But now what should she do? The driver in the next cab had noticed her, apparently; he rolled down the window and looked out with an alertness that she thought might get her to her hostel at last.
“Taxi?” he called. She noted his fair face and wide-set eyes, the first blue eyes she remembered seeing since she’d arrived in Sofia. He had straight light hair that fell in a bowl cut over his forehead, as if he had swapped himself with one of the early Beatles. When she showed him her slip of paper, an address she had written out in Cyrillic letters, he nodded at once and held up his fingers to demonstrate the right amount of leva. An honest guy, and apparently he meant “yes” by a nod. He hopped out, took her big suitcase, and put it in the trunk.
Alexandra got quickly into the back of the taxi. He didn’t speak to her further, although his face looked pleasant in the mirror; apparently he already knew enough about her to satisfy him. She set her bags on the seat beside her and leaned back at last. The driver pulled out into traffic and around the corner so that suddenly they became part of Sofia. She could see tall straight poplars next to the street, people walking fast in their dark clothes or blue jeans, teenagers in vivid T-shirts with English words on them, the shine of litter and broken glass along a muddy gutter, as if this were both a city and a kind of dilapidated countryside. It was another world, but she realized now that she would manage here—especially after a few hours in a quiet room where she could lock the door and go to sleep.
Exactly at that moment she noticed the tall man’s satchel, or was it the old man’s, resting on the seat beside her, pressed against her own bags, all the straps dropping over her knee together. The sight of it went through her like a whisper of voltage—plain black canvas, long black handles, the upper side closed with a black zipper. She touched it. No, it was not one of hers. It was similar to her smaller bag; but it was his, theirs, and they had disappeared into the city.
She touched the bag. There was no marking on the canvas, on the handles or sides. After another breath she unzipped it and looked for an internal label. She could feel something angular, something hard wrapped in black velvet. When she couldn’t find any identification on the inside, she dug around for a moment and unwrapped the top of the object.
It was a box made of wood—ornate carving around the upper edge, the rest beautifully polished—and here at last was a label, or rather a thin wooden plaque with Cyrillic lettering chiseled onto it. Two words, one longer than the other: Стоян Лазаров. She felt the taxi turn a corner. Because there was no other information, she sounded the words out very slowly, using the alphabet she had tried to memorize. Stoyan Lazarov. No dates. The ending of the second word made her think, from other passages in her guidebook, that it must be a last name. Alexandra searched numbly in the bag, but there seemed to be nothing else. Without really wanting to, she raised the hinged lid of the box. Inside sat a clear plastic sack, sealed. It was full of ashes—dark gray, pale gray, rougher white particles among them. She touched the outside of the plastic with a fingertip; in a more normal situation, the movement of her hand would have looked like reverence, and in fact she could feel the reverence even under her terrible consternation.
Alexandra glanced all around, ahead and behind, at the blurred city. She had no idea what to do. Jack would have known, if he’d lived to his almost twenty-eight years now. This was when one needed a brother. They might have been traveling together across Europe, slinging backpacks on side by side.
She reached over the seat and shook the driver by his bony shoulder—shook him hard.
“Stop!” she said. “Please, stop!” Then she began to cry.
My brother and I were raised in a small city in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My mother taught history at a local college, and my father taught English at a local high school. They decided early in their married life to go back to the land, and for much of my childhood we lived in a very old farmhouse out in the country. Our lives there, in the 1990s, were remarkably like the lives people might have lived on that spot a century before. The house had a porch across the front and around two sides, its floorboards painted gray. One board creaked just in front of the door, like a doorbell; Jack, who was two years older than I, always tried to make that board speak. The house had a real and unusual doorbell as well, a brass key you turned in the doorframe, which made a powerful friendly ringing throughout two floors. The field that sloped away south from the yard was an orchard, or the ruins of one—gnarled, nearly human trees, their trunks split by winter storms, slippery apples attracting yellow jackets underfoot.
Inside the house, high-ceilinged plain rooms were filled with our hand-me-down furniture. I’ve never stopped missing that place, its currant patch and rhubarb beds, its ancient irises with flat bulbs branching as big as my wrist, and the tall grass Jack and I could lie in without being seen—or seeing much, except the blue outlines of mountains. The back parlor had a full-bellied Franklin stove my father fed with apple-wood and oak all winter. He and my mother read to us next to the stove when their truck couldn’t get up or down the mountain in the snow.
In fact, because it was a long drive to the homes of any of the friends Jack and I made in our rural elementary school, we were often isolated on that hill, talking, cooking, perfecting our Chinese checkers strategy, playing my father’s record collection of great European symphony orchestras, exploring the mountainside. Have you ever seen an LP, a black vinyl disk on which a needle drops into grooves, adding a scratchy sound here and there to the music? And there were several books in the living room bookcase that we particularly loved. One was a giant dictionary, which we used for a game of reading obscure words out loud and making each other guess their meanings. Another was a book of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, his face getting older and more knowing—but not exactly wiser—as you turned the pages.
