The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  Alexandra shrank back.

  “Where shall I light it?” he asked patiently.

  “Down there, please,” said Alexandra. “In the sand.”

  Outside they walked around the courtyard, to check in every direction. Alexandra saw a monk hurrying along one of the wooden galleries on the first floor—how old, how unbelievably ancient it all looked, even the monk, who appeared as timeworn as the frescoes inside the church. He wore a tall black hat like an inverted chimney that seemed to have sprouted out of his black hair and black beard, his dark robes. Bobby went to speak with him. Alexandra kept her distance; she recalled reading somewhere that monks did not like even to speak to women, lest they be tempted. Bobby made shapes and signs with his hands. The monk kept his own hands at his belt, holding them as still as if he had captured a pair of birds.

  At last the monk spoke, and she saw Bobby shake his head. He came slowly back to her.

  “They aren’t here,” said Alexandra.

  “It’s strange. They told you they were coming to Velin, and they did not return to the hotel. If they came directly here, they left at least thirty minutes before us. And this priest has just told me that there is no bus coming today—it is not one of the right days of the week for a bus. So they could only come by taxi, or borrow a car, something like that. They should be here already. He also said that no visitors who look like those people have registered today for sleeping here.”

  “I see,” she said. She wished she could set down the bag, leave it quietly in a corner of the chapel, so that someone else—maybe that monk—would find it and take care of it. Perhaps he would simply bury it here, or wherever their cemetery was. That would be almost right, in the larger scheme of things.

  “Maybe they went to the police station, instead, but after I left it.” A familiar taste was welling in her mouth—the trail behind her empty, no one stepping energetically over the tree roots. She hadn’t managed to do the right thing in this situation, either.

  “I think we must walk into the remainder of the building, to be sure,” Bobby was saying.

  “Are we allowed to do that?”

  He shrugged. “If someone doesn’t like it, they will tell us.”

  They went all around the lowest gallery, looking into each open room. The floors were flagstones, the lintels of the doors massive horizontal stones, the doors themselves worm-eaten dark wood. There was a library, lined with crumbling books, and a bare room with a long table and benches, perhaps the old refectory. There were empty rooms and rooms with locked doors.

  When they came to a flight of wooden stairs, they took it to the second-floor gallery. Up there they found a big echoing dormitory bathroom, with elderly porcelain sinks and spiders in the corners. Alexandra stayed behind to use one of the toilets, which flushed by means of a long chain overhead.

  All the other doors on the second floor were shut. “Probably the monks live up here,” Bobby told her in a low voice.

  They took another staircase back down to the first floor. There was one more open door to check there, which let them into a room full of brittle-looking documents and church paraphernalia in glass-topped cases, and a second room of the same beyond that—a museum devoted to the history of the monastery, apparently. The yellowing index cards next to the exhibits were typed in English and French as well as Bulgarian. There were no other tourists or monks here. Bobby shook his head and led the way back toward the gallery.

  The door through which they’d entered was shut, although Alexandra was sure they had left it open behind them. Bobby pressed on the handle. He pushed. He turned to her.

  “What?” she said.

  “I think it is locked.” He tried the handle again. It was old and heavy, iron bolted into wood, and it made an impotent clanking sound.

  “But we just came in here,” she said.

  Bobby’s face drew down into concentration; she felt almost afraid to look at him, exhausted and confused as she already was.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, and it sounded like something worse. “Somebody has locked it from the outside.”

  Alexandra was not only very tired, but also young, in both years and experience. The loss of her brother had prepared her to a significant degree for the imperfection of the world, but that event had been thrown into relief for her by the very fact that it followed a childhood of kindness and simplicity: Jules Verne and digging potatoes, and the protective love of her parents. Her most recent life—four years at a good college, and then a few years of shelving books—had given her a vague sense of freedom with no disorder attached, apart from her inner misery.

