1

“FST.”

Mister Dancho freezes, cocks an ear, listens … decides his imagination is working overtime and goes back to tugging on his cuffs so that they protrude from the sleeves of his blazer.

“Fsssst.”

There is no mistaking it this time. Mister Dancho’s eyebrows dance as he takes in the lobby. The only one in sight is the old woman who checks coats in the winter and spends the summer keeping out from under foot so that the restaurant’s director won’t get it into his head to lay her off. Right now she sits tucked away in a nook behind the empty coatracks, staring with total absorption into a pocket mirror propped up on a ledge, carefully lining up the tweezers and pruning with short snapping motions hairs from her chin.

“Fsssssssssst.”

Mister Dancho wheels. The skirt of his blazer flares. “What in — “

The door marked “Sitters” opens a crack and a single heavily made-up eye peers out at him.

“You!” Dancho whispers, darting through the door and catching the woman inside in his arms. Wordlessly, they embrace.

After a while the woman sighs:

“These six weeks have been an eternity.”

“My dear Katya,” Mister Dancho murmurs, arranging his facial expression as if he were setting a table, “how I’ve waited for this moment.” He holds her at arm’s length and stares unblinkingly into her eyes. “There is no logic in this, you understand.” A thought strikes him. “Where is your husband?”

“Not to worry. The Minister is off to Moscow — something to do with Czechoslovakia. He won’t be back till tomorrow, maybe even Tuesday.” She looks up at him with anxious, moist eyes.

Mister Dancho is obviously relieved. “On the other hand,” he goes on, “we can spend a few stolen hours together. This is no small thing, because there is much emotion between us.” He breaths heavily, as if breathing is an effort. Then he says gravely:

“I stand ready to try, on the condition that either one of us has the right to call it quits if the” — he searches for a delicate word — “liaison” — and watches carefully to see what effect it will have on her— “produces more pain than pleasure.”

She winces at the word “liaison” (Dancho, who is not without experience in such matters, has the impression she feels she ought to), then leans against him and breaths into his ear:

“I’ll risk everything.”

“My darling,” Mister Dancho exults. He draws her palm to his lips, which are as soft as a child’s. “I’ll be at Club Balkan later …”he implores, and she seals the rendezvous with a smile. Before it fades, he has slipped out of the ladies’ room.

For Mr. Dancho, entrances and exits are the parentheses between which he invents himself, and so he gives them as much attention off stage as on. Pausing just outside the threshold of the dining room, he pats his lips with a monogrammed handkerchief, tucks it into his breast pocket so that the tip spills out haphazardly, adjusts his cuffs again, rearranges his facial expression and plunges through the curtain into the waves of sound the way a fish returns to water — a quick splash and he is off and running as if he has never been away.

“Dobr vecr, Mister Dancho! Kak ste?”

“Salut, Dancho — how was London, England?”

“Our conquering Dancho returns! But you must take a drink with us.”

“Welcome back, Mister Dancho! Did you convert the Queen to Communism?”

Shaking hands left and right, pecking with his child’s lips at rouged cheeks angled up to him, Mister Dancho drifts from table to table in crosscurrents of conversation. Behind him, waiters in wrinkled black jackets race into and out of the steam-filled kitchen through a swinging door that squeals on its hinges like a cornered cat. At one booth, six actors are arguing over a cure for migraines. They have divided into two camps, the herbalists and the acupuncturists, and appear ready to go to war over the point. Nearby, two adjacent dinner parties are joining forces, the men scraping tables and chairs together while the women hold high the drinks as if they are afraid of mice or flooding. The waiter for the station looks on sullenly, not lifting a finger to help, concerned only with how he will sort the checks. A woman who is table-hopping backs into Mister Dancho, turns, brightens and plants a wet kiss on his lips. Raising her eyebrows, she smiles and moves on, sure that Dancho’s eyes will follow her. Knowing she is sure, he looks away, his fingers scraping the excess wetness from his lips.

A darkly handsome young actor grabs Dancho’s arm as he passes. His name is Rodzianko, and he is the star of an immensely popular television series in which Bulgarian intelligence agents foil the American CIA every Monday between 8:00 and 9:00 P.M. (In the most recent episode, Rodzianko was abducted to Greece. “How many counterespionage operatives in Bulgaria?” the CIA interrogator demanded. “Eight million — our entire population!” Rodzianko replied arrogantly.)

“Just the man I’ve been looking for,” Rodzianko insists now. He pulls Dancho’s head toward him and, lowering his voice to a stage whisper, gives him a hot tip on the Paris stock market.

“My dear fellow,” Dancho bellows over the din, “how can I show my appreciation? I’ll cable my broker first thing in the morning.”

Rodzianko looks at Mister Dancho in astonishment. “You’ll cable your broker? Just like that?”

“I’ll use a code, naturally,” Mister Dancho shoots back, inventing himself as he goes along. “I’ll tell him: ‘Don’t buy such and such.’ He’ll understand.”

Mister Dancho sidesteps a waiter hurtling across the room with half a dozen plates of kebapeta balanced on an arm, then stops to chat with a middle-aged portrait artist who has recently divorced his wife and married his mistress, who happens to be the granddaughter of an alternate member of the Presidium.

“Business is booming,” yells the artist, whose name is Punch. He is very drunk. “Never had it s’good. I’m into landscapes nowadays, you know. Day doesn’t go by but I get a commission from one of those neopreposterous tourist traps on the Black Sea.”

“I thought they went in for portraits,” Mister Dancho ventures.

