His superiors assign him to Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and Khristo begins to experience the relentlessly cruel, cataclysmic decades of World War II and its aftermath. Khristo, realizing the menace of fascism, takes a risk on the promise of communism and flies east to Moscow, where he becomes a promising agent of the NKVD, predecessor of the KGB. Set in 1934, this evocative, moving novel concerns the travails of the boy's brother, Khristo Stoianev. When a small-town Bulgarian landlord, a grocer and their cohorts, decked out in foolish uniforms and caps with goose feathers, hear a village teenager ridicule their march, they do what petty fasciststaking their cue from the no-longer laughable Nazisdid best: they gang up on the boy and kill him.
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