Perhaps, in place of all the wonderful polyglot flowers that grew here, they would plant the new sort of tulip known as the National—with blossoms of white fusing into green and red. After many attempts, a gardener had succeeded in isolating this variety. To force green into the petals of a tulip was to do violence to its essence, which has preserved green for the stem and leaves, but not for the flowers.
People believe that no matter what happens, the inviolable consolation of nature will remain. There will always be spring, summer, and fall, replaced by winter and then in turn by spring. But even this is not guaranteed. Incidentally, according to the Celts, one of the first signs of the apocalypse is the mixing of the seasons.
At that moment shots rang out clearly somewhere nearby. After a whole day of clamor and commotion, this did not faze me at all, but I thought I heard a round of machine gun fire, and the sirens of ambulances and police cars confirmed that something really had happened. High-profile killings in the center of Sofia were the trademark not only of the 1990s and the 1920s, but also of the late nineteenth century. One prime minister was blown up here on Tsar Osvoboditel, another hacked to pieces right over there on Rakovski. Just so you know where you are.
I paid and got up to leave, having had enough emotional upheaval for one day. When I got home, I turned on the news and saw that at the Monument to the Soviet Army there had been a clash between participants in the two rallies. Two of the Heroes had been seriously injured, most likely shot by a Shpagin submachine gun from the era of World War Two, the reporter clarified. The monument was on the border between the two rallies. In the segment, the wounded meekly lay there bleeding. The TV crews had gotten there before the ambulances.
14.
At Demby’s
The next day I headed over to the Baths early in the morning. It had rained overnight and in the cool May dawn the city looked completely different from the day before. The sidewalks were like minefields, the paving stones would tilt and spit mud up on your pant legs. This turned walking into a peculiar exercise indeed, full of careful assessments, jumps, hesitations, searches for detours. Not walking, but maneuvering. And so, imperceptibly, with curses and surges, I reached my destination.
The Central Bathhouse, of course, had long since ceased to be a bath, but it remained one of the most beautiful buildings in Sofia, with a light, exquisite touch of Secession on the façade and rounded Byzantine contours. At the moment it housed the Sofia History Museum, but everyone still called it the Bath, in any case and from time to time some NPO would turn up demanding that it be changed back into a city bathhouse, with the large pool in the men’s side and the smaller one on the women’s. I made my way through the museum galleries, slipped past the golden Louis XVI–style carriage, and past a massive desk—a present to Tsar Ferdinand from Bismarck himself—that rivaled the carriage in size. . .
Demby’s office was on the upper level at the very end of the hallway. A spacious room, chaotically heaped with objects from various styles and eras, as if it were a natural extension of the museum.
What’ll you drink? he asked me as soon as he answered the door.
What’s on offer?
Everything from coffee to kumis.
Kumis? I exclaimed. Mare’s milk?
Yes, along with a Proto-Bulgarian breakfast, Demby replied, it’s been selling like hotcakes lately. Porridge from millet, boiled bulgur, and a thinly sliced strip of jerky. Try it.
And he whipped a sheet off the little table next to him, where the foods had been laid out.
Dried under the saddle of a horse, I joked, reaching for the jerky.
Well, that’s what’s written on the package, but I can’t guarantee it . . . By the way, in recent years horses have gotten to be more plentiful than sheep, they’ve even caught up to the number of cows raised here in Bulgaria. Patriotism has turned out to be a force of production.
I chewed the thin slice of jerky slowly and with suspicion. It was tougher than I had expected and had a strange, unpleasantly sweet taste.
Oh, I forgot to tell you, Demby said, seeing the look on my face, that’s horse jerky.
I could barely restrain myself from spitting it into a napkin . . .
Well, of course, the Proto-Bulgarians didn’t raise pigs and cows, Demby said, they used horses for everything. By the way, that jerky is incredibly good for you, it contains two times less cholesterol and fat, plus lots of zinc, he rattled on like a radio advertisement. It just hit the market recently, Khan Asparuh brand.
He pointed out a calendar on the wall, a gift from the company, which showed Khan Asparuh, the founder of the First Bulgarian Empire way back in AD 681, sitting majestically on his horse, chewing a hunk of jerky as if it had just been sliced off that very same horse. The taste of Great Bulgaria. And beneath that in smaller letters: Made from Bulgarian meat. Now, that sounded like cannibalism.
A coffee, I requested, without mare’s milk, if possible.
I drank it almost in one gulp, to wash away that lingering sweetish flavor of the horse meat. Demby offered me juice from celery and beets, and I accepted. While the blender was whirring, I looked carefully around the room. A big map of Great Bulgaria—I could not remember when exactly it had existed in this form—was hanging to the right of the door. Almost all of Europe was Bulgarian, plus two slices cut from Asia like jerky. In a small glassed-in display case behind the desk stood four extremely odd chalices. I stepped closer and saw that they were in fact skulls, carefully carved out and ensconced in wrought iron to form wineglasses.
The Nikephoros’s Noggin¶ set, Demby called from the far corner of the room.
Several old rifles, Krnkas and Mannlichers, hung elegantly on the wall. Whenever I see a rifle on display, I automatically imagine Chekhov. Right next to the guns—an old wooden radio with a little knitted doily on top of it and a flower vase homemade from an old bottle of Vero dish soap, in which several fake lilies of the valley cavorted. Nothing brings back the past like kitsch.
Look, I know what you’re thinking, Demby said suddenly, but these are exactly the type of things my clients like.
I waved off his concerns and continued my tour around the office.
In a glass carafe with a red five-pointed star on the lid floated a brain in formaldehyde, as if stolen from some biology lab. It’s Georgi Dimitrov’s, Demby noted casually, as he brought over the juice. They preserved it when they mummified him.
At the end of this exposition wall stood a small model of the mausoleum made out of matchsticks, a very detailed work.
That burns easily, I couldn’t resist.
Speaking of the mausoleum, what did you think of the demonstration yesterday? Actually . . . my company was behind the . . . reenactment, he added modestly.
So this was what my old friend Demby had been up to.
So you’re saying that you were . . . the director? I didn’t know if this was the right word.