Beneath all that, at six feet under, among the red and black drawings of the theater decorator Ignati Nivinski, lay Lenin himself. People descended along the right-hand staircase, circled the sarcophagus on all three sides, then ascended out through the left-hand staircase. They all wept, and years later, someone would say: “Half of mankind mourned his death, when they should have been mourning his birth!”]
[I really ought to write these things down, they’re so easy to forget . . .]
[Oh, and another thing! When, afterward, they built the third mausoleum with reinforced concrete and granite, marble, and elvan stone, Moscow became the only capital in the world to measure distance to all corners of the world not from its central post office, but from Lenin’s mausoleum.
And that was that.]
[Wednesday, February 13, 2013]
They sent the announcement for the new magazine a little before the New Year in nineteen twenty-four. It was something to behold—magnificent, large-format, luxurious paper, a handsome jobbing font, and unprecedented circulation. Soon after, the poet left an impressive down payment at the royal printers, and two weeks into January, three or four days after Christmas, the nimble printers finally mounted Plamuk’s first quire onto the big machine. The poet and Sheytanov stood by on the side, surrounded by the aroma of inks, lead, and glue, and when the machine turned with a groan, the poet grabbed the first sheet that sank softly into the basket.
He folded it and froze, spellbound. He could barely contain the joy he felt at these white pages, big as bed sheets, where the poems swam as if finally free. It was a world away from the orphan pages of Vezny . . .
Which is why once the magazine was printed he became irate upon spotting an ugly typo, courtesy of the typesetter, inside his manifesto. “The ivory tower, the refuge of poetry and hiding place of pieces, collapses into pitiful ruins.”
“What pieces, goddamn it?!” he was imbued with the helpless rage of a duped child. “What pieces? The poets,” he screamed, “The poets! These people are making a mockery of us. They’re still piss drunk from Christmas. You have to be a complete imbecile to mistake poets with pieces . . .”
The boys with the yellow glasses were writing the addresses of the subscribers on the still-warm books, happily licking stamps and sticking them to the covers of the magazine with a slap, but when they heard him screaming—they became dumbfounded and perturbed, put on their raggedy student overcoats, grabbed piles of addressed issues, and bolted from the editorial office.
The poet screamed, swore like an animal, called the typesetter a provocateur, and spit out the most violent profanities he could summon, courtesy of the army reserves in Kniajevo, then he swore a hundred times he wasn’t going to pay these incompetents for the magazine and that he was going to shove it up their let’s not say where . . . He turned to Sheytanov and told him that when he was a student in Germany before the wars, one of the big papers—the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which had been published since eighteen fifty-six—always had a special note, set in large letters. It said the newspaper would give ten deutsche marks to the first person who reported a typo . . . There had been maybe one person a month who got the money, if that.
Sheytanov sat and looked at him, and finally spoke:
“Listen Milev,” he said, “you want me to go off on that fucking fascist? One word and I’ll go shoot them all up—the whole print shop. I’ll start with the typesetter and take them all out until the last useless one of them is gone . . .”
Then he laughed, patted Milev on the shoulder and said:
“Enjoy this! Why are you letting it poison you like this? The magazine is out in the world—enjoy it!”
The poet shut up, insulted.
He stood quiet for about a second, then said:
“To Koprivshtitsa, forward march! You’re the patron, drinks are on you.”
“You got it,” said Sheytanov. “But we won’t be going to Koprivshtitsa today. Today,” he said, “I’ll take you someplace else. It’s closer.”
The poet said he didn’t mind, as long as he wasn’t the one paying, and not five minutes later they were already inside Benoni on Alabinska Street—it was warm and smoky, and the smell of bean salad and pickled cabbage and wine and rakiya blanketed the air, which was so thick that, if someone had decided to shoot a gun, the bullet would have ricocheted in the air. The tavern was filled with dark men wearing wide-brimmed hats that hid their faces, and the barkeep did absolutely nothing to hide the two revolvers tucked into his belt.
“Come in, come in,” said Sheytanov, “it’s time you met my people. It’s not I who is your patron, my brother. These are your patrons, remember their faces.”
