“And you just can’t do it,” he explained to the poet seriously. “The revolution is a revolution, but you just can’t take it on an empty stomach!”
So he crawls out from underneath the awning, cocky, since the liner’s already out in the open sea, what’re they going to do, take him down to the police station? He tiptoes around the deck to see what’s happening, and the first thing he spots is a cabin with its door wide open—and inside it’s bright and warm, with plush furniture and a table covered with salamis, cheese, bread, oranges, apple cider . . . perfect for a hungry revolutionary. He sneaks in, takes the salami, the bread, and the bottle of cider—all in the name of the future revolution, of course—and just as he’s about to sneak back out, an imposing madame appears. A fat Russian lady, to put it plainly, and she starts screaming: “Vor! Vor! Pomogite!”* Sailors immediately rush in from all directions, grab hold of him and start pulling him this way and that way. He defends himself, he’s not a thief, he says, just hungry, but they keep roughing him up. He gets fed up with the whole ordeal and sacrifices the bottle of cider by breaking it across a sailor’s head. The whole deck is now covered in glass and cider. At this point the captain himself storms in, bellowing: “Put your hands up! Put your hands up!” and he’s waving his Mauser around. The Mauser looks loaded! Or maybe it’s not, but it’s still a Mauser, still terrifying. Sheytanov stands fierce. “I,” he says “am a Bulgarian revolutionary, and a Bulgarian revolutionary would die before he surrenders! So don’t you dare tell me to put my hands up. And as for the salami, I refuse to give it back!” “Would you look at that,” the captain shouts, “Revolutionary, you say. You revolutionaries,” he says, “I can’t stand you! You people,” he goes on, “you have nothing better to do than to ask for someone else to feed you, while you wave your flags and give your speeches. Revolutionaries! As though you people today can be compared to the real revolutionaries!” he yells. “Real revolutionaries set off bombs and killed emperors! You, and your mothers, all you know is how to steal people’s salami! How many emperors have you killed?” The captain was fearsome as he asked this and Sheytanov couldn’t figure out whether the man was a reactionary associated with the tsar, or simply a buffoon. So he responds that no!—he hadn’t yet killed an emperor. “I knew it!” the other shouts, “always the same story! You haven’t even killed a single emperor yet, all you’ve managed is to break this poor sailor’s head!”
“He was a buffoon!” the poet said resolutely. “He may have also been a scoundrel, but a buffoon for sure!”
“Well, yes,” sighed Sheytanov, “he was a buffoon. But he holsters his Mauser and says, ‘Where do you think you’re going? Revolutionary or not, show me your ticket!’ I’m ready to burst out laughing at this point. I tell him I have no money for a ticket and he tells me, ‘Well of course! When have revolutionaries ever had money for a ticket! You’ve got money for everything except a ticket. You think everybody owes you something. Since you’re going to be liberating them anyway, why not get a free ride now! Tell me,’ he continues, ‘Where are you headed?’ ‘To Paris,’ I tell him. ‘Because,’ I go on, ‘Paris is full of revolutionaries.’ And he pats me on the shoulder and says, ‘Molodets!* Of course Paris is filled with revolutionaries, and of course they’re just sitting there waiting for you to spark the world revolt. As for me,’ he goes on, ‘I’ve never been to Paris, but I’ve been told that it’s not only full of revolutionaries, but that the Parisian whores bathe every day, can you believe it? Okay then!’ he continues, ‘I’ll take you to the French shore, and you can go from there. I can’t take you all the way to Paris, you understand, but I’ll take you to Marseille, I promise you that. I can take you to London too, if you want, but to Paris, never.’ ‘I don’t want to go to London,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t have any business there. That king they’ve got is a first cousin of your little tsar, and there aren’t any revolutionary crowds . . .’ ‘You and your revolutionary mother!’ He tells me. ‘If you don’t want to go, I won’t take you!’ The whole thing had turned facetious by this point, the sailors were doubled over with laughter, and the captain, if you can believe it, takes out twenty rubles and hands it to me, to stop stealing salami from the other passengers. I couldn’t resist biting back, too. “‘My apologies,’ I say. ‘Mon Capitan! I had no idea the madame was a passenger! I thought she was . . . cargo!’”
