The Facebook pages of such associations enjoyed exceptional popularity. Everyone had revolutionary-inspired profile pictures, with tattoos on their biceps and chests, a few even had the whole poem about the Battle for Shipka Pass on their backs.
Most numerous were the clubs for historical reenactments, every one of them had a few hundred members and volunteers. If you counted up the weapons, the flintlock rifles, the daggers, the scimitars, the pistols and machine guns they had all together, surely it would amount to more than the standing Bulgarian army’s arsenal. In a certain sense they could be (and most likely were) real combat units in disguise.
The not particularly discreet support from state institutions was immediately apparent. On the website of the Hajduks# Association you could see several men armed to the teeth with daggers and pistols tucked in their belts barging into a classroom filled with frightened children. Most likely this was during the newly introduced class periods for patriotic education, since the teacher, in a blue tunic with a wreath of flowers on her head, was touching the dagger of the most bloodthirsty among them with awe. After that “the children were given the opportunity to see authentic weapons up close,” as the caption below the photo explained. An eight- or nine-year-old boy could be seen gripping a revolver with both hands and aiming at the blackboard, another young-hero-in-training of the same age was trying to pull a scimitar from its sheath before the hajduks’ grinning faces. All this, even though bringing weapons into schools was officially banned. The website offered special thanks to patriotic firms who had donated funds for the education of young Bulgarians.
On another page the association for reenactments had decided to offer a live performance of the dismemberment of Balkandzhi Yovo, who refused to hand over Beautiful Yana to the Turks. To this end they used a mannequin dressed in a native costume. As far as I could tell, this reenactment had been cut short because several of the more sensitive children had fainted. Otherwise I noted that “Upcoming Events” promised the Hanging of the Revolutionary Hero Vasil Levski and the Massacre of Bulgarian Villagers at Batak.
The sun was rolling red behind Vitosha like the head of a hajduk. As evening fell, the city smelled strongly of roasted peppers, that favorite, most Bulgarian of scents. If I am patriotic about anything, it would be about that scent—roasted peppers at dusk. Somewhere from the other floors, meatballs were sizzling, a TV buzzed . . . Life went on with all its scents, spices, meatballs, and fussing. It was starting to get cold, so I got up, threw on my jacket, and prepared to quickly surf through the Soc Movement as well.
19.
The Soc activists had also mastered the new media, or rather “conquered” it, as they themselves would put it. The specter of communism was haunting the Internet. Old emblems and souvenirs once again became symbols. When did all of this happen? Now, here’s a site: “Let’s Bring Back Socialism, Druzya,” with half of it written in Russian. A video immediately starts playing—archival footage of children ritually “tapping” the general secretary and the geezers from the Politburo with decorated sticks to ensure health during the New Year at the Boyana Residence sometime in the late ’70s. The old men are disoriented, they awkwardly pat the children on the head with their bear-like paws and try to kiss them. One little girl wipes her face with her sleeve in disgust and the camera quickly cuts away.
The most striking thing was that the whole site was teeming with poorly rhymed slogans, like from a children’s primer. Tons of photos of the Bulgarian communist dictator Todor Zhivkov and Brezhnev, pictures of Stalin, shots from World War Two, photos of Lada automobiles . . .
Every day with iron fists,
The enemy is smashed to bits.
The left’s myth remains fundamentally impoverished.
It can keep going, so that the glue of the myth holds, but they have to forget quite a few things. Forget the terrorist attack of 1925 in that church. Forget those who were murdered and buried in mass graves immediately after any coup. Forget those who were beaten, stomped under heavy boots, sent to camps. Forget those who were surveilled, lied to, separated, banned, humiliated . . . all must be forgotten. And then forget the very forgetting . . . Forgetting takes a lot of work. You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget something. Surely that’s how every ideology functions.
I really wanted a smoke . . . I really wanted to smoke sharp-tasting cigarettes, harsh, like from back in the day. I didn’t feel like sitting around the apartment, so I went out. I passed through the little park in front of St. Sofia and came out behind the statue of Tsar Samuel that had been erected a few years ago. The sculptor had put two little LED lights in the eyes, to the horror of passersby and cats. Thank God the lights burned out after two months and nobody had bothered to change them.
If anything can save this country from all the kitsch that is raining down on it, that is laziness and apathy alone. That which destroys it will also protect it. In apathetic and lazy nations, neither kitsch nor evil can win out for long, because they take effort and upkeep. That was my optimistic theory, but a little voice inside my head kept saying: When it comes to making trouble, even a lazy man works hard.
I was strolling around outside, but the Facebook hajduks and communists were screaming in my head, and with the sobering chill of the night air it was growing ever clearer to me—there were two Bulgarias, and neither one of them was mine.
I sat down for a bit near the statue with the glowing eyes which no longer glowed. I must have looked pretty shabby and dejected, like in that old joke: Are you a writer? No, I’m just hungover.
A group of teenagers, slightly high, hollered at me: Hey, buddy, don’t waste your time guarding Mr. X-Ray Specs. Don’t worry, he’s not gonna run away! They walked past me laughing their asses off, never guessing that that was the most normal line I had heard this whole week. I would have gotten up and joined them if I could.
It should be my city and my past tumbling through these streets, peeking out from around every corner, ready to chat with me. But it seemed we were no longer talking.
20.
I have determined that communication in this city has been interrupted on all levels. People don’t talk across professions; doctors don’t talk to their patients, salesclerks don’t talk to their clients, the taxi drivers don’t even talk to their passengers, people in the guilds don’t talk, some writers don’t talk to other writers, who in turn don’t talk to yet other writers. Families do not talk at home, husbands and wives don’t talk, mothers and fathers don’t talk. It’s as if all topics of conversation have suddenly disappeared like the dinosaurs, mysteriously died out like the bees, they’ve been annihilated through the ventilation hood in the kitchen or through the little window in the bathroom with the torn screen.
And now they are standing there and they can’t remember exactly when and where the conversation left off. At a certain point you fall silent. And the more time that passes, the more impossible continuing the conversation becomes. It’s simple, silence begets silence. In the beginning there’s a moment at which you would like to say something, you even work it out in your head, take a breath, open your mouth, then you wave your hand dismissively and shut the door from the inside.