The October Circle

by Robert Littell

  “How bad is he?” the Flag Holder asks.

  “Is someone sick?” Kovel whispers to the Dwarf.

  “Just you driving,” Bazdéev shoots back.

  “I don’t know,” Elisabeta tells the Flag Holder. “I called the hospital to make sure he was there. The girl who answered said they only give information to relatives. I told her I was his sister. She let the phone dangle for a few minutes — I could hear it tapping against the wall — and came back and said he has no sister. That’s how I know he’s there. I mean, they wouldn’t have the dossier of someone who isn’t there, would they?”

  They turn into a narrow lane lined with trees, the trunks of which have been whitewashed, and suddenly they are in front of the hospital, a gray building full of angular shadows.

  The nurse on duty in the lobby looks up from her magazine suspiciously when they troop through the door.

  “I have come to see Georgi Dimitrovich Mendeleyev,” the Flag Holder announces. “I am his father.”

  He tells the same thing, in he same tone, to the night intern, and then again to the army doctor with the cropped mustache who identifies himself as the duty officer.

  “How is it you know he is here?” the doctor inquires.

  The Flag Holder snaps his head from side to side, shaking off the question the way a dog shakes off water. “The boy — where is he?”

  The doctor hesitates, looks at the telephone on the desk, then back at the Flag Holder. Then he jerks his head in a “follow me” gesture and starts briskly down the corridor. The footfalls from the group follow him through the dimly lit hallway. The doctor stops with his back against the door marked “Unit 9.”

  “You should know what it is that is wrong with him,” he tells the Flag Holder softly.

  The Flag Holder nods imperceptibly.

  “The boy will recover, but you should know that he has been — “ The doctor hesitates. Then, in a barely audible voice he finishes the sentence:

  “He has been mutilated.”

  Elisabeta turns away and covers her face with her hands.

  After a moment the Flag Holder asks:

  “How mutilated? Mutilated how?”

  The Racer starts to say something, but the Flag Holder repeats the question. His voice is flat, deliberate.

  “Mutilated how?”

  The army doctor glances at the Rabbit. “Perhaps it would be better if she — “

  “Mutilated how?”

  The doctor shrugs and tells him, in cold clinical terms, what has been done to the boy Georgi.

  “Oh my god my god my god my god,” the Racer whispers hoarsely. He puts his hand and head against the wall to steady himself.

  The Flag Holder shuts his eyes and fills his lungs with air and lets it out again slowly, unevenly. When he has controlled himself, he pushes past the doctor into the room. The Racer and the doctor follow him. The Dwarf and Elisabeta stay behind in the corridor.

  The Flag Holder calls his son’s name.

  “Georgi.”

  The boy, propped up in bed, turns his head in the direction of the voice.

  “How is it with you, Papa?”

  The Flag Holder touches the boy on the part of the arm not covered in bandages.

  “How is it with you?”

  “I’m fine, really,” the boy assures him. The bandages over his face muffle his voice, which sounds extraordinarily nasal. “Oh, I’m missing bits and pieces, so they tell me. But it’s nothing compared to what they did to the others — “

  The boy’s voice breaks. He strains forward. “The little c unts,” he cries. His words have a liquid sound, as if they are rising like bubbles in a pond and popping wetly when they reach the surface. He collapses back into his pillow, sobbing softly. After a while mucus seeps onto the starched pillow case from between the folds of the bandage covering his nose.

  11

  THE GIRL’S HAND darts to the Racer’s arm in alarm.

  “There — do you hear it?” she whispers.

  The Racer stops talking and listens.

  “Hear what?”

  “There — there. Can’t you hear it?”

  They are sitting at the kitchen table in the Dwarf’s house on Vitoša, snacking on lukewarm coffee and stale pastry. The girl squeezes his arm again and Tacho hears it this time: a faint but utterly unmistakable sucking in of air. The room, the house, the hillside seem to be breathing.

  “Oh, go look” the girl pleads, her eyes full of fear.

  Tacho scrambles to his feet and disappears into the house. Soon the breathing stops. He returns a moment later.

  “Kovel fell asleep on the couch. Some of Angel’s Hungarians taped his breathing. They were playing it back over the hi-fi speakers.”

