The Porcupine (18 page)

‘Juan Carlos, King of Spain: “You, Mr President, have proved, on many occasions, an active, untiring dedication to the cause of
détente
, to the safeguarding of all people’s inalienable right to decide their destiny, on the path serving best their interests, to the full use of their own resources – free from the foreign interference that opposes the exertion of their own sovereignty.”

‘Valéry Giscard d’Estaing: “France is glad to receive the
Head of State who has had an important role in the policy of rapprochement and co-operation between the two parts of Europe.”

‘James Callaghan, Prime Minister of Great Britain: “You make an important contribution to the development of relations with the third world, to the efforts made for doing away with underdevelopment, to economic stability in which all the countries, the highly industrialised ones included, are interested.”

‘Giulio Andreotti: “I appreciate the President’s role in international life will keep being positive, since he enjoys a high prestige and universal consideration thanks to his goodwill and wish for peace and for contributing to a settlement in the mutual interest.”

‘Franz Josef Strauss: “The leader makes an important contribution to maintaining peace, through a perspicacious policy of wide opening, through a clear assessment of the problems, through wise decisions and actions.”

‘Leonid Brezhnev: “The Soviet working people assess highly the wonderful gains of the working class, the cooperative peasants and the intelligentsia in your country that, under the trusted leadership of the Communist Party, have changed the look of the nation. We are glad to see that your Socialist Republic is a country developing at a fast rate, that it has a modern, developing industry and a well-organised co-operative agriculture. The activity of your entire Party, with you at the head, takes the country to new peaks of socialist construction.”

‘Javier Perez de Cuellaer, UN Secretary General: “I take it as a satisfaction to thank such a personality as the President for the active, constructive and energetic contribution made in all the domains of activity of the UN.”

‘Mario Soares: “For myself, I highly appreciate the efforts of the President in favour of European security, of all people’s peace and independence, of non-interference by some countries in other countries’ domestic affairs.”

‘Prince Norodom Sihanouk: “Your socialist nation and her much beloved leader, who internationally symbolise, in a wonderful way, the firm attachment to the ideas of justice, freedom, independence, peace and progress, are always on the side of the oppressed peoples, those that are victims of aggression and that fight to win their independence back.”

‘Hu Yuobang, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party: “You safeguard firmly the state sovereignty and national dignity. In international activity, you are against the law of force, you safeguard the peace of the world and the cause of human progress.”

‘President Canaan Banana of Zimbabwe: “You have understood that your independence cannot be complete unless the whole of mankind is freed from the chains of imperialism and colonialism. That is why your country has stood at the forefront of those who have assisted us in our just struggle for national emancipation. You have given us material and moral support in the hardest of trials.”

‘Mohammad Hosni Mubarak, President of the Arab Republic of Egypt: “As to myself, I experience the same joy about our relationship, a joy stemming from my profound appreciation of your clear-sighted position, of your wisdom, courage, wide, all-embracing vision of history, of your particular capability of assuming responsibility, of your standing above events and your approach to the realities of the epoch.” ’

[‘
He fucked them all. He really fucked them all
.’

‘
Takes two to fuck
.’]

‘I am not making these claims for myself,’ Petkanov continued. ‘This is what others say, others who are more competent to judge.

‘When I was here before, many years ago, in the bourgeois-fascist court in Velpen, I was charged, as I am now, with invented crimes. You, Professor Prosecutor, at the start of this … show, reminded me that the crimes I was accused of as a sixteen-year-old member of the Union of Communist Youth were listed as damage to property and so on. But everyone knew that I was really charged with the capital offence of being a Socialist and a Communist, of wishing to improve the lot of working people and the peasants. Everyone knew that, the bourgeois-landlord police, the prosecutor, the court, myself and my comrades. And everyone knew that this is what I was sentenced for.

‘And the same is happening again. Everyone, everyone in this court and who is a witness to this show, knows that the charges against me are convenient inventions. I was the helmsman of this nation for thirty-three years, I was a Communist, I sacrificed my whole life for the people, therefore I must be a criminal according to those who once made the same promises and swore the same oaths that they now betray. But the real charge, which we all know, is that I am a Socialist and a Communist, and that I am proud to be a Socialist and a Communist. So let us not beat about the bush, my former comrades. I plead guilty to the real charge. Now sentence me to whatever it is that you have already decided.’

With a final, belligerent glare at his accusers, Stoyo Petkanov abruptly sat down. The President of the Court glanced at his watch. One hour and seven minutes.

By late February the last legal submissions were being made. Sun was beginning to pierce the smog over the city. Granny March would soon be here. She was known to be a capricious old woman, and very hard to please, but when she smiled, she promised you fine weather.

Peter Solinsky had bought two
martenitsas
: woollen tassels, each of them half red and half white. Red and white chased away evil, brought good luck and good health. But this year Maria didn’t want to hang them up.

‘We hung them up last year. Every year.’

‘Last year I loved you. Last year I respected you.’

Peter Solinsky phoned for a taxi. Well, if that was how it was going to be. At least one of the new freedoms was that you didn’t have to fake gratitude about being married to the daughter of a leading anti-Fascist.
She
should have been grateful to
him
instead of disparaging his performance, calling him a TV lawyer. Even if the court had subsequently declined to add the charge of murder to the indictment, he had done well, very well. Everyone told him so. His
coup de théâtre
had shifted public perception decisively. Newspaper cartoons portrayed him as St Georgi slaying the dragon. The faculty of law had given a dinner in his honour. Women smiled at him now, even women he didn’t know. His only critics had been Maria, the editorialists at
Truth
, and the author of an anonymous postcard he had received the other day. The picture showed the former Communist Party headquarters in Sliven, and the text simply read:
GIVE US CONVICTIONS NOT JUSTICE
!

