At times he spoke, some evenings more than others. Said things out loud that many of them literally did not dare to think, lest some secret police sorcerer divine their blasphemies. Antipin was fearless. What were dark and secret passions to them seemed to him merely words that required saying. Thus it was he who spoke of their lifelong agonies: landlords, moneylenders, the men who bought their fish and squeezed them on the price. It seemed he was willing to challenge the gods, quite openly, without looking over his shoulder for the inevitable lightning bolt.
“To them you are animals,” he said. “When you are fat, your time has come.” “But we are men,” a fisherman answered, “not animals. Equal in the eyes of God.” He was an old man with a yellowed mustache.
Antipin waited. The silence in the smoky room was broken only by the steady drip of water from the eaves above the window. The café was in the house of one of the fishermen's widows. After her husband drowned, people stopped by for a fruit brandy or a mastica at the kitchen table. Somehow, the condolence visits never quite ceased, and in time the widow's house became a place where men gathered in the evenings for a drink and a conversation.
Finally, the fisherman spoke again: “We have our pride, which all the world knows, and no one can take it from us.”
Antipin nodded agreement slowly, a witness who saw the truth in what others said. “All people must have pride,” he answered after a time, “but it is a lean meal.” He looked up from the plank table. “And they can take it from you. They can put you on your knees when it is to their purpose to do so. Your house belongs to the landowner. The fish you catch belongs to the men who buy it from you. The little coins buried in your dooryard belong to the tax collectors. And if they take them from you, you will get nothing back. These people do with you as they wish. They always have, and it will continue in this way until you stop it.”
“So you say,” the fisherman answered. “But you are not from here.”
“No,” Antipin said, “I am not from this town. But where I come from they fucked us no less.”
“We are taught,” the fisherman said after a while, “that such things—such things as have been done elsewhere—are against our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“Perhaps they are right.” Antipin's face was that of a man who acceded to superior logic. “When they come to take you away, you must remember to call for the priest.”
At this, a few people chuckled. Someone at the back of the room called out dramatically, “Father Stepan, come quick and help us!” A hoot of laughter answered him.
“A grand day,” another man said, “when the capon runs to save the cock!”
Antipin smiled. When it grew quiet again, the fisherman said, “You may laugh while you can. When you are older, perhaps you will see things in a different light.”
The man sitting next to Antipin bristled. “I'll go to meet God on my own two feet, not on my knees,” he said. “Besides,” he added, slightly conciliatory, “there can be nothing wrong with a little laughter.”
“There can be.”
It was said plainly, from where Khristo sat on the edge of a table facing Antipin's end of the room.
“It is a step,” Antipin said, “to laugh at them. The holy fathers in their expensive robes, the king, the officers. But it is only the first step. We have a proverb …”
But they were not to hear the proverb. What stopped Antipin in midsentence was a series of loud bangs against the wood of the door frame on the exterior of the house. A puzzling sort of sound—a pistol shot would have had them all up and moving—everyone just looked up and sat still. A moment later they were on their feet. Glass shattered out of the room's single window—a glittering shower followed by an iron bar, which swung back and forth to finish the job, hammering against the interior of the frame. The men in the café stood transfixed, every eye on the window. The iron bar withdrew. There was a shout outside, something angry but indecipherable, then a glass jug was thrown into the room. It was filled with a brownish-yellow liquid that plumed into the air as the jug rotated in flight. It broke in three when it landed and the liquid flowed slowly across the floorboards in a small river. Stove oil—the reek of it filled the room. The men found their voices, angry, tense, but subdued, as though to conceal their presence. From without, a cry of triumph, and a blazing torch of pitch-coated rope hurled through the window. The fire caught in two stages. First, small flames flickered at the edges of the oily river. Then an orange ball of flame roared into the air with a sigh like a puff of wind.
The earlier banging sound now began to make sense, as several men thrust their weight against the door but could not open it. It had been nailed and boarded shut from outside. The intention was to burn them to death inside the widow's café.
The man near Antipin who, moments earlier, had made clever remarks, leaped into the air and screamed as the fire exploded. Seeing the mob of men shoving and cursing at the door, he rushed to the window and started to clamber through, without heed to the long shards of glass hanging from the frame. The iron bar, swung at full force, hit him across the forehead, and he collapsed over the sill like a dropped puppet.
Khristo Stoianev stood quietly, resisting the panic inside him. His eyes swept about the room, to the door and the press of bodies in front of it, to the smashed window, trying to choose. Before he could move in either direction, a hand took him above the elbow, a hard grip that hurt. It was Antipin, face completely without expression. “A cold cellar. There must be one,” he said softly.
