‘Crazy ideas!’ he says, ‘my head’s full of them. And do you know what,’ he says, ‘when I’ve got them pecking proper I’ll send them off to the ministry in Sofia, so they can have a go at a few really big bugs as well!’
What he said got repeated round the village and before long the police sergeant paid him a call and warned him not to get too big for his boots or there’d be a police horse blowing down his neck. An official warning it was, at the village hall, and he was kept there for twenty-four hours. While he was away the whole market was out collecting worms down by the river so his poor orphans wouldn’t go hungry. And after Gogosha got back the people kept on with the worms, and in a couple of weeks the birds’ feathers shone like they was polished with wax. The birds grew stronger, they puffed up their feathers and they began to sing!
It was a Thursday, market day. Peasants were driving past our workshops in their carts – ox-carts mostly -creaking and squeaking and clattering on the cobbles, and suddenly this whistle echoed over the square. You know, like when you whistle to the oxen to get them to stop or take a drink. And when the whistle rang out the oxen in front stopped, and so did the ones behind and the whole convoy stopped dead…. We all went out of our shops to see what was up. The peasant in the first cart was a big fat fellow – from the valley he was – with a scarf round his head, and he picked up his stick and started beating the oxen to get them to move, but with that whistling noise going on they wouldn’t budge. Then the peasant started looking round to see who was stopping his oxen, but he couldn’t see anyone whistling at all. He got down and tried pulling, but the oxen weren’t having it. In the end the whistling stopped and they moved off, but no sooner was he back on his cart than it started again and the oxen stopped once more. The peasant felt such a fool he went bright red with shame – it’s no joke having the whole street stare at you – and he looked round to see who it was trying to make a fool of him. But he never thought of looking into the cage.
The whole street was rolling about in fits of laughter. Spotty Kolyu, the butcher, who rarely even managed a smile, could hardly stand up for laughing. And old Ali’s head shook that much he’d got one hand on his stick and the other on his head to stop his turban flying off. The peasant was wild! He lashed out with his goad, and if Gogosha hadn’t taken the cage inside, he would most likely have collapsed in tears.
From then on every day or every other day we had a repeat performance. Whenever a cart came up the street, we’d all go out. Gogosha had the cage hanging up outside and pretended he didn’t know a thing, and the blackbird quickly got the message, so as soon as the cart got anywhere near, it let out a great fruity whistle…. The cart stopped, the peasant got annoyed and we all rolled about killing ourselves with laughter.
The street got some life back in it and trade picked up a bit too, because when the carts stopped, now and then a peasant would spot the fcoza-seller’s halva or the koundouri-maker’s papoutsis or a piece of tripe perhaps, and he’d go home a lev or two lighter.
Gogosha and his birds grew famous : the landlord from the Yellow Peter offered him a whole barrel of Malaga wine for them and Arap was ready to swop all the finches in his coffee-house, cages and all, for that one pair of blackbirds, but Gogosha wouldn’t hear of it.
‘They’re my mascots!’ he said. ‘They’re not for sale, and I’m not swopping them neither.’
The goldfinches did sing nicely, though, just like they was reading off a score. But Gogosha always said songs without music were more up his street.
And to be sure the blackbirds did manage quite a repertoire without any. There was a wild haidouk whistle, short and shrill, one blast followed by a long pause, and you’d almost be expecting a rustling in the bushes, the crack of revolvers, the crashing of rifles and a voice shouting out: ‘Your money or your life!’ Then there was the rich fruity whistle they used to stop the oxen, and a third variety, more spirited, like the two birds were having a slanging match. ‘Chook-chook-chook-chook!’ went the cock. ‘Chink-chink-chink-chink!’ answered the hen. And when she got really angry she changed to ‘Choor-rook, choor-rook! Choor-r-r-rook!’ as if to say: ‘You’re bad, you’re bad! You’re wicked!’ Then the cock got angry as well and began chasing her round the cage and lunging at her with his beak, but he had a bad wing, so he couldn’t catch her and started spluttering and stuttering instead….
