And so it was.
After he read everything from beginning to end,
[Monday, March 4, 2013]
the poet spread out the galley proofs of the covers.
On the front cover he added in pencil: “Add color photograph: Lenin’s portrait, two-color print engraved on wood by M. Metzger.”
On the back cover he wrote:
“Correction: Issue 1, p. 44, the first line of the article ‘A Light Shines in the World’ should read: ‘The ivory tower where the poets reside.’”
He wasn’t rancorous, but he didn’t forget,
[Tuesday, March 5, 2013]
[Hmm, there was a hurricane in Gabrovo. They’ve announced a state of emergency—many wounded and one killed . . . No electricity or bread . . . Yet Yambol is quiet, quiet and spring-like. Strange. Gabrovo is 106.037 km from here, but Dryanovo is even closer, and there are hurricanes there too, but not a thing here!]
and he didn’t let these things slide.
But the second issue came out late as well, just as the first one had—a week or so after the date stated on the subscription. In January he let the delay slide, but when it happened again in February, he couldn’t. He barked this wasn’t going to work. He stormed into the printer’s and raised hell. He told them he wasn’t going to let them embarrass him in front of the subscribers, that they didn’t know whom they were dealing with, after which he left and returned home, where god knows why he took it out on Mila (after which he couldn’t stop thinking of ways to apologize), while the cover of the third issue now read:
“Due to the inadequacies of the printing shop, issues 1 and 2 came out after they were supposed to—on the fifteenth of the month. Because of this mistake, we have been forced to delay the publication date of PLAMUK to the twenty-fifth of every month.”
And beneath that, the poet wrote: “Rhodope Printing shop, owner—Todor L. Klisarov, Sofia, 29 Exarch Josif, tel. 575—making it very clear who was right and who was wrong, goddamn it.
But they barely stayed at that press for another two issues before moving yet again, this time to Balkan chromolithography, owned by one Ivan Ts. Naydenov.
Everything was repeating all over again and the whole thing had become personal. The same thing had happened with Vezny. The second to last issue was printed at Vitosha, and the last—at the Elit printing house; the almanac—at the royal printers, and every book published by Vezny was printed in a different place.
Anguish! Anguish and lots of darting from printer to printer—that’s what it meant to publish a magazine in Bulgaria.
[Two]
“A swine has breached the temple of life—kill it.”
—Written by Georgi Sheytanov in 1919
[Wednesday, March 6, 2013]
. . . Mariola had a strange attitude toward Death in general. She’d seen Death once and there was nothing enlightened about her. Death wasn’t how she was described in books. Death was ugly; ugly and repulsive. Death reeked of sweating, snorting men who sprayed their scorching seed wherever they pleased. Mariola had already wished for death—the real and instant kind—instead of the fear and helplessness slowly wasting her since that June day in nineteen twenty-three, when they’d come to her school and arrested her following the coup. The policemen then took turns raping her at the Pleven police station, as ten paramilitary volunteers from Sofia looked on and snickered, shamefaced and squeamish. She had wanted to die then, but she hadn’t been able to: her young woman’s body, broken and destroyed by the beatings and the men’s vulgarities, never completely gave up during the twelve months she spent locked up inside a cell in the Pleven prison, and after the amnesty of twenty-four, she came back to Kilifarevo, the small town in central-northern Bulgaria she called home. She now loathed men, and Georgi Sheytanov had had to gradually and relentlessly resuscitate her for weeks on end: slowly, gently, with tender words and soft caresses, until he finally managed to pull her out of the vortex of melancholy and bring her back to life, and she had felt like a woman again.
