I went into hiding on the night of Sept. 21, a Wednesday. At that point, I had been in Bulgaria for a total of three and a half months—illegally for the previous 13 days—working for an English-language newspaper. Clive, the paper’s South African editor-in-chief, let me sleep on the couch in his living room, next to a room shared by his 3-year-old daughter Leah and 70-year-old mother-in-law, a retired actress who didn’t speak a word of English. His wife, a television reporter, was on assignment in New York. Two days beforehand, I had been turned down for a visa extension and a nasty, unlucky run-in with police had led me here.

An anti-apartheid veteran at 43, the experience made Clive nostalgic. “I never thought I would be harboring a fugitive from the authorities again,” he said.

I had arrived in Europe well back in March, with the plan to get a job at a good

English-language paper somewhere, anywhere in Eastern Europe. Clive had hired me as a copy editor for The Sofia Echo upon my arrival in the country in June. When I first got there, I can't say I had any fascination with Bulgaria, none of the love for the little country, Robert Kaplan describes in Balkan Ghosts.

I was an upper middle-class dilettante seeing the world and enjoying myself. I had filed 17 stories about Bulgaria since June. There were some favorites, including one about a Manga-inspired comic book drawn by young men in the strangest corners of the country started by a Bulgarian aikido fanatic who had spent five years in Japan. And I’d written another about the country's own Bush-like response to its flood crises.



In the end, it was the little things I learned that made me love this place, almost none of which ever made it into a single story that I wrote. I heard stories from a Bulgarian colleague about how the Kosovar and Serb refugees who watched the videos of the NATO bombing together at her school. When she saw me reading Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, she said, "My mom read that book in the early ‘90s. It upset her a great deal and she told me not to read it." A straight Bulgarian I had met at a gay bar told me about finding himself in a fight in which his head was grazed by a bullet. He showed me the scar.

Others left indelible impressions too: from the strong-armed gorgeous boy with the odd eyes and the sweet smile I made out with in my first week to the 18-year-old ice cream vendor in front of the National Palace of Culture who had bigoted things to say about the Roma. We live in foreign countries to experience things like this. I was ending my education earlier than I wanted.

Clive's apartment was elegant, tidy and small, the kind intelligent men design for themselves in foreign countries. The walls were decorated by his late father-in-law’s paintings, including one of a ghostly white clown, which loomed over the square kitchen table and another reminiscent of Gauguin above the couch where I slept. There was a small, heavily crowded bookcase, a television and a stack of Leah’s VHS tapes.

On Thursday morning, I was nursing a hangover from a night of comfort drinking with Clive. Leah and I watched an animated version of “Fraggle Rock.” I vaguely remembered these annoying creatures from grade school. Leah was feeling anxious that morning and Clive thought it might be a good idea to take a walk in Sofia’s large South Park—an old, quirky communist-era expanse full of aging rides and Bulgarian strollers—which was10 minutes away. His mother-in-law stayed in.

Somehow after three months in Sofia, I had never managed to visit the place. Three Roma on a horse-drawn carriage picking up scrap metal—-a ubiquitous 19th-century

element in an otherwise modern city—-passed us. The thought occurred to me that in a few days, such an occurrence wouldn’t be normal.

We saw some cops on the street, and Clive told me not to talk, let alone speak any English, and act naturally so they wouldn’t notice me. It was hard to tell how seriously we were taking the situation. Yes, the cops made me feel nervous, but if worse came to worse, it wouldn't take more than a small bribe to get rid of them.

I had a wealth of good family connections back home. The worst part of getting out of the country was already taken care of: My mom had already agreed to pay for a $317 plane trip to Prague. She was terribly paranoid, filled with visions of a totalitarian hell and wanted me out of the country as soon as possible.

Clive and I made joking references to The Great Escape, well aware of how melodramatic we were being. When Leah complained that she wanted to go on one of the rides just one more time, part of me I felt slightly relieved as there is nothing more common in Bulgaria than a misbehaving child. Part of me laughed at myself for wanting to feel slightly relieved. I really liked the idea of being one of the many fugitives Clive had taken care of. I was trying to play Steve McQueen.



That night, we went to my studio, which was on the top of a five-floor concrete walk-up in Lozenets, the wealthiest neighborhood in the city. I crammed my unwashed clothes into a suitcase and dug through all my scattered papers, making sure I left nothing behind. I had a double bed on a loft above a single bed below, a small kitchenette and one ratty wooden chair. The bathroom was a small, comical affair, in which the shower faucet was placed at such an angle so that it would spray directly on the toilet.

The script was all against the conventions of spy movies, according to Clive: I should have spent the bulk of my time here living in a nice place, and my final days hiding in

a hovel.

We had agreed at the beginning of my time in hiding that I would only leave the apartment accompanied by him. But by Friday, I was feeling more confident, and I went out for a few hours on my own. Still, I only felt safe in the apartment, which gave it a strange aura.

There were times there when I never felt cozier, as if I were a 7-year-old hiding in a pillow fort, doing absolutely, wonderfully nothing. But for the most part doing nothing made me overanxious—or, maybe wanting to feel overanxious—and I couldn't concentrate enough to read.

There was a study a few years ago that suggested the brain's activity while watching television was lower than staring at a white wall. But when I watched television now, I could only hear myself thinking of every detail that needed to be taken care of: I had to go with my iBook to the Radisson Hotel that had a free Wi-Fi service and order my plane tickets online and then I had to weigh my bags and then I had to return a book to a friend.

I was restless—or wanted to be restless?—but for the full period of three days, I couldn't bring myself to change out of my gray dress shirt and a pair of trousers that I bought at a discount stand off. In the end, my sanity was saved partly by others' bad fortune. Clive's mother-in-law had a mild flu and Clive was coming down with a bad cold. Their combined lugubriousness had a calming effect.

I had a short conversation with Clive’s mother-in-law. He served as the interpreter.

“Anyone who has seen communism can’t support it,” she said.

“Yes, but there are many Bulgarians here who lived through communism, who know what it is, and still voted for the Socialist party,” I said. “They’re brainwashed. I have a friend who’s like that. She says that she won’t go to church because it’s an awful place.”

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