Time Shelter

1.

Returning

Folk music is playing softly on the airplane. The stewardesses are rushing around before takeoff in stylized native costumes, their hair in braids, their tunics shortened above the knee. The only male flight attendant looks slightly ridiculous in his modified breeches and vest. The pilot’s voice comes over the loudspeaker.

We are proud to welcome you on board the Bulgarian national air carrier . . .

I notice the little changes to language. Until recently they said “we are happy to welcome you.” Where did this pride come from all of a sudden? The airline is certainly not one of the best, it is a public secret that it will soon be heading for bankruptcy. The airplane starts rolling away from the gate as those safety instructions that we are all sick to death of begin. I put in my earplugs and only watch the stewardesses’ movements. Without sound their gestures resemble a strange conjuring ritual, the gestures of tribal soothsayers. The strange thing is that they keep doing it. There is no evidence that anyone has ever been saved during a plane crash thanks to having put on their oxygen mask that automatically drops down from above or by having pulled out the life vest from beneath your seat and by blowing the emergency whistle. Perhaps a joint prayer would do more good.

The plane I am on resembles one of those fixed-route taxi-vans so ubiquitous in Sofia. I wouldn’t be surprised if they soon start allowing standing-room-only passengers. A few years ago I flew on some domestic flight from Belgrade to Montenegro standing up as if on a bus, hanging on to a metal bar. The driver, pardon me, the pilot, was just an arm’s length away from me. There was no door, just a threadbare curtain that was unhooked on one side, so he and I shot the breeze a bit. At one point he lit up a cigarette and I was praying he didn’t open up the window to ash outside, and thus wreak havoc with the cabin pressure.

With age the fear of flying grows. Clearly it accumulates with the hours and miles you fly, too bad you can’t cash it in, too. A Frequent Frighter card would be a good idea.

After the safety ritual the plane takes off relatively smoothly, perhaps the stewardesses’ conjuring did have an effect after all. The upholstery is threadbare, the seat pockets are ragged, the in-flight magazine is crumpled from the nervous fingers of dozens of passengers. The Bakelite body of the plane creaks softly. The smoking sign only shows how old these machines are, from the era when you could still smoke on board.

Suddenly a fly lands above me, right next to the call button. A fly in the airplane. (A friend once sent me a poem with that title, knowing of my passion for flies, and now look, the poem is coming true, in a manner of speaking.) I have a special relationship with this creature, which most find annoying, thus its presence here makes me happy. I wonder if it’s a Bulgarian fly; the plane had come from Sofia earlier that day. Or perhaps it’s a misguided Swiss fly (actually, do they allow flies into Switzerland at all?) who mixed up the flights. A fly who shall remain a foreigner its whole life in an obscure Balkan country that proclaims itself the Switzerland of the Balkans.

Do flies have nations? What are the characteristics of the national fly? Does it feel devotion and nostalgia for its homeland, could it develop some primitive form of patriotism? What would happen if we were to put that nationalism under the microscope of natural history?

The fly and the nation, now, there’s a serious topic for you. In the framework of historical or natural time, the nation is only a speck of dust, a microscopic part of the evolutionary clock, far more ephemeral than the fly. In any case, the fly surpasses the nation time-wise hundreds and thousands of times over. What would Homo nationalisticus be, if it could slip into the taxonomy of living creatures?

Genus—Homo . . . sapiens . . . I’m afraid that even at this level the nationalist will jump up, who are you calling a Homo? Where are you putting me?

Where did we start from? From the fly. And where did we end up? At the elephant of nationalism.

A fly, my seat neighbor squeals, stating the obvious and interrupting the newly built evolutionary chain in my head . . .

The stewardess rushes over. Can I help with something?

An unregistered passenger on board, I say, he flew away just now.

The fly, however, makes a circle and naïvely lands in the same place. Get out of here, I tell it in my head, but with an unexpectedly quick grab, the stewardess catches it in her hand. Do they get special training for that?

Please let it go, says the women next to me, who had outed the fly only a few moments earlier.

Yes, I would also ask you to let it go, I join in, it isn’t bothering anyone.

Everything teeters on the edge between irony and seriousness.

Is it with you? the stewardess fixes me with a stern gaze, taking up the game. Good God, if stewardesses, those ironclad creatures, have a sense of humor, there is hope for the world yet.

It’s with me, as a pet, I reply. That’s not a problem, is it?

It just needs to be in a cage or in its owner’s lap, she recites. And delicately opens the bars of her long fingers.

My neighbor turns to me a bit later. Thank you for stepping in. A woman of a difficult-to-determine age around fifty, with narrow blue eyes and freckles.

Oh, I am a great friend of flies, I say casually. I’m something like their historian.

She smiles, giving herself time to assess whether I am some kind of maniac or just a man with a strange sense of humor. Ultimately, she seems to go with the latter.

I didn’t know flies had a history.

Quite a bit longer than ours, I reply. They appeared several million years before man.

It’s strange to see a fly at this altitude, she says.

Actually, it shouldn’t be all that strange. The first living being sent into space was none other than a fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Its name is longer than the fly itself. Right after the war, with the then-prized rocket V-2.

I thought it was the dog Laika.

That’s what everyone thinks. There is a great injustice in that. Before the dog Laika there were quite a few other dogs, there were monkeys, snails . . . All of them remained anonymous. Like the poor fly, who sacrificed itself first, after all. But flies don’t have names, and therein lies the whole problem. If you don’t have a name, you’re dropped from history.

But why exactly a fly? my seat-neighbor asks.

Now, that’s a good question. Because they are short-lived and die quickly. The rocket flew for only a few hours, at an altitude of a hundred kilometers, on the very border of space, incidentally. So they needed a creature with a quick life cycle. It needed to be born, develop, attain sexual maturity, conceive, give birth, and die . . . The simple fruit fly possesses all these qualities. Besides that, the death of a few flies is far more acceptable than that of a dog, monkey, or cow, don’t you think? People are very impressed by size.

I look around and notice the subject of our conversation has wisely hidden somewhere.

At that time they start passing out “Bulgarian Rose” wet wipes—now, there’s something that hasn’t changed since my first flight so many years ago. The scent of rose oil wafts amid the clouds. The airplane prepares for landing. Mount Vitosha is visible, as is the outline of Sofia, the neighborhoods with their concrete panel-block apartments, then Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, the green rectangle of Boris’s Gardens, and the strip of Tsarigrad Road down below. There, somewhere to the right of the highway, is a neighborhood called “Youth,” where I used to live in some other lifetime. Suddenly the woman next to me, we never did introduce ourselves by name, starts to cry, quietly, calmly, without hysterics, as she turns her head toward the window. I’m sorry, she says, I haven’t been back in seventeen years.

The plane lands softly, followed by the passengers’ inevitable applause. Some foreigners, unused to this ritual, always look around rather puzzled at that moment. The woman next to me starts clapping, too.

Be careful, the pilot might take that as a plea for an encore and take off again, I joke.

Over the loudspeaker they welcome us to Bulgarian territory with pride, inform us of the outside temperature, and play the song “One Bulgarian Rose” by Pasha Hristova, who died, by the way, in a plane crash on this same airline at this same airport.

2.

The jostling and cutting in front of the passport control booths is something of a trademark for this place. Luggage delivery will take forever, then the taxi driver won’t return your greeting and will drive off angrily, the pedal to the metal, once he realizes that the address you give him is not on the other side of the city. He’ll crank up the music and light up a cigarette.

And yet this time there is something I wasn’t expecting. The first driver I head toward is wearing a wide red sash around his waist, a white shirt with a vest over it (in complete contrast to his Bermuda shorts below), and the handle of a dagger peeks out of his sash. Things have really gone too far—too far back, that is. I think how much better suited that costume would be to a horse cart or a carriage with two and not ninety horsepower, which is how much the secondhand Korean Daewoo he’s driving is. At the last moment I decide not to take the cab (taxi drivers with daggers have never been a weakness of mine) and turn toward the neighboring taxi stand. There at least the drivers are dressed normally. I open the door of the first car and ask whether the cab is free. It’s free, the driver says with a laugh, and while I’m still getting settled in he says: You’ve heard that old joke, right, where back in the day a Cuban student in Sofia would stop taxis, open the door, ask if they were free, and when they’d say they were, he’d just shout: “Long live freedom!” and send them on their way. I chuckle, even though, yes, I had heard it before.

Something is a bit off with this car, too, but I only figure out what it is as we drive off. As we slowly pull away from the airport, I see that all the cars are from the socialist era.

Moskvitch, I nearly shout, in a tone that combines a question, suspicion, sincere surprise, and confusion.

Moskvitch, the driver proudly confirms, a twelve. It’s forty years old, but a solid machine. They don’t make ’em like they used to, he says, starting up the car on the second try, which for a car of this venerable age is a brilliant start(er). It reeks terribly of gas, clearly the insulation has long since given up the ghost.

I recall that my uncle used to have a Moskvitch like this. He said it with the accent on the first syllable because he thought it sounded more Soviet that way. If we truly have body memory, then my body from 1975 surely remembers even now how the seat dug into me, that stink of gas and vomit. I always traveled with a plastic bag. I feel sick now even thinking about it. I also note the small portrait of Stalin above the rearview mirror.

It’s my buddy on the night shifts, the driver says, catching my gaze. Old Uncle Dinko is all for the 1950s.

I remember how at one time all the buses had photos of Stalin—both before and after the cult of personality, they never disappeared from the drivers’ cabins. Even later, in the ’80s, those Georgian mustaches would be peeking out from beneath Sandra and Samantha Fox’s full-color breasts.

Do you remember Samantha Fox? I suddenly ask.

Ooh, I think I’ve got a lighter with her on it somewhere here, I collect them, he says, reaching over and opening up the glove compartment, where at least a dozen different lighters and as many boxes of matches are rolling around inside. I prefer these. He takes out a Zippo engraved with Che Guevara. But otherwise these girls are mighty fine, too. He lowers the sun visor and on the back beam the Golden Girls of Bulgarian rhythmic gymnastics from the ’70s, who were part of our very own permanent and always permanently suppressed adolescent sexual revolution.

Leaving Sofia Airport in the puttering Moskvitch, the last thing I notice is an enormous billboard for one of the leading mobile operators. They offer a patriotic package with thirteen hundred free minutes—one for each year since the country’s founding—access to all Bulgarian historical films, and a portable flag with a collapsible handle, which will fit easily into your toiletries case.

3.

Just like every time I come back, melancholy inevitably settles in. Before, the sorrow was lighter, like a walk through a sparse forest in which invisible cobwebs sparkle. I loved walking through the park, in the upper part, passing by the lake with the lilies. The time I spent there so many years ago in some other life has melted away without a trace. Is the light still the same, at least? The leaves on the trees, which I waded through in late October with a certain girl, strange that I remember only autumns, anyway, those leaves had already turned at least thirty times since then. Do things remember us at all? That would still be some sort of compensation. Does the lake, with every frog and lily in it, preserve our reflections somewhere? Has the past itself—have our younger selves—turned into frogs and lilies?

I didn’t find the answer that afternoon. I found only late yet tolerable melancholy and cold April air. For a moment I felt like calling that girl. Then I imagined her—with two kids and a husband; a woman who has long since tucked our story away somewhere on the top shelf between the empty spice jars and a notebook full of recipes from her mother. What would I actually want from her—reconstruction, reenactment, recollection? A recollection of what—the elusive color of her eyes? Or was the desire more egocentric—to make sure that I had existed, so she could tell me what had happened to us, a few memories, nothing more? To give back to my memory a few walks, a few words we had laughed over back then. Souvenirs of the past. The dark entryways we hid in. The park. That one time behind the monument to . . . who was it commemorating again? The city suddenly transforms, it has a different topography for lovers . . . We imagined an apartment for ourselves, which didn’t really exist. We fantasized what would happen to us there, how we’d come home to it. Yesterday I stopped by there, she would write to me on my old Nokia, and I forgot my sweater. Let it stay there and remind you of me. Did you water the orchid? They are very fussy. The cat and I are alone, come on over . . .

Can a person be gathered up like that, piece by piece, through the memories of others, and what would you get in the end? Would some Frankensteinian monster emerge from all that? Something patched together from absolutely incompatible memories and ideas from so many people?

. . . Well, you were always laughing . . . You were totally antisocial, sometimes you’d go days without saying anything (that’s my wife, I recognize her voice) . . . You were so sweet, so, how can I put it . . . romantic, we’d lie on benches and imagine how we would get to be a hundred years old, like turtles, and we’d still be together, in a house with light blue shutters, by the sea . . . Jesus Christ, how you could curse, when you got pissed off, watch out . . . Skinny, super-skinny . . . You got to be pretty heavy . . . I was always asking you not to walk so fast . . . You limped . . . Tall . . . Hunched over . . . And when I saw your blue eyes . . . hazel or green, they changed their color depending on the season . . . in a red jacket . . . That green leather jacket . . . You were always forgetting names, and once . . . You always had a lit cigarette in your hand . . . I can’t imagine you ever smoked . . . There were a few words you never remembered, and when you’d be telling a story and get stuck on something, I’d list them off for you . . . Spaced out, very spaced out . . . A person who never wasted any time . . . Then you saw some book on my bed, that very first night, we had just gotten undressed, you turned around and said no way, I’ve got to go, I can’t sleep with someone who reads Coelho, and it was a completely different author, a Portuguese guy with a similar name, we had a good laugh about it then . . . You were gentle . . . A bit rough in bed . . . We had such nice pillow talk afterward . . .

Is all of that me?

4.

There’s something, a draft and grief, which instead of weakening seems to grow stronger with the years. And it is surely tied to the ever-quicker emptying of the rooms of my memory. One who opens door after door, going from room to room in the hope, the hope and fear of finding himself in one of them—there, where he is still whole.

