The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  She turned. “And look at this.”

  Someone had left behind at least a dozen photographs, which stood framed on the bureau or hung on the walls. The photographs were mainly black-and-white, some brown or yellowish sepia. Several of the images looked very old; these were wedding groups in stiff clothing with something Eastern about it, young people staring transfixed into futures now long past—the men in leggings and caps and woolen vests, the women in heavy dresses and short veils or wreaths of flowers. Here and there, a square of brighter paint revealed where a photograph had been removed; perhaps the Lazarovi had taken with them the most valued images of all. There was one photograph Alexandra found particularly striking: a young woman in a V-necked blouse and Hollywood pose, marcelled hair setting off her longish nose, skin luminous as a dewdrop, her eyes raised trustingly to the viewer. She wore a short string of pearls and pearl bobs on her earlobes. Alexandra could not look away from her gaze.

  The neighbor had come in behind them and Alexandra guessed that she and Bobby shouldn’t be lingering so long. But Bobby was pointing at a black-and-white snapshot, a couple with a little boy, the man in a jacket and tie, the woman in a dark dress and bouffant dark hair; they sat close together on a divan. The little boy looked six or seven, long-legged and solemn, standing between his parents. Maybe, thought Alexandra—yes, maybe he had grown up to be a tall man.

  “Ask her if she knows who the people in the photos are,” she instructed Bobby. But when he put the question, the neighbor gave a quick nod, which Alexandra realized after a moment was the venerable “no” she had been watching for.

  They bent to see the last few. There was a snapshot of the same little boy, at a party, seated between his mother and father. This time the boy looked younger, perhaps four years old, his face soft and round. He had glanced away from the camera at the last second, toward his father. There was another group seated out of doors, a birthday or holiday, people raising glasses of wine around a feast. Alexandra found the gangly teenager in the background, and his still-lovely mother sitting next to him. The father didn’t seem to be with them; perhaps he’d taken the picture, gesturing for everyone to lift their drinks. The boy was sullen or shy, his face closed but inevitably handsome, that heavy lock of hair on his forehead.

  Above the head of the bed, apart from the other photographs, hung the image of a young man in a thick dark suit and quaintly high white collar. It was a larger print than the rest, and the frame had a look of expense and Art Deco. The young man stood alone next to a pedestal with a potted plant on it. He held a violin before him in one hand, and in the other a bow, pointing toward the ground. The quality of the photograph was exquisite, Alexandra thought, and at the lower right she read in gilt letters: K. BRENNER, FOTOGRAFIE, WIENSTRASSE 27, 1936. The man had a fine, rather thin face, dark-eyed and clear-browed, as if he could see farther than most and was gazing beyond his photographer to distant mountains. He wore the unsmiling expression of a studio pose, but Alexandra had the sense that there was something eager and energetic just under it. His next movements would be vigorous, even arrogant—he would tuck the instrument under his chin in a single swift gesture. She smiled at him for no reason, except that he was youthful and beautiful and, sadly, could no longer smile back.

  “I wonder why they left so many pictures here,” Alexandra said.

  Bobby shrugged. “Maybe to make the house look nice—to help sell it.”

  “But these are precious, and personal.” Or maybe they couldn’t bear to look at them anymore, after the death of Stoyan Lazarov.

  The neighbor made a move to go; of course—she had left her children with someone at home and probably had work to do. She spoke to Bobby and he nodded. “She says we can look around a few more minutes, and that we should pull the door behind us—she will come back to lock it.”

  He seemed to listen hard until they heard the front door close behind her and then he dug inside his jacket, took out a pair of latex gloves, and put them on with a faint snap. Alexandra stood frozen. He carried gloves? But Bobby went matter-of-factly to the bureau, opening each drawer and searching it, although most were empty and the one that wasn’t held a couple of ancient undershirts, neatly folded.

  “Wait,” Alexandra said, aghast. “Should you do that? What are you looking for?” She was a little afraid again, as well as shocked. Did he rob houses, on the side, with his gloves and his lock-picking tool? Could he be the nicest criminal one would care to meet?

