[Thursday, January 10, 2013]
Towering and swarthy like a raw-boned raven, the young man from Yambol marched next to Sheytanov in the humming Sofia dusk. It was the fall of nineteen twenty-three, the first day after the government had lifted the martial law; the young man was convinced he knew the poet Geo Milev very well, and was recounting the latter’s visit to Yambol the year before last, where some idiot, some witless moron, had had the nerve to arrest him.
“Can you believe it, Sheytanov?” The young man gesticulated wildly and kept tripping over his own feet along the sidewalk. “He had, you know, long hair over his eye, and can you even guess who that idiot mistook him for?! . . .”
Sheytanov said nothing and only smiled, but the young man went on to say the dumb cop had mistaken the poet Geo Milev for none other than Georgi Sheytanov himself! The cop had arrested him, even dragged him down to the station . . . Yambolian bullshit. The young man had immediately run after them, demanding to know whether these people were out of their heads—did they even know whom they’d detained?
“And so I tell them,” he went on, “that this is the apostle of contemporary Bulgarian art, and they respond well how the hell are we supposed to know that he’s an apostle, Krustev! . . . To us, they tell me, he’s just some strange-looking guy, and it’s our duty to find out who he is and what he’s doing! You dimwits, I tell them, you, I tell them, I know you don’t read newspapers, but don’t you at least read the placards? They’re everywhere! Have you heard nothing about tonight’s lecture? He’s a Bulgarian writer who gives lectures—that’s it, I tell them. We’re embarrassing ourselves. I lay into them real good, I’m telling you.”
Sheytanov wasn’t acquainted with the young man—he knew his father, the bookshop owner Vassil Krustev. He’d often stop by his shop on Coburg Square in Yambol, right next to the tram stop with the two municipal horses tied up in front of it. But on this day in October, it so happened that when Sheytanov went to Professor Kazandjiev’s lecture at the university, someone pointed out the young Krustev during the break, so he went up to him and introduced himself. The kid practically jumped out of his skin. The anarchist only smiled and suggested the kid work on not getting so startled in the future.
[Years later, when this same young man from Yambol was deep into his wise years, he’d tell anybody who’d listen that he hadn’t been the least bit startled when he met the anarchist. He told everybody how he’d immediately spotted the gun underneath the frightening man’s polished suit, but hadn’t been the least bit scared. Not in the least! And then he’d remember something even scarier: the gun hadn’t actually been underneath the overcoat, but inside that wide-brimmed hat Sheytanov was known for, and he held it folded in his hand like a bag, so that when the young man had peeked inside, he saw not only the gun, but a bomb, too. And Sheytanov had said: “Just in case!”
Sometimes those listening to the stories laughed under their breath disrespectfully. “Come on now, Bai Krustev, what gun, what bomb inside a hat are you going on about? What would he need a bomb for, he was on his way to meet a poet, not take out a general. You,” they’d say, “you’re starting to lose it a bit, eh?” He looked at them, young and disbelieving, mocking him . . . but he held his head high and shrugged it off: “Those were the times! Everybody in Yambol,” he’d yell, “went around with guns and bombs . . . You wouldn’t understand.”
Then he’d wave his hand and go on.
“I too am still wondering,” he explained assuredly, “where I got the courage that night to go for a stroll in such company. I suppose I had no fear then.”
Anyway, when he—the most wanted man in the entire kingdom, whose name derived from sheitan, Turkish for “devil”—had come up to ask the then-young Krustev whether he’d introduce him to the poet, he had responded without so much as blinking an eye: “You bet I will! Let’s go.” Now the elder Krustev kept jabbering and believing everything he said.]
