The Porcupine (8 page)

Thereafter, Ganin’s rise had been so swift that his wife Nina scarcely had time to tack a new rank on his uniform before it became outdated. She was pleased when he moved into civilian clothes; but her amused relief was premature. The dinners Georgi found himself obliged to attend meant
that regular alterations had to be made to his suits as well. Now he stood in Solinsky’s office, a corpulent civil servant, red-faced from climbing the stairs, his middle button under pressure despite the doubled thread Nina had used. Awkwardly, he offered a cardboard file to the Prosecutor General.

‘Tell me about it,’ said Solinsky.

‘Comrade Prosecutor …’

‘Mr Prosecutor will do,’ Solinsky smiled. ‘Lieutenant-General.’

‘Mr Prosecutor, sir. We in the Patriotic Security Forces wish to encourage you in your work and trust that your diligence will be rewarded.’

Solinsky smiled again. It would take a while for the old forms of address to die away. ‘What is in the folder?’

‘We trust that the accused will be found guilty on all charges.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Such a verdict would be greatly helpful to the PSF in their current restructuring.’

‘Well, that’s a matter for the court.’

‘And a matter of evidence.’

‘General …’

‘Of course, sir. This is a preliminary report on the case of Anna Petkanova. The core files have unfortunately been destroyed.’

‘Hardly surprising.’

‘No, sir. But even though the core files were destroyed much has been patriotically saved. Even if access and identification are not always easy.’

‘…?’

‘Yes. As you will see, there is preliminary evidence of
the involvement of the Department of Internal Security in the case of Anna Petkanova.’

Solinsky was barely interested. ‘There are dead pigs under every hedge,’ he replied. Frankly, there was little in the public life of the nation over the last fifty years which, on examination, would not disclose preliminary evidence of the involvement of the Department of Internal Security.

‘Yes, sir.’ Ganin was still holding out the folder. ‘You wish us to keep you informed?’

‘If …’ Solinsky accepted the file almost absent-mindedly. ‘If you think it appropriate.’ Hmmm. How easily he fell back on the old formulas.
If you think it appropriate
. And why had he said
There are dead pigs under every hedge?
That wasn’t the way he talked. It sounded like the defendant in Criminal Law Case Number 1. Perhaps he was being infected. He must practise saying
Yes
and
No
and
That’s stupid
and
Go away
.

‘We wish you good fortune with the continuation of the prosecution, Mr Prosecutor, sir.’

‘Yes, thank you.’ Go away. Put a soldier into civvies and the length of his sentences doubled. ‘Thank you.’ Go away.

Vera crossed the Square of St Vassily the Martyr, which had, in the course of the last forty years, also been Stalingrad Square, Brezhnev Square, and even, briefly, in an attempt to get round the whole problem, the Square of the Heroes of Socialism. For several months now it had lapsed into anonymity. Bare, stumpy metal posts imitated the dormant chestnut trees. Both were waiting for spring:
the trees to get back their leaves and the posts to sprout name-plates. Then the city would once again have a Square of St Vassily the Martyr.

Vera knew she was pretty. She was pleased with her high cheekbones and wide-set brown eyes, approved her legs, felt that the bright colours she wore suited her. But crossing the public gardens in the Square of St Vassily, as she did each morning at ten o’clock, mysteriously turned her into a frump. This had been happening now for months. There were up to a hundred men clustered by the garden’s western gate, and not a single one of them looked at her. Or if they did, they looked away at once, not even bothering to check her legs, not smiling at the chiffon burst around her neck.

Before the Changes, any public gathering of more than eight people had to be officially registered, and the registration procedure might be very
ad hoc
, consisting of men in leather coats demanding to know names and addresses. Since the Changes, sights like this, of a loosely swirling vortex of people, had become common. Some passers-by joined in automatically, as they would attach themselves to any queue outside a shop in the theoretical hope of a few eggs or half a kilo of carrots. The odd thing about the crowd here was that it consisted entirely of men, most between the ages of eighteen and thirty: in other words, the sort of men who
always
looked at her. But instead they were in a state of ordered excitement, as one by one, in a scarcely observable, apian process, they were sucked from the outer fringe of the group to the middle, and then, after a few minutes, expelled. Some seemed to have got what they wanted, and headed purposefully through the western gates; the rest drifted off aimlessly in any direction.

Pornography, that was Vera’s first explanation. You
saw groups of men gathered heatedly around an upturned beer-crate on which some badly printed magazine was being displayed. Or sometimes what stood there was a bottle of foreign spirits and a few small glasses; the bottle normally came from the waste-bin of a tourist hotel, and had been refilled with toxic home-brew. Or again, it might be the black market. Perhaps the fortunate ones who went off through the western gates were going to pick up the contraband. Or if it wasn’t that, it was probably to do with religion, or the monarchist party, or astrology, or numerology, or gambling, or the Moonies. Such huddled, fervent meetings rarely concerned themselves with the new democratic structures, environmental pollution, or the problems of land reform. It was always something illegal, or escapist, or at the very best to do with grubby self-advancement.
And
they didn’t look at her.

