Summary
They had pointed it out to me. And I already knew who Teodor Trayanov was. I wanted to meet him. This happened after a long trip of mine around the country giving talks about Rabindranath Tagore. It was in May 1925. The tragedy of the April events had darkened the people - only two years after the June 9 coup and the September anti-fascist popular uprising. Morning. In front of the Tsar Osvoboditel cafe, I was waiting for my friend Ivan Rachev. He had made my trip easier as a lecturer. The Sunday morning in May had filled the boulevard with people. In the courtyard of the Military Club, the brass band of the Guards Regiment was playing with its conductor, Maestro Georgi Atanasov. And so Teodor Trayanov walked from the club to the cafe. He was alone. His gait was that of a thoughtful man - slow. When he walked, he used a cane. In his ashy checked suit, he was a medium-sized and slender man, with dark brown hair and a slightly swarthy face, an aquiline nose and a high forehead over thick eyebrows that overshadowed his large, dark eyes. When he crossed Rakovski and stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the cafe, I stopped him and turned to him with my desire to meet him. He stopped, pleasantly surprised. When we stepped aside so as not to disturb passersby, he wanted to know where I was from, what had brought me to Sofia "in these anxious days." My youthful interests in Rabindranath Tagore were not foreign to him. And in order to continue our conversation, Teodor Trayanov invited me for coffee. His first visitors were already sitting here and there in the cafe, among whom were his acquaintances. He wanted us to be at a separate table, alone. He ordered coffees. Before they could even be served, he put the lid on. Here I sat as if I had known him for a long time: his direct tone in the conversation predisposed and brought an intimacy that did not leave my friendship and meetings with him until the end of his life. I remember - when he learned that I was from northeastern Bulgaria, in the precincts of Dobrudzha, his discharge transferred to a characteristic of the national-typical of that region, about the psychology of the people there - the Bulgarian woman and the Bulgarian man ... About the past of that part of our land, on which the first Bulgarian state was created, about an equal Dobrudzha ... When I reached to get up, Teodor Trayanov did not hesitate to say smiling, with the nobility of a rarely hospitable person, devoid of the banal intellectual arrogance: - Since you are in Sofia, I want you to call me. I am pleased that we met. At that moment, another person came and sat at his table, who, as it turned out, was his friend.