5.
[Friday, February 15, 2013]
After that night in Benoni, Sheytanov disappeared for two whole weeks,
[Saturday, February 16, 2013]
and while the poet’s father sat in Stara Zagora, incredulous that the new magazine, Plamuk, was selling so well, the poet finally decided to legalize the family’s Sofia address at the sixth residential commission. He’d delayed it for months and he could tell that Suselov, his landlord, was becoming flustered. The man had thirteen apartments in Sofia alone, a summerhouse in Borovets, villas in several villages in the Plovdiv region, and who knows how many other properties, so it wasn’t about their measly rent. But the man was a lawyer, and he was very well aware of the terrible law for residential demand, and what’s more, its addendum with those inhumane domicile decrees and registrations, and even his millions weren’t going to save him from the merciless and uncompromising residential commission.
The air was weighed down by fear that year; everyone was afraid of something. Mila had been urging him gently, but she grew increasingly persistent—they’d already moved twice and that hadn’t been that big of a deal, but now the kids were growing, and they had more possessions, so if their landlord decided to kick them out . . . And, well, she’d been completely right.
The poet let out an annoyed curse over having to stop his work, and got up and went down to the station to fill out a residential housing ticket. Inside the dusty chancery, a young man—the secretary of the commission—leapt toward him and practically fell over himself with exclamations of amazement, invited him to sit, begged him to sit, even, and then, while he anxiously dug through all those files, did not cease to repeat what an honor it was to meet him, that he was a regular subscriber to Vezny and how he had read the first issue of Plamuk cover to cover and couldn’t wait for the second. He had nothing against Teodor Trayanov’s Hyperion, but it had an air of wilted chrysanthemums, of something threadbare and decaying—people had forgotten about symbolism—while Plamuk represented the new and the authentic. He humbly threw in that, as a matter of fact, he too dabbled in poetry, but of course he wouldn’t dare mention his own work in the same breath as the poet . . . He truly did have an affinity for serious magazines!
“What can we even call highbrow,” he added bitterly. “Bai Atanas Damyanov* at least says it right! Surely you’ve heard him speak, Mr. Milev? He wasn’t trying to start a magazine for the intelligentsia, he said. I’m after the numbers, he said! I need the masses, the worker, the cabby, the villager, the chimney cleaner, the barkeep. In other words, he wants to publish newspapers for people who move their lips while they read. And he’s right. How else can you print that many newspapers—Utro, Zarya, Illustrated Week, Nedelno Utro, Dnevnik and Kukurigo—and build that kind of a monopoly!”
The poet grunted impatiently. He had a galley to proof, an article to write on women’s poetry, and he possessed little patience for the young man’s chitchat, so he gave him instead a sour “sure, sure okay!” and asked him if he’d be so kind as to hurry the whole thing up.
The other mumbled nervously that of course, of course he would, inserting the blank sheet of paper into his Ideal—a typewriter big as a threshing machine. He glanced at the application for only a split second before his fingers leapt across the keys. He wrote impressive
ly fast and didn’t stop speaking even while he typed. He explained that residential dealings in Sofia were too intense, endlessly unfavorable, rather, and had in fact become calamitous. Sofia was growing vigorously—not so much growing as bloating. Officially, there were around one hundred fifty thousand people, but nobody knew the actual number for certain, it was quite possible the number was closer to two hundred. Too many—a veritable megapolis! In his mind, this was no longer a housing crisis, but a housing misery. Austere measures were needed to eliminate this misery, but the state didn’t care for rent regulations on housing, because Bulgaria today was a country owned by money-grubbers. The young man knew what had to be done, but he was a nobody, who would listen to him? Nobody asked him, of course, for he was but a speck in the gray mass of archivists, a plankton in an ocean of clerks. What a pity! Had they asked him, he’d tell them the solution at once . . . He went on, and the poet wondered how it was possible that someone could string together newspaper clichés and slogans stolen from poor people’s rallies with the groundbreaking conviction of an innovator.