Mariola and Sheytanov had been close back before her father sent her the hundred thirty kilometers away to Pleven—far from her wanton, anarchist-leaning friends in Kilifarevo. She’d been a diligent high school student until the day they brought her to a shack behind the vineyards over Tarnovo and she’d first laid eyes on him. She still remembered the talk he gave that night—eloquent words on Kropotkin, Senkevich, and Chernyshevsky—but what exactly it was he’d said she couldn’t recall. She’d listened to him speak just as everyone else in the shack had, but heard only the irreparable gravel of his voice, caused by drinking caustic soda as a child, and the words passed through her without meaning. She was hypnotized by him. The same thing happened every time someone brought him to a tiny student dorm room somewhere in Tarnovo so he could speak on Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, whether high up in the forests or under the Kilifarevo poplars where, during the spectacular, quiet nights, he lectured them on future uprisings and battles and the enlightenment of the masses . . . He spoke of these future uprisings and battles, and the enlightenment of the masses, but Mariola stared at him, and what she felt had nothing to do with an impulse to grab a gun and fight for social justice and universal human rights. What she felt was something else entirely, and Mariola flushed, embarrassed, and all the while Sheytanov’s black eyes glimmered in the rusty half-light.
He never read from a piece of paper when he spoke. Instead, he asked his audience for what it was they wanted to hear. “My friends,” he’d say, “I’m simply not interested in reading you my words off a piece of paper. May I suggest you name the topic of discussion, and we can begin. And if and when I’m ignorant of a particular subject matter, I’ll let you know upfront, you have my word.” He’d then speak as if he’d spent days in libraries and reading rooms, preparing. They all aahed; how was it possible for him to possess this knowledge? But Mariola just stood there, transfixed by his eyes.
Following his discourses he would, without exception, disappear for weeks and months on end, leaving Mariola to agonize . . . At first the price on his head was a hundred thousand Bulgarian leva, then it went up to two hundred and she’d open her father’s newspapers dreading she’d find out how the most dangerous criminal in the kingdom—the most wanted man in the land—had been captured and killed unceremoniously. Rumors flew that a young woman named Mara Bargazova from Ruse—also Mariola’s age—had, after being questioned by police on Sheytanov’s whereabouts and refusing to give him away, undressed by the bank of the Danube and diligently folded her clothes before drowning herself. Mariola locked herself in her room and wept for a long time . . . She cried until she realized that she wasn’t crying out of sadness for Mara Bargazova, but out of pure, helpless jealousy. She cried even more when someone gloatingly whispered in her ear that a girl named Stoyana had her stomach out to here—also Sheytanov’s doing. Mariola had no way of knowing whether it was true, but her jealousy only became fiercer. She had difficulty going to sleep, and when she did, she dreamt dark and sad dreams. And when she woke up, she wept again.
[Thursday, March 7, 2013]
They released Mariola from the Pleven prison with the late-summer amnesty in nineteen twenty-four, and she took off back to Kilifarevo. The thing that scared her most was running into him. Which she did. Yet he was terribly attentive; he did not question or interrogate her—not about Pleven or anything else, he only stroked her hair and took her to a movie. They had just started showing Chaplin’s The Kid at the Modern Theater on Samovodska Charshia, whose very first subtitle revealed this was to be a picture with a smile, and perhaps a tear, and in the dark salon fragranced by a hint of wood, amid the periodical bursts of laughter from the audience, she managed not a single smile. Pleven had made her incapable of it. She cried for the little boy, whom Charlie Chaplin had taken in, and whom the government was trying to take away. The little boy stretched out his little arms toward Charlie Chaplin, and then toward God, and Mariola wept. She wept even when Charlie Chaplin ran and ran on the roo
ftops, jumped into the truck taking the kid away and beat up the government official as the kid clung to him. She wept even as everything ended happily. The white sheet in front of them flickered and blurred inside her tears, and as she sobbed and swallowed the lump in her throat, she knew she was crying from indignity and from relief. After the film ended, Sheytanov got a taxi and took her back to Kilifarevo.
And so it was.
Mariola took her final eighth grade exams in Turnovo, but without the right to ever attend university. She was already twenty years old.
