warm day. However, fearing the eyes of local visitors, it was decided to show the Ashten statue at night… As the night’s darkness thickened and the people in the houses sat down to dinner, the secretary of ideology, taking four or five guests with him, arrived in the square in front of the mill. Ashten stood as if cast in steel, proud and motionless, holding a lamb’s hide high in his hands. Not like the last time.’ He must have gained experience, seemingly unmoved even if delegations from not only the socialist countries, but all the capitalist countries were to arrive. At the sight of such an original statue, the Ital- ian guests opened their mouths in amazement and squeezed their eyes shut in delight. When one of them opened his eyes, he saw something gleaming in the spotlight shining from below in the middle part of the worker’s figure. He took a closer look and realised that it was the neck of an ordinary quatroon, sticking out of the pocket of the dirty sweatshirt of a sculpted hero, and was dumbfounded. After blinking for a while, he poked his elbow at a fellow delegate standing nearby and pointed at the neck of the bottle with his eyes. Hearing a suspicious whisper among members of the delegation, the secretary of ideology, without lifting his head, followed with his eyes where their gazes were directed and saw what they had seen. His heart shivered. As had been agreed beforehand, he beckoned to one of the instructors and began to scurry out of the crowd, trying to go unnoticed. In two or three minutes the searchlights should have gone out, but they continued to shine brightly, as if to say, ‘Look, look!’ The secretary of ideology immediately sent another instructor to follow. And then the Bulgarian brothers, one by one, began to ask what it was that was shining in the pocket of the statue. The secretary replied that it was the first time he had ever seen such a thing, that it had snowed yesterday and that it was the ice which glistened in the light. It turned out that there was a burnout in the electrical panel. While the two instructors searched for the electrician in the booth and demanded that the spotlights be turned off immediately, because that was the order from on high, the electrician replied: ‘It

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21