[Friday, February 15, 2013]
After that night in Benoni, Sheytanov disappeared for two whole weeks,
[Saturday, February 16, 2013]
and while the poet’s father sat in Stara Zagora, incredulous that the new magazine, Plamuk, was selling so well, the poet finally decided to legalize the family’s Sofia address at the sixth residential commission. He’d delayed it for months and he could tell that Suselov, his landlord, was becoming flustered. The man had thirteen apartments in Sofia alone, a summerhouse in Borovets, villas in several villages in the Plovdiv region, and who knows how many other properties, so it wasn’t about their measly rent. But the man was a lawyer, and he was very well aware of the terrible law for residential demand, and what’s more, its addendum with those inhumane domicile decrees and registrations, and even his millions weren’t going to save him from the merciless and uncompromising residential commission.
The air was weighed down by fear that year; everyone was afraid of something. Mila had been urging him gently, but she grew increasingly persistent—they’d already moved twice and that hadn’t been that big of a deal, but now the kids were growing, and they had more possessions, so if their landlord decided to kick them out . . . And, well, she’d been completely right.
The poet let out an annoyed curse over having to stop his work, and got up and went down to the station to fill out a residential housing ticket. Inside the dusty chancery, a young man—the secretary of the commission—leapt toward him and practically fell over himself with exclamations of amazement, invited him to sit, begged him to sit, even, and then, while he anxiously dug through all those files, did not cease to repeat what an honor it was to meet him, that he was a regular subscriber to Vezny and how he had read the first issue of Plamuk cover to cover and couldn’t wait for the second. He had nothing against Teodor Trayanov’s Hyperion, but it had an air of wilted chrysanthemums, of something threadbare and decaying—people had forgotten about symbolism—while Plamuk represented the new and the authentic. He humbly threw in that, as a matter of fact, he too dabbled in poetry, but of course he wouldn’t dare mention his own work in the same breath as the poet . . . He truly did have an affinity for serious magazines!
“What can we even call highbrow,” he added bitterly. “Bai Atanas Damyanov* at least says it right! Surely you’ve heard him speak, Mr. Milev? He wasn’t trying to start a magazine for the intelligentsia, he said. I’m after the numbers, he said! I need the masses, the worker, the cabby, the villager, the chimney cleaner, the barkeep. In other words, he wants to publish newspapers for people who move their lips while they read. And he’s right. How else can you print that many newspapers—Utro, Zarya, Illustrated Week, Nedelno Utro, Dnevnik and Kukurigo—and build that kind of a monopoly!”
The poet grunted impatiently. He had a galley to proof, an article to write on women’s poetry, and he possessed little patience for the young man’s chitchat, so he gave him instead a sour “sure, sure okay!” and asked him if he’d be so kind as to hurry the whole thing up.
The other mumbled nervously that of course, of course he would, inserting the blank sheet of paper into his Ideal—a typewriter big as a threshing machine. He glanced at the application for only a split second before his fingers leapt across the keys. He wrote impressively fast and didn’t stop speaking even while he typed. He explained that residential dealings in Sofia were too intense, endlessly unfavorable, rather, and had in fact become calamitous. Sofia was growing vigorously—not so much growing as bloating. Officially, there were around one hundred fifty thousand people, but nobody knew the actual number for certain, it was quite possible the number was closer to two hundred. Too many—a veritable megapolis! In his mind, this was no longer a housing crisis, but a housing misery. Austere measures were needed to eliminate this misery, but the state didn’t care for rent regulations on housing, because Bulgaria today was a country owned by money-grubbers. The young man knew what had to be done, but he was a nobody, who would listen to him? Nobody asked him, of course, for he was but a speck in the gray mass of archivists, a plankton in an ocean of clerks. What a pity! Had they asked him, he’d tell them the solution at once . . . He went on, and the poet wondered how it was possible that someone could string together newspaper clichés and slogans stolen from poor people’s rallies with the groundbreaking conviction of an innovator.
“The answer to the problem, Mr. Milev,” he exclaimed, “the answer is in the creation of reasonably-priced housing and affordable rent. And not,” he stressed, “in housing market speculation, as the current situation dictates . . .”
He then pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter and read it out ceremoniously. Residential housing ticket, station one, located at 23 Maria Luisa Boulevard, owner Susselov, Dimitar . . .
