The October Circle

by Robert Littell

  “Seriously, though, Dancho,” Octobrina implores, “what’s London, England, like — what’s it really like, I mean?”

  Mister Dancho picks absently at a cuticle. “My dear Octobrina, you will know everything you want to know about London, England — indeed, about the English — when I tell you that in Harrods, which resembles our ZUM in the sense that a diamond resembles cut glass, you will find a sign that reads in its entirety: ‘Please try not to smoke.’ “

  “Oh, that’s lovely,” marvels Octobrina. “ ‘Try not to smoke!’ “

  “I attempted to purchase the sign in question for our friend here” — Dancho indicates the Flag Holder, who is puffing away like a chimney — “but they apologized profusely and said it was most unfortunately not for sale. The salesman — who resembles our sales clerks in the sense that a Maserati resembles a Moskovich — the salesman actually offered to telephone the sign maker to see if some accommodation could be worked out. But as I was leaving shortly, I decided to take home the story in place of the sign.”

  They banter back and forth, skirting the subject foremost on their minds almost as if they are afraid to put a curse on it by talking about it. The silences grow longer and more awkward. Looks are exchanged. Finally Mister Dancho cannot stand it any longer. “You’ve followed what’s happening?” he asks guardedly.

  “Sometimes,” the Racer says carefully, “I listen to the news and pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.”

  “Who among us would have reasoned that such a thing was possible?” Popov demands, turning up his hearing aid.

  “It is a new beginning,” Mister Dancho agrees excitedly. “If the experiment is successful, it will spread.”

  “The wind will carry such ideas like seeds,” exults Popov.

  “It’s true,” the Racer laughs. “It could happen here.”

  “The Flag Holder will be our Dubek,” exclaims Mister Dancho. He spills wine into a glass and leaps to his feet.

  “To the Dubeks,” he cries, his glass thrust high, “theirs and ours.”

  “The Dubeks,” the Racer joins him in a toast.

  “The Dubeks,” Popov echoes.

  The Flag Holder rises slowly. “To friend Dubek,” he says softly, holding aloft his glass of mineral water.

  They all turn toward Octobrina, who remains seated. “You’re all fools,” she sneers. “I don’t permit myself the luxury of hope.”

  “What you don’t permit,” Mister Dancho chides gently, “is the luxury of admitting you hope.”

  “Come on, Octobrina,” the Racer coaxes.

  With a snort Octobrina climbs to her feet. “To Alexander Dubek,” she toasts grudgingly, “the plastic surgeon who is trying to put a human face on Socialism.” And she mutters under her breath:

  “He will be the death of us all.”

  Solemnly, they drink his health and settle into their seats again. The Flag Holder punches a Rodopi between his lips. As he fumbles for his lighter, Mister Dancho holds out his empty hand and, with a twist of the wrist, produces a flaming match.

  “Let us hope,” Octobrina says sourly, “that friend Dubek doesn’t wind up as a chapter in Lev’s book.” She is referring to the Flag Holder’s work in progress (it has been in progress for the better part of a decade), a history of nonpersons in the Communist movement.

  The Flag Holder’s face twists into a smile. “Let us hope,” he repeats.

  “How is it going, your book?” Dancho inquires.

  The Flag Holder pulls on his cigarette reflectively. He is wearing an old corduroy jacket and a hand-knitted tie (imported: a gift from Mister Dancho) knotted carelessly, with the narrow end hanging lower than the wide end. The bottom button of his shirt, the one just above his belt, is open, revealing the skin of someone who never exposes himself to the sun. The cuffs of his shirt and his collar are frayed. His hair, the color of sidewalk, is cropped close to the scalp, making him appear younger and more vigorous than he is.

  The Flag Holder operates from under a carefully cultivated turtle’s shell of formality, to which the only threat (as he sees it) is spontaneity. His first reaction to anything is usually a reflective silence. (When he is moody, which is often nowadays, the silence can be a prelude to long periods of introspection.) When finally he joins a conversation, he speaks the way he writes: selecting his words cautiously, the way you select footfalls in a newly seeded garden. He never raises his voice and seldom gestures; he believes that words should carry an impact based on their precise meaning and not on the emphasis you give them. With people he doesn’t know well, he is meticulous about keeping his distance, which he feels is essential to human intercourse. Even his closest friends are kept at arm’s length. There are only four people in the world he addresses with the familiar “thou” —his son, Georgi, the Racer, Mister Dancho and the Rabbit, Elisabeta Antonova, who is his mistress.

