5

The eyes of the diplomats were filled with melancholy. They were sat fidgeting around the long empty table in the meeting-room beneath the map of Bulgaria, with its cold pink and yellow colouring. Malicious tongues had it that the map had been put there not so much to arouse patriotic spasms in the employees, but to serve as a reminder of where they came from and where they could be returning if they were not sufficiently careful. In practice, that was the only thing that could truly make them feel anxious. The ghost of going back! This ghost was a constant, inexorable presence around them. It sniggered maliciously in every corner and poisoned their lives with the memory of the finely scented black earth of their birthplace, from the very first to the very last day of their mandates. The subject of ‘going back’ was taboo, shrouded in painful silence. To ask somebody when he thought he might make the return journey (a blatant euphemism) was considered an act of bad taste, base manners and even hostility. Nobody talked about going back, nobody dared to say it out loud for fear of catching the attention of the evil powers that slumbered somewhere deep in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Despite the fact that everyone, down to the last telephonist, knew that this was their irrevocable destiny, as inevitable as winter or death, deep in their hearts they still sheltered the hope that that dolorous hour might pass them by, that they might be missed or forgotten in the overall mass of people and that the awful notice might never reach them. But the notice invariably arrived, along with its sinister title:Permanent Return – the creation of a vengeful bureaucrat from the distant past, the title had remained unchanged throughout the decades. And then began the time of the great retreat, the slow ebb. The condemned soul took to the road, watered with the tears of their predecessors, back to Heathrow Terminal 2, through Gate 7 or 9, and into the gloomy vessel of the national airline ‘Balkan’, after which the door slammed behind their back permanently.

It was soon after 10 p.m. The presidential chair was still empty. At a reasonable distance of a few empty chairs, the diplomats were sat with open pads, pens at the ready. The technical staff had crammed themselves at the other end of the table – the driver, the accountant, the radioman, the cook and the housekeeper. Very few things bonded those people together as did mutual dislike, slowly built up, layer on layer, over the course of all those years of enforced co-existence, resigned to financial and cultural restriction. Nevertheless, it could be said that for some time they had been leadin