“Portraits! Portraits have to be changed every time someone in the superstructure sneezes. But a good landscape, Christ, you can get ten or fifteen years’ wear out of a good landscape.” The artist swivels in his seat and thumps the back of a man at the table behind him. “Did you catch that? Mister Dancho here thinks I could give ‘em portraits. That’za laugh!”

Dancho leans closer to the painter. “Would you do a portrait for me?”

The painter sees he is serious. “Sure, why not. Who you have in mind?”

“Alexander Dubek.”

“Alex — ” the painter roars with laughter.

At the far end of the table, directly opposite the portrait painter, sits a beautiful television actress with a scrubbed Slavic face — full pink cheeks and large brown eyes. Rumor has it that she is the illegitimate daughter of the Soviet marshal who led the Russian armies that “liberated” Bulgaria in the closing days of the Great Patriotic War. Mister Dancho looks the television actress in the eyes and she stares back, a belligerent smile forming on her lips.

“Give us a trick,” Dancho’s artist friend calls.

Never lifting his eyes from the actress’s face, Dancho strides over to her and dips two fingers into her low-cut bodice. Someone at the table gasps. The actress doesn’t bat an eyelash, but the man sitting next to her starts up angrily. An older man next to him puts a restraining hand on his elbow and whispers something and he sinks back — perhaps a shade too eagerly, Dancho judges. From between his fingers Mister Dancho begins to extract lengths of silk. With a flourish, he shakes the fabric loose and holds it up for everyone to see.

It is made up of small Czechoslovak flags sewn end to end.

An uneasy murmur goes round the table as Mister Dancho laughingly beats a retreat.

“It’s all good fun, friends,” the former portrait painter, suddenly sober, assures everyone. But a thin man with a Party pin in his lapel says quietly:

“Bastard — someday one of them will go too far.”

The old waiter Stuka approaches Mister Dancho. There is a suggestion of a shuffle to his walk, an almost imperceptible hunch to his shoulders, a hint of vagueness to his speech. Stuka, who can still spend eight hours a day on his feet thanks to the lace-up high shoes with built-in arches that Mister Dancho once brought him from West Germany, bows and points toward the thick red curtain that divides the private room from the main dining room of the restaurant, which is called Krimm.

“They are all here, all except the Dwarf and the one you call the Rabbit. And Valentine, who is off singing in Italy.”

Mister Dancho reaches into Stuka’s breast pocket and produces a thick wad of American dollar bills, a currency it is illegal to possess.

“Ha! You devil, Stuka,” Mister Dancho whispers, as if excited by the find, “hoarding hard currency again!”

Dancho smiles warmly and Stuka, shaking his head happily, reaches into his own breast pocket to see if Dancho has left any of the bills behind. As usual, he has. Stuka starts to protest, but Dancho motions him to remain silent and parts the curtain to peek into the private dining room.

Nothing has changed. (“Nothing ever changes,” the Flag Holder is fond of saying, “except our point of view.”) The table is cluttered with overflowing ashtrays, abandoned dinner plates and half-empty bottles of mineral water and red wine from Melnik, a small town near the Greek border that cultivates vines imported from Bordeaux. A single glass of cognac, full to the brim, rests — as always, untouched — before the Flag Holder.

In theory, the room is open to the public. In practice, only a handful of people would have the nerve to use it without an invitation from one or another member of the “October Circle” — an informal group that takes its name from its only female member, Octobrina Dimitrova, who was born on the October day the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace and named Octobrina to honor the revolution. The four people who are in the room now, sitting in straightbacked chairs beneath blown-up photographs of themselves, are all charter members. For them the room is a home away from home. Small, windowless, it is dominated by a heavy wooden table and a massive sideboard (“A period piece,” the Flag Holder calls it, “Stalin Gothic!”) in which the restaurant’s accounts are stored.

Looking through the peephole he has created in the curtain, Mister Dancho cannot make out who is speaking. But he knows from the way everyone hangs on his words that Popov must be reading his list.

“One plastic contraceptive coil, manufactured in France by the look of it. One Communist Party card, undated but unlaminated, which indicates it is fairly old, in the name of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Dreschkova. Do you recognize the name, Lev? She was the wife of the poet Dreschko, who hanged himself when they confiscated his manuscripts.” Popov lets his breath whistle softly through his teeth, a sign that he is rummaging in his brain for a misplaced detail. “Sssssssss. There was a Dreschko who fought in Spain with you, wasn’t there, Lev? I ask myself if he was any relation?”

“The Dwarf knew him too — he was in the circus before the war,” the Flag Holder replies thoughtfully. “I seem to recall he had a younger brother who wrote poetry.”

“Must be the same family,” Popov guesses. “Whatever happened to him?”

“He worked with Georgi Dimitrov in Moscow for a time, then he just disappeared. Dimitrov once told me he made discreet inquiries, but he never received an answer. From this Dimitrov assumed that Dreschko died in Siberia.”

Popov stares, with unfocused eyes, at the table. Then he snaps his head. “Let me see, where was I? Sssssssss. Ah, one electrical bill in an unopened envelope, addressed to ‘Resident, eighty-four Stalin Boulevard, Sofia,’ postmarked eight January nineteen fifty-four, with the words ‘Deceased’ and ‘Left no forwarding address’ written across the face of the envelope. One plastic reproduction of our statue to the unknown soldier, with the gold paint peeling away; I wrote a poem once — is it possible you remember it, Octobrina? — about a man who tells the authorities he knows the name, rank and serial number of the unknown soldier.”

