Cleanness

by Garth Greenwell

  We reached the top of the hill, where the medieval atmosphere was broken by two large trucks parked close to the ruins, each of them marked SOFIISKA NATSIONALNA OPERA I BALET in the block Cyrillic of government pronouncements. Tents had been set up to sell wine and refreshments, and genteel white folding chairs were arrayed on wooden platforms in front of the stage, where men in costumes, doubling as stagehands, were arranging scenery and props. A few potted plants and a painted backdrop sketched an idea of a forest, while complicated wooden scaffolding scaled the medieval wall, at the top of which a large statue of Ganesh reached out his many arms. I tried to take it in while R. flipped through the program: the ruins, the socialist-era trucks, the European refinement of the audience, the nineteenth-century sets, the ancient god serenely gazing; it was like a palimpsest with no original text, just endless layers peeling away, and I felt a quick shudder of vertigo, as though the ground might swing open beneath me.

  I was surprised by how large an audience there was for a summer opera in a little town, and for an opera not quite in the standard repertoire. R. didn’t know anything about it, of course, and as we waited for the performance to start, listening to the clatterings of the invisible orchestra, the occasional brass instrument clearing its throat, I gave him a sketch of the story, how a British soldier falls in love with a young priestess, who betrays her vows and then, when she’s betrayed in turn, kills herself in a sacred grove. Well, that sounds awful, R. said. It’s really not the best choice for a first opera, I said, wanting to lower his expectations, feeling protective of the experience I had been so eager to share. But I loved it when I was a kid, I said, and it has some beautiful music; though I worried that even the music would be less transporting than I remembered. And I was right, there was something a little embarrassing about it; everything seemed hopelessly dated, the sentimental music and oriental fantasy of a plot, and the first notes of the overture made clear that the performance wouldn’t be very good. Bulgaria had a storied history in opera, it had produced some of the best singers I had listened to in my bedroom as a teenager, my hoarded recordings; but musicians too were fleeing westward, now that they could, leaving behind them anyone whose talents couldn’t buy them a ticket out. It was a cruel thought, I was ashamed of it even as I cringed at the poorly tuned strings and splattered brass, the wooden movements of chorus and dancers. Most of the singers were past whatever prime they had had, though the oldest were the most impressive, I thought, an almost elderly bass and especially a mezzo whose voices, however they wobbled or frayed, had retained some ambered texture of accomplishment. I wondered if any recordings of their younger voices had survived; I could only guess, from the moments of resonance, the few ringing tones, at the mastery they had once possessed. That mastery must grow feebler by the day, I thought, it must be painful to feel it go. But it was Lakmé herself who mattered most, she had almost the only music in the opera worth hearing: the flower duet, which everyone knows and which has gone dull with repetition, and the bell song, when her father forces her to sing to the point of collapse, the music demanding the athleticism and suffering opera has always expected of its heroines. The soprano in the role was the only singer who was very young, in her twenties, a woman at the start of her career; she was a pleasure to watch, lovely and thin and with a pretty voice that was affectingly pure, maybe too untested for the role, so that the line between character and singer blurred and I was worried for her in the final bars of her big scene.

  I remembered every note of the music, though I hadn’t heard it for years. I must have been fourteen when I bought the CD, a London double set I picked out because of a single name, a soprano I knew my teacher adored, already I wanted to imitate him in everything. I remember falling asleep to the soldier’s arias as sung by a tenor whose voice, which I’ve never found on another recording, was beautiful and light-bodied and pure, embodying my every ambition; as I listened to him I imagined the life my own voice would lead me to, scrubbed of shame. It didn’t matter that the performance in Veliko Turnovo was poor; as I sat beside R. I felt that hope again. I was overcome by feeling for him, and it was painful not to touch him, even to reach my hand to his. Caution had become an instinct, and even here, if there wasn’t actual danger I could imagine the discomfort any display of affection would cause. But we had our repertoire of covert gestures, the brushed elbow or knee, the slight pressure of a foot, and we made use of them as the night deepened and the air chilled and the ruins stood out more eerily in the lights. Looking at them I felt, with a force beyond the figures of my children’s history, beyond any history at all, how ancient the place was; it was a battlefield we sat on, every inch of the ground had been steeped in blood, it must still be in the chemistry of the soil.

