I make ends meet. With my company here, I create historical reenactments, that’s my main business. I’ve always loved theater, never mind they didn’t accept me into the theater academy back in the day.
I recalled that the demonstration had had some very subtly finessed details and I told him as much, which clearly delighted him.
That bit with the crackling loudspeakers was good, you did that on purpose, right?
What do you think? And that mistake during the sound check and the sound guy swearing . . . People remember those sorts of things. Rest assured that from all those identical demonstrations during socialism, that’s exactly what they’ve remembered, some gaffe. And when you re-create it for them now, it takes them straight back there. And what’ll you say about Dimitrov’s appearance, hm? Deus ex machina. Before the rally I went down into the basement of the mausoleum. Now, there’s a sight to see. When they went to destroy it, they only blew up the upper part, more or less; underneath everything is cracked, the metal reinforcements are hanging down, but the rooms down below nevertheless survived. The room for the mummy, I call it the makeup room, is absolutely unscathed, as is the elevator they used to put him on, a bit rusty, but intact. And it works. Every night they’d bring him down into the freezer, that was Bulgaria’s first air-conditioning, from the late ’40s, a huge hall with pipes. Then they’d take him into the makeup room to freshen him up, to slather him with this and that, and then back to the upper world via elevator. It wasn’t easy on that poor stiff, going up and down, between this world and that one. Tons of back-and-forth.
If you ask me, that part with the hand wave at the end was a bit too theatrical, I commented, sipping my juice.
What else should we have done? I do theater, not revolutions, he huffed, offended. I couldn’t care less about their stupid political movements. They pay up, and I do my thing. It’s the new theater, in the open air, with crowds who don’t even know they’re taking part in a performance. Tragicomedia dell’arte. Actually, some of them do know it, he added, they’ve been called in. I provide extras for rallies and revolutions, in a manner of speaking.
Extras for revolutions? You can’t be serious, I said. Wait, don’t tell me you’re behind the Heroes’ uprising, too?
Ah well—Demby hemmed and hawed—I’d rather not discuss it, they called me at the last minute, I had to save them. But when you hand out rifles to amateurs, they end up making a hash out of the drones and of everything—
At that moment his phone rang, and to my astonishment the sound came right from a box which I had thought was purely decorative. It looked like a mini telephone switchboard—a square wooden panel carved at the edges with a heavy black Bakelite receiver, two rows of buttons, and a round rotary dial mounted in the upper corner. They’re calling me on the petoluchka, the five-pointed star, Demby winked conspiratorially and answered the phone. “The Petoluchka”—that mythical secret telephone network for the crème de la communist crème. Parallel telephones, parallel cafeterias, parallel villas, restaurants, barbershops, chauffeurs, hospitals, masseuses, surely also parallel good-time girls. Clearly there had always been two parallel states.
Sorry, he said, I’ve got to take this. Give me five minutes and we’ll go out for a breath of fresh air.
15.
So these are the dealers of the past, I told myself. Demby has become one of them, a black-market player, and one of the best of them, judging from what he’d later tell me. Actually, it wasn’t even a black market, this business was completely legal. He took orders from all sorts of customers, he didn’t have any political prejudices. In this case, those from the ’60s and ’70s paid the best, plus he felt in his element there as well. He always added in a touch of irony. I’ve pissed on them plenty of times, as he put it. I presume that only he understood these “pissings” and they served mostly as an alibi before his own conscience.
Demby, with his well-tended beer belly, as they called it around here, had actually been chubby since childhood. Everything had always come easily to him, even back in his primary school days. He secretly drew naked women in the back pages of his notebooks, arousing himself in the process, so he’d go and masturbate in the bathrooms. At that time all the books about sex we could get our hands on, and they were a grand total of two—Man and Woman Intimately and Venereal Diseases and Disorders—condemned masturbation as a dangerous undertaking that led to infamous illnesses. (I only remember that you went blind.) For ten cents, Demby would sell us his drawings as well, so that we, too, marched blindly toward our own blindness, so to speak, adding millimeters to the lenses of our glasses. Besides, the diagrams of copulating couples in Man and Woman Intimately more closely resembled a cross-section of an automobile engine, with all those pistons and the like.
I remember that in our final years of high school, Demby had made his attic space into an improvised photo studio/darkroom. I clearly recall the thick curtain over the little window, the red lamp, the trays full of fixer and developer. At that time, developing a photo was a process, hard work, and, let’s be honest, a minor miracle. (Where there is darkness, a miracle always lies sleeping.) You dip the photo paper in one tray, then in the other. If you leave it in for longer, the silhouettes get scorched like burned toast, and if you don’t leave it in long enough, they come out pale and blurred.
I was his helper and lighting man. I positioned his grandma’s old white umbrella and held the battery-powered projector. A few girls from our school passed through the studio. At some point in the session, Demby would send me out, so as not to make the “model” nervous, and they would be left alone in the darkened room. Sometimes even the neighborhood beauty, Lena, who was quite a bit older than us, would drop by. Then Demby would stay in the studio for longer. From time to time he would rent it out by the hour to guys from the neighborhood who wanted to be alone with their girlfriends. I remembered all this because, in fact, Demby took incredible photos. He knew how to measure out the light and darkness with the accuracy of a pharmacist, he played with the shadows, freed bodies from frozen and dull poses. The natural awkwardness of his so-called “models” only added to the eroticism. When he needed quick cash, he could always sell a few photos to the local Komsomol members from our school and neighborhood, who were forever hungry for naked bodies. He said that Komsomol secretaries were always his biggest customers. The deficit of eroticism in late socialism, the early corruption of youth, and the primitive accumulation of capital. Now, there’s a possible topic for university economics departments.
Demby could be faulted for many things, but talent gushed out of him with generous negligence. He never wanted to develop this talent, to show off what he had made, to find his way into photographers’ circles. Why should I bother, he would say, making his voice sound a bit like an Italian mobster’s, I do what I want, I make enough money, and I get the prettiest girls in the neighborhood. I presumed he had maintained this standard of living up until now as well. I wondered whether he didn’t sometimes secretly dream of getting out of business and going into art. I asked him. His answer was exactly what I expected: You’ve always lived outside the real world. And he added that one day, when he’d saved up enough money, he’d make only art, he’d even written down his ideas in a notebook. I wasn’t sure whether he was making fun of me or if he really did plan on it.
16.
Extras for Revolutions
We crossed Dondukov Boulevard, and then the square in front of the Presidency. We could see how they were dismantling the temporary mausoleum a little farther down the street. On the yellow cobblestones, the heads of carnations were still rolling, along with popped balloons and paper funnels that once held sunflower seeds . . . The rain had stopped and the day was gradually clearing up. We passed St. Nedelya Church. Twenty-five kilos of explosives under the main dome, plus a bottle of sulfuric acid to asphyxiate any survivors, and at 3:20 in the afternoon on April 16, 1925, Bulgaria became the absolute world record holder for the bloodiest terrorist attack in a church at that time—150 men, women, and children killed. By the radical wing of the same party that now headed the Movement for State Socialism. If someone really wants to go back to the 1920s, they’re going to have to tackle this issue as well, I thought.