The Same Night Awaits Us All

by Hristo Karastoyanov

  On the thirty-first of August, they killed Todor Aleksandrov up in the Pirin Mountains as he traveled to the congress of the Serski Revolutionary Region. He was killed by Shteryo Vlahov and Dincho Vretenarov. They, in turn, killed themselves on the fifteenth of September in some shack by Pripechene, and when their bodies were found, they were thrown into the Struma River. Todor Aleksandrov was forty-three, Shteryo Vlahov had just turned forty, and Dincho Vretenarov couldn’t remember when he’d been born.

  On the twelfth of September, Kiril Drangov killed Aleko Pasha in Gorna Dzhumaya.

  On the thirteenth of September in Sofia, Vladislav Kovachev from Štip was killed by Mircho Kikiritkov. Kikiritkov was forty years old when they killed him in Yugoslavia.

  On the same day, the thirteenth of September, they killed Dimo Hadzhidimov from the communist party. He was forty-nine. He was killed by Velichko Kerin, aka Vlado Chernozemski, from IMRO.

  [Let it be said! Vlado Chernozemski lived to be thirty-seven, becoming Vanche Mihailov’s right-hand man. Vanche Mihailov personally referred him to Ante Pavelić, who then made him a terrorist instructor for the Croatian Ustashas. On October ninth, nineteen thirty-four, now going by the name Peter Kelemen, with a Czechoslovakian passport in his pocket, two guns—a Parabellum and a Mauser—and a bomb beneath his blue blazer, Vlado stood together with the crowds lining Marseille’s lakeshore boulevard, La Canebière, to greet the King of Yugoslavia, Alexander I Karađorđević. The king had arrived in France to discuss a joint action regarding the problem with Macedonia. The king and the French Foreign Minister, that old fox Louis Barthou—seventy-two at the time—sat in the back seat, with the top down, making what little security there was—two mounted policemen and one civil agent, someone named Gale—completely useless. Vlado Chernozemski jumped out of the crowd and apparently yelled “Vive le roi!” But as he tore through the street and threw himself onto the step of the black Delage, he screamed, in Serbian, “Death to the tyrant!” He then withdrew the barrel of the perfect killing tool—his Mauser—and shot once, then again, and then again straight into the king’s heart, and the latter slid down the car seat. The third bullet pierced Barthou’s arm, four others were fired at General Alfonse George, who had attempted to stop Vlado, and also gunned down the unlucky Gale. Only then did one of the pair of mounted police finally get to the automobile and twice hit Chernozemski with his sabre as the assassin clung to the vehicle’s door. Vlado Chernozemski collapsed on the pavement, but continued to shoot. The policemen swarmed him and jumped on top of him, and the bystanders went delirious: people tore through the cordon and stampeded toward the car, trampling Vlado. King Alexander I Karađorđević died on the spot, having not yet turned forty-six. Louis Barthou died as well, but later: in the commotion someone attempted to stop the bleeding from his wounded arm, but did an amateur job tying it up, instead of stopping it making the bleeding even worse. An ambulance arrived and took them both—him and the killer—to the nearest hospital, but Barthou had lost too much blood and lost consciousness. He died in the doctors’ arms. He was seventy-two. And General George? He lived and survived World War II, even with four bullet wounds in his chest. He died in nineteen fifty-one—just a little short of his seventy-sixth birthday. Vlad Chernozemski, slain by the policemen and trampled by the rabid crowd, died that same evening at eight o’clock. He would have turned thirty-seven ten days later.

  But this would be another gospel altogether.]

  On December fifteenth, nineteen twenty-four, around six thirty in the evening, after darkness had set, they killed the prosecutor Joakim Dimchev—thirty-six, French-educated, pretty as a rosebud and spiteful as a widow. He had been the one who ordered the prison directors to keep political prisoners chained up at all times and to deny them newspaper reading privileges, and as for newspapers in general, he ordered that they be confiscated at his whim—he really was spiteful as a widow, this guy. But he was gunned down on the doorstep of his home with a single bullet to the heart. That was it for prosecutor Dimchev!