The book that most fascinated us, however, was an atlas of Eastern Europe. I don’t know why it was on our shelves, and I forgot until too late to ask our mother or father; probably it had turned up on some giveaway table at the college. We quizzed each other on the names of countries and regions no one we knew had ever seen and whose borders changed depending on the dates printed at the tops of the pages. Jack would cover a place name or even close the book and say, “Okay, the small pink one in the middle of the page, 1850. Five points.” Whichever of us got more than fifty points first had to make cookies for the other, although I usually ended up tending the oven while Jack wandered off to kill wasps or dig a hole to pee into under the porch. Each of us had a favorite country—mine was Yugoslavia after World War I, magically solidified into a neat yellow mass from the little patches of different colors on the previous page. Jack liked best the countries that lay in a ring around the Black Sea—in theory, at least, you could go from one to another by boat, which he said he planned to do someday. Bulgaria, pale green, was his favorite; if I could name all the countries that bordered it, he gave me an extra ten points.
We read to ourselves, too, Narnia and Middle-earth, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the piles of National Geographic in the back room where the stove was. I devoured some girl books Jack disdained, like Nancy Drew. My parents listened to the radio instead of watching television, and the branch library dominated our lives until a friend from school took Jack and later both of us to an arcade full of wondrous games—and we gradually realized that the computers in the math room at school had other possible uses. I liked the games less than Jack did, and craved the arcade less, which was my first sense of losing my bond with my brother.
Jack and I tormented each other, like most siblings; he bullied me sometimes and I told on him. But we were inseparable in our isolation, fond and resourceful. We grew up able to pitch a tent, build a campfire, whistle through a blade of grass, scramble safely over icy rocks, and follow water downhill to a settlement if we got lost. We could read aloud with expression, although Jack often balked at this task. We knew how to clean out the chicken house, make popovers in our mother’s ceramic cups, and di
g potatoes. I learned to knit and to mend my clothes. I mended Jack’s as well, since he was never interested; his ran mostly to rents in the knees, for which I devised patches in sedate dark colors. We could play anywhere we wanted, except near the houses at the foot of the road, with their creekside trash dumps and big chained-up dogs. “Good fences make good neighbors,” said my father, who always touched his cap to them on their porches as we drove by.
—
ALL OF THIS SHOULD have been happy, and for me it frequently was because I loved our house on the hill and I had my brother for company. By one of those strange chemistries of family life, however, Jack seemed from earliest childhood unable to get along with our parents, and his discontent with them extended to whatever they proposed or provided. By the time he was seven or eight, he was as apt to destroy something as to do what he was asked: when we weeded the garden, he pulled out half a row of carrots instead of thinning them, and I knew it was on purpose. If we had to clean the eternal chicken shed, I worked hard; I loved the groaning sound the hens made in the corners on a hot afternoon, the discovery of new eggs, my father’s praise for a job well done. Jack varied the chore by breaking a hole or two in the bottom of the walls, which let in foxes and touched off a bloodbath a few nights after. Jack wrote “the hell with everybuddy” using a charred stick on the wall above his bed. When he burned down a tree in the orchard one afternoon and the fire almost spread to the house, our father grounded him for a week—not that there was much to ground him from—and our mother took time away from her office hours at the college to talk about him with the elementary school counselor.
Middle school was worse. Jack smoked at the bus stop until another boy told on him, and I found myself mending dime-sized burn holes in his jeans instead of rents from the blackberry briars. He cut off the top of his red curls and shaved off both his eyebrows and then explained to our father that it was part of the thrift they were forever extolling (our mother had always trimmed our hair for us with special scissors). The next year, he told our parents he would run away, seriously, he would, if they didn’t take him to town once a week to hang out with “the guys”—other scrawny seventh-graders with their own bad haircuts. Our father invited him to fulfill his threat, but our mother reluctantly drove him down the mountain on Saturdays, saying that we were growing up and needed social life, and taking me with her to get an ice-cream soda. I lived in fear that there would be a fight, an even worse one, between Jack and our parents. But to me Jack was mostly affectionate and even confiding. When he told me that he and the guys occasionally shoplifted cheap pocketknives or packages of beef jerky, I kept his secret—that seemed a small price to pay, especially since he brought me gifts of candy and comic books, which he always said he’d bought with his allowance.
—
WE LIVED OUT IN THE COUNTRY until Jack was going into ninth grade and I was starting seventh, and then our parents sold the house and bought an apartment in the newly revitalized downtown in Greenhill, where they couldn’t grow vegetables but we could walk to the best public schools in the city. Once we moved into town, my brother and I led more separate lives; I was at the middle school, a stable full of terrifyingly well-groomed girls and mysterious boys, and Jack began to run track and play basketball for the high school teams and to hang out with wholesome-looking athletic new friends. Our mother and father were clearly relieved—he seemed too busy now to get into much trouble, and the early morning practices sent him straight to bed in the evening, exhausted. That first year in the city went well; so did the beginning of the second. But I missed him, as I missed our mountain house; I felt that Jack had slipped away while I wasn’t looking. He was nicer to me than he’d been when we were children, but more distant. My happiest times with him were when he dropped by my cramped bedroom in the evening, often while I was doing homework.
