[Saturday, February 9, 2013]
That January in nineteen twenty-four happened to be very cold—so cold the snow had frozen and the pipes inside the houses burst. Despite the fact it snowed from New Year’s until after Christmas,* which was still on January seventh according to the Orthodox calendar, the air did not soften up. Unprecedented storms and blizzards swooped in and trees toppled with the hollow crack of death, and the trains stopped in the middle of nowhere because the snow had seemingly buried the tracks forever. Even the express train from Vienna got derailed somewhere between Tsaribrod and Dragoman, so the minister Dimo Kazasov had to send for a medical train with a snowplow attached to its locomotive to gather up the frozen passengers, who had, for some unknown reason, decided to set off from Europe to Turkey at the worst possible time . . . The snow halted all the trains from Slivnitsa onward; even the buses were stopped throughout the entire country. The Maritsa River froze, the Tundzha froze too—from Yambol all the way down to the border. Even the Danube froze, and Utro wrote how Tutrakan filled up with Romanians, who got there by travelling over the ice in horse-drawn sleds and carriages so they could drink chilled, aromatic pelin and wine, making the barkeeps quite happy and not at all deploring of the cold. Dnevnik wrote about Vidinians going grocery shopping across to Kalafat, but Zora said that whole herds of starving Transylvanian wolves had in turn also crossed the benumbed river to cause mischief in the pens . . .
[“. . . these wolves bred around Turnu Magurele, eating maize all summer long, which turned their fur white—and when a wolf that white lies in the snow, you’d never even notice it . . .”]
Still, during that same time—in that very cold winter of nineteen twenty-four—a royal wedding was thrown in Bad Mergentheim, Germany, and Duchess Nadezhda became princess of Württemberg. The old King Ferdinand I had been there too, and for this reason, his firstborn and the heir to the throne, Boris, hadn’t shown up, sending instead his younger brother Kiril, so the people would have nothing to whisper about. Illustrated Week sent a special correspondent who had later written that his majesty the young prince had shown the happy couple his goodwill and gifted them an automobile. “The automobile,” it had been detailed in the gazette, “was a Steyr, 6 cylinder motor 12/40 P.S. – Model 5, manufactured by the renowned Österreichische Waffenfabriksgesellschaft in Steyr. These same automobiles,” the article continued, “are widely used in Bulgaria. They are well known for being sturdy, economical, and elegant.” And since it had been an illustrated newspaper after all, they placed a photograph of the vehicle Boris had given to Nadezhda. Indeed, it had all been very elegant.
Only a day later, in the small town of Chamonix, beneath Mont Blanc, the international week of winter sports began and Sofia hosted the Bakers Association Congress, plus another congress—in Ruse—of traveling salesmen. The first issue of the magazine Woman came out, a publication from the association of bachelors, widowers, the abandoned, and the yearning. In Kyustendil, anarchists and police officers had collided—both sides opened fire right in the middle of the day, resulting in one dead policeman and two dead anarchists, a pair of wounded wardens, and an injured passerby. The authorities at the Varna port discovered a whole two people with the plague aboard an Italian cruise liner, and around the same time the HMS L-24—whatever an L-24 is—sank at La Manche. In Germany, communist uprisings marked the anniversary of the death of Karl Liebknecht; in Vienna, three thousand disabled rose in revolt; and in Soviet Russia, on Monday the twenty-first, at exactly six fifty in the evening, the leader of the local Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, died. On the twenty-second in England, Ramsay McDonald became the first Labour Party Prime Minister; on the twenty-fifth in Chamonix, the aforementioned winter games began; on the twenty-sixth in Russia, Petrograd became Leningrad; and on the twenty-seventh the burial procession for Lenin was held at the Red Square in Moscow . . .
[NB! On the twenty-third of January, at nine o’clock in the morning, the body of Lenin, dressed in a paramilitary jacket (a garment he’d never worn while he’d been alive), badly shaven, and with a closely cropped haircut, was placed in his coffin. The nearest train station was four kilometers away, so Lenin was carried from Gorki to Gerasimovo in negative thirty-five degrees Celsius. His body was then loaded up on the ceremonial train—decorated according to the somber occasion and followed by crowds the entire way to Moscow. Lenin’s body was then unloaded from the train and again carried until it reached the columns in Pillar Hall inside the House of the Unions. This final journey of Lenin’s took six hours.
The wake lasted from seven o’clock at night on January twenty-third until the twenty-seventh. The newspapers were filled with telegrams coming in from all corners of the vast country, but one surpassed all others. It read, “Vladimir Ulyanov died—Lenin lives!” A slogan read: “Lenin’s tomb—cradle of the world revolution!”
In any case . . .
It was still so bitterly cold, all the streets and squares were lined with small bonfires: the people squeezed out from between the columns to warm up, then got back into the slow crawling lines.
