The October Circle Read online

  “Do you remember your dreams?” Mister Dancho asks.

  “Bits, pieces, like Popov’s images, but I never being able to reconstruct the whole.” Angel is suddenly afraid he has given away too much. “Why is it are you asking?”

  “I was curious, that’s all.”

  “Will you take a drink with us?” the Racer asks to smooth things over.

  Angel’s eyes darken and he ignores the invitation. “My taxi waiting. Can I drop any of you?”

  Poleon immediately accepts and starts counting out some bills to cover his share of the check.

  The Dwarf nods to the Hungarians and they lace their fingers together and skip toward the door.

  “Dog,” Angel orders, pulling the leash taut, “on feet — your seeing-eye Dwarf being ready.”

  Without a word of goodbye he starts after the Hungarians, with the blind dog Dog clawing the floor at his side.

  Poleon hastily shakes hands all around and follows the trail of silence toward the door.

  The American girl, who has gotten the gist of the conversation (Bulgarian and Russian being similar), is bursting with questions. “Eve never seen anything like him — he’s fantastic. Who is the Witch of — “

  “Melnik,” Tacho supplies.

  “Witch of Melnik — who is that?”

  “She is a famous seer,” Tacho tells her. “She is old and blind and lives in a small peasant cottage outside of Melnik, near the Greek border. If you pass that way you can visit her. You smile at things you know nothing about. Some of our academicians have written books about her. The peasants come from as far away as Blagoevgrad to see her; the Greeks even try to slip across the frontier. The ones who get there line up outside her cottage before sunup, holding a piece of sugar in each palm. As the first cock crows, the Witch emerges and calls out to the people by name; people, remember, she cannot see, so she has no way of knowing who is there. She tells them whom they will marry and when to plant and what to plant and whether their children will be born with birth defects. Sometimes she says mysterious things — they’re like puzzles and you have to figure them out.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  The Racer stares at the back of his hand thoughtfully. “I was raised in Melnik, which is a half-hour’s hike from the Witch’s cottage. On my twelfth birthday my mother led me by the hand up the path that runs past her cottage and we waited with the peasants. I held the sugar tightly in each fist. The Witch was young then, but she looked old; the peasants say she was born old. She called out, ‘The boy from Melnik, Tacho.’ My mother pushed me forward until I stood right in front of the door. I was very frightened, but I looked up, looked into her eyes. They were like Angel’s dog — filmy eyes, without pupils, filled with smoke. She took my sugars and smelled one and then the other and said: ‘You will be a boy of motion but a man of movement.’ “

  “But what does it mean?” Melanie wants to know.

  “I’m still trying to figure it out. I think she wanted me to know that there was a difference between the two.” And the Racer adds:

  “She is a very great lady.”

  “I’d like to meet her —after all, I am a practicing Capricorn!”

  Mister Dancho looks at his watch again and then glances with annoyance toward the door. Katya at last! She is standing in the entrance way, squinting into the darkness. Mister Dancho springs up.

  “Pay for me and I’ll settle with you later, Tacho. Dear lady, I shall count myself the poorer if our paths don’t cross again,” he adds in Russian to the girl. And pulling at his cuffs, he disappears.

  “Where’s the fire?” Melanie wonders, looking after Mister Dancho. She turns back to the Racer. “Is the Dwarf really going to marry that girl? She’s only a child.”

  Tacho explains about the Dwarf’s weddings. “Last year he had three.”

  “I feel sorry for the girls. Are they really Hungarian?”

  Tacho nods. “They don’t speak a word of Bulgarian.”

  “But how can they live in a country when they don’t speak the language?”

  “You can only live in a country when you don’t speak the language,” the Racer says matter-of-factly.

  “That sounds like something your Witch of—”

  “Melnik.”

  “ — Melnik might say. Here” — she playfully thrusts a cube of sugar into his hand — “I’ll be the Witch. I’ll tell you something mysterious.” She raises her chin and closes her eyes and says slowly:

  “You have a …”

  Suddenly her eyes open wide; the game is over. “You have a dark interior.”

