I looked at Irina. “Is this baby yours?” I said in a shaking voice.
“No, he’s mine,” Vera said. She did not make a move toward me. “We thought you were dead.”
Saying this seemed to unloose her and she suddenly burst into a wild sobbing, bending over as if she might vomit. I stood bewildered. I remembered how frightening I must look to her, a corpse. And this baby, who was Vera’s but could not be mine. I stood up, my hands made a movement, and I thought it was to grab something from the table and hurl it at the wall—Irina’s coffee cup, perhaps. But instead my arms threw themselves around Vera and she wrapped her sobs around my neck. She was tremendously alive, much stronger than I, and she was embracing a skeleton. She looked at my face, stroked my stubbly head, picked up my twisted hands and stared at them. She cried and cried. I couldn’t speak; I only wanted to feel her touch and stare at her in return.
Irina stood frozen, watching us. After a couple of seconds she went over and picked up the baby, who stopped crying at once and turned a streaked red face toward us. He wore a shirt and knitted pants. He seemed about six months old, although I wasn’t good at estimating such things, and he had Vera’s remarkable eyes. He reached out for her and she took him from Irina. Irina shrank back into the corner of the kitchen, the only time I’d ever seen her cowed. Vera gazed at me over the baby’s head, and then he swiveled and stared at me, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her mouth quivering. Next to her, the baby looked more like himself, less like his mother. “We believed that you were dead.”
“Are you married again?” I kept one hand on the edge of the table, for balance. Irina slipped quietly out, past us. I knew her—we would meet later, and say our greetings then. Her leaving me alone with Vera meant she trusted me not to hurt her sister; the knowledge of that steadied me further.
“No,” she told me, in the same low voice.
I thought about asking the man’s name, but at last I said, “Do you love his father?”
Her head drooped toward the baby’s. He was watching me with those beautiful eyes. “No. But he helped me very much after they told me you were dead and that I should forget you. He was kind and good, and in love with me. He’s not here anymore. He went to work in another city. He wanted to marry me, and to take me and the baby with him, but I said no.”
“Who told you I was dead?”
“The police, eight months after you left. They said they had discovered that you were a criminal and that you had come to a bad end somewhere. They said they could not give me your body, but to forget about you as soon as possible. After a while I believed you really must be dead, or you would have come back to us.” She began to weep again. “I never believed you were a criminal.”
I stood shaking, on my unreliable feet. “And why did you stay here?”
She raised her head, and that was the proud, contained Vera, the schoolgirl. “Later, when I knew I was pregnant—after I knew that, I had a dream that you were coming back to see the baby. So I told everyone you were alive and that I had gone to visit you secretly, out in the country where you were working—that you had been sent to work far away—to make them think the child was—” She drew back again, confused, her hand stroking the baby’s little shoulders.
Suddenly the baby leaned toward me, so far that I was afraid he would fall out of his mother’s arms. He stretched out his hands and I came closer and bowed my head in front of him. He touched my rough scalp and leaned even closer, until I reached forward and took him.
I hadn’t known I knew how to hold a baby. His limbs were warm even through the clothes. His shirt rode up to show his rounded belly and Vera automatically put a hand out to pull the hem back down and tuck it in. He gazed at me, somber but interested. He put his hand on my shoulder and left it there. His nose was small and flat, his cheeks broad and smooth. When he looked up at me, I could see the narrow wet paths where his tears had traveled. Even his tears must have been very small, each of them. It was strange to see the glow of his face up close, after my many months of looking into the faces of the dead, or the living dead. His body fitted mine, the hollows of my ribs and shoulders. I thought I must be mad, holding another man’s child against my heart. I did not even want to know; the camp had emptied me of all questions except one, and that was about how to live. And one other.
“What do you call him?”
She smiled for the first time and wiped her face. “He has your father’s name, but I could not use that, so I call him Neven.”
I was a dearly loved child, Neven told Alexandra. I knew only that my father went away for a while before I was born, and then again two times when I was in school, and that my mother worried and cried sometimes. I remember the second time he was away, although I didn’t see him leave. But my mother was kind and lively, younger than my father, a very strong person, and all four of my grandparents were alive and helped us. Once, when I was about eight, my father came home in the middle of his time away; he visited us in Burgas for three days and told me that he had to work in a village for a while longer because he was needed there, and that I must take care of my mother when he left again.
Each time, he returned to us with his hands terribly bruised from work; he was a fine musician but he often had trouble with his fingers—arthritis, he said. After every absence, he began very slowly to practice again until he could play in any orchestra that would have him, first in Sofia, and then, once Uncle Milen had helped us move to the sea, in Burgas. There my father got a job in a food-processing factory. I knew that when he went away he couldn’t be working as a musician, because his violin always stayed behind and my mother would put it deep in our wardrobe under some extra blankets. I overheard him tell my mother that he was allowed to return sometimes to the orchestra only because they knew how good he was, and they needed him—the bitterness in his voice shocked me. He never spoke that way if he knew I was listening.