Lenin’s brain had already been removed, as was the heart, along with a bullet lodged in his neck just next to the carotid artery.
The brain and heart were necessary for Lenin’s resurrection: they were in fact certain it could be done.
The bullet, of course, they did not need.
But the people standing in those endless lines did not suspect that.
They erected a mausoleum in Lenin’s honor, deciding to do this on, let’s say, the twenty-sixth. The mausoleum, resembling both an Egyptian pyramid and a Babylonian ziggurat, was built on the twenty-seventh. And since the ground outside the Kremlin was frozen, they thawed it by lighting fires as they dug the foundations. And when the fires weren’t enough, they blasted open the earth. One such fougasse tore through a sewer canal. An animal stench spread all around, and it is said that Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow spitefully exclaimed: “These aromas are becoming of Lenin’s relics!”
Beneath all that, at six feet under, among the red and black drawings of the theater decorator Ignati Nivinski, lay Lenin himself. People descended along the right-hand staircase, circled the sarcophagus on all three sides, then ascended out through the left-hand staircase. They all wept, and years later, someone would say: “Half of mankind mourned his death, when they should have been mourning his birth!”]
[I really ought to write these things down, they’re so easy to forget . . .]
[Oh, and another thing! When, afterward, they built the third mausoleum with reinforced concrete and granite, marble, and elvan stone, Moscow became the only capital in the world to measure distance to all corners of the world not from its central post office, but from Lenin’s mausoleum.
And that was that.]
[Wednesday, February 13, 2013]
They sent the announcement for the new magazine a little before the New Year in nineteen twenty-four. It was something to behold—magnificent, large-format, luxurious paper, a handsome jobbing font, and unprecedented circulation. Soon after, the poet left an impressive down payment at the royal printers, and two weeks into January, three or four days after Christmas, the nimble printers finally mounted Plamuk’s first quire onto the big machine. The poet and Sheytanov stood by on the side, surrounded by the aroma of inks, lead, and glue, and when the machine turned with a groan, the poet grabbed the first sheet that sank softly into the basket.
He folded it and froze, spellbound. He could barely contain the joy he felt at these white pages, big as bed sheets, where the poems swam as if finally free. It was a world away from the orphan pages of Vezny . . .
Which is why once the magazine was printed he became irate upon spotting an ugly typo, courtesy of the typesetter, inside his manifesto. “The ivory tower, the refuge of poetry and hiding place of pieces, collapses into pitiful ruins.”
“What pieces, goddamn it?!” he was imbued with the helpless rage of a duped child. “What pieces? The poets,” he screamed, “The poets! These people are making a mockery of us. They’re still piss drunk from Christmas. You have to be a complete imbecile to mistake poets with pieces . . .”
The boys with the yellow glasses were writing the addresses of the subscribers on the still-warm books, happily licking stamps and sticking them to the covers of the magazine with a slap, but when they heard him screaming—they became dumbfounded and perturbed, put on their raggedy student overcoats, grabbed piles of addressed issues, and bolted from the editorial office.
The poet screamed, swore like an animal, called the typesetter a provocateur, and spit out the most violent profanities he could summon, courtesy of the army reserves in Kniajevo, then he swore a hundred times he wasn’t going to pay these incompetents for the magazine and that he was going to shove it up their let’s not say where . . . He turned to Sheytanov and told him that when he was a student in Germany before the wars, one of the big papers—the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which had been published since eighteen fifty-six—always had a special note, set in large letters. It said the newspaper would give ten deutsche marks to the first person who reported a typo . . . There had been maybe one person a month who got the money, if that.
Sheytanov sat and looked at him, and finally spoke:
“Listen Milev,” he said, “you want me to go off on that fucking fascist? One word and I’ll go shoot them all up—the whole print shop. I’ll start with the typesetter and take them all out until the last useless one of them is gone . . .”
Then he laughed, patted Milev on the shoulder and said:
“Enjoy this! Why are you letting it poison you like this? The magazine is out in the world—enjoy it!”
The poet shut up, insulted.
He stood quiet for about a second, then said:
“To Koprivshtitsa, forward march! You’re the patron, drinks are on you.”
“You got it,” said Sheytanov. “But we won’t be going to Koprivshtitsa today. Today,” he said, “I’ll take you someplace else. It’s closer.”
The poet said he didn’t mind, as long as he wasn’t the one paying, and not five minutes later they were already inside Benoni on Alabinska Street—it was warm and smoky, and the smell of bean salad and pickled cabbage and wine and rakiya blanketed the air, which was so thick that, if someone had decided to shoot a gun, the bullet would have ricocheted in the air. The tavern was filled with dark men wearing wide-brimmed hats that hid their faces, and the barkeep did absolutely nothing to hide the two revolvers tucked into his belt.
“Come in, come in,” said Sheytanov, “it’s time you met my people. It’s not I who is your patron, my brother. These are your patrons, remember their faces.”