The Porcupine (7 page)

‘Unreliable whores, you mean,’ said Petkanov. ‘Neurotic whores.’

There had been a Revolution, of that there was no doubt; but the word was never used, not even in a qualified form, preceded by Velvet or Gentle. This country had the fullest sense of history, but also a great wariness of rhetoric. The high expectations of the last years refused to declare themselves in tall words. So instead of Revolution, people here spoke only of the Changes, and history was now divided into three quiet parts: before the Changes, during the Changes, after the Changes. Look what had happened throughout history: Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Revolution, Counter-Revolution, Fascism, Anti-Fascism, Communism, Anti-Communism. Great movements, as by some law of physics, seemed to provoke an equal and opposite force. So people talked cautiously of the Changes, and this slight evasion made them feel a little safer: it was difficult to imagine something called the Counter-Changes or the Anti-Changes, and therefore such a reality might be avoidable too.

Meanwhile, slowly, discreetly, the monuments were coming down all over the city. There had been partial removals before, of course. One year, bronze Stalins had been purged at a whisper from Moscow. They had been taken from their plinths in the night and delivered to a patch of waste ground near the central marshalling yard, where they were lined up against a high wall as if awaiting the firing squad. For a few weeks two militiamen had guarded them, until it became clear that there was little popular desire to desecrate these effigies. So they were surrounded with barbed wire and left to fend for themselves, kept awake through the night by the hoot and moan of goods trains. Each spring the nettles grew a little higher, and bindweed made a fresh curling run up the inside leg of the booted war-leader. Occasionally an intruder with hammer and chisel would climb one of
the shorter monuments and attempt to chip off a souvenir half-moustache; but drink or the inadequacy of the chisel always brought failure. The statues lingered on beside the marshalling yard, shiny in the rain and as undefeated as a memory.

Now Stalin had company. Brezhnev, who favoured bronze and granite postures in life, and now happily continued his existence as a statue. Lenin, with worker’s cap and inspiringly raised arm, the fingers clasping holy writ. Next to him the nation’s First Leader, who in a permanent gesture of political subservience loyally remained a metre or so shorter than the giants of Soviet Russia. And now came Stoyo Petkanov, displaying himself in various guises: as partisan leader with pigskin sandals and peasant’s blouse; as military commander with Stalinist knee-boots and general’s ribbons; as world statesman with boxy, double-breasted suit and Order of Lenin in the buttonhole. This close, select company, some of its later representatives roughly mutilated by an unsympathetic crane, huddled together in permanent exile, silently discussing policy.

Recently, there was talk of Alyosha joining them. Alyosha, who had stood on that low northern hill for almost four decades, his bayonet glittering fraternally. He had been a gift from the Soviet people; now there was a movement to return him to his donors. Let him go back to Kiev or Kalinin or wherever: he must be getting homesick after all this time, and his great bronze mother must be missing him badly.

But symbolic gestures can prove expensive. It had been cheap enough to sneak the embalmed First Leader out of his Mausoleum on a forgotten night when only one street-lamp in six was lit. But repatriating Alyosha? That
would cost thousands of American dollars, money better spent on buying oil or mending the leaky nuclear reactor in the eastern province. So some argued instead for a gentler, local banishment. Pack him off to the marshalling yard and let him join his metallic masters. He would tower over them there, for he was the largest statue in the country; and that might be a small, inexpensive revenge, the thought of those vain leaders discountenanced by his huge arrival.

Others believed that Alyosha should stay on his hill. It was, after all, indisputably true that the Soviet army had liberated the country from the Fascists, and that Russian soldiers had died and been buried here; true also that at the time, and for a while afterwards, many had been grateful to Alyosha and his comrades. Why not let him remain where he was? You did not have to agree with every monument. You did not destroy the Pyramids in retrospective guilt at the sufferings of the Egyptian slaves.

