[May 5, 2013, Easter]
But all this would happen lat
He’d heard the poet was worshipped by the younger generation, that a considerable number of them knew all his poems by heart, and that just as many simply emulated him. Many even adopted his moniker, shortening their own Georgi to Geo, but the pinnacle of it all was witnessing no fewer than three young men with the same lock of hair over one eye at 145 Rakovski Street.
“Say now, Bai Milev,” said Sheytanov as that same young man flew between the tables at Battenberg Square, “these lads, these young poets, fear you more than wealthy men fear me! Are you beating them or slaughtering them or chasing them with a gun . . . what exactly are you doing to have that effect on them?”
“What can I say,” the poet sighed conceitedly. “I give them a beating here and there. But here’s the thing! When you’re young, you look at the geranium on the windowsill and you think it is the pinnacle of creation, and you can’t wait to piss on it and mark your territory. And there’s talent there, and lots of it—for the growing poet, I mean, not for the geranium. The young poet needs to aim for the poplars beyond the stone wall, not for his daddy’s backyard hedge. But until you give him a good slap on the back of the head, he won’t get it.”
“I get it now,” Sheytanov nodded.
“Sure you do,” the poet sighed. “Look, to be honest, today’s youth really trouble me. They’re full of rapturous Salieris and maybe a Mozart meandering here and there, like a thorn in your fucking side. See what I mean? These people are no longer writing in the name of literature. Not at all! They’re not even thinking about their readers when they’re writing. All they’re looking for is the three snobs aahing and wringing their hands in the reading salon . . .”
“So what are they thinking about, then?” Sheytanov interrupted him.
“The literary awards!” the other yelled and angrily slammed his fist on the table. “Because they know very well just what the awards juries like, and they’ve learned to mold it exactly to their taste. These juries don’t have an ounce of literary consciousness, so you can imagine how literary their awards are. ‘The awards were given precisely to the right people!’ says Dr. Galubov. He was apparently feeling just like Buridan’s ass—the donkey that died of thirst and hunger because it couldn’t figure out whether to go for the pail of water or the stack of hay placed at an equal distance before him—all of the books were so wonderful, he just didn’t know which one to pick. And accordingly, the writers take out their arsenal of stock phrases and check the boxes: here a rhyme, there a rhythm—a little rain here, snow, yellow leaves, fall, wilted roses, and crestfallen damsels, night, moon, the desolate flame of a candle inside an abandoned house, a forgotten love letter, the melancholy curls of the smoke rising from my cigarette, tearful eyes, strange accords, broken strings . . . ‘Inside the poky hovel, at dawn I’ll spin a loom, at night, alone, I’ll snivel, a necklace of black gloom’ or ‘That’s how I will pass life by, insatiate and malcontent. And when I die alone, abroad, a cuckoo-wanderer I’ll be.’ And behold the flood of awards! The epigones scratch their amateur vulgarities onto the paper knowing full well who likes what and how, and who sits on what awards jury and where. Everything’s been thought out. Because now—the writers must choose between Vae Victis and Winners Are Never Judged! And they always choose right. So they win their awards and the following spectacle ensues: first the winners get awarded, then the same people who gave out the awards praise the ones who’ve won them, then the ones who’ve won them praise those who have awarded them in the first place! A truly awesome thing! They award them, then praise them, then award them again, and all the while, they claim to be doing it all in the name of inspiring the budding poets. The awards go to their heads and they become regulars at Bai Ilia Yugrev’s confectionary on Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard, the unawarded raise hell because they don’t want to be left out of the confectionary and they come out to fight with their little canes, so then they’re awarded so they’ll keep quiet, and in the end, they all get into the Writer’s Union together. Poets with pomade in their hair and cologne in their moustaches. That’s the poetry scene of today—misters decked out in smooth, dark suits, so many with pale foreheads, a miner’s disposition, and sorrowful smiles. It is a scary thing, I’m telling you! Don’t even ask me how many people now despise each other because of these literary bursaries. Young people, my ass! So what does it all come out to then, Sheytanov? If you sell your body, we call that being a whore, but when you sell your talent—we call that stardom, right? That’s why I’ve always said: we need to do like Hungary’s Béla Kun. The man knew what he was doing. All burgeoning, hardworking and worthwhile poets, he said, would receive two-thousand-krone subsidies—so they can sit on their asses and write. The epigones—eight-hundred-krone lifetime pensions, on the condition that they—under the threat of death—don’t write! But what happened here in Bulgaria? Just the opposite! The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment gave a bursary to Lisa Belcheva! Can you imagine that? How does that even work? She’s written three, maybe four poems in her life, and it’s not even clear if she’s going to write anything ever again. Some Gergi from Ruse took the last name Polyanov, and this year the Writers’ Union, when it accepted him as a regular member, did so because half the writers voting thought they were voting for the old Polyanov, for Dimitar Polyanov, for Alana! It’s a dangerous thing, I’m telling you. When did these people get so goddamn savvy—I just don’t get it! Malcontent . . . there’s another word that comes to mind, but let’s not go there.”
Sheytanov gave a short laugh and told the poet he really ought to be a little more careful.
“What for?” the poet bristled. “Am I wrong?”
“I’m not one to judge if you’re right or wrong,” Sheytanov said, “but what I do know is that once a person begins his sentences with ‘when I was their age,’ he’s done for.”
