[Saturday, April 20, 2013]
That year on April first, someone named Hitler—and his friends along with him—were convicted for attempting to incite a social and national putsch, a coup, in other words, a revolution, inside a Munich beer hall the previous November. The trial had started back in February in the main reading room of the Munich infantry’s military academy. There had been three hundred sixty-eight witnesses, correspondents had flocked in from all corners of the world, shooting nonstop with their magnesium lamps and buzzing with their cameras, and what’s more, the court let hundreds more into the courtroom to watch, while two battalions from the province’s national guard were guarded behind the barbed wire and barricades outside. A true clusterfuck and hullabaloo. When the smoke cleared, some were let go, Hitler and two others were allegedly given five-year prison sentences and a fine of two hundred gold deutschemarks (the new ones), but the men had time taken off for having served in the war and ended up doing just six months. Everyone assumed that after such a disdainful and insulting sentence, this guy Hitler was done with: in a month or two, no one would remember who he was and what exactly he’d fought for . . .
In any case.
In April of that year in Bulgaria, the snow melted and caused terrible flooding. The high water deluged a mass of villages around the Danube and sunk the Pleven-Somovit train line; the torrents washed out the train tracks between Kyustendil and Rujdavitsa, as well as the sleeper cars, gravel—everything. Brutal hail followed, the evil fly befell the villages in the Kulsko region, and hordes of ticks crawled out, bringing with them all sorts of terrible illnesses for the cattle—scabies, tuberculosis, glanders, foot and mouth disease, swine flu . . . all severely damaging and harmful afflictions that everyone had long hoped had disappeared once and for all. The authorities set up sanitary-control posts, put up barricades all over to guard the roads, and the people in the villages wailed while they slaughtered their own cattle befallen by this scourge, then threw out and buried mounds of bloated animals. Destitute times had come. And to top it all off, locusts took over the regions of Karnobat and Yambol, reaching all the way to Malko Turnovo, and the evil fly had traveled through the entire country and gotten all the way up to the northwestern town of Belogradchik.
Right around that time, a whole lot of congresses, conferences, and annual assemblies began to take place. On the second of March, the congress for the Starini Association of Retirees started up. On the fourth, the Union of Cyclists gathered in Lom. On the ninth, it was the annual assembly for peace through allying that came together, suspiciously under the auspices of the masons . . . And after that, on the twenty-third of March, the annual gathering of the Association of Sofia Journalists took place. The Sofia journalists did what they could and once again elected their man Nikola Mitev chairman, since he was a notable mason and quite close to the government, and aside from that had access to the palace and did not have to beg for an audience beforehand. The papers feared him and gave money for the insurance fund without too much whining, despite rumors that half of their installments went to the so-called Macedonian factions—rebels who claimed to fight for Macedonia’s liberation, but more often than not were quite simply brutal killers for hire. Nikola Mitev then became guest of honor at the First Regular Congress of the Union of Bulgarian Provincial Journalists. (This guy just loved to be invited as a guest of honor to all sorts of events. And he loved it when they made him boss. The second the masons founded the union of intellectuals, they voted for him to chair the permanent presence of the supreme counsel.) The Union of the Provincial Journalists was founded in January, so the congress in May was a big deal: his royal highness Ferdinand himself sent a congratulatory telegram, Nikola Milev spoke of the debt journalists owed to pacifism, and everyone yelled hooray for a long time.
And so it was.
[Sunday, April 21 2013]
Just then, amid all that proud national appeasement and out of nowhere, a fighting pack of anarchists descended into Sofia. They called themselves “Heroes of the Night”—and it was how they signed the threatening letters they sent to the more affluent politicians and the rich. They were here to combat the new government, their leaflets said. The newspapers regularly published these letters and leaflets, but the Heroes of the Night were about far more than just the written word. One Tuesday, they boldly robbed the offices of the Haim Benaroya bank located at 1 Drin Street; three days later they somehow carried out entire bags of revenue stamps from the national bank, after which they attacked some insurance offices with their Mausers and Parabellums, shooting so wildly all over the place they even hit a student: Vulchev someone or other. Then they shot a Public Safety agent, Stefanov, and they shot up the boss of the second police station, Karamfilov. They shot at Paskalev too—the mayor of Sofia—although, true, he did manage to escape without a scratch, but who would put it past these Heroes of the Night to try a second time? The newspapers Zarya, Dnevnik, and Utro shocked the already cowed people with macabre details from the thugs’ raids, and Free Speech and the Democratic Alliance called for the government to uncross its arms and be merciless with these people.
