The Same Night Awaits Us All

by Hristo Karastoyanov

  She had no idea what time it was when a fearsome explosion shook the windows and a whirl of wind blew her hair back. She screamed, dropped the books, and rushed into the room where her children and her sister’s daughter, Anna, had been. The little girls hadn’t even been frightened; they appeared more curious by what had happened, and Lili rushed to tell her how, right after the explosion, the poet threw himself on Bistra and Leda, stroking their hair and calming them down, and he’d even asked Lili if she’d gotten scared. They all got up and leaned out the windows to look outside. They saw people—covered in debris, red brick dust, and glistening shards of glass—screaming, terrorized, running from the cathedral down toward the Bania Bashi Mosque and trampling the street stands as they went.

  Above St. Nedelya, still Holy King to many, the stern creation by the architect Lazarov, puffs of black smoke and ash slowly rose up from the tattered roof of the church as if straight from the devil’s furnace. The black cloud cast its heavy shadow over the entire square, imbuing the air with the smell of brimstone and sulfur.

  As if suddenly sensing what lie in store for them, Mila whispered:

  “Dear God, please no.”

  [May 3, 2013, Good Friday]

  Then the check-ins started. Two agents appeared at their doorstep around midnight about seven days after the attack. Everyone at the house was asleep except for the poet, up reading galleys, which was why he was the one to answer the door.

  He soured at having his work interrupted, but the two agents were exceptionally courteous—apologizing profusely when they heard the children wake from the strange voices in their house, sleepily protesting as their mother whispered, anxious but gentle, not to worry. They were simply checking the address registrations of everyone in Sofia, nothing more, they said. The poet brought them his documents. As one of them checked the papers, the other, still so very politely asked whether the poet minded if he lit a cigarette. He spoke mutedly, almost whispering so as not to wake up the children on the other side of the thin curtains dividing the living room from their bedroom. The poet answered that he could, of course, and the agent took a box of Tomasyan cigarettes out of his coat pocket. He offered one to the poet, but the latter preferred his own Sultans, which he kept inside his army brass tin.

  “You have a trial coming up soon,” the agent smiled at him, “isn’t that right, Mr. Milev?”

  The poet cracked his mouth into something resembling a smile and mumbled that yes, there was something like that coming soon.

  “I can tell you didn’t recognize me!” The other kept smiling.

  The poet looked closer. The man did seem vaguely familiar. But he couldn’t recall where he’d seen him, let alone what his name was.

  “I had the honor of personally validating your address registration,” the man kept on, “last February. You were a little late getting it registered, but I let it slide, didn’t I! Geshev,” he reminded him warmly. “Nikola Geshev!”

  “Oh yes, of course. I remember you.”

  “I’m not there anymore,” the other went on. “I’m not at the housing commission! Archiving is such tedious work . . . See, even you couldn’t remember who I was. No one remembers a clerk!”

  He waved his hand dismissively.

  As he spoke, the agent’s fingers leapt between the sheets of paper, galleys and books scattered on the poet’s desk—his eyes seemed calm and his gaze affable, but his fingers were searching for something.

  The poet clenched his jaw, there was nothing he detested more than having someone go through his things, but he held his tongue because his kids were right there.

  “Ha!” the other exclaimed. “May I?”

  Before the poet could answer, the agent picked up a yellowed copy of Reflections on the Revolution in France.

  “Edmund Burke?” he said surprised. “Incredible! Is this a first edition, too?”

  The poet responded that yes, it was a first edition; he’d picked it up from a bouquiniste’s in London. He then reached over to take his book back, but Geshev absentmindedly pulled his hand away.

  “You never cease to surprise me, Mr. Milev,” he said. “You’re reading an author who writes against the social revolution. Very interesting!”

  The other agent had finished looking through the poet’s documents, as well as those of Mila and her sister, and looked at him with tired eyes, but Geshev hissed for him to wait outside and began to recount being a student in Italy, where he too read a lot about the French Revolution. Which is how he had come across Edmund Burke’s reactionary theories.