[Friday, January 11, 2013]
“He was really pissed, I’m telling you,” the young Krustev wouldn’t shut up afterward on the street, zigzagging between the throngs of people. “He says to them, ‘I am a Bulgarian writer, and who the hell are you!’ And before that, we’ve got him on a caïque. We’re taking him to one of our people across the river in Cargon . . . Romantic, right? But then the boat starts swaying, and our guy’s practically screaming . . . ‘What the hell are you doing? Goddamn it, are you trying to drown me in your Tundzha? Is that what you want, you giftless scumbags! Ha ha, I’m only joking!’ He said he was joking, but he seemed really pissed off to me! . . . So we bring him to my house straight from the station. My mother starts setting the table for him—taramasalata, yogurt, crepes, this and that, and he turns to me, ‘Hey Kiril, a minute ago you tried drowning me in that damn river of yours and now you want to starve me to death. Look at me, do I look like someone who can get by on taramasalata and crepes? I need manja! I,’ he says, ‘love nothing more than to eat manja and converse.’ Well, I got embarrassed. I got up right away and ran across the street to the Little Kazak, where I grab, no joke, an entire pan of stuffed peppers, and run back home . . .”
Krustev and Sheytanov drifted through the jovial Sofia crowds and the kid from Yambol kept on shouting excitedly, lest Sheytanov assumed all they’d done with the poet was eat and drink, which they surely had, of course—entire Dionysian suites followed the poet’s lecture at the Yellow Salon. And he’d said it exactly like that—Dionysian suites, nonchalantly adding that what he meant were bacchanal transpositions from ancient Dionysus, of course. The poet had drunk them all under the table, for the man could drink. The young men—in all their Bohemian glory!—had barely finished a tin of wine (they all drank from petrol tins which they called amphorae of modernism), but the poet, he had drained one entirely by himself. The kid was impressed. The poet had been a great aesthete otherwise. And he had immediately agreed to contribute to their magazine in Yambol . . .
Sheytanov had heard of their magazine, yes, and smiled. They’d started it in Yambol—in all their Bohemian glory!—in the spring of twenty-two with all the ferocious earnestness and exalted impertinence in the world, and had not only convinced the poet to write for them, but had somehow contacted the famous Italian poet Marinetti himself. Their magazine halted publication after only the second issue, naturally. At the time, Sheytanov had been at the commune near Ruse, but frequently came back either to Sliven or to Yambol, and when he did, he was sure to stop by to see the young man’s father, Vassil Krustev, at his bookstore, where he had learned of their magazine with the bombastic name: Crescendo. As a joke, he and Vassil Krustev wagered a bet to see just how long these literary Qizilbash would last before they abandoned the whole thing. The bookseller laughed bitterly and told him that he’d sold a whole four copies of the first issue, three from the second, and that if the philosophizing slackers had really pushed, they could have gotten to six issues out of pure pig-headedness—just long enough to spend the last of their literary patron Petkov’s money. Sheytanov bet they’d make it to five issues. But in the end, both guessed wrong.
And so it went . . .
[Friday, January 11, 2013]
It was as though Sofia had come to life again following the bleakness of martial law on this Wednesday, the tenth of October, nineteen twenty-three: the confectionaries were once again sweet with the aroma of caramelized sugar, cakes and boza; the cafés rolled up their blinds with a bang and the waiters ran around drawing the colorful awnings and setting the tables on the sidewalks; the beer halls were already brimming with men and easy women, and flower girls and cigarette girls squeezed between the tables; charcoal pans smoked with the first chestnuts of autumn; the shops took down the shutters from their window displays and set out whole sacks and crates of uncovered goods; and the servant girls hurried along with their baskets, picking out dinner for their masters . . . And so it was! And besides, who enjoys sullen times? By the afternoon, everyone had already forgotten about the two horrible weeks that followed the September mutiny, when the streets were patrolled by a military watch day and night and the horses of the sour-faced mounted Sofia police clopped along the pavement, and the plateless black trucks rattled back and forth, loaded with things no one in the city wanted to imagine.
But now the city hummed with an air of jubilance and the pointy-roofed newspaper stands opened once again,
[Now I remember! Some newspapers managed to get their evening editions printed earlier that afternoon, filled with the panicked declarations that so and so, following the unparalleled September endeavor of such and such, had cut all ties with the so-called communist party and conjured the esteemed public not to mistake them ever again for those villains the communists.
