The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

“Panelki—that’s what we call them,” he shouted; it would be days before she actually learned the word and understood what he had said. “Because they were made of panels, prefabricated.” She didn’t see any panels—only rows of metal balconies, many with laundry on them, some full of flowers and even green trees in pots.

  He waved to her again, over his shoulder. “The official name for them is blokove. I grew up right over there.” They all seemed disastrously the same to Alexandra; she would have preferred a vista of little villages. Besides, she wished he would look only straight ahead.

  The road left the city in two lanes with a chipped concrete barrier between them, nothing like a highway. She watched some houses go by, a suburban area—squat stucco in various colors and conditions, most with red tile roofs, many with chain-link fences outside, or concrete walls. In front of one house there was a wire gate with two big dogs barking wildly behind it. In another yard she saw a sweet-eyed donkey looking over a wall, and she wondered if they were now officially out of the city. Alexandra thought about trying to write down some of what she was seeing, but what was the point? She would never use those scrawls for anything, now that she had no stories to tell.

  Instead, she leaned out the window with her camera and photographed the houses, the yards with newly leafed apple and peach orchards in them. Kitchen gardens flourished everywhere, vigorous potato plants, peas and beans climbing up strings, tomato stalks with small green tomatoes already swelling on them. She saw an elderly couple in their garden; the woman stood with her hands on her hips, the man leaning on his hoe. Alexandra realized that the taxi was the only car on this road now.

  She bent forward to shout to Bobby again. “How far did you say it was to the monastery? I mean, how long?”

  “The time?” Bobby suddenly slowed. Five or six chickens crossed, officious, leisurely. He honked at them.

  “Yes.” She had to lean even farther forward to hear.

  “Do you want to sit in the front seat?” he called out. He stopped by a wall made of something speckled black and white, like the chickens. She didn’t like to leave the bag with the urn alone, but finally she set it on the floor in the back, bracing it with her own luggage so that it wouldn’t tip over.

  When she stepped out of the taxi everything seemed suddenly different, inside of her and out. She did not feel sleepy anymore, or had moved beyond sleep to a brilliant new fatigue. She had the urge to touch the trees leaning over the wall beside her, a couple of weeping birches and a peach tree with hard-looking fruits the size of walnuts. The air was soft and fresh and clean-smelling, after Sofia. Alexandra filled her lungs and climbed in next to Bobby. It was odd being close to another person in this new place, his denim knee and his hand on the gearshift. She resolved that if he put that hand on her, anywhere, she would open the door and threaten to jump out. The front of the cab was more worn than the back, although it seemed clean; the seat showed a fringe of loose stuffing around her thighs. From the rearview mirror he had hung a string of beads that ended with something that looked like an ancient silver coin. She could see an owl on one side of the coin—and then, when it twirled around, the profile of a woman with her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck.

  Bobby pulled out into the road again. “You don’t have to use your seat belt,” he admonished her sharply. She was hunting for the buckle. “I am a very good driver.”

  “I can see that,” she told him. He was apparently an odd bird, annoyed and somehow annoying, and she thought without wanting to of Jack’s frequent moods. She said, “I promised my mother that I would always wear a seat belt, even if I went to the moon.”

  He laughed, turning in her direction. His face seemed suddenly older, perhaps because wrinkles leapt into play around his eyes, so that the blue almost vanished. She was relieved when he looked ahead at the road again.

  “I promised my mother, also,” he said. “Not about the moon—only to use the seat belt. Especially since I must drive every day.”

  “Do you do this full time?”

  Bobby frowned, picking up speed again. At the edge of the suburbs, open fields spread out on both sides of the road. In the distance she saw mountains coming closer, steeper than the ones that loomed above Sofia. In the taxi’s side mirror, she got a glimpse of her familiar self, the freckled pale oval of her face, the serious green gaze and thin mouth, her father’s rusty eyelashes and eyebrows, her fierce obsidian earrings. It was like encountering an old friend in an unexpected setting. As always, she saw Jack in herself, too, although her hair was more brown than red and her skin fair instead of ruddy like his. But they’d had the same eyes.