“Where she cooks.” Khristo nodded toward the kitchen area, separated from the main room by a sagging drape on a cord.
“Come then,” Antipin said.
They brushed the drape aside. There was an old black wood stove, a rickety table, a bent-twig crucifix on the wall. A bin where potatoes and onions were stored through the winter. In order to circulate the air and keep the food from rotting, a square had been cut in the wall, then covered with a metal screen to keep the rats out. In winter, a piece of cardboard was hung over it on a nail to keep out the worst of the cold.
The widow, on hands and knees, was in the act of crawling through the broken-out screen of the narrow square. She disappeared suddenly, with a little cry, and they could see the night outside.
Antipin stopped him with a hand on the chest. “Let us see if there is a surprise planned. Wait for me to go through, then shout for the others.”
He was a square block of a man, but he moved like a monkey. Grabbing the upper edge of the frame with both hands, he swung out feet first. A few moments later, his face appeared.
“It's safe,” he said.
Khristo moved toward the window, grasped the frame as Antipin had. Antipin raised a palm. “The others,” he said. Khristo shouted, heard a thunder of footsteps behind him, then went through. He landed on the side of the house facing the river, away from the dirt road.
Antipin peered cautiously around the side of the house, then waved for Khristo to follow him. Up by the road, a group of silhouettes stood beside a farmer's open-bed truck. The shapes were silent, moving restlessly, pacing, turning to one another. In the darkness, Khristo could not see details—faces or clothing. One man detached himself from the crowd and walked slowly down the hill, toward the house.
Antipin, meanwhile, pulled the board away from the door and a group of coughing men came out in swirls of smoke and cinders. It was not difficult to jerk the nails from the wood, a kick from within would have done it, but the board had been cleverly positioned, across the knob, so that kicks against the door were ineffectual, and no one had thought to kick at the knob, an awkward target.
Khristo watched as the board was worked free of the door. It took him a moment to understand the device, it was too simple. But, when he did understand, something in the knowledge turned his stomach. Somebody, somewhere, in appearance a man like himself, had thought this method through. Had studied the problem: how to obstruct a door when setting fire to a house full of people so that those within could not escape, and had found a solution, and applied it. That there were those in the world who would study such things Khristo Stoianev had never understood. Now he did.
The man coming down the hill was Khosov the Policeman, brother of Khosov the Postman who kept the rhythm for the National Union parades. He was a policeman because no one had known what else to do with him. He was a man whose mouth never closed, who stared dreamily around him, seemingly amazed at a world full of ordinary things. He was slow. Everything had to be figured out. But when he did figure it out—and eventually he always did, especially if there was somebody around to help him—he could be swept away by a blind, insentient rage. At one time he had been much persecuted by children, until he beat one little boy very nearly to death with a broom handle.
The men stood around and watched the house burn. There was nothing to be done about it. A few buckets of water were tossed on neighboring roofs, to protect the dry reeds from embers floating through the night air. The widow knotted her hands in the binding of her apron and held it in her mouth while she wept, her wet cheeks shining in the firelight. The men around her were silent. They had brought a disaster down on her, and there was nothing to be done about that either.
Policeman Khosov came down the hill and stopped ten feet from Antipin. His eyes searched the crowd carefully; one had better not make a mistake here, as one's fellows watched from the road above. They were counting on him, trusted him to go it alone; he wasn't going to—not if he had to stand here all night—let them down.
One to another, each in turn, he peered at them, his face knotted with concentration, sweat standing on his brow with the effort of it, mouth open as always. Even though it might be you he sought, the sheer agony of the process made you want to help him.
Finally, he discovered Antipin, his eyes widening with the amazement of having gotten it right. He pointed with his arm fully extended, like an orator.
“You,” he said. “You, communist, come with me now.” His other hand rested on the butt of a large revolver in a holster.
Antipin made no move. There was a long silence, the fire crackling and popping as the dry roof timbers caught.
“Did you hear me?”
Antipin took a step forward, inclined his head toward Khosov and said, “What did you say?”
“I said come with me. No trouble, now.”
Antipin took another step. The fire played shadows on his back. He spoke very slowly, as to a child. “Go back up this hill, you braying ass, and tell your friends up there that their mouths will be full of dirt. Can you remember that?” The “mouths full of dirt” referred to events in the grave.