  He put the book down and whispered confidingly that, out of everything connected with the French Revolution, most fascinating to him was the fact a revolution could birth that perfect executioner’s tool, the guillotine! He’d read everything he could find about the guillotine, and he was most struck by the concern of the revolution’s leaders that death sentences could be carried out . . . humanely. They sentenced hundreds of people to death, yet they wanted that death to happen quickly! They had wanted to improve on hanging, which was long and torturous for the condemned . . . not to mention the horror of being burned at the stake, or the barbarianism of being drawn and quartered—up until then, the only three ways death sentences were carried out. Only those in high standing had their heads cut off with an ax! Mercy for the highest bidder.

  The poet discerned a cold covetousness in the other’s whispers.

  “The irony here of course being that Dr. Guillotin himself was utterly opposed to the death penalty. But one day they called him in and ordered him to devise a new way to kill. And I’m not sure whether you know this or not, Mr. Milev, but the guillotine as we know it was not actually built by Dr. Guillotin. It was someone else, also a doctor, a surgeon perhaps . . . Antoine Louis, yes. And he in turn asked someone else—a harpsichord maker, a German guy, I’m forgetting his name now . . .”

  “Schmidt,” the poet interrupted.

  “Say again?” Geshev was caught off-guard.

  “His name was Tobias Schmidt,” the poet replied edgily, “and he built pianos, not harpsichords.”

  “Oh, is that how it was?” the other raised his eyebrows. “True, pianos and harpsichords are indeed different, aren’t they? See, I’m starting to forget things. Anyway, on the seventeenth of April, seventeen ninety-two, at ten o’clock in the morning, they tested the new machine for the first time. The first guillotining took place, so to speak! I don’t know if you know this, but that first test run was attended by Paris’s chief executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, so that he could personally approve the apparatus, give the go ahead, so to speak. And, well, he obviously did, because not a week later it was already put into operation. The first to have his head cut off was just an apache, a vagabond, not even a bandit in the real sense of the word, a pickpocket. And do you know how the story goes, Mr. Milev? The crowd, if you can believe it, was terribly disappointed! The people had gotten so used to executions taking at least an hour, and for the condemned to be tortured, frenzied, twitching, eyes popping out, biting their tongue, even, pardon me, shitting themselves as they were being hanged . . . And here was this guillotine—shhhing!—and it was all over.”

  “Very interesting,” the poet tensed up, “now if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  “One second,” the other stopped him. “May I just finish my thought? I beg your pardon, it’s just been so long since I’ve spoken to an intelligent man. By the way, after Dr. Guillotin died, his family petitioned the state to change the name of the guillotine! They didn’t want executions referred to as “guillotining,” either. Moreover, people already referred to the guillotine as the Louisetta, assuming it was Louis who’d actually invented it, not the doctor. But the government refused. So do you know what the family did?”

  “No,” the poet groaned. “What?”

  “Very simple!” Geshev exclaimed with affected nonchalance and dead, soulless eyes. “They changed their name. And guillotine stayed! Life, what are you going to do? But there was something
else I was going to tell you. After they tested the guillotine with that lowlife apache, they moved on to the aristocrats. Louis XVI, his wife Marie Antoinette, and so on, and after that, they went after their own people. And it was then the industrialization of beheadings truly began!

  “But, not long after, word spread the guillotine wasn’t that humane after all. Doctors claimed the head lived for at least fifteen minutes after it was cut off! Even now, the books I read in Italy were filled with eyewitness accounts of detached heads’ eyelids opening and closing, blinking, mouths moving their lips, things of that nature. I even read that when they cut off Charlotte Corday’s head, her face expressed in no uncertain terms her absolute indignation at what had been done. This was written somewhere by the executioner Sanson himself . . . I’m only telling you what I’ve read on the subject, of course—I haven’t witnessed a guillotining personally, I’m only interested in it theoretically.”

  “I know something else,” the poet couldn’t resist. “This same Charlotte Corday was Pierre Corneille’s great-granddaughter.”

  “Is that right?” Geshev lit up. “That same Corneille, the poet?! Would you look at that. It will turn out the world really is a small place, won’t it?”