Isn’t this draft pulling toward the past in the end an attempt to reach that sound place, no matter how far back it might be, where things are still whole, where it smells of grass and you see the rose and its labyrinth point-blank? I say place, but it’s actually a time, a place in time. Some advice from me: Never, ever visit a place you left as a child after a long absence. It has been replaced, emptied of time, abandoned, ghostly.

There. Is. Nothing. There.

A man sets out to pull himself together by returning to the places where he grew up. He gathers up all the addresses of the girls and women he has been in love with from kindergarten until now. He won’t ask anything of them, he only wants to see them, to tell them that he has carried them in his head his whole life (he wanted to say in his heart, but that seemed too sentimental) and that only they have remained in the end. The doctors have given him a few months at most. Like a miser, he splits them into days and hours, as if breaking large bills into small change. It seems like more to him that way. He still has three months, which means at least 91 afternoons, he loves afternoons and . . . multiplied by 24, that means about 2,184 hours. That still seems like too little to him, so he multiplies by 60, then ends up with more than 130,000 minutes. Now, that’s better, he has never felt like such a tycoon, he can spend them down to the last minute. He travels all day on a bus to the little town. The house he lived in is no longer there. Most of the other addresses have changed. The girls have long since become women, they’ve married other men, how awful. Who knows why, but he thought they would lie there bleeding in the middle of their relationship that had been cut short, still pining over him like Chekhovian heroines.

In the end he nevertheless finds one of the great loves of his life in that little town. They had been fourteen. They had pretended to get married; he had stolen a ring from his mother (who had practically torn the house apart looking for it). She had been a tall, dreamy girl, that’s how he remembers her, like a young Romy Schneider. As he nears the house, he catches sight of an elderly woman with frazzled, tied-back hair lugging a tub of wet clothes. She’s not here, he says, she must have moved. But he still decides to ask, this woman might know something.

It’s her.

Nothing is left of that girl. He doesn’t know what to say. We know each other from such-and-such . . . She doesn’t make the connection right away. Several lifetimes have passed since then. She guesses, says the wrong name. Then it is as if something opens up in her memory. At that moment an old man in a tank top comes out, her husband. What’s going on? he asks, gripping his cane, seeing his wife talking to a strange man through the fence. What do you want? He can’t say what he wants, he hasn’t managed to explain why he is here.

She keeps silent, too.

Nothing, our man says, nothing, I’m just buying old junk, pictures, embroidery, watches, radios, old stuff. Go on, the old man says, get on your way now, go on, now, we ain’t got nothing old, nothing new, either . . .

The woman still stands there like a statue, hasn’t even set down the tub. The man hides in the shade on the sidewalk across the street. From somewhere he can hear a radio giving the level of the Danube River in centimeters, that abracadabra of his entire childhood. So it’s three in the afternoon, he tells himself, he doesn’t need to look at his watch. He slowly sets off down the street, the soles of his shoes sticking to the asphalt melted by the heat; he is shrinking while they scatter from his pockets, tinkling softly and gleaming like coins, all those (no longer needed) minutes that were left to him.

The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories.

5.

For an afternoon, I stop by the city where I used to live. I go back there every time I’m in Bulgaria, even though I know that nothing remains of that time, that neither the park, nor the little square by the covered market, nor the street I grew up on remember my footsteps.

On the trunk of a chestnut by the post office I see a sheet of paper affixed with four tacks, upon which the following is written in large letters. I have copied it down exactly:

TRADE

Big L-C-D tellevision

32 inches works good 8 years old

For 30 liters of rakia

Yambol, phone number: 046 . . .

15 feb.

I stand in front of this message, true marginalia taken from the tree of life, or rather, pinned to it with tacks. Now, there’s part of the Bulgarian epos for you, a piece of it, the mystery of the Bulgarian voice, quiet, inscrutable, and suddenly erupting with its most sublime dream.

A TV in exchange for brandy.

There are dreams and horror here, horror and dreams . . . February, it says down at the bottom. Only in February could this cry arise, with all its tragedy . . . The rakia is gone, but the winter is still here. Now, there’s the whole existential novel of a people for you. The jeep of life, that old battered jeep with the canvas roof, or no, the Moskvitch of your life has gotten stuck at the end of winter, darkness has fallen, the jackals are howling, and you are out of gas. Fuck this life, you say, pounding your fist. Fuck it, fuck you, you even took my rakia. (Nobody’s taken it from you, you drank it yourself, but that’s how people have talked around here since time immemorial, somebody has taken something from you or let you have it.)

And now you’re sitting in the middle of nowhere, in the jeep or Moskvitch that is your life. And you decide, to hell with shame, you’re going to post an ad, you can’t take it anymore. You take a sheet of paper, a notice from the bank warning that if you don’t pay off the interest by . . . You don’t have any rakia, and they’re wanting interest. You flip it over and look for a pen. You think about asking your son to write it, because it’ll come out nicer, with fewer mistakes, but you feel too ashamed to ask him. That’s the only thing you’re still ashamed of. Finally you sit down and write it yourself, with all the spelling errors and missing commas. You grab a handful of tacks and go to the neighborhood all the way on the other side of town, for the second time you’re a bit ashamed. And what are you offering in exchange for the rakia—you’re offering your most precious possession, of course. Measure for measure, meaning for meaning. The television or the rakia, that is the question. The television is transcendence, a false transcendence, of course, but nevertheless the final dream of the beyond. Your grandmother had an icon, your mother had a little portrait of Lenin, and you have your TV. But what good is your TV if you don’t have rakia? The TV simply cuts life, like pouring water into your rakia . . . They’re already selling electronic cigarettes, tomorrow you’re going to be shoving electronic rakia in my hands, fucking electronic motherfuckers . . . Well, now, that’s what the TV is, electronic rakia . . . so there, take it back, a 32-inch screen for 30 liters of rakia, a liter an inch, I’ve giving you a deal. Thirty liters of rakia for a month more of life, maybe even a month and a half if we’re economical about it. Only rakia is honest, goddamn it. It doesn’t lie to you like the TV, it doesn’t try to pull the wool over your eyes, it doesn’t blather on and on. It hits you in the nose, burns your throat real good, then it goes down and warms up all that stuff down below that has long since gone cold. Rakia is the Bulgarian sublime, the Bulgarian television at long last.

I wonder whatever happened to that guy, I think as I curse inwardly. Shouldn’t I call the phone number to check? This isn’t just a want ad, it’s a cry for help. It’s the end of April. Not a single one of the tabs at the bottom with the phone number has been torn off. I go back to Sofia that same afternoon.

6.

I don’t have anyone to call, so I’m wandering through the windy streets of Sofia. I stop in front of a pet store.

During my first year at university a friend of mine and I bought a pair of parrots as a present for this girl in our class. But won’t they be squawking all day? I asked. What do you care, my friend said, you’re not gonna live with them, right? The birthday party that night was dreadful, some sort of row erupted, it even came to blows, her ex-boyfriend was pounding on the door—the 1990s . . . I remember clearly that as I slunk away I said to myself: Now there’s one woman I’ll never live with. A year later I was standing in that same room, changing the parrots’ water as they screeched hideously. In the mornings we’d throw an old towel over them so they’d think it was nighttime and we could get at least an hour of peace. We named the female parrot Emma Bovary—at that time we were reading Flaubert at the university—while we called the male one Pechorin, who knows why. Emma was constantly attacking him, and poor Pechorin, who supposedly had all sorts of Princess Marys wrapped around his little finger, would just sit there disheveled and pecked, pressed against the thin bars of the cage.

I now realize that I’ve never had as many friends as I did then. That studio apartment was always full of people. I remember how one night, in the wee hours around four a.m., when everything had been drunk and smoked up, we suddenly got ravenously hungry. There was nothing in the refrigerator; those were the hungriest days of the 1990s. I went out with two of the other guys to look for something, as if we could kill a rabbit or doe in the empty city. It was dark, formless, and empty, only packs of dogs roamed the streets. And then, like a miracle, a white Nissan puttered up, stopped nearby, unloaded three crates of yogurt in front of the local store, and drove off. Our generation hated yogurt (on principle), because that’s what they used to make us eat every morning for breakfast as kids. We looked around, nobody showed up, so we grabbed two cartons of yogurt apiece, left all the change we could find in our pockets, and ran back home.

Everybody was waiting for us, starved. I will never forget that picture, the empty bottles and cups on the table, ten identical little nickel-silver bowls set out in front of each of us, all of us twenty-odd years old, and slurping up our yogurt like angels. I don’t know whether angels eat yogurt, but that’s how I’ve remembered us, with white yogurt mustaches, happy and innocent . . .

Soon after that we would go our separate ways, grow cold, forget one another; the rebels would grow tame as teaching assistants in the universities, the sworn bachelors and party animals would be pushing baby carriages and zoning out in front of their TVs, the hippies would get regular haircuts at the local barbershop. The parrot Pechorin would die one morning, and Emma Bovary would shriek and hurl herself against the bars, crazed with grief. She wouldn’t outlive him by a week. The other Emma (yes, that really was her name) and I would break up a few months later. Neither of us would die of grief. I would start my first novel, so I would have somewhere to go home to when I was going crazy, a novel about homeless people.

The truth is, there is no way I can call any one of those erstwhile angels, not even Emma, especially not her. It’s awful that I can’t forget them and (I would never admit this to them) that I miss them. I miss myself, too.

7.

The two big rallies for the primary political forces are scheduled for the last Sunday before the referendum. Bulgaria is abuzz with all kinds of movements championing the various decades. Their arguments range from free medical care to the taste of tomatoes and grandma’s chicken stew. I doubt that the referendum will bring back the taste of stew. It’s as if some people think that bringing back the recent past will also automatically take them back the age they were then. The red light goes on and suddenly you are fifteen or twenty-seven again.

All of that feeds into the propaganda, of course. In the end most of the polls show two main movements to be considerably ahead of the rest. On the one hand, there is the Movement for State Socialism (SS), which holds echoes of State Security, but was better known in short as Soc—which wanted to bring back the time of mature socialism, more specifically the 1960s and ’70s. At its core stands the Socialist Party, even though the Soc movement’s supporters in the referendum outnumber the political party’s shrinking ranks by several orders of magnitude. In that sense it would be truer to say that the party itself is trying to get an infusion of fresh blood from the movement.

The other movement, whose results are projected to be almost neck-and-neck with the SS, is officially named Bulgari-Yunatsi, the Bulgarian Heroes, known colloquially and unofficially as simply the Heroes. It’s difficult for them to point to a specific period, to the decades they would like to return the nation to, since mythology can’t be split into years. Great Bulgaria is an eternal dream and reality, at least according to their speeches. Since, according to the guidelines of the referendum, the earliest possible time frame is the beginning of the twentieth century, the Heroes, illegitimately expanding this deadline, have chosen a late, idealized Bulgarian Revival Period, whose apex is the April Uprising of 1876.^*

Can an uprising that never fully happened become sublime and emblematic? Actually, what could become sublime and emblematic but the unhappened? Is this not the only thing that has the potential to happen and to create things as we would like them to be, unimpeded by facts? To be reenacted, as it were, on the basis of memory and imagination? Here everyone is born with (or inherits) the experience of the unhappened.

I wonder which of these two straws—Soc or Heroes—our man with the rakia, rakiaman, would clutch at. Between this Scylla and Charybdis, the little boats of the smaller movements tried to survive.

8.

Meeting with K.

Unlike my previous, almost anonymous visits here, which were tied mainly with the clinic, this time I want to talk to someone about the situation. I finally call a friend from my university days, who has become a professor in the meantime. We haven’t spoken in several years, I don’t even know if his phone number is still the same. I am about to hang up when his sleepy voice says, “Hello,” into the receiver . . .

It seems to me that, besides surprise, his voice also holds a certain joy. That rush of joy when you see or hear from someone you haven’t run into in a long time is not a given in Bulgaria. I remember during my first couple visits back here when I’d meet a friend or acquaintance on the street, I’d rush to hug him, and he would look at me bewildered and grunt out something along the lines of, Oh, hey, what’re you doing here? What’s more, K. himself suggests we meet up this evening at a pub on the roof of the State Archives. Here in Bulgaria you can still make plans for the same day.

In the late 1980s K. was a young teaching assistant. We loved him because he was different from the others. We had dubbed him “Kafka,” Junior Assistant Kafka; I suspect he had nothing against it. He was (and still is) gruff, systematic, something that was quite useful to our confused minds, filled as they were with chaotically read books. Our conversations with him also ended in intense disagreements, often going beyond the pale of civility; he would get fired up, he was caustic, he would interrupt. An academic brawler, but therein lay his charm. We weren’t extremely close friends, but we’d drink together and argue through the pubs and seminars of the 1990s, whose like has never been seen again. All of our encounters began with goodwill on his part, passed through long conversations, and ended in rows. A week later he would call and ask with sincere astonishment, Why haven’t you called? Uh, well, we’re in a fight, I would reply. Well, yeah, so what better time to have a drink and make up?

Our fights were just an excuse to make up, which would lead to a new argument, which in turn would be a new excuse, and so on. That’s how everyone lived in that wondrously simmering time.

Maybe that’s why I call him now. I’m hoping that he has remained the person who can still formulate things with the clear categoricalness of a Protestant pastor. I have never liked and never availed myself of such categoricalness, perhaps that’s why I always need someone like him. And maybe that’s why nobody likes him. I like people that other people don’t like. (Actually, my first introduction to K. came at that same seminar by the sea in the late ’80s where I also met Gaustine for the first time. And I must say that to K.’s credit, he was the only person besides me who was interested in Gaustine; he tried to invite him to his gatherings, but Gaustine, of course, never showed up to a single one.)