They watched Khosov's face. Watched the slow painful process as the information was worked at, disassembled, examined. When comprehension arrived, his hand tightened on the butt of the pistol but it was much too late.
Antipin flowed easily through the space between them and punched Khosov in the heart, a downward motion, as though his balled fist were a hammer. It blew the breath from Khosov's mouth and made him sit down and wrap his arms around his chest. Anti-pin leaned over and took the revolver from the holster and smashed it to pieces on a rock. Khosov groaned, then hunched over, struggling to breathe. Antipin reached down and put two fingers inside his nostrils and jerked his head upright. Khosov gave a shrill little cry like a hurt animal.
“Now you go up there and tell them what I said. That they shall eat the dirt.”
Antipin let him go and he managed to stand up, still gasping for air. Blood ran freely from his nose and he tried to stop it with his hand. He gave Antipin one terrified glance—this is a thing that makes pain, stay away from it always—then turned and scrabbled up the hill, holding his nose, head turtled down between his shoulders like a child running away from a beating.
Khristo watched him go, then turned to look at the men around him, illuminated by the light of the burning house. They coughed and spit, trying to get the smoke out of themselves. Someone had dragged the man from the windowsill where he had fallen and laid his smoking body on the ground. He had been burned black in the fire, but those who had heard the sound of the iron bar knew he had been beyond feeling anything at all. Up on the road, the group of silhouettes shifted nervously as Khosov the Policeman scurried toward them.
Khristo sensed clearly that this was not the end of it, that it would go on, that each act would become a debt to be repaid with interest. Nikko's death had seemed to him, to his family, a tragedy of bad fate—like a drowning, or a mother taken at childbirth. You had to live with death, God gave you no choice. Today it was your turn, tomorrow it would touch your neighbor; thus people gathered around you, held you up with their spirit, tried to fill the empty place. He now understood that Nikko's death was a tragedy of a different kind. It was part of something else; there was a connection, a design, at first faint, now much clearer. The unknown intelligence that conceived a method of blocking doors could also see a purpose in the murder of a fifteen-year-old for laughing at a parade.
As Khosov climbed toward the road, a man near Khristo said, “We had better stand together here.”
The old fisherman took a step back. “I am no part of this.”
“Go home then,” someone said. “They know where you live.”
“I do not oppose them. I will tell them that.”
“Then there will be no problem,” the man said, a sour irony in his voice.
On the road, Khosov and the others climbed onto the back of the truck, which stuttered to life and bounced away down the dirt road.
Khristo found Antipin at his shoulder. “Come with me,” the Russian said. “Let us take a little walk together.”
They walked down to the river, past the sagging pole docks, to the sand beach below the walls of the old fort, called Baba Vida—Grandma Vida—built by the Turks three hundred years earlier, though some of the inner walls had blocks set by Greek and Roman hands.
It was well after midnight, a stiff breeze blew off the river, they could just make out the dark bulk of the Romanian shore on the other side. Antipin rolled two cigarettes and gave one to Khristo, lit a wooden match with his thumbnail. They bent toward each other to protect the flame from the wind. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness as they walked along the beach.
“You understand, do you not,” Antipin said, “that they meant for me to kill him.”
“Who?”
“The policeman.”
“Khosov?”
“If that's his name.”
“Why?”
“Why. To create an incident, to make politics, to give their newspapers something to say: bloody-fanged Bolshevik murders local policeman. Yes?”
Khristo thought about it for a time. He understood it, but it seemed very strange. Events occurred, newspaper stories were written. That the sequence could be staged—events made to happen so that stories would be written—had simply never crossed his mind.
“The murder was their alternative, a second scheme to try in case their first one failed.”
Khristo squinted with concentration. The world Antipin was describing seemed obscure and alien, a place to be explained by an astrologer or a magician. Violence he knew, but this was a spider web.
“You see,” he continued, “they meant for all of us to die in that house. An accident, they would say. Those pigs were swilling brandy and some lout knocked over an oil lamp and whoosh, there it went and too bad. But you see, Khristo Nicolaievich, I repeat only their words. And words may be spoken in different ways. Their fine faces would tell a much different story. The wink, the sly look, the flick of a finger that chases a fly, would give those words quite another meaning. We burnt them up, they would say, with pride in their eyes. That's how it is, boys. We take care of our own problems around here. We don't go crying to the politsiya. We see something wrong—we go ahead and fix it.”
Khristo nodded silently. Veiko, the others, were like that.
“So, you can see how it works? They had the policeman ready in case we got out of the house. Sent him down to arrest me. Knew very well he was too stupid to manage it. A simple provocation. Right?”
