The Same Night Awaits Us All Read online




  Praise for Hristo Karastoyanov

  “On the surface, this is a far away story in a far away time, but Karastoyanov masterfully brings his reader in close, immersing each of us in the action, anarchy, and art of a fierce political resistance.”

  —DW Gibson

  “A poet and an anarchist in the same year, 1925, both their last. The men’s voices and narratives breathlessly intersect, take hold of one another, then mix into the blood and terror of Bulgaria’s undeclared civil war, which would vanish them without a trace. A poignant novel, at once tense and fractured, brutal and lyrical. Powerful voices that haunt you long after the ending.”

  —Georgi Gospodinov

  “Karastoyanov never lets us forget that this story, like every history, is a could-have-been narrative refracted through the prism of the present moment. . . . Izidora Angel’s translation skillfully captures the author’s (and the characters’) sardonic commentary, while still conveying Karastoyanov’s deep connection to and concern with events that even now continue to shape Bulgarians’ conception of their own history.”

  —Angela Rodel

  “A writer of true European spirit.”

  —Berliner Zeitung

  Copyright © 2014 by Hristo Karastoyanov

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Izidora Angel

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Izidora Angel

  First edition, 2018

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-74-8

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

  This book is published within the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s program for Support of Contemporary Bulgarian Writers and in collaboration with the America for Bulgaria Foundation.

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  Contents

  Translator’s Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  Translator’s Acknowledgements

  One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Two

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Three

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Four

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Five

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  The hour of death

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  End Notes

  September

  Translator’s Introduction

  “Art can blossom only when it is planted in freedom.

  If you censor the writer, you would be killing art itself.”

  —Geo Milev

  Hemingway, in writing about Bulgaria for Toronto’s Daily Star in 1922, said of the country, “There are no internal problems in Bulgaria, there are no troublesome minorities . . .” And of its leader, Alexander Stamboliyski, he said “[He] is chunky, red-brown-faced, has a black mustache that turns up like a sergeant major’s, understands not a word of any language except Bulgarian, once made a speech of fifteen hours’ duration in that guttural tongue, and is the strongest premier in Europe, bar none.”

  Caught between Germany and Russia’s titanic post-First World War appetites, the tiny Eastern European country of Bulgaria suffered many internal struggles for power financed by external interests, and within a year of Hemingway’s dispatch, fascist forces would descend onto Bulgaria and Stamboliyski, the leader of the Agrarian Union, would be dead—brutally tortured and then murdered by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) following the military coup of June, 1923, which brought down his democratically-elected government and inserted a fascist one in its place.

  Hristo Karastoyanov’s novel opens eighteen months later, in May of 1925, with the brutal murders, imagined here on the same night, of two key Bulgarian figures: the erudite, exquisite poet Geo Milev, and the notorious anarchist Georgi Sheytanov. Karastoyanov then rewinds and takes us back to the year and a half leading up to the men’s deaths, bookending the narrative on one side with the aftermath of the September Uprising in 1923 (the hastily organized and brutally suppressed response to the June coup, which claimed as many as 30,000 lives and effectively led to the communist party being outlawed), and on the other end with the unprecedented terrorist attack in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, on the St. Nedelya Church in April 1925, which took the lives of 150 and injured 500, and is still considered one of the bloodiest terrorist acts in Europe. The attack was planned and executed by the communists in an attempt to eradicate high-standing members of the police force. The attack resulted in violent repressions led by the Military Union with the fascist government’s implicit consent. In the aftermath, nearly 450 people were executed without trial, including the poet Geo Milev.

  In 1923, we see a Bulgaria on the verge of tyranny, amid an identity crisis, a nation still reeling from the five-century Ottoman yoke. And we see anarchists whom today we’d hardly hesitate to call terrorists. And yet, it is precisely an anarchist, Georgi Sheytanov, who sponsors Geo Milev’s magazine.

  It is perhaps very natural to frame the book around the question “Who killed Geo Milev?” It’s a loaded question, raising many more with it in regard to Bulgarian and European early twentieth-century history, politics, and culture. But perhaps before attempting to answer who killed Geo Milev, we need to know who Geo Milev was and what he died for.

  Despite losing part of his skull and with it his right eye while fighting for his country in the First World War, in early 1920s Bulgaria the international literary promise of this young visionary poet—German-educated, avant-garde writer, multilingual translator, and magazine publisher—was unbound. Contrarian, brilliant, and erudite, he worked fanatically and almost obsessively in a race against time to expand the horizons of the Bulgarian literary landscape. A fierce apologist of modernism and expressionism, he authored potent poetry and sweeping political commentary, and translated into Bulgarian no less than Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, John Keats, Browning, and de Musset, to name some. In turn, he was despised by the conformist literary circles, the pseudo-intellectuals, and, of course, the government.

