Big Brother

[fiction]

When in the spring of 1984, BBC World Service broadcast a dramatization of George Orwell’s 1984, Daddy listened to each of the fifteen episodes, his ear glued to the short-wave radio. He kept the volume low to make sure our neighbors wouldn’t hear it and report him.

Barely sixteen at the time, I had no idea what the big deal was and instead of joining him, I sulked, complaining bitterly about missing the pop songs playing on the regular radio. Because the radio was all I had.

I was the only one of my friends without a cassette player, except for Lily, whose father was the head of the Party’s neighborhood branch. Even if they had the money, he would have never allowed it, fearing that music from the West would poison her mind with capitalist ideas. When Madonna’s album, Like a Virgin, came out at the end of our sophomore year in high school, my friend Vera offered to make me a tape. Blushing, I had to admit I had no use for it, so she invited me over to hear it while doing our math homework.

“She’s a good friend to have,” Daddy said when I told my parents about it. “Studious. Not like that other one.”

“Her name is Lily,” I snapped. “And she’s my best friend.”

“That’s precisely what I’m talking about.” Daddy had just returned from his shift at the plant and was slumped at the kitchen table, smoking. A nearly empty bottle of beer sat next to the ashtray, gathering a sheen of perspiration. “She’s a bad influence, spending her days smooching with that good-for-nothing—”

The ring of the phone interrupted him. Our neighbor, Baba Vaska, was calling to alert us that the store by the school had received a new shipment of bananas. Before Mama had put the receiver down, Daddy was already reaching for his coat.

Bananas were a rarity, available only in select produce stores during the winter months, and word spread quickly when a delivery came in. There was a limit of two kilos per person, but supplies ran out fast, and people often returned home empty-handed after waiting in line for hours.

“Your father is just worried about you,” Mama said after we heard the front door slam behind him. “He wants to make sure you won’t repeat our mistakes.”

I sighed. I was tired of hearing about how she’d dropped out of high school in tenth grade to start working at the beer factory and leave her parents’ house, while Daddy was expelled in ninth grade for getting into too many fights. He’d gotten a job at the metallurgy plant outside Sofia, where he still worked.

***

Vera’s apartment was on the third floor in the building next door, and it had the exact same arrangement as ours. But the similarities ended there. Everything in Vera’s place was stylish and modern. Shiny sleek cabinets, parquet floors, and Turkish carpets. Vera’s family was rich. Or at least, as rich as one could be in Communist Bulgaria. “Old money,” Mama told me once. Vera’s grandfather had been a goldsmith before the Communist takeover at the end of World War II. The new government had confiscated people’s property, their lands and businesses, but gold had the advantage of being easy to hide. Vera’s parents had university degrees and worked in offices. They also knew people in the right places, which was how they were able to buy a shiny blue Lada, despite the long waiting list for cars in the country.

Lily was already there. Vera had invited her too, of course. A detail I purposefully omitted, having heard Daddy’s reservations about her.

Even though Lily’s family had the least amount of money, she was the most stylish among us. With the help of sewing patterns from magazines, using cheap materials, or repurposing old dresses, Lily made her own clothes on her mother’s manual-pedal Singer. Today, she was wearing a tight T-shirt under a jacket, her tiny waist accentuated by a wide belt over baggy black pants. A choker with a cross completed her outfit. If her father saw the cross, she’d be grounded for days.

Before Vera put Madonna’s record on, she brought us three Coca-Cola bottles from the kitchen. Lily and I looked at each other, our eyes widening. Coca-Cola was a treat I enjoyed only on the few occasions we ate out.

“Do you want some candy?” Vera asked, opening one of the wall cabinets.

Lily elbowed me as I stared at all the Milka bars, bubble gum, and chocolate eggs stacked up inside. It was like going into a Corecom, the special stores where you could buy goods from the West, assuming you had dollars. Which meant only tourists and citizens who were allowed to travel abroad, like Vera’s engineer father, could shop there.