“Geo Milev,” he read on in a deep voice, “Eastern Orthodox, Bulgarian citizen, born on such and such date, in such and such month, in such and such year in Stara Zagora, writer, college educated, served conscription duties in such and such infantry regiment, married, spouse—Mila Keranova Mileva, two children—Leda and Bistra, previous residency at 26 Lomska Street. Application for address approved on the twenty-seventh of February, nineteen twenty-four. Applicant: Geo Milev.”
The clerk reached over all the folders and papers that covered the writing table, handed him the sheet of paper and announced:
“Congratulations, Mr. Milev! You have nothing to worry about now.”
“Is that all?” the poet asked and rose from the chair.
“Oh yes, yes,” the young man jumped to his feet too.
Then, just as awkwardly, he took out his business card and handed it to the poet with a sort of pleading smile.
“If there is anything at all,” he said, “it would be an honor to help you out as best as I can. Us intellectuals, if we don’t stick together . . .”
The poet absentmindedly pushed the card into his overcoat—he would certainly forget it there, as he always did—and attempted to hurry out.
“By the way, Mr. Milev,” the clerk suddenly remembered, “do you know that you and I almost served together?”
“What do you mean?” the poet became even more annoyed.
“Well, I too graduated from the Military School for Reserve Officers!” the other declared excitedly. “Quite before you, however. I was there in the summer of nineteen fifteen. So, about two years ahead of you. They got our entire cohort to sign up right after high school, so we could learn to defend the king, the motherland, and the flag. The Great War started right after that, but you, well, you were at the front line, a hero, you were wounded in battle, and I, well, I got placed at the freight battery of the sixth artillery and we hung around Dupnitsa the whole time . . .”
“Well, there’s no escaping fate,” the poet interrupted, shrugged, and quickly departed with a wave.
He would never learn the name of the young man—this insignificant little clerk in the housing commission: Geshev.
Nikola Geshev.
[Would you look at that . . .
From nineteen twenty-four to nineteen twenty-five, Nikola Geshev is secretary at the fourth and sixth housing commissions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and National Health, but he leaves when the position is eliminated.
On May twentieth, nineteen twenty-five, he is appointed to a criminal pursuit-party. His salary would be eighty leva a month. Were he to catch a criminal—he’d get at least five thousand. Were he to kill one—up to twenty thousand. And if he was the one killed in the line of duty—fifty thousand leva for his family. Were he to become disabled—another twenty thousand.
And disability pension.
But even before that, in April, actually, immediately following the St. Nedelya Church assault, Pane Bichev—a top cop and the main investigator on the case—personally summons him to help . . .
It is on May fifteenth that Geo Milev disappears.]
[Sunday, February 17, 2013]
Sheytanov finally appeared again on a Thursday at the beginning of February. He arrived frozen and dead tired, but the poet didn’t waste time with pleasantries, mumbling instead that he’d come just in time, and proudly pointed to the piles of colored postcards laid out on top of Marcho’s table.
“Metzger?” asked Sheytanov.
“Metzger!” the poet answered and spread out his arms. “Who else? Look, just look at this!” he exclaimed. “It’s not a vignette, can you believe it? It’s a wood engraving! This thing is a modernist icon. What do you think? I commissioned him to do it last night, and he had it ready first thing in the morning. Metzger is unbelievable.”
Metzger had, as always, done an excellent job: the illustration resembled an explosion—erupting with large chunks of shattered browns and pale greens, out of which Lenin’s brick-red face popped out.
The poet impatiently admitted that he’d already written the caption that would go beneath the photo, grabbed a sheet of paper from the table and read it excitedly, then took one of the January issues and showed him exactly where the note would go and where the color photo would be glued—something he’d only dreamed of with Vezny. He then stared at Sheytanov in palpable expectation of praise. Sheytanov was quietly nonchalant, however, and instead the poet recounted going to Balkan, Ivan Naydenov’s chromolithographic printer, with Marcho the day before, how they’d brought the engraving, how the man had cut them off immediately, the shameless skinner.