The secretary, Razsukanov, really did get the entire Sofia police up in arms, and the head of Public Safety sent entire hordes of secret agents out on the streets, but those Heroes were elusive. They’d hit up a place and vanish in an instant: scuttling into the nearest building and quickly kicking through the back door, then from one basement to another, from one courtyard to another, jumping over little iron gates, dashing through a hole in a stone wall or straight over them, then up a tree and onto someone’s roof, and then they’d come down the balconies, the window grates, or simply by the gutters . . . and straight into the neighbor’s garden. In Sofia, you could
[Monday, April 22, 2013]
cross entire neighborhoods, even in the city center with its passages and bedestens reeking of plaster and lime, with its new multiple front-entry and multiple back-exit structures built of stone; the skylights were also perfect for one to disappear through, and to reappear completely non-chalantly somewhere else entirely, somewhere far away, where even the cop’s whistles faded to nothing. And so it was. Anyone could disappear into the night without so much as sticking his head out into the street—and how were you supposed to catch such a person?
[Tuesday, April 23, 2013]
Also that May, the politician and philosopher Dimitar “The Grandfather” Blagoev died. They buried him on the eleventh, a Sunday, and the streets through which the funeral procession was to pass filled up with cops and secret agents early on.
Milev made it to the house on Debar Street precisely as six mourning pallbearers carried out the coffin. He knew the man standing up at the front—he’d been a friend of Smirnenski’s and could recite his poems perfectly. Valko someone or other, Chervenkov.
But he saw another familiar face on the other side of the coffin. He couldn’t recall exactly where he’d seen it before, but when the other looked straight at him, the poet immediately remembered. It was the same chatty young man, big boned and dark as a corner, the clerk at the sixth residential commission, that same pseudo-intellectual who’d approved his address registration inside his dusty chancery at the station some months ago. Nikola Geshev. But the poet had long forgotten his name because he’d immediately tucked the man’s business card into some pocket somewhere and had put the whole thing out of his mind.
[Wednesday, April 24, 2013]
He strode among crowds unmatched in size since the grand funeral of Ivan Vazov three years earlier, he listened to all the eulogies, he sang when the people sang “You fell in battle,” and fell to his knees when someone yelled “On your knees for the Grandfather!” and the undertakers lowered the coffin into the grave. Afterward, he didn’t go home, but went straight to Balkan press, which was kind of on his way because it was located on Maria Louisa Boulevard, the same one he lived on, just a little farther down, right next to the train station. Anyway. He burst into the room where the typesetters were, tore a piece of paper from some galleys laying on the wayside and wrote the Grandfather’s obituary in one go, without so much as lifting the pencil from the paper once. From there he threw himself onto the already printed pages of the May issue of Plamuk, called for the form-setter, and showed him exactly where he needed to fit in the obituary—right after “The Stones Speak” by Hadjiliev and above “The Procession” by Ivan Gol. There was a poem in the space already, but he told them to cut it, disregarding the fact it was already typeset; they could do without it for this issue, but they couldn’t do without the obituary. The poem could wait until June, of course, whereas the obituary would look pitiful and useless then. The head typesetter mumbled something, but the poet had already flown out of the production room.
He didn’t feel any sense of mourning while this was all happening: he felt only elation and contentment. He was happy that he’d made it to the printer’s on time and that the obit would come out in May, not a month after, or something like that.
That’s how it was.
[Thursday, April 25, 2013]
Then he went home because he and Mila had to get Bistra and Leda ready for Stara Zagora.
[Friday, April 26, 2013]
Leda loved being in Stara Zagora better than in Sofia. In Stara Zagora there were no trams to watch out for and due to which you had to hold your mother’s hand without exception when crossing the boulevard. And they had a big house in Stara Zagora, with many rooms and many doors and many windows, a cellar, an attic, a yard, a boxwood, an oak, and flowers, planted not inside pots, but just like that, right in the ground. In Stara Zagora there was a garden, and a hedge between the yard and the garden, and a big wooden gate out front you could swing back and forth on without getting yelled at to come down; there was a water basin, cats, and two turtles, but the real bliss—even better than all of these things—was Grandpa Milyo’s bookstore. The bookstore was filled with magical drawings from Berlin, and the best part were the pencils and wonderful paper on which Leda could write as many letters as she wanted and her dyado would never say: “Don’t waste the paper, kiddo!” the way her old baba Gena, her grandmother Anastasia’s mother, always chided her. And she could draw. Just like her father did, always drawing them, her and her sister Bistra. She started by diligently drawing some letters, then she’d quickly do a picture, then she’d write out some more letters and then another picture, and when a piece of paper got folded, it became a little book, just like the one she got as a gift from the stunningly beautiful Dora Gabe Peneva. Leda could recite Dora Gabe’s poem Baba, Grandma, just as expressively as her mother could. “Mommy said that baba too was once so very small, that she too could not dress herself, not even at all.” What a funny poem! Even Bistra laughed at the line “Babo dear, Babo sweet!” at the end, even though she was still little—that’s how funny the poem was. Leda also knew that every book had to have a title (just as Mrs. Gabe Peneva’s book Little Songs, had) and it had to be written in bigger letters, and that cover of the book most certainly had to bear the name of the author.
