Anyway, they stayed for a week and visited with many people in the village, making friends and seeing the children. Stoyan had a kind look to his face, but also sometimes sad, I thought—I supposed that was because they had no children. He never talked much. During the day you could hear him playing his instrument for hours, and it was fine city music like from the radio, not our mountain dances. I kind of prefer the dances, myself, but he made a wonderful sound, especially when he played in the evening and the tune wandered out of the chimney and went up to the stars. I liked to sit on the square and hear it. Then they went back to Sofia, since their vacation time had ended.
But they started coming more often after that—with Irina at New Year’s one time when it snowed less than usual, and sometimes in summer for the Ilinden festival on the mountainside. Stoyan lay in the grass next to their picnic basket and listened to the men playing our kind of music—I think he enjoyed that. We got used to seeing them and it was like a little holiday, or at least a change, whenever they arrived. Stoyan still never said much to anyone, but Vera brought gifts for the children and one of the last things Anton ever made was a coat to thank her. He made it out of sheep wool, dyed dark bluish gray from berries in the forest and combed very soft. He cut it in a city style and sewed a collar on it made of rabbit fur. I liked it immensely and was even a little jealous, but it takes a young woman to look good in something like that. I was already getting old, although I could still bale hay with the best of them. Anton was amazingly strong for his age, too, in spite of his leg—some people said it was from living with me, and some said it was the water from the spring in our basement. That water is so good you can give a bottle of it as a present to someone and he will be happy for days, or recover from illness. Of course, Anton drank more of it than anyone else, living with me.
When he gave the coat to Vera she kissed us both and said that she would wear it forever and that old friends were always the best ones, and blessed us in the old-fashioned way. I really was attached to her, even if I didn’t yet know Stoyan as well. Then they left for the city, and that was the last time Anton saw them, because for some reason they didn’t return the next year, or the next, and maybe for some years after, and we just took care of their house and waited for some news. Vera sent a short letter once at New Year’s to say that they missed us and that Stoyan had been away from home, working, so they couldn’t come. She said nothing about children, and I thought they must still be waiting for some.
You don’t get any warning about an earthquake. The first thing I knew of it, it was already over. This was early summer, almost nine years after the Revolution, and I was putting berries into jars in the kitchen, with a big fire in the stove and boiling pots everywhere. I needed more water, and Anton, who was in from the fields for lunch, had gone down to the spring, our deepest cellar, to fetch it up for me. He was like that, doing things in spite of his bad leg. None of the great-grandchildren were there, so I think they were at the fields, too. Suddenly everything shook around us, hard. We had not had any earthquakes in years, at least not a strong one. And it is such a strange feeling that I thought at first it was my brain that had shaken, or that I was getting sick. I ran outside without thinking what to do, and immediately the house caved in.
It happened so quickly that I didn’t understand what I was looking at. It was my house, the house my great-something had built, and in two seconds it had fallen in. The earthquake had stopped as quickly as it started. Nothing moved except steam flowing upward out of the pots on the buried stove, still managing to find its way around the stones and the collapsed roof. The houses on either side looked the same as always—it was only our house that fell in, all alone. But the neighbors had felt the ground tremble and they had run out into the street, too.
Then I remembered that Anton was down in the deepest cellar and I began to scream and pull at the rocks. My neighbors understood at once and they rushed at the ruins of my house to help me. And then the stove set fire to everything that was caught under the rocks—the clothes and the furniture and I don’t know what else. I screamed for Anton, who had started downstairs only a minute before with the pail, wearing his old blue trousers with the strong patches, going down very slowly because he limped but insisted on doing this for me. In fact, he might have lived if he had not yet been coming back upstairs. If he’d still been in the deepest cellar he might have lived. And even coming back up the stairs he might have lived if it had not been for the fire. I don’t know whether he heard me screaming, because he never screamed back.
We buried him in the churchyard the next day. I don’t want to think about what we buried. I couldn’t say anything about him to anyone; I had lost my voice. When it started to return, I didn’t feel like speaking anyway, so I stayed silent for a year. I had to live in Iliya Kaloyanov’s empty house, two doors away—they had gone to Plovdiv to find work by then. I didn’t cook much, or do much in that house except sit and survive. I was only a visitor there. I got up, I sat for a long time, and then the sun went down and I went to bed. I didn’t let anyone touch my ruined house—if the grandsons came to try to work on it, I drove them off without speaking. I’m sure I worried everyone badly, but sometimes you just have to do what you need to.
The day I posted the one-year nekrolog on the door at Iliya Kaloyanov’s, I said aloud to my granddaughter Milena, who was keeping house with me, “Let’s clean Iliya’s kitchen.” The next morning we took everything out of the kitchen, which was pretty dirty by then, and we scrubbed even the bottoms of my iron pots. Someone had pulled them from the ruins for me, along with what remained of my furniture, which was almost nothing. We sprinkled the floor with water and swept it until it cried. Then we cleaned the rest of Kaloyanov’s house with the windows open and repaired the front steps.
