THE DWARF’S taxi driver, a fat man known only by his last name, Kovel, has had a difficult day. He spent the morning tracking down a tourist who was rumored to have a supply of German sparkplugs. En route he double-parked near the flower market for the time it takes to run into a tabac for a package of Rodopies, and returned to find a dent in the right rear fender of his two-year-old Fiat.
“It was a lady XX what done it,” a vendor shouted — an “XX” on the license plate indicated that the car was owned by a foreigner.
“Which XX, for god’s sake?” Kovel demanded, but the Vendor merely shrugged and muttered:
“I didn’t see nothing.”
When Kovel finally found him, the tourist had a box of East German plugs, hardly worth a trip around the corner, much less across town. In disgust, Kovel went back to his apartment, only to have his wife dispatch him across town again to the hard currency store; she had heard on the grapevine that it had just received a shipment of electric hair curlers from Italy and she wanted to give a set to their daughter for her birthday. (Kovel bought two sets and sold the second, at a profit, to the wife of the man who shared the kitchen of their apartment.)
After lunch Kovel moonlighted around the tourist hotels for a while before checking in with the Dwarf, who instructed him to put one of the Hungarians on the Budapest train. Kovel’s wife went with him hoping to find some peasants at the station with fruits and vegetables fresh from the countryside. All the way to the station she kept peering over her shoulder at the Hungarian girl, who was tall for her age, in the back seat.
“She’s the same age as our Ekaterina,” the wife whispered to Kovel. “God knows what goes on up there.”
“Everyone knows what goes on up there,” Kovel responded. “And you don’t have to whisper — none of them speaks a word of Bulgarian.”
Kovel glanced at the girl in his wide-angle rearview mirror (French manufacture: a gift from Mister Dancho). The Hungarian girl was huddled in a corner of the seat, clutching a synthetic leopard-skin coat and an embroidered cloth carryall with a bread and sausage jutting out of it. Obviously on the verge of tears, she reached down to scratch her behind, then absently lifted her thin fingers to her nose. At the station, the girl became hysterical. A crowd gathered and a militiaman pushed through to see what was happening.
“What’s this?” the militiaman challenged officiously.
“My niece,” Kovel explained, talking quickly and shepherding the girl and her belongings toward the waiting train. “She’s crying because she’s sad to leave us, that’s all.”
In the late afternoon, just when he was supposed to take the Dwarf into the city, Kovel discovered that the Fiat had a flat tire. When he turned up at the Dwarf’s house on Vitoša twenty minutes late, Bazdeev was furious.
“Plenty goddamn taxi drivers around if you not wanting job,” he warned. But he calmed down quickly and passed Kovel a packet of hashish which he wanted him to deliver to an actor who lived on the outskirts of Sofia, along the highway that ran toward Plovdiv and the Turkish border. Kovel ate at his brother-in-law’s on the way back into the city, then parked, as usual, in front of Krimm to wait for the Dwarf.
He is slumped in the front seat, sound asleep, when the Dwarf, the Racer, the Flag Holder and his lady friend, Elisabeta, come out of the restaurant on the run.
“Driving fast, Kovel. Army hospital in — “ The Dwarf names a village about twenty kilometers outside of Sofia.
They drive for a long while in silence, with Kovel flinging his passengers from side to side as he corners without braking. On Ruski Boulevard, workers are already erecting wooden bleachers on either side of Dimitrov’s tomb for the pass-in-review the following day, September 9, marking the twenty-fourth anniversary of the liberation of Bulgaria by the Red Army. A militiaman directing traffic motions Kovel to give way to a truck carrying wreaths for the tomb. The Dwarf, sitting next to Kovel, taps him sharply on the shoulder and he accelerates instead. Through his rearview mirror he sees the militiaman peer angrily at his license plate as he reaches for his notebook. The Flag Holder is in the rearview mirror too, puffing on a Rodopi, staring out the window lost in thought.
Suddenly the Flag Holder turns to the girl. “How did you find out about it?”
‘‘Someone telephoned me in the Ministry on an interoffice line,” she recounts. “He didn’t give his name, and I didn’t recognize his voice. He said he knew you and honored you. He said he thought you should know that your son was back, was in the Army Hospital. Then he clicked off.”
They are off the cobblestones now and on to the smooth paved surface of the surburban roads. Small clusters of wooden shacks, each one with two or three chickens pecking around the front door, fly past the window. Then a factory with a giant hammer and sickle over the arched en trance way.
“How bad is he?” the Flag Holder asks.
“Is someone sick?” Kovel whispers to the Dwarf.
“Just you driving,” Bazdéev shoots back.
“I don’t know,” Elisabeta tells the Flag Holder. “I called the hospital to make sure he was there. The girl who answered said they only give information to relatives. I told her I was his sister. She let the phone dangle for a few minutes — I could hear it tapping against the wall — and came back and said he has no sister. That’s how I know he’s there. I mean, they wouldn’t have the dossier of someone who isn’t there, would they?”
They turn into a narrow lane lined with trees, the trunks of which have been whitewashed, and suddenly they are in front of the hospital, a gray building full of angular shadows.
The nurse on duty in the lobby looks up from her magazine suspiciously when they troop through the door.
“I have come to see Georgi Dimitrovich Mendeleyev,” the Flag Holder announces. “I am his father.”
He tells the same thing, in he same tone, to the night intern, and then again to the army doctor with the cropped mustache who identifies himself as the duty officer.
“How is it you know he is here?” the doctor inquires.
The Flag Holder snaps his head from side to side, shaking off the question the way a dog shakes off water. “The boy — where is he?”
The doctor hesitates, looks at the telephone on the desk, then back at the Flag Holder. Then he jerks his head in a “follow me” gesture and starts briskly down the corridor. The footfalls from the group follow him through the dimly lit hallway. The doctor stops with his back against the door marked “Unit 9.”
“You should know what it is that is wrong with him,” he tells the Flag Holder softly.
The Flag Holder nods imperceptibly.
“The boy will recover, but you should know that he has been — “ The doctor hesitates. Then, in a barely audible voice he finishes the sentence:
“He has been mutilated.”
Elisabeta turns away and covers her face with her hands.
After a moment the Flag Holder asks:
“How mutilated? Mutilated how?”
The Racer starts to say something, but the Flag Holder repeats the question. His voice is flat, deliberate.
“Mutilated how?”
The army doctor glances at the Rabbit. “Perhaps it would be better if she — “
“Mutilated how?”
The doctor shrugs and tells him, in cold clinical terms, what has been done to the boy Georgi.
“Oh my god my god my god my god,” the Racer whispers hoarsely. He puts his hand and head against the wall to steady himself.
The Flag Holder shuts his eyes and fills his lungs with air and lets it out again slowly, unevenly. When he has controlled himself, he pushes past the doctor into the room. The Racer and the doctor follow him. The Dwarf and Elisabeta stay behind in the corridor.
The Flag Holder calls his son’s name.
“Georgi.”
The boy, propped up in bed, turns his head in the direction of the voice.
“How is it with you, Papa?”
The Flag Holder touches the boy on the part of the arm not covered in bandages.
“How is it with you?”
“I’m fine, really,” the boy assures him. The bandages over his face muffle his voice, which sounds extraordinarily nasal. “Oh, I’m missing bits and pieces, so they tell me. But it’s nothing compared to what they did to the others — “
The boy’s voice breaks. He strains forward. “The little c unts,” he cries. His words have a liquid sound, as if they are rising like bubbles in a pond and popping wetly when they reach the surface. He collapses back into his pillow, sobbing softly. After a while mucus seeps onto the starched pillow case from between the folds of the bandage covering his nose.