“I think so.” Bobby scanned the word on the wall, his hands still in his pockets. “Another strange thing is that there are very few wolves in the mountains anymore.”
Alexandra tried not to look at the head again. “Isn’t that, I mean, it must be illegal, to kill a wolf?”
“Illegal?” Bobby snorted.
Alexandra wished she hadn’t seen it. There was so much brown blood on it, and in the corner; she could smell it now. And there was that other horror, the animal’s final struggle.
Bobby knelt carefully beside the divan and checked the floor with a finger; Alexandra could tell he had already done this several times. “Dry,” he said. “But blood dries quickly.”
She didn’t want to know how he knew this. “We can’t let Irina see. And I don’t think Lenka noticed.”
“No.” Bobby pulled a paper napkin from his pocket and wiped his hand. “I will take a picture, and then I will bury it in the yard. But first we must find a box or a bag to put it in, so that we can dig it up if we need it for some reason.”
“You mean you will call the police?”
He looked at her—but thoughtfully, without annoyance, and shook his head.
—
THE KITCHEN TURNED OUT to be a cave of stone, dim and cold until they lit the stove. It was very neat, even clean—a few pots hung on nails along a whitewashed board; braided onions and garlic dangled from the rafters above them. At one end was a fireplace with a wide bench of hearth. Alexandra had always been sensitive to the smell of a new place, and here she had to restrain herself from sniffing audibly. The kitchen had a complicated aroma—cold, earthy, as if the house had been built into the mountain. She imagined the winter wind, deep snows, driving rain. The house had survived it all, year after year, like a well-sheltered grave. The bright day outside seemed to have vanished until Bobby pried open the single kitchen window and let it in. Lenka filled a kettle with water from the tap and added a handful of herbs from her bag. There was a telephone in one corner, although not the old-fashioned kind Alexandra had imagined for Irina’s house in Plovdiv. Ants ran up and down the sugar pot and stitched a border along the oilcloth on a shelf. When the tea was ready, Lenka took a cup out to Irina.
Bobby and Alexandra sat at the battered table, drinking hot water with the herbs strained out of it.
“What should we do now?” she asked him. “What if whoever is writing these messages comes back here? Maybe we should leave right away?”
He had rolled up his sleeves and washed his face in the cold tap, smoothed his hair so it lay damp.
“I don’t think that Irina can travel again yet,” he said. “But I also don’t think we should sleep here tonight, even with the doors and windows locked. We will have to find another place. And maybe the Lazarovi will arrive tomorrow, if they have been traveling in this direction. Irina can help me to keep calling Neven’s mobile.”
“If they don’t arrive, what should we do?”
“We must see how Irina is.”
“Do you think she’s sick?”
Bobby shook his head. “No—only very old and very tired. I should not have permitted her to come.”
“I think she is the one who permitted us,” Alexandra said. “But she doesn’t look well now.”
“Tomorrow or the next day we can take her home. Then we can go back to Sofia and try again to find them,” said Bobby. “Or to Bovech first. Although I am worried about leaving her alone, even at her house. Especially at her house, if someone knows we were there and that we had the urn. I am glad now that we didn’t leave her alone with it.”
“I am, too. But why would we go back to Bovech?”
“Only an idea,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.”
Lenka returned with the empty cup and began to wash the dishes, refusing their offers of help. While she was at the sink, Alexandra touched Bobby’s arm. “Why does the word say that? We know? If the other graffiti was about the urn, this one must be, too,” she said.
“Probably.” He picked at a rough spot on the table.
“Well, so someone knows that we have it—that’s what they know.”
Bobby leaned back, stretched his shoulders; she felt his eyes sharp and blue on her. “But that is exactly what the other one seemed to mean, on the taxi—that someone knew that we had it and they wanted it back. If we are correct about this.”
Alexandra thought for a moment. “Maybe this one is saying they know something about the urn, not just that we have it.”
“You mean, whose ashes are in it?”
This time she nodded. “Yes, or maybe they are saying they know something about the man, as well. About Stoyan Lazarov,” she added in a low voice. It seemed embarrassing to her now, disrespectful, to speak of him as ashes.
