2

MISTER DANCHO wants to use the back entrance to Hotel Balkan, which means going out of their way, but the Racer says nobody will bother them at this ungodly hour, so they make straight for the great revolving door with its corroded brass handles and gold-lettered “BALKAN” in English on the glass. The lettering reads “ ALKA ” on the panel the Racer pushes with his palms and “BAL AN” on Mister Dancho’s.

The teen-age girls pounce as they step into the lobby.

“Look, Mister Dancho,” they squeal, clustering around him like iron filings on a magnet.

“Oh, do us a trick,” cries one, smacking away with open lips on a piece of gum.

“The thing you did on television — the thing where you cut the rope and make it whole again.”

“Do the bit where you — “

“No tricks, no tricks,” Dancho calls good-naturedly, pushing through the group after the Racer, who has started up the stairs toward Club Balkan.

A tall girl, bolder than the others, tugs at Dancho’s blazer. “An autograph then,” she demands, tilting her head coquettishly and batting false eyelashes, one of which is peeling away at the edge.

Dancho turns back. “Open your shirt,” he instructs her. The girls giggle — until they see her reach for the first button.

“Oh, Maya, don’t.”

“Come away, Maya.”

Maya unbuttons her shirt down to her waist, exposing full breasts sagging into a washed-out brassiere. Dancho uncaps a felt-tipped pen, grips her shoulder to hold her steady and scrawls “Dancho” on the swell of breast that spills over the brassiere.

The girls stare after Dancho as he walks away. From the first landing, he glances back. The tall girl is buttoning her shirt as her friends pull her toward the revolving door. “Bitch,” Dancho hears one of them hiss at her. “How could you?”

Dancho catches up with the Racer inside the threshold of Club Balkan.

“You missed the fun,” he tells him, but the Racer makes no answer, and the two of them stand there for a moment to get their night vision. Gradually Club Balkan emerges from the darkness — a long, narrow room, dimly lit, with a bar down one side and small round Formica tables down the other. There is no decor, just four windowless walls. The bar is packed, three and four deep in places, with Japanese members of an export exhibition currently being held in one of the hotel’s banquet halls. The tables are taken up by foreign tourists and a sprinkling of Bulgarians.

Mister Dancho strains for a glimpse of Katya at the tables nearest the door. Not finding her, he starts down the room between the bar and the tables. The Racer follows. Elbows jostle them where the crowd at the bar is the thickest. Snatches of conversation drift out of the darkness.

“Couldn’t sleep — someone was building Communism with goddamn jackhammers across the street — “

“Life shouldn’t be an open book — it should be a poem. Open or closed, it should be a poem.”

“They have them at ZUM, right next to the grocery counter with the imported mushrooms. West German. Smooth, aren’t they? Here, feel — “

“Workers are shits — they can be bought off for an extra wet dream a week. Look at what happened in Paris — “

“The worst is having to listen to things you can’t stand from someone with bad breath. Did you — “

“ — shortcoming of governments is that they balance conflicting interests instead of determining where the rights of the matter lay.”

In the twilight the Racer bumps into a journalist he knows. “Dobr veer, Marko — what do you hear?”

Marko flings an arm over the Racer’s shoulder and draws him aside. “My editor just decided he’d better spend his budget before the end of the year if he wanted to get more money next year, right? So he gathered us together today and asked who spoke English. The lady who raised her hand gets to go to London, England, for a month! Who speaks French? A horse’s ass is off to Paris, France! Who speaks Spanish? Ha! I speak Spanish! I’m off to Madrid, Spain, next week! Say” — Marko hesitates — “how’s that race of yours shaping up? I’m toying with the idea of maybe putting some money on your boys. What do you think?”

Tacho considers the matter. “What I think is: the man who bets on a bicycle race will never profit from his mistake.”

“Funny,” Marko says dryly. “Very funny.”

Further on a man and a woman scrape back their chairs and start for the door. The third man at the table looks up from his cognac. “Sa/ui,” he calls, waving Mister Dancho and Tacho toward the free places.

“Salut, salut. Kak ste?” Dancho says vaguely. Suddenly he recognizes the man: he is the film director known as “Poleon” after Napoleon because of his dictatorial manner on the set. “Ah, you, Poleon, I couldn’t make you out in this cave.” Dancho slides into a seat. “Found an apartment yet?”

Poleon has divorced his wife but is still living with her because neither one of them has been able to find an apartment. “Still looking,” he mutters sourly. “Only thing worse than living with a wife, take it from someone who knows, is living with an ex-wife. If you get wind of something, please god let me know. I’m going out of my mind. It’s been eight months now. I’d sell my grandmother for an apartment.”

Dancho laughs appreciatively and summons the waiter with a wave of his hand. “Three cognacs. And none of your Pliska three-star dry rot. It corrodes the stomach lining. Imported, you understand?”

“How long have you been back?” Poleon asks conversationally. He is a heavy man gone to seed, and what hair he has left falls in long, pasted-down strands across his freckled scalp.

