by Alek Popov
At that moment, an iron hand grabbed his neck. The other was pointing a very long, razor-sharp knife at his face. A poisonous, penetrative radiation was oozing from Batushka’s eyes. Very slowly and clearly he uttered some unintelligible phrases in his native language. The meaning of those words could not have been overly complicated and revealed itself spontaneously to the cook: She leaves the freezer, you enter the freezer – no empty freezer here!
Kosta woke with a plaintive groan. The wiry fingers of Batushka still fixed around his throat. His legs, stretched out on the little table in front of the television had pins and needles. His back was aching. He had fallen asleep in the chair. The duty room bell was buzzing insistently. The screens, monitoring the streets around the entrances to the Embassy were flickering with bluish light. The figure of Chavdar Tolomanov could be seen quite clearly on one of them, he was nervously stamping his feet in front of the back entrance of the Embassy. The cook got up, puffing, from the chair, dragged his body near to the button of the automatic door-release and pressed it.
Chavdar pushed the door and entered. He found himself in a small squalid corridor, leading to a second door. The automatic lock buzzed again and he walked through. Kosta greeted him, dopey and pale.
“Hey, Pastry, why didn’t you open the door?!” shouted Chavdar.
“I was asleep,” muttered the cook. “And as for you, why are you late?”
“Who’s late?” Chavdar practically rammed his watch into the cook’s nose. “Ten minutes I’ve been ringing!”
Kosta scratched behind his ear. “Well, I’ve been dreaming…” he started and stopped uncertainly.
“About girls, again?”
“She was a princess… Diana… Her corpse, to be precise…”
“No kidding! You pervert!”
“You had stolen it,” continued Kosta gloomily “and dragged it to the Embassy. Then hid it in the freezer. Just like Charlie Chaplin’s story…”
“I see,” the actor scratched his head. “The thought hadn’t occurred to me…Well, too late now! Let’s go and get the job done …because Batushka is going to lose his nerve.” He concluded.
“Okay then, wait for me around the back,” the cook moaned.
He came back to the room with the monitors: the street and the main entrance were clear. Only Chavdar’s figure appeared in one of them as he ran quickly towards a van, parked to one side of the Embassy. Then the van reversed and disappeared from the screen. The cook switched off the light, left the door slightly open and plunged into the depths of the Embassy. He got down into the basement, walked through a maze of old corridors, stuffed with old junk and then up some narrow metal stairs, twisting in the dark. He had to put some effort into opening the rusty lock. The small, heavy metal door opened finally and he entered into a spacious compartment filled with the pervasive, heavy smell of machine oils. The light switch clicked; light crawled across the surface of a long greasy puddle. The garage was empty with the sole exception of a pile of old scrap in one corner. Carefully, so as not to stumble into the inspection pit, Kosta stepped around the puddle and reached the door. Turning the switch off again, he unlocked the padlock and lifted the latch. The two sections of the door opened with a heart-stopping squeak.
The van’s brake-lights glowed eerily in the darkness. The van reversed, following Kosta’s instructions and slowly but surely disappeared down the black throat of the garage.
Batushka turned off the engine and pointed a powerful torch in Kosta’s face. The cook covered his eyes.
“Molodets!” the Tartar’s voice echoed.
Chavdar quickly opened the back door. Both of them set to, unloading some large nylon bags. Kosta watched them from one side with the unpleasant feeling that he had witnessed the scene before. The air in the garage stank of petrol and he felt sick. Batushka looked at him discontentedly, “What you being stare at?!” He thrust the torch at him and forced him to carry one of the bags.
They inched down the stairs and across the basement, then came out into the corridor, turned left and found themselves directly in front of the kitchen door. Here the cook stopped and started listening nervously.
“What’s wrong?” asked Chavdar anxiously.
“I thought I heard something inside,” Kosta whispered and continued to listen.
“Coward! You’re going to fill your pants!”
The cook curled his lip contemptuously, opened the door and turned on the light.