Bobby sat fiddling with a saltshaker. “I’m not sure. This musician who died very old, in a small town—not so interesting, in a way. He was not rich, or a criminal, or with a public life. He never became famous. What is there to know? Maybe it is about his son, Neven—maybe he is a criminal.”
“Then wouldn’t the police just find him and arrest him?” Alexandra said.
For a moment, they sat staring at each other, listening to Lenka slosh the cups under the faucet.
—
WITH LENKA, THEY PUT the front room to rights, scrubbing off the blood, and Bobby buried the wolf’s head in the back garden. Lenka asked no questions, but there was fear on her quiet face. Afterward, they went into the room under the stairs to speak with Irina Georgieva. Irina lay with her eyes closed; her pink-veined eyelids looked huge. Alexandra saw that the old lady had removed the brooch and set it on a bureau—she had a nervous feeling that Irina might fade away without it. She sat down on a chair beside the bed. She remembered sitting this way beside her mother, in the weeks after Jack’s disappearance; sometimes her mother’s reddened face had relaxed into a dull normality, and occasionally she would reach out to touch the hand Alexandra offered.
“How are you feeling, Madame Georgieva?” Bobby asked.
Irina opened her eyes. “I confess that I am tired. The trip, I suppose. And the shock of the house.”
“We’ve cleaned up the front room,” Alexandra told her.
“Thank you, dear.” Irina raised a hand to smooth her hair. “I am sorry to delay you—I do not believe that I will be able to travel back until tomorrow, at the earliest.”
Bobby bent over the bed. “That is what we thought, also. But I don’t advise we should stay in this house tonight.”
Irina stirred against her pillow. “You are right. I do not want to, in fact. Perhaps we could stay with Baba Yana, up the street. She is our oldest friend here—extremely old, and she knew all our family, my father and mother, Vera, Stoyan. I am sure she will welcome us.” She made a motion as if to sit up, but feebly. “Baba Yana is blind.”
Bobby was studying her. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, she is not sorry. She was not born that way, you know—I heard that it happened on the day she became one hundred years old. And some people say that she sees things. Go up and ask her for me if we can sleep there tonight. She lives on the main street, three houses after the church. And ask if she knows anything about where my sister and Neven are. Maybe she sees them with her special vision.” Irina closed her eyes again. “I don’t believe anyone will disturb us now—especially not in the daylight.”
Alexandra bent to kiss the old woman’s forehead, which smelled like mint. Lenka was waiting for them in the passage outside and she went in to Irina at once.
Bobby and Alexandra locked the cottage door behind them and walked toward the main street of the village, Stoycho following them briskly without his rope. The sun had dropped already toward a horizon of mountains; Alexandra regretted not having worn her sweater. The trees along the village streets were beginning to leaf out with a thin, bright foliage that looked almost transparent. She and Bobby paused for a minute at the wide place on the road to watch a man herding a dozen goats toward
the ancient-looking trough. There was a dog with him, a tall alert animal with ears that stood up in aggravated triangles as it drove the stragglers toward the herd. Stoycho ran over to meet this rival, hair rising on his brindled back, but the strange dog looked around, without rancor, then hurried on: Sorry, I’m working just now—can we talk later?
The shepherd turned on a tap at one end of the trough to run water into the hollow stone while his goats shoved forward. They wore small brass bells that rang with every movement; when they pushed each other they sounded like a complicated instrument playing itself. Alexandra went close enough to look into the horizontal slits of their eyes, which made her want to turn the pupils upright. She put her hand on one ridged and bony back, felt the surprisingly soft coat, the flesh warm underneath. The goat shied a little but pressed forward for water without looking at her.
Then Bobby started up the main road again, and Alexandra hurried after him. They passed an old woman peeling potatoes in her dooryard, a cascade of roses over a wire fence, stone houses and barns shored up against the slopes. Alexandra noticed suddenly that Stoycho had slipped away. Her first thought was to call for him, but Bobby pointed to a church spire at the top of the road, which they’d nearly reached. From here most of the houses lay below them, scalloped stone roofs fanning out, stained with lichens. She could see a cloud of dust on the road below the village where a truck lumbered upward. Around the village spread endless meadows, mostly wild and golden-green with what Alexandra guessed was future hay.
