“And as I am sure you understand,” he added, “Todor Vlaykov is not the type of man people lie to!”
Mila had begun to despair at that point, and she humbly insisted that they check once more. Konstantinov promised to do so, but who knows why he still avoided her gaze, and Mila did not return, not to the bank behind the National Theater, and not to 129 Rakovski . . .
[Wednesday, January 1, 2014, 12:17am]
On the last day of May, nineteen twenty-five, a Saturday, when she again returned to the Police Directorate building in the late afternoon, she was taken to someone called Nikola Geshev in the brigand criminal pursuit office. The office of those in charge of the pursuit was at the bottom of the dark stairwell—somewhere far down the basement labyrinths, where dark men roamed and where the stench of the detainees mixed with the heavy aroma of opium. This same Nikola Geshev told her he knew her husband personally and greatly admired him, but he had not seen him as of late . . .
“Geo Milev was never here, madame!” he said. “Honest! Do you think I wouldn’t know had he come here? I would never lie to you!”
His demeanor appeared convincing, but she saw the man was hiding something.
[Tuesday, January 7, 2014]
She got up and left without saying goodbye. She headed down Maria Louisa Boulevard, where the red trams rattled down toward the Lions’ Bridge and back up the hill toward the gutted remains of the St. Nedelya Church, where soldiers with helmets, armed as if for war, strode tensely; she went inside her apartment building, across from the mosque—with the drug store at one end, and the boza fabric Radomir on the other, the post office on the first floor, and the import-export bank on the second, and the Bulgarian offices of Longine on the third. She listlessly climbed the seventy-seven steps to their then home, walked in, and asked her sister-in-law if she could watch the kids for just a little while longer. Maria hiccupped through her sobs and nodded, and Mila went inside the space, curtained off by an ebullient drape, which the poet and his wife considered their matrimonial bedroom. She lay down on the bed and before she could even think about how exhausted she was, she fell asleep and began to dream how
[Friday, January 10, 2014]
a snow-covered wilderness crawled with an endless procession of people clad in black. The line of people was so long that when, one day, those in front overheard the people farthest in back, crazed with hunger, had eaten a person, they had no way of knowing for sure—if they were to send someone all the way back to find out, he’d never catch up with them again . . . And they couldn’t possibly stop, either, for anyone who stopped fell and died on the spot: the road was blackened by hundreds of corpses that the eternal cold gave no chance of decaying. Every three days those up front lit fires, warming the people in back as they passed . . .
A long time ago, a man had told them about a faraway land, so far it was all the way at the other end of the world. The Promised Land. There, everyone would find a house, there would be work for the men, rose bushes, colorful flower beds, and vegetable gardens for the women to tend to, milk and ice cream for the children, wooden toy guns and merry-go-rounds for the boys, and for the girls—dolls and mirrors with pictures of actors on the backs . . . The people repeated this like a prayer chant. That same man had also told them not to fear the long road ahead—there was nothing to fear. They would cross many lands, he told them, and they would meet good people. And the good people would hire them for small jobs—to dig a well, to mix mud and straw for mudbrick, to erect a stone wall, to dig up beets and potatoes—and they would get by until they got to the Promised Land, and when they got there . . .
But they came across no good people who wanted to give them jobs. The bitter cold was permeating and no one dug wells or mixed mud and straw; the houses were made of red and black stone, the stone walls had already been erected in another time, and there were no potatoes or beets to speak of. The locals peered darkly through the narrow embrasures of their northern windows, and none came out to offer bread or cured meat to the travelers.
True, this had taken the people by surprise, but they kept on walking . . .
In the fourth year, when the glimmer of the Promised Land appeared on the horizon, the people spotted a somber horseman riding toward them. They stopped him and asked him whether he was coming from the Promised Land. He answered that yes, that’s where he came from.
“Is it far now to the Promised Land? And,” they went on, anxiously, “is there work waiting for the men, flower gardens for the women, and milk and seesaws for the children?”
The man gave them a long look.
“Nonsense.”
The people grew anxious and began to fret, what did he mean, nonsense, but the stranger repeated:
“Nonsense! Flower gardens, seesaws . . . complete nonsense.”
Frightened, they laid into him, shouting at him that he had no idea what he was saying.
“How dare you call that nonsense,” they yelled furiously, “when a man told us about the Promised Land many years ago! He said there would be a house for everyone and work for the men, and rose bushes and flower beds for the women, and vegetable gardens they would tend to while the men were at work, milk and ice cream for the children, wooden toy guns and merry-go-rounds for the boys, dolls and little mirrors with the pictures of actors on the backs for the girls . . . We trusted him, that’s why we set off in search of the Promised Land. He told us to!”
“He told you to. So what?” the horseman grunted. “He told you a fairy tale and forgot to mention it was just a story!”
[Wednesday, January 29, 2014]
[The snow is mixed with rain—exactly like in Chamonix in January, nineteen twenty-four. Then as now, the rain mushed the snow, and when the savage cold set in, it turned into a hellish ice slick.]
“That it was . . . what?” the people gasped.
