There’s only one restaurant worth eating at in Veliko Tarnovo, the hostel guy explained carefully to Adrian, and it is called Pectopaht. He wrote it down carefully on the map of the city. “That means restaurant. This restaurant has a balcony where you can see the valley, but you won’t eat there — the tables are always full. You will eat on the terrace at the front. That’s how you will recognize the restaurant, it has a terrace at the front and the wall is yellow. The food is the best.”
As Adrian plunges into a plate of grilled eggplant with nuts, baked potatoes, and large meatballs stuffed with cheese and pickles, all washed down by Zagorka beer, he can’t help but agree with the hostel guy: this food is, indeed, the best.
Adrian stares at the restaurant’s waitresses, an attraction unto itself, as he enjoys his food. The waitresses, all alike, are beautiful in an Eastern-European, extremely done-up way: hair flattened and styled with precision; nails long, perfectly shaped, painted with care; makeup applied thickly on the entire face, retouched often. They send flashy, faux-happy smiles to the majority of male customers. They all wear short, tight black dresses and constantly mix up their orders.
Good food and beautiful women, thinks Adrian, this country is indeed the best. Except maybe for the transportation system.
From what he can tell most of the restaurant’s clientele is local. There is a strange looking man at the table next to his, however, who is clearly foreign. His English is as poor as his waitresses’, but he tries to communicate with her in good humour, laughing a thick, loud laughter very often. Overdone, thinks Adrian. The foreign man stares at the ass of his waitress as she walks away, he is cockeyed, chuckling. A pervert’s laughter.
Soon the waitress returns with an appetizer, some kind of white soup, and clearly she has made a mistake in the order because the foreign man gets very angry at her. He starts to scream, first in English, then in what is most certainly German, and then he spits. His face becomes a dark, veiny crimson. The waitress runs away meekly with the soup, comes back a few minutes later with a salad. The German man has calmed down, but he doesn’t look at the waitress when she brings him the plate. He stares at her ass again when she walks away, and then eats his salad, indifferent, every once and while sipping some kind of honey-coloured alcoholic beverage from a tiny glass.
*
Stuffed with the underpriced, delicious Bulgarian food and pistachio ice-cream grabbed on the way back, Adrian has returned to the hostel. He heads for his dorm to relax for a while, perhaps make plans for the rest of the evening. Four tall, very blond guys are sitting in the lounge, gawking at the football playing on TV. Adrian exchanges a nonchalant “Hey!” with them.
In the dorm Adrian comes face to face with a tall, bearded man folding some clothes on the top bunk of his bed.
“Hey!”
“Allo!”
The man brings out his hand for Adrian to shake.
“Tu parles-tu français?”
“Oui. You must be the other Canadian guy.”
“Yes. Tu viens-tu du Québec?”
“Ummm… Oui!”
“OK. Mais tu parles Anglais?”
“Oui, mais je parle français aussi… pas très bien, mais…”
“OK. I speak English too, but not very well either,” he says with his heavy Québecois accent, and then laughs heartily. “I come from Chicoutimi, that’s why. My name is Simon.” He says his name the French way, without pronouncing the n.
“I’m Adrian. I come from Montreal.”
They shake hands.
“Nice to meet you, Adrian.”
Adrian turns to his own bunk and starts to pull out some stuff from his backpack, takes out his toothbrush, towel, shuffles some clothes around.
“So, how long have you been here?” Simon asks.
“Well I just arrived in Veliko Tarnovo today. I’ve been in the Balkans for five days now.”
“Just… going around?”
“Yeah, just visiting places. I plan on visiting the Balkans and then heading north into Eastern Europe. Hungary, Prague…”
“That’s really good. They are beautiful places."
“You’ve been there already?”
“Yes. I was there a couple of months ago. We’re doing the contrary. I started travelling in Russia and made my way down into Ukraine and Poland, Slovakia, République Czech, Austria, Hungary…”
“Wow! You’ve been everywhere!” They laugh. “I feel like a wuss, now. My trip is only five weeks long! How long have you been away now?”
“Almost five months!”
“Wow! That’s awesome. Don’t you miss home?”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Well, same thing for me!”
They laugh again. Simon has been sitting on the floor, taking off some sturdy hiking boots and replacing them with sandals.
“Well,” he says. “I’m really hungry and I didn’t have supper. I’m going to the Pectopaht. Do you want to come with me?”
“Well, I’ve actually just gotten back from the restaurant—"
He studies his current prospects for the evening: reading some Hemingway and hitting the sack early, watching football with those Sweedish guys and hitting the sack early, exploring the Veliko Tarnovo nightlife alone, coming back early and hitting the sack. Simon is friendly, he’s an experienced backpacker, probably has tons of tips and tricks.
“— but I’ll come and keep you company if you don't mind.”