Smiling inquisitively, Octobrina Dimitrova shakes her head no, and the Flag Holder asks:

“And?”

Popov looks puzzled. “And what?”

“The man who knows the name, rank and serial number of the unknown soldier,” the Flag Holder replies politely. “What happens to him?”

Popov’s throat rattles gleefully. “Why, he’s shot for trying to deprive the state of its heroes, and buried in an unmarked grave, that’s what happens to him. A few decades later, some Reformers came along and put a marker on the grave announcing the presence, in the earth below, of the remains of the unknown prisoner!” Popov looks down at his ledger. “Where was I? Sssssssss. Ah, yes, one broken violin with a single string on it.” Popov’s eyes wander off to one side, trying to recall the details of another story. “There was a well-known Russian violinist in the thirties who only gave concerts in towns without newspapers. It was at the height of the purges and he was afraid a review would draw attention to him at a time when it was dangerous to draw attention to oneself. One day a critic from Pravda happened to hear him play and wrote a rave review. When the violinist heard he had a review in Pravda, he dropped dead on the spot. Heart attack. They swear it’s true. Does it ring a bell, Valentine?”

“Valentine’s not here tonight,” Octobrina reminds him gently.

“Ah, yes, so you said, so you said. No matter. Where was I? Sssssssss. Ah, here” —Popov taps his ledger excitedly — “here’s an exceptionally interesting item. One …”

With four stubby fingers wedged between his high starched collar and the ever-present red welt on his bony neck, Atanas Popov works his way down the list, which is written, as always, in a pocket ledger in a tiny, meticulous handwriting. His breath whistling through his teeth like a slow leak in an inner tube (“Sssssssss”), his brow furrowed and his good eye bulging behind the thick pince-nez, he struggles to read each entry. Occasionally his fingers abandon their post under the collar to edge the pince-nez down to the tip of the misshapen nose (it was given considerable attention by several interrogators before his “rehabilitation”) where it acts as a magnifying glass. When he finally makes sense of the handwriting, Popov’s small, agile head bobs excitedly — “Ah, yes, that’s it” — and he plunges on.

Popov is half-deaf and half-mad, though at any given moment nobody can say which dignity (the Flag Holder insists on equating insanity with “dignity” rather than “indignity”) has the upper hand: people accuse him of being insane when he has merely turned down his hearing aid (Swiss manufacture, a gift from Mister Dan-cho); the all-union psychiatrist who examined him after he cast the only dissenting vote at an important Party meeting neglected to commit him because he thought he was merely hard of hearing. And so Popov remains at large, shoring up against his ruin, in the strident tones usually used by people who have trouble hearing themselves, his daily heap of broken images.

“… One copy of the German edition of Das Kapital; Tacho here is too young to know this, but the first country in the world to translate Papa Marx was Mother Russia. Ha! Translations are the kiss of death. They say poetry is what’s lost in translation That’s what they say. As for me, I’ve been published in translation only. Which is probably why the handful of people in the West who have an opinion of me have a low opinion of me. Where was I? Sssssssss. Ah, yes. One packet of Rumanian headache suppositories, empty, marked ‘Not to be used after January 10, 1937/ That’s a coincidence. Mandelstam wrote a poem entitled ‘January 10, 1934.’ Hmmmmm. One fragment from an icon, dating — judging from the absence of any halo over the head of the infant Jesus — from the Second Bulgarian Kingdom; you have only to glance at an icon to realize that iconoclasm is the only reasonable way of life. Ha! What do you say to that, Lev? Ah, here’s my last but not least. One carton of bankbooks listing, in an anal handwriting common to the English upper classes, deposits and withdrawals for nineteen twenty-nine from the Balkan branch of Barclays. Sssssssss.”

Popov looks up from his ledger in time to see Mister Dancho thrust aside the curtain (another entrance!) and sweep into the room.

“Friends, Romans, comrades — “ he cries, flinging his arms wide as if he intends to embrace everybody at once.

“I don’t believe it!”

“Is it you, Mister Dancho?” exclaims Popov, his good eye bulging behind his pince-nez.

“We didn’t expect you until — “

“Dear Dancho, a thousand times welcome!”

One by one, with great warmth, Mister Dancho embraces his friends. Then, settling his bulk into a vacant seat beneath a blown-up photograph of himself as a young man taking a curtain call on some long-forgotten stage, he points a playful finger at the Racer.

“Tacho, dear boy, you have changed — for the worse, bien entendu. You never used to button the top button of your shirt. If you do that, you must wear a tie like the Flag Holder here. What is it? Trying to look like the perfect proletariat? Or perhaps it is just age — ”

Popov interrupts in accented English:

“He grows old, he grows old, he shall wear the bottoms of his trousers rolled. Sssssssss.” He reaches into his side pocket, turns down his hearing aid and sits back with a distant smile on his lips to watch the mouths move.

“Tell us about London, England,” demands the Flag Holder, whose name is Lev Mendeleyev.

“And be sure to give us the unexpurgated version,” urges the Racer, whose name is Tacho Abadzhiev.

“Dear Dancho, don’t mince words with me,” Octobrina Dimitrova teases. “Tell us of your conquests.”

“There was a German girl,” Mister Dancho concedes. “ Til do anything,’ she whispered, so I tried everything I’d ever tried. ‘I mean absolutely anything, anything at all,’ she panted, so I tried everything I’d ever read about. ‘Hey, I’m serious, really, anything under the sun,’ she moaned, so I dipped into my imagination and invented a few things. She licked her lips. ‘Listen,’ she begged, ‘there’s nothing I won’t do, absolutely nothing.’ “

“What did you do then?” the Racer demands impatiently.

