“How will Kiril get his car back?” Alexandra said.
“Oh, they know each other. They’ll arrange it.” Bobby was backing the Ford carefully into the street.
“Which one of them is your boyfriend?” Alexandra said.
Bobby laughed. “Neither—anymore. Rumen is a great guy. A novelist.”
“Of course,” Alexandra said. “What about Kiril?”
“No, Kiril works for a real estate company in Sofia.”
Alexandra shook her head.
In the back seat, Stoycho lay down again and groaned, once.
“Now what?” Alexandra said.
Bobby sighed. “Now what, now what. So American,” he said.
Alexandra was hurt. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Never mind,” said Bobby. “What I’d like is to find Stoycho some water—and us some food, quickly—and I would like a cold beer.”
But instead of stopping at the little café in the park, he drove straight out of town and back onto the highway.
—
IT HAD BEGUN TO seem to Alexandra that she was going in circles now, in Bulgaria; they had started returning to places they’d been before. There was something eerie about that, and she suddenly wondered if they’d end up back at Velin Monastery, to bury the urn themselves. Then she remembered that their first trouble had appeared there.
But Bovech did not look familiar to her as they drove into town—this time they were approaching it from the east. In the first neighborhood, she saw a weedy deserted piazza occupied by the sculpture of a man, larger than life, his granite peasant garb falling in angles around him and a huge stork nest—a real one—on his head. Standing in the nest was the stork, which made the figure even taller, like someone wearing a preposterous hat. A pack of street dogs slept at his feet, too lazy even to raise their heads from the dust; Alexandra was glad that Stoycho was safely in the back seat of the car.
“Another monument,” Bobby muttered, in answer to her silent question. “All right—this one says 1923 because it marks the first big communist uprising in Bulgaria. It was suppressed very brutally, out in the countryside.” As they watched, the stork raised its wings and flapped, then settled onto the nest.
The Lazarovi house when they found it again was a shock to her, as if she’d been there many times before instead of once. They found the pretty neighbor crocheting under a tree while her two children played with plastic trucks on the front walk. At first she seemed not to remember Bobby and Alexandra; then she greeted them with the warmth of boredom, until she spotted Stoycho. She looked hard at him and backed away. She told them that only one person had come to see the house next door since their visit, right after them—a young man who didn’t want to buy it for his parents after all. (The Wizard’s detective, thought Alexandra.) Good thing for the Lazarovi that this nice young couple was interested enough to look again—she would get the key. She seemed to consider them trustworthy this time, or couldn’t be bothered with another tour, and they entered the house alone.
The smell inside was the same, smoky and clean and musty all at once, and the light filtering through the cheap curtains was just as Alexandra remembered. What was different this time was her sense of Stoyan’s presence—that he’d lived a whole life, and for a while had lived it here, and had perhaps died here as well. Or had he died at a hospital nearby? She wished she’d asked Miss Radeva, or Irina.
Nothing had been disturbed in their absence, even by the police officer who had lied about his parents. “At least that’s good,” Bobby said, as if other things might well not be. He paused in the middle of the kitchen and looked around very slowly. There were a few handwritten notes taped to the side of a cupboard. “Those were here before.” He translated for Alexandra: Fix 2 chairs, take shoes and tomatoes to P, fabric, call Irina. Old paper, yellowed, a reminder of tasks long since done, or not done. She wondered whose handwriting it was—probably Vera’s, since it looked somehow like feminine Cyrillic, and not like the writing in Stoyan’s confession. Besides, a woman would be more likely to make such a list.
The kitchen bed sat mute—as did the woodstove lid with its handle sticking up like the handle of a pie-server, the plants alive still on one windowsill, the fossilized rag over the faucet. This time Alexandra felt the presence of real people, an old lady who had cooked here a thousand times and cleaned the counters bone-bare, an old man who had probably stopped playing his violin only when his hands got too arthritic; he had sat at that table, defeated, reading a newspaper full of unimaginable political change. And, at some point, the second old man—Milen Radev, who had been their best friend and perhaps had no other place to go after his retirement, had come here to live—and then to care for the old woman just as Stoyan had once commanded him to, when she became a widow. Now the kitchen was full, for Alexandra, not empty.