  “There might be an address book,” he said softly. “Old identity cards. Or more photographs. Something that could help us find them more quickly, if the address in Plovdiv doesn’t work either. We should look while we’re here. They probably took it all, but I want to see.”

  He searched the other bedroom in the same way, disturbing nothing, but it was equally empty. She trailed him downstairs, nervous and confused, and watched as he peered into kitchen cabinets and drawers—a few forks, a pile of pink paper napkins, a mousetrap—and in the drawer of the television table in the tiny sitting room. That one held what looked like an outdated phone directory. He went to the bookshelves and pulled out a volume or two, ran his hand down behind all the books, one shelf at a time, standing on a chair to reach the top. From the second shelf, he retrieved a few coins, which he replaced. He moved the television table and reached behind the densely packed row of music scores, feeling around.

  “Bobby!” Alexandra said. “Who do you think you are—Sherlock Holmes? We could get into terrible trouble here.”

  He grinned. “I love Sherlock Holmes,” he said. Then, as if sensing her worry, “Don’t be afraid. I’m not trying to steal. I’m just checking all the places people might put things.”

  He moved his arm deeper, out of sight. After a moment, he drew something up from behind the music. It was a box—a tightly lidded box made of tin that might long ago have contained candy. It had apparently had a picture on the lid, worn now to shapes in red and gray, illegible.

  Bobby set the box on the coffee table, next to the urn, and they looked at it. Probably nothing important, Alexandra started to say, and then stopped herself. She didn’t want to open the tin box, but she suddenly felt that she wanted Bobby to. After examining the lid, he did, and they both bent over it.

  She thought for a first queasy instant that there was a dead animal inside, or maybe just the decayed, shed skin of a snake. Bobby’s gloved fingers touched the contents, and touched them again. He lifted an object out—two objects, long and sinewy and brownish—and draped them over the table. They looked as if they had once been fabric but were now stiff with age.

  Alexandra felt a creeping of skin along her arms and neck. “What are they?” The words tasted garbled on her tongue, as if she’d fallen between languages.

  Bobby had gotten down on his knees. He held one of the shriveled ribbons carefully to his nose and sniffed it. When he glanced up at Alexandra, there was perplexity in his eyes, and a faint disgust.

  “They stink,” he said, and his words were caught somewhere far off, like hers. “But in a very small way, like from a long time ago. Dirty.”

  “Are they bandages? Old bandages?” That brown stain, dried over time—her stomach shifted.

  Bobby was still staring. “I don’t think so. They do not look exactly like bandages. But something rotten. Something very bad.”

  After a moment, he took his phone out and photographed the two objects, without explaining. He coiled them back into their box and replaced it carefully behind the scores. Alexandra noticed that he glanced around the room before they left, as if to be sure he’d put everything back in its exact place. She picked up the bag with the urn, wondering for a moment if they should simply leave it there. Bobby kept his gloves on until after he’d pulled the front door shut behind him.

  Then they went next door again; at Bobby’s request, the neighbor fetched a scrap of paper and copied out on it the address in Plovdiv to which the Lazarovi had gone, and a mobile number for the middle-aged man.
Bobby thanked her and bowed a little instead of shaking hands, and Alexandra said, “Mersi mnogo,” which made the woman beam at them and ask Bobby a question.

  “Ungarka,” he said, and she raised her eyebrows but seemed pleased.

  “What?” said Alexandra.

  “I told her you’re Hungarian. Be quiet, Bird.” He smiled pleasantly at the woman and shook hands this time. “She doesn’t need to know every damn thing, right?”

  In the cab they sat for a long minute, not speaking, with the windows rolled down.

  “Why did you want to go into the house?” Alexandra asked, at last.

  “I thought that we might learn something there.”

  “So, did you learn something?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But I am not sure yet what it was. And you?”

  “I learned that they’re the same people—I mean, the people we’re looking for. I’m certain of it. I should have shown you before, but I didn’t think of it.” She rummaged in her purse and took out her camera. “Here they are.”

