He entered the Macedonia Hotel café, ordered a German coffee and reached over for the bamboo stick holding Krapchev’s newspaper, Zora. Its first page was also dedicated to the Macedonian factions’ arrests, but again no mention of any names, so Sheytanov turned to the third page. There he saw the photograph of three men seated at a table, with a caption underneath that read: “A Bulgarian record! Three jolly fellows from Pazardzhik, the first of whom (from the left) drinks 30 liters of wine, the second (standing) 25, and the third—40 liters, every single day!”
“Ashkolsun!” he thought to himself. “Well done, champions! That’s how you build a strong country.”
The fourth page, however, was entirely dedicated to Henry Ford and how Henry Ford raised his workers’ wages, how he cut their workday from nine hours to eight, and how he even made the workweek five days instead of six—even before the war. Now everybody who worked for him in his factories could buy a car with his salary after only four months. Everyone was happy, the workers were loyal down to the last one, and Ford had completely squashed the competition—and now, in nineteen twenty-three, was already producing around two million automobiles a year. It also said that Ford slashed his prices, so now one of his vehicles cost only four hundred dollars, and he still managed annual revenues of eight hundred million dollars, or eighty billion leva. Ford raised his workers’ salaries once again, and now nobody even thought about labor unions anymore. It occurred to Sheytanov that you can’t liberate such a person—what would you be liberating him from? How would you be able to convince this person that co-ops were the future of the working class, he thought, when no co-op can give this person tomorrow what Henry Ford can give him today? The paper even cited Ford himself—and luckily Zafirovi Brothers Press had just published a translation of Ford’s My Life and Work. In it, he wrote that if you want someone to dedicate himself entirely to his work, you must pay him enough to eradicate his financial worries. And that, he said, is a good thing. According to him, there were two reasons men worked: one was for wages, and the other for fear of losing their jobs.
“And he’s right, too, that scoundrel!” thought Sheytanov. “He’s happy and they’re happy. Everyone’s satisfied.”
He tossed the paper on the table and stepped out onto Banski Square—filled with rumbling vehicles, many indeed Fords, imported by the international automobile trading company Strela. “We need to have Effi and Bae give this Strela the once over,” he thought to himself.
And so it was.
[Thursday, April 11, 2013]
The cold silver sun glimmered through tall windows as Sheytanov entered the David and Mois Aronovi brothers’ shop. He went straight to the confectionary counter and bought two chocolate bonbons. One was from the chocolate factory of the famous chocolatier Velizar Peev in Svoge, and the other—from the commercial and industrial house for tahini and confectionaries owned by Avram Chalyovski; both bonbons were packed in exquisite little boxes lined with velvet. He only bought the chocolates for the boxes anyway: the bonbons were for Leda and Bistra, but the boxes—for the poet. The poet had a strange affinity for these little boxes; he collected them passionately and guarded them jealously, and had amassed a whole lot of them. Sheytanov wouldn’t forget how the man had once made an unfortunate waiter run around for thirty minutes in the confectionary of the Grand Hotel Panah, making the poor guy bring down various boxes until he was finally satisfied. The people standing around weren’t sure if they should get angry or just assume he was crazy, but the poet paid them no mind. He was possessed. If someone had burst in to rob the place in that half hour, he’d have yelled at him to get out of his way.
So it went . . . He arranged the prettiest boxes on his display shelf, together with the wooden house he had brought some time ago from England—an exact replica of Shakespeare’s house—behind whose miniature door you could see the chestnut the poet had taken from Shakespeare’s yard in Stratford. This shelf was not to be touched by anyone else—not even the children—it could only be admired from afar. The poet had a strange affinity for miniature memorabilia, he thought it terribly important: he didn’t let anyone get near it and the things just stood there, where he left them, seemingly because of their importance, but they slowly sank into the dust of oblivion.
[Friday, April 12, 2013]
That morning the poet had, of course, already been working for some time—he was neither disturbed by the hollow rumble of the boulevard outside, nor by the children’s ruckus behind the curtains, nor by Mila’s voice as she tutored them. The ashtray in front of him was overflowing and the entire table was covered in galleys, various notebooks, sheets of paper, books and dictionaries, and his brand new typewriter, which stood out amid everything else. He was very happy to see the funny armagan, the amusing gift from afar, but he quickly got to business and let Sheytanov know he was just the man he needed!
“I’m selecting this and that from the Sinclair anthology,” he said, “so have a seat and tell me what you think.”
Sheytanov shrugged and politely said that advice was something he’d be happy to give—as long as it wasn’t money he wanted.
“Very funny!” the poet guffawed. “Very funny indeed! Now listen. I’m still of two minds as to whether this should go in: ‘If my soldiers were to begin to reflect, not one of them would remain in the ranks.’ What do you think of the translation? Do you think it’s too literal?”
“Kaiser Wilhelm?” asked Sheytanov.
“Frederick the Great!” the poet answered impatiently.
“That works too,” Sheytanov responded. “Just don’t omit his name, you wouldn’t want General Vulkov thinking you were mocking him.”
