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Banov should have been put on a flight to Franco’s Spain thirty years ago; and thather husband Peter, having striven for so long to obtain a good job and a decent apartment, having avoided the malign shadow of his deviationist father largely thanks to her presence, was either losing whatever small political sense he once had, or else suffering a mid-life crisis, and quite possibly both at the same time.
    She kept quiet while some she knew reviled the beliefs they had loyally upheld a few months earlier; she observed the furious glee of the crowds, and on every boulevard of the city she smelt revenge like sour sweat. She withdrew increasingly into her life with Angelina. At times she envied the child learning simple, certain things like mathematics and music, and wished she could join her. But then she would also have had to learn the new political certainties, the new orthodoxies they rushed to teach at school.
    Nevertheless, on the first morning of Criminal Law Case Number 1, when her husband came to kiss her goodbye, something stirred within her, and made her forget the quick betrayals and slow disappointments of the last few years. So Maria Solinska kissed Peter back, and with an affectionate fussiness she had not displayed for some time, straightened the scarf-ends he had jammed hastily between his turnedout lapels. ‘Be careful,’ she said as he left.
    ‘Careful? Of course I shall be careful. Look,’ he said, putting down his briefcase and holding up his hands, ‘I am wearing my porcupine gloves.’

    Criminal Law Case Number 1 began in the Supreme Court on the 10th of January. The former President was seen arriving under military escort: a short, stout figure in a buttoned-upmackintosh. He wore his familiar heavy glasses with a slight tint in the lens, and when he got out of the Chaika he took off his hat, letting viewers see yet again the head familiar from so many of the nation’s postage stamps: the skull set low on the shoulders, the sharp, questing nose, the frontal baldness and the stiff, sandy-coloured hair over his ears. There was a crowd, and so he smiled and waved. Then the camera lost sight of him until he re-emerged into the courtroom. Somewhere along the burrow he had left his hat and coat: now there was a sombre, square-cut suit, a white shirt and a green tie striped diagonally with grey. He stopped and looked around, like a footballer surveying an unfamiliar stadium. Just as he seemed about to move forward, he changed his mind and stepped across to one of the soldiers on guard. He peered at a medal ribbon, and then, almost as an afterthought, paternally adjusted the militiaman’s tunic. He smiled to himself, and walked on.
    [‘ Such a fucking ham.’
    ‘ Shh, Atanas .’]
    The courtroom had been built in an early-Seventies’ mode of softened brutalism: pale wood, flattened angles, chairs that approached comfort. It could have been a rehearsal theatre, or a small concert hall in which spiky wind quintets were played, except for the lighting, a drab collaboration of strip neon and cowled down-lamps. It gave no favouritism or focus; the effect was flat, democratic, unjudging.
    Petkanov was shown to the dock, where he stood for a few moments, looking round at the two rows of lawyers’ desks, the small public gallery, the raised bench where the President of the Court and his two assessors would sit; he scrutinised the guards, the ushers, the television cameras, the push of pressmen. There were so many journalists thatsome had to be accommodated in the jury box, where a sudden self-consciousness hit them: thoughtfully, they began examining their empty notebooks.
    Eventually, the former President sat down on the small hard chair that had been chosen for him. Behind, and therefore always in shot when Petkanov was on camera, stood an ordinary prison officer. The prosecution had arranged this little touch of stage management, and suggested in particular that a woman guard be chosen. The military were to