Sheytanov apologized and put away the damned weapon, swearing to never again step foot inside the good people’s home while armed.
[Friday, July 12, 2013]
He left Yambol at the end of summer when the army and the police were once again on edge because of the organized groups roaming about. The partial amnesties from the previous summer meant some of the old ruffians came crawling out of the jails—infamous scoundrels, deft, uncatchable, armed to the teeth. They planted ambushes and stopped passengers, businessmen, and the first impatient wheat-brokers on the side of the road, pulling all of them down from their horse carriages and their cabriolets, first robbing them, then beating them, and finally abandoning them in the middle of the road without a cent, terrorizing the people in the surrounding areas. Not a week went by without bloodshed. They killed the local German, Anton Karden, who’d moved into these parts as far back as nineteen and one—they jumped him as he came back from the Government Cattle and Stallion Depot in Kaya Burun: they put a bullet in his head and disappeared with the money. Plenty fell dead, so the district authorities fortified the police in the city and put up army posts in the waiting room and the platform at the train station, where the mixed patrols greedily seized every piece of luggage they deemed suspicious.
Sheytanov started to travel with a leather bag, the contents of which included: three automatic pistols, several boxes of bullets, and five bombs from Mityo Ganev’s arsenal. He buried all of it under paper bags filled with two kilograms of oranges and one kilogram of lemons from Pasko Kulov’s new store, Svezda. At the train station, he went right up to the guard in the waiting room and amicably asked him to watch his bag while he bought his ticket. The patrols inspected every single bag, weaved basket, and bundle but his bag, which they did not touch, even going so far as to yell at the soldier to move it out of the way. All the while, Sheytanov took his time at the ticket counter.
When the train from Bourgas arrived, Sheytanov came up to the soldier and said, “God bless you brother, for keeping my fruit safe, it’s for a little kid, an orphan, ill for two Sundays now!” but the soldier didn’t realize the joke was on him.
In Sofia, he handed the bag to Zhelyo Grozev to give to Efi and Bae, and to warn them to be careful because Pane Bichev himself was onto the elusive heroes of the night and had woven a nasty trap for them.
The oranges and lemons he took to Mila and the kids.
He and the poet were in Alkazar when they happened upon a sting operation. The cops descended on small trucks and blocked the streets and exits while an entire horde of uniformed and plainclothes officers stomped through the tables, searching and checking the clientele at random. The orchestra broke off mid-note as havoc engulfed the crowd. The women yelped from fear and the men shouted in protest, threatening inquiries and escalations.
The poet looked at Sheytanov anxiously, but the latter simply stood up and yelled out for everyone to keep calm.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” he shouted. “Calm down, please. Let the officers of the law do their checks, our police are here to protect us, you know this. These people are here for our own good.”
The cops threw him hateful looks and passed him by, and the poet cackled:
“You’re quite the psychologist, eh?”
Before that, in August, they arrested Zhelyo in Sofia. They took him to the police directorate and interrogated him for three hours, but he just looked at them, insulted, and alternated between exclaiming “Yes, for God’s sake!” and “No, goddamn it!” They searched him and when they found nothing—they told him to get the hell out of there. So when, soon after, Sheytanov met up with Mosko Moskov at the Petropavlov Monastery, he did not miss the opportunity to remind him that if Zhelyo had had his Mauser on him at the time of his arrest, where would he be now?
“Think about it, my friend,” he said. “Just imagine how bad things would’ve been, and stop reaching for your gun every other second.”
But Mosko made light of it:
“I love it when I hear a bullet hiss by! When I hear a bullet, that’s when I know: it’s not my bullet. If I hear it whistle by, it means I’m still standing, my friend.”
He and Zhelyo had decided to carry their guns into town only when they were a hundred percent certain they would need to use them. Good thing they did, too.
