[Wednesday, January 23, 2013]
He looked into Mariola’s eyes and his heart broke from anguish and powerlessness: there was no hope in her eyes, only fear.
They’d been on the run for a few days when they’d made a fatal mistake. There was no use in cursing each other out about it now: they’d sent the miller to the Urva neighborhood for provisions, and the grocer would’ve had to have been an idiot not to figure out what was going on when the customer asked for sixteen packs of cigarettes, all different brands. It didn’t take long for the search party to come after them—an entire horde of rabid anti-partisan mongrels from Veliko Turnovo. Sheytanov had yelled up at his men to keep running, then sprawled across the mill-stream, shooting at anyone from the enraged mob who showed his head above the trees and bushes—just to make them panic and lose time by having to bury their heads into the piles of last year’s leaves. Somewhere behind him, Mariola attempted to take her own life. She grabbed a gun and put it to her head, and were it not for Zhelyo, she may have succeeded. “Mariola!” he hissed in her ear and tore the gun away. “I’ll rip your head off, fool! Stop this nonsense!” He then dragged her up in between the trees—away from the forest ambush and into the icy rain, which hadn’t stopped for days in that spring of twenty-five, and they were all soaked down to their frozen bones.
[Thursday, January 24, 2013]
He caught up with them all the way up at the Predel. And when he laid eyes on Mariola, drenched like a frightened forest animal and with the same spring coat she’d put on in Kilifarevo on the Monday after Easter, he quickly took off the Poseidon raincoat from his own shoulders and wrapped her up in it. He pushed the wet strands of hair from her forehead, but had no idea what to say to her.
[Friday, January 25, 2013]
Back in Kilifarevo, they couldn’t get enough of the story . . . When, on the tenth of June the previous year, a day after the coup, the bells in Kilifarevo began to toll and the crowd gathered in protest against the coup organizers, it was none other than Mariola’s father who came out to talk to the infuriated people in the village square. Whether he did so in his capacity as army reserve captain, or because he had been the former district constable of Turnovo—either way—those currently in power had made him the chair of a three-person committee of the Democratic Alliance, which was created to replace the village administration. But nobody wanted to hear a word of what he had to say. They told him that this fascist committee of his wasn’t going to be doing any work here, and announced they were dismantling it and reinstating the village administration.
And there you had it: her father had joined the newly minted fascists, and here she was running away with a band of anarchists. Not with the agrarians, not even with the communists, but with the anarchists . . .
[Saturday, January 26, 2013]
And so it went.
Twelve of them had fled Kilifarevo—and by the time they reached Konyov Roadhouse No. 24, it was only the two of them: him and the girl. Even Zhelyo took off for Turnovo Seimen and Harmanli, looking for Mityo Ganev to lead him into Turkey.
When Sheytanov saw the hopeless fear in Mariola’s eyes, he reached out his hand, helped her to her feet, and probably wanted to tell her that everything would be all right . . . but why lie to her? Nothing was going to be all right . . .
“Calm down!” he said to those villagers by the train tracks. “Take it easy with the rifle waving, or you’ll do something stupid. . .”
[Sunday, January 27, 2013]
[A long time later, in a completely different time, there would still be those who remembered how in the late afternoon of the twenty-sixth of May, nineteen twenty-five, a whole herd of cops—uniformed and plain-clothes murderers—brought two people, a man and a woman, into the station in Nova Zagora. They were bound to each other by an awfully short rope—his left hand to her right—and it wasn’t until they got them into the muddied yard that they separated them.]
[Monday, January 28, 2013]
Dusk set as king’s guards arrived at the police station. They were led by some sort of lieutenant. Darkness had set in completely by the time this lieutenant took out a piece of paper and started walking around the cells, calling out each person on the list. After he called out yet another name, the elite officers dragged the respective person out of the cell and pushed him outside, where the person was then chained up. Each time they hammered down the wedges into the shackles’ rings, the yard echoed with a steel clang. They took Sheytanov out last.
3.