  “What does that mean, dark interior?”

  “Dark, as in the absence of light. You remind me of those apartments where they close the shutters during the day to keep out the sunlight.”

  The Racer remembers the farmers crowding into the Melnik market at harvest time. “The peasants say there are two kinds of people: those who push downward into the earth, like radishes or carrots, and those who push up, like cornstalks or sunflowers. In Melnik, the old ones still talk about the dark and the light as they finger seeds or a newborn baby.”

  “You re not angry?”

  “I’m not angry.”

  Club Balkan is beginning to empty out; there is a steady trickle of people toward the door. Tacho tries to catch the waiter’s eye to pay the check, but the girl says:

  “When I was little, my father took me to a bike club to see a film clip of you setting the world record.” The memory releases a flood of reminiscenses which moisten her eyes, but she shakes her head and blinks back the tears. “You looked like a knight in armor to me. When you threw your arm into the sky, my heart stopped. I think I must have fallen in love with you then.” She finishes what is left of her cognac and stares into the empty glass. “Later, when my father … I hated you after that.”

  “Is that why you came here — because you hated me?”

  “I told you before, I don’t know why I came here. I mean, I do know why.” She takes a deep breath and begins at the beginning. “I work as a dance therapist in a small town in New Jersey.” She sees that New Jersey makes no sense to him. “A small town near New York. Anyhow, about a year ago, my uncle died and left me five thousand dollars. I wanted to do something with the money that would be — well, something I’d remember all my life. So I flew to Paris, bought a Deux Chevaux and started driving. I’ve always wanted to see where my father was born, so I headed for Moscow by way of Germany and Poland. I stayed there a week, then I went south to the Black Sea. From there I went to Persia. I stayed in Persia for a while, then I started back through Turkey. I hated Turkey; I never imagined such poverty existed. I spent a week in Istanbul. Then I went up to the Black Sea at Varna — “

  “Varna is a tourist trap. The best part of the coast is further south — “

  “I spent three days in Trnovo — “

  “Popov was born in Trnovo. You don’t know him. It’s a great town, isn’t it? It was our capital during the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, when we ruled everything between the Adriatic and the Caspian.”

  “And here I am in Sofia.”

  “How long have you been traveling, all together?”

  “I left New York in, let’s see, in September.” She counts on her fingers. “That’s eleven months ago. Eleven months.”

  “Any Bulgarian would give his right arm to make a trip like that. But we don’t have the possibility. What does it feel like, to make a trip such as the one you are making?”

  She looks at him, then lowers her eyes and speaks into her glass. Her voice, full of shades, is pitched low and tense with contained fright. “I feel like a fly scurrying across a movie screen, trying desperately to make out the figures and the booming dialogue. But it is all patterns of shifting gray and black and white, no matter which direction I run.”

  Melanie doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she looks up. “I felt that way before my trip too.”

  Only a handful of people remain in Club Bal
kan now, and the barman switches on the overhead lights and begins collecting ashtrays and glasses from the tables. The sudden light makes the Racer feel exposed and vulnerable. He turns to a man at the next table who is counting out small change and asks him the time. When the man looks back blankly, Tacho taps his bare wrist where a watch would be if he wore one. The man, drowsy with drink, smiles a silly smile and says in English:

  “Sorry, fella, but I’m not from around here.”

  Melanie translates his answer into Russian and the Racer shrugs. The barman calls over the time and Tacho peels off some bills and piles them on top of the cash register stubs.

  “Where are you staying?” the Racer asks.

  She names a hotel where foreign tourists are usually put up.

  “I’ll walk you over and catch a trolley in Place Lenin.”