  On January second, nineteen twenty-five, about two weeks after Joakim Dimchev’s murder, they got Nikola Kuzinchev. He was Pane Bichev’s personal agent. His murder was identical to that of Dimchev: both men were taken down in the same way, and in both cases the murderer—or perhaps murderers—left a trilby hat next to the corpse. Utro was having a field day with the police. “Maybe next time the killer ought to leave a business card too, so that the Police Department can know for sure who the perpetrator was.”

  On the eleventh of February, nineteen twenty-five, they killed Vulcho Ivanov. They strangled him and hung a note on him, “Go to court with prosecutor Dimchev!” and dumped his body right below journalist Joseph Herbst’s windows, knowing he’d write about it the very next day in his newspaper Ek Vecheren. And he did. “They took him,” he wrote, “and with no court or trial, strangled him and dumped his body out on the street—in the capital of a democratic Bulgaria, lead by the most enlightened government in the world.” Vulcho Ivanov was killed by Kocho Stoyanov’s men. They didn’t even know which side they were on, they just liked to kill—regardless of who—and couldn’t care less how they did it: rope, bludgeon or dagger. That year, however, they felt as though they were government executioners—they killed with righteousness, they did important work, for which they weren’t reprimanded, but paid off. Kocho Stoyanov, their captain, was the police commandant of Sofia. He was fifty-one years old when he killed himself on September ninth, nineteen forty-four, the day of Bulgaria’s communist coup d’état.

  On February thirteenth, they killed Nikola Milev, who was from the village of Mokreni, on Dondoukov Boulevard. He was a history professor and chair of the Union of Sofia Journalists, and also director of the newspaper Slovo, a member of the alliance board of the Grand Mason Lodge of Bulgaria, and God knows what else: he would kill for status. He perpetually attacked Stamboliyski any which way he could, but it didn’t stop him from accompanying the latter to the conference in Lozana. He had a hand in drafting the Bulgarian Law for the Protection of the Nation, and was even being groomed as an ambassador to the United States. He took advantage of every single perk Bulgaria had to offer, yet persistently referred to the country as a foreign constituent. Many took credit for his murder, but officially it was attributed to Milan Manolev from Kukush, a statistics clerk. He in turn was killed on the fourteenth of April. When they killed Manolev, they also dumped the body where Nikola Milev was killed. Nikola Milev was from the Democratic Alliance, and Milan Manolev was an anarchist and a member of IMRO. The thirteenth of April that year was on a Friday. Friday the thirteenth.

  On the seventeenth of February, at seven thirty in the evening, they killed Todor Strashimirov with a single shot to the back of the neck. His killer was never found. His brother, Anton Strashimirov, wrote an obituary that read, “They’ve murdered my brother, Todor! May God save us all!” A rumor began to circulate that the authorities ordered the dead man’s corpse be driven to the cemetery while it was still dark out—seven thirty in the morning—and that Todor Strashimirov was buried with only four or five people as witnesses. But it wasn’t a rumor; it was the sad truth.

  On March sixth, while the amendments to the Law for the Protection of Bulgaria were being voted on, Haralampi Stoyanov walked out of the National Assembly. Haralampi Stoyanov had started off as a member of the Communist Parliamentary Group, then became one of the six who left the group almost immediately and formed his own, called the Independent Labor Parliament Group, and then abandoned that, too, and proclaimed himself a communist. But never mind all that. He stopped by the Army Club to buy some newspapers. They killed him with a single shot to the temple. The killer never did surface: the newspapers wrote that a Ipokrat Razvigorov from Štip had done it, but he never did confess to anything of the sort.

  On the fourteenth of April, around eight o’clock in the evening, they killed the reserve general Konstantin Georgiev—also a member of parliament, but from the Democratic Alliance—in the garden in
front of Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church. He was quite young for a general—not yet fifty-two. The two killers were from Petar Abadjiev’s Six. Their names were Atanas Todovichin and Jivko Dinov. Three shell casings from a Luger pistol were found next to the body.

  [Petar Abadjiev lived a long life; he even became a colonel in the Red Army, after which he came back to Bulgaria and was appointed lieutenant commander in the Air Forces. In April of forty-six, during military exercises, his commander’s automobile crashed and his head was decapitated by the front windshield. They found the head eight meters away on the side of the road.]