Once Mariola came back from Pleven, her father, Mitko Sirakov’s, two-story house in Kilifarevo became a field hospital for the local band of communists and anarchists. Mitko Sirakov, humiliated by having to head a three-person committee in Kilifarevo, had otherwise been a decent man: he saw what his daughter was up to and nagged her, but Mariola let his criticisms wash over her; he’d been more afraid for her than he was interested in political loyalty. She walked past him with clenched teeth, silent as the moon, and he withered behind her—the powerful bureaucrat and fascist, now nothing more than a crestfallen and dumbstruck old man. Mariola hurried back and forth between Kilifarevo and Tarnovo, where she went every other day to buy medicine and gauze, becoming a charitable nurse and ward maid in the process, constantly hiding or bandaging someone new.
That’s how it went that entire fall of twenty-four when the tattered, gloomy fog smoked and drifted down the valley. After that, right on the first of January, nineteen twenty-five, Norway renamed its capital from Christiania to Oslo, and lighting struck the colossal statue of Jesus Christ in some forgotten little town in Guidaliolo, Italy, somewhere close to Rome, shattering it from its pedestal up, resulting in the prophesies of all sorts of bad things and cataclysms. As it happened, not long after, gale-force winds ripped the English airship R33 from her mooring mast at Pulham, tearing and shattering her bow and sending her adrift, yet she hovered in the air for 28 hours before landing safely, a wild explosion inside the Magirus automobile factories took four lives and critically wounded around fifteen, the rebels continued to destroy the Spanish armies in Morocco, and Italy’s metropolises (where Mussolini had just recently and abruptly abandoned his longstanding plans to become a founding father and supreme leader of a future Fascist International) were now host to loud quarrels and gory encounters between the indignant fascists and their most bitter enemies from the opposing parties. All of Europe sat under a rising smoke, and even before the old one could be forgotten, the smell of a new war began to permeate.
Such was that rainy spring of twenty-five, all the way up to that Easter, the sixteenth of April, when the terrorist attack on the St. Nedelya Church in Sofia’s city center unleashed a merciless war on anyone who was suspected of siding with the opposition, and the doors of hell finally burst wide open . . .
Bulgaria was no different. It was barely February when a band of hoodlums crossed from the Serbian border and attacked the village of Godech. About a hundred of them split up into three groups: one group broke into the postal and telegraph station, another into the municipal offices, and the third into the police station. They cut the telephone and telegraph lines, killed one cop and wounded another, then retreated back into Serbia scot-free. Only after that, like an umbrella after the rain, did the police and some troops finally show up in Godech. The cold spring showers followed, the surrounding hills turned black and ugly, and the trees awoke in a cautious, scant green. Mityo Ganev’s band suddenly took off, pillaging anything and everything from Haskovo on out—through Kavakliisko, Karabunar and Malko Tarnovo. The story went that they were all armed to the teeth, that they even had a Hiram Maxim machine gun, as well as another, medium sized one—a Schwarzlose—and long-range carbines from the arms factories of one Paul Mauser in Oberndorf, good French automatic rifles, piles of bombs, and excellent semi-automatic Nagants, prototypes from the now phantom-like eighteen ninety. Some wrote that all these weapons were brought to them by Soviet Russia, others explained how they got the shipments by sea from the Turkish sailors, while others arrogantly declared that smugglers of tobacco paper bootlegged the weapons for them on donkeys via Strandzha and Sakara.
“Don’t believe a word of it,” Sheytanov assured Mariola. “It’s bullshit! As if Mityo Ganev needs machine guns in those thorn bushes and in that mud . . .”
Such was that rainy spring of twenty-five, all the way up to that sixteenth of April, when the gates of hell truly, finally opened . . .
[Friday, March 8, 2013]
On the Monday after Easter, Sheytanov told her softly, “It’s time to clear out.” He took her to his twelve-man partisan crew, the Kilifarevo Pack, and they went on the run. Death followed Mariola here, too, together with the rain, which was incessant even during April, and then May. Death was constantly at their heels: she screamed commands and orders hysterically from behind the trees and bushes, she thundered behind them while the bullets hissed and snapped at twigs just above their heads. They escaped Death, but she would catch up to them in another place and with another ambush.
