Now everything’s new, modern, and European.
So be it . . .
It is also somewhere around this time that Geo Milev is murdered.]
[Tuesday, September 10, 2013]
MAN ON A WIRE
A short interlude . . .
Meanwhile, a tightrope walker had arrived in Bulgaria from Sicily, Montagnani someone or other, Giorgio, or something of the sort—renowned in all of Europe, a man invited, as Dnevnik and Utro detailed, to the court of none other than George V himself, king of England, and so forth. The flashing chrome and bronze and the gleam of the Hispano-Suiza’s black paint, with its stork figurine mid-flight atop its grill—trailed by two mottled trucks, carrying the gear for his dangerous art—traveled from city to city, and his dexterous workers erected the pylons with their circus-like red flags, together with the blue and yellow streamers, pulling the rope tightly across the market squares where he walked high above people’s heads, once at ten in the morning—for the kids, students, and the soldiers, and twice more in the afternoon—for the remaining fawners.
He traveled with those same caravans, making the rounds at all the spring fairgrounds under the blue skies of that splendid May. Just like Signor Montagnani, they too unpacked their giant drays, unloaded their lorries, and raised their tents up at the empty places around the markets and hung their colorful signs, and the whole town echoed from the clangor and the children’s enthusiastic commotion. There were fire-eaters, Indian wizards, shooting galleries called “William Tell” and “Good Aim,” walnut trees festooned with garlands and targets enticing players with a promise of “A bonbon from Mimi,” two tough guys riding their motorcycles around inside a giant wooden barrel, causing an even louder roar—once from the bikes, and again from the creaking of the wood. There were wax-work exhibitions and large jars where dead calves with two heads swam in formalin, there were mysterious species of fish and snakes and turtles and unborn fetuses, there were zoo corners with black Malayan Sun bears, Siberian wolves with blue eyes, monkeys, and tiny lazy crocodiles, a lion, by turns molting or well-groomed, and finally, in some other tent—the obligatory woman born to a human mother and an orangutan father. The fire-eaters and Indian wizards were nothing more than ordinary Bulgarians, of course, with turbans on their heads; the woman begotten by a Siamese monkey sang a melancholy song of her mother’s travels on a steamboat, and that same steamboat’s unfortunate sinking by the banks of distant Asia and the horrible death and mass drowning that ensued, but it was her mother—the sole survivor—who somehow escaped, only to be captured in the jungle by the orangutan . . . and who knows why, but the song the woman mumbled in that sweaty tent was in Bulgarian.
But moving on.
The red placard announcing this same Montagnani featured a rope with the tightrope walker himself sitting on it—this had been his trademark party trick: to sit cross-legged on the rope, the long stick resting on his lap, pretending to smoke a chibouk while two Italian ladies below, head to toe in sequins and lace, yelled up “Ole!” The photo was headlined: “Sir Montagnani, the king of the tightrope!”
Geo Milev was really impressed by the placard. One afternoon, as he made his way back from one of the printers, he couldn’t contain himself: he carefully ripped the poster off someone’s fence somewhere along Dondoukov Street and brought it back home, where he carefully pinned it to the door with four thumb-tacks, taped a piece of paper over the name of the Italian circus performer, put a dash after “the king,” and another little piece of paper over “tight,” so that it now read: “King on a rope!”
He admired his work and called Mila and the children to see it too. Leda and Bistra loved it, but Mila didn’t.
“Wait, wait a second,” he said, “What better advertisement for the government! ‘King on a rope!’ It’s funny!”
Mila didn’t feel like laughing. She looked around at the other doors on the floor—they all had eyelets or small windows in the middle and may as well have been watchtowers—and she only shrugged.
“Oh, come on!” Geo Milev groaned, affecting disappointment. “You just don’t get the joke!”
He guffawed, reached over and pushed her glasses down her nose like a schoolboy.
The kids snickered, Leda immediately launched into “Babo dear, Babo sweet,” Bistra fell over laughing, but Mila again failed to see the humor.
19.
[Wednesday, September 11, 2013]
[This, I didn’t know.
The Trial of Viktor Jara’s Killer
The former officer from General Pinochet’s junta—Pedro Pablo Barrientos—will face criminal charges in Florida for the torture and murder of singer Victor Jara in 1973. Victor Jara, then forty, was a member of the communist party and one of the most popular protest-song performers in Latin America. He was arrested by the junta after the coup of the eleventh of September, 1973, together with thousands of students from the Santiago University of Technical, where he taught. They were then taken to the main stadium, held captive, tortured, and murdered by soldiers from the junta. Today this same stadium bears the name of Victor Jara.
The criminal trial against a former officer of Pinochet’s army—Lieutenant Pedro Pablo Barrientos—began on the eve of the tragic forty-year anniversary of the bloody military coup in Chile. The claim was filed on September fourth at the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco by Victor Jara’s widow, Joan, and their children. They were adamant that the regional courts in Jacksonville convict the sixty-four-year-old Barrientos—an American citizen since 1989. The claim pointed to the fact that Victor Jara’s killer, residing in Daytona, Florida, should be subject to criminal investigation in compliance with the articles set forth in the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991. In December of last year (2012), the Chilean court charged Barrientos and another officer from the junta—Hugo Sanchez—with the murder of the Chilean singer. Six more soldiers and officers from the junta were named as defendants in the same suit.
