The Same Night Awaits Us All

by Hristo Karastoyanov

  [NB! I’ve got the whole correspondence here somewhere—Sliven judges and prosecutors from Plovdiv demand to know Sheytanov’s whereabouts for weeks and months on end, to assure a trial, while at the same time Turnovo’s district court writes to the chief of Public Safety, “where is he now, in some prison, killed in an attempted escape, etc.,” because any information is “necessitated by the public prosecutor’s office in order to carry out the verdict of the Turnovo district court: 10 years of solitary confinement inside a maximum security prison” . . . And so forth. All of these institutions received the same response: the Police Directorate had “absolutely no information,” a dispatch containing any of the alleged information was never logged, and appeared to be “floating” . . . Whatever that may mean.]

  He put the piece of paper in his pocket and told the ill-at-ease telegraphers to report on every single word they got on Sheytanov.

  “You know where to find me,” he said to them and left the room.

  [Friday, November 15, 2013]

  The following day, one of the telegraphers did descend to the basement of the building with the ludicrous bell tower. He found Geshev, leaned over and whispered in his ear that First Lieutenant Kutsarov had indeed arrived with his entire party, but without the arrestees.

  Geshev lost his ability to speak.

  “What do you mean without the arrestees?!” he asked.

  “Yessir!” the telegrapher responded. “Without the arrestees. And they were all fall-down drunk.”

  “Without even a single arrestee?” Geshev repeated, but the telegrapher only shrugged with shame.

  Geshev sent him on his way and, now alone in the darkened room, mumbled, “They let them get away!” He cursed and slammed his fist on the writing table with the most impotent rage he’d felt in his entire li

  22.

  [Sunday, November 17, 2013]

  They unhooked the train car at the Belovo train station and unloaded all the prisoners onto the black, mud-covered square outside, where three bearded Macedonians already cursed impatiently. First Lieutenant Kutsarov told his men to unhook Sheytanov from the chains. (His men were still wearing their winter, hoopoe-like guard uniforms—it had been a frigid spring that year. The rain hadn’t let up all of May.) The Macedonians tied Sheytanov up using some disgusting rope, and Sheytanov could only throw Mariola a glance before they shoved him into the darkened vehicle.

  Mariola Sirakova would stay with the other unfortunates at the train station. First they took them to a tavern where they beat up the men and raped the women. Mariola probably thought she was reliving the nightmare she went through in those carnal, blood-soaked basement rooms at the police station in Pleven. There was no way she could have known that this time the hell would end the same night: by morning they would all be dead. Hell was no longer a place; hell was time. Hell could go on for months, or it could end in mercy after only a few hours.

  She had survived Pleven, but did not survive Belovo. Mariola was not yet even twenty-one. She was seventy-eight days short of her next birthday.

  They brought the devastated bodies to the Gaitanovets region and quickly unloaded them into the hole they’d dug—another mass grave to hold yet more victims of that year, the year nineteen twenty-five.

  Sheytanov might have only imagined what happened with Mariola—there was no way to know. They took him to the other side of the mountains, to Gorna Djumaya, uttering not a single word, until he opened his mouth to ask, “What are we doing now?” and they only responded: “Shut it!” His arrival in Gorna Djumaya was met by the same pathological murderers whose names had been on everyone’s lips that year, the year an undeclared, repulsive war pitted neighbor against neighbor: Sheytanov knew who they were. As soon as he laid eyes on them he thought, “This is it.” But he steeled himself and asked them not to play with fire.

  “Me,” he said, “you don’t sentence. Me,” he said, “you either shoot or you let go.”

  The group who informed him they’d be the ones to decide his fate—all those Vanchos, Ionkovs and Perovs—mhmmed bitterly and shut themselves in the other room to talk it over

  [NB! Years later, one of them would say the following:

  “Well, there was no other way! The Army League demanded Sheytanov’s head at any price!”

  And that was that.]

  and he remained alone with two of their goons. They weren’t the same ones who’d taken him up here, but they all looked alike—as though they were all begot by the same mother. They reeked like hell and their eyes were black with the opium they couldn’t do without. He knew their type—the type who killed without a second thought.