“Why, I packed away my magic wand and beat a retreat, naturally. What else could I do?”

Mister Dancho joins his friends in laughter; he has an endearing way of laughing at his own stories. He is beginning to get into the spirit of things, rocking back and forth and gesturing extravagantly as he talks. There was another girl, what the British call a bird. I rented a Daimler and took her to dinner at an old inn on an island in the Thames. There were scratches on the bar from the spurs of the Crusaders. We drank from pewter mugs and ate dinner in a corner of the garden next to a bed of forget-me-nots. Can you visualize it? At one point the bird looks up at the sky, a breathless expanse of stars, and says: ‘Looks just like a bloomin planetarium:” Shaking his head with exaggerated sadness, Mister Dancho repeats the line. “ Looks like the planetarium!’ “

“Dear Dancho,” sighs Octobrina, “for you sex is mere recreation, something you do to keep your weight under control. Will you ever settle down and get married again?”

Mister Dancho and the Racer ooh and aah at the suggestion, and Popov, tuning into the conversation, says:

“You think wives are bad. Widows are worse. Remember what Stalin said about Krupskaya. ‘We’ll have to appoint another widow for Lenin’ is what he said. Ha! That’s humorous. Appoint another widow!” Popov’s face suddenly tenses. “It was the only joke Stalin ever made. Sssssssss.” Leaning back, he turns down his battery and removes himself from the conversation.

“I’ve had my fill of living with women,’’ Mister Dancho announces jovially, but everyone understands he is speaking out of bitterness. “Living with a woman is the process of peeling away masks. When you start out, you pee in private so as not to spoil your image. Before very long you discover you are peeing with the door open, scratching your arse, farting freely.” Mister Dancho summons a memory. “One day I peeled away a mask too many. And so she peeled away another one of her masks — that particular one was undying affection — and left me.”

Octobrina smiles. “If you peel away enough masks you get to the real you.”

But the Flag Holder shakes his head. “There is always another mask underneath. We are constructed like onions — all layers, no core.”

“Seriously, though, Dancho,” Octobrina implores, “what’s London, England, like — what’s it really like, I mean?”

Mister Dancho picks absently at a cuticle. “My dear Octobrina, you will know everything you want to know about London, England — indeed, about the English — when I tell you that in Harrods, which resembles our ZUM in the sense that a diamond resembles cut glass, you will find a sign that reads in its entirety: ‘Please try not to smoke.’ “

“Oh, that’s lovely,” marvels Octobrina. “ ‘Try not to smoke!’ “

“I attempted to purchase the sign in question for our friend here” — Dancho indicates the Flag Holder, who is puffing away like a chimney — “but they apologized profusely and said it was most unfortunately not for sale. The salesman — who resembles our sales clerks in the sense that a Maserati resembles a Moskovich — the salesman actually offered to telephone the sign maker to see if some accommodation could be worked out. But as I was leaving shortly, I decided to take home the story in place of the sign.”

They banter back and forth, skirting the subject foremost on their minds almost as if they are afraid to put a curse on it by talking about it. The silences grow longer and more awkward. Looks are exchanged. Finally Mister Dancho cannot stand it any longer. “You’ve followed what’s happening?” he asks guardedly.

“Sometimes,” the Racer says carefully, “I listen to the news and pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.”

“Who among us would have reasoned that such a thing was possible?” Popov demands, turning up his hearing aid.

“It is a new beginning,” Mister Dancho agrees excitedly. “If the experiment is successful, it will spread.”

“The wind will carry such ideas like seeds,” exults Popov.

“It’s true,” the Racer laughs. “It could happen here.”

“The Flag Holder will be our Dubek,” exclaims Mister Dancho. He spills wine into a glass and leaps to his feet.

“To the Dubeks,” he cries, his glass thrust high, “theirs and ours.”

“The Dubeks,” the Racer joins him in a toast.

“The Dubeks,” Popov echoes.

The Flag Holder rises slowly. “To friend Dubek,” he says softly, holding aloft his glass of mineral water.

They all turn toward Octobrina, who remains seated. “You’re all fools,” she sneers. “I don’t permit myself the luxury of hope.”

“What you don’t permit,” Mister Dancho chides gently, “is the luxury of admitting you hope.”

“Come on, Octobrina,” the Racer coaxes.

With a snort Octobrina climbs to her feet. “To Alexander Dubek,” she toasts grudgingly, “the plastic surgeon who is trying to put a human face on Socialism.” And she mutters under her breath:

“He will be the death of us all.”

Solemnly, they drink his health and settle into their seats again. The Flag Holder punches a Rodopi between his lips. As he fumbles for his lighter, Mister Dancho holds out his empty hand and, with a twist of the wrist, produces a flaming match.

“Let us hope,” Octobrina says sourly, “that friend Dubek doesn’t wind up as a chapter in Lev’s book.” She is referring to the Flag Holder’s work in progress (it has been in progress for the better part of a decade), a history of nonpersons in the Communist movement.

The Flag Holder’s face twists into a smile. “Let us hope,” he repeats.

“How is it going, your book?” Dancho inquires.

The Flag Holder pulls on his cigarette reflectively. He is wearing an old corduroy jacket and a hand-knitted tie (imported: a gift from Mister Dancho) knotted carelessly, with the narrow end hanging lower than the wide end. The bottom button of his shirt, the one just above his belt, is open, revealing the skin of someone who never exposes himself to the sun. The cuffs of his shirt and his collar are frayed. His hair, the color of sidewalk, is cropped close to the scalp, making him appear younger and more vigorous than he is.

