The October Circle

by Robert Littell

  “She appears to be aging at the rate of a month a word,” Mister Dancho observes dryly.

  “Next witness,” the Prosecutor calls, and the clerk reads out the name of the film director Poleon.

  “Poleon!” The Racer starts out of his seat. “That spineless son of a bitch.”

  For the first time in the trial, Mister Dancho’s eyes harden. His mouth twists into a grim smile. His knuckles whiten on the handrail around the prisoner’s box.

  Looking neither right nor left, Poleon makes his way to the witness box. He is all business.

  “You are” — the Prosecutor calls Poleon by his real name.

  “Yes, yes. My friends call me Poleon.”

  “If you still have any left after today,” Mister Dancho jeers. The Lady Judge gavels for silence.

  “The witness was present at a party at the home of the circus performer Angel Bazdéev on the night that allied soldiers responded to the request for assistance in Czechoslovakia?”

  Poleon nods once. Without waiting for the Prosecutor to prompt him, he plunges right into his testimony. “Early in the evening in question, I heard the accused Dancho recount a slanderous anti-Soviet joke. The joke went like this. The streets around our Central Committee building are blocked off in preparation for a visit by a delegation from the Soviet Politburo. Somehow a Bulgarian citizen manages to maneuver his bicycle past the barriers. As he leans his bike against the Central Committee building, a soldier tells him: ‘You can’t do that— a high Soviet delegation is due any minute.’ The Bulgarian replies: ‘That’s all right, I’ll chain it up.’ “

  Nobody in the courtroom smiles — except Mister Dancho, who bursts out:

  “You can’t even tell it well, you bastard.”

  “One more such outburst,” the Lady Judge admonishes Dancho, “and you will be removed from this courtroom.”

  “That same evening,” Poleon continues, “Mister Dancho reached into the breast pocket of my dinner jacket and pulled out a photograph of the Czechoslovak revisionist Dubek.”

  “Is this the photograph in question?” the Prosecutor demands, picking up a small poster from the table piled high with notebooks taken from Dancho’s apartment.

  “Yes it is,” Poleon agrees. “He pulled it from my pocket and waved it around, and it was clear, to me at least, from the way he gloated over the picture that he supported the counterrevolutionary activities of this Granien fellow. Shortly afterward, when word of the allied intervention in Czechoslovakia spread, I heard Mister Dancho slander the Soviet leadership.”

  “Do you recall his exact words?” growls the Lady Judge.

  “As it happens, I do. He said they were a ‘bunch of gangsters.’ “

  There are gasps from the spectators, almost all of whom have been selected for their loyalty to the Party.

  The Prosecutor turns toward the audience and throws the next question over his shoulder:

  “He called the Soviet leadership a group of gangsters?”

  “A bunch of gangsters,” Poleon corrects him.

  “Group, bunch, what’s the difference. He called them gangsters,” the Prosecutor insists.

  “Gangsters, that’s correct,” Poleon says.

  As Poleon passes the defendant’s box on his way from the courtroom, he looks at Dancho. “Please understand, there was nothing personal,” he says under his breath.

  “Go hide in your new apartment,” Mister Dancho sneers, and he looks away in disgust.

  Dancho’s attorney puts the defense’s case succinctly. He argues that the charges against Mister Dancho — producing rolls of foreign currency or Czech flags or Dubek posters — are the result of a misunderstanding. Oh, the defense is willing to concede that the “tricks” — for that is what these are, just the stock in trade of an entertainer — were in poor taste. But should a man be punished for his poor taste? Especially a man like Mister Dancho, who fought heroically in the Resistance, who has since contributed a great deal toward the building of Socialism, who has in fact been one of Bulgaria’s leading ambassadors for almost a decade. Should not these inconsequential “missteps” be put on the scale and weighed against the positive aspects of his life? One can see, Dancho’s attorney sums up, that the Prosecutor is only doing his duty in pressing charges against Mister Dancho. Vigilance, after all, is everyone’s business; witness the recent events in one of the neighboring Socialist states which shall remain nameless. But hasn’t the court already achieved its purpose by drawing attention to these “missteps”?

