The MC’s voice floated over the square, deep and emotionally charged. They had found an old actor with the same poignance from back then, you couldn’t help but get goose bumps. Those same words about the blood of thousands of heroes, the difficult yet sole path toward the bright future, ebullience and audacity, audacity and ebullience . . .
The people around me, just like back then, hardly tried to crack the meaning of what was being said, and it wasn’t possible in any case, but the very abracadabra of the utterance, the intonation and the pathos, was the little red light, sufficient to unlock the digestive juices of the past. I found a spot in the back row of the Fatherland Front block. I caught sight of Grandpa Mateyko and we nodded at each other.
The parade set off. A brass band was at the very front, followed by a small team of cheerleaders. I never understood when socialism started allowing such erotica, clearly the senile geezers from the Politburo gave their lecherous approval sometime in the ’80s. Those very same geezers, who had once ordered the police to stamp girls’ thighs with permanent ink if their skirts were too short, suddenly approved these Lolitas in revolutionary uniforms.
Next the gymnasts, on their moving platform, made a living five-pointed star with their bodies, then it was the turn of the girls who had been practicing making Lenin/Dimitrov’s head with their flags. This was followed by several electrocars pulling huge floats with Styrofoam constructions and portraits. And bringing up the rear were the common laborers, us with our carnations and little red flags. (I never did manage to outfit myself with either one of these attributes.) Our corps ended up at the very back of the square, by the gallery/palace/town hall, but on the upside from there you could see the whole picture. And the mausoleum, above all. As whole as whole can be, rebuilt, it was the high point of the event. You could sense real excitement ripple through the ranks as we stood in front of it. Those workers the other night really did do a good job. The mausoleum gleamed like the real thing, whiter than ever before. The soldiers in front performed the ritual changing of the guard. On cue the demonstrators began chanting three times: “Glory, Glory, Glory” . . . I wonder when they had rehearsed, chanting so perfectly in sync doesn’t happen just like that. In any case I clearly had missed the rehearsal and joined in slightly out of tempo, but hey, we were from the Fatherland Front after all, the bottom of the barrel. At that moment officials began climbing onto the stage, waving just like they used to, only with their palms, from the wrist. There’s choreography here, I thought. It’s all been worked out in advance. I’d like to know who their screenwriter is.
Suddenly, as if on cue, the chanting died down and the MC’s voice once again carried over the square. Let us welcome our leader and teacher, Comrade Georgi Dimitrov . . . There must be some mistake in the script, I thought. Perhaps we’ll honor his memory, but to welcome him back, that’s going a little far . . .
And then, in the silence that had fallen, a fanfare rang out, the roof of the building opened, two flat panels slid to the side, and from the inside of the mausoleum Dimitrov’s funerary bed slowly began rising, looking exactly as I had seen it as a child, with the red plush shroud beneath it, with flowers around the waxy body . . . and the waxy body itself. The sarcophagus hung above the stage and those standing on it; a woman at one end quickly made the sign of the cross. The square froze. I was afraid the mummy would roll off his pedestal and fall on the heads of the officials below. I think they were afraid of the same thing. After that, the two panels soundlessly slid back together. And then—a quiet shudder of horror ran through the crouching rows because, no, say it isn’t so, the mummy discreetly raised his palm, only his palm, and delicately waved. Barely visibly, almost imperceptibly. I saw several elderly women clutching at their hearts and being quickly escorted away. Immediately Dimitrov’s voice joined in, some old recording saying that the path we are walking ain’t smooth and level like the cobblestones in front of Parliament, but thorny . . . These people never did learn to speak properly.
It was horrifying, I must admit that even I felt my heart skip a beat. When the recording ended, the leader of the movement came forward, a red-haired woman of around fifty, in a quintessential suit, slightly gathered and cinched at the waist, a red fichu around her neck and a red carnation in the breast pocket of her jacket. She signaled to the crowd to quiet down and began with that opening: Dear daring comrades and compatriots . . . Four r’s in as many words, clearly this was the hidden code of socialism. The more r’s, the better. It is surely not coincidence that they recommend that dogs’ names include the r-sound. So they respect you when you give them commands.
11.
Collective Amnesia and the Overproduction of Memory
The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory. The light industry of memory. The past made from light materials, plastic memory as if spit out by a 3-D printer. Memory according to needs and demand. The new Lego—different modules of the past are on offer, which fit precisely into the empty space.
The uncertainty remains as to whether what we are describing is a diagnosis or an economic mechanism.
—Gaustine, New and Imminent Diagnoses
12.
The Uprising
I didn’t wait around to hear the rest of the speech in front of the mausoleum. It was getting late, and I still had to catch the Heroes’ meeting, which was beginning five hundred meters farther down the street in Boris’s Garden. I slipped away through the little park behind the town hall. I had rented an apartment nearby, where I changed from my suit coat and slacks into breeches and an embroidered vest; I kept the white shirt on, white shirts are always in fashion, wound my sash around my waist, swapped the cap on my head for the kalpak, and voilà—now I was a young hero. The puttees that wrapped around my calves and the handmade moccasins gave me a bit more trouble, but they also brought certain relief after the hard and unbroken-in oxfords. I made my way past the university, headed down through the Knyazheska Garden with the monument to the Red Army, which was now surrounded by a cordon of left-leaning volunteers who had been guarding it around the clock lately due to a recent spate of pranks. All it took was half an hour’s work with spray paint in the dead of night, and the Russian soldiers would wake up the next morning as Batmen and Supermen. Actually, that was the only good thing that could still happen with that monument. I headed past the stadium and entered the recesses of Boris’s Garden, which had formerly been called “Freedom Park,” and before that Boris’s Garden, and even earlier than that the Pepiniera or the Nursery.
Here every place is formerly something else.
I entered Boris’s Garden. If one of the patriots gathered here had read that before the liberation this was exactly where the Turkish garrisons had stood, and soon thereafter a Turkish cemetery, surely they would have looked for a different rallying point. But nature has no memory, nor do people, and so Boris’s Garden echoed with heroic songs at that near-noon hour, or, as they would have said back in the day—at twelve o’clock Ottoman Standard Time. As I walked past Ariana Lake, one of my moccasins came untied and I almost fell on my face.
How goes it, bacho, elder brother, are you in need of help? a young lad said, bending down over me.