“Earth shall be heaven!” the poet threw out deafeningly. “It shall!”
Quiet overtook the room. The poet laughed and asked:
“What do you think, Sheytanov?”
Sheytanov shrugged.
“Wasn’t it supposed to be about Prince Marko instead,” he said, “Prince Marko, Musa Kesedžija . . . ?”
“Those two can wait,” the poet responded. “Their time will come too, just not right now, because right now . . . wait, I missed something. Did I tell you what the title is going to be?”
“No,” Sheytanov furrowed his brows. “What will it be?”
“September!” the poet yelled victoriously. “September, my brother, September. Now tell me, do you like what I’ve written?”
“Well,” he attempted to answer, but quickly bit his lip, because he heard how Mila sighed painfully.
But the poet heard her too!
Since losing his right eye—and with a left one rapidly fading, he’d soon have been completely blind—the poet had the hearing of a bat. He heard her sigh.
“None of that, Mila!” he thundered. “This is a work of art, what are you sighing about? You could say ‘Well done, Geo, you’re incredible,’ it would do the job better. Don’t make me second-guess myself!”
He said this, but then he darted around the table and embraced her.
“It’s a good poem, don’t be afraid,” he said and pushed her glasses down her nose with guilt. “You shouldn’t do that, it’s no
[Sunday, July 21, 2013]
[NB!
“Only in Russia poetry is respected—it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?” Mandelstam.
Look at that, how peculiar. Did Mandelstam really think that? In the thirties, no less, when . . . And if he did think it, did he believe it?
Peculiar indeed.]
[Sunday, July 21, 2013]
good to think like that,” he said, “please, smile!”
[Four]
“Your Highness, I have yet to receive a response to either of my previous appeals sent to Your Highness.”
—From Milyo Kassabov’s
third letter to Boris III,
December 5, 1925
15.
[Sunday, July 21, 2103]
During that entire month of April in nineteen twenty-five, the sky was leaden and sepia rains poured out of it: they poured relentlessly, scalding the still delicate virescence of the trees. It was then that three Englishmen, Labour MPs, appeared in Sofia. Their names were William Mackinder, Cecil Malone and Josiah Clement Wedgwood. Lieutenant Wedgwood was a distant relative of Charles Darwin—yes, that same Darwin! He was also a bearer of the Order of Merit for services to the army, a member of the king’s secret council, dry and pleasant, as any real Englishman who came from good stock ought to be. He was in superior ranking to the other two men accompanying him.
In any case.
The three were escorted by pastor Reuben Markham—so he could direct them where to go and translate for them—and the men went all over asking and interrogating so they could get to the bottom of what in God’s name was happening in this blighted little country.
They queried the Bulgarian MP, Grigor Vasilev, too, who’d received his law degree from Geneva before coming back to Sofia to work in Parliament. He stared sullenly at the three men and answered most of their queries with a grunt, but when they said they’d heard that at least six thousand had been arrested following the attack on St. Nedelya Church, he couldn’t restrain himself.
He slammed his fist on the table and yelled that was completely preposterous!
“This is a repugnant fantasy, gentlemen!” he exclaimed. “It’s not that crazy to think that after an attack of this magnitude—which resulted in the deaths of over one hundred seventy-five people, and wounded more than eight hundred—there would be arrests, but six thousand . . .”
“Well, how many, then?” Lieutenant Josiah Clement Wedgwood asked courteously. “Approximately.”
“Well, I don’t know exactly how many,” Grigor Vasilev became more infuriated. “In any case, the maximum number of people arrested was never higher than a thousand. After all,” he said, “one must strive to eradicate society’s tumors!”
“Could you please repeat that?” Wedgwood interrupted him in that same courteous manner. “Did you say a thousand?”
“Give or take a few!” the Bulgarian MP responded triumphantly.
Lieutenant Wedgwood wrote this down and asked:
“To what extent is it true that there were people detained throughout the entire country? For instance in Ruse, Varna, and Bourgas?”
Vasilev shrugged.
“Mais bien sûr!” he said. “It’s true. These rats are everywhere, gentlemen!”
It was then that Josiah Clement Wedgwood raised his eyebrows.
“Let me see if I’ve understood everything correctly,” he said. “You, sir, are telling us, that the entire horrific plot to murder innocent people via an explosion inside the cathedral was planned by one thousand people, give or take a few, all scattered three- to four-hundred kilometers apart from each other?”
He took a breath and then sighed.
“To be honest, this must be the most puzzling plot in the entire world history of conspiracy theories.”
Grigor Vasilev’s face went scarlet and he opened his mouth to speak, but Josiah Clement Wedgwood, grandson of Darwin himself, the man whom George V once personally sent to Siberia to keep an eye on the Bolshevik’s handle of the situation, so that he would remain free of suspicion from communist affiliation, at once shut his leather notebook.
“Interesting,” he said dryly. “And where might you suppose these one thousand people, give or take a few, gathered to plot the attack?”
[Monday, July 22, 2013]
But anyway.