  “I thought the house was breathing.” The girl shudders. “It gave me the creeps,” she says in English, and then she smiles nervously and translates it into Russian as best she can. “It frightened me.”

  “Georgi’s breathing sounded strange too,” Tacho remembers. “It came in great gasps through the gauze that covered his mouth. With each breath, the gauze was sucked in and out like a diaphragm. I thought I would faint from the smell — “

  “You were up to where they — “

  “Where they flew him into the Ukraine, yes. Georgi said they thought it was a training exercise until the Russians issued live ammunition. He said a Soviet colonel mustered them at dawn and read them a letter from some Czech workers requesting military assistance against the counterrevolutionary forces loose in their country. That’s how it began.” The Racer sips his coffee. “He had a wild night crossing the Carpathians on those Russian trucks …”

  The Racer talks on quietly, listening all the while to the echo of Georgi’s voice in his brain — muffled by bandages, at times hysterical, at times serene.

  “… we had a wild night crossing the Carpathians on those Russian trucks. The loose canvas cracked like a whip against the sides. The night was cool, cold even — when we stopped to pee, vapor rose from the piss. God, but it was a great long wild ride. The villages we went through were shuttered and dark and dead, except for one where there was a man with an official ribbon diagonally across his chest, and a woman and two children, standing at an intersection waving small Russian flags. They must have thought we were Russians, you see. We waved back and went on, stopping only to pee and, once, to eat, and every now and again to cut telephone wires.

  “The first roadblocks were outside Banská Bystrica. Someone had pulled a wagon full of logs across the road and broken the wooden wheels with an ax so that the cart sank onto its axles. We found Russians and Polish soldiers in Banská Bystrica when we got there, guarding the Party building and the post office, and there were some tanks parked in a hay field outside of town. I remember seeing this farmer cutting the hay between the parked tanks.

  “We lost Sasha just outside Banská Bystrica. Shots rang out. The trucks screeched to a stop. We all jumped out and took cover in a drainage ditch along the side of the road. There was some yelling and more shooting up front. When we moved on, they were carrying Sasha back into town on a litter. His hand had fallen over the side of the litter and swayed as they carried him. There were also two dead Czechs, sprawled in pools of thick red ooze. Why did they do it, Papa? Why did they invite us in and then shoot at us?

  “You wouldn’t have recognized Bratislava. I was there a year ago when I went camping with … whom did I go camping with, Papa? I sent you a picture postcard, remember, of the cow wearing a man’s hat. The Russians had taken over the city by the time we got there. They frisked the Czechs before they let them into public buildings. There was one young soldier who would blush like crazy when he frisked the women. Their jeeps were whizzing around the city, always with two soldiers in front and two civilians in back. The sides of the jeeps, and the sides of the tanks parked in the lot across from the railroad station, were plastered with spattered eggs and tomatoes, and slogans in whitewash. The slogans said things like: ‘Ivan Ivanovi
ch, go home.’ I don’t understand why they invited us in. I don’t understand it.

  “Our boys camped in a soccer stadium on the edge of the city. We kept the stadium lights on at night and patrolled the entrances. It was hard to fall alseep with the lights in our eyes like that, but after a few nights we got used to it. We shaved in the public toilets under the bleachers. The old woman who cleaned up after us asked us in Russian why we had come. She thought we were Russians too. Everyone thought we were Russians. We told her we had been invited in. She asked who had invited us in, but I couldn’t remember the names on the letter the colonel read us.

  “There was a workers’ canteen nearby and we got permission to go there, as long as we went in a group and kept our weapons with us. We drank Czech beer at one end of the bar. The workers who were there looked the other way. A young boy, he couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen, came over to us and asked us in Russian, ‘What right do you have here, in our country, in our canteen?’ One among us started to tell him about the invitation, but he interrupted. ‘We, the Czechs, don’t want you Russians here. Go now.’ Our boys told him we weren’t Russian but Bulgarian, but he didn’t seem to understand. His legs were shaking as he walked away.