“Just got in,” Mister Dancho replies, his eyes scanning the room for a sign of Katya. “I played in London, England.” Mustering what enthusiasm he can, he proceeds to tell Poleon about the embassy reception and the lapel buttons.

The waiter sets three cognacs on the table, and places a cash register receipt face up on a small dish.

“What are you up to these days?” the Racer asks. Poleon has had a huge success with a film entitled I.D. The picture won some sort of award at the Berlin Film Festival, and actually ran for ten days in a New York art theater after the New York Times called the Bulgarian director “half poet, half magician.” Since then Poleon has done two other films, but neither one has been released by the censors.

Poleon takes another sip of cognac and laughs dryly. ‘Tm in the most delicate stage of film making, which is to say I’m negotiating with your friend and mine, the censor. He has certain ideas about which camera angles or shreds of dialogue or gestures contribute to the building of Socialism. I on the other hand have certain ideas about which camera angles or shreds of dialogue or gestures contribute to the creation of an artistic entity commonly referred to as a motion picture. We project the rough cut again and again, we sip mineral water because his section chief is too cheap to authorize vodka, and we bargain. Oh how we bargain. I agree to cut a close-up of the hero’s eyes and he in return agrees to leave in a particular inflection that gives to the dialogue a shade of meaning not apparent when it was passed by the scenario censor eight months ago. We’ve been at it every morning for three weeks now.”

“What do you save the afternoons for?” Mister Dancho asks jokingly, but Poleon takes the question seriously.

“My afternoons are taken up with a different censor. We go over, scene by scene, paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable, the scenario for my next film. He has certain ideas about what will contribute to the building of Socialism. Et cetera. Et cetera. I once calculated I spend three fifths of my professional time with the censors and two fifths actually working at my metier.” Poleon glances at his watch. “Another good hour till the trolleys start — might as well.” And he signals the waiter for a refill. “Jesus, I hope to god it doesn’t rain tomorrow.”

Tacho laughs. “You say that as if the weather makes a difference.”

“But it does, it does,” Poleon insists. “You don’t believe me? I can see you don’t believe me. Listen. My morning censor has rheumatism. The wet weather makes him irritable. When he’s irritable, he makes fewer concessions. My afternoon censor has a mistress, and the mistress has two small children who stay in and watch television when it rains. The censor can only go over there when the sun shines and the children are out playing. So when it rains, he never concedes a point. He just sits there shaking his pointed head and obliterating the offending words or sentences with thick black ink.”

“The things that go into a film,” Mister Dancho marvels, glancing over his shoulder toward the door. Tacho remarks:

“You should do a film on how you make a film.”

“Tried that,” Poleon snaps. The waiter sets a brimming cognac in front of him and he brings his head down to the glass and sips it so that it won’t spill. “The project was killed at birth by the evening censor — the one who is oblivious to the exigencies of time and weather, the one” — Poleon smiles sweetly — “who deals with ideas.”

Tacho snickers sympathetically. “Your new film, the one the morning censor is working on, what’s it about?”

“It’s a portrait of a fictional capitalist country where everyone, in one way or another, works for the police. The characters have no names, only numbers. The hero, whom I call ‘Eight-eighty,’ is the chief of the directorate that provides an appropriate amount of crime in order to justify the existence of the police. I call the film Police State “

“But that doesn’t sound like something you should have problems with,” Tacho observes.

Poleon snorts. “So I thought, but my morning nemesis flares his nostrils and sniffs the air and says he smells ambiguities which might place my fictional police state closer to home. I argue, with as straight a face as you’ll find in the movie industry, that one has only to look around one to realize that this is absurd, but my friend the censor persists, lifting words as if they were rocks and poking around underneath for worms of treason.”

Poleon laughs hoarsely and takes another sip of cognac. “Sometimes I almost feel sorry for the poor sons of bitches,” he says seriously. “With what’s happening these days, they don’t know which way to jump.”

The Racer remembers the conversation at Krimm and asks Poleon what he thinks about Czechoslovakia.

Poleon lowers his voice. “I don’t have anything against the Schweiks, but I’ll be goddamned if I know what they expect to gain from all this. They’re just building up people’s hopes with all that talk of real elections and a free press. The Russians will never put up with it, mark my words. I heard Novotny’s already in Moscow organizing his comeback. Meanwhile the rest of us have to suffer.” Poleon leans forward. “They’re holding everything up until this thing sorts itself out. I got that straight from a make-up man who has a brother who works for the Central Committee.” Tacho starts to say something, but Poleon cuts him off. “A friend of mine was supposed to have his novel in the stores this week — it was cleared two, maybe three months ago — but they’ve stopped distribution. When he asked why, they told him there was a shortage of cartons for shipping.” Poleon leans back. “Cartons my ass. They’re just afraid to put themselves on the line as long as this thing with Czechoslovakia is up in the air. I heard another story — “

Someone two tables down starts to scream. It isn’t a very loud scream, but it is a scream all the same and it brings conversation to a stop. Everyone turns to see — except the Japanese, who are too discreet. A second person at the table opens her mouth to scream, but clamps it shut again without a sound.

