von Pablo Wezel (copyright)

„Es war einmal“ würde nicht nur langweilig sondern auch viel zu verjährt klingen. Der schwere süssliche Geschmack von Blut klebte noch so sehr in der Luft, dass man mit den Worten kürzlich beginnen möchte. Dennoch streben wir manchmal danach, schreckliche Ereignisse hinter uns zu lassen, um möglichst schnell vergessen zu können. Also nehme ich einfach den Mittelweg und beginne mit: Einst als Krieg das Land beherrschte und Minen das Feld bestückten, lebte in durchlöcherten Gemäuern eines verlassenen Hauses eine Spinne. Sie war alt und grau und hiess Ludwig. Ludwig fehlte ein ganzes Bein. Dieses verlor er gerade letzte Woche, als neben ihm eine Bombe einschlug. Aber in seiner zarten Weisheit hatte Ludwig gelernt mit all dem Hass und jener Gewalt, welche er mit sich brachte umzugehen. Still konnte er in all der Traurigkeit, welche ihn umgab etwas Schönes entdecken. Wenn erneut tausende von Kugeln durch das leere Haus kreischten, flüchtete Ludwig, seit letzter Woche etwas langsamer, hinter den vergilbten Heizkörper des Wohnzimmers. Dort wo die alte Mila immer die nassen Socken ihres Mannes aufgehängt hatte. Ihm hatten die Männer vor einigen Wochen hinter dem Haus ins Gesicht geschossen. Er musste dafür auf seine selbst gezimmerte Veranda knien. Immer hatte er erwähnt, dass sie gestrichen werden sollte. Vermutlich hatte er aber nie geglaubt, dass sein eigenes Blut als Grundierung eingesetzt würde.
Hinter dem vergilbten Heizkörper rührte Ludwig nicht ein Beinchen bis wieder Ruhe einkehrte. Die Schüsse und Schreie verstummten. Eines Tages, der Morgen war noch sehr jung, und Ludwig gerade unterwegs zu der Wand, wo all die Kinderzeichnungen von Milanka und Sabia hingen, stürzte ein kleiner Junge in das Haus. Blutüberströmt torkelte er ins Wohnzimmer. An seiner rechten Schulter baumelten Hautfetzen hin und her. Der Junge hatte einige Gedanken zuvor noch Fussball gespielt. Mit Novica an seiner Seite. Dann ein Knall und Novicas Körper platzte in alle Himmelsrichtungen. Der Junge versorgte sich selber und Ludwig begleitete ihn dabei. Ludwig war glücklich. Glücklich nicht mehr alleine zu sein. Zusammen sahen sie die Sonne aufgehen. Und wenn der Junge schlief hielt Ludwig die ganze Nacht Wache.
An einem Morgen, Ludwig war gerade kurz eingenickt, trampelten grüne Männer in das Haus. Gefährlich mit Gewehren brüllten sie alle durcheinander. Ihre Stimmen überschlugen sich. Ludwig schrie auch. Mutig warf sich Ludwig zwischen die Gewehre und den Jungen. Trotz Ludwigs Warnungen blitzen plötzlich alle Gewehre auf und der Junge mit dem Stummel an der Schulter sackte lautlos zusammen. Die Gewehre gingen und liessen nichts als den Gestank des Schiesspulvers und das leise Wimmern des Jungen zurück. Ludwig setzte sich neben den Jungen und sah zu, wie der Tod kam. Das Blut quoll unter dem kleinen Leib hervor und floss zäh in Richtung Küche. Ludwig wusste, dass das Haus ein kleines Gefälle hatte. Leise ging er wieder hinter seinen vergilbten Heizkörper.

Provided by Universal Frame GmbH – Marketing und Public Relation

von Andrea Tallarita (Copyright)

How stupidly it all began, how senselessly, as if to prove that there is no sense to anything else, as if to tell me that everything else of that whole story was equally pointless, and in a way it was, after all who’s ever fallen in love with a computer character? And is it even possible to love an artificial image of something that does not exist? The female protagonist of a game, her aesthetics probably thought out with no other intention than to satisfy a few twelve-year olds’ need for a beautiful icon over which to masturbate in their bathrooms. And what a fool I was to think of myself as something different from all those twelve-year old kids, to think that I was in some way purer, or more noble, to think that I was something special. But what is love? What does it really mean, after all, this overly abused word?
And how did it all begin? Oh, that makes for a laugh. Here. Let me tell you.
With a game called Petals of Darkness, some kind of a mix between a survival horror and an adventure type. It even had a subtitle in Latin so that the kids could go “Oooooh, look, this is culture!” and claim that their pastimes were art. I didn’t buy it back then because it came out for a console and I didn’t own a console – nor did I give a toss about buying one, to be honest. So I let it slip. In the meantime, the game received a surprising amount of critical acclaim. Game of the century! – Best game ever made! – 98% on Gamesmania! and so on so forth, more or less the kind of stuff you get every month or two if you’re somewhat up to date with videogame journalism.
However, a little later, and as so often happens, they converted the game to PC. Out of curiosity more than anything else, and having waited a few months for the prices to go down, I purchased the game.
It was a pretty good thing, no one could deny that. The whole story went that there was one of those undergods that tend to lay asleep for thousands of years and only wake up when every chance for survival lie in the hand of one person alone (and, you know, it’s you!). The bloke in question is awoken by the particular disposition of stars that occurs at a certain time. His name is Deimos. So Deimos returns, he begins taking over the earth, blah blah blah, but (surprise surprise) it turns out that there’s one person who can save the day: Beatrix, the daughter of Deimos himself. The mother was a mortal woman, obviously very fascinating and very blind if she’s seduced a guy with scales and horns on him.
Beatrix’s very name was a reference to the Divine Comedy. There was a whole mythology they’d made up to give some background to the otherwise shabby plot. That, together with some amazingly well-written and well-directed cutscenes, as well as some beautiful settings, made for the magnificent atmosphere that pervaded the game and that made it, as it was, a very good piece of work.
The whole thing consisted in going down to the depths of hell and eating the heart of Deimos, passing in the meantime through seven hellish worlds where each represented one of Beatrix’s nightmares. Ok, not very original perhaps, but then my brutal summary really doesn’t do justice to a game so heavy, dark and vivid in almost every aspect of its atmosphere. Beatrix, for a start, was a remarkably well-achieved blend of the bad-ass bitch and the sad, sensitive, innocent girl. At times she was using a devil’s blood to paint her face, at others she was crying over the grave of her sister.
A fabulous character, all in all. I was hardly ten per cent through the game and already I found myself praising its virtues on the net. And yet even then, looking back on it, I see that I wasn’t praising the game. The game was nothing. It was Beatrix; that character had fascinated me beyond belief. I finished the whole game playing with an intensity seldom known before. I would rush through the shoot ‘em up areas just to get to the bosses, because I perfectly well knew that the prize was going to be another fantastic cutscene. Shoot this monster, torch this other one, behead the third one, all of it just to see her stand before Thulax Sovereign of the Despair Chamber and shout “wipe that grin off your face or you’ll have to wipe the blood off the bricks.”
There, that was it! Wipe that grin off your face or you’ll have to wipe the blood off the bricks! That was all I wanted from the game. That was all I desired at all. I didn’t care for the dark, gloomy corridors, I didn’t care for the 60.000 polygons graphics; the only thing that made me play that game was Beatrix.
And the girl was attractive. All fictional heroines are, but she happened to possess precisely that kind of beauty that appealed to me. There’s no way I could deny it, from the very first time I saw her I immediately thought “wow.” She had smooth, black hair combed backwards like Trinity’s in The Matrix, with huge green eyes and black lips. Her body, like that of all computer-generated heroines, was spectacular. Perfect, one could easily say, with that typically absurd coupling of anorexic limbs with breasts like soccer-balls, all strapped under a black cloak which half-allowed and half-denied vision of that ridiculously tight, black leather outfit she wore. But it wasn’t vulgar. Ok, that might sound a little hard to believe after my description, but if you just saw her. I swear she was a symphony.
By finishing the game you could earn a few more costumes the only purpose of which was, of course, to uncover a few more inches of polygonal legs, but that wasn’t the reward. No, the reward was seeing the final cutscene – oh, the dramatic intensity of it all! Beatrix confronting her father, Deimos, a twenty-foot tall monster of a devil ready to overtake all human souls and rip your lungs out in the process.
“Who are you?” asks the monster in a deep, rumbling voice that shakes the mountains, fire flaring from his eyes, black jaws drooling. “That dare wade knee-deep in hell and enter the lair where black reigns eternal?”
Beatrix’s cold-blood is heroic.
“Who wants to know?” she asks back, as if the Lord before her was just anyone, making you leap to your feet and cheer for her, making you laugh your heart out at that fuck-face Deimos who stands totally taken aback.
A brief conversation ensues, until the monster finds out that you’re his daughter.

“Ah, so you have returned to join me,” he says, and I couldn’t prevent myself from standing up like a little kid and shouting “fuck off” at the computer screen. And then a whole load of exchanges, Beatrix cries and laughs, she’s courageous and sensitive.
“So you have come to destroy me,” chuckles the monster.
“Yes,” she states, ice in her eyes.
“And you expect to survive, do you?”
“That really doesn’t matter.”
“Your sister and mother suffered, and you shall suffer more. I have been visiting you in your bloody dreams every night – as I have always done and now, eternally will.”
At this Beatrix looks up at him, and with all the delicate grief of a doleful heart, whispers:
“Why are you doing this to me?”
And on went the conversation, touching peaks of beauty rarely found in a videogame, and me there like an idiot, rooting for her like a child at a world cup final, until the conversation ended with Deimos hollering “Come and get it, bitch!,” and that’s when you regained control of her. At that point you had to defeat the final boss.
He was a nightmare. I can’t even remember how often I died. This was another strange thing – I hated dying. Death tends to be a normal fact in videogames, a parenthesis, a comma, a daily step in the journey, and yet here I was, doing my honest, human best to avoid dying as frequently as possible. Perhaps it was because I never personally identified with the character of the game – it wasn’t me going through the gates of hell, it was Beatrix. So I almost felt responsible for her, and seeing that game over cutscene with her crucified before Deimos’s face, tears of blood rolling down her cheeks… it made me feel guilty. I know it’s stupid, but I always ended up feeling guilty. And maybe even a little jealous, because let’s face it, like everything else in the game that cutscene was sexual in its allusions, in its movements, in Beatrix’s position, and there was a little nagging thought behind my mind whispering “And now what’s Deimos going to do with her?,” and yes, part of the discomfort that I felt when I died was that Deimos wasn’t me, that he was the one with Beatrix’s living body immobilised on a cross, not me. But of course I only came to admit that to myself a lot later. At the time, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I just thought it was compassion. And compassion is always a comfortable way out for anyone who gets possessive of other people’s lives.
Inevitably, I finally beat Deimos, and from there on it was just a matter of revisiting certain areas to find some kind of item that I might have missed or something – the game was full of them, fortunately. I immediately started the game one more time, striving to finish it all over again and see all the cutscenes again. All the while I was discussing on the Internet how great the game was and how fascinating a character Beatrix was and all the rest. I found the fan site of Petals of Darkness, registered and became an active member within the forums. Fortunately the game had been a great success, and there was a solid base of fans to ensure I didn’t feel alone. Most of them were thirteen year old idiots who talked about Beatrix’s tits, and the rest were way too mature to feel anything for a computer character.
Except for me. Me, that short, pimplish guy with the sweat in his hands and that one, single, overarching eyebrow on his forehead. Me, the lonely computer-freak whose free time in school was spent reading Spiderman and at uni going to nightclubs which I hated in the hope of finding someone drunk enough to get laid by me. I’ve never even kissed a girl on the lips, although when asked I’m always generously detailed in recounting the dozens of erotic adventures I had and the myriads of girls I say I’ve slept with. How pathetic is that? Not that anyone ever believes me, of course. But it’s my defence. By speaking about sex like an idiot, I don’t have to face any real discussions on the subject.
By the time I was getting through the third journey through hell, having finished the second one and having stuck a giant Beatrix poster in my room, I was almost growing aware of what I felt. I fought through levels which I knew by heart, it was boring, and yet every time I saw her in one of the cutscenes I would smile and wink an eye at her, or send her a kiss. I’d given up painting as soon as my GCSE-Level art was over, but I took it up again so that I could make my own posters and pictures of Beatrix. At first my paintings sucked, and I threw them all away, but with a little time and practice and a few of those Do-It-Yourself books on how to paint, I somewhat improved.
I liked to use Beatrix as my model – I’d paint her in classical kind of images, as one of the Greek goddesses or as an angel descending from the clouds, the sun gleaming behind her. I really liked to imagine her in those relaxed, abandoned poses that you always see painted women in. She was never naked of course – I wouldn’t dare do this to her. On the contrary, she was always an emblem of purity. I had even started writing fan-fiction stories for the site – I was one of the most active users there. The stories were all about glorifying the girl and presenting her as an incredibly noble and wonderful character. I wrote a story which was about her life before the events in the game, and one which occurred in-between the events. Both contained ample descriptions of her personality and of her physique, which I somehow managed to present as even more perfect than the original.
And yet I was in denial. In love with a computer character? In love with Beatrix? Of course not! It never even crossed my mind. It was just sexual attraction, right? I just thought she was very pretty, much in the same way you think a film-star is very pretty, or a pop-star or whatever, didn’t I?
But if that was true, why was it always so… different? Why had I never had sexual fantasies about Beatrix? Of course, I would fantasise about kissing her, hugging her and simply speaking with her, but I never went beyond that. I never tried to imagine her naked. The sole idea of sexual fantasies involving Beatrix gave me the creeps.

