VIENNESE FURNITURE

VIENNESE FURNITURE

Ivan Evtimov

When I was arrested for first time I was just 10 years old. I was coming back from the beach, and when I was passing the first Police Station I was grabbed by the neck from a policeman guarding the door.

“How dare you walk with shorts, dirty pervert” he shouted at me and jostled me in the building yard.

The yard was big, entirely tiled. At the far end could be seen two policemen’s trucks, and at the near end, next to a huge iron door, stood two “Varshavas”.

The militiaman pushed me down the stairs and into small lobby. From there, I walked into a spacious corridor.  The militiaman opened the first door and shoved me in a big room.  In there were three writing desks, covered with some green cloths, burned here and there from cigarettes. In the corner was a hanger from which were suspended the hats of the three militia men who are sitting behind the desks. The windows were open but the fresh air, coming from outside couldn’t disperse the stuffy acid odour of sweat, cigarettes and garlic.

           “Walking in shorts!” said merrily the militiaman, who brought me in, proud for capturing me.

             “All my friends are dressed like this” I justify.

In only a year I had shoot up two heads above my classmates. They didn’t believe me that I am 10 years old and slapped me on the face for lying.  Of course, I start crying. Only then they looked closer at my childish face and they began to doubt that I may be telling the truth.

They asked me my father’s name and where he is working. The one, who arrested me, led me to the end of the corridor and locked me in a cell.  The cell was big. On the wall there were wooden plank beds. One of the windows was walled up, while on the others barred. In one of the corners there was a bucket from which was coming an excruciating stench.

The year was 1952. The Militsia were carrying raids against decadent bourgeois elements, who wear modern dress. Many young people disappeared in the concentration camps and played with their health or even life for the vanity to dress with trousers or swing type skirts.

After fifty minutes or so, one of the three militiamen opened the door and let me in to the corridor. They returned me to the office, where my father was expecting me.

            “Take him and don’t let him out again with shorts. He might be young but he looks quite grown up.  Put him in to something decent!” instructed the most senior ranking of the three.

My father took my hand somewhat slow, examining the corridor with his eyes and finally let me out. We walk on the street in silence. I was still sobbing.  

My father stopped, took out his handkerchief, wiped off my tears and with a smile, told me:

“Come on, stop crying. It’s a blessing in disguise. You’ve been arrested, but you visited your granddad house.”  

I stared at him in disbelief and he continued:

“Once this was our house. I lived here from birth until I was thirty, when your Granddad went bankrupt and the creditors took it.”

*   *  *

When I visited the house again the year was 1992. The militiaman post has been close down. It was now occupied by the numerous democratic parties, who had appeared after the fall of the socialism.  Once more it was summer and it was hot. The house was full of people. In the rooms had been turned tо offices, instead of the militia man behind the desks there were young men. The old type-writers were replaced by computers.  The hum from the printers and the heavy hiss from the Xerox machines were blending with the chattering of people. From the walls were hanging boards and posters, overflowing with any kind of messages.   

I walked from room to room, peeped behind each door, thinking out ways to dwell longer in the huge lounges of the two floors, trying to visualize how the house have been looking when my family had living there, but I couldn’t. Everywhere I went, the memory of the militia cell in which I was locked was following me.

My father was reticent man, but my other relatives also didn’t like to talk about the past.

I didn’t have enough stories with the help of which to build the splendour of the house.

I strained my imagination and called for help to some of the furniture, which I knew and which were present once in this house.  I was arranging them in my mind but there was not enough. Still I managed to achieve some sort of a picture.  Both the exterior and the interior of the house were consistent with the “Late Moderna.” My granddad, being admirer of Loos[1], also detested the ornaments. The house represented a parallelepiped stitched to a cube.  Only at the main entrance there has been delicately implied ornament of stylized lilies. The furniture in the enormous lounge had been made from black wood and red velvet.  The joinery itself had been some first version of the later tubular furniture. No tick planes, only exquisite curved wooden poles. 

