“You heard right!” the other slapped the table again. “We should all come out and hang ourselves, one after the other. Can you picture that? A young, misunderstood poet hanging from every street light, jazz playing, the tram headed to the Military Academy rattles mournfully by the streetlights, and the whole of society wails and pulls out its hair. Just imagine the beauty of the picture! With the legions of poets that would’ve swarmed the place—we’d have hung for miles. And if we’d run out of streetlights, we’d have doubled up on each one. And if we’d have run out of those too, we could’ve started with Dondoukov Boulevard. I’m being facetious, of course, but when I said all this to Dimcho Debelyanov, I was dead serious. How did you put it before? Puerile antagonism? Well, mine was the same thing—puerile antagonism.”
He sank back into his chair, overcome by the guffaws Sheytanov so enjoyed hearing.
“Wait till you hear what Dimcho wrote back,” he said, “I know his letter by heart, more or less, because it was memorable. ‘I didn’t write you back right away,’ he wrote, ‘because I was busy with something very important—torturing myself by trying to convince myself and the others that it’s high time we acquiesced to our own impotence and take your advice to contrive a never-before-seen spectacle: hang ourselves on the electric streetlights along Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard . . . but!’ he wrote, ‘what do you know, all my efforts were for naught. Neither I, nor the others, it turns out, were ready to perish, so young, so green. The reasons being literary,’ he wrote, which was of course the funniest part about the whole thing. That’s exactly what he wrote! ‘For reasons steeped entirely in literature!’ What a refined human being he was, he would never smack you across the back of the head, he would only give you a teasing tap on the nose, and if you felt like getting it, you would.”
“And then what did you do?” Sheytanov asked as he took two glasses from the waiter.
“What do you mean what did I do?” the poet raised his eyebrows. “I became very distressed, I read the letter a thousand times, I pulled out my hair, traitors, I yelled, apostates, and the like, but . . . you as my witness, I’m sitting here and drinking my beer with you. Ergo, I didn’t hang myself!”
“True,” Sheytanov affirmed, serious. “You did not.”
[Saturday, May 11, 2013, a day for reflection]
[Every television channel is bursting with scandal, some news bulletins have apparently been found in some printing press . . . I must have missed something, because I understood nothing. Everybody’s giving press conferences, the hubbub is brutal.
Piss on this day of reflection!]
[Sunday, May 12, 2013, Election Day]
“Where was I?” the poet asked, “Oh yes, the young people. Today’s youth is ready to gouge their eyes out, they’re dying to compete with each other. I saw it the other day in Hyperion’s last issue—Luydmil took a little bite out of Lalyo Marinov. In short, he says, Troyan’s Lalyo Marinov is threatening Europe! He who has ears, let him see, he says, he who has ears, let him see. A jokester, too! He who has ears, let him see. Very clever! Now Lalyo wants to shoot him. Earlier, Boyan Penev called Luydmil a literary Plutus. Very dishonorable. You can prove anything you want that way, but that’s another story. And Vladko the timeserver? Straight to the journal Zlatorog that very second! Because he and Boyan Penev are Zeus, the Thunderer of literary impertinence. Lyudmil goes to Lalyo and says: ‘Let’s go get rid of Boyan Penev!’ Lalyo didn’t ask too many questions, he just went along, and now Luydmil judges Lalyo from the position of Apollonius, of the muses, of the Dryads. Tombs he calls mounds, anchors—mudhooks, paddles he calls blades, fingers he calls thumbs. Not words, but passcodes for entering the kingdom of immortality. He prattles left and right about some international symbolism. You can’t find a more senile aesthetic, my dear man! I just don’t understand, when did this guy grow so hopelessly old? He’s become yet another dreadful deadbone in the corpse of literature.”
“Dreadful what?” asked Sheytanov.
“Deadbone!” the poet repeated. “From a dead bone—deadbone. I just came up with it. But it could be as though bacho Anton said it, couldn’t it? It’ll come in handy, I should remember it and write it down somewhere because I’m starting to forget things.”