If it was simple sexual attraction, then why didn’t I ever masturbate about her? Of course, I had no qualms in imagining me and Anna Faris shagging in eighteenth century France, or working as a cook in Gwyneth Paltrow’s house and being asked to feed her the biggest sausage in the kitchen, indeed I was comfortably ready to choke my chicken for almost any attractive girl I knew – damn, even the teacher I’d had through primaries wasn’t spared – except for the one I found the most attractive of all, Beatrix.
Why?
With time, my fanfiction grew more and more centred on absurd love-stories that Beatrix might have had in some indefinite time that could have occurred. With less of the blood and the guts, other people on the site began to protest, but I didn’t really care. After a little, I began to write stories exclusively for my own reading – stories which were, again, relatively stupid love stories, their only interesting aspect being their protagonist. I went on every possible internet site and downloaded images and frames of her. Then I printed them and stuck them on my wall. It cost me a fortune to print them in colour. I began writing down her cutscene lines, so as to put down a “script” of what she said – that was the way I justified the fact that for the seventh time now I was playing through the same game.
The male protagonists of her love stories were always half-demons or handsome humans, all with exotic names and with muscles straight out of a cement-house. But it was me that I was writing about. Behind all those muscles, behind that fictional charisma, behind those models of men that were, aesthetically speaking, the male equivalent of Beatrix herself, behind all that was me. The post-modern Quasimodo. Silly, little and pathetic, picturing experiences that he would never live. And so it was that she took me by the hand and brought me flying above the clouds to see the constellations, so it was that we sat together and threw pebbles inside a stream, and we held hands on the back of a dragon and plucked flowers growing on other worlds; we sat together and told each other about our fears, we comforted each other; we had conversations with the dolphins, we sang love songs inside Cathedrals, and we kissed under a rainbow. The dialogues between my characters and her became dialogues between me and her, outlets of my daily frustration that I self-answered impersonating her myself.
I would fight the last level of the game over and over again, and then reach the final cutscene and listen to her speak. And when Deimos was going to say his lines, when he was going to say “So you have come to destroy me,” I would send the volume counter to zero and myself ask the screen “You know I love you, don’t you?” Then I’d send the volume counter up again and she’d say “Yes.” And I sent it down again when Deimos was going to say “And you expect to survive,” and I said “I’m afraid I don’t deserve you. I’m terribly ugly.” And I would let her speak, and she would say “That really doesn’t matter.” And finally I would tell her how much I loved her and how much I’d have loved to be with her, but I’d also tell her that I was too ugly and too stupid and too base for her, and that she deserved someone better, someone that could truly make her happy, and that for this reason I would leave and disappear. And her face crumpled in delicate grief – oh, how beautiful she was when she cried! – and she would say “Why are you doing this to me?”
I was forced to face my feelings, I think, the day I wrote Beatrix a love letter. I had managed to deny myself all I felt until then, but that time I really overdid it. I don’t know what was going through my head. It just happened. I was sitting at the computer thinking “What would I write if I had to declare her my love?” And I started writing, I wrote Darling; there are no words that I could use, and then I went on and on and wrote three pages one after the other. And when I stopped and re-read everything that I had written, when I saw myself begging the skies for death for having placed before me a love so unattainable, when I compared her cheeks with spring and her eyes with winter, when I listened to my very own words – at that point, I could not lie myself anymore. I loved her. I was in love with her, and she was a computer character.
It is an arbitrary thing, love. I suppose the reason for which I never wanted to accept it myself was that it was shameful. And yet why? Because I was meant to get a real girl? But why should I have? What was there of good in those self-consciously attractive women, made of vulgar flesh, speckled with imperfections and wasting what little youth they had in hiding them, when self-denial is the greatest imperfection of them all? Yes, what good was there in these girls, that looked down upon me as inconsiderable? Why was it that if my gaze crossed an attractive girl’s in the metro, her eyes would turn to scorn? And I’m meant to drool after one of those girls, when Beatrix, by not existing, never asked anything of me and always respected me for what I was.
Why is there this emphasis, in people, to follow only that which pertains to the so-called real world, this gray and meaningless place full of indifferent people? What is there in this monotonous passing of day after day, this reaching of a high point in one’s twenties and then the slow, inevitable decay of the mind and of the body, that seems so worthy of merit? And why glorify it?
And love, is it not about perfection? Do we love people or what we want to see in people? Is my love for a perfect woman just another form of loving what we find beautiful, the only difference being that Beatrix was incapable of interacting with me, and thus incapable of insulting me, humiliating me, treading on me like every other girl had done? Who, of those that claim to love, can claim to love a human being purely and solely for what that person is like inside – for that person’s personality, the thoughts, and for that part which is as real as all that’s good, the faults? Do we love the stupidity, the vulgarity, the ignorance, the arrogance, the selfishness that are part of all of us, or do we simply try to ignore them? And can anyone present me a woman, or a man, that is never vain, never arrogant, never selfish, fickle, or whatever else it takes to bring one from the pedestal of divinity? No, we love not people. We love beauty, and that alone, and in loving beauty, we love ourselves – we love those things in the universe which we see as beautiful, and nothing more. People – they’re strangers.Beatrix was, the more I think about it, just my view of perfection. She was intelligent, attractive, honest, and brave. Ok, so she wasn’t real, but so what? Does that make my feelings less intense? How do you think I felt about not being able to interact with her? About speaking with her and writing to her without answer, knowing that every single thing I said was going to be absolutely wasted and that in no way she was ever going to hear it? As if I never wept.
I tried to speak about all this with a guy I knew through msn. He thought I was pulling his leg. I couldn’t convince him otherwise, and after a little frustrating talk, decided to leave it at that. (I can’t blame him, I guess – the very fact that I’d speak about my problems with a guy I knew through msn instead of someone real would seem unlikely to the most).
Ah, yes, and in the meantime there was sexuality. Because in all of this, at a certain point, I had begun masturbating about Beatrix, too. At first it was simply my fantasies; they shifted from mere kissing to something a little bit more “osée” concerning her breasts. Gradually, I began imagining her with less and less clothes on. Then, one night, I was happily masturbating thinking about whichever girl it was, when I visualised Beatrix and all of a sudden, it was her that I was humping. I don’t know why. It just happened. At first I could sort of justify myself by saying that when I thought about her, I never thought about oral or anal sex, but that too didn’t last, as five days later I was thinking about her dressed as a cavewoman and blowing me on the beach. What I’d originally considered disgusting to even think about had suddenly turned pleasant. So there, hasta la vista to all the illusions about morality, dignity or purity – in the end, she’d become to me no different than every other girl: An object of sexual desire.
I quickly developed a sense of guilt. Which was ridiculous, of course. How the hell do you develop a sense of guilt for someone who doesn’t exist? How much sense does it make? And why on earth was I feeling guilty? Since when had I deluded myself about being some pure, self-righteous, noble guy? I was a perverted little creep bursting with ugly sexual fantasies – I had always been one – and I knew it. And yet there I was, feeling sorry for myself because suddenly I was masturbating about the computer character I thought I loved. A computer character which had been designed precisely to possess that kind of impossible, unattainable beauty which stimulates lust, not love.
By now the solitude of my relationship was beginning to get at me. I wanted to speak about this with someone, to scream my whole story to the world, but how the hell do you do it? Bob, sit down. I have a story to tell you, and I need some advice. See, I’ve just fallen in love with a character from this computer game, and I… they’d be laughing their heads off in the space of a minute, even if they were your friends – and given the amount of friends that I had, it sure didn’t make things easier.
I was so desperately in need of an excuse to talk about her – to have someone, anyone speak with me and tell me something, that I’m not an idiot perhaps, maybe even console me – that I opened a topic on a forum in Game-Zone.com, in which I asked advice on what to do when you’re in love with a girl that you can’t reach. The first to answer was a Thai guy, some Silver_Dragon or other (people in the net have strange nicks – mine, for example, was Jonesy_the_Cat). His advice was to try and make friends with the girl. Ooohhh, thank you Silver_Dragon, thank you, what wonderful advice you give! Of course when I say “a girl that you can’t reach” I really mean “a girl a couple of blocks down!” Of course!
Then there were other idiots, all with dumbfuck advice. And then there was Mystic_Lemons, a guy who must have been a psychologist or other, with an absolutely terrifying intelligence, God knows what he was doing on a videogame forum amidst a bunch of kids like the rest of us were, sending his message with the self-assured voice of an unreachably confident son of a bitch: “Not exactly, Jonesy_the_Cat, you’re obviously feeling guilty about your desire for some reason…” and on, and on, and on. All useless.
Even though he was right. There were people who fucked with pigs out there. There were people who needed to see women eating shit to get aroused. Why did I, of all people, have to feel guilty? And what for? Who was I doing any harm to?
A little later, while I was exploring a site of Japanese pornography, I fell on Petals of Darkness Hentai. That is, pornographic comics with characters from Petals of Darkness, drawn in that Japanese style with big eyes and V-shaped faces.
I blushed immediately. The first comic involved Beatrix being captured and raped by Deimos together with three other demon bosses. The second one was about Beatrix being put under a spell by Deimos and forced to reach a, uh, super-orgasm-energy-portal-something with a giant tentacled monster. The next ones were even worse.
They were disgusting, as simple as that. I felt revolted. The idea that they could use my angel for such disgusting exploits was enough to make me sick.
And yet little more than a week later, to my dismay, I found myself going back to the site again. And reading through those comics again. And still telling myself how disgusting it was and how shameful it was and how sacrilegious it was, but in the meantime, distinctly feeling myself aroused.
Within other two weeks, I became a regular reader of Petals of Darkness Hentai. I could hardly masturbate without them. So not only was I masturbating about Beatrix, I was doing so before comics which were by all standards revolting. I, that had painted her as an angel with the sun behind her head, I, that had written about us kissing under the rainbow – that had confessed to her my fears and comforted her through hers. Where was I now? There, wanking like an animal in front of a computer screen. By then, there was just no getting round it. I had forced myself to admit that I was in love with a computer character. I had been forced to admit that even when in love, I was incapable of respecting the subject of my affection as something more than a sexual object. And I had been forced to admit that there was no limit to desire – that no matter how deep my beliefs in morality, love, or integrity, that no matter how much guilt or self-sacrifice or suffering I went through, I was always going to be bent, I was always going to give in, my desire and my nature would always come first. And my nature had proved itself to be revolting.
It was not my love for Beatrix in itself, that was the problem. And it was not the impossibility of having her. No, the problem was that Beatrix was forcing me to face who I was. She had taken me as a person and proved to me that I was not pure, I was not moral, I was not good in any way. I was myself and I had to face it, I had to face the extent of my imperfection, and I was no better than any other human being by virtue of being a human being. I was forced to face it, and I’m still forced to face it every time I see my stupid and ugly face in the mirror. Being a dirty, small, pathetic guy hadn’t been so bad until someone told me that I was one.
I did not realise all of this immediately, of course. For a while I simply tried to resist masturbation and pornography through will-power, much like I had tried to resist the notion of being in love with a computer character. But I could not. Inevitably, despite all the promises and the good intentions, at the end of the day I found myself sitting before a computer screen and going at it – going at it and feeling no kind of pleasure whatsoever, because the entire experience was bursting with guilt and self-disgust. It is paradoxical, but I couldn’t resist doing it and I couldn’t do it without feeling miserable.
And then I thought of myself walking out of the front-door every day, into the gray streets of my wasted life, towards my stupid little job that would never lead me anywhere, I thought of the scream of my brain resonating inside my skull, I thought of my chest brimming with angst, I thought of myself opening the gate of my garden and walking out, the grass green and the flowers violently red, but everything, everything gray. I thought about pain and misery and suffering. And I finally understood what Beatrix was doing to me. I watched her face in the posters, smiling so sweetly you’d think she was made of sugar, smiling as if she were trying to tell me that she loved me. I couldn’t keep living like that.
So I decided to kill her.
It was a decision which I took one night, in bed, as I stared at the ceiling. I had to kill her. It was the only way out. It was either me or her. I meant to do it the next day, but at first I couldn’t. I just didn’t have the strength. Then, the day after that, I went through all the material I had for the last time, I masturbated three times in a row, and finally set off to it.
I tore all the posters from the wall. All the pictures, all the paintings, all the sketches I had done of her were collected in a heap and I burnt them all. I searched my house thoroughly for any written material or any object that might have concerned her. I found a surprising amount of written pieces, some poems, as well as various toys and action figures. I threw them all in the garbage bin outside, and the written pieces I burnt.
Then I turned to the computer. I threw the game – CD, case and all – in the bin together with the toys, and disinstalled it from my computer. My mind was blank throughout the whole process. I opened a huge amount of desktop folders, and found all the fanfiction and letters I had written. I re-read them all one last time before sending them to the waste-basket. I opened them, and my eyes burning, my lips mouthing the words, I re-read each and every single one of them.
And so it was that once again she took me by the hand and brought me flying above the clouds to see the constellations, so it was that we sat together and threw pebbles inside a stream, that we held hands on the back of a dragon and plucked flowers growing on other worlds; we sat together and told each other about our fears, we comforted each other; we had conversations with the dolphins, we sang love songs in Cathedrals, and we kissed under a rainbow.
The fanfiction took me ages. After I finished, I immediately pressed on ‘empty wastebasket’ to make sure I couldn’t change idea. Next folder. This one contained a recording of every single sentence that Beatrix had uttered during the game. I listened to them all, one after the other, then threw them in the wastebasket. One of them was said in a tone of delicate, doleful grief: “Why are you doing this to me?” And for a minute I could not speak, I could not think, and I just sat there, looking into the light of the screen.
I threw it away and passed on. There were all the pictures I had saved from the net, all the screensavers. Then all of my love letters. All of the biographical information on her, and all of the work done in paint. I threw it all away.
By nightfall I had finished. After hours of work, I had finally finished. No more cutscenes. No more Petals of Darkness. No more Beatrix.
Never more.
I stood up and the room seemed incredibly empty. The walls were white all around me. The computer was empty in every sense, deprived of all its heaviest files.
It was dinner time and I hadn’t eaten all day, so I went into the kitchen and made myself some eggs. I spilt the salt and one of the eggs was a little burnt at the edges. I sat at my table and ate them in silence. Then I looked at the chair before me, empty, and I noticed that the room’s lamp needed some fixing. For some reason I wasn’t hungry anymore, so I went back into the kitchen and emptied my plate into the bin.
I fell on my knees, and quite stupidly, I wept.