“Right.”
“You are a thinker, that I can tell. You turn the world over in your mind to see if it is truly round.”
Khristo was both flattered and a little uncomfortable to be addressed in this way. One didn't hear compliments. He took a drag at his cigarette, feeling very much the man. There was something so admirable about Antipin. The local toughs were blowhards, dangerous only in a group. Antipin was strong in another way entirely, he had an assurance, carried himself like a man who owned the ground wherever he stood. The notion that he, son of a fisherman in a little town at the end of the world, could win the respect of such a man was definitely something to be thought about.
“I try to understand things,” he answered cautiously. “It is important that people understand”—here he got lost—“things,” he finished, feeling like a bird with one wing.
“Naturally,” Antipin said. “So you see their intention. Get rid of a problem, let everybody here and about know you got rid of it, and perhaps others will not be so quick to cause problems. Bravery is a quirky thing at best—you know the old saying about brave men?”
“All brave men are in prison?”
“Just so. We have it a little differently—all brave men have seen heaven through bars—but the thought is almost the same.” He was quiet for a time. Somewhere out on the river, in the distance, was the sound of a foghorn. When he spoke again, his voice was sad and quiet. “We Slavs have suffered. God knows how we have suffered. In the West, they say we cannot be bothered to count our dead. But we have learned about human nature. We paid a terrible price to learn it, because you must see desperation before you can understand how humans truly are. Then you know. Lessons learned in that way are not forgotten. Do you see this?”
He paused a moment, then continued. “I will tell you a story. When Catherine was empress of Russia—you'll remember, she was the one who fucked horses—she chanced to be wandering one day in a wood some distance from St. Petersburg and found a beautiful wildflower. She was enraptured by it, such a tiny, perfect thing, and so she decreed right then and there that a soldier be assigned to guard the spot just in case, in future days, it should bloom again. Eighteen years later, someone chanced to find that order in a file and went out there, and there was a soldier guarding a spot in the forest, in case a wildflower might bloom, in case, if it did bloom, some shitfoot of a peasant might come along and stomp on it—as if he had nothing better to do.”
Khristo was properly silent for a moment; he loved and respected a story like little else. Antipin bent to the sand, put his cigarette out, slipped the remnant in his pocket.
“Was the flower grown? When they went there the second time?”
“The story does not say. I like to think it wasn't. But the point has to do with being ruled. Being someone else's property. Fifty years ago the landlords owned their serfs, hundreds of them, to do with as they pleased. They would marry them off, one to another, to please their wives' romantic fantasies. We love dolls in Russia, Khristo Nicolaievich, it helps us remember our past.”
“Perhaps it was like that here too,” Khristo said. “When the Turks ruled us.”
“The Turk still rules you, my friend, except that he has taken off the fez and put on a crown. Czar Boris, your king calls himself. Czar! And he is the toy of the army and the fascist officers' clique that calls itself Zveno, the chain link. You are young, and have lived a natural life on this river, perhaps you don't yet understand how these bastards work. You see Veiko and his little army, and you know them for what they are—bullies, drunken piss-bags out for a good time. But when there is fertile political soil, your Veiko will soon be a towering tree. As things stand now, he is the future of this country.”
He paused a moment, cleared his throat. “Forgive me, there is a demon in me that demands to make speeches. Let me tell you, instead, what will happen here. Your brother died at the hands of swine, and nothing was done. Nothing will be done.”
Khristo's heart sank. A thousand times he had wished that that night could be lived over again, that he could take Nikko by the scruff of the neck, as a wise older brother should have, and haul him away from the ridiculous parade. He had loved his brother well enough, his death was a piece torn away from his own life, but there was more than that. The sorrow of the family had lodged in his father, and he suspected, no, he knew, that his father blamed him for it.
“Do not feel shame,” Antipin said quietly, reading his mood. “It was not your fault, no matter what you think. You should not blame yourself. I do not grant absolution, I am not a priest. But it is history that I understand, and this thing had to happen. It was meant to happen. That it happened to you, to your brother, is sorrowful but you will someday see that it was inevitable. The important thing is this: what will you do now?”
“I don't know.” His voice sounded small. They had reached the end of the beach and stood for a time, the Turkish fortress looming above them, the river running quietly along the sand, white foam visible in the darkness.
“I will presume,” Antipin said, “to jump history a pace and I will tell you what to do. Do not waste your time with grief. It is a great flaw in our character, our Slavic nature, to do that. We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain.”
“What then?”
