The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  “When do you have time for your running, then?” she said.

  “Late at night, after I’m finished with work, or before breakfast, or sometimes both.”

  Alexandra watched as he accelerated up the boulevard; she could believe he loved to run. His forearms were knotted with veins, and she understood now the thin, hardened look of his frame behind the steering wheel. She thought of her brother’s much sturdier body, his compactness across from her at the dinner table. Alexandra pushed the habitual surge of loss down with a firm hand. Not in a new country; she was here to start fresh, at least in the first weeks. Grief would always be available, waiting to catch the corner of her eye.

  “That man,” she said, “the tall one I took the bag from—he told me that Bulgaria is a place where anything can happen.”

  Bobby kept his eyes ahead, on the complicated streets.

  “Yes,” he said, “and where a lot of things usually do not happen.” But unlike the tall man, he was smiling.

  As they left Sofia again, they seemed to be moving away from the mountains rather than into them, although there were always gray-blue peaks on the horizon. Bobby said they were going due east. At a stoplight just before the highway, Alexandra saw two young women in short black skirts talking with each other, idling on their high heels. One of them momentarily stuck out a thumb, then dropped her arm.

  “Do they need a ride?” she asked.

  Bobby shook his head. “No. They need a client.”

  Alexandra, shocked, tried not to stare at them. They were very young, maybe just teenagers, and one had black hair to her waist. The other girl was checking her phone, her high-heeled foot propped on a couple of bricks for balance. They stood out against the dusty exit, with its shrubs coming into leaf, as if transported there from a bar in a city.

  “In the middle of nowhere?” she asked. “Don’t the police see them?”

  “Yes,” said Bobby shortly. “Probably the police are their clients, too.” As if to cleanse himself of these thoughts, he turned on the stereo. A familiar American growl filled the taxi.

  “Is that the radio?” Alexandra asked, surprised.

  “No.” He shook his head, as if she’d said something preposterous. “A CD. The other Bobby. Do you like Bob Dylan?”

  “Sure,” said Alexandra, who’d been raised on Mozart and Vivaldi.

  “I’ll say this, I don’t give a damn about your dreams,” Dylan growled. Alexandra, looking out the window at the industrial suburbs of Sofia, thought—not for the first time—that when you got right down to it the man couldn’t really sing. But she understood suddenly that that wasn’t the point.

  Farther away from the city, they passed a cart loaded with branches and pulled by a drooping horse. Cars sped up to swerve around it. The cart was driven by a man and woman in faded blue coats that looked like some kind of ex-uniform. The woman wore a flowered scarf on her head, the man black trousers tucked into boots. His trousers were splitting open down the thighs, his knees exposed. They turned deep-tanned faces to the taxi as it went by; Alexandra saw a flash of silver in the woman’s teeth.

  “Gypsies,” Bobby said. “They collect wood the old way, in carts, instead of trucks. No bad emissions. It’s strange—they are actually ahead of us on the environment. Although we can go so much faster in our ridiculous cars and we like that.”

  A few minutes later, Alexandra saw more of these carts gathered at the edge of a field, the horses tied loosely and grazing under trees while people in old clothes, the women in headscarves, moved around at the edge of a wood. They were collecting branches from the ground, piling them in the carts. More gypsies—Roma, her guidebook called them.

  “Where do they live?” she asked Bobby.

  “In towns. In their own neighborhoods, like ghettos. These probably come from the ones on the edge of Sofia. The children don’t always go to school.”

  Bobby was driving along a valley now, with newly green trees in the distance where a river must be flowing out of sight. Along the roadsides she saw broad fields, some of them plowed and planted, some apparently lying fallow, then long ruined buildings—brick and wood, their roofs caved in, timbers collapsed, weeds engulfing their foundations.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  Bobby turned to look across her. “Those are farm buildings from communist times, the collectivized farms. Some of the fields are rented for crops now, but no one will ever go back to the buildings. Look at all this old stuff.” He waved—beside the ruins lay rusting machinery, the broken teeth of a harrow pointing toward the sky, weeds and vines claiming a tractor. Brontosaurus, thought Alexandra.