These squabbles always brought a great crowd flocking E to the cage. From the moment they unstrapped their packs at midday till after sunset the carriers lay sprawled on their backs watching the cage, listening to the blackbirds quarrelling and waiting for them to make their peace. Gradually the hen would stop squawking and running away and the cock would begin combing out her ruffled feathers with his beak and tweaking her under the left wing.
‘Ataboy!’ shouted Sazdo.
‘Ataboy! That’s the way!’ the other carriers repeated after him. And there was such a chuckling and chortling the devil himself would have kept his distance.
Spotty Kolyo told Gogosha he didn’t want the carriers hanging around outside his workshop but Gogosha wouldn’t listen to him.
‘They’re people too, you know…. Let them have some free fun if they want!’
One day old Ali called in at my shop. I had a coffee brought for him and as he sipped at it he shook his head.
‘Kosta, Kosta,’ he said, moving his thin neck, ‘there’s been too much laughter in this street of ours. No good can come of it….’
‘Why’s that, Ali?’
‘Something’s bound to happen. After too much laughter it always does.’
‘It might be something nice though,’ I says to him. ‘Perhaps we’ll get Gogosha onto the Council. Elections are coming up and everyone respects him….’
‘Perhaps, we’ll see,’ he says, ‘but it’s past full moon and nothing good ever happens when the moon’s on the wane.’
About four or five days later, I can’t rightly remember now how long it was, I was making up a pair of papoutsis when I heard this row outside. The carriers were shouting and some were even in tears…. Aye, in tears they were, and carrying something wrapped in bast matting. Then I saw Gogosha’s shutters still down, and I felt a stab in the chest. Just outside Gogosha’s shop the carriers put down their bundle, untied the matting, and there was our friend, all stiff and showing the whites of his eyes … He had a bloody hole on the left pocket of his waistcoat. He was wet, and from his clothes ran trickles of water and blood.
What a weeping and a shouting there was! The whole street came flocking round. The carriers and butchers were furious, but they hadn’t a clue who to punish for it. The body was taken away by the police to be cut open, so they could see what the wound came from, and later on they said he’d done it himself. ‘He was deeply in debt,’ they said, ‘so he took his knife and stabbed himself. No one’s to blame….’ But Spotty Kolyu said that after shutting the shop Gogosha had gone past carrying a fishing rod and had asked him to go with him.
‘Come on Spotty!’ he’d said. ‘Give us a hand carrying the fish so we can collect some worms for the birds!’
But Spotty hadn’t gone…. He’d stayed behind to salt some rancid fat, and Gogosha had gone off to the river on his own, so no one ever found out whether he’d killed himself or been bumped off.
Anyhow we gave him a funeral of sorts, without any ceremonial, and no bells neither, because Gogosha didn’t believe in priests and bells and that, they said. And the very next day the bailiff came round and started selling off everything in the shop. He said Gogosha had borrowed money from Hadji Vassil Keketo and should have paid up ages before. Anyhow everything went, down to the old bits of leather under the workbench, and right at the end Hadji Vassil himself came in person to collect the cage…. The butchers wanted to buy it off him, but he refused.
‘I need it to stop the peasants by my grocer’s shop!’ he said and took the cage away.
At one fell swoop he robbed us of our laughter and our joy. We wilted and dro
oped as if the phylloxera beetle had attacked us too. The boxa-sellers went quiet and so did the butchers and the kebabche-sausage-sellers. Everything went dead. It was just like the plague, and the centre of town went quieter than a glade in the forest. Now I’ve nothing against a quiet glade in the forest, mind, but there can hardly be anything worse than a quiet market! At one point the butchers spoke of sending a deputation to Hadji Keketo to get the birds back, but while they were discussing who was to deliver the petition word went round the market that the cock bird had given up whistling. Gone dumb apparently. So we went round to see. There was Ali, Babacha, Spotty Kolyu, Sheker the sweet-tooth and me. We couldn’t see the hen bird anywhere.
‘Where’s the female, then, Hadji Vassil?’
‘I wrung her neck, lads,’ Keketo said. ‘She didn’t whistle all that well and besides she ate twice as much as the male. The only trouble now is, though, the old boy’s lost his voice.’