The Flag Holder operates from under a carefully cultivated turtle’s shell of formality, to which the only threat (as he sees it) is spontaneity. His first reaction to anything is usually a reflective silence. (When he is moody, which is often nowadays, the silence can be a prelude to long periods of introspection.) When finally he joins a conversation, he speaks the way he writes: selecting his words cautiously, the way you select footfalls in a newly seeded garden. He never raises his voice and seldom gestures; he believes that words should carry an impact based on their precise meaning and not on the emphasis you give them. With people he doesn’t know well, he is meticulous about keeping his distance, which he feels is essential to human intercourse. Even his closest friends are kept at arm’s length. There are only four people in the world he addresses with the familiar “thou” —his son, Georgi, the Racer, Mister Dancho and the Rabbit, Elisabeta Antonova, who is his mistress.

In overall physical appearance, there is something “hewn” about him despite his exceptional height; Octobrina came closest to putting her finger on it when she likened him to a “knife-sharpened pencil.” Her description made the rounds, and eventually turned up in one of the public school biographies that describe the Flag Holder’s exploits during the war.

The Flag Holder is painfully self-conscious about his hands, which he keeps out of sight whenever he can. The few who are able to get a look at them see immediately what is wrong. He has no fingernails.

“As a matter of fact,” the Flag Holder replies, “I discovered a new nonperson just the other day. Does the name Joseph Konstantinovich Livshitz ring a bell? He won a Stalin prize in the late forties for his novels about the war. A translation of one of them appeared in England, and some damn fool made the mistake of sending him the money it earned. Livshitz was arrested as an enemy agent and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. His Stalin prize was revoked. His books disappeared from the library shelves. His name was removed from The Great Encyclopedia. His birth certificate and later his death certificate vanished. People who had known him were carted off to prison camps. He ceased to exist.”

“Where did you find him?” Octobrina inquires, as if Livshitz is a warm body about to be presented in evidence.

“In the archives at the Centre. It seems that at one point during the war Livshitz hid out with his family on a farm. He drummed it into their heads never to let on that they were Jewish. One day a Fascist sympathizer stopped by for lunch. He asked Livshitz’s little girl where she wanted to live when she grew up. Palestine, she said. Everyone held their breaths. The Fascist asked why Palestine? The little girl said because Jesus was born there.”

Stuka shuffles into the room with a pot of tea and a tray full of cups and saucers. As he parts the curtain to enter, the din from the restaurant intrudes, and fades again as the curtain falls back into place. Octobrina pours. Mister Dancho takes a jar of confiture from the sideboard and mixes a spoonful into his tea. The others use lump sugar — oversized cubes wrapped in cheap paper with the name of a tourist hotel on the Black Sea printed on it. The Flag Holder drinks his tea Russian style, straining it through a lump held in his mouth.

“Lev and his nonpersons,” snorts Octobrina, fussily flicking ashes from her black lace shawl (Spanish: a gift from Dancho) with the back of her hand. “It’s more than flesh and blood can stand.” Octobrina is old before her time and bone dry and brittle like a fallen leaf or a fallen angel. When it comes to people or politics, she is a kettle at perpetual boil: the water sizzling inside, the tin cover rattling overhead. When it comes to material things, she exhibits a carefully nurtured ineptitude: she is awkward when ordering in restaurants, graceless when introducing people, forgetful about paying bills. When she pays for something out of pocket, she cups her hands and holds out whatever coins she finds in her purse. (Dancho occasionally tests her by taking a few coins too many, but if she is keeping count, she never lets on.) She smokes American filter cigarettes through a long ivory holder, gripping the holder between her thumb and third finger and barely putting it in her mouth. In the winter she smells of moth balls, in the summer of lilacs. She smells of lilacs now.

“Dear Lev, you permit that book into circulation and they’ll make a nonperson out of you.”

“They’ll have their work cut out for them,” the Racer retorts lightly.

“But no,” cries Octobrina, stabbing the air furiously with her holder, “you don’t understand them, you don’t understand them at all. Push them too far and they are capable of anything.”

Mister Dancho nods toward the blown-up photograph of the Flag Holder, which shows him with a flag pole thrust high leading a partisan unit into Sofia in 1944. “Be reasonable, Octobrina, they can’t touch him and you know it.”

“Our pictures,” agrees the Racer, “are our protection.”

“Not Octobrina’s,” notes the Flag Holder. “At least not the ones she is painting these days.”

“Out on another artistic limb?” chides Mister Dancho, and he shakes his finger at her as if he were scolding a schoolgirl for trespasses against the curriculum. “What are you up to now?”

Octobrina takes a series of quick puffs on her holder and peers mischievously at Mister Dancho, her head cocked to one side so that she presents him with a three-quarter profile; as a young girl of twelve she had been introduced to Mayakovsky, who told her she had a beautiful profile, and so she is forever presenting it to people. “I’m not up to anything,” she declares in a tone of voice that makes it clear she is up to something. “I’ve started a new phase in my artistic cycle. I’m experimenting with still lifes.”

“You mean apples and oranges and grapes!” Mister Dancho rolls his eyes in mock horror.

“You don’t understand, you don’t understand at all. I’m working with still lifes of animate objects. My still lifes are life abstracted down to its motionless essence. On my canvases, things exist not with respect to their movement, but only in the contrast between their stillness and their potential for movement. Do you see it? I’m trying to capture the tension generated by the dialectical contradiction between the word ‘still’ and the word ‘life.’ “

“I smell political comment,” declares Mister Dancho, flaring his nostrils and sniffing the air.