The church stood alone, flanked by spruces. It had a stone lintel over the door, and the outside was whitewashed, although here and there pieces of stucco had fallen off, showing the skeleton of rocks and clay underneath. Stoycho had flopped down on the front step, waiting for them. Around the church was a little yard whose gravestones were tall and slender or short and broad, with a bed of earth outlined in stone for the body that must lie beneath. On the graves sat candles, lanterns made of red glass, vases of wilted flowers, on one a pile of rounded pebbles. The newer headstones were glossy black or gray granite, polished to a sheen that reflected the surrounding colors of meadow and shrub; Alexandra saw her own form in one, when she bent close to it.
“Ivanka Belechkova,” she read. There was a photo of a face etched with eerie precision onto the granite, an unsmiling curly-haired woman trapped in the stone. Alexandra thought she looked ready to move or speak—dark magic. But it was a pleasant place, quiet apart from the wind. It offered the best view yet of the village, and the best view of the valley. It looked out toward mountains in three directions, the forested shoulders of the highest peaks. Jack would have liked to rest in a place like this, she thought, where he could see mountains and be up high, but still among people.
Alexandra reached for Bobby’s sleeve. “Why didn’t they bury him here?”
“Stoyan Lazarov?” He was reading names on the oldest-looking stones.
“Yes. He must have liked it up here, visiting with his wife’s family. It’s so peaceful.”
“I suppose,” Bobby said. “But we don’t know if that was his wish.”
“I guess he wanted the monastery, and it’s not for us to decide, anyway,” she said.
Bobby shook his head. “Maybe not even for Irina Georgieva to decide.”
Alexandra looked out toward the peaks, where the light still hung in hazy layers. “Do you ever think—sometimes I have this feeling that we’re walking along the edge of a precipice. I mean everyone, all the time.”
“A precipice? Like a cliff?” Bobby thought about this. “Yes, of course we are.”
“You feel that, too?” She watched the light in his fair hair, the narrowing blue of his eyes.
“Yes,” he said, and then was silent for a moment. “I also believe that my country is doing that. If we fall, we will fall a long way.” He looked straight at her, but she couldn’t see what he was seeing.
“What do you mean?” She touched his arm.
He turned to the panorama spread below them—the village roofs, the fields. “If you grow up here, you know this is the most beautiful country in the world, even when you sometimes hate things about it. But we have these memories of how we were shut away from the world and forced against each other. It happened quickly, once it started, and not very long ago—my grandparents were already alive then. If we accept the wrong government, it could happen again.”
“That’s true in any country, the part about the wrong government,” Alexandra objected, although she knew she was out of her depth.
Bobby suddenly grasped her shoulder; she thought for a moment he was going to shake her. Then he reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear, his fingers gentle. “I know,” he said. “But when you accept an intruder for too long, you sometimes invite him back later as a guest.”
He turned and looked again across the village, down to the fields. Alexandra tried to follow his gaze. “My country has come a long way in a short time, in spite of everything. I think we have something special to give the world—culture, and lessons from history. And beauty. It would be tragic for us to go backward. We have already suffered too much.”
Sunset had begun to pierce the village as they passed out of the churchyard and down the road on the other side; it carved out alleys between the houses and made fissures in the trees. Alexandra knew this rapid disappearance of the sun, the way it plunged out of sight behind peaks instead of setting gradually. She could smell wood smoke again, and some kind of meat cooking. She thought of the urn, and then of her own luggage, abandoned in the hostel room in Sofia, and the fact that she didn’t have clean clothes to change into; it hardly seemed to matter anymore. The scar on the underside of her arm was itching. Stoycho stayed close to their heels, without his rope. The evening sank and cooled, moment to moment.
“This is like the mountains at home,” she told Bobby. “The sun sets so quickly. You want to grab it before it disappears.”
“Are you homesick, Bird?”
Not for a place, she thought. “No. But this does remind me of being in the Blue Ridge.”