Sometimes, when my father was ill and tired and had a few days of vacation, my mother sent him to visit his friend Nasko Angelov, a painter she said my father had known during his work out in the country before I was born. Nasko had lived in Sofia for a while, and then moved back to his old village in the Rhodopes after he was married. He worked in a small factory near the village. My parents did not have many friends, but these two men, Nasko and Uncle Milen, were devoted to us.
My father wanted me to learn to play the violin. Our lessons were not a success. Even when my father was not away, he was tired and sickly—for years I thought he must be much older than he said he was—and he could be very quiet, even withdrawn. His attempts to teach me were interrupted for such long periods by his absences that I could not make the progress he wanted me to. I actually don’t believe I would have been much good, anyway, although maybe it helped him to think I had unfulfilled talent.
Instead, I excelled in mathematics and at sports; I ran track—I was fast, although I never managed to win any big medals. I was a well-behaved child, too. I don’t think I did anything wrong in my childhood, except that I sometimes put nails in the street near car tires when no one was looking—all the boys did that—and once I stole a map out of a library book, a big map of Europe from an old book I thought no one would ever want, and hung it on the wall in my little bedroom. It filled the room. My favorite part of it was Bulgaria, which was pale green; the rest always looked alien to me. I told my father I’d bought the map at a bookstore for a few stotinki, but he said nothing; he stared at it in silence and then went out of the room. So I was allowed to keep it.
When I was ten or eleven, my father called me to him and showed me a book, a rare book in Russian he had saved for and bought from the antikvarna in central Burgas. It was an illustrated history of the architecture of Italy, and he explained to me that when he was young he had been to Rome to play a concert, and had visited briefly in Florence, and he showed me the pictures. I knew better—and had known all my childhood—than to discuss with other people the fact that my father had stud
ied music in the decadent West. Because of this, it was thrilling for me to listen to him talk about it, and a little frightening. This was the Colosseum, where men fought wild beasts—I had learned about that at school. This was something called a duomo, which Brunelleschi had designed for Florence. My father had seen these things with his own eyes.
And this, my father said, turning a leaf over very carefully, was Venice, the Queen of the Adriatic, La Serenissima, a great city he had not managed to visit in his youth. It was very special, he said, because it was built on islands and marshes, almost on water. I looked at the illustration, a painting reproduced in color. It showed high buildings all around a square, and the domes of a big church, and drawn up at the edge of the square was a fleet of little boats. Farther out on the water were sailing ships. The people walking around on the square, looking very small, wore cloaks and triangular hats, or long dresses with very wide hips. For years after, I thought of Venice as a place where the streets were made of water and, even more strangely, the people wore outlandish, outdated clothing.
Then my father said that I must never tell anyone, but that someday he and I would go to Venice together. He said he would finally see where his favorite composer, Vivaldi, had lived and worked, and he would take me with him, because together Vivaldi and I had saved his life. I must have looked puzzled; he pulled me to his side and kissed my cheek and ruffled my hair. He asked me to bring him his violin and he played me a piece from memory, a piece as beautiful and big and brilliant as the cathedral in the middle of Sofia.
“That is our friend Vivaldi,” he said, when he’d finished. “When I’m long gone, this piece will be yours.” His face was full of joy, which puzzled me again, because he was talking about his death—besides, he was still young, even if he looked older. I did not want him to die, ever.
By the time I was thirteen, I understood that my father was not like other people, and not only because he had been to the West and practiced the violin all the time and had vanished like a magician several times during my childhood. When he was living at home with us he had to check in at the police station in Burgas once a month—“official business,” he always said. Sometimes he was called there suddenly, and he never went without kissing my mother goodbye, passionately, which always surprised and embarrassed me. My mother would pace the kitchen until he came home an hour later, except the times when he didn’t come home for months.
He told me once that if he ever had to go again to work in another part of the country, I must call Milen Radev to help my mother and me, that Uncle Milen was absolutely loyal to us and would always help. That was their arrangement, he said. At least once a year my father took out his book and showed me Venice, and told me that someday we would see it, he and I.
I left home at nineteen and went into the army, as we all did, and my mother sent me socks she knitted and pieces of cloth to wrap my feet, to keep them drier inside my boots. I got blisters and funguses and lost my toenails anyway. The army was terrible, the food was terrible, we were always cold in the barracks. But I was young and it didn’t matter so very much, in the end. I made some good friends there. After the army, I wanted to go to Sofia University in mathematics—not to the Conservatory, as my father had hoped I might. I could not get a good enough reference from my high school, although I had done well there. I settled instead for a place at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Burgas, where I studied petrochemical engineering. I lived at home, in our apartment in the new housing complexes near the stadium, and I did my work at the kitchen table. Then I went to work in the refinery, like everyone else, and later in a smaller plant.
