The October Circle

by Robert Littell

  “They are not clients,” Petar tells the other man. “They are my guests.”

  “They are always guests,” the first man sneers. “So were they guests, those hikers last week. So too were they guests, the Greek businessman and his wife the week before that. The regulations under which we function specify we are to close at eleven” — the man’s voice turns shrill with anger— “but you, Petar, go your own way. Don’t think I don’t know why, because I do know why. You make it appear as if your restaurant is more productive than mine. But the only way you can do that is by serving after eleven. Well, you are not going to get away with it. I am going to report you this time.”

  “Do as you like,” Petar scoffs. “Do whatever will make you feel a man.”

  “You, Petar, dare say that to me,” the other man challenges in a hurt voice.

  “I say that to anyone who tells me he is going to the militia,” Petar tells him.

  “Who said anything about going to the militia?”

  “You spoke of turning in a report,” Petar reminds him caustically.

  “That was a figure of speech,” the visitor maintains. His hands shoot out, palms up. “Are you so thick, then, you don’t recognize a figure of speech when you hear one? I have come here to discuss with you, man to man, the feeding of clients after the regular closing hour of eleven. Where is the crime in that?”

  “And I have told you, man to man, that I am not feeding clients. I am feeding my guests.”

  “I have your word on that?”

  “You have my word, yes.”

  The visitor starts toward the door. “You understand, Petar, I am merely looking after my interests. Your restaurant has fewer tables than mine, and greater income. The District Secretary is certain to start asking questions. What do I say to him when he asks these questions?”

  “Say to him,” Petar advises, “that I feed customers after the obligatory closing hour of eleven. That way, he will issue a warning to me, and be pleased with both of us — with you for keeping your eyes open, with me for surpassing my quota.”

  “You consent to my saying such a thing, then?”

  “Of course say it,” Petar urges. “We will have the last laugh.”

  The two men shake hands warmly, and the door closes behind the visitor.

  “How is it,” Tacho asks Petar when he returns, “you do more business than he does if you have a smaller restaurant?”

  “Simple,” Petar confesses, pouring himself another full glass of red wine. “He weighs out each portion according to the instructions from the Party — seventy-five grams of chopped meat, one hundred fifty grams of sliced tomatoes, two hundred grams of boiled potatoes. Christ, when a Communist makes love, he is only permitted to expel twenty cc’s of sperm! I beg your pardon, American lady, but that’s how it is with us.”

  “And you don’t weigh your portions?” Tacho inquires.

  “We don’t even have a scale!” Petar boasts. “Isn’t that right, Blagoi?”

  From behind the bar Blagoi smiles wickedly.

  Later, in an icy hotel room — there is no central heating, only more blankets—the girl undresses with the light on. This time the Racer props himself up on an elbow and watches her.

  A donkey brays under their window, waking them before the cocks crow.

  “Get up,” Tacho shakes the girl. “I have something I want to show you.”

  Tacho puts on a pair of hiking boots and some work clothes that Melanie has not seen before.

  “Where did you get those?” she wants to know.

  “Petar,” the Racer says.

  It is warmer outside than in, and Tacho leads the way up a narrow footpath that runs parallel to the river. The houses of Melnik are of a style Melanie has not seen before — sprawling two-story wooden structures, with the second story hanging over the first. Every house has something to distinguish it: carved shutters, a colorful weathercock on the sloping roof, delicate lace curtains on the windows, a fist carved out of wood which serves as a door knocker. Huge piles of cut logs are stacked under the overhangs of the houses. Chickens peck the ground near a garden of tomatoes planted late and no longer ripening on the vines.

  “I see what you mean about the sky,” Melanie announces. The sand cliffs, carved into exotic contours by centuries of wind and rain, loom around her, over her.

  Tacho turns the corner of one house and spots the boy with the Moskovich from the night before. He is stumbling up the steps of a house with his arms full of boxes. The boy’s wife, a chubby girl wearing a new pair of high-heeled East German shoes, totters uncertainly along behind him with another armload. Her father brings up the rear. He is carrying an electric iron, an electric blender, an electric heater and an electric toaster. A neighbor flings open her shutters across the path and leans out.