We’re sitting on the roof of the Archives at dusk, in the hour of the blue haze, I quote the famous Bulgarian poet Yavorov, watching how in the distance Vitosha darkens to a deep violet. Like a violet island in moon-silver waters, K. takes up the game with another poet. I realize that this city is already more literature than anything else to me, I know it only through books and only as literature does it still attract me. Sofia of the 1930s and the early 1940s, those must have been its strongest years. Somewhere close by here, the first neon advertising sign flickered on outside the office of the French airlines in 1931. Neon immediately entered urban poetry. I imagine those glowing letters, seen for the first time by an eye that has traditionally been entranced by the moon and stars. The rise of neon amid the dim light of the streetlamps clearly must have been shocking and moving, then it quickly became trivial. A long time ago, it now seems like a different lifetime, I had studied the advertising, cinema, and radio from that time, I had looked through the illustrated weeklies, the broadsheets, the film magazines, and handbooks about how to construct your own radio receiver. The whole poetry of that era was teeming with everything from condensers, antennas, neon lights, advertising logos, Bayer and Philips’, Lucky Strike, and White Horse to the names of films and the lion from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer . . . I take up this topic, even though I’ve come to talk about something else. We get carried away, the quotations are flying fast and furious. Do you remember that . . . what about this . . . And the ads for Bayer and Philips’ bloomed like in paradise? Hm, K. stops to think about this last quote, and I am truly delighted to have caught him not knowing something. I give up, who is it . . . ? Bogomil Raynov as a young poet, I say, before he became a satrap.

If I were to take part in the referendum on the past here, I would pick the 1930s (despite what comes after them) or I’d truly be torn between the 1930s for the literature and the 1960s for the vague feeling that I remember that decade in detail.

I ask K. which decade he would choose. He doesn’t rush to answer, as if he has to decide once and for all at this moment. We order another rakia and as the waiter walks away, K. says slowly: I’m debating between the 1920s and the 1950s, although the polls show they have the least support.

It’s understandable that no one wants them; both were pretty bloody.

I know his research on the poetry from the ’20s. There are several brilliant Bulgarian poets from that decade. The best of them literally paid with his head, shattered by shrapnel on the front, patched together in Berlin, only to disappear six years later, found in a mass grave and only recognized by his glass eye. It’s well known that our inept homegrown police of all eras have always shown unerring taste in poets and writers—they always manage to kill the most talented and leave the most mediocre.

I understand K.’s choice of the ’20s, the literary historian in him wants to go back to his subject matter. But why the 1950s? I ask point-blank. Those are dark times, rough, merciless, a time of terror and labor camps, stilted aesthetics in the style of that commie dogmatist Todor Pavlov.

In the ’50s my father was sent to the camp in Belene, K. begins, and he was never the same again. He also never spoke a word about it afterward. In school I was immediately designated as “unreliable.” When they talked about enemies of the people, the teachers would point me out directly as the son of an enemy. I was the ideal example of how forgiving the people’s power was, that they allowed even kids like me to live and study alongside everyone else.

One day the doorbell rang; I was seven. I looked through the spy hole and saw some frightening bearded man with slumped shoulders outside and I automatically turned the key in the lock one more time. My heart was about to burst. Come on, open up—the man outside knew my name. We don’t open the door to strangers, I shouted at him from inside. Don’t you recognize me, I’m your father, he said softly, as if he were afraid the neighbors might hear. I looked out through the spy hole and he seemed to be crying . . . That’s not my father, I told myself, but since he’s bawling, he must not be a robber, either. But I didn’t open the door. My mother was at the factory, she’d be home in a few hours. He stood there on the wretched landing, his clothing fusing with the dull beige of the stairwell. I asked him how he would prove that he was my father . . . I thought that question would throw him off balance completely. He told me that I have a scar on my left eyebrow from when I fell once in winter when I was little. He told me to open up the wardrobe and I’d see a coat with metal buttons, he’d left it behind when they’d taken him in for questioning. He told me that I was constantly asking him about his time on the front. All of this was true, but my father was a different man, much handsomer and younger than this one, and I actually even let that slip. He sat down on the steps and I could see only a dingy cap. Now I realize how stupid and cruel I was. Yet I told myself again, This is not my father, but since he’s crying he must be a good person, fallen on hard times, but if my mother finds out that I’ve made such a person wait outside . . . So I opened up the door. He came inside, but realized that I didn’t really believe him, he didn’t hug me, he didn’t even try to, surely so as not to scare me, and told me that he was going to take a bath. He knew where it was. I heard the water gush out. Thank goodness my mother returned then, she had heard that they had released the prisoners after an amnesty, and she had asked the boss to let her leave early.

We sit in silence for some time, then K. continues. So I would go through the ’50s because of my father, he died a year later. We didn’t have time to talk about anything, I never managed to pry a word out of him about it.

While K. tells this story, it is as if he has become a different person, he looks suddenly aged, nothing of his former coldness and causticness remains, even his sharp profile has retreated. He has turned into his father, whom he is telling me about, just as sooner or later we all will turn into our fathers.

Then he suddenly gives a start, realizing he has let himself get sentimental. He calls the waiter, we order a second round of shopska salad, that classic Bulgarian invention of Balkantourist from the late ’60s. The white, green and red of feta cheese, cucumbers and tomatoes—now, there’s clever move, I say to change the subject, serving the Bulgarian tricolor to tourists.

9.

Evening is falling around us. Once, only thirty-some years ago, the red five-pointed star on the party headquarters would have shone on our right. The 1930s-style clean neoclassicism of the Bulgarian National Bank across the way flows smoothly into the Stalinist architecture of the former Balkan Hotel and the Council of Ministers. Several workmen are scurrying around the empty space left by the mausoleum.

What are they doing, they’re not going to reconstruct the mausoleum, are they?

In a certain sense, they are, K. replies. You do know, right, that tomorrow the Soc rally will be here. I wouldn’t be surprised if they rebuilt it.

With no body inside, I assume.

Who knows? K smiles sourly.

I’ve ordered a “triple with sides” because of the name, which immediately brought back memories of long-ago summers at the seaside, when my father would proudly order us those classic three sausages with sides, a single portion for my brother and me to share. That’s what it meant to be like the grown-ups.

Like from back in the day, the waiter says conspiratorially as he brings them over.

I hope they’re a little fresher than that, I quip.

K. looks at my plate with slight disdain: isn’t that a little too Soc?

Actually, it’s a little too salty, I reply, biting into to one of the sausages of coarsely ground meat just like the ones back then, with little bits of bone here and there that could do a number on one of your fillings. Ajvar, boiled beans, and overfried potatoes—the holy trinity of side dishes.

He has ordered vinen kebap, a classic dish of pork in wine sauce. The food isn’t very good, but at least the portions are enormous.

So you’ve already realized that it’ll be a choice between nationalism and socialism, K. says. That’s how bad things have gotten. If you ask me which is the lesser of two evils, I don’t know. Not that there wasn’t nationalism in late Soc, of course.

Then he goes into his favorite role of professor and the table becomes his lectern. At one point our two plates join the action as well—my trio of sausages with sides is the Soc movement, while his vinen kebap becomes the Heroes. He says that we missed our chance to explain communism with all its horrors and labor camps and now a whole generation just takes it as a “lifestyle.”

Don’t go there, I interrupt him at one point, otherwise we’ll end up at that eternal “back in the day we did such-and-such, while kids these days . . .” Everywhere in the world the young rise up against the old, while here the old try to pound down the young. Like Taras Bulba—I created you, I will kill you.

You might be right, he says, we did nothing, absolutely nothing . . . Here where we’re sitting right now, at Five Moscow Street, you do know this was the State Security building, and here below us, in the basement that opens up onto Malko Turnovo Street, were the cells where they’d beat prisoners. They’re whaling on a few scrawny kids, come on, take off your pants, but without taking off your shoes. If you can’t, that means they’re tighter than they’re supposed to be, okay you’re goin’ down to Moscow Five for questioning, a few punches to the kidneys so it doesn’t show, and if that’s the end of it you should thank your lucky stars. What the hell is your problem, motherfuckers, why should my pants bother you, huh? Why are you beating us like dogs, what’s the big deal if my pants are too tight or my trench coat is lemon-yellow or my overcoat has wooden buttons, stupid bastards . . . K. is truly livid. People from the other tables start turning around to look at him.

Look, I try to cut him off—

Hang on a second, K. says, weren’t you one of the ones who wanted to make a State Security museum right here in the basement below us? Where is your museum now?

I was, I reply tersely. They ostensibly approved the idea, we wrote up fifty pages about what should be in it and how it should be presented, it was all over the newspapers for a while, and then in the end—nothing. The first excuse they thought up so it wouldn’t happen was that there wasn’t any free space. If the mausoleum were still standing, but now . . . Suddenly all the spaces in Sofia turned out to be taken. And so then we hit on the idea of the basement of Moscow Five. You know how it echoes in there . . . It has some kind of acoustic memory, so many people have screamed in that basement. And it was supposed to happen, but then everyone backed away from it at the last minute, we don’t want to divide the people, it wasn’t the right moment . . . In short—nothing came of it. You can’t make a museum to preserve something that has never left.

We sit in silence for some time, the neighboring tables start emptying out, it’s getting cool. Then K. takes up the conversation again. He talks about how people are sick of political parties, they’re sick of globalization and political correctness . . .

What’s globalization ever done to them, I try to cut in . . . and what political correctness here, of all places, where we curse out people’s mothers as a way of saying hello?

Look—K. does not like being interrupted at all—something’s not fair and people can feel it. While we intellectuals have withdrawn like . . . we don’t even want to risk talking to them.

“Risk” is exactly the right word, I reply. You talk like somebody who should be helping the weak. But you and I are the weak, things have been turned upside down, when are you finally going to see that? Those guys with the shaved heads couldn’t care less that some bespectacled twerp has deigned to talk to them.

You’re not here all the time and you have no right to talk like that, K. cuts in.

We’re heading toward a row, just like in the good old days.

Wait a second . . . So if they don’t want to hear us out, what do we do . . . go try to talk to them about the liberal discourse? . . . They’ll just grin at you, they’ll knock your glasses off and step on them and then push you out to find your way home in the dark, in the best-case scenario. Or they’ll beat you around the head with a discourse of their own while you search for your glasses. I realize I’ve gone too far, K. falls silent and somehow subconsciously raises his hand toward his head, as if to check whether his glasses are still there. He hasn’t seen this side of me before, but I’ve drunk down a lot of silence along with several rakias. I went on: What does the nation-state give you? It gives you the security that you know who you are, that you exist among others like you, who speak the same language and remember the same things—from Khan Asparuh to the taste of Zlatna Esen cookies. And at the same time they have a shared dementia about other things. I no longer remember who said that a nation was a group of people who have agreed to jointly remember and forget the same things.

Ernest Renan, back in the nineteenth century, I taught him to you, K. tosses in.

Okay, fine, but what happens now when Europe splits into different times? Nationalism is territorial in any case, territory is sacred. What happens if we pull that rug out from under its feet? There is no shared territory, instead it is replaced by a shared time.

The question is: Can we make that choice, are we ready? K. murmurs. By the way, what do you think of this whole business with the referendum? He suddenly eyes me sharply over his glasses in that way of his.

The evening wind buffets the napkins, the table is covered in glasses and dirty dishes not yet cleared away. And amid that whole jumble suddenly, who knows why, I recall that distant evening in the late 1980s, that seminar by the seaside, as if from a different lifetime. (K. was also at the table then.) And the small porcelain saucer which passed exquisitely over our heads with Gaustine’s creamer.

I don’t know, I reply, I don’t know anymore.

I don’t get it at all, either, K. says.

I realize that I’ve never heard this exact phrase uttered by him. Things are clearly not okay if the most categorical person I know shakes his head, uncertain.

Explosions ring out somewhere behind us . . . then a firework blooms in a trio of white, green and red, hanging above us for a few seconds.

They’re practicing for tomorrow, K. says. Let’s get out of here.

My erstwhile friend, the junior assistant, now Professor Kafka. I feel closer to him than ever, in the way a person feels close to someone he happens to be thrown together with during a disaster. The stars above us twinkle coldly à la Kant, while the categorical imperative is rolling around somewhere on the streets. Down below us the workmen continue building the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov with some lightweight materials, surely they’ll be done by morning. (After all, back in 1949 they built it from real bulletproof cement in only six days. In 1999 it took them seven days to destroy it.)

Passing by them, K. can’t help himself and calls out: And who are you going to put inside, boys?

Several of the workmen turn around, give us dirty looks, but don’t say anything. Once we pass by, I hear them clearly behind our backs: Just make sure it isn’t you.

10.

The Soc Parade

I woke up on the next morning with Auden’s headache from September 1, 1939. It was Sunday, May 1. The perfect day for the Soc movement—International Workers’ Day, and for the Heroes—the outbreak of the April Uprising. (Due to Bulgaria’s late switch to the Gregorian calendar in 1916, the April Uprising is now in May.) Rallies for both of these largest coalitions, only a week before the referendum.

I decided I needed to take part in both of them, to go undercover as a supporter and participant so I would have absolutely authentic insider experience and also so I would have something to tell Gaustine afterward. It wasn’t hard to get ahold of costumes for both. A costume was the password, the membership card. The movements had even set up their own booths and were selling outfits at a special discount. On the whole, sewing uniforms had become one of the most lucrative businesses in the country.

Strange as it may seem, under socialism tailors were a privileged class. I remember how, when practicing private professions was forbidden, in our neighborhood alone lights shone from tailor shop windows in little ground-floor rooms. We would go there, dragged by our mothers, to get fitted for new suits. The tailor (as if born bald, just a few strands of hair covering his pate, little round glasses, a mustache, and shiny cuffs, a truly bourgeois character) draped the cloth over me, made a few marks here and there with the chalk, on the second or third fitting I could see how the cloth was taking the shape of pant legs and sleeves that hung off my scrawny body, stuck together with pins. I was afraid of those pins. You’re like a little Jesus on the cross, my boy, the tailor would say with a laugh, taking a step back, squinting his eyes, come on, now, stand up straight, just look what a fine young bachelor you’ll make.