  In other words, nothing in her previous experience had prepared her for the feeling of being suddenly locked in a monastic room with a stranger five thousand miles from the Blue Ridge Mountains, holding an urn containing the ashes of another stranger. In addition to being tired and afraid, she was suddenly a thief, a vagrant, and a prisoner. Is it any wonder that when Asparuh (whose patrician first name was just a mumble of sound to her) announced that they were trapped alone together, her first thought was terror? He was not a nice guy after all; he had locked the door on purpose himself. He had some kind of Balkan switchblade in his pocket, and a predilection for foreign flesh. The door was not actually locked, but he’d decided to tell her it was, and now he would—what? He had seemed so respectful, helpful, if a little sharp-edged. She took a step away from him as they stood there. Then, feeling she had to know at any price, she made herself go quickly to the door and try it. It really was locked—for a minute she felt relieved.

  She turned to Bobby. “Do you think it just got stuck somehow?”

  To her surprise, he put a finger to his lips, bent his ear close to the bolt, and listened. Then he shook his head.

  “No,” he whispered. “No. I heard feet outside, a minute ago, and now the feet are leaving the hall.”

  “Maybe they close the museum at this time of day,” she whispered back. “Shall we knock on the door until someone hears us?”

  But he stopped her with a quick movement. “We were talking normally in here, and anyone could hear us,” he murmured. “Let me think for a moment.”

  Which he did, visibly, standing in total silence with his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans—Alexandra stood there also, watching him and feeling a strange trust. But why on earth didn’t he just bang on the door until someone realized they were shut in? Was he paranoid by nature, or had she missed something, very possibly, that he had understood?

  “I think there was another door,” he said at last. He turned and walked silently back through the two rooms, Alexandra following with the urn. One wall of the far room was hung with dark curtains, as if to shade the exhibits from sunlight. Almost out of sight, beyond the last cases of reliquaries and rotting manuscripts, there was indeed a door she hadn’t noticed. The lock looked modern, with an ordinary keyhole and a steel handle. Bobby knelt to peer through the hole before slowly trying the handle. This door was clearly locked, too, and Alexandra felt a quiver of panic again. Perhaps he really was crazy, and she was still shut in here with him, even if he hadn’t locked the doors himself. Then he groped in the lining of his denim jacket and brought out what looked like a tiny screwdriver, which he inserted into the lock, working the handle gently with his other hand. After a few moments something clicked.

  But the door did not budge. “Hell,” he whispered. “It has a big—bolt thing—on the outside.”

  He turned to Alexandra. “Come. We are going to look for another way, but very quiet, okay?”

  She stared at him—He knew how to pick locks?—and then nodded, and he began to check the long windows and sills. Everything seemed to be bolted or nailed shut. Suddenly he stopped short, and she heard steps outside, coming toward the door on the gallery corridor. She could see the inside of that door through the opening between the rooms. The worst part was that there were no voices, no one speaking outside, just the sound of a key going gently into the lock. Someone had tr
ouble with the bolt and tried again, and in that moment Bobby put a hand out and pulled Alexandra with him behind the curtains. We won’t fit back there, she wanted to say.

  To her surprise, and perhaps also to Bobby’s, they stumbled around the curtains into a larger space, a room for presentations, apparently—plastic chairs in rows, a video screen on one wall, posters with photos of the monastery. At the other end were two more doors. Bobby opened the first with a quick movement and drew her in. They found themselves in a closet, which contained a few boxes and a broom. He closed the door with silent speed and they stood wedged together in the dark; Bobby’s hand seemed to be doing something to the handle—locking it somehow, from the inside. She felt rather than heard him let out his breath.

  Then there was the thud of heavy steps—at least two people, from the sound of it. Alexandra, with the urn squeezed between her stomach and Bobby’s back, wondered why they were hiding. Her heart jumped around uncomfortably and she prayed she wouldn’t feel his hands on her in the dark, fiddling with her as they had with the lock. But he stayed still, listening. She could smell him very close—a scent of light sweat and aftershave, as if he kept himself radiantly clean. She hoped he would explain everything when this was over. The darkness pressed against her face, her eyes, and she thought this might be part of an extended dream. Perhaps she was really in a hostel bed in Sofia, or in her mother’s apartment in Greenhill; the rest of it, what was actually happening, was too bizarre to be real.

