Rakia Maria – Part Two of Two

So I said to Priyatelkata ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ and she replied ‘Yes! It’s very lovely.’ Maria added, ‘Life and health!’ in Bulgarian, of course.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well I’ll tell you what went wrong. This lovely day was the first anniversary of the day on which alcohol had last touched my lips. For the first time since I was three I had gone a whole year without a drop of the strong drink. Priyatelkata had done the same. We were absolutely delighted with our achievement, even though the task had been made so much easier for us with our social life having been snatched away in accordance with the Bulgarian Health Ministry’s antivirus rules and regulations. I think it was rule number six that stated that enjoying yourself was strictly forbidden. Having loved every moment of their sabbatical, my liver and kidneys had put the bunting up to celebrate not having to go back to working long hours in the evenings and at weekends and were ready to party themselves, and my heart almost had a heart attack on hearing the joyous news. Now I’m no physiotherapist but I had always believed that if you don’t use a muscle in your body often enough it will seize up, so a good swallow of Jameson’s every now and again would do these workshy wee organs the power of good.

With a twinkle in her eye, which would become two twinkles before the day was out as the double vision set in, almost-neighbour said, ‘My name’s Maria and I make rakia faster than I can drink it, even though I drink like a formula one fish.’

My loved one and I had never had an alcohol problem (scones and bits of cheesecake were more our style when it came to substance dependency) but soon after giving up the bottle we felt oh so healthy in our bodies and our minds. So we had decided to continue in this constant state of sobriety for the rest of our lives. And then, as the twinkle escalated into a blaze of light, almost-neighbour went and got a family-sized rakia bottle out of the rakia bottle cupboard in her kitchen. The bottles were all family-sized, apart from the ones that were party-sized. Oh, and the flagons! Maria had a lot of those, probably because they were too big to be concealed in her shopping bag for a crafty wee swig on the bus home. It also appeared that all of her cupboards were rakia bottle cupboards. There wasn’t as much as a sniff of any sort of food, not even a tin of Cyrillic Alphabetti Spaghetti.

Homemade rakia tends to be stored in re-used plastic bottles, Fanta seeming to be the most popular of these from my experience. But Maria is a woman of dignity and sophistication so she would never put a Fanta bottle on the table when entertaining guests. Instead it is decanted behind the scenes into a posh bottle. Every house in Bulgaria has a posh bottle and I’ve often heard it said that you will never see a more intense look of concentration on a Bulgarian’s face than when he or she is decanting the heavenly distillation from Fanta bottle to posh bottle. Spilling rakia is worse than spilling blood! Please note: other plastic bottles are available.

In a panic, Priyatelkata immediately declared that she never ever drinks alcohol, no matter how posh the bottle. But Bulgarian people take great pride in offering a glass of their homemade tipple when welcoming guests into their homes, especially for the first time, and it would have been very, very rude for us both to turn down her hospitality. So muggins here felt obliged to take a drink and consequently fell off the wagon exactly one year to the day from clambering onto it. Maria’s big smile grew even bigger as we said ‘наздраве!’ (the Bulgarian word for the Irish ‘sláinte’ which also means ‘for health’, and is pronounced as naz-dra-vay), clinked our glasses together and imbibed sixty or seventy millilitres of Bulgaria’s national pastime. I really hadn’t wanted to break my vow of abstinence but I did what I did for Maria.

This delightful Balkan woman with flashing eyes and stainless steel teeth had made the rakia herself from her own grapes with her own bare hands and feet and using her own still (казан, in Bulgarian, and pronounced ‘kazan’) and her own plastic bottles that she had emptied herself. It really was excellent stuff. I had forgotten just how good a feeling it gives you as it permeates every cell of your body and makes you smile like a Maria. It’s important to emphasise this because so many people come here from Western Europe or the world beyond and write off rakia as firewater when in actual fact it is a spirit with much more flavour and body to it than the likes of many types of vodka or gin. I think the problem lies in the fact that foreigners are not usually accustomed to drinking spirits without fancy additives that kill the taste. From day one I have been at ease with rakia drunk the proper way because all of my life I have been of the opinion that if someone is going to the trouble to manufacture a beverage of such excellence then it is very wrong and impolite to pollute it with the taste of Coca Cola, quinine or other types of fizzy pop loaded with chemicals. Maria and I only ever mix our rakia with more rakia. I don’t even put milk in my tea and coffee, though I do enjoy dunking a digestive when nobody’s looking.