  In overall physical appearance, there is something “hewn” about him despite his exceptional height; Octobrina came closest to putting her finger on it when she likened him to a “knife-sharpened pencil.” Her description made the rounds, and eventually turned up in one of the public school biographies that describe the Flag Holder’s exploits during the war.

  The Flag Holder is painfully self-conscious about his hands, which he keeps out of sight whenever he can. The few who are able to get a look at them see immediately what is wrong. He has no fingernails.

  “As a matter of fact,” the Flag Holder replies, “I discovered a new nonperson just the other day. Does the name Joseph Konstantinovich Livshitz ring a bell? He won a Stalin prize in the late forties for his novels about the war. A translation of one of them appeared in England, and some damn fool made the mistake of sending him the money it earned. Livshitz was arrested as an enemy agent and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. His Stalin prize was revoked. His books disappeared from the library shelves. His name was removed from The Great Encyclopedia. His birth certificate and later his death certificate vanished. People who had known him were carted off to prison camps. He ceased to exist.”

  “Where did you find him?” Octobrina inquires, as if Livshitz is a warm body about to be presented in evidence.

  “In the archives at the Centre. It seems that at one point during the war Livshitz hid out with his family on a farm. He drummed it into their heads never to let on that they were Jewish. One day a Fascist sympathizer stopped by for lunch. He asked Livshitz’s little girl where she wanted to live when she grew up. Palestine, she said. Everyone held their breaths. The Fascist asked why Palestine? The little girl said because Jesus was born there.”

  Stuka shuffles into the room with a pot of tea and a tray full of cups and saucers. As he parts the curtain to enter, the din from the restaurant intrudes, and fades again as the curtain falls back into place. Octobrina pours. Mister Dancho takes a jar of confiture from the sideboard and mixes a spoonful into his tea. The others use lump sugar — oversized cubes wrapped in cheap paper with the name of a tourist hotel on the Black Sea printed on it. The Flag Holder drinks his tea Russian style, straining it through a lump held in his mouth.

  “Lev and his nonpersons,” snorts Octobrina, fussily flicking ashes from her black lace shawl (Spanish: a gift from Dancho) with the back of her hand. “It’s more than flesh and blood can stand.” Octobrina is old before her time and bone dry and brittle like a fallen leaf or a fallen angel. When it comes to people or politics, she is a kettle at perpetual boil: the water sizzling inside, the tin cover rattling overhead. When it comes to material things, she exhibits a carefully nurtured ineptitude: she is awkward when ordering in restaurants, graceless when introducing people, forgetful about paying bills. When she pays for something out of pocket, she cups her hands and holds out whatever coins she finds in her purse. (Dancho occasionally tests her by taking a few coins too many, but if she is keeping count, she never lets on.) She smokes American filter cigarettes through a long ivory holder, gripping the holder between her thumb and third finger and barel
y putting it in her mouth. In the winter she smells of moth balls, in the summer of lilacs. She smells of lilacs now.

  “Dear Lev, you permit that book into circulation and they’ll make a nonperson out of you.”

  “They’ll have their work cut out for them,” the Racer retorts lightly.

  “But no,” cries Octobrina, stabbing the air furiously with her holder, “you don’t understand them, you don’t understand them at all. Push them too far and they are capable of anything.”

  Mister Dancho nods toward the blown-up photograph of the Flag Holder, which shows him with a flag pole thrust high leading a partisan unit into Sofia in 1944. “Be reasonable, Octobrina, they can’t touch him and you know it.”

  “Our pictures,” agrees the Racer, “are our protection.”

  “Not Octobrina’s,” notes the Flag Holder. “At least not the ones she is painting these days.”

