The Porcupine Read online

  The accused took no notice of the prosecutor in his shiny Italian suit, and turned instead to the President of the Court. ‘I wish to make an opening statement.’

  ‘First answer the Prosecutor General’s question.’

  The Second Leader looked back at Solinsky as if noticing him for the first time, and inviting him to repeat his question like a schoolboy.

  ‘You are Stoyo Petkanov?’

  ‘You know I am. I fought with your father against the Fascists. I sent you to Italy to buy your suit. I approved your appointment as professor of law. You know very well who I am. I wish to make a statement.’

  ‘If it is brief,’ replied the President of the Court.

  Petkanov nodded to himself, taking in and yet ignoring the judge’s request. He looked around the courtroom as if he had only just become aware of the place, settled his spectacles a little higher up his nose, laid his fists on the padded wooden bar in front of him, and asked, in the tone of one used to better organisation of a public event, ‘Which camera am I on?’

  [‘The shit, listen to him, the bastard.’

  ‘We don’t buy it, Stoyo, we don’t buy it any more.’

  ‘I hope he dies in front of us. Live on TV.’

  ‘Calm down, Atanas. You’ll croak if you go on like that.’]

  ‘Make your statement.’

  Petkanov nodded again, more in self-consultation than acknowledgement of another’s instructions. ‘I do not recognise the authority of this court. It does not have the power to try me. I was illegally arrested, illegally imprisoned, illegally interrogated and am now before a court which is illegally constituted. However …’ and here he allowed himself a pause, and a quick smile, knowing that his ‘However’ had cut off an interruption from the bench, ‘… However, I will answer your questions provided they are relevant.’

  He paused again, allowing the Prosecutor General time to wonder if that was the end of his statement or not. ‘And I will answer your questions for a simple reason. I have been here before. Not in this very courtroom, true. But more than fifty years ago, long before I became helmsman to the nation. With other comrades I was helping organise the Anti-Fascist Struggle in Velpen. We were protesting against the imprisonment of railway workers. It was a peaceful democratic protest but of course it was attacked by the bourgeois-landlord police. I was beaten up, so were all the comrades. In prison we discussed how we were to proceed. Some of the comrades argued that we should refuse to answer the court on the grounds that we had been illegally arrested and illegally imprisoned and that the evidence against us was being fabricated by the police. But I convinced them that it was more vital to warn the nation about the dangers of Fascism and the preparations for war by the imperialist powers. And that is what we did. As you know, we were sentenced to hard labour for our defence of the proletariat.

  ‘And now,’ he went on, ‘I look around this court and I am not surprised. I have been here before. And therefore, once again, I consent to answer your questions, provided they are relevant.’

  ‘You are Stoyo Petkanov?’ the prosecutor repeated, with an emphatic weariness, as if it were not his fault that justice required him to pose every question in quadruplicate.

  ‘Yes, indeed, we have established that.’

  ‘Then, being Stoyo Petkanov, you will know that your conviction by the court in Velpen on 21st October 1935 was for criminal damage to property, theft of an iron railing, and criminal assault with the said stolen item on a member of the national police.’

  When the camera cut back to Petkanov, Atanas took a deep puff of his cigarette and exhaled through narrow, pushed-out lips. The smoke hit the screen and flattened against it, drifting away. It was better than spitting, thought Atanas. I spit in your face with smoke.

  Peter Solinsky had not been first choice for the post of prosecutor general. His experience was largely academic, and only partly in criminal law. But he knew after his first interview that he had done well. Other, more qualified candidates had played politics, suggested conditions; some, after consulting their families, had discovered previous commitments. But Solinsky had manifestly wanted the job; he came with specific ideas about the framing of charges; and he boldly proposed that his own years of party membership might even be an advantage in trying to ensnare Petkanov. Set a fox to catch a wolf, he had quoted, and the minister had smiled. In this slim, anxious-eyed professor he identified a pragmatism and an aggression which he thought necessary in a prosecutor general.

