This past Sunday night, acting on information it was to host a gathering of anarchists, the Sofia police ambushed the residence belonging to one Al. Kotev, a postal worker, situated on the corner of Dorostopol and St. Ivan Rilski Streets. The following morning, a Monday, police officers attempted to enter the building to perform a search of the property, but were met with gunfire, which wounded the superintendent of the third precinct, Zahari Georgiev, and two officers—Ts. Popetsov and G. Markov. The house was then surrounded by army troops, and gunfire was exchanged between the officers and the anarchists; the latter did not cease fire. Soon the house was engulfed in flames and the anarchists continued to shoot and to throw bombs at the police, all the while singing through the flames, ‘Volga, Volga, our Birth Mother.’ An agent from Public Safety, Dimiter Zhdrebev of Kyustendil, attempted to enter the premises and to capture the anarchists, but he was killed with a shot to the heart. Velko Andreev was another fallen officer. In the afternoon, the burnt corpses of three of the anarchists were pulled from the wreckage. The dead anarchists were Georgi Todorov from Pazardjik and Popeto, the first was killed by a bomb, and the second had shot himself.
Illustrated Week, February 1924.
Take away the field artillery, and everything else repeats. It wouldn’t be faithful to the truth if Geshev hadn’t felt the déjà vu!]
something was brewing. January had not yet ended when Geshev opened Utro and read that a law student named Yankulov, an anarchist, of course, young just like Baeto and Efito, had, quite impertinently, arrived in Turnovo to defend those arrested in connection with the Kilifarevo revolt. An agent from Public Safety followed him and arrested him. The other seemingly went along with the agent, but on the way down to the station, right in front of the Agrarian Bank, Yankulov took out his gun, shot into the air, and attempted to ineptly run away.
The agent rolled under a horse carriage, another cop slipped inside a shop and hid behind the piles of goods, a sergeant major ostensibly pulled out his sword, but he too took to his heels . . . it wasn’t until Yankulov got to the county court that he was actually surrounded by officers and soldiers. He opened fire. They responded. He shot. They shot. Finally they got him. They took his identification and his gun and the four wads of cash in his pocket along with his other gun. “Heroes!” Geshev cursed out loud in his tiny, dusty little chancery, nearly chewing the paper with his teeth. “Fuck your mother and your heroics! A single person makes a mockery out of you, you fucking fags!”
February had barely begun when a pack of anarchists entered from Serbia, assaulting Godech, and then pulled back, giving up not one of their men. And so it was . . .
Later, when he was already at Public Safety, Geshev desperately wanted to catch even one of them, just one anarchist. Had he caught one—the rest would be easy. But he never had such luck. Anytime they found them, the anarchists fought back like beasts, and if they didn’t kill them in the endless gunfire—they’d blow out their own brains. It was as though Death had been a preferable, more amicable place than being detained and going to prison.
That’s what he couldn’t understand!
That is why his hatred for them was vast: because with just one shot to their own head, they managed to escape.
The police, the army, the gendarmerie—they were good at what they did, no doubt. Just like the gangsters in America: shoot first, ask questions later. Geshev was beside himself any time he opened a paper and saw yet another photograph of a dead anarchist, sprawled on the cobbles of some square, with his shirt rolled up and his trousers pulled down, mouth gaping. “Bravo!” he hissed through clenched teeth. “Scrubbed him clean, didn’t you. Now how’ll you question him! He’ll tell you everything, without a doubt! You dumb moron,” he said to himself, “gas him up, put him to sleep, get his head spinning, and then capture him like a normal person.” He wasn’t sure which headline got him more roiled up: “The Escape of the Brave Anarchist” or “Anarchists Killed in Lozenets.”