“No way!” he’d said to them. “It can’t be done! I wouldn’t be able to get to it even the day after tomorrow.” He was in the middle of printing labels for something. Some sort of large order from the Luv cognac factory in Veliko Tarnovo, the poet wasn’t paying attention—and besides, they could’ve been printing “Rooster” soap labels for all he cared, it was all garbage. And yet, one hundred thousand pieces of it! Don’t bother me with small-scale jobs, was Naydenov’s underlying implication, and the conversation was over. Naydenov turned around and disappeared, and the whole thing would’ve been over, had it not for one Bai Stoichko, an old printer and secret communist: he went into the chancery, and when he came back out just a few minutes later the machines had stopped! Bai Stoichko took the bullshit labels’ typographical cliché off the press, while Marcho did what he did best and got in the way of the whole thing, then they washed the blue ink out and poured in the red, and her printing majesty, the American, started turning again. The poet yelled in Bai Stoichko’s ear, wanting to know what had caused this miracle, and the other responded he’d simply explained to Naydenov who Lenin was.
“Would you look at that,” he laughed crudely as he remembered the story, “is that what did it for the goddamned printer? And Bai Stoichko is sitting there laughing and he tells me, no, of course it wasn’t. ‘I told him,’ he says, ‘that if he doesn’t let us do Lenin’s portrait right away—we’re not working for three days.’ ‘So you threatened him with a strike?’ I say to him, and he’s looking at me incredulous. ‘What did you think? That they care about Lenin that much? Threaten a strike, though, and it’ll work every time.’”
He went on and on, as if he couldn’t stop . . .
“Take these, take them!” the poet said and handed Sheytanov about ten postcards. “Take some for your guys . . . Bai Stoichko printed at least two hundred extra!”
[Monday, February 18, 2013]
“Lenin is a vile human being.” Sheytanov said calmly.
“What?” the poet bristled. “Sheytanov! Don’t do that, I don’t want to argue with you. You want to rain on my parade?”
“He’s vile,” the other shrugged. “You can treat him like an icon, but to me, he’s a wretch.”
He wanted to tell the poet the first thing this man did was to go after the same anarchists who’d handed him his victory on a silver platter that one horrible month when, while half the world was already in November, Russia was still stranded in October.
But he didn’t. He didn’t want to argue either.
He’d seen this Lenin.
Not face to face, of course. He’d seen what Lenin was capable of.
But first, he’d met Karl Radek.
[Tuesday, February 19, 2013]
Sheytanov arrived in Moscow one March day in nineteen eighteen, a week or two after the Bolsheviks had established it as the capital of Russia, and who knows why, but the first thing he laid eyes on was a Chaliapin concert placard. He didn’t hesitate for a second: using the last kerenka rubles he’d been given by the army council in Odessa, he hopped on a phaeton and went to the theater; he used the rest for a ticket and after, when he walked out of the theater with his head spinning, he had only a couple of copper coins left in his pocket.
He spent a brutally cold night nodding off and then waking up on a bench outside the theatre. In the morning, he saw seven somber geese marching through the muddied theater square. He joked to himself the geese were probably on their way to rescue the Third Rome,* then spent a good amount of time laughing at his own joke.
He bought a paper with the few copeiki he had left and spotted an ad inside with a call for agitators. Sheytanov went to the address listed in the paper and found the editorial offices for a gazette called Revolucija—a Serbian gazette, Yugoslavian, rather, very much communist. It’s there he met Radek.* This Radek had the face of a crook, which he was: much later, Sheytanov would find out the man’s real name was actually Karol Sobelsohn—an Austrian and an international swindler who was simply bereft of morals. But there was no way for Sheytanov to know it then.
We digress . . .
Sheytanov told Radek he was a Bulgarian revolutionary, perfectly qualified for the volunteering position they’d advertised. The other had the nerve to ask him for a referral.
“From who?” he asked, incredulous, and Radek responded that he needed to see a letter of recommendation from the Bulgarian Marxist Socialists.
He’d had the urge to leave right then and there, but clenched his jaw and pulled out a memo from the regional police department, stating he was a revolutionary anarchist who’d escaped from the Sofia Central Prison and that he was armed and dangerous.
“Here’s my letter of recommendation,” he hissed, and Radek let out a laugh.
“Bravo!” he said. “A wanted man! Very clever, but you have to wait my dear, wanted comrade. We’ll be in touch!” And he disappeared.
It was Godina the Czech who took him in. At least that’s what he claimed—that he was Czech and that his name was Godina. He worked for that same paper, as an editor or God knows what; that year Moscow had been overrun by people with shady pasts: professional revolutionaries, financial wizards wanted by the police, or just common gangsters.
