The Porcupine Read Online Free PDF Page A

government was still inviting the opposition parties to join in and save the nation, but the opposition parties kept saying, No, you fucked it up, you sort it out, and if you can’t sort it out, resign, and then things stumbled on with half-reforms and wrangles and insults and frustration and fear and black markets and risingprices and more half-reforms, so that none of it was heroic, or at least not in the way some had anticipated – a valiant hussar sabring through the rope of slavery – instead it was just heroic in the way that work could be heroic. Vera thought it had been like slowly prising open the fingers of a fist closed tight for half a century, a fist which held a gilded pine-cone. At last the cone fell free, badly crushed out of shape, and heavily tarnished by the sweat of years; but even in this form its weight was still the same, and its beauty just as treasured.
    The last part of this process – the end of the beginning – was Petkanov’s trial. So Vera insisted that the four of them be witnesses. If they couldn’t get into the courtroom, they could watch the proceedings on television. Every moment of them, every minute of the nation’s sudden passage from enforced adolescence to delayed maturity.
    ‘What about the cuts?’ said Atanas.
    That was a problem. Every four hours – except when it was every three – there was a power cut lasting an hour – except when it lasted for two. The cuts rotated by district. Vera lived in the same electricity sector as Stefan, so that didn’t help. Atanas lived a good twenty-minute bus-ride away, beyond the southern boulevards. Dimiter’s district was closer, a fifteen-minute walk, an eight-minute run. So they would start at Stefan’s (or Vera’s when Stefan’s parents got fed up with them), move to Dimiter’s as first alternative, and in an emergency – if everyone else was blacked out – bus it to Atanas’s.
    But what if the power cut out in the middle of the trial, just as Petkanov was squirming and the prosecutor was sticking it to him, telling how he’d swindled the nation, lied and stolen, bullied and killed? They’d miss almost tenminutes’ transmission running over to Dimiter’s. Or worse, twenty minutes getting out to Atanas’s.
    ‘Forty,’ said Atanas. What with petrol shortages and bus breakdowns, that’s what you had to allow nowadays. Forty minutes!
    It was Stefan, the engineer, who found the solution. Each morning the State Electricity Board published its schedule of ‘interruptions’, as they neutrally termed them, for the next thirty-six hours. So the plan went like this. Say they were watching at Vera’s and a power cut was promised for a certain time. Two of them would set off for Dimiter’s apartment ten or fifteen minutes in advance. The two left behind would watch until the picture failed, then follow the others over. At the end of the day’s transmission each team would fill in the other on the ten minutes or so they had missed. Or the forty minutes, if they had to trail out beyond the southern boulevards.
    ‘I hope they hang him,’ said Dimiter the day before the trial began.
    ‘Shoot him,’ Atanas preferred. ‘Takka-takka-takka-takka.’
    ‘I hope we learn the truth,’ said Vera.
    ‘I hope they just let him talk,’ said Stefan. ‘Just ask him simple questions to which there are simple answers, and then hear him come out with all that shit. How much did you steal? When did you order the murder of Simeon Popov? What is the number of your Swiss bank account? Ask him things like that, and watch how he doesn’t answer a single one of them.’
    ‘I want to see film of his palaces,’ said Dimiter. ‘And pictures of all his mistresses.’
    ‘We don’t know he had mistresses,’ said Vera. ‘Anyway, that’s not important.’
    ‘I want to know exactly how dangerous our nuclear plants are,’ said Stefan.
    ‘I want to know if he personally authorised the Department of External Security to try and kill the