  “Out on another artistic limb?” chides Mister Dancho, and he shakes his finger at her as if he were scolding a schoolgirl for trespasses against the curriculum. “What are you up to now?”

  Octobrina takes a series of quick puffs on her holder and peers mischievously at Mister Dancho, her head cocked to one side so that she presents him with a three-quarter profile; as a young girl of twelve she had been introduced to Mayakovsky, who told her she had a beautiful profile, and so she is forever presenting it to people. “I’m not up to anything,” she declares in a tone of voice that makes it clear she is up to something. “I’ve started a new phase in my artistic cycle. I’m experimenting with still lifes.”

  “You mean apples and oranges and grapes!” Mister Dancho rolls his eyes in mock horror.

  “You don’t understand, you don’t understand at all. I’m working with still lifes of animate objects. My still lifes are life abstracted down to its motionless essence. On my canvases, things exist not with respect to their movement, but only in the contrast between their stillness and their potential for movement. Do you see it? I’m trying to capture the tension generated by the dialectical contradiction between the word ‘still’ and the word ‘life.’ “

  “I smell political comment,” declares Mister Dancho, flaring his nostrils and sniffing the air.

  “You smell correctly,” observes the Racer.

  “You smell politics everywhere,” Octobrina protests, but she is secretly pleased. “If man is a political animal — “

  “Does anyone doubt it?” the Racer puts in.

  “ — then for me, his significance lies in the contrast between his potential for political action and his political inactivity.”

  “She means our potential for political action and our political inactivity,” the Racer sums up.

  “They’ll never let you exhibit,” Mister Dancho tells her flatly. “They’ll see through your still lifes in a minute.”

  Octobrina remains unfazed. “What makes you think I want to exhibit? As a matter of fact, I’m working in white, and a painter who works in white has to reckon on what time will do to the color — tone it down, mellow it, yellow it. I have no intention of showing my whites until they’re at least five years old. Perhaps five years from now white still lifes will be just what our constipated cultural counselors are looking for. Who can say what history has in store for us?”

  “History,” comments the Flag Holder, the Rodopi bobbing on his lower lip, “is a sponge that soaks up events as if they were spilt milk.”

  “I see you haven’t lost your talent for coining phrases that stop conversation,” groans Dancho, suddenly downcast. He smiles weakly. “Don’t mind me. It’s the postpartums. Happens every time I get where I’m going.”

  Octobrina tugs at his sleeve. “Dear Dancho, you are a moody soul. You are protected by layers of appropriate emotion which you unfold and use and crumple and toss away as if they are disposable paper handkerchiefs.”

  “Cheer up,” the Racer cries. “I’ll tell you about Octobrina’s escapade at the Artists’ Union.”

  Octobrina gleefully supplies the details. “Some hyena raised the criticism that too much religious hocus-pocus was creeping onto our canvases under the guise of historical. themes. I simply pointed out that the first thing that Lenin did upon taking power was to make the sign of the cross. And for good measure, I told them that Georgi Dimitrov died with his mother’s crucifix in his hands.” She laughs happily. “The uproar would have warmed the cockles of your heart, dear Dancho.”

  “How do you know such things?” Mister Dancho marvels.

  “I don’t — I make them up!”

  “Wait, there’s more,” the Racer insists. “The Dwarf got into hot water for asking his circus comrades to adopt a resolution calling on all fraternal Communist parties to respect the independence and integrity of other parties in the Communist family.”

  “The Dwarf is a lovely person,” the Flag Holder says.

  “Needless to say,” the Racer continues, “his motion was not seconded, much less voted on. As for me, the All-Union Sports’ Directorate just circulated another petition against Solzhenitsyn. I was the only member who didn’t sign on the dotted line.”

  “Tell what happened,” Octobrina demands, clapping her hands together happily.

  Tacho smiles sheepishly. “The Chairman, who is a pompous ass, tried to embarrass me into signing by asking me to explain myself at a public meeting.”

  “So you explained yourself,” laughs Mister Dancho.

  “So I explained myself,” Tacho admits. “I told them that since Solzhenitsyn’s writing is banned in Bulgaria, I have never had the opportunity to read him, and since I have never read him, I couldn’t very well condemn him.”

