by Alan Furst
Veiko saw it happen-the tightening of the mouth, the slight flush along the cheekbones-and it pleased him. And he let Nikko know it pleased him. Showed him a face that most of the world never saw: a victorious little smirk of a face that said, See how I got the best of you and all I did was say three words.
The troop re-formed itself. Veiko squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, thrust his lead marching leg into the air.
“Forward!”
From Nikko: “Yes sir, Colonel Dog Prick!”
Not too loud.
Just loud enough.
An audible mumble particularly native to fifteen-year-olds-you can choose to hear this or not hear it, that’s up to you. A harsh insult-khuy sobachiy-but by a great deal not the worst thing you could say in a language that provided its user with a vast range of oath and invective. It was a small dog, the phrase suggested, but an excited one-dancing on its hind legs in expectation of affection or table scraps.
Veiko chose to hear it. Stopped the troop. Backed up until he was even with Nikko and, in the same motion, swept his hand backward across Nikko’s face. It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t meant to hurt. It was the blow of a tenor striking a waiter, and it was meant simply to demonstrate the proposition I am someone who can slap your face.
Veiko returned the hand halfway, to a point in line with Nikko’s nose, pointed with an index finger, and shook it firmly twice. Lifted his eyebrows, raised his chin. Meaning Naughty boy, see what happens when you curse your betters?
Nikko let him have it.
He could toss a hundred-pound sack of fish onto his shoulder. The shot was open-handed and loud and the force surprised even Nikko. The feathered cap flew off and Veiko staggered back a step. He stood absolutely still for a long moment, the red and white image of a hand blooming on his cheek.
Both brothers went down under the first rush.
There were no shouted commands or battle cries; it was an instinctive reaction, blind and furious, and it no longer had anything to do with military formations or political slogans. It had become entirely Vidin business, Bulgarian business, Balkan business.
There was an initial rain of blows, ineffective flailing punches that hit the Stoianevs, the ground, other troopers. Khristo’s mind cleared quickly; he tried to curl into a ball, tried to protect head and groin, but he could barely move. There were five or six of them on top of him, and it was a lot of weight. He could smell them. Licorice mastica, garlic, boiled cabbage, bad fish, bad teeth, uniforms sweated and dried and sweated again. He could hear them. Grunting, panting, soon enough gasping for breath. Khristo was a moderately experienced fighter-in Vidin it was inevitable-and knew that street fights burned themselves out quickly. He did not thrash or punch. Let them get it out of their system.
Nikko was fighting. He could hear it-his brother cursing, somebody’s cry of pain, somebody yelling, “Get his head!” Damn Nikko. His crazy boiling temper. Punching walls when he got mad. Damn his wise-guy face and his fast mouth. And damn, Khristo thought, turning his attention to his own plight, this fat, sweaty fool who was sitting on his chest, trying to bang his head against the cobblestones. In just about two seconds he was going to do something about it-dig an elbow into fat boy’s throat, drive it in, give him a taste.
Then Nikko screamed. Somebody had hurt him, the sound cut Khristo’s heart. The street froze, suddenly it was dead quiet. Then, Veiko’s voice, high and quivering with exertion, breath so blown that it was very nearly a whisper: “Put that one on his feet.”
For the first time, real fear touched him. What should have been over was not over. In Khristo’s world, brawls flared and ended, honor satisfied. Everybody went off and bragged. But in Veiko’s voice there was nothing of that.
They hauled him to his feet and they made him watch what they did next. It was very important to them that it be done that way. There were four or five of them clustered around Nikko, who lay curled around himself at their feet, and they were kicking him. They kicked as hard as they could and grunted with the strain. Khristo twisted and thrashed but they had him by the arms and legs and he couldn’t break free, though he ground his teeth with the effort. Then he ceased struggling and pleaded with them to stop. Really pleaded. But they didn’t stop. Not for a long time. At the last, he tried to turn his face away but they grabbed him under the chin and forced his head toward what was happening and then he could only shut his eyes. There was no way, however, that he could keep from hearing it.