  “People come and take them for the metal if they are not too rusted,” Bobby said. “But most of this will go back into the earth. Maybe in a thousand years, or five thousand.”

  They passed through a village, then another. She saw a new house—concrete, metal beams, whole tree trunks—going up in an empty lot. “Bovech is farther than I thought it would be,” she said.

  Bobby seemed to be musing at the wheel; he looked at her with absent eyes. “Oh, it is close,” he said, and she didn’t ask more.

  —

  SHE SAW THE SIGN at the edge of Bovech before Bobby did because it was spelled in Latin letters as well as in Cyrillic. Next to that sign there was another, a blue marker with a ring of yellow stars on it, which Bobby said was the symbol for the European Union and had been put up only a year or so before; it was already rusting at the edges. Bovech looked larger than the villages they had passed through, a sprawling settlement on its own flat plain, its outermost buildings abandoned. Alexandra saw a huge black-and-white bird opening angular wings above a nest. The nest sat on a wooden pole.

  Bobby was looking at it, too. “That is a—shturkel, what is the word? Stork—a stork. They make nests on the chimneys, which can be a problem, so people build this kind of post for them.”

  “Do they bring babies?” Alexandra asked.

  “Well, here they bring good luck. And they bring us the springtime—when they come back, beginning in late March, we know the spring is really here. When they go away in the autumn, I always feel a little sad.”

  She watched the bird stretch up onto one long leg; it flapped its wings and then folded inward, settling over the enormous nest again as they passed. “Where do they go?”

  “For the wintertime? To northern Africa. Even South Africa.”

  Alexandra caught her breath, feeling the stretch of this new world. Across Greece, across the whole Mediterranean, to another continent.

  In the center of town, Bobby stopped the taxi, took the address from Alexandra, and jumped out to ask a man sitting at what looked like a bus stop. The man raised a hand, seemed about to point up the street, looked at the address again, shrugged. Then Alexandra saw Bobby approach a woman who carried heavy shopping bags in each hand, like a well-balanced ox. She bent her head attentively and said something staccato, jerking her chin in the right direction.

  Bobby returned looking satisfied. “The street is at the other side of the town. But it is not difficult to find.”

  In the end, however, it was quite difficult to find, and they drove around on that side of town looking for the sparse street signs and seeing few people to ask for further directions. Bovech seemed to be a sleepy place, even on a weekday morning. There were tattered posters with photographs of giant faces on them, exclamation points and a few words Alexandra could recognize in Cyrillic, including Bulgaria!—perhaps for an election long past. She pulled out her camera, resisting the urge to glance again at her photo of the tall man. The houses on this side of town looked neat and prosperous. In one yard, an old woman in black sat in the shade, knitting something pale. She looked up and smiled at Alexandra’s face in the taxi window. Alexandra felt tears start to her eyes, for no particular reason, and tried to smile back. At another house, behind a low-gated fence, a mother sat on her doorstep with two small children in red shoes playing around her. The public sidewalk was rutted
and weedy, the street riddled with holes, which looked strange against the freshly painted walls and fences, the tidy yards and crisply dressed children.

  “That is it. Probably,” said Bobby, and he pulled to a stop. They climbed out and compared the address with their note; the house just next door to the young mother’s had a pebbly wall in front of it and the right number on its gate. Alexandra felt her stomach surge with anticipation. They looked around for a bell at the gate, and finding none, opened it and went up the walk to a green door. The house was not the oldest they’d seen in this town, nor the newest; it sat somewhere in between, mellowed and probably often repaired, the stucco painted recently enough for uniformity. There was no one working in the yard, to Alexandra’s temporary relief, or twitching the sheer curtains aside at the windows. She stood with the urn in her arms; she didn’t dare let the bag dangle from her elbow, much less set it down on that speckled cement step next to the pots of flowers.