[Friday, May 24, 2013, holiday; St. Ivan Rilski Clinic]
[This is of course, a well-known fact, but I’ll say it again: May twenty-fourth will always bring a beautiful rain, with raindrops like gems. Always. It always rains on May twenty-fourth. I don’t know what this means, but thank God it always happens this way.]
[Saturday, May 25, 2013]
[Monday, July 1, 2013]
[I’ve never known what to expect from a month that starts on a Monday. June came and went in a rainstorm, now July comes, cold.]
[Monday, July 1, 2013]
[Outside, they’re protesting again—beating their drums and blowing their whistles and horns and yelling: “Resignation!”]
[Three]
“I am an independent writer.”
—From Geo Milev’s notes
in his written summation
from January, 1925
[Monday, July 1, 2013]
Sheytanov would likely have been back in Kilifarevo by the time the prosecution drafted the accusation against the poet on the twenty-fifth of March, nineteen twenty-five, thus establishing criminal case No. 249 at the third capital ward of the Justice of the Peace Court in Sofia against one Georgi Milev Kassabov. The case was accompanied by a single piece of evidence as to the poet’s crime: the double issue of Plamuk with two brick-red numbers, seven and eight, on its cover, and “September” on the first page.
They handed the accusation to the poet on the second of April, a Wednesday, and he became furious. His rage was not borne out of fear; he was angry he’d have to interrupt his work and sit down to write a defense, when he had so many other things to do—all of them important, all urgent.
“Idiots!” he yelled, strewing the ashes from his cigarette all over himself. “Total idiots! Shoving the masses into the prisons and tying their hands, and now, trying to shut their mouths too, with this law. And who’s deciding my case?” he yelled. “The barbers!”
The barbers, indeed. The judges from that third capital ward looking over all the print-related cases and the excise duties, the same ones who decided on forest law fines, had to look at fifty to sixty cases in one sitting: half-assedly shaving yet another poor wretch in record time, as the bailiff already called for the next person. Hence barbers, and the department—the barbershop.
All of the famed Sofia attorneys had either raised their arms helplessly, “No, no this’ll only bring me a great deal of harassment!” or were already in jail, or simply hid as soon as they saw him, so the poet’s defense was eventually taken up by one Stefan Rashenov, who’d just arrived from Rousse and contributed to newspapers here and there under the byline Stanimir Lilyanov. This Stefan was a sensible man and when he heard the kind of speech the poet had drawn up to read inside the courtroom, he told him to ease up.
“Look here,” he said. “Your best bet is to fall ill! I’m serious. Get sick, hide somewhere where you can write, and I’ll take the medical evaluation to the court and get the trial postponed by a month or two. And who knows how things will play out then—we might not even have anything to worry about.”
The poet spat back that that was simply not going to happen, and if he suggested something of the sort again, he’d relieve him from his services at once.
“Get ready to fight, goddamn it!” he snorted, and lit yet another cigarette. “The poetry will come later.”
[Tuesday, July 2, 2013]
Meanwhile, sitting behind the colorful drapery sectioning off the tiny kitchen, Mila and her sister-in-law quietly whispered to each other. The poet’s sister recalled him pacing the rose garden outside their house in Stara Zagora when he returned from the war—one-eyed and disfigured.
“He’d lean forward,” she recounted, “and he’d smell the flow
ers, then he’d lean again and smell them again, then he’d turn to Mother and tell her: ‘Plant roses, many roses! Only roses,’ he would say. ‘I want the whole garden to be filled with only roses.’”
And she recalled how she overheard their mother tell their father: “What must this boy have gone through that he can’t get enough of roses?”
Another time he came back home around ten o’clock in the evening, elated at having a small puppy follow him all the way from the center of Stara Zagora—it didn’t want to leave his sight.
“He was so joyous, so alive . . .” the poet’s sister recalled. “He said, so excited, ‘Here I am shooing it away, trying to shut the gate, but it’s going in circles through my legs, whimpering. There it still is, right in the yard! Come on, give me the lamp so I can show you!’ Dad’s heart just melts and he made us all get up and go out of the house, looking at the little dog, which had rolled up into a ball under the awning, and when it saw my brother, it began to crawl on its belly, just crawling toward him, whimpering, going all around him, jumping, trying to bark, and it sounded all baby-like.”
