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.