  They walk side by side down the stairs, past a gallery of blown-up photographs, including one of the Racer with his hand thrust into the sky. In the lobby the night clerk looks up from his magazine to admire the bare legs of the girl. His once-over makes her nervous and she runs her fingers through her hair, which is parted in the middle, with wisps escaping from the sideburns. Quickening her pace, she follows the Racer through the great revolving door into the street.

  The night is cool and quiet, and the two of them stand there for a moment savoring it. The street is deserted except for a drunk weaving away from Club Balkan. They turn in the opposite direction and start up Don Dukov, then cut across Benkovski to Ruski Boulevard. A few blocks ahead they can make out the giant red star atop the Central Committee building, and Tacho explains what it is when she asks. The cobblestones in Place 9 September are wet, and further along they come to a water wagon with the hoses manipulated by husky women in long blue smocks.

  As they walk, Melanie’s soft Kazan boots make no sound, but the Racer’s shoes echo on the cobblestones. At the corner they have to leap across a rivulet of water to reach the curb. Dimitrov’s tomb, a carbon copy of Lenin’s in Red Square, looms ahead and the two honor guards standing like statues before the door follow the girl’s legs with their eyes, not their heads. Wilting funeral wreaths with satin inscriptions — “From the Plovdiv Komsomol” — lean against the side of the tomb; new wreaths will be substituted before the morning rush hour, and a lush bouquet or two from visiting dignitaries will be laid, with full press coverage, during the day.

  On Stambolski, they come to where the girl has parked her Deux Chevaux. In Persia she paid someone to paint a map on the driver’s door, with a thin red line to indicate her route. Now, squatting alongside the car, she travels it again for the Racer with her thumbnail, ticking off the cities she has seen. “Paris, Luxembourg, Bonn, Berlin, Pozna, Warsaw, Brest Litovsk, Minsk, Smolensk, Moscow, Kharkov, Odessa, Tbilisi …”

  Tacho notices the windshield wipers are still on her car. In Sofia, people with private cars lock them away in the glove compartment so they won’t be stolen; at the first drop of rain, everyone pulls over and races around trying to put them on again. Tacho insists she lock hers away too, and she opens the car and finds her tool kit and hands him a screwdriver. He unscrews the wipers and stows them away in the glove compartment. “Now you’re part Bulgarian,” he says.

  Further along they come across two men and a woman pulling strips of film out of a tangle of reels in a garbage can in front of a motion picture developing studio. They thread the strips between their fingers and hold them up against the light in the window of the American legation, which is across the street, to see what they have. “For Christ’s sake, don’t tear it,” one of the men tells the women irritably. “Maybe we can sell it.”

  Nearby another woman sits on the curb with one shoe off, massaging her stocking foot and hiccupping. “Are you holding your breath?” the other woman calls over.

  “How can I hold my breath and answer you,” the woman complains, hiccupping again. Suddenly she turns on the Racer. “What are you staring at? What is he staring at, huh? Haven’t you seen anyone with the hiccups before?” And she hiccups again.

  Overhead, television antennae jut sideways like metal antlers from the shuttered balconies of apartment buildings.

  They are not far from the girl’s hotel now; Tacho can hear the first trolleys starting up. He turns to the girl and asks her the question he has been aching to ask since he found out who she is.

  “Why did your father do it?”

  She answers instantly, as if she has been expecting the question. “For the money. A bicycle company offered him twenty-five thousand dollars. That was only the beginning; he would have made a lot more endorsing products.”

  “What does that mean, endorsing products?”

  “In America, well-known people go on television and say how they always use such and such a product. It’s called endorsing.”

  “And they pay you for doing that?”

  “Yes, of course. Why else would anybody do it?”

  The Racer nods thoughtfully. “And did the company give you anything after … afterward?”

  The girl smiles faintly. “They gave me a bicycle.”

  At the corner, Place Lenin opens before them: the Black Church on an island in the middle, the hotel off to the right and across the square, a giant statue of Lenin silhouetted against a huge billboard with a graph showing the increase in milk production expected under the next Five-Year Plan. Just around the corner, a young man leans a wooden ladder against the side of a building, climbs gingerly up and begins pasting a small poster onto the wall. As they pass, the girl notices dozens of other posters just like it. They all have black borders and badly reproduced photographs of a man or woman on them.