  “We took to going to the canteen every evening for beer, but the Czechs never spoke to us. Not once did they speak to us. Then one night we found three girls there. They weren’t like the others; they were laughing and seemed interested in us. We talked to them for a while, and bought them beers, which they drank. One of them whispered they would meet us in the woods across the stream from the soccer stadium. Vasily said it was foolish to go, but we went anyhow — Dimitri, Vasily and me. We shaved carefully and showered and snuck past the sentry, who winked and turned the other way, and made our way to the woods, never thinking, never believing the girls would show up.

  “They were there all right, along with twenty boys. We tried to run. Vasily almost got across the stream, calling all the while for help, screaming for help. They stripped us naked in front of the girls, who were laughing still, but it was a nervous kind of laughter. I thought that would be the end of it. But then they tied us to trees and pulled out razor blades and started in on Vasily. Some of the Czechs turned away, and one of the girls vomited. I must have fainted, but they got water from the stream and threw some on me and started in on me. I tried to tell them I wasn’t Russian, Papa, but I had to tell them I wasn’t in Russian because they didn’t speak Bulgarian, so they didn’t believe me. Vasily’s dead, you know — in the hospital, he saw himself in a mirror and slashed his wrists. I don’t know what happened to Dimitri. Do you know what happened to Dimitri?”

  “…he asked us whether we knew what had happened to his friend Dimitri,” the Racer remembers. “Lev told him no, he didn’t know. All the time he was talking, the boy Georgi was holding on to Lev’s hand, gripping it, clinging to it as if he were drowning and it would keep him afloat.”

  There is a peel of girlish laughter from somewhere upstairs, then a barked command from Bazdeev, then a door slams and a radio comes on.

  “How did the Flag Holder react to all this?” the girl asks the Racer.

  “That’s the point,” the Racer replies. “He didn’t. He listened carefully, the way he listens carefully to everybody, but he didn’t react. Georgi must have sensed this — maybe he felt it through Lev’s hand. Because he said something — “

  The Racer bends his head again, straining for the echo of Georgi’s voice. “He said that his father often told him about the war, about how he had been tortured. But Georgi said he had the impression that for his father, memory was devoid of emotion. While for him, memory was emotion. This must have released a floor of memories, because Georgi started talking about his childhood. He remembered the story about how Lev got the SS doctor who had done medical experiments on women to perform an appendectomy on Georgi. I remember it too. Lev got him out of prison and put a pistol to his head and cocked it and held it there through the operation. Later, when we examined the boy, we could barely find the scar. Georgi also remembered how his father had talked his way out of the concentration camp — “

  “How on earth did he do that?”

  “It was in the last days of the war. They could hear the sound of Russian artillery in the distance, rolling closer like a thunderstorm. The guards had begun shooting batches of prisoners and bulldozing their corpses into a trench. Lev told the assistant commandant that he would personally save him from the Communists if he opened the gate and let the prisoners escape. The assistant commandant asked, ‘How can I know you mean what you say?’ Lev looked him in the eyes and said, ‘You have my word.’ He is very imposing, you know for yourself, so the assistant commandant grasped at the straw and opened the gates.”

  “And did he save him?”

  The Racer whispers the answer. “He handed him over to the prisoners, and they mutilated him.”

  “The boy Georgi, does he know the end of the story too?”

  The Racer nods. “Georgi accused his father of having been brutal. It’s odd, but I never thought of the Flag Holder as brutal. If I thought about it at all, I would have associated him with gentleness. But Georgi suddenly let go of his father’s hand and touched the bandages on his face with his fingertips, which were swollen. And he said, he said” — again Tacho listens for the words, the tone — “he said, ‘Violence is the opiate of the people.’ “

  The girl reaches across the table and covers Tacho’s hand with her own. Tacho sees that her eyes are wet. A telephone rings somewhere inside the house. For a long time no one picks it up. Then Bazdéev shouts down from upstairs, and the phone stops ringing. Tacho looks at his watch. It is almost seven-thirty.

  Tacho goes to the window and pushes open the shutters. “Look, it’s light out already.”

  There is a commotion in the living room; the Dwarf is waking Kovel. The Hungarians are running barefoot through the bedrooms upstairs. The front door slams. Kovel can be heard starting up his taxi. Bazdéev sticks his dwarf head through the doorway leading to the kitchen.