Godina took him in at the former Dresden Hotel on Skobelev Square, precisely where—from the window of room 152—Sheytanov witnessed the enthused Bolsheviks destroy Skobelev’s statue. That same Skobelev—the White General. Lenin himself had given the order!
Godina told him that come fall, the Russian Army was preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution, and the government had decreed that monuments erected in honor of the tsars and their servants, generals, and commanders—essentially any monument of no interest from a historical or art history perspective—were to be dismantled and removed from the squares and the streets; some were to be put in storage, others were to be used as scrap metal. They took down all those statues and monuments and who knows why, but Skobelev’s Lenin was expressly singled out for demolition. From his hotel window, Sheytanov witnessed how they shattered the fine, white Finnish marble at the base and, using levers, broke off the bas-relief with its images from the war for the liberation of Bulgaria . . . The sight stung. It wasn’t so much that he mourned the monument as it was that his mother had taught him at an early age that Bulgaria’s liberators deserved respect—Stoletov, our general, Radetzky, who arrived with a bang, and, of course, the White General, that same Skobelev.
They demolished the monument in a day, and on the first of May, a barren spot stood in its place.
[Wednesday, February 20, 2013]
[Hmm, would you look at that, the prime minister resigned . . . “We did all we could!” he said. Actually, it was the government itself that announced its own resignation . . . we did all we could. It’s much like that story with the soldiers . . . An old man’s two oxen fall into a hole. The old man, this dyado, looks around and sees a bunch of young soldiers doing their army exercises. So he asks them to help him get his animals out of the hole. “Of course we’ll help!” they say, and tie one end of their wire rope to their tank and the rest around the animals’ necks and start pulling. They pull and they pull, until the wire ropes cut off the oxen’s heads. Then the soldiers put their ropes away, rub their hands together and declare to the old man: “Well, dyado, we tried our best! No need to thank us, that’s just what we’re here for . . .”
Resignation . . . what a joke.]
Before that, on the ugly night of the eleventh of April, Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka attacked all twenty-five palaces the anarchists had occupied during the previous year’s revolution, doing nothing in the time since but partying. They all talked and talked, then drank, danced and sang—reveling with abandon like zombified lunatics until the early morning hours. And they shot a whole lot. The paintings on the walls became targets in the relentless shooting of their Mausers, they used the priceless carpets like army tarpaulin—wrapping the wooden chests filled with bullets in them and barricading the windows with the thick, sturdy covers of rare first-edition books from the lavish libraries.
This was all detailed in the newspapers, and if something was written in the paper, how could you not believe it?
All of Moscow gossiped about the debaucherous life the anarchists led inside the residences they occupied, and the easily repulsed grannies whispered resentfully in each other’s ears about the disgusting orgies, the gatherings of bastards maniacal with disenthralment, and the exalted girls, who discarded every bit of clothing off their backs, letting the sailors contort their bodies every which way. The palaces had turned into ribald brothels, places of reprehensible doings and elemental disgrace, and they smelled of smoke, fish, and carrion.
Dzerzhinsky’s Chekas, together with Jukums Vācietis*—Chief of Russia’s armed forces—and his Latvian gunmen simply burst in.
They shot at everything that moved, indiscriminant at wiping out anarchists and women whose bodies were toxic with vodka and semen, then arrested those who’d somehow survived the massacre. When they took out those they’d detained, they came eye to eye with the same men they’d started a revolution with just half a year prior, but in that April night, the first group decimated the second.
The first door to hell had opened.
Sheytanov asked Godina what happened, but the other bared his teeth and sourly remarked:
“Lenin got ’em!”
He fell silent and then gave a disgusted snort:
“What’s more, it was an anarchist who handed him the power, in case you didn’t know . . .”
He recounted how, in January, during the founders’ assembly, they’d sat around waging their tongues with all sorts of nonsense, and earlier, on the nineteenth of January according to the new calendar, at four twenty in the morning, the head of the military guard, the sailor Jeleznyakov, burst into the shiny hall inside the Tauride Palace where the meeting was supposedly in session, climbed up on the podium, put a hand on chairman Chernov’s shoulder and said: “Please adjourn this meeting! The military guard is tired and wants to take a nap . . .”