After Pinochet’s military regime ended, out of fear of retribution, Barrientos decided to hide from the authorities by running away to the United States. Last year, a team of investigative journalists from Chile managed to track down Victor Jara’s killer in Daytona. But Barrientos adamantly denied being responsible for Jara’s death, or that he was even present inside Santiago’s stadium during the mass killings of Salvador Allende’s supporters. However, testimony by Barriento’s former soldiers unequivocally proved his guilt. One such subordinate—Jose Paredes—testified that Lieutenant Barrientos and other junta officers personally tortured Victor Jara, and more than once and alongside other captives, beat him unconscious. “I personally saw Lieutenant Barrientos take out his gun, spin the cylinder, release the safety, and step toward Victor Jara, who was sitting on the grass with his arms tied behind his back. He then shot Jara point blank, and the other officers followed suit. Victor Jara slid face down onto the grass, dead, entirely covered in blood.”
Although the Chilean Supreme Court gave a judge the power of attorney to ask for Barrientos’s extradition from the United States in January of this year, the Chilean government has yet to send an official letter to the relevant American agencies. According to the Chilean foreign ministry, the reason for the delay was purely technical: the translation of the documents accompanying the trial—543 pages in all—simply hadn’t yet been completed.
After Victor Jara’s murder, his wife Joan Jara—a British dancer—left the country together with their two daughters. She did not return to Chile until 2001, intent on finding justice and retribution for the death of her husband and the other victims of Pinochet’s junta. Joan Jara filed suit, asking that Lieutenant Barrientos and his accomplices be held responsible for the 1973 murder. Over the next 35 years, the case was repeatedly delayed, dragged out, dismissed, and renewed.
In 2009, Victor Jara’s remains were exhumed because of the pending medicolegal investigation and reburied, while the details surrounding his murder have been painstakingly pieced togeth
er over several decades from the testimonies of dozens of witnesses.
The prosecution’s case against Pedro Barrientos now states he must claim responsibility for a number of crimes, including torture, execution without trial or conviction, cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners, holding people captive against their will, and crimes against humanity. Joan Jara is unequivocal in her petition that she is looking only for justice for her husband’s killers, not financial gain. “No money can ever make up for the pain and suffering caused to Victor Jara. I have personally lived two lives, one before 1973 and one after.”
Hmm, well, at least one other statistic is widely known: “Officially, the number of those disappeared without a trace is three thousand one hundred ninety-seven people. In the period between nineteen seventy-three and nineteen ninety, between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred thousand people went through camps and prisons, and the number of those killed reached nearly ten thousand . . .”
“In the year two thousand, Pinochet was named in over two hundred criminal lawsuits involving mass killings, kidnappings, and cruelty to prisoners. Every one of them is deferred, citing senility.”]
[And so it goes . . .
Everyone gets away with it!
That’s how it works. Time flies and it turns wildly in the night.
Think about it.]
[One can’t help but wonder, why I remember that September eleventh—and I really do—I was in the library.
Two years later, I saw Joan Jara. She was surrounded by the Young Communists, who wouldn’t let anyone get near her. They only showed her face in press conferences.
I remember April twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-four, too, goddamn it!
At the same time I’d seen Joan Jara, I also saw singer José Afonso. The Young Communists guarded him like a president, too, but they must have lost track of him one day, because I ran into him inside the courtyard of the Rila Monastery and we quietly sang that song of his, “Grândola, Vila Morena,” which had sparked everything in Portugal. José Afonso died in Setubal in nineteen eighty-seven. He was fifty-seven years old.
Coups, putsches, revolutions, carnations . . .
And so be it.]
[Thursday, September 26, 2013]
[Suddenly, fall has come. Yesterday, the first fog settled and now the first September rain is falling. That’s how it’ll be. The days are so long, yet the years fly by. And while you’re wondering when goddamned Wednesday will become Friday, a new year has already begun.]
20.
[Friday, September 27, 2013]
On January fifteenth, nineteen twenty-five, the poet hosted a gathering for his friends: he was turning thirty. A lot of people came and somehow they all managed to fit inside his office—two to a chair and knee to knee on the couch. Behind the windows, the beautiful falling snow resembled a meshwork painting, the city had quieted and cozied, and the air inside was fragranced by winter wine and the smoke curling from the sizzling sujuk Mila was frying up on the stove in the kitchen. Leda and Bistra puttered about, their flowy, taffeta dresses rustling, which their mother had purchased after a long haggle with a reseller. A neat pile of freshly printed, still-warm issues of Plamuk sat on the shelf, a proud “Year II” on the cover and the start of the poem “Hell” . . .
[. . . Whose ending on page nine declared there would be eight more circles of suffering—seven deadly sins and eight infamous contemporary crimes. “Hell”—it said—is the first part of the trilogy DIVINE COMEDY: HELL—PURGATORY—HEAVEN.”