  “I thank you.” The attorney bows and backs toward his seat.

  The judges are out for forty minutes. When they file back into the room, Mister Dancho is instructed to rise and face the bench. The Lady Judge stands and reads tonelessly from a piece of paper:

  “In consequence of the evidence presented this day, we the judges find you not guilty of corrupting the morals of a minor. We find you guilty of slander of a Socialist ally, which is to say, anti-Soviet agitation: slander of government policy, which is to say, counterrevolutionary activity: violation of currency regulations, which is to say, criminal activity. We hereby declare you to be a Socially Dangerous Element, and sentence you to a term of five years in prison at hard labor.”

  “A fiver!” cries Mister Dancho. The blood drains from his face, and his knees buckle beneath him. The guards, experienced in such matters, catch him under his armpits, one on each side, and hold him up.

  Octobrina leaps to her feet as he is being led from the courtroom. “Zaklyuchenny,” she cries — for some reason it is the Russian word for prisoner, not the Bulgarian, that springs to her lips. Mister Dancho winces, and reaches toward her with his empty hand. With a twist of the wrist, he produces out of thin air a small brown paper flower. Inclining his head gallantly, arranging his facial expression into what in happier times passed for a smile, he flicks it into her outstretched hands.

  9

  IT IS A MEASURE of their mood that Popov never once turns down his hearing aid.

  “If trouble comes,” he asks, squinting through his pince-nez and running two fingers under his starched collar, “can the Minister be far behind? Sssssssss.”

  They are seated around the table at Krimm, taking bets on when the Minister will show up. Octobrina thinks he will be discreet: he’ll wait a day or two, she predicts, and then make small talk for half an hour before he comes to the point. The Dwarf is sure he’ll send a deputy to do his dirty work. But the Flag Holder, who knew the Minister long before he ever dreamed of becoming a minister, agrees with Popov: he will turn up in person that night, he says, and he will come straight to the point. The point being Mister Dancho.

  In the event, the Flag Holder knows his man.

  “About Dancho,” the Minister begins as he settles into the first vacant seat he comes to; it is, of course, Mister Dancho’s.

  “How is he getting on,” the Racer inquires, “in that hotel of yours?”

  “He is in high spirits,” the Minister reports. “They tell me he’s fabricating paper flowers out of toilet paper to toss at people — as he did to you, dear Octobrina. His jailers, who are nothing if not conventional, want to put a stop to it. Their handbooks warn that flowers in whatever shape or form are subversive. But I instructed them to let Dancho have his fun. Was there a message in Dancho’s flower? I ask you, you have my solemn word on it, out of nothing more than curiosity.”

  Octobrina remembers the Minister’s curiosity from the war; his soft-skinned peasant boot kicking curiously at the corpses of some German officers who preferred suicide to capture by the Communist partisans. “As a matter of fact, there was a message,” she acknowledges. Her usually musical voice is almost metallic. She plucks Dancho’s toilet paper flower from her handbag and twirls it in her long, wrinkled fingers. Then she peels back a single petal and reads:

  “ ‘A Communist is someone who, when he smells roses, looks around for the coffin.’ “

  She looks up and smiles sweetly. “By that standard, even yo
u could pass for a Communist.”

  “When I smell flowers,” the Minister retorts evenly, “I sneeze. I have hay fever.”

  “Workingmen of the world unite,” snaps Octobrina, “you have nothing to lose but your allergies.”

  Stuka approaches with a menu, but the Minister ignores him and he backs out of the room. The Minister looks around the table. They are all, in a sense, old friends. In the famous photograph, in which he can be seen marching alongside the Flag Holder, the Minister’s eyes are darting off to one side, proud and flashing; now they appear dull and steady, the eyes (according to Octobrina, who specializes in eyes) of a professional poker player.

  “About Dancho,” the Minister says agan. This time nobody interrupts. “I put it to you frankly: what are we to do with him? He’s been terribly naughty, but I’m ready to concede that the judges were a bit eager on this one. Five years” — the Minister runs the tip of his forefinger over his lips, which are chapped — “five years is a long time to put Dancho on ice, wouldn’t you agree?”