  The general’s wake was scheduled for three o’clock in the afternoon on the sixteenth of April, Holy Thursday, in the St. Nedelya Church.

  [Sure enough! It was a time of casting stones and a time of gathering stones, a time to kill and a time to die.

  A time of silence and a time to speak.

  Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, arm for arm, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound. Stripe for stripe.

  It was a time for war, but not a time for peace . . .

  After that, there was lightning and voices, thunder and quakes, and a great hail.

  That’s how it was.]

  On April sixteenth, Holy Thursday, at precisely twenty-three minutes after three o’clock in the afternoon, fifty kilograms of melinite and pyroxylin erupted beneath St. Nedelya’s main dome. Five fuses were used to detonate the bomb. The tails of the fuses were dipped inside a tin filled with rubbing alcohol, so that when the rubbing alcohol was lit—the fuses would light up alongside it, burn together, and blow up the entire devil’s apparatus in synchronicity. That’s how it happened—it all blew up. And the man behind it all was Nikola Petrov. On that particular day, Nikola Petrov had not yet turned nineteen years old, but it was he who lit the match and ran out of the church, revealing the inferno in his wake. One hundred thirty-four people died instantly from the blast—twelve generals, fifteen colonels, seven lieutenant colonels, three majors, nine captains, three members of parliament and the head of the Office of the National Assembly, Krastev, mayor Paskal Paskalev, district governor Nedelchev, three masons, a whole lot of other people, one baby, and four Jews. Some died from asphyxiation due to the poisonous gas from the fuming sulfuric acid, which the attackers had placed right underneath the bomb. Those wounded inside the church and around it numbered over five hundred, and since some died later from their injuries, the total number of victims reached two hundred and thirteen.

  But not a single priest!

  And not a single minister!

  The king did not step foot inside the temple that entire day. Some said that he and his retinue were attending the funeral of their chief huntsman Petar Kotev in Beli Iskar.

  That’s the story of how God turned his back on Bulgaria, how the gates of hell opened once more, and how in the weeks following, this same hell claimed victims who would forever remain uncounted.

  Tsar Boris said: thousands perished.

  The Minister of War, General Ivan Valkov, said: twenty-five people, in total.

  Amen!

  10.

  [May 5, 2013, Easter]

  But all this would happen lat

  He’d heard the poet was worshipped by the younger generation, that a considerable number of them knew all his poems by heart, and that just as many simply emulated him. Many even adopted his moniker, shortening their own Georgi to Geo, but the pinnacle of it all was witnessing no fewer than three young men with the same lock of hair over one eye at 145 Rakovski Street.

  “Say now, Bai Milev,” said Sheytanov as that same young man flew between the tables at Battenberg Square, “these lads, these young poets, fear you more than wealthy men fear me! Are you beating them or slaughtering them or chasing them with a gun . . . what exactly are you doing to have that effect on them?”

  “What can I say,” the poet sighed conceitedly. “I give them a beating here and there. But here’s the thing! When you’re young, you look at the geranium on the windowsill and you think it is the pinnacle of creation, and you can’t wait to piss on it and mark your territory. And there’s talent there, and lots of it—for the growing poet, I mean, not for the geranium. The young poet needs to aim for the poplars beyond the stone wall, not for his daddy’s backyard hedge. But until you give him a good slap on the back of the head, he won’t get it.”

  “I get it now,” Sheytanov nodded.

  “Sure you do,” the poet sighed. “Look, to be honest, today’s youth really trouble me. They’re full of rapturous Salieris and maybe a Mozart meandering here and there, like a thorn in your fucking side. See what I mean? These people are no longer writing in the name of literature. Not at all! They’re not even thinking about their readers when they’re writing. All they’re looking for is the three snobs aahing and wringing their hands in the reading salon . . .”

  “So what are they thinking about, then?” Sheytanov interrupted him.

