Dates.
Places.
“Ivan Yordanov – 1974.”
Maria Kostova – 1983.
Elena Petrova – 1991.
“Dimitar Simeonov — 2007.”
Daniel came up without wanting to.
On one of the labels read:
“Boris Stoyanov — 2011.”
That was his father.
Boris.
The man who was missing when Daniel was eight.
He wasn't dead.
He wasn't found.
He had just gone to Sofia one day to file for work, and never came back.
Police then said he probably went abroad.
His grandmother said Boris was always restless.
His grandfather didn't say anything.
His mother cried for years.
And Daniel learned not to ask.
But now his father's name was standing on a glass container.
There was an old men's ring inside.
And a little blue plastic soldier.
A toy that Daniel had lost the day his father disappeared.
His knees softened.
"What is it?" he whispered.
His grandfather closed his eyes.
— Archive.
"To what?"
To people who should not have been forgotten.
Daniel turned to him.
"Dad?" Where's Dad?
Stoyan did not answer.
"WHERE'S DAD?"
His voice echoed in the room.
The lamps on the ceiling blinked.
Somewhere in the depth of the tunnels, a metal scraping was heard.
His grandfather raised his hand.
The straps around his wrists squeaked.
Quiet down, Danny. They shouldn't hear you.
"Who should hear me?"
The people who made this place.
You made this place!
Stoyan looked down.
And for the first time in his life, Daniel saw fear in his eyes.
Real fear.
"No," he said. "I'm just protecting him."
It all started in 1968.
Then Stoyan was a young engineer in a state geological service. He worked on mapping old tunnels around the Troyan Balkan. Officially searched for groundwater and stable terrain for a new road.
Unofficially, as he found out later, a group of people were looking for something else.
Old military archive.
In the 1940s, after the war, there was a secret laboratory in the area. It was not officially marked on any map. She was working under the guise of a small sanitary station to the army.
They examined the memory.
Not just how one remembers.
And how memories can be extracted, transferred, hidden.
Stoyan was telling this in a shredded manner.
His voice was weakening, but Daniel couldn't interrupt him.
“I thought they were legends,” his grandfather said. “Until we found the first camera under the old monastery road.”
What does this have to do with your grave?
The cemetery was built from above. Years ago. No one knew what was underneath it. Or at least that's what people thought.
