He couldn't stop spilling oranges everywhere he went. When he was five, he was a hide-and-seek failure, when an orange always rolled out from under the slide or tilted open a closet door. When he went to the grocery store with his mother, he always had a wrist slapped when they left, because she reached for his hand and the sinister fruit would drop and spin serenely across the parking lot. He always apologized looking at his shoes, confused.
I have to admit that precisely for this reason I'm pleased about this interrogation in front of you. It reminds me of that one in '41. After that our relations with Esther changed. She realised that when your name is Esther and you live in Paris in '41 it's difficult for your innocence to be proven. The most difficult thing was to find someone who would believe in this proof. I don't know how it came about that they believed me in the Gestapo. And even now I can't get my head around it. Perhaps it's because nothing sounds more convincing than the actual truth.
You don't need to be born somewhere to become a part of it, as the career of artist Deyan Valkov shows. Born 42 years ago in Silistra, he graduated from the National Fine Arts School and the Arts Academy in Sofia, specialising in mural painting. Since then, Deyan has turned Bulgaria's capital into the centre of his work, which takes him to the rest of Bulgaria and abroad.
Tell us something about your work – what have you done in the past?
The pun is unintended and probably bad, but if you can't pronounce the headline of this article you are unlikely to understand what is really going on in Bulgaria under Boyko Borisov and Tsvetan Tsvetanov.
One is cold and the other is warm: the differences between Norway and Bulgaria by far outnumber the similarities. One is traditionally tolerant; the other has been trying to become tolerant for just 20 years. One is rich - the richest in GDP-per-capita terms in Europe; the other is the poorest.