  “They have no first thought to speak of,” he thought, and immediately vowed to remember the joke and share it with the poet when he saw him in the coming days. Geo Milev could surely use it in a poem or in one of the angry diatribes he published in the magazine.

  Suddenly, a poem came to him. What kind of epoch is this, / Which drowns our souls in crimson and gold, / Which, when our hour strikes bare—conspires to send us to death, with fanfare . . .

  He would give it to the poet for his next magazine—there was bound to be another magazine sometime! But he had no way of writing the poem down: he was all tied up.

  So he began repeating it—once, a second time, a third, many times over, so that he wouldn’t forget it. What kind of epoch is this, / Which drowns our souls in crimson and gold, / Which, when our hour strikes bare—conspires to send us to death, with fanfare . . . / What kind of epoch is this, / Which drowns our souls in crimson and gold, / Which, when our hour strikes bare—conspires to send us to death, with fanfare . . . / What kind of epoch is this, / Which drowns our souls in crimson and gold, / Which, when our hour strikes bare—conspires to send us to death, with fanfare.

  And that was that.

  23.

  [Monday, November 18, 2013]

  . . . Inside the Police Directorate’s jam-packed rooms, some of the detainees took to etching small notches on the smoke-blackened walls: seemingly to mark the days, but they quickly lost count, because each night they were moved from floor to floor and from room to room, where they were met with a whole new set of days and itchings to match. The poet did no such thing. He saw no reason to—so certain was he that those men from the police were obligated to release him any moment now, and bring him to the prison where he could start serving his sentence. Instead of marking notches on the walls, he protested loudly for being detained, threatened inquiries, and yelled he would write about this in every European newspaper. He made a lot of noise and hullaballoo, but no one paid any attention. “Write all you want,” they said to him. “We won’t read it.” Then they moved on and he pounded his fist into the wall and spit out all the worst profanities he’d learned at the Kniajevo Military Academy.

  He thought about Mila and the kids incessantly. He wondered what could possibly be keeping them from coming to see him. Right before they took him in, Bistra had been on the verge of chicken pox—feverish, sneezing and coughing, her little nose constantly wet—all those sure signs of measles the old people would call brusnica—and the poet’s heart broke remembering how torturous it had been for Leda, who’d had it when she was two. He wondered why there was no sign of his brother, Boris, either. True, he was on friendly terms with the new government, but the poet refused to believe his brother would give up without looking for him. He knew his brother loved him the most out of everybody in the big Kassabov household. When they were children, Boris had trailed him devotedly, picking up all those flying pieces of paper and notebooks—batko’s magazines! The poet tore them up, and Boris would race to pick it all up. The poet drew, tore, and threw away—and Boris picked it all up. The poet tears—Boris picks up. When he collected the pieces—he glued them all back together one by one inside his own small little notebook, which he then hid with yet another torn up magazine of the poet’s in places he was certain were very, very secret and that only he knew about . . .

  For this
reason he knew, he was certain Boris was out there looking for him—somewhere outside the walls of this cursed building.

  The days came and went, people disappeared and others came, but he was not afraid, he was simply beside himself.

  [Tuesday, November 19, 2013]

  What do you know—one Saturday night, when, according to his estimations, May was already on its way out, two police officers came in, pulled him out of the airless room, and led him down the muddy staircase. He looked at his watch and saw that is was a quarter to eleven—the same hour in which they usually came in silently and took out yet another person. But he still wasn’t afraid. The silence in that enormous building was broken by all the noises of men crammed together and only the black shadows of Kocho Stoyanov’s Macedonians scattered in the hallways.

  They descended down the stairs, going all the way down to the first floor, but they didn’t stop there, nor did they take him outside as he thought for a split second; instead they kept climbing down.

  They went all the way down to the basement, and led him inside a room.

  The room had a chair, a warped writing desk and a weak, bare light bulb.

  And behind the writ

  (Crossed out)

  [Saturday, November 23, 2013]

  [Goddamn it! My thoughts at this point are so convoluted and mired that I’m going to need a good amount of time to pull the right one out.]