‘He’s sad, that’s why,’ Ali said to Keketo. ‘He’s in mourning for his little lady. That’s why he won’t whistle.’
‘If he’s sad, why does he go on eating?’ Keketo burst out. ‘If he eats he’s got to whistle. Otherwise I’ll get my chopper and send him to join that little lady of his! Three days I’ll give him, no more!’
Then Babacha piped up:
‘Give the bird to us!’ he begged. ‘We’ll find him another female and then perhaps he’ll sing. You can’t get a song by force you know.’
‘Oh yes you can!’ Keketo cried. ‘And how! Throw a five lev note to a gypsy and you’ll get a song all right!’
‘But the bird’s not a gypsy to go selling himself for money,’ said Babacha. ‘He couldn’t care a damn about your money.’
‘S-s-scram! G-g-get out of here!’ Keketo blustered, beginning to stutter. ‘What’s m-m-my m-m-money to you? … Any money I’ve got I’ve earned myself and I don’t have any need to thank you for it. You’re grown men, yet you down tools on account of some stupid bird! Out, I say, out!’
Before we left I glanced over at the cage. The blackbird was sitting there with his feathers all puffed up. Carts were rattling past outside and people were shouting, but the bird wasn’t listening. He’d got his eye on Keketo, following every move he made, not missing a thing, so as he wouldn’t be caught napping and get his throat slit….
Two days later Sazdo the carrier came round to Baba-cha’s with something tied up in a handkerchief. He undid the little bundle and there lay the bird, dead.
‘Keketo had wanted to slit its throat,’ he said, ‘but the bird went zooming round the cage, crashing into the ceiling and floor, and finally dropped down dead.’
‘But why’s its head missing?’ asked Babacha.
‘Keketo pulled it off. Apparently the bird had eaten a whole oka of millet and hadn’t sung a single note.’
Babacha’s eyes filled with tears. I’d never seen a butcher cry. It was the first time. And the last. Anyhow before we had time to look round the whole market had gathered outside the shop : koundouri-makers, boza-sellers, carriers and saddlers, everyone you could think of. The little bird was lying on the handkerchief and all around stood the men, their hats in their hands and their heads bowed. More people came and everyone asked :
‘What’s the matter? What’s going on?’
‘Keketo’s throtded Gogosha’s blackbird!’
They all took off their hats or caps or whatever they had on their heads and went on standing there until the whole street outside the butcher’s shop was full of people. Then Babacha bent down, took the dead bird in his hands and set off towards the new graveyard; behind him Ali, bareheaded, still in his apron and carrying his turban under his arm, and behind him stretched a whole procession, with its head by the fountain and its tail reaching right the way back to the wooden bridge! A dozen or so backgammon players came out of the hunters’ coffee-house, and when they found out what was going on they tagged along too. When we went past the Yellow Peter a whole group of musicians came tumbling out, and before we had time to discover who they were they’d joined the procession and started to play. It was a song very popular about that time:
‘Lay me dead in my grave,
And on my forehead
Place a kiss! …’
You should have seen the way they played! There was the wail of a clarinet like a bride mourning her beloved, a horn on either side taking up the melody, and a great tuba, first sobbing like it was alive : ‘Ouf-ouf-ah! Ouf-ouf-ah! Ouf-ouf-ah!’ and then letting out such a deep and heavy sigh it was enough to tear your heart into tiny pieces….
Just up the road we met some peasants from Cheshnigir.
‘Who are you burying?’ they asked.
‘Our laughter and our joy!’ Ali told them.
Whether or not they understood, I don’t know, but they left their oxen and joined the crowd.
We arrived at the graveyard and there we buried the little black bird next to Gogosha. Ali sprinkled the first handful of earth; Sazdo fired his pistol and shouted so everyone could hear:
‘Today a pistol, tomorrow a cannon ! Today we fire into the air, and tomorrow – God willing – at Keketo in his lair! …’
The pistol cracked, and the music played – on and on it went!