  Bobby straightened his jacket and his posture. Then, putting up one hand, he rang the bell.

  They waited side by side. They could hear but not see the children playing next door. Alexandra couldn’t pick Bulgarian out of their talk, any more than she could have Japanese, and for a moment she entertained herself by converting their sounds into English words: “stove,” “Buddhist,” “derby hat,” “Why not?” Beneath this distraction, her heart was pounding hard.

  But nobody inside seemed to have heard the doorbell, so Bobby finally rang again, holding down the button a little longer. Alexandra wondered whether both the old people were deaf. The urn grew heavy in her arms.

  “They aren’t at home,” Bobby said decidedly. “I suppose they have not yet returned from Sofia.”

  She shifted her weight, feeling a twinge of exasperation. “How can you be sure? Couldn’t they be upstairs?”

  “Nobody has been outside this morning,” he said. “In a house like this, in nice weather, there would be shoes in the front, here, and perhaps some dirt on that thing—” He indicated a boot-scraper fixed to the edge of the walk. “The door is locked in two places, not only in the handle. Also, the flowers in these bowls have not been watered. I don’t think they are at home, these people. They haven’t yet come back from Sofia. And something is not right here.” He shook his head and Alexandra stared at him, wondering again why he got up at four in the morning and didn’t like to talk about his life.

  “Maybe they’re just out shopping and will be back soon,” she ventured.

  But Bobby turned away. She followed him out of the yard and watched as he shut the front gate carefully behind them. He went along the sidewalk and knocked at the neighbor’s gate. The young mother was setting rolls and juice on a wooden table and propping her children up in two little chairs beside it. She had tied a bib on the smaller child, who seemed to be a boy, although both had buoyant dark curls. She came to the gate and opened it. Her face was as pretty as her children’s—inquiring, soft-eyed; she looked like a little girl herself. Bobby held council with her for a few minutes, during which the woman glanced repeatedly at his foreign companion, as if expecting her to join the conversation.

  At last he interpreted for Alexandra. “I asked if the family called Lazarovi live next door. I didn’t tell her about the ashes. She says they lived there until about three months ago, and she has lived here herself only half a year. She didn’t know them well, but they left an address in Plovdiv and a mobile number. She says there was an old man and an old woman, and a younger man who was getting old, too, because he had never found a wife. The mobile number is his. He only visited them here from time to time—he works somewhere else, maybe on the coast. She is not certain.”

  Bobby paused to listen to the woman again. She gathered her curly hair back from her temples with both hands as she talked; her nails were painted pink and she wore a small gold ring. Bobby turned to Alexandra. “Now she watches their house and keeps it clean for a little payment until they can sell it. Or maybe they sold it already—she is not certain. She is waiting to hear from them. She asks if we are here to buy the house. She can show it to us, if we like.”

  “Oh,” said Alexandra. She seemed to have slammed up against a wall, but the wall was inside her chest. She wished she had left the urn at the police station after all. What had possessed her to press forward like this, with so little information? But the Wizard at the station had seemed sure this was the right address—and it was, except that the family was not here anymore. And the tall man had never gotten married, so it was probably not his son whose ashes she carried. Perhaps, like her, he had lost a brother.

  The pretty mother was bending over her children now, putting a red shoe back on a miniature foot, taking them out of the chairs and setting them upright again, restraining the boy from eating something in the flowerbed.

  “I told her we might be interested in buying the house and we would like to see it.” Bobby adjusted his jacket, confident, smiling.

  “What? Why did you say that?”

  “Because of course we want to see it. Be quiet, Bird, or we will lose this chance, you know? Don’t tell her what you are carrying.” He smiled hard at her.

  “Okay,” she said.

  The woman took the children inside and they heard her speaking to someone. She returned alone, holding a key, and led Alexandra and Bobby back to the locked house. Alexandra reflected that she—a foreigner here—was now not only a thief but also possibly a trespasser. Bobby wiped his shoes on the mat before they entered.