von Stoyan Valev (Copyright)

Translated from Bulgarian by: Nevena Pascaleva

It was a first time he came upon his father listening to the radio in daytime. He usually did it at night, selecting some special stations.
The speaker from radio Sofia was listing countries. Their troops were marching into Czechoslovakia.
Confused, he surveyed his father. The latter was pale and scared. The boy closed the door behind him, after the message was over and then he didn’t dare move.
‘What happened, dad?’ he asked, clutching at the bag where he carried the bread with his hands.
His father hesitated, but still, he gave the answer:
‘It’s hard to explain, my boy, you are too young…’ he was silent for a moment, then he asked: ‘What if both you and me decide now to bring the radio to the next room – can we do this?’
‘Yeah’ the boy nodded – a piece of cake – they take the radio and move it.
‘And after we move it, suddenly certain people come in and force us to take it back to its old place.’ The father went on, watching him with fervent curiosity.
‘How ever come?’ the boy was astounded and exclaimed outraged: ‘But this is our radio! And this is our house!’
‘Yeah…’ the father sighed ‘The Czechs decided to change something in their country which is in a sense their house and a number of other countries, including our own, decided to go in their way. Do you understand now what happened?’
‘But why?’ the boy asked, loosing the grip around the bag, dropping it on the ground, letting the white round bread tumble down on the floor and settle itself near the cat, which craned her neck and started sniffing it.
‘When you grow up, you’ll come to understand’ his father heaved another sigh, raised from the chair and walked out, for the first time forgetting to scold him about the disrespect of food.
In a minute the boy heard the blows of the ax: he already knew that when his father is extremely agitated, he was chopping wood. In such moments he would choose the broadest stumps and would hit as hard as he could… the neighbors would give each other a wink and throw some remarks on hearing the noise:
‘Costa is angry, he’s chopping!’
In the evenings, the boy peeped into the room, where the men, all of them sitting around the old radio, began listening to the special broadcasts. The most clearly heard were the cracks that were followed by oaths and curses. They had reacted to the interception, he understood later.
Everything in their house got so confused, that he was even allowed standing in the room and listening!
They were arguing.
Furiously, madly.
Even though they had done this before, the boy was already aware that you should be silent outside and speak freely only between these four walls. Now, it was somehow different. His father was constantly repeating, his sweat dripping down his face, red with strain and anger:
‘They’ll crush them! The same as in 1956! Just like in Hungary!…’
‘God! God help the Czechs!’ the priest Sava whispered, crossing himself.
‘Who’s that God? If there was any God, would all this madness be allowed in the world?’ his father hissed and sipped at his glass of rakia.
‘Don’t be blasphemous, Costa! God defends the weak!’ the priest gesticulated, reprimanding.
‘Blah-blah-blah!’ his father could not be hushed ‘They’ll crush the Chechs as a mad cow crushes her calf.’
‘America won’t let that happen!’ his uncle demanded, and his father gave a shout:
‘Now will you stop blabbering! We are just a medium of exchange! Churchill sold us to Stalin after the war for ever after!’ and angrily, he asked: ‘Your America, where was your America in 1956, in Hungary?’
’Strong are they, stro-o-ong!’ cried out Toncho, the neighbor.
’They are not strong, we are weak –in our minds’ priest Sava uttered accusingly.
‘They’ll crush them with their tanks!’ his father said over and over again.
The boy’s lids were heavy with sleep; often their voices came to him as if in a dream, he could hear them from far away.
One night, curling in his bed next to the wall, he saw it in his sleep: the tank was approaching powerfully, reaching him; and the boy held out both hands to stop it, but it was coming and… he screamed with terror.
His mother burst in from the next room.
But the tank emerged again, coming towards him and the red pentacle, cut out on its top, was burning like a flame. All night long the boy was tossing in his bed and when he opened his eyes, he felt his body, to see if it is still intact…
During the day, his mother prayed before the icon of Virgin Mary and his father, sitting with his inevitable glass of rakia and tomato appetizer, threw out:
‘Stop this nonsense! There is no God for such people as us!’
‘Don’t be blasphemous, Costa!’ priest Sava uttered upon coming, nodding to the mother ‘Pray, Catherina, pray, child! He sees all!’
And it was dreadful. Through the half-opened door the boy could hear the fervent, broken whisper of his mother. Even his father fell silent. But only for a while, because he couldn’t stand it and then he asked mockingly:
‘And wha’s your prayer about, I wonder?’
‘About the Czechs’ answered his mother meekly.
The boy got used to imagine the Czechs as some timorous and fragile people who stand in their houses and the tanks, just like in the movies, streaming from all sides, crush them. In his mind, apocalyptic, horrible pictures were born.
‘Daddy, are the children being crushed by the tanks?’ asked the boy one evening. Petrified, everyone looked at him. His mother took him in her embrace. In the darkness, sounded the father’s voice, hoarse with emotions and unrestrained cruelty:
‘They do, my boy! They crush children, too!’
A bomb of discontent exploded in the room; murmur went around and above all raised the voice of the mother:
‘Costa, you’re going too far! You’re scaring the child!’ she shouted, caressing the boy’s short cut hair with her trembling hand.
‘So, what? You want me to tell lies, s’that what you want, eh?’ his father snapped.
‘You’r-r-right… ‘Toncho the neighbor stammered ‘But, still… it’s not that… we shouldn’t… what’s their fault in the end…‘
‘He should know wha’s ahead of him!’ the father said curtly and severely.
His mother took him out of the room, made his bed for him and lay next to him.
‘Mum, it’ scary!’ the boy whispered.
The mother shivered with helplessness.
‘Sleep, don’t give ear to your father, he’s talking his arm off that’s all… ‘she managed to utter and then asked tenderly: ‘Do you want to tell you a tale, eh?’
‘No…’ the boy answered. And he understood it was the end of fairytales, that it was impossible to believe in that fantasy stuff about the good spirits and people who do noble deeds. ‘In the tales, the good ones always win. So, in life it is the opposite, isn’t it?’ he asked his mother and she caressed his hair and pressed her lips to his forehead.
‘It’s often like that, my boy, and it shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t be!’
The moonlight was pouring a soft shining over the room, a quiet breeze was rocking the apple’s branches and they were knocking gently on the window pane. It was so beautiful and frightful at the same time. The terror was springing out like a fountain from everywhere around him . . . and the boy heard again the rumble of tanks, advancing.
‘Why doesn’t God help the good guys, mum?’
His mother sobbed in despair:
‘I keep myself asking the same thing, my boy . . . and there is no answer, but I believe that the good ones win after all…’
‘Yes, but daddy says the good are being killed, mum! ‘Cause the Czechs were the good ones and they were chased by tanks…’
‘Don’t listen to your father; he doesn’t believe what he’s saying!’
They fell silent.
Squeezed in his mother’s embrace, the boy drifted off – and the tanks were there again. But, look, a miracle! They passed through houses, through people’s bodies and went away. And then… then the houses were built again, people raised… and there was no blood and no destruction. Because the good won.
In the morning, he ran to the kitchen, bare-footed and told his mother his dream. She smiled, as she stood at the stove and brushed a strand off her forehead.
‘That’s right, my boy. The good might often be weak, but in the end, they turn out to be right. Even when they are killed, even when they are tortured…‘
‘Don’t you fill the child’s head with nonsense!’ came the voice of his father behind the kitchen sink. He was shaving; one half of his face was lathered when he appeared with a razor in his hand.
‘Don’t you scare him! I’m forbidding you!’ his mother flared up.
‘I want him to know the truth!’ his father said sharply and went to the sink again.
From all people who came to listen, bending their heads to the radio, he liked best uncle Pancho. He used to exclaim, enraptured:
‘The end of the yoke is close! The Czechs might be crushed, but the world will know! The world opinion will be raised and the executioners will be branded!’
‘The world gives not a dime for the Czechs!’ his father broke in sharply.
‘God sees!’ the priest Sava persistently reminded.
‘Your God seems to choose what to see, father!’ his father said spitefully.
‘The world is different now!’ Pancho uttered with inspiration, as if reciting a poem. ‘This is the beginning of the end! Mark my word! They will be mopped up by history!’
‘Amen!’ priest Sava exclaimed and lifted his glass, giving his father a wink. Why did he do that?
He understood when one evening Pancho left earlier. His father uttered through his teeth:
‘Dirty informer!’
‘What is an ‘informer’, daddy?’ the boy asked immediately.
The faces of everyone in the room fell. The first to react was priest Sava. He stretched out his hand and caressed his thin small neck:
‘A sinner, son, that’s what ‘an informer’ means!’
His father was silent, and was looking down, but suddenly he burst out:
‘I’m ashamed of the kid!’
‘Well… you might tell him… you know, not to come and…’ stammered, as always, Toncho the neighbor.
‘Leave him be!’ said his father and ordered firmly to his son ‘And you go to bed now!’
The boy obediently left the room and his mother followed.
The huddled together in the bed and she explained to him for a long time that there were such weak people that listen to what the other would say and make notes.
‘Pancho is not a bad man, he’s been forced…’
He did not understand her completely, but he believed her.

