The Same Night Awaits Us All Read online

  [Monday, January 14, 2013]

  They spoke at length next to that window, behind which the gray night had already fallen. The first tattered Sofia fog fumed between the streetlights, and beyond the fog, the cupola of the sign for the Splendid Hotel seeped through like a silver halo. They drank up the wine while they conversed, and Sheytanov gave the young man from Yambol money to run across the street to Turgovska to get some more before the public houses shut down for the night on account of the police curfew. They kept talking throughout that first night—the poet asked questions, Sheytanov answered, then vice versa . . . Sheytanov set forth to the poet his own take: there was no other god but ordinary man, and it was he who sat at the center of the universe, not the state.

  “The state,” he said, “is a badly written fable, an abominable pyramid scheme for cowards and marauders, and it is man who stands at the center of the universe . . .” The poet slammed his hand on the table and challenged him: were Tsankov, Russev, and Vulkov,* the current prime minister and his two generals, were they in fact the ordinary man?

  Sheytanov told him to leave the Russevs and the Vulkovs alone . . .

  “They,” he said, “are a fluke, an anecdote. And a sinister one at that, but an anecdote nevertheless, as was the miserable Stamboliyski,* with his pitiful ministers and his delusions of grandeur, attempting to bring down Tsankov and getting slaughtered. Not to mention the others, the Dimitrovs and the Kolarovs,* who couldn’t even incite a proper civil war, instead fleeing through the border and writing letters from Vienna. All of them,” he said, “are miscreants.”

  The poet acquiesced. He knew from his own father that Ivan Vulkov’s father was known as Urdechkata—the Goose—in Kazanluk.

  “How low have we sunk to if we’ve got the sons of geese for generals? General Goose. What has Bulgaria come to!”

  They went on until ten o’clock, when Mila had long put the little girls to bed behind all those draperies and curtains. She’d brought a glass for herself too and sat quietly next to them, looking at her guests with the wide eyes of an actress, while the last trams, vacant due to the unrelenting curfew, made their way to their depots.

  After a minute or two of silence, Sheytanov calmly asked the poet:

  “Milev . . . What do you say we start another magazine?”

  The poet froze. “What magazine?” he snarled, but Sheytanov saw in the poet’s good eye such a quick, fierce hope, that he hurried to smile.

  “A magazine,” he said. “A literary magazine.”

  [Monday, January 14, 2013]

  The poet jumped from the chair, leaned sharply over the table, and hissed:

  “Sheytanov! Are you mocking me, my dear man?”

  Sheytanov looked at him, incredulous. “Me? Why would I do that?”

  “You tell me!” the poet remained furious. “You obviously are. You have the gall to bring up a magazine in the house of the damned. Have some respect!”

  Sheytanov only sighed and asked the poet to forgive him if he’d felt insulted, that he’d be on his way at once. The poet’s wife stood and carefully wiped the tear rolling out from beneath the black lens of her husband’s glasses.

  “You’ll wake the children,” she calmly said. “Hear the man out, then decide if it’s worth getting angry for.”

  The poet glared at her as though he were going to slap her across the face, then calmed down as quickly as he’d boiled over. He sat back down in his chair and mumbled that he hadn’t been right to lose his temper, but that he’d been through a lot lately. He still found it hard, he said, not to get angry over losing the magazine he had so hoped would push this pitiful Bulgarian literary landscape forward. Instead, no one saw past his own nose and every ego was more inflated than the next . . . He gave an irate flick of his wrist and reached for his cigarettes.

  He smoked violently, as if he were murdering someone, and lit up frequently. Often, as he pulled out a new Sultan cigarette from his officer’s cigarette tin, the previous one would still be smoldering in the small Japanese ashtray next to him, only half smoked. His better half would only sigh, reach over, and quietly put it out, and then he’d already be on his third. When he gesticulated with his hands, the smoke curled up like a whirlwind around him and the ashes scattered everywhere.

  Sheytanov politely heard him out, and when he was done talking, he just as courteously asked him if he could offer an observation.

  “Go on,” the other snapped.