After that, leaning on my knowledge of “Moderna”, I was adding the carpets, the curtains, the coffee tables with the desk lamps, the cabinet in the same style as the furniture and it was coming out as a really impressive interior. I was turning the numerous rooms on the two floors, where now were hurrying up and down the democrats from the new parties, into master bedrooms, spacious bathrooms and kitchens with big stoves, with cupboards and huge tables laden with food.  I also furnished a study where my granddad had received officials and businessmen.  I devoted special attention to the big library, reaching the ceiling and occupying two of the walls packed with books on economics, trade and finance, but also philosophy and religion as well as novels.  On the large, low coffee table with two leather sofas besides, I piled up Bulgarian, German and Russian newspapers. I left one or two magazines, the rest I put in the library drawers.

At the end, I came down to the semi-floor, two thirds of which was under ground level. Here there was only one room; the rest was a cellar in which were kept different food and most important a reserve of big casks of wine. The room was furnished in Bulgarian folk style with couches, covered with fluffy rugs, big wooden chests with wrought iron covered with carpets.  One motley rug was spread over a low table with few three-legged chairs around it, on the walls hanged swords, rifles and revolvers. 

According to the testimonies of one of my aunts, there was such a room, in which my granddad and his friends in their mercenary years[2], and later his business partners, secretly discussed the most important deals.  The confidential conversations were lavishly irrigated with wine and were finishing with revolutionary songs.

One mistrustful democrat wrenched me out of my constructive dream, who rather fiercely inquired what I am doing in the cellar. Faced with the danger to be locked in again, I had to show my documents.

After one or two years the house underwent restoration. Its new owners assessed that the house had been worn-out, firstly from the National Militia and after that from the multiparty administration and had hastily sold it to a development company who erected a massive block of flat in its place.

The house had such a significant meaning for me as a symbol of the former greatness of my family, not just material, but equally mythical proof for the reality of the past, which has faded in to anonymity.

Like people, buildings also have their fate and as with people, many things happened fortuitously. From a symbol of bourgeois prosperity and a comfortable home of a big family, the house had turn in to “the house of horror”, to become for a short time symbol of “the wind of change” that returned the democracy and the capitalism in our country.

A fugitive from Macedonia after the Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising[3], my granddad together with another four young men settled in the coastal city. The men were survivors from one of the numerous militia groups, fighting against the Turkish army. The former fighters started one of the most profitable businesses in the region in the trade in grain and it continues to stand until this day. They drove around Dobrogea[4] with their big horse carts, and then they were reselling it on the harbour. Like today, the roads were not safe, and the competition was not civilised. The business favoured those with military skills; they were sufficiently brave and unscrupulous in pursuing their goals. The former mercenaries did not lack any of the required qualities and they made they authority felt in the trade in grain.  

My granddad was an ordinary chetnik during the uprising, but rose fast as a leader of the trade company, as he was the only one with education in economics. He was coming from rich merchant family, who sent him to study economics first in Russia and after that in Germany. But when the uprising broke he left his studies and he returned in Macedonia to learn that his whole family, father, mother, his younger brother and sister were killed. The house and the attached shop burnt, their wealth looted by the Bashi-Bazouk[5]. He joined one of the mercenaries groups. He then needed to remember what he had study at the University.

The economics were undoubtedly useful, but the appearance and the charm of the intellectual chetnik proved to be even more useful and after two years my granddad got married to the daughter of ranch farmer from Dobrogea. The big dowry brought by the bride made it possible the erection of the big house, as well as to buy a boat. That way the trade cycle had been closed and instead of selling the grain on the port he was selling it straight to Istanbul.  My granddad’s partners got wealthier too. They built houses, opened shops, but the shops were attended by others and they continued to go around Dobrogea.

The trade was more than successful. Soon my granddad built two houses in the eastern outskirt of the city close to the sea. In that time the Centre of the city was inland from the shore, in the suburbs next to the sea lived the poor.  My granddad began to rent apartments in the two houses, but his profit from that was close to nothing.  It was something as a social programme, as he rented the apartments to destitute migrants from Macedonia.

