The Porcupine (4 page)

His Department of External Security had once shown him a document passed on by their fraternal colleagues in the KGB. It was an FBI report on the safety of the American President, his levels of protection, and so forth. Petkanov always remembered one particular detail: that the place where the American President felt most safe, and where the FBI considered him most safe, was in Disneyland. No American assassin would dream of shooting him there. It would be sacrilege, it would be an offence against the great gods of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. This was what it had said in an FBI report conveyed to Petkanov’s Department of External Security by the KGB in case such information might prove useful to them. For Petkanov it had confirmed the infantile nature of the Americans who would soon be invading his country and buying it all up. Welcome, Uncle Sam, come and build a big Disneyland here, so that your President will feel safe, and you can listen to your Frank Sinatra records and laugh at us all because you think we are ignorant peasants who don’t know how to dress.

They had to be witnesses, Vera insisted. All four of them together: Vera, Atanas, Stefan and Dimiter. This was a great
moment in their country’s history, a farewell to grim childhood and grey, fretful adolescence. It was the end of lies and illusions; now the time had arrived when truth was possible, when maturity began. How could they be absent from that?

Besides, they had been together from the start, from that recent, distant month when it had felt almost like a lark, an excuse for the boys to hang around Vera and flirt with her safely. They had gone along to those first anxious protests, uncertain what they could say, how far they could go. They had watched and marched and shouted as it had all turned serious and stiflingly passionate. Terrifying, too: they had been together when that friend of Pavel’s had been half-crushed by an armoured car on Liberation Boulevard, when the militiamen guarding the presidential palace had lost their nerve and started hitting women with their rifles. Several times they had run from gunfire, shit-scared, dodging into doorways, linking arms and trying to protect Vera. But they had also been there when it had begun to feel like pushing at a loose, worm-eaten old door, when the soldiers grinned and winked at them, and shared their cigarettes. And not long afterwards they knew they were winning because even some Communist Party deputies had wanted to show their faces at the demonstrations.

‘Rats jumping ship,’ commented Atanas. ‘Weasels.’ He was a student of languages, a drinker and a poet, who liked to claim that his scepticism disinfected the germy souls of the other three.

‘We can’t purify the human race,’ Vera told him.

‘Why not?’

‘There’ll always be opportunists. You just have to make sure that they’re on your side.’

‘I don’t want them on my side.’

‘They don’t count, Atanas, they don’t matter. They just show who’s winning.’

And then, with a final push on the door, Stoyo Petkanov was gone, overnight, not allowed to pretend he was ill or making way for his successor, just packed off by the Central Committee to his house in the north-east province with a five-man guard for his own protection. At first that finger-in-the-wind deputy of his, Marinov, had tried to hold the Party together as a conservative reformist, but within weeks he was stretched and snapped on his own rack of incompatibilities. Then events began to blur like bicycle spokes; yesterday’s improbable rumour became tomorrow’s stale news. The Communist Party voted to suspend its leading role in the nation’s political and economic development, renamed itself the Socialist Party, urged a Front for National Salvation involving all main political organisations, and when this was turned down, called for elections as soon as possible. Which the opposition parties didn’t want, or at least not yet, since their structures were rudimentary and the Socialists (formerly Communists) still controlled state radio and television and most of the publishing houses and printing works, but the opposition was obliged to take its chance and won enough seats to put the Socialists (formerly Communists) on the defensive, although the Socialists (formerly Communists) still had a majority, which western commentators found incomprehensible, and the government was still inviting the opposition parties to join in and save the nation, but the opposition parties kept saying, No,
you
fucked it up, you sort it out, and if you can’t sort it out, resign, and then things stumbled on with half-reforms and wrangles and insults and frustration and fear and black markets and rising
prices and more half-reforms, so that none of it was heroic, or at least not in the way some had anticipated – a valiant hussar sabring through the rope of slavery – instead it was just heroic in the way that work could be heroic. Vera thought it had been like slowly prising open the fingers of a fist closed tight for half a century, a fist which held a gilded pine-cone. At last the cone fell free, badly crushed out of shape, and heavily tarnished by the sweat of years; but even in this form its weight was still the same, and its beauty just as treasured.

The last part of this process – the end of the beginning – was Petkanov’s trial. So Vera insisted that the four of them be witnesses. If they couldn’t get into the courtroom, they could watch the proceedings on television. Every moment of them, every minute of the nation’s sudden passage from enforced adolescence to delayed maturity.

‘What about the cuts?’ said Atanas.