She followed Bobby into the sitting room; he seemed to scan it all with new attention, but this time he touched nothing. He bent to look at the top of the antiquated television; the neighbor had done her job and there was not even any dust. Alexandra pictured Stoyan seated on the divan in front of the evening broadcast, his hands in his lap—listening, maybe, to stories about young people who were no longer required to work only where the government sent them, or prevented from studying abroad. By then, he would have been too old to be sent anywhere, anyway.
They went upstairs. “What are we looking for?” she asked Bobby.
“Whatever we can find,” he said, maddeningly, but now he pulled thin gloves from his pockets. He was so thorough, opening drawers again and searching closets, that Alexandra found herself listening hard for the sound of the neighbor coming to the door, or the police to the curb. In the bedroom, under the neatly made double bed, he found a tin of dried shoe polish and some stained rags folded in newspaper. “For black shoes,” Bobby noted.
“Orchestra shoes?” Alexandra said automatically.
He unfolded the newspaper. “1987. The July meeting of the Miners’ Trade Union began today in the capital and will continue until August 1. Okay.” In a drawer of the stand by the bed, he found a loose photograph—the black-and-white image of a young man in his late teens or early twenties, his dark hair unbecomingly shaggy, his sweater knitted in diamond patterns, his long fingers restless on one knee. Sitting on a bench or wall, the badly faded sea behind him.
“That’s Neven,” Alexandra said, taking it carefully in her hand. It was worn at the edges, as if someone had held it many times. Opening the drawer by the bed, picking it up, looking at it. Every night, before sleep.
“How do you know?”
But she knew. She knew the shape of his head and the fine planes of his face, the way the thick hair would someday be cropped short, the long quiet body, the magnificent hands, the look of curiosity curbed into diffidence but not tamed—the directness of the eyes, even blurred in a bad photo. She had stood right next to him, in his shadow, and looked up at his face above her. In life, his physique had thickened and perhaps also grown stronger, but here he was. No writing on the reverse, no date. When Bobby turned to another part of the room, Alexandra put the dog-eared photo into her purse. She would give it back with the urn, if that ever happened, and confess all then.
The photographs on the walls held them for a moment; Alexandra looked hard at Vera in her Hollywood pearls, wishing she could ask the woman in the photograph where she was now. And also tell her that she, Alexandra, knew at least some of what had happened to Stoyan to make him sad and silent for the rest of his life.
But there was nothing else new, and Bobby turned from the bedrooms with a grunt of frustration. In the living room Alexandra paused before the bookshelf: Italy, Hemingway, music history, all those titles in Cyrillic, a few in other languages. Dictionaries. Below them, half-obscured by the small television, was the shelf of bound sheet music, some of it worn at the edges like the photograph in her purse, perhaps also loved, pages turned again and again in rehearsal.
“His music,”
she said aloud, and stood there in front of it. This had been his vocation, even if he’d never been able to return to study in Vienna or play in front of grand audiences around the world. She thought about how a person’s life could be distilled into so little—the person in ashes, the work a shelf of melodies dead to the air.
“Bobby,” she said. “The story of my life.”
Bobby turned from pulling out sofa cushions and looked at her, frowning, confused.
Alexandra pointed. “Remember? He said that the story of his life was in his music. He told that to—who?—Irina. And gospodin Angelov.” She faltered, thinking of the artist, the way he had suddenly kissed her forehead. “This is where we found the box with the bandage things, too.”
Bobby was beside her at once, carefully moving the television and the table it sat on. She thought he might start pulling out the row of bound music. Instead, he stood staring at it for a moment, as she had.