Batushka whistled in surprise. The kitchen was vast; one might assume that they were cooking for entire regiments down there. Which incidentally was not very far from the truth, especially in the not so distant totalitarian past when the life in the Embassy had been flying high. Now, social life was dribbling, squeezed drop by drop through the needle’s eye of the market economy, and stagnation had settled in the kitchen. Some of the crockery had been stolen. The basins were covered with mould. The tiles around them were yellowish and cracked. Kosta drifted like a phantom between the cold ovens and the empty fridges. He rarely had to cook now; the only things left to do were the sandwiches and various nibbles, made from convenience products. From time to time he prepared the traditional Bulgarian pastry called ‘banitsa’, which was received by the guests with exclamations of ‘Oh, banitsa!’ A mixture of grief, nostalgia and hope still hid in his heart for a more substantial order, like a saddle of lamb, for example. Alas, the era of saddles was long gone, buried beneath a mountain of gnawed bones. A piece of sausage and a slice of gherkin speared with a tooth pick was the only thing he could hope for now. Without blinking, Kosta emptied the contents of the bag onto the long metal table. Around ten well-fed ducks fell out of it. Their necks were broken, twisted without pity. He noticed, on the leg of each one of them, a small silver ring.
“Wow, where did you catch these?”
“Nearby,” both men chuckled.
One of the birds flapped its wing haplessly; apparently, not completely finished off. Kosta quickly put an end to its suffering. He was now feeling more at home and that reassured him. He took out two whitish aprons and threw them to his accomplices. After a moment of hesitation, they put them on and moved closer to him like apprentices. The cook gave each one of them a big knife and pointed at the stove where a big pot of water had been simmering for some hours.
“You know what to do now?” he asked.
Both men rolled up their sleeves and started.
“You have four hours,” he warned them.
He went back to the duty room and checked his watch. He had been absent for no more than twenty minutes. He sat behind the desk, took out the logbook and signed in the column ‘on duty’, because he expected to forget about it in the morning. In the next column-‘comments’ – he wrote, ‘nothing unusual’. He then closed the logbook and put it back in the drawer.
Night-watch duty was awful, and, on top of that, long. From the cook to the consul – no escape. Everyone was equal as far as that sacred duty was concerned. Every day, around six in the evening, one could see the person on duty trot to the Embassy with his toilet bag, lunch box and some bed sheets. The humiliation recurred three or four times a month, according to the rota. They had to stay in the duty room like spiders in their web until the morning: watch television, answer the phone, open the door if necessary, drink, eat, and sleep. They were guarding the state’s dream. Some even shagged, but the cook was not one of them.
He flumped his body in front of the television, slipped off his shoes and opened a can of beer. Under other circumstances he would have sprawled on the bed and fallen asleep immediately, but now he had to watch. He was alert and quite often looked at the glaring blue screen, hanging on the opposite door. It seemed to him somebody was watching him although the situation was actually the opposite.
The air stank of socks.
He dragged the remote out from beneath his bottom and flicked to the pornography channel, decoded for the people’s use, courtesy of an able Bulgarian student. He gaped at it a bit, but coul
d not concentrate. He thought only of the ducks. Fat birds! Wonder, where they took them from…? If the Chinese don’t buy them, as Chavdar and Batushka swore, we’re going to be eating duck into the next year. For fuck’s sake! Hell of a lot of birds that!
The electronic bleep of the telephone jolted him out of his dream. He picked it up and sleepily said, “Yeah.”
“Bulgarian Embassy?” a distant little voice sang.
“Aha.”
“Excuse me, could you tell me if I need a visa to visit Bulgaria?”
A short pause followed. The cook’s heart lurched into revolt. He hardly spoke a word of English, but the word ‘visa’ was clear enough to pour fat on the fire.
“You cunt!” he hissed maliciously in Bulgarian “What kind of visa are you looking for at this hour in the morning, go and fuck yourself, otherwise I’ll do it for you!!!”
