“I knew he’d try to trick you!” the same man called out again, yet was the first to laugh.
He may have won them over, but Vasil Ikonomov he couldn’t. They stopped speaking to each other for a long time, even though it pained both of them tremendously.
And so it went.
Another time, he told the writer Mosko Moskov:
“Mosko, Mosko my dear man . . . the way we’re going, by the time we liberate these people, we’ll have killed them all!”
Mosko replied that he’d shoot him too, right on the spot, if he ever saw him in a cop’s cap.
“Wouldn’t you do the same to me?” Mosko added.
Mosko loved to act like a foolish country boy, walking around with his worn-out vest and his tattered hat and a pouch over his shoulder, all of which he could pull off because he was wide-eyed and round-faced.
He took everything in jest, even his own reputation as a ladies’ man with many lovers. He told a story once—his new lady friend had a twin sister, and upon being asked whether he had any trouble keeping track of the ladies’ identities, his round face had lit up triumphantly and he happily responded that they should be the ones keeping track of him. Or he’d say, “In the words of Chekhov, ‘People should be beautiful in every way. Especially in their guns!’” And he’d convulse with the innocent laughter of a street urchin.
But he was sharp as a razor.
Sheytanov knew it and asked him to drop the act.
“Do you mean that anytime someone looks at me sideways I should shoot him? Don’t agree with someone? Let’s get out our guns and shoot each other. Don’t like how someone looks at me? Get my sword and stab him. Is that how you see it? Leave that thinking alone, boy.”
Mosko gave him a look and responded:
“What am I supposed to do instead? Let the wolves eat me?”
“Mosko,” he said, “you’re asking for trouble, my friend. Are you seriously unable to differentiate between bravery and idiocy?” He couldn’t tell if Mosko’d heard him, and if he had, if he’d understood him.
The young man feigned ignorance yet again, putting his hand on his heart and went on:
“Sheytanov,” he said, “wait a second and hear me out! This is how it all happened—I was walking, I wasn’t bothering anyone, they stop me. Why, they couldn’t tell you, either. If they’d only stopped me, I would’ve been fine with that, but, no, they have to ask for my identification card. I say fine, I’ll show you my identification card, if that’s what you want. I’m keeping the peace! I go into my bag and get out my gun . . . So I ask you, what right do they have to ask me for identification? Me . . . with an identification card? Are they out of their minds or what? So I ask you again—which one of us is looking for trouble?”
“I just want to remind you,” Sheytanov interrupted him, “that you’re an anarchist, not a malefactor. Don’t forget that.”
Mosko suddenly grinned and said:
“Sheytanov, funny thing is, even if it were you in an officer’s cap, I’d still blow your brains out.”
His laugh sounded like a young wolf’s howl.
Sheytanov sighed.
“No, Mosko. The funny thing is that I believe you . . .”
He was serious. Both he and Mosko Moskov were very serious.
That’s how it was. But anyway . . .
[Sunday, July 7, 2013]
He was soaked to death when he got back to the Kilifarevo Monastery. Zhelyo awaited him, as did Mariola, frightened with bad presentiments. Sheytanov flopped down wearily on the bench and relayed what the Hero had told him. Zhelyo grinned darkly and let cursed, relieved that at least he needn’t think about Vassil shooting and missing, which had been truly worrisome. He took a look at Mariola huddled into Sheytanov and said it was time to clear out.
“Sheytanov,” he said, “My men are in Harmanli. They’re just waiting for my signal. One snap of my fingers and we’re in Turkey, brother. Tell me, what are we doing?”
But Sheytanov sighed.
“It’s not that simple. We didn’t start this circus, brother, but we’re in neck deep, we have to play it till the end . . .”
“Like hell we do. And when they kill us like dogs, we’ll really show them what’s what! I’m not telling you to run like a coward. I’m offering you a common sense option.”
Then he groaned and punched the wall with his enormous fist.
“Think about her!” he said, meaning Mariola. “She hasn’t even tasted life and you’re leading her to slaughter. Didn’t she suffer enough in Pleven?
