“For this year,” he went on, “for nineteen twenty-five, he predicted earthquakes, floods, and all types of natural disasters. But the most important thing he said, is that three suns will appear, can you imagine that?”
“No!” she laughed.
“Neither can I,” he said. “But that’s what the man said! And if he wrote it, it must be true. Just wait till you hear what else is going to happen in this century.”
In nineteen sixty, he told her, the island of Sicily would sink; France and Spain would be destroyed by an earthquake in the seventies; and in nineteen ninety—the guy did his prophesies by the decade—there would be a big solar eclipse.
“How big?” Mariola kept laughing.
“Huge,” Sheytanov said. “It’ll cover the earth in darkness and it will be six whole days before a single star will appear in the sky. Death will devastate the world and people will leave the cities en masse.”
“How is that going to happen?” she protested. “You’re making it up. If death devastates the world, who’s going to be left to leave the cities? I don’t buy it.”
“That’s what it said in the paper!” Sheytanov defended himself. “Have you ever known a newspaper to lie?! So let’s see, with everything bound to happen in the nineties, the world will end by the year two thousand. And that’s it.”
“That’s terrible!” Mariola exclaimed. “I’m only going to be ninety-six . . .”
It was likely around lunchtime by now, so the two stopped to rest by a water fountain near the workman’s lodge, taking a seat near the stone basin. Sheytanov covered her shoulders with his raincoat and out of nowhere said:
“One shouldn’t get old. It’s ugly and disparaging.” Mariola looked at him, stunned, because she’d had the same thought at the precise moment.
“We had this really old woman in my old neighborhood,” he went on, “all of Yambol knew her, she was something of a midwife, constantly surrounded by people: women she’d raised, almost as old as her, people whose children she’d delivered once upon a time, piles of relatives, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren . . . They didn’t let her out of their sight for even a minute, despite the fact she was a tough old granny who had no issue taking care of herself. When she topped ninety, she turned to my mother and said, ‘You know, sister, all these people around me all the time make me feel so wonderfully superfluous. God gave me too long a life: what a cruel blessing!’”
Just then, the handful of ragged murderers in breeches jumped out from the other side of the tracks with their crooked rifles, screaming that no one move. But their faces betrayed a primal fear. Mariola was certain Sheytanov would dash into the waist-high cornfields and vanish; after an hour or two, he’d be up in the mountains across from them, or, if he headed east, he could disappear into the streets of his native Yambol by nighttime. She imagined this and grew numb.
But Sheytanov only stood up, raised his arms, and yelled at the panicked scarecrows to put down their guns before someone got hurt.
They took Mariola and Sheytanov to nearby Mladovo, where something no one could have predicted happened: at the municipal office, when they looked at their identification, someone remembered to send for an officer to bring the local high school teacher.
She told them that yes, indeed, she knew the student on the ID card, Mariika Vassileva, but as soon as she laid eyes on Mariola, she confirmed hers was not the face of their Mariika . . .
[Saturday, March 9, 2013]
[Many years later, in another time, Sheytanov’s brother Ivan, having never gotten over his batko’s death, and having pieced together his life scrap by scrap to write about it, attempted to find this same high school teacher. He found her in Sliven. When he looked her in the eyes—he suddenly realized there was nothing to be said.
He turned and left, and she exclaimed to his back:
“Don’t hold it against me!”
“I don’t,” he answered.
And that was that.]
6.
[Monday, March 11, 2013]
On March fourth, nineteen twenty-four, a Tuesday, Sheytanov went to Zheko “Gerginata” Gerginov’s funeral. He took the bus from Turnovo to Stara Zagora, and then the train to Haskovo, where the funeral procession had already stretched from the Turkish baths in the center of town all the way to the Kenana Cemetery. While he strode through the mobs of people, Sheytanov looked on darkly as Ignes told him how it had gone down.
Two days prior, on the second, on the eve of the forthcoming amnesty set to release everyone detained in connection with the June uprising, a couple of guards pulled Gerginata aside for some bullshit reason and separated him from everyone—out of the communal cell and into a completely isolated part of the prison. In the middle of the night, three non-coms from the Haskovo garrison burst in screaming, “Freeze! Don’t move!” as though they’d caught someone making a break or inciting a riot, and shot up the cell, riddling Zheko Gerginov with bullets before he’d even managed to sit up in his plank-bed. The three non-coms then disappeared and left the man to agonize all night. He did not breathe his last breath until the morning, at the precise hour the guards went down their lists and freed the inmates.