From the other end came a burst of mocking laughter.
“Dozy Pastry! Your old mother!” Chavdar Tolomanov quickly changed his intonation “Stupid Pastry!” He was phoning on his mobile from the kitchen.
“Is that you? Are you taking the piss?” gasped the cook, after he’d calmed down a little. “Are you ready?”
“What do you think?”
“Coming,” he answered shortly.
It was half-four in the morning.
The kitchen was like an abattoir. Chavdar and Batushka were furiously scrubbing under the taps – their hands were sticky with blood, which had seeped deep under their fingernails. The freezer was stuffed with birds. The feathers and the offal had been stuffed back into the bags. Kosta looked underneath the tables and frowned; he would have to mop the floor. On the table top lay a plate, full of silver rings.
“Let us scram the fucking out!” said Batushka wiping his wet hands against the wall.
Something clicked in the cook’s head.
“And the money? Where’s the money?”
“Aaa! Sorry I forgot,” Batushka raised his hands.
“What do you mean – you forgot?!” hissed the cook. “I thought we agreed. 100 pounds, cash, up front.”
“Tomorning, Zavtra,” mumbled Batushka with some annoyance.
“No tomorrow, no zavtra, now!” shouted Kosta.
“Easy, my man,” Chavdar decided to intervene. “Zavtra says the man, That means tomorrow. We’re doing business for millions here, we’re hardly going to cheat you for spare change. Isn’t that right, Batushka?”
“Right, that’s right,” said Batushka scornfully.
The cooked goggled like a zombie. They were pulling the same number on him for the second time. He opened his mouth to speak, but felt he was going to enter the same familiar script. He waved them off and spat on the floor.
12
Varadin popped up into the Embassy just after nine. He had met Kosta in the street, coming back from his night-shift, carrying a nylon bag in one hand and with an anxious sticky look on his face. This encounter curdled the Ambassador’s mood instantly; as if a bogie had unexpectedly dropped into his milk that morning. They greeted each other dryly.
Behind the reception window another low-spirited employee faced him; she was meditating over an old Bulgarian newspaper. He crossed the official entrance hall and tried to go through the door, which led to the Embassy interior. It turned out he had forgotten its security code. He tried in vain for several minutes. In the end, the Consul appeared and without any sign of noticing his troubles (although he was laughing inside!), carefully greeted him and keyed in the code. Varadin rushed to slip into the lift and pressed the button for the second floor. Leaving the lift, he looked to the right, where he had noticed a particularly dirty spot on the carpet the previous day, and noted with pleasure that it had been cleaned.
Tania Vandova was behind her desk, in the front office, feverishly sorting out the usual pile of correspondence that arrived every morning.
“Good morning,” she greeted him without interrupting her work.
He mumbled something incomprehensible and slammed the door behind him.
A short conversation on the phone followed, after which the accountant galloped in, carrying an armful of folders.
“Is the list of tenants ready?” he asked.
She nodded in confirmation and gave him the list. Varadin sighed heavily, like a man set the task of moving mountains.
The Embassy was overcrowded, although recently the personnel had been drastically cut, thanks to the permanent economic crisis. The clothes of the former dinosaur state were not the same size as those of its inheritor. Nature, however, did not leave empty spaces, and the living quarters were filled up to the last attic by suspicious subjects, apparently protected under the terms of ‘Balkan Common Law’. Varadin knew the delicacy of this problem, but he also knew that he had to clear them out one by one. Living space was a powerful tool in the hands of any ruler: one can manoeuvre and trade with it. This resource belonged to him by right and it was he, and only he, who should decide who was to occupy it.
“Why do all these people live here?”
“Weeell….” Bianca Mashinska drawled, while she grumbled to herself, why do you pretend you don’t know anything, you asshole? “It’s an inherited situation!” she spat out at last, happy to have found the exact formula.