For some reason, we got to talking about what we wanted to do when we grew up. Vera dreamed of being an academic, maybe a history professor. Lily hoped to become a seamstress, a fashion designer if she was lucky. I shrugged, unsure. As a kid, I’d dreamed of being a doctor, but as I got older I realized that going to medical school was about as far-fetched as traveling in space. (For a time, I’d entertained the idea of becoming a cosmonaut like Georgi Ivanov who joined the Salyut 6 Space Station in 1979, making Bulgaria the sixth country in the world to have a citizen in space.) Vera was the only one I knew who planned to apply to university and was already preparing for the entrance exams in two years, studying with a tutor once a week.

“I’ll probably get a job in Mama’s factory,” I said.

Vera looked at me pointedly, a spot of melted chocolate stuck to her upper lip. “I thought you wanted to be a doctor?”

“Yes, but—”

“Well, then, you better apply to med school!”

She said it with that confidence of hers I sometimes envied and other times, like now, found grating. While, at an early age, I’d learned to resist asking for the doll in the shop window, knowing all too well my parents didn’t have the money for it, Vera was used to getting everything she wanted. That was the beauty of growing up privileged—you believe anything you set your eyes on is within reach; all you need to do is extend your arm and grab it. And if you don’t, you must be stupid, or lazy, or both.

“What’s the point of applying,” I said, struggling to keep the frustration out of my voice, “when there is no way I’ll pass the entrance exams?”

“Nonsense,” Vera scoffed.

“I can’t compete with students like you who have been tutored for years.”

Lily rolled her eyes in solidarity. We both knew that much of the test material wasn’t covered in class. Education was officially free, but in reality, the kids of the rich had the advantage of being better prepared to take the entrance exams.

“Of course you can,” Vera went on. “You’re the best chemistry student in the school. You’ll only need a biology tutor.”

She said it as if it were the simplest thing. Just a quick trip to the store, never mind the cost.

“How much is it?” I asked, to placate her.

“Depends on the teacher. But most charge thirty leva an hour.”

Lily and I gasped. Once a week, that came to a hundred and twenty a month. Mama’s salary was a hundred and eighty.

***

We were halfway through Madonna’s record when our friend Pavel called to tell us that his brother had a new film. Pavel’s older brother had recently acquired a VCR on the black market and would sometimes get his hands on bootleg tapes with Hollywood movies smuggled behind the Iron Curtain. Vera wasn’t interested—she wanted to finish her homework—but Lily and I ran out, leaving our notebooks behind.

Pavel’s apartment was back in my building on the fourth floor. We climbed the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. The stairwell was dark and cool, the paint peeling off the walls, chunks of stucco crumbling in places. On the third floor, Lily stopped suddenly and looked at me. “You know,” she said, “Vera can be a spoiled brat, but she’s right. You should apply to med school.”

“I’ve got no chance!” I shrieked. Why was everyone getting on my case about it today?

“Your chance of getting in is zero if you don’t apply.”

“But realistically—”

“The hell with what’s realistic and what’s not. You’re giving up before even trying. Dream big, Kalina. You’ll never achieve anything if you don’t.”

I stared at her. The smell of fried meat and paprika wafted from one of the apartments, making me nauseous. “What about you?” I snapped. “Why aren’t you planning to apply to uni then?”

“Because I hate studying.” She laughed. “Plus, there are no degrees for fashion designers. Not in Bulgaria anyway.”

***

You could tell when Pavel’s brother had a new movie by all the shoes lined up on the landing outside the door.

The living room was dark, heavy with the stink of sweat and dirty socks. People crowded together on the couch and armchairs, spewing clouds of smoke that hung below the glass chandelier. We joined Pavel and Ivan on the floor, backs propped against the coffee table, legs sprawled. The translator, a dark-haired guy in his mid-30s, sat on an ottoman at the front, leaning forward in concentration. I recognized his guttural, monotonous voice from some of the other films we’d watched with the translation already dubbed in. It was the first time he was interpreting live, in real time. His name was Boris. Like Vera’s father, he traveled abroad regularly for work and had just returned with a couple of new tapes.

The film playing was called Mad Max. I didn’t particularly care for it, even though Lily next to me seemed transfixed. I might have liked it better if I were able to focus. But Lily’s words kept ringing in my head.

Maybe she had a point. Growing up, I’d internalized the fact that we were poor. I’d trained myself so well not to want things I couldn’t have that I’d killed the magic of dreaming. I’d stopped reaching for things I deemed unreachable. I’d become defeatist.