In the nature of things, the happy family commence having children. First came a son, then two daughters and not long after, Anna, my grandma was pregnant again. One of my granddad tenant a masculine man with fierce appearance, due to his long haidouk[6] moustache, was hired to be as we would say today a bodyguard. His task was to protect and chaperon Anna when shopping or strolling around the city. He didn’t protect her.  As he was looking at some goods, the guardian left Anna and at that moment two men hurl themselves over the woman. They knocked her on the flour and kicked her 8 months pregnant belly. Then they hid in the crowd and the guard simply didn’t manage to respond. The doctors saved the child but not the expectant mother.

Just when they buried Anna, came the news of the outbreak of the Balkan War. Macedonians in the town were gripped by patriotic enthusiasm and all wanted to fight for the liberation of Macedonia. Overwhelmed with grief, my granddad did not see any other way out but to go and die in battle. So the partners abandoned the businesses and hastily formed a detachment and headed to the front. They were out of luck. Just when they crossed the border, they were surrounded by a large Turkish army and after a brief skirmish, realizing the hopelessness of the situation, they surrendered.

It soon became clear that my granddad and his associates have long been sought by the Turkish authorities for their past exploits. They were taken to Istanbul and after a quick trial they were sentenced to death.

In anticipation of the sentence, my granddad managed to contact one of his Turkish trading partners, who were purchasing his grain. Commerce solidarity proved stronger than national pride and the Turk, relying on ubiquitous corruption, managed to get my granddad from the clutches of death.

They took him from the prison at midnight. Outside was waiting the cab of his partner and he was taken to a pier. My granddad was transferred to a boat, which ferried him to a sailing vessel that waited outside the Bosphorus. Two days later the granddad returned home.
He had escaped, however his companions, alas, were hanged on the gallows. But his position was far from satisfactory as he had to pay a huge debt to his benefactor.

After the Balkan War, Bulgaria lost Dobrogea and my granddad business collapsed and his situation was desperate.

After losing Dobrogea, the city Varna become a centre of tourism. The houses built in the suburbs and close to the sea, suddenly acquired value. My Granddad stopped the social program, drove the unfortunate out and began to rent the apartments to tourist, however the profits, were not so great.

A former classmate of my granddad from Germany offered him the opportunity to trade in American cigarettes. After all that wars, one following another, the population was starving, destruction reigned everywhere, but perhaps because of this, cigarettes were in demand. The Cigarette trade proved more profitable than the trade in grain.

My granddad paid his debt and return again to the previous social status. His second marriage was to the widow of one of his hanged comrades, and with her he took on a shop for agricultural machinery. The deal was fair, as illiterate Santa hardly would have been able to keep the shop. His new wife delighted him with another son and a daughter. In the big house once again the life bubbled.

It seemed that everything was looking up. However, granddad was not the same; gone were the cheerful drinking sessions in the hajduk room. After he came back from Turkey the room stayed locked. Instead Granddad increasingly took refuge in his office and fervently devouring all kinds of religious literature. He was particularly fond of the Eastern religions and the new teaching of Elena Blavatskaya.

 In the large living room on Saturday evenings granddad started inviting local intellectuals. Poets, writers, musicians, artists, businessmen and engineers were talking about art, science and religion, whilst sipping excellent wine. During the summer some celebrities from the capital were visiting the house for a couple of weeks. He accommodated them in the guest rooms. During the day they were wandering along the beach, in the evenings they adorned the provincial intellectual gatherings. They reciprocate his generosity by giving a piano and drawing lessons to my aunt.

Business thrived. Granddad bought for himself and his eldest son a car each, the first cars in the city. Along with this miracle of technology he sent in turn his son to Germany to study economics.

For himself he hired a driver and took the visiting intellectuals out. It seems as if nothing could spoil this life, filled with meaning and intellectual joys.

 Until at one of the gathering showed up unacknowledged inventor who had  not finished his engineering studies in Germany. His obsession was to build a power plant on the beach. In our country electricity was something new, but enterprising businessmen already were turning to this possibility. For several years, in the city, there had worked small coal fired plant which supplied electricity to the wealthy neighbourhood in the centre. But in other parts of the city the gaslights were still flickering.