And so, between Christianity and bachelorhood, with a detour through the slap factory, we grew up. But my suspicion of tailors, with their bourgeois airs, their piousness and their pins, has remained to this day. I went on a bit of a tangent there, pardon me, but the past is full of side streets, ground-floor rooms, chalked-up patterns, and corridors. And notes in the margins about things that seemed unimportant to us—only later do we suddenly realize that the goose of the past has made her nest and laid her eggs exactly there, in the unimportant.

Anyway, I got ahold of both costumes easily and at a good price. I first put on the Soc outfit. Their rally began an hour earlier than the other. Socialism was fond of early risers. Revolutions, coups, and murders take place early in the morning, before the daybreak. Back then we all got up at the crack of dawn, not for revolutions, but for school; crusty-eyed and sleepy-headed, we would listen to that signal for the radio show Bulgaria—Deeds and Documents (annoying due to its early hour) and that children’s song Here at home the clock is ticking, wake up, little children . . . For years on end to our still-snoozing ears it sounded like Hearatome theclocky sticking . . .

So there I was at seven-thirty in the morning, already at the underpass in front of the former party headquarters. That was the rallying point for the demonstration. I was wearing a long red tie, which hung down to my navel, its bottom part flared. I looked ridiculous in my mousy gray suit with faint stripes and pocket flaps. As a free bonus, I had gotten a real men’s cloth handkerchief with blue edging and a little comb to put in the inside pocket of the jacket. I must admit that they had thought of everything down to the last detail. If they win, I said to myself, we’ll have to restart production of handkerchiefs and little combs. And the whole haberdashery of that era. “Haberdashery,” when’s the last time I thought of that word? When things come back, language comes back as well. My shoes were shined, my socks were dark green for some strange reason, probably taken from some military warehouse. I had brought my flat cap just in case, but for now I was holding it in my hands.

Despite the early hour the square had begun filling up with early-rising Soc sympathizers. Everywhere the once-ubiquitous “comrade” could be heard . . . At first I thought that there was still something facetious in the use of that appellation, which my ears had long forgotten, but I don’t think there was. I remembered how, since my father’s first name is Gospodin, which in Bulgarian means “Mister,” and his last name is Gospodinov on top of that, when some acquaintance called out to him on the street “Heeeey, Mister, Missssster!” everybody would freeze. Who are you calling “mister,” comrade? some watchful citizen would butt in. Yet “Comrade Mister” sounded equally ridiculous.

An old man with a white beard had sat down to rest on the stones in front of the Archaeological Museum and was now struggling to get back up, without success. He was clutching his little flag in one hand and his cane in the other, and he didn’t think to set down his flag so as to steady himself. I went over to help him.

Are you here for the demonstration, grandfather?

Indeedy, for the demonstration, sonny boy. I’m from the Fatherland Front, been a member all my life. Back in those days they whooped me good lotsa times, ’cause I was always pokin’ my nose where I shouldn’t, but I still wanna go back then if need be. ’Cause that there socialism might’ve been a load of hooey, but at least I got its number, it’d fool me once, but I’d fool it twice, we always found a way to work things out, but in these here new times, they rob you blind just by lookin’ at you. Run you right over like a freight train, fyooom and that’s it, you’re standin’ there stripped down to your underpants and no one gives a hoot.

He brushed the dust off his trousers and looked at me, his eyes narrowed. Well, now, if we turn back time, will I get all them years back, too? They can whoop me all they like, as long as I’m twenny-somethin’ again.

I laughed, patted him on the shoulder, and Grandpa Mateyko (I will call him that after the Elin Pelin story about the old peasant who winds up in heaven) thanked me for the help and minced over toward his region.

Comrade . . . an older woman wearing a “party vanguard” armband and carrying a red Partizdat notebook came over to me and asked, Which party organization are you from?

(Oof, seriously? . . . Am I really going to blow my cover at the very beginning of my mission?)

I’m asking which precinct you’re from.

From the Lenin Precinct, I replied automatically, expecting the woman to call over the militia officer standing nearby (yes, they had found old “people’s militia” uniforms for the security guards) to haul me off the square.

Contrary to my grim expectations, she instead beamed and nodded.

People have already forgotten the real names of the precincts from back in the day, she said. I am from Kirkovski. What is your name so I can register you?

I mumbled something like Gaustinov, which the woman dutifully took down.

You can take a red flag and free carnations from those tables there, she said, pointing them out to me before going on her way.

I’ve seen this picture hundreds of times, I’ve buried it somewhere in the basement of my mind and now it is floating up before my eyes like a ghost, but one of those ghosts which you know are made of flesh and blood and which won’t disperse if you stick your hand through them. And in that sense, if they are real, then you yourself are the ghost.

Men, women, the masses, the people . . . Men in identical mousy costumes like mine, here and there some dark blue or black blazer. A sea of women’s trench coats, beige, in the style of the late ’70s, if I’m not mistaken. As if the Valentina Fashion House or the Yanitsa Center for New Goods and Fashions had again started up their production lines. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had. I also noticed some more distinctly dressed women, with slightly different patterns, clearly the comrades of the higher-ranking members of the party committees; the signature of the first secretary’s granddaughter was evident, she herself was a designer and “real fashion dictator,” as the left-leaning sector of the media had written ad nauseum. The women sported bouffant hairdos, teased up early in the morning with plenty of hair spray, à la Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space; incidentally, those vintage hooded hair dryers at the salons were strikingly similar to the space suits of the first Soviet cosmonauts. I wouldn’t be surprised if during an emergency all the women at a salon could just blast off directly with them. The crowd was scurrying around, women were kissing each other on the cheek, then spending a long time wiping the lipstick off each other’s faces. The men were smoking, clean-shaven, with the sharp scent of cologne, eyeing their female colleagues.

I must admit there was joyful excitement in the air.

I stuck out, awkward and alone, without a flag or carnations, so I set off toward the stands. They’re all gone, comrade. The woman shrugged helplessly. They promised to restock us . . .

Good God, how nice and familiar all of this was. Clearly I must have looked pretty crestfallen, since a man in the line behind me held out a pack of cigarettes: Would you like a smoke?

Stewardess! I exclaimed in utter sincerity. The memory of my first cigarette at age nine, which is also the memory of my first theft (of my father’s cigarettes), of my first lie, my first feeling of being a man, my first revolution—how many things lay hidden in the tobacco of a single cigarette.

The man clearly misinterpreted my reaction and took another pack out of his inside pocket: I also have HB, from the hard-currency store.

I laughed, and only then really looked at him. He was wearing a poisonous yellow tie and his suit coat was slightly unusual, it differed from the masses around us. Suddenly something clicked in my brain, clearly it also clicked for him at the same instant. That well-known genre of reacquaintance ensued, considerably more trivial than in the time of the Odyssey: Is that you . . . But you . . . I thought you were living abroad. Come on, now, abroad isn’t the underworld, people do come back.

Demby, my classmate from way back when, who also was my fellow student at the university for a brief stint, realized in the nick of time that literature was a dead-end street and disappeared somewhere into the parallel world of the early ’90s.

We hadn’t seen each other in thirty years. Last I heard, he was selling real estate and airplane parts, and opening a chain of Rosa Bella patisseries. In exactly that order.

Once he had called me to think up an advertising slogan for his chain of cake shops. Come on, he said, aren’t you a poet? I wasn’t a poet at all, of course, I was a sophomore in college studying literature and I was every bit as broke as my major and year demanded, so I immediately took him up on his offer and came up with something along the lines of “Our sweets can’t be beat,” which he absolutely loved, while I earned my first honorarium of sixty leva, thirty two-leva bills; I got the feeling they had just been taken out of the sweet shop’s till and were still sticky with buttercream.

Demby, with whom I had weathered all the idiocies of adolescence, was the slyest dog at our high school, one of the most likable scammers you will ever meet. We were mutually surprised to run into each other here. All around us trumpets started playing, people were lining up in rows. Demby suddenly remembered he was in a hurry and stuck his business card into my hand: I’m here for work, he said, but let’s get together when things are less rushed, and then he disappeared into the crowd. I glanced at the business card before tucking it away: Deyan Dembeliev, telephone . . . Just a name and phone number. Only extremely famous or extremely modest people could use such cards. Demby was not the latter.

Suddenly the square was transformed and the buzzing crowd started falling into formation as if on cue. Clearly there was some sort of problem with the sound system, you could hear one of the sound guys say, Shit . . . and it echoed across the whole square. Then, as if to cover up this gaffe, the strains of “The Internationale” blared out: Arise, ye workers from your slumber . . . In the very front on a platform towed by electrocars stood gymnasts in shorts, ready to make a pyramid on cue. Next to me girls waving kerchiefs and flags practiced a composition, at a certain sign they squatted down and with their bodies and flags created a face that was sufficiently vague so as to pass for Georgi Dimitrov and Lenin at the same time. I recalled that every time we were gathered around a table, an aunt of mine would proudly recount how as a student in 1968 she had been part of Lenin’s mustache—at the National Stadium for the opening of the Youth Festival, in front of forty thousand people, you can’t imagine how exciting it was. I also remember how every time I heard that story, I was overcome by such an urge to laugh that I always had to run into the kids’ room so as not to risk a slap from my mother. My poor aunt, her whole life she dreamed of a career as an artiste, as she herself put it, while the role of her life had been as a hair in Lenin’s mustache.

The idea for the rally to take the form of a socialist-era demonstration was not bad, but it had certain drawbacks since the space was limited. We only needed to walk about 200 or 250 meters until everybody ended up between the mausoleum and the National Gallery, which had once been the tsar’s palace, which had once been the Turkish town hall. The MC’s voice crackled from the speakers. Had they taken the trouble to find old speakers, so we could purposely experience that same crackling and popping like back in the day? If that was the case, then serious brains and cash were behind this movement. It was an open secret that the money came from Russia, which was gradually and very clearly turning back into the Soviet Union, returning, via referendums, if we can use that word in this case, its once-lost territories.

The MC’s voice floated over the square, deep and emotionally charged. They had found an old actor with the same poignance from back then, you couldn’t help but get goose bumps. Those same words about the blood of thousands of heroes, the difficult yet sole path toward the bright future, ebullience and audacity, audacity and ebullience . . .

The people around me, just like back then, hardly tried to crack the meaning of what was being said, and it wasn’t possible in any case, but the very abracadabra of the utterance, the intonation and the pathos, was the little red light, sufficient to unlock the digestive juices of the past. I found a spot in the back row of the Fatherland Front block. I caught sight of Grandpa Mateyko and we nodded at each other.

The parade set off. A brass band was at the very front, followed by a small team of cheerleaders. I never understood when socialism started allowing such erotica, clearly the senile geezers from the Politburo gave their lecherous approval sometime in the ’80s. Those very same geezers, who had once ordered the police to stamp girls’ thighs with permanent ink if their skirts were too short, suddenly approved these Lolitas in revolutionary uniforms.

Next the gymnasts, on their moving platform, made a living five-pointed star with their bodies, then it was the turn of the girls who had been practicing making Lenin/Dimitrov’s head with their flags. This was followed by several electrocars pulling huge floats with Styrofoam constructions and portraits. And bringing up the rear were the common laborers, us with our carnations and little red flags. (I never did manage to outfit myself with either one of these attributes.) Our corps ended up at the very back of the square, by the gallery/palace/town hall, but on the upside from there you could see the whole picture. And the mausoleum, above all. As whole as whole can be, rebuilt, it was the high point of the event. You could sense real excitement ripple through the ranks as we stood in front of it. Those workers the other night really did do a good job. The mausoleum gleamed like the real thing, whiter than ever before. The soldiers in front performed the ritual changing of the guard. On cue the demonstrators began chanting three times: “Glory, Glory, Glory” . . . I wonder when they had rehearsed, chanting so perfectly in sync doesn’t happen just like that. In any case I clearly had missed the rehearsal and joined in slightly out of tempo, but hey, we were from the Fatherland Front after all, the bottom of the barrel. At that moment officials began climbing onto the stage, waving just like they used to, only with their palms, from the wrist. There’s choreography here, I thought. It’s all been worked out in advance. I’d like to know who their screenwriter is.

Suddenly, as if on cue, the chanting died down and the MC’s voice once again carried over the square. Let us welcome our leader and teacher, Comrade Georgi Dimitrov . . . There must be some mistake in the script, I thought. Perhaps we’ll honor his memory, but to welcome him back, that’s going a little far . . .

And then, in the silence that had fallen, a fanfare rang out, the roof of the building opened, two flat panels slid to the side, and from the inside of the mausoleum Dimitrov’s funerary bed slowly began rising, looking exactly as I had seen it as a child, with the red plush shroud beneath it, with flowers around the waxy body . . . and the waxy body itself. The sarcophagus hung above the stage and those standing on it; a woman at one end quickly made the sign of the cross. The square froze. I was afraid the mummy would roll off his pedestal and fall on the heads of the officials below. I think they were afraid of the same thing. After that, the two panels soundlessly slid back together. And then—a quiet shudder of horror ran through the crouching rows because, no, say it isn’t so, the mummy discreetly raised his palm, only his palm, and delicately waved. Barely visibly, almost imperceptibly. I saw several elderly women clutching at their hearts and being quickly escorted away. Immediately Dimitrov’s voice joined in, some old recording saying that the path we are walking ain’t smooth and level like the cobblestones in front of Parliament, but thorny . . . These people never did learn to speak properly.

It was horrifying, I must admit that even I felt my heart skip a beat. When the recording ended, the leader of the movement came forward, a red-haired woman of around fifty, in a quintessential suit, slightly gathered and cinched at the waist, a red fichu around her neck and a red carnation in the breast pocket of her jacket. She signaled to the crowd to quiet down and began with that opening: Dear daring comrades and compatriots . . . Four r’s in as many words, clearly this was the hidden code of socialism. The more r’s, the better. It is surely not coincidence that they recommend that dogs’ names include the r-sound. So they respect you when you give them commands.

11.