Her brother began to convince their father to keep the little thing! Look how sweet it is, the poor little one, how pretty, look, he said, all white, with only one little black ear. We’ll call her Bella. Well, if Maeterlinck’s got a sheep, I’ll have a little dog.
Everyone exclaimed there was no way they could leave it now, and later she heard her mother say to her father, “What must the boy have been through at the front, that he’s this happy to see a little puppy!”
Mila listened for a while then suddenly whispered back:
“What must this young man have been through at the front that he’s this happy to play with his children!” and she thought about the poet’s impatient yearning for a son.
11.
[Thursday, July 4, 2013]
Sheytanov, in turn, went up into the Troyan Mountains to visit Vassil the Hero. All of Bulgaria was talking about how this man had shot at the king in Arabakonak, but had missed, and he wanted to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Hesitation wasn’t part of Vassil’s makeup. And Sheytanov wasn’t about to buy the whole ‘shot and missed’ scenario when, just a year prior, the Hero had shot the local superintendent, Serbezov, at the park in broad daylight.
Vassil confirmed he didn’t shoot and miss.
“Sheytanov,” he began tiredly. “Tell me, do you also think that this dynastic spawn could run not two meters in front of me and that I would miss, had I wanted to kill him?”
Sheytanov responded that he was wondering precisely the same thing, so Vassil asked him whether he really wanted to know what’d happened, or if he just wanted to start an argument.
Sheytanov shrugged.
“As you wish,” he answered.
Vassil told him how the other Vasil—Ikonomov—got him and five or six other men to go hit up the post office in Orhaniye. They didn’t bring rifles, just pistols and bombs. At first they didn’t even consider going to Orhaniye—they set off for Gulubets to rob the passing cars, but they were spotted, and only then went in the direction of Arabakonak. Funny thing was, while they walked that way, Vassil told them how, since the king loved to play hunter right around these parts, wouldn’t it be funny if they ran into him. He was being facetious, in other words, but anyway. As they walked, they suddenly heard the buzzing of a motorized vehicle. They all knelt down behind the trees and didn’t have to wait long—not a minute later a car approached from around the bend. It was a big, black, and shiny car—expensive, in other words—so it was worth the wait to see who exactly was driving it. Vassil stepped out in front of the vehicle with his hand raised, holding an empty matchbox, as if he’d run out of matches and needed more. Only then did he see who was the driving the car—the king himself, Boris! They all saw it. Ikonomov hissed from behind the trees that they’d really hit the big time now, and all the men lay down on the ground, pistols loaded, fingers on triggers, as Vassil threw the empty matchbox on the ground and pulled out his automatic pistol. He yelled, “Freeze!” and shot in the air, but the uniformed driver sitting next to the king raised his own carbine and opened fire, that idiot. He had no choice, Vassil had to kill him. Another idiot stood up behind him with his own firearm, attempting to be heroic. Vassil shot that man, too. It wasn’t until later, when he read the newspapers, that he realized whom he’d shot: the entomologist Ilchev. He still had no idea who the man was. Right then, the regularly scheduled bus from Orhaniye to Sofia rounded the corner. Boris had apparently recovered from the shock of what had happened because he grabbed the steering wheel to turn the car around, but instead crashed it into the telegraph pole on the side of the road—then he sprang through the gaping car door and took off for the bus. Ikonomov screamed at the men to hold their fire and yelled up at the Hero: “Run and get him! But don’t shoot him. Bring him back so we can settle the matter.” And Vassil really did take off after his majesty. “Slow down, slow down, man,” he yelled, “stop, we gotta tell you something! Stop!” But Boris did not oblige; he only ran and ran. He reached the bus, jumped in, and pushed the panicked driver away, took over the wheel and turned the bus around. Vassil the Hero swore, and yes, he admitted it—raised his pistol—but he refrained from shooting. The other, naturally, was not about to wait for anything else: he put the pedal to the metal and tore away to Orhaniye. That’s how it had all gone down. And in the whole pandemonium, his majesty had forgotten his binoculars and his blunderbuss inside the car, so Ikonomov took the former and Vassil took the gun. He was sorry about Ilchev, naturally: he’d been a decent man who’d fought for the cause.
