We digress . . .
Sheytanov told Radek he was a Bulgarian revolutionary, perfectly qualified for the volunteering position they’d advertised. The other had the nerve to ask him for a referral.
“From who?” he asked, incredulous, and Radek responded that he needed to see a letter of recommendation from the Bulgarian Marxist Socialists.
He’d had the urge to leave right then and there, but clenched his jaw and pulled out a memo from the regional police department, stating he was a revolutionary anarchist who’d escaped from the Sofia Central Prison and that he was armed and dangerous.
“Here’s my letter of recommendation,” he hissed, and Radek let out a laugh.
“Bravo!” he said. “A wanted man! Very clever, but you have to wait my dear, wanted comrade. We’ll be in touch!” And he disappeared.
It was Godina the Czech who took him in. At least that’s what he claimed—that he was Czech and that his name was Godina. He worked for that same paper, as an editor or God knows what; that year Moscow had been overrun by people with shady pasts: professional revolutionaries, financial wizards wanted by the police, or just common gangsters.
Godina took him in at the former Dresden Hotel on Skobelev Square, precisely where—from the window of room 152—Sheytanov witnessed the enthused Bolsheviks destroy Skobelev’s statue. That same Skobelev—the White General. Lenin himself had given the order!
Godina told him that come fall, the Russian Army was preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution, and the government had decreed that monuments erected in honor of the tsars and their servants, generals, and commanders—essentially any monument of no interest from a historical or art history perspective—were to be dismantled and removed from the squares and the streets; some were to be put in storage, others were to be used as scrap metal. They took down all those statues and monuments and who knows why, but Skobelev’s Lenin was expressly singled out for demolition. From his hotel window, Sheytanov witnessed how they shattered the fine, white Finnish marble at the base and, using levers, broke off the bas-relief with its images from the war for the liberation of Bulgaria . . . The sight stung. It wasn’t so much that he mourned the monument as it was that his mother had taught him at an early age that Bulgaria’s liberators deserved respect—Stoletov, our general, Radetzky, who arrived with a bang, and, of course, the White General, that same Skobelev.
They demolished the monument in a day, and on the first of May, a barren spot stood in its place.
[Wednesday, February 20, 2013]
[Hmm, would you look at that, the prime minister resigned . . . “We did all we could!” he said. Actually, it was the government itself that announced its own resignation . . . we did all we could. It’s much like that story with the soldiers . . . An old man’s two oxen fall into a hole. The old man, this dyado, looks around and sees a bunch of young soldiers doing their army exercises. So he asks them to help him get his animals out of the hole. “Of course we’ll help!” they say, and tie one end of their wire rope to their tank and the rest around the animals’ necks and start pulling. They pull and they pull, until the wire ropes cut off the oxen’s heads. Then the soldiers put their ropes away, rub their hands together and declare to the old man: “Well, dyado, we tried our best! No need to thank us, that’s just what we’re here for . . .”
Resignation . . . what a joke.]
Before that, on the ugly night of the eleventh of April, Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka attacked all twenty-five palaces the anarchists had occupied during the previous year’s revolution, doing nothing in the time since but partying. They all talked and talked, then drank, danced and sang—reveling with abandon like zombified lunatics until the early morning hours. And they shot a whole lot. The paintings on the walls became targets in the relentless shooting of their Mausers, they used the priceless carpets like army tarpaulin—wrapping the wooden chests filled with bullets in them and barricading the windows with the thick, sturdy covers of rare first-edition books from the lavish libraries.
This was all detailed in the newspapers, and if something was written in the paper, how could you not believe it?
All of Moscow gossiped about the debaucherous life the anarchists led inside the residences they occupied, and the easily repulsed grannies whispered resentfully in each other’s ears about the disgusting orgies, the gatherings of bastards maniacal with disenthralment, and the exalted girls, who discarded every bit of clothing off their backs, letting the sailors contort their bodies every which way. The palaces had turned into ribald brothels, places of reprehensible doings and elemental disgrace, and they smelled of smoke, fish, and carrion.