The moon was well up by the time Khristo reached home. A shack by the river, garden vines climbing along a stake fence and up over the low roof. With Nikko on his shoulder, a long night of walking. He’d had to stop many times. It was cold, the wind had dried the tears on his face.
The uniformed men had left in a silent group. Khristo had stood over his brother’s body. He’d felt for a pulse, out of duty, but he knew he need not have done it. He’d seen death before and he knew what it meant when a body lay with all the angles bent wrong. He had knelt and, slowly and carefully, with the tail of his shirt, had cleaned his brother’s face. Then he took him home.
Where the dirt road turned into his house, the dogs started barking. The door opened, and he saw his father’s silhouette in the doorway.
The Russian, Antipin, came a few weeks later.
Like the odd little man from Germany in the mint-colored overcoat, he came on the river. But, the local wise men noted quietly, there were interesting differences in the manner of his coming. The German had arrived by river steamer, with a movie projector and a steel trunk full of film cans and pamphlets. The Russian rowed in, on a small fishing skiff, tying up to one of the sagging pole-built docks that lined the river. The German was an older man, balding, with skin like parchment and a long thin nose. The Russian was a young man, a Slav, square-faced and solid, with neatly combed brown hair. The German had to use German-speaking National Union members to translate for him. The Russian spoke idiomatic Bulgarian-at least he tried-and they could understand his Russian well enough. All along the river, the Slavs could speak to each other without great difficulty.
The German arrived as a German, and his arrival was honored. The postman’s chubby daughter waited at the dockside with a basket of fruit. There had been a banquet, with speeches and copious brandy. The Russian said, at first, that he was a Bulgarian. Nobody really believed him. Then a rumor went around that he was a Czech. Because it was a rumor, there were naturally some who believed it. Somehow there was confusion, and the Russian-Bulgarian-Czech, whatever the hell he was, wasn’t much seen around the town. To a few people, the Stoianevs among them, he admitted that he was a Russian and that his name was Antipin. Vassily Dmitrievich. The falsehoods were a gesture, he explained, not serious, necessitated by the current situation.
The German smoked a cigar every night after dinner. It looked peculiar, outsized, in his thin weasel’s face. The Russian rolled and smoked cigarettes of makhorka, black Russian tobacco, earthy-smelling weed grown in the valleys of the Caucasus mountains. He was provident with it, offering constantly. Poor stuff, it was true. But what he had he shared, and this was noticed.
Of all the points of difference that distinguished the two visitors, however, there was one that absorbed the coffeehouse philosophers a great deal more than any other:
The German came from the west.
The Russian came from the east.
The German came downriver from Passau, on the German side of the Austrian border. The Russian came upriver from Izmail, in Soviet Bessarabia, having first sailed by steamer from the Black Sea port of Odessa.
And, really, the local wise men said, there you had it. That was the root of it, all right, that great poxed whore of a river that ran by every front door in the Balkans. Well, in a manner of speaking. It had brought them grief and fury, iron and fire, hangmen and tax collectors. Somewhere, surely, it was proposed, there were men and women who loved their river, were happy and peaceful upon its banks, perhaps, even, prayed to its watery gods and thank
ed them nightly.
Who could know? Surely it was possible, and it was much in their experience that that which was possible would, sooner or later, get around to happening. Fate had laws, they’d learned all too well, and that was one of them.
And it was their fate to live on this river. It was their fate that some rivers drew conquerors much as corpses drew flies-and the metaphor was greatly to the point, was it not. Thus it was their fate to be conquered, to live as slaves. That was the truth of it, why call it something else? And, as slaves, to have the worst slaves’ luck of all: changing masters.