“You smell correctly,” observes the Racer.

“You smell politics everywhere,” Octobrina protests, but she is secretly pleased. “If man is a political animal — “

“Does anyone doubt it?” the Racer puts in.

“ — then for me, his significance lies in the contrast between his potential for political action and his political inactivity.”

“She means our potential for political action and our political inactivity,” the Racer sums up.

“They’ll never let you exhibit,” Mister Dancho tells her flatly. “They’ll see through your still lifes in a minute.”

Octobrina remains unfazed. “What makes you think I want to exhibit? As a matter of fact, I’m working in white, and a painter who works in white has to reckon on what time will do to the color — tone it down, mellow it, yellow it. I have no intention of showing my whites until they’re at least five years old. Perhaps five years from now white still lifes will be just what our constipated cultural counselors are looking for. Who can say what history has in store for us?”

“History,” comments the Flag Holder, the Rodopi bobbing on his lower lip, “is a sponge that soaks up events as if they were spilt milk.”

“I see you haven’t lost your talent for coining phrases that stop conversation,” groans Dancho, suddenly downcast. He smiles weakly. “Don’t mind me. It’s the postpartums. Happens every time I get where I’m going.”

Octobrina tugs at his sleeve. “Dear Dancho, you are a moody soul. You are protected by layers of appropriate emotion which you unfold and use and crumple and toss away as if they are disposable paper handkerchiefs.”

“Cheer up,” the Racer cries. “I’ll tell you about Octobrina’s escapade at the Artists’ Union.”

Octobrina gleefully supplies the details. “Some hyena raised the criticism that too much religious hocus-pocus was creeping onto our canvases under the guise of historical. themes. I simply pointed out that the first thing that Lenin did upon taking power was to make the sign of the cross. And for good measure, I told them that Georgi Dimitrov died with his mother’s crucifix in his hands.” She laughs happily. “The uproar would have warmed the cockles of your heart, dear Dancho.”

“How do you know such things?” Mister Dancho marvels.

“I don’t — I make them up!”

“Wait, there’s more,” the Racer insists. “The Dwarf got into hot water for asking his circus comrades to adopt a resolution calling on all fraternal Communist parties to respect the independence and integrity of other parties in the Communist family.”

“The Dwarf is a lovely person,” the Flag Holder says.

“Needless to say,” the Racer continues, “his motion was not seconded, much less voted on. As for me, the All-Union Sports’ Directorate just circulated another petition against Solzhenitsyn. I was the only member who didn’t sign on the dotted line.”

“Tell what happened,” Octobrina demands, clapping her hands together happily.

Tacho smiles sheepishly. “The Chairman, who is a pompous ass, tried to embarrass me into signing by asking me to explain myself at a public meeting.”

“So you explained yourself,” laughs Mister Dancho.

“So I explained myself,” Tacho admits. “I told them that since Solzhenitsyn’s writing is banned in Bulgaria, I have never had the opportunity to read him, and since I have never read him, I couldn’t very well condemn him.”

“And what did he say to that, your chairman?” Dancho inquires.

“He didn’t say anything,” the Racer concedes, “but I had the impression he was filing something away in his mind.”

“Tell about the circular, Lev — “ Octobrina prompts.

There is a chorus of encouragement. “Out with it,” orders Dancho.

“It came about this way,” says the Flag Holder, drawn almost against his will into the game. He pauses to light a Rodopi from the butt of an old one. The first deep puff makes him cough; he sips mineral water to set it straight. “I received a circular for senior Party people ordering recipients to keep an eye peeled for evidence of mental instability on the part of other senior Party people.”

“Don’t tell me you — “ Dancho’s arms open wide.

“I submitted a dossier on each of the members of the Presidium, citing various actions or comments attributed to them and analyzing the mental condition of which this was a symptom.”

“You go too far,” Octobrina warns.

“My poor efforts pale beside your leaps of imagination,” Mister Dancho declares.

“And what poor efforts do you speak of?” the Racer wants to know.

Mister Dancho tugs modestly at his cuffs and tells them how he dipped into the bodice of the television actress “to pull out — “

“American dollars,” guesses the Racer.

“Too obvious,” cries Octobrina. “Something more devious. Ah, a samidzat written on toilet paper— “

“A Swiss bankbook,” ventures the Flag Holder.

Mister Dancho cannot contain himself. “Czech flags sewn end to end!”

“Oh, dear Dancho, how could you?” sighs Octobrina. “And in front of everyone.”

“In London, England,” Dancho continues, “someone at an embassy reception noticed that the Soviet Ambassador and I had small pins in our lapels and asked if we belonged to the same organization. The Ambassador showed his. It was a small likeness of Lenin. I showed mine. It was a small portrait of — “

“Stalin,” Octobrina tries.

“Mao?” guesses the Racer.

“Me!” explodes Mister Dancho, and he thrusts his lapel forward with his thumb so that everyone can witness his audacity.

Tapping his knife against an empty wine glass, Tacho calls the meeting to order and says formally:

“I propose we award our friend here the golden sickle of achievement.”

Octobrina nods happily. The Flag Holder looks on the way an adult watches children at play — trying to keep his distance, but aching to join the fun.

“How do you know he’s not exaggerating,” scoffs the Rabbit, pushing through the curtain into the room. She goes straight to Mister Dancho and plants matter-of-fact kisses on both his cheeks. “Stuka told me you were back.”