To make up for her not being able to join us in a dram, Priyatelkata was given a tray of freshly laid eggs; so fresh that the chicken excrement stuck to them was still warm and a bit runny, much to the delight of the flies that had given up on the goats’ nether regions because they had found them a bit too hygienic. She was also given a jar of some sort of preserved meat items that we decided must have been fresh at some point during the preceding twelve months but in all honesty didn’t look as appetising as the warm runny substance stuck to the eggs. I felt guilty about prejudging these potted animal parts before trying them, particularly as they were animal parts that I didn’t recognise. It’s easy for us to say that we don’t like pork chops or sausages because most of us have at least tasted them at some point in our lives but to write off spleens, noses and nipples without any previous experience of ingesting them is very impolite. I’m sure the delicacies in the jar are just as worthy of a place in Bulgarian culinary tradition as rakia is, but it’s worth mentioning that I never heard anyone say ‘for health’ when the jar was handed over to us, and Maria did seem quite pleased to be getting rid of it.

With the help of bilingual friends and relatives equipped with telephones to do a bit of translating from afar, we established that Maria, having lost her husband in the last three years, was lonely and in need of friends, wood for her rakia still and an occasional lift to her other home in the evenings. We all agreed that we liked each other (Priyatelkata and I had already been liking each other for almost two years, which saved us a bit of time), that Maria’s first lift of the new agreement would be that very evening and that she would call in at our house at 6:00 pm.

At 5:15 pm she appeared at our garden gate. We offered her a cup of tea but she said no because she was in a hurry to get home; probably desperate for a drop more rakia, we thought. We all got into our car, which had recently been cleaned, serviced and certified safe to travel in by a government appointed inspector, but she still put her mask on and cried a bit. Then she told us that she didn’t want us to drop her off at the usual mutually convenient place but instead asked to be taken to her apartment block, so we obliged. We stopped the car by the building’s main entrance and waited for her to get out but, using only the medium of the Bulgarian tongue, she invited us to join her inside and we were in yet another it-would-be-rude-not-to situation.

The slowest moving white knuckle ride that I have ever experienced was the creaky old lift which successfully did the job of elevating us to the fifth floor of her block even though it appeared to be constructed entirely from 1960’s Formica coffee tables and spare parts from Soviet tractors. Her apartment was much the same inside as her house had been except it had furniture instead of potted plants and framed family photographs instead of potted animal parts. It also lacked the outstanding view of the countryside but from her balcony she had an outstanding view of twenty or thirty more Communist era concrete apartment blocks, which I find strangely beautiful in their own way.

Every square centimetre of the walls of her living room was covered with framed photographs. We could tell how much she loved each individual member of her family by the varying amount of tears shed as she explained who each of them was. We commented that one of her young female offspring was particularly pretty only to be told that we were looking at a photo of a woman dressed up as Saint Zlata of Maglen (the patron saint of Bulgarians living abroad) outside the local Orthodox church on Saint Zlata of Maglen’s Day (18^th October, apparently) who she prayed to every day for the safety and protection of her entire family, all of whom had moved away. Most had gone to distant parts of Bulgaria but her granddaughter was in an even more distant in a place called London, that we might have heard of. A house in Potters Bar and a job in IT in Canary Wharf could never replace life in rural or even suburban Bulgaria but I suppose the lure of the lucre is greater than the lure of the world’s best yoghurt (rich in delicious lactobacillus delbrueckii subspecies bulgaricus), fresh but mucky eggs and fresh air. How much happier we would all be without the stresses and strains imposed upon us by global economics? I thought.