  Bobby stretched his arms, settling in behind the steering wheel. “Drive full time? No, not really. Maybe thirty-five hours a week.”

  This seemed to Alexandra rather close to full time—perhaps Bobby had to hold down two jobs, in this economy. She felt delicate about asking more, so she just nodded. “How long did you say it’ll take us to reach the monastery?”

  He smiled. “I did not say. It would be about another hour.”

  Alexandra felt her insides lurch. “An hour? But we’ve been on the road at least half an hour, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, well—naturally.” She wondered if he was making fun of her. “Velinski manastir is not so far away. The problem is the road. Very twisted, with a lot of turns. It’s up there, at the beginning of the Rila Mountains”—he pointed through the windshield, toward the high forest—“so we can almost see it now. But the route is complicated.”

  “Your English is really good,” she said, partly to distract herself from the thought of that mountain road and partly to express appreciation for his driving her up it for relatively little money. “I’d like to learn some Bulgarian. I know only five or six words, so far.”

  “I’m certain you can learn a great deal,” he said. “But it is a hard language. We have difficult verbs.” He laughed, clearly proud—his verbs stumping foreigners.

  “That’s not good news,” said Alexandra. They grinned at each other. Then she grabbed the sides of her seat. A car was coming straight toward them, in their lane. She tried not to scream; she willed herself not to seize Bobby’s arm. Her mother and father flashed through her mind, and then the car swerved back into its own lane and she saw it had been passing a slower driver. Her heart raced in her throat, in her temples.

  “Are you all right?” Bobby said.

  “That car,” Alexandra said weakly. “Almost hit us.”

  “No, no—he was just passing. It is a passing zone here. I would not let him hit us.”

  Alexandra did not know what to say. She felt that their headlights and the headlights of the oncoming car had practically kissed. She had seen very clearly the driver of the other car, head on, a man in a bright green T-shirt—his eyes, his expression of concentration. He must be a couple of kilometers behind them by now, at that speed. On the interstates back home, he would already have been pulled over and given a great big ticket.

  “Oh,” Alexandra said. “I’m used to American roads, I guess. There’s some speeding there, too, of course.” But she couldn’t get her blood to stop fizzing. She focused on the view of fields.

  Bobby was speaking to her again. “Where are you from, in the U.S.?”

  “North Carolina,” she said. “It’s in the South.”

  “I’ve heard of it.” She saw that for him it was an obscure name, as Bulgaria had been for her, and for Jack.

  “What is an American doing here, in any case?” He shifted down; a hill rose ahead and she saw the road had turned now in the direction of those soft dark folds, the higher mountains that held their destination.

  “I’m going to teach English.” She tried to compose herself. “I have a job starting at the end of June, tutoring at a language program. I wanted to come here early—to travel around before I begin work.”

  “Well, you are traveling already,” he said. “Is your job in Sofia?”

  “Yes—it’s at the Central English
Institute,” she said, examining his face for further sharpness, but he looked approving.

  “Brilliant. They have an excellent reputation and many students. First rate.” He took a curve into the shade of woodland. They were leaving behind the crops, the vast fields and distant villages receding to smudges of red and beige. The forest was deep, sprinkled with sun; the trees were mossy spruces and stands of oak and beech.

  “So you think Sofia is a good place to work?” she ventured.

  “It is the only place,” he said solemnly. “You can do a lot there, see the theater and go to lectures and concerts. Of course, those things often cost money.”

  “Have you ever lived anywhere else, in Bulgaria—I mean, outside Sofia?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Or anywhere else? Another country?”

  Then she felt she had been rude; probably he had never had the chance. He surprised her: “Yes, in England.”

  “Why England?”

  “I worked some construction there.”

  “Really?” she said. So that was how he’d acquired the accent.

  “You see, I am a Sofia intellectual.” He smiled at her. “We sometimes go to do construction in England. I took one year of time off in the middle of my university. Liverpool. Some friends arranged it. I learned a lot of Polish there, too, actually.”

