So these are the extras for revolutions, I said.
Some of them. That was the rehearsal for the protest platoon, but we’ve got lots of other stuff . . . Lots of other stuff, he said again.
I thought that with a hundred or so people trained like this, or probably even fewer, you could seriously destabilize governments, bring about international incidents, get into the agencies’ breaking news. I told him that.
I know, he replied. But why would I do that? There’s nobody to step into the vacuum. I can destroy and turn things on their head, but I can’t sustain a new installation . . . or a system, if you will. Whatever comes after that fake coup will sweep us away, too. When there is something like an approximation of a state that nevertheless maintains some kind of order, that’s good for us. We work in that alimentary environment. Something like a virus within the body of the state, when the body is weak—that’s great for us; but when it disappears completely, we disappear as well. We don’t have any political ambitions, Demby said. By the way, I tried some social initiatives along the same lines, he said.
And . . . ?
And, well, diddly-squat . . . (a word from forty years ago, that’s what we’d say back in our neighborhood).
And it was an amazingly well-thought-out project, Demby said, and waved his hand dismissively.
17.
It was time for lunch. We sat down on Little Five Corners at a place that used to be called Sun and Moon. At first glance, nothing had changed, even the name was still the same, the young man who came over to give us menus had a lumbersexual beard and resembled the poet-revolutionary Hristo Botev. (Lumbersexuals around here always resemble Botev.) The young man recited the lunch specials: Bulgarian yogurt, Bulgarian lamb with mint dip, Panagyurishte-style eggs from liberated (that’s how he put it) chickens, calf-head cheese with Brussels sprouts and Bulgarian spices, spelt rolls made according to a traditional recipe, and for dessert April Uprising cherry cake or Samokov-style crème brûlée. We quickly settled on the Bulgarian lamb. Unlike me, Demby was not impressed by the menu.
It was a brilliantly thought-out project, a real social cause, he repeated. The villages and towns are full of old people, their children have left, some way back in the ’90s, others later. They don’t come back for years on end, their children’s children are born there, abroad. And they’re left alone, with nobody around. Intense loneliness, a sickness they don’t put down in medical records, but if you ask me there’s no more serious cause of death here. When this business with reenactments was just getting started, we went around the country and I got an eyeful of these people. And not just old people, but folks our own age as well. The wife has left for either Spain or Italy, to take care of sick people there, she sends money back home. The husband is left here, unemployed. In the beginning she comes back every two or three months, then every half year, then she quits coming back at all, first, because it’s expensive, and then because she’s found somebody else there. In the other case it’s the husband who’s left, but it’s the same old story. One is abroad sending money back home, the other is here with the kids, if they have any. A whole generation who only see their mothers on Skype, a whole generation of Skype moms. And so I said to myself, Why don’t I make it so those folks can hire someone once a week, for a Saturday or Sunday, a “wife” to cook you up some chicken soup, to go to the café with, to chat a bit. The kids need to sense a woman’s touch around the house as well. She doesn’t need to look like their mother, we’re not going for doppelgängers, but as you know, to the orphan every woman is a mother, every man is a father. I offered fathers as well. At rock-bottom prices, too; I didn’t add any markup for myself, I could afford not to.
At first this struck people as so absurd that they couldn’t understand what was different about this idea. It was easier for them to hire someone for one night. But sex wasn’t part of my package. There were several incidents at the very beginning, customers tried to rape two of the women hired out as Saturday spouses. That was five or six years ago. Now I see that they’re doing something similar in Japan. It must be in the air.
It’s a great idea, I said with complete sincerity. I know one person who will appreciate it. I was thinking of Gaustine, of course.
He smiled skeptically: In any case a terrible isolation is coming, clearly.
The crème brûlée we ordered for dessert had the same standard taste as all other crème brûlée in the world. Why Samokov-style? I asked Botev as we paid our bill. The cook is from there, the young man replied.
Demby went back to his office to work. In these pre-election days, he needed to make hay while the sun shines, as he put it. I assured him that I would look him up again and that I had an idea for him.
Okay, Joe, come rescue me from here when things get hairy, he called as he walked away.
Joe . . . I had forgotten that we had called each other that in school. “Lemonade Joe,” there had been a Czech cowboy film of that name, and we, like the hero, took on superpowers when we guzzled down lemonade. I watched him disappear across Graf Ignatiev Street toward the St. Sedmochislenitsi Garden, and yet again on this visit I felt terribly lonely. Like a superhero who had suddenly lost his superpowers, like somebody who had traveled to the future and everyone he knew was already dead, like a child lost in an unfamiliar city, which had happened to me once, at dusk, as people were hurrying home and no one stopped to help . . . There is always such a moment, when a person suddenly grows old or suddenly realizes it. Surely at such moments you sprint in a panic after the last caboose of the past, which is disappearing into the distance. This backward draft is the same for people as it is for nations.
I needed to get drunk on lemonade right away.
18.
Late in the afternoon I sat out with my laptop on the balcony of the apartment I had rented. It was a beautiful building from the early twentieth century, one of the first blocks of flats in Sofia, actually I think it was the first, if the sign down by the entrance was to be believed. Handsome European construction, the same as what you can find in Prague, Vienna, or Belgrade. The terrace looked over an inner courtyard, clearly a common space, judging by the extent to which it was neglected.
After everything I had seen and heard these last few days and after what Demby had shown me, I wanted to grasp how far the battle for the past had really gone.
The Internet was going nuts. What I had seen on the news and on the street was magnified many times over on websites and social media. Most polls showed almost exactly even results for the two main movements, Soc and Heroes; the differences came down to a fraction of a percent, well within the bounds of statistical error. Of course, we’re not counting the sociological studies funded by the movements themselves; ironically, both groups gave themselves an eight-point lead. As for the other parties, the Movement for Reason, which included university professors and intellectuals, K. among them, trailed far behind. As did the Young Green Movement, which the trolls immediately called “Young and Green.” These two groups tried to unite into a coalition, which despite not yet having managed to hammer out an alliance, had already been dubbed “Smarties and Greenies.” Actually, they were more or less for staying in the present, although their leaders made quite contradictory statements.
I plugged in the keyword “heroes” and one Bulgaria appeared before my eyes. All kinds of clubs for historical reenactments, patriotic associations, small and large communities, propaganda sites, textile workshops for sewing rebel flags, advertisements for native costumes of all possible kinds, tracksuits embroidered with “Liberty or Death,” tank tops and other undergarments stamped with the slogan “Bulgaria on Three Seas,” patriotic tattoo parlors . . . I remembered what Demby had told me at his office: I’m not one of the biggest players, but the big fish seek me out, because I do things differently, I might be creating kitsch, but at least it is sublime kitsch.