“Try,” a man coaxes.

“I can’t do it,” the woman groans. “I just can’t do it.”

“What’s going on?” Mister Dancho whispers.

“Don’t you know about the Scream Therapist? No, of course, you were out of the country — “

“Scream what?” Tacho demands.

“Scream Therapist.” Poleon swivels around so he can get a better look at the table. “See the bald guy, the one sitting between the two women. Name’s Hristo Evanov. He’s Bulgarian by birth. His father was a factory owner who fled just ahead of the Russians in forty-four. Took Hristo with him to America. He’s a psychiatrist now, but a special kind of psychiatrist — he practices something he calls scream therapy. He came here last week to bury his mother. Since then he’s been going around trying to get everyone to scream.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” Mister Dancho scoffs.

“No, it’s really very interesting. The odd part is he hasn’t been able to elicit one good ear-splitting, glass-shattering scream in all of Bulgaria. Or so he says. You’ve got to meet him —it’ll make your night. Here” — Poleon starts to get up —”I’ll ask him to join — “

The girl materializes out of thin air. One second there is nobody there, the next she is standing before the table looking from Poleon to Dancho to Tacho, and the waiter is stammering:

“Excuse the intrusion, please, but this lady asked me to point you out —eh, she insists on meeting you. I’m sorry if—”

It all happens so suddenly that Poleon, who has had quite a bit to drink, thinks she is an apparition. Sinking back into his seat, he tries to blink her away.

She won’t go.

Dancho is the first to pull himself together. “Dear lady, by all means,” he beams, adjusting his cuffs as he hefts himself out of his seat.

“Eh, excuse me again, please, but she doesn’t want to meet you” the waiter interrupts apologetically. “She wants to meet you” He looks at the Racer.

“Me!” exclaims Tacho. He looks at Mister Dancho, plainly embarrassed and at a loss for words.

The girl takes a step toward Tacho. She is wearing embroidered Kazan felt boots, a khaki miniskirt, a thin white T-shirt through which no bra straps are visible and a bright yellow scarf tied around her neck cowboy style. She is almost as tall as the Racer, and thin, with the bone structure of a small bird. Her hair is cropped short, and dark. She is flat-chested and round-shouldered and straight-hipped and nervous, though the nervousness isn’t so much in her body as in her eyes — ghetto eyes, permanently wide, ready for flight. She stares at the Racer without changing her expression, as if her facial muscles or her emotions are paralyzed, as if her appetite is dulled, as if her anger or her fear or her sexuality has lost its edge. Later, the Racer will tell her that she gave him the impression, the first time he saw her, that whatever she wanted, she could wait to get it.

Mister Dancho pokes the Racer in the ribs. “Tacho, dear boy, where have you been hiding this flower?”

“I never saw her before in my life,” Tacho swears, reddening.

“Look at those eyes, will you,” Dancho plunges on. “They’re enormous. What do you take her for, Poleon? German? Swiss? Dutch perhaps?”

“I’m neither German nor Swiss nor Dutch,” the girl says in flawless Russian.

Dancho’s jaw sags. “My god, you don’t look Russian!” he blurts out, lapsing into Russian himself.

“You don’t look Bulgarian,” the girl fires back.

Poleon laughs and Dancho, regaining his composure, bows from the waist. “I take that as the ultimate compliment, dear lady. You hear that, Poleon, she says I don’t look Bulgarian.”

Dancho offers the girl his seat and she slips into it. The waiter brings another for Dancho. The girl looks at the waiter. “Please — I think I’d like a cognac now.”

Dancho covers her hand with his. “Dear lady, if you are really Russian, then our opinions on womanhood in that vast motherland of importunity, that Mecca of antireligious fervor, will have to undergo revision.”

The girl slides her hand out from under his. “I am American,” she informs him quietly.

For a moment nobody says anything. “American!” Dancho looks around, stunned. “Dear lady, say it isn’t so?” He turns on Poleon. “She says she’s American!”

“I have ears,” snaps Poleon. Through all their minds races the same thought: things being what they are, this is not exactly the time to be seen with an American.

The girl fixes her eyes on the Racer as if she knows him, as if they have a past. “You are Abadzhiev,” she observes. “You look like your photograph — the one with your hand reaching into the sky.” And she half demonstrates.

“What is it you want of me?” Tacho asks.

The girl thinks about that for a moment. “I’m not sure,” she says finally. Then, as if it will explain a great deal, she tells him:

“My family name is Krasov.”

“Krasov,” Tacho repeats. It is vaguely familiar —no, he knows the name, but from where?

“The Krasov who …”

The girl looks at him without changing her expression.