This trend had appeared as early as June of twenty-three, when dozens of frightened people—downtrodden deadbeats with beggars’ habits and vile dispositions—clamored to denounce the agrarian union.*
And all these newspaper columns were positioned right alongside the news about how the now brutally murdered prime minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski’s closet inside his villa in Slavovitsa was, apparently, overflowing with lace slips and women’s silk culottes, not to mention how entire milk-cans of perfume had been found at his homestead in Zaharna Fabrika. It would appear the village tribune practically bathed in perfume!
But so what, nothing new under the sun . . .]
and the walls and the ad pillars, variously colored by the newspaper placards and vibrant posters, announced everything imaginable. The Drummers Cabaret, showcasing Stamboliyski in the Heavens from Borio Zevzeka; the public lectures of the famous Russian professor Aleksei Etastovich Yanisheski from the Sofia medical faculty and his lecture “Fear and Bravery”; the traveling healer Nesterov—a scientist, supposedly, but really a charlatan and incomparable whoremonger—with his noisy scholarly essays on psychological phenomena and their application in treating nerve-related illnesses; the Italian acrobat Montagnani, the king of the tight rope; there were new and already old placards for German films (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors at the Modern Theater down Maria Louisa Boulevard; Paul Wegener’s The Golem at Gloria Palace); Russian concerts, all things of that sort . . . and the two of them, the young man from Yambol and Sheytanov, marched all around that kaleidoscope of color, first down Shipka Boulevard, past Sofia University, then past the King’s manège, by the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, built long-ago yet still unconsecrated, down Moskovska Street, and from then on toward Dondukov Boulevard, where one could barely get past the crowds and where the vitrines of the famous butcher shops of Dokuzanov and Krusharov were festooned with smoked pigs’ heads and legs, salamis gilded in foils, and countless sorts of sudjuk, where the trams turned with a scream down the even louder Targovska Street or pushed straight ahead to the Sveta Nedelya Cathedral.
From Dondukov Boulevard they turned by the Macedonia bookstore and descended down Targovska Street toward the Berlin Hotel, where the jovial babel of the first customers rose up from the garden. From there down to Banski Square—through the garden, where a street organ was breaking the hearts of bystanders and a parrot pulled fortunes out of a nearby box, and a hundred grinning shoe-shiners tapped on their boxes, and phaetons and expensive automobiles were lined up along the curb . . . The construction sounds of gas chainsaws screamed and grated down the tiny side streets in all directions, and extending above all of that was the ineradicable twittering of the billions of Sofia sparrows and the hollow cooing of the pigeons.
“Krustev, Krustev . . .” said Sheytanov to the young man. “How funny life is. Just look at these people. Loosen their leash just a touch—and off they go, celebrating . . .”
“No shit!” he said, repulsed. “Philistines.”
[Saturday, January 12, 2013]
. . . The two men arrived at the poet’s apartment building, which was across the street from the Banya Bashi Mosque and was practically glued to the side of the Market Hall. A pharmacy stood at one end; at the other end a sign enthusiastically advertised the boza beverage company Radomir; right next to the main building door, yet another sign publicized an import-export bank with branches in Varna and Burgas, and a “Post Office” sign hung above the door; and above all that, between the second and the third floors, the dark blue blinds of the Bulgarian offices of the company Longines stretched all the way from one end of the building to the other. The two men crossed the boulevard with its red trams rattling on their way to Lavov Most, and headed over to the dark mass of Sveta Nedelya and pushed open the heavy wooden front door. Sheytanov spotted the doorbell bearing the poet’s name and saw “77 steps” written right next to it, which made him laugh.
“Are you laughing about the steps?!” the young man exclaimed. “It’s absolutely, exactly seventy-seven, I counted!”
Then they both spotted someone had scribbled “Cyclops!” below the doorbell and the young man, angry at the sight of the reference to the one-eyed monster, shouted:
“Bastards! Come on, let’s go, and try not to swear.”