“A fairy tale! Don’t you know what a fairy tale is? The man wrote a story, read it to you in a church, and you went and believed him. Now you’re dragging around like meanderers without kin, you yellow, emaciated tatterdemalions . . .”
He then dug into his horse with the gleaming spurs of a fallen angel and galloped in the direction from which they all came, past the entire train of people wrapped in black tatters, ragged blankets, and bedraggled scarves, who’d yet to realize they’d been duped.
24.
[Thursday, January 30, 2014]
Night had fallen by the time Mila awoke. The black sky behind the window had no moon or stars—only the Splendid company’s diamond halo radiated from behind Banya Bashi’s minaret as a late, lone tram clattered down toward its depot on the other side of Lions’ Bridge.
The Market Hall’s clock began to strike. It did so eleven times—any other year this hour brought Sofia’s night to life in the sheer spring dusk, but on that night, only the clack of horses’ hooves, the snore of a dense automobile, and that same lone tram cracked the dead silence.
She raised herself up and sat on the edge of the bed when she felt something inside of her tear in a scarlet hurricane of agony.
It was with that Mila Geo Mileva realized the little boy she and the poet had whispered about on so many of the cool, rainy spring nights in nineteen twenty-five would never be.
25.
[Monday, February 3, 2014]
[The End.]
[Epilogue]
After that night
[Friday, November 14, 2014]
“1283 Milev, Geo, from Stara Zagora, b. January 29, 1896, son of Milyo Kassabov and Anastasia Kassabova; writer, height: 160 cm, eyes brown, nose straight, disabled (scar on skull, right eye missing). Prosecutor’s office, Sofia, outgoing: 11300-1926.”
—From the central police bulletin for
missing persons, Sofia, June 10, 1926
Milyo Kassabov grew old in an instant.
He held himself together for an entire year after the poet’s disappearance—he went around, he inquired, he came back home and went out again looking for his son. He wrote thre
e pleas to the king, one to the National Assembly, and five to the ministers, growing rather surprised when, after a continuous, uninterrupted silence, he received the following lone response . . .
[Before I forget. This response arrived on the eighteenth of December, nineteen twenty-five. With outgoing number six hundred seventy, the king’s clerks were responding to a plea sent to them on June of twenty-five. Half a year later! The response said only that his plea was forwarded to the Ministry of Interior and of National Health in November. For further investigation. That is all. Some fucking country.]
[Not that this constituted a response—it’s that no one else had given even this much.]
He had forbidden anyone in the family to so much as put on an article of mourning, even marrying his oldest daughter Evgenia to one Zheko Velikov and sending Pesha to America to study in Chicago at the national academy for kindergarten teachers.
“Have you seen Georgi’s dead body?” he demanded. “Have you washed it? Have you thrown dirt in his grave? I haven’t!”
That’s what he said.
And he always scowled at his daughter-in-law. He was convinced she was not doing enough, that she wasn’t looking for Georgi as she should. He knew it wasn’t true, but he scowled all the same.
But the following spring, when the yard and the garden on the other side of the hedge burst in the scant green of reawakening, he who hadn’t yet turned fifty-eight years old, broke down. At the end of May, he wrote an obituary announcing the wake that would take place over the unknown grave of his beloved departed, he gave the obituary to be typed up, accompanied the servant girl to buy twenty loaves of bread, negotiated the lamb for the qurbani himself, and the service took place on Sunday, the twenty-third, inside the Church of Sveta Bogoroditsa (under whose arches the old king had once proclaimed the war manifesto). He’d chosen the twenty-third, because on another twenty-third of May, precisely three hundred sixty-five days and three hundred sixty-five nights earlier, someone had spotted his son through a window inside the grim building next to Sofia’s Lavov Most for the last time.
[. . . The poet had retreated to a corner of his cell, writing something in his notebook: he’d promised to say a few words about Slavic literature the following day, May twenty-fourth, the day of letters, to the rest of the detainees, and perhaps this is why he’d been near a window.]
It was the last time anyone would see him.
And so be it.
On the eve of the wake, Milyo Kassabov opened his notebook No. 52 and wrote down the following with the decisive handwriting of a well-read man:
70 printed obituaries—100 leva
20 loaves of bread and a lamb—520 leva
Misc.—180 leva
Total: 800 leva
He now knew for certain this was to be the last money he’d ever spend on the poet.
He put the pen point back into the inkpot and as he raised his head, he saw in the darkened window not the strong and ambitious face of a big-time businessman, but the willowed countenance of a man on the threshold of agedness.
The dark outside stifled the fragrance of the rose bush that for years spiraled up toward the window, and that of the petunias down by the house, and although nothing was meant to have changed from the good old times his large family enjoyed, it was as though the May eve was now haunted by horrors and grotesque evils.
[Sunday, November 16, 2014]
Sunday, the twenty-third of May, nineteen twenty-six, was the day of the Holy Apostle Simon the Zealot—the one with the Marriage at Cana—where Jesus had been invited with his mother, who’d already arrived. And when they ran out of wine at the wedding, Jesus’s mother said to Him, “They have no wine!” Jesus looked at her despondently, for His hour had not yet come, but he asked the servants to fill the now-empty earthen wine vessels with water, and take them to the steward of the Feast. The man ladled the water, but it had already turned to wine, so the old man reproached the groom, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” But what neither of the two men knew was that this had been the water Jesus had turned into wine. And that he had just performed the first of His miracles.