Tacho nods slowly. “Now I … I’m sorry.”

The waiter brings the girl’s cognac. He leans close to the Racer’s ear. “Please believe I had no intention — “

Tacho shakes off the apology. “It’s all right,” he says. He pushes the cognac toward the girl and motions with his head for her to drink. She hesitates, then lifts the glass to her lips and sips the liquid as if it is medicine. All the while her eyes are fixed on his.

There is another half scream from the next table, but nobody turns toward it this time.

“Who is Krasov?” demands Dancho.

“I’ll explain later.” Tacho says this in a way that leaves Dancho no room to repeat the question. To the girl, Tacho says:

“What is your given name?”

“Melanie.”

The Racer tries to pronounce it, and she has to say it several times before he can produce a reasonable facsimile.

“And your patronymic?”

“Americans don’t have patronymics,” she informs him. “I have what is called a middle name — Daisie.”

Tacho tries it out, then Dancho. “It’s very melodious,” concedes Mister Dancho, who comes closest to getting it right. “Melanie Daisie,” and he rocks his head back and forth on his shoulders in appreciation.

Tacho catches the girl looking at him. Flustered, he asks:

“What are you? I mean, how do you describe yourself when someone asks you to describe yourself?”

“I say I’m a practicing Capricorn,” the girl replies. Both Mister Dancho and Poleon explode in laughter, and she smiles for the first time — a slow smile that begins uncertainly in her cheek muscles, takes hold and spreads to her lips and to her eyes. It lingers deep in her eyes, obscuring the fright.

Tacho starts to ask her something when he becomes aware of a shifting of weight, a moving of feet, a cutting off of conversation. There is no commotion, just a self-conscious silence that spreads from person to person — and then the scraping of a dog’s claws on linoleum. In the girl’s eyes, fright gets the upper hand.

“The Dwarf,” someone whispers, and Mister Dancho observes with careful nonchalance:

“Angel must be here.”

The Hungarians come first, three pubescent girls with milk white baby’s skin and crimson lips and buds of breasts visible through their filmy dresses. All three are barefoot, and the one in the middle wears a garland of poppies woven into her hair, which falls in knotted ringlets over her bony shoulders. They walk with gawkily graceful children’s steps, holding hands and whispering to each other in Hungarian.

The runt of a dog comes behind them, its short legs claw-dancing across the floor like a crab’s, its wrinkled rat’s head straining against the leash. “Down,” a voice commands, but the dog stands its ground, panting. Saliva spills from its jowls. Its unblinking fog-filled eyes stare straight ahead, seeing nothing.

The dog is stone blind.

“Down, Dog,” the voice commands again. A dwarf-leg shoots out and pushes its rear feet out from under it, and the dog sinks onto the floor. The girl with the poppies in her hair drops to her knees beside the dog and, wrapping her thin arms around its neck, buries her head in the folds of skin above the collar.

The Dwarf looks down at the girl and mutters something in Hungarian. The girl looks up. He repeats the phrase. Lowering her eyes, she climbs to her feet and takes her place alongside him, slouching so as not to appear taller than he is, her arm hooked lightly through his.

Smiling at some private joke, the Dwarf glances around. The people at the nearby tables turn away under his gaze and quietly resume their conversations.

Angel Bazdéev is the most famous dwarf in the world. He is retired now, and incredibly rich by Bulgarian standards — he wears a diamond ring on his pinkie and drives around in a taxi that he hires by the year and pays for according to what is on the meter. But every Bulgarian over five, along with hundreds of thousands of Europeans, remembers him in his heyday — Bazdéev the king of clowns, with his painted angel’s face and his mocking smile and his exploding fedora and his baggy trousers out of which the dog called Dog leaped on signal to snap at the toes of his oversized shoes. At one time or another, Bazdéev has played in all the great circuses on the Continent. When television came into its own in the early 1950s, he became an international star, commanding huge fees for twelve minutes of antics. In France his forty-eight-inch figure with its bulging chest and slightly out of proportion head, his broad wrinkled brow, his jet black hair, became a comic-strip character and Bazdéev still gets royalties twice a year from this. The only sour note in his career came in 1956, when he applied for a visa to perform with Barnum and Bailey in America. There was some confusion when it was discovered he had been born and raised in Hungary, but was a citizen of Bulgaria; apparently the State Department handbook made no mention of this particular type of hybrid. This had barely been ironed out (by a command decision on the “highest level”) when a well-known Washington columnist accused Bazdéev of being a card-carrying Communist (true: he fought in the Flag Holder’s partisan unit during the war) who was “playing the clown to further the international Communist conspiracy,” as the columnist put it.

