Bobby talked easily with the paint woman—she had stopped rushing and seemed to be taking them on a tour—and Alexandra could tell that he was asking about Milen Radev’s niece, and maybe about the orphanage itself. Suddenly the halls were filled with children; they seemed to be going en masse to some activity. The oldest looked about seven or eight and the smallest as young as three. They wore clean, if much used, play clothes and their hair and faces shone. Bobby whispered to her that many of them were Roma, and she remembered the children at the edge of Aunt Pavlina’s town, perched like birds on a fence. They put their fingers to their mouths and laughed when they saw strangers; the littlest ones, holding their teachers’ hands, stared. One of the boys reached out and pulled on Alexandra’s skirt as he passed her.
Bobby translated the teacher’s whisper: “The children know that when someone comes to visit, they might go home to a family. It is often disappointing for them.” She took Alexandra and Bobby in the opposite direction, but Alexandra turned and saw that the children at the end of the line had turned around, too, to watch them go. They were smiling, waving, one of them diligently picking his nose with the other hand.
The rest of the orphanage was also bright and clean, and it took a while for her to realize that everything they were seeing had been put together from almost nothing. The walls were nicked but painted with care and decorated with more of the children’s art in cardboard frames. Alexandra noticed the portrait of a gray-haired woman badly but benignly painted in oils, perhaps an early director. The curtains were clean sheets neatly cut and sewn, and in some rooms they served to separate sleeping areas from play spaces, or hung in place of doors. A couple of women in the big open dormitory rooms were sorting shabby toys and clothing onto shelves. Rows of wooden beds sat low to the floor; on one pillow Alexandra saw an object like a ragged spider that turned out to be a relentlessly loved cloth doll. From outside the windows came the ululation of children chanting together—some song to go with calisthenics, an eerie, uneven sound.
The woman settled them in an office, where there was a large desk but no one on duty. Then she left, holding her stained arms out in front of her.
“Miss Radeva will come in a minute. She works on the other side of the building. This is nice, here, not like the orphanages I have read about,” Bobby said thoughtfully.
“What are the other ones like?” Alexandra inquired, but at that moment they heard shoes tapping along clean floors and the door opened.
This brought a further surprise. Alexandra had imagined Milen Radev’s niece as an aging female version of Radev himself—not in a wheelchair, of course, but with worn features and thinning gray hair and Radev’s look of sunken disengagement. The woman coming toward them could have been thirty, or even twenty-six, like Alexandra. Miss Radeva was tall and slim and alert. Her smooth dark hair fell past her shoulders. Alexandra thought she had the face of a Byzantine princess—delicate, with almost unnaturally large dark eyes and olive skin. She wore a dress of lavender silk with striped collar and cuffs, more suited to a dainty lunch out than to working with children—but perhaps she did only typing and phone calls, not finger painting. She moved as if there was little to keep her tied to the ground, straight and slightly airborne, like a ballerina off duty. Alexandra and Bobby both stared at her, Bobby with unveiled admiration, and Alexandra without jealousy.
“How do you do?” Miss Radeva said in English. Her voice was quiet and musical. Alexandra remembered the ugly cement entrance to the building where this visitation apparently lived. “Madame Georgieva told me that someone might come to see me. You are Americans?”
“Only me,” Alexandra said, shaking the hand Miss Radeva offered her. It was slim and cool, like the rest of her, with silky skin over the bird bones. “Bobby—Asparuh—is from Sofia.”
“And you are interested in the children? I do not quite understand why you are here.” Miss Radeva frowned, a faint wrinkling of velvet. Her English was beautifully formed, the accent strong but every word clear, like her face.
“Oh, no,” Alexandra said. “I mean, I love children, but we came to ask you—to talk with you about your uncle, Milen, if you wouldn’t mind. We’ve been looking for him, or rather for the friends he’s traveling with—”
“Might we close the door?” Bobby said.