Collective Amnesia and the Overproduction of Memory

The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory. The light industry of memory. The past made from light materials, plastic memory as if spit out by a 3-D printer. Memory according to needs and demand. The new Lego—different modules of the past are on offer, which fit precisely into the empty space.

The uncertainty remains as to whether what we are describing is a diagnosis or an economic mechanism.

—Gaustine, New and Imminent Diagnoses

12.

The Uprising

I didn’t wait around to hear the rest of the speech in front of the mausoleum. It was getting late, and I still had to catch the Heroes’ meeting, which was beginning five hundred meters farther down the street in Boris’s Garden. I slipped away through the little park behind the town hall. I had rented an apartment nearby, where I changed from my suit coat and slacks into breeches and an embroidered vest; I kept the white shirt on, white shirts are always in fashion, wound my sash around my waist, swapped the cap on my head for the kalpak, and voilà—now I was a young hero. The puttees that wrapped around my calves and the handmade moccasins gave me a bit more trouble, but they also brought certain relief after the hard and unbroken-in oxfords. I made my way past the university, headed down through the Knyazheska Garden with the monument to the Red Army, which was now surrounded by a cordon of left-leaning volunteers who had been guarding it around the clock lately due to a recent spate of pranks. All it took was half an hour’s work with spray paint in the dead of night, and the Russian soldiers would wake up the next morning as Batmen and Supermen. Actually, that was the only good thing that could still happen with that monument. I headed past the stadium and entered the recesses of Boris’s Garden, which had formerly been called “Freedom Park,” and before that Boris’s Garden, and even earlier than that the Pepiniera or the Nursery.

Here every place is formerly something else.

I entered Boris’s Garden. If one of the patriots gathered here had read that before the liberation this was exactly where the Turkish garrisons had stood, and soon thereafter a Turkish cemetery, surely they would have looked for a different rallying point. But nature has no memory, nor do people, and so Boris’s Garden echoed with heroic songs at that near-noon hour, or, as they would have said back in the day—at twelve o’clock Ottoman Standard Time. As I walked past Ariana Lake, one of my moccasins came untied and I almost fell on my face.

How goes it, bacho, elder brother, are you in need of help? a young lad said, bending down over me.

I’m well, brate, brother—I tried to get into the language as well—thank you, and Godspeed.

It was a nice philological exercise. I could get into that sort of thing. Everything always comes down to language in the end. There it was “comrade,” here it was “bacho,” and language endured everything like a beast of burden, it didn’t revolt. Because it remembered the time before we existed. Or because it has no memory.

Lassies decked out in traditional finery with flowers behind their ears passed me, giggling. The coins adorning their costumes shone in the sun, their ornate silver belt buckles gleaming before them. From their costumes you could tell they were from different regions of Bulgaria, the red kirtles and black embroidered aprons of the girls from Thrace, the black tunics of the maidens from the Shoplukregion around Sofia, the beautiful satiny bodices of the Rhodope lasses . . . Many companies for making men’s and women’s clothing, which had now renamed themselves as “studios for homespun,” were sewing breeches, vests, tunics, and rebel uniforms at full steam, including for children, as if we were preparing for a new April Uprising.

It was a fine day, the May sun was shining softly, and you could say that the trees, too, had put on their native costumes, so as not to be left out of what was to happen. On the broad meadows of Boris’s Garden, people were sitting in small groups. Some had spread blankets on the ground and were pulling out chicken, hard-boiled eggs, ajvar, whatever they had brought along.

There were men of every caliber—from smooth-faced young boys to fellows of an undefined middle age (but with well-defined potbellies) to white-haired old men. These latter were the most sympathetic, some of them were so old that it seemed as if they had never shifted to Western dress. Every man had either a saber or an old dagger or a pocketknife.

Most of them were wearing roomy breeches decorated with black braiding and deeply pleated backsides, a revolver and a dagger with a bone handle tucked into each sash. More or less every single one of them had an old rifle—Berdans flashed past, you could also catch sight of flintlocks, Krnkas from the Russo-Turkish War, and here and there some Chassepots from that same era. The more amateurish among them, having no other weapons, had come with Flobert air rifles with the buttstocks painted in the colors of the rebel banner. (Just look how your tongue begins to slide and before you know it has slipped on breeches as well, going from word to word.)

To the right, next to the stadium itself, there was a small band of cavalry taken straight out of Zachary Stoyanoff’s 1884 Pages from the Autobiography of a Bulgarian Insurgent, or rather, the movie version of that book. Thirty or so horses with rebels mounted on them, each with a lion on their kalpak and a feather, turkey feathers, it seems to me. One of them, it must be Benkovski,^† had tied up his horse and was bantering rather cheekily with some lass carrying a green rebel standard.

I wanted to mix in with some group, to hear what people were saying. I was curious, while my ironical attitude was slowly evaporating. This was my homeland, “which nationalism has stolen from us,” as K. would say. I remembered sweating in grade school under my astrakhan hat, which crushed my ears, while my woolen cloak bit into my neck so badly that for a week afterward they had to slather the rash with pig lard. Every morning, instead of normal exercises, we had had to do various folk dances in the schoolyard. They always put me at the tail end of the line, but I still managed to throw off those around me. That’s how it was, but didn’t I secretly want to feel like one of the whole for just an hour, to laugh out loud at the jokes, to feel other bodies like mine, with whom I supposedly shared common memories, common stories? . . . And weren’t they here precisely for that, to be with someone who was as confused as they are, yet proud, someone who hates Turks and Gypsies with the same passion that he loves tripe soup and imam bayildi, the magnificence of the Bulgarian Khans, Turkish coffee, the anthem “Get Up, Get Up, Young Balkan Hero,” but also the pop-folk hit “White Rose,” someone who loves to doze a bit in the afternoon, to sit down in the evening with a little shot of rakia, to turn on the TV, to let fly a juicy curse or two, to yell toward the kitchen, Woman, where the hell did you hide the saltshaker?, he likes for everything to be neat and clean at home, that’s why he dumps his ashtray into a little plastic bag, then throws the bag outside, over the balcony railing, so that tomorrow when he’s walking down the street and the wind picks up the bag and sticks it to his forehead or when he steps in dog shit, he can say, Damn, but isn’t Bulgaria a pigsty, and again let fly a few choice curses. Who ever said that swearing is the Bulgarian satori, the Bulgarian Zen, a flash of enlightenment, a shortcut to the sublime . . . ?

Thank God the bagpipes started up with a squeal and pulled me out of these dark thoughts . . . People jumped up and ran to join the horo, the traditional round dance. I stepped away and saw an old man under a tree, this rally’s Grandpa Mateyko, exactly the same as the other one I had seen at the demonstration this morning, so I headed over to him. I even wondered if it wasn’t the same old man. He was trying to light his little pipe with tinder, hitting the steel against the flint to give off a spark. There was something of the whole of Bulgarian literature and folktales in that gesture.

How goes it, grandfather, may I sit down a bit in the shade with you? I said.

Good day to you, my son. Go ahead, sit down, the shade is for all of us, he replied without lifting his eyes.

Did your heart leap when you heard the bagpipes? I said, teasing him a bit.

Aye, my heart leapt, but my legs won’t follow, the old man replied. My heart says, Giddyap, legs, but they’ll hear none of it. And my ears are deaf as doornails, as well, and my eyes can’t see. I’m like Balkandzhi Yovo^‡ himself, the old man said with a laugh. The years are the biggest Turk of them all, they’ve taken everything from me. Without even asking. I used to spin songs, but my gadulka burned up, so now I just play on a pear leaf, but nowadays you can’t even find a pear tree anymore. I can sing you the songs of Botev and Vazov from beginning to end. I’m from Baldevo, have you heard of Baldevo?

I knew of the beggars of Baldevo, who were the descendants of Tsar Samuel’s blinded soldiers who scattered across the land after the grimmest of Bulgarian defeats in 1014 and became wandering gusla players and singers on the bridges and squares. To earn a crust of bread with songs about misfortunes and blinded soldiers. The old man was visibly delighted that someone had heard of this.

Well, I’m from their stock, he said, and now look, with time I, too, have gone blind like one of Samuel’s soldiers.

Have you anyone to help you? I asked.

I do, my granddaughter brought me here, she’s surely joined the horo. Once she’s had her fill of dancing, we’ll head home. This hullaballoo they’re kicking up, I don’t much like it, nor the rifle shots.

A gentle soul, he reminded me of my grandfather. Thank goodness we have such old men, who have miraculously survived.

The horo was truly thundering, growing ever larger. It had begun from the upper walkways of the park, had wound around the lily pond, and was now heading down toward Ariana Lake and the entrance to the garden. Soon it reached Eagles’ Bridge itself. I don’t know if they had a permit to block traffic on Tsarigrad Road, but who would have the guts to stop them? There was something telling about the emptiness of the highway that led to that outsized Bulgarian dream of yore. The song “A Din Rising near the Bosporus” tells us of Tsar Simeon before the walls of Tsarigrad, a city that would never be his, a city the Greeks called Constantinople. But just the fact that the Byzantine emperor Romanos trembled was still enough for the long-suffering Bulgarian soul. Besides, every day buses dumped Simeon’s descendants out onto the Kapali Carsi Market. Why bother conquering a city when you can bargain for it?

Indeed, the horo was growing by the minute, leaping over the guardrails of Tsarigrad Road and again winding through Eagles’ Bridge and into the park.

Eee-hooo-eee-hoo-hoooo, the dancers whooped and hooted. . . . If someone were to give the command, “Onward! To Tsarigrad!” at this moment, the dance line would head there, to the east, like a dragon, snaking along the highway the whole way, until it finally halted before them there Tsarigrad Palaces, surrounding its walls on all sides and splashing straight across the Bosporus. And when the noose tightened around the city, when the bagpipes wailed and the horo-siege surrounded it, wouldn’t the city fall? Of course it would fall, and it would join the horo, to boot. The horo, now, there’s the secret Bulgarian strike troops, the Bulgarian Trojan horse. Young Heroes disguised as horo-dancing revelers, but with pistols tucked in their breeches. There’s an Odyssean slyness here, Clever Peter^§ and Wily Odysseus rolled into one.

Suddenly there was a noise above Boris’s Garden and a shadow slowly floated over the trees, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Everyone immediately looked up. A Bulgarian flag, carried by three hundred drones, as they wrote in the papers afterward, was flying in the heavens above us. The largest Bulgarian flag ever unfurled, a candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records. (Here Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” would have fit perfectly, even though the organizers had chosen “Izlel e Delyo Haydutin,” the Bulgarian folk song that had gone into space on Voyager, instead.)

There was something strange about the whole sight, reminiscent of a postapocalyptic film. The drones buzzed solemnly, pulling the flag, the end of which was not in sight. Down below some people with breeches and rifles from the nineteenth century hurled their hats into the air and shouted hurrah . . . When the drones had covered the whole patch of sky above the park with astounding accuracy, they paused over the heads of the flabbergasted people.

A sky made of silk so grand, that is my fair homeland . . . Someone started singing a socialist children’s song from the improvised stage, but no other voices joined in and he awkwardly fell silent. Then one of the leaders of the movement grabbed a megaphone and gave the password: Bul-ga-ro young hero! The chant was taken up immediately; it echoed off the hills and valleys, slammed into the buildings on the other side of Tsarigrad Road, and returned amid the trees of Boris’s Garden. Bul-ga-ro young hero! . . . people shouted, their eyes gazing up at the drones as if greeting them.

One bold lad not far from me could no longer contain himself. He lifted his Mannlicher and let off a joyful shot into the sky, just as he’d seen people do in the movies. Knock it off, you’re gonna punch holes in the flag, an older compatriot sitting next to him, perhaps the leader of their rebel band, immediately scolded him. The lad blushed and lowered his rifle, but the signal had been given and around us shots rang out from rifles and revolvers (“levorvers,” as they once wrote, and how nice that sounds). Several drones were hit, and they sputtered and fell into the crowd below. Thank God there were no casualties. It was strange to witness the murder of a drone, like seeing a goose shot in flight; no feathers went flying, but still you get the sense of a shot-down bird.

Right at that moment, as if on cue (no one ever did figure out whether this was part of the scenario or if it was due to the sudden shooting), the drones opened their pincers in perfect sync and disappeared to the west, while the flag, left hanging on its lonesome in the air, seemed surprised for a moment before slowly starting to fall; it descended somewhat silkily, embracing the trees, the bushes, the slides, and the stone elephant on the playground, the pond with the lilies, the benches, the gazebos, the monuments to poets and generals, Benkovski’s cavalry, and the people with all their riflery. Those people at the edges of the park managed to escape, a few of the more frightened women and children also took off running immediately, but most people remained standing underneath it. Where there were tall pines and chestnuts, something like enormous circus tents were formed, while on the slopes and meadows the fabric settled flat on the ground and the bodies of those pressed beneath it could be seen scurrying around, and here and there people screamed that they were suffocating, so someone was forced to slice through the sacred cloth with a knife. Boris’s Garden was covered with the largest Bulgarian flag ever made, more than three square kilometers, as if wrapped by Christo, whom most of the young heroes otherwise lambasted.

Thank God I ended up near the tall chestnut that Grandpa Mateyko had been sitting under. There was air here, it was even pleasant, except for the intense aroma of the cloth and hand-wipes. It turns out the flag had been spritzed with rosewater and Boris’s Garden was now transformed into the Valley of Roses, to the horror of those wheezing and hacking beneath it. Those daggers and sabers at long last came in handy for the liberation of the suffering people. Screams, coughs, and curses rang through the air, people called out their lost loved ones’ names. All of this spoiled the planned re-creation of the outbreak of the April Uprising. The cherrywood cannon never did end up firing; they had a hard enough time getting it to fire back in the day, and now under the cloth it would only asphyxiate the populace. Of the cavalry only a few horses could be seen, frantically racing around in a circle crazed with fear and at risk of trampling their fallen riders. From the very hill that was supposed to have represented Shipka Pass and from which for the sake of historical accuracy they were supposed to hurl stones and wood, only muffled groans floated, along with a lonely voice reciting the famous poem over the loudspeakers.