  Georgi Sheytanov was only a year younger than the poet and one of the most famous anarchists in Bulgaria in the 1920s—the single most wanted man by the police, in fact. Like Geo Milev, he too was a bright and extraordinarily erudite political commentator, and, repulsed by Lenin’s communism, the world traveler, anarchist, and perpetual escape artist left Russia for Bulgaria, where he inspired and became a patron to Geo Milev’s cause: to awaken the sleeping people at any cost.

  The two created the magazine Plamuk (Flame), which was not only excellent, but also incredibly successful, and somewhat leftist. Plamuk, after only a year of existence, fell prey to the censorship of the authorities, who, after the September Uprising, and especially after the attack on St. Nedelya, persecuted both dissidents and anybody else who dared to think with equal fervor.

  Karastoyanov brings Geo Mi
lev and Georgi Sheytanov back to life in a lush, dark, and “true fictional” account that is, as the author himself notes, “maybe not all true, but certainly faithful to the truth.”

  It wasn’t until 1954 that Geo Milev’s remains were uncovered in a mass grave at the outskirts of Sofia, nearly thirty years after his secret execution. He was recognized only by the blue glass eye in the right socket of his skull.

  It’s difficult to overstate the parallels of the Bulgaria—even of the world—of today with the Bulgaria—and the world—of a century ago. Karastoyanov employs a diary construct with the precise goal of disintegrating the distance of the ostensibly faraway dates he chronicles, drawing unabashed parallels with the culture and politics of today: press monopolies concerned more with entertainment and selling papers rather than with ascertaining facts; weak, pusillanimous politicians; ruthless cops with ruthless ambitions; even the fundamental pandering of literary awards and the eternal struggle between real intellectuals and politics. He dares to ask: What has changed, if anything?

  “The ivory tower, the refuge of poetry and hiding place of poets, lies crumbled in ruins. From the dust of dreams, from the ruin of fantasies the poet emerges—stunned, astounded, no longer blind—and confronts the bloodstained face of the people, his people . . .”

  —From Geo Milev’s manifesto in Plamuk, which included the poem “September,” about the September Uprising

  —Izidora Angel

  Translator’s Note

  Breaking apart Karastoyanov’s dense, vigorous paragraphs from the inferential mood of that “guttural tongue,” as Hemingway calls the Bulgarian, and forming them back into English was nothing short of heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and ecstatic.

  Idiomatic English is stunning in its complex beauty, but the complexity and richness of the Bulgarian comes from an entirely different source—a deeply nuanced grammar comprised of over 40 tenses across different aspects and moods. Karastoyanov employs one such mood—the inferential—throughout the entire novel. It’s a retelling of events bound by an admittance on the part of the narrator that he wasn’t present when they occurred. Aside from a few instances of “allegedly” and “surely,” I had to let that mood go.

  There are also some incredibly potent single-syllable relays in Bulgarian that are near impossible to render—“a,” a kind of sharp right turn that could mean “but,” “moreover,” “therefore,” and “there you have it.” Karastoyanov starts an inordinate number of his sentences with “I,” meaning “and,” but to have retained these in English would have diluted the potency of his storytelling; he also ends an inordinate number of sentences with exclamations; that too was difficult to let go of, but ultimately necessary.

  Karastoyanov’s language in the novel is beautifully archaic without being impeding—he doesn’t give his characters 1920s slang, which I was grateful for, but there are still some great older words like “dodeto,” essentially “to what extent” or “close to”; “podir,” meaning “behind” or “in his wake”; or the more transitional “ta,” meaning “and so,” or even the novel’s ubiquitous “tai bilo,” meaning “that’s how it was” or “that’s how it happened,” which the author uses to great effect when he wants to poke his head into the narrative and remind us this is a reimagining.

  So, although this potency was inevitably sometimes lost in translation any time “tai bilo” had to be rendered into something so ostensibly trivial as “and so it went,” my hope and vision for the novel is that it travels well, and that I’ve left enough Bulgarian words in to strike a chord and leave an impression.

  Translator’s Acknowledgements

  There are far easier things than living with a writer, although the conversation is always interesting and the bourbon is good. Christo, your tireless support of and contribution to the artistic process, even during extraordinarily difficult times, has meant more to me than I can ever say. My pack of female anarchists—Sofia, Alexandria, and Mirielle—being your mother is an honor.

  Thank you to Kaija Straumanis and Chad W. Post for giving me the luxury of three uninterrupted weeks of writing in Rochester, and for believing in—and editing, and publishing—this novel. I have immense gratitude for the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s support of this translation, and specifically Milena Deleva—the work you do is incredible, and with this novel you’ve affected my life forever.