She kisses Octobrina and squeezes her hand, and then hugs Popov and the Racer before slipping into the seat next to the Flag Holder, whom she greets by resting her hand lightly on his thigh. He shifts in his chair; physical intimacy is not something he is comfortable with.

“I’m not exaggerating, little Rabbit,” Mister Dancho protests, but Elisabeta waves away (he comment. “The whole business is immature;, if you ask me,” she frowns. “Grown men playing with” — she looks at the Flag Holder — “fire.”

“How can you sit there and say that?” Mister Dane ho retorts belligerently, and Lev tries to smooth things over:

“If we are immature, Elisabeta, more power to us.”

“Immaturity,” snaps Octobrina, parroting the Flag Holder’s style of speech, “can be seen as the refusal to pocket those portions of the personality which rub society the wrong way.”

“Just so,” agrees Lev, annoyed.

“Have it your own way,” Elisabeta yields grudgingly, “but I still say you’re playing with fire. This simply isn’t the moment …” She shrugs and lets it drop.

Octobrina asks Elisabeta if she has eaten.

“Someone fetched sandwiches to the ministry,” the Rabbit tells her.

“What news?” asks the Racer.

Popov turns up his hearing aid. Octobrina leans forward in her seat. The Flag Holder stops smoking.

Elisabeta speaks quietly. “It doesn’t look good. The Boss was summoned to Moscow this morning — “

“The Minister went with him,” Mister Dancho interjects.

“How do you know that?” Elisabeta fires at him in astonishment. “You only just arrived.”

“I heard it,” Dancho replies evasively. “W’hat’s the difference where?”

The Racer and the Flag Holder are staring at each other grimly. “Maybe it’s consultations,” the Racer suggests, but Elisabeta shakes her head:

“They are not in the habit of consulting us; they inform us. Besides, some of our army people went along too. No, no. Something’s definitely up.” She fiddles with an earring. “There is a rumor making the rounds that the Soviet Politburo’s already voted seven to four to use force, with Kosygin, Suslov, Podgorny and Voronov on the dove side.”

Elisabeta plucks an orange from the bowl in the middle of the table and begins peeling it. Her long, thin fingers work quickly, stripping back petals of skin, then tucking the ends under so that the final product looks like the bud of a large orange flower. She raises her eyes and silently offers the open orange to Mendeleyev — the offer is intended, and taken, as an expression of intimacy — but he shakes his head imperceptibly, and so she attacks it herself.

After a while the Racer asks:

“Is there more?”

The Rabbit nods as she swallows a section of orange. “We put together a sheet of excerpts from Pravda for internal circulation. Believe it or not, they’re comparing the situation to Hungary in fifty-six.”

“They’re priming the pump,” concludes Octobrina. “I warned you not to get your hopes up.”

“It’s all a bluff,” asserts Mister Dancho. “Don’t you see that? In the end, Czechoslovakia isn’t that important to them.”

“It’s important to us,” observes Octobrina, “and that makes it important to them.”

“The wind will carry such ideas like seeds,” declares Popov, who is having difficulty following the conversation.

“It’s important,” the Flag Holder insists. The cigarette bobbing on his lower lip is burning dangerously near the skin, but he doesn’t appear to notice it. “What’s happening now has nothing to do with Hungary. That was a crisis of Stalinism. This is a crisis of Leninism — the first in the history of the Movement. In the end, Dubek and his Czech comrades are challenging three things that Lenin superimposed on classical Marxism: democratic centralism, the monopoly of power of the Communist Party and the ideological dogmatism with which that power is exercised.”

Lev suddenly becomes aware of the cigarette and plucks it from his mouth. “If the Czechs succeed, they will have redefined Communism — they will have created something called Socialist Humanism.” He hesitates, then continues almost in a whisper. “I share Octobrina’s fears about hope. After all these years — “

“Why torture ourselves?” Octobrina cries.

“Why torture ourselves?” the Flag Holder repeats. “And yet … and yet …”

There is a long silence.

“There’s another side to consider,” Octobrina says finally. “Changes like the ones Dubek is proposing tend to be open-ended. What if our Russian friends are right? What if Dubek doesn’t stop at some vague finish line called Socialist Humanism? What if he reforms himself right out of the bloc?”

“ ‘The worst workers’ party,’ “ Popov quotes, “ ‘is better than none.’ “

“Marx?” guesses Octobrina.

“Engels?” guesses the Racer.

“Not at all,” snaps Mister Dancho. “It’s Lenin.”

Popov shakes his head and supplies the source. “Rosa Luxemburg,” he says, delighted to have stumped them. “Sssssssss.”

“What if it does lead to a restoration of capitalism?” Octobrina insists. ‘What if?”

“No adventure is without risks,” the Flag Holder tells her.

“Risks are what the Russians won’t take,” Octobrina bursts out.

“Why are you all so blind? They’ll crush the Czechs under their heels.”

“It’s not that simple,” the Flag Holder observes. “If they use force, they’ll alienate every Communist in the world. Think how the French or the Italian Communists would respond to an invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Russians will be totally isolated.”

“The Russians won’t dare to use force,” Mister Dancho assures Octobrina, “for fear the Czechs will fight.”

Octobrina throws up her hands in frustration. “Oh, they’ll fight all right — to the last drop of ink!”

“The Czechs don’t have to fight,” the Racer points out. “They only have to convince the Russians they intend to fight. Tito did that in forty-eight and it kept the Russians out.”

“Tito convinced the Russians because he was ready to fight,” Octobrina reminds him.