And that’s it.
What remains is silence.]
When everyone’s glasses were full, the poet stood up and roared:
“Dear convivial folk! You shall now be quiet, because I have a very important message. I,” he said, “am turning thirty years old! I can hardly believe it. From here on out,” he declared celebratorily, “I will count each successive year as a gift from God Himself! If He gives me fifty more—I’ll take it! If he gives me a hundred—I’ll take that! I’ll take whatever I can get. I won’t be nitpicky with Him. In that vein, nazdrave!”
“Nazdrave!” everybody yelled. “You’re going to live forever!”
[For his birthday, the poet got decked out in a suit made of that same terrible plaid fabric everybody called “commissary” because it was given to poor people for stamps by the provision commissaries.]
[Saturday, September 28, 2013]
Not ten days later, he was arrested.
The examining magistrate assigned him to house arrest and monetary bail of five thousand leva, and Mila had immediately thought, “My God, it’s all beginning.”
At dusk, Sheytanov brought her the money (ten pitiful, violet bills depicting the Varna port).
Mila looked at him, frightened. He told her there was nothing to worry about, but he didn’t believe his own words.
[Five]
“It would not be an overstatement to admit my agony over Geo would be far less bitter had G. Sheytanov remained alive.”
—From the letter Mila Geo Mileva
penned to Dr. Konstantin Kantarev
[Friday, September 27, 2013]
. . . Nikola Geshev was clear where he stood on Death: he spited her. He thought her something wholly superfluous and bad for business. She was, of course, a necessary evil, but he couldn’t understand why you should have to cut off the chicken’s head right away when this same chicken could one day lay you golden eggs. Death was useless. That’s why he felt the aversion he did for the anarchists. The communists he could handle, the social democrats weren’t a problem, the fascists were still wet behind the years—not sure if they wanted to fuck or piss. They weren’t in the way, either.
But the anarchists, they crawled on his damn nerves and he couldn’t get a wink of sleep at night because of them. They got under his skin—he could never understand why they wouldn’t simply give up like everyone else! Were they just too full of pride, or were they simply the worthless offspring this new tribe of anarchism-worshippers had spawned—that’s what he couldn’t understand. They got in your face, they fought with boundless impertinence, and at the end they split—if they even got that far—and if not, they shoved the barrel down their own damn throats.
He hadn’t yet been hired by the criminal pursuit agency, when, right on Three Kings’ Day, the nineteenth of January, in the Dolni Lozenets neighborhood, which half of the town still referred to as Kurubaglar, the police got hold of some anarchists. As soon as he heard the news, Geshev locked up his dusty chancery at the housing commission with lightning speed and jumped on the tram heading in that direction. He saw what went down and would remember it with real despair—it had been a true battle. The police and gendarmerie shot up the building for several hours, but the guys inside wouldn’t give up and that was that. Late in the afternoon, the police were left with no choice but to call for help from the army. The army! For help! And it was then Geshev witnessed how the military folk drove up with several small trench mortars and started to shoot up the house with cannons! They disemboweled the structure almost entirely—if you looked through the windows you’d see the sky. When even the cannonade wasn’t enough, they brought in the fire trucks. And they lit the whole place on fire. The flames twisted around the walls, licked the eaves and then vehemently swallowed everything, all the while the guys inside shot back relentlessly. In the end, a second before the beams collapsed amid sparks and thunderous creaking, in that scarlet January night, the following tortured and sorrowful, yet proud curse echoed through the fire: “Fuck you, you fucking murderers!” they yelled from the inside, “Catch our dicks, if you can! Roast us, you fascist fuckers!” The house was then eviscerated, the roof collapsed and buried them under the heavy blustering flames, and their vile curse was the last and only thing the military, the police, and anyone else within earshot would ever hear from them. A few soldiers then entered the smoldering structure and dragged out the tattered and seared bodies, and it was then it became clear the entire epic battle was fough
t by just two men. Just two! Two men with toothy grins and staggeringly short and wrinkled corpses. The soldiers leaned the dead bodies up against a cannon and the journalists buzzed around taking pictures in the beam of the headlights. Geshev grabbed one such journalist (the one who snapped away most feverishly with his flash) by the collar of his overcoat and hissed: “Stop photographing, you moron! What are you photographing, the nation’s shame? Get the hell out of here before I break the camera on your head, dickwad.” The other’s tail curled between his legs and he ran off, but despite that, it was all the papers wrote about in the following days, and it was precisely from the papers that Geshev found out who the men had been—the until-then uncatchable duo from the Heroes of the Night—Stefan Efito and Hristo Baeto, one twenty-six, and the other not yet twenty-two. And that was that. “I’m surprised they didn’t call an airplane to drop a couple bombs on them,” he said to himself.
The year had started off badly, very badly. Next to the comparably calmer nineteen twenty-four, it now appeared that
[NB: No, I must have something wrong here. Nineteen twenty-four was far from calm. It may have been calm for everyone else, but not for the anarchists.
I better keep the following in mind:
THE BLOODY FACE-OFF WITH THE ANARCHISTS IN THE CAPITAL
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 21