  She felt too jet-lagged to process this. He was a Sofia intellectual and he drove a cab? And what in particular made him call himself an intellectual? Was that a kind of title, here?

  “It must have been very interesting,” she said lamely. “Is that why you speak such good English?”

  “It’s not so good,” Bobby said. His brusqueness seemed to have returned. “I also went to Sofia University in English philology. I can tell you all about George Bernard Shaw, if you want. But I am forgetting a lot of words.”

  She stared at him. Then he laughed. “Are you hungry?” He was looking her over—more as if he thought she might be showing the first signs of starvation, she thought, than as if he found her attractive.

  “Yes, a little. Mostly very tired.” That reminded her of something. She unbuckled, leaned over the back of her seat, and caught the handle of her purse. Inside was a packet of airplane pretzels. She offered him a few, which he accepted with alacrity.

  “Thank you. We can stop for some lunch later, if you would like,” he said. “I just don’t want to lose the time.”

  “I don’t want to, either.” She wished she had a bottle of water and hoped his proposal of lunch wouldn’t lead to dinner, or a room for the night. If she had to ditch him, she would keep the urn with her, protect it, find a ride on to the monastery.

  But he was looking at her with amusement. “I thought that your mother said to you to wear your seat belt.”

  “Well, see—I’m buckling it again,” she told him. She felt a pang of relief. Here she was, sitting right next to him, and he seemed respectful—no hand on her knee, just a friendly question or two.

  After that they didn’t speak for a while. She kept thinking about a normal meal, and a clean bed, and a hot shower, but she was thankful for her empty stomach as the mountain road became dizzying.

  Near the end of their journey Bobby turned off into a narrow lane; Alexandra saw a brown sign that said ВЕЛИНСКИ МАНАСТИР/VELINSKI MANASTIR with a white symbol next to the words, a church or a castle. This new road was dirt, although hard-packed and clean; it wound among rocky cliffs half-hidden by trees. She had definitely been awake long enough now to stop minding being awake at all.

  “Here we are,” said Bobby, and they drove in past stone pillars and an iron gate that stood wide open. He steered along an alley of enormous peeling sycamores. The walls of the monastery rose up before them, forbidding but also mellowed by profound age, a sight that made Alexandra’s heart leap—this was the kind of thing she had hoped to see. On one side, vines had grown densely over the stones. Small towers and slate roofs were visible above the walls.

  Alexandra scanned the parking area, which contained four or five cars, but Bobby had already been looking. “There is no other taxi here,” he said flatly.

  “They could have told the driver to go back to Sofia,” she proposed. “Or come on a bus, like you said.”

  “Yes, of course.” He pulled the hand brake. “Probably yes. Especially if they were going to sleep in the monastery for a couple of days.” Then he looked doubtful. “But they would not do that without the urn, I think. They would be looking for you, or going home to wait.”

  “So you can stay here? Even if you are not—a monk?” she asked, thinking again of a bed, a door with a lock.

  “Yes,” he said. “You can stay for a month if you make a reservation. People do that for a rest, sometimes, or if they are very religious. If your people are coming by bus, we will need to wait for them here for a while, at least half an hour.”

  She took the bag and her purse with her and Bobby locked her computer in the trunk with her suitcase. The urn seemed heavier than before—she didn’t remember its weighing so much on her arm in front of the hotel, before she had known what it was. She thought of a life, a face she had never seen and couldn’t imagine, a real human body full of its own experiences, its memories. And now this. Perhaps he had been young, with a firm jaw and a startling smile. Perhaps the old man and woman had lost their other son, or a teenaged grandson. Now he was ashes, in the arms of a stranger. She thought of the tall man, standing with one hand on his son’s shoulder. The son would be a little shorter, but even more beautiful; the man would grip him with that big hand. She could feel the warmth of it for a moment on her own shoulder. The son would be smiling, shy. How such a thing could happen at all: Alexandra carrying his urn across a parking lot, in a holy place, under these palatial trees. She felt tears of anger spring to her eyes.

