Night Soldiers (3 page)

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 Arpád 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 café 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 café 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 café.

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.

Khristo Stoianev stood quietly, resisting the panic inside him. His eyes swept about the room, to the door and the press of bodies in front of it, to the smashed window, trying to choose. Before he could move in either direction, a hand took him above the elbow, a hard grip that hurt. It was Antipin, face completely without expression. “A cold cellar. There must be one,” he said softly.

“Where she cooks.” Khristo nodded toward the kitchen area, separated from the main room by a sagging drape on a cord.

“Come then,” Antipin said.

They brushed the drape aside. There was an old black wood stove, a rickety table, a bent-twig crucifix on the wall. A bin where potatoes and onions were stored through the winter. In order to circulate the air and keep the food from rotting, a square had been cut in the wall, then covered with a metal screen to keep the rats out. In winter, a piece of cardboard was hung over it on a nail to keep out the worst of the cold.

The widow, on hands and knees, was in the act of crawling through the broken-out screen of the narrow square. She disappeared suddenly, with a little cry, and they could see the night outside.

Antipin stopped him with a hand on the chest. “Let us see if there is a surprise planned. Wait for me to go through, then shout for the others.”

He was a square block of a man, but he moved like a monkey. Grabbing the upper edge of the frame with both hands, he swung out feet first. A few moments later, his face appeared.

“It's safe,” he said.

Khristo moved toward the window, grasped the frame as Antipin had. Antipin raised a palm. “The others,” he said. Khristo shouted, heard a thunder of footsteps behind him, then went through. He landed on the side of the house facing the river, away from the dirt road.

Antipin peered cautiously around the side of the house, then waved for Khristo to follow him. Up by the road, a group of silhouettes stood beside a farmer's open-bed truck. The shapes were silent, moving restlessly, pacing, turning to one another. In the darkness, Khristo could not see details—faces or clothing. One man detached himself from the crowd and walked slowly down the hill, toward the house.

Antipin, meanwhile, pulled the board away from the door and a group of coughing men came out in swirls of smoke and cinders. It was not difficult to jerk the nails from the wood, a kick from within would have done it, but the board had been cleverly positioned, across the knob, so that kicks against the door were ineffectual, and no one had thought to kick at the knob, an awkward target.

Khristo watched as the board was worked free of the door. It took him a moment to understand the device, it was too simple. But, when he did understand, something in the knowledge turned his stomach. Somebody, somewhere, in appearance a man like himself, had thought this method through. Had studied the problem: how to obstruct a door when setting fire to a house full of people so that those within could not escape, and had found a solution, and applied it. That there were those in the world who would study such things Khristo Stoianev had never understood. Now he did.

The man coming down the hill was Khosov the Policeman, brother of Khosov the Postman who kept the rhythm for the National Union parades. He was a policeman because no one had known what else to do with him. He was a man whose mouth never closed, who stared dreamily around him, seemingly amazed at a world full of ordinary things. He was slow. Everything had to be figured out. But when he did figure it out—and eventually he always did, especially if there was somebody around to help him—he could be swept away by a blind, insentient rage. At one time he had been much persecuted by children, until he beat one little boy very nearly to death with a broom handle.

The men stood around and watched the house burn. There was nothing to be done about it. A few buckets of water were tossed on neighboring roofs, to protect the dry reeds from embers floating through the night air. The widow knotted her hands in the binding of her apron and held it in her mouth while she wept, her wet cheeks shining in the firelight. The men around her were silent. They had brought a disaster down on her, and there was nothing to be done about that either.

Policeman Khosov came down the hill and stopped ten feet from Antipin. His eyes searched the crowd carefully; one had better not make a mistake here, as one's fellows watched from the road above. They were counting on him, trusted him to go it alone; he wasn't going to—not if he had to stand here all night—let them down.

One to another, each in turn, he peered at them, his face knotted with concentration, sweat standing on his brow with the effort of it, mouth open as always. Even though it might be you he sought, the sheer agony of the process made you want to help him.