While he was still in Turnovo, he was asked to speak in front of some people. One night in Dolna Oryahovitsa he stayed out too late, there was no way to get back into town, so someone offered him a place to stay, but that someone’s house was right next door to the village police station. And who knows why, they decided to get back to the house in a horse carriage. He told the men: “Get in, I’ll rein in the horses.” The sentry standing outside the station even yelled at him and called him a clod, hadn’t anyone taught him to rein horses? “Who gave you the reins, goddamn it?” the cop yelled at Sheytanov, who did not miss the opportunity to show his teeth and snarled back: “The horses are mine, and I’ll do with them as I please! You,” he said, “what are you going to do? Arrest me or straight up shoot me? Or are you just bored from standing at that post for hours?” The cop swore at him sourly and told him to get lost, that he could barely stand to look at him, let alone fight him.
Another time in Turnovo, while the police left no rock unturned looking for him, he sat inside the hippest barbershop on Bajdarlak Square, dressed like a prince from an American film. Across the street at the confectionary, Zhelyo and Mosko ate cakes and grinned through the glass: Zhelyo dressed like he ought to be in a movie, too, Mosko with his rubber tsarvuli and his village idiot’s cap, and there’s Sheytanov getting a shave and listening to the barber’s jabber. A pretty picture—they couldn’t get enough of it.
[Saturday, July 13, 2013]
Right around then, someone called Petko arrived in Turnovo from the village of Duskot. He’d been all over Sofia, treating his tuberculosis of the bone, and he came back deformed, limping, with swollen knees, a cane, and a statement in his pocket, written by six enraged Sofia men. The statement was filled with bitter accusations against Sheytanov—that he’d joined forces with the communists, that he’d come to an agreement with them to present a united front with the agrarians, so that after the revolution it would be the communists who ruled the whole country, with a small piece for the agrarians, and Kyustendil and Turnovo for the anarchists. The rumor made its way through dorms and clubs, it spread like kerosene fire, and the statement changed many hands and was read by everyone, and all of Turnovo was in goose bumps. “This Sheytanov,” they yelled, “he’s in bed with the Bolsheviks, the dog! Moscow must be paying him in dollars.”
He was hurt by the words, but what most weighed on him was how he and Vasil Ikonomov parted as enemies. At one time, the two men planned to blow up the Council of Ministers, precisely when Stamboliyski would’ve been there with all of his ministers at yet another of their endless sessions. It would have been the perfectly gruesome payback for the Yambol massacre on March twenty-sixth. They were planning to dig a tunnel to the basement of the building and stuff it with dynamite. Then out of nowhere, it occurred to them that this would not only be payback for the slaughter in Yambol—blowing up the Council of Ministers building would also honor the young people who died exactly twenty years prior, on April nineteen and three, when there wasn’t a stone left standing at the Ottoman Bank in Solon. They’d realized this at the same time and they both exclaimed: “Just like the motherfucking sailors in Solon!” They even shook hands, the way people who’ve said the same thing at the same time do. The anniversary may have been a coincidence, but it felt like a perfect foretoken. They immediately looked around for a small, empty storefront on Rakovski, something close by and facing the Council of Ministers building, so they could lease it and start digging, just as the Solon bombers had done. They calculated exactly how many people should enter, pretending to shop, and leave with paper bags filled with dirt from the tunnel, because that’s exactly how Yordan “Orce” Popyordanov and Kosta Kirkov ha
d done it. They even arranged for the dynamite—nearly two hundred kilograms of it—as well as two demijohns of nitroglycerin: both were taken care of by three reserve captains, seething with hatred for Stamboliyski for having fired them from the army at the prime of their might. Ikonomov and Sheytanov even tracked down a guy, an electrician, who worked at the tram depot on Maria Louisa to finish the bombs, laughing as they imagined watching the blast and the fire from behind the police cordons, and if it so happened that a few geese walked on by . . .
That’s how it had been. But only a year after, in the summer of twenty-four, he and Ikonomov had a falling out, and the latter left Kilifarevo without so much as saying goodbye.