The uprising was headed for disaster, just as it had historically. And this made the reenactment absolutely authentic.

13.

The May twilight was delicately trying to conceal the remnants of the rebellious afternoon, the scraps of flag on the chestnuts in Boris’s Garden, empty bottles, newspapers, wrappers . . . I don’t know who cleans up after every revolution.

I walked up Krakra Street toward the Doctors’ Garden. I didn’t feel like going home yet, so I went into the café at the Union of Architects, a place where I used to spend almost all my afternoons at one point. They had a cozy little courtyard with a garden, the perfect place for reading and reflecting, unless you run into a chatty friend, of course. I called Gaustine’s phone number at the clinic. I wanted to give him a brief report. It rang and rang, so I hung up. I told myself it would be better to write him, since he didn’t like phones in any case.

Then I decided to call Demby. I took out his card and dialed his number. Again it rang and rang with no answer. I texted him that it was me and suggested we meet up. A minute later I got a message. Demby apologized, but he’d had a really rough day and invited me to meet him for a coffee at his office in the Central Bathhouse the next day instead.

The Union of Architects’ courtyard was rather quiet. After a whole day of demonstrations and uprisings it was as if nothing had happened. Several elderly aristocratic-looking couples were gathered at a larger table in the corner, demurely celebrating something—an anniversary, perhaps a diamond one, or simply the fact that they were still alive. Not far from me a young couple were kissing. Now, there are things that don’t change, I thought, trying not to look in their direction. I also tried to imagine how this café and its courtyard would look if the Heroes won. Would they lug the cherrywood cannon up to the entrance, would they switch out the glass cups for clay ones, those traditional Bulgarian ceramics? Would they cover the tables with folky red woven cloths? Would the pleasantly spacey waitress be forced to don a tunic with decorative coins and tie a colorful kerchief on her head? Would the soft jazz be replaced by folk music? Would at least a couple neutral places remain for citizens exhausted by history?

Perhaps, in place of all the wonderful polyglot flowers that grew here, they would plant the new sort of tulip known as the National—with blossoms of white fusing into green and red. After many attempts, a gardener had succeeded in isolating this variety. To force green into the petals of a tulip was to do violence to its essence, which has preserved green for the stem and leaves, but not for the flowers.

People believe that no matter what happens, the inviolable consolation of nature will remain. There will always be spring, summer, and fall, replaced by winter and then in turn by spring. But even this is not guaranteed. Incidentally, according to the Celts, one of the first signs of the apocalypse is the mixing of the seasons.

At that moment shots rang out clearly somewhere nearby. After a whole day of clamor and commotion, this did not faze me at all, but I thought I heard a round of machine gun fire, and the sirens of ambulances and police cars confirmed that something really had happened. High-profile killings in the center of Sofia were the trademark not only of the 1990s and the 1920s, but also of the late nineteenth century. One prime minister was blown up here on Tsar Osvoboditel, another hacked to pieces right over there on Rakovski. Just so you know where you are.

I paid and got up to leave, having had enough emotional upheaval for one day. When I got home, I turned on the news and saw that at the Monument to the Soviet Army there had been a clash between participants in the two rallies. Two of the Heroes had been seriously injured, most likely shot by a Shpagin submachine gun from the era of World War Two, the reporter clarified. The monument was on the border between the two rallies. In the segment, the wounded meekly lay there bleeding. The TV crews had gotten there before the ambulances.

14.

At Demby’s

The next day I headed over to the Baths early in the morning. It had rained overnight and in the cool May dawn the city looked completely different from the day before. The sidewalks were like minefields, the paving stones would tilt and spit mud up on your pant legs. This turned walking into a peculiar exercise indeed, full of careful assessments, jumps, hesitations, searches for detours. Not walking, but maneuvering. And so, imperceptibly, with curses and surges, I reached my destination.

The Central Bathhouse, of course, had long since ceased to be a bath, but it remained one of the most beautiful buildings in Sofia, with a light, exquisite touch of Secession on the façade and rounded Byzantine contours. At the moment it housed the Sofia History Museum, but everyone still called it the Bath, in any case and from time to time some NPO would turn up demanding that it be changed back into a city bathhouse, with the large pool in the men’s side and the smaller one on the women’s. I made my way through the museum galleries, slipped past the golden Louis XVI–style carriage, and past a massive desk—a present to Tsar Ferdinand from Bismarck himself—that rivaled the carriage in size. . .

Demby’s office was on the upper level at the very end of the hallway. A spacious room, chaotically heaped with objects from various styles and eras, as if it were a natural extension of the museum.

What’ll you drink? he asked me as soon as he answered the door.

What’s on offer?

Everything from coffee to kumis.

Kumis? I exclaimed. Mare’s milk?

Yes, along with a Proto-Bulgarian breakfast, Demby replied, it’s been selling like hotcakes lately. Porridge from millet, boiled bulgur, and a thinly sliced strip of jerky. Try it.

And he whipped a sheet off the little table next to him, where the foods had been laid out.

Dried under the saddle of a horse, I joked, reaching for the jerky.

Well, that’s what’s written on the package, but I can’t guarantee it . . . By the way, in recent years horses have gotten to be more plentiful than sheep, they’ve even caught up to the number of cows raised here in Bulgaria. Patriotism has turned out to be a force of production.

I chewed the thin slice of jerky slowly and with suspicion. It was tougher than I had expected and had a strange, unpleasantly sweet taste.

Oh, I forgot to tell you, Demby said, seeing the look on my face, that’s horse jerky.

I could barely restrain myself from spitting it into a napkin . . .

Well, of course, the Proto-Bulgarians didn’t raise pigs and cows, Demby said, they used horses for everything. By the way, that jerky is incredibly good for you, it contains two times less cholesterol and fat, plus lots of zinc, he rattled on like a radio advertisement. It just hit the market recently, Khan Asparuh brand.

He pointed out a calendar on the wall, a gift from the company, which showed Khan Asparuh, the founder of the First Bulgarian Empire way back in AD 681, sitting majestically on his horse, chewing a hunk of jerky as if it had just been sliced off that very same horse. The taste of Great Bulgaria. And beneath that in smaller letters: Made from Bulgarian meat. Now, that sounded like cannibalism.

A coffee, I requested, without mare’s milk, if possible.

I drank it almost in one gulp, to wash away that lingering sweetish flavor of the horse meat. Demby offered me juice from celery and beets, and I accepted. While the blender was whirring, I looked carefully around the room. A big map of Great Bulgaria—I could not remember when exactly it had existed in this form—was hanging to the right of the door. Almost all of Europe was Bulgarian, plus two slices cut from Asia like jerky. In a small glassed-in display case behind the desk stood four extremely odd chalices. I stepped closer and saw that they were in fact skulls, carefully carved out and ensconced in wrought iron to form wineglasses.

The Nikephoros’s Noggin^¶ set, Demby called from the far corner of the room.

Several old rifles, Krnkas and Mannlichers, hung elegantly on the wall. Whenever I see a rifle on display, I automatically imagine Chekhov. Right next to the guns—an old wooden radio with a little knitted doily on top of it and a flower vase homemade from an old bottle of Vero dish soap, in which several fake lilies of the valley cavorted. Nothing brings back the past like kitsch.

Look, I know what you’re thinking, Demby said suddenly, but these are exactly the type of things my clients like.

I waved off his concerns and continued my tour around the office.

In a glass carafe with a red five-pointed star on the lid floated a brain in formaldehyde, as if stolen from some biology lab. It’s Georgi Dimitrov’s, Demby noted casually, as he brought over the juice. They preserved it when they mummified him.

At the end of this exposition wall stood a small model of the mausoleum made out of matchsticks, a very detailed work.

That burns easily, I couldn’t resist.

Speaking of the mausoleum, what did you think of the demonstration yesterday? Actually . . . my company was behind the . . . reenactment, he added modestly.

So this was what my old friend Demby had been up to.

So you’re saying that you were . . . the director? I didn’t know if this was the right word.

I make ends meet. With my company here, I create historical reenactments, that’s my main business. I’ve always loved theater, never mind they didn’t accept me into the theater academy back in the day.

I recalled that the demonstration had had some very subtly finessed details and I told him as much, which clearly delighted him.

That bit with the crackling loudspeakers was good, you did that on purpose, right?

What do you think? And that mistake during the sound check and the sound guy swearing . . . People remember those sorts of things. Rest assured that from all those identical demonstrations during socialism, that’s exactly what they’ve remembered, some gaffe. And when you re-create it for them now, it takes them straight back there. And what’ll you say about Dimitrov’s appearance, hm? Deus ex machina. Before the rally I went down into the basement of the mausoleum. Now, there’s a sight to see. When they went to destroy it, they only blew up the upper part, more or less; underneath everything is cracked, the metal reinforcements are hanging down, but the rooms down below nevertheless survived. The room for the mummy, I call it the makeup room, is absolutely unscathed, as is the elevator they used to put him on, a bit rusty, but intact. And it works. Every night they’d bring him down into the freezer, that was Bulgaria’s first air-conditioning, from the late ’40s, a huge hall with pipes. Then they’d take him into the makeup room to freshen him up, to slather him with this and that, and then back to the upper world via elevator. It wasn’t easy on that poor stiff, going up and down, between this world and that one. Tons of back-and-forth.

If you ask me, that part with the hand wave at the end was a bit too theatrical, I commented, sipping my juice.

What else should we have done? I do theater, not revolutions, he huffed, offended. I couldn’t care less about their stupid political movements. They pay up, and I do my thing. It’s the new theater, in the open air, with crowds who don’t even know they’re taking part in a performance. Tragicomedia dell’arte. Actually, some of them do know it, he added, they’ve been called in. I provide extras for rallies and revolutions, in a manner of speaking.

Extras for revolutions? You can’t be serious, I said. Wait, don’t tell me you’re behind the Heroes’ uprising, too?

Ah well—Demby hemmed and hawed—I’d rather not discuss it, they called me at the last minute, I had to save them. But when you hand out rifles to amateurs, they end up making a hash out of the drones and of everything—

At that moment his phone rang, and to my astonishment the sound came right from a box which I had thought was purely decorative. It looked like a mini telephone switchboard—a square wooden panel carved at the edges with a heavy black Bakelite receiver, two rows of buttons, and a round rotary dial mounted in the upper corner. They’re calling me on the petoluchka, the five-pointed star, Demby winked conspiratorially and answered the phone. “The Petoluchka”—that mythical secret telephone network for the crème de la communist crème. Parallel telephones, parallel cafeterias, parallel villas, restaurants, barbershops, chauffeurs, hospitals, masseuses, surely also parallel good-time girls. Clearly there had always been two parallel states.

Sorry, he said, I’ve got to take this. Give me five minutes and we’ll go out for a breath of fresh air.

15.

So these are the dealers of the past, I told myself. Demby has become one of them, a black-market player, and one of the best of them, judging from what he’d later tell me. Actually, it wasn’t even a black market, this business was completely legal. He took orders from all sorts of customers, he didn’t have any political prejudices. In this case, those from the ’60s and ’70s paid the best, plus he felt in his element there as well. He always added in a touch of irony. I’ve pissed on them plenty of times, as he put it. I presume that only he understood these “pissings” and they served mostly as an alibi before his own conscience.

Demby, with his well-tended beer belly, as they called it around here, had actually been chubby since childhood. Everything had always come easily to him, even back in his primary school days. He secretly drew naked women in the back pages of his notebooks, arousing himself in the process, so he’d go and masturbate in the bathrooms. At that time all the books about sex we could get our hands on, and they were a grand total of two—Man and Woman Intimately and Venereal Diseases and Disorders—condemned masturbation as a dangerous undertaking that led to infamous illnesses. (I only remember that you went blind.) For ten cents, Demby would sell us his drawings as well, so that we, too, marched blindly toward our own blindness, so to speak, adding millimeters to the lenses of our glasses. Besides, the diagrams of copulating couples in Man and Woman Intimately more closely resembled a cross-section of an automobile engine, with all those pistons and the like.

I remember that in our final years of high school, Demby had made his attic space into an improvised photo studio/darkroom. I clearly recall the thick curtain over the little window, the red lamp, the trays full of fixer and developer. At that time, developing a photo was a process, hard work, and, let’s be honest, a minor miracle. (Where there is darkness, a miracle always lies sleeping.) You dip the photo paper in one tray, then in the other. If you leave it in for longer, the silhouettes get scorched like burned toast, and if you don’t leave it in long enough, they come out pale and blurred.

I was his helper and lighting man. I positioned his grandma’s old white umbrella and held the battery-powered projector. A few girls from our school passed through the studio. At some point in the session, Demby would send me out, so as not to make the “model” nervous, and they would be left alone in the darkened room. Sometimes even the neighborhood beauty, Lena, who was quite a bit older than us, would drop by. Then Demby would stay in the studio for longer. From time to time he would rent it out by the hour to guys from the neighborhood who wanted to be alone with their girlfriends. I remembered all this because, in fact, Demby took incredible photos. He knew how to measure out the light and darkness with the accuracy of a pharmacist, he played with the shadows, freed bodies from frozen and dull poses. The natural awkwardness of his so-called “models” only added to the eroticism. When he needed quick cash, he could always sell a few photos to the local Komsomol members from our school and neighborhood, who were forever hungry for naked bodies. He said that Komsomol secretaries were always his biggest customers. The deficit of eroticism in late socialism, the early corruption of youth, and the primitive accumulation of capital. Now, there’s a possible topic for university economics departments.

Demby could be faulted for many things, but talent gushed out of him with generous negligence. He never wanted to develop this talent, to show off what he had made, to find his way into photographers’ circles. Why should I bother, he would say, making his voice sound a bit like an Italian mobster’s, I do what I want, I make enough money, and I get the prettiest girls in the neighborhood. I presumed he had maintained this standard of living up until now as well. I wondered whether he didn’t sometimes secretly dream of getting out of business and going into art. I asked him. His answer was exactly what I expected: You’ve always lived outside the real world. And he added that one day, when he’d saved up enough money, he’d make only art, he’d even written down his ideas in a notebook. I wasn’t sure whether he was making fun of me or if he really did plan on it.

