The Porcupine (19 page)

But the former President did not express any of this. Instead, in a quiet voice, he said, ‘Every man has doubts. It is normal. Perhaps there were times when even I did not
believe. But I allowed others to. Can
you
do as much?’

‘Ah,’ replied the prosecutor. ‘The great enabler. The flawed priest who leads the ignorant to Heaven.’

‘Your words.’

‘He’s guilty, Granny.’

Stefan’s grandmother stirred her head slightly, and looked up from beneath her woollen cap at the student’s face. The silly little thrush, grinning stupidly, twitching his beak up at the colour portrait of V.I. Lenin.

‘They found your sweetheart guilty as well, Granny. While they were at it.’

‘So are you happy?’

The thrush was startled by her sudden question. He thought for a moment, then exhaled his cigarette smoke over the founder of the Soviet State. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘now you ask. I’m blissed.’

‘Then I pity you.’

‘Why?’ For the first time the boy seemed to concentrate properly on the old woman sitting beneath her icon. But she had turned her eyes away from him and retreated into her memories. ‘Why?’ he repeated.

‘God forbid that a blind man should learn to see.’

Vera, Atanas, Stefan and Dimiter turned off the television and went out for a beer. They sat in a smoky café which had been a bookshop before the Changes.

‘What do you think he’ll get?’

‘Takka-takka-takka.’

‘No, they won’t do that.’

The beers arrived. Silently, reverently, they raised their glasses and clunked them damply together. The past, the future, the end of things, the beginning of things. They each drank a serious first mouthful.

‘So, anyone here feel purged?’

‘Atanas, you’re such a cynic.’

‘Me? A cynic? I’m so uncynical I just wanted them to put him up against a wall and shoot him.’

‘There had to be a trial. They couldn’t just say, off you go, we’ll pretend you’re sick. That’s what the Communists used to do.’

‘It wasn’t right, though, was it, the trial? What he’s done to the country, you can’t just put it in criminal terms. It should have been about more, about how he corrupted everything he touched. Everything we touch too. The land, the grass, the stones. How he lied all the time, automatically, as a policy, as a reflex, and how he taught everyone else to. How people can’t trust easily any more. How he corrupted even the words that come out of our mouths.’

‘He didn’t corrupt mine, the lying fucking shit-faced dog-eating bastard.’

‘Atanas, I wish you’d be serious. Just once.’

‘I thought that was part of it, Vera.’

‘Part of what?’

‘Freedom. Freedom not to be serious. Not ever again. Not ever, ever, if you don’t want to be. Isn’t that my right, to be frivolous for the rest of my life if I want to be?’

‘Atanas, you were just as frivolous before the Changes.’

‘Then it was anti-social behaviour. Hooliganism. Now it’s my constitutional right.’

‘Is this what we’ve been fighting for? Atanas’s right to be frivolous?’

‘Perhaps that’s enough to be going on with for the moment.’

The day before the sentence in Criminal Law Case Number I was published, Peter Solinsky came to see Stoyo Petkanov for the last time. The old man was standing inside the painted semicircle with his nose to the window. The militiaman on duty had been instructed that the restriction no longer applied. Let him see the view now if he wished. Let him look down over the city he had once bossed.

They sat on opposite sides of the deal table while Petkanov read through the court’s decision as if searching for an irregularity. Thirty years of internal exile. That should see him out. Personal assets sequestered by the State. Something familiar, almost comforting about that. Well, he had begun with nothing, he would end with nothing. He shrugged and put the paper down.

‘You have not stripped me of my medals and honours.’

‘We thought you should keep them.’

Petkanov grunted. ‘So, anyway, how are you, Peter?’ Now he was grinning at the prosecutor with a crazy fullness, as if life were just about to begin, a life studded with jaunts and schemes and madcap ventures.

‘How am I?’ Exhausted, for one thing. If this was the sour-stomached, thick-brained weariness you felt when you had got what you wanted, when your country had been liberated and your professional career kissed with success, what was the weariness of defeat like? That initial sense of triumph was now emptied bathwater. ‘How am I? Since
you ask, my father is dead, my wife wants a divorce and my daughter is refusing to speak to me. How would you expect me to be?’