  “So he’s back from where he went,” she observes, eyeing the boxes in the old man’s arms.

  “Yes, he’s back,” the old man allows. “He has come by automobile, of which he is the owner.”

  “A Russian automobile,” the daughter calls over her shoulder excitedly.

  “A Moskovich,” the boy corrects her, emerging from the house empty-handed.

  The old woman takes this in. “Aren’t many in Melnik what owns a private automobile,” she notes, obviously impressed.

  “Aren’t any,” the boy corrects her, blushing with pride, “less you count the co-op van and the hotel pickup.”

  The higher the Racer climbs in the village, the closer the houses get to the river until finally, near the limit of the village under the cliffs, the upper floors hang over the river itself. Beyond the last house, Tacho pauses to look back at Melnik, which tumbles away from him, like the river, toward the main road far below.

  They continue to climb the cliffs until Melnik is lost from view. About twenty minutes later the path flattens out, the river narrows and shallows and the land becomes greener and softer underfoot. Presently a kind of miniature valley opens before them. In the middle of the valley, some thirty or forty peasants are lined up before a brightly painted one-room cottage which has been constructed on the edge of the river.

  An old woman with coarse skin and a bristly mustache sits on a sturdy chair before the front door, her head cocked, staring through sightless eyes. Baskets of food are piled behind her chair.

  “The peasant Slaveykov,” she calls. Her Adam’s apple bobs when she talks, and her voice sounds like the croaking of a bullfrog.

  A heavy set peasant with knee-high boots and an embroidered cape steps from the line and approaches the woman. She holds out her hand and he places something in it.

  “Money?” Melanie whispers.

  “Sugar cubes,” Tacho says. “She is the Witch of Melnik — member I told you about her the first time we met?”

  The Witch turns the lumps of sugar in her thick fingers, licking and sniffing them for a moment.

  “The child your wife carries will be stillborn,” she croaks. “Plant maize. Enlarge your flock, for you will lose half of it come spring to a disease the name of which no one will know.”

  The peasant Slaveykov grasps the Witch’s hand and kisses it.

  “The tanner Stojanov,” the Witch summons the next person. A thin man with a bushy mustache steps from the line and hesitates, but his wife pushes him forward. He advances warily, and drops two sugars into the Witch’s outstretched palm as he would into a cup of coffee too hot to touch.

  “You don’t believe,” she cackles, and communes with the sky:

  “A nonbeliever.”

  There is a murmur from the other peasants in the line.

  “No difference,” the Witch mumbles, and she begins licking and sniffing at the sugars. “Your son Panchu will walk again — the bone was well set.”

  Stojanov glances at his wife, shaken; she sinks to her knees and touches her forehead to the ground.

  “The investment your godfather invites you to make is a good one. The winter will be mild and the harvest will be prosperous
. Stay away from electricity.”

  The tanner Stojanov kisses her hand, but the Witch pulls it back and rises slowly to her feet, where she stands silently, her head cocked, listening to the river.

  “All honor,” she croaks, “to the one from Melnik—the Racer Abadzhiev.”

  Tacho steps from the line. The peasants turn to look at him, whispering excitedly to each other.

  “Don’t stand for me, old woman,” Tacho says, approaching the Witch.

  “Have you then become a man of movement?” she challenges, settling back into her chair.

  “I am becoming,” Tacho replies. He reaches in his pocket for the sugars he put under the pillow the night before. The Witch fingers them for a moment, then licks them and raises them to her nostrils.

  “Even so,” she says vaguely, as if the sugars merely confirm what she already knows. “Beware of a Greek appearing to bear a gift,” the Witch declares carefully, articulating each word. “Do you see it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Tacho stammers.

  “You will lay the foundation of a house that your sons will build and your grandsons will live in,” the Witch intones feverishly. “Do you see it?”

  “No,” Tacho whispers.

  “No matter,” the Witch cackles, “I see it. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

  Limping painfully on his bad leg, Petar meets them halfway up the sand cliffs. His grandson walks alongside, holding his hand. Blagoi struggles along behind them carrying the bicycle over his shoulder.