  Sheytanov shrugged. “At the risk of offending you a second time, Milev, I do have to admit that Vezny simply didn’t resemble a real magazine . . .” And just as politely he added, “I apologize for having to put it that way.”

  “I see,” the other snarled combatively. “And what exactly do you mean?”

  “Well, what I mean is . . .” Sheytanov smiled. “You simply can’t call a pamphlet folded in eight and printed on terrible paper—with no cover to speak of—a magazine. Especially if, inside that very same publication, you are writing about aesthetics.”

  The poet bristled again and tried explaining that it didn’t matter what a magazine looked like—what mattered was what was written in the magazine!

  Sheytanov stopped him.

  “Really?” he asked thoughtfully. “Should we ask the young man how many issues of Vezny his dad sold in Yambol?”

  “I know exactly how many he sold!” The poet lost it again. “I know perfectly well how many! One. That’s how many. That beanpole over there was my only subscriber.”

  He vehemently pointed to Kiril as the latter began to fidget in his chair, grew red in the face, and started loudly protesting that he could explain. It was because his friends came over to read it with him, and each had felt relieved from the material obligation of purchasing it, you see, which was why they hadn’t all subscribed, the dogs. And he would’ve gone on, but the poet cut him off.

  “Kiril, shut up, my friend. Just listen to yourself, goddamn it, you’ll get your tongue up in a knot. Material obligation, my ass. You’re all nothing more than petty conmen, every last one of you. And don’t give me that face. You still owe me that hundred leva for the translation, and aside from that, eighty-four leva for the subscription for the German magazine you never sent me! Now sit your ass back down and shut up.”

  “Why don’t you,” Mila spoke up then, “leave Kiril alone for a minute and hear the man out?”

  She then turned to Sheytanov with a gentle expectancy. He simply shrugged and repeated that he wasn’t here to pick fights, but that, in his humble opinion, a magazine ought to look good, too.

  “In any case, how something is presented is quite important. A person is more likely to buy something beautiful, and, if it also happens that it ends up being of value to him . . .”

  “You think I don’t know that?” the poet burst out again. “You think I don’t know what quality paper is, you think I don’t want a thick cover and a spine, so that you can put the magazine in your bookcase, like a normal person? Huh? You think I don’t know what an illustrated magazine is supposed to look like? So you can publish prints, so you can have paper at the very least on par with Illustrated Week, so you can put photographs on every page, illustrated supplements . . .” he sighed and waved his hand hopelessly.

  “That’s exactly what I had in mind,” Sheytanov calmly responded. “Just like Illustrated Week, why not?”

  “And did you think about the money? Where’s the money going to come from?” the poet looked at him sideways. “Do you have any idea how much paper costs now? And I mean regular paper—I’m not even talking about chrome paper. Do you have any idea how greedy those miscreant printers have become? They tell you they’re buried under urgent print jobs, thirty thousand labels and God knows what else, and that you, with your measly print of three thousand, would just be getting in their way. And they’re looking for handouts. I give them a piece of my mind, and I go someplace else, but it’s always the same story.

  “A guy just like that has the guts to say to me,
‘Well Mr. Milev, you know the printing press is a lot like the millstone at the flour mill. When it turns,’ he says, ‘the flour falls into the miller’s bag, but the person who brings the grist to the mill gets a little toll too, right?’ ‘Okay I get it,’ I say to him, ‘nothing wrong with a little toll, but this bag you have, djanum, is bottomless!’

  “Extortionist prices everywhere . . . My father can’t take it anymore, either. I’m asking him for money to buy paper, he writes that he can’t believe the numbers. I’m wracking my brain how to keep the business going, how to make it reputable, and he’s writing back that we need to cut back. And he sends me a case of miniature bust portraits so that I can sell them to buy the printing paper. Who am I supposed to push this stuff to? My grandmother? I left seventy with Chipev—he sold one in three months. One! Ibsen’s. Lenin’s is not selling that well for some reason. So Chipev—who’s avoiding me at this point—am I supposed to try to sell him more of these? They’re asking an arm and a leg at the royal presses too. It’s madness. ‘Is this some kind of joke,’ I ask them, and they answer, ‘No joke, that’s how much it costs today, and we can’t guarantee how much it’ll cost tomorrow.’ And this, at the royal presses, where they’re meant to have the most reasonable prices . . .”