  When nobody says anything — there is almost a conspiracy to manufacture strained silences — the Minister leans forward and runs his fingers over his lips again. In another context, it could be a sensuous gesture. “Come now, let’s not beat about the bush. Dancho’s appeal sits on my desk even as we speak here. No matter what you think of me, I am a Communist, and being a Communist implies a certain — how to phrase it — solicitude for mankind — “

  “People who have difficulty relating on a one-to-one basis usually compensate for this by exhibiting a solicitude for mankind,” Octobrina lectures him.

  The Minister reddens at the neck. “The trouble is,” he tells them, “your idea of Communism is not my idea of Communism.”

  “Your idea of Communism, Comrade Minister, is not Communism,” the Flag Holder retorts, looking him in the eye.

  The Minister is not accustomed to being baited. He leans forward, flushed now, and speaks sharply:

  “And what is it, in your opinion, about my idea of Communism that is not Communistic?”

  The Flag Holder smiles thinly. “There does not exist, within your scheme of things, the clash of ideas necessary for practice to make perfect.”

  “If you’re speaking about the bourgeois notion of a clash of ideas — “

  “I’m speaking about the Marxist notion of thesis versus antithesis — “

  “But my dear Lev, surely we must have done something right. We are, after all, members of that small group” — he gestures vaguely to the photograph above the Flag Holder’s head — “who have succeeded in making a revolution.”

  “Taking power, or for that matter staying in power, does not make a revolution successful” the Flag Holder says.

  “What does, then?”

  “To call a revolution successful, it must make some lasting contribution to human dignity.” And he adds:

  “This was something you knew before you became a minister.”

  The Minister has a sense that the exchange has gone as far as it ought to, so he cuts off the conversation with a wave of his hand.

  “About Dancho,” he begins a third time. “Let me be unmistakably clear about it; his arrest and trial were intended as a warning to all of you in this room. I tell you as a friend, there were some who felt that your escapade of the other morning demanded a bolder response. The Soviet Ambassador, who is normally the soul of mildness, was beside himself when he heard of the affair. But there were others, myself among them, who argued that a bolder response was precisely what you were looking for, indeed, what you had calculated on. And so it was decided not to play into your hands, to warn you instead with a rap on the knuckles — “

  “You dare to call a five-year prison sentence a rap on the knuckles!’’ Octobrina explodes.

  “My dear Octobrina, when you consider the rumors that have reached my ears” — the Minister pauses for effect — “you must surely take Dancho’s arrest as a rap on the knuckles.” He massages his lips thoughtfully. “No, no, no, someone has to tell you. You have made the error of thinking that this unfortunate business in Czechoslovakia is an area in which you can play your usual games with us. I am here to correct this misconception.”

  The Minister appears to be growing bored with the conversation. “If you were going to make waves, you should have done so years ago when we collectivized agriculture, or when we expropriated the private sector.”

  “Those were things we agreed with,” Tacho says coldly. “You forget, Comrade Minister, that we are not dissidents — we are Communists.”

  The Minister looks at Tacho, amused. To everyone, he says:

  “I require your word that you will not repeat the escapade of the other morning. Give it to me and Dancho will be free to return to his silly tricks and his silly women and his silly friends. But be clear about it: No more manifestations.”

  Tapping his foot impatiently, the Minister turns to the Flag Holder. The others look toward him too. The Flag Holder sucks on the butt of a Rodopi for what seems like an eternity. Then he nods to himself as if he has just explained something to himself, and looks up. He is about to speak when the Rabbit pushes through the curtain into the room.

  “Oh, Lev,” she cries. She takes a deep breath — she has obviously been running. “Georgi’s back.”

  10

  THE DWARF’S taxi driver, a fat man known only by his last name, Kovel, has had a difficult day. He spent the morning tracking down a tourist who was rumored to have a supply of German sparkplugs. En route he double-parked near the flower market for the time it takes to run into a tabac for a package of Rodopies, and returned to find a dent in the right rear fender of his two-year-old Fiat.

  “It was a lady XX what done it,” a vendor shouted — an “XX” on the license plate indicated that the car was owned by a foreigner.