A week later, I was even gladder I’d cleaned up so well, because Vera and Stoyan suddenly came back. I had not seen them in years. They brought Irina with them—Irina went out right away with her painting equipment to the fields in her funny clothes and I don’t know what else, but Vera and Stoyan came to visit me even before they had unpacked their luggage. Vera hurried straight in the door without knocking and she hugged and kissed me like a daughter, and Stoyan hung back behind her. She said she had not known about it until they saw the first nekrolog at the foot of the village, on a wall, and they had hurried up the street to find me.
“Oh, babo Yano,” Vera whispered. “We saw your house, and then Ivanka’s son told us what happened and where you were staying.”
Stoyan had lifted his hat off to enter, but not with the same smartness. When I looked at his face in the light, I felt shocked. He was like an old man, twenty or thirty years older. His skin was gray and full of little broken red and black patches, and his fingers shook where they held his hat. His hands had always appeared so clever and fine, for playing that tsigulka, you know, but now they were like an old farmer’s, brown and scarred, some of the fingernails gone. I knew he must have gone to work doing something other than playing music, to have lost his fingernails. I’d never thought to see him so ugly, when he used to look like a prince.
“Have you been sick?” I said.
He smiled, as if this cheered him up in some strange way, and said yes, but he was getting better, and that he would soon have a job again, back at home. We sat down together and I gave them bilkov chai, tea from the mountain herbs, which I remembered was Vera’s favorite. I thought it would help whatever was wrong with Stoyan and I whispered to Vera to soak his hands in more of it in the evening. I also gave her a big jar of our spring water, from where it still came out farther down the mountain. I explained to them I’d been speaking out loud for only a few days and my voice was out of practice—I was glad they hadn’t come before that.
Stoyan hardly touched his tea, and he kept stroking his hat on his lap as if he had a small child sitting there. Finally he asked me why my house had not been repaired. I said I didn’t want anyone to touch it, after Anton. He nodded and was qu
iet for a while, listening to me and Vera talk about the news of the village, and she told me they had a little boy. He was at home with Stoyan’s mother and father but they would bring him to the village soon. I was happy to hear they had finally managed this, especially with Stoyan looking like the shadow of death, although I didn’t say that part.
Then they got up to leave, but Stoyan stopped at the door and said, “I will repair it for you.”
“What, my house?” I said. “But I haven’t let anyone touch it. Why would I let you do that?”
“Because you would be helping me, if you would allow me to,” Stoyan said, and he put the hat back on his head almost like a fine gentleman again. I tried to protest, for all kinds of reasons, but he gave that little city bow and took Vera’s arm to go. I was so glad to see them and to hear that they finally had their child, and to talk about Anton with someone new, that I didn’t stop them. I understood that they were trying to make me feel better with their words, and I was grateful, even if Stoyan hadn’t meant what he’d said.
You can imagine my surprise when I came out the next morning an hour after sunrise, to get some things from the store, and glanced from habit at the ruin of my house just up the street. The ruin was still there, with its broken spine against the front wall of the chicken barn. But Stoyan was there, too, in an old shirt and pants, his sleeves rolled up above the elbow. Two of our neighbors, men, were talking with him, but if either tried to lift something for him, move a stone, he drove them off just as I had all the year before. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He had already made neat piles of about a third of the stones from the front wall and had brought a wheelbarrow to fill with the rotten stucco and old hay from inside the walls, and other debris. Now and then he stopped to mop his forehead.
I thought to myself that a tsigulka player ought not be working like that with his fine hands. Then I remembered how bad they already looked. He lifted the stones skillfully, in spite of his sickness. I could see that he was piling them in the yard, out of the way of his work but as close as conveniently possible to where the wall of the front room would need to be rebuilt. That was just as I would have done it. In fact, I had imagined many times doing it that way.
“Good morning, babo Yano,” he called, when he saw me.
“Good morning, Stoyane,” I said. He was getting closer, in his clearing-out work, to the spot where we had found Anton, so I turned away and went down to the store. When I came back, he had already stacked most of the stones—for the first time the place looked like something other than a wreck.
“You are wearing yourself out, sine,” I said to him.
“Exactly,” he replied, without stopping. “But maybe you shouldn’t watch this part.” He had begun scraping out what was left of my belongings—scraps of burned cloth, shards of dishes, some objects even I couldn’t recognize. My grandmother’s fine tablecloths and blankets had been in there, and eighty years of things after that.
“All right, I won’t,” I said.
I went back to Kaloyanov’s house and made a big lunch for Stoyan and anybody else who might drop by, and believe me he was hungry when one o’clock came. Vera walked up, too, and my granddaughter Milena, and we all ate together and pretended not to look at the scratches and welts on Stoyan’s arms.
“Just let him do what he wants, babo, if you don’t mind too much,” Vera whispered to me before she left.
