“IT WAS very moving,” Valyo tells Popov. “Really it was.”
“I hoped to have a poem ready …” Popov is visibly upset.
Octobrina squeezes his hand. “But your lists are poems.”
“Do you think so?” Popov asks eagerly. “Or do you just say that?”
“Of course I think so,” Octobrina promises him. “Everyone thinks so. Isn’t that right, Valyo? Isn’t that right, Valyo?”
Valyo quickly nods. “Certainly it’s right.”
One of the soccer stars across the room laughs at a dirty joke, but he stops abruptly when Gogo catches his eye. The Dwarf, trailed by three of his Hungarians and Dog, pushes through the crowd at the door.
“Coffee,” he tells Gogo. As usual the girls cluster around the counter eyeing the pastries. The Dwarf takes the Racer by the arm and pulls him into a corner. “The bastards are started,” he rasps.
“How do you know?” Tacho glances through the window at Trench Coat, who is sunning himself in front of a barber shop across the street from the Milk Bar.
“Kovel — he seen it with his eyes. Not one of them death papers is left to tell the story. All them others are still up there on the walls, but the Flag Holder, he been scraped off—”
“But if they’re denying the” — the word doesn’t come easy to Tacho — “the immolation … they had to do that.”
“More.” The Dwarf is impatient. “His photo gone. From Krimm. From Hotel Balkan. From War Museum — I seen that myself. From lobby of Central Committee building.”
“What do you mean gone!”
“Gone, goddamn. You understand word. Gone. Jesus, Tacho, sometime you give stupid question. Gone is gone. In Krimm, in Central Committee building, they hanged other pictures in place. In War Museum, in Hotel Balkan, they just gone. Hook still there. Wall all clean where picture was.”
“My god,” moans Tacho. The full weight of what is happening hits him.
“More,” insists the Dwarf. “Kovel got a daughter, and the daughter she been sent home from school this morning to bring history book back to school. She says they all of them been ordered return history books. She says it’s Party people, not school people, that’s doing the collection.”
“The Flag Holder’s photograph is in that book.”
“In front, before all the writing been started.”
“It’s not possible …”
“It possible.” The Dwarf’s face twists into a grin. “If they do it to him, they can maybe do it to me. But I not ever let them.” He tilts his head and looks curiously at the Racer. “You still thinking on that idea of yours?”
“I’m thinking.” Tacho notices Octobrina casting worried glances in their direction. “Don’t say a word about what I told you to the others,” he warns.
A short while later, Octobrina, the Dwarf, the Racer and Popov pile into Kovel’s taxi, which is double-parked around the corner from the Milk Bar.
“That dumb Tomato,” snorts Kovel, glaring through the windshield at the policeman directing traffic at the intersection. “He’s the one what tried to give me a ticket.”
“The thing to do,” Valyo ventures, “is to yell back at them. That way they know you are important and leave you alone.”
“I tried that,” Kovel asserts.
“What did it cost you?” demands Valyo.
“Fifty leva,” Kovel replies with a smirk.
The Dwarf taps him on the shoulder. “Cemetery,” he orders. “Flower market first.”
Dog farts, and those nearest the windows rush to open them. Kovel rolls his eyes, and the Dwarf strokes the dog’s deformed head soothingly. “He only doing that when he upset,” he apologizes.
“I do the same when I’m upset,” quips Kovel.
“You’ll have to get a smaller dog, or Kovel will have to get a larger taxi,” Valyo says, but his effort at humor falls flat.
The flower market is a splash of color against the gray side streets of Sofia. Kovel double-parks, blocking the narrow street. Horns blare behind him but Kovel turns and stares at the drivers until they stop. Octobrina hurries back with an armful of rust-colored chrysanthemums.
“Fall flowers are the most beautiful,” she sighs. “They have an inner life” — she smiles thoughtfully — “a still life. Spring flowers are brighter, but their brightness is superficial. They have an outer life. A restless, gossipy life.”
“There’s an old Russian poem about fall flowers,” Popov says. He rubs his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. “I can’t seem to remember how it starts.”
Kovel parks alongside the iron gate of the cemetery and settles down to read the sports page. The others make their way past row upon row of graves.
“This is right,” calls Ocrobrina, in the lead and cradling her bouquet. “I remember passing that statue. Doesn’t she have a demonic smile? Whoever honored her certainly didn’t like her. Here, this way. Maybe the headstone will be up.”
They come to the part of the cemetery that borders on lush farm fields. Octobrina looks around, confused. “But I could have sworn …”
“It was over here,” Tacho observes grimly. He looks down at the gravestone of a mother and child, both of whom, according to the legend, died in childbirth. The stone, which is weatherworn, is dated January 12, 1942.
The Dwarf calls to a gravedigger weeding in the next row of graves. “We bury some person here, old man — “
The man — bending the way the peasants do: from the w ist — straightens up. “You must be makin’ a mistake,” he replies coolly. “That there’s been ‘round long as I been ‘round.”
“How long is that?” Tacho demands.
“Long enough.”
Tacho kicks at the soil, which is freshly turned, with the toe of his boot. “This is a new grave.”
The gravedigger shakes his head. “You can see from the stone it ain’t no new grave. It was me what turned the earth this mornin’, if you’re a-wonderin’ about that dirt there.”
Tacho notices Green Socks leaning against a gravestone four or five rows away. It is hard to be sure at that distance, but he appears to be smiling, as if at some private joke.
Octobrina touches the gravestone with her fingertips; the flowers she brought dangle from the other hand. “They’re … trying to turn him into a nonperson,” she says, hushed. “As long as we’re around, they won’t be able to do that, will they?”
She studies their faces, one after the other, for confirmation. Finding none, she slowly clamps her hand over her mouth.
“Oh!”