The October Circle Read online

  “I’ll risk everything.”

  “My darling,” Mister Dancho exults. He draws her palm to his lips, which are as soft as a child’s. “I’ll be at Club Balkan later …”he implores, and she seals the rendezvous with a smile. Before it fades, he has slipped out of the ladies’ room.

  For Mr. Dancho, entrances and exits are the parentheses between which he invents himself, and so he gives them as much attention off stage as on. Pausing just outside the threshold of the dining room, he pats his lips with a monogrammed handkerchief, tucks it into his breast pocket so that the tip spills out haphazardly, adjusts his cuffs again, rearranges his facial expression and plunges through the curtain into the waves of sound the way a fish returns to water — a quick splash and he is off and running as if he has never been away.

  “Dobr vecr, Mister Dancho! Kak ste?”

  “Salut, Dancho — how was London, England?”

  “Our conquering Dancho returns! But you must take a drink with us.”

  “Welcome back, Mister Dancho! Did you convert the Queen to Communism?”

  Shaking hands left and right, pecking with his child’s lips at rouged cheeks angled up to him, Mister Dancho drifts from table to table in crosscurrents of conversation. Behind him, waiters in wrinkled black jackets race into and out of the steam-filled kitchen through a swinging door that squeals on its hinges like a cornered cat. At one booth, six actors are arguing over a cure for migraines. They have divided into two camps, the herbalists and the acupuncturists, and appear ready to go to war over the point. Nearby, two adjacent dinner parties are joining forces, the men scraping tables and chairs together while the women hold high the drinks as if they are afraid of mice or flooding. The waiter for the station looks on sullenly, not lifting a finger to help, concerned only with how he will sort the checks. A woman who is table-hopping backs into Mister Dancho, turns, brightens and plants a wet kiss on his lips. Raising her eyebrows, she smiles and moves on, sure that Dancho’s eyes will follow her. Knowing she is sure, he looks away, his fingers scraping the excess wetness from his lips.

  A darkly handsome young actor grabs Dancho’s arm as he passes. His name is Rodzianko, and he is the star of an immensely popular television series in which Bulgarian intelligence agents foil the American CIA every Monday between 8:00 and 9:00 P.M. (In the most recent episode, Rodzianko was abducted to Greece. “How many counterespionage operatives in Bulgaria?” the CIA interrogator demanded. “Eight million — our entire population!” Rodzianko replied arrogantly.)

  “Just the man I’ve been looking for,” Rodzianko insists now. He pulls Dancho’s head toward him and, lowering his voice to a stage whisper, gives him a hot tip on the Paris stock market.

  “My dear fellow,” Dancho bellows over the din, “how can I show my appreciation? I’ll cable my broker first thing in the morning.”

  Rodzianko looks at Mister Dancho in astonishment. “You’ll cable your broker? Just like that?”

  “I’ll use a code, naturally,” Mister Dancho shoots back, inventing himself as he goes along. “I’ll tell him: ‘Don’t buy such and such.’ He’ll understand.”

  Mister Dancho sidesteps a waiter hurtling across the room with half a dozen plates of kebapeta balanced on an arm, then stops to chat with a middle-aged portrait artist who has recently divorced his wife and married his mistress, who happens to be the granddaughter of an alternate member of the Presidium.

  “Business is booming,” yells the artist, whose name is Punch. He is very drunk. “Never had it s’good. I’m into landscapes nowadays, you know. Day doesn’t go by but I get a commission from one of those neopreposterous tourist traps on the Black Sea.”

  “I thought they went in for portraits,” Mister Dancho ventures.

  “Portraits! Portraits have to be changed every time someone in the superstructure sneezes. But a good landscape, Christ, you can get ten or fifteen years’ wear out of a good landscape.” The artist swivels in his seat and thumps the back of a man at the table behind him. “Did you catch that? Mister Dancho here thinks I could give ‘em portraits. That’za laugh!”

  Dancho leans closer to the painter. “Would you do a portrait for me?”

  The painter sees he is serious. “Sure, why not. Who you have in mind?”

  “Alexander Dubek.”

  “Alex — ” the painter roars with laughter.