[Sunday, July 14, 2013]
If the topic ever came up, Sheytanov and Georgi Popov couldn’t see eye-to-eye regarding that same camaraderie with the communists, but when, at the beginning of August, Sheytanov learned the identity of the two cops who’d desecrated Popov’s corpse—wrath engulfed him. He took Zhelyo and three other men from their pack of anarchists, went down to Kilifarevo, and burst into the police station where he personally executed one of them, and Zhelyo took care of the other. Then they left. The guard outside the United Industries bank started screaming from the other end of the square: “Help! Thieves! Help! Bandits!” Sheytanov called Zhelyo over and told him to go tell that moron to shut up. But the guard was already picking up his Mannlicher and Zhelyo had no choice but to shoot first. So he did.
That’s how it happened.
[Monday, July 15, 2013]
Others couldn’t let go of the fact he’d given fifty thousand leva to the poet to start Plamuk. They told him they could have started their own magazine with that money. What don’t you like about the poet’s magazine, he’d ask them. It’s good, they’d answer, but it wasn’t theirs! He didn’t quarrel with them, but he also didn’t like the darkness of the “us” versus “them”: he’d seen it in Russia and knew how those things ended. “Us and them,” he thought, “so they can kill us separately.”
He roamed around a lot that summer—on this side of the Balkan Mountains and that, with Zhelyo, without him, greeted with a scowl, or with a firm pat on the shoulder. He saw a lot, he heard a lot. But the more he traveled, the more sobering his thoughts became. He became convinced that after the handful of chaotic post-war revolts, what lay ahead was nothing more than the harrowing dormancy of an entire people.
[Tuesday, July 16, 2013]
One August afternoon he made his way to the editorial offices—he walked along Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard, toward Rakovski, and just as he got to Benkovski, he heard a slow and heavy stomp. He turned around and saw a black river of invalids spilling onto the street from the public gardens outside the palace. People on crooked wheelchairs or with crutches, with prostheses for arms and wooden pegs for legs, blind people with canes, most with dirty, worn out clothes, some with old and tattered military uniforms, with hole-ridden caps and with medals of honor on their faded tunics. There were so many of them that the first ones were already as far as the Russian Church, while the last were still stumbling over the curved tram tracks outside the palace gates. A dense police squadron waited ahead of them between the writers’ gathering spot at Bai Yugrev’s confectionary and the still-unplastered house of the businessman Nikola Shavkulouv, but the men dragged unyielding toward the cordon; the stomp of the dozens of lame legs was sinister. The cops dug their heels into their horses’ sides and steered them toward the crowd, which was drawing out through the Rakovski intersection, passing by the Military Club—where the dark gazes of several young officers on the veranda followed the scene—and straight toward the National Assembly.
That’s when he saw the poet: amid the swarm of broken down, spent, and gutted men. He strode, head lowered, with the prideful humility one adopts when he walks among his own kind.
He saw him, but he didn’t call out to him. He never mentioned it. The poet never did, either.
[Wednesday, July 17, 2013]
That same night, it was just the two of them at 145 Rakovski, and somehow the subject of the dissolution of the co-op, Liberation, came up. The poet immediately began to swear against the government. When the government starts confiscating and liquidating, it’s no longer a government, it’s a rabble of marauders, he yelled. Sheytanov let the poet get it out of his system and then calmly added that Liberation wasn’t exactly what it should have been, either.
“Don’t take it all at face value, Milev,” he said, “don’t believe everything they say. Half of them are dogmatists, the other half—total hustlers.”
The poet was ready to explode all over again, but Sheytanov didn’t let him get a word in.
“Milev,” he said, “Liberation hasn’t been a co-op in the true sense of the word for a long time. There’s no way it can be a true co-op—its leadership is nothing more than a breeding ground for communist money-pigs. The people in charge of Liberation,” he said, “they have fatty hearts.”
The poet began to disagree, and challenged him, but Sheytanov interrupted him again.