  The appointment came as little surprise to Peter. His life, when he examined it, seemed to consist of long periods of caution followed by moments of decisiveness, even recklessness, in which he got what he wanted. He had been a dutiful child, a good student; obedience to his parents’ wishes even led him to get engaged on his twentieth birthday to their neighbours’ daughter Pavlina. Three months later he had jilted her for Maria, and insisted on marrying at once, with so much sudden obstinate zeal that his parents had naturally examined the girl’s belly. They were puzzled when the next months did not bear out their suspicions.

  After that, for many years, he had been a loyal party member and good husband – or was it a good party member and loyal husband? Sometimes the two conditions seemed muddlingly close in his mind. Then, one evening, he announced that he had joined the Green Party at a time when, as Maria vigorously pointed out, it contained very few professors of law married to the daughters of anti-fascist heroes. Worse, Peter had not simply gone along to a few meetings on the sly; he had sent back his party card with an openly provocative letter which a few years earlier would have brought men in leather coats to the door at an unsocial hour.

  Now, according to his wife, he was indulging his vanity again. His colleagues simply judged his appointment an enviable career move, one revealing in the courteous and enclosed lawyer a secret wish for television stardom. But then such people saw only Solinsky’s outer life, and tended to assume that his inner existence must be equally well ordered. In fact, he oscillated constantly between different levels of anxiety, and his intermittent thrusts of decisiveness were intended to allay the fret and stew within him. If nations can behave like individuals, he was an individual who behaved like a nation: enduring decades of edgy submissiveness, then bursting into revolt, eager for fresh rhetoric and a renewed image of himself.

  In prosecuting the former Head of State, Peter Solinsky was embarking on his most public form of self-definition. To newspaper columnists and TV commentators he represented the new order against the old, the future against the past, virtue against vice; and when he spoke to the media he customarily invoked the national conscience, moral duty, his plan of easing truth like a dandelion leaf from between the teeth of lies. But in the background lay feelings he did not care to inspect very closely. They were to do with cleanliness, personal rather than symbolic; with the knowledge that his father was dying; and with the desire to force upon himself a maturity which mere time was failing to supply.

  The post of prosecutor general had only become available after extensive public debate. Many had argued against a trial. Surely it was better for the nation to let bygones be bygones, and focus its energy on reconstruction? This would also be more prudent, as no-one could claim that Petkanov was the only guilty person in the country. How far through the nomenklatura, the Party, the security police, the regular police, the civilian informers, the magistracy and the military was guilt held to run? If there was to be justice, some argued, then it should be full justice, a proper accounting, since the select punishment of a few, let alone a single individual, was obvious injustice. Yet how far was ‘full justice’ distinguishable from mere revenge?

  Others pressed for what they called a ‘moral trial’, but as no nation in the history of the world had ever held one before, it was unclear what the thing might consist of, or what sort of evidence might be adduced. Besides, who had the right to judge, and did not the assertion of that right imply a sinister self-elevation? Surely God was the only person capable of pres
iding over a moral trial. Terrestrials were better off concerning themselves with who stole what from whom.

  All solutions were flawed, but the most flawed was to do nothing, and to do nothing slowly. They must do something quickly. A Special Parliamentary Committee therefore appointed a Special Investigatory Office with the understanding that while all its enquiries were to be conducted with an even greater diligence and thoroughness than usual, the case against Stoyo Petkanov must be ready to start by early January. It was also stressed that correct juridical procedures must be followed. The days were gone of laying a broad charge which could then be interpreted by the court as covering whatever behaviour the State decided to punish. The Special Investigatory Office was instructed to establish exactly what Petkanov had done that infringed his own laws, to assemble trustworthy evidence, and then decide the charges. This involved a considerable reversal of traditional thinking.