So each time she finished another little book, she very clearly wrote on its front: LЭDA.
[Saturday, April 27, 2013]
You had to take the train to get to Stara Zagora. Leda loved the train, too; it was filled with people and luggage and baskets and suitcases and bundles and bags, sometimes even hens and ducks, and it was always bustling and yet composed, full of smoke and grime on the other side of the windows and wooden separators on the backs of the wooden seats—but you could easily see the people on the other side if someone lifted you up just a little bit.
Starting this year, she would travel with her very own ticket. True, a half-priced kid’s ticket, but still a ticket! She was four now and she could say her age with words, not with fingers, like Bistra, who was still little, did. That’s why Bistra wouldn’t have a ticket, but Leda would.
Leda knew everything and she was a good kid. Everyone said so. She already knew she was going to an American daycare. Starting next year. Her father said so to her mother—his daughters absolutely had to learn English, had to know it so well in fact, that they would dream in English. She heard that and started to wonder what it might be like to dream in English. But it would be years and years before she would understand what that actually meant.
[Sunday, April 28, 2013]
[A bat in the apartment entryway. Strange.]
[Monday, April 29, 2013]
The poet took Mila and the kids to Stara Zagora, stayed a day, just long enough to teach Leda how to lie next to the trimmed boxwood, just as her aunt Maria had done when she’d been the same age, and on the second day, he took the train back to Sofia to put together the sixth issue of Plamuk. Sheytanov was in Sofia as well, so at dusk one June day in nineteen twenty-four, as they finished whatever they had yet to finish with the new issue, the two men sat down at the St. George rotunda on Battenberg Square to drink beer and to eat kebapcheta. The poet ate ten. When he saw Sheytanov’s incredulous eyes, he nonchalantly told him ten kebapcheta was nothing—he’d eaten seventy fried-dough cakes, mekitsi, at the Kniajevo Military Academy.
“Come on,” Sheytanov laughed. “Play it down a little bit. Nobody can eat seventy mekitsi.”
“I beg to differ!” the poet seemed insulted. “The entire academy is my witness. Whoever’s left, anyway. I made a bet with one of the villagers that I could eat seventy mekitsi, but they—like you—did not believe me. I only had one condition—I also had to have a big washbasin of yogurt.”
“And?” Sheytanov couldn’t stop laughing.
“A whole crowd gathered,” the poet laughed, too. “The whole company lined up to form a square. In the middle—a table. On the table? A paper bag. Inside the paper bag? Seventy mekitsi, personally counted by the sergeant major, because, well, he’s the mother of the whole group, who else would do it. Next to the paper bag? A washbasin filled with yogurt. Next to the table? Your humble servant. And so the séance beings! Thirty-two mekitsi with no yogurt whatsoever. From the thirty-second one on, I had a whole system set up: one mekitsa, two spoonfuls of yogurt. This was in July. The sun is brutal and the heat unbearable. God damn, the whole thing was a pain in the ass. One mekitsa, two spoons of yogurt, one mekitsa, two spoons of yogurt. You don’t believe me, but at the end, all the troops applauded and yelled ‘Hooray!’ Even the platoon leader congratulated me—for the first and last time, and even the sergeant major said to me, ‘Well done, klutz! I know you as the biggest lout at this school. There was always something bothering you, you never lined up in formation on time, yet here you turn out to be a bona fide Balkan hero, cadet Kassabov!’”
[Tuesday, April 30, 2013]
“You’re lying!” said Sheytanov.