“So just keep all that in mind, Bulgarian,” Godina sighed. “Just keep it in mind . . . By the way,” he added, “Zheleznyakov was also arrested by Dzerzhinsky’s people. Keep that in mind, too—Lenin does not forgive or forget, Dzerzhinsky even less! . . . As for Vācietis, up until yesterday he was lieutenant colonel in the Imperial Russian Army . . . And that’s that!” he said. “Turncoats don’t keep their word.”
All of Moscow looked over its shoulder and whispered in fear about the leather men. At first, Sheytanov had no idea who these men were or what they were about, but two surviving anarchists from that April night explained it to him. The Cheka were referred to as leather men because they wore double-breasted, black leather air force jackets, in actuality the same uniforms worn by British pilots. The new government had discovered a Triple Entente storage depot in Petrograd, and appropriated and gifted the leather jackets to Dzerzhinsky’s people. A perfect gift, indeed. Very convenient, too, because leather is the perfect defense against lice—that irrepressible wartime pest.
And so it was.
Sheytanov hissed with disappointment, “Very clever, very clever indeed.” And clenched his teeth again . . .
He attended meetings and rallies to look for other Bulgarians with whom to form a unit, but he found no one who’d take him up on it.
One night Godina dampened his revolutionary enthusiasm by elaborating a few points for him. Turns out, the total number of casualties on that October night in Petrograd—the October Revolution!—totaled a mere six people. On both sides.
“Bulgarian,” he said. “There are two million in Petrograd. Officially. No one knows the real number. Tell me—was there any way this multimillion city was even aware of what was going down?”
He told him about the coup at the Winter Palace as well—how it had been really taken over. The Winter Palace, was, in actuality, one big, giant wine cellar guarded by barefaced cadets and girls from the women’s regiment. The cadets and the women drank what they could and when they got word a bunch of Bolsheviks were headed their way to attack their palace, they filled up their bags with bottles and ran. That’s precisely what the attackers were looking for—the wine reserves—and there was still a sea of booze left.
“This great socialist October Revolution was, if you can believe it, history’s most bloodless revolution,” he said, but Sheytanov had no idea whether to believe him or not.
[Thursday, February 21, 2013]
He met up with Radek a few more times, listened to him tell disparaging jokes about Jews, despite himself being Jewish, and witnessed him ingratiate himself with people who didn’t even want to sit at the same table with him; it quickly became apparent what kind of person he was. At the beginning of July he saw Trotsky at a rally inside the Moscow Circus: it was there that Trotsky announced that any and all parasites would be tracked down and captured and sent away to unspeakable places to do dreadful, difficult things, and those who dared to oppose this plan of his were guileful windbags. The crowded circus exploded in applause, and Sheytanov enjoyed it too, but afterward, Godina clarified that this Leon Trotsky was in actuality Lev Davidovich Bronstein.
“That’s how it is, Bulgarian,” he said, “The Trotskys and the Radeks want to start the revolution, and it’ll be the Bronsteins and the Sobelzonovs who will end up paying for it. I’ve said it before,” he added, “don’t expect anything good from a turncoat . . .”
A strange fellow this Godina was. During the day he wrote about starting the revolution, but when night fell he spoke against it. Sheytanov couldn’t quite understand it, but he didn’t argue with the man; instead at night he listened to him with even greater interest alongside the preposterously expensive bottle of Smirnoff he had in his hand. On one such night, Godina told him what Trotsky himself had said to the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach. “I know,” Trotsky had said to him, “that we’re already dead, but I also know that there’s no one left to bury us . . .”
“And it so happened that Blumkin and Andreev put a bullet in that same Mirbach right in the embassy, and to make sure they finished the job they threw in a bomb as well,” Godina laughed vengefully. “They shot him barely three months into his ambassadorship! What do you know, Georgi the Bulgarian, what do you even know . . .”
Then he fell quiet, took a disconsolate pull from the bottle and informed him he was heading to bed, but that beforehand, he wanted Sheytanov to know something.
“Lenin,” he said, “is a very sick man. Lenin might live another five, six years, or he might not. He’ll be gone, but someone else will come to replace him. I don’t know who that’ll be yet, but whoever it is, I’m willing to bet that he’ll be even more terrifying. It’s inertia, Bulgarian, once it starts it won’t stop. The only thing inertia does is gather speed downhill . . .”
Anyway.
Sheytanov did in fact see Lenin once. He didn’t remember when or where. He resembled your average-looking, haughty university professor with his hat, his tattered jacket, and wrinkled vest underneath. When, a few years later, he saw Alexander Tsankov for the first time, he immediately thought of Lenin. They could’ve been the same person.