They climbed up the red carpet, fastened by brass rods to the wide staircase, and went straight to the fourth floor . . .
When the poet opened the door, Sheytanov held out his hand:
“Sheytanov.”
“I know,” the other responded, “Milev.”
“I know.”
[Sunday, January 13, 2013]
Sheytanov had spent nights in all manner of locations, been all over, including lux hotels—places of quiet, calm debauchery, sophisticated brothels, really, with an endless supply of hot water, silk sheets, and feather duvets; the hallways were covered in carpets a centimeter deep and the hotel whores were bathed, discreet, and polite. But he’d also laid his head down in hovels with dirt floors, blackened straw-mattresses, and snorting cattle. This place, however, truly impressed him. Originally designed as a regular apartment, the poet’s abode was now a vast single room he’d cleverly partitioned with curtains, like an enfilade. There was a vestibule, a bedroom, a kitchen, and between them a hallway adorned with dozens of prints from famous paintings by Marc Chagall, Heinrich Zille, and Edvard Munch. There was also a little room behind a colorful cotton print for his oldest daughter (who was already a little miss of three, a hair before four, even, and she couldn’t possibly be expected to sleep in the same room as some baby!), an office for him, and even a guest room by the window facing the boulevard, where the first electric streetlights came on as dusk fell.
And the ceilings . . . high as the sky.
“Well,” the poet spread out his arms, “here we are, this is our life, maybe not the one we want, but for now, the one we have . . .”
“You have a great place here,” Sheytanov reassured him. “Very nice. Cozy and comfortable . . .”
“Ha-ha!” the other laughed. “Well, I’m not complaining! I can rear-range it at any time, and the most important thing is that with walls like these, there’s no need for us to yell from one room to another . . . But the kids love it too—they can potter about without having to worry about opening doors. Apart from that, the coziness is entirely Mila’s doing, and the comfort—well, that’s all me.”
He continued laughing and added that if they were to ask Kiril, he’d tell them that in a bourgeoisie apartment, the orderliness of only two rooms mattered: the bath-room and the toilet-room! . . . The young man’s face went scarlet as he began to explain himself, arguing that the poet had in fact quoted the Soviet writer Ehrenburg, but the other cut him off again.
“Ehrenburg, Shmehrenburg—you’re both wrong! The most wonderful place in a bourgeoisie apartment is the dining room, Bai Krustev . . . The dining room!”
And he let out an even louder chortle . . .
The poet led them to the guest room and excitedly pointed to the window. This was the best part about living on the fourth floor, he explained—you could watch the world from up high, both the people and the city, and he wasn’t quite sure which he liked more, watching the city or the human ant trail underneath. But he most loved watching the trams—the way they followed the straight line from the bridge all the way down the entire boulevard with certitude, then obediently made their turn up by the church. He noted how only the minaret across the street was higher than his building, but that didn’t bother him since the mosque was so old and grand—a true masterpiece created long ago by Mimar Sinan himself.
“So, there you have it,” he said, “nothing more to say about our place, really. Oh, yes, and I don’t need curtains on the windows, either—it’s not as if the muezzin’s going to be peering in from his minaret. Let’s sit, and please, make yourselves at home.”
They sat around the round, lace milieu-covered table, while the poet’s astonishingly beautiful wife quickly brought glasses and a bottle of wine as her youngest daughter pattered behind her, still a baby at barely two years, and the eldest marched with a grandiose waddle wanting very much to show everyone that she cared about nothing else but the doll in her arms, likely sewn by her mother. Aromas mingled all around—the tart scent of the washing, the bouquet of an autumn stew, and of milk, from behind the canvas to the kitchen.
And the smell of books . . .
[Sunday, January 13, 2013]
At some point the little girl couldn’t stand it anymore and stepped out from behind her kingdom of disinterestedness, went up to Sheytanov, and tugged on his sleeve. When he looked at her, the little girl politely said:
“How do you do? My name is Leda-Evgenia Georgieva Kassabova! Nice to meet you!”