At nine thirty one morning, Peter Solinsky was standing beside his office desk, soundlessly interrogating one corner of the bookcase fifteen feet away. This was how he practised for the day’s work. He was midway through a question which stretched the legal rules a little, being less an enquiry than a factual hypothesis with implicit moral denunciation, when the telephone irritatingly announced a visitor. Solinsky briefly excused the bookcase, which was perspiring and mopping its brow in a guilty fashion, and directed his attention to Georgi Ganin, Head of the Patriotic Security Forces (formerly the Department of Internal Security).

Nowadays Ganin wore a suit, to indicate that his work
was an unthreatening, civilian business. But on that day, only a couple of years ago, when he had come to fortunate fame, his corpulence had been trussed up in a lieutenant’s uniform, and his shoulder-flashes pronounced him a member of the North-West Provincial Military Command. He had been sent with twenty militiamen to control what had confidently been described as an unimportant demonstration in the regional capital of Sliven.

It was indeed a small gathering: three hundred local Greens and oppositionists in a sloping cobbled square, stamping their feet and clapping their hands as much to keep warm as anything else. In front of the Communist Party headquarters rose a fat barricade of dirty snow, which in itself would normally have been sufficient protection. But two factors made the occasion different. The first was the presence of the Devinsky Commando, a student organisation which had not yet qualified for a security file. This was hardly surprising, since information on student behaviour had lately become difficult to obtain; and in any case, the Devinsky Commando was registered as a literary society, named after Ivan Devinsky, poet of the region, who despite various decadent and formalist tendencies had proved a patriot and martyr during the fascist invasion of 1941. The second factor was the chance attendance of a Swedish TV team whose locally hired car had broken down the previous day, and who now found themselves with nothing to film but a piece of routine provincial dissent.

Had the security police investigated the Devinsky Commando, they might have discovered that the poet had a reputation as an ironist and provocateur; and that in 1929 his ‘loyal sonnet’ entitled ‘Thank You, Your Majesty’ had led immediately to a three-year exile in Paris. The members
of the student Commando identified themselves by wearing the red bonnets of Junior Pioneers: headgear for ten-year-olds, which was either ludicrously stretched or else satirically attached to the crown with a girlfriend’s hair-clip. The other protesters, like the security forces, had never heard of the Devinsky Commando, and were irritated by what looked like a group of pro-communist infiltrators. Their suspicions were confirmed when the Devinskyites unfurled a banner reading
WE, LOYAL STUDENTS, WORKERS AND PEASANTS, SUPPORT THE GOVERNMENT
.

Pushing their way to the front of the demonstration, the Commando took up a position close to the bank of dirty snow and began to chant. ‘LONG LIVE THE PARTY. LONG LIVE THE GOVERNMENT. LONG LIVE THE PARTY. LONG LIVE THE GOVERNMENT. ALL HONOUR TO STOYO PETKANOV. LONG LIVE THE PARTY.’

After a couple of minutes, the tall french windows on the reviewing balcony opened, and the local party chief emerged to witness for himself a display of support rare in these counter-revolutionary days. Immediately the students widened their repertoire of chants. With fists patriotically raised and red bonnets forming a loyal phalanx, they acclaimed the smiling boss of Sliven:

‘THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE RISES.’

‘THANK YOU FOR THE FOOD SHORTAGES.’

‘GIVE US IDEOLOGY NOT BREAD.’

The students were well drilled and had loud voices. Their fists punched the air, and there was no hesitation as they switched from one slogan to another.

‘THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE RISES.’

‘STRENGTHEN THE SECURITY POLICE.’

‘LONG LIVE THE PARTY.’

‘HONOUR TO STOYO PETKANOV.’

‘THANK YOU FOR THE FOOD SHORTAGES.’

‘GIVE US IDEOLOGY NOT BREAD.’

Suddenly, as if they had taken a silent vote, the rest of the crowd joined in. ‘THANK YOU FOR THE FOOD SHORTAGES’ began to echo furiously round the square, the party chief banged shut the french windows, and the demonstration suddenly acquired a hysterical edge which Ganin knew to be dangerous. His men were drawn up at the side of the building, and they now caught the attention of the Devinsky Commando. Three times the platoon of students advanced a few dozen metres towards the militiamen, chanting:

‘THANK YOU FOR THE BULLETS.’