“Oh, that kind of equation,” he would say. “I remember those. Need some help?” Or he would come in suddenly, his hair wet from the shower, and sit on the edge of my bed with a grunt. “Wiped out. Extra practice today.” Those moments were never long enough, because sooner than later he would knuckle the top of my head and depart to do his own homework or phone a girlfriend.
I think our parents mainly accepted this rift as the growth of a young man upward and outward, away from family; but to balance it they insisted on retaining a few rituals from our old life, foremost among them the hike we took together about once a month. We usually waited for the right weather—some sunny, clear weekend morning when the high mountains showed vividly, whatever season it was. On those days, we would be returned as a group to the experience of looking out over range on range, the blue folds beyond.
That was how we lost him.
When Alexandra opened the urn, she began to cry not because she was afraid of human remains but because it was just too much, the last straw. She was in a strange country, she was exhausted, her plans had already gone awry, and in the dramatic way of the young she felt herself in the grip of something larger—destiny, or some plot that could as easily be evil as good.
She had to shake the driver’s shoulder and cry out “Stop!” a couple of times before he turned to look at her, scanned her stricken face, and pulled rapidly through the Sofia traffic to a side street. A couple of kittens and a mangy cat scattered as the taxi halted at the curb; Alexandra saw they had been eating something bloody there. The area was shaded by big trees that she couldn’t have known yet were lipa—lindens, with their masses of upside-down greenish blooms. This street was weirdly quiet after the big boulevard and the hotel. Alexandra waited, trying to stifle her sobs, while the driver put the car in park and left the engine running.
“Is there a problem?” he said. She wondered how he knew such clear English, and why he hadn’t used it earlier.
“Please,” she said. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry, but I have somebody else’s luggage here.”
It was too fast for him, apparently, or her voice was shaking too much. He frowned at her. “What? Are you okay?”
“Yes, but I have somebody’s bag.”
“Somebody?” he said. He craned over the back of the seat. She pointed, wordless now, and patted the object.
“This is not yours?” He looked hard at her, rather than at the bag—could that be a Bulgarian characteristic, the business of checking a person’s face for clues before getting into the situation itself? The tall man had done that with her, too, but perhaps it was because she was a foreigner.
Next he got out of the driver’s seat and came around to her door. He opened it and leaned in to examine the pile of luggage. “Whose bag?” he said.
She looked at him harder, too, because he was so close to her. In that moment, she saw him for the first time not in his commercial function, her ride to a hostel, but as a person, a man not much older than she—maybe twenty-nine, or at most in his early thirties. She saw again that he had a square pale face and that his light hair fell forward to obscure it when he bent over. His eyes were indeed blue, true blue, not blue-green. He was not large, and there was a grace to his movements, his thin hands.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “How did this happen?”
“I took it from the man on the steps at the hotel, those old people. The tall man and the old man in the wheelchair, and an old woman.” She tried to speak distinctly.
“You stole their bag?” He shot her a look, more of surprise than disapproval. She understood that he had seen the old people, too, as they made their painful way out of the hotel.
“No.” She felt tears prick again. “I took it by accident when I helped them get into their taxi. But I think it is—look.”
She opened the lid of the urn and showed him the plastic sack inside. He leaned in closer—she felt she must be thoroughly puzzling him now—and touched it, as she had. He frowned. She watched his fingers searching for a sign from the box, as hers had, exploring the outside of the polished wood. He peeled back the velvet bag and this time she saw that the carved bor
der was a wreath of leaves, with the head of an animal on each side. He found the name before she could show it to him, and read it aloud.
“I think this is a person,” he said. “It was a person—a man.”
“I know,” she said, remembering the figure in the wheelchair. The image made her face feel weak. Maybe the old man had lost his other son? Or his brother?
“Do you understand? This is the body of someone,” the taxi driver repeated.
“I know,” she said. “Not the body, the ashes.”
“Yes, ash.” His voice was sharp. “In Bulgarian, we call it prah. Dust.” The word had a guttural sound. “Maybe you have to give it back to them quickly.”
“Of course I have to,” she almost wailed. “But I don’t know who they are or where they went. I think I should go to the police.” She pictured the police searching a computer system, finding this man’s name, taking the urn into respectful custody, telling her they would return it to its owners. Perhaps they would give her an address and she would take it to them herself. Then she imagined facing the people whose treasure she had kept. Her throat closed—they must be looking all over Sofia for her. But she had found her cab after they’d left in theirs; would they have seen yet that the bag was gone? Surely they would have noticed at once.
“No—actually, we have to go back to the hotel,” she amended. “I think they might return to the hotel to look for me.”
“That is a good idea,” he said. His English sounded warmed up now, more flexible, although his face was wary. His accent was hard to place—British, almost cockney. “Come on. We’ll go right away.” In the midst of her misery, she liked the way his thin, nicely shaped lips found the words. His front teeth were a little crooked, with a dark spot of decay on one of them, like a freckle. His cheekbones looked like exactly that—bones, wide and tight—and she noted again how the skin on his face was milky smooth except for a constellation of pale brown moles near one corner of his mouth. He closed the lid of the urn with care, settling the canvas over it. Then he got back into the driver’s seat and put the car into gear before she could thank him.