And he responded:
“Likewise young lady—Sheytanov, Georgi Vassilev! . . . You have a very pretty doll.”
Then he scrunched up his face a little and repentantly asked:
“But shouldn’t I have introduced myself first?”
“Oh, no,” Leda explained. “That’s only how grownups do it. Kids should always go first, so that the adults aren’t always saying ‘what’s your name, little girl, what’s your name, little girl? . . .’”
Sheytanov put a hand to his heart in relief, about to ask her something else, when she beat him to it and reproachfully queried:
“Where is your wife, Mister Sheytanov? Is she in Stara Zagora or Berlin?”
The poet’s wife started to scold her, but the little girl sighed and went on:
“Is she expecting?”
Now everybody laughed and the poet’s wife picked up the child to carry her to her room. Leda looked over her mother’s shoulder and still managed to get out:
“Isn’t that what women do? Expect children?”
Her mother lifted the printed curtain to her room, and Leda Georgieva Mileva waved her hand, courteously declaring:
“Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!”
“The third will be a boy,” the poet declared proudly. “We’ve made our decision . . . My mother and father started with two boys. I was first, followed by my brother, Boris, and then four beautiful girls, one after the other. We’ll do it just the opposite—two girls and four strong boys!
[Monday, January 14, 2013]
They spoke at length next to that window, behind which the gray night had already fallen. The first tattered Sofia fog fumed between the streetlights, and beyond the fog, the cupola of the sign for the Splendid Hotel seeped through like a silver halo. They drank up the wine while they conversed, and Sheytanov gave the young man from Yambol money to run across the street to Turgovska to get some more before the public houses shut down for the night on account of the police curfew. They kept talking throughout that first night—the poet asked questions, Sheytanov answered, then vice versa . . . Sheytanov set forth to the poet his own take: there was no other god but ordinary man, and it was he who sat at the center of the universe, not the state.
“The state,” he said, “is a badly written fable, an abominable pyramid scheme for cowards and marauders, and it is man who stands at the center of the universe . . .” The poet slammed his hand on the table and challenged him: were Tsankov, Russev, and Vulkov,* the current prime minister and his two generals, were they in fact the ordinary man?
Sheytanov told him to leave the Russevs and the Vulkovs alone . . .
“They,” he said, “are a fluke, an anecdote. And a sinister one at that, but an anecdote nevertheless, as was the miserable Stamboliyski,* with his pitiful ministers and his delusions of grandeur, attempting to bring down Tsankov and getting slaughtered. Not to mention the others, the Dimitrovs and the Kolarovs,* who couldn’t even incite a proper civil war, instead fleeing through the border and writing letters from Vienna. All of them,” he said, “are miscreants.”
The poet acquiesced. He knew from his own father that Ivan Vulkov’s father was known as Urdechkata—the Goose—in Kazanluk.
“How low have we sunk to if we’ve got the sons of geese for generals? General Goose. What has Bulgaria come to!”
They went on until ten o’clock, when Mila had long put the little girls to bed behind all those draperies and curtains. She’d brought a glass for herself too and sat quietly next to them, looking at her guests with the wide eyes of an actress, while the last trams, vacant due to the unrelenting curfew, made their way to their depots.
After a minute or two of silence, Sheytanov calmly asked the poet:
“Milev . . . What do you say we start another magazine?”
The poet froze. “What magazine?” he snarled, but Sheytanov saw in the poet’s good eye such a quick, fierce hope, that he hurried to smile.
“A magazine,” he said. “A literary magazine.”
[Monday, January 14, 2013]
The poet jumped from the chair, leaned sharply over the table, and hissed:
“Sheytanov! Are you mocking me, my dear man?”
Sheytanov looked at him, incredulous. “Me? Why would I do that?”
“You tell me!” the poet remained furious. “You obviously are. You have the gall to bring up a magazine in the house of the damned. Have some respect!”