  I’m also deeply grateful for receiving the support of an English PEN grant while still translating the book. And to DW Gibson—thank you for inviting me to Ledig House, in the company of true heavyweights, and for making it so that Hristo Karastoyanov could see New York, and the Empire State Building.

  “The same night awaits us all,

  And the road to death is to be trodden once.”

  —Horace

  [One]

  “. . . I’d be far from able to fully satisfy your interest in the friendship of our two dearly departed—Geo and Georgi.”

  —From a letter written by

  Mila Geo Mileva to the

  Plovdiv-based anarchist

  Dr. Konstantin Kantarev,

  October 30, 1944

  [Saturday, December 29, 2012]

  “This is it,” Georgi Sheytanov must have thought as they unfastened the shackles chaining his ankles to those of some gruff, petrified villager from Nova Zagora, and shoved him toward the dark, unlit car parked at the train station. He must have been certain it would all end that night. He’d cut and run from everything and everywhere, including the Sofia Central Prison, where his escape was but a given fact and they’d kept a watchful eye on him, not, as it turned out, to actually prevent him from fleeing, but rather from the itch to see how the infamous anarchist would do it. But how closely had they watched him, really? True to form, he stayed just long enough to incite a riot and then vanished, and life once again lay before him, whatever that meant.

  Yet in that moment, at the train station at the foot of the mountain, he must have felt a deathly fatigue.

  In any case . . .

  The chains they took off, the ropes they left on, and they forced him, bound, into the car, steering the automobile up the sharp mountain road. And he would never find out what had happened to the poet, Geo Milev.

  [Sunday, December 30, 2012]

  The headlights of the heavy vehicle cut through the darkness ahead, only illuminating the boulders on the side of a road eroded from that spring’s incessant rains and riddled with black puddles that the car tore through, spraying the drops far and wide like precious gems. The driver took the turns up the steep road violently; Sheytanov, all knotted up in the back seat, had no way of grabbing the bronze handle on the inside of the door, and instead lurched side to side with the car.

  They took him across the mountains to Gorna Dzhumaya, where his arrival was met by the same pathological slaughterers whose names had been on everyone’s lips that year—the year an undeclared, loathsome war pitted neighbor against neighbor. And it is said that these thugs then began to contemplate his verdict. But he wasn’t about to have any of it.

  “Me,” he said, “you don’t sentence. Me, you either shoot or you let go.”

  But who can say if that’s how it really happened? It may not be all true, but it’s certainly faithful to the truth.

  [Tuesday, January 1, 2013, New Year’s Day]

  Sheytanov must have known that exactly two weeks prior to his own capture, Geo Milev had already been to court and that his lawyer had conveniently not shown up on time, which had necessitated the poet to act as his own attorney—that much was reported in the newspapers. The case itself had been absurd: a poet on trial for writing a poem. The people in the dust-filled courtroom had not taken in a single word from the poet’s defense—that everything he’d written was in the name of humanity, brotherhood, and love and peace on earth, that this was an idea anchoring his entire body of work, and that the real question at hand for the Bulgarian court was: would it convict a poet for his words? But when have a poet’s words ever b
een taken seriously by a court? Geo Milev was convicted, and it was then, in the middle of May, as he lay low in the Balkan mountains amid the tentatively verdant forests above Kilifarevo that Sheytanov likely first read the resulting headline inside that rag known as Utro: “Guilty: Author-Provocateur of ‘September’ Poem Convicted for Instigating Class Division and Hatred!” And perhaps while reading that same paper he had also learned what the poet’s sentence had been, and who knows, maybe he’d simply groaned that a year in jail along with a twenty thousand leva fine was the lesser of two evils. The twenty thousand wouldn’t be a problem to get hold of, just as the five thousand leva bail before it hadn’t been; he had been the one to bring the money to Mila, the poet’s wife, after they’d first arrested her husband back in January. Mila had been running around in despair then, making the rounds at all the publishers her husband worked with, the bookstores and newspaper stands whose owners still owed him money—managing to collect a hundred leva here, two hundred there—all the while growing faint and nauseated with the realization she’d never actually come up with the full amount. Sheytanov brought her the accursed five thousand leva in the afternoon: ten lousy bills the color of dirty violet . . . Her eyes, behind frames thin as a spider’s web, had looked distraught, and he, seeing her so scared, had lied for the first time in his life; he said everything would be all right. But they both knew the ten worthless pieces of paper solved nothing, that the bail money would not bail out the poet, that January was not the end, but only the beginning . . .

  The twenty thousand in question now didn’t seem like a big deal, either, and the twelve months in jail . . . well, what’s a year in jail? Nothing. He’d done it himself.

  “He got off easy,” he said to Mariola and tossed the paper aside. “What’s a year compared to eight! I bet the prosecutor and the judge were fans . . .”