“You do have a point,” the poet agreed. “But do you know what I was doing when I was their age? Get us a cognac and I’ll tell you.”
Sheytanov snickered again and waved to the waiter. The poet was already leaning over the table, recounting how, in nineteen fifteen, a year before the man’s death in the war, he’d proposed to the poet Dimcho Debelyanov* the following: as a way to protest the habitual philistine logic of society—which is always standing in the way of literature’s high tides, clipping her wings—in rebellion and in opposition to all of that, all the young poets should come out of their houses and hang themselves along the streetlights of the boulevard.
“What now?” Sheytanov’s eyes widened. “Come again?”
“You heard right!” the other slapped the table again. “We should all come out and hang ourselves, one after the other. Can you picture that? A young, misunderstood poet hanging from every street light, jazz playing, the tram headed to the Military Academy rattles mournfully by the streetlights, and the whole of society wails and pulls out its hair. Just imagine the beauty of the picture! With the legions of poets that would’ve swarmed the place—we’d have hung for miles. And if we’d run out of streetlights, we’d have doubled up on each one. And if we’d have run out of those too, we could’ve started with Dondoukov Boulevard. I’m being facetious, of course, but when I said all this to Dimcho Debelyanov, I was dead serious. How did you put it before? Puerile antagonism? Well, mine was the same thing—puerile antagonism.”
He sank back into his chair, overcome by the guffaws Sheytanov so enjoyed hearing.
“Wait till you hear what Dimcho wrote back,” he said, “I know his letter by heart, more or less, because it was memorable. ‘I didn’t write you back right away,’ he wrote, ‘because I was busy with something very important—torturing myself by trying to convince myself and the others that it’s high time we acquiesced to our own impotence and take your advice to contrive a never-before-seen spectacle: hang ourselves on the electric streetlights along Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard . . . but!’ he wrote, ‘what do you know, all my efforts were for naught. Neither I, nor the others, it turns out, were ready to perish, so young, so green. The reasons being literary,’ he wrote, which was of course the funniest part about the whole thing. That’s exactly what he wrote! ‘For reasons steeped entirely in literature!’ What a refined human being he was, he would never smack you across the back of the head, he would only give you a teasing tap on the nose, and if you felt like getting it, you would.”
“And then what did you do?” Sheytanov asked as he took two glasses from the waiter.
“What do you mean what did I do?” the poet raised his eyebrows. “I became very distressed, I read the letter a thousand times, I pulled out my hair, traitors, I yelled, apostates, and the like, but . . . you as my witness, I’m sitting here and drinking my beer with you. Ergo, I didn’t hang myself!”
“True,” Sheytanov affirmed, serious. “You did not.”
[Saturday, May 11, 2013, a day for reflection]
[Every television channel is bursting with scandal, some news bulletins have apparently been found in some printing press . . . I must have missed something, because I understood nothing. Everybody’s giving press conferences, the hubbub is brutal.
Piss on this day of reflection!]
[Sunday, May 12, 2013, Election Day]
“Where was I?” the poet asked, “Oh yes, the young people. Today’s youth is ready to gouge their eyes out, they’re dying to compete with each other. I saw it the other day in Hyperion’s last issue—Luydmil took a little bite out of Lalyo Marinov. In short, he says, Troyan’s Lalyo Marinov is threatening Europe! He who has ears, let him see, he says, he who has ears, let him see. A jokester, too! He who has ears, let him see. Very clever! Now Lalyo wants to shoot him. Earlier, Boyan Penev called Luydmil a literary Plutus. Very dishonorable. You can prove anything you want that way, but that’s another story. And Vladko the timeserver? Straight to the journal Zlatorog that very second! Because he and Boyan Penev are Zeus, the Thunderer of literary impertinence. Lyudmil goes to Lalyo and says: ‘Let’s go get rid of Boyan Penev!’ Lalyo didn’t ask too many questions, he just went along, and now Luydmil judges Lalyo from the position of Apollonius, of the muses, of the Dryads. Tombs he calls mounds, anchors—mudhooks, paddles he calls blades, fingers he calls thumbs. Not words, but passcodes for entering the kingdom of immortality. He prattles left and right about some international symbolism. You can’t find a more senile aesthetic, my dear man! I just don’t understand, when did this guy grow so hopelessly old? He’s become yet another dreadful deadbone in the corpse of literature.”
“Dreadful what?” asked Sheytanov.
“Deadbone!” the poet repeated. “From a dead bone—deadbone. I just came up with it. But it could be as though bacho Anton said it, couldn’t it? It’ll come in handy, I should remember it and write it down somewhere because I’m starting to forget things.”
[Friday, May 24, 2013, holiday; St. Ivan Rilski Clinic]
[This is of course, a well-known fact, but I’ll say it again: May twenty-fourth will always bring a beautiful rain, with raindrops like gems. Always. It always rains on May twenty-fourth. I don’t know what this means, but thank God it always happens this way.]
[Saturday, May 25, 2013]
[Monday, July 1, 2013]
[I’ve never known what to expect from a month that starts on a Monday. June came and went in a rainstorm, now July comes, cold.]
[Monday, July 1, 2013]
[Outside, they’re protesting again—beating their drums and blowing their whistles and horns and yelling: “Resignation!”]