Sheytanov didn’t respond. He only held the girl closer to him and told her: “Don’t listen to him. It’s going to be fine,” and then he went quiet, while that same shadow rose up behind the monastery walls, rustled past the trees, and dissipated in between the bristling hills . . .
12.
[Monday, July 8, 2013]
May fourteenth, nineteen twenty-five—the day of the Holy Prophet Jeremiah, the day the village folk chase away the snakes—happened to be gloomy. The rain came down in a soft drizzle, and as they walked to court, the poet made a big deal of seeming fine—he went so far as to attempt a joke.
“Just look at this day!” he said to his wife, Mila, and to his sister Mika. “Byronic gloom! Byronic judgment . . . Byronic peace and love. I shan’t be sentenced on such a day, you’ll see with your own eyes. You,” he said, “just sit and watch!”
He then remembered, and relayed just as joyously that, on top of that, the Orphan had given his word the previous night to show up as a witness.
“The Orphan,” he said, “drinks his rakiya with the judge at the Wild Roosters, he’ll come sort things out, there’s no way he won’t! We may have had our disagreements at the theater, but that’s a different thing all together. The Orphan is my guy. It’s not like I’m asking him to do a whole lot, either—all he needs to do is show up, give a furtive nod to the judge without the stenographer noticing and spreading it all over town, and we’ve got this.”
Mila and Mika nodded and responded that yes, exactly, exactly, and they laughed nervously, but he couldn’t even entertain the thought their laughter might be disingenuous.
Case No. 249 was eighteenth in line on this particular day, and the three of them sat down in the crammed hallway.
Nine o’clock came, but the Orphan was nowhere to be found. The poet leafed through the papers containing his summation, adding a word here, crossing out another there, raising his head expectantly every time the door cracked open and the smell of rain and spring rushed into the corridor.
At ten, the Orphan was still nowhere to be found. At fifteen minutes after ten, the poet could no longer bear it and told his sister the man had probably overslept—she should run and get him!—and in all her long and lonely years as a widow, Mika would never forget how she ran and ran and rang the doorbell with all her might . . .
[Before I forget! Maria Kassabova, or Mika, whom everyone agreed was the most beautiful of Milyo Kassabov’s four daughters, wed the talented sculptor Vladimir Vladimirov from Ruse in nineteen thirty-four. But they lived together only a few months; he died a young man, that very same year. Milyo Kassabov attended his funeral, and later sent a telegram to his wife. “It was as though I buried my son a second time!” he wrote.
After she was widowed, Penka Kassabova, who had already become the director of the American daycare in Sofia, sent her sister to America. In the United States, Mika, as she was now called, studied pedagogy. In forty-two or forty-three, she tried to come back to Bulgaria—but the war made it impossible, and then . . .
In any case. In New York, she worked as a teacher in a large daycare, and New York was also where she died in nineteen ninety, when she was eighty-six years old.
Childless.
Life!]
Mika would never forget how, instead of the Orphan, it was his wife, Olga, whom all of Sofia knew as the Orphaness, who opened the door. She would also never forget what the woman said to her then.
“O
h, he went to his studio to stretch his canvases,” she told her. “He must have completely forgotten about your brother’s trial, Miss.”
“Never mind that!” Mika threw out impatiently. “Where is he stretching his canvases, so I can go and remind him?”
“Well, in his studio, miss,” the Orphaness responded, “his studio in Dragalevtsi.”
Mika would also forever remember how she had been stunned speechless, how she was unable to utter a single word. “What do you mean in Dragalevtsi!” she had wanted to scream. “How is he in Dragalevtsi? It’s at least an hour there, another back!” But she couldn’t speak. She only watched, terror-struck, as the face of the woman began to fade, disappear, melt away, how her phlegmatic eyes also dematerialized, leaving only her blonde hair—a spurious halo lit by a vestibule lamp doing its best to offset the late morning gloom.
Mika returned to court worried sick with the news the Orphan was stretching his canvases in Dragalevtsi, but the poet only smiled and brushed it off.
“No worries,” he said, “I’ll get on fine without him. These people can’t even imagine the kind of speech I’ve got for them.”
He said as much, but his smile was now disingenuous as well.