He resented the praise directed at the police for their killing of yet more anarchists, and he called it cuntish. Secretly he gloated when they shot down Nikola Milev: that vindictive poser got under his skin with his nonstop blabbing that the anarchists had to be exterminated like rabid curs. The guy was carried on everyone’s shoulders and everyone walked on eggshells around him; he was even being groomed to become a plenipotentiary minister in Washington—just to hide him away somewhere far off, Geshev thought. They’d elected him member of the United Franco-Masonic Grand Lodge of Bulgaria, so his friends from the Lodge (the government was already crawling with them) got him twenty-four hour security detail, on which Minister Roussev—himself a mason as well, naturally!—had immediately signed off. There was not a single second day or night in which there weren’t at least two armed policemen near him. And what of all of this? They had still gunned him down in the middle of the capital, in the middle of the day. On Friday, the thirteenth, no less.
What did Geshev think? That it served him right!
[The evening of Friday, September 27, 2013]
He fell into such deep desperation at times that he’d barge into any one of the many underground brothels and grab the first available whore: he would take her upstairs into the room where he practically tore her insides apart with the inconsolable rage of the ignored, while the other women on the floor couldn’t figure out whether the wails drifting out of that room, and even into the downstairs, were screams of passion or of agony and terror. What he did had little to do with consummating relations—it was an act of hostility, a massacre. The woman cut his face and his back with her nails, screaming she would turn him into the police and he’d only hiss back, “I am the police, you fucking whore.” And he mercilessly poured his seed inside of her. He stopped going to the brothels once he had to visit Dr. Bogomil Beron’s clinic, referred to as the syphilis clinic. He knew it would come to it sooner or later. Venereal disease was such an inconvenience; it’d become a real scourge after the wars and a good many folk moaned and groaned when they pissed. While he was in the clinic being infected with malaria, the resulting fever from which would kill off the goddamn bacteria, and they cured him with arsphenamine and quinine—the doctor told him something that blew his mind, and in the soft voice of a Bessarabian Bulgarian. In some village whose name he immediately forgot, a government census discovered that out of all four hundred forty people residing there, two hundred fifty-six had syphilis!
“Just think, young man,” Dr. Beron said to him, “Eighty-two percent of the families there were diagnosed with syphilis . . . Nearly half the villagers had secondary manifestations in their mouths! That’s truly disturbing, God help them.” He threw his arms out, “Statistics, sir, what can you do?”
Geshev clenched his jaw, “Fuck this whole country!” And his teeth kept chattering through his synthetic fever.
[Saturday, September 28, 2013]
He sensed there was talk behind his back, accusations of never giving proper acknowledgement to his brother Georgi, but that had been a false accusation: as far as greeting his brother went, he did greet him, albeit out of the corner of his mouth, for the simple reason that his brother was the better chess player. Geshev also played chess, but always alone and locked up in his room, while Georgi, the youngest in the family, was already winning tournaments—true, school and town club ones, but tournaments, nevertheless. Anyone being superior gave Geshev the needle. After yet another solitary match, he would sweep the chess pieces back inside the box and stare out the window into the quieted midnight boulevard.
[Saturday, September 28, 2013]
Back in April of twenty-five, before they’d appointed him to work for the police, and Pane Bichev had personally called him in to help with the investigation following the bombing of the cathedral, Geshev hadn’t felt the least bit of trepidation because he’d long thought about and imagined exactly what he would do and how he would do it—if only they’d take him into Public Safety! He’d waited for this moment a long time. Bichev he
ard him out carefully, signed off where necessary, and only a day later, Geshev had a desk and a chair inside the criminal pursuit party’s room.
And while Peter Amzel and his people kept searching for the organizers of the attack, Geshev would go to one of the higher ranking communists, someone, say, on the board of the Liberty co-op, and he would need only an hour or two before he’d let him go, but not before learning a slew of new names, which he would follow up with after.