Sheytanov only sighed and asked the poet to forgive him if he’d felt insulted, that he’d be on his way at once. The poet’s wife stood and carefully wiped the tear rolling out from beneath the black lens of her husband’s glasses.
“You’ll wake the children,” she calmly said. “Hear the man out, then decide if it’s worth getting angry for.”
The poet glared at her as though he were going to slap her across the face, then calmed down as quickly as he’d boiled over. He sat back down in his chair and mumbled that he hadn’t been right to lose his temper, but that he’d been through a lot lately. He still found it hard, he said, not to get angry over losing the magazine he had so hoped would push this pitiful Bulgarian literary landscape forward. Instead, no one saw past his own nose and every ego was more inflated than the next . . . He gave an irate flick of his wrist and reached for his cigarettes.
He smoked violently, as if he were murdering someone, and lit up frequently. Often, as he pulled out a new Sultan cigarette from his officer’s cigarette tin, the previous one would still be smoldering in the small Japanese ashtray next to him, only half smoked. His better half would only sigh, reach over, and quietly put it out, and then he’d already be on his third. When he gesticulated with his hands, the smoke curled up like a whirlwind around him and the ashes scattered everywhere.
Sheytanov politely heard him out, and when he was done talking, he just as courteously asked him if he could offer an observation.
“Go on,” the other snapped.
Sheytanov shrugged. “At the risk of offending you a second time, Milev, I do have to admit that Vezny simply didn’t resemble a real magazine . . .” And just as politely he added, “I apologize for having to put it that way.”
“I see,” the other snarled combatively. “And what exactly do you mean?”
“Well, what I mean is . . .” Sheytanov smiled. “You simply can’t call a pamphlet folded in eight and printed on terrible paper—with no cover to speak of—a magazine. Especially if, inside that very same publication, you are writing about aesthetics.”
The poet bristled again and tried explaining that it didn’t matter what a magazine looked like—what mattered was what was written in the magazine!
Sheytanov stopped him.
“Really?” he asked thoughtfully. “Should we ask the young man how many issues of Vezny his dad sold in Yambol?”
“I know exactly how many he sold!” The poet lost it again. “I know perfectly well how many! One. That’s how many. That beanpole over there was my only subscriber.”
He vehemently pointed to Kiril as the latter began to fidget in his chair, grew red in the face, and started loudly protesting that he could explain. It was because his friends came over to read it with him, and each had felt relieved from the material obligation of purchasing it, you see, which was why they hadn’t all subscribed, the dogs. And he would’ve gone on, but the poet cut him off.
“Kiril, shut up, my friend. Just listen to yourself, goddamn it, you’ll get your tongue up in a knot. Material obligation, my ass. You’re all nothing more than petty conmen, every last one of you. And don’t give me that face. You still owe me that hundred leva for the translation, and aside from that, eighty-four leva for the subscription for the German magazine you never sent me! Now sit your ass back down and shut up.”
“Why don’t you,” Mila spoke up then, “leave Kiril alone for a minute and hear the man out?”
She then turned to Sheytanov with a gentle expectancy. He simply shrugged and repeated that he wasn’t here to pick fights, but that, in his humble opinion, a magazine ought to look good, too.
“In any case, how something is presented is quite important. A person is more likely to buy something beautiful, and, if it also happens that it ends up being of value to him . . .”
“You think I don’t know that?” the poet burst out again. “You think I don’t know what quality paper is, you think I don’t want a thick cover and a spine, so that you can put the magazine in your bookcase, like a normal person? Huh? You think I don’t know what an illustrated magazine is supposed to look like? So you can publish prints, so you can have paper at the very least on par with Illustrated Week, so you can put photographs on every page, illustrated supplements . . .” he sighed and waved his hand hopelessly.
“That’s exactly what I had in mind,” Sheytanov calmly responded. “Just like Illustrated Week, why not?”