When the attendant called them in the courtroom at noon, it wasn’t just the Orphan who was missing. Stefan Rashenov, the lawyer, was also absent.
He simply did not show up.
Actually, he did show up, at the end—when everything had already been settled and the only thing that remained was for the judge to read the verdict and yell a tedious “Next!” to the same attendant.
That’s how it was.
13.
[Wednesday, July 10, 2013]
As the poet finished his plea in the dusty courtroom, Mila squeezed his elbow hopefully despite her utter despair and whispered:
“When you spoke, we could feel the beating of angels’ wings!”
As soon as the words left her mouth, she bit her lip, for they immediately felt like a gruesome prophesy, an omen, a summoning of something wretched, like a subterranean echo.
But the poet was so content with the speech he’d given, it didn’t even occur to him how ghastly the vision of angels’ wings was.
“I don’t know,” he whispered excitedly, “I don’t know about that, but I gave the judges one hell of a lecture on art and life!”
“Absolutely!” his sister exclaimed. “Did you see how the stenographer was staring at you as you spoke, the chairman had to remind him to keep up with recording the proceedings and to pay attention!”
So it had been. The poet’s voice had been loud and thunderous: “Your honors, in the name of Bulgarian justice, do not come down with a guilty verdict! If you,” he said to the judges, “give me a guilty verdict, you would be punishing, wounding, and staining the entirety of Bulgarian art! And its development. Because,” he said, “art can blossom only when it is planted in freedom. If you censor the writer,” he said, “you would be killing art itself!”
But they still came down with their guilty verdict, and the poet lost it. He jumped to defend himself, but the judge only banged his gavel and yelled: “Next!”
They left the room and the poet, seeing his beautiful wife destroyed by what had happened, attempted to calm her down.
“Don’t worry, it’s nothing! This way I can work in peace in prison, I’ll even make more money. The state will feed me for free.”
Such were the words that came out of his mouth, and his sister could not fathom how her brother was able to summon the courage to joke about it.
[Years and years later, far beyond continents and oceans and those times, as she lay alone in her apartment in the vastness of New York, she would remember with the clarity one remembers a bad dream, how, as they strode toward the ugly building on Maria Louisa Boulevard, she suggested to her brother that the poet ought to gather the writers and march up to the palace to ask for a pardon since the king was going to celebrate his name day the following day.
“We must immediately go to the chairman of the Writers’ Union, Vlaykov! He,” she said, “is part of the Democratic Alliance, there’s no way they won’t hear him out at the king’s court.”
She tottered at her brother’s side, pulled on his sleeve and declared, convinced, that if the writers weren’t going to defend their own artistic freedom, who would do it for them? They should at once go to the confectionary on Tsar Osbovoditel, instead of home. Things of that manner.
But she’d been young, so young.
She also remembered how her brother had stopped dead in his tracks and looked her up and down, then waved his hand and hissed something dismissive.
“Right, they’ll practically break their legs running to defend me. Writers! Mika, Mika,” he asked her, “did you already forget how they all ran to city hall to ask for permission to protest the fact I was arrested for literary crimes? We’re drowning in their courage.”
He walked ahead once more, and she remembered about the Orphan and how he’d chosen precisely this day to go stretch his canvases, all the way in Dragalevtsi.
Every time she remembered all of it, regardless of how much time had passed from that foggy fourteenth of May, nineteen twenty-five—the day of the Holy Prophet Jeremiah, who’d been told by wise men and princes he could never be sentenced to death, because he spoke directly from God, our Lord—every time she remembered all of this, the blood drained from her face.]
14.
[Thursday, July 11, 2013]
Sheytanov was in Arbanasi when, toward the end of June, nineteen twenty-four, he heard the sixth issue of the magazine had been confiscated. He was surprised to hear this, because he knew the contents well and there was nothing that different in this book from the first five, and so decided it’d been yet another dirty attempt to impede them. He realized how right he’d been when the poet sent a young man with a quickly scribbled note. City hall had not only confiscated the entire issue’s circulation, he wrote, but had also posted two policemen at 145 Rakovski, where a special police envoy had already come to collect all of Plamuk’s past issues and every single book from the archives. And then they arrested everyone! They’d all been loaded up and taken to the fourth police precinct—no letter, no explanation. The poet was livid—he’d written as much in the note—and he was intent on getting to the bottom of this vandalism. He asked about it at city hall, at Public Safety—and nothing, they would not say a word to him. He wrote to the district attorney in protest, but expecting a response was akin to waiting for a letter from a dead person.