After the Change his father returned shocked when he read his file and he stood for a long time in the room, smoking, near the old radio that they sill kept there. It was not listened to for long, near it a new stereo has taken proudly its place, but they kept it – as a monument, or as a memory – they didn’t know… At last the old man reached out for his son, who moved his eyes away from the computer and saw his father speaking excitedly:
‘Pancho was really an agent of national security but he had been having them on… he wrote about me that I am… let me remember the exact words! Ah, here it is: ‘completely devoted to the communist ideas’ The damned Pancho! I hated him so and despised him so…’
His mother dropped his knitting and clapped her hands:
‘Didn’t I tell you the good people are those who decide our destiny!’ she put down her glasses and wiped her tears.
He was watching the two old people, smiling slightly: it had started all over again.
‘Blah-blah!’ his father burst out ‘If you only knew what informers we had!’
‘They must have been weak…’ the old woman shook her head stubbornly, just like she did in all those years and stole a glance towards the icon of Virgin Mary, as f searching for some support from her again. ‘God, he knows his work!’
‘You and your God! Why don’t you quit it!’ the father wheezed and started coughing.
The priest Sava had long ago moved to another world where there were no tanks chasing helpless Czechs and he couldn’t enter, as before, and say: ‘Don’t be blasphemous, Costa!’ to turn to his mother and bless her: ‘And you pray, Catherina, just keep praying! God helps all – Czechs, Bulgarians even the miserable Russians because they are only a passing weapon in the hands of Satan.’
The village had vanished. There were only a hundred of old people left. And though it looked seclude, as it had been once, life was boiling in it, because now he heard astounded his father’s voice:
’You could be right, you could…’ and, immediately after, the shrewish remark: ‘But not that much, because just like in 1968 when the West did not help the Czechs, we are perishing now in a new slavery, of our own kind!’
‘God!..’ started the mother.
The son, the former boy stood up and silently walked out of the room.
He had already learned life’s alphabet from those very people and it all had started in the summer months of that prominent 1968, when several Bulgarians in a godforsaken village tried feverishly to work out the hypocrisy and magnitude of history.
And they led, at those times, as well as nowadays, though humble, still a life worth of remembrance.

von Stoyan Valev (Copyright)

Translated from Bulgarian by: Nevena Pascaleva

For seven years now Gergov had been putting it away.
Sometimes he asked himself: why? No, it wasn’t fear. It was something else. But what?
And there was no answer. However, he felt he could hear a powerful whisper: don’t, don’t ever do it!
Still, he took heart. But he still felt the hesitation pricking at him while he was driving towards the village.
He kept asking himself: why go back? To the cave he had crawled out of? Why do it?
Many years ago he naively thought that the memory of the camp had been following him closely, like a shadow, like a gun pointed at the back of his neck, ready to spew its fierce fire. But he understood it was inside himself, this memory, like a wound eating into his flesh, it had penetrated into his blood long ago. That there is no salvation from it; that he will take it with him into his grave and they would be together for the whole eternity that was expecting him there, together, grappling at one another, fighting…
He stopped up his ears but the sound of the violent blows grew stronger. And it was scary, and strange – it appeared that others were tortured, the pain was his. The pain was in his face, in his body, in his soul.
Then he realized the hypocritical art of torturing. He realized that when you are a spectator you squirm together with the victim, you suffer and die no less than the unfortunate fellow in front of the line. And when they were forced to pass by the dead bodies, he could see the shock in their eyes, their twisted fingers and he asked himself: am I dead, too? How many times he woke up and he didn’t know whether he was dead, or alive.
And how could he forget that sultry June afternoon, when he collapsed on the ditch, and sprawled dead tired on the freshly dug earth. Smokov shouted out:
‘Get up! Double-quick! At my side!’
He did not even make an effort to rise. He knew couldn’t have done it, for all efforts. This was the end, he realized in a second. He could even feel the touch of the soft, merciful, icy fingers of Death on his forehead. And why are we so much afraid of the end, he asked himself, amazed, isn’t He saving us from the terror, the grief, the despair? He frees us! He opened his eyes widely, to see Him, but he saw Ivanov instead, bent over him. He was talking something.
And when the bucket full of icy water splashed over him, snapping like a gunshot, he again saw Smokov, And he could clearly hear his yell:
‘On your feeeet!’
They were pulled on their feet, he and Ivanov, and drawn in front of the line. Gergov gazed at the campers but they didn’t move a finger. The cloyingly familiar faces had suddenly become strange and cold. And it seemed to him he could see the relief, the joy even that: there, he was standing in front of them, waiting for his punishment; he, not them. They watched him but he couldn’t meet their eyes. They have written me out already, he thought in despair, from the list of the living ones.
He was seized by Smokov’s voice:
‘Now, Gergov, you are going to execute the punishment I set on Ivanov. For his willful delinquency. Fifty staffs to his body!’ the superviser stretched himself tight and started speaking; moving his eyes along prisoners’ faces ‘The camp is like a school! It is a place for re-education and not a ball, where everyone invites any woman he might like! By hard work and discipline, you are going to compensate for your mistakes and only then, you can get the privilege to live in the fairest regime in this world! And what are you doing?’ and he touched Ivanov with the tip of his stick. ‘You are breaking the order! Somebody’s fallen? ‘But what’s the meaning of a person here’ as one proletarian poet has said, ‘next will come and that is that!’ What about the plan? What about discipline? No, cur, you’ve learned nothing here!’ he turned towards Gergov and said loudly, in a military way ‘Go about it!’ Ivan pulled down his trousers and bent over the barrow.
‘Strike!’ Smokov shouted.
Then Gergov heard Ivanov’s whisper:
‘Strike, Gergov, strike, my friend, or he’s going to kill us both…’
And Gergov started raising his hand. He had to count the strikes loudly – clearly and distinctly and the campers repeated together.
Smokov cancelled every strike he deemed to be too weakly applied. He did not close his eyes the whole night in the barrack; he stared at Ivanov and listened to his hardly audible whisper:
‘It’s all right, Gergov, we are living among beasts. You must understand that; we, however, must stay human, despite all, despite them…’
The camp.
They came in one creepy morning in 1949, on 7th of February, at four o’clock. They pushed him into the van with one single explanation: ‘IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE’. In the cell, they counted themselves: nineteen people, traders like him, manufacturers like Ivanov, lawyers, the judge, the school principle, several big land-owners, ex-policemen and military men.
I’ve never messed up with politics, why, whispered Gergov to the manufacturer Ivanov, his closest friend. Here, that is our mistake, Gergov, he answered, that such men like ourselves did not stand against that scum around us, the previous and the present ones, they are tarred with the same brush, and we were dealing with our firms, God, what fools we were! But what is this, Gergov was whispering, why are they doing it? Plague, the communism is a plague, and they hate us because we are wealthy. But didn’t they take everything from us, Gergov couldn’t understand, what else do they want, to pull out our souls? Those who manage physically to survive in this Bacchanalia, Gergov, will be asked to give away their souls, too, smiled Ivanov in a very strange way. No, I can’t understand this thing, that’s madness, Gergov groaned.
For four years, each night before falling asleep, Gergv gave to God an ardent prayer of gratitude for having got through another day. And each morning, he quickly crossed himself, as if he had been summoned to his death, not towards the quarry. It was not very different, actually. So much death Gergov had seen in this camp that he stopped fearing it, but still, he didn’t want it in his way.
He knew that He could come any moment, the same way he took many of them in his fatherly embrace. Every day, Death reached out his fingers now for this one, now for the other. Some cried with terror at his touch. Some smiled, as if they had met their happiness, bliss, or just peace. Others met him with fierce indifference, they did not tremble. Those are heroes, Gergov whispered, amazed and filled with admiration, but Ivanov hissed: no, they are not living, Gergov, they are dead long ago. How so, Gergov gave a start. Easy, answered Ivanov with his strange smile, how few are those among us who are actually still living… He couldn’t understand that at the moment but later, in the long sleepless nights he realized the deep meaning of those words.
Did you get it, man, how stupid we were, when we were free, Ivanov whispered feverishly in the nights. Why, we lived, we did, Gergov answered. But we knew nothing, absolutely nothing, Ivanov’s words babbled devilishly in the pit of darkness, we didn’t know anything about freedom, or death. I wished I had never learned about it, damned it, Gergov moaned. If we refuse to learn it, this will go on and on the same way, forever, if not with you; with your son, with your wife, see, man, we’ve got it all wrong with our lives, and we were cheated at school, at the university, that we know, that we can and look what we did with out lives; we are guilty for the existence of such people like Smokov!… No, it’s not true! Gergov was panting with anger, have I ever lied, have I ever stolen, or killed anyone? It is not enough, Gergov, no, man, people like Smokov we had to win on our side, to investigate into their souls, to help them out if we could, and what did we do? We laid up money! The money were not for us only, have you forgotten that, Ivanov, what about the orphanage, the school, the allowance for the three students in Germany, what do you mean we haven’t given enough, Gergov was trembling in a protest. No, it wasn’t that, we should have done different things, if God had allowed all that to happen to us, so, we have not given enough, we are guilty, we have sins to atone for… and Ivanov was crossing himself feverishly and stretched out both hands towards the Almighty… and Gergov shook his head: confused, desperate; for a long time now he had started to believe this world was a creation of the Satan.
One day, they pushed him into the van and returned him back home; as unexpectedly as they had stolen him. Without any explanation. They had just warned him to keep silent, and if not: he’d be welcome there again, he’d be gladly accepted. Authority.
Or madness? Why did they do what they did? With such unflinching certainty that they were absolutely right; that they alone were aware of the whole truth about past, present and future. What was that truth? Or probably, Ivanov was mumbling, they just know THERE IS NO TRUTH?
Did they not fear retribution, Gergov asked himself. What retribution, man, they have the power. What about their children, aren’t they afraid their chidren will know and judge them? Their children will be like them –they will shape them after themselves, Ivanov snapped.
His wife started crying silently when she saw him – skin and bone, white-haired and he hadn’t turned thirty yet. He had had a bath, caressed his son’s blond head and unnoticeably dozed off. He dreamed he was there again – lying on the ditch. Terrified, he opened his eyes to see his wife, on her knees, thanking God silently.
The first days he couldn’t sleep. The moment he closed his eyes he found himself in the camp. He cried, half-asleep: ‘Yes, comrade commander!’ He shook his wife and screamed, furious and terrified: ‘Where is my spade?!’
In a few months, he learned to sleep, but he always woke up at four in the morning. It was the hour of his arrest. Every little noise in the night made him spring out of his bed: he ran in the corner or he crawled under the table expecting them to burst in and say: ‘IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE’ And take him away. So passed the rest of the night, until the morning.
His wife didn’t dare speak a word, she was just crying in bed, curled up beneath the blanket.
During the day, he got scared every time his opponent raised his voice, he moved back quickly; rose his arms in front of his head to protect himself against the eventual strike but nobody stroke him any more. Everyone spoke to him without punching him in the face, without kicking at his loins, without pulling at his hair.
He slowly got used to that ‘new’ he found after his return. Although, it seemed strange to him, absurd, even grotesque at times. While he was at the camp, something had happened to those people, they had accepted the changes. Or at least they appeared to, they did not discuss it. It was as if the former life had never been…
And things somehow turned for the better without any help of his own. It was as if he was repaid double for his suffering. Therefore, Gergov told himself dreamily, there is God, there is justice and he felt he could hear the tender waft of an angel’s wing. He looked around him, startled, and saw his wife. He found her working at the shoe factory, once belonging to Ivanov, now nationalized. His wife suddenly went up into the hierarchy, after the endless ‘purge’ of Bourgeois elements, then after the settling of accounts with the so called: ‘enemies with a party ticket’. She had been assigned as a sub-manager and after a few months her chief was transferred to another job and she took his place. Absolutely unexpectedly, one of his cousins, now a big shot in Sofia, made him the proposition to take the vacant place of a trade manager in an enterprise that deal with export of agriculture products. It so happened that, in a year and a half, the general head of the enterprise resigned and Gergov took the managing of the whole enterprise, whose center they arranged to be now in their town.
One by one, the camp survivors returned. Gergov and his wife were the leaders of great enterprises, they had a wide circle of acquaintances and for everyone who returned, they found a job easily. The ex-campers felt simultaneously grateful and certain with them. They called on them, they used to be guests at their house and there the table was always heavily laden with food, appetizers and drinks. They listened to BBC radio, Free Europe, and The Voice of America.