  But Bobby’s absolute quiet kept her motionless. There were no voices outside—just firm steps starting and stopping. The sound came closer. Someone was now in the presentation room; she heard whoever it was bump into something. For an awful second the sound halted and she thought that the people in the room must be listening hard, as she and Bobby were. Then footsteps again, and somebody tried the door of their closet, roughly. In the dark, she felt she might faint with apprehension; Bobby closed a hand on one of her wrists, as if to warn her not to move. There was a grunt outside, and the hands seemed to be trying the door next to the closet, which didn’t open, either. Her knees had begun to quiver and she squeezed them together. Then both sets of footsteps moved away. Alexandra heard the outer door open and shut—the sound of keys again, the rattle of the handle, a bolt dropping into place.

  They waited again in the dark so long that Alexandra thought she might doze off in the midst of her bewilderment. At last Bobby softly unlocked the closet door. He opened it and put his head out to look before beckoning to Alexandra. She drew a long breath, but silently. There was no one in the presentation room, although she could see that two of the chairs had been knocked out of line. Bobby tried the door next to the closet—it was locked, as the searchers had discovered, but he took the mysterious tool out of his jacket and worked at the keyhole until the handle moved. Again, he looked out first, then motioned Alexandra to stay close behind him.

  The door led into a short dark passage. At the end was a larger door, a very old one, that ejected them directly into sunlight. Alexandra got a glimpse of scraggly trees and a stone well just outside. She followed Bobby down several steps onto bare ground, trying not to trip in the brightness. Mountains loomed just above them and she realized that they were emerging into an orchard—apple trees laden with green leaves.

  Bobby began to make his way along the outside of the monastery, staying behind the screen of trees and touching the outer wall for balance once when he tripped. Alexandra thought they must look suspicious doing this, even if they had been locked in through no fault of their own, and she hoped nobody was watching from the slits of window far above. She kept close to the wall, imitating him, and tried not to stare up at the massive building. He took a long way around the parked cars and unlocked his taxi without haste. He started the engine gently, looking around him.

  They were back on the main road before Alexandra felt she could ask anything. “What was—”

  He broke in at once. “I’m sorry if I made you to be nervous,” he said, and she saw the sober blue of his glance, checking her. She had automatically gotten into the back seat again, but he said nothing about that. He peered into his mirrors several times, as if he thought someone might follow them; she turned around, but the road behind them stretched empty through the woods.

  Bobby straightened at the wheel. “I didn’t have a good feeling about the first door. Somebody heard us there and locked us in, not by accident. There is no other explanation. We were talking quite normally in the museum and we were not far away from the door. And then someone else came in to look for us, or maybe the same people.”

  “I thought so—I heard that, too.” Alexandra reached down and touched the urn where she’d settled it firmly between her feet. “But why would anyone lock us in?”

  She watched Bobby’s eyes flicker again to his rearview mirror; this time he spoke without looking at her. “I am not sure.”

  “Then why did we have to hide?”

  Bobby raked his hair off his forehead with one hand. “When people want to lock me into a room, I do not want to meet them.”

  “But what do you think they would have done if they’d found us?” said Alexandra. “Whoever they were?”

  Bobby answered her only with another question, and she saw she would get nothing more from him. “What would you like to do now?” he said. “Shall I drive you back to Sofia?”

  Alexandra clenched her hands together in her lap. “I guess I ought to go to the Bovech address, the one the police gave me. I think it’s on the other side of Sofia from here, a lot farther away.” Part of her couldn’t believe she was saying this, but where else could she take the urn? Bobby seemed to be driving even faster than he had on the way to the monastery; maybe he was just tired of the whole thing now and wanted to dump her off in Sofia so he could get on with other work. Now that it was over, their standing squashed together in a dark closet seemed as unreal to her as her arrival in Sofia had before.