And when, on the last day of August, the news flew threw Moscow that a woman named Fanny Kaplan had waited at the Hammer and Sickle factory for Lenin after one of his rallies, and had emptied the contents of her Browning into him, Sheytanov felt only one thing.
Malicious joy.
“Not Fanny, Bulgarian,” Godina kept on with his poisonous mid-night diatribes. “Not Fanny, but Fanya. An anarchist, allegedly, but somehow, suddenly an SR, a socialist revolutionary. What did I tell you about apostates? No one really knows who sent her there, either,” he went on, “or if she was the one who really shot him, so let us drink to the revolution!”
Anyway.
The summer of nineteen eighteen had been unbearably hot. Even the animals fainted from the Moscow heat. Revolucija was now called World Revolution and Sheytanov contributed four or five articles, but had no idea how many people actually read them, if at all.
Two women, whose beauty had long been washed off their faces, lived two doors down from them. The women’s names were Raisa and Hriseida, but Sheytanov couldn’t say which was which. They fought and insulted each other to death, like the time Raisa accused Hriseida of being Mikhail Lomonosov’s lover, and Hriseida responded that indeed she had been, and before he died in seventeen sixty-five, he had personally told her Raisa had been just too damn old for him. Things of that nature. Then they’d get at each other’s blue hairs and end up coming over to Godina’s, who made them calming tea and amused them with tales about the water spirit in Vltava. Or he recited poetry. Sheytanov remembered how one night he recited Alexandr Blok’s* “A Girl Sang A Song”: A girl sang a song in the temple’s chorus, / About men, tired in alien lands, / About the ships that left native shores, / And all who forgot their joy to the end . . . And Raisa and Hriseida wept. Actually, they always cried after the tea and the Czech’s stories and usually went home arm in arm, while Godina shrugged and said to Sheytanov, see how easy it is . . .
But that same night he didn’t say that; instead he went to the window, stared at the fires burning in the space where the monument had been, and hollowly recited the rest of the poem: Thus sang her clean voice, and flew up to the highness / And sunbeams shined on her shoulder’s white—/ And everyone saw and heard from the darkness / The white and airy gown, singing in the light. / And all of them were sure, that joy would burst out: / The ships have arrived at their beach, / The people, in the land of the aliens tired, / Regaining their bearing, are happy and reach. / And sweet was her voice and the sun’s beams around . . . / And only, by Caesar’s Gates—high on the vault, / The baby, versed into mysteries, mourned, / Because none of them will be ever returned.
And Sheytanov could have sworn he heard Godina choke up.
[Friday, February 22, 2013]
By the end of August, another monument—an ugly imitation of an Egyptian obelisk without engravings—was already protruding in place of the one that had been demolished. They called it the Monument of Soviet Constitution. By the end of September, he knew there was nothing to stay for.
And so he left.
As he sat on the train and watched the disappearing domes glisten under the autumn sun, he thought of those seven geese he’d seen that first day in Moscow, and it occurred to him it wasn’t some Third Rome they were en route to liberating—it was simply that they hadn’t yet been eaten by the Bolsheviks.
He crossed a country enveloped in a war with no front line, but with many armies and commanders, where they’d long stopped keeping track of sides, yet none surrendered, and they fought on like beasts. They flew rumbling and tumbling on their horses and companies as uncontrollable drays rolled over—horse-drawn machine-gun platforms, so to speak—and they all fired nonstop at everything in sight, echelons crammed to the brim carried army supplies and weapons to and from unknown locations, and the smell of mud, dust, gunpowder, and sulfur permeated everything. With their hooded cloaks and their waving flags, the armies resembled flocks of Devil Birds.
He reached Ukraine, but the hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi’s soldiers got hold of him on the border. They took him to Kiev and put him in a cell with some Bolsheviks scheduled to face the firing squad the very next morning—and him with them. He didn’t feel like dying just yet and he announced loudly that he was a Bulgarian soldier. An officer from the German occupational command overheard him and told the Ukrainians: “Bulgarien ist mit uns!” Bulgaria’s with us! And Sheytanov was off the hook. In October, when dirty clouds the color of bathwater lazily floated in the sky, Sheytanov set foot on the white, stone-paved quay of Varna’s port. And he realized that everything was still exactly the same. Even the cops were the same—so what if they no longer worked for Ferdinand, but for his feeble son, Boris.
