[Monday, March 11, 2013]
On March fourth, nineteen twenty-four, a Tuesday, Sheytanov went to Zheko “Gerginata” Gerginov’s funeral. He took the bus from Turnovo to Stara Zagora, and then the train to Haskovo, where the funeral procession had already stretched from the Turkish baths in the center of town all the way to the Kenana Cemetery. While he strode through the mobs of people, Sheytanov looked on darkly as Ignes told him how it had gone down.
Two days prior, on the second, on the eve of the forthcoming amnesty set to release everyone detained in connection with the June uprising, a couple of guards pulled Gerginata aside for some bullshit reason and separated him from everyone—out of the communal cell and into a completely isolated part of the prison. In the middle of the night, three non-coms from the Haskovo garrison burst in screaming, “Freeze! Don’t move!” as though they’d caught someone making a break or inciting a riot, and shot up the cell, riddling Zheko Gerginov with bullets before he’d even managed to sit up in his plank-bed. The three non-coms then disappeared and left the man to agonize all night. He did not breathe his last breath until the morning, at the precise hour the guards went down their lists and freed the inmates.
Sheytanov listened to all of this in silence and, when Ignes added that, according to someone he was close to, it had been Russev himself who had called up the director of the prison from Sofia and personally ordered him to do whatever was necessary to keep Gerginov from getting out alive, the anarchist spat with the kind of somber decisiveness borne out of suppressed rage:
“They want war. We’ll give them war.”
[Tuesday, March 12, 2013]
Before the dirt on Zheko’s grave had even settled, five men entered the army barracks at the Tenth Rhodope Polk and took out ten Austrian Steyr Mannlicher carbines, two dozen nine-millimeter automatic pistols with wooden holsters, fifteen cases of bullets for the aforementioned guns, and a whole lot of trusty, club-shaped, Bulgarian-made hand grenades. They loaded all of this into the car of one of their guys, a White Guard, and took it to Mityo Ganev on the other side of Harmanli—in the Sakar Mountains. Mityo Ganev was even more furious than they were, because he loved Zheko and considered him more than a brother, and he hadn’t even been able to say goodbye. Now, as his fellow rebels found themselves armed to the teeth, they ran wild in the surrounding areas—devilishly deft and elusive—like angels of darkness. They kidnapped the famous tobacco businessman from Haskovo—Smochevksy—a majority stakeholder of Nikoteya, and gave him a good beating; they occupied the Momkovo and Malko Popovo City Halls, which were lacking in any resistance (who could stage any sort of defense with those feckless, pre-war rifles anyway?); they blocked the wrecked, muddy road between Malko Gradishte and Ortakyoi and took a captain and his ten startled little soldiers captive. They didn’t hurt them; they confiscated their guns and their bullets and immediately brought them to Mityo Ganev, who demanded to know the names of the three men who’d murdered his friend Gerginata in prison, and when he got what he needed, he gave them all a good kick in the ass and let them go. Except for their weapons, of course. He stole those.
But even before that, Mityo Ganev made sure word spread in Haskovo: Gerginata’s killers were as good as dead; he had personally sentenced them, and whomever they were, they could expect visitors in the unknown hour of vengeance.
But the poor souls already sensed what was coming their way.
[Wednesday, March 13, 2013]
[That had all happened in March—during the limbo between winter and spring—when people prayed for the first green buds to appear.
One night in the middle of summer, on the twenty-sixth of July, two days after the government finally acquitted everyone who’d been convicted following the June uprising of nineteen twenty-three, the air was thick and tense as it is right before a thunderstorm. Mityo Ganev shouted: “Now!” and pointed to two of his best haidoukhs to go into Haskovo with him to take the three killers by complete surprise.
In the now almost four months since the murder, the poor wretches had not so much as left each other’s side in a lame attempt to keep from falling apart. They drank endlessly in the hope of numbing the horror of the inevitable, knowing very well who Mityo Ganev was and what he was capable of doing. Everyone knew—songs were sung in the man’s honor from Kavaklii all the way to Koprivshtitsa. Tense and jumpy, the three were quick to reach for their guns and hassled everyone they came into contact with in Haskovo. Even their commanders were at their wits’ end. They understood their situation, sympathized with it even, but the whole thing had gotten out of hand. So they wrote to their superiors, pleading with them to release the three from duty and send them off.