  “So you want to go to their home?” he asked.

  “Well, I feel I have to try,” she said.

  “Of course,” he agreed. “If this were the funeral of my own grandfather, I would like somebody to try. But I see you are very tired. Maybe you need to rest, first.”

  “How did you know what to do with that lock?”

  This time his eyes were smiling at her in the mirror. “One door of my taxi is sometimes difficult to open. So is the door to my apartment. I always carry with me some tools for that. Are you hungry, by the way?”

  “Am I hungry?” she said—she almost shouted—and he began to laugh. She realized he’d already turned off the main road, and then onto another road, well out of sight of the first, and slowed the car.

  They had come to a wooden building under trees, with a dirt parking lot and some potted vines on trellises in front.

  “Dvorut,” she read out loud. “What does that mean?”

  “It means ‘The Courtyard.’ The name of this restaurant. I hope they are open.”

  Bobby led the way into a single room lined with windows and filled with sunny tables; Alexandra could see a stream cascading off the steep slope just behind. A television sat on a shelf above the cash register and there was a tinny murmur of folk music from a loudspeaker in the corner. Two waiters leaned against the counter, watching the television, and a woman with bleached hair sat nearby typing on her cell phone. Some of the windows were open to let in the sound of rushing water and the crisp vegetal smell of mountain air. There were no other customers in the place, and apparently they were to seat themselves.

  Bobby chose a table near the back and slumped opposite her, stretching his arms.

  “You must be tired, too,” she said.

  “Certainly. I get up at four o’clock in the morning.”

  And you just got locked into a monastery, she added to herself. “To drive your taxi?”

  “No,” he said. “And I am not as tired as you are. How long does it take to travel from your part of America? Twenty-fo
ur hours?”

  “Almost,” she said. “I live in a small city, so I had to fly to a much bigger one, and then to Amsterdam, and then to Sofia. Maybe twenty hours. Counting the waits between flights.” She wished he would explain why he got up so early, but he didn’t seem to like answering questions about himself. She hoped that was not a bad sign.

  “I’ve never been to America,” Bobby told her. He was looking around the restaurant, as if he thought someone he didn’t like might walk in. She had begun to realize that he was one of the most alert people she’d ever met—more like a bird, or a wild animal, than a human being. He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and read some texts, but without replying to any of them. A waiter listlessly approached their table and handed them a couple of menus. When he was gone, Bobby began to explain the dishes to her.

  “Do they have trout?” she said.

  “Trout? Yes. In Bulgarian it’s called pusturva. How did you know there is trout?”

  “I come from mountains, too,” she said, smiling. “This stream looks like some of the ones we have at home. Probably really cold water, and clean. But I don’t actually want any trout.”

  In the end, he ordered for her—a soup of thin beef broth and vegetables (“Very good for you after traveling,” he said, and she decided not to tell him that she normally didn’t eat meat), a salad of cucumbers and tomatoes heaped with shavings of feta, and a plate of French fries. For himself, he ordered several large meatballs, a salad like hers, and three steaming cups of black coffee, one after another. He also insisted on getting Alexandra a Coca-Cola, although she protested that not all Americans drank it.

  “It will make you feel stronger,” he said, and in the end she swallowed the whole thing, with a pang of nostalgia for childhood—when it had been a rare treat, with equally rare pizza. She told Bobby about this and he laughed. “Here you can have both of those things any time you wish. Bulgaria is full of pizza. And Coke, everywhere. But it was not like that when I was a child. We had a Bulgarian kind of cola called Altay. Same problems for our teeth, however, with either one.” He looked quickly around the room, as if he’d forgotten for a moment to stay on guard. “I was fifteen when the changes came, so I remember the old drinks quite well. And some other things, too.”