  At the end of the opera, when the scattered bodies had risen for their applause, R. seemed less moved than bemused, looking at me as if to say is that all? The ovations were long and generous, especially for Lakmé, who left the stage half-interred by flowers. Then, before we could rise, an announcement was made that in twenty minutes the spektakul zvuk i svetlina, the sound and light show over Tsarevets, would begin. This was famous enough that R. had heard of it, and he wanted to go, even though it was cold now, the chill had deepened through the performance, and we were both tired after the day. I had been disappointed by the light show the year before, and I wasn’t excited at the thought of sitting through it again; but it was short, fifteen minutes or so, and I resigned myself to it as we began to move with the crowd down the hill. There weren’t any lights to guide us, except for the beams of one or two flashlights some members of the audience had known to bring. There was stumbling and cursing, but also a kind of good cheer, people were laughing and chatting, and in the dark I slipped my arm through R.’s, pressing him against me. I knew he had been disappointed by the opera, which hadn’t brought about the closeness between us I had hoped for, and I felt in some obscure way that I had failed. A group of young people nudged us aside as they passed, raucous, singing melodies from the opera and swinging two-liter plastic bottles of beer: music students from the university, who seemed to know their way well enough in the dark.

  I let go of R.’s arm as we reached the bottom of the hill, where lights met us again along the stone road, from which it was a five- or ten-minute walk to the observatory point where we would watch the show. Not many of the other operagoers joined us there, they scattered to their cars or set off on foot for home. The benches at the little plaza were full anyway, packed with children and what I took for their grandparents, the very old and the very young, as though everyone of vital age had been called away. R. and I stood behind the benches, watching the last well-dressed couples bend into their cars and slide off, until the speakers behind us popped awake and the lights in the square went out. R. made a humming noise of anticipation, and all of the bodies on the benches stiffened with attention. But as the music started, a kitsch fusion of folk instruments and Slavic chorus and dated synthesizer, as different quadrants of the hill and its ancient walls were illuminated, now in red, now blue and green, I felt myself receding from the square, from the light and sound. For hours I had managed not to think about R. leaving, about the uncertainty of our future, the guilt I felt no matter how I tried to dismiss it. I had never wanted permanence before, not really, or I had wanted my freedom more; I had accepted that passionate feeling faded, all my earlier experience had confirmed it, when love that seemed certain simply dissolved, on one side or both, for no particular reason, leaving little trace. But what I felt for R. was different, it didn’t dissolve, and I wanted to believe in our language of boundlessness and the impossibility of change; to let it go would mean there had been bad faith, on one or both of our parts, maybe it isn’t fair to think that but I thought it.

  The lights were acting out some mounting drama, it was hard to say precisely what. The hill, which had at first been illuminated quadrant by quadrant, was now swept by red and blue lights, first in one direction and then the other. It must have mea
nt the clashing of armies, though which were the virtuous Bulgarian forces and which the victorious Turks was lost on me, despite the narration of two children who stood on the rearmost bench, whispering excitedly to each other Turtsite! Turtsite! at each sweep of the lights. Whatever was happening a climax was approaching, it was clear in the martial lament of the music and also in the lights, which were mounting ever higher, toward the citadel itself and its reconstructed tower, though the effect was dampened by an anachronistic line of vehicles, the opera trucks at the fore, making its way down the hill. Then, from the tower, beams of light shot out, first in one direction, then in the other, then in both directions at once. What could it possibly mean, I wondered; it was clear it meant something, even the children were rapt, everyone sat transfigured. At the far end of one of the benches I saw that an old man had bent his head and covered his face with his hands, and that his shoulders were shaking as he wept. Then the lights went dark, and the speakers behind us fell silent, and from the hill itself in front of us rolled the slow sound, unamplified, of bells. There were many of them ringing together in the darkness, their tolling layered and fluid, the most affecting music of the evening, I thought, plangent and bare. And then, as they continued to ring, the hill was suddenly ablaze with light, not the colored floods of the warring sides but a white light, unsparing, so that every tree stood out and every stone was exposed, the ineffective walls, the whole much-repaired skeleton of it laid out at once grievous and proud. I heard R. make a little gasping sound beside me of marvel or dismay, and suddenly I was inside it, the wonder of the place, for a brief time at least I felt it too. Then the hill went dark again, and silent, and in the pause before anyone spoke or moved to leave I leaned toward R., wanting to feel him beside me, and for a moment he pressed warm against me in the dark.