When the door was shut, they explained the outlines of their search, beginning with Alexandra’s meeting Milen Radev and the Lazarovi on the steps of Hotel Forest and accidentally keeping the urn. As she listened, Miss Radeva took a box of chocolates off a shelf above the desk and opened it gracefully before them, then poured water for tea from an electric pot in the corner. The chocolates tasted mainly of dust and sugar, but Alexandra ate three; they had missed lunch again. Then she showed their hostess the photograph of Neven and Vera, with a blurry Milen Radev in the back seat of the taxi. Alexandra omitted her visit to the police, and Bobby left out their lunch with the Wizard and the three episodes of graffiti. Alexandra hoped this wasn’t a mistake; perhaps they could tell Miss Radeva these things later, if it became necessary.
Miss Radeva said very little until they had finished, although when Alexandra mentioned the urn, she opened her dark eyes wide and glanced around, as if expecting to see someone else in the room. When she sat even straighter, her small dancer’s breasts and lightly etched collarbone shimmered under the silk. “I see,” she said.
“We don’t wish to take more of your working time,” Bobby amended. “We heard from Irina Georgieva that your uncle and the Lazarovi sometimes come to stay with you. Have you seen them recently? Do you know where they have gone?”
But Miss Radeva shook her head. It was true, she said, that Vera and her uncle had called her from Gorno to say they were going to bury Stoyan’s ashes at last. She’d been surprised; she had assumed Stoyan had been buried soon after he died, although she did not remember hearing about a funeral. At that time, she had telephoned her uncle to give him condolences on his friend’s death. When they had called from the Rhodopes, ten days ago, she had urged them to visit her, since she had not seen them in more than two years. Her uncle had said they might come to visit her sometime soon, after they buried the urn.
Bobby played with the hem of his jacket. “Did they sound unhappy on the telephone? That is—upset?”
Miss Radeva pondered this, one long finger under her perfect chin. She wore gleaming pale polish on her fingernails, but no rings. Perhaps, thought Alexandra, angels were not permitted to marry.
“My uncle is not usually a cheerful person these days, because he is often in pain,” Miss Radeva said. “But this time on the telephone I noticed that he was also rather anxious. Not in a big way. Quietly. He said that after the burial of Uncle Stoyan—and a visit to me—they would take a vacation, maybe at the sea, because Neven wanted that. But he did not sound happy about it. They have very little money—I do not know how they will manage to do this traveling. I was glad, however, because he has always loved the sea, where we all lived, and he has not been there in a long time. I asked where they would go, on the coast, and if they would visit Burgas. He said maybe not—Neven had not decided yet where to stay.”
There was a knock at the door, and a gray-haired woman put her head in, nodded to them, and addressed Miss Radeva with rapid concern.
“Da,” said Miss Radeva. “Nyama problem.” The woman vanished again.
“You must go back to your job,” Bobby told her apologetically. “Just one more question, if it is all right. Do you know any reason gospodin Lazarov could have been wanted by the police?”
Miss Radeva had gotten up, smoothing her dress, and at this she froze. “Is my uncle in some trouble?” she asked fearfully. “Or Neven?”
“No,” Bobby said. “They have not done anything illegal, that we know about. But we think that Stoyan Lazarov was in trouble, at some time, perhaps a long time ago. This might be causing trouble for them now, somehow. Did your uncle ever mention this?”
She stood very straight in f
ront of them, as if wondering what to do.
“I’m sorry.” Bobby had risen, too; he seemed about to take her hand. “I know you are close with your uncle. But we are trying to learn what we can about gospodin Lazarov so that we can help your uncle and gospozha Lazarova to give his ashes a safe—ending. You see, maybe you could help us?” His voice was gentle.
Miss Radeva’s gleaming dark head drooped and she was silent for a moment. “There is something I should tell you,” she said, finally. “But we cannot talk about it here.” She stroked back a burnished lock of hair. “And I must return to work. I will finish as quickly as possible, so that I can leave a little before five o’clock.”
“Thank you,” Bobby said gravely.