His work was followed by the watchful eye of his boss, Bichev. He was taken aback when Geshev simply released those they’d arrested, but he didn’t interfere. Right when he became irritated at himself for having hired him, just three days after the bombing, on Easter Monday on the Octave of Easter, he became witness to something he had a hard time believing could really happen. A member of the central communist committee—someone whom Peter Amzel had personally arrested, but whom Bichev had specifically arranged to be questioned by Geshev—stood on one of the staircase landings. The arrestee was not bound by chains. No chains, nothing; he stood and thrashed his arms, screaming at the serpentine file of arrestees trudging beneath him: “Rat them out!” he screamed. “Rat them all out,” he yelled, “so we can put an end to this cannibal party once and for all!” The arrestees turned their heads up—some with fear, some with repulsion—but he just kept screaming for them to give up everything and everyone they knew, so that it could all end.
When he saw all this, Bichev called Geshev into his office and poured him a glass of cognac.
“I think I know what you’re up to, young man,” he said. “Keep on doing what you’re doing and you’ll get far.”
Geshev wasn’t sure if he was being threatened, mocked, or praised, but he chose to take the comment as encouragement. He wasn’t ashamed of being a bureaucrat—just as he’d been in that tiny office at the municipality, and he wanted nothing more than to do the same at the police: le bureaucrat qui vive.
And that was that.
He kept on with an even greedier inspiration. “Control!” he thought. “Whacking these dregs did nothing, control is the mother of order in the nation. Keep an eye on them and then watch them squirm.” He’d started to dream of one day tapping all the telephones—in Sofia and elsewhere—but he knew that even if he could, it would bring him neither what he sought nor respite: anarchists never used the telephone.
[Sunday, September 29, 2013]
Bichev’s words had been praise, indeed, and Nikola Geshev, the lonely paper-shuffler from the sixth housing commission, was quickly promoted a rank. He clenched his teeth and said to himself, “Good!”
[Sunday, September 29, 2013—Monday, September, 30, 2013]
That spring, even the bells in the kingdom had tired of the endless funeral knell and no longer rang, but croaked and whanged. There hadn’t been this many simultaneous burials since the September riots in twenty-three. Death had people’s psyches stretched taut like drum skins, and their eyes betrayed a looming terror.
[Monday, September 30, 2013]
[Look at that, September’s gone now too. So be it!]
[Monday, October 7, 2013; cardiology unit]
You could catch a lot of anarchists in your net that April and that rainy May, but you also risked catching a lot of small fish, too. Geshev could identify the small fish and wannabe bandits who thought themselves justice fighters with one look. There were also those who’d been sent packing by their own friends and who couldn’t wait to squeal. At times the police went about it in the most vulgar way possible—they arrested the woman, beat her and tortured her, and the man they were after would run over to give himself up. Geshev squeamishly pursed his lips and said: “Dimwits. This is the extent of their anarchism!” and proceeded to kick out the first group and then the second and then the third, passing off the whole mess over to his other colleagues. Then he’d lock himself up in his office to do the crossword inside the omnivorous Atanas Damyanov’s Illustrated Week (the first clue across was a work by Byron, the first vertical—a heroine from a work by Prosper Mérimée, and he’d bitterly fill in Corsair and Carmen). He’d never get to Ikonomov or Sheytanov with these idiots. Especially Sheytanov. The most wanted of them all—the man with the biggest bounty on his head.
Geshev couldn’t care less about the bounty, of course. He would give anything just to have Sheytanov in his office.
[Tuesday, October 8, 2013; cardiology unit]
But Sheytanov was nowhere to be found. And when Geshev completed yet another crossword, he turned to Illustrated Week’s gossip page: “Everything—About Everyone,” where he read about the failed love affairs of movie stars, about the destruction of entire cities and humanity’s lunacy, what with its chemical warfare; he read about Czechoslovakia’s new postage stamps, which the country would print in honor of its candidature for the next Olympic Games, an exercise costing one million two hundred thousand of their currency . . . things of that nature. Newspaper nonsense.