  He shrugged, relishing a drag from his cigarette, and asked after the poet and his new magazine, Zhar—Ember—and would the first issue come out soon because he was awaiting it with great anticipation. He missed the now defunct Plamuk terribly. He said it just like that—he missed it terribly. He could hardly wait for Zhar to come out.

  “I hope,” he remarked buoyantly, “that it is exactly like Plamuk. After your articles,” he stressed, “I liked Georgi Vassilev’s articles best. A great polemicist! I am assuming that he will continue contributing to Zhar as well? I wonder if you might one day introduce me to this contributor. He goes by Shaytov as well, doesn’t he? I am dying to have a chat with him sometime!”

  The poet started, but hid it and only hmmed in agreement.

  “And here you are, awaiting trial,” Geshev added solicitously. “I’m probably the last thing you need right now. The trial is set for the fourteenth of May, if I remember correctly? I personally find it rather unfair that you are on trial for writing ‘September.’ How absurd that you wrote a poem in 1924, after the article incriminating literary works for inciting class hatred was removed from the Law for the Protection of Bulgaria! It just isn’t right. I promise you, I will be in the courtroom that day to listen to what you have to say! It’s sure to be riveting.”

  “Riveting, yes, no doubt,” the poet groaned. “Better that it wasn’t happening at all. But we’ll see, we’ll see.”

  “We will most certainly!” Geshev said energetically as he surveyed the room for an ashtray. “By the way, I do have a copy of ‘September.’ It’s inside an issue of Flame some friends of mine brought over. I might even recall a line or two . . .

  “The people’s voice

  is the voice of God”

  The people,

  Pricked

  By a thousand knives,

  Dulled,

  Degraded,

  Poorer than beggars,

  Deprived

  Of brain

  And nerve

  Arose

  From the darkness and fear

  Of their lives

  —And wrote with their blood

  FREEDOM!*

  He pinned the poet with a zealous gaze.

  “When that ridiculous trial is over, Mr. Milev, I’ll stop by so you can autograph the booklet for me . . . and then perhaps introduce me to Georgi Vassilev, I hope . . .”

  Now Geshev really seemed as though he was leaving, but he suddenly thought of something again and turned around.

  “Apropos, Mr. Milev,” he whispered, “the Industrial Revolution, in turn, gave birth to the electric chair! Doesn’t it seem as though every revolution first invents a new way to kill, and only then gets around to thinking up new laws?”

  He tipped his hat and left.

  The poet locked the door behind him and stepped back into his office, where books, papers, and proofs shrouded the small writing table and his typewriter. He went to open the window, and felt the crispness of the cool April night, but he also caught the smell of something else. A heavy, cloying scent. It wasn’t coming from the viridescent trees in the garden across from their bathroom.

  It was reminiscent of carrion.

  Not exactly carrion, but rather burning flesh.

  The Gospel of Herod the Great

  On the fourteenth of May, nineteen twenty-three, they murdered former Prime Minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski. Velichko “the Uncle” Velyanov did the deed. The Minister of War Ivan Valkov personally ordered Captain Harlakov to do it, and the whole operation was led by retired Colonel Slaveiko Vassilev.

  Ivan Valkov lived to be eighty-seven, and claimed it wasn’t he who ordered the murder, but Aleksandar Tsankov. And so he said, “Slaveiko Vassilev turned Stamboliyski over to Harlakov, who carried out the murder, personally ordered by Tsankov, as a way to implement the decision of the Military Union.”

  Aleksandar Tsankov lived to be eighty years old and said that it had all happened on the order of Ivan Valkov. He said, “Ivan Valkov and the people around him were cleansing Bulgaria from any and all traitors, spies, and saboteurs.”

  Ivan Harlakov lived to be fifty-seven and said that both of the others ordered him to do it. But he added: “It is my deep conviction that out of everything done on the ninth of June, this murder was carried out with the king’s knowledge and consent.”

  Velichko Velyanov lived to be sixty-nine and said nothing.

  Slaveiko Vassilev lived to fifty-five and killed himself on September ninth, nineteen forty-four.