The Englishmen continued to putter about Sofia, but the city was desolate. Even the otherwise lively cafés and confectionaries were empty that April. Markham remained hopeful and took to visiting people’s homes; people with whom he was acquainted and whom he was certain would talk.
But they didn’t talk! They didn’t, in fact, even open their doors.
Everyone had bolted up the locks and peered pitifully out their peepholes.
Only the poet did no such thing.
He invited the men into his office with the embrasure-like window, and using the most perfect English they had heard since setting foot in Sofia, explained everything. True, he spoke with the strong accent of a someone from the South of Europe, but he was as precise in his wording as he was in his manners.
As soon as they all sat down at the round table with the lace cloth, he warned them that he wasn’t sure exactly what sort of new information they were hoping to learn, but they’d do well to keep in mind that those in office in Bulgaria were in a perennial war with their citizens. A bona fide war. And as with any war, everyone yelled “God help us! God help us!” but it would appear as though this time God was on the side of the machine guns. Those in power now, according to him, did little to hide their real intentions. He read them something he’d written in his own magazine a year before. The black sun on the ninth of June, he went, rose in the name of such glorious things as freedom, the constitution, trampled human rights, social justice, culture, and national prosperity, and it burned all too brightly into the eyes of the people.
“This is how it is over here,” he said. “They arrest you, beat you, kill you—in the name of the Law for the Protection of the Nation. And when you try to fight back using the same tactics—that’s called terrorism. Full stop.”
He spoke tiredly and with dispassion, because as a man obsessed with new theater, he knew an icy tone and even voice were far more sinister than the screams and laments of the old school. But he smoked an entire pack of Sultans in three hours, and could do little to calm his nervous fingers, which continuously drummed the table. He was not embarrassed at having to wipe yet another riv
ulet trickling out from behind his glass eye, while the descendants of George V listened to him and urgently scribbled into their expensive notebooks all afternoon, and at least five men in long black coats stood on the sidewalk below, staring up anxiously and with malice at the fourth floor.
The Englishmen were very interested in what he had to offer as a way of a response to someone named Ernest Hemingway, who’d apparently been quoted as saying that Bulgarian intelligentsia is made up of people who, due to the excesses of their knowledge, had lost all honor and nobility.
The poet’s face dropped and he in turn asked them where they’d read such a thing.
“A Toronto paper,” they explained. “The Toronto Star or something of the sort. It’s a rather big paper . . .”
“Well, I don’t have the honor of being acquainted with the gentleman,” the poet cut them off.
“Not many do,” shrugged Wedgwood. “But it’s an important paper. It has a good readership outside of Canada as well.”
“I’ve heard of the gazette, but I have not heard of the gentleman,” the poet interrupted again. “But he is correct. Unfortunately. I can’t say whether this is really due to an excess of knowledge, since I doubt that immensely. As it happens, I’ve written something similar. The Bulgarian writer today has fallen out of favor; he cries in his coffee with a broken spirit, so foolishly servile was he during the previous regime’s reign. And even if he desired to be valiant now, he couldn’t muster it up. He’s in no rush to do so, either.”
He slapped the table and clarified that this too was warranted. Censorship.
“I call it Police Critique,” he declared abruptly.
The other three nodded, as though they understood what he meant, but he countered that there was no conceivable way they could understand what Police Critique might possibly be.
“Police Critique, gentlemen,” he stressed, “is when the authorities send the mutton-shunters to confiscate your magazine. When the mutton-shunters become literary critics, that’s what I call Police Critique, gentlemen! That’s a step below churlish critique. In lieu of debate, a baton. In lieu of reason, confiscation. This is what I mean by Police Critique, sanctified by the state!”
All of this had not, of course, begun yesterday. He told them that in nineteen twenty-two for instance, there was a typhoon of print lawsuits, ergo, lawsuits against journalists. A thousand in a single year! Just in the Sofia public prosecutor’s office alone, there were over six hundred claims filed to prosecute journalists on account of the special journalism article, Article 235 of the penal code.
“A thousand lawsuits in a single year against the people who rely on print for their bread and butter. Can you gentlemen even conceive of such a thing? And it is the state that is suing them. The authorities are suing them, not some offended dimwit. Some unfortunate journalist exposes yet another abuse by yet another minister-sponger, and the whole ministry jumps up and sues. Not the greedy slyboots, mind you, but the journalist! A thousand lawsuits against journalists. This is one number that, as far cultural statistics are concerned, you, gentlemen, will be hard-pressed to match. Those unenlightened to the Bulgarian disposition will likely feel bewilderment or fall into a nervous breakdown for now, the written word is by law a political crime!”
He then threw down in front of them a state newspaper, with Bulgaria’s Law for the Protection of the Nation, newly added in the cold month of March, where it was clearly stated: any literary works deemed antiestablishmentarian by the authorities are to be seized through a prosecutor’s warrant; but the police had the right to stop distribution even without a warrant. The law made it so that even the owners of the printing shops could be charged as accomplices.