“And did you think about the money? Where’s the money going to come from?” the poet looked at him sideways. “Do you have any idea how much paper costs now? And I mean regular paper—I’m not even talking about chrome paper. Do you have any idea how greedy those miscreant printers have become? They tell you they’re buried under urgent print jobs, thirty thousand labels and God knows what else, and that you, with your measly print of three thousand, would just be getting in their way. And they’re looking for handouts. I give them a piece of my mind, and I go someplace else, but it’s always the same story.
“A guy just like that has the guts to say to me, ‘Well Mr. Milev, you know the printing press is a lot like the millstone at the flour mill. When it turns,’ he says, ‘the flour falls into the miller’s bag, but the person who brings the grist to the mill gets a little toll too, right?’ ‘Okay I get it,’ I say to him, ‘nothing wrong with a little toll, but this bag you have, djanum, is bottomless!’
“Extortionist prices everywhere . . . My father can’t take it anymore, either. I’m asking him for money to buy paper, he writes that he can’t believe the numbers. I’m wracking my brain how to keep the business going, how to make it reputable, and he’s writing back that we need to cut back. And he sends me a case of miniature bust portraits so that I can sell them to buy the printing paper. Who am I supposed to push this stuff to? My grandmother? I left seventy with Chipev—he sold one in three months. One! Ibsen’s. Lenin’s is not selling that well for some reason. So Chipev—who’s avoiding me at this point—am I supposed to try to sell him more of these? They’re asking an arm and a leg at the royal presses too. It’s madness. ‘Is this some kind of joke,’ I ask them, and they answer, ‘No joke, that’s how much it costs today, and we can’t guarantee how much it’ll cost tomorrow.’ And this, at the royal presses, where they’re meant to have the most reasonable prices . . .”
And he didn’t stop at that. He grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil, wiped yet another trickle off his cheekbone, and began to scratch towering columns of numbers.
“See here,” he said, “this is how much they wanted last year just to publish Verlaine’s collection of selected poetry. I went and bought paper from Lazar Kotev, because it’s smaller, seventy centimeters to a hundred and eight, and it’s lighter, around thirty-five grams to the sheet. So, for forty kilograms, I don’t get a thousand sheets like if I were to buy them from Chipev, but instead fourteen, almost fifteen hundred. Win, win. Add the numbers: forty kilograms times sixteen leva, what is that? Six hundred forty. Ten leva go to Bureau Express for shipping to Stara Zagora, so what are we at, six hundred fifty, right? I borrowed four hundred from my father . . . that makes it two hundred fifty. I got two hundred nineteen from going around the newspaper stands like an idiot, I gave thirty-one from my own pocket . . . Oh, I forgot Chipev’s wooden box for shipping—another fifty leva. This is just for the regular circulation. Let’s compare with the luxury edition. One sheet yields two quires, so for one hundred issues in five quires, we need two hundred fifty sheets. Chipev, that’s where I had to go, because he’s got better paper than Kotev, and Chipev wants six hundred fifty leva from me. And how I tormented him to cut it down to six hundred. He wouldn’t budge! So now one sheet comes out to two-sixty. That’s when I gave up and decided not to print a hundred issues from the luxury edition, but fifty, because then we’ll need only a hundred twenty-five sheets, which is the same as three hundred twenty-five Bulgarian leva . . .”
Sheytanov heard him out without interrupting, but when the poet turned the sheet over, about to start some other calculation, he politely raised his hand.
“Look, Milev,” he said. “How about we don’t talk about money right now?”
The poet stuttered and tried to object, but Sheytanov asked:
“If you were a general about to lead your troops into battle, what would your battle cry be?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Maybe ‘On to battle!’ I don’t know . . .”
“Most people think that,” smiled Sheytanov. “But if you ask me, a general, a military commander, shouldn’t have ‘On to battle!’ as his war cry. I think a real general would tell his people ‘After me!’”