  Inside the house, everything had a damp smoky smell, the musk of absence. Alexandra noticed at once that, although they were furnished, the rooms looked bare, as if all the ordinary life had been sucked out of them. Her heart sank further—this long trip, and for nothing. There were crocheted doilies on a table in the entryway, but no keys or vases or magazines, no jackets on the hooks by the door. The curtains at the windows had been drawn; their panels let in a silent greenish light. In the small parlor, Alexandra saw an afghan folded over the back of a chair, and a television in one corner, but no plants or photographs. The sofa and chair were upholstered in scratchy orange fabric that had received years of people’s skirts, trousers, seated weight. The carpet, very clean, was a scuffed brown. An empty cut-glass dish sat on a coffee table, as if someone had tried to make the room look less bare.

  Behind the elderly television were several shelves of books, which Alexandra lingered over while the young woman showed Bobby the light fixtures and the view of a back garden. She could sound out some of the authors, if not the titles. Hemingwei, she read with surprise. Charlz Dikenz. They were matching sets—maybe forty or fifty years old, some a little mildewed on the spine. There were many Bulgarian books—histories or novels, apparently, and biographies of composers: Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky. There were several books in French and quite a few in German, and a couple of newer, Western-style photographic volumes with colorful spines: London, France, Italy. Then more about Italy, including two on Venice.

  Bobby had come to stand beside her and he was gazing at the books, too. The lowest shelf, just behind the television, was packed with yellowing music scores, although there was no piano or other instrument in sight. She set the bag with the urn in it on the coffee table, thinking this would be more respectful than carrying it from room to room.

  Across the hall from the parlor was an equally tiny dining room—again, all the aging cheap furniture still in place, and a cut-glass vase on a sideboard. A cabinet next to the window contained stacks of teacups in flowered porcelain, but every other shelf was bare and free even of dust. Perhaps this house had been too full of memories of the man whose ashes now sat watching the blank television; maybe his relatives had left as soon as they could find another place. They had gone somewhere else, possibly to die themselves. But why hadn’t the pretty neighbor mentioned another man, the one whose ashes these were? Had he actually died elsewhere? An awful thought seized Alexandra: the old people had gone to a nursing home, if there were such things h
ere, and now she would never be able to find them. She tried to calm herself by gazing at Bobby’s competent black denim back, moving through the rooms ahead of her.

  The kitchen, at the rear of the house, opened onto a small garden; the neighbor said she tended it herself and pointed proudly to young pepper plants and clumps of parsley. A fence overgrown with flowering vines looked into other backyards and then away to fields outside the town; beyond that, very far, Alexandra saw a mountain range disappearing into haze. An old woodstove stood in one corner of the kitchen, which explained the smoky smell—lifting the plate carefully off the top, she caught a glimpse of wood ashes. Yes: it was exactly the smell of her family’s mountain house during the long summers. Plates and cups were arranged on shelves above a rust-stained, well-scrubbed sink; a colorless rag had fossilized over the tap. There was no food in evidence except a faded scent of frying. Alexandra felt the old urge—to kick in a wall, the way Jack had so long ago. The linoleum was clean but had cracked open across the middle of the floor, as if an earthquake had taken place here. Behind the kitchen table stood an iron bedstead, to Alexandra’s surprise, with pillows and a blanket folded on the bare mattress.

  Upstairs, they found two bedrooms; someone had painted the walls a soft peach color. Again, everything neat, clean, silent, sad. In the larger of the two rooms stood matching narrow beds, stripped. In the smaller bedroom, Alexandra stopped, astonished. The double bed was made up with white sheets and heavy blankets, pillowcases waiting immaculate for heads that no longer rested on them. A comb, brush, and razor lay on a nightstand. Across from the bed hung a tourist calendar from 2006, open to a photograph of maidens in some kind of traditional dress dancing around a wooden-roofed well: юни/JUNE. Alexandra stood in front of it and thought of a poem. “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” she muttered.

  “What?” said Bobby.