  “It is done,” Petar says, motioning to the bicycle. The grandson settles back on his haunches and stares up at the Racer. Petar breathes with difficulty because of the climb. “Five gears,” he says, “closely spaced, with a full two hundred and twenty-five centimeters on the bottom one. Remember to let some air out before you ride to increase traction.”

  Petar hands the Racer a small shepherd’s knapsack, which he hangs over his shoulder. “The uniform is in here.” Tears well up in the old man’s eyes. “I never thought you would ride that bicycle again,” he admits. “I never thought …” He shakes his head, unable to say more.

  Wordlessly, they embrace.

  Tacho turns to the girl, whose face is contorted. “Let me have your wristwatch,” he says.

  She hands it to him. It is a man’s watch, with a sweep second hand. “It was my father’s — he used to time himself with it. It has a stopwatch. To make it start, you press here. To stop, here.”

  “I’ll give it back to you in Greece,” Tacho tells her.

  Melanie starts to look around wildly.

  “Listen to me,” Tacho tells her. “I have always been intrigued by two things in my life: bicycle riding and politics. Now they have come together — bicycle riding has become a political act.”

  The girl fights back tears. Tacho leads her a step away from the others and talks to her quietly, quickly. “There is a poem by the Russian Mandelstam called ‘I Have Studied the Science of Parting.’ Atanas read it to me many times. As for me, I have never studied parting before today — I had no one to part from, and no place to go. Now you have given me the gift of both.”

  Tacho kisses her formally on both cheeks, and then on the lips, and embraces her. For an instant she clings to him.

  Blagoi leans the bicycle against a rock and, with a wave, starts down the path toward Melnik. Petar takes his gandson’s hand and follows him. Tacho gently pushes the girl away. She looks into his face, her eyes wide with fright.

  “What did the Witch mean?” she asks. “ ‘You will lay the foundation of a house that your sons will build — ’ ”

  “ ‘And your grandsons will live in,’ “ Tacho finishes it for her. “I don’t know yet what it means.”

  Melanie nods once, and hurries down the hill after Petar.

  20

  THE RACER recognizes the spot from the war (and a hundred dreams): the clearing where they buried the grade-school teacher from Blagoevgrad, the old forestry trail sloping down through heavy timber to join the main highway just after it twists, in an almost perfect U, around a hairpin curve. They had come across it while combing the countryside for an ambush site, the Flag Holder, the Minister, Mister Dancho and the Racer. It was a serious business, the selecting of ambush sites; your life could depend on it. They inspected several possibilities, mulled the advantages and drawbacks of each and settled on this one as the most promising; the forestry trail especially interested them because it offered a convenient route for the getaway. At the last moment the Minister, pouring over the map, raised an objection: the gunfire could be heard at the frontier post, he said, which meant they would have to terminate the ambush quickly before help had a chance to arrive. The Flag Holder didn’t agree. It was the very nearness to the frontier, he argued, that made the spot so attractive; the Germans, knowing they were so close, would never suspect an ambush here.

  In the end, the Flag Holder was right: the first German to die, the machine gunner on the open mount of the lead truck, had taken off his helmet and was sunning himself atop the turret when the burst of gunfire caught him in the face. The partisans then blew up two trucks which were supposed to be full of tank treads (they didn’t stop to confirm this) and retreated up the old forestry trail into the Pirins on the run, carrying the only one among them to be wounded — a nearsighted grade-school teacher from Blagoevgrad. He had blown off his own leg with a clumsily handled grenade, and was bleeding to death from the stump despite the belt that Mister Dancho had tightened around it.

  In the clearing, they scooped out a shallow grave near a dead oak and waited impatiently for the grade-school teacher to die. Tacho wet his lips with a damp rag. The grade-school teacher licked the moisture with his tongue, which had swollen to twice its normal size. He turned his head and saw the stony-faced partisans squatting on their haunches next to the grave, fidgeting nervously, fingering the loose earth, worrying about whether the gunfire had been heard at the frontier.

  “I’m trying to hurry,” the grade-school teacher said thickly. And as soon as he decently could, he died.