And conversations and wrangles started and never ended until the morning. They felt they were trapped. Ivanov, who was assigned as a head of storage department in what was once his own factory, now kept repeating they must fight. Gergov wasn’t of the same opinion. We fell into the trap at the time when Chirchil negotiated with Stalin, we were, and we are, doomed, brother, what fight are you talking about, you never got over the loss of your factory in the first place! What about you, didn’t you regret about your stores, Ivanov got aroused. No, no regret at all, this could be for people’s good, how could you know, Gergov shook his head. What, and the camp, did you forget the camp, Ivanov raged. But, understand, brother, understand, Ivanov, the Western democracies, to assure their peace, made the deal with Stalin, and at the same time, urge us to fight, while they keep strictly their arrangement for the sale of our skins: why did they never enter the conflict in Hungary at 1956? We heard Imre Nagi calling them on the radio, and they – what – they left the Russian tanks to crush them like green stuff…
His argument with Ivanov never stopped during the years.
His wife was silent all the time.
And Ivanov kept repeating: we are guilty, Gergov, we are to blame for all that, us and nobody else!
And suddenly, the most frightening thing came: Ivanov was accompanied by young men and they were furious and desired madly to fight against the regime. They edited illegal newspaper, they got guns. Ivanov revealed to him his idea: we are going to an armed struggle. Gergov sheepishly judged: madness. His wife, who became a witness to all that, went towards Ivanov, crossed him, started kissing his hands. As if she knew what was going to happen.
And it happened: they arrested Ivanov and the boys, all of them.
Then something happened that quite amazed Gergov – Ivanov was released. And the boys disappeared. Obviously where. Forever.
Ivanov was a wreck, he died in a month.
Now, Gergov, they have invented something else instead camps, spoke Ivanov, his eyes closed, only his two withered arms were visible under the cover, they have implanted informers among us. You know who was our camp supervisor – Ivan Smokov, now he’s the boss of National Security. They have moved the camp here, in town. Everything is a camp now. And somebody among us betrayed us; take that from me and keep your eyes open, Gergov! He was dying and the terror was springing from his eyes: now the supervisors are among us, they have appointed our own people to do their despicable job; do you understand what happened, but we have no idea who they are, I told you they will snatch our souls, they did it!…
There were only three people attending his funeral: Ivanov’s wife, Gergov and his wife. He couldn’t take his eyes off his friend’s harrowed face. Now it was magnificent and seemed to ask: who, Gergov, who is the man that gives us away to authorities?
At first, he banished it angrily, furiously, but it always came back – the obtrusive thought about Ivanov’s release. Why release him? Why kill the others and let him live? Because they knew he’ll die anyway, he calmed himself. And perhaps… crawled the nasty suggestion, like a snake into his mind. No, he answered himself and chased it away. But it never stopped following him: day and night, everywhere.
The suspicion nestled itself in everyone’s soul. Gergov felt their inquisitive looks over himself, too. The way everyone smiled, shame-facedly, as if caught in the act, when they felt the looks of others on their faces, made Gergov tremble. Me! But he also suspected each of them, asked himself: who among them? They still gathered but it was not the same. Ivanov’s death robbed them and destroyed everything.
Suddenly they felt guilty; they tried in every possible way to conceal the warm of suspicion that was eating into them day and night. In vain. In each smile now they were looking for a hidden sense, in each, even involuntary gesture, a confirmation of their fears. It turned out that what had been making them close, had been Ivanov; and now that he was gone, they suddenly realized they were strangers to each other.
Great was their amazement at how intimate they had felt before. They still gathered, but by sheer habit now, and spoke of everything else but of what really was bothering them at that moment. Now everyone hid his thoughts behind the mask of empty jokes, gossip and slanders about colleagues, acquaintances and friends.
And when at 1989 the system collapsed like a paper tower, everyone was confused. It was so easy after all. They were offended. Therefore, Ivanov was right, somebody muttered. We had to stand up, like him, all of us, to march against the wicked system, but since we are cowards and rascals, we couldn’t, said another, enthusiastically and guiltily.
Bullshit, Gergov broke in, the Great Powers made an arrangement again; now the communists are out of the stage, our life passed between two agreements, he signed. And we don’t know what have they prepared for us this time but this time, we should really fight, to take things in our own hands, understand, and he stared at their faces and they looked down.
Why?
And there was no joy, no elation; they just waited, day after day, to see what was going to happen.
Somehow, without realizing it, they scattered. Some, like Gergov, went into politics, some, crying, started kissing their returned properties; others ran abroad to relatives never to be seen again.
Then Gergov took his decision: to find out the truth about the lost years. And he shared this idea with his friends from the camp and they told him: don’t, let the past die; it is over, thank God, what more can you demand? But I want this never to repeat, that’s why, I want to go into the truth, the whole truth of what and why exactly it was, he answered angrily and they kept a cold and guilty silence.
Why?
Gergov knew where the truth about the past years was hidden. In the endless files of National Security. And they were hidden, those files, because now there was nothing in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but the truth was lurking somewhere, like a time-bomb, waiting for its hour to come. It’s true; there was an explosion from time to time. But where it came from, he could only guess. For a long time now, he knew one thing only: that the shortest way for detecting the truth about his life, about the camp, about Ivanov, is hiding behind the face of Ivan Smokov, the ex camp supervisor, now a retired man. He was the man who took away, together with his resignation, all the information of the local filial of National Security. It so happened, that as he had been holding their throats before, he was holding them today, because he was keeping the information. He took the ever-winning card, that son of a bitch, groaned the ex-campers.
Why?
Gergov was always intending and never finding the time to go and meet this man.
Sometimes he apologized, and he knew it was so, to the angry shadow of Ivanov, and that entire political wrangle he rushed into. But when his son at last overcame his fears and ran into the politic and soon sat on a minister’s seat, Gergov took heart. There was no way to delay any more and he went; he was driving the parliamentary Mercedes himself. He released the chauffeur on purpose, who knows why; he wanted to be on his own.
He found the house in the village without much wandering. He parked in front of the small iron gate and wooden fence, dyed in yellow. In the bottom of the yard, he could see a massive, two-storied building.
His hands started shivering. But he pushed the gate open and walked down the cement alley. Suddenly he stopped, petrified.
Even older, pulling his left leg after him, there he was, in front of him: Ivan Smokov. He’d have recognized him even in a thousand years. The way he used to stare at this impudent, red face, the way he used to see in the night the fists, heavy as iron, landing on somebody’s back and the man sprawling in the mud and Smokov trampling, kicking, swearing, raging… Once. At the camp. And now he was coming towards him.
‘Who? Who are you?’ asked Smokov in a hostile way.
‘I will tell you – Gergov braced himself and even smiled after his answer, then kept walking forward, throwing out: ‘You’ll understand!’ and he was walking towards him and his legs hypocritically trembled, the blood was throbbing in his temples, red sparkles flashed in front of his eyes…
Smokov was paralyzed; he was watching him in surprise, but fearfully, too. Then his wide face ran into a sweat and he heaved a noisy sigh.
He had recognized him and was rooted to the spot, bowing his head.
He’s like a bull, Gergov thought, half in disgust and half in fear and passed by him, walking towards the house. He turned his head back and asked:
‘What? Won’t you let me come in?’
‘Yes, yes, please!’ Smokov started babbling and followed him, shuffling his left leg ‘Here, let’s take a seat, here! Under the shadow, eh?’ and pointed to the small table under the apple tree.
‘Let’s sit’ Gergov agreed and pulled aside a branch, laden with huge, blood-red apples.
‘A coffee or some rakia?’ Smokov asked, his hands trembling. When he sensed his guest was following him with derisive eyes, he hid his hands behind his back and grew even redder.
‘I’d rather we talk!’ Gergov answered, his voice vibrating with emotion. ‘I have to pull myself together, I must!’ he commanded himself.
‘That we shall talk, that’s more than clear. But never on an empty table, I say!’ Smokov said and vanished into the house.
Gergov took out from his pocket the box of cigarettes and long time clicked the lighter. At last, he lit the cigarette. He tried to knock the ash out of his cigarette and hardly hit the ash-tray. Why am I so frightened, I should pull myself together – and he clenched his left hand in a fist.
‘Here you are!’ Smokov brought out a jug of coffee and two bottles: one-of glass, the other – plastic, full of mineral water. Tears welled up out of the two bottles: he had taken them out of the freezer.
He poured into the glasses standing, concentrated, and only then did he sit in front of him. He slumped heavily in the chair, as if all his bones had suddenly broken; the chair gave a creak.
‘What the hell – cheers!’ said Smokov in low voice and sipped at his glass of rakia.
Gergov hesitated, but took his glass and raised it to his lips, too. He was surprised by the aroma. He sipped and asked, cordially, as if accosting a close friend:
‘What is it made of?’ and bit at his lip. To drink with a killer! With Smokov!
‘I mix many things. To get what you see. It’s rubbish to drink rakia made only of grapes or plum. I add some herbs, such things, the village people taught me here.’ And he gave a resounding laugh.
Gergov watched him in astonishment. Acting like a normal human being and what a beast was he there, at the camp! Is it fear? Or just years? Could it be that he believes everything was already forgotten?
‘I live here. In the country, I resigned, patched up my father’s house. What patching – I built it anew.’ Smokov was speaking very fast. It was obvious he was confused and he was trying to hide it behind the flow of words.
‘Is that so?’ Gergov nodded with deliberate indifference ‘So, you are living in the country?…’
‘Here, here! One has always something to do here: some tomatoes, pepper, this and that, some animals, too. And so… what about you? Your son became a minister!’
‘He did’ Gergov uttered dryly and drank This rakia, beside its strange taste, was tickling at the palate, inviting, appealing. Good, but treacherous; it could draw you unnoticeably to whatever realms it wished.
They fell silent.
Gergov suddenly felt the great force of the country silence. For long, for many years he hadn’t felt a peace so powerful. Since the time he roamed in the mountains like a starving lone wolf. It is the perfect place, here, for a fasting, prayer and forgiveness… came the strange thought to Gergov.
‘Everything got wrong, Gergov’ broke the silence Smokov and sighed noisily.
‘Do you now why am I here?’ his question was so abrupt that he himself gave a start.
Smokov was just pouring more rakia in his glass and he gave a shudder, his hand jerked aside and he spilled the liquid. He reached out, took the white towel flung over the next chair and mopped up the spilled rakia. He pushed the liquid towards the end of the table and it leaked down the cement in heavy drops.
‘No matter! To the dead, as we say!’ mumbled Smokov.
‘To the dead you say? Why, how many liters should you spill on the ground, Smokov?!’ Gergov shook his head derisively.
‘Everyone knows for himself!’ Smokov snapped and started tapping on the table with his fingers.
‘That’s true…’ said Gergov thoughtfully ‘I came to ask you certain things…’ he didn’t finish, because his opponent grinned. Suddenly, his grin disappeared – as quickly as it had come.
‘Ask!’ stretched Smokov in a military way, clenching his fists ‘Ask and I’ll answer! But!… do you kno…’ he stared at the man in front of him ad fell silent.
‘What? What do I know?’ Gergov asked curtly.
‘I have an answer to everything!’ replied Smokov with a sudden calmness ‘I’ve been a pensioner for a seven years: all I do is sit here and think. What happened, why happened, this I think and think! Now I’m ready for everything! I’ve found the answer to any question you might ask! Go ahead!’ and he leaned back on the chair, his belly swelled under the white shirt and his left eye filled up with blood.
‘Why talk about the camp. You were young, inoculated with your idiotic ideology! You were a monster!’… Gergov discovered, amazed, that he was at a loss for words. That he was unable to continue! The camp is something he can’t talk of any longer! It is just a subject of forgetting! However, the unclean sheds stink, Gergov groaned in his mind and listened to what the ex-supervisor was talking to him with enthusiasm.
‘I believed we were right! You can not imagine how I believed! To the simple peasant boy, such a power is given out of a sudden – complete, absolute power! Even the kings in the past did not have such a power! I thought naively that when there is no longer such people like you, and then everything’s going to be all right! Let Rivers of blood flow, it is of no consequence if a paradise is to be built! Later, I saw it wasn’t that way. No, not that way at all!’ Smokov shook his white head energetically.
‘When? When is that ‘later?’ he was curious to know what such kind of people might have thought or felt. We have lived our lives together and we don’t know each other at all! And if we get to know each other, isn’t it possible that we forgive each other? Should we? No way! He jumped, as if emerging from some deep, dark and muddy water. He looked about him, trembling, as if the ex-supervisor could have read his stupid thoughts. Because that’s what they were, and hypocritical on top of that! And again he stared hungrily at Smokov’s old face.
‘When did I understand? When the camps were abolished. I returned to the city and, you know, I started in National Security. And to find what? In what have they been transformed, those so called ‘heroes’, and I believed them to be such at those days – the guerillas, came down from the mountains, the communists, released from the prisons. Those who were brave yesterday, were crawling today before each young party chief. And why? Not to lose what they had stolen from people like you, or received illegally from the state, meaning, from such people like me. So? But it was not only them that made me so confused, so scared and disappointed. I saw the others – your, Gergov, your people! They weren’t any different from the ‘our’. And then, what could I do then? My wife helped me a lot, she was a saint, God rest her.
‘Since when have you believed in God too, you murderer?’ Grgov broke in ironically.
‘If I believe or not, is my own business, and why do you now, just like us, take the monopoly, as if God’s having his breakfast with you only!’ Smokov snapped, shook his bald head and went on quietly and dreamily ‘She, my wife, slowly, meekly, started to uproot that fury that possessed me. It did not get in the way of my business, I just got smarter. We had an agreement between us, me and my woman – to retire here, in the country and built our own, personal paradise, because there could not be any other. However, she died two years before retiring. And the son and the daughter, they went and became doctors, both of them. My wife used to say: ‘They, at least, will help people, if you have tormented them so… Let them atone for your sins, healing people’s wounds. So, my family’s attitude towards me was interesting… they both respected me and never forgot to reprimand me…’
Smokov fell silent and somewhere close by sparrows squeaked merrily, flew above them like a jubilant wheel. The apple branches, laden with fruit, were quietly whispering something unintelligible, as if some unknown music was pouring itself over them.
This one here’s trying to make a fool of me, thought Gergov, seething with rage.
‘Have you ever, Smokov, made an account of the people you’ve killed?’ he was watching him with sincere hatred. No, he couldn’t conceive how after so much blood spilled by his own hands this man can stand in front of him and babble old wives’ tales! Almost claiming to be normal, he, the murderer!
‘Many are those destroyed by me…’ Smokov moaned ‘I’ve killed, I’ve tortured, I’ve shot, I’ve strangled, I’ve drowned…‘ he spoke with his head bowed, then suddenly looked up and shouted: ‘Want more?’
And Gergov was shocked and said nothing.
‘I can tell stories, do you want?’ Smokov smiled mercilessly.
‘And you sleep well?’ Gergov exclaimed, sincerely, impulsively.
‘I sleep…’ Smokov shook his head ‘And I don’t…’ The wrinkles on his face suddenly grew clearly visible and for the first time it showed how much had he really aged. ‘It depends. At first, immediately after the Change, I was very afraid. I said to myself – they’ll come now! They’ll come and take their revenge!’
‘And did someone come?’ Gergov leaned on his elbows. He was curious, because Smokov had been through feelings no different from his own after he had returned from the camp and that made him somehow intimate to Gergov; he shuddered when he felt that.
‘No!’ Smokov whispered ‘You are the first!’ and he pointed at his guest ‘Otherwise, I’m waiting. So many years I’ve been sitting here, I don’t go anywhere, just wait. Nobody’s coming.’
‘What if somebody comes?’ Gergov stared at his eyes – Smokov didn’t even flinch. He went on, angrily ‘If somebody of those that you’ve beaten to death appears? Those you’ve crippled? The sons and daughters of the murdered, if they come? What then?’
Smokov’s left eye, filled with blood, started working.
‘They will be right to kill me, I deserve that…’ he was stammering and suddenly a strange half-smile ran across his face ‘No doubt’ he said, again with an even voice.
And Gergov felt, like a paralytic strike, the force of this steel gaze – now he remembered it so clearly he hurt. In the line, in the ditches, in the barracks, on the field, Smokov was everywhere with that look of his. There was mo mercy in that look, it was like a blade. But now it seemed to flinch, some dark grief was stealing into it; it was still frightening but in a different way. Once, one look was enough to make a camper stop, as if hypnotized. Could such beasts change, too, oh, Lord! He cried out in his mind, terrified and shocked; he couldn’t understand. And then he bowed his head, swallowed, feeling the rage rising in him again.