1950
Into the early spring, I pursued Neven’s musical education, with snow still on the ground and the cold still hounding us, and one night I dreamed again of Vivaldi. It had snowed in Venice, too, and the Red Priest was hurrying alone to the printer’s with new scores, his long wool coat with its shoulder-cape flapping around him. He wore a triangular blue hat on his pale wig, no gloves; perhaps he didn’t need gloves, if Venice was seldom very cold. His boots took him swiftly across a square I didn’t recognize—not San Marco, but still a rather large one—and they added footprints to all the others crossing the snow in every direction. It was morning, not early; the sun had crested the buildings that shadowed the square. He passed a woman with rosy jowls inside her head-shawl, a basket on her arm. I felt afraid, for some reason, and frustrated; he was in danger and I was supposed to tell him but couldn’t make my presence known.
In fact, I seemed to be invisible, or even not there at all. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it must be lined with worry. I watched his long coat move across the square, as if I had a bird’s perch in the buildings and couldn’t screech loudly enough to get his attention. He was quick, and he seemed to be talking to himself. Work weighed on him; I knew that kind of hurry myself, when I’d tried to fit some errand in before the inevitable rehearsal.
Church bells were ringing now, and I wanted to count them—this was also important—but I lost count at four, although I knew that it must be at least nine in the morning. He passed out of the edge of the square into an alley at the far corner, and I watched him disappear without being able to follow him. Then I realized that he’d dropped a score from his bundle—a thick handwritten sheaf—and I attempted to fly down to pick it up, but I couldn’t. I knew the ink would melt and smudge in the snow, and that perhaps other people would come along to steal it, or perhaps, not noticing, would trample it. Then I understood that it contained a message for me, which I would not be able to retrieve.
—
SPRING BROUGHT AN END to the searing, terrible cold, and summer brought warmth and then heat to replace it. For me, the cold was also replaced by a mental misery I could hardly describe even to myself. Then even this was replaced by a fever. My frame, after surviving the bitterest cold workdays, seemed suddenly weak in every joint; one morning I could hardly stand up. I could not walk all the way to the latrines; I collapsed in the yard. My first thought was to tell Vera and Neven and my violin goodbye, since I would probably be shot in the dust there, a useless old horse. But the Chief sent Momo to me, with a great show of irritation, and made the younger man hoist me over his shoulder—I was lighter, of course, than I’d ever been—and carry me to the infirmary. The ground looked distant and the sky yellow, the mountains wavering and shrinking above the camp. Even in my mounting delirium I didn’t want Momo to touch me and I didn’t want to go to the infirmary, from which so many returned in tightly tied sacks. But I couldn’t struggle. The Chief must have felt I was somehow worth saving, and also not too sick to save—or perhaps he simply didn’t want me to infect the other men.
Momo carried me to the infirmary without speaking; when we arrived, he dropped me almost absentmindedly on the bed nearest the door, one of the few that was empty. Then he seemed to remember me and turned back. I saw him loom over me—the heat in my head made him look even larger and more angelic than usual—and he swatted me across the face, but casually, as if his heart wasn’t in it. It hurt terribly, more because my head was swollen and fiery already than because there was any force in the blow.
“Aw, get up, get back to work, faker,” he said, but as if practicing, a boy imitating more authoritative elders. I felt my contempt for him oozing up through the misery of fever. I tried to turn my head away but was too weak even for that. He was gone suddenly, as if snatched out of my vision by magic. A man I thought must be Nurse Ivan had come over to talk to me; I seemed to have been there hours already, and the nurse was putting cloths soaked in terribly cold water on my face. Cold water dripped into my ears and clothing. I understood that the pain of the cold water just might undo the pain of fever: a trade. It seemed to be winter again, possibly spring, then a scorching summer afternoon, then Vienna in the parks—autumn—red leaves in a whirl like music on the pavements.