The Hero relayed all this, and Sheytanov listened without interrupting.
“You see, Sheytanov?” he said at the end. “I hope you of all people get it. We had no idea the king was going to pass through there, and now Ikonomov’s saying I fucked up the whole thing, that I’d somehow known who was coming, and that I purposely came out before anyone else and shot into the air—to warn him! ‘You,’ he said, ‘did it on purpose because the king pardoned your father in nineteen nineteen and let him out of jail, and now you’re returning the favor.’ Can you believe that fucking story?”
Sheytanov was reminded of that Russian captain on the ship to Marseille, how he’d been certain revolutionaries were only worthy of that name after they’ve killed an emperor. He smiled bitterly. Vassil the Hero looked at him suspiciously, but he only shrugged, got up and left for Kilifarevo, but it was as though a shadow hovered over him.
A cold and bristling shadow.
[Friday, July 5, 2013]
He walked back, same as he’d done coming in. Every once in a while he stopped horse-carriages whose owners froze with fear, and even before they could acquiesce or refuse to let him on, he’d jump in and ask to be taken to wherever he was going. He just sat in the back and yelled: “They’ve really put the fear in you, haven’t they? Come on, let’s go!” and he tucked himself into the driver’s goods.
He’d then jump from the carriage, wave goodbye to the man driving it, and take off walking again. His Poseidon raincoat now only got in the way when he walked briskly through the overgrown paths, or when he slid into the thickets surrounding the muddy roads, but he couldn’t do without it in that unrelenting rain.
His gun and his bombs were uncomfortable too, but he couldn’t leave them, either.
[Saturday, July 6, 2013]
Sheytanov felt strangely about Death. He’d inflicted Death on many, more than once, but that spring she’d begun to repulse him, for he, like many others, had become convinced that he should leave behind the days he would not leave the house without a gun under his belt; the times he shot his pistol at night at the poor policemen, and scared the field-keepers just for kicks. It was true—he’d shot dead plenty in those past years.
But one day he suddenly asked himself: What had the policemen actually done to him, personally? He’d been surprised by his own question, and twice as surprised by the realization—not
hing. They hadn’t done anything to him. It was then he decided he was done with guns and bombs, and people couldn’t figure out how he—the fearsome Sheytanov, the most wanted man in the land—could walk around without so much as a pocket knife. People asked him what was wrong with him, was he giving up or what? And if he saw those posing the questions were actually interested in the answer, he’d take the time to tell them.
Once, he got word that some local boys from Nova Zagora were whispering that he wasn’t the same Sheytanov anymore. That he’d buried his guns, that maybe he’d gotten the jitters, and so forth. So he hopped over the Balkan Mountains to Nova Zagora, where twenty scowling men waited for him in a room. He took out his automatic pistol and slammed it on the table.
“I’ve come,” he said, “to straighten some things out.”
“Don’t let that smooth-tongue speak! He’ll only wheedle you in,” one of the young men yelled pitifully from across the table.
“Shut up for a second,” said Sheytanov and put down a freshly printed copy of Ethics by Kropotkin right next to the gun.
“One of these will kill a man, and one of these will make him come with you,” he said.
“So what?” the same man yelled out again.
“So nothing. You can either go it alone, or you can inspire someone to come with you. There’s strength in numbers.”
“I told you he’d try to wheedle you in,” the other objected again, but Sheytanov simply put away his gun and the book and told them that he wasn’t there to convince them of anything. Better that he tell them a story . . .
During the Yoke, a vaivode sends his men down to the village to do some of their warlord things. They grab their guns, girdle their swords, wave their flag, and set off. Suddenly, they spot two policemen headed toward them. The haidouks immediately run back through the shrubs. The vaivode intercepts them at the top of the hill and asks why they’re already coming back, empty-handed to boot. They start explaining themselves and the man cannot believe his ears. “What could we have possibly done, vaivode,” they say. “There were two of them and we were just by ourselves!”
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 15