‘THANK YOU FOR THE MARTYRDOM.’

‘THANK YOU FOR THE BULLETS.’

‘THANK YOU FOR THE MARTYRDOM.’

It was noticeable that the Greens and oppositionists preferred not to take up this cry, waiting for the Commando to rejoin them before calling once more in favour of price rises and food shortages. The TV crew were by this time in position and filming.

Ganin received the order from a stranger in a leather coat, who emerged swiftly from a side door of the party headquarters, mentioned a name and security rank, and instructed him, as a direct order from the party chief, to fire over the heads of the demonstrators, and if that did not disperse them, to fire at their feet. His message imparted, the man disappeared back into the building, though not before his presence had been noted by the students.

‘PLEASE MAY WE JOIN THE SECURITY FORCES,’ they bellowed, then, ‘THANK YOU FOR THE BULLETS. PLEASE MAY WE JOIN THE SECURITY FORCES.’

Ganin marched his men forward twenty metres. The Commando came to meet them. Ganin tried to look confident as he gave the order to aim over the heads of the crowd, but several things alarmed him. First, the authority of the instructions he had received. Second, the fear that some idiot ranker would decide to lower his aim. And third, the knowledge that each militiaman had only one clip of bullets. THANK YOU FOR THE SHORTAGES was a cry which had its echo in the army too.

With a delaying hand raised to his troops, Ganin walked towards the Commando. At the same time a young man wearing two Junior Pioneer bonnets, one clipped over each ear, detached himself from the students. Swedish Television caught the decisive meeting of these two, the bearded student in big red ear-mufflers, and the rotund, pink-cheeked army officer, his breath fogging out before him in the cold air. The cameraman bravely moved in closer, but the sound recordist had sudden thoughts of his family back in Karlstad. This moment of prudence was just as well for the young lieutenant. Had the ensuing conversation been preserved, his rise to authority might have been slower.

‘So, Comrade Officer, are you going to kill us all?’

‘Just go. Disperse and we will not shoot.’

‘But we like it here. We have no classes at the moment. We were enjoying our exchange of views with Party Chief Krumov. Perhaps you could ask the loyal security officer why his esteemed boss broke off our productive discussions.’

Ganin had to make an effort not to smile. ‘I order you to disperse.’

But the student, instead of obeying, came even closer, linking his arm with the lieutenant’s. ‘So, Comrade Officer,
how many of us have you been ordered to kill? Twenty? Thirty? All of us?’

‘Frankly,’ replied Ganin, ‘that’s not possible. We don’t have enough bullets. What with the shortages.’

The student burst out laughing and kissed Ganin suddenly on both cheeks. The pink-faced lieutenant laughed back, his face filling the eye-piece of the Swedish cameraman. ‘Look,’ he said confidentially, ‘I’m sure we can work something out.’

‘Of course we can, Comrade Officer.’ He turned away, and shouted back to his colleagues, ‘MORE BULLETS FOR THE SOLDIERS.’

As the Devinsky Commando advanced, their red bonnets flopping, with alternate cries of DOWN WITH THE SHORTAGES and MORE BULLETS FOR THE SOLDIERS, Ganin gestured uneasily at his men to lower their rifles. They did so anxiously, and didn’t look much happier when each of the students picked out a soldier and embraced him vigorously. But the pictures were splendidly dramatic, and the lack of sound enabled viewers to imagine dialogue which was inevitably more noble. Ganin was transformed in this moment from an indecisive, if not cowardly, junior officer into a symbol of decency, an advertisement for the power of negotiation and the middle way; while his brief, silent exchange of pluming breaths in a cobbled square before a palisade of dirty snow was widely taken as a sign that the army, if forced to choose between the people and the Party, would place its support behind the people.