Alfréd Schubert

“All four of us arrived by bus to the Black Sea, to Burgas, which was crowded with tourists. We didn’t like there one bit. We decided to have a look further south, we found on the map that there aren’t any summer resorts there, but mountains instead. We hitched a ride to a village which was still quite a long way from the Turkish border. We met up and went to the local shop to buy some food before setting off into the mountains. We did our shopping, but there was no going outside. The door was locked, and the locals had already called the police that there were suspicious foreigners there. I guess the border guards there had their informers just like our ones did. They started asking us what we were looking for, why weren’t we on the beaches by the sea like all the other tourists, why were we headed in the direction of Turkey - and they insinuated that we had wanted to cross the border. They took us back to Burgas, where they kept us at the police station and gradually took for questioning one by one. We each had to say separately where we’d come from, who we’d come with, why we’d been going to the mountains by the Turkish border, if we hadn’t wanted to go to Turkey, and so on. We sat in an inhospitable room for a long time, with various Communist posters around us. Perhaps we had some food to eat, but we certainly didn’t feel comfortable there. In the end they told us we would be deported from Bulgaria.”

“You couldn’t just go travel wherever you wanted to, not even to the Soviet Union, only with the national travel agency, Čedok. In 1973 a close friend of mine was travelling around Ukraine with Cirkus Praga. He worked as a roustabout, which is the name for those who build the circus tent and help during the show. He sent me an invitation, it was false again, he had to lie that I was his cousin. I joined him in the city of Chernivtsi. I liked the circus, I didn’t want to go home after just a week. The boys from the circus knew a nurse at the hospital. She took a sheet of headed paper, wrote I had pneumonia, borrowed a stamp and added an illegible signature to it. I wrote to my work place in Prague that I had fallen ill and I would return as soon as I recovered. I stayed with the circus a whole month, I made friends with a bunch of roustabouts, I helped put the bars up when the tigers were to be on show, to lay out the carpets or put down the floorboards for the artistic cyclists.”