  “And what did he say to that, your chairman?” Dancho inquires.

  “He didn’t say anything,” the Racer concedes, “but I had the impression he was filing something away in his mind.”

  “Tell about the circular, Lev — “ Octobrina prompts.

  There is a chorus of encouragement. “Out with it,” orders Dancho.

  “It came about this way,” says the Flag Holder, drawn almost against his will into the game. He pauses to light a Rodopi from the butt of an old one. The first deep puff makes him cough; he sips mineral water to set it straight. “I received a circular for senior Party people ordering recipients to keep an eye peeled for evidence of mental instability on the part of other senior Party people.”

  “Don’t tell me you — “ Dancho’s arms open wide.

  “I submitted a dossier on each of the members of the Presidium, citing various actions or comments attributed to them and analyzing the mental condition of which this was a symptom.”

  “You go too far,” Octobrina warns.

  “My poor efforts pale beside your leaps of imagination,” Mister Dancho declares.

  “And what poor efforts do you speak of?” the Racer wants to know.

  Mister Dancho tugs modestly at his cuffs and tells them how he dipped into the bodice of the television actress “to pull out — “

  “American dollars,” guesses the Racer.

  “Too obvious,” cries Octobrina. “Something more devious. Ah, a samidzat written on toilet paper— “

  “A Swiss bankbook,” ventures the Flag Holder.

  Mister Dancho cannot contain himself. “Czech flags sewn end to end!”

  “Oh, dear Dancho, how could you?” sighs Octobrina. “And in front of everyone.”

  “In London, England,” Dancho continues, “someone at an embassy reception noticed that the Soviet Ambassador and I had small pins in our lapels and asked if we belonged to the same organization. The Ambassador showed his. It was a small likeness of Lenin. I showed mine. It was a small portrait of — “

  “Stalin,” Octobrina tries.

  “Mao?” guesses the Racer.

  “Me!” explodes Mister Dancho, and he thrusts his lapel forward with his thumb so that everyone can witness his audacity.

  Tapping his knife against an empty wine glass, Tacho calls the meeting to order and
says formally:

  “I propose we award our friend here the golden sickle of achievement.”

  Octobrina nods happily. The Flag Holder looks on the way an adult watches children at play — trying to keep his distance, but aching to join the fun.

  “How do you know he’s not exaggerating,” scoffs the Rabbit, pushing through the curtain into the room. She goes straight to Mister Dancho and plants matter-of-fact kisses on both his cheeks. “Stuka told me you were back.”

  She kisses Octobrina and squeezes her hand, and then hugs Popov and the Racer before slipping into the seat next to the Flag Holder, whom she greets by resting her hand lightly on his thigh. He shifts in his chair; physical intimacy is not something he is comfortable with.

  “I’m not exaggerating, little Rabbit,” Mister Dancho protests, but Elisabeta waves away (he comment. “The whole business is immature;, if you ask me,” she frowns. “Grown men playing with” — she looks at the Flag Holder — “fire.”

  “How can you sit there and say that?” Mister Dane ho retorts belligerently, and Lev tries to smooth things over:

  “If we are immature, Elisabeta, more power to us.”

  “Immaturity,” snaps Octobrina, parroting the Flag Holder’s style of speech, “can be seen as the refusal to pocket those portions of the personality which rub society the wrong way.”

  “Just so,” agrees Lev, annoyed.

  “Have it your own way,” Elisabeta yields grudgingly, “but I still say you’re playing with fire. This simply isn’t the moment …” She shrugs and lets it drop.

  Octobrina asks Elisabeta if she has eaten.

  “Someone fetched sandwiches to the ministry,” the Rabbit tells her.

  “What news?” asks the Racer.

  Popov turns up his hearing aid. Octobrina leans forward in her seat. The Flag Holder stops smoking.

  Elisabeta speaks quietly. “It doesn’t look good. The Boss was summoned to Moscow this morning — “

  “The Minister went with him,” Mister Dancho interjects.

  “How do you know that?” Elisabeta fires at him in astonishment. “You only just arrived.”