  At the far end of the table, directly opposite the portrait painter, sits a beautiful television actress with a scrubbed Slavic face — full pink cheeks and large brown eyes. Rumor has it that she is the illegitimate daughter of the Soviet marshal who led the Russian armies that “liberated” Bulgaria in the closing days of the Great Patriotic War. Mister Dancho looks the television actress in the eyes and she stares back, a belligerent smile forming on her lips.

  “Give us a trick,” Dancho’s artist friend calls.

  Never lifting his eyes from the actress’s face, Dancho strides over to her and dips two fingers into her low-cut bodice. Someone at the table gasps. The actress doesn’t bat an eyelash, but the man sitting next to her starts up angrily. An older man next to him puts a restraining hand on his elbow and whispers something and he sinks back — perhaps a shade too eagerly, Dancho judges. From between his fingers Mister Dancho begins to extract lengths of silk. With a flourish, he shakes the fabric loose and holds it up for everyone to see.

  It is made up of small Czechoslovak flags sewn end to end.

  An uneasy murmur goes round the table as Mister Dancho laughingly beats a retreat.

  “It’s all good fun, friends,” the former portrait painter, suddenly sober, assures everyone. But a thin man with a Party pin in his lapel says quietly:

  “Bastard — someday one of them will go too far.”

  The old waiter Stuka approaches Mister Dancho. There is a suggestion of a shuffle to his walk, an almost imperceptible hunch to his shoulders, a hint of vagueness to his speech. Stuka, who can still spend eight hours a day on his feet thanks to the lace-up high shoes with built-in arches that Mister Dancho once brought him from West Germany, bows and points toward the thick red curtain that divides the private room from the main dining room of the restaurant, which is called Krimm.

  “They are all here, all except the Dwarf and the one you call the Rabbit. And Valentine, who is off singing in Italy.”

  Mister Dancho reaches into Stuka’s breast pocket and produces a thick wad of American dollar bills, a currency it is illegal to possess.

  “Ha! You devil, Stuka,” Mister Dancho whispers, as if excited by the find, “hoarding hard currency again!”

  Dancho smiles warmly and Stuka, shaking his head happily, reaches into his own breast pocket to see if Dancho has left any of the bills behind. As usual, he has. Stuka starts to protest, but Dancho motions him to remain silent and parts the curtain to peek into the private dining room.

  Nothing has changed. (“Nothing ever changes,” the Flag Holder is fond of saying, “except our point of view.”) The table is cluttered with overflowing ashtrays, abandoned dinner plates and half-empty bottles of mineral water and red wine from Melnik, a small town near the Greek border that cultivates vines imported from Bordeaux. A single glass of cognac, full to the brim, rests — as always, untouched — before the Flag Holder.

  In theory, the room is open to the public. In practice, only a handful of people would have the nerve to use it without an invitation from one or another member of the “October Circle” — an informal group that takes its name from its only female member, Octobrina Dimitrova, who was born on the October day the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace and named Octobrina to honor the revolution. The four people who are in the room now, sitting in straightbacked chairs beneath blown-up photographs of themselves, are all charter members. For them the room is a home away from home. Small, windowless, it is dominated by a heavy wooden table and a massive sideboard (“A period piece,” the Flag Holder calls it, “Stalin Gothic!”) in which the restaurant’s accounts are stored.

 
Looking through the peephole he has created in the curtain, Mister Dancho cannot make out who is speaking. But he knows from the way everyone hangs on his words that Popov must be reading his list.

  “One plastic contraceptive coil, manufactured in France by the look of it. One Communist Party card, undated but unlaminated, which indicates it is fairly old, in the name of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Dreschkova. Do you recognize the name, Lev? She was the wife of the poet Dreschko, who hanged himself when they confiscated his manuscripts.” Popov lets his breath whistle softly through his teeth, a sign that he is rummaging in his brain for a misplaced detail. “Sssssssss. There was a Dreschko who fought in Spain with you, wasn’t there, Lev? I ask myself if he was any relation?”

  “The Dwarf knew him too — he was in the circus before the war,” the Flag Holder replies thoughtfully. “I seem to recall he had a younger brother who wrote poetry.”

  “Must be the same family,” Popov guesses. “Whatever happened to him?”