  “The Rabbit is telephoned,” he announced huskily. “She is crazy with fright. The Flag Holder has disappeared.”

  12

  THE RABBIT flings open the door of the apartment before the Racer’s finger can jab at the buzzer. She stands there looking almost feverish, her eyes red and puffy, desperately glad to see them. With a rush of words, they all start to talk at once. Tears spurt into the Rabbit’s eyes. Melanie puts her arm around her and guides her into the bathroom. When they come out, the Rabbit’s face is glistening wet from the cold water that has been splashed on it.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, sinking into a corner of the couch. “I’m sorry.”

  The Racer takes her hand. “It’s all right, Elisabeta, but for god’s sake, tell us what happened?”

  She sucks on her lower lip, gathering her thoughts. “Kovel dropped us here around midnight,” she remembers, controlling herself, measuring out her words. “We came straight up. Lev didn’t say very much, and I didn’t ask him anything — I could see he didn’t want to talk. I worked for a while on the bedroom wallpaper, then I got into bed and waited. About two or three, I don’t really remember the time, I came in here. He was at his desk” — she glances over, a filmy look in her eyes — “at his desk, writing in his notebook. There was a glass of … cognac in front of him, and — “

  The Rabbit starts to sob again. Melanie offers her a handkerchief. She blows her nose noisily and resumes her story, twisting the handkerchief in her fingers. “The glass of cognac — it was half empty. Lev saw me looking at the glass and told me to go to sleep, not to worry and go to sleep is what he told me. I asked him to let me stay, but he wouldn’t let me, so I went back into the bedroom. I tried to keep awake, but I must have dozed, because the next thing I knew it was light out. That’s when I saw that he was gone. The cognac bottle was empty. Oh, Tacho, he hasn’t taken a drink in two years!” The Rabbit shudders, chilled to the bone
by what she is thinking. “I’m frightened out of my mind. This whole Czech business, and now Georgi.” She looks unblinkingly at Tacho and speaks quietly, as if speaking quietly will convince him of what she is about to say. “He’s going to do something desperate, you know.”

  The Racer takes it all in, nodding, squeezing her hand as she finishes. He stands up and walks over to the window. Directly below the Flag Holder’s apartment is an old prewar house that has been turned into a children’s day-care center. Boys and girls in blue smocks are crawling through a length of pipe cemented to the ground, or racing wildly around the shrubbery. The teacher sits on the steps, her head angled up toward the sun, her eyes closed. The boxlike prefabricated balconies of the apartments on the other side of the school are full of crates of fruit, drying clothes, motorcycles, tools, tarpaulins, strings of green peppers. On one balcony a woman in curlers leans over the railing talking animatedly to a neighbor. Beyond the apartment looms Vitoša. High up, where the houses stop and the woods begin, the leaves are already yellow.

  His mind made up, Tacho takes the Dwarf into the foyer and speaks to him in a low voice. “Angel, get Kovel to check his hangouts — the Milk Bar, Club Balkan, the Jewish Centre. There’s always the chance he just went to work early. Maybe Kovel should check out the hospital too. And get some of your circus friends to start looking for him. You’d better alert Valyo and Octobrina and Atanas. Use the phone in the bedroom.”

  Tacho sends the Rabbit and the American girl into the kitchen to heat up some coffee. With the room to himself, he sits down at the Flag Holder’s desk. He pushes away a saucer overflowing with ashes and cigarette butts. On one side of the desk is an ordinary kitchen tumbler with some yellowish liquid on the bottom. The Racer lifts it to his nose — cognac. He sees the glass has left a ring on the table. Next to the ring are two silver-framed photographs: one is of Georgi the day he earned his paratrooper wings; the second, a group shot taken in front of the Rila Monastery during the war, shows the Racer, Mister Dancho, Valyo, Popov and the Dwarf (standing on a box), all looking very young, their arms flung over each other’s shoulders. On the other side of the desk, sandwiched between two leaden bookends, is a loose-leaf notebook — the Flag Holder’s Nonperson manuscript. Tacho thumbs through it until he comes to the last page that has writing on it. What he sees numbs him; for a moment he thinks he is going to be sick.