Milyo Kassabov was thinking about something else entirely.
He thought that precisely a year ago—on the day someone had for certain seen his son for the last time at the Police Directorate—it had again been the day of Simon the Zealot, and that these three hundred sixty-five days and nights were enough. He gave up.
He told his wife to put on her mourning clothes, hung the black crepe on the gate, and sat down to write the obituary containing the irreversible words grave and departed.
He no longer waited for a miracle.
[Thursday, November 20, 2014]
That year had been long and yet it flew past like a dark moment.
[Saturday, November 22, 2014]
Before that, all sorts of people kept wandering by, speaking to him without moving their lips—like real ventriloquists. Half a year this went on! The train of people started in June of twenty-five and did not halt until Christmas. These people would swear up and down that his son was alive, crossing themselves, and describing exactly where they’d seen him. One such degenerate came into his bookstore in July, wandered around obnoxiously and began to tell him that he knew: they’d only cut Georgi’s arm off—the right one, so he’d never be able to write again—but that otherwise he was fine, he was alive and well and they were going to release him very soon, the arm they probably cut off out of vengeance and to make an example out of him. Milyo Kassabov heard him out, stood quiet for a minute, and then shooed him out. He did the same to some architect who came to tell him just how much he cared for his son, who’d encouraged him so patiently to pursue the artistic vein, and then told Milyo he was only passing through Stara Zagora, really he was on his way to Sliven, where he’d been sent by some extraordinarily secret organization to retrieve Georgi from his fate at the local prison. A third—this one an actor—assured him that he, too, knew Georgi was still alive and that his friends would never let him perish. And Milyo Kassabov sank deeper into depression because he realized that even people like that somehow managed to attach themselves to Public Safety as lowlife spies, provocateurs, and general contemptibles.
His daughter Mariika once told him about the Orphan—how he’d given his word he would show up as a witness for the poet on the day of his trial, but did not come, and how she ran all the way to his house to remind him, only to be met by the Orphanness, who told her her husband was stretching his canvasses, but not in their beautiful house in Sofia, no, he was doing it all the way in their villa in Dragalevtsi, an hour away from the capital. And Milyo Kassabov had told her:
“Mariika, Mariika, by God, you must be turning into a socialist—you’re delirious with camaraderie and solidarity. It comes from Christ, doesn’t it, this solidarity and compassion. Well, let me remind you of something, my daughter. When Pontius Pilate’s people arrested Christ at Gethsemane, did they arrest only him and no one else? Peter even cut off the ear of some poor slave, and still he didn’t get locked up. That he cut off the slave’s ear is written in the Gospel, but it says nothing of him being arrested. Why? Because, when they saw what was happening, they all ran, that’s why. And Peter would have been the first to run. Fear is a scary thing, my child, remember that.”
Maria looked at him, pale as the wall—but he went quiet and stayed silent, then added that all these books were written and then rewritten by those same cowards, and if not personally by them, then by their followers. And when they wrote, and crossed out and rewrote, they did it so they’d come out the heroes.
“That’s how it goes,” he said, “and if these same cowards one day rule, it is they who will write the history.”
And he waved his hand dismissively.
[Sunday, November 23, 2014]
During that same rainy summer of twenty-five, old man Pavel, Bishop of Dragovitii
ski and Metropolitan of Starozagorski, a diplomatic man well-versed not only in church doings but in secular ones as well, took off for Sofia to personally ask after and inquire about Georgi. When he returned, His reverence sent for Milyo Kassabov and told him he’d personally been to see General Valkov, and upon inquiring about Georgi, the general had replied: “I personally gave the orders in regard to him!”
“What orders did he give, your Eminence?” Milyo Kassabov asked drily, “Good orders or bad? Did he say?”
Who knows why, but the bishop pressed his hand to the enameled icon pendant on his chest, sighed, and spread out his arms.
“This man,” he said, “is like a mire, Mr. Kassabov. You know neither how deep it runs, nor what might be hiding in the mud.”
[Monday, November 24, 2014]
Milyo Kassabov crossed himself and left, and when he lay down that evening, he dreamt he found a stray kitten in the garden by the train station. He picked it up because he wanted to bring it to the children—in his dream they were still kids. But the kitten was skittish: it pulled away, twisting in his arms like orange lightning, scratching wildly and biting, and Milyo Kassabov saw his hands covered in scratches that seeped with blood. He felt the pain even in his dream, but he still didn’t leave the kitten. He got home and Georgi immediately reached for the kitten, but he told his son the kitten was wild and that it scratched and bit. “Don’t try and be a hero with this kitten, now is not the time.” But Georgi still took the animal from his hands and it suddenly became tame. It did not scratch, or bite, but quieted into his embrace and gave a vehement purr when Georgi scratched its pink ear.
The Same Night Awaits Us All Page 24