“You think he’d think that?” the poet stood up, on edge. “Does he even speak English?”
“No. I don’t know.” Sheytanov shrugged again. “Lighten up, I was joking.”
“I don’t have a sense of humor on Wednesdays,” the poet replied. “Just take a look at this though, it’s also from Sinclair’s book . . .”
He dug out a new sheet of paper, held it up high in front of his good eye and read:
“‘Recruits! Before the altar and the servant of God you have given me the oath of allegiance. You are too young to know the full meaning of what you have said, but your first care must be to obey implicitly all orders and directions. You have sworn fidelity to me, you are the children of my guard, you are my soldiers, you have surrendered yourselves to me, body and soul. Only one enemy can exist for you—my enemy.’”
The poet threw his guest a scornful look, mumbled and continued:
“‘With the present Socialist machinations, it may happen that I shall order you to shoot your own relatives, your brothers, or even your parents—which God forbid—and then you are bound in duty implicitly to obey my orders.’ Well? How is it?”
“Frederick?” Sheytanov asked seriously.
“No,” the other laughed. “Wilhelm! But it may as well have been General Goose himself who said it, intellectual that he is! Or any general, for that matter. They all take themselves for generals over there.”
“There you have it,” Sheytanov sighed. “The state is an antisocial institution, defended only by the lowly . . . what I’m trying to say is—you must strangle the state!”
The poet cut him off and asked him not to agitate and rattled off the translated sentence on his brand new little Adler typewriter.
“I’m not agitating,” Sheytanov grinned, “I’m only encouraging you.”
Then he added:
“I know a saying, too. ‘More comfort leads to less bravery.’ What do you think?”
“Frederick?” the poet asked absent-mindedly.
“Suvorov!” Sheytanov laughed again.
“Yeah right,” the other responded and pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter. “Like one villager at the Kniajevo Military Academy liked to say: ‘He who laughs last shoots first.’”
He took a look at what he’d written, liked it, and sighed.
&
nbsp; “You know, sometimes I get the urge to go somewhere where there’re lots of people, let’s say the St. Nedelya altar, for instance, get up on a soapbox and yell out: ‘People! Read smart books today, so you won’t have to read banned ones tomorrow!’”
8.
[Saturday, April 20, 2013]
That year on April first, someone named Hitler—and his friends along with him—were convicted for attempting to incite a social and national putsch, a coup, in other words, a revolution, inside a Munich beer hall the previous November. The trial had started back in February in the main reading room of the Munich infantry’s military academy. There had been three hundred sixty-eight witnesses, correspondents had flocked in from all corners of the world, shooting nonstop with their magnesium lamps and buzzing with their cameras, and what’s more, the court let hundreds more into the courtroom to watch, while two battalions from the province’s national guard were guarded behind the barbed wire and barricades outside. A true clusterfuck and hullabaloo. When the smoke cleared, some were let go, Hitler and two others were allegedly given five-year prison sentences and a fine of two hundred gold deutschemarks (the new ones), but the men had time taken off for having served in the war and ended up doing just six months. Everyone assumed that after such a disdainful and insulting sentence, this guy Hitler was done with: in a month or two, no one would remember who he was and what exactly he’d fought for . . .
In any case.
In April of that year in Bulgaria, the snow melted and caused terrible flooding. The high water deluged a mass of villages around the Danube and sunk the Pleven-Somovit train line; the torrents washed out the train tracks between Kyustendil and Rujdavitsa, as well as the sleeper cars, gravel—everything. Brutal hail followed, the evil fly befell the villages in the Kulsko region, and hordes of ticks crawled out, bringing with them all sorts of terrible illnesses for the cattle—scabies, tuberculosis, glanders, foot and mouth disease, swine flu . . . all severely damaging and harmful afflictions that everyone had long hoped had disappeared once and for all. The authorities set up sanitary-control posts, put up barricades all over to guard the roads, and the people in the villages wailed while they slaughtered their own cattle befallen by this scourge, then threw out and buried mounds of bloated animals. Destitute times had come. And to top it all off, locusts took over the regions of Karnobat and Yambol, reaching all the way to Malko Turnovo, and the evil fly had traveled through the entire country and gotten all the way up to the northwestern town of Belogradchik.
Right around that time, a whole lot of congresses, conferences, and annual assemblies began to take place. On the second of March, the congress for the Starini Association of Retirees started up. On the fourth, the Union of Cyclists gathered in Lom. On the ninth, it was the annual assembly for peace through allying that came together, suspiciously under the auspices of the masons . . . And after that, on the twenty-third of March, the annual gathering of the Association of Sofia Journalists took place. The Sofia journalists did what they could and once again elected their man Nikola Mitev chairman, since he was a notable mason and quite close to the government, and aside from that had access to the palace and did not have to beg for an audience beforehand. The papers feared him and gave money for the insurance fund without too much whining, despite rumors that half of their installments went to the so-called Macedonian factions—rebels who claimed to fight for Macedonia’s liberation, but more often than not were quite simply brutal killers for hire. Nikola Mitev then became guest of honor at the First Regular Congress of the Union of Bulgarian Provincial Journalists. (This guy just loved to be invited as a guest of honor to all sorts of events. And he loved it when they made him boss. The second the masons founded the union of intellectuals, they voted for him to chair the permanent presence of the supreme counsel.) The Union of the Provincial Journalists was founded in January, so the congress in May was a big deal: his royal highness Ferdinand himself sent a congratulatory telegram, Nikola Milev spoke of the debt journalists owed to pacifism, and everyone yelled hooray for a long time.