Through all this, from my childhood on, my father loved me indulgently, although I know it must have been a disappointment to him—I must have been a disappointment to him. He smiled if I came into a room, kissed and hugged me almost every time he saw me. He loved my mother, too, watching her with bright eyes, but was silent and reserved with her even in front of me. Whenever he was at home, she was cheerful, although with a crease of anxiety across her forehead that looked older than she was, as if she had borrowed it from my father’s worn-out face. I think they didn’t talk much with each other about where he had been. I have often thought that the terrible thing in communism was not just that we turned against each other. It was that we turned away from each other.
After the changes, the plant where I worked was shut down. I began taking jobs in construction, often as a mason, lifting rocks and mixing cement; it upset my father, to see my hands bruised and injured, but there was no choice. I think young people now don’t know much about those times, or don’t understand—they think it’s always been as it is now, the mobile phones and friends on the Internet and lots of people going to other countries to work. Soon we had even less money. The orchestra shrank when the government changed, because no one would pay for it—my father had retired before that, anyway. He wanted to give music lessons, but few could afford them, especially outside Sofia. My parents left the sea and a cousin of my mother shared her house in Bovech with them until she died and left it to them. It was much cheaper for them to live there. Sometimes they visited Gorno, of course. I went back to Sofia with a little money saved and did a course in bookkeeping, so I could get a job online. I almost got married, too, but it didn’t work out. That was especially sad for my mother, because she has no grandchildren.
My father disliked Bovech, I am sure, although he said very little about it. He practiced his violin every day and read his books, and just before he got sick he found that dog, who loved him. He read a great deal, as I said—I think he reread his whole library. And I believe that Milen Radev helped with some money whenever he could, and he came to see them often, and to live with them once he retired.
When my father got sick, he told no one, even me, until it was very late. We could not have saved him anyway, the doctor said. That was why my father called me to be with him. And that day when he sent my mother to Plovdiv to have a rest, he told me about Zelenets, where Vivaldi and I had saved him because the thought of each of us was more powerful than anything they could do to him there. He told me why he had been arrested and how he had tried to do his own penance. I wept when he told me what he had lived through. And I was confused, because I knew he must have been in the camp when I was conceived and born. But he said he had looked forward to having a son and had known he would love him as he loved me. That was what he said, and suddenly I understood what his story meant. My mother had given him the son he wanted, and Stoyan Lazarov had become my father. For me he was truly my father, even if I guessed who in turn must have given me to him.
Then he told me that he still knew two people from Zelenets. I remember he was getting very weak from talking. He lay still for a while and his face was white on his pillow, and sweating. I brought him water and some of the pills for pain, but he said he did not want to take too many because they made him sleepy and he needed his mind clear to tell me the rest. It was early summer, like now, but already June, and I opened the window in his bedroom so he could feel the warm air. He smiled and said that it was good that he had turned over the page of the calendar ahead of time, so it would be on the right month when he died.
I sat down next to him and he put his hand out. That was a new thing for him, that he liked to have me hold his hand. His body had always been thin, and now it had grown even thinner in his bed. I sat with him and felt how soon he would not be there anymore, and I could hardly believe it.
Then he stirred and said, “I want to tell you about the two people from Zelenets I still know about. One is a saint, and the other is a devil. The saint, of course—” He lifted a hand as if pointing in someone’s direction. “That is Nasko Angelov. You know now how we met. He is stronger than I am, and he will be your friend for as long as he lives. When I found him again in Sofia—alive—it was one of the happiest days of my life.”
He licked his lips and I brought him water again and watched while he closed his eyes. “Please rest, Tatko,
” I said. “We can talk tomorrow.”
“No,” he said, and his eyes flew open. “Not when your mother is here. She has suffered enough. I will go out of here as quietly as I can, to make it easier for her. She knows where I was. I do not want her to know all the rest of it.”
He kept his eyes on me. They had stayed brighter than the rest of his face—I loved those deep, dark eyes, always turned on me with affection. “There is something more I must tell you. Two years ago I was at Gorno, with your mother, the last time I ever went there. It was very early in the morning—a beautiful morning in spring.” He clenched my hand, as if in a spasm of pain, and I thought again of reaching for the pills on the bureau. “I was walking on the hill road by myself, as you know I liked to do. I stepped off the road among some trees to see the flowers that hide there in spring. As I stood looking for them, a car came by on the road, a big expensive car I had never seen up there before, and I knew it must belong to the businessman who had built the huge house around the mountain—or perhaps this was one of his friends, visiting.
“Suddenly the car stopped and someone in the back seat opened the door and leaned out to adjust something—a seat belt or something that had become caught on the outside. I saw the man’s face clearly, although I don’t think he noticed me standing still among the trees in my work clothes and hat. If he did, he ignored me—of course I was just another villager. He was only five or six meters away from me. His face was covered with a heavy beard, the cheeks above it scarred and puckered as if by an old accident, the eyes yellowed. His hair was very strange—stiff and neat but long, almost to his shoulders, and dyed brown. To me, it looked like a wig.