  “He worked with Georgi Dimitrov in Moscow for a time, then he just disappeared. Dimitrov once told me he made discreet inquiries, but he never received an answer. From this Dimitrov assumed that Dreschko died in Siberia.”

  Popov stares, with unfocused eyes, at the table. Then he snaps his head. “Let me see, where was I? Sssssssss. Ah, one electrical bill in an unopened envelope, addressed to ‘Resident, eighty-four Stalin Boulevard, Sofia,’ postmarked eight January nineteen fifty-four, with the words ‘Deceased’ and ‘Left no forwarding address’ written across the face of the envelope. One plastic reproduction of our statue to the unknown soldier, with the gold paint peeling away; I wrote a poem once — is it possible you remember it, Octobrina? — about a man who tells the authorities he knows the name, rank and serial number of the unknown soldier.”

  Smiling inquisitively, Octobrina Dimitrova shakes her head no, and the Flag Holder asks:

  “And?”

  Popov looks puzzled. “And what?”

  “The man who knows the name, rank and serial number of the unknown soldier,” the Flag Holder replies politely. “What happens to him?”

  Popov’s throat rattles gleefully. “Why, he’s shot for trying to deprive the state of its heroes, and buried in an unmarked grave, that’s what happens to him. A few decades later, some Reformers came along and put a marker on the grave announcing the presence, in the earth below, of the remains of the unknown prisoner!” Popov looks down at his ledger. “Where was I? Sssssssss. Ah, yes, one broken violin with a single string on it.” Popov’s eyes wander off to one side, trying to recall the details of another story. “There was a well-known Russian violinist in the thirties who only gave concerts in towns without newspapers. It was at the height of the purges and he was afraid a review would draw attention to him at a time when it was dangerous to draw attention to oneself. One day a critic from Pravda happened to hear him play and wrote a rave review. When the violinist heard he had a review in Pravda, he dropped dead on the spot. Heart attack. They swear it’s true. Does it ring a bell, Valentine?”

  “Valentine’s not here tonight,” Octobrina reminds him gently.

  “Ah, yes, so you said, so you said. No matter. Where was I? Sssssssss. Ah, here” —Popov taps his ledger excitedly — “here’s an exceptionally interesting item. One …”

  With four stubby fingers wedged between his high starched collar and the ever-present red welt on his bony neck, Atanas Popov works his way down the list, which is written, as always, in a pocket ledger in a tiny, meticulous handwriting. His breath whistling through his teeth like a slow leak in an inner tube (“Sssssssss”), his brow furrowed and his good eye bulging behind the thick pince-nez, he struggles to read each entry. Occasionally his fingers abandon their post under the collar to edge the pince-nez down to the tip of the misshapen nose (it was given considerable attention by several interrogators before his “rehabilitation”) where it acts as a magnifying glass. When he finally makes sense of the handwriting, Popov’s small, agile head bobs excitedly — “Ah, yes, that’s it” — and he plunges on.

  Popov is half-deaf and half-mad, though at any given moment nobody can say which dignity (the Flag Holder insists on equating insanity with “dignity” rather than “indignity”) has the upper hand: people accuse him of being insane when he has merely turned down his hearing aid (Swiss manufacture, a gift from Mister Dan-cho); the all-union psychiatrist who examined him after he cast the only dissenting vote at an important Party meeting neglected to commit him because he thought he was merely hard of hearing. And so Popov remains at large, shoring up against his ruin, in the strident tones usually used by people who have trouble hearing themselves, his daily heap of broken images.

  “… One copy of the German edition of Das Kapital; Tacho here is too young to know this, but the first country in the world to translate Papa Marx was Mother Russia. Ha! Translations are the kiss of death. They say poetry is what’s lost in translation That’s what they say. As for me, I’ve been published in translation only. Which is probably why the handful of people in the West who have an opinion of me have a low opinion of me. Where was I? Sssssssss. Ah, yes. One packet of Rumanian headache suppositories, empty, marked ‘Not to be used after January 10, 1937/ That’s a coincidence. Mandelstam wrote a poem entitled ‘January 10, 1934.’ Hmmmmm. One fragment from an icon, dating — judging from the absence of any halo over the head of the infant Jesus — from the Second Bulgarian Kingdom; you have only to glance at an icon to realize that iconoclasm is the only reasonable way of life. Ha! What do you say to that, Lev? Ah, here’s my last but not least. One carton of bankbooks listing, in an anal handwriting common to the English upper classes, deposits and withdrawals for nineteen twenty-nine from the Balkan branch of Barclays. Sssssssss.”

