I haven't seen my body for days. It's wrapped up in layers and has been sleeping in low-roofed peasant cottages without bathrooms. I washed my underwear four days ago in the last bathroom and every night I've been hanging it out to dry. By morning it's stiff and frosty and crunches back into my pack.

 

 

It's Easter and we're in Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria, a museum town noisy with the Topolnitsa River rushing through the main street. The town is bound by new snow and old stories of ideological ferment, cultural reinvention and armed uprising. The 1876 uprising which led to the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8 and Bulgarian independence from Turkey was proclaimed in this village. Today there are Coke signs and buses from the 1960s but not much else has changed.

We're staying in a painted wooden house, empty for the winter and opened up for us. My piss breaks the ice in the toilet and I hang my board of underwear out again. I'm travelling with Christo, an ex-junkie violinist who's been in exile in Amsterdam for the last 18 years, and Tutti, his lipstuck girlfriend and powerful adventuress.

 

Christo is back in Bulgaria to deal with the practicalities of his father's death, to organise his papers and find a name he can take back to the West to try out. He is troubled, his disappearances for 'one cigarette' or 'just one small cognac' are a joke running out of legs.

Tutti is learning English, starting with words like 'actress', 'intellectual' and 'intelligence', and ignoring the headbashing subtleties of 'I' and 'you' and 'he' and 'she'. She decides: she is an artist, I am an intellectual. She slogs the whole way around Bulgaria in high heels, hates buses and loves hitching, sticking her hand out like a pin-up girl and kindly advising me not to bother trying myself.

 

  I'm feeling more of a stranger than ever, despite my face which passes for Slavic and my silly travel writer celebrity. My picture in the newspaper, my voice on the radio and a TV appearance planned.

I know that the marks of home are disappearing from my body, being pressed back into my skin, whitening under familiar clothes. I dream of my body being trekked, trawled, tramped, travelled. I hold myself inside my pockets like I'm looking for keys.

 

In the church it is cold but airless and I worry I will faint. There are no pews, the only chairs are lined against the wall for old people. I watch them being filled one by one, waiting for some sort of brash courage to move me to sit down, but then it's too late and they are all taken.

It is a long night, the service culminates at midnight. But the priest is drunk and reeling and the sermons are going nowhere. The singing is muffled by confusion and members of the congregation take over the reading of the scriptures from the robed priest's Bible.

Public worship still has the feeling of an insurrection here. I've got a candle in my hand, burning to remember all the dead I am mourning, burning all my wishes into a heaven which

 

isn't mine. The bells are still now but quivering on their big night, horses are stamping and steaming outside.

I resist an attachment to this place where someone might say they are going for a whiskey and return two hours later, barely drunk and surprised that the moon has moved in their absence. I want to be the daughter of immigrants to a rich land.

 

The idea is to keep your candle alight during a circumambulation of the church. If you manage to walk around the church with candle-breath still stoking back at you, your sins are erased.

We are a shuffling crowd of coats and hats and candles, except for the mutri, the crime gangs, in their suits and gold chains. They bring shields for their candles so that no hint of breeze can get in, and they walk around the church with their candle flames as still as paintings, a procession of ritual purity.

The next day Christo introduces me to a sad local boy who follows me and my camera around, watching me, pinning me to his landscape till it makes me nervous. He edges into all my photos like a dog sneaking closer to the dinner table, sidling into frame.

  Snow shucks off the steep roofs. The mountains are melting and tumbling along the river which ran red with patriot blood over a century ago.

Heroism was inconceivable to me the night before, but today, after a snowball fight and with a studied comic outlook, it is possible to imagine people hiding with weapons behind the wooden corners of these houses. It is possible to imagine revolution. I leave them all there and head off with my celebrity of strangeness on a train through mountain tunnels and into the northern plains. I wish I had a ghost husband to make me respectable.

I don't enjoy feeling so strange but I don't like this place enough to want to belong here. I covet my alien nature, only because if circumstances had been slightly different, and my grandparents hadn't made it to Australia, all this trouble could have been my trouble. I am reading Treasure Island slowly, keeping a shipwrecked world of fearless necessity close to me, and hidden, like a talisman. But the old people here look like my grandparents and learning Bulgarian is like remembering it.

A tramp offers me a banana and we talk in my idiot Bulgarian until an inspector stamps into the carriage and my ticketless friend hurries away. I stay there sitting with pockets full of painted and boiled Easter eggs while the train rattles through the tunnel darkness and my underwear steams quietly in my backpack.

The next town I arrive in has no hotels and I am adopted for the night by a Turkish family. They crowd together on cushions in the living room so I can sleep alone in the bedroom they share. I'm a lucky stranger this night, showered with kindness, and I hang my underwear around my bed like flags.

Text by Dani Valent
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