our friendship!”
They too began confessing their lies one after another with self-forgiving smiles. In the end all four of us, liars until a moment ago, were hugging one another. We were definitely glad to have each other again. On one thing we were unanimous: it was our egos that had been the apple of discord between us, not Titi. The next day we invited her to smoke with us. At first she was surprised, but she quickly cheered up. She told us she was very pleased to see us back to our old selves. It sounded sincere, and each of us silently thanked himself that he had never allowed himself, in front of the others, to compare her to the “sour grapes” of Aesop's fable.
That, it seems, was the only thing we could be proud of where she was concerned.
Our placement ended, and later our studies too, and the four of us ended up in different towns and even countries. We were married by then, had children and saw each other less and less. When we met we cheerfully reminisced about our shared past, but nobody ever mentioned Titi. Sometimes I wonder how she herself perceived what happened back then. She certainly wasn't bored with us, and she never took anyone's side in our one-upmanship. She had regarded us as individuals, while we had regarded her – it seems – merely as an object for someone to prevail over. It was as if we had interpreted the musketeers' motto as: “One girl for all, and all for one girl”.
Let's hope we remember only the comic side of that period, and that nobody, not even Titi herself, is tempted to take on the role of judge of the others' actions. After all, back then we were all in the melting pot of youth, where whatever guilt there may be is understandable and forgivable.
Sometimes the thought crosses my mind that, seeing my story published, Granny Titi will giggle again just as sexily as she used to back then, and those old grandpas will crack a smile too.
God willing, that's exactly how it will be.
