Now, when the murky stream of his overflowing emotions had drained away, only pure joy remained in his soul, sparkling like a mountain spring. He had achieved his goal. That moment of surprise. The usual mob that populates embassies the world over had been thrown into turmoil. With indescribable pleasure he imagined the feverish scurrying in the residence. The hysterical phone calls. The panic in the Embassy. They surely expected him to appear at any moment. They were already postponing planned meetings. They were tidying up their desks. He had managed to mess up everybody’s plans.
“Permission to report,” he hissed. “The first stage of Operation Arrival of the Boss, completed with success!”
4
To be, or not to be?
The question repeated itself obsessively in the mind of Second Secretary Kishev as he gazed at the letter on his desk. He dared not open it. The envelope was distinguished by the seal of the Royal Chancellery. The letter had arrived that morning and immediately found itself in his office correspondence drawer. He had no need to open it to guess what was written inside. There were only two possibilities. The first would bury him. The second make him a hero. He was not a gambling type and already cursed himself for taking on this engagement so light-heartedly. This was definitely more than he could handle.
The man who sits quietly by will miss the miracle as it passes, as they say. But how, how could he sit quietly by when his mandate was relentlessly running out; when the days were draining away, one after the other, like the grains of sand through the hourglass? Maybe that was the reason he had grabbed at that straw in the hope of gaining some brownie points and impressing the power-players of the day. He liked life on the Island. He had spent more than two years here and it seemed a cruel injustice to have to pack his bags just now, just when this life had worked its way under his skin. And what was waiting for him back home? That, no one could say. Much water had passed under many bridges during those two years. The government had changed; people he had done favours for and who had supported him had been thrown out of the Ministry; new and hungry people had replaced them and were certain to be making their own arrangements for him. Panicked by the potential results, he had ditched his healthy bureaucratic instinct (he who does nothing makes no mistakes) and thrown himself into feverish activity. He had taken on this delicate mission, which was obviously beyond his capabilities. He had imagined that as a reward they would allow him another mandate in London. Or a year. Even six months would be something! But what could a small Second Secretary do against an Imperial Establishment, centuries old? How could he influence it? From what position? With what means? Nobody would so much as ask. Quite the opposite in fact, they were bound to make him the guilty party – the worm.
You’re out-trumped, Kishev, you’ve out-trumped yourself, he thought to himself, staring gloomily at the envelope. But what if he hadn’t? He should be thinking positively. Positive thinking lies at the heart of every success. Negative thinking is the inheritance of socialism. He carefully opened the envelope and took out the piece of paper with trembling fingers.
Dear Mr. Kishev
Her Majesty thanks you for the kind invitation to attend the cultural festivities organized by your Embassy. Unfortunately, Her
Majesty’s official programme is fully booked and she will be unable to attend.
Yours sincerely,
Muriel Spark
Public Relations Officer.
On behalf of The Palace.
Kishev read the letter another ten times. In both directions. The content remained the same. Then he held the sheet up against the light to examine the watermark. He sniffed it; and he caught that scent of wealth and power given off by objects originating in the world of High Society. Deep metaphysical fear froze his heart.
The bearer of bad news is killed, isn’t he?
At that moment someone knocked at the door. A curly head appeared for a second and then fired the news with the precision of a professional killer.
“The new Ambassador has arrived!”
Varadin Dimitrov turned out to be a very bad psychologist. Contrary to his expectations, the news of his arrival had not hit the Embassy immediately, but had travelled by an overly long and meandering route, following human laws as opposed to nature’s.
Kosta Pastricheff was a lonely and desperate soul, to whom the mere idea of solidarity and mutual aid was foreign. It did not so much as cross his mind to grab the phone and warn his colleagues of their imminent danger. In reality, a cook cannot have colleagues. There is no position in the world lonelier than his. Beneath him there is the assistant-cook. Above him there is God or, according to ones beliefs, an even more frightening Nothing. And Kosta was an atheist.
He served the Mayor a plateful of trotter jelly, opened two ice-cold beers and sat down to keep him company. There was less than two hours left before his flight, but the Mayor was not especially worried: on the contrary, he could not believe that the plane would take off without its most important passenger. They chatted indifferently in the brief pauses between some of the Mayor’s mouthfuls. Kosta had no doubts that the new Ambassador had run directly to the Embassy, and the thought of that made him pull gently at the corners of his greying whiskery moustache. At 15.30 the driver, Miladin, rang the front-doorbell. The Mayor and the cook shook hands.
“If ever you find yourself unemployed,” exclaimed the Mayor, “you are more than welcome in Provadia. With those trotters you’ll not fail, my man!”
The driver, of course, had not the slightest suspicion regarding the dramatic turn of events. He first heard about it from his chatty interlocutor, who did not fail to congratulate him on his new boss. Miladin, who was also a less than outgoing individual of stunted social instincts, decided to keep the news to himself. There was a mobile phone in his pocket, which he deliberately switched off. After he dropped the Mayor at Heathrow, Miladin headed towards one of London’s famed car-boot sales.
Left to his own devices, Kosta dropped the mask of arrogance and indifference, which he always put on in front of other people, and became as gloomy as a peasant watching thunderclouds looming above the harvest fields. He let his wife’s bitching drift past his ears unheeded – she was, as per usual, railing against the social position fate had decreed for her.
“They come here, the dregs of society, stuff their faces, screw everything up, and then guess who gets to clean up after them!” she complained, carrying a stack of dishes to the kitchen. “They all became big-shots! There’s no life left for common folk!”
She was a tiny, thick-set woman with big, workers hands and a bitter mouth. Through eyes that were forever screwed up, she regarded reality around her with mistrust and reproach. As the wife of an international cook, she had ‘done’ a fair chunk of the world, but deep-down she believed that only one patch of her homeland truly mattered – somewhere between the river Iskar and Mount Vitosha. No matter where she stayed – in Paris, Berlin or London – she arranged the family’s way of life according to her pre-Columbian image of the world, slowly reclaiming from the Western jungle a small clearing for her domestic civilization.
Of late, Kosta had frequently asked himself, why the hell had he married her? Or more precisely, why, for fuck’s sake, did he continue to be married to her? Out of laziness, that was the truth of the matter. He had been too lazy to search for the woman of his dreams and instead had opted for the closest one available. He had been too lazy to divorce her afterwards and here they were, already a good twenty