“But surely the Americans will intervene, or threaten to intervene, which will amount to the same thing,” the Racer suggests. “The Americans have democratic traditions — “

“No, no, never,” Octobrina retorts.

“Octobrina is right about the Americans,” the Flag Holder confesses. ‘We must understand that, in some respects, Czechoslovakia is more of a threat to America than Russia ever was. Up to now, the world has had to choose between Stalinism and Capitalism, and the Americans have had no real competition. But imagine if the world had a third choice — Marxist Humanism! No, no, the Americans are dead set against Dubek.”

“Everybody says that Capitalism and Communism are moving toward each other,” the Racer observes. “In a sense, this confirms it.”

“With our luck,” Dancho says, “they’ll pass each other and keep going, leaving us with two extremes.”

Octobrina sighs and follows her own trend of thoughts:

“Nothing moves us greatly, that’s the heart of the problem. We pay textbook attention to our lives. We treat our bowel-moving and our lovemaking as if they were punctuation. We embrace our children with parentheses. We package whatever bits and pieces of self-knowledge we come by, as I’m doing now, in corrugated metaphors.”

“We hover like falcons,” the Flag Holder says quietly, staring into the stillness of his untouched cognac, “motionless on political currents, facing into the stream but not progressing against it; making slight adjustments in the angle of a wing; above all comfortable; above all apathetic.” He looks up. “Every now and then we narrow our beady eyes and swoop down, spittle streaking from our beaks, for a juicy intellectual kill.”

“What an image,” Octobrina cries excitedly. “That would make an absolutely wonderful still life.”

“Well, I think it’s not quite fair,” Mister Dancho starts to say, but Popov, in a world of his own, interrupts:

“We cleanse our souls the way we clean our windows,” he recites, articulating each word as if he is composing, “with the curtains already hanging on them.” His voice peters out and he looks around and smiles foolishly.

“Who said that?” Octobrina inquires.

“I wasn’t quoting anybody. I said that.”

“Oh, Atanas, it was very lovely,” Octobrina tells him.

“We cleanse our souls,” Popov begins again. “Sssssssss.” He can’t remember the rest.

“That’s all right,” Octobrina covers his hand with hers. “I remember that it was very lovely.”

Later, while Stuka bends over the sideboard moistening his pencil point on the tip of his tongue and adding up the bill, Mister Dancho comes back to Dubek:

“If he is as important as we think, Lev, then he must do everything to survive. No holds barred.”

The Flag Holder considers that for a moment. “Perhaps” is all he says.

Dancho is ready to let it drop, but the Racer presses Mendeleyev.

“You say do everything to survive,” the Flag Holder says. “It seems to me that even Dubek — that especially Dubek — must draw the line somewhere. You must fight the demons without becoming the demons you fight. This is central to the struggles taking place in the world today. When you adopt the enemy’s tactics, or his weapons, or even his double-speak, even if you win, you lose — because you are the enemy. This was the error Lenin made.” A thought occurs to Mendeleyev. “Malraux once asked Nehru: ‘What has been your most difficult task?’ And Nehru replied: ‘To make a just state with just means.’ “

“You’re saying the ends don’t justify the means,” the Racer interjects, following the conversation intently.

“I’m saying that ends and means are the same thing.”

Stuka folds the check on a plate and places it on the table. Each member of the Circle calculates his share and puts the money on the plate; Dancho, gallant as always, insists on paying for Octobrina. The four dinners and wine and tea and the Flag Holder’s cognac come to fifteen leva. With one leva for Stuka, the total is sixteen.

“My very dear ladies and gentlemen,” Octobrina announces, “we can’t change the world, but if we hurry we can still catch the last trolley.” It is ten to two, and the trolleys stop running at two.

“I think I’ll meander over to Club Balkan,” Mister Dancho says casually. “How about it, Tacho?”

On weekends the Hotel Balkan keeps an upstairs bar open until four, when the trolleys start running again. It is always full of foreign tourists and well-heeled Bulgarians. The prices are steep, but the liquor is imported.

“Why not?” Tacho agrees amicably.

The main dining room is empty except for two waiters clearing the last tables; they are required to set them for lunch before they are allowed to go home for the night. In the lobby, another waiter is talking into the wall telephone.

“Hold on a second,” he shouts. Letting the telephone dangle, he blows his nose into an enormous handkerchief and inspects the results. Then he picks up the telephone. “Yellowish green. Yes. Yes. All right.” He hangs up and complains to nobody in particular, “My God, it’s really dreadful to have an intelligent wife.”

On the far end of the lobby, on a long wall directly opposite the coatracks, hangs a floor-to-ceiling mirror in which you can see the rest of the lobby— the coatracks, the wall telephone, the door marked “Sitters” and another marked “Pointers,” and the heavy double door leading to the street. It is only when you stand directly in front of the mirror and don’t see yourself in it that you realize it is a painting of a mirror.

It is a joke of long standing to line up before “the ultimate in Socialist realism,” as Octobrina likes to call it, on the way out of Krimm. Without a word they line up now. Mister Dancho tugs on his cuffs. Octobrina peers at her three-quarter profile and adjusts her shawl. Popov centers the knot of his tie. Elisabeta puts on a new layer of lipstick, then blots her lips on a piece of toilet paper. The Racer unbuttons the top button of his shirt and rearranges his shirt collar so that it overlaps the collar of his sport jacket.

Only the Flag Holder doesn’t play the game. Instead, he stares into the mirror as if he has noticed, for the first time, the fact of his nonexistence.