  The clearing has not changed much in twenty-four years. All traces of the shallow grave have vanished, and for a moment the Racer is tempted to hunt for it, to turn up the earth near the dead oak and see if the bones of the grade-school teacher are still there. It sticks in Tacho’s mind that the grade-school teacher came from the Valley of the Roses. He remembers the Flag Holder telling him, just before he set the speed record, how the peasant women harvested dew in the rose fields. It comes to him now: Lev had the story from the grade-school teacher. Tacho would like to put a rose on the grave — if there were a rose around and a grave to put it on.

  There is the scar of a campfire in the center of the clearing; several people have eaten here, and slept here afterward. Poking through the debris, Tacho finds some empty cans and a broken can opener which he recognizes as being of Russian manufacture.

  “One can opener, broken, manufactured in the Soviet Union and popular with Bulgarian housewives in the early nineteen fifties,” Tacho says out loud — in his mind’s eye he can hear Popov delivering the day’s inventory. “Four empty, rusted cans, apparently opened with this very same can opener. One spoon, rusted, apparently used to eat the food that came from the cans opened by the Russian can opener. One shoelace, black, of the kind used by hunters or frontier patrolmen. One razor blade, rusted, origin uncertain. They say that shaving is the only thing that separates men from monkey. So they say. Sssssssss.”

  Tacho feels a great emptiness, which manifests itself as a tightness in the chest. With a conscious effort, he forces himself to concentrate on the ride ahead of him. He sits cross-legged on the ground and methodically eats the food Petar has put in the knapsack: chunks of cured ham, small pieces of dark peasant bread. His throat is dry and he has difficulty swallowing, so he washes down each bite with a mouthful of water from a canteen.

  Afterward, his hands burrowing deep inside the pockets of his sheepskin coat, his eyes fixed on the gro
und, he starts down the forestry trail toward the highway, one hundred forty meters away, kicking aside branches and stones as he goes. He inspects it again on his way up to the clearing, then coasts down on the bicycle to memorize the contours of the trail. He climbs to the top with the bicycle and strips off the sheepskin coat. Selecting a gear, he leans the bicycle against a tree at the top of the trail and takes up a position on the side of the clearing that overlooks the highway to the north.

  “Ready, set, go.” He punches Melanie’s stopwatch and dashes for the bicycle, leaps on and starts down the trail, picking up speed as he goes. The trees flash by with only the faintest view of the road between them. He dips onto the hard surface of the highway and stops the sweep second hand in the same instant. It reads nine and eight-tenths seconds.

  The Racer makes three more trial runs before he is satisfied that his timing is accurate — for accurate it must be if his plan is to work. If he comes out onto the highway too soon, the other riders will see him; too late and he will never catch up with them and be spotted at the frontier.

  Ten seconds to get down the forestry trail. In ten seconds, Tacho calculates, the four Bulgarian riders, pushing uphill in third gear toward the hairpin curve, will cover one hundred twenty meters. Tacho paces off one hundred twenty meters down the highway and ties his handkerchief to a twig on the side of the road to mark the spot. When the last of the four Bulgarian riders reaches the handkerchief, he will dart for his bicycle and ride down the forestry trail and come out — god willing — right behind them. Then it will be just a matter of keeping up.

  In the clearing again, Tacho strips off the hiking boots and peasant clothes that the Trainer provided. From the knapsack he pulls his old riding suit, the one he wore so many years ago in the Valley of the Roses — black riding shoes, red shorts and a green T-shirt with the number eight in red on the back. It is the same uniform that Tacho has designed for the four riders.

  He packs his hiking clothes in the knapsack, and wraps the knapsack in the sheepskin coat and hides the bundle behind some bushes in the woods. He looks at Melanie’s watch — half an hour to go — and forces himself to urinate. Then he checks the bicycle again. He is about to lean it against the tree when he remembers the Trainer’s warning about the traction, so he lets a small amount of air out of both tires. That done, he takes up his position on the edge of the clearing overlooking the highway. The Trainer has left some rock candy in the pocket of his shorts, and he sucks noisily on a piece. After a while he feels chilled — nervousness, he thinks — and begins to run in place to keep warm.