Miss Radeva glanced from one of them to the other. “Please meet me in the center of the town, at the café near the mosque. I will be there in an hour.”
Bobby looked wary. “Can we speak inside this café, in private? I don’t want to sit outside while we talk.”
“Yes,” Miss Radeva said. “It is a good place for that.”
Just then, the door opened and the paint-spattered teacher came in again. She had an older woman with her, and a man with springy gray hair. For some reason, he was wearing a dark-green Tyrolean jacket, with silver buttons and embroidered flowers; he reminded Alexandra of Captain von Trapp, with his horde of children.
“My shefs,” said Miss Radeva, and Alexandra understood this must mean her bosses.
“Are you interested to adopt a child?” asked the man in the jacket. His face was puffier than Christopher Plummer’s, and sadder.
“I’m afraid not,” Alexandra said, and thought suddenly of carrying one of the littlest ones away with her, a boy of four or five, maybe, as naturally as she and Bobby had carried off Stoycho. It set up an ache under her ribs.
“Too bad,” said the Captain, and fell silent. Miss Radeva showed them out, then, and waved goodbye, her slender hand vanishing through the door.
1949
The train traveled for what seemed to me most of the day, stopping twice along the route. Each time it stopped, I thought they might open the car to let us out at our unknown destination, or to admit more men, or at least to give us water. The longing to get out of the dark and the stink began to overpower everything else, for me. Every time we stopped, some man close to the door managed to get his eye to a crack in it and report to the rest of us. At the first halt, perhaps an hour after we’d left Sofia, he told us that we were in a field, near woods, and a rumble of hope and fear went through the darkness. For a while, I felt certain that we had headed east.
“They should let us out,” a man near me said. “We all got to piss.” But he said it quietly, as if he didn’t expect any results, and indeed there were none. The train sat until the ground began to shake, and then our car trembled briefly and frighteningly; they had let another train pass us. I wondered where on the line we had stopped, but I never knew. We all settled again to holding our bladders in the dark, but then somebody bumped into a bucket hung in the corner and told the rest of us he was putting it on the floor. When we absolutely had to, we crept toward it—gripping anonymous shoulders and even the tops of heads—and relieved ourselves. Anyone who could moved away from the bucket, which smelled worse and worse as the day wore on; eventually it overflowed. It was warm for October.
We went uphill for a while, and around sharp curves, where the train’s whistle blew far ahead. The second time the train stopped, the same man put his eye to the chink in the door and reported, “Mountains. Big ones, with pine trees.”
Then I guessed that we had been taken on the northern line, into Stara Planina, but I couldn’t estimate how far. I couldn’t smell anything except the ripening urine and the man on the other side of the car who had not been allowed to clean up his pants, but somewhere out there was fresh mountain wind and the scent of fir trees under the autumn sun. I knew that region from a trip my parents had taken me on when I was small, to visit a dying great-grandmother. I couldn’t recall the old woman we’d gone to say goodbye to, but I remembered the straight wall of rock, the pines crawling up it, the peak covered with snow in late spring. It was cooler up here, even in the densely packed car. For a moment, I had a strange sense that we could not be traveling through Bulgaria anymore, or that I couldn’t be awake.
“It’s a station,” the man said. “But I can’t see any sign. Maybe we get off here.”
But again the train moved, and I fell asleep; I slept around the edges of an empty stomach, until thirst overcame my hunger and I woke trying to sort my tongue out from the roof of my mouth. The thought must have been on everyone’s mind, because the injured man next to me began to sob for water, and someone else told him roughly to shut up. No one wanted to hear the word; I wished for a moment that I could bring the poor man a whole pitcher, and drink from it with him, and then I wished I could punch him. I moved my sore back and hips and put my arms over my ears. It already seemed to me weeks since the evening before, when I’d eaten supper with Vera, urinated in a clean W.C., drunk a glass of water at bedtime, and stretched my whole frame out on a bed.