  And he didn’t stop at that. He grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil, wiped yet another trickle off his cheekbone, and began to scratch towering columns of numbers.

  “See here,” he said, “this is how much they wanted last year just to publish Verlaine’s collection of selected poetry. I went and bought paper from Lazar Kotev, because it’s smaller, seventy centimeters to a hundred and eight, and it’s lighter, around thirty-five grams to the sheet. So, for forty kilograms, I don’t get a thousand sheets like if I were to buy them from Chipev, but instead fourteen, almost fifteen hundred. Win, win. Add the numbers: forty kilograms times sixteen leva, what is that? Six hundred forty. Ten leva go to Bureau Express for shipping to Stara Zagora, so what are we at, six hundred fifty, right? I borrowed four hundred from my father . . . that makes it two hundred fifty. I got two hundred nineteen from going around the newspaper stands like an idiot, I gave thirty-one from my own pocket . . . Oh, I forgot Chipev’s wooden box for shipping—another fifty leva. This is just for the regular circulation. Let’s compare with the luxury edition. One sheet yields two quires, so for one hundred issues in five quires, we need two hundred fifty sheets. Chipev, that’s where I had to go, because he’s got better paper than Kotev, and Chipev wants six hundred fifty leva from me. And how I tormented him to cut it down to six hundred. He wouldn’t budge! So now one sheet comes out to two-sixty. That’s when I gave up and decided not to print a hundred issues from the luxury edition, but fifty, because then we’ll need only a hundred twenty-five sheets, which is the same as three hundred twenty-five Bulgarian leva . . .”

  Sheytanov heard him out without interrupting, but when the poet turned the sheet over, about to start some other calculation, he politely raised his hand.

  “Look, Milev,” he said. “How about we don’t talk about money right now?”

  The poet stuttered and tried to object, but Sheytanov asked:

  “If you were a general about to lead your troops into battle, what would your battle cry be?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Maybe ‘On to battle!’ I don’t know . . .”

  “Most people think that,” smiled Sheytanov. “But if you ask me, a general, a military commander, shouldn’t have ‘On to battle!’ as his war cry. I think a real general would tell his people ‘After me!’”

  The poet shook his finger at him . . . He laughed suddenly, and told Sheytanov his thinking was identical to that of the Bulgarian writer Joseph Herbst. He’d written a similar anecdote . . . In the middle of the night, a young soldier runs away from the bottom trenches—he’s looking for a better seat in the battlefield theater. An officer stops him, “Where do you think you’re running to, soldier?” “Well, I must have gotten lost, Second Lieutenant, sir,” the young soldier replies. “What the hell are you talking about boy, I’m a chief corporal major!” And the soldier responds: “Gee, how far did I run?”

  Sheytanov erupted in laughter, but Kiril sat silent . . .

  “You didn’t get it, did you Kiril?” the poet was laughing too. “And how would you, you haven’t even been to the barracks, let alone fought in the war . . . The battlefront is like the theater, my dear boy—the best seats are in the back.”

  He gesticulated and smacked the table triumphantly.

  “Sheytanov!” he said, “And do you know, my friend, that I already have a name? Plamuk! What do you say? Plamuk. Flame.”

  Sheytanov looked at him and quickly raised his glass.

  “And so,” he said in turn, “then what are we waiting for? Let’s do this! You’ll be in charge of the magazine, I’ll get in your hair, and we’ll take it as it comes.”

  [Monday, January 14, 2013]

  [Would you look at that, it snowed this afternoon. And it’s sticking . . . I hadn’t even noticed.]

  [Tuesday, January 15, 2013]

  “Now we’re talking!” the young man from Yambol spoke up—and years later, when he would grow old, proudly, and with the stateliness of a solitary wise man, he would write in his journals about the things that happened on that Wednesday night, the tenth of October, nineteen twenty-three, a day after the authorities had lifted the martial law declaration brought on by the king’s eleventh decree, and lasting eighteen miserable days . . .