16.

Extras for Revolutions

We crossed Dondukov Boulevard, and then the square in front of the Presidency. We could see how they were dismantling the temporary mausoleum a little farther down the street. On the yellow cobblestones, the heads of carnations were still rolling, along with popped balloons and paper funnels that once held sunflower seeds . . . The rain had stopped and the day was gradually clearing up. We passed St. Nedelya Church. Twenty-five kilos of explosives under the main dome, plus a bottle of sulfuric acid to asphyxiate any survivors, and at 3:20 in the afternoon on April 16, 1925, Bulgaria became the absolute world record holder for the bloodiest terrorist attack in a church at that time—150 men, women, and children killed. By the radical wing of the same party that now headed the Movement for State Socialism. If someone really wants to go back to the 1920s, they’re going to have to tackle this issue as well, I thought.

The whole time, Demby was going on about how the ideologies of the past had changed the nature of the market, bringing back forgotten professions—piecework seamstresses, gunsmiths—and inventing new ones, most likely he meant his extras for revolutions. The market truly was enormous. For example, an endless and unemployed army of actors sitting around provincial theaters suddenly had their moment in the sun. It was precisely professional actors who made up the backbone of every reenactment. There was always a need for either a Thracian king or a fertility goddess, or even a Proto-Bulgarian khan with dramatic cheekbones, while all the blondes were immediately transformed into Slavic concubines in long white robes. There were roles for everyone—Ottomans, Janissaries, bandits . . . Suddenly unemployment in the theater sector dried up. Theaters no longer needed to stage plays and could get by just by renting out costumes and props, old weapons, golden cloaks and Damascene swords . . .

Then idlers of all ages who were hanging around the pubs in the towns and villages suddenly turned into “actors-in-waiting.” That is, they were still hanging around the pubs, but now they had hopes, a dream, you could say, that they, too, would be called up to play perhaps a rebel or an Ottoman or even a commie guerrilla. True, Demby admitted, village folks had stopped working the land. Since you could make twenty, thirty, even fifty bucks a day just like that, why roast in the sun out in the fields? If the city council was funding the reenactment, the pay was terrible, but still, even those twenty bucks were nothing to sniff at. But if some local strongman was putting on a private theme party—say, the Battle at Klokotnitsa or Krali Marko freeing three chains of slaves—then the money was better and the job was easier, especially if you were on the chain.

Wait, let me show you something, Demby said suddenly, and stopped.

We had reached the intersection of Angel Kanchev and Patriarch Evtimiy, directly across from where Kravai Café had once been—an underground “cult” place (to use the jargon of the time) in the ’80s, where the first shoots of punk sprang up in Bulgaria, in Milena’s husky sarcastic voice . . . if they had picked the ’80s, they would’ve needed to restore that place, to revive the legend.

We’re going to NPC, he said.

Isn’t there any nicer place? I tried to protest. The giant concrete turtle that was the National Palace of Culture, also from the ’80s—built quickly, as everything had been for the 1,300th anniversary of the Bulgarian state—stood between us and Mount Vitosha. There was one enormous auditorium for party congresses and a dozen other halls scattered around the various floors. No matter what cultural event you held there, be it a concert or a reading, in some strange way everything always coagulated into a pale imitation of a party plenum. And all the clapping at the end sounded like “wild and unabating applause and cheers of glory to . . .” as they put it in those endless transcripts of party congresses published in Worker’s Deed daily back in the day.

We went into the building through a side entrance near the giant flagpoles. The security guard nodded at us silently, then Demby used a key card to open some doors farther inside and we headed down to the basement. I had never been there before. We were walking down long hallways reminiscent of bomb shelters—I wouldn’t be surprised if that was exactly what they’d been designed to be. Finally, we arrived unexpectedly in front of a large glass door that led us to a windowless hall with a low ceiling. What I saw there was something halfway between gymnastics practice, training of the national honor guard, and rehearsal for a demonstration. About fifty young men and women with athletic figures were practicing various movements. They suddenly raised their right arms, bent at the elbow, fists clenched. And at a barely visible command, they shouted, Glory . . . Glory . . . Glory.

I remembered how the previous day at the demonstration I had been struck by the strange synchronicity of the chanting, something difficult to achieve for people who had not practiced and who had just gathered together spontaneously on the square. As if reading my thoughts, at the next command the group suddenly broke up their perfect formation, and (well-rehearsed) commotion ensued. The one giving commands was a short man in military fatigues, I could hardly see him from where we were standing. Somebody in the group shouted, Resign . . . and gradually, deliberately disorganized at first, other shouts joined in. From the side it really did look spontaneous and authentic. Faces took on angry expressions for a moment. Then one man bent down, picked up an invisible rock, and hurled it toward an equally invisible building. His gesture was immediately taken up by the others around him. Soon everyone was throwing rocks at the target. I was startled when I heard the sound of breaking windows, but Demby just glanced toward the speakers. A short while later the “police” struck back and clearly started advancing, because the gymnasts, so to speak, went on the defensive. They crouched down, trying to escape the tightening noose, they took out wooden sticks that had been prepared in advance, so that for a short while the scene looked like aikido practice. The commander’s voice was harshly barking out instructions and curses, Not like that, dumbass, kick him in the balls, fall down, now yell, scream, scream already goddammit, the cameras are rolling, so they’ve gotta hear you . . . that must have been directed at a woman who was on the ground shrieking . . . Things seemed to be smoothly shifting into a different phase, the victim phase. Suddenly a white-haired man appeared, his head cracked open. I hadn’t noticed him before, blood (paint) was running down his temples and dripping onto his T-shirt. He ran his palm over his face, lifted his bloodied fingers over his head, and as if on cue the others began yelling, Killer cops! . . . Killer cops! . . . Killer cops! . . .

Get your hand up higher . . . come a little farther forward, the shrimpy commander was shouting, the cameras need to catch you, panic a bit, your head is bleeding, after all . . . go over to the police, yeah, that’s it, taunt them, taunt them . . . into coming after you so they’re in the shot, too . . .

With a glance, Demby signaled that we could leave if I wanted to, it had gotten pretty stuffy in there.

Those are my people, he said outside, exhaling smoke from his little cigarillo that smelled like cherry. Then he struck a ceremonious pose and quickly launched into a spiel: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men. Hamlet, Scene Three, Act Two. I know it by heart, I tried out for the theater academy with it once upon a time, disastrously . . . But now I’ve got my own troupe . . . Now and then I invite some of the professors to teach them. Those who sent me packing . . . I toss ’em a few bucks.

So these are the extras for revolutions, I said.

Some of them. That was the rehearsal for the protest platoon, but we’ve got lots of other stuff . . . Lots of other stuff, he said again.

I thought that with a hundred or so people trained like this, or probably even fewer, you could seriously destabilize governments, bring about international incidents, get into the agencies’ breaking news. I told him that.

I know, he replied. But why would I do that? There’s nobody to step into the vacuum. I can destroy and turn things on their head, but I can’t sustain a new installation . . . or a system, if you will. Whatever comes after that fake coup will sweep us away, too. When there is something like an approximation of a state that nevertheless maintains some kind of order, that’s good for us. We work in that alimentary environment. Something like a virus within the body of the state, when the body is weak—that’s great for us; but when it disappears completely, we disappear as well. We don’t have any political ambitions, Demby said. By the way, I tried some social initiatives along the same lines, he said.

And . . . ?

And, well, diddly-squat . . . (a word from forty years ago, that’s what we’d say back in our neighborhood).

And it was an amazingly well-thought-out project, Demby said, and waved his hand dismissively.

17.

It was time for lunch. We sat down on Little Five Corners at a place that used to be called Sun and Moon. At first glance, nothing had changed, even the name was still the same, the young man who came over to give us menus had a lumbersexual beard and resembled the poet-revolutionary Hristo Botev. (Lumbersexuals around here always resemble Botev.) The young man recited the lunch specials: Bulgarian yogurt, Bulgarian lamb with mint dip, Panagyurishte-style eggs from liberated (that’s how he put it) chickens, calf-head cheese with Brussels sprouts and Bulgarian spices, spelt rolls made according to a traditional recipe, and for dessert April Uprising cherry cake or Samokov-style crème brûlée. We quickly settled on the Bulgarian lamb. Unlike me, Demby was not impressed by the menu.

It was a brilliantly thought-out project, a real social cause, he repeated. The villages and towns are full of old people, their children have left, some way back in the ’90s, others later. They don’t come back for years on end, their children’s children are born there, abroad. And they’re left alone, with nobody around. Intense loneliness, a sickness they don’t put down in medical records, but if you ask me there’s no more serious cause of death here. When this business with reenactments was just getting started, we went around the country and I got an eyeful of these people. And not just old people, but folks our own age as well. The wife has left for either Spain or Italy, to take care of sick people there, she sends money back home. The husband is left here, unemployed. In the beginning she comes back every two or three months, then every half year, then she quits coming back at all, first, because it’s expensive, and then because she’s found somebody else there. In the other case it’s the husband who’s left, but it’s the same old story. One is abroad sending money back home, the other is here with the kids, if they have any. A whole generation who only see their mothers on Skype, a whole generation of Skype moms. And so I said to myself, Why don’t I make it so those folks can hire someone once a week, for a Saturday or Sunday, a “wife” to cook you up some chicken soup, to go to the café with, to chat a bit. The kids need to sense a woman’s touch around the house as well. She doesn’t need to look like their mother, we’re not going for doppelgängers, but as you know, to the orphan every woman is a mother, every man is a father. I offered fathers as well. At rock-bottom prices, too; I didn’t add any markup for myself, I could afford not to.

At first this struck people as so absurd that they couldn’t understand what was different about this idea. It was easier for them to hire someone for one night. But sex wasn’t part of my package. There were several incidents at the very beginning, customers tried to rape two of the women hired out as Saturday spouses. That was five or six years ago. Now I see that they’re doing something similar in Japan. It must be in the air.

It’s a great idea, I said with complete sincerity. I know one person who will appreciate it. I was thinking of Gaustine, of course.

He smiled skeptically: In any case a terrible isolation is coming, clearly.

The crème brûlée we ordered for dessert had the same standard taste as all other crème brûlée in the world. Why Samokov-style? I asked Botev as we paid our bill. The cook is from there, the young man replied.

Demby went back to his office to work. In these pre-election days, he needed to make hay while the sun shines, as he put it. I assured him that I would look him up again and that I had an idea for him.

Okay, Joe, come rescue me from here when things get hairy, he called as he walked away.

Joe . . . I had forgotten that we had called each other that in school. “Lemonade Joe,” there had been a Czech cowboy film of that name, and we, like the hero, took on superpowers when we guzzled down lemonade. I watched him disappear across Graf Ignatiev Street toward the St. Sedmochislenitsi Garden, and yet again on this visit I felt terribly lonely. Like a superhero who had suddenly lost his superpowers, like somebody who had traveled to the future and everyone he knew was already dead, like a child lost in an unfamiliar city, which had happened to me once, at dusk, as people were hurrying home and no one stopped to help . . . There is always such a moment, when a person suddenly grows old or suddenly realizes it. Surely at such moments you sprint in a panic after the last caboose of the past, which is disappearing into the distance. This backward draft is the same for people as it is for nations.

I needed to get drunk on lemonade right away.

18.

Late in the afternoon I sat out with my laptop on the balcony of the apartment I had rented. It was a beautiful building from the early twentieth century, one of the first blocks of flats in Sofia, actually I think it was the first, if the sign down by the entrance was to be believed. Handsome European construction, the same as what you can find in Prague, Vienna, or Belgrade. The terrace looked over an inner courtyard, clearly a common space, judging by the extent to which it was neglected.

After everything I had seen and heard these last few days and after what Demby had shown me, I wanted to grasp how far the battle for the past had really gone.

The Internet was going nuts. What I had seen on the news and on the street was magnified many times over on websites and social media. Most polls showed almost exactly even results for the two main movements, Soc and Heroes; the differences came down to a fraction of a percent, well within the bounds of statistical error. Of course, we’re not counting the sociological studies funded by the movements themselves; ironically, both groups gave themselves an eight-point lead. As for the other parties, the Movement for Reason, which included university professors and intellectuals, K. among them, trailed far behind. As did the Young Green Movement, which the trolls immediately called “Young and Green.” These two groups tried to unite into a coalition, which despite not yet having managed to hammer out an alliance, had already been dubbed “Smarties and Greenies.” Actually, they were more or less for staying in the present, although their leaders made quite contradictory statements.

I plugged in the keyword “heroes” and one Bulgaria appeared before my eyes. All kinds of clubs for historical reenactments, patriotic associations, small and large communities, propaganda sites, textile workshops for sewing rebel flags, advertisements for native costumes of all possible kinds, tracksuits embroidered with “Liberty or Death,” tank tops and other undergarments stamped with the slogan “Bulgaria on Three Seas,” patriotic tattoo parlors . . . I remembered what Demby had told me at his office: I’m not one of the biggest players, but the big fish seek me out, because I do things differently, I might be creating kitsch, but at least it is sublime kitsch.

The Facebook pages of such associations enjoyed exceptional popularity. Everyone had revolutionary-inspired profile pictures, with tattoos on their biceps and chests, a few even had the whole poem about the Battle for Shipka Pass on their backs.

Most numerous were the clubs for historical reenactments, every one of them had a few hundred members and volunteers. If you counted up the weapons, the flintlock rifles, the daggers, the scimitars, the pistols and machine guns they had all together, surely it would amount to more than the standing Bulgarian army’s arsenal. In a certain sense they could be (and most likely were) real combat units in disguise.

