Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria

Reading Kapka Kassabova’s new book is something like that moment of startling awake just before you fall asleep. There’s the relief of knowing you’re safe and far from danger. But there’s also a lingering disorientation, even a vague dread.

The eponymous border is “the last border of Europe . . . where Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey converge and diverge . . . where something like Europe begins and something else ends which isn’t quite Asia.” It’s a liminal, neither-here-nor-there region that has fascinated Kassabova since her childhood in Soviet Bulgaria.

The journey she chronicles in the book was born of a desire to see what had been kept from her by the barbed wire and the soldiers waiting to catch those who got too close to the edge. “I wanted to see the forbidden places of my childhood,” she writes, “the once-militarized border villages and towns, rivers and forests that had been out of bounds for two generations. I went with my revolt . . . and with my curiosity.” Her adult excursion into the mostly demilitarized woods retains a feeling of subversiveness and wonder that only a childhood’s worth of curiosity and fear could provide.