“And he didn’t hit you?” The poet asked gleefully.
“No. He didn’t, but the fat Russian tried. He says to me, ‘She might be cargo, but it’s paid cargo, whereas you . . . you’re just deadwood, aren’t you?’ And the cargo is about to faint, you see . . . ‘Bastard! Bandit! How dare you offend me! I am a noblewoman!’ And she’s coming at me! The captain stops her. ‘Madame,’ he says ‘I will not tolerate this sort of ruckus on my ship! . . . I can only imagine what sort of noblewoman you are, since you’re aboard my gothic piece of shit-tub here . . . Please don’t make me sound the alarm and collect everybody’s passports! One revolutionary without a passport is enough for one day.’ And he turns to the sailors: ‘Men, hang on to this fat dragon here and don’t let her get too rowdy.’ Then he turns to me. ‘Now, take these twenty rubles, though just so you know, I’m really giving you twenty-five, but I am deducting five for bandages for the sailor whose head you busted, and for Rivanol! . . . You break it, you buy it,’ he says. All in all, a good guy. . .”
[Friday, February 8, 2013]
Despite everything, they get to Marseille, where the captain gives him another twenty rubles, tells him to get in touch with some railway worker friends of his who’d gladly take him to Paris, then sounds the horn and sets their course for London.
Sheytanov stays in Marseille for a couple days, then leaves for Paris.
“Lalyo Marinov* says that you got to Paris on foot,” the poet said, “is that true? You weren’t yanking his chain, were you? He believes everything you say, you know.”
“Oh, I’d never do that to him,” Sheytanov responded. “I really did walk it. Remember—puerile antagonism! I’ve walked the road to Golgotha, you know. I can’t take the train to Golgotha!”
“So how long did this crusade take you?” the other sat blown away. “It’s pretty far from Marseille to Paris, no?”
“Well, if you’ve decided to walk it . . . all together probably about two weeks,” he said, and suddenly began to laugh. “Forget about how long it takes, it’s nothing when you’re seventeen. But you should have seen me, soaked to the bone the entire time! I’m telling you, the rain was unbelievable! It didn’t stop. I threw on a bunch of waterproof clothes, but I was soaked, miserably wet as a . . . I won’t even tell you what.”
“Wet as a dog?” The poet watched him.
“Wet as a hen,” he clarified. “Just don’t tell anybody, I’ll lose my heroic nimbus! At least I discovered the meaning of mistral. And if someone tries telling you how poetic it is, don’t believe him for a second. Seriously. I tasted the mistral’s poetry.”
On one such night, when the pouring was especially vile, and he swore at the rain and at Paris and its revolutionary masses, but at himself most of all—what the hell had he been thinking setting off to the middle of fucking nowhere—he spotted a faint light on the side of the road. It came from a farmhouse. He was wet and frozen and he immediately went in the direction of the small light. The house was dark, save for a single window, which he peered through. Inside the warm and cozy room was a woman. And a baby. The baby was in a cradle, and it appeared the woman was singing to it—he couldn’t hear the song, but he could see that’s what she was doing. There was not a soul around in the bitter night, just the window and the woman and her baby in its cradle, and he felt such a devastating nostalgia in his heart that he immediately knew—no matter what, he could not go into the house.
He finally got to Paris, and intent on seeing it right away, the first place he headed to was the teacher and anarchist Sébastien Faure’s famous alternative school—La Ruche.* But the hive turned out to be nothing more
than a school. Different-looking, but still just a school.
Then came the first of May. May Day in Paris! What a grand event. Speakers everywhere—Belgians, French, Germans, Italians, Russians—all inspired like prophets, fists shaking in the air, flags waving . . . He couldn’t figure out where to look first: to the speakers on the tribune or to the sea of people. It was the same at every rally he attended—the speakers alternated between French and English, English and Russian, and French again, without a single person protesting this Babylonian Bacchanalia. It possessed far more method than chaos.