‘And so you sit here and wait!’ and he spoke curtly, to conceal the terror rising in him ‘You wait for someone to come and do away with you? You wait for your punishment! The just punishment!’ and only after he had spoken he realized the meaning of his words. That certainly must be so cruel!
‘Yes’ said Smokov quietly, with resignation ‘I’m sitting here, waiting. So many years – just waiting!’
Gergov felt an inexplicable pity rousing in him for this man. And he shuddered. But he was a killer! End of it! Yes, but the sadist is also a human being, someone said hypocritically in his soul and who said that? He looked down and that meant he was trying to infuriate himself, to get himself back into the previous position of hatred. He was trying and he couldn’t. He gave it up and looked up at the camp supervisor.
Smokov sipped at his rakia and chased the fly away from his hand. But it came back and again, impudently, landed on his wrist. Then he screwed up his eyes, took aim and deftly knocked it with the tip of his thumb. He crushed it. He pushed it away from the table with his fingernail.
‘That way! That s exactly the way you’ve been killing us, Smokov!’ Gergov exclaimed with sincere hatred and clenched his hands into fists. The rage that surged in his lungs almost made him cough.
‘Absolutely true!’ Smokov confirmed pensively. And he cringed in his chair.
He is like a beaten dog, Gergov thought with repulsion.
‘And you built your strength on this fear of ours, that you have our lives in your hands!’ Gergov almost shouted.
‘No, no, not fear only!’ Smokov suddenly came alive ‘Fear was only at the beginning. Then came the other thing.’ And his eyes beamed.
‘What other thing? What?’ Gergov smiled mockingly.
‘You don’t know, too?’ waspish half-smile crawled on the face of the ex camp supervisor. ‘You tell me you don’t know?’
‘I don’t know…’ Gergov got confused ‘What should I know?’
‘I told you – your informers! Your informers, Gergov! They’d break their legs in the desire to report! This one sneezed, that one farted – everything had its political base. Why did they do it? Ve-e-ery simply! To live a little better, that’s all. But on what price? That is the question! Judge for yourself: brother betrays his brother, father – his son, wife – her husband. Do you understand?’ Smokov got heated and started tapping his fingers on the table.
‘You forced them Smokov! That’s the truth and nothing else!’
‘No!’ Smokov waved his finger ‘No, you are wrong! I know and you don’t!’
‘You are lying, Smokov, I’ve been there, I know’ Gergov waved his hand in contempt ‘And, besides, who’s going to believe you today? Who?’
‘See, you are correct on this point.’ Smokov spread out his arms helplessly ‘Now you are going to dress up history. Whatever you decided it was, that’s what you are going to put down! Do you know why the real memoirs of our time are missing?’ he asked and before waiting for the answer went on ‘Because, without my and your testimony, ther is no real history, you know.’
‘You say so’ Gergov smiled in contempt, lighting his cigarette. He had never thought about that, really.
‘Because, in a country like ours, if you decide to write memoirs, you have to stain yourself first. If you decide to write untruth they will expose you! If you decide to write about the truth and nothing but the truth, so it will turn out you yourself had been the greatest villain! And why? Because the others, the much bigger villains, are silent. I tried, Gergov, I tried, you know!’
‘Well?’
‘I described my life, I described everything! My memory is as fresh as those apples! I remember everything – day by day! So I write it and give it to my children to read! I say, that’s a must, they should know first! And do you know what they did?’ he shook his head sadly and went on ‘They read the writing and came home. They burned the notebooks before my very eyes. And they haven’t come near since, five years now. I don’t know if they will come to my funeral. They are right! I do not blame them! They were shocked to know what kind of a father they have! And probably they want everything to be forgotten! What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’ Gergov reacted with a malicious smile but suddenly, unexpectedly for him, he uttered: ‘I have never imagined we shall be talking like that, both of us…’
Smokov seemed not to hear him, but went on:
‘I’ve been thinking about it. Ok, we die and we took our knowledge about the world with us – good or bad, still knowledge. What we’ve been through, we take way and it’s over! Should it be like that?’ he darted a look at Gergov ‘No, I say, no, no! No, because without the knowledge of our fathers, what are we? There is no history. History is over. But if we don’t have a history, we don’t have retribution, right?’
Gergov did not answer; he was trying to understand where he was driving at and only nodded. Smokov leant forward and said, gasping:
‘And retribution – this is the knowledge of what we have been doing, good or bad, me, you, all of us! But everyone, without exception, chose the other way – let, with my death, all bad deeds I have done, pass away. And it’s not right for one to speak and others remain silent! But if we don’t have the whole truth, the sinner becomes saint and the sinner – a lecher. The insignificant becomes a colossus, and the giant – a dwarf; take that from me, Gergov. You… do you understand me?’ he looked at him hungrily and when he failed to meet his eyes, sighed and suggested: ‘Drink, Gergov, drink, I’m telling you! This rakia is like teardrop!
‘You, Smokov, demoralize people… You set them at each other, you chased them. And now you are crying! You are the guilty ones, you!’ Gergov reached for the glass, it turned out empty. The bottle turned out empty, too.
‘Hey! We drank it, huh!’ Smokov cried, while he was getting up, and then he scurried towards the house, limping and soon returned with a full bottle ‘I’ve stacked to drink till the ed of the world, if we must! Until the prosecution goes, I mean! And how long it will be, only the devil knows!…’
Gergov turned away. What, really, was that meeting? Just a meeting? Did he really have the right to judge? And why not? He whished Ivanov had been alive at that moment…
Smokov stared at the apple branches and started speaking slowly, as if to himself:
‘At a certain moment, probably ninety percents of the informers were due to jealousy, climbers’ greed, personal hatred, etc. One glanced at his fellow in the wrong way – and here the information, from both of them. He wants to get his chief’s seat – bang: information. The other, of course, does not give in: writes against him and tracks down his family all the way back to the Roman empire to show he’s the right one! And, between us, both are sincere rascals! That was the way it was.’
Gergov gave a start, he felt disgusted, this wasn’t the point after all.
‘Wait, hold! Do you want to say that we, the victims, have built the prison you pushed us in?’
‘The prison was built by us, the foolish ones! Why? I could never understand how it exactly happened. Except if we start to explore the trend of collective psychotics… yes, I have searched everywhere this truth of our lives!’ he sighed and stared again with his eyes of steel at the ex-camper ‘We were soldiers, Gergov! And we acted as such! You know how it is! If you don’t shoot, you’ll be shot! If not by the enemy by that man who stands behind you watching you carrying out his orders… and we were shooting!’
‘But it wasn’t a war!’ Gergov hit the table angrily with his palm. The glasses tinkled sadly and the dove, that had been sitting on the branch above their heads, soared in the silver blue sky hanging over them…
‘Yes, it was! A real war! We, a bunch of men against our people! It was so! Could we otherwise have established our system? With persuasion? Drivel. Only with your hand on the gun, that’s what we did. And after we won the battle, some people, like me, asked themselves: now what? What have we done? How are we going to live from now on? With whom, after we’ve bathed in blood, after we’ve been cursed night and day by the widows of the dead men… So, I suffered, after realizing…’
‘Yeah, I believe you! And how!’ exclaimed Gergiv, grinning.
‘I know you won’t believe me, I know!’ Smokov agreed ‘After killing for years on end, we grew more sophisticated. We understood there is another way. And we started to do the same, but using different hands. Yeah!’
‘Through our people, through the implied agents, huh?’ Gergov broke in.
‘Well, Gergov, ours, yours, in a certain moment it was no longer clear. It all got somehow confused. In the end, why did your friend Ivanov, die?’
‘Because you crippled him; you beat him to death and let him die at home!’ and he raised his finger at Smokov. Now he was really accusing, like a prosecutor ‘You did a dirty job!’
‘But who killed him? I can answer that question! And I’ll answer: we both killed him. Together. Yeah, that’s how Ivanov passed away.’
Gergov watched him, perplexed. Well, that was really impudent!
‘No, it’s not true!’ he said, ready to argue till the end of the world.
‘Believe what you will! However, I, unlike you, can prove my argument – I’ll apply what papers are necessary, every court will acknowledge them! But there is no use. It’s too complicated Gergov, nobody on this earth is either good or bad. If we can understand that, as people, as a nation, as human beings, too, we can be really saved!’
‘Are you going to teach me, now?’ Gergov stretched on his chair ‘I know your philosophy: we are all dirty bitches, we are all guilty!’
‘Well, isn’t that so? Because, I agree, we built the prison. But then we preserved it with both our efforts. There was always someone to throw out: ‘Look, chief, this bar is too weak!’ I’m telling him: mind your own business, I’m the expert in bars, and he persists. So, he wants his bars stronger! So, what do you want? Everyone became everyone’s supervisor, but that’s in man, too.
‘Which one?’ Gergov hissed spitefully.
‘To supervise. If not in man as a whole, in Bulgarians for sure.’
‘So, that’s your defense, You’ve been practicing this speech in front of the mirror, haven’t you, actor?’ Gergov smiled mockingly.
‘Now you’re being foolish. I’m telling you what I think. This could be my last minutes, how could I know?’ he stared at the ex-camper’s steady face and went on ‘You can take out a gun and shoot me. I could be talking in the face of death. And there, you talk truth and nothing but the truth!’ he said that bitterly, with chagrin.
‘And you are not afraid?’ Gergov fixed him icily.
‘I felt ashamed, but now the shame is gone. Now I think that what has been done can not be undone. We are all guilty. Somebody – guiltier, like me, others – less, like you.’
‘Wow, now I’m guilty, too!’ Gergov exclaimed. He had started to enjoy the situation ‘Well, I think I’m not guilty.’
‘Now, you are! If I have gone through what you have, I’d fall over myself but I’d find my revenge I’d revenge myself on everyone who ordered such… such…’ he hesitated, uncertain about the right word and Gergov helped:
‘Crimes!’
‘Yes, crimes! And what did you do, darling? When you returned from the camp, went back into your cave and shut your mouth. You’ve been handed a cushy director’s job and you took it – don’t ever forget – you took that privilege from the hand of the butcher! After the Change, too. Our system collapsed and you never care about your past, why? Why are you afraid of the past? You’ll say – ashes! Yes, but there are ambers in that ash, my man, that burn into the present! Look, I have cleaned the past for myself but for you – no, there is just no way out of it for you!’ he filled his glass and drank it in one gulp.
Gergov was amazed – what was exactly what the ex supervisor meant? He stood and thought in the deadly silence and at last, he uttered firmly:
‘There is a way. Let’s read this page about the past and close it forever at last.’
Gergov uttered the words a little higher than necessary and they sounded false, like a speech on a public meeting.
‘I don’t know. This is personal, Gergov. We can not read anything together. Can you feel you are infected by our ideology, too? Why do you always speak in the plural? Everyone should reach for the truth for himself. Alone!’ it was a different Smokov now – full of enthusiasm and, definitely, honest.
‘No, we’ll read together, buddy, all of us! Let the society know who I am, who are you! Who are the victims, who are the butchers! The name of everyone! Let’s read and judge. And after that – forget. Only then could we move on.’
‘Ah, no! If we start to read this way, we can’t stop. We’ll kill each other. After what happened with my children, I understood we should read nothing. Everyone should read into his soul. There is every document one needs. And that’s that.’ said Smokov curtly.
‘You are not right, but that’s best for you, so I can understand you!’ Gergov gave a malicious laugh.
‘No, I know already that if we start reading – we’ll grow mad. We’ll kill each other. We are one bunch of a people. If everyone learns the truth about everyone, OUN must send all its peace-making forces here!’ and he laughed heartily.
‘Your philosophy is very convenient, isn’t it!’ sighed the ex-camper in contempt.
‘That’s all from me! We reached the line! To go further will be dangerous!’ said Smokov and stood up.
Gergov was watching him, perplexed.
Suddenly, the village church bells started tolling someone’s death. Smokov lifted his hand and started crossing himself: passionately, whole-heartedly, obediently, his fingers trembling all the time.
And Gergov laughed.
Smokov sat back and moaned:
‘It’s death, somebody’s blessed death again!… We are dying, Gergov!’
The ex-camper and at present member of the parliament waved his hand, bored.
‘They die! Old people! They can’t live forever!’
Smokov suddenly grew enthusiastic again:
’They die from lack of hope, mister! There is no light in the heart of man and he dies! Their children are abroad or drinking in the pub, wasting their lives! Unemployed, in other words, useless! And when the children are useless, what about the old men, mister? And they die, they die!’ He rose his voice angrily ‘Genocide and fascism is what you do, mister! You deserve the bullet, too!’ and then he started speaking thoughtfully again, even tenderly: ‘They quarreled with God, too, beside the fact they are eating at each other! And they hang each other, drown each other! Every day and every night! Father killed his son, son slaughtered his mother! They lead a war among each other! You brought this on them, to execute themselves alone! You don’t need camps, why should you need them?
The toll ceased as unexpectedly as it had began and Smokov was still crossing himself from time to time. Suddenly, he asked:
‘Cross yourself, you unbeliever! You do it on TV only, for people to see!’
Gergov smiled and said:
‘You cross, you have sins to atone for! My job is easy!’
‘You are a real fool!’ exclaimed Smokov angrily.
Gergov drank and said:
‘I hear, you’ve repaired the village church. You make your bed, in a way, bribing that one up there, oiling his hand! Is he going to take it, huh?’
Smokov got embarrassed and uttered:
‘Well, I saved up a little from my pension and gave them to repair the roof, you know, it leaked… it would have fallen if I… But anyway, no one is going there in the first place. Only me from the men and two or three crazy old women! That’s the local congregation, all of it! Now I’ve made some orders… for a cross and an icon, because they are stealing them all the time, you have no place to pray!’
‘So, you pray! And does he hear you?’ the ex-camper gave a wink.
And Smokov gave a start.
‘Who?’
‘He!’
Smokov raised from his chair:
‘Who?!’
Gergov laughed:
‘God!’
Smokov sat down again and waved his finger:
‘Don’t mock, Gergov. I talk to God, day and night I’m telling him about my life. I have things to say to him, he have things to say to me, too. What are we, without God, man?’
‘If there are no gods, you’ll make them up and adore them: Stalin, or Christ, it makes no difference for people like you! Well, then, Smokov, have you made an account before God how many people have you killed, name by name? How many have you crippled? Just the number? How many have you broken the legs of, the arms, or destiny? How many have you left without soul, curse you!’
Smokov’s face fell and he bowed his head:
‘Yeah, not very few of them. I’ve killed, I’ve crippled, I’ve raped the souls of many!’ suddenly his eyes flashed ‘I’ve confessed it. I’ve confessed everything to God.’
‘And he did what? Did he forgive you? Did he judge you? Or, probably, you won Him over your side?’
The ex-camp supervisor only shook his head, then stood up, picked two apples, rinsed them in the sink outside, put them on the table and pointed his finger at them:
‘Here, the forbidden fruit. Nice apples, aren’t they just magnificent?’ Gergov nodded, this one at least was true ‘But if eat them, you die.’
‘What are you blabbering?’ Gergov asked, very angrily; he grew tired of hints; he wanted everything cleared up in simple words. Actually, what could he want to learn from this disgusting person?’
‘The forbidden fruit, mister Gergov’ smiled Smokov enigmatically’ Has given men the curse of knowledge.’
‘What are you blabbering?’ Gergov snarled in a hostile and at the same time, condescending way.
‘Have you read the Bible? I’m giving you this fruit but you don’t dare touch it!’
‘You are grudging it!’ Gergov smiled and reached out for one of the apples.
‘No! Don’t do it! What if it contains the knowledge you mustn’t posses?’ the ex supervisor screwed up his eyes and laughed.
Gergov had already bitten at the juicy fruit.
‘I suggest’ Smokov said ‘that everyone should live his life as one knows it. Let’s stay with our illusionary view of ourselves, and of the others, if you like! And our souls will stay unmourned, misunderstood, as orphans, lost among rocks and heaths. That’s the way it should be!’
‘No!’ Gergov answered with a full mouth ‘You are running from retribution!’
‘I said’ the ex-supervisor shook his head, bored ‘I’m sitting here, waiting. So many years have passed. No one wants to hear, let alone take the other’s truth. You too, Gergov. You too, accuse, without even listening to the other. ‘he waved his hand in despair, took his glass again, played with it for a while, then drank.
‘What will I lose, if I know everything? If I know everyone who reported me? Or Ivanov and the rest of my friends?’ Gergov spoke passionately but felt the crawling fear of the coming knowledge. What could he possibly learn? And what should he do after that?
‘And their truths, the truths of those informers, will you take them, dear?’ Smokov was fixing him, his left eye still filled with blood, still working ‘Because you are going to loose everything, honey! I wanted the knowledge not for myself, but for the others! And I told you what happened!’ he was still smiling so strangely.

