The last part of this process – the end of the beginning – was Petkanov’s trial. So Vera insisted that the four of them be witnesses. If they couldn’t get into the courtroom, they could watch the proceedings on television. Every moment of them, every minute of the nation’s sudden passage from enforced adolescence to delayed maturity.
‘What about the cuts?’ said Atanas.
That was a problem. Every four hours – except when it was every three – there was a power cut lasting an hour – except when it lasted for two. The cuts rotated by district. Vera lived in the same electricity sector as Stefan, so that didn’t help. Atanas lived a good twenty-minute bus-ride away, beyond the southern boulevards. Dimiter’s district was closer, a fifteen-minute walk, an eight-minute run. So they would start at Stefan’s (or Vera’s when Stefan’s parents got fed up with them), move to Dimiter’s as first alternative, and in an emergency – if everyone else was blacked out – bus it to Atanas’s.
But what if the power cut out in the middle of the trial, just as Petkanov was squirming and the prosecutor was sticking it to him, telling how he’d swindled the nation, lied and stolen, bullied and killed? They’d miss almost ten minutes’ transmission running over to Dimiter’s. Or worse, twenty minutes getting out to Atanas’s.
‘Forty,’ said Atanas. What with petrol shortages and bus breakdowns, that’s what you had to allow nowadays. Forty minutes!
It was Stefan, the engineer, who found the solution. Each morning the State Electricity Board published its schedule of ‘interruptions’, as they neutrally termed them, for the next thirty-six hours. So the plan went like this. Say they were watching at Vera’s and a power cut was promised for a certain time. Two of them would set off for Dimiter’s apartment ten or fifteen minutes in advance. The two left behind would watch until the picture failed, then follow the others over. At the end of the day’s transmission each team would fill in the other on the ten minutes or so they had missed. Or the forty minutes, if they had to trail out beyond the southern boulevards.
‘I hope they hang him,’ said Dimiter the day before the trial began.
‘Shoot him,’ Atanas preferred. ‘Takka-takka-takka-takka.’
‘I hope we learn the truth,’ said Vera.
‘I hope they just let him talk,’ said Stefan. ‘Just ask him simple questions to which there are simple answers, and then hear him come out with all that shit. How much did you steal? When did you order the murder of Simeon Popov? What is the number of your Swiss bank account? Ask him things like that, and watch how he doesn’t answer a single one of them.’
‘I want to see film of his palaces,’ said Dimiter. ‘And pictures of all his mistresses.’
‘We don’t know he had mistresses,’ said Vera. ‘Anyway, that’s not important.’
‘I want to know exactly how dangerous our nuclear plants are,’ said Stefan.
‘I want to know if he personally authorised the Department of External Security to try and kill the Pope,’ said Dimiter.
‘I want to see him shot,’ said Atanas.
‘I want to know about the Politburo’s privileges,’ said Dimiter.
‘I want to know how much we owe, each of us,’ said Stefan.
‘Takka-takka-takka,’ went Atanas. ‘Takka-takka-takka.’
The week before Criminal Law Case Number 1 opened in the Supreme Court, former President Stoyo Petkanov sent an open letter to the National Assembly. He intended to promote his own defence vigorously, both to the people and to the parliament, on television and in the press, until such time as the fascist tendencies currently at work succeeded in gagging him. The text of his letter ran as follows:
Esteemed National Representatives,
Certain circumstances compel me to address this letter to you. These circumstances lead me to believe that certain people want to turn me into a means of achieving their own political interests and personal ambitions. I would like to declare that I will not play into the hands of any political group.
As far as I know, a single head of state has been tried and convicted in modern history so far: Emperor Bokassa in Africa (who was convicted) for conspiracy, murders and cannibalism. I will be the second case.
As to my personal responsibility, I can tell you even now, fully aware and having summed my life up after long contemplation, that as this country’s party leader and head of state for 33 years I bear the greatest political responsibility for everything done. Did the good things outnumber the bad things, did we live in darkness and hopelessness during all those years, did mothers give birth to children, were we calm or anxious, did the people have any goals and ideals: I have no right to judge all this myself now.
The answers to all these questions can only come from our own people and our history. I am sure that they will be stern judges. I am convinced, however, that they will be fair too, categorically rejecting both political nihilism and total denigration.
I have done everything in the belief that it was good for my country. I have made mistakes along the way, but I have not committed crimes against my people. It is for these mistakes that I accept political responsibility.
3rd January
Respectfully yours,
Stoyo Petkanov
Like most of his contemporaries, Peter Solinsky had grown up within the Party. A Red Pioneer, a Young Socialist, and then a full party member, he had received his card shortly before his father fell victim to one of Petkanov’s routine purges and was exiled to the country. There had been sour words between them at first, since Peter, with all the authority of youth, knew that the Party was always greater than the individual, and that this applied in his father’s case as in anyone else’s. Peter himself had naturally fallen under suspicion for a while; and he acknowledged in those clouded days that marriage to the daughter of a hero in the Anti-Fascist Struggle had given him some protection. Slowly, he had regained favour with the Party; once, they had even sent him to Turin as part of a trade delegation. They had issued him with foreign currency and told him to spend it; he had felt privileged. Maria, understandably, had not been permitted to accompany him.