Not two months later, news broke that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie had been assassinated in Sarajevo. Every newspaper exclaimed: “Double attentant! Double attentat! L’Archiduc héritier d’Autriche et sa femme assassinés en Bosnie!” He immediately remembered how the captain had challenged him—what kind of a revolutionary could he have been if he hadn’t so much as killed an emperor yet. And he started to hate that Gavrilo Princip fellow! Because he envied him. “How funny life is,” he thought to himself, “people are already killing the heirs to the throne, soon they’ll move on to the emperors, and me, I’m sitting here at the patisserie, listening to speeches and wiping tables after some mollycoddled princesses!” Indeed. He’d become a pastry-shop busboy. “Fuck these revolutionary masses! Fuck Paris!”
“And to top it all off, he’s my age,” he sighed. “I’m seventeen, he’s nineteen. He kills emperors, and I’m waiting hand and foot on these tarts, for God’s sake!”
“That’s right!” Milev exclaimed. “They couldn’t even hang him because he was a minor.”
“Anyway,” Sheytanov sighed.
He stayed in Paris exactly three months in all. Aside from the pastry shop, he also worked at a furniture factory, and just as he’d been planning to bolt to London—so that he could listen to the famous writer and anarchist Kropotkin* speak against capitalism and feudalism at the gathering of the anarcho-communists—World War I broke out and the gathering hadn’t even taken place. He’d then written to his father asking for three hundred leva because he was home sick, then he waved au revoir to the Parisians and was back in Yambol by August.
And that was it . . .
“Mmhmm,” Milev said, “By that time I was already in London . . .”
Sheytanov laughed. “But you know what I missed the most? I missed a good old-fashioned Bulgarian profanity, that’s what. Those Frenchies can’t even get a good swear going! Their language may be fine for poetry and rhymes, but if you really want to revile somebody you just can’t do it. So the first thing I did when I stepped foot back in Bulgaria was to spit out the biggest, fattest curse I could muster.”
“You know what, Sheytanov,” the poet exclaimed. “You should write all of this down!”
Sheytanov looked at him carefully and shrugged again.
“What for?” he said. “Life,” he said, “is far too serious to be explained away in a book. I say live it, and let whatever happens, happen.”
And with that, he took the fire-tongs and stirred up the embers in the heater, prompting sparks to scatter and spray . . .
Just at that moment, the literary barbarians came charging in with their yellow glasses and their student hats, and the poet mumbled: “Church is out, the Jacquerie is here!” and everything went back to normal on 145 Rakovski Street, just as it had been in those first months of nineteen twenty-four, when their magazine sold out every month and the subscribers paid on time, when the shadow of a vengeful envy was yet to discompose them and the hell to come was still far.
4.
[Saturday, February 9, 2013]
That January in nineteen twenty-four happened to be very cold—so cold the snow had frozen and the pipes inside the houses burst. Despite the fact it snowed from New Year’s until after Christmas,* which was still on January seventh according to the Orthodox calendar, the air did not soften up. Unprecedented storms and blizzards swooped in and trees toppled with the hollow crack of death, and the trains stopped in the middle of nowhere because the snow had seemingly buried the tracks forever. Even the express train from Vienna got derailed somewhere between Tsaribrod and Dragoman, so the minister Dimo Kazasov had to send for a medical train with a snowplow attached to its locomotive to gather up the frozen passengers, who had, for some unknown reason, decided to set off from Europe to Turkey at the worst possible time . . . The snow halted all the trains from Slivnitsa onward; even the buses were stopped throughout the entire country. The Maritsa River froze, the Tundzha froze too—from Yambol all the way down to the border. Even the Danube froze, and Utro wrote how Tutrakan filled up with Romanians, who got there by travelling over the ice in horse-drawn sleds and carriages so they could drink chilled, aromatic pelin and wine, making the barkeeps quite happy and not at all deploring of the cold. Dnevnik wrote about Vidinians going grocery shopping across to Kalafat, but Zora said that whole herds of starving Transylvanian wolves had in turn also crossed the benumbed river to cause mischief in the pens . . .
[“. . . these wolves bred around Turnu Magurele, eating maize all summer long, which turned their fur white—and when a wolf that white lies in the snow, you’d never even notice it . . .”]