[Friday, February 1, 2013]
One Wednesday in November, a little after the National Assembly elections, right on Michaelmas, November eighth, when butchers marched in the streets to celebrate their patron, Sheytanov and Milev had just established a brick-and-mortar location for their editorial office: the small apartment of one Marcho from the village of Marcha. The office was located at 145 Rakovski Street, and the poet joked that he worked right across from the Council of Ministers. Marcho’s landlord—a civil procedures lawyer, a civil law specialist, as the sign outside proclaimed—was an old man completely disinterested in politics, and even less so in literature. He had a son who was studying somewhere in Europe and a paraplegic wife, whom he had to take out for a walk in a wheelchair every day, so keeping track of the comings and goings from his one-story house wasn’t a priority. He even ignored the sheet of paper stuck on the brick-colored siding with four drawing pins that read Plamuk Magazine . . . The poet went around to all the Sofia presses, waving his hand disdainfully at any mention by the directors of their unreasonable prices, announcing coldly that money was no issue—he wasn’t there to haggle. All that mattered was the quality of the publication. Their mouths gaped open and, who knows why, they even started to lower their prices and immediately scattered all sorts of samples on their writing tables: beautiful typographic paper, matte and glossy card stock for the covers and inks and letters made of lead, and antimony for color prints. They sent the workmen to bring artistic jobbing fonts and all sorts of engraving plates: right- and left-pointing arrows; vignettes with grape leaves or finely engraved fascicules, ornaments with interlaced designs and monograms with Latin letters, anything you could imagine . . . The engraving plates, their precious copper gleaming, weighed no more than a feather because their overlays were made out of hollow cubes from an unknown African tree—light yet resilient. It was reliable and made to last forever . . . They explained all this in great detail, but the poet again gave a disdainful wave of his hand and told them they could put away this garbage. He asked them not to waste his time with unsightly stock imagery, as the magazine would be new and different.
“You can sell this bullshit to Podvurzachov. But not to me. I’m going to work only with original lithographs. The typeface will be Korina and that’s that; I’m not discussing this any further.”
The printers would quickly agree and begin to imply of even deeper discounts. He responded that he still had to think about it, and then left to go to yet another printer.
And so it went.
[Saturday, February 2, 2013]
Right around that time Geo Milev wrote to five people, inviting them as contributors. He wrote that he was starting a new magazine, which he referred to as “superb” and which would, as its name Plamuk suggested, set the literary world ablaze. It would be something entirely different, it would be exactly what everyone had long ago agreed was missing. He wrote that it wouldn’t be “expressionistic,” it would be nothing like Vezny, and that Georgi Bakalov, who thought himself a monopolist of all leftist publications, had already been cut off from it, since he had somehow gotten it in his head that he was going to be Plamuk’s guru and use it as a communist pamphlet. New! Every time he got to the part that Plamuk would be illustrated, he swelled with pride. Illustrated, he wrote. We have the funding. And he especially delighted in ending each letter with the following: Circulation: 3,000. Honorariums: substantial! He signed off with, I am eagerly awaiting your response. Yours, Geo Milev. He was e
lated and impatient.
It wasn’t clear if it was these letters—not yet officially sent—that caused the news of Geo Milev himself starting a new magazine to spread so fast and so fiercely around all of Sofia that had turned the tiny room at 145 Rakovski into a veritable madhouse.
Disheveled poets with yellow-tinted lenses flocked from all over with bags bursting with titanic opuses, and Milev read and read and read . . . He read everything, skipping nothing and swearing through it all. “Oh, here’s another one!” he roared and recited out loud: “Poor, pallid Bedouins, wandering desolate deserts, mounted on camels, their legs thin as pins . . . Unbelievable!” he yelled, and pulled out another piece of paper from the piles of poems. “When the beak of the wood-pie taps the tired tree . . . Bravo! You’re one dangerous forgeron, my friend. Very modernistic, I’m simply speechless. I haven’t been privy to such literary crap in quite a while!” and things of that nature. He’d then dress them down even further, address them with a fierce derision and tell one author he didn’t know the difference between Thermopylae and Propylaea, or palindrome and palisade; he’d tell another that he wrote madrigals with the exquisite touch of an iron stove; and a third he told to, quite simply, eat shit . . . It was as though he was possessed by a demon of condescension. He threw their folders at them and exclaimed he’d better not see their faces back there again, uniquely giftless as they were, then rudely kicked them out, while they demanded to know the meaning of forgeron, and when they did find out—they conceived a hatred for the poet deep within their wounded souls. “Opa!” he would yell after the door slammed shut behind yet another hurt, tearful loser. “Ladies and Gentlemen, yours truly has gained another savage little nemesis! . . . This one here, zum Beispiel, I fully expect to become a mighty literary warrior.”