The third time we stopped, it was for good; we could hear engineers calling up and down the tracks, someone hammering, a sound of ringing on heavy steel. Voices and hands were outside our car, shouting, unbolting, prying something off the doors, then opening it all up. We blinked and struggled, too stiff to stand, but there were men with guns in the bright opening, fitting ramps to the back of a couple of trucks. “Move!” they shouted, and somehow we moved, partly in the hope that there would be water. These were different men from the ones who’d packed us in at Sofia. I don’t care to remember them. They lined us up along the ramps and counted us as we crossed into the trucks; my sleeping companion still could not walk, and it took three of us to get him on his feet. I was among the last off, and I saw the commotion at the back of the car, where the light hardly reached.
“What is it?” shouted one of the guards.
“He’s dead,” said an older prisoner, coming forward almost apologetically. “I don’t know his name, but he got in with us yesterday, in the morning. He was bleeding.”
“Move along with you,” said the man. “Get on the damn truck. Son of a bitch—count him off,” he added to a man with a big notebook. “You’ll have to tell Vasko when we get there.”
“Do we take the body with us, comrade?” the man with the notebook asked.
“Hell, we’ll have to.”
Three of the prisoners stayed behind to remove the dead man. I thought, At least he’s not thirsty anymore. Then I remembered Vera and felt guilty. She would need me back alive.
The trucks were large—army transport vehicles from the war; I noticed an instruction in German along the doors as I climbed in, but saw only a few words of it: IN CASE OF—. For a moment on the ramp I caught sight of evening sky, high peaks, rocks, pines clinging to crevices, and felt an unbelievably sweet, cool breeze on my face. I could also see an old train station with a tiled roof and a blue and white enameled sign. The sign said ZELENETS, apparently the name of this village. I had never heard of it. Far below the station I could see a few houses and a church.
At the entrance to the truck was a bucket of water, with a single wooden dipper. A boy in a torn jacket gave us each a gulp of it as we got on—we were not allowed to touch the dipper ourselves. As soon as I’d had a slurp of water, I began wondering when they would give us food. Troop benches lined the sides of the truck, and the first who filed in sat down there; I missed the chance to sit but was glad when I noticed that a fainting man with hugely swollen bare feet had found a place. The rest of us stood, braced together in our stink, and the men with guns shut the back doors and bolted them from the outside.
The truck climbed with a roar along the road, slipping on stones and into ruts, then moving at walking pace under its load. I hoped that if we rolled over and fell into one of the valleys, the door would break open and we’d at least die in light and air.
The prisoners around me kept their heads down, exhausted, fearful. I looked cautiously at the faces I hadn’t been able to see in the dark car all day—old men with white whiskers and white spittle on their lips, very young men with blue shadows under their eyes and smears of dirt or blood on their cheeks, and every kind of man in between—and I realized I was the only one looking around. Everyone else was holding on to the truck or the next man’s shoulder and staring down at the swaying metal floor. We were not merely hungry, thirsty, sore, stinking, and frightened. We were too humiliated to meet one another’s eyes.
The truck rode for a long time into the mountains, generally upward on winding roads, and then along a straight flat stretch for a few minutes before we halted. The back was opened again, and again the men with guns goaded us out, and they were joined by other men who had come to meet them. A few of these new guards wore real uniforms, a dark-green wool that looked hot and scratchy in the mild evening, and caps with a red star, like army officers. They were better organized, too, herding us into line down the truck ramp. It was dimmer where we got out; the sun had gone behind the slopes of a gorge, and I saw that we were on a road that followed a small river into the mountains.
Then the officers with the real uniforms ordered us all to kneel, and I thought this might be where they would shoot us. I felt oddly numb, more hungry than afraid; I regretted the idea of dying without a final meal, the last supper that condemned men in novels were always allowed to have. I decided not to think of Vera or my parents. That would make it easier. I knew I had done wrong, but not the wrong they thought they were shooting me for. I thought, How strange to die without even knowing where you are. Then they counted us again, swiftly, shouting; I saw that one of them had a face like that of my second-best friend from high school, with the same oversized jaw and beaky nose, and yet was not him.