Other saints’ pictures filled the gaps along with images of scantily clad Bulgarian pop stars and a huge portrait Boyko Borrissov, the former prime minister, former (and possibly current) mafia supporter, former Communist Party employee and former hero of Maria and her former husband. In fairness to the man, Boyko does seem like a nice bloke when he’s on the television or in the papers. He always has a warm smile on his face and I’m sure he’d be an entertaining sort of a fella to go for a pint with but I’d worry about exactly where the money was coming from when it was his turn to buy a round.   

Once again a posh rakia bottle appeared and this time I was less reluctant to join our hostess in a glass as it had only been seven hours since my last drink rather than 365 days so there was a lot less to lose. Once again I was only having a drink for Maria’s sake. As the amber liquid warmed me in the belly and in the brain, Priyatelkata drank a glass of locally produced cola which I suspected to be a lot more damaging to the internal organs than any grape-based distillate might have been, but on the other hand it doesn’t seem to hinder attempts to keep the body upright, as rakia does if taken in the wrong quantities, or right quantities, depending on how you look at it. Other items brought to the table included traditional Bulgarian dry roasted peanuts, a huge box of chocolates (which Maria boasted to have bought fresh from Lidl that morning) and a block of homemade goat’s cheese. Feeling a bit puzzled, Priyatelkata and I looked around the room to see where the goat was kept before realising that the cheese must have been homemade in her other home in our village. The chocolates tasted more like goat’s cheese than the goat’s cheese did.

After an hour, despite our concerted effort to reduce it, the combined weight of the remaining nuts, cheese and chocolates must still have exceeded four kilogrammes and Maria was still toing and froing between the big smiling face and the crying as she told us about her lovely family as it had been in the past and how lonely she was now that they had all gone, leaving her all alone and without friends. We wondered if we would ever be able to get away without offending her. Suddenly the doorbell rang (do they ever ring any other way?) and Kamelia came to our rescue. Kamelia, another dear lady of more or less the same build and teeth, was Maria’s best friend who had invited herself round for an evening of non-stop chatter, goat’s cheese and gossip (and probably, nay unquestionably, rakia). The main topic of conversation, I was sure, would be Priyatelkata and me. After our two to three hundred parting thank-you’s, a grand tour of her three room abode, and our assurance that we would see her at her Malki Chiflik house sometime within the next few days, the Formica-Belarus Deluxe model elevator arrived to return us to the ground floor and the twenty-first century at a velocity at least ten times greater than that at which we had arrived. Formica, it seemed, had been developed by scientists during the Space Race of the 1960s and 1970s and all Soviet space capsules had been coated with it to stop them burning up as they re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.  We, like Yuri Gagarin, had survived what was really a wonderful, heart-warming experience. 

The following morning, I returned to my work in the wilderness strip. At around eleven o’clock Maria and Kamelia walked by, both in a good mood because they had just been to the cemetery. Both remarked upon what a wonderful job I had done so far with the land clearance project. I agreed that my progress had been remarkable, considering how much of my time I had spent having to talk to passers-by. In addition to Maria and Kamelia there had been several more, the most time-consuming of which had been the woman who repeatedly told me that she didn’t like our dogs and that I shouldn’t be working on that piece of land as it was a public right of way, even though no member of the public had been able to make their way through it for years on account of it being totally blocked off by dead tree branches, old car tyres, fridge doors, empty plastic beer bottles and the mortal remains of people who didn’t like our dogs.

It was very cold and light rain had begun to fall. Having started work early, I was already tired and ready to retire for the day. Maria put her hand in her shopping bag and rummaged around for a while, eventually producing a smaller bag with something solid in it. Not more rakia and potted body parts, I hoped, but it turned out to be two chocolate wafer biscuits. It seemed that, having cemented our friendship the previous day, the rakia-based honeymoon period was over. My digestive system and I breathed a sigh of relief and cracked on with being sober as I waved goodbye to lovely but lonely Maria and her best friend Kamelia who seemed to be in a bit of a hurry to be off which, I assumed, was because they were in need of a drop of something to take away the chill and the dampness and the reality.

Link to Part One:

https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/rakia-maria-part-one-two

Image:

Every image I use is from a photograph I have taken myself. 

On this occasion – Rakia Maria’s posh bottle for entertaining guests.