The poet shook his finger at him . . . He laughed suddenly, and told Sheytanov his thinking was identical to that of the Bulgarian writer Joseph Herbst. He’d written a similar anecdote . . . In the middle of the night, a young soldier runs away from the bottom trenches—he’s looking for a better seat in the battlefield theater. An officer stops him, “Where do you think you’re running to, soldier?” “Well, I must have gotten lost, Second Lieutenant, sir,” the young soldier replies. “What the hell are you talking about boy, I’m a chief corporal major!” And the soldier responds: “Gee, how far did I run?”
Sheytanov erupted in laughter, but Kiril sat silent . . .
“You didn’t get it, did you Kiril?” the poet was laughing too. “And how would you, you haven’t even been to the barracks, let alone fought in the war . . . The battlefront is like the theater, my dear boy—the best seats are in the back.”
He gesticulated and smacked the table triumphantly.
“Sheytanov!” he said, “And do you know, my friend, that I already have a name? Plamuk! What do you say? Plamuk. Flame.”
Sheytanov looked at him and quickly raised his glass.
“And so,” he said in turn, “then what are we waiting for? Let’s do this! You’ll be in charge of the magazine, I’ll get in your hair, and we’ll take it as it comes.”
[Monday, January 14, 2013]
[Would you look at that, it snowed this afternoon. And it’s sticking . . . I hadn’t even noticed.]
[Tuesday, January 15, 2013]
“Now we’re talking!” the young man from Yambol spoke up—and years later, when he would grow old, proudly, and with the stateliness of a solitary wise man, he would write in his journals about the things that happened on that Wednesday night, the tenth of October, nineteen twenty-three, a day after the authorities had lifted the martial law declaration brought on by the king’s eleventh decree, and lasting eighteen miserable days . . .
The poet’s wife rose up from her chair, thanked them for their visit, and asked them to come back often, then wished them goodnight with a kind and tired bright smile before disappearing through the dreamlike draperies. The three of them wished her a good night and sat around the table until the first garbage trucks began to roll down the boulevard and the powerful streams from the street cleaners’ water-carts pelted the pavement. They thought about everything on that long-forgotten night and made many decisions.
And so it was.
At the end, when he and the young man from Yambol stood up to go, Sheytanov took out a package from his overcoat, wrapped haphazardly in newspaper. He gave it to the poet and said:
“Don’t worry, this is just to start things off . . . you decide what you’ll do with it, but,” he said, “don’t go to a cheap printer.”
The poet unfolded the newspaper and the young man’s
[Wednesday, January 16, 2013]
eyes bulged from their sockets. The package contained money, a lot of it—a pile of hundreds equal to ten, maybe even fifteen thousand leva, according to his lighting-quick estimation.
“Look at that!” he couldn’t contain himself. “That’s a lot of money!”
“It’s a lot for our enslavers, du lieber Augustin!”* the poet cut him off scornfully. “And if you’re going to be appalled, don’t do it here.”
“Milev,” Sheytanov began, grinning at him rakishly, “I hope you understand that I don’t want this mountain giving birth to a molehill. I have my name attached to it. I don’t want to become a laughing stock.”
“Neither do I, Sheytanov,” the poet assured him. “Neither do I.”
As he said that, he wrapped the money back in the newspaper and dropped it into the pocket of his housecoat,
[Thursday, January 17, 2013]
while the young Kiril, as soon as he got back to his student flat—unexpectedly and surprising even him—turned toward what he thought was the east (he had long lost any sense of direction in the labyrinth of corridors and crooked attic staircases) and whispered excitedly:
“Thank you, dear God, for this day and for giving me these intelligent comrades! Something great’s going to happen! Amen!”
Not that he believed in God, but saying a prayer had been a habit he’d developed as a child, when he was chastised anytime he didn’t say one, so he said one now, just in case.
Then he got under the covers and fell asleep in an instant.
[Sunday, January 20, 2013]
[How strange . . . it’s the twentieth of January and yet it couldn’t be more like spring outside. There’s not a trace of the dusting of snow that fell last week, and the sand poured on the streets by the sanitation department has gotten into everything, crunching under our feet as we track it into our houses on our shoes . . . Only the sky isn’t a spring sky—it’s gray and lead-like. Strange indeed.]