[Sunday, November 17, 2013]
They unhooked the train car at the Belovo train station and unloaded all the prisoners onto the black, mud-covered square outside, where three bearded Macedonians already cursed impatiently. First Lieutenant Kutsarov told his men to unhook Sheytanov from the chains. (His men were still wearing their winter, hoopoe-like guard uniforms—it had been a frigid spring that year. The rain hadn’t let up all of May.) The Macedonians tied Sheytanov up using some disgusting rope, and Sheytanov could only throw Mariola a glance before they shoved him into the darkened vehicle.
Mariola Sirakova would stay with the other unfortunates at the train station. First they took them to a tavern where they beat up the men and raped the women. Mariola probably thought she was reliving the nightmare she went through in those carnal, blood-soaked basement rooms at the police station in Pleven. There was no way she could have known that this time the hell would end the same night: by morning they would all be dead. Hell was no longer a place; hell was time. Hell could go on for months, or it could end in mercy after only a few hours.
She had survived Pleven, but did not survive Belovo. Mariola was not yet even twenty-one. She was seventy-eight days short of her next birthday.
They brought the devastated bodies to the Gaitanovets region and quickly unloaded them into the hole they’d dug—another mass grave to hold yet more victims of that year, the year nineteen twenty-five.
Sheytanov might have only imagined what happened with Mariola—there was no way to know. They took him to the other side of the mountains, to Gorna Djumaya, uttering not a single word, until he opened his mouth to ask, “What are we doing now?” and they only responded: “Shut it!” His arrival in Gorna Djumaya was met by the same pathological murderers whose names had been on everyone’s lips that year, the year an undeclared, repulsive war pitted neighbor against neighbor: Sheytanov knew who they were. As soon as he laid eyes on them he thought, “This is it.” But he steeled himself and asked them not to play with fire.
“Me,” he said, “you don’t sentence. Me,” he said, “you either shoot or you let go.”
The group who informed him they’d be the ones to decide his fate—all those Vanchos, Ionkovs and Perovs—mhmmed bitterly and shut themselves in the other room to talk it over
[NB! Years later, one of them would say the following:
“Well, there was no other way! The Army League demanded Sheytanov’s head at any price!”
And that was that.]
and he remained alone with two of their goons. They weren’t the same ones who’d taken him up here, but they all looked alike—as though they were all begot by the same mother. They reeked like hell and their eyes were black with the opium they couldn’t do without. He knew their type—the type who killed without a second thought.
“They have no first thought to speak of,” he thought, and immediately vowed to remember the joke and share it with the poet when he saw him in the coming days. Geo Milev could surely use it in a poem or in one of the angry diatribes he published in the magazine.
Suddenly, a poem came to him. What kind of epoch is this, / Which drowns our souls in crimson and gold, / Which, when our hour strikes bare—conspires to send us to death, with fanfare . . .
He would give it to the poet for his next magazine—there was bound to be another magazine sometime! But he had no way of writing the poem down: he was all tied up.
So he began repeating it—once, a second time, a third, many times over, so that he wouldn’t forget it. What kind of epoch is this, / Which drowns our souls in crimson and gold, / Which, when our hour strikes bare—conspires to send us to death, with fanfare . . . / What kind of epoch is this, / Which drowns our souls in crimson and gold, / Which, when our hour strikes bare—conspires to send us to death, with fanfare . . . / What kind of epoch is this, / Which drowns our souls in crimson and gold, / Which, when our hour strikes bare—conspires to send us to death, with fanfare.
And that was that.