Now the city was developing, in the summer the city was packing with tourists seeking fun in the seaside pubs. The port was growing and new factories were opening.  The investment in a new power plant were looking very promising.

Granddad consulted with various specialists and they all explained to him that although theoretically it might be possible to yield electricity from waves, in practice this is not feasible, since there is still no technology capable to do so.

But the inventor was damned convincing. He was unfolding huge drawings on the table in the living room and explained for hours that he had found the solution. Based on his drawings, the inventor painted an alluring picture of spectacular economic success, based on a revolutionary new technology that will allow them to build power of seashores around the whole wide world.

Blinded by the beautiful words, finally my granddad took the plunge to the most risky undertaking in his live. He pledged all his property and rushed to build the technological wonder of the century.

The intellectual gatherings ended. Granddad was completely absorbed in the grand project. He took up the organisation and the financing. First they had to chose a site. It was to be away from the bay where the waves were not powerful enough, but not too far from the city to minimise the expenses for electricity transfer.

 They decided on the location "St. Konstantin and Elena", where the eponymous monastery is. Somewhat down from the monastery there was a small cove, carried deeper into the sea, where the waves are crashing with particular ferocity in the rocky coast. According to the inventor this was the perfect place. Granddad purchased the land from the monastery and began to build. He was organizing the workers, providing the materials and equipment from Germany requested by the inventor. He harried continuously between the building site and its office in the city, while the driver muttered about the nice car being trashed on the bad roads.

In the sea-side cafes, where most of the male population of the city squandered their free time, the power plant became one of the favorite themes. They were inventing increasingly colorful jokes, and with the progress of the construction they put down bets whether it would work or not.

On the day the Nazis invaded Poland and the World War II started, the plant was ready. Near the monastery nestled in the ground stood an impressive building with stone foundations and walls built of red bricks. The tests started. A whole week the mad inventor was trying to get electricity, but no electricity derived.

Followed a complete bankruptcy.

The old warehouse in the northwestern corner of the city and the vineyard on the Franga’s hill were the only things that my granddad failed to pledge.
The warehouse was built when they started to trade with the grain. Part of it was a large yard, where once the carts were unhitched. The warehouse was one level but massive, with heavy stone foundations, thick walls and narrow windows like arrowslit protected by iron bars. At the bottom of the building they erected two small rooms and a narrow corridor leading to the yard through a side door. Initially in these rooms slept the five friends when they were coming back from traveling in Dobrogea.

Since granddad abandoned the grain business, he was renting the warehouse, and the rooms stood locked. It was in these rooms that the large family moved, more particularly in one of them. In the first one granddad placed the fantastic furniture from the large living room. Among all the furniture from the huge house he was most fond of it.  He had ordered it in Vienna together with his first wife, Anna. Made in a single copy, it was unique. It had nothing to do with the tasteless luxury demonstrated by the swanky ornamented furniture of most wealthy people. Simple, austere and elegant at the same time, it respected with the harmony of its perfect design and its pure aestheticism would awaken spontaneous admiration.

The room accommodated the couch, the two armchairs and the six chairs, but there was not space for the huge table and he had to abandon it. Instead granddad slipped a small, high table, on thin delicate legs on which he set his latest acquisition. One “Philips” radio, which with its long, medium and short waves, was providing a link with the world. The radio itself was a very nice piece of furniture made from special wood.

Granddad locked the room. He wrote to his son to return from Germany, to revive the business and to return the Viennese furniture in a new house, more beautiful than the old one. Then he hired a cart, loaded it with his religious literature and went to the vineyard. To build seaside villas among the vineyards was not yet in vogue. Usually the vineyards had barracks or coarse buildings of one or two rooms. Such was our vineyard too. One of the rooms was a warehouse, where stayed the tools, canisters with grapes, the barrels with blue stone and machines spraying. In the other there were three beds, rough wooden table with the same kind of rough chairs and a stove that had forgotten it years. In the days of hard work they stayed in the vineyard overnight.

My granddad said he did not want to see anyone and that he was given to prayer and fasting to atone for his sins. Occasionally Santa was visiting the vineyard, but my granddad was locking himself in the room and was refusing to talk. Santa left him food, talked to him about what happens to the children, telling him about the war and the political changes. My granddad listened, but did not reply. In the summer of 1945, Santa found him dead under a large pear tree.