And so it was.
[Sunday, April 21 2013]
Just then, amid all that proud national appeasement and out of nowhere, a fighting pack of anarchists descended into Sofia. They called themselves “Heroes of the Night”—and it was how they signed the threatening letters they sent to the more affluent politicians and the rich. They were here to combat the new government, their leaflets said. The newspapers regularly published these letters and leaflets, but the Heroes of the Night were about far more than just the written word. One Tuesday, they boldly robbed the offices of the Haim Benaroya bank located at 1 Drin Street; three days later they somehow carried out entire bags of revenue stamps from the national bank, after which they attacked some insurance offices with their Mausers and Parabellums, shooting so wildly all over the place they even hit a student: Vulchev someone or other. Then they shot a Public Safety agent, Stefanov, and they shot up the boss of the second police station, Karamfilov. They shot at Paskalev too—the mayor of Sofia—although, true, he did manage to escape without a scratch, but who would put it past these Heroes of the Night to try a second time? The newspapers Zarya, Dnevnik, and Utro shocked the already cowed people with macabre details from the thugs’ raids, and Free Speech and the Democratic Alliance called for the government to uncross its arms and be merciless with these people.
The secretary, Razsukanov, really did get the entire Sofia police up in arms, and the head of Public Safety sent entire hordes of secret agents out on the streets, but those Heroes were elusive. They’d hit up a place and vanish in an instant: scuttling into the nearest building and quickly kicking through the back door, then from one basement to another, from one courtyard to another, jumping over little iron gates, dashing through a hole in a stone wall or straight over them, then up a tree and onto someone’s roof, and then they’d come down the balconies, the window grates, or simply by the gutters . . . and straight into the neighbor’s garden. In Sofia, you could
[Monday, April 22, 2013]
cross entire neighborhoods, even in the city center with its passages and bedestens reeking of plaster and lime, with its new multiple front-entry and multiple back-exit structures built of stone; the skylights were also perfect for one to disappear through, and to reappear completely non-chalantly somewhere else entirely, somewhere far away, where even the cop’s whistles faded to nothing. And so it was. Anyone could disappear into the night without so much as sticking his head out into the street—and how were you supposed to catch such a person?
[Tuesday, April 23, 2013]
Also that May, the politician and philosopher Dimitar “The Grandfather” Blagoev died. They buried him on the eleventh, a Sunday, and the streets through which the funeral procession was to pass filled up with cops and secret agents early on.
Milev made it to the house on Debar Street precisely as six mourning pallbearers carried out the coffin. He knew the man standing up at the front—he’d been a friend of Smirnenski’s and could recite his poems perfectly. Valko someone or other, Chervenkov.
But he saw another familiar face on the other side of the coffin. He couldn’t recall exactly where he’d seen it before, but when the other looked straight at him, the poet immediately remembered. It was the same chatty young man, big boned and dark as a corner, the clerk at the sixth residential commission, that same pseudo-intellectual who’d approved his address registration inside his dusty chancery at the station some months ago. Nikola Geshev. But the poet had long forgotten his name because he’d immediately tucked the man’s business card into some pocket somewhere and had put the whole thing out of his mind.
[Wednesday, April 24, 2013]
He strode among crowds unmatched in size since the grand funeral of Ivan Vazov three years earlier, he listened to all the eulogies, he sang when the people sang “You fell in battle,” and fell to his knees when someone yelled “On your knees for the Grandfather!” and the undertakers lowered the coffin into the gra
ve. Afterward, he didn’t go home, but went straight to Balkan press, which was kind of on his way because it was located on Maria Louisa Boulevard, the same one he lived on, just a little farther down, right next to the train station. Anyway. He burst into the room where the typesetters were, tore a piece of paper from some galleys laying on the wayside and wrote the Grandfather’s obituary in one go, without so much as lifting the pencil from the paper once. From there he threw himself onto the already printed pages of the May issue of Plamuk, called for the form-setter, and showed him exactly where he needed to fit in the obituary—right after “The Stones Speak” by Hadjiliev and above “The Procession” by Ivan Gol. There was a poem in the space already, but he told them to cut it, disregarding the fact it was already typeset; they could do without it for this issue, but they couldn’t do without the obituary. The poem could wait until June, of course, whereas the obituary would look pitiful and useless then. The head typesetter mumbled something, but the poet had already flown out of the production room.
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 11