“Come with me. East.” Antipin nodded his head downriver.
His eyes followed Antipin's gesture into the darkness, toward the East. His stomach fluttered at the idea of such a journey, as though he had been invited to step off the edge of the world.
“Me?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Why?” In wonder.
“Here, in this town, it will go on. You will not survive it. They murdered your brother; they must now presume you to be their mortal enemy, very troubling to keep an eye on. As the eldest brother, responsibility to even the score rests with you. With me or without me, Khristo Nicolaievich, you must go away. You may very well save your family's life, you will certainly save your own.”
Khristo had not meant why go. He had meant why me. But Antipin had answered the wrong question the right way. It would happen like the old feuds—one of mine, one of yours, until only one stood. Since Nikko's death he had hidden this from himself but it festered within him. Now it had been said aloud and a weight fell away.
“Come with me,” Antipin said, “and I will teach you something. I will teach you how to hurt them. Hurt them in ways that they do not begin to understand, hurt them so that they cry for mercy, which, by then, I think you will not grant. Your country has a sickness. We know the sickness well because we were once its victims, and we know how to cure it. We have taught others, we can teach you. You yearn to see the world, to move among men, to do things that matter. I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse's backside. Come with me, my friend, it is a chance at life. This river goes many places, it does not stop in Vidin.”
Khristo's heart rose like the sun. These were words he had waited all his life to hear without realizing, until now, that he waited. The river, he knew from hours of droning in the dusty schoolhouse, did not stop in Vidin. It rose in Germany, its legendary source a stone basin in the courtyard of a castle of the Fürstenberg princes in the Black Forest. Called the Donau by all German-speaking peoples, it moved through the Bohemian forests to Vienna, crossed into Czechoslovakia at Bratislava, where they named it the Dunaj, turned south through the Carpathians into northern Hungary, divided the twin cities of Buda and Pesth, flowed south into Yugoslavian Serbia, passed Belgrade at the confluence of the river Sava, known now as the Duna, roared through the Iron Gate—a narrow gorge in the Transylvanian Alps—and headed east, serving as a border between Romania and Bulgaria, where it was called Dunărea to the north and Dunav to the south. Then, at last, it turned north for a time and split into three streams entering the Romanian delta, snaking through the marshes to Izmail, Sulina, and Sfintu Gheorghe, where it emptied into the Black Sea, bordered by the Russian Crimea and Turkey, where the Caucasus mountains ran down to the sea, where Europe ended and Asia began.
“Well,” Antipin said, “how shall it be?”
“I …” He was not sure how to say it. “I do not think I am a communist.”
Antipin dismissed that wordlessly, throwing it away on the wind with a broad flip of the hand.
“Does it not matter?”
“You are a patriot. That matters. You are not our enemy. That too matters. Some day, we may convince you to be our true friend. All we ask is opportunity.”
They turned and walked back along the sand toward the town, where it was quiet and dark. So there will be cities, Khristo said silently, talking to his destiny. He had argued with it, prayed to it—to him it was a live presence, which might or might not heed petitions and curses, but one had to try—damned or praised it depending on what it did with him. Oh but what a trickster it was, this sly eel of a fate that wiggled his life about. He had yearned for Vienna or—someone had to find treasure, else why ever look—Paris. Now he rather thought it would be Moscow. Turn around then, and face east. Nothing new in this country. Still, a city. Golden onion domes, elegant buildings, people who read books and talked into the night of important things. Like Antipin, they would understand and appreciate him, encourage him. His imagination dined on caviar and inhaled the perfume of the one who sat across the table yet leaned so close.
“When?” he said.
“Tomorrow,” Antipin said. “They are done for tonight, except for the drinking and the singing. Tomorrow is soon enough.”
What few things he had, Khristo tossed onto a blanket in a small pile, then he tied the corners together in a thick knot. At dawn, it started to rain hard, little streamlets poured off the roof and dripped from the grapevine that grew above the kitchen window. They drank tea and ate what remained of yesterday's bread. His mother embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks, gave him a smile of love to travel on. His father looked at him for a long moment, from another world, then patted his shoulder—as though he would be back in a few hours—and plodded off toward the docks, walking head down in the rain. His sister, Helena, whose black hair and fierce blue eyes made her nearly his twin, reached across the table and touched his face. He went out into the yard and looked around for the last time. Helena ran out of the house and took him hard by the arms. “This is for the best,” she said, the rain running down her face, “but you must not forget we are here.” He could see she was afraid. “Promise,” she said. He promised. She went back into the house and he left.