  III

  HARBOR

  Even in the dark I liked to look at it, though the sea was never truly dark, even now in the off-season it caught the light of the moon, which hung high and almost full, and of the few restaurants and hotels that were open in the new town, so that the whole harbor shimmered with points of light. It had been months since I had seen the sea, a year, and I was hungry for it; I had stepped to the edge of the terrace to check my phone but found myself staring at the sea instead. You could lose yourself in it, that was what drew me, it was beautiful but also it was like looking at nothing, the sight of it drowned out thinking like the sound of it drowned out noise, and at first I didn’t hear the others calling me to join them. I smiled as I turned, though I resented being called back, and saw that they were standing in a circle beside the tables where they had been smoking and talking, their glasses empty. Come here, one of the American writers said, we’re playing spin the bottle, and I laughed and took my place. We were choosing partners; there would be a reading to close the festival at the end of the week, and we would read in pairs, one American, one Bulgarian. A Bulgarian writer held one of the wine bottles we had emptied; he crouched in the center of the circle and then stepped back to the periphery once he had set it spinning, which it did crazily over the cobblestones of the patio. He was the oldest of us, midfifties and handsome, a champion boxer when he was young and now a coach of some sort. All the Bulgarians had other careers, there’s no such thing as a professional writer in Bulgaria, and no writing programs, either, or almost none; they worked in business, or as journalists, one ran a satirical website all my students loved, one was a priest. And they had all published books, some of them several, so that though the program was for emerging writers it was hard to tell the difference between them and the writers still inside the restaurant, the famous writers. That wasn’t true for the Americans, who were younger and less accomplished; most were still in graduate programs for writing, or had just finished. We were boring in comparison to them, I thought as the bottle came to a stop and, to a chorus of cheers, the boxer stepped forward and shook the hand of one of the Americans. There was something a little sheepish about the pair of them, maybe the erotic overtones of the game caused them to lean away from each other as they shook hands, each staying decidedly in his own sphere. N., who ran the website, took the bottle next. He was a bigger man, not quite fat, not quite handsome, the friendliest and funniest in the group; he had made us laugh to tears over dinner and he made us laugh now, when he took his American partner by the shoulders and hugged him close, he was so happy, they would be brothers forever, a toast, he said, taking him to the table and its bottle of rakia.

  There were six of us left, we tightened our circle as another Bulgarian writer, the only woman in their cohort, took the bottle and spun it on the cobblestones. But before it could come to a stop a voice called out in Bulgarian and then a waitress from inside stepped in between us, wagging her finger and snatching the bottle up from the ground. Chakaite, one of the Bulgarians said, hold on, we’re almost finished, but the waitress said Ne, ne mozhe, it’s not permitted, we were being too loud, people lived above the restaurant, and the bottle, what if it broke, what a mess, and then she turned and walked back inside, the bottle cradled against her chest. We looked at one another, embarrassed, and then the Bulgarian woman shrugged and turned back to the table. Most of the others joined her, one or two went inside the restaurant, where the writers who taught the workshops were sitting, one Bulgarian and one American, we had had our first sessions earlier that day. I stepped away again, not wanting to join them, I pulled my phone out but put it back in my pocket unchecked. I can’t, R. had said, wiping his face, I don’t think I can, I don’t know what I feel, I have to figure out my life. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his computer open in front of him, he kept leaning toward the screen and back. But Skups, I said, using my name for him, our name for each other, that’s what we’ve been doing, we’re figuring out our lives, you are my life, I didn’t say, but I thought it, for two years he had been my life. Every couple of months I flew to Lisbon to spend a long weekend with him, a week, whenever I had a break I stayed in his tiny student’s room, we slept together in the narrow bed he was sitting on now. I’m trying, I said to him, I’m applying for jobs, but there were no jobs, or none I could get, it was too expensive to hire Americans, they said, especially with the crisis, if I had an EU passport it would be different. It’s impossible, R. said, you know it’s impossible, we have to accept it, I have to live my life. I had to live my life too, and I wanted a different life, not a life without R. but a life in a new place, I couldn’t keep living the same day again and again, the hours of teaching, I wanted a new life too.

