About The Albena Shkodrova Blog

On racism etc.

July 18, 2009 • Comments Bulgaria

It was a little story, but the more hours that separate me from it, the more I want to shout out loud about it.

After a walk with my baby, this morning I decided to take the tram back home. I live in the center of Sofia and rarely use trams, but every time I need to get on one, it's like stepping in some kind of a social swamp. It takes me a lot of sense of humour to go through such an experience without enraging myself. I usually end up using up all my reserves.

So when this morning I was walking to the tram, I found myself fishing from my memory some Fawlty Towers scenes. I went to the stop booth and was for several minutes feeling like a piece of paper under the magnifying glass of its transparent roof in Sofia's July heat. Then the tram came, and I rushed to the door marked with a sign of a baby pram. The difference between this door and the other ones is, that here there is no handle in the middle. Apart from that, it still has two stairs I had to carry the pram up.

Once in the tram, crashing knees and ankles, I moved forward, towards where the only ticket vendor machine stands. Alas, it was out of order. And while I was trying to push a coin through it in vain, I overheard a conversation between a woman, standing with her back to me, and the tram driver. In Sofia buying tickets from tram drivers was, and still is, a most usual practice. The woman was obviously trying to do just that.

Hearing her say “Will the vendor take 50 stotinki coins?”, I assumed the tram driver had no tickets either. It was also a most usual practice. “The vendor is out of order”, the driver answered, and the woman walked away.

I didn't give much thought to the scene itself, but just stood there for several seconds, considering whether I should get back off the tram, or just continue without a ticket. I decided to stay on, thinking that at the end it's not my fault - there is a clear sign on the tram that you can buy your ticket inside, and you actually can't. Besides, I am with a baby.

Still, I decided to get myself one more alibi, asking the tram driver personally: ok, I tried, there was no way. “Got any tickets?” “Yes!” the tram driver suddenly replied . She took my coin and gave me back a new ticket. And then she also gave me a used one. “It's from this tram. Use it. Keep the new one for next time”, she smiled. In Bulgaria the tickets are validated by punching holes in them with small funny machines mounted on the side-walls of the trams. Each tram has a different set of holes. This ticket had the right set of holes fro this tram, so I could travel with it. I could also, as some compassionate people do, “forget” it on my seat in my turn, so that someone else would find it and have a ride for free.

"Thanks," I said. But while sitting on a seat, ungrateful thoughts were already rushing through my head. “Silly woman! It's her own payment and the safety of the tram she is driving that she is giving away like this!” And then, calming myself down “Ok, it may be a silly kind of goodness, but it's still goodness, isn't it?”

At that moment my eyes were caught by a tattoo on the hand of a woman, sitting opposite to me. Michail, it said. A male name. She was 60-65 years old, and looked like a working class Meril Streep, once she gets 65, that is. The thought of this woman's resistant sexuality, despite her age, her obvious modesty and her typical, grey Bulgarian fate, written on her face, made me smile. I thought of all the weird ways your body keeps the traces of your past, and was wondering where is now that Michail in her life ? I was probably looking with quite an indiscreet curiosity at her face, for she thought she would talk to me.

She opened her hand, the one that had Michail's name on it, and showed me two coins of 50 stotinki. “They are too dark, the tram driver said. So she wouldn't take them. And I have no other coins. Now I may be fined if there is a check”.

It was only at this moment when I realized that the woman opposite to me was the same one as the woman who was speaking to the tram driver earlier. And that she was of Roma origin. I took the used ticket, so benevolently donated to me by the philanthropic driver, and gave it to the woman. Then I took the new one out and validated it.

In the next several minutes the woman thanked me, murmured something about better dying and, overwhelmed by humiliation, started crying.

I got off a bit later, and soon realized, that it was one stop earlier than the one I needed. I don't know why I made such a mistake. And why was it, that while walking the longer way home, I found myself thinking of what had happened in English, and not in my native Bulgarian.