Petkanov grinned again, and light glinted on the metal of his spectacles. He felt strangely cheerful. He had lost everything, but he was less defeated than this ageing young man. Intellectuals were pathetic, he had always known it. Probably young Solinsky would now decline into illness. How he despised those who got sick. ‘Well, Peter, you must reflect that your changed circumstances now give you more time to devote to the salvation of your country.’

Was he being ironic? Trying to claim some bond between them, giving him advice like this? Peter’s thin consolation was the knowledge that he loathed this man as much as ever. He rose to leave; but the former President had not quite finished with him. Despite his age, he moved swiftly round the table, shook the prosecutor’s hand, and then sandwiched it between his own plump paws.

‘Tell me, Peter,’ he asked, in a voice that was both sarcastic and ingratiating, ‘do you think me a monster?’

‘I don’t care.’ Solinsky was keen only to get away.

‘Well, let me put it this way. Do you think of me as an ordinary man, or as a monster?’

‘Neither.’ The Prosecutor General gave a sharp nasal sigh. ‘I suppose I think of you as just a gangster.’

Petkanov laughed unexpectedly at this. ‘That is not answering my question. Peter, let me give you a riddle, to replace the one your father gave you. Either I am a monster or I am not. Yes? If I am not, then I must be someone like you, or someone you might be capable of becoming. Which do you want me to be? It is up to you to decide.’

When Solinsky declined to answer, the former President
pressed on, almost tauntingly. ‘No, you are not interested? Then let me continue. If I am a monster, I will come back to haunt your dreams, I will be your nightmare. If I am like you, I will come back to haunt your living days. Which do you prefer? Eh?’

Now Petkanov was tugging on his hand, pulling him closer so that Solinsky could smell hard-boiled egg on his breath. ‘You cannot get rid of me. This farce of a trial makes no difference. Killing me would make no difference. Lying about me, saying I was only hated and feared, not loved, that will make no difference. You can’t get rid of me. Do you see?’

The Prosecutor General wrenched his hand from his captor’s grasp. He felt stained, contaminated, sexually corrupted, irradiated to the bone marrow. ‘To hell with you,’ he shouted, turning violently away. He found himself face to face with the young militiaman, who was following the exchange with a new democratic curiosity. Something made the prosecutor nod politely, and the soldier clicked his heels in response. Then he shouted again, ‘To hell with you. Curse you.’

As he was reaching for the doorknob he heard a dry scuttle behind him. He was startled by the terror he felt. A hand gripped his upper arm and made him turn. The former President was now glaring up at him, and pulling, pulling to bring their faces closer. Suddenly, the prosecutor lost strength, and their eyes were furiously on the same level.

‘No,’ said Stoyo Petkanov. ‘You are wrong. I curse you. I sentence you.’ The unvanquished stare, the whiff of hard-boiled egg, the old fingers clamped bruisingly around the upper arm.
‘I
sentence
you.’

Since the Changes, people had started coming back to the Church; not just for baptism and burial, but for worship, for unspecific consolation, for the knowledge that they were more than bees in a hive. Peter Solinsky had expected a crush of head-scarved
babas
, but he saw only men and women, young and old and middle-aged: people like himself. He stood awkwardly in the narthex of St Sophia, feeling like an impostor, wondering what to do, whether to genuflect. When no-one challenged his credentials, he began to walk slowly up the narrow side aisle. He had left behind the dull forty watts of a March afternoon; now his eyes adjusted to a brightness that depended upon surrounding darkness. Candles blazed at him, the polished brass was fiery, and small high windows focused the sun into thin hard rays.

The sturdy wrought-iron candle-stand, with its bristling spikes and soft curlicues, was a theatre of light. Candles were lit at two levels: at shoulder height for the living, ankle height for the dead. Peter Solinsky bought two beeswax tapers and touched them into flame. He knelt, and pressed the first one into the flat tray of sand on the church floor. Then he rose, extended his arm, and forced the base of the second candle, the one burning for his country, down on to a black iron spike. The assembled flames were hot on his face. He retreated stiffly, like a wreath-laying general, and stood to attention. Then his fingertip discovered his forehead, and unprotestingly he continued the sempiternal gesture, crossing himself, from right to left, in the Orthodox fashion.