They were climbing the narrowed part of the street now—barren yards, one house partly collapsed, its slate roof fallen in and the chimney topped with birds’ nests. Then a yard with a little boy and a girl shaking rugs under a tree, laughing, snapping the fringe in each other’s faces. The first children they had seen here.
“A blue ridge?” Bobby asked.
“Yes, the Blue Ridge Mountains,” Alexandra said. “I told you—I live in the part of them that is in North Carolina. They’re like this, but more—blue, softer. Not so rocky.”
Bobby suddenly stopped walking, and she realized they’d reached the third house above the church—a stone cottage with a few pots of flowers in front. A woman was sitting in a chair just outside the door.
Alexandra had imagined a big round old woman with blank eyes, but this person was tiny, like a scrap of dark fabric. She was dressed entirely in mourning except for an apron that might once have had a pattern in red and green but was now threadbare. Under the apron she wore—to Alexandra’s surprise—the black clothes of a man. A very small man he would have been, and dressed for winter: pilled wool trousers with black patches sewn onto the knees, tiny black rubber shoes mended with some kind of tape, a shabby black wool jacket. She had planted a stick in the ground before her, her colorless hands gripping the handle on top. Her head was covered with a black scarf, folded in some complicated flattened way around the cheekbones and drawn tightly under a miniature chin. Her face was less a face than a crumpled piece of origami. She was possibly the oldest person Alexandra had ever seen. If the woman had eyes, seeing or not, they seemed to have disappeared into the folds of her skin, along with her eyebrows and the color of her lips. Alexandra thought she could trace some delicate lines there, in the thin, transparent nose and arched forehead. Eighty years ago, Baba Yana might have had a birdlike beauty—might have been the tiniest belle in the village. Perhaps she had never grown up, only grow
n old.
Bobby called a greeting, but in the moment they’d stood staring, the old woman had already swung around as if she heard or smelled them. Her small face lifted; she cocked her head sideways, and then for the first time she had eyes, unhooded—not the blank white weirdness Alexandra had dreaded, but a pair of dark buttons. Stoycho darted toward her and for a moment Alexandra and Bobby both froze. Then the dog’s tail whirled with joy and he nosed Baba Yana’s rigid hands gently until they opened. Her face unfolded with an equal pleasure; she stared up into the sky, caressing his head, her mouth stretching to show a last tracery of teeth. Her hand was a claw against his coat, patting him, greeting him.
“Babo Yano,” Bobby began politely, but the old woman interrupted him with a string of words. Her voice was much larger than she was.
“She says,” he murmured to Alexandra, “that she knew we were coming.” He bent to take Baba Yana’s hand and spoke to her, using Irina’s name, and Vera’s, and she looked blankly up into his face for a moment. He watched her and listened. “She says she has not seen the Lazarovi in several weeks. Or years—she isn’t sure.” The old woman reached around, patting Alexandra as she had the dog; she seemed to be ascertaining that there were two of them.
—
AN HOUR LATER IRINA was settled in bed again, this time in a small room Baba Yana had chosen for her. Irina put her head on the pillow with evident relief. She spoke again, faintly, as Alexandra left the room. “Ask her about this house,” she said. “And our family.”
Alexandra found Bobby sitting outside the front door, talking with the blind woman; he patted the empty chair beside him. Before Alexandra could make any request, Baba Yana looked up at the twilight, the first stars, as if she could see them. Her voice was loud and gravelly.
“Stoyan Lazarov,” she said.
I tell you even if you don’t believe me that I saw the Turks driven out of these mountains. My father said to me, You will remember this moment all your life, even if you live to be a hundred and twenty. You see, the rest of Bulgaria had been free for a long time. Then, when I was already a young mother, some Turkish officials who lived in the big village down the mountain heard that the Bulgarian army was in the Rhodopes for the second time—this was in 1912 or 1913, the First Balkan War. The army had come at the time of the first liberation of Bulgaria and then they had lost these lands again. But this time the army was taking us back for good. So all the Turks from the villages around here left one night with their wives and their livestock and never returned. There were only a few in Gorno, but they went, too. They left with their horses and mules, very noisy, in a long line.