  Bobby had put on a denim jacket as worn as his jeans—it was cool here, after the Sofia streets. “This way,” he said, and she saw that the doors to the monastery were open—smoke-darkened nicked wood beneath a stone arch. There was a painted sign above them, an elaborate Cyrillic she could not even sound out.

  Bobby saw her looking. “It says something like, ‘This monastery is to the glory of God and of the Holy Virgin Mary, 1349.’ That is when the oldest part of it was built, I think. The rest is a little more new, from the early time of the eighteen hundreds.” A group of tourists had surrounded them and were looking at the words, too. Alexandra could hear them speaking French, the women pushing sunglasses up onto their hair.

  “Come,” Bobby said.

  Inside, the courtyard was drenched with sunshine, apart from the shadowed wooden galleries that ran around the second and third stories. A small stone church basked like a hen in the middle of the yard, digging itself in, pointed cypresses clustered around it. Underfoot the yard was cobblestone, and she noticed a dog lying in the sun, all its swollen nipples on display. Beside the gate was a glass kiosk—definitely not medieval—with a placard: POLITSIYA, she sounded out. In the kiosk sat a single figure in a uniform.

  There were a few people walking here and there, or entering the church, but she saw no sign of an old man in a wheelchair, an old woman with weirdly auburn and gray hair, or a tall upright man in a black vest looking all around for the foreigner who’d taken their bag. It had seemed so real to her that they would be there that she felt shocked not to see them. They must be somewhere else, inside the buildings.

  Bobby took her elbow, then seemed to think better of this and dropped his hand. Alexandra was not sorry. “They might be in the church,” he said. “They might go inside to see if you are there, maybe. Or to pray.”

  For their treasure to be returned to them, she thought. She got a tighter grip on the bag and followed him. The church had a small wooden porch; haloed portraits flanked the door, a man with a long black beard and a man with a long white beard—twin bodyguards. She walked between them into darkness that suddenly became musty candlelight. In the dim entryway, a w
oman in a cage was selling books, postcards, and thin yellow candles. Alexandra felt terribly lonely. The air in the church was chill and damp, like the breath of a cave. Yes: she and Jack had gone to Dixie Caverns in Virginia once, on a rare road trip with their parents, and this had been the smell down there, the four of them huddling together along wooden walkways. Earth, the depths of it, cold rock and trickling water. If there were a hell, she thought, it must be cold, like Hades, a land of shadows with this frightening stillness emerging from nowhere. The Greeks had it right—no fire, just the chill breath of the Styx, a river that flowed underground, carrying away everyone you loved, the sound of oars dipping too quietly into dark currents.

  Bobby stopped in front of the cage and bought several candles. “One is for you,” he said in a gentle voice, as if he had guessed the nature of her thoughts.

  She followed him into the nave, and the inside of that was a surprise, too—a high space, entirely painted with smudged figures. Light filtered into it from the dome above. It contained no pews, only a row of tall chairs like thrones along the walls. Across the far end, she saw a screen of gold branches and leaves, purple velvet curtains, crowned faces taut with resignation. Here and there stood candelabra with those yellow candles dissolving in them, the smell of incense and flame, beeswax. There were four other people in the chapel—a young man in a track suit, two women in black skirts and high heels crossing themselves in front of an icon, a little boy in shorts who stood twisting one foot around the other. And behind them Alexandra herself, with that weight in her arms, and Bobby—Asparuh—somehow dignified in his jacket and jeans. They turned and looked at each other. Alexandra felt the long scar on her arm begin to sting. She stretched her other hand toward it, across the urn, to calm herself.

  “We can search in the monastery,” Bobby told her. But first he went to the nearest candelabrum, lit one of the candles he had bought, and set it into a holder.

  “Up here at the top is for the living,” he told her in a low voice. “And down here, in the sand”—he indicated a tin box below filled with what looked horribly like ashes, for a moment—“is for the dead.” He held a second candle out to her. “This one is for you,” he said. “Do you want to put it somewhere?”