  Etcetera.

  On August twenty-sixth, nineteen twenty-three, they killed the politician Rayko Daskalov. He was thirty-five, and they detested him almost as much as they detested Stamboliyski. He had decided not to return to Sofia and instead stay in Prague—maybe the whole thing would blow over and they’d forget about him. But they found him in Prague anyway and killed him there. Yordan Tsitsonkov, an agent of IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, was behind the murder, and they caught him at the scene of the crime. First they acquitted him, then they sentenced him to twenty years, and in the end he hung himself in jail. This happened on January twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty-five. Yordan Tsitskonkov had just turned twenty-six.

  On September twelfth, nineteen twenty-three, the police arrested dozens of communists based on reports of informants that revolts were imminent. They even arrested Dimitar Blagoev, but he had just turned eighty-seven, so they put him under house arrest.

  On September fourteenth, nineteen twenty-three, the communists caused a big stir at the Sofia outdoor market and the deputy of the local police station, Konstantinov, fell dead to the ground in the hullabaloo. An anarchist from Aytos by the name of Anton Kutev killed him.

  The intelligence that the communists were cooking up a revolt ended up being true. The authorities put an end to it, but not without numerous victims—it’s doubtful anyone could ever confirm how many died. Some say this many, others say that many, and the truth about death is never somewhere in the middle. The leaders of the revolt—Georgi Dimitrov, who would go on to become Bulgaria’s first communist leader, and Vasil Kolarov, future deputy prime minister of Dimitrov’s government—ran away to the Serbia, and Dimitar Blagoev cursed them from his house arrest.

  On October seventeenth, nineteen twenty-three, at eight thirty in the evening, they killed Nikola Genadiev. They ambushed him at the corner of Krakra and Shipka Streets and shot him several times. The killers were never found. The parliamentary opposition proposed Milan Grashev be assigned as special investigator to the case with unrestricted rights. Milan Grashev was born in Prilep and his real name was Mihail, Mihail Grashev. He had lived in Sofia for twenty years and was a well-known attorney. He authored a leaflet declaring the IMRO a mafia, Todor Aleksandrov and Aleksa
ndar Protogerov mobsters, and the king’s court: their main patron.

  On April thirtieth, nineteen twenty-four, they shot down the deputy of the Second Police Precinct, P. Karamfilov, at the Bodega beer hall on the corner of Nishka and Osogovo Streets. The man had sat down to drink with his friends Dimo and Konstantin Antonov, but around eight o’clock, a middle-aged stranger enters, hat pulled down low, and heads straight for their table. He approaches, pulls out his revolver and fires three bullets into Karamfilov, who falls dead on the spot. One of the bullets shattered his jaw, knocking out several teeth, while the other two bullets pierced straight through his heart and kill him instantly. Mayhem ensues, and the killer disappears into the night. Some said it was that same Anton Kutev from Aytos, others claimed that no, it wasn’t him at all, it was Hristo the Hare from Dupnitsa, but either way, he was never caught.

  They killed Milan Grashev on the twenty-sixth of May, nineteen twenty-four. He was twenty-four, and his killers were never found.

  On November tenth, nineteen twenty-three, they killed Spas Douparinov. They were allegedly taking him to Sofia to stand trial, but they killed him on the way there. Then they buried him around Cheshmadinovo, where he was born. He wasn’t even thirty years old.

  On the fourteenth of June, nineteen twenty-four, on the corner of Moskovska and Rakovski Streets, the plainclothes police officer Stefan Karkalashev fired three bullets into Petko D. Petkov, killing him. Karkalashev was from IMRO. They caught him at the scene, but he showed them his badge and they let him go. They arrested him again and sentenced him to death, then changed it to life. He was out in three months. Petko D. Petkov had been only thirty-three.

  They killed Mihail Dashin in Samokov on the eighteenth of August. He’d barely qualified for amnesty and returned to Samokov, where he’d briefly acted as mayor during the second local commune. It wasn’t clear who killed him and why—too many people had it out for him already for leading the June uprising.