So I did—let him do what he wanted, partly because I was curious about how he would do it, a city man who’d never worked on a farm in his life and who’d been ill on top of that. He didn’t look as if he had the strength to lift a single stone and yet he hauled them all day long. The rest of the village was curious, too, and he let them come by to watch his work and even talk with him. But still no one could touch even a pebble there. He would stop anyone who tried to do that, in a way that left no doubt he was serious. People gave up trying, even my grandsons, who were angry because I hadn’t allowed them to rebuild the house for me themselves and came to talk with me about it. But I silenced everyone. I didn’t know what on earth he was doing, besides repairing my house, but I recognized that same need I’d had when I left it in ruins and didn’t speak for a year. Maybe he was one of those people who just can’t bear a mess, or a job not finished. Besides, there are things you have to do for yourself, even if everyone else thinks you’re crazy.
In any case, Vera settled down here in Gorno for a while to let him do this work. She had some leave because she’d lost a baby after their first one, and been sick from that, I found out. And for some reason Stoyan was actually required by a special card to stay in the village for several months. Even when he was working on my house, he took a bus down to an office in town once a week to register himself there, walking all the way back—one of the Goranov boys drove the bus in those days, and he told us about it.
Vera must have sent for their little boy, because one day he arrived with his paternal grandparents, all the way from Sofia, and that was the first time I saw Neven. The grandparents were just what you’d imagine, city people with neatly mended clothes, clean and fine but not too proud. The father had Stoyan’s strong jaw. But Neven looked like Vera, which meant he was the most beautiful child I’d seen in a long time, even with all my own great-grandchildren around. He was about three years old and very serious. He held Vera’s hand, but he also stood apart from her, like a little pasha in the old stories. His hair was soft and dark, with a bit of red in the sunlight. It was a cool morning, and he wore a red sweater someone had knitted for him in beautiful patterns. His eyes were golden when the sunshine touched them, and his skin was soft and golden, too. His nose was straight and fine, like Vera’s. But those were just the things in his face. Even though he was not much more than a toddler, he held himself upright the way Stoyan had always done before he got sick. I thought what a lucky child he was, touched with Vera’s beauty and Stoyan’s elegant ways.
The strangest thing about Neven was that as soon as you saw him, you wanted him to like you, although he was only a little boy. I went out to meet them and stooped down in front of him so I could look into his face. Most children would have shrunk back from such an old woman dressed in black, but he raised his sweet round chin up and looked at me with curiosity. I picked a flower from the pots in the yard and handed it to him. He took it and looked at it in the same way, softly, then looked back at me.
“Say thank you,” Vera told him.
“Thank you, babo,” he said in a clear voice, like a much older child. Then he smiled for the first time. That smile—so handsome it made the sun come out. I didn’t even know what to say in return.
Vera brought Neven every day to see the progress on my house. Soon the rubble was all cleared, even what had fallen into the cellars. Stoyan had stacked the loose stones around the edges of the yard, with the few beams that were still sound placed neatly beside them. He asked me a lot of questions about the walls, both the ones that were standing and the ones that were gone. He bought bags of a cement powder down in the town—they were probably stolen by somebody from the factory there, but that’s the way it was then. He mixed big pails of mortar like gray bread dough. This wasn’t going to be like the old days, with just straw and mud. It took him a whole day to get the trick of putting the stones together, but he didn’t let anyone help him, not even me. Soon enough, he could turn his wrist with those clever, scarred hands and mortar two stones together as smooth as my daughters filling banitsa for lunch.
The ground floor was built up in two weeks, and then he rested for the first time. The next week he found some logs in the old barn below the store, to make beams for the ceiling. He must have bought them from Petar Ivanov, whose father had hidden them there for years. After that, he had a serious problem: hauling them out of the barn and up our hill. Finally, he borrowed a wagon from Petar. No one really knew what he went through with those logs, because no one was allowed to help—some people believed it took him hours to move them even a few meters. He had to rest e
very two minutes, they said, because he was still weak from his illness, and it would have been a hard job even for a healthy man. But maybe he actually had someone help him at the barn, at least. I hope so. Vera and I both begged him to stop and let somebody else take the rest of the work—he had done more than one man could usually manage, anyway.
But he was determined and he no longer even argued with us. If we tried to reason with him about it, he just looked over our shoulders at something else until we stopped talking. He trimmed one side of each log with an adze. Then he borrowed pulleys and ropes that took nearly as long to put into place as the walls of the first floor of the house had taken to rebuild, and he used that contraption to raise the beams.
One day, he left his work and came to sit next to me in the shade, and I gave him water to drink. I had gotten in the habit of knitting or crocheting under the tree at the edge of the yard, now that the rubble was gone. He had something on his mind, I could see, but it took him a little time to come out with it.
“Babo Yano,” he said finally. “What do you think of this. Could you imagine living in a house with one story, rather than two as it was before?”
I saw his point at once. If he put on the roof now, he could finish by himself. But even with his pulleys and ramps and his wife wringing her hands at the danger, he wouldn’t be able to lift beams above a second story without help. And I thought about it before I answered. My great-something had built the house taller as well as deeper than most in the village, a big solid house that rose high above its cellars. There had been a second floor for living and then bedrooms in the attic, all fine big rooms.
“Stoyane,” I said, after thinking it over. “What would be so bad about getting my grandsons to help, just with this part? They are very strong. If it would make you feel better, I would allow you to pay them something. Why not?”