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.