“All of this has to be just a misunderstanding!” Sheytanov thought and felt himself boil up into a helpless rage.
He went back to Yambol, but he felt strange there. He walked the streets and although cops recognized him, they passed him by. He thought it might be from fear, or because of the still-fresh memory of the previous year’s pointless carnage on March twenty-sixth, nineteen twenty-three. Everyone remembered it and everyone was still on edge about it—including the cops. As early as the previous summer, Tsankov’s government had trumpeted the fact it had already, in the name of something—not clear what, exactly—punished those responsible, despite the fact the punishment itself was no punishment at all: several army commanders were moved to different garrisons, a couple of higher-ranking officers who’d really outdone themselves in their efforts were sent out of sight, and Aleksandar Tsankov personally held back some upper classmen at the pedagogical high school (because in his efforts to get them to settle down and keep them from going astray with their penchant for anarchism, the minister of education, Omarchevski, had already sent them away to Burgas and Kazanlak in April). That was the extent of the punishment. Meanwhile, the interior minister, Stoyanov, who’d sent the following preposterous telegram to the district police chief, Spassov: “We can do without a Yambol, but the anarchists must be squashed at any cost!” just sat around in jail, where he was treated like a precious treasure and they couldn’t figure out how to get rid of him fast e
nough.
[Before I forget! Only the chief of police, B., got what was coming to him. First they tried to shoot him down in Yambol, but they only wounded his legs. The new government very helpfully drove him all the way to Sofia to be saved by the greatest medical luminaries. Someone from Yambol sent him a care package—cakes sprinkled with strychnine. He bit into one, but sensed the poison and spit it out, the swine. He dodged that bullet and only threw up. That’s when Zhelyo really got pissed off and took the train to Sofia. He waited for B. outside the hospital and saw him taking a stroll along the sidewalk with a young lady. He took him out with a single shot—B. sprawled out on the leaf-covered sidewalk and his crutches clanked against the pavement, and just as the woman opened her mouth to scream, Zhelyo told her: “Not a sound. Count to 100 before you start squealing again.” Then he hopped onto a passing tram. And that was that.]
Anyway, during those couple of weeks when Sheytanov was back home in Yambol, the cops turned the other way when they passed him on the street, and he didn’t have to keep his hand on the gun inside his pocket the entire time.
He loved Yambol in summer. It didn’t matter where he was, at dusk he still listened for the short, whip-sharp whistles of the pigeoners, that pulsating flutter of the pigeons crossing the trees and over the rooftops; he even missed the fumes emanating from the tanneries by the river.
In the evenings he went out, crossing the river over the Balahurski Bridge, past the pedagogical school and the bathhouse, and arrived at the public gardens, still alive with loud crowds and brass music. The young people looked at him the way one looked at a legend, but he just smiled to himself and disappeared into the shadows.
One evening, Kiril, the bookshop owner Vassil Krastev’s boy, took him to visit the home of David Krispin, Tasko Gigov’s partner at the gutter-tile factory. Krispin’s daughter, Esther, was a friend of those modernist literary mules, which was perhaps why her parents invited him so courteously into their big house in the Jewish neighborhood by the river. Inside the guestroom lit up by an electric chandelier and the calming clink of the floor-to-ceiling crystal bookcases, Esther sat down at the piano and began to play something by Chopin. She was an excellent pianist. In the middle of a nocturne, Sheytanov’s gun tumbled onto the carpet: he’d let himself relax into a long forgotten and perpetually ignored repose and hadn’t even felt the pistol slip out of his summer jacket. Esther hadn’t even heard the telltale tumble, but Kiril Krastev saw everything and paled greatly, while Krispin just looked at Sheytanov with sad reproach.
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 16