We felt as though we had worn down the Bulgarian border guards to the point that they let their guard down and we began to repack the VW van. We had a lot of stuff and some was on the roof and some on a rack on the back but we kept the Raleigh bike handy. When we made stops we took the bike off for short rides around and used it as a scout. Bulgaria was a particularly poor country at that time and the theme across the countryside was one of resignation and depression.

Collectivization had not worked. Stalin’s policy of grabbing land and building large collectively run farms was not limited to Russia or the Soviet Union itself. Bulgaria was never part of the Soviet Union but was a satellite of Moscow and followed the dictates of Stalin who demanded whatever wealth was generated by these new large farms, be diverted to the Soviets to finance their industrialization plans. Communism has many meanings -- most of them misunderstood projections of Western fear and propaganda -- but in this case, where the landholdings of thousands of peasants and small farmers were seized to lay out large “collectives” -- small landholdings seized through intimidation and arrest and often resulting in the execution of those “kulaks” who resisted -- the forced transformation of the Bulgarian culture and landscape left the people suspicious and dark. No other Eastern Block nation suffered the same degree of collectivization Bulgaria suffered, and the Bulgarian party rulers reveled in their corrupt absolute power backed by the Soviets.

Yet, here we were, behind the Iron Curtain, free to roam where we willed across the green and brown landscape of late summer. It is not as you imagine. There were concrete roads like the way old Route 52 used to be before the blacktop, but most roads were unpaved, graded, but unpaved. In the fields, the tractors looked bulky and from the 1940’s. We could see large harvesters and many people working in the larger fields and, yes, everyone had a job but the pay was stultifying low, the fruits of your labors going to party cronies and to Stalin. Feudalism had been reinvented by the state.

It wasn’t as if there were stores and restaurants along the road and gas stations. Not at all. It was difficult to find anything to buy. Procurement of gasoline for the van was an adventure in itself. We asked “Petrol? petrol?” and not many even knew where to buy gasoline. Down that road. Hand point. And we went down that dirt road and brambles along the ditches and nothing. Another stop, “Petrol? Gasolina?” and we were sent down another country road until we came a large tank on stilts and we could only buy so much, as it was rationed for the farm work, was part of the collective farm, the fuel owned by the state, and we bought what we could. We always felt vulnerable because we could not fill up.

Occasionally, we would run into a person who was not suspicious of us, this western gang with long hair and a new military-green German manufactured van, toys and fine fabrics. Most of the population seemed to have suffered a close vested tragedy, or loss, and a certain bleakness pervaded their movements and conversations. But on one back road where we searched for gas, we came upon a small table set long the drainage swale. Next to the table an old woman sat on a metal kitchen chair with a plastic covered seat. She was dressed in a billowing flower print dress and had a light-yellow, greenish kerchief tied around her head. Her face was wrinkled enough to hold two days of rain, but her eyes smiled, and on the table were ten or twelve unmatched jars of something she was selling. We stopped. We grappled out of the van. The jars had a dark greenish brown reddish hue and she had them lined up hopefully across the nicked and bruised table. She stood up as we approached and she was waving her hands and speaking in a language none of us had the foggiest.

I picked up one of the jars and gave it a good look in the morning sun because if was still morning and I saw the bit seeds of strawberries and the unprocessed small chunks of strawberries and I said to the crew, “It’s real strawberry jam!” and we bought a couple jars. We popped off the paraffin sealing layer and stuck our fingers in and it was the best I ever had.

I think we sparked in the woman some memories of when she was a younger girl, before the war, when life was different, and she tried talking to Hellena, the Swiss girl traveling with us, and she touched the embroidery on Hellena’s sweater and gestured towards we boys as if the joke was on us, and she was remembering her days of beauty when she could command the attention of the village men and she had a good laugh at us, most of her teeth missing, grabbing Hellena’s hand in solidarity.

We paid her in Bulgarian levs and I could see her little wooden cottage over by the big tree and her picket fenced yard and I imagined her strawberry plants in the fenced-in backyard and her cabbage in rows and big sunflowers by the fence. She was an entrepreneur farmer from a time gone by and she was going to sell her own work and no commissar was going to come along and tell her otherwise, you just knew that, and no one was going to mess with her.

We went down the road to a nearby village and bought bread and found some ice cream in a store with walls of white tiles like a pharmacy. The chocolate ice cream had real flakes of iced milk in it and was the best in the world and those are the two things I remember the most clearly about the Bulgaria of that time: the chocolate ice cream and the strawberry jam. They didn’t have much else, but, man, when what food they do have is really real, you remember that.

Author’s Note: Next week, we actually do make it to Romania, I promise.