Sheytanov listened to all of this in silence and, when Ignes added that, according to someone he was close to, it had been Russev himself who had called up the director of the prison from Sofia and personally ordered him to do whatever was necessary to keep Gerginov from getting out alive, the anarchist spat with the kind of somber decisiveness borne out of suppressed rage:
“They want war. We’ll give them war.”
[Tuesday, March 12, 2013]
Before the dirt on Zheko’s grave had even settled, five men entered the army barracks at the Tenth Rhodope Polk and took out ten Austrian Steyr Mannlicher carbines, two dozen nine-millimeter automatic pistols with wooden holsters, fifteen cases of bullets for the aforementioned guns, and a whole lot of trusty, club-shaped, Bulgarian-made hand grenades. They loaded all of this into the car of one of their guys, a White Guard, and took it to Mityo Ganev on the other side of Harmanli—in the Sakar Mountains. Mityo Ganev was even more furious than they were, because he loved Zheko and considered him more than a brother, and he hadn’t even been able to say goodbye. Now, as his fellow rebels found themselves armed to the teeth, they ran wild in the surrounding areas—devilishly deft and elusive—like angels of darkness. They kidnapped the famous tobacco businessman from Haskovo—Smochevksy—a majority stakeholder of Nikoteya, and gave him a good beating; they occupied the Momkovo and Malko Popovo City Halls, which were lacking in any resistance (who could stage any sort of defense with those feckless, pre-war rifles anyway?); they blocked the wrecked, muddy road between Malko Gradishte and Ortakyoi and took a captain and his ten startled little soldiers captive. They didn’t hurt them; they confiscated their guns and their bullets and immediately brought them to Mityo Ganev, who demanded to know the names of the three men who’d murdered his friend Gerginata in prison, and when he got what he needed, he gave them all a good kick in the ass and let them go. Except for their weapons, of course. He stole those.
But even before that, Mityo Ganev made sure word spread in Haskovo: Gerginata’s killers were as good as dead; he had personally sentenced them, and whomever they were, they could expect visitors in the unknown hour of vengeance.
But the poor souls already sensed what was coming their way.
[Wednesday, March 13, 2013]
[That had all happened in March—during the limbo between winter and spring—when people prayed for the first green buds to appear.
One night in the middle of summer, on the twenty-sixth of July, two days after the government finally acquitted everyone who’d been convicted following the June uprising of nineteen twenty-three, the air was thick and tense as it is right before a thunderstorm. Mityo Ganev shouted: “Now!” and pointed to two of his best haidoukhs to go into Haskovo with him to take the three killers by complete surprise.
In the now almost four m
onths since the murder, the poor wretches had not so much as left each other’s side in a lame attempt to keep from falling apart. They drank endlessly in the hope of numbing the horror of the inevitable, knowing very well who Mityo Ganev was and what he was capable of doing. Everyone knew—songs were sung in the man’s honor from Kavaklii all the way to Koprivshtitsa. Tense and jumpy, the three were quick to reach for their guns and hassled everyone they came into contact with in Haskovo. Even their commanders were at their wits’ end. They understood their situation, sympathized with it even, but the whole thing had gotten out of hand. So they wrote to their superiors, pleading with them to release the three from duty and send them off.
That night, the three were together as they left the summer masquerade ball at the officer’s hall, where they’d already rolled three cigarettes with tobacco mixed with hash and apple blossom, which is perhaps why they pissed their pants the instant Mityo Ganev and his merciless harbingers of death came out of the shadows on that lilac eve and surrounded them. They appeared in all their splendor: black-bearded and long-haired, girded with leashes, cartridge belts, and scabbards. The vaivode surveyed each of the three lowlifes, personally swore at each in an even, coldblooded manner as if he were reading him his verdict, and informed all three they had no idea what kind of man they’d killed, that they didn’t deserve to live themselves, that they were better off dead, in fact, because even the chicken—that brainless creature—still looked up to God when it drank water, but they, they didn’t even have the fear of God in them. He swore at them again, this time invoking their mothers—and that was the last thing those three heard in their ratty little lives. The rebels then shattered their skulls point-blank and dissipated into the shadows of that July evening, leaving the three corpses to lie soaked in their own urine and feces in a remote alley of the city gardens. The three bloodstains the color of overboiled, strewed, dried fruit hardened overnight, until a spring shower came around midday the next day to wash it all away.