Dzerzhinsky’s Chekas, together with Jukums Vācietis*—Chief of Russia’s armed forces—and his Latvian gunmen simply burst in.
They shot at everything that moved, indiscriminant at wiping out anarchists and women whose bodies were toxic with vodka and semen, then arrested those who’d somehow survived the massacre. When they took out those they’d detained, they came eye to eye with the same men they’d started a revolution with just half a year prior, but in that April night, the first group decimated the second.
The first door to hell had opened.
Sheytanov asked Godina what happened, but the other bared his teeth and sourly remarked:
“Lenin got ’em!”
He fell silent and then gave a disgusted snort:
“What’s more, it was an anarchist who handed him the power, in case you didn’t know . . .”
He recounted how, in January, during the founders’ assembly, they’d sat around waging their tongues with all sorts of nonsense, and earlier, on the nineteenth of January according to the new calendar, at four twenty in the morning, the head of the military guard, the sailor Jeleznyakov, burst into the shiny hall inside the Tauride Palace where the meeting was supposedly in session, climbed up on the podium, put a hand on chairman Chernov’s shoulder and said: “Please adjourn this meeting! The military guard is tired and wants to take a nap . . .”
“So just keep all that in mind, Bulgarian,” Godina sighed. “Just keep it in mind . . . By the way,” he added, “Zheleznyakov was also arrested by Dzerzhinsky’s people. Keep that in mind, too—Lenin does not forgive or forget, Dzerzhinsky even less! . . . As for Vācietis, up until yesterday he was lieutenant colonel in the Imperial Russian Army . . . And that’s that!” he said. “Turncoats don’t keep their word.”
All of Moscow looked over its shoulder and whispered in fear about the leather men. At first, Sheytanov had no idea who these men were or what they were about, but two surviving anarchists from that April night explained it to him. The Cheka were referred to as leather men because they wore double-breasted, black leather air force jackets, in actuality the same uniforms worn by British pilots. The new government had discovered a Triple Entente storage depot in Petrograd, and appropriated and gifted the leather jackets to Dzerzhinsky’s people. A perfect gift, indeed. Very convenient, too, because leather is the perfect defense against lice—that irrepressible wartime pest.
And so it was.
Sheytanov hissed with disappointment, “Very clever, very clever indeed.” And clenched his teeth again . . .
He attended meetings and rallies to look for other Bulgarians with whom to form a unit, but he found no one who’d take him up on it.
One night Godina dampened his revolutionary enthusiasm by elaborating a few points for him. Turns out, the total number of casualties on that October night in Petrograd—the October Revolution!—totaled a mere six people. On both sides.
“Bulgarian,” he said. “There are two million in Petrograd. Officially. No one knows the real number. Tell me—was there any way this multimillion city was even aware of what was going down?”
He told him about the coup at the Winter Palace as well—how it had been really taken over. The Winter Palace, was, in actuality, one big, giant wine cellar guarded by barefaced cadets and girls from the women’s regiment. The cadets and the women drank what they c
ould and when they got word a bunch of Bolsheviks were headed their way to attack their palace, they filled up their bags with bottles and ran. That’s precisely what the attackers were looking for—the wine reserves—and there was still a sea of booze left.
“This great socialist October Revolution was, if you can believe it, history’s most bloodless revolution,” he said, but Sheytanov had no idea whether to believe him or not.
[Thursday, February 21, 2013]
He met up with Radek a few more times, listened to him tell disparaging jokes about Jews, despite himself being Jewish, and witnessed him ingratiate himself with people who didn’t even want to sit at the same table with him; it quickly became apparent what kind of person he was. At the beginning of July he saw Trotsky at a rally inside the Moscow Circus: it was there that Trotsky announced that any and all parasites would be tracked down and captured and sent away to unspeakable places to do dreadful, difficult things, and those who dared to oppose this plan of his were guileful windbags. The crowded circus exploded in applause, and Sheytanov enjoyed it too, but afterward, Godina clarified that this Leon Trotsky was in actuality Lev Davidovich Bronstein.
