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.