  “Death notices,” Tacho explains. “When someone dies, his relatives or friends have the right to put up twenty-five around the city. They used to put up as many as they liked, but the walls became papered with them, so now they limit you to twenty-five. He’s using the ladder to put his poster as high as he can. That way it will remain longer when the workmen come by to clear the wall.”

  Tacho steps closer to one and points to the picture of an old man. “ ‘Alexander Nickilov Denev, age 52, died 16 August 1968, after a long illness; an anti-Fascist fighter and a builder of Socialism, mourned by his beloved widow, Tsola Vsilava, and numerous comrades in arms.’ There’s a quotation too — can you make it out?”

  Melanie reads:

  “ ‘I don’t know whether, if things change, they will get better. But I know if things are to get better they must change.’ There’s a name after it. Lichtenberg. Who is Lichtenberg?”

  “I’m a bike racer,” Tacho says. “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  “The fifty-two must be a mistake; he looks at least eighty in that photograph.”

  “Hespent two years in a concentration camp.”

  “Oh.” Then:

  “Did you know him?”

  “I fought in the Resistance with him. I was a boy then. I remember he was an oak of a man, but that was before he was wounded. He was an invalid the rest of his life.”

  “Was he important in the Resistance; was he a general or something like that?”

  “He was important, yes. He was a flag holder, the one who carries the flag and leads the men in an attack.”

  “In America there’s a tradition that when the man with the flag falls, someone else picks it up. Do you have the same here?”

  “We have the same,” Tacho says. “When he fell, someone else became the Flag Holder.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” she says again.

  At the hotel she starts up the steps, hesitates, turns, looks down at him. The moment is awkward. The seconds tick loudly away. Dawn drains the sky over Vitoša. Not knowing what to say, the girl says the first thing that comes into her head. “Do you still race?”

  He has not expected that. “I ride a lot, but I don’t really race. I’m too old for that. I’m training a team for the Sofia-Athens race in three weeks. On
e day we do roadwork up in the mountains” — Tacho nods toward Vitoša. “The next we work on sprinting in the stadium.” He almost lets the thought trail off. At the last instant he adds:

  “We’re sprinting tomorrow afternoon. Would you like to watch? Afterward, if you like, I’ll take you to the Dwarf’s wedding.”

  “I’d like that,” she says with conviction.

  “Well — “ says Tacho.

  “Well — “ says the girl.

  From somewhere nearby comes the delicate ticking of spokes. The man on the ladder hears it too and stops what he is doing to listen. The ticking grows louder. From around the corner appears a man on a unicycle. He is a mime, old and wiry and dressed in black trousers, a skintight black turtleneck and a top hat. His face is painted chalk white. He pedals briskly up to the Racer, stops his unicycle on a dime, balances for an instant as he tips his hat and bows from the waist.

  “Oh, he’s beautiful — “ the girl exclaims.

  The Mime hops off his wheel, leans it against the wall and turns, with a bow, to the man on the ladder. The man looks embarrassed. The Mime stares at him with wild, crazy eyes and bows again, insisting. The man on the ladder shrugs and grudgingly inclines his head back. The Mime bows to the girl and she smiles warmly and bows back. The Mime turns to the Racer and bows fiercely. Holding his bow, he glances up. Their eyes meet and Tacho bows back as if he is honoring the man.

  Everybody is engaged now, and the Mime retreats a few paces toward the street. He draws on imaginary skintight gloves, then turns and slaps his palm onto an imaginary glass wall behind him. The girl thinks she can hear the smack of his palm against the glass. The Mime turns back, crosses his ankles, laces his fingers together behind his head and lounges against the wall he has created.

  “Oh, look,” the girl cries happily, and she claps her hands in delight.