“I swear to you on my life!” the other did not let up. “I wrote a whole poem about it. I am a man / the man wonder who prevailed / a whole cassole of yogurt I inhaled. The others thought it went with the poem ‘Maritza Runs,’ can you imagine that? I think it did go with it. Go on, try it out. They even tricked me into writing the refrain, and well, who am I to refuse? I wrote it on the spot: Eat! Eat! Eat! Beans and rice and milk! / First into the food we’ll tuck / and then we’d like some girls to . . . you can figure out the rest yourself. It nearly got me thrown into the cooler after all those hoorays. Complete bullshit, but what can you do? Military school is military school, not boarding school. Nineteen-year-old lads—barely out of high school, can’t even swear properly—get told by some old guys in caps that they’re men now. So they do their best to act like men—they swear and spit out vile curses. And you know what, the sergeant major was right. I was always bedraggled and unbuttoned, my breeches—wrinkled, my cap—ragged. When everyone lined up for formation, I always ran out last. When we went to eat in the cafeteria—I was late again, and everyone got angry with me for that too. You know what I loved the most? The individual exercises. Of course, you haven’t so much as smelled a military school—you have no idea what I’m talking about. Individual exercise means every man gives himself orders. You command yourself to: “Pull out the knife!” and then you follow your own command. You yell, “Fire!” and you get down and shoot. Guess what I told myself to do.”
“I have no idea! What?”
“I told myself to ‘Freeze! As you were!’ All the time.”
“What?!” Sheytanov spit out his drink.
“There’s no what. ‘Freeze! As you were! Excellent, cadet!’ Things like that. What’s more, I’d tell myself ‘at ease!’ I came up with that all by myself, and the sergeant major went blue in the face.”
[Wednesday, May 1, 2013]
He sighed, then they both laughed, and only then spotted the young man with a too timid disposition standing next to their table, nervously shifting from one foot to another.
The poet scowled and snapped at him to stop sticking out like that and to sit, if he’s going to sit.
“Listen to me now, young man,” he said, when the other sat down wimpishly, barely on the corner of the chair. “Obviously I read your notebook, and what can I say . . . Apropos,” he growled, “I had a damn hard time with your handwriting. You have the handwriting of a genius, goddamn it. No matter, I read them all. Now, your poems are meant to be erected with the leitmotifs of social discontent, and yet you deck out your constructing mechanisms with the style of the symbolists and the decadents. Well? How could you think you could get away with that, my boy? After the wars, nothing is as it was. Think about that! Before the wars women still walked around with crinolines and hats like birdcages, and just look at them now. They don’t just put make up on, they smear it on with a distempering brush, as if they’re applying war paint. They threw away their corsets and now what? Two little rags in the front, two little urkuzuncheta in the back.”
“Urkuzunche?” the other’s face reddened from ear to ear.
“Ties, strings,” the poet clarified, “Don’t you know what urkuzun means? They founded some international women’s league for peace and freedom, invented some kind of hula-hooping dance and look at them now—they’ve got us wrapped around their little finger.”
He shut up long enough to light a cigarette and went on.
“And us,” he went on, “we came back from the battlefronts excoriated. If you ask me, the twentieth century didn’t start in nineteen and one, it started in nineteen fourteen, that’s what I think! Europe today has nothing to do with Europe then—just look at the map: brimming with new nation states. There are four or even five new countries popping up out of Austro-Hungary, and I haven’t even counted how many came out of Russia. After all that hell, you need to break the mold! All the molds. Anywhere you see a mold, you have to destroy it and obliterate it. Because what should you want from life?”
“What?” the young man whispered, intimidated.
“Nothing if not everything, my boy!” the poet banged the table. “Only that!”
Georgi Sheytanov looked on curiously as the poet’s demeanor transformed right in front of him: he straightened up his posture where he sat in the black Viennese chair, raised his finger triumphantly, and brought his voice to the same timbre he used for his lectures in those small, dark community-center salons. The only difference being that while he tried not to smoke during his lectures, here he chain-smoked and the cigarettes hissed and crackled like lit bomb fuses, and the ash scattered all around him. A drop the color of wax crawled down his cheek, but he paid no mind to it—not yet. The usual bustle of restaurant clamor encompassed them, with all those plates clattering, the ringing of glasses and the shouts of the waiters—“Right now, please!” and “We’re bringing it!” and “Coming up!” Instead of the dim and buzzing lamps in those salons and reading rooms, here the electric globes shone fiercely high above the high ceiling, but the poet was far from being discomforted by the fact, just as he was completely nonplussed by the fact he wasn’t speaking to twenty or thirty people, but just a lone, sweaty young man. Bewitched by those prideful demons of haughtiness, he spoke to him as though he were speaking to a sea of one hundred.