“Read!” he said. “Read my lords, read it. Article 6. They just added it in March. ‘Anyone caught creating propaganda or setting in motion agitation, either by word of mouth, or in writing, or through the distribution of printed works, with the goal of subverting the political or economic order of the country through crime, violence, or terrorist activity, will be punished with solitary confinement in a maxim security prison for no fewer than five years and will be fined anywhere between fifty thousand and five hundred thousand leva.’ Article 7. New as well. ‘Anyone caught creating propaganda or setting in motion agitation, either by word of mouth, or in writing . . .’ blah blah blah. Same thing: this many years in prison, this much in fines. Prison, fines, prison, fines. Brilliant, isn’t it?”
He explained that his own magazine had been confiscated as well—twice. The second time they came straight to the printer’s. He’d gone to four different printers just to print the same issue. Right when they’d start, they’d have to stop. Four times.
“Pure misery,” he said. “And the printers? They act despicably too, out of fear.”
The poet sighed and admitted he too had already been arrested once, to the exaltation of those same newspaper heels, and was awaiting trial on the fourteenth of May. He was being sued for writing a poem, which contained all of his own horror regarding an event he himself had chosen to write about.
“Just an idea, dear gentlemen,” he stressed. “But the prosecutor filed a lawsuit. And why do you think he did that?”
He quieted for a second, surveyed each of the Englishmen and muttered:
“Because the poem is called ‘September’! And if that title summons up the ghosts of someone else’s conscience, it is not I who is to blame. Do you see what I’m getting at? Had the title been different, I’m willing to wager a bet that they would have, one hundred percent, overlooked the whole thing and wouldn’t have made me out to be a criminal. But no, ‘September’ is what frightens them. There you have it: the Law for the Protection of the Nation, Article 6, Article 7, added just for me, surely. ‘Anyone who by word of mouth, or through writing, or by the distribution of printed or other works, incites hostility, hatred or crimes against certain classes or echelons of the population or the presiding authority, and with these actions jeopardizes the social and judicial order of the country . . .’ Hah, and this results in solitary confinement inside a maximum security prison for three to eight years and a fine of three hundred thousand leva. As though ‘September’ is a call to arms or a political proclamation. I’m at a loss as to how a poem can be classified as terrorism.”
He laughed darkly.
“For God’s sake! Hostility, hatred, crime, jeopardizing the social and judicial order? Crime against the state?! If we’re talking about crimes against the state, this entire government of ours should be in prison, don’t you agree? Just look at the penal code. Article 99, which states that every action that has as its core the aim of applying forcible change to the governmental order or the country’s unity, constitutes treason. Well, didn’t they do precisely this on the ninth of June, last year? They did, indeed! Not to mention the even more shining Article 247, whomever premeditates to murder another will be punished with death. Again, the government is guilty of this.”
Out from underneath the blackened lens of his glasses, a single amber trickle made its way down his cheek again, and Mila quickly wiped it away with her handkerchief, while he groaned and reached for his cigarette tin.
“Allow me to get to the point,” he said and raised his finger. “In conclusion, literary works are the same as inciting the people to rise up! That’s censorship and nothing more. But when else has censorship ever been immortalized by a special law? They’ve done it in this country. And it’s not parliament who did it, parliament’s been useless since June ninth, nineteen twenty-three. Do you know who did it? The nikolamilevtsi and borisvazovtsi, the government and a certain person who signed it, tout de suite. And herein lies the most horrifying thing of all—once it’s been done once, each successive government will feel free to do the same until every single newspaper in the world simply reprints the words of the prime minister, so there is no truth but the truth coming out of his mouth! Ah, to be led by ibrikchii.”
The English gentlemen appeared quite confused, so the p
oet was quick to clarify:
“Ibrikchii!” he spat out again. “Grovelers, sycophants, toadies, political concubines, obligers, bootlickers, ordinary caitiffs. Long live the whores on Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard, serpentine careerism, and the white lace valentines of the Stratievs and the Stoubelovs. On we go until each and every person stops thinking with his own head, declaring the truth to be that which is written in Slovo, Mir, and Zlatorog. The herd mentality, that’s what the obscurantists want. Deprive one of the truth, it’ll be easier for him to lie. Without censorship, the despot is impotent, because censorship is the mother of tyranny.”
He began to dig about a pile of newspapers on his shelf, found what he was looking for, and yelled out victoriously:
“Here we have the dream result, my dear gentlemen. Is this,” he said, “Le Temps? It is, indeed. The heavy artillery. Almost on par with your Times, perhaps even a bit better. Let’s see what it says in the heavy artillery. Here it is . . . ‘Before my visit to Bulgaria, the liberals warned me that Tsankov’s government was very unpopular among the people. Now, after my two-week visit to this peaceful country, I’d really like to pose a question to myself and to the liberals: what does a popular or an unpopular government look like? Actually, let me rephrase the question: which is better for a country—an unusually popular prime minister, for whom the ladies clap, but whose ideas are inconvertible and inexecutable, or a prime minister who might make the hairs on your neck stand up just at the mention of his name, but whose word is the law?’ Well, look at that! His word is the law and the law is his word!”
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 18