For who in history had not tried it? Put another way; if they had not tried it, their place in history was soon given over to the next applicant. Every schoolchild had to learn the spellings, for their national history was written in the names of their conquerors. Sesostris the Egyptian and Darius the Persian, remote bearded figures. Alexander the Great-one of their own, a smart Macedonian lad, a very demon for the love of a fight like they all were down there, a hundred miles south in what they called the dark Balkans. With reason. Charlemagne came through this way, and so did Arpad the Hungarian. (Magyars! A curse on their blood!) Genghis Khan, with his Tatar armies, who believed that babies grew up to be soldiers and that women were the makers of soldier-babies. And acted accordingly. The Romans had come down on rafts, after Dacian gold. The legions of Napoleon were stopped some way upstream. (What? A disaster avoided? Oh how we will pay for that.) And at last, the worst. The Turks.
As love can be true love, or something short of it, hatred too has its shadings, and the Turk had stirred their passions like none of the others. It was the Turk who earned the time-honored description: “They prayed like hyenas, fought like foxes, and stank like wolves.” The Turk who decreed that no building in the empire could be higher than a Turk on horseback. The Turks who, when they were fed up with local governors, simply sent them a silken strangling cord and had them manage the business for themselves. Now there was a condition of stale palate that a man could envy! Even murder, apparently, would with time and repetition produce a state of listless ennui.
In 1908, after three hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks withdrew, leaving, alas, only a minor cultural legacy: bastinado, the whipping of bare feet; pederasty, the notion of sheep-herding mountain youths agitated even the pashas’ burned-out lusts; and the bribery of all high persons as a matter of natural law. The first two faded quickly from life in Vidin, though the latter, of course, remained. The local wise men would have been astonished to discover people who did not know that greed far exceeded sadism and lechery in the succession of human vice.
The mosques were turned into Eastern Orthodox churches, the minarets painted pale green and mustard yellow, and the people of Vidin were free. More or less. By 1934, the Bulgarian people had enjoyed twenty-six years of freedom over the course of three centuries-if you didn’t count military dictatorships. A sad record, one had to admit, but God had set them down in a paradise with open doors front and back-the great river. Open doors encouraged thieves of the worst kind, the kind that came to live in your house. And when the thieves stole away, to whatever devil’s backside had spawned them, they left something of themselves behind.
For historical custom dictated that conquest be celebrated between the legs of the local women, and each succeeding conqueror had added a river of fresh genes to the local population. Thus they asked themselves, sometimes, in the coffeehouse: Who are we? They were Bulgars, a Turco-Tatar people from the southern steppe, chased down here in the sixth century by invading Slavs from the north. But they were also Slav and Vlach, Turkish, Circassian and Gypsy. Greek, Roman, Mongol, Tatar. Some had the straight black hair of the Asian steppe, others the blue eyes of the Russo-Slav. “And soon,” a local wit remarked, gesturing with his eyes toward the river steamer that had brought the German, “we will be blond.”
It was remarked, by others there, that he spoke very quietly.
As did Antipin.
In the evenings, in the melancholy dusks of autumn when small rains dappled the surface of the river and storks huddled in their nests in the alder grove, he would roll his makhorka into cigarettes and pass them about, so that blue clouds of smoke cut the fish-laden air of the dockside bars. He was, they discovered, a great listener.
There was something patient in Antipin; he heard you out and, when you finished, he continued listening. Waiting, it seemed. For it often turned out that you only thought you were finished, there was more to say, and Antipin seemed to know it before you did. Remarkable, really. And his sympathy seemed inexhaustible, something in his demeanor absorbed the pain and the anger and gave you back a tiny spark of hope. This is being writ down, his eyes seemed to say, for future remedy.
At times he spoke, some evenings more than others. Said things out loud that many of them literally did not dare to think, lest some secret police sorcerer divine their blasphemies. Antipin was fearless. What were dark and secret passions to them seemed to him merely words that required saying. Thus it was he who spoke of their lifelong agonies: landlords, moneylenders, the men who bought their fish and squeezed them on the price. It seemed he was willing to challenge the gods, quite openly, without looking over his shoulder for the inevitable lightning bolt.