Indeed. After the short introduction about the wars and the changing times, the poet confidently spat out that it was here that expressionism truly burst into life, powerful and unyielding. Because what was expressionism if not a rebellion?! Why? Because it rose up against the old and broke the cliché of the patriarchal literary comfort—and in search of what? In search of the new form, of course. He raised his hand and clarified that yes, symbolism was adept at that as well—the visual resources of symbolism taught man how to use beautiful symbols to illustrate his thoughts, to give them a deeper perspective.
“Symbolism,” he said, “is far too young for us to label it and lock it up inside the archives of human misconceptions.”
He added that so far, so good! But, what happens now?
“Alright, let’s see,” he said. “You take the words “night” and “death” for instance. What will the symbolist do with them? The night is preternaturally sorrowful, the night is more Stygian than death. Beautiful? Beautiful. That ‘more Stygian than death’ is simply magnificent, no doubt. I could kill a man for one simple ‘more Stygian than death,’ but let’s move on! What would the expressionist do with those same elements?” He snapped his fingers, “let’s see if I can improvise something.”
He lowered his head, thought for a second, and began tapping a beat on the table:
“Something like this. The night gives birth . . . the night births from its dead womb . . . you see it, right? Something is born out of something dead! Death gives birth, and that which is born is alive. That’s it. From the dead womb of night, but what comes out of that damned and intrusive night? Let’s keep going. From the dead womb of night, the legendary spite of the slave is born! Let’s see, what would come after. No, wait a minute! Legendary won’t work. It’s too persnickety, too melodramatic and vulgar. We need something raw here. Age-old. Yes! From the dead womb of night, the age-old venom of the slave is spawned! Now let’s add a couple of things from what we know of symbolism, something like: His crimson spite, so mighty.
“Incredible!” the young man exclaimed. “It’s great! Powerful!”
“Precisely.” The poet agreed.
He then turned cheerfully toward Sheytanov and cried:
“What do you say, Sheytanov? From the dead womb of night, the age-old venom of the slave has spawned! His crimson spite, so mighty. I just came up with that on the
[Wednesday night, May 1, 2013]
spot. I could gift it to the young man, but he’ll only ruin it. Like Lalyo. For some reason I said to him that the faces of our modern-day saints should be imprinted on iron icons, so I told him: Here! Take it. I’m giving you the iron icons. And he couldn’t stop. Now they’re a dime a dozen. I can probably make better use of it. From the dead womb of night, the age-old venom of the slave has spawned! I’m thinking of a poem about Prince Marko and Musa Kesedžija, we’ll see how it turns out.”
He then turned his chair back toward the young man and added that the futurists would take it even further. The futurist would never be content with “the night spawns from its dead womb”—the futurist would by all means add something like Zang tumb tuuum . . .—but that was going too far.
“Zang tumb tuuum is gluttonous,” he declared, “but yours too is far from being ripe for a revolution. You need fire to spark a revolt, you don’t go to war with wilted chrysanthemums. And let us quit while we’re ahead, because we’re risking stepping into the barbed wires of the big question of style versus substance, if you catch my drift!”
The young man attempted a flaccid defense, but the poet cut him off, asking him not to defend himself like some old lady, but to write!
“I want you,” he ordered him, “to bring me new material by the time we get to the twenty-fourth of May, the day of letters, got it? Either new stuff, or you edit these ones. Wait, wait. Did I say the twenty-fourth of May? That’s too late. Can you get them to me by Saturday?”
The young man went scarlet and mumbled fervently, that, well, but the poet cut him off once more.
“Done, then. Let me ask you something else. You,” he said, “what did you study in Vienna?”
“Business,” the other responded in despair.
“Would you look at that Sheytanov!” the poet exclaimed. “Look at what the kids are studying these days, not like you and me.”
“Don’t look at me!” Sheytanov said defensively. “I’m innocent. I didn’t even graduate high school.”
The poet didn’t even hear him—he was already saying something else to the confused youth.
“Very practical,” he said “Business. Extraordinarily practical, that profession! And since you’re not lacking in imagination or wit, I think you’ll make an excellent millionaire. Just cure yourself of the desire to write poetry. I’m serious!” he exclaimed enthused, “Why aren’t you a bank director yet? Literature?! Basta! Literature is a blighted endeavor in this country, haven’t you figured that out yet?”
He tapped him on the shoulder, told him to run along, and that he was expecting him on Saturday with the poems. The young man jumped up and flew away through the tables. Sheytanov cracked a smile.