  It startled her to see them after having been inside their house, the handsome tall man leaning close to his mother in the back of their taxi, and the blur of the old figure behind them. The tall man’s face was familiar to her now, with that sadness around his eyes, and the old woman looked almost pretty.

  Bobby peered at the screen. “Yes, they could be the same. I see it. They would be the right ages now, from some of those photographs.”

  Alexandra brooded over her one image of them, her head close to Bobby’s. She carefully enlarged the younger man’s face. It was even more striking up close, the eyes narrow and bright. “I think he was that little boy in the pictures. Of course, people change so much as they get older.” Her words brought the usual stab under a rib: Jack, a one and only brother, would not be doing that. Changing as he got older was out of the question. She never heard such phrases—get older, grow up, come of age, in the prime of life—without pain, even when they came out of her own mouth.

  “One thing is more important,” Bobby said at her shoulder. “We do not know who Stoyan Lazarov was. Maybe he was the man in those photos, or maybe he was somebody else. But we don’t even know for certain that he lived here.”

  “No. We don’t.” Alexandra was still thinking about Jack, how few photographs she had of him, even at home. She had copied her three favorites and brought them on this trip, including the small one that seldom left her wallet. It was safer than traveling with their originals—those could never be replaced, like Jack himself.

  She said, “Maybe Stoyan was a younger man, their other son.” Cut down in his prime.

  “Yes, but if Stoyan was the old people’s other son, there would probably be two boys in the pictures,” Bobby pointed out, “and some sign of the one who died.”

  “Well, there were beds for four people, in the bedrooms,” Alexandra said. “If you count the double bed.”

  Bobby looked at her with what she thought might be admiration. “True. And the police sent you to this house. So even if he is not in the photos, Stoyan Lazarov probably did live here. Or is that what they said—that he was sure Lazarov actually lived at this address?”

  “That’s how I understood it. But maybe they meant that this was simply the address of his nearest relatives.”

  “That is possible,” Bobby said, “but I wish you had asked.”

  “You wish I’d asked?” She smiled at him, although his criticism nettled her a little, and put away the camera.

  He was looking serious again. “So you showed the police this photo?”

  “Yes—I thought it would help somehow.”

  “I see.” Again, she felt he wasn’t pleased. Then he nodded at her, blue light in his eyes. “Well, now we have a phone number, so we can see if they answer.”

  He got out his cell phone and the paper from the neighbor. Alexandra hung her arm out the taxi window and watched him, thinking of the tall man with the amber eyes. She could hear ringing at the other end, but at last it simply stopped.

  “No one answers,” Bobby said. “And no way to leave a message.”

  Alexandra chewed the inside of her lip.

  “Want to go to the address in Plovdiv?” he said. “I have more than half a tank.”

  “That’s an even longer trip for you,” said Alexandra nervously. Why would he be willing to keep driving her around like this? Either he was going to charge her far too much, or he was going to proposition her, sooner or later.

  “Please,” said Bobby. “We already decided that this is not about money. I want to know who this Lazarov was, just like you do.”

  First they went to look for some lunch, and it was Bobby who suggested this. Alexandra was beginning to like many things about him, despite her unease; one of them was this propensity to pause often for meals—as a still young, still thin person, she was never without an appetite herself. She’d noted long before that many people ate infrequently, or only at mealtimes, whereas she began to feel woozy and stupid after two or three hours without food. Bobby, with his wiry, compact runner’s body, was not so different from her: always famished.

  They left the cab where it was parked and walked toward the center of Bovech; Bobby had seen a café open two streets back. The sidewalk was rough here, too, full of holes. Alexandra picked her way carefully along behind him. There were more houses similar to the Lazarovs’, with more walled-in yards. One was fenced from the street by a row of young fruit trees painted white up to the middle of their trunks. The sun drummed on the back of her head and she felt summer coming quickly to this place, probably a hot summer. They passed what looked like a mechanic’s garage, with cars parked in rows outside but no one in sight to fix them, a padlock holding the doors shut, something painted in dripping white Cyrillic letters across the front wall. She would never know what it said—it was another of those many mysteries of travel. And of loss; she’d also never know what Jack would have thought of this place.