And he would laugh darkly, unaware of exactly how right he had been. (Or maybe he had been very aware, who can say.)
[Wednesday, February 6, 2013]
He also cursed those whose essays he did like—but in such a way that they turned scarlet with pride. He alternated between calling them literary heroes and a literary army-supply train, army privates and feebles, demons, waywards and lambs and a literary band of brothers, until they became enraged, suddenly vociferous, taking off and returning before dark, tortured by love and hope and with still more poetry in their hands. Sometimes they materialized wearing two different shoes—let’s say one black, one red—and the poet sourly remarked: “Fools! So this is how one becomes a bohemian . . .”
Once, Sheytanov heard him explain writing to a very young man. At first he could barely contain his laughter, but thought better of it and listened—and suddenly the need to mock disappeared.
“Listen to me boy,” the poet declared, “here’s a little piece of advice from me about what it takes to write. Buy a notebook. Sit down and write something on the first page—write whatever you like. A poem, a story, doesn’t matter, just write. The next day, wake up, tear out that first page, rip it up, and throw it in the fire. Or in the garbage, all the same, the important thing is that you throw it out. The next day, write some more—again you’ll be on the first page, right? On the third day, wake up, tear it out, crumple it up, and throw it out, then sit back down and write! You follow me? Keep going until you are out of pages in your notebook. Then go and buy a new notebook and start all over again . . . That’s it. Somewhere around your tenth notebook you might have something worthwhile.”
The young man eyed him with the devotion of a neophyte.
“Do you understand?” Geo Milev asked, but the other kept on staring.
“Well I just don’t understand you!” he grew angrier. “Are you dumb, or just an idiot?”
But then he’d get over it.
[Thursday, February 7, 2013]
One afternoon, when, for some unknown reason, the whole stable of literary exhibitionists wasn’t loitering about and the two men sat alone next to the coal heater in the editorial offices, the poet asked Sheytanov how much of what people were saying was true—that he’d spent time in Paris.
The other gave a dismissive wave.
“I was there long enough to say bonjour to the French,” he said with a crooked sneer. “Teenage indiscretions . . .”
But then he let out a laugh and admitted that the whole ordeal had actually been a veritable odyssey. He’d only been seventeen when, following a rather puerile attempt to drum up antagonism in Yambol, he’d decided to go off the grid and run away from Bulgaria. Done and done. The antagonizing itself had been quite a good time, too . . . One beautiful summer night, instead of singing songs and pinching the schoolgirls in the city gardens, he and Delyo someone-or-other decided to set fire to the courthouse archives. They bring a demijohn filled with gasoline, enter through an open window, pour out the gas, strike a match and—off they run . . . The archives go up in flames, which is all fine and well, but in the morning, as soon as the constables come to see what’s happened, they spot the demijohn’s cap right outside the window. And conveniently written on the cap? The name of the store where Delyo had bought the gasoline. The cops go over to the shop to ask the owner a couple of questions and, sure enough, he immediately remembers how Delyo had come in the night before and bought a demijohn filled with gasoline. So, they gather up Delyo, slap him about a couple of times, and Delyo rats out his companion, so the cops gather up Sheytanov too. Then they proceed to spend the entire day idly beating both of them, just so they can’t say they got off scot-free; but in the middle of the night, Delyo and Sheytanov kick through the window grating, since, as was customary for those times, the grating was flimsy. Sheytanov grabs a cudgel and runs by the police station, passing right in front of the cop on duty, who, as soon as he spots the cudgel, pretends to be asleep. From there Sheytanov goes home, takes his revolver and his knife, and proudly tucks them into his belt, while his mother watches with fear in her eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m on the lam. There’s no other way—I have to go.”