I’ll never forget that music:
‘Lay me dead in my grave,
And on my forehead
Place a kiss! . . ,’
The clarinet wailed, the horns took up the melody on either side, and the great tuba, sobbing away like it was alive: ‘Ouf-ouf-ah! Ouf-ouf-ah!’ tore your heart into tiny pieces.
A Naked Conscience
Just one year I had in power – ‘thirty-three, during the ‘Block’ period – but that one year will last me as long as I live. When we came to dividing up the posts in the village the Democrats got the mayor’s job and the Peasants’ Party chose the Deputy. I could have been mayor – I was the senior Democrat in the village, after all, but I said to myself: ‘What’s the point of saddling yourself with the burdens of being mayor? Who’s stolen what from whom, who’s ploughed whose field – everyone always runs straight to the mayor, wanting him to straighten their crooked cucumbers for them! Far better be the odd-job man – it’s the same pay as mayor and much less work!’ We got a lad who could read and write, made a Democrat out of him and appointed him treasurer and secretary. The Forestry Commission had given us the go-ahead to fell two thousand cubic metres of wood in the municipal forests, so it looked as if the money side of our local council work would go like a bomb. The trouble was, two or three months later the bomb went off – right under me! The time had come to cut the wood and I reckoned the Council ought to pay for the work to be done and then sell the wood to the highest bidder, so the village would make as much as possible out of it. But the mayor and the secretary, they did a deal with a couple of merchants and let it go for next to nothing.
I got to know about this hanky-panky with the merchants and I told the mayor that by law he had to sell the wood to the highest bidder and not to the first person who came along.
‘You worry about those boilers of yours,’ the mayor said. ‘And don’t meddle in matters that don’t concern you!’
‘I’ll tell the other Council members!’
‘Go ahead!’ he answered. ‘Only I want one thing made clear – I’m the mayor and you’re just the odd-job man and I can do what the hell I like with you!’
The next morning I was given my notice : ‘For arguing with the mayor and not looking after the boilers properly.’ They didn’t have any money for my wages, so I was given a piece of paper saying the Council had to pay me. With that piece of paper I took the Council to court, but the court wanted to see a proper list of all the wages, and seeing as that upstart of a secretary wouldn’t let them have it, I had to kiss my wages goodbye. It was about then the merchants arrived and started felling in the municipal forest. You should have seen them! For every tree that was marked they felled half a dozen as weren’t! They loaded their wagons and
drove off via Stoudnitsa straight into town. And the local police were mixed up in it too. They were keeping the forester and his wardens out of the way, so they wouldn’t see what was going on – paralysed, the lot of them! Well, when I realized they’d all been bribed and we hadn’t a hope of stopping the dirty deals on our own I began sending telegrams to the Ministry of Agriculture – one a day and always the same text: ‘Law-breakers stealing our forest. Request immediate inquiry ! On behalf of Kriva Luka village – Panayotov.’ They weren’t cheap, those telegrams, but time and money meant nothing to me. I even gave up what I was doing and built a little hut by the side of the Stoudnitsa road, so I could sit there with my brother-in-law the priest and count the merchants’ waggons on their way into town. That was during the day, and in the evenings we sent our telegrams to the Minister of Agriculture. The priest did the writing and I signed.
One day Vancho, the merchants’ agent, came looking for me.
‘I’d like to have a chat,’ he said. ‘Just the two of us.’
The priest was away in the village.
‘By all means,’ I said. ‘Come in.’
When we were inside the hut he shoved his hand into the leather bag he’d got over his shoulder and pulled out a wodge of banknotes.
‘Here’s ten thousand,’ he said, ‘go out and enjoy yourself. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll lay off and keep your big mouth shut!’
‘My conscience wouldn’t allow me to do that,’ I told him.
But he thought I was trying to tell him ten thousand levs wasn’t enough, and he grabbed a pencil.
‘That’s all I’ve got with me,’ he said. ‘But I’ll write you a note and you can collect the other five thousand from the boss when you’re next in town.’
‘You don’t seem to understand,’ I explained. ‘I don’t want your money!’
Vancho just stared at me. He couldn’t believe his ears. In those days fifteen thousand was a tidy sum.
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