“Mm-hmm, inherited situation!” It was disgusting. “But they cannot stay here anymore,” he added sharply.
“Of course, especially those who do not pay their rent. Like the Bobevs for example…”
“And why haven’t they already been evicted?!”
“Because they have filed a lawsuit. Rasho Bobev, the ex-attaché for trade and commerce, is suing the Ministry. He has filed for unlawful dismissal.”
“And so what?” Varadin exploded “He can go back to Sofia and sue them as much as he wants from there!”
“He does not want to go back. He says that he is waiting for the court’s decision. He hopes they are going to reinstate him.”
“As if they would reinstate him!” Varadin pursed his lips. “He calculated it quite well. Those court proceedings go on for months. Throw him out!”
Bianca Mashinska said nothing.
“What is the matter? Are there no police in this country?”
“But then the whole thing will blow up in our faces and that will hit our reputation again.”
“Yes, correct. That is not a good idea,” he sighed, massaging the base of his nose. The sort of idiocy he was forced to deal with! A feeling of rage overcame him, “Then think of something else,” he spat out with a hissing voice. “Cut his electricity. Stop his water. I want him out!”
“I’ll inform the housekeeper,” she nodded indifferently.
“Work on it!”
Very well, one by one he was going to take them out of the honey-pot like small, repugnant insects – with tweezers. This pretty vision made him grit his teeth with pleasure. He poured himself a glass of water and dropped one fizzy pill into it, which immediately coloured the liquid a poisonous yellow. He swallowed it and burped.
At that very instant one of the telephones on his desk started ringing furiously.
“Hellooo, is that you?” a capricious female voice sounded in his ear.
“It is me,” (without a drop of enthusiasm). “I am very pleased to hear your voice.”
“Don’t be so pleased!” she snarled. “I thought I could rely on you!”
“Of course you can!”
“I can’t, that is the problem. Why you are hiding it from me?”
“What am I hiding?” his adrenaline jumped.
“Are you kidding me? I know everything,” she shouted, then added, heartbroken, “a refusal has arrived!’
“My god, is that your worry?!” he exclaimed. “Don’t even think about it, the situation is under control.”
“Not to worry?!! I am furious! That snail, Kishev, it took him almost half a year!” she exploded. “You have to punish him!”
“I will punish him, of course!” he hurriedly agreed
. “I’ll punish him good and proper.”
“Yes, but it is too late now. Who knows what kind of mess he’s caused,” she sighed. “He probably broke with the required etiquette on purpose to annoy her; to make her reject us forever. Saboteur! And you protect him!”
“I do not protect him!” he was indignant.
“I do not want to see his sorry face next time I come around, you hear me!”
“Well, his mandate is nearly over,” he cooed. “And he is not going to see a next one.”
“That is exactly what he deserves,” she grumbled. “And what are we going to do with this situation?”
“I was thinking of hiring a special agency for exactly this purpose.”
A suspicious crackling noise appeared in the line and he suddenly wondered if they were being tapped. They were not discussing something incredibly secret, but he felt really stupid.
“What agency?”
“Public relations.”
“Oooo!” a certain respect entered her voice, as though they were discussing the use of some exceedingly sophisticated domestic appliance.
“Tomorrow, I have an appointment with their director. They look kosher, but I cannot tell you more than that right now,” added Varadin cautiously.
The thought of the phone tap had upset him.
“When are they going to bring her out?” Her question caught him on the hop.
“She isn’t a cow!” his anger threatened all his safety valves.
“I don’t care!” she shouted. “In two months time she should be on line! You owe it to me, damn it!”
“I’ll do what I can,” he groaned, half-suffocated by resentment.
“That would be best for all concerned!”
The connection was cut.
“94!” he shouted pathetically.
For the next several seconds he stayed motionless. The internal telephone rang several times, but Varadin did not react. Somebody knocked on the door and Tania Vandova’s head appeared.
“Major Potty is waiting tobe received,” was her edgy explanation.