“That’s how it is, Bulgarian,” he said, “The Trotskys and the Radeks want to start the revolution, and it’ll be the Bronsteins and the Sobelzonovs who will end up paying for it. I’ve said it before,” he added, “don’t expect anything good from a turncoat . . .”
A strange fellow this Godina was. During the day he wrote about starting the revolution, but when night fell he spoke against it. Sheytanov couldn’t quite understand it, but he didn’t argue with the man; instead at night he listened to him with even greater interest alongside the preposterously expensive bottle of Smirnoff he had in his hand. On one such night, Godina told him what Trotsky himself had said to the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach. “I know,” Trotsky had said to him, “that we’re already dead, but I also know that there’s no one left to bury us . . .”
“And it so happened that Blumkin and Andreev put a bullet in that same Mirbach right in the embassy, and to make sure they finished the job they threw in a bomb as well,” Godina laughed vengefully. “They shot him barely three months into his ambassadorship! What do you know, Georgi the Bulgarian, what do you even know . . .”
Then he fell quiet, took a disconsolate pull from the bottle and informed him he was heading to bed, but that beforehand, he wanted Sheytanov to know something.
“Lenin,” he said, “is a very sick man. Lenin might live another five, six years, or he might not. He’ll be gone, but someone else will come to replace him. I don’t know who that’ll be yet, but whoever it is, I’m willing to bet that he’ll be even more terrifying. It’s inertia, Bulgarian, once it starts it won’t stop. The only thing inertia does is gather speed downhill . . .”
Anyway.
Sheytanov did in fact see Lenin once. He didn’t remember when or where. He resembled your average-looking, haughty university professor with his hat, his tattered jacket, and wrinkled vest underneath. When, a few years later, he saw Alexander Tsankov for the first time, he immediately thought of Lenin. They could’ve been the same person.
And when, on the last day of August, the news flew threw Moscow that a woman named Fanny Kaplan had waited at the Hammer and Sickle factory for Lenin after one of his rallies, and had emptied the contents of her Browning into him, Sheytanov felt only one thing.
Malicious joy.
“Not Fanny, Bulgarian,” Godina kept on with his poisonous mid-night diatribes. “Not Fanny, but Fanya. An anarchist, allegedly, but somehow, suddenly an SR, a socialist revolutionary. What did I tell you about apostates? No one really knows who sent her there, either,” he went on, “or if she was the one who really shot him, so let us drink to the revolution!”
Anyway.
The summer of nineteen eighteen had been unbearably hot. Even the animals fainted from the Moscow heat. Revolucija was now called World Revolution and Sheytanov contributed four or five articles, but had no idea how many people actually read them, if at all.
Two women, whose beauty had long been washed off their faces, lived two doors down from them. The women’s names were Raisa and Hriseida, but Sheytanov couldn’t say which was which. They fought and insulted each other to death, like the time Raisa accused Hriseida of being Mikhail Lomonosov’s lover, and Hriseida responded that indeed she had been, and before he died in seventeen sixty-five, he had personally told her Raisa had been just too damn old for him. Things of that nature. Then they’d get at each other’s blue hairs and end up coming over to Godina’s, who made them calming tea and amused them with tales about the water spirit in Vltava. Or he recited poetry. Sheytanov remembered how one night he recited Alexandr Blok’s* “A Girl Sang A Song”: A girl sang a song in the temple’s chorus, / About men, tired in alien lands, / About the ships that left native shores, / And all who forgot their joy to the end . . . And Raisa and Hriseida wept. Actually, they always cried after the tea and the Czech’s stories and usually went home arm in arm, while Godina shrugged and said to Sheytanov, see how easy it is . . .
But that same night he didn’t say that; instead he went to the window, stared at the fires burning in the space where the monument had been, and hollowly recited the rest of the poem: Thus sang her clean voice, and flew up to the highness / And sunbeams shined on her shoulder’s white—/ And everyone saw and heard from the darkness / The white and airy gown, singing in the light. / And all of them were sure, that joy would burst out: / The ships have arrived at their beach, / The people, in the land of the aliens tired, / Regaining their bearing, are happy and reach. / And sweet was her voice and the sun’s beams around . . . / And only, by Caesar’s Gates—high on the vault, / The baby, versed into mysteries, mourned, / Because none of them will be ever returned.