I remembered Vera and decided that I would simply stay very close to her until the end came. It seemed to me we had a son, whom I loved, but I was having trouble remembering the unusual name by which we called him. Vera sat next to me stroking my forehead, a treatment that felt infinitely better than the smelly cold rags I’d imagined there a moment before. She sat caressing my head and face with her cool hand for three or four days. I realized once that I should be practicing; or teaching my little son—what was his name?—to play his tsigulka; or following Vivaldi around Venice for his rehearsals. But it also occurred to me that the Red Priest might be too busy composing, might not want me interrupting him in his rooms while he worked, and that I had lost track of which day it was anyway. I struggled to sit up and go back to work—they would shoot me if I didn’t get to the quarry, and then I would never be able to take the train back to Vera. Someone pushed me down; it was no use. I waited to die, keeping Vera’s name in my bloodstream, where it pulsed.
And then I woke one morning, exhausted and half-alive, but no longer on fire. My mind was stunned but clear. I looked around in the early light and saw that I was still in a building that must be the infirmary. I had the strange feeling of having been out of camp for a while, free for the first time since I’d arrived, not a prisoner. Now I was enslaved again and Vera was not there. Water welled up in my eyes and ran down the sides of my face, but my hands were too weak to reach it. Daylight was pouring in through four tall windows, which must be nailed shut. The room was warm.
Turning my head a little, I could see men’s bodies, dead or alive, in several other beds, one heap to a bed, unmoving. If it was daylight, all who could stand on their feet were at work already, in the quarry or the mines. I wondered how Nasko was, whether he was living, whether he had missed me, and then how long I had been away, or asleep with fever. I remembered that if I was alive, even in camp, there was a chance I would be released one day to see Vera and my son Neven and to play music again with my own hands. Next I remembered that my son had not yet been born, that my hands might never heal enough, and that perhaps Vera had already given me up for dead.
Nurse Ivan came to my bedside, a blurry figure still, and bent over me with a cup of water, then a cup of the usual thin soup. I couldn’t hold on to anything, and when I tried to drink I coughed it back up on his arms and hands and he wiped them on my bedclothes. That was when I realized there were sheets and a real blanket—I hadn’t felt such things against my hands for so long that I could hardly recognize them. They were rough sheets and probably dirty, but they were like messengers from another world.
Nurse Ivan said, “You’ve had the bad one, but you lived.” He didn’t shout at me or threaten me; it had been a long time since any camp official had spoken to me in a normal voice, if it had ever happened before
at all. “Five others didn’t. And, see, those men over there are still recovering.” He didn’t sound much interested, and I remembered that people said he was not a real nurse.
“How long was I sick?” I said. “I can’t remember.”
“Several days, I suppose,” said Nurse Ivan. “You better rest more.”
I reflected that I had no choice; I could hardly move. He went away and didn’t come near me again for hours, until I was calling for water. I drank greedily this time; the fever had left me as dry as dirt.
The next morning I could eat a little more soup, but still couldn’t sit up. I had learned by then to urinate into a jar if the nurse held it, which he did with barely controlled distaste—I probably smelled as bad as any of them. He took away my urine-stained sheet, too, and brought me a cleaner one. I lay looking at the light on the other side of the dusty windows, and the shapes of trees, which sometimes moved in the breeze. It was apparently summer out there; that was why it grew hot in the infirmary as the day progressed. I wished they could open the windows but knew better than to ask. I thought that I should get better as slowly as I could so that I would not have to return to the quarry a moment earlier than necessary—if they sent me back too early, the work would probably kill me. Simply resting, floating horizontal, was such a novelty for me that I kept feeling I must be dreaming. A man in another bed began to moan over and over and I realized I had heard that sound often during the previous days without being able to place it. I hoped Nurse Ivan would come to the poor man’s aid; I didn’t see him anywhere in the room.
I tried to think about Venice, but my mind was too weak to imagine anything from a painting or an engraving. I decided in a rambling way that if I got out of the infirmary and then out of the camp, I would somehow, sometime, go to Venice. In a few more years, with the new society confidently in place, or perhaps failed and behind us, the borders would reopen. Venice was the first destination to which Vera and I would travel, even before I went back to my studies and performances and competitions. We would take Neven. We would stand on the Piazza and I would realize I had imagined it all correctly.