The columnist also raised the specter of moral turpitude by revealing that Bazdéev had once been beaten up for molesting a child in Warsaw. This was an exaggeration. What had actually happened was that a small girl broke away from her mother during a performance and wrapped her legs around Bazd6ev’s as if she were a mating dog. The clown lost control of himself and had to be pried off her by a Rumanian lion tamer and two Jugoslav jugglers. Some peasants started into the ring to teach Bazdéev common decency, but the other clowns laughed as if the whole thing had been part of the act, and the show, or what was left of it, went on. Needless to say, the columnist’s rehashing of the incident resulted in the denial of his visa application — and the denial of the visa resulted in the breaking of every window in the American legation in Sofia.

Bazdéev, who neither forgot nor forgave, was not without friends.

At home Bazdéev had his detractors too. A woman professor accused him in print of really hating children because they were considered normal while he, although the same size, was not. (Bazdéev bought and burned the entire press run as soon as he got wind of the letter.) And another clown, in a fit of professional jealousy, stood up at a meeting of circus Communists and asked Bazdéev to his face whether it was true he surrounded himself with Hungarian nymphets upon whom he performed unspeakable acts in public as well as in private. There was an embarrassed silence. Bazdéev waddled up to the stage, climbed up on a stool so he could reach the microphone and said with great dignity that the accusation was an out and out lie — he never touched them in public!

By that time Bazdéev’s sexual appetites were already a matter of legend. And except for a crank or two, the general tendency was to see in him what the Flag Holder saw in him: a nobility of spirit that was in constant state of rebellion against the role the world wanted him to play — that of a freak.

The Dwarf comes right to the point. Now, as always, there is no shaking of hands; Angel doesn’t like to be touched except by his Hungarians. “I heard the Witch of Melnik said twenty August is the end and the beginning — of what, she was not sure,” the Dwarf rasps, his voice pitched high. “I organize to celebrate this end, this beginning with a wedding, and I invite all you to it.” His eyes flit over the American girl — over her knees and thighs — and come to rest on the girl with the garlands in her hair. “I have intention to make honest child out of this petal of Hungarian flowerhood.” Bazdéev smiles his mocking smile.

Bazdéev’s “marriages” are spur-of-the-moment bacchanals that he organizes when the spirit moves him: sometimes to coincide with one of the solstices, sometimes with a national holiday, sometimes with a political event he wishes to mark and mock. Among the cognoscenti, invitations are as valuable as exit visas.

“When is the wedding?” Mister Dancho inquires, rubbing his hands together happily.

“Tomorrow night … sundown … Paradise Lost.” Paradise Lost is the name Popov has given to Bazdéev’s mansion on Vitoša, the mountain that slopes up like the sides of an amphitheater south of Sofia.

The Dwarf produces a cigar and sticks it between his lips. Mister Dancho extends his empty hand and offers him a light. The Hungarian girls squeal in delight. As Angel puffs the cigar into life, clouds of blue smoke obscure his head. Poleon says:

“Some day I mean to get you roaring drunk and find out what you’re trying to prove with these weddings of yours.”

Angel, whose face comes up to Poleon’s even though one is standing and the other is sitting, waves his hand to disperse the smoke. “But I can be telling you now. You have noticed, no, how in dreams, bizarre things are taken as normal everyday occurrences? It is my contention to demonstrate the same holds true for events who are taking place during waking hours!” Again the mocking smile.

“Do you remember your dreams?” Mister Dancho asks.

“Bits, pieces, like Popov’s images, but I never being able to reconstruct the whole.” Angel is suddenly afraid he has given away too much. “Why is it are you asking?”

“I was curious, that’s all.”

“Will you take a drink with us?” the Racer asks to smooth things over.

Angel’s eyes darken and he ignores the invitation. “My taxi waiting. Can I drop any of you?”

Poleon immediately accepts and starts counting out some bills to cover his share of the check.

The Dwarf nods to the Hungarians and they lace their fingers together and skip toward the door.

“Dog,” Angel orders, pulling the leash taut, “on feet — your seeing-eye Dwarf being ready.”

Without a word of goodbye he starts after the Hungarians, with the blind dog Dog clawing the floor at his side.

Poleon hastily shakes hands all around and follows the trail of silence toward the door.

The American girl, who has gotten the gist of the conversation (Bulgarian and Russian being similar), is bursting with questions. “Eve never seen anything like him — he’s fantastic. Who is the Witch of — “

“Melnik,” Tacho supplies.

“Witch of Melnik — who is that?”

“She is a famous seer,” Tacho tells her. “She is old and blind and lives in a small peasant cottage outside of Melnik, near the Greek border. If you pass that way you can visit her. You smile at things you know nothing about. Some of our academicians have written books about her. The peasants come from as far away as Blagoevgrad to see her; the Greeks even try to slip across the frontier. The ones who get there line up outside her cottage before sunup, holding a piece of sugar in each palm. As the first cock crows, the Witch emerges and calls out to the people by name; people, remember, she cannot see, so she has no way of knowing who is there. She tells them whom they will marry and when to plant and what to plant and whether their children will be born with birth defects. Sometimes she says mysterious things — they’re like puzzles and you have to figure them out.”

“Have you seen her?”