And Sheytanov could have sworn he heard Godina choke up.
[Friday, February 22, 2013]
By the end of August, another monument—an ugly imitation of an Egyptian obelisk without engravings—was already protruding in place of the one that had been demolished. They called it the Monument of Soviet Constitution. By the end of September, he knew there was nothing to stay for.
And so he left.
As he sat on the train and watched the disappearing domes glisten under the autumn sun, he thought of those seven geese he’d seen that first day in Moscow, and it occurred to him it wasn’t some Third Rome they were en route to liberating—it was simply that they hadn’t yet been eaten by the Bolsheviks.
He crossed a country enveloped in a war with no front line, but with many armies and commanders, where they’d long stopped keeping track of sides, yet none surrendered, and they fought on like beasts. They flew rumbling and tumbling on their horses and companies as uncontrollable drays rolled over—horse-drawn machine-gun platforms, so to speak—and they all fired nonstop at everything in sight, echelons crammed to the brim carried army supplies and weapons to and from unknown locations, and the smell of mud, dust, gunpowder, and sulfur permeated everything. With their hooded cloaks and their waving flags, the armies resembled flocks of Devil Birds.
He reached Ukraine, but the hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi’s soldiers got hold of him on the border. They took him to Kiev and put him in a cell with some Bolsheviks scheduled to face the firing squad the very next morning—and him with them. He didn’t feel like dying just yet and he announced loudly that he was a Bulgarian soldier. An officer from the German occupational command overheard him and told the Ukrainians: “Bulgarien ist mit uns!” Bulgaria’s with us! And Sheytanov was off the hook. In October, when dirty clouds the color of bathwater lazily floated in the sky, Sheytanov set foot on the white, stone-paved quay of Varna’s port. And he realized that everything was still exactly the same. Even the cops were the same—so what if they no longer worked for Ferdinand, but for his feeble son, Boris.
He went into a canteen, and when he saw his reflection in the mirror, he spotted a graying lock against his otherwise black hair. He w
asn’t yet twenty-three. He wouldn’t turn twenty-three until February the following year, nineteen nineteen . . .
[Friday night, February 22, 2013]
[A cold and tedious rain falls outside—an autumn rain. How strange. It’s February twenty-second, but the rain is a lonesome, November rain . . .
Truly strange . . .]
[Sunday, February 24, 2013]
Sheytanov told the poet nothing of all this. They’d long since ceased to stand on ceremony with each other, but they hadn’t yet become “comrades” either, so he kept it to himself. He looked at the drawing again and suddenly thought that Metzger had really captured the soured disdain and hate pouring out of Lenin’s very sick person’s eyes. He felt the poet was unnerved and, unsure whether the abyss behind the darkened right lens hid anger or insult, sighed and shrugged.
“I take back my words,” he said calmly. “I don’t want to argue, either.”
He even put a bunch of the cards in his coat pocket, but the tension in the air remained . . .
“Wait, did you see this?” the poet asked quickly and dug out a wrinkled newspaper. “Look what Peev wrote in Pravda!” He began to read, “‘After Thought magazine, published by Dr. Krastev, our meager literature is lacking another publication of similar amplitude and a comparable richness in its literary thought . . .’ Well said, bravo! We showed that impudent Vladko Vasillev how it’s done, didn’t we? There’s no beating us now. We have a hundred twenty issues in that Yambol of yours alone. We had one of Vezny, and a hundred twenty of Plamuk!
[Sunday, March 3, 2013]
Just then the Pechenegs with the yellow glasses stormed in and brought the proofs—the printer was already putting the second issue together. They must have run the whole way, because when they threw off their hats and scarves, their heads were practically steaming. The poet snarled that the jacquerie is here! Then forgot everything and lowered his head to the pages, and the others first tried to rummage through the cupboard of Marcho from Marcha but upon discovering it was as empty as it always had been, began to spar with each other.
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 8