That’s how it went down.]
[The evening of Thursday, March 14, 2013]
[Back in the spring of nineteen nineteen, Mityo Ganev went delirious with the legends of Vaivode Angel’s untold treasures, and, stubborn as a mule, dug around for days in the places where Angel and his gang had once roamed. He wasn’t afraid of digging—he was young, barely nineteen, and strong as two men—and when he started digging, he dug and dug—with a map no less!—from Kozlek all the way to Karakolyova Dupka on the other side of Kavaklii. He lingered for a while around Kavaklii and punctured the earth around Paleokastro, then went all the way back from Kavaklii to Harmanlii. He’d become a spectacle. “What in God’s name are you doing?” they mocked him. “What are you now, a treasure hunter?” But he just kept on digging. He dug for one month, then two, and in the third month a miracle happened! One June morning in that same nineteen nineteen, in a ravine by Bryastovo, amid the prickly blackberry bushes and the milk thistle, in between two wizened, wild plum trees, Mityo dug out five delvi, earthenware pots, each brimming with hundreds of old gold Turkish mahmudiye, handfuls of heavy Napoléons and Austrian münzes, strings of gold coins and gold and silver necklaces, rings and bracelets with diamonds cast in precious metalwork . . . Spellbound by their sheen, Mityo sat and stared at the jewels. For three days and three nights he took pleasure in the fortune before he buried it back in the ground—this time in the hellish, barren lands around Dragoina . . .
Mityo Ganev met Zheko Gerginov inside Haskovo prison three years later. Gerginata taught him to read and write and made him learn all of Hristo Botev’s* poems by heart. And in November of twenty-two, just a little before he got bored of prison and decided to split, Mityo Ganev pulled Zheko aside and told him the incredible story of Vaivode Angel’s treasure. He had a plan:
“You,” he told Zheko, “have become more dear to me than a brother. As soon as we get out of here, we’re splitting the haidoukh’s treasure, you have my word!”
But Zheko replied, “Mityo, Mityo . . . Do you understand what you’re suggesting? You want us to act like those goons and miscreants, like some rich wannabes? . . . It’s not who we are. Give some of what you found to the poor and stockpile the rest for the revolution. Got it?”
“Got it!” Mityo yelled out. A week later he jumped off the train taking him to Sliven for his trial.
He returned to his kingdom amid the oak forests of Sakar Mountain, where his men had already gotten word of the treasure and eyed him in hungry anticipation. But there would be no talk of dividing up anything; he told his men loud and clear he had given his word to Gerginata.
“The only way you’ll ever get your hands on a single gold coin or jewel is over my dead body,” he said.
In Mityo’s mind, Gerginata’s plea may as well have come from God himself. The rebels grumbled for a while, but they couldn’t break Mityo’s word any more than he could go against Gerginata and let it go. And when, in nineteen twenty-five, he sensed with his entire being—the way a cornered animal might—that he was about to be wiped out, he dug up those same five delvi and brought them to a man named Dimko in Haskovo.
“I am entrusting you with all this,” he said. “Hide it and protect it for better times. And don’t for even a second think about touching it. Or I’m personally going rise from the grave and cut off your arm myself!”
Dimko was flabbergasted by the bitter threat—he couldn’t imagine ever laying a hand on the treasure. He really did keep it hidden, for seven years. Until one day several unidentified men showed up, claimed they’d been sent by the communists, and coaxed him into giving them everything for the “cause.”
It was the last time he saw either—the emissaries or the gold. And that was that.]
7.