The Racer stares at the back of his hand thoughtfully. “I was raised in Melnik, which is a half-hour’s hike from the Witch’s cottage. On my twelfth birthday my mother led me by the hand up the path that runs past her cottage and we waited with the peasants. I held the sugar tightly in each fist. The Witch was young then, but she looked old; the peasants say she was born old. She called out, ‘The boy from Melnik, Tacho.’ My mother pushed me forward until I stood right in front of the door. I was very frightened, but I looked up, looked into her eyes. They were like Angel’s dog — filmy eyes, without pupils, filled with smoke. She took my sugars and smelled one and then the other and said: ‘You will be a boy of motion but a man of movement.’ “

“But what does it mean?” Melanie wants to know.

“I’m still trying to figure it out. I think she wanted me to know that there was a difference between the two.” And the Racer adds:

“She is a very great lady.”

“I’d like to meet her —after all, I am a practicing Capricorn!”

Mister Dancho looks at his watch again and then glances with annoyance toward the door. Katya at last! She is standing in the entrance way, squinting into the darkness. Mister Dancho springs up.

“Pay for me and I’ll settle with you later, Tacho. Dear lady, I shall count myself the poorer if our paths don’t cross again,” he adds in Russian to the girl. And pulling at his cuffs, he disappears.

“Where’s the fire?” Melanie wonders, looking after Mister Dancho. She turns back to the Racer. “Is the Dwarf really going to marry that girl? She’s only a child.”

Tacho explains about the Dwarf’s weddings. “Last year he had three.”

“I feel sorry for the girls. Are they really Hungarian?”

Tacho nods. “They don’t speak a word of Bulgarian.”

“But how can they live in a country when they don’t speak the language?”

“You can only live in a country when you don’t speak the language,” the Racer says matter-of-factly.

“That sounds like something your Witch of—”

“Melnik.”

“ — Melnik might say. Here” — she playfully thrusts a cube of sugar into his hand — “I’ll be the Witch. I’ll tell you something mysterious.” She raises her chin and closes her eyes and says slowly:

“You have a …”

Suddenly her eyes open wide; the game is over. “You have a dark interior.”

“What does that mean, dark interior?”

“Dark, as in the absence of light. You remind me of those apartments where they close the shutters during the day to keep out the sunlight.”

The Racer remembers the farmers crowding into the Melnik market at harvest time. “The peasants say there are two kinds of people: those who push downward into the earth, like radishes or carrots, and those who push up, like cornstalks or sunflowers. In Melnik, the old ones still talk about the dark and the light as they finger seeds or a newborn baby.”

“You re not angry?”

“I’m not angry.”

Club Balkan is beginning to empty out; there is a steady trickle of people toward the door. Tacho tries to catch the waiter’s eye to pay the check, but the girl says:

“When I was little, my father took me to a bike club to see a film clip of you setting the world record.” The memory releases a flood of reminiscenses which moisten her eyes, but she shakes her head and blinks back the tears. “You looked like a knight in armor to me. When you threw your arm into the sky, my heart stopped. I think I must have fallen in love with you then.” She finishes what is left of her cognac and stares into the empty glass. “Later, when my father … I hated you after that.”

“Is that why you came here — because you hated me?”

“I told you before, I don’t know why I came here. I mean, I do know why.” She takes a deep breath and begins at the beginning. “I work as a dance therapist in a small town in New Jersey.” She sees that New Jersey makes no sense to him. “A small town near New York. Anyhow, about a year ago, my uncle died and left me five thousand dollars. I wanted to do something with the money that would be — well, something I’d remember all my life. So I flew to Paris, bought a Deux Chevaux and started driving. I’ve always wanted to see where my father was born, so I headed for Moscow by way of Germany and Poland. I stayed there a week, then I went south to the Black Sea. From there I went to Persia. I stayed in Persia for a while, then I started back through Turkey. I hated Turkey; I never imagined such poverty existed. I spent a week in Istanbul. Then I went up to the Black Sea at Varna — “

“Varna is a tourist trap. The best part of the coast is further south — “

“I spent three days in Trnovo — “

“Popov was born in Trnovo. You don’t know him. It’s a great town, isn’t it? It was our capital during the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, when we ruled everything between the Adriatic and the Caspian.”

“And here I am in Sofia.”

“How long have you been traveling, all together?”

“I left New York in, let’s see, in September.” She counts on her fingers. “That’s eleven months ago. Eleven months.”

“Any Bulgarian would give his right arm to make a trip like that. But we don’t have the possibility. What does it feel like, to make a trip such as the one you are making?”

She looks at him, then lowers her eyes and speaks into her glass. Her voice, full of shades, is pitched low and tense with contained fright. “I feel like a fly scurrying across a movie screen, trying desperately to make out the figures and the booming dialogue. But it is all patterns of shifting gray and black and white, no matter which direction I run.”

Melanie doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she looks up. “I felt that way before my trip too.”