The eldest son, like his father, had to abandon the University, which in fact he had already extended for seven years. When he returned, he found the family stuck in indescribable misery. Although he has not graduated, thanks to his higher education, and thanks to his father's connections with merchants, entrepreneurs and financiers the son was quickly appointed director of a bank branch in nearby coastal town. The solid salary allowed him to rent a big house and he got married. Naturally, he assumed the care of the family, but he was not very generous as he insisted on leading an affluent life that corresponded to his social status.

His sisters understood that they had to save themselves. The younger two quickly turned the attention to two Naval chiefs, married and left the warehouse. The oldest one, which was rather ugly and above all limped after a fall from a horse, did not have this chance, but she knew languages and was superb painter. She managed to get a teaching position in another town and she never returned again.

In 1944, the younger brother graduated from high school and immediately was taken into the army. He was sent to the front. In Drava[7] the Germans captured him. The Americans freed him from the captivity and then in somewhat obscure ways he ended up in Australia, from where he sent several letters. After the final victory of the Communists in the elections of 1947, the country severed all ties with the bourgeois world and the letters stopped. Since then, nobody heard about him.

Only Santa remained, shrunken and dried in a way that only grandmothers can, she was quietly fading in the dark room.

The year 1947 proved fateful for my father and our family. The raging communist purge did not bypass the director of bank of bourgeois origin, which above all did not hide his aversion to the new system. My father, my mother and I already a school boy, suddenly found ourselves in the dark room of the warehouse. Although the warehouse was also nationalised they left us to live in its rooms. Not long after the communist authority took the vineyard too, as the terrain was selected for water pressure station.

Without work and without any means of a livelihood we were close to staving.  In this difficult time my aunts came to help. The married ones were helping with a little money; the teacher was sending food parcels.

After half a year the Communists discovered that thanks to their total ideological purge, there was nobody left in the bank who understood accounting and finance. They returned my father to work, but now as a humble clerk.

Ruined after everything that had landed on his head and that had totally overturned his life, my father felt silent.

After work he would enter into the room with the Viennese furniture. Despite the narrowness, he refused to change anything in this room. It had become something of a chapel or a small museum, preserving the relics of one irretrievable past.

He would squeeze between the furniture brushing the table with the radio and he would switch it on. First he would listen to the German radio stations, but they rarely said anything about Bulgaria. Than he would switch to Radio "Free Europe" and "Voice of America". Powerful jamming stations prevented the signal, but my father had specialised in outsmarting them. He would shift slightly off the arrow, the terrible noise would subside and it would become possible to distinguish some speech. As if the Jamming station understood what had happened in a little while the noise with all its might would debark over the speech, but my father would again slightly turn the knob, this time on the other side, and he would be able to listen once again. This strenuous deceiving each other would often continue late into the night.

On my mother reproaches that he spends his free time in the most idiotic way; my father was replying that he is waiting to hear when the Americans will come. He was firmly convinced that the free world will not tolerate long the inhuman nature of the Communist system and will come to free us. He will get back his due status and he will fulfil the covenant of his father to return the Viennese furniture to its befitting environment. Until then, he meticulously cared for it. They had sewn dust cover, which he was putting on the furniture and clean them regularly, although wrapped up in this way they did not need much care.

My mother did not endure her obsessed husband, who was spending his evenings waiting to hear that the Americans are coming to release him, she didn’t withstand the damp and dark rooms, where the sunbeam could not penetrate nor she withstand the mice who were weary of the flour diet in the warehouse  and were ducking between our feet in search of something different to eat and disappointed again returned in the flour and she ran off with one of the heroes of the modern age, a driver of the recently emerged large trucks.

My father did not seem to notice her absence. He went on methodically listening to their stations and to fight the signal jamming. He was doing it by habit, even he didn’t believe any more that the Americans will come.

That is how I found him, when he passed away, sitting on the chair next to the radio. His head was dejected and leaning against the radio set from which was floating the, hideous noise of the Jamming Station, a noise that seemed to come truly from the hell.