  She tapped Bobby’s shoulder. “What do those words mean?”

  He turned, frowning. “It says, Ne parkirai pred garazha. Do not park in front of the garage.”

  “I see.” She had to laugh. Some mysteries were not really mysteries.

  The next lot was protected by chain-link fencing, with a hole bent into the front of it. Inside, Alexandra saw a strange exhibition: dozens of pieces of playground equipment and yard sculpture, massed together. Much of it appeared used, even battered; concrete birdbaths leaned exhausted against each other and a large plastic slide in the shape of a clown’s head lay on its side, the orange smile broken off in one corner. Most of the pieces were sculpted animals—wolves with their noses thrown back in a frozen howl, lions pacing nowhere, a towering bear painted pale green, a cartoon skunk raising its tail.

  One of the animals suddenly moved, the only real one, and then Alexandra saw it hurrying among its paralyzed brethren. It was a medium-sized brown-and-black dog, brindled of coat but with a long black face and a white chest, as if it had recently pushed through a snowdrift—a least-common-denominator dog, five or six different breeds mixed together so that they all canceled each other out. The only thing left was its dogness, its alert chestnut eyes and a friendly pink tongue hanging out of one side of its mouth. This dog was headed for the gap in the fence, and Alexandra went forward to greet it.

  Bobby suddenly stepped in front of her. “Go back,” he said. “We don’t know if it is mad.”

  “What?”

  “Lots of dogs in Bulgaria are mad. They bite people.”

  The dog stopped a few feet away, sat down, and looked calmly at Alexandra—she was certain he was looking at her. It was definitely a he. He was too thin, but sitting there he seemed even more collected and peaceful than the concrete yard animals behind him.

  “He likes me,” she said.

  “Do not be sure,” Bobby admonished. He was standing still now and scrutinizing the dog. “This is a wild dog. But he does seem intelligent. And clean.”

>   “Yes, he looks as if he could speak.”

  “In English?” Bobby said. “Come on, let’s go for lunch.”

  Alexandra turned away, reluctantly; she had the thwarted feeling of a child who is told not to pat the dog, the cat, the sweet mouse. As soon as they moved on, the dog followed them; she watched him over her shoulder.

  “Kush,” said Bobby, waving a hand, but carefully, as if not to anger him. The dog sat down again. When they started up, he started up, too, trotting after them without hurry.

  “He actually likes you,” Alexandra said slyly. “I’m sure you’re the one he likes.”

  Bobby shook his head—enough. They had reached the café and he held a gate open for Alexandra. The dog sat down on the sidewalk, shut out.

  There were tables in front of the café and Bobby chose one in the shade. A kind of music Alexandra had never heard before poured out of the building—singing, somehow Middle Eastern, complicated. “There will not be real lunch, but you can order a coffee and some toast with cheese,” he explained. A teenaged waitress came sauntering over and smiled back at Alexandra; she wore silver-sequined shoes and a black T-shirt that said, in English script, Get Me Going!

  While they ate their toast and drank black coffee, the dog sat quietly outside the gate, where Alexandra could see him. He watched them in silence. A shining thread of drool fell from his jaw. “He’s hungry,” she said.

  Bobby shook his head. “Don’t give him any attention.”

  She wondered at this acceptance of bad things: hunger, loneliness, mad dogs on the loose, dangerous driving, broken sidewalks. Why did people have to be so damned accepting? Including her, of course. “I’m going to save him part of my toast,” she insisted.

  Bobby shrugged. The sun was high now and it filtered through the leaves to dapple their empty plates. “Third meal in Bulgaria,” he said. He regarded her with his head on one side.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m already losing count.”

  On the sidewalk, she lagged behind him and let the portion of her toast slip from her fingers. The dog pounced. Alexandra stopped to watch him, and Bobby turned and sighed. She said, “He’s really hungry.”