Still, during that same time—in that very cold winter of nineteen twenty-four—a royal wedding was thrown in Bad Mergentheim, Germany, and Duchess Nadezhda became princess of Württemberg. The old King Ferdinand I had been there too, and for this reason, his firstborn and the heir to the throne, Boris, hadn’t shown up, sending instead his younger brother Kiril, so the people would have nothing to whisper about. Illustrated Week sent a special correspondent who had later written that his majesty the young prince had shown the happy couple his goodwill and gifted them an automobile. “The automobile,” it had been detailed in the gazette, “was a Steyr, 6 cylinder motor 12/40 P.S. – Model 5, manufactured by the renowned Österreichische Waffenfabriksgesellschaft in Steyr. These same automobiles,” the article continued, “are widely used in Bulgaria. They are well known for being sturdy, economical, and elegant.” And since it had been an illustrated newspaper after all, they placed a photograph of the vehicle Boris had given to Nadezhda. Indeed, it had all been very elegant.
Only a day later, in the small town of Chamonix, beneath Mont Blanc, the international week of winter sports began and Sofia hosted the Bakers Association Congress, plus another congress—in Ruse—of traveling salesmen. The first issue of the magazine Woman came out, a publication from the association of bachelors, widowers, the abandoned, and the yearning. In Kyustendil, anarchists and police officers had collided—both sides opened fire right in the middle of the day, resulting in one dead policeman and two dead anarchists, a pair of wounded wardens, and an injured passerby. The authorities at the Varna port discovered a whole two people with the plague aboard an Italian cruise liner, and around the same time the HMS L-24—whatever an L-24 is—sank at La Manche. In Germany, communist uprisings marked the anniversary of the death of Karl Liebknecht; in Vienna, three thousand disabled rose in revolt; and in Soviet Russia, on Monday the twenty-first, at exactly six fifty in the evening, the leader of the local Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, died. On the twenty-second in England, Ramsay McDonald became the first Labour Party Prime Minister; on the twenty-fifth in Chamonix, the aforementioned winter games began; on the twenty-sixth in Russia, Petrograd became Leningrad; and on the twenty-seventh the burial procession for Lenin was held at the Red Square in Moscow . . .
[NB! On the twenty-third of January, at nine o’clock in the morning, the body of Lenin, dressed in a paramilitary jacket (a garment he’d never worn while he’d been alive), badly shaven, and with a closely cropped haircut, was placed in his coffin. The nearest train station was four kilometers away, so Lenin was carried from Gorki to Gerasimovo in negative thirty-five degrees Celsius. His body was then loaded up on the ceremonial train—decorated according to the somber occasion and followed by crowds the entire way to Moscow. Lenin’s body was then unloaded from the train and a
gain carried until it reached the columns in Pillar Hall inside the House of the Unions. This final journey of Lenin’s took six hours.
The wake lasted from seven o’clock at night on January twenty-third until the twenty-seventh. The newspapers were filled with telegrams coming in from all corners of the vast country, but one surpassed all others. It read, “Vladimir Ulyanov died—Lenin lives!” A slogan read: “Lenin’s tomb—cradle of the world revolution!”
In any case . . .
It was still so bitterly cold, all the streets and squares were lined with small bonfires: the people squeezed out from between the columns to warm up, then got back into the slow crawling lines.
Lenin’s brain had already been removed, as was the heart, along with a bullet lodged in his neck just next to the carotid artery.
The brain and heart were necessary for Lenin’s resurrection: they were in fact certain it could be done.
The bullet, of course, they did not need.
But the people standing in those endless lines did not suspect that.
They erected a mausoleum in Lenin’s honor, deciding to do this on, let’s say, the twenty-sixth. The mausoleum, resembling both an Egyptian pyramid and a Babylonian ziggurat, was built on the twenty-seventh. And since the ground outside the Kremlin was frozen, they thawed it by lighting fires as they dug the foundations. And when the fires weren’t enough, they blasted open the earth. One such fougasse tore through a sewer canal. An animal stench spread all around, and it is said that Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow spitefully exclaimed: “These aromas are becoming of Lenin’s relics!”
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 6