  On the patio a plan was forming to leave the restaurant and explore the town. It was a warm night, early June, still a week or two before the shops would open for the summer tourists, with signs in Russian hung out over cheap souvenirs; we would have the streets to ourselves. N. made a quick trip inside the restaurant, to the long table where food had been laid out, and returned with a bottle of wine, which he held low and tight against his body, hiding it from the waitress. Rations, he said, very important. The restaurant was near the hotel, at the tip of the little peninsula that formed the southern side of the harbor, and the street we walked along was like all the others in the old town, cobbled and lined on both sides with unpainted wooden houses in the National Revival style, two- or three-story buildings, oddly off-kilter and asymmetrical, with elaborate wooden beams buttressing upper floors jutting out over the foundations. They were in varying stages of upkeep, some renovated, others barely shacks, even here along the most desirable streets near the shore, where buildings jostled for a glimpse of the sea. Most of them were empty, shuttered hotels and vacation homes, but occasionally the sound of a television reached us from inside, or light spilled through the slats of the wooden shutters, a few people lived here all year long. I was walking with another American, a graduate student in a program he hated in the South. He was younger than I was, and fit; in the mornings he ran along the sea, on the path that led to the new town, where the shops were open, he said, it was a real city, not just a museum.
He was friendly and I tried to match his friendliness, it was why I was here, I told myself, to meet people, to make friends. But I didn’t trust myself, I was too eager, I caught myself looking at him, at almost every man I passed, with a kind of hunger R. had shielded me from, I mean the thought of R. It might be possible, I thought about the other writer, he looked at me sometimes in a way that made me think maybe I could have him, or he could have me, we could have a little romance, though that wasn’t what I wanted; I wanted something brutal, which was what frightened me, I wanted to go back to what R. had lifted me out of. It was a childish feeling, maybe, I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me.

  We were trailing behind the others, we could hear them ahead of us in the dark, their occasional bursts of laughter. We were walking up Apolonia, the main thoroughfare, though it wasn’t until we reached the center of town that there were any real signs of life, some open shops, a restaurant, a man at a table outside, hunched over a slice of pizza. We caught up with the others in front of a convenience store, and waited until N. and the priest emerged with new bottles of wine and a stack of plastic cups. N. handed these out as the priest busied himself with one of the bottles, cutting the foil at the neck with a pocketknife attached to his keys, working at it slowly, with the deliberateness of drunkenness. He had arrived after the rest of us, driving in from Veliko Turnovo. We had all been curious to meet him, but there was nothing especially priestly about the man who appeared dressed all in black, not in a cassock but in jeans and a T-shirt he wore tucked in, tight on his thin frame. He had a young man’s beard, scraggly and unkempt, a sign of laziness more than devotion, I might have thought. Only his hands marked him out, the fingers long and thin, a scholar’s hands, with the weird sliding grace of someone accustomed to ritual. Or maybe I had this impression because of the way I had seen him raise his hand to a man’s lips earlier in the evening, when the distinguished Bulgarian writer, elderly and reclusive, asked for a blessing before he read. He had become priestly in that moment, he had stood solemnly while the writer pressed his lips to the third joint of the second finger of his right hand, and then he made the sign of the cross over the writer’s bowed head. It had surprised me, it was a gesture I hadn’t seen in years, not made in earnest, not since the year I had played at conversion in graduate school, when I had made it myself or had it made over me at the rail of a church in Boston, where I stood with my arms crossed over my chest, my mouth sealed by my disordered life, as I thought of it then.