The not particularly discreet support from state institutions was immediately apparent. On the website of the Hajduks^# Association you could see several men armed to the teeth with daggers and pistols tucked in their belts barging into a classroom filled with frightened children. Most likely this was during the newly introduced class periods for patriotic education, since the teacher, in a blue tunic with a wreath of flowers on her head, was touching the dagger of the most bloodthirsty among them with awe. After that “the children were given the opportunity to see authentic weapons up close,” as the caption below the photo explained. An eight- or nine-year-old boy could be seen gripping a revolver with both hands and aiming at the blackboard, another young-hero-in-training of the same age was trying to pull a scimitar from its sheath before the hajduks’ grinning faces. All this, even though bringing weapons into schools was officially banned. The website offered special thanks to patriotic firms who had donated funds for the education of young Bulgarians.

On another page the association for reenactments had decided to offer a live performance of the dismemberment of Balkandzhi Yovo, who refused to hand over Beautiful Yana to the Turks. To this end they used a mannequin dressed in a native costume. As far as I could tell, this reenactment had been cut short because several of the more sensitive children had fainted. Otherwise I noted that “Upcoming Events” promised the Hanging of the Revolutionary Hero Vasil Levski and the Massacre of Bulgarian Villagers at Batak.

The sun was rolling red behind Vitosha like the head of a hajduk. As evening fell, the city smelled strongly of roasted peppers, that favorite, most Bulgarian of scents. If I am patriotic about anything, it would be about that scent—roasted peppers at dusk. Somewhere from the other floors, meatballs were sizzling, a TV buzzed . . . Life went on with all its scents, spices, meatballs, and fussing. It was starting to get cold, so I got up, threw on my jacket, and prepared to quickly surf through the Soc Movement as well.

19.

The Soc activists had also mastered the new media, or rather “conquered” it, as they themselves would put it. The specter of communism was haunting the Internet. Old emblems and souvenirs once again became symbols. When did all of this happen? Now, here’s a site: “Let’s Bring Back Socialism, Druzya,” with half of it written in Russian. A video immediately starts playing—archival footage of children ritually “tapping” the general secretary and the geezers from the Politburo with decorated sticks to ensure health during the New Year at the Boyana Residence sometime in the late ’70s. The old men are disoriented, they awkwardly pat the children on the head with their bear-like paws and try to kiss them. One little girl wipes her face with her sleeve in disgust and the camera quickly cuts away.

The most striking thing was that the whole site was teeming with poorly rhymed slogans, like from a children’s primer. Tons of photos of the Bulgarian communist dictator Todor Zhivkov and Brezhnev, pictures of Stalin, shots from World War Two, photos of Lada automobiles . . .

Every day with iron fists,

The enemy is smashed to bits.

The left’s myth remains fundamentally impoverished.

It can keep going, so that the glue of the myth holds, but they have to forget quite a few things. Forget the terrorist attack of 1925 in that church. Forget those who were murdered and buried in mass graves immediately after any coup. Forget those who were beaten, stomped under heavy boots, sent to camps. Forget those who were surveilled, lied to, separated, banned, humiliated . . . all must be forgotten. And then forget the very forgetting . . . Forgetting takes a lot of work. You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget something. Surely that’s how every ideology functions.

I really wanted a smoke . . . I really wanted to smoke sharp-tasting cigarettes, harsh, like from back in the day. I didn’t feel like sitting around the apartment, so I went out. I passed through the little park in front of St. Sofia and came out behind the statue of Tsar Samuel that had been erected a few years ago. The sculptor had put two little LED lights in the eyes, to the horror of passersby and cats. Thank God the lights burned out after two months and nobody had bothered to change them.

If anything can save this country from all the kitsch that is raining down on it, that is laziness and apathy alone. That which destroys it will also protect it. In apathetic and lazy nations, neither kitsch nor evil can win out for long, because they take effort and upkeep. That was my optimistic theory, but a little voice inside my head kept saying: When it comes to making trouble, even a lazy man works hard.

I was strolling around outside, but the Facebook hajduks and communists were screaming in my head, and with the sobering chill of the night air it was growing ever clearer to me—there were two Bulgarias, and neither one of them was mine.

I sat down for a bit near the statue with the glowing eyes which no longer glowed. I must have looked pretty shabby and dejected, like in that old joke: Are you a writer? No, I’m just hungover.

A group of teenagers, slightly high, hollered at me: Hey, buddy, don’t waste your time guarding Mr. X-Ray Specs. Don’t worry, he’s not gonna run away! They walked past me laughing their asses off, never guessing that that was the most normal line I had heard this whole week. I would have gotten up and joined them if I could.

It should be my city and my past tumbling through these streets, peeking out from around every corner, ready to chat with me. But it seemed we were no longer talking.

20.

I have determined that communication in this city has been interrupted on all levels. People don’t talk across professions; doctors don’t talk to their patients, salesclerks don’t talk to their clients, the taxi drivers don’t even talk to their passengers, people in the guilds don’t talk, some writers don’t talk to other writers, who in turn don’t talk to yet other writers. Families do not talk at home, husbands and wives don’t talk, mothers and fathers don’t talk. It’s as if all topics of conversation have suddenly disappeared like the dinosaurs, mysteriously died out like the bees, they’ve been annihilated through the ventilation hood in the kitchen or through the little window in the bathroom with the torn screen.

And now they are standing there and they can’t remember exactly when and where the conversation left off. At a certain point you fall silent. And the more time that passes, the more impossible continuing the conversation becomes. It’s simple, silence begets silence. In the beginning there’s a moment at which you would like to say something, you even work it out in your head, take a breath, open your mouth, then you wave your hand dismissively and shut the door from the inside.

I knew some people, a husband and wife, who didn’t speak to each other for forty years, nearly a whole lifetime. They had gotten into a fight about something and since they couldn’t remember anymore what they’d argued about, the chance of making up was nil. Their kids grew up, raised with their silence, and then they left home. During the rare moments when they would come back, the parents would speak through them, even though they were in the same room. Ask your father where he put the scissors. Tell your mother not to put so much salt in the lentils.

When they were brought to the clinic, they didn’t speak at all anymore. It seemed to me that they didn’t even know each other.

When people with whom you’ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there’s no such thing as half a past. It’s as if you’ve torn a page in half lengthwise and you’re reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends. And nobody understands anything. The person holding the other half is gone. That person who was so close during those days, mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, in the months and years . . . There is no one to confirm it, there is no one to play through it with. When my wife left, I felt like I lost half my past. Actually, I lost the whole thing.

The past can only be played by four hands, by four hands at the very least.

21.

Chronicle

Here in brief is how events unfolded after that:

Three days before the referendum, the Movement for Reason brought to light evidence of meddling by Russian hackers in support of Soc.

That same night three activists from Reason were beaten in their homes. One of them was K.

Election day passed with a few dozen reports of irregularities at polling stations, which were ignored.

The initial election results showed an almost perfect tie between Soc and the Heroes, within the margin of statistical error.

At press conferences in the wee hours of the night, analysts noted the surprisingly conciliatory tone between the leaders of the two movements and the rapprochement between their positions.

The next day at noon, after the final results of the Soc’s razor-thin victory by three-tenths of a percent had been announced, the Soc leader appeared in a red suit, and after vigorously thanking all her supporters, she invited to the podium . . . the chieftain of the Heroes. The shock felt by observers at the press conference was palpable. The general secretary of Soc announced that after a brief meeting, the Central Committee had decided to form a coalition with the Heroes, so as to preserve the unity of the nation. She pointed to the evenly split vote. For the good of Mother Bulgaria and so as to preserve the legacies of Georgi Dimitrov and Khan Kubrat,^** she said, raising her voice, at which point together with the head chieftain she picked up a bundle of sticks that had clearly been prepared in advance; they tried to break it but, of course, they could not. They raised it above their heads and uttered solemnly in one voice: Let our people be united like this bundle, in their joys and sorrows, in times of joy and ill fortune!

It sounded like a justice of the peace’s blessing for newlyweds.

All signs indicated that the decision to unite the two movements had been negotiated at least a week in advance (if not even earlier) and was now reconfirmed after the close election results, as predicted. But that wasn’t all. Instead of picking a specific decade, Bulgaria, after much dithering, chose a hodgepodge or mixed platter, if you will. A bit of socialism, if you please, yes, yes, that one there with the side of ajvar. And a serving of the Bulgarian Revival, but deboned, a fattier cut.

Men in breeches lay down next to women with shellacked hairdos . . .

The second half of the speech was even more radical. After a brief pause, as if after announcing a difficult decision, the general secretary proclaimed that the two leaders had agreed to set into motion the procedure for withdrawing from the European Union and setting out on a new path toward a homogeneous and pure nation, true to the legacies of our hajduks and partisans . . .

None of the outside observers had expected that Bulgaria of all countries would be the first the leave the EU after the referendum. Being first was not part of its portfolio.

The nation nationalized, the fatherland fathered anew. I wrote that online. Less than an hour later I had been reported and my account had been blocked.

I managed to catch a flight out the next day.

The borders were closed two days later.

After a dictatorship of the future, as my friend K. would say, came the dictatorship of the past.

It’s nice to know your home country so well that you can leave it shortly before the trap springs.

I had already lived through what was to come.

22.

I could imagine perfectly what happened from then on and sketch it out in my notebook.

Those who had wanted Soc received, as part of their free membership package, a ban on abortions, a subscription to Worker’s Deed, a moratorium on travel, sudden searches and a deficit of feminine hygiene products. (Those who hadn’t wanted Soc also received this.) Various things started disappearing from stores somehow imperceptibly. IKEA left the country and those for whom this had been the site of their Sunday pilgrimages found themselves suddenly bereft. Peugeot, Volkswagen, and all the other Western companies closed down their flagship stores. The Kremikovtsi metalworking plant prepared to fire up again and its chimneys belched out a few salvos of black smoke so as to announce the event. Condoms disappeared on the black market, and with connections you could still find Bulgarian-made ones of light rubber covered in talcum powder. Newspaper cut into little squares replaced the now-missing toilet paper. The erstwhile dissident act of using exactly that scrap of newspaper with the first secretary’s picture on it to wipe your ass came back into fashion. Radios again were all the rage, especially the old Selena and VEF sets that could catch the forbidden wavelengths at the very end of the spectrum. Radio Free Europe, which had prematurely been closed down as unnecessary in democratic times, once again opened up its headquarters in Prague. And those who listened to it would once again be rounded up in the early morning by the people’s militia in their Ladas.

In the beginning people thought that this was all a game, but the militia quickly managed to explain things clearly and firmly. A fist to the stomach, a dislocated shoulder, broken fingers, billy clubs, and kicks to the ribs—that good old arsenal from before the times of simpering liberalism was back in action. Most likely as a nod to the new coalition, the people’s militia now wore shepherds’ kalpaks instead of peaked caps. Reviving the network of State Security informers was no problem at all, since it had never disbanded in the first place, it had never become “deprofessionalized,” as its members proudly proclaimed. And it would completely naturally pick up from the point where it had left off—or hadn’t left off, as it were.

International passports were confiscated. The fences along the national border were reconstructed in record time, actually they had already begun being replaced even before the referendum, due to the migrants. Border guards returned to the once-abandoned outposts. Stores were filled with ready-to-wear clothes of several predominant styles. Quickly the fashion on the streets changed—more and more women were wearing identical suits, the only new things were the stylized traditional tunics. The old Bulgarian brands of jeans like Rila and Panaka reappeared; back in the day we would buy them and rip off the tags immediately, sewing in their place tags from Rifle and Levi’s, which we’d gotten God knows where. These were topped with white shirts with Bulgarian embroidery, T-shirts of Khan Asparuh, and wide sashes around the waist.

One of the most unpleasant things for those who had grown unaccustomed to Soc were the newspapers and television from that time. Reading that officious blather was truly agonizing. The television programming ended at ten-thirty in the evening with the news, followed only by the national anthem and white snowflakes on the empty screen.

To the delight of smokers, you could now light up freely everywhere. Unfortunately for them, however, only the old brands of cigarettes were available. Stewardess was every bit as sharp as before, as was BT hard pack, the ladies’ slims Phoenix and Femina Menthol had that same slightly nasty sweet aftertaste. While Arda, with or without filters, tore up the lungs of those who had been mollycoddled by Western blends.

Most people, as has always been the case, began adapting unexpectedly quickly, as if they had been patiently waiting for thirty years for those times to return. Old habits turned out to be alive and well. As for those who couldn’t get used to it . . . soon disbelieving citizens who were still living under some democratic inertia (including the young) quickly started to fill up the holding cells. The basement at Moscow 5, which my friend Professor K. and I had discussed, started working again at full steam, and not as a museum, of course.

The old jokes were funny once more. And frightening.

*During the April Uprising of 1876, Bulgarian rebels rose up against the Ottoman authorities. Although the uprising ultimately failed, it remained as a key event in the Bulgarian national memory and mythology.

†Georgi Benkovski (1843–1876) was a leading figure in the ultimately unsuccessful April Uprising of 1876 against Ottoman Rule in Bulgaria; he was the head of “The Flying Band” or Hvarkovata cheta of horsemen.

‡Reference to the poem by Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912) in which the Ottomans repeatedly ask Yovo from the Balkan Mountains to give up his beautiful sister Yana. After each refusal, they punish him.

§A classic trickster character from Bulgarian folktales.

¶Nikephoros I, the Byzantine emperor, was killed in battle in 811 by the Bulgarian Khan Krum, who is said to have made a chalice out of his skull.

#In Balkan folklore, hajduks were Robin Hood–style outlaws during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries who were also guerrilla fighters against the Ottoman authorities.

**Khan Kubrat established Old Great Bulgaria circa AD 632 in what is now southern Ukraine and southwest Russia; all Bulgarian schoolchildren are taught the legend that Khan Kubrat tried to convince his sons to remain united after his death by the demonstration with the sticks. His son Asparuh later founded the First Bulgarian Kingdom in present-day Bulgaria.