After several years the warehouse was demolished. With the time the warehouse had turned to be located almost in the city centre. They were plans to build a block of flats in its place. We were compensated for it with a studio flat in which there was no way to fit the Viennese furniture. I put it for sale. It was bought by one of the residents of the nearby block. He was a young man, a new arrival from the nearby villages who had made a quick career. I found out that he was Party secretary of one of the largest companies in the Devnya^[8] industrial zone.

The man was excited by his acquisition like a child. He was going to mesmerise his guests, telling them that he had inherited it from his grandpa. He invited me in his big sitting room to show me how he has arranged it. In the spacious lounge the antic timeless furniture was shining with its prime beauty. Just one terrible, also second hand bought, enormous table with lion legs was creating unbearable dissonance. It was like amidst the elegantly playing Viennese orchestra somebody with giant tuba was making incredibly loud false noises. 

I closed my ears and left. I didn’t regret selling the furniture. Through the force of the circumstances they naturally were entitled to the red nomenclature, which have already starting to become a bourgeois and were needed the material symbols, to make apparent their new self-awareness. The unique Viennese furniture once again was going to symbolise the things it was created for, the prestige and the self-confidence of the social stratum that has won.   

The only thing left was my radio. It played a few more days and then fell silent forever. One of the lamps had burnt, but there was no way to change it because lamp radios were not produced any more. It is still stays silently next to me and I think to myself that it might start playing once more if somebody set off to liberate us again.

---

[1] Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos (1870 –1933) Austrian and Czech architect.

[2] the word in Bulgarian is chetnik which refers to small unofficial group of fighters again the occupant Turkish state.

[3] The Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising of August 1903 was organized in Macedonia and Thrace against the Ottoman Empire. The name of the uprising refers to Ilinden the Bulgarian and Macedonian name for Elijah's day, and to Preobrazhenie  (Transfiguration).. The uprising was crushed- hundreds villages were burned down, thousands died, 70 900 become homeless, 30 000 refuges went to Bulgaria. On 3rd March 1878 to end the Russian-Turkish war was sign the San Stefano peace treaty. According to which the territories where ethnic Bulgarians lived were liberated from the Ottoman Empire. However the six world powers at the time – Great Brittan, Austro-Hungary, Russia, France, Germany and Italy, fearing the creation of big country and an increased Russian influence on the Balkan Peninsula reconsidered the San Stefano treaty and signed another one in Berlin on 13 July 1878, which divided the territory of Bulgaria to five different parts: Autonomous kingdom Bulgaria (include territories between Danube river, the Balkan mountain range and Sofia). Easterly Rumelia self - administrative region of the Ottoman empire with Capital Plovdiv; Macedonia and Southern Thrace were given back to the Ottoman empire, north Dobrogea was given to Romania and the south Pomoravie to Serbia. The Berlin treaty created a knot of conflicts and wars (two Balkan wars and Serbian-Bulgarian war) that define the development of the Balkan Peninsula for decades ahead. Map ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bulgaria-SanStefano_-(1878)-byTodorBozhinov.png)

[4] Dobrogea is a grain production region located between Bulgaria and Romania

[5] Bashi-Bazouk. History. Irregular Turkish troops in XVIII-XIX centuries. Figurative. Person or persons who do arbitrariness, unbridled and ferocious atrocities .// adj. bashi-bazouk

[6] Hajduk is a term most commonly referring to outlaws, brigands, or freedom fighters in Southeastern Europe. In Balkan folkloric tradition, the hajduk (hajduci - plural) is a romanticized hero figure who steals from  reach and  leads his fighters into battle against, the Ottoman authorities. The term could also refer to any robber and can carry a negative connotation as a lot of the  hajduci of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries commonly were as much guerrilla fighters against the Ottoman rule as they were bandits who preyed not only on Ottomans and their local representatives, but also on local merchants.

[7] River Drava battle between Bulgarians, Soviets, and Yugoslavs against German Wehrmacht forces from 6 to 21 March 1945

[8] Industrial town near Varna