Only a handful of people remain in Club Balkan now, and the barman switches on the overhead lights and begins collecting ashtrays and glasses from the tables. The sudden light makes the Racer feel exposed and vulnerable. He turns to a man at the next table who is counting out small change and asks him the time. When the man looks back blankly, Tacho taps his bare wrist where a watch would be if he wore one. The man, drowsy with drink, smiles a silly smile and says in English:

“Sorry, fella, but I’m not from around here.”

Melanie translates his answer into Russian and the Racer shrugs. The barman calls over the time and Tacho peels off some bills and piles them on top of the cash register stubs.

“Where are you staying?” the Racer asks.

She names a hotel where foreign tourists are usually put up.

“I’ll walk you over and catch a trolley in Place Lenin.”

They walk side by side down the stairs, past a gallery of blown-up photographs, including one of the Racer with his hand thrust into the sky. In the lobby the night clerk looks up from his magazine to admire the bare legs of the girl. His once-over makes her nervous and she runs her fingers through her hair, which is parted in the middle, with wisps escaping from the sideburns. Quickening her pace, she follows the Racer through the great revolving door into the street.

The night is cool and quiet, and the two of them stand there for a moment savoring it. The street is deserted except for a drunk weaving away from Club Balkan. They turn in the opposite direction and start up Don Dukov, then cut across Benkovski to Ruski Boulevard. A few blocks ahead they can make out the giant red star atop the Central Committee building, and Tacho explains what it is when she asks. The cobblestones in Place 9 September are wet, and further along they come to a water wagon with the hoses manipulated by husky women in long blue smocks.

As they walk, Melanie’s soft Kazan boots make no sound, but the Racer’s shoes echo on the cobblestones. At the corner they have to leap across a rivulet of water to reach the curb. Dimitrov’s tomb, a carbon copy of Lenin’s in Red Square, looms ahead and the two honor guards standing like statues before the door follow the girl’s legs with their eyes, not their heads. Wilting funeral wreaths with satin inscriptions — “From the Plovdiv Komsomol” — lean against the side of the tomb; new wreaths will be substituted before the morning rush hour, and a lush bouquet or two from visiting dignitaries will be laid, with full press coverage, during the day.

On Stambolski, they come to where the girl has parked her Deux Chevaux. In Persia she paid someone to paint a map on the driver’s door, with a thin red line to indicate her route. Now, squatting alongside the car, she travels it again for the Racer with her thumbnail, ticking off the cities she has seen. “Paris, Luxembourg, Bonn, Berlin, Pozna, Warsaw, Brest Litovsk, Minsk, Smolensk, Moscow, Kharkov, Odessa, Tbilisi …”

Tacho notices the windshield wipers are still on her car. In Sofia, people with private cars lock them away in the glove compartment so they won’t be stolen; at the first drop of rain, everyone pulls over and races around trying to put them on again. Tacho insists she lock hers away too, and she opens the car and finds her tool kit and hands him a screwdriver. He unscrews the wipers and stows them away in the glove compartment. “Now you’re part Bulgarian,” he says.

Further along they come across two men and a woman pulling strips of film out of a tangle of reels in a garbage can in front of a motion picture developing studio. They thread the strips between their fingers and hold them up against the light in the window of the American legation, which is across the street, to see what they have. “For Christ’s sake, don’t tear it,” one of the men tells the women irritably. “Maybe we can sell it.”

Nearby another woman sits on the curb with one shoe off, massaging her stocking foot and hiccupping. “Are you holding your breath?” the other woman calls over.

“How can I hold my breath and answer you,” the woman complains, hiccupping again. Suddenly she turns on the Racer. “What are you staring at? What is he staring at, huh? Haven’t you seen anyone with the hiccups before?” And she hiccups again.

Overhead, television antennae jut sideways like metal antlers from the shuttered balconies of apartment buildings.

They are not far from the girl’s hotel now; Tacho can hear the first trolleys starting up. He turns to the girl and asks her the question he has been aching to ask since he found out who she is.

“Why did your father do it?”

She answers instantly, as if she has been expecting the question. “For the money. A bicycle company offered him twenty-five thousand dollars. That was only the beginning; he would have made a lot more endorsing products.”

“What does that mean, endorsing products?”

“In America, well-known people go on television and say how they always use such and such a product. It’s called endorsing.”

“And they pay you for doing that?”

“Yes, of course. Why else would anybody do it?”

The Racer nods thoughtfully. “And did the company give you anything after … afterward?”

The girl smiles faintly. “They gave me a bicycle.”

At the corner, Place Lenin opens before them: the Black Church on an island in the middle, the hotel off to the right and across the square, a giant statue of Lenin silhouetted against a huge billboard with a graph showing the increase in milk production expected under the next Five-Year Plan. Just around the corner, a young man leans a wooden ladder against the side of a building, climbs gingerly up and begins pasting a small poster onto the wall. As they pass, the girl notices dozens of other posters just like it. They all have black borders and badly reproduced photographs of a man or woman on them.