He asked the taxi driver to take him to the northern hills.

‘Saying goodbye, Chief?’

‘Goodbye?’ Did it show that he’d just had a row with Maria?

‘To Alyosha. I hear they’re carting him away.’

‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

‘Comrade Chief.’ The driver pronounced the words with obvious irony. He turned slightly towards his passenger, but all Solinsky could see was a wizened neck, a battered cap and the profile of a half-smoked cigarette. ‘Comrade Chief, now that we’re all free and can speak our minds, permit me to inform you that I don’t give a fuck either way.’

The taxi parked and waited for him. He walked up through the public gardens and climbed the granite steps. For a little longer Alyosha would continue to raise his glittering bayonet and advance hopefully into the future; around his plinth the machine-gunners would go on holding whatever position they had been set to defend. And then? Would something else go up in Alyosha’s place, or had the time for monuments passed?

Peter Solinsky looked down over the bare chestnuts and limes, the poplars and the walnuts, all weeks away from leaf. To the west he could see Rykosha Mountain, the scene of Petkanov’s adolescent rhapsody (or banal fabrication). To the south lay the smogbound city, guarded by its domestic ramparts. Friendship 1, Friendship 2, Friendship 3, Friendship 4 … Perhaps he should get a new place to live, as Maria had suggested. He could mention it to the Deputy Minister of Housing, who like him had been an early member of the Green Party. Just because Maria wasn’t coming with him, it didn’t mean he had to live in a dingy mouse-hole. Six rooms, perhaps? A prosecutor general sometimes has to receive foreign dignitaries at home. And then, well, he wouldn’t be divorced for ever.

He remembered standing here as a boy, stiff-backed beside his father, hearing the band, watching the Soviet
Ambassador lay a wreath and salute. He remembered Stoyo Petkanov ripe with power. Anna Petkanova too: the pug face, the braided hair. For the next ten years or so, he’d had a distant crush on the Beacon of Youth. The magazine photos had made her look stylish, and she’d been interested in jazz. Had she really been murdered? Had the country been that degraded? Would anyone do anything for any reason? Who could tell. Stalin had Kirov murdered: welcome to the modern world.

Coming down the granite steps, Peter Solinsky took the two
martenitsas
out of his raincoat pocket. He crossed a patch of scruffy grass, and beneath the approving gaze of three aged municipal gardeners, slipped the woollen tassels under a large stone. That’s what you did in the country at this time of year. A few days later you would go back to where you had left the
martenitsa
. If there were ants under the stone, there would be lambs on the farm that year; worms and bugs meant horses and cattle; spiders stood for donkeys. Any living thing that stirred promised you fertility, a new beginning.

‘How was your weekend, Peter? Has anything happened? Did the mental defectives hold a protest against the new constitution?’

This man was indefatigable. You couldn’t understand him because he kept exhausting you. It must be all that yoghurt he ate. Or the wild geranium under his bed. Good health and long life: the plant of centenarians. Perhaps he should order the militiaman to chuck it out of the window the next time Petkanov left the room.

The Prosecutor General no longer felt like jousting. The case was over except for the sentence, and he had won. Strange that the defendant had shown him no ill-will – or at least, no extra ill-will – after the allegations about Anna Petkanova. Or perhaps that told you something.

‘I went to see my father,’ Peter Solinsky replied.

‘And how is he?’

‘He is dying, as I told you.’

‘Well, there are no bears in the ground. Truly, I am sorry. Whatever our differences …’

Solinsky did not want to hear another grotesque and sentimental perversion of his family’s past. ‘My father talked about you,’ he said sharply. Petkanov looked across in anticipation, a leader accustomed to flattery. But his expectant mood dwindled as he studied the prosecutor’s face: thin, harsh, older. No, he couldn’t call him a boy any more. ‘My father did not have many words left, but he wanted me to hear them. He said that when you were young, when you were both young, you were a true believer. Oh, he said you were crazy for power, but that wasn’t incompatible with being a true believer. He said he wondered at what point you lost the faith. It worried him, to know when and how it happened. Perhaps at the death of your daughter, but perhaps, he thought, long, long before.’

‘You may tell your father that I am still a true believer in Socialism and Communism. I have never wavered from the path.’

‘Then you will be interested in what my father said to me, just before I left. He said, “I have a riddle for you, Peter. Which is worse, the true believer who continues to believe despite all the evidence of observable reality; or the person who admits such reality yet continues to
claim to be a true believer?” ’

Stoyo Petkanov for once tried not to show all of his exasperation. That was just like old Solinsky, always trying to play the fucking intellectual. There they would be, in the final stages of approving the next economic programme, with ministers worrying about targets set, or the rains at harvest-time, or the effect of yet another crisis in the Middle East on Mother Russia’s supply of crude, and old Solinsky would fiddle with his pipe and push back his chair and pompously spout theory. ‘Comrades, I have been re-reading …’ was his favourite way of starting to bore them.
Re
-reading! You read, of course, to begin with, you studied, but then you worked, you acted. The scientific principles of Socialism were laid down, and you applied them. Of course with local variations. But when you were deciding the completion date for the hydro-electric dam, or wondering why the peasants in the north-east were withholding grain, or considering the DIS’s report on the ethnic Hungarian minority, you did not, Mr Comrade Doctor Professor Fucking Solinsky, if you don’t mind my saying, you did not, excuse me, need to
re
-read anything. His trouble was that he had been far too soft, far too patient with Peter’s father. The old fool should have been sent to the country to play with his bees years earlier. He hadn’t been so high and mighty and theoretical when they’d been in Varkova prison together. He hadn’t asked the warders permission to re-read something before laying into that Iron Guard who’d become detached from the main group. Solinsky had known how to make a Fascist whimper in those days.