He went into a canteen, and when he saw his reflection in the mirror, he spotted a graying lock against his otherwise black hair. He wasn’t yet twenty-three. He wouldn’t turn twenty-three until February the following year, nineteen nineteen . . .
[Friday night, February 22, 2013]
[A cold and tedious rain falls outside—an autumn rain. How strange. It’s February twenty-second, but the rain is a lonesome, November rain . . .
Truly strange . . .]
[Sunday, February 24, 2013]
Sheytanov told the poet nothing of all this. They’d long since ceased to stand on ceremony with each other, but they hadn’t yet become “comrades” either, so he kept it to himself. He looked at the drawing again and suddenly thought that Metzger had really captured the soured disdain and hate pouring out of Lenin’s very sick person’s eyes. He felt the poet was unnerved and, unsure whether the abyss behind the darkened right lens hid anger or insult, sighed and shrugged.
“I take back my words,” he said calmly. “I don’t want to argue, either.”
He even put a bunch of the cards in his coat pocket, but the tension in the air remained . . .
“Wait, did you see this?” the poet asked quickly and dug out a wrinkled newspaper. “Look what Peev wrote in Pravda!” He began to read, “‘After Thought magazine, published by Dr. Krastev, our meager literature is lacking another publication of similar amplitude and a comparable richness in its literary thought . . .’ Well said, bravo! We showed that impudent Vladko Vasillev how it’s done, didn’t we? There’s no beating us now. We have a hundred twenty issues in that Yambol of yours alone. We had one of Vezny, and a hundred twenty of Plamuk!
[Sunday, March 3, 2013]
Just then the Pechenegs with the yellow glasses stormed in and brought the proofs—the printer was already putting the second issue together. They must have run the whole way, because when they threw off their hats and scarves, their heads were practically steaming. The poet snarled that the jacquerie is here! Then forgot everything and lowered his head to the pages, and the others first tried to rummage through the cupboard of Marcho from Marcha but upon discovering it was as empty as it always had been, began to spar with each other.
And so it was.
After he read everything from beginning to end,
[Monday, March 4, 2013]
the poet spread out the galley proofs of the covers.
On the front cover he added in pencil: “Add color photograph: Lenin’s portrait, two-color print engraved on wood by M. Metzger.”
On the back cover he wrote:
“Correction: Issue 1, p. 44, the first line of the article ‘A Light Shines in the World’ should read: ‘The ivory tower where the poets reside.’”
He wasn’t rancorous, but he didn’t forget,
[Tuesday, March 5, 2013]
[Hmm, there was a hurricane in Gabrovo. They’ve announced a state of emergency—many wounded and one killed . . . No electricity or bread . . . Yet Yambol is quiet, quiet and spring-like. Strange. Gabrovo is 106.037 km from here, but Dryanovo is even closer, and there are hurricanes there too, but not a thing here!]
and he didn’t let these things slide.
But the second issue came out late as well, just as the first one had—a week or so after the date stated on the subscription. In January he let the delay slide, but when it happened again in February, he couldn’t. He barked this wasn’t going to work. He stormed into the printer’s and raised hell. He told them he wasn’t going to let them embarrass him in front of the subscribers, that they didn’t know whom they were dealing with, after which he left and returned home, where god knows why he took it out on Mila (after which he couldn’t stop thinking of ways to apologize), while the cover of the third issue now read:
“Due to the inadequacies of the printing shop, issues 1 and 2 came out after they were supposed to—on the fifteenth of the month. Because of this mistake, we have been forced to delay the publication date of PLAMUK to the twenty-fifth of every month.”
And beneath that, the poet wrote: “Rhodope Printing shop, owner—Todor L. Klisarov, Sofia, 29 Exarch Josif, tel. 575—making it very clear who was right and who was wrong, goddamn it.
But they barely stayed at that press for another two issues before moving yet again, this time to Balkan chromolithography, owned by one Ivan Ts. Naydenov.
Everything was repeating all over again and the whole thing had become personal. The same thing had happened with Vezny. The second to last issue was printed at Vitosha, and the last—at the Elit printing house; the almanac—at the royal printers, and every book published by Vezny was printed in a different place.
Anguish! Anguish and lots of darting from printer to printer—that’s what it meant to publish a magazine in Bulgaria.