At the squatty police station, a yellow building no higher than a Turk on horseback, the old fisherman showed up early and stood solemnly in a corner—one did not sit down and wait for the captain. He had lain awake all night, alternately cursing his luck and praying for deliverance. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. He had determined to make a clean breast of it, the authorities would have no question about where he stood. At last he was ushered into the captain's office. A hangdog Khosov sat open-mouthed on a chair in the corner, like a bad boy at school. The remains of his pistol were gathered on the edge of the captain's desk. There was, the old man announced, treason afoot, and he would have no more of it. There was a Russian loose in Vidin, spouting revolution and atheism in the cafés. He was prepared to tell them all he knew.
His understanding of the official methodology in such instances was woefully inadequate—“all he knew” wasn't enough. They'd known of the Russian for a week—such heresies came quickly to the attention of the local gods—and had wired Sofia to find out what to do about him. Though the country was ruled by Czar Boris and his army officers and the future was clear to those with the stomach to see it, foreign policy was ephemeral, and it was hard to know where to put your foot. Russia might be characterized as a wicked beast of a nation, but it was a very large beast, and sometimes it thrashed its tail. Thus, to date, the central administration in Sofia had been silent. As for the old fisherman with the yellowed mustache, him they took down to the basement, to see whether such things as were done there might not stimulate his memory. Their efforts proved fertile and a few hours of it had him, in whatever remained of his voice, making every sort of denunciation. All of it was copied down. Later it was widely believed that it was he who had denounced the Stoianev family.
They moved downriver in the skiff, taken gently along by the current, rowing or poling from time to time, principally to keep warm. They'd rigged a waterproof groundcloth on four makeshift poles to keep the rain from falling directly on their heads, but autumn on the river demanded philosophical travelers—the drizzle often enough blew sideways, and there was every sort of dripping mist and fog. The river itself was wide here, often as much as a mile between shores, as it moved through the Wallachian plain. The wheat harvest was long in, on sunny days farmers burned the yellow stubble and columns of thin smoke hung on the horizon. Now and again they would be passed by steam tugs pulling barges loaded down with sand, crushed rock, or timber.
On the Romanian side, there were occasional watch towers. Soldiers with slung rifles trained binoculars on them as they went by. On the Bulgarian shore, stands of oak and beech stood dark and silent. Antipin kept two fishing lines trailing from the stern, and patrol boats took them for fishermen. When the weather cleared, the river dawn was exquisite, a painting at first without color, shapes in negative light. Then strands of pearl-colored mist rose from the water, gray herons skimmed the surface, flocks of pelicans took off from the sandbars in midstream, and the hills turned blue, the birches white, the bare willows brown. It was a world of great stillness, and they instinctively spoke in undertones.
Antipin was no less a listener than he had ever been, and Khristo talked for hours. Mostly on the subject of Vidin and how life was there. Who was rich and who was poor. Lechery and drunkenness, religion and hard work, love and hate. It was like most places in the world, really, but Antipin sat and soaked the stories up with scrupulous attention. He was, Khristo came slowly to realize, learning it. On hearing the oft-told tale of Velchev's wife and the borrowed chamber pot, Antipin recalled that Velchev's wife was also Traicho's daughter. Extraordinary. He knew the names of the fascists, the agrarians, the intellectuals who had supported Stamboliiski and the Peasant party.
And he could, it seemed, do anything he turned his hand to and do it well. Cut wood shavings to start a fire, gut a fish, rig a shelter, steer the skiff around the gravel islands that dotted the river. If this was the world he was entering, Khristo thought, he would have to learn very quickly, but the challenge was not displeasing to him. He had been set apart, for the first time in his life, and felt that his fortunes had taken a sharp turn for the good.
They moved past Kozloduj, past Orehovo and Nikopol. Past Svistov, where the Bulgarian poet and patriot Aleko Konstantinov had been stabbed to death, where his pierced heart was exhibited in a small museum. Past the great city of Ruse, the grain port of Silistra. At the border, where the river flowed north into Romania, they pulled over and stopped at a customs shed. Antipin produced a Nansen passport in Khristo's name, with a blurry photograph of a young man who could have been anybody. The Romanian customs officer accepted a makhorka cigarette and waved them through. It was, to Khristo, simply one more rabbit from the hat, one more specimen from Antipin's collection of little miracles. He did wonder, once in a great while, what on earth made him worth such grand attentions, but these thoughts he put aside. There was enough of the East in him to take pleasure in the present moment and paint the future white.