Illustrated Week also wrote about the “child killer” cult in Zhytomyr, Russia, where a murder trial was underway against one Zymbalnik someone or other. This Zymbalnik was a member of a local cult, which called itself Korneavtsi, and had murdered his four children. According to the teachings of this cult, it was a sin to bear a child and, according to the testimonies of dozens of witnesses, the cult deemed children red devils who needed to be murdered before they went through the communist education system and grew up into the most fervent of communists. The Korneavtsi were avowed enemies of communism and looked at the communist leaders as antichrists who had come down for one reason only: to destroy humanity. Zymbalnik testified that he had acted simply of his own deep conviction and that God had come to him in a dream and told him the villagers should kill their own children rather than allow them to live and become communists. And so he did. This was printed inside the “Woman’s Week” page—right between the articles “Dresses with Pleats” and “En Vogue: Low-Heeled Shoes,” right under a photograph showcasing the latest Parisian styles and above the advertisement “Replace your phaeton with a motorized Ford! Quiet, with no fumes or odor!” Geshev was incensed at the garbage he was reading; he felt like going down to that idiot Pilgrim’s office and tearing off his head. “He calls this propaganda,” he cursed to himself, “that witless fool.”
Geshev felt an inhuman aversion toward newspaper publishers.
[Monday, November 11, 2013; middle of the night]
In the days following the attack, the convoys of arrestees resembled gloomy rivers of lava, lazily flowing from all directions toward the imposing edifice of the Police Directorate, above which a small bell tower absurdly festooned with a protruding five-point star and a hammer and sickle, and the affixed bayonets and soldiers’ helmets glimmered like flashes of lightning underneath the razor April rain.
The building was still full of people even though it was May—from the basement to the attic—as many as twenty, even thirty people crammed inside a single room. The crowds of people sat and lay on the dirty hardwood floors. In the evening, they moved them from room to room and Geshev knew why—to torment them and to keep them from forming connections. And to help them disperse the dreadful sense of death looming around every corner. At night, the horror of anxiety set in: around eleven o’clock, when the city descended into another uncertain sleep behind darkened windows, the black camionettes arrived. They came empty. They came to take away yet another hapless batch of paralyzed men to an unknown location. Inside the rooms, they all covered their heads—with whatever was nearby—a blanket, a coat, a shirt—and they fell silent, all ears, as the killers stalked the floors. Geshev sometimes accompanied them while they worked: these people never called anyone out by name, they just hit a head with their stick, and when the casualty removed the coat or shirt from his face, they uttered one quick “Get up!” and took him out into the hallway. Sometimes they got the wrong guy, in which case, they grunted sourly, “No, not you!” and caned the next head over.
[Tuesday, November 12,
2013]
Then they’d drive away, but back inside the building no one breathed relief—it was too early to relax, the men with the sticks could come back at any moment. It wasn’t until dawn, when the windows facing the boulevard grayed in the new rainy morrow that the people dared to think they had survived, dared get some sleep in the knowledge they’d live at least until that night.
21.
[Wednesday, November 13, 2013]
One day toward the end of May, the Directorate’s hallways and floors echoed with news that Sheytanov had finally been caught. The blood drained from Geshev’s face and he shot toward the telephone exchange. He barged in and demanded, “Is he alive?” When they answered him that yes, he was alive, there hadn’t even been a shootout, he declared that from that moment on, he was to know of Sheytanov’s whereabouts every second of the day. The telegraphers shrugged and moaned, yessir, but he yelled:
“And where is he now?!”
The telegraphers were startled because he had an awful look in his eye. One of them jumped out of his chair and handed him the dispatch, where Geshev read that the deputy district constable of Nova Zagora—Vrangelov someone or other, Ermia Vrangelov—was sending fourteen detainees to Sofia. The names were listed below, and Geshev spotted Sheytanov’s name. He was eighth: immediately after someone called Andrea Petrov and right before Mariola Sirakova. It also said the detainees would be convoyed by First Lieutenant Kutsarov. The last detail nettled him—he knew the man personally and his penchant for causing trouble. He shook his head, knocked on wood just in case, and asked the telegraphers whether anyone else had seen the dispatch and the list of detainees. They explained over each other that it had just arrived and they were just about to take it to the chief, but Geshev nonchalantly told them he’d take care of it—he would bring it himself.
And he put the piece of paper in his pock
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 22