*
The strange German man, of course, is no longer seated at the restaurant when Adrian and Simon get there. The waitresses are still all gorgeous, but strangely Adrian doesn’t recognize any of them. It’s as if they’ve had a change of shift.
He and Simon throw appreciative looks at the girls while perusing their menus. Adrian, having eaten already, orders only a beer. Simon orders an all Bulgarian meal: Tarator (a kind of yoghurt soup with cucumbers, garlic, and dill — Adrian recognizes it as the soup the German man sent back), Shopska salad (similar to Greek salad, but with softer, grated cheese), and Pulnena piperka (green pepper stuffed with spiced, minced meat and rice) — topped off with a glass of rakia, Bulgarian brandy.
Over the meal the Canadian backpackers discuss their travels, their aspirations, their loves, lives, and losses. Simon works as a gym teacher in Chicoutimi, but his mind has always been wandering. He has taken a year off to travel Europe, get off the beaten track, meet new people, experience things he couldn’t anywhere else. His girlfriend left him that winter — he feels elated and free. He talks about a Spanish girl he slept with in Prague (“It was the most intense experience of my life. You know, I’d only known her for a few hours, but we were so connected. We spent three complete days together in the most beautiful city, it was incredible. We did not even speak the same language, but it was like I’d known her all my life. We had so much sex. I didn’t know I could have so much sex. J’avais la libido dans l’tapis, you know!?”).
Adrian starts to open up to this friendly Québecois. He talks about school, about the undergraduate degree in political science he knows he’ll never finish, about his girlfriend back home (“I know I love her, I really do, but it’s tough… Knowing she’s over there, and I’m here. What happens if a hot girl starts flirting with me? What am I gonna do? Say no? No thanks, I have a girlfriend waiting for me back in Montreal. You know what I mean? I’m conflicted. It’s like everything is on a different planet over here, everything’s in a different time zone. Well, I mean, we are in a different time zone, but it’s like, deeper than that.”)
“How old are you?” Simon asks.
“Twenty one.”
Simon flashes him a knowing smile between two mouthfuls. He orders another beer for Adrian and a refill of rakia for himself.
“I’m twenty-nine. That means we’re opposites. You’re just starting to be twenty, and I’m almost done. The party’s almost over for me. You know, all those French songs. Charles Aznavour, Serge Regiani, and all those singers?”
“Not really…”
Simon starts singing a few lyrics under his breath, looking Adrian straight in the eye: Hier encore, j’avais vingt ans, je caressais le temps… La bohême, ça voulait dire, avoir vingt ans… Votre fille a vingt ans, que le temps passe vite… Qu’avons nous fait, au fil du temps, de nos vingt ans, de nos vingt ans?... La femme qui est dans mon lit n’a plus vingt ans depuis longtemps…
“All those songs just talk about one thing,” he continues. “They say that being twenty is the best thing in the world, and it goes by so fast. You can never have it again when it’s gone.”
“I know that…”
“No! You think you know. You know what I’m saying, but you don’t feel it yet. I would give anything to be twenty-one again. You’re very lucky to be here, travelling, when you’re twenty-one. And about your girlfriend, ben, j’ai rien qu’une affaire à dire: What happens in Bulgaria stays in Bulgaria!” Simon shouts this and drains his glass of Rakia, calls for a another emphatically, grazing the waitresses’ ass. He continues: “The backpackers in Europe, especially here in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, it’s like underground, you know? It’s like a, like a communauté secrète. Everyone knows everyone, you make friends like that and then the next day they’re gone but it doesn’t matter — it doesn’t mean what you had with them was, you know… it was deep…”
“It wasn’t superficial?”
“Right. It’s real, you know? It’s the real deal. You talk about real stuff, about life. Like this, what we’re doing now —“ He points to the Pectopaht, the town around them (it has started to grow dark, now, the terrace is filled and noisy, the waitresses are as beautiful as ever, the street beyond is filling up with scantily dressed, high heeled women). “I would never talk like this to anyone I’ve just met in Chicoutimi.”
“I felt it the moment I entered the first hostel I slept in,” remarks Adrian, suddenly feeling a burst of appreciation for everything around him. He understands, somehow, what Simon is getting to. He is immersed in waves of delightful exhilaration, of frightful excitement: he feels in every fiber of his being his exact location on the planet, his displacement from his home and his existence here, in this moment, as if by magic, on the terrace of a crowded restaurant in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. He finishes his beer in one swig, barely tasting it. “It’s like you share something with all the other people who are travelling with you, in other places, at the same time. A great movement in which you take part, like a migration. A mass wandering.”
Simon looks at him, eyes sparkling. “It’s strange because we come from the same place — at least, for people here, for Europeans, we come from the same place — and yet we are so different. But right now, I understand you completely, and you understand me. You are like my brother.”
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