In the grim days of Zhivkov, President for Life,
you and I flew to Sofia in an old Russian Tupelov
where everyone smoked and coughed and spat
and over each window hung a little box marked
in English and Cyrillic in case of emergency
safety rope. Laughing, we said sky hook, but when
on landing they took away our passports and return
tickets, fear whistled down my throat. You,
ever equable, assured me that as our country’s
goodwill ambassadors at the harvest festival
to honor Nikola Vaptsarov, we were safe as sunrise.
Vaptsar, they called him, this war-hero poet
and factory machinist martyred in the Resistance.
Homegrown fascists dispatched him in 1942
but not before he flung the plume of revolution
at them. He survives as a park, boulevard, museum.
They bused us into his beloved mountains
where girls with fruit and flowers offered
ripe pears the size of platters, so succulent
that one bite sluiced our chins. Everyone
in peasant dress, all reds and greens, and endless
speeches. No one mentioned Vaptsarov’s life story,
how his countrymen had hung him upside down
for hours and beaten him with rifle butts
before they assembled the firing squad. Because
you were gay and in the closet (this was the seventies)
you leaned your shoulder against mine in public
and squeezed my hand to stay awake through the rhetoric.
Nightly your new artist buddy Misha
hoped to be invited to your college.
Nightly we three drank to this with slivovitz
and Ludmilla, our interpreter, who did not drink,
who once had served for the Lord Mayor of London
and wanted help with amerikanski slang, raised
a dry glass. They took her from us the fourth day,
I said it was because we’d been too friendly.
You disagreed. Misha pulled away and fell silent.
Two more days of speeches, nights of parties
and then the hairpin turns back down the mountains
made queasier by hangover. The firing squad.
And then the worms, Nikola wrote the night before
his execution. I fell. Someone else will take my place.
Balkan Airlines’ engines throbbed, the door
was latched, we had already fastened our seatbelts
but how could we go? Sit tight, you said,
as if we could do anything else. The plane pulsed
angrily. The heavy seal gave way, a functionary galloped
down the aisle restoring our identities, our passports.
from Where I live, New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, W.W. Norton, 2010
Leave a Reply