Once more Mariola wished to die, and when the search party caught up to them yet again by the Urva neighborhood and Sheytanov stayed back to guard them, she ducked into some bushes and raised a gun to her head to end it all. But Zhelyo saw her in time, tore the gun from her hand and dragged her through the forest. And when he saw she was limping, he threw her over his shoulder and carried her. He was a large man, Zhelyo. And strong. It’s probably why everyone called him Bolshoi.
Sheytanov caught up to them, and they all headed toward the Predel Pass—the mountain passageway between the Pirin and Rila mountains, over a kilometer above sea level. They climbed over the Balkan Mountains, scraping up their faces and hands, and slid down last year’s blackened leaves and into the precipices. At Borushtitsa they crossed the tracks only a second before the troop train carrying soldiers and gendarmerie thundered by, and a thick black rain pelted them again, continuing even as they split up near the riotous village of Enina, each group taking off on its own way. When they reached Nova Zagora, only three of them remained—Mariola, Sheytanov, and Zhelyo.
In Nova Zagora the three hid at the house of a woman named Minka, whom Zhelyo and Sheytanov addressed as kaka, like an older sister, and who lived only with her daughter, Mariika—a student in her last year at the local high school.
Every bone in Mariola’s body ached from the endless eighty-kilometer trek from Kilifarevo to Nova Zagora. She was soaked and scared, shivering pitifully in her drenched city coat and deeply grateful when kaka Minka cleaned the scratches on her face and brought her some of Mariika’s dry clothes to try on. They fit.
Kaka Minka did odd jobs at the train station and informed them about the mobilized thugs—murderers—who had been guarding the railroads for the third week in a row. Stay away, she warned, those idiots were armed and jumpy and something bad was bound to happen. She’d also seen the groups of armed fascist gangs that had been brought in on two covered trucks—one from Stara Zagora, one from Sliven. Kaka Minka gave Mariola her daughter’s ID card, made the beds for them, and went into the other room.
Zhelyo looked at Mariola, huddled into Sheytanov, and again attempted to convince him to head south and cross into Turkey.
“Sheytanov,” he said, “It’s nothing—just a short walk—for Mityo Ganev to take us into Turkey!”
But Sheytanov refused again. He likely harbored a different idea: to take Mariola into Yambol where they could both vanish into the Second District’s maze of blind alleys until the storm subsided. All of this had to end sometime.
Mariola did not sleep a wink all night. She lay nestled in Sheytanov’s arms, listening to the deep, even breathing of his slumber, and looked out toward the scattered shadows on the wooden ceiling, alternating between a paralyzing desperation and mystifying bursts of energy borne out of blurred hopes and possibility of a new life.
They went their separate ways in the early dawn: Zhelyo embraced Sheytanov, promising to ha
ve Mityo Ganev wait for them at Sakar Mountain, on the other side of the Maritsa River, while Zhelyo himself would meet them both in Odrin, if it so happened that Sheytanov changed his mind. He then turned to Mariola and muttered: “Mariola, don’t you dare get scared! And don’t think for one second about shooting yourself again, because I’ll kill you myself, you got it! . . .” And he disappeared to the south.
The two of them, Mariola Sirakova and Georgi Sheytanov—the most wanted man in the kingdom—left the town, and the gray dawn on that twenty-sixth of May, nineteen twenty-five, found them on their way to the Workman’s Lodge, No. 24. As they walked, Sheytanov told her the story of a monk from the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, who died a hundred and fifty years ago. They had recently discovered a manuscript of his written on parchment paper, and what do you know, when they deciphered it, it turned out it contained prophesies from seventeen sixty-three—all the way up until the year two thousand. All the newspapers in Rome were falling over themselves to publish every single little detail; the whole thing had become a spectacle.
“And as you probably know,” said Sheytanov, “all of the old prophecies come true.”
Mariola couldn’t tell if he was serious, but he kept going. It also turned out that the monk foretold the French Revolution, and the manuscript also detailed a new machine that was going to be used to behead the king and queen. The monk predicted the revolts and mutinies of eighteen forty-eight, the Polish uprising from eighteen fifty, and even the Great War of this century, which devastated all of Europe and caused the famine that spread throughout the world.
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 9