  (Crossed out)

  . . . but this time the poet recognized him immediately. The same young clerk, the braggart who had once upon a time validated his address registration, whom he had seen carry Blagoev’s coffin with his own two eyes, who had only just recently come inside his home for a midnight check up.

  Geshev. Nikola Geshev—he truly recognized him now.

  “Well, Mr. Milev,” said Geshev, “we’re alive and well to see each other again, what do you say?”

  “Yes, hello, hello,” the poet mumbled. “But enough with the hellos, would you be so kind as to explain what I’m doing here? I’ve been held for two weeks, I have no idea why they even brought me here, why aren’t I in prison? I haven’t spoken with my wife, or my children—what’s happening here!”

  “Milev, Milev . . .” Geshev sighed, his eyes becoming as black as two lifeless coals. “I asked you to introduce me to Sheytanov, didn’t I? Had you done that, you’d still be alive.”

  “But I am alive!” the poet countered surprised.

  What Geshev said next he said with bite, looking at the poet at once with worry and impatient anticipation.

  “No, no you’re not,” he groaned. “You are no longer. You just don’t know it yet.”

  He nodded to the two men, who stood like black clouds in the rusted dusk and whom the poet hadn’t even noticed. One of them approached him, took the thick bludgeon from the desk, and swung with all the might of his muscular body and unloaded into the poet’s head. He did so from the left—where the poet’s only good eye was. The entire room echoed with the ugly sound of a cracking skull, and the good eye flew out of its wrecked orbit.

  Geshev sighed and left the room.

  (Crossed out)

  [November 25-November 29, 2013; Germany]

  (Crossed out)

  [Sunday, December 29, 2013]

  [This is something! It is true that the days are long, but the years fly by. And while I’m wondering when the Wednesday will become a Friday—the whole year has gone by.

  A whole year, and there’s still no end in sight for this diary . . .

  God help me!]

  [The hour of death]

  “The following is given to Mila Geo Mileva, regarding her inquiry #823, so she may use it wherever is necessary.”

  —From the certification given to Mila Geo Mileva

  by the Police Directorate and the Sofia Police

  Commandantship on August 6, 1925

  [Monday, December 30, 2013]

  Mila searched for the poet day after day. She went to all the Sofia police precincts, stood for hours outside the prison, visited the civil prosecutor and the field court prosecutor. Nothing. Public Safety told her they had no copy of an arrest warrant issued in the poet’s name, the prison said he’d never been brought there. It was the same thing everywhere she went. When she heard detainees were held at the First Infantry Regiment—she immediately went down to the First Infantry Regiment. She went straight to any place rumored to be housing arrestees. She’d been to the Fourth Artillery Regiment, and inside the Military Academy—everywhere! After which she returned to the throngs of people by Lavov Most.

  Heavy clouds hung over Sofia, and Mila didn’t think they were clouds at all, but the souls of all those who’d been gathered up and disappeared that spring, summoned to silently keep vigil somewhere high up—at the threshold of heaven and earth.

  One Thursday she overheard that the Fotinov School was also full of arrestees. She went there too—rushing off along the river and turning down the boulevard. The school was occupied by an army, but an officer came out from his post to speak to her, and when he heard whom it was she was searching for, he immediately let her go inside to the gymnasium to see with her own eyes they had no such person. She was shocked by what she saw inside, but not by the sight of a hundred or so men meandering about between the wall bars, gym horses, and climbing ropes. The astonishment came from the men’s complete lack of consternation. Quite the contrary, right as she walked inside the stale-aired gym hall that reeked of rot, sweat, horseradish, and goat shit, the detainees were falling over with laughter as three hapless men—arrestees like all the rest—had pushed three tables together, climbed on top, and were now performing a satirical skit and singing a dirty song.

  So repulsed was she at the men’s bubonic cackling, she never stepped foot inside that school again.

  But she did keep visiting all of the police precincts and heard the same thing everywhere, “Geo Milev has never been here!” One day, amid the soundless crowd outside the Police Directorate, she spotted Viola Karavelova: she was dressed head to toe in white and had pinned to her skirt a photograph of her husband, Joseph Herbst. The women stood so close to one another that Mila could see into Viola’s eyes—blue, piercing, and vacant. Mila at once thought this is it—our lives were sundered and this is what remains. Their men were never friends, their paths had not crossed, and they did not share the same acquaintances, but now the two women would wander the city together, looking for them. Together. The same places, the same reason; they’d wade through the same mud beneath the same May rain, united by a common nightmare from which there was no waking.