Gergov reached out and took the second apple. He was about to bite it when Smokov handed a knife to him.
‘Cut it, it could have a warm!’
Gergov split the apple in two equal halves and began to cut it in little slices. It was juicier and tastier than the first one.
‘Listen, Smokov I don`t have much time. I’m a busy man’ he looked at his watch ‘I was pushed into a parliament commission recently’
Smokov nodded.
‘I’ve decided to reach the truth this time. I named all the scamps in the report. And the strange things began – they gave me some hints that they will reveal something disgraceful about me! I have been thinking a lot but I couldn’t find out anything. They are pressuring my son too -to influence me, if he wants to keep his job as a minister. And he told me – dad, my career is in your hands. What could they threaten me with? I don’t have anything in my past to be ashamed of…’
‘You are fooling yourself. We all have something to be ashamed of. And you have to agree, put out the names of these scamps, you have done this so many times.’ the ex-camp supervisor gave him a wink.
‘So you advise me that… So they really have something… Is that so?’
‘Yes. Since now they had been quiet – you have been stealing like everybody else. How did this ever come to your mind – to act like an angel? Keep on doing what you have done so far!
‘I don`t want to!’ Gergov whispered, becoming pale.
Smokov shook his head and sighed:
‘There`s no other way. You are doomed to be a minor swindler.’
‘You are not right!’ the ex-camper flared up.
‘And what about all those millions you had made, my friend? Were they achieved only by your hard work?’ the ex-camp supervisor burst out laughing.
‘Just like everybody else…’ Gergiev bowed down his head.
‘Well, now you will have to shut up like everybody else. That`s the only advice I can give you.’
‘Tell me, Smokov! Tell me the truth and I will decide what to do with it. Tell me!’
‘You don`t need the truth. Live with the illusions and that`s it’ said Smokov firmly.
‘I’m telling you – I want it. Give it back to me’ Gergov said steadily and clearly.
‘All right’ Smokov heaved a sigh and stood up ‘What you call a file is here, your file. I will give it to you’ and he raised, fixing his gaze on his face. As if he was waiting him to quit it.
Gergov also raised, turned back and went through the garden. There wasn’t even a blade of grass – Smokov laughed silently and thought “He set himself up as a great owner” Bounded to small steak piles, there were big reddish tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. The lonesome corn was spreading mightily her leaves.
Suddenly everything turned back in Gergov`s mind – the camp, all the years after that, Ivanov`s smile, his wife’s soft palms. Gergov used to say – God took my youth, but he gave me a woman. She managed with everything – with their home, while he was away, she raised the child and they lived happily. Ivanov has exclaimed once, while he was watching her making coffee – There’s the kind of woman I have always dreamed of, my friend…
‘I have left everything on the table, buddy. So take a look!’ He heard Smokov’s voice behind his back. ‘I will water the garden.’
Smokov held the hose but he couldn’t see the bubbling water. When the water filled the ditch, he took the next. He couldn’t hear the rustling of the plants, that had made him drunk before. Here, he was thinking feverishly, now he would understand why he was released from the camp so quickly, and the others were left to rot for years. And that he had already found out what caused Ivanov’s arrest. It was clear to him why his friends have been disappearing one after another, first from the city, then from the world. Now he would understand the most dreadful thing – that everything he had spoken, during all his miserable life, was THERE, on these pages – day by day, month after month, year after year. A whole lifetime. And the cost of his freedom.
The hours were slipping away, it was nearly sunset.
Smokov put the hose on the ground; it began crawling and pushing up the water in the air. He crossed the few meters that separated him from the table and saw Gergiev – he was smoking, holding his head in both hands.
‘Drink!’ he pushed the glass of rakia towards him ‘You’ve understood it now.’
‘I did’ Gergiev uttered ‘She, my wife, reported everyone – me, my friends. She! And I love her, see!’
The silence hung over them like a snare.
‘You have some gasoline?’ Gergiev asked unexpectedly.
‘Gasoline?’ the ex-supervisor gave a start ‘No, I have some naphtha only… Give it to me!’
’I’m getting it from the cellar this minute!’ limped Smokov.
While he was coming back with the can in his hand Gergiev shouted:
‘Pour it down!’
‘I’m pouring, I’m pouring it!’ the ex-supervisor nodded obediently, in a servile way; and the naphtha started flowing down with a grisly gurgle.
‘My lighter! Where is my lighter!’ asked Gergiev, searching through his pockets, still keeping his look at the files soaked in naphtha.
‘Here it is!’ Smoke grasped it from the table.
Gergiev clicked, and the flame belched out. It soared up and licked the bent apple branches. The tree seemed to shudder and an apple fell down on the ground with a thud. Gergiev kicked at it in contempt.
When there was nothing left from the files but ashes, Gergiev made a step forward and started trampling over it. And he kept doing it, as if performing a strange dance.
‘Enough, come here!’ Smoke grasped his elbow ‘Come here and drink!’
Gergiev sat obediently. He snatched the glass with a trembling hand and drank thirstily. He lit a cigarette, drew at it once and threw it on the ground.
‘Jesus, my wife! How can I look her in the eyes now! The informer of my life!’ he clutched at the table with both hands, sobbed and his tears started falling down the table.
‘THE ANGEL OF YOUR LIFE, YOUR GUARDIAN ANGEL, Gergov! She only wanted to help you!’ said Smokov in a solemn way, then went on quietly, as if desiring to hypnotize his opponent ‘She started in order to help you and later – to help all of us – you and the others, even me! Now you can’t understand that. You can’t conceive it at all! So don’t judge, just forget it!’
‘No!’ cried Gergiev ‘That can’t be forgotten! To live my whole life with a snake! Have I been blind, oh, my Lord! Have I been so foolish!?’
‘She was doing it for you only. It was love. Understand her! Listen, she turned us all from beasts to human beings. I owe this to her. I admit it. What horrible things we could have done, hadn’t she been there for us! She understands man, she respects man!’ Smoke was whispering dreamily ‘I whish there were more of her kind!’
‘Shut up!’ Gergiev jumped from his chair and snatched the glass bottle.
The ex-camp supervisor held up his arms to protect his head.
Gergiev, for one long dreadful moment, thought twice, and crashed the bottle on the cement.
They felt the strong smell of rakia in the air.
Gergiev went down the cement walk, he was reeling.
Before opening the gate, he turned back to Smoke and cried:
‘Good bye, you rat!’
And the answer was:
‘Good bye, you saint!’ and a mocking laughter followed.