[Monday, March 18, 2013]
Sheytanov caught the express train to Sofia that night after Gerginata’s funeral. He pressed a large bill into the ostensibly snooty conductor’s palm and sat inside an empty first-class compartment. He turned the key and sank into the velvet seat; by the time the train reached Pazardzhik, he’d written the article he’d promised the poet for the April issue. He titled the piece “Inception” and signed it Georgi Vassilev instead of Georgi Sheytanov: no need to pull the devil by the tail and destroy the magazine prematurely—his name had long been considered a path to blitheness anyway. The snow had not yet melted from Pazardzhik on out, and he caught glimpses of snowdrifts underneath the reflections of the train lights—small squares of light that ran and jumped, and then spun and disappeared into the jet-black nothingness beneath, pierced only by the orange sparks from the locomotive. It was the darkest hour of night. Inside the warm compartment, with the hollow pulse of the iron beneath his feet, and engulfed by the comfort of the velvet, mahogany, and polished brass detail, Sheytanov closed his eyes and slept all the way to Sofia.
He began to dream. He was walking down Turgovska Street in Yambol, and at the corner of the town’s cloth mill and the bus depot, he came across a fallen horse. A fallen, white horse. It lay there, breathing heavily, and yet no one else stopped by it—the people passed the animal at Sheytanov’s feet as though they didn’t even care the creature wasn’t long for this world. He continued on up toward the Federation Club on Coburg Square when another horse jumped out from behind a street gate. This one was sorrel. The animal then somehow lifted both of its right legs and tipped, collapsing onto the white pavement. In his dream, Sheytanov stared in disbelief. He turned back toward the intersection where the small white horse had fallen and froze: behind him, the entire street was covered with toppled horses . . . white, black, sorrel: healthy animals with powerful muscles visible underneath their shiny hair, and yet unable to stand up, convulsing as if they’d been struck down by something horrifying. Sheytanov tore away and ran off, suddenly flying. It had been a while since he dreamt of flying. A long time ago, when he was a little boy, he’d often dream he was flying, and he still recalled the joy of roaming above the trees. He remembered these youthful reveries well—whe
n he squeezed in between the cables and whirled around the bell tower of St. George, the church right next to their old house and the highest point in Yambol’s entire Second District, visible from every part of town . . . But this was different. There was no joy in this dream, no freedom in this deceitful flight. It was something terrifying and agonizing, as if he were freefalling into a black abyss—like a stone plummeting into a bottomless pit. The dream became more chilling: the bottom of the hole was now visible and blanketed by lifeless birds with shiny feathers, yet warped and withered bodies. And he was falling into them . . .
He startled awake, sweating heavily. The sweat beneath his collar stank of fear. He feared nothing when awake—he could always find a way out. But dreams were far from nothing, and he felt helpless once he fell asleep. Oftentimes he’d jolt awake, sweating and shaking, unable to recall even a fragment of the dream that had caused the distress. But it made no difference even when he could remember—superstitions and interpretations weren’t his thing, and he wasn’t about to go digging around dream books. What was the point? He’d been terrorized already anyway.
Now the train swayed softly atop the dispersing tracks, the orange lights of the station slowly drawing closer, and the pearl March dawn of the Wednesday grayed somewhere behind . . . he’d arrived in Sofia.
[Wednesday, April 10, 2013]
The first thing he did in Sofia was buy Utro, where he read that only a day earlier the government had gone after the Macedonian factions everywhere it could find them. Numerous people had been arrested, close to five hundred according to the newspaper . . . But there were no names mentioned, and he tucked the paper into his pocket.
Instead of taking the tram, he decided to walk down Maria Louisa. Police patrols were at every step, and when he passed each of them by, he tilted his hat and greeted them. Trams gathered and filed out for their daily routes, milk carts rattled, carriages carried vegetables in from the greenhouses at the outskirts of Sofia, the shop shutters rolled up with a bang, cafés and shops opened their doors, and the apprentice boys swept the sidewalks in front; and the air was sweet with mekitsi and burek and fresh bread . . . The first shoe-shiners were already clattering with their brushes on Banski Square; Sheytanov stopped at one. The man first scraped yesterday’s mud off his shoes, then shined them until they sparkled, dandified . . . Then Sheytanov stopped at a barber’s somewhere on Turgovska and got a shave. And after the barber was finished and sprayed him twice with eau de cologne, and had brushed the crisp one-leva bills bearing Stamboliyski’s face on his beard for good luck—for it was the first money to come in that day—he went so far as to walk him out to the door, and Sheytanov had felt as good as new. He didn’t even sense the foul odor of horseradish and vinegar still lingering beneath his shirt . . .
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 10