  The Special Office found straightforward proof of malpractice hard to obtain. Little was written down; what had been written down was mostly destroyed; and those who had destroyed it suffered reliable attacks of memory loss. A wider problem came from the unitary nature of the State which had just collapsed. Article 1 of the New Constitution of 1971 had enacted the leading role of the Party. From that moment Party and State merged into one, and any clear separation between a political organisation and a legislative system ceased to exist. What was judged politically necessary was, by definition, legal.

  Eventually, under increasing pressure, the Special Office discovered enough evidence to recommend proceeding with three charges. The first, deception involving documents, related to the receipt of undue royalties from the former President’s writings and speeches. The second, abuse of authority committed in an official capacity, covered a wide range of benefits allegedly given and received by the former President, and was helpful in demonstrating the extent of corruption under the communist system. The third, mismanagement, concerned a payment of undue social benefit to the former Chairman of the Environmental Protection Committee. The Special Office was rather embarrassed by this, since the other person named was a marginal figure now in frail health; but it was agreed that a mere two charges were insufficient for such a historic indictment. The Special Office also recommended that as the circumstances of the case were exceptional, the prosecution be allowed to present newly discovered evidence in mid-trial, and to add further charges if necessary as the case proceeded. Despite much criticism, these provisions were adopted.

  Since Petkanov declined to co-operate with State Defence Advocates Milanova and Zlatarova, it was decided that the normal professional courtesies between prosecution and defence would have to be extended to the accused in person. Accordingly, when the court adjourned, Peter Solinsky went to the sixth floor of the Ministry of Justice (formerly Office of State Security), taking with him documents which the defence had a right to see. In these second encounters of the day the former President was often more relaxed, but not necessarily more agreeable.

  Each morning a militiaman brought Stoyo Petkanov the five national newspapers and laid them on his table in a pile. Each morning Petkanov extracted Truth, the mouthpiece of the Socialist (formerly Communist) Party, and left untouched The Nation, The People, Liberty and Free Times.

  ‘You are not interested in what the devil has to say?’ Solinsky asked lightly one afternoon, when he found Petkanov hunched over party gospel.

  ‘The devil?’

  ‘The journalists of our free press.’

  ‘Free, free. You make such a fetish of that word. Does it make your prick swell? Freedom, freedom, let’s see your pants stir, Solinsky.’

  ‘You’re not in court now. There’s no-one watching.’ Only a militiaman acting the deaf-mute.

  ‘Freedom,’ said Petkanov with emphasis, ‘freedom consists in conforming to the will of the majority.’

  Solinsky did not respond at first. He had heard that line before and it terrified him. Finally he murmured, ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘Everything else you call freedom is merely the privilege of a social élite.’

  ‘Like the Special Shops for party members? Did they conform to the will of the majority?’

  Petkanov threw down the newspaper. ‘Journalists are whores. I prefer my own whores.’

  The Prosecutor General found these exchanges frustrating but useful. He needed to learn his opponent, to feel him, to discover how to predict his unpredictabilities. So he continued, in a pedantically reasonable tone, ‘There are differences of category, you know. Perhaps you should read Free Times on your trial. It does not take the obvious position.’

  ‘I could spare myself the trouble and pour a bucket of shit over my head instead.’

  ‘You don’t want to understand, do you?’

  ‘Solinsky, you have no idea how this discussion wearies me. We considered all this decades ago and came to the correct conclusions. Even your father agreed, after spinning like a top for several months. You have given him my warm greetings?’

  ‘The term “free newspaper” doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?’

  Petkanov sighed melodramatically, as if the Prosecutor General were arguing flat-earth theory. ‘It’s a contradiction. All newspapers belong to some party, some interest. Either the capitalists or the people. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘There are newspapers which are owned by the journalists who write them.’

  ‘Then the party they represent is the worst of all, the party of egoism. A pure expression of bourgeois individualism.’

  ‘And there are even journalists, it may surprise you to learn, who change their opinions on subjects. Who have the freedom to come to their own conclusions, then to examine them, to re-examine them, and alter their views.’

  ‘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 Fi
rst 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.