That was a problem. Every four hours – except when it was every three – there was a power cut lasting an hour – except when it lasted for two. The cuts rotated by district. Vera lived in the same electricity sector as Stefan, so that didn’t help. Atanas lived a good twenty-minute bus-ride away, beyond the southern boulevards. Dimiter’s district was closer, a fifteen-minute walk, an eight-minute run. So they would start at Stefan’s (or Vera’s when Stefan’s parents got fed up with them), move to Dimiter’s as first alternative, and in an emergency – if everyone else was blacked out – bus it to Atanas’s.

But what if the power cut out in the middle of the trial, just as Petkanov was squirming and the prosecutor was sticking it to him, telling how he’d swindled the nation, lied and stolen, bullied and killed? They’d miss almost ten
minutes’ transmission running over to Dimiter’s. Or worse, twenty minutes getting out to Atanas’s.

‘Forty,’ said Atanas. What with petrol shortages and bus breakdowns, that’s what you had to allow nowadays. Forty minutes!

It was Stefan, the engineer, who found the solution. Each morning the State Electricity Board published its schedule of ‘interruptions’, as they neutrally termed them, for the next thirty-six hours. So the plan went like this. Say they were watching at Vera’s and a power cut was promised for a certain time. Two of them would set off for Dimiter’s apartment ten or fifteen minutes in advance. The two left behind would watch until the picture failed, then follow the others over. At the end of the day’s transmission each team would fill in the other on the ten minutes or so they had missed. Or the forty minutes, if they had to trail out beyond the southern boulevards.

‘I hope they hang him,’ said Dimiter the day before the trial began.

‘Shoot him,’ Atanas preferred.
‘Takka-takka-takka-takka.’

‘I hope we learn the truth,’ said Vera.

‘I hope they just let him talk,’ said Stefan. ‘Just ask him simple questions to which there are simple answers, and then hear him come out with all that shit. How much did you steal? When did you order the murder of Simeon Popov? What is the number of your Swiss bank account? Ask him things like that, and watch how he doesn’t answer a single one of them.’

‘I want to see film of his palaces,’ said Dimiter. ‘And pictures of all his mistresses.’

‘We don’t know he had mistresses,’ said Vera. ‘Anyway, that’s not important.’

‘I want to know exactly how dangerous our nuclear plants are,’ said Stefan.

‘I want to know if he personally authorised the Department of External Security to try and kill the Pope,’ said Dimiter.

‘I want to see him shot,’ said Atanas.

‘I want to know about the Politburo’s privileges,’ said Dimiter.

‘I want to know how much we owe, each of us,’ said Stefan.

‘
Takka-takka-takka
,’ went Atanas. ‘
Takka-takka-takka
.’

The week before Criminal Law Case Number 1 opened in the Supreme Court, former President Stoyo Petkanov sent an open letter to the National Assembly. He intended to promote his own defence vigorously, both to the people and to the parliament, on television and in the press, until such time as the fascist tendencies currently at work succeeded in gagging him. The text of his letter ran as follows:

Esteemed National Representatives,
Certain circumstances compel me to address this letter to you. These circumstances lead me to believe that certain people want to turn me into a means of achieving their own political interests and personal ambitions. I would like to declare that I will not play into the hands of any political group.

As far as I know, a single head of state has been tried and convicted in modern history so far: Emperor Bokassa in Africa (who was convicted) for conspiracy, murders and cannibalism. I will be the second case.

As to my personal responsibility, I can tell you even now, fully aware and having summed my life up after long contemplation, that as this country’s party leader and head of state for 33 years I bear the greatest political responsibility for everything done. Did the good things outnumber the bad things, did we live in darkness and hopelessness during all those years, did mothers give birth to children, were we calm or anxious, did the people have any goals and ideals: I have no right to judge all this myself now.

The answers to all these questions can only come from our own people and our history. I am sure that they will be stern judges. I am convinced, however, that they will be fair too, categorically rejecting both political nihilism and total denigration.

I have done everything in the belief that it was good for my country. I have made mistakes along the way, but I have not committed crimes against my people. It is for these mistakes that I accept political responsibility.

3rd January

Respectfully yours,

Stoyo Petkanov

Like most of his contemporaries, Peter Solinsky had grown up within the Party. A Red Pioneer, a Young Socialist, and then a full party member, he had received his card shortly before his father fell victim to one of Petkanov’s routine purges and was exiled to the country. There had been sour words between them at first, since Peter, with all the
authority of youth, knew that the Party was always greater than the individual, and that this applied in his father’s case as in anyone else’s. Peter himself had naturally fallen under suspicion for a while; and he acknowledged in those clouded days that marriage to the daughter of a hero in the Anti-Fascist Struggle had given him some protection. Slowly, he had regained favour with the Party; once, they had even sent him to Turin as part of a trade delegation. They had issued him with foreign currency and told him to spend it; he had felt privileged. Maria, understandably, had not been permitted to accompany him.