Stefan’s grandmother refused to watch the trial, and at first the students were awkwardly aware of her presence. She sat a few metres away in the kitchen, underneath a small framed colour print of V.I. Lenin, which no-one had dared suggest she take down. She was a short, spherical woman with a down-turned mouth accentuated by the loss of several teeth, and the home-knitted cap she wore at all times, even indoors, added to her circularity. Nowadays she spoke little, finding that most questions did not require answers. A nod, a shrug, a held-out plate, occasionally a smile: you could get by with that. Especially when dealing with Stefan and his young friends. How they chattered. Listen to them round the television, gabbling away, interrupting one another, unable
to pay attention for more than a moment. Squabbling like a nestful of thrushes. Brains of thrushes, too.

The girl treated her with reasonable politeness, but the other two, especially that cheeky one, Atanas, was it … Here he came again, poking his beak round the door, fixing his birdy little eyes on a point above her head.

‘Hello, Granny, is that your first husband?’

Another remark that didn’t need a reply from her.

‘Hey, Dimiter, have you seen this snap of Granny’s boyfriend?’

A second thrush from the nest appeared and examined the portrait for longer than necessary.

‘He doesn’t look very cheerful, Granny.’

‘And he looks a bit old for you.’

‘I should drop him, Granny. He doesn’t look any fun at all.’

None of this required answering.

The previous evening she had wrapped a woollen scarf over her woollen hat, taken the picture off the wall and left the apartment without saying where she was going. She had caught a tram to the Square of the Anti-Fascist Struggle, whose name she continued to use whatever insolent bus-drivers called it, and bought three red carnations from a peasant who at first tried to charge her double on the ground that she was going to the rally and was therefore a Communist and the cause of all his life’s problems. Her rare sally into speech shamed him into normalising the price, and she had stood in the square with a few hundred other loyalists, while confident men who were clearly not party members patrolled the edges of the gathering. How long would it be before the Party was banned again, forced to go underground? Before the Fascists resurfaced, and young men searched their attics for the faded green shirts of
their Iron Guard grandfathers? Ahead she saw an inevitable return to the oppression of the working class, to unemployment and inflation being used as political weapons. But she also saw, beyond that, the moment when men and women would rise and shake themselves, recovering their rightful dignity and starting again the whole glorious cycle of revolution. She would be dead by then, of course, but she did not doubt that it would come to pass.

It was not until the weekend that Peter Solinsky had time to examine the dossier given him by the security chief. Anna Petkanova 1937–1972. Curious how the dates were always attached so that he knew them by heart. The name and the dates, on postage stamps, memorial plaques and concert programmes, on her statue outside the Anna Petkanova Palace of Culture. Only child of President Stoyo Petkanov. Beacon of Youth. Minister of Culture. Photographs of Anna Petkanova as a dimpled Young Pioneer in her red bonnet, as a serious-faced chemistry student with eye applied to microscope, as an overweight young cultural ambassadress receiving bouquets at the airport on her return from foreign trips. An example to women throughout the nation. The very spirit of Socialism and Communism, the embodiment of its future. The youthful Minister inspecting plans for the Palace of Culture now named in her memory. The stouter Minister accepting flowers from folk dancers, sitting attentively in the presidential box at symphony concerts. The positively fat Minister, cigarette in advanced prodding position, listening critically at meetings of the Writers’ Union. Anna Petkanova, more than a little overweight, unmarried, keen on cigarettes and
banquets, dead at thirty-five. Mourned by the nation. Even the nation’s finest heart specialists had been unable to do anything despite the most modern techniques. Her ageing father, bare-headed in the felty snow, standing to attention outside the crematorium as her ashes were scattered. And the plaque on the wall there repeated: Anna Petkanova 1937–1972.

Really, thought Solinsky, as he leafed through Ganin’s report, this is trivial stuff. It did not surprise him that the Department of Internal Security had had a file on the President’s daughter, that a certain well-placed assistant in the Ministry of Culture reported on a monthly basis, or that the Minister’s relationship with that gymnast who had won a silver medal in the Balkan Games should have been closely watched. The gymnast, he seemed to remember, had got offensively drunk at a banquet some weeks after Anna Petkanova’s death, and shortly afterwards had been permitted to emigrate, the standard phrase for being woken at dawn and driven to the airport without a change of clothes.

Stoyo Petkanov had declared a week of national mourning for his daughter. They had been very close. After her appointment as Minister of Culture she was increasingly seen at his side, replacing her invalid mother, who apparently preferred to stay in one of the country residences. It was rumoured that Petkanov had been grooming his daughter to succeed him in office. It was further rumoured that the President’s daughter had grown so stout because on one of her foreign trips she had become addicted to American hamburgers, and after unsuccessfully trying to instruct the presidential cooks in their manufacture, had taken to having them flown in. Frozen hamburgers in bulk, courtesy of the diplomatic bag.