“Death notices,” Tacho explains. “When someone dies, his relatives or friends have the right to put up twenty-five around the city. They used to put up as many as they liked, but the walls became papered with them, so now they limit you to twenty-five. He’s using the ladder to put his poster as high as he can. That way it will remain longer when the workmen come by to clear the wall.”

Tacho steps closer to one and points to the picture of an old man. “ ‘Alexander Nickilov Denev, age 52, died 16 August 1968, after a long illness; an anti-Fascist fighter and a builder of Socialism, mourned by his beloved widow, Tsola Vsilava, and numerous comrades in arms.’ There’s a quotation too — can you make it out?”

Melanie reads:

“ ‘I don’t know whether, if things change, they will get better. But I know if things are to get better they must change.’ There’s a name after it. Lichtenberg. Who is Lichtenberg?”

“I’m a bike racer,” Tacho says. “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

“The fifty-two must be a mistake; he looks at least eighty in that photograph.”

“Hespent two years in a concentration camp.”

“Oh.” Then:

“Did you know him?”

“I fought in the Resistance with him. I was a boy then. I remember he was an oak of a man, but that was before he was wounded. He was an invalid the rest of his life.”

“Was he important in the Resistance; was he a general or something like that?”

“He was important, yes. He was a flag holder, the one who carries the flag and leads the men in an attack.”

“In America there’s a tradition that when the man with the flag falls, someone else picks it up. Do you have the same here?”

“We have the same,” Tacho says. “When he fell, someone else became the Flag Holder.”

“Did you see it?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she says again.

At the hotel she starts up the steps, hesitates, turns, looks down at him. The moment is awkward. The seconds tick loudly away. Dawn drains the sky over Vitoša. Not knowing what to say, the girl says the first thing that comes into her head. “Do you still race?”

He has not expected that. “I ride a lot, but I don’t really race. I’m too old for that. I’m training a team for the Sofia-Athens race in three weeks. One day we do roadwork up in the mountains” — Tacho nods toward Vitoša. “The next we work on sprinting in the stadium.” He almost lets the thought trail off. At the last instant he adds:

“We’re sprinting tomorrow afternoon. Would you like to watch? Afterward, if you like, I’ll take you to the Dwarf’s wedding.”

“I’d like that,” she says with conviction.

“Well — “ says Tacho.

“Well — “ says the girl.

From somewhere nearby comes the delicate ticking of spokes. The man on the ladder hears it too and stops what he is doing to listen. The ticking grows louder. From around the corner appears a man on a unicycle. He is a mime, old and wiry and dressed in black trousers, a skintight black turtleneck and a top hat. His face is painted chalk white. He pedals briskly up to the Racer, stops his unicycle on a dime, balances for an instant as he tips his hat and bows from the waist.

“Oh, he’s beautiful — “ the girl exclaims.

The Mime hops off his wheel, leans it against the wall and turns, with a bow, to the man on the ladder. The man looks embarrassed. The Mime stares at him with wild, crazy eyes and bows again, insisting. The man on the ladder shrugs and grudgingly inclines his head back. The Mime bows to the girl and she smiles warmly and bows back. The Mime turns to the Racer and bows fiercely. Holding his bow, he glances up. Their eyes meet and Tacho bows back as if he is honoring the man.

Everybody is engaged now, and the Mime retreats a few paces toward the street. He draws on imaginary skintight gloves, then turns and slaps his palm onto an imaginary glass wall behind him. The girl thinks she can hear the smack of his palm against the glass. The Mime turns back, crosses his ankles, laces his fingers together behind his head and lounges against the wall he has created.

“Oh, look,” the girl cries happily, and she claps her hands in delight.

Suddenly a cloud passes over the Mime’s face: his brow furrows, his eyes listen. He leaps upright and darts a few steps to the right — to come up against a glass wall there. He recoils, then approaches the wall again and begins to slap his palms onto it to see how far it extends. His eyes grow panicky. His hand motions become quicker. The wall is everywhere around him. He feels wildly for an opening, a door, a window, a crack, but there is nothing, nothing but solid wall. Now it is pressing in on him — no room to reach out — his elbows pinned to his sides — his fingers describe the wall — his nails scratch at it. He thrusts one arm straight up as if to climb out the top and discovers a ceiling. He can’t get his arm back down again — no room — the wall squeezing him. His eyes bulging in terror, one arm over his head, the other pinned to his side, he opens his mouth and screams a silent scream that makes the three people watching him wince.

Then it is over and the Mime is bowing and holding out his top hat and the Racer is rummaging in his pockets for some change. The Mime slips the money into a small leather pouch that hangs from his belt, climbs onto his unicycle and, tipping his hat, pedals off into what is left of the night.

“Who is he?” the girl asks when she can no longer hear the spokes.

But the Racer stares into the accumulating light without replying.