  Popov looks up from his ledger in time to see Mister Dancho thrust aside the curtain (another entrance!) and sweep into the room.

  “Friends, Romans, comrades — “ he cries, flinging his arms wide as if he intends to embrace everybody at once.

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “Is it you, Mister Dancho?” exclaims Popov, his good eye bulging behind his pince-nez.

  “We didn’t expect you until — “

  “Dear Dancho, a thousand times welcome!”

  One by one, with great warmth, Mister Dancho embraces his friends. Then, settling his bulk into a vacant seat beneath a blown-up photograph of himself as a young man taking a curtain call on some long-forgotten stage, he points a playful finger at the Racer.

  “Tacho, dear boy, you have changed — for the worse, bien entendu. You never used to button the top button of your shirt. If you do that, you must wear a tie like the Flag Holder here. What is it? Trying to look like the perfect proletariat? Or perhaps it is just age — ”

  Popov interrupts in accented English:

  “He grows old, he grows old, he shall wear the bottoms of his trousers rolled. Sssssssss.” He reaches into his side pocket, turns down his hearing aid and sits back with a distant smile on his lips to watch the mouths move.

  “Tell us about London, England,” demands the Flag Holder, whose name is Lev Mendeleyev.

  “And be sure to give us the unexpurgated version,” urges the Racer, whose name is Tacho Abadzhiev.

  “Dear Dancho, don’t mince words with me,” Octobrina Dimitrova teases. “Tell us of your conquests.”

  “There was a German girl,” Mister Dancho concedes. “ Til do anything,’ she whispered, so I tried everything I’d ever tried. ‘I mean absolutely anything, anything at all,’ she panted, so I tried everything I’d ever read about. ‘Hey, I’m serious, really, anything under the sun,’ she moaned, so I dipped into my imagination and invented a few things. She licked her lips. ‘Listen,’ she begged, ‘there’s nothing I won’t do, absolutely nothing.’ “

  “What did you do then?” the Racer demands impatiently.

  “Why, I packed away my magic wand and beat a retreat, naturally. What else could I do?”

  Mister Dancho j
oins his friends in laughter; he has an endearing way of laughing at his own stories. He is beginning to get into the spirit of things, rocking back and forth and gesturing extravagantly as he talks. There was another girl, what the British call a bird. I rented a Daimler and took her to dinner at an old inn on an island in the Thames. There were scratches on the bar from the spurs of the Crusaders. We drank from pewter mugs and ate dinner in a corner of the garden next to a bed of forget-me-nots. Can you visualize it? At one point the bird looks up at the sky, a breathless expanse of stars, and says: ‘Looks just like a bloomin planetarium:” Shaking his head with exaggerated sadness, Mister Dancho repeats the line. “ Looks like the planetarium!’ “

  “Dear Dancho,” sighs Octobrina, “for you sex is mere recreation, something you do to keep your weight under control. Will you ever settle down and get married again?”

  Mister Dancho and the Racer ooh and aah at the suggestion, and Popov, tuning into the conversation, says:

  “You think wives are bad. Widows are worse. Remember what Stalin said about Krupskaya. ‘We’ll have to appoint another widow for Lenin’ is what he said. Ha! That’s humorous. Appoint another widow!” Popov’s face suddenly tenses. “It was the only joke Stalin ever made. Sssssssss.” Leaning back, he turns down his battery and removes himself from the conversation.

  “I’ve had my fill of living with women,’’ Mister Dancho announces jovially, but everyone understands he is speaking out of bitterness. “Living with a woman is the process of peeling away masks. When you start out, you pee in private so as not to spoil your image. Before very long you discover you are peeing with the door open, scratching your arse, farting freely.” Mister Dancho summons a memory. “One day I peeled away a mask too many. And so she peeled away another one of her masks — that particular one was undying affection — and left me.”

  Octobrina smiles. “If you peel away enough masks you get to the real you.”

  But the Flag Holder shakes his head. “There is always another mask underneath. We are constructed like onions — all layers, no core.”