  Her face darkened with each barren day, her exquisite femininity betook itself into the black hole of unease. It was as though all those old premonitions of woe now befell them and she chased them away, and just when she felt like she might keel over and give in to the desperation and her world reached the brink of collapse, she would get up and take off to yet another place someone tipped her off about, with even more determination.

  [Tuesday, December 31 2013]

  The very next day after they took the poet away, Mila’s brother-in-law, the poet’s little brother, Boris, immediately arrived in Sofia from Stara Zagora via the overnight train. He jumped into the first available taxi or phaeton—and went straight to Nachev. He wasted no time going to the Police Directorate, he went straight to the man’s house, because the two of them went far back, they’d served in the same regiment together . . . It wasn’t easy to get to Nachev in those times, it was a known fact the communists had issued him a death sentence and hence the man was fiercely guarded. But they let Boris in. Only after that did Boris go to his sister-in-law’s house on Maria Louisa, but he had a bewildered air. He told Mila everything would be fine, Nachev had given his word he would look into it and take care of it—they’d been friends, after all—but Mila felt as though he was afraid to look her in the eye. She had reason to be anxious: Nachev had promised to call first thing the following day, but he did not—perhaps because the following da
y had been a Sunday, Boris thought. But on Monday, concerned the man may have forgotten what they’d talked about in the diabolical chaos following the attacks, Boris again up and went into the Police Directorate. He did not return until the afternoon; even more disconcerted, he now looked afraid, plain and simple, and his eyes were red. Mila and Boris sat down and wrote the first official complaint letter, and Boris departed for Stara Zagora the next day.

  It was already the nineteenth of May. On the twentieth, a Wednesday, Mila’s father-in-law, Milyo, arrived in Sofia. He came into town but got a hotel; he didn’t stay at their house on Maria Louisa. Mila knew the man did not care for her, but her getting angry at him about it now was futile. Her father-in-law went around and did what he did, and on the twenty-fourth of May he caught the train back to Stara Zagora, because someone had told him the poet was in the Sliven prison or maybe in the Haskovo one, perhaps he’d be well advised to go check on it in person. He stopped by Mila’s long enough to embrace Leda and let Bistra play with his mustache, gave them both a couple of leva bills and a kiss, and left, and Mila continued to make the rounds at all the police precincts, lodging yet more complaints.

  One Thursday, she remembered her sister-in-law had had the idea to get all the writers together to make a stand on the poet’s behalf. Mila immediately up and went to the imposing building of the Central Bulgarian Cooperative Bank, situated on the corner of Bazov and Rakovski Streets—right behind the National Theater. She knew the writer Konstantinov worked there as a legal adviser, in addition to being the secretary of the Writers’ Union, and he was a close, trusted associate of the new union chair, Vlaykov, and had, for that reason, combined one with the other, and in addition served as editor of Vlaykov’s magazine Democratic Review. He also signed everything as Dushechka. Mila found him and informed him what had brought her to him, all of which he was very surprised to hear! He shuddered and yelled that this was a grotesque disgrace, that he would at once inform the chairman, who, as a writer, lover of mankind, and a political man, would by all means be able to do something. Mila got the chills when she heard that a writer, the secretary of the writers, no less, was hearing about her husband the poet’s disappearance from her, but she let it go. Afterward, she could barely wait for Monday to come—right after the twenty-fourth of May, the day of the Saints Cyril and Methodius, the day celebrating the written word, which that year fell on a Sunday—so she could go back to the bank. Dushechka wasn’t in on that particular day, and the policeman at the entrance with the caryatids and the heavy, wrought iron gate, sent her to the Writers’ Union—not too far, at 129 Rakovski Street. She went there, too, and Konstantinov told her mister chairman had gone to the director of the police, but he was told the writer Geo Milev had neither been arrested, nor detained there, and that they had no idea as to his whereabouts.