  “Which XX, for god’s sake?” Kovel demanded, but the Vendor merely shrugged and muttered:

  “I didn’t see nothing.”

  When Kovel finally found him, the tourist had a box of East German plugs, hardly worth a trip around the corner, much less across town. In disgust, Kovel went back to his apartment, only to have his wife dispatch him across town again to the hard currency store; she had heard on the grapevine that it had just received a shipment of electric hair curlers from Italy and she wanted to give a set to their daughter for her birthday. (Kovel bought two sets and sold the second, at a profit, to the wife of the man who shared the kitchen of their apartment.)

  After lunch Kovel moonlighted around the tourist hotels for a while before checking in with the Dwarf, who instructed him to put one of the Hungarians on the Budapest train. Kovel’s wife went with him hoping to find some peasants at the station with fruits and vegetables fresh from the countryside. All the way to the station she kept peering over her shoulder at the Hungarian girl, who was tall for her age, in the back seat.

  “She’s the same age as our Ekaterina,” the wife whispered to Kovel. “God knows what goes on up there.”

  “Everyone knows what goes on up there,” Kovel responded. “And you don’t have to whisper — none of them speaks a word of Bulgarian.”

  Kovel glanced at the girl in his wide-angle rearview mirror (French manufacture: a gift from Mister Dancho). The Hungarian girl was huddled in a corner of the seat, clutching a synthetic leopard-skin coat and an embroidered cloth carryall with a bread and sausage jutting out of it. Obviously on the verge of tears, she reached down to scratch her behind, then absently lifted her thin fingers to her nose. At the station, the girl became hysterical. A crowd gathered and a militiaman pushed through to see what was happening.

  “What’s this?” the militiaman challenged officiously.

  “My niece,” Kovel explained, talking quickly and shepherding the girl and her belongings toward the waiting train. “She’s crying because she’s sad to leave us, that’s all.”

  In the late afternoon, just when he was supposed to take the Dwarf into the city, Kovel discover
ed that the Fiat had a flat tire. When he turned up at the Dwarf’s house on Vitoša twenty minutes late, Bazdeev was furious.

  “Plenty goddamn taxi drivers around if you not wanting job,” he warned. But he calmed down quickly and passed Kovel a packet of hashish which he wanted him to deliver to an actor who lived on the outskirts of Sofia, along the highway that ran toward Plovdiv and the Turkish border. Kovel ate at his brother-in-law’s on the way back into the city, then parked, as usual, in front of Krimm to wait for the Dwarf.

  He is slumped in the front seat, sound asleep, when the Dwarf, the Racer, the Flag Holder and his lady friend, Elisabeta, come out of the restaurant on the run.

  “Driving fast, Kovel. Army hospital in — “ The Dwarf names a village about twenty kilometers outside of Sofia.

  They drive for a long while in silence, with Kovel flinging his passengers from side to side as he corners without braking. On Ruski Boulevard, workers are already erecting wooden bleachers on either side of Dimitrov’s tomb for the pass-in-review the following day, September 9, marking the twenty-fourth anniversary of the liberation of Bulgaria by the Red Army. A militiaman directing traffic motions Kovel to give way to a truck carrying wreaths for the tomb. The Dwarf, sitting next to Kovel, taps him sharply on the shoulder and he accelerates instead. Through his rearview mirror he sees the militiaman peer angrily at his license plate as he reaches for his notebook. The Flag Holder is in the rearview mirror too, puffing on a Rodopi, staring out the window lost in thought.

  Suddenly the Flag Holder turns to the girl. “How did you find out about it?”

  ‘‘Someone telephoned me in the Ministry on an interoffice line,” she recounts. “He didn’t give his name, and I didn’t recognize his voice. He said he knew you and honored you. He said he thought you should know that your son was back, was in the Army Hospital. Then he clicked off.”

  They are off the cobblestones now and on to the smooth paved surface of the surburban roads. Small clusters of wooden shacks, each one with two or three chickens pecking around the front door, fly past the window. Then a factory with a giant hammer and sickle over the arched en trance way.