I knew some people, a husband and wife, who didn’t speak to each other for forty years, nearly a whole lifetime. They had gotten into a fight about something and since they couldn’t remember anymore what they’d argued about, the chance of making up was nil. Their kids grew up, raised with their silence, and then they left home. During the rare moments when they would come back, the parents would speak through them, even though they were in the same room. Ask your father where he put the scissors. Tell your mother not to put so much salt in the lentils.
When they were brought to the clinic, they didn’t speak at all anymore. It seemed to me that they didn’t even know each other.
When people with whom you’ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there’s no such thing as half a past. It’s as if you’ve torn a page in half lengthwise and you’re reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends. And nobody understands anything. The person holding the other half is gone. That person who was so close during those days, mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, in the months and years . . . There is no one to confirm it, there is no one to play through it with. When my wife left, I felt like I lost half my past. Actually, I lost the whole thing.
The past can only be played by four hands, by four hands at the very least.
21.
Chronicle
Here in brief is how events unfolded after that:
Three days before the referendum, the Movement for Reason brought to light evidence of meddling by Russian hackers in support of Soc.
That same night three activists from Reason were beaten in their homes. One of them was K.
Election day passed with a few dozen reports of irregularities at polling stations, which were ignored.
The initial election results showed an almost perfect tie between Soc and the Heroes, within the margin of statistical error.
At press conferences in the wee hours of the night, analysts noted the surprisingly conciliatory tone between the leaders of the two movements and the rapprochement between their positions.
The next day at noon, after the final results of the Soc’s razor-thin victory by three-tenths of a percent had been announced, the Soc leader appeared in a red suit, and after vigorously thanking all her supporters, she invited to the podium . . . the chieftain of the Heroes. The shock felt by observers at the press conference was palpable. The general secretary of Soc announced that after a brief meeting, the Central Committee had decided to form a coalition with the Heroes, so as to preserve the unity of the nation. She pointed to the evenly split vote. For the good of Mother Bulgaria and so as to preserve the legacies of Georgi Dimitrov and Khan Kubrat,** she said, raising her voice, at which point together with the head chieftain she picked up a bundle of sticks that had clearly been prepared in advance; they tried to break it but, of course, they could not. They raised it above their heads and uttered solemnly in one voice: Let our people be united like this bundle, in their joys and sorrows, in times of joy and ill fortune!
It sounded like a justice of the peace’s blessing for newlyweds.
All signs indicated that the decision to unite the two movements had been negotiated at least a week in advance (if not even earlier) and was now reconfirmed after the close election results, as predicted. But that wasn’t all. Instead of picking a specific decade, Bulgaria, after much dithering, chose a hodgepodge or mixed platter, if you will. A bit of socialism, if you please, yes, yes, that one there with the side of ajvar. And a serving of the Bulgarian Revival, but deboned, a fattier cut.
Men in breeches lay down next to women with shellacked hairdos . . .
The second half of the speech was even more radical. After a brief pause, as if after announcing a difficult decision, the general secretary proclaimed that the two leaders had agreed to set into motion the procedure for withdrawing from the European Union and setting out on a new path toward a homogeneous and pure nation, true to the legacies of our hajduks and partisans . . .
None of the outside observers had expected that Bulgaria of all countries would be the first the leave the EU after the referendum. Being first was not part of its portfolio.
The nation nationalized, the fatherland fathered anew. I wrote that online. Less than an hour later I had been reported and my account had been blocked.
I managed to catch a flight out the next day.
The borders were closed two days later.
After a dictatorship of the future, as my friend K. would say, came the dictatorship of the past.
It’s nice to know your home country so well that you can leave it shortly before the trap springs.
I had already lived through what was to come.
22.
I could imagine perfectly what happened from then on and sketch it out in my notebook.
Those who had wanted Soc received, as part of their free membership package, a ban on abortions, a subscription to Worker’s Deed, a moratorium on travel, sudden searches and a deficit of feminine hygiene products. (Those who hadn’t wanted Soc also received this.) Various things started disappearing from stores somehow imperceptibly. IKEA left the country and those for whom this had been the site of their Sunday pilgrimages found themselves suddenly bereft. Peugeot, Volkswagen, and all the other Western companies closed down their flagship stores. The Kremikovtsi metalworking plant prepared to fire up again and its chimneys belched out a few salvos of black smoke so as to announce the event. Condoms disappeared on the black market, and with connections you could still find Bulgarian-made ones of light rubber covered in talcum powder. Newspaper cut into little squares replaced the now-missing toilet paper. The erstwhile dissident act of using exactly that scrap of newspaper with the first secretary’s picture on it to wipe your ass came back into fashion. Radios again were all the rage, especially the old Selena and VEF sets that could catch the forbidden wavelengths at the very end of the spectrum. Radio Free Europe, which had prematurely been closed down as unnecessary in democratic times, once again opened up its headquarters in Prague. And those who listened to it would once again be rounded up in the early morning by the people’s militia in their Ladas.
In the beginning people thought that this was all a game, but the militia quickly managed to explain things clearly and firmly. A fist to the stomach, a dislocated shoulder, broken fingers, billy clubs, and kicks to the ribs—that good old arsenal from before the times of simpering liberalism was back in action. Most likely as a nod to the new coalition, the people’s militia now wore shepherds’ kalpaks instead of peaked caps. Reviving the network of State Security informers was no problem at all, since it had never disbanded in the first place, it had never become “deprofessionalized,” as its members proudly proclaimed. And it would completely naturally pick up from the point where it had left off—or hadn’t left off, as it were.
International passports were confiscated. The fences along the national border were reconstructed in record time, actually they had already begun being replaced even before the referendum, due to the migrants. Border guards returned to the once-abandoned outposts. Stores were filled with ready-to-wear clothes of several predominant styles. Quickly the fashion on the streets changed—more and more women were wearing identical suits, the only new things were the stylized traditional tunics. The old Bulgarian brands of jeans like Rila and Panaka reappeared; back in the day we would buy them and rip off the tags immediately, sewing in their place tags from Rifle and Levi’s, which we’d gotten God knows where. These were topped with white shirts with Bulgarian embroidery, T-shirts of Khan Asparuh, and wide sashes around the waist.