  The poet’s wife rose up from her chair, thanked them for their visit, and asked them to come back often, then wished them goodnight with a kind and tired bright smile before disappearing through the dreamlike draperies. The three of them wished her a good night and sat around the table until the first garbage trucks began to roll down the boulevard and the powerful streams from the street cleaners’ water-carts pelted the pavement. They thought about everything on that long-forgotten night and made many decisions.

  And so it was.

  At the end, when he and the young man from Yambol stood up to go, Sheytanov took out a package from his overcoat, wrapped haphazardly in newspaper. He gave it to the poet and said:

  “Don’t worry, this is just to start things off . . . you decide what you’ll do with it, but,” he said, “don’t go to a cheap printer.”

  The poet unfolded the newspaper and the young man’s

  [Wednesday, January 16, 2013]

  eyes bulged from their sockets. The package contained money, a lot of it—a pile of hundreds equal to ten, maybe even fifteen thousand leva, according to his lighting-quick estimation.

  “Look at that!” he couldn’t contain himself. “That’s a lot of money!”

  “It’s a lot for our enslavers, du lieber Augustin!”* the poet cut him off scornfully. “And if you’re going to be appalled, don’t do it here.”

  “Milev,” Sheytanov began, grinning at him rakishly, “I hope you understand that I don’t want this mountain giving birth to a molehill. I have my name attached to it. I don’t want to become a laughing stock.”

  “Neither do I, Sheytanov,” the poet assured him. “Neither do I.”

  As he said that, he wrapped the money back in the newspaper and dropped it into the pocket of his housecoat,

  [Thursday, January 17, 2013]

  while the young Kiril, as soon as he got back to his student flat—unexpectedly and surprising even him—turned toward what he thought was the east (he had long lost any sense of direction in the labyrinth of corridors and crooked attic staircases) and whispered excitedly:

  “Thank you, dear God, for this day and for giving me these intelligent comrades! Something great’s going to happen! Amen!”

  Not that he believed in God, but saying a prayer had been a habit he’d developed as a child, when he was chastised anytime he didn’t say one, so he said one now, just in case.

  Then he got under the covers and fell asleep in an instant.

  [Sunday, January
20, 2013]

  [How strange . . . it’s the twentieth of January and yet it couldn’t be more like spring outside. There’s not a trace of the dusting of snow that fell last week, and the sand poured on the streets by the sanitation department has gotten into everything, crunching under our feet as we track it into our houses on our shoes . . . Only the sky isn’t a spring sky—it’s gray and lead-like. Strange indeed.]

  2.

  [Tuesday, January 22, 2013]

  What might have gone through Sheytanov’s mind when a handful of unkempt villagers clad in breeches jumped out from the other side of the railroad tracks with their crooked rifles? He knew what they were up to. It was a well known fact the authorities mobilized armed groups in the villages and asked them to patrol the railroads, since killing rebels was still legal—a reality held up by two laws: the Law for the Extermination of Thugs, left over from Alexander Stamboliyski, prime minister and leader of the Agrarian Union until he was ousted in the military coup of June, nineteen twenty-three, brutally tortured, and then murdered; and the Law for the Protection of Bulgaria, with its newly added eleventh article . . .

  Sheytanov could have easily escaped the mangy scrags—it wouldn’t have been the first time. The wheat had grown tall that spring, and if he were to slip into the surrounding fields he’d have disappeared in minutes and vanished completely into the graying mountains to the north in another hour or two . . . If he had taken off to the east, he would’ve been back in Yambol by dark and they would have never caught him.

  But he could see the villagers in front of him were already jittery, and if he were to take off they would’ve panicked and fired indiscriminately.

  And they would’ve gotten Mariola . . .

  He sighed and stood up.

  “Stop, don’t move!” the others started screaming. “Don’t move! We’ll shoot!”

  “Relax,” he groaned. “Are you blind? I’ve got my hands up. And put these rifles away before someone gets hurt.”