It was not until a friend called – from Maastricht, having seen the news on BNT – that I even knew that there had been a fire. The smell of burnt plastic I had attributed to someone’s Easter candle left to burn too long in a yoghurt container, forgotten after a night that started with proceeding three times around Alexander Nevski and finished up at 5am in some night club to greet the Resurrection.
It was late when I arrived home from having spent the holiday with a friend and her family at their house in Belovo. It was late and it was dark, and it was not until he called, worried, having recognised the burning building from his television screen in the Netherlands (“Magda! How are you?” “Fine, thank you, how are you?” “Is everything ok after the fire?” “Fire, what fire?” “I saw on BNT that there was a fire and then thought ‘Wait, I know that building!’” “Oh, so that’s why it reeks in here; I just got back to Sofia 20 minutes ago...”), that I even noticed the black dust on the water in my cup. It was not warm outside, but I still opened all the windows.
Later I realised that the black line around the inside of the the old white enamel basin in the sink was not a shadow caused by the 60W light bulb hanging from the ceiling (the one that requires skilful manouvering if wanting to cook or read at night, lest the light be blocked by my back), but by soot. But I still did not know exactly where the fire had been, or when, or how large.
This morning, scurrying down the seven flights of stairs, I saw that all the windows from my storey – the top – to the second had been broken. Glass was still lying in shards on the ground; all the windows were open. The hallways of the third and the second floors looked as if a giant had taken a watery sponge full of dark grey paint and swiped it over all the walls and the ceiling; the first storey and the rez-de-chaussee were normal.
Walking to the recycling bins, something crunchy-feeling fell on my scalp. I was disgusted, thinking it dry bird poo or a careless construction worker. Looking up, I saw what it was: the charred apartments, the two on the corner of the building, where all that remained was a window frame that looked like a log left over from a summer night’s beach barbeque.
Returning a bit later, I passed my neighbour on the street, talking to another man. “Hi Maggie!” he said. “Crazy, crazy!” He likes to try out his English on me. “What happened? What was this fire?” I asked. “Fire.” “Yes, but when? Saturday, yesterday? How did it happen?” “Yesterday at about noon. What did you do for Easter? We stayed at home and went to church.” I told him that I had been in Belovo, which seemed to interest him more (the lives of foreigners make good gossip, I suppose) than the fire.
It happened that my neighbour and I shared the lift up to our flats. “Eh, Maggie, it’s because people have sinned; God is punishing them,” he said. I did not reply, save a vacillating grunt: I was not sure if I felt like explaining that I believe God to be a God of love, forgiveness and grace, not some choleric overlord who throws thunderbolts from the sky.
I have spent the day cleaning. This soot covered everything, even the insides of closed cabinets, and, unlike regular dust, it was not possible to simply wipe it up with a damp cloth. My flat has not been this clean since November, when my vacuum cleaner broke. It made me wonder how the survivors of Vesuvius would have managed. It made me wonder what I would have really missed if my flat, too, had burnt: my computer, not because of itself as a machine, but because everything that I have written over the past five years is on it; my computer warranty, because I still have not registered it, and it is a nice machine; letters from my friends and family. That is about it, though; the rest is just stuff.