On the next day in the local newspaper, the leading issue came out with the headline: A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT DIED IN A CAR ACCIDENT. And followed by: ‘The reason: drinking.’

von Stoyan Valev (Copyright)

Translated from Bulgarian by: Nevena Pascaleva

One February evening, when the pub was full of men and outside the wind was fiercely hauling, the door slowly opened.
It opened, but nobody came in.
They fell silent and waited.
For, when a door is being opened, somebody should have opened it.
And since it is opened by someone, that someone would like to come in.
The tip of his snout showed first.
Next all of his body sneaked in.
A wolf came into the pub.
‘Lord!’ the bartender exclaimed.
He had never had such a customer, though he had been doing this business for thirty years.
Ivan slowly rose from a table and stepped towards the wolf.
So far, so good: the wolf, however, snarled and bared his teeth.
‘Where, Ivan?’ old Stoimen cried while Ivan was looking right into the wolf’s eyes.
‘I’m going to fix him!’ Ivan rolled up his sleeves and again made a step towards the animal.
Old Stoimen reached out to stop him, but it was too late.
A human being and a wolf grappled into a deadly combat.
Ivan was trying to grip the wolf’s neck but kept failing.
The wolf was growling and his teeth were clattering but it was obvious he only defended himself; he did not attack, he only protected himself, pushing his adversary away.
When Ivan at last managed to nab the wolf’s neck with both hands and his fingers started tightening, the animal gave such a growl that everyone’s hair stood on end.
Unexpectedly, Ivan loosened his fingers and got up from the floor.
The wolf also got up on his four feet, shook himself and made for the bar.
‘My, that bloody cur!’ the bartender whimpered and deftly leaped onto the bar, despite his hundred kilograms.
The wolf stopped in front of the bar and stared at him with his wide-opened, wondrous, sad eyes.
Nobody dared move.
A couple of minutes lasted the wolf’s survey and an eternity it seemed to the people. Then slowly he rose on his hind legs, pointed his snout at the ceiling and started howling.
It was not a howl, but a cry devilish and ominous. The same way the women would howl on funerals.
Dumbfounded, a score of men in the village pub were listening.
So the wolf kept howling and they kept standing silent.
It was understood, then, that a grief was upon that wolf; a grief heavy and dark as the night outside, if it was a wolf at all.
And as unexpectedly as it had began, the howling ceased.
The wolf lay on the floor, placed his head between his front legs and moved no more.
He was lying.
And the men were standing still, watching the wolf.
Then old Stoimen got up and went to him.
Someone bit their lips, but not a voice was heard to prevent him doing that.
The wolf would probably jump on him and bite his throat! It would be easy, how much was the old man’s strength . . .
But the wolf kept lying still.
Old Stoimen squatted, with a low moan, rested one knee on the floor and bowed over the wolf. He reached out both hands, took the wolf’s head, stared at his eyes.
It was as if the wolf was confiding something to him, but old Stoimen did not wanted to admit it.
After a long moment he laid the animal’s head between its paws again and took off his greasy hat.
So stood the old man, on his knees as if before a dead man dear to his heart.
The men perceived the wolf had given away his spirit – to God, to the Devil, or to some Deity of his own kind? . . .
They drew closer, watching him with scrutinizing eyes – they saw a most wonderful wolf!
Then old Stoimen stood up slowly and said:
‘Now, get the hoes and shovels and let’s bury him!’
‘But you . . . have you lost your mind?’ the bartender snapped at him, getting down from the bar.
‘Shut up!’ the old man ordered and at the authority of his voice everyone felt he was right.
The men quickly fetched hoes and shovels.
‘Where?’ they asked old Stoimen.
‘What do you mean where?’ the old man snapped ‘in front of the pub!’
They filed out of the pub.
It was a bitter cold. A blizzard, quite a blizzard. The earth: ice-bound. But the men set off digging.
They were warming up with one gulp of rakia at a time and at last they dug up the grave.
Old Stoimen laid the wolf into the grave and bowed to the ground.
‘Take a bow, you!’ the old man ordered and score of men bowed to a dead wolf.
But what kind of wolf? . . . A wondrous wolf! . . .
They filled up the grave and got back to the pub.
It was then when the mayor burst in.
‘Eh, what have you been doing again?’ he was mad, it was obvious.
‘You shut up!’ old Stoimen said reprovingly and poured out a drop of his glass on the floor.
‘Bury a wolf! In the center of the village! Tell me, aren’t you savage?’ raged the mayor, sipping at his glass of rakia and already starting to relax with each sip.
He poured out a drop on the floor, too.
‘Let the powers that watch over us, condone the sins of that wolf!’
So goes the world.
If a door is being opened, someone is surely to come in. Wolf or a man.
And was it a wolf?
They kept asking old Stoimen, who was renowned for his wisdom, but he only smiled and waved his hand at them:
‘What, a wolf? Are you out of your mind? If it was a wolf, would I have you buried it in the centre of the village, you fools!’
‘Well, then! What was it?’
Did it matter, after all?
It came, it was gone, it was buried, and the rest is for everyone to decide.
Isn’t that right?!