At forty, he had been appointed professor of law at the capital’s second university. The apartment in Friendship 3 had then seemed luxurious; they owned a small car and a cottage in the Ostova woods; they had limited but regular access to the Special Shops. Angelina, their daughter, was cheerful, spoiled, and happy at being spoiled. What made these solutions to life insufficient? What had turned him – as Truth had put it only that morning – into a political parricide?
Looking back, he supposed that it had started with Angelina, with her whys. Not the confident, ritualistic whys of a four-year-old (why is it Sunday? why are we going? why is it a taxi?) but the considered, tentative whys of a child of ten. Why were there so many soldiers when there wasn’t a war? Why were there so many apricot trees in the countryside but never apricots in the shops? Why is there fog over the city in the summer? Why do all those people live on that waste ground beyond the eastern boulevards? The questions were not dangerous, and Peter had answered easily enough. Because they are there to protect us. Because we sell them abroad for hard currency that we need. Because there are many factories working at full capacity. Because gypsies choose to live that way.
Angelina was always content with the answers. That was the shock. He hadn’t been a father prodded into doubt by an innocent child’s potent questions; what stirred him was the innocent child’s passive satisfaction with responses he knew to be at best plausible evasions. Her blithe acceptance troubled him profoundly. As he lay awake, fretting in the dark, Angelina’s condition expanded until it became symptomatic of the whole country. Could a nation lose its capacity for scepticism, for useful doubt? What if the muscle of contradiction simply atrophied from lack of exercise?
A year or so later, Peter Solinsky discovered that such fears were over-pessimistic. Sceptics and oppositionists were tactically quiet in his presence because they were roundly suspicious of him. But peo
ple did exist who wanted to try again from the beginning, who preferred facts to ideology, who wanted to establish small truths before proceeding to the larger ones. When Peter realised that there were enough such people to encourage the timid majority to stir, he felt as if the smog was lifting from his soul.
It had all begun in a medium-sized town on the northern border with their nearest socialist ally. A river ran between the two states here, a river from which no fish had been taken for years. The trees above the town grew twisted and low, rarely putting out leaves. Prevailing winds blew a greasy, dun-coloured air across the river from another medium-sized town on the southern border of the nearest socialist ally. Children developed chest ailments from infancy; women wrapped scarves round their faces before going out to shop; doctors’ surgeries were full of burnt lungs and tortured eyes. Until one day a group of women sent a protest to the capital. And since by chance the nearest socialist ally was passingly in disfavour for being less than fraternal towards one of its ethnic minorities, the letter to the Minister of Health turned into a small paragraph in Truth, which the next day was alluded to sympathetically by a member of the Politburo.
So a small protest became a local movement and then a Green Party, which was permitted to exist as a sop to Gorbachev while severely instructed to concern itself with nothing but environmental matters, and preferably those which might embarrass the nearest socialist ally. Whereupon three hundred thousand people joined the new movement and started tugging at the nettle-roots of political cause and effect: from regional secretary to provincial secretary to Central Committee Department to deputy minister to minister to Politburo to presidential whim; from dead tree to living five-year plan. By the time the Central Committee realised the danger and declared membership of the Greens incompatible with Socialism and Communism, Peter Solinsky and thousands like him cared far more about their new party card than their old one. It was too late then for a purge; too late to stop Ilia Banov, that slyly telegenic ex-Communist turned leader of the Greens, from grabbing national popularity; too late to avoid the elections forced upon the socialist countries by Gorbachev; too late, as Stoyo Petkanov told the eleven-man Politburo in emergency session, to prevent the whole fucking lid from blowing off.
Maria Solinska’s private opinion – and increasingly her opinions tended to be private – was that the Green Party was a collection of cretinous foresters, hooligan anarchists, and fascist sympathisers; that Ilia Banov should have been put on a flight to Franco’s Spain thirty years ago; and that her husband Peter, having striven for so long to obtain a good job and a decent apartment, having avoided the malign shadow of his deviationist father largely thanks to her presence, was either losing whatever small political sense he once had, or else suffering a mid-life crisis, and quite possibly both at the same time.
She kept quiet while some she knew reviled the beliefs they had loyally upheld a few months earlier; she observed the furious glee of the crowds, and on every boulevard of the city she smelt revenge like sour sweat. She withdrew increasingly into her life with Angelina. At times she envied the child learning simple, certain things like mathematics and music, and wished she could join her. But then she would also have had to learn the new political certainties, the new orthodoxies they rushed to teach at school.
Nevertheless, on the first morning of Criminal Law Case Number 1, when her husband came to kiss her goodbye, something stirred within her, and made her forget the quick betrayals and slow disappointments of the last few years. So Maria Solinska kissed Peter back, and with an affectionate fussiness she had not displayed for some time, straightened the scarf-ends he had jammed hastily between his turnedout lapels. ‘Be careful,’ she said as he left.