“Let me remind you of something!” he said. “Lani Toudjarov practically broke his back going over there to ask them for something, anything for Smirnenski. Well?” he added, “Did they give him anything? They gave him the middle finger is what they gave him. They knew he was on his way out and that the only thing that could save him was a sanatorium, but not only did they not give him one stotinka for a sanatorium . . . what am I even talking about—they wouldn’t even give him money for medication, let alone a sanatorium. Shady assholes. How many kindhearted shady assholes do you know? Think of how much they made just off his book alone. In one year they gave it two print runs, these Bolshevik swine. You’re a publisher—you do the math. They could’ve sent him not to a little Bulgarian village, but to Davos, and just with the money they got from importing that soviet cement. You tell me, what kind of a co-op doesn’t take care of one of its own?”
“Well, I don’t know if Smirnenski was ever actually a member,” the poet snorted reluctantly.
Sheytanov went black.
“He was a member of their party!” he argued spitefully. “Of their party. Isn’t that enough? Let me ask you something. Last year you spoke at Smirnenski’s wake, you spoke well, I was there, I heard you, but where, exactly, were his comrades? Or had their permission not yet arrived from Moscow—or maybe they weren’t required to be present by the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that what people are saying is true—that Minister Roussev gave his people from Public Safety a warning after June ninth. Do you know what he supposedly said to them? We won’t touch the communists, that’s what he said to them. What do you think of that, Milev?”
He gave a hopeless wave of his hand.
“Do you know what they say where I’m from,” he added, “the goat and the Bolshevik are never sated!”
They sat around a few minutes more, then went their separate ways with furrowed brows.
[Thursday, July 18, 2013]
Summer was wearing off when he brought Mariola to the poet’s house. Both the poet and his wife welcomed her warmly, Mila quickly put together something to eat, the two men sipped from the Yambol grape rakiya Sheytanov had brought, and they got to talking about the confiscation of the sixth issue.
“Listen to me,” Sheytanov said brightly, “when you think about it, a confiscated magazine is a big deal. People will be dying to exaggerate its contents with God knows what. And curiosity does help a lot. Hey!” he added, “it’s not you who’s behind the whole thing, is it? Tell me if you are, you’ll feel better about it too.”
“You’re laughing!” the poet took offense immediately. “You think the whole thing is funny? People are exaggerating, I even hear that it’s being passed from hand to hand, but it’s not available in any shops. I can tell you what to do with fame when there’s not a single sale behind it. The bookshop owners shrug their shoulders, sorry Mr. Milev, they tell me, the poli
ce came and took every last one, I couldn’t sell a single copy. You go and try to prove they did or didn’t, if you’ve got nothing better to do. Thankfully we got the issue to all of the subscribers before it was confiscated, maybe we’ll get a couple of leva from that.”
He added that he’d already written his thoughts on the confiscation—he’d show them!
“The way I’ve written it,” he said, “the way I’ve written it, I’m telling you, it’s going to start a fire under their asses, theirs and their talentless mothers’, pardon me, ladies. This is nothing but a police-driven critique!”
[Friday, July 19, 2013]
Later that night, when the rumpus from the convivial public drifted from the boulevard up through the open window, the poet suddenly declared:
“Listen to me now, Sheytanov, I came up with something, I want your opinion.”
He got up, lowered his head and began: “From the dead womb of night, the age-old venom of the slave is spawned.” Sheytanov was surprised and started to ask something, but decided against it and did not interrupt the poet. The poet was not reading from a piece of paper; he spoke confidently and Sheytanov quickly figured out that he and Mariola were far from being the first to hear the thunderous words. He saw, too, that Mila’s whole demeanor darkened, and knew at once he’d been right: many must’ve already heard these verses. It occurred to him that Mila likely already saw herself a widow with fatherless children. The thought was heart-wrenching. The poet recited with his hands in his pockets, but his entire body moved to the rhythm of the words: the verdant dusk inside the room thickened, and the poet’s shadow on the wall alternated between swinging as if in a heavy march, and crouching like a beast before pouncing . . . all the way to the end of the poem, with its unexpected “No god! No master!”
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 17