The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  Bobby stopped in front of an apartment building with cornices of gray stone and decaying stucco walls. Alexandra’s heart sank. “We don’t have a leash for Stoycho,” she said. “I mean, a rope, something to hold him with.”

  “He will stay near us,” Bobby assured her. “He will want his dinner.” He let the dog out of the back of the car. Stoycho staggered for a moment and then stretched his legs deeply.

  “You,” Bobby said in a stern voice. “Come with me.” He pointed at his shoes and the dog followed them around the back of the apartment building, where there was a courtyard.

  “Stay here,” said Bobby. “We will bring you some food and water.”

  The dog urinated heavily on a bush, sniffed the wet patch, and then sat watching them; Alexandra saw his tail whip the dusty ground. The courtyard was shocking to her, a sea of dried mud with atolls of struggling grass here and there, a pit in one corner into which someone had thrown the skeleton of an old-fashioned baby carriage. The wall that surrounded the yard was crumbling, and the top of it was studded with shards of glass stuck into cement, many of which had broken off again and fallen to the ground—she hoped Stoycho wouldn’t step on any of them. Alexandra stroked his head and made herself turn away.

  The front walk of the building, when they went around to it, was cracked and muddy. She wondered how Stoycho would endure this night; she wondered about herself. She wished she were at home, in Greenhill, with its smooth sidewalks. She almost wished she had never come to Jack’s favorite pale-green country on the map.

  Bobby rang one of eight ancient doorbells and backed away, looking up. After a moment, someone called down to them. Alexandra saw that a red-haired woman in a housedress was leaning over a balcony two floors above, smiling and waving hard.

  “Oh!” she cried. “Oh, Asparuh! Kakvo pravish tuk?”

  Bobby stood there smiling, too, his hands in his jacket pockets, and then shouted something back. He explained to Alexandra: “She wants to know what we’re doing here, and I told her I could not live one day more without her cooking.”

  The woman raised a hand to Alexandra and gestured rapidly for them to wait there. Alexandra waved back, feeling with sudden new conviction how insane this all was. Then she heard someone on the stairs, and Bobby’s aunt opened the front door of the building. She was much shorter than Alexandra and squarely built, without fat. She had pinned up the back of her red-brown hair, the color of which certainly came out of a bottle. She wore a flowered smock with big pockets, and fluffy slippers on her feet; her bare legs were a fresco of veins. She kissed Bobby on the cheeks four or five times, audibly. Bobby introduced Alexandra and his aunt shook her hand first in one of her own and then in both.

  “Pavlina,” she told Alexandra several times.

  “That’s her name,” Bobby said. “She says you can call her by her first name. She says we should come upstairs with her immediately. But first I will explain to her about Stoycho.”

  This information seemed to sober Aunt Pavlina for a moment, and the way she looked at Bobby made Alexandra think that this was probably not the only time he had turned up with something as odd as American women or stray dogs. She had hoped his aunt would invite Stoycho in with them, but that didn’t seem to be forthcoming. They followed her to the third floor; Alexandra tried not to mind the filthy staircase. Pavlina unlocked her door and then shut it behind them.

  They were in a front hall with closed doors leading off it on each side. Evening light came through an opening to the kitchen and touched a parquet hall floor so clean it looked like polished amber. The walls were painted some pale hue that seemed to be part of the light; Alexandra saw on one of them a watercolor of boats pulled up onto a beach, dark waves lapping their sterns. Bobby hung his coat from a rack with an old mirror. Alexandra caught half her own face there, where it looked unfamiliar and faded, like something preserved in a daguerreotype. Copying Bobby, she took off her sneakers and put on a pair of wool slippers that reduced her steps to a shuffle.

  Then Aunt Pavlina hurried them into the kitchen, where the air was full of aromas of boiling potatoes and frying meat. Bobby sighed with satisfaction and threw himself down on an old daybed in the corner. A cutting board and knife sat on the red Formica table; potato peels lay in the otherwise spotless, worn sink. The floor looked scrubbed to its bones and late sun came in through windows whose glass was almost too clean to be visible. Aunt Pavlina gestured Alexandra to a seat and turned down the noise of a small TV set, where a man in a tuxedo was giving away a sports car to anyone who could answer the next question. It was an American show; the words on the screen read “What is the largest body of water in South Dakota?” The dressed-up man provided a set of choices—Alexandra knew only that it was not Lake Victoria. Maybe South Dakota didn’t have any water