  “The literary awards!” the other yelled and angrily slammed his fist on the table. “Because they know very well just what the awards juries like, and they’ve learned to mold it exactly to their taste. These juries don’t have an ounce of literary consciousness, so you can imagine how literary their awards are. ‘The awards were given precisely to the right people!’ says Dr. Galubov. He was apparently feeling just like Buridan’s ass—the donkey that died of thirst and hunger because it couldn’t figure out whether to go for the pail of water or the stack of hay placed at an equal distance before him—all of the books were so wonderful, he just didn’t know which one to pick. And accordingly, the writers take out their arsenal of stock phrases and check the boxes: here a rhyme, there a rhythm—a little rain here, snow, yellow leaves, fall, wilted roses, and crestfallen damsels, night, moon, the desolate flame of a candle inside an abandoned house, a forgotten love letter, the melancholy curls of the smoke rising from my cigarette, tearful eyes, strange accords, broken strings . . . ‘Inside the poky hovel, at dawn I’ll spin a loom, at night, alone, I’ll snivel, a necklace of black gloom’ or ‘That’s how I will pass life by, insatiate and malcontent. And when I die alone, abroad, a cuckoo-wanderer I’ll be.’ And behold the flood of awards! The epigones scratch their amateur vulgarities onto the paper knowing full well who likes what and how, and who sits on what awards jury and where. Everything’s been thought out. Because now—the writers must choose between Vae Victis and Winners Are Never Judged! And they always choose right. So they win their awards and the following spectacle ensues: first the winners get awarded, then the same people who gave out the awards praise the ones who’ve won them, then the ones who’ve won them praise those who have awarded them in the first place! A truly awesome thing! They award them, then praise them, then award them again, and all the while, they claim to be doing it all in the name of inspiring the budding poets. The awards go to their heads and they become regulars at Bai Ilia Yugrev’s confectionary on Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard, the unawarded raise hell because they don’t want to be left out of the confectionary and they come out to fight with their little canes, so then they’re awarded so they’ll keep quiet, and in the end, they all get into the Writer’s Union together. Poets with pomade in their hair and cologne in their moustaches. That’s the poetry scene of today—misters decked out in smooth, dark suits, so many with pale foreheads, a miner’s disposition, and sorrowful smiles. It is a scary thing, I’m telling you! Don’t even ask me how many people now despise each other because of these literary bursaries. Young people, my ass! So what does it all come out to then, Sheytanov? If you sell your body, we call that being a whore, but when you sell your talent—we call that stardom, right? That’s why I’ve always said: we need to do like Hungary’s Béla Kun. The man knew what he was doing. All burgeoning, hardworking and worthwhile poets, he said, would receive two-thousand-krone subsidies—so they can sit on their asses and write. The epigones—eight-hundred-krone lifetime pensions, on the condition that they—under the threat of death—don’t writ
e! But what happened here in Bulgaria? Just the opposite! The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment gave a bursary to Lisa Belcheva! Can you imagine that? How does that even work? She’s written three, maybe four poems in her life, and it’s not even clear if she’s going to write anything ever again. Some Gergi from Ruse took the last name Polyanov, and this year the Writers’ Union, when it accepted him as a regular member, did so because half the writers voting thought they were voting for the old Polyanov, for Dimitar Polyanov, for Alana! It’s a dangerous thing, I’m telling you. When did these people get so goddamn savvy—I just don’t get it! Malcontent . . . there’s another word that comes to mind, but let’s not go there.”

  Sheytanov gave a short laugh and told the poet he really ought to be a little more careful.

  “What for?” the poet bristled. “Am I wrong?”

  “I’m not one to judge if you’re right or wrong,” Sheytanov said, “but what I do know is that once a person begins his sentences with ‘when I was their age,’ he’s done for.”

  “You do have a point,” the poet agreed. “But do you know what I was doing when I was their age? Get us a cognac and I’ll tell you.”

  Sheytanov snickered again and waved to the waiter. The poet was already leaning over the table, recounting how, in nineteen fifteen, a year before the man’s death in the war, he’d proposed to the poet Dimcho Debelyanov* the following: as a way to protest the habitual philistine logic of society—which is always standing in the way of literature’s high tides, clipping her wings—in rebellion and in opposition to all of that, all the young poets should come out of their houses and hang themselves along the streetlights of the boulevard.

  “What now?” Sheytanov’s eyes widened. “Come again?”