“To them you are animals,” he said. “When you are fat, your time has come.” “But we are men,” a fisherman answered, “not animals. Equal in the eyes of God.” He was an old man with a yellowed mustache.
Antipin waited. The silence in the smoky room was broken only by the steady drip of water from the eaves above the window. The cafe was in the house of one of the fishermen’s widows. After her husband drowned, people stopped by for a fruit brandy or a mastica at the kitchen table. Somehow, the condolence visits never quite ceased, and in time the widow’s house became a place where men gathered in the evenings for a drink and a conversation.
Finally, the fisherman spoke again: “We have our pride, which all the world knows, and no one can take it from us.”
Antipin nodded agreement slowly, a witness who saw the truth in what others said. “All people must have pride,” he answered after a time, “but it is a lean meal.” He looked up from the plank table. “And they can take it from you. They can put you on your knees when it is to their purpose to do so. Your house belongs to the landowner. The fish you catch belongs to the men who buy it from you. The little coins buried in your dooryard belong to the tax collectors. And if they take them from you, you will get nothing back. These people do with you as they wish. They always have, and it will continue in this way until you stop it.”
“So you say,” the fisherman answered. “But you are not from here.”
“No,” Antipin said, “I am not from this town. But where I come from they fucked us no less.”
“We are taught,” the fisherman said after a while, “that such things-such things as have been done elsewhere-are against our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“Perhaps they are right.” Antipin’s face was that of a man who acceded to superior logic. “When they come to take you away, you must remember to call for the priest.”
At this, a few people chuckled. Someone at the back of the room called out dramatically, “Father Stepan, come quick and help us!” A hoot of laughter answered him.
“A grand day,” another man said, “when the capon runs to save the cock!”
Antipin smiled. When it grew quiet again, the fisherman said, “You may laugh while you can. When you are older, perhaps you will see things in a different light.”
The man sitting next to Antipin bristled. “I’ll go to meet God on my own two feet, not on my knees,” he said. “Besides,” he added, slightly conciliatory, “there can be nothing wrong with a little laughter.”
“There can be.”
It was said plainly, from where Khristo sat on the edge of a table facing Antipin’s end of the room.
“It is a step,” Antipin said, “to laugh at them. The holy fathers in their expensive robes, the
king, the officers. But it is only the first step. We have a proverb …”
But they were not to hear the proverb. What stopped Antipin in midsentence was a series of loud bangs against the wood of the door frame on the exterior of the house. A puzzling sort of sound-a pistol shot would have had them all up and moving-everyone just looked up and sat still. A moment later they were on their feet. Glass shattered out of the room’s single window-a glittering shower followed by an iron bar, which swung back and forth to finish the job, hammering against the interior of the frame. The men in the cafe stood transfixed, every eye on the window. The iron bar withdrew. There was a shout outside, something angry but indecipherable, then a glass jug was thrown into the room. It was filled with a brownish-yellow liquid that plumed into the air as the jug rotated in flight. It broke in three when it landed and the liquid flowed slowly across the floorboards in a small river. Stove oil-the reek of it filled the room. The men found their voices, angry, tense, but subdued, as though to conceal their presence. From without, a cry of triumph, and a blazing torch of pitch-coated rope hurled through the window. The fire caught in two stages. First, small flames flickered at the edges of the oily river. Then an orange ball of flame roared into the air with a sigh like a puff of wind.
The earlier banging sound now began to make sense, as several men thrust their weight against the door but could not open it. It had been nailed and boarded shut from outside. The intention was to burn them to death inside the widow’s cafe.
The man near Antipin who, moments earlier, had made clever remarks, leaped into the air and screamed as the fire exploded. Seeing the mob of men shoving and cursing at the door, he rushed to the window and started to clamber through, without heed to the long shards of glass hanging from the frame. The iron bar, swung at full force, hit him across the forehead, and he collapsed over the sill like a dropped puppet.
