Indeed, the horo was growing by the minute, leaping over the guardrails of Tsarigrad Road and again winding through Eagles’ Bridge and into the park.
Eee-hooo-eee-hoo-hoooo, the dancers whooped and hooted. . . . If someone were to give the command, “Onward! To Tsarigrad!” at this moment, the dance line would head there, to the east, like a dragon, snaking along the highway the whole way, until it finally halted before them there Tsarigrad Palaces, surrounding its walls on all sides and splashing straight across the Bosporus. And when the noose tightened around the city, when the bagpipes wailed and the horo-siege surrounded it, wouldn’t the city fall? Of course it would fall, and it would join the horo, to boot. The horo, now, there’s the secret Bulgarian strike troops, the Bulgarian Trojan horse. Young Heroes disguised as horo-dancing revelers, but with pistols tucked in their breeches. There’s an Odyssean slyness here, Clever Peter§ and Wily Odysseus rolled into one.
Suddenly there was a noise above Boris’s Garden and a shadow slowly floated over the trees, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Everyone immediately looked up. A Bulgarian flag, carried by three hundred drones, as they wrote in the papers afterward, was flying in the heavens above us. The largest Bulgarian flag ever unfurled, a candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records. (Here Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” would have fit perfectly, even though the organizers had chosen “Izlel e Delyo Haydutin,” the Bulgarian folk song that had gone into space on Voyager, instead.)
There was something strange about the whole sight, reminiscent of a postapocalyptic film. The drones buzzed solemnly, pulling the flag, the end of which was not in sight. Down below some people with breeches and rifles from the nineteenth century hurled their hats into the air and shouted hurrah . . . When the drones had covered the whole patch of sky above the park with astounding accuracy, they paused over the heads of the flabbergasted people.
A sky made of silk so grand, that is my fair homeland . . . Someone started singing a socialist children’s song from the improvised stage, but no other voices joined in and he awkwardly fell silent. Then one of the leaders of the movement grabbed a megaphone and gave the password: Bul-ga-ro young hero! The chant was taken up immediately; it echoed off the hills and valleys, slammed into the buildings on the other side of Tsarigrad Road, and returned amid the trees of Boris’s Garden. Bul-ga-ro young hero! . . . people shouted, their eyes gazing up at the drones as if greeting them.
One bold lad not far from me could no longer contain himself. He lifted his Mannlicher and let off a joyful shot into the sky, just as he’d seen people do in the movies. Knock it off, you’re gonna punch holes in the flag, an older compatriot sitting next to him, perhaps the leader of their rebel band, immediately scolded him. The lad blushed and lowered his rifle, but the signal had been given and around us shots rang out from rifles and revolvers (“levorvers,” as they once wrote, and how nice that sounds). Several drones were hit, and they sputtered and fell into the crowd below. Thank God there were no casualties. It was strange to witness the murder of a drone, like seeing a goose shot in flight; no feathers went flying, but still you get the sense of a shot-down bird.
Right at that moment, as if on cue (no one ever did figure out whether this was part of the scenario or if it was due to the sudden shooting), the drones opened their pincers in perfect sync and disappeared to the west, while the flag, left hanging on its lonesome in the air, seemed surprised for a moment before slowly starting to fall; it descended somewhat silkily, embracing the trees, the bushes, the slides, and the stone elephant on the playground, the pond with the lilies, the benches, the gazebos, the monuments to poets and generals, Benkovski’s cavalry, and the people with all their riflery. Those people at the edges of the park managed to escape, a few of the more frightened women and children also took off running immediately, but most people remained standing underneath it. Where there were tall pines and chestnuts, something like enormous circus tents were formed, while on the slopes and meadows the fabric settled flat on the ground and the bodies of those pressed beneath it could be seen scurrying around, and here and there people screamed that they were suffocating, so someone was forced to slice through the sacred cloth with a knife. Boris’s Garden was covered with the largest Bulgarian flag ever made, more than three square kilometers, as if wrapped by Christo, whom most of the young heroes otherwise lambasted.
Thank God I ended up near the tall chestnut that Grandpa Mateyko had been sitting under. There was air here, it was even pleasant, except for the intense aroma of the cloth and hand-wipes. It turns out the flag had been spritzed with rosewater and Boris’s Garden was now transformed into the Valley of Roses, to the horror of those wheezing and hacking beneath it. Those daggers and sabers at long last came in handy for the liberation of the suffering people. Screams, coughs, and curses rang through the air, people called out their lost loved ones’ names. All of this spoiled the planned re-creation of the outbreak of the April Uprising. The cherrywood cannon never did end up firing; they had a hard enough time getting it to fire back in the day, and now under the cloth it would only asphyxiate the populace. Of the cavalry only a few horses could be seen, frantically racing around in a circle crazed with fear and at risk of trampling their fallen riders. From the very hill that was supposed to have represented Shipka Pass and from which for the sake of historical accuracy they were supposed to hurl stones and wood, only muffled groans floated, along with a lonely voice reciting the famous poem over the loudspeakers.
The uprising was headed for disaster, just as it had historically. And this made the reenactment absolutely authentic.
13.
The May twilight was delicately trying to conceal the remnants of the rebellious afternoon, the scraps of flag on the chestnuts in Boris’s Garden, empty bottles, newspapers, wrappers . . . I don’t know who cleans up after every revolution.
I walked up Krakra Street toward the Doctors’ Garden. I didn’t feel like going home yet, so I went into the café at the Union of Architects, a place where I used to spend almost all my afternoons at one point. They had a cozy little courtyard with a garden, the perfect place for reading and reflecting, unless you run into a chatty friend, of course. I called Gaustine’s phone number at the clinic. I wanted to give him a brief report. It rang and rang, so I hung up. I told myself it would be better to write him, since he didn’t like phones in any case.
Then I decided to call Demby. I took out his card and dialed his number. Again it rang and rang with no answer. I texted him that it was me and suggested we meet up. A minute later I got a message. Demby apologized, but he’d had a really rough day and invited me to meet him for a coffee at his office in the Central Bathhouse the next day instead.
The Union of Architects’ courtyard was rather quiet. After a whole day of demonstrations and uprisings it was as if nothing had happened. Several elderly aristocratic-looking couples were gathered at a larger table in the corner, demurely celebrating something—an anniversary, perhaps a diamond one, or simply the fact that they were still alive. Not far from me a young couple were kissing. Now, there are things that don’t change, I thought, trying not to look in their direction. I also tried to imagine how this café and its courtyard would look if the Heroes won. Would they lug the cherrywood cannon up to the entrance, would they switch out the glass cups for clay ones, those traditional Bulgarian ceramics? Would they cover the tables with folky red woven cloths? Would the pleasantly spacey waitress be forced to don a tunic with decorative coins and tie a colorful kerchief on her head? Would the soft jazz be replaced by folk music? Would at least a couple neutral places remain for citizens exhausted by history?