And—off he goes!
From Yambol, he takes off for Varna with a stolen passport, boards the cruise liner, and off he goes to Kustendja. From Kustendja, to Bucharest. In Bucharest, some clerk looks at his passport, looks up at him, looks at the passport, back up at him . . . “Now wait a minute domnul, sir,” he finally says to him in Romanian. “This here says you are thirty years old, but you still look like a student to me. How do you explain that?” “Don’t worry about it. I’m an old man, I just can’t grow a beard!” The clerk tells him to get lost. So from Bucharest, he hops back to Kustendja, from Kustendja back on another cruise liner into Tsarigrad. But as soon as they catch sight of him in Tsarigrad—disheveled, wrapped in a cape, a wide-brimmed hat on his head—they simply arrest him, without grounds. Two cops start dragging him back to the station, and he thinks to himself, I’ve barely left home and these two idiots are going to send me right back to Bulgaria—what a waste of gunpowder that would be. As soon as they turn down some crooked street, he just knocks them both down, runs for it, and goes straight to Father Pasterov at the Exarchate. Pasterov, a fellow Yambolian, takes him in and gives him a job, which Sheytanov stays at for an entire month before growing restless and taking off for Jaffa. From Jaffa, to Alexandria, which the Turks still call Iskenderun. From Alexandria, he circles back and this time lands in Jerusalem . . .
“And now you can laugh at me all you want,” he added, “but on the twenty-fifth of December, nineteen thirteen, on high Christmas Day, your faithful servant became a Hadji!”
“What?” the poet chortled. “You became a what?”
“I became a Hadji!” he laughed back. “I’m dead serious! I leapt into the Jordan River and now—cross my heart—I’m a Hadji, and that’s that.”
“Would you look at that!” the poet nodded in approval. “I’m speechless! So now you must be Hadji Georgi Hadji Sheytanov!”
“Well, Hadji Georgiev, too!” the other shrugged.
“The first holy devil in the
history of civilization!” the poet continued with the same approving tone. “Not bad.”
“I’ll take it. I even sent my mother a postcard. ‘Your son finally became a Hadji, don’t cry for me Mother, don’t grieve—I’m fine!’ And what do you think was on the postcard? The Gethsemane. I thought the postcard was quite nice, too, I sent it to make her happy . . .”
Anyway, once in Jerusalem he started working at a bakery. It could even be said that he almost settled down: he was there a whole ten days before getting thrown out for giving seven loaves of bread to a beggar. Not one loaf—seven. The owner could have parted with one, but seven—never! So the owner starts yelling and shouting . . . “What the hell are you doing, Bulgarian? What do you think this is? How could you waste my bread like that?” “I don’t know how you can even call yourself Jewish when you don’t know squat about business! It’s simple,” Sheytanov argued back. “I gave him seven loaves, so that he’ll stay away for the whole week, not scaring your customers and getting in the way of your alush verish!” The boneheaded owner, obviously failing to live up to his Jewish heritage, reveals himself devoid of even a whiff of humor and promptly throws him out. Sheytanov shrugs and spits in his direction, and curses him out in his mother’s name in his trademark Yambolian style. By January—now nineteen fourteen—he winds up in Cairo in all his heroic glory.
Of course everything’s great in Cairo—libraries, pyramids, camels, Nubian whores, baklava, dirt-cheap paper bags brimming with dates, Turkish zaptiehs, unaware of which god to pray to because it isn’t the Turkish Empire anymore, but it’s technically still not entirely a British colony, either—peace, quiet, and British tourists with parasols . . . But as for a revolutionary atmosphere? None. He thinks to himself that he just can’t justify staying here if there isn’t a revolution brewing, so he hops right back to Alexandria, where he sneaks onto a cruise liner with no passport, no money, nothing. And since the Alexandria port is international, there are cruise liners for days. So he hops on one, and it just so happens to be a Russian one. He tucks himself into a lifeboat and the liner takes off for England, with a scheduled stop in France. It had all been very revolutionary up until then, if it weren’t for the fact he was starving! . . .
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 5