That night, the three were together as they left the summer masquerade ball at the officer’s hall, where they’d already rolled three cigarettes with tobacco mixed with hash and apple blossom, which is perhaps why they pissed their pants the instant Mityo Ganev and his merciless harbingers of death came out of the shadows on that lilac eve and surrounded them. They appeared in all their splendor: black-bearded and long-haired, girded with leashes, cartridge belts, and scabbards. The vaivode surveyed each of the three lowlifes, personally swore at each in an even, coldblooded manner as if he were reading him his verdict, and informed all three they had no idea what kind of man they’d killed, that they didn’t deserve to live themselves, that they were better off dead, in fact, because even the chicken—that brainless creature—still looked up to God when it drank water, but they, they didn’t even have the fear of God in them. He swore at them again, this time invoking their mothers—and that was the last thing those three heard in their ratty little lives. The rebels then shattered their skulls point-blank and dissipated into the shadows of that July evening, leaving the three corpses to lie soaked in their own urine and feces in a remote alley of the city gardens. The three bloodstains the color of overboiled, strewed, dried fruit hardened overnight, until a spring shower came around midday the next day to wash it all away.
That’s how it went down.]
[The evening of Thursday, March 14, 2013]
[Back in the spring of nineteen nineteen, Mityo Ganev went delirious with the legends of Vaivode Angel’s untold treasures, and, stubborn as a mule, dug around for days in the places where Angel and his gang had once roamed. He wasn’t afraid of digging—he was young, barely nineteen, and strong as two men—and when he started digging, he dug and dug—with a map no less!—from Kozlek all the way to Karakolyova Dupka on the other side of Kavaklii. He lingered for a while around Kavaklii and punctured the earth around Paleokastro, then went all the way back from Kavaklii to Harmanlii. He’d become a spectacle. “What in God’s name are you doing?” they mocked him. “What are you now, a treasure hunter?” But he just kept on digging. He dug for one month, then two, and in the third month a miracle happened! One June morning in that same nineteen nineteen, in a ravine by Bryastovo, amid the prickly blackberry bushes and the milk thistle, in between two wizened, wild plum trees, Mityo dug out five delvi, earthenware pots, each brimming with hundreds of old gold Turkish mahmudiye, handfuls of heavy Napoléons and Austrian münzes, strings of gold coins and gold and silver necklaces, rings and bracelets with diamonds cast in precious metalwork . . . Spellbound by their sheen, Mityo sat and stared at the jewels. For three days and three nights he took pleasure in the fortune before he buried it back in the ground—this time in the hellish, barren lands around Dragoina . . .
Mityo Ganev met Zheko Gerginov inside Haskovo prison three years later. Gerginata taught him to read and write and made him learn all of Hristo Botev’s* poems by heart. And in November of twenty-two, just a little before he got bored of prison and decided to split, Mityo Ganev pulled Zheko aside and told him the incredible story of Vaivode Angel’s treasure. He had a plan:
“You,” he told Zheko, “have become more dear to me than a brother. As soon as we get out of here, we’re splitting the haidoukh’s treasure, you have my word!”
But Zheko replied, “Mityo, Mityo . . . Do you understand what you’re suggesting? You want us to act like those goons and miscreants, like some rich wannabes? . . . It’s not who we are. Give some of what you found to the poor and stockpile the rest for the revolution. Got it?”
“Got it!” Mityo yelled out. A week later he jumped off the train taking him to Sliven for his trial.
He returned to his kingdom amid the oak forests of Sakar Mountain, where his men had already gotten word of the treasure and eyed him in hungry anticipation. But there would be no talk of dividing up anything; he told his men loud and clear he had given his word to Gerginata.
“The only way you’ll ever get your hands on a single gold coin or jewel is over my dead body,” he said.
In Mityo’s mind, Gerginata’s plea may as well have come from God himself. The rebels grumbled for a while, but they couldn’t break Mityo’s word any more than he could go against Gerginata and let it go. And when, in nineteen twenty-five, he sensed with his entire being—the way a cornered animal might—that he was about to be wiped out, he dug up those same five delvi and brought them to a man named Dimko in Haskovo.
“I am entrusting you with all this,” he said. “Hide it and protect it for better times. And don’t for even a second think about touching it. Or I’m personally going rise from the grave and cut off your arm myself!”
Dimko was flabbergasted by the bitter threat—he couldn’t imagine ever laying a hand on the treasure. He really did keep it hidden, for seven years. Until one day several unidentified men showed up, claimed they’d been sent by the communists, and coaxed him into giving them everything for the “cause.”
It was the last time he saw either—the emissaries or the gold. And that was that.]