‘Careful? Of course I shall be careful. Look,’ he said, putting down his briefcase and holding up his hands, ‘I am wearing my porcupine gloves.’
Criminal Law Case Number 1 began in the Supreme Court on the 10th of January. The former President was seen arriving under military escort: a short, stout figure in a buttoned-up mackintosh. He wore his familiar heavy glasses with a slight tint in the lens, and when he got out of the Chaika he took off his hat, letting viewers see yet again the head familiar from so many of the nation’s postage stamps: the skull set low on the shoulders, the sharp, questing nose, the frontal baldness and the stiff, sandy-coloured hair over his ears. There was a crowd, and so he smiled and waved. Then the camera lost sight of him until he re-emerged into the courtroom. Somewhere along the burrow he had left his hat and coat: now there was a sombre, square-cut suit, a white shirt and a green tie striped diagonally with grey. He stopped and looked around, like a footballer surveying an unfamiliar stadium. Just as he seemed about to move forward, he changed his mind and stepped across to one of the soldiers on guard. He peered at a medal ribbon, and then, almost as an afterthought, paternally adjusted the militiaman’s tunic. He smiled to himself, and walked on.
[‘Such a fucking ham.’
‘Shh, Atanas.’]
The courtroom had been built in an early-Seventies’ mode of softened brutalism: pale wood, flattened angles, chairs that approached comfort. It could have been a rehearsal theatre, or a small concert hall in which spiky wind quintets were played, except for the lighting, a drab collaboration of strip neon and cowled down-lamps. It gave no favouritism or focus; the effect was flat, democratic, unjudging.
Petkanov was shown to the dock, where he stood for a few moments, looking round at the two rows of lawyers’ desks, the small public gallery, the raised bench where the President of the Court and his two assessors would sit; he scrutinised the guards, the ushers, the television cameras, the push of pressmen. There were so many journalists that some had to be accommodated in the jury box, where a sudden self-consciousness hit them: thoughtfully, they began examining their empty notebooks.
Eventually, the former President sat down on the small hard chair that had been chosen for him. Behind, and therefore always in shot when Petkanov was on camera, stood an ordinary prison officer. The prosecution had arranged this little touch of stage management, and suggested in particular that a woman guard be chosen. The military were to be kept out of the picture as far as possible. See, this is just another civilian case in which a criminal is brought to justice; and look, he is no longer the monster who terrified us, he is just an old man guarded by women.
The President of the Court and his colleagues entered: three elderly men in dark suits, white shirts and black ties, the most senior of them identifiable by a loose black gown. The trial was declared open, and the Prosecutor General invited to read the charges. Peter Solinsky, already on his feet, looked across at Stoyo Petkanov, waiting for him to stand up. But the former President remained where he was, head slightly on one side, a powerful man comfortably seated in the royal box, waiting for the curtain to rise. The wardress leaned forward and whispered something, which he pretended not to hear.
Solinsky did not react to this studied contrariness. Quietly, ordinarily, he went about his work. First he took as long and deep a breath as was possible without anyone noticing. Control of the lungs, he had been taught, was the key to advocacy. Only athletes, opera singers and lawyers understood the importance of how you breathed.
[‘Stick it up his arse, Solinsky, go on, stick it up his arse.’
‘Shh.’]
‘Stoyo Petkanov, you are charged before the Supreme Court of this nation with the following offences. First, deception involving documents, under Article 127 (3) of the Penal Code. Second, abuse of authority in your official capacity, under Article 212 (4) of the Penal Code. And thirdly …
[‘Mass murder.’
‘Genocide.’
‘Ruining the country.’]
… mismanagement under Article 332 (8) of the Penal Code.’
[‘Mismanagement!’
‘Mismanagement of the prison camps.’
‘He didn’t torture people properly enough.’
‘Shit. Shit.’]
‘How do you plead?’
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Petkanov remained in exactly the same position, only now with a faint smile on his face. The wardress leaned towards him again, but he stopped her with a flick of the fingers.
Solinsky turned for help to the President of the Court, who said, ‘The accused will answer the question. How do you plead?’
Petkanov merely cocked his head a little more, delivering the same wanly supercilious expression to the judicial bench.
The President of the Court looked across to the defence counsel. State Advocate Milanova, a dark, severe woman in early middle age, was already on her feet. ‘The defence has been instructed not to enter a plea,’ she announced.
The three judges conferred briefly, then their President announced, ‘Silence is interpreted by the court as a plea of not guilty under Article 465. Continue.’
Solinsky began again. ‘You are Stoyo Petkanov?’
The former President seemed to be considering the question for a few moments. Then, with a slight cough, as if making clear that the movement which followed came from his own volition, he stood up. But still he made no attempt to speak. The Prosecutor General therefore repeated, ‘You are Stoyo Petkanov?’
The Porcupine Page 3