My jaw clenched in anger.

The elite were loaded with money; they had powerful connections and advantages at every step of the way. But they had no monopoly on dreams. Just because our pockets were empty, it didn’t mean we should drain our hearts and souls of hopes for a better future.

Lily was right. Tomorrow, I would talk to my chemistry and biology teachers and ask them to recommend extracurricular materials. Maybe they could even loan me a few textbooks to help me prepare for the tests.

***

The following week, to everyone’s shock, Pavel’s brother was taken in for questioning at the local police station, his VCR and tapes confiscated. “Someone snitched on him,” I told my parents that evening. “Pavel thinks it’s one of our neighbors.”

“You can’t trust anyone, Kalina,” Daddy said. “I keep telling you.”

“The Party has eyes and ears on us at all times,” Mama said under her breath and pulled herself a cigarette from Daddy’s pack.

***

Two weeks later, on the morning of my seventeenth birthday, my parents called me into the living room.

“We have a birthday surprise for you,” Mama said.

“We know how much you want a cassette player,” Dad joined in.

“And we don’t want you to always have to go to Vera’s to listen to music,” Mama continued.

I clasped my hands excitedly, then halted, staring at them. “But where are we going to get one?”

“Corecom,” Daddy said. “We bought some dollars.”

“On the black market,” Mama added in a low, conspiratorial tone, as if there was any other way to buy dollars.

My stare shifted between the two of them. Was that safe? What if we got caught? Except for listening to shortwave radio, my parents have always played by the rules, even when the rules made no sense. “The law is the law,” Daddy often said.

“No more objections,” he now said, sensing my hesitation. “You and I are going to Corecom today so that you can pick it out yourself.”

***

For a poor girl growing up under Communism, entering a Corecom store was akin to walking into a church. Accustomed to the drab, muted colors of Bulgarian and Soviet-made things, I stared in awe at shelves upon shelves crowded with shiny, brightly colored goods. It was like looking into a kaleidoscope made of candy and chocolate bars, toys, clothes, and electronics.

Daddy halted at the door, his eyes darting nervously around. So much for acting as if we shopped here all the time, as we’d discussed outside. One look at the two of us standing there with our mouths agape, and you could tell we didn’t belong. Finally, spotting the cassette players towards the back of the store, we exchanged nods and headed straight there. There were five different types, ranging from $150 to $320. I didn’t know anything about electronics and chose the second cheapest, a Philips for $186.

Daddy told me to go wait in the street in case he was asked to show proof of obtaining the dollars legally. “If they arrest me,” he said, “I don’t want you to be implicated.”

My hands clammy, my ears buzzing, I walked outside. The sky was slate gray, the wind cold and raw against my cheeks. After yesterday’s snowstorm, the streets had turned to brown mush, and shallow pools of water filled the intersections, forcing pedestrians to slosh through them. My feet were already wet in my imitation-leather boots, so I didn’t think twice before stepping into knee-deep snow to get closer to the store’s window. I stood there, my breath fogging up the glass, as Daddy pointed out the Philips unit. As he headed to the register, the buzzing in my ears grew louder, shriller. I pictured a policeman stepping out from behind the counter, demanding to see his papers.

As Daddy reached for his wallet inside his coat, it occurred to me that I was being stupid. My parents shouldn’t be spending all that money so that I could listen to music. And Daddy certainly shouldn’t risk getting in trouble over it. Two hundred dollars would buy me twenty sessions with a tutor, or five months’ worth if I went once a week like Vera. That would be the best investment I could make.

I rushed back inside, my wet boots squeaking against the cement floor. Daddy was just pulling the money out of his wallet. “Let’s go,” I said, tugging on his sleeve. “I changed my mind.”

The clerk was looking at me like I was crazy and maybe I was.

“You’re planning to apply to medical school?” Daddy asked outside when I explained why we’d left empty handed. His eyes shone with excitement and a little bit of awe. “Come here,” he said, opening his arms, and wrapped me in a bear hug right there in the middle of the sidewalk. As cars zoomed by, splashing our legs with brown slush, he crushed me to his chest, his eyes glimmering with tears. “You’re an exceptional young woman,” he whispered in my ear before finally releasing me. “And I’m so very proud of you.”