“The answer to the problem, Mr. Milev,” he exclaimed, “the answer is in the creation of reasonably-priced housing and affordable rent. And not,” he stressed, “in housing market speculation, as the current situation dictates . . .”
He then pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter and read it out ceremoniously. Residential housing ticket, station one, located at 23 Maria Luisa Boulevard, owner Susselov, Dimitar . . .
“Geo Milev,” he read on in a deep voice, “Eastern Orthodox, Bulgarian citizen, born on such and such date, in such and such month, in such and such year in Stara Zagora, writer, college educated, served conscription duties in such and such infantry regiment, married, spouse—Mila Keranova Mileva, two children—Leda and Bistra, previous residency at 26 Lomska Street. Application for address approved on the twenty-seventh of February, nineteen twenty-four. Applicant: Geo Milev.”
The clerk reached over all the folders and papers that covered the writing table, handed him the sheet of paper and announced:
“Congratulations, Mr. Milev! You have nothing to worry about now.”
“Is that all?” the poet asked and rose from the chair.
“Oh yes, yes,” the young man jumped to his feet too.
Then, just as awkwardly, he took out his business card and handed it to the poet with a sort of pleading smile.
“If there is anything at all,” he said, “it would be an honor to help you out as best as I can. Us intellectuals, if we don’t stick together . . .”
The poet absentmindedly pushed the card into his overcoat—he would certainly forget it there, as he always did—and attempted to hurry out.
“By the way, Mr. Milev,” the clerk suddenly remembered, “do you know that you and I almost served together?”
“What do you mean?” the poet became even more annoyed.
“Well, I too graduated from the Military School for Reserve Officers!” the other declared excitedly. “Quite before you, however. I was there in the summer of nineteen fifteen. So, about two years ahead of you. They got our entire cohort to sign up right after high school, so we could learn to defend the king, the motherland, and the flag. The Great War started right after that, but you, well, you were at the front line, a hero, you were wounded in battle, and I, well, I got placed at the freight battery of the sixth artillery and we hung around Dupnitsa the whole time . . .”
“Well, there’s no escaping fate,” the poet interrupted, shrugged, and quickly departed with a wave.
He would never learn the name of the young man—this insignificant little clerk in the housing commission: Geshev.
Nikola Geshev.
[Would you look at that . . .
From nineteen twenty-four to nineteen twenty-five, Nikola Geshev is secretary at the fourth and sixth housing commissions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and National Health, but he leaves when the position is eliminated.
On May twentieth, nineteen twenty-five, he is appointed to a criminal pursuit-party. His salary would be eighty leva a month. Were he to catch a criminal—he’d get at least five thousand. Were he to kill one—up to twenty thousand. And if he was the one killed in the line of duty—fifty thousand leva for his family. Were he to become disabled—another twenty thousand.
And disability pension.
But even before that, in April, actually, immediately following the St. Nedelya Church assault, Pane Bichev—a top cop and the main investigator on the case—personally summons him to help . . .
It is on May fifteenth that Geo Milev disappears.]
[Sunday, February 17, 2013]
Sheytanov finally appeared again on a Thursday at the beginning of February. He arrived frozen and dead tired, but the poet didn’t waste time with pleasantries, mumbling instead that he’d come just in time, and proudly pointed to the piles of colored postcards laid out on top of Marcho’s table.
“Metzger?” asked Sheytanov.
“Metzger!” the poet answered and spread out his arms. “Who else? Look, just look at this!” he exclaimed. “It’s not a vignette, can you believe it? It’s a wood engraving! This thing is a modernist icon. What do you think? I commissioned him to do it last night, and he had it ready first thing in the morning. Metzger is unbelievable.”
Metzger had, as always, done an excellent job: the illustration resembled an explosion—erupting with large chunks of shattered browns and pale greens, out of which Lenin’s brick-red face popped out.
The poet impatiently admitted that he’d already written the caption that would go beneath the photo, grabbed a sheet of paper from the table and read it excitedly, then took one of the January issues and showed him exactly where the note would go and where the color photo would be glued—something he’d only dreamed of with Vezny. He then stared at Sheytanov in palpable expectation of praise. Sheytanov was quietly nonchalant, however, and instead the poet recounted going to Balkan, Ivan Naydenov’s chromolithographic printer, with Marcho the day before, how they’d brought the engraving, how the man had cut them off immediately, the shameless skinner.
“No way!” he’d said to them. “It can’t be done! I wouldn’t be able to get to it even the day after tomorrow.” He was in the middle of printing labels for something. Some sort of large order from the Luv cognac factory in Veliko Tarnovo, the poet wasn’t paying attention—and besides, they could’ve been printing “Rooster” soap labels for all he cared, it was all garbage. And yet, one hundred thousand pieces of it! Don’t bother me with small-scale jobs, was Naydenov’s underlying implication, and the conversation was over. Naydenov turned around and disappeared, and the whole thing would’ve been over, had it not for one Bai Stoichko, an old printer and secret communist: he went into the chancery, and when he came back out just a few minutes later the machines had stopped! Bai Stoichko took the bullshit labels’ typographical cliché off the press, while Marcho did what he did best and got in the way of the whole thing, then they washed the blue ink out and poured in the red, and her printing majesty, the American, started turning again. The poet yelled in Bai Stoichko’s ear, wanting to know what had caused this miracle, and the other responded he’d simply explained to Naydenov who Lenin was.
“Would you look at that,” he laughed crudely as he remembered the story, “is that what did it for the goddamned printer? And Bai Stoichko is sitting there laughing and he tells me, no, of course it wasn’t. ‘I told him,’ he says, ‘that if he doesn’t let us do Lenin’s portrait right away—we’re not working for three days.’ ‘So you threatened him with a strike?’ I say to him, and he’s looking at me incredulous. ‘What did you think? That they care about Lenin that much? Threaten a strike, though, and it’ll work every time.’”
He went on and on, as if he couldn’t stop . . .
“Take these, take them!” the poet said and handed Sheytanov about ten postcards. “Take some for your guys . . . Bai Stoichko printed at least two hundred extra!”
[Mon
day, February 18, 2013]
“Lenin is a vile human being.” Sheytanov said calmly.
“What?” the poet bristled. “Sheytanov! Don’t do that, I don’t want to argue with you. You want to rain on my parade?”
“He’s vile,” the other shrugged. “You can treat him like an icon, but to me, he’s a wretch.”
He wanted to tell the poet the first thing this man did was to go after the same anarchists who’d handed him his victory on a silver platter that one horrible month when, while half the world was already in November, Russia was still stranded in October.
But he didn’t. He didn’t want to argue either.
He’d seen this Lenin.
Not face to face, of course. He’d seen what Lenin was capable of.
But first, he’d met Karl Radek.
[Tuesday, February 19, 2013]
Sheytanov arrived in Moscow one March day in nineteen eighteen, a week or two after the Bolsheviks had established it as the capital of Russia, and who knows why, but the first thing he laid eyes on was a Chaliapin concert placard. He didn’t hesitate for a second: using the last kerenka rubles he’d been given by the army council in Odessa, he hopped on a phaeton and went to the theater; he used the rest for a ticket and after, when he walked out of the theater with his head spinning, he had only a couple of copper coins left in his pocket.
He spent a brutally cold night nodding off and then waking up on a bench outside the theatre. In the morning, he saw seven somber geese marching through the muddied theater square. He joked to himself the geese were probably on their way to rescue the Third Rome,* then spent a good amount of time laughing at his own joke.
He bought a paper with the few copeiki he had left and spotted an ad inside with a call for agitators. Sheytanov went to the address listed in the paper and found the editorial offices for a gazette called Revolucija—a Serbian gazette, Yugoslavian, rather, very much communist. It’s there he met Radek.* This Radek had the face of a crook, which he was: much later, Sheytanov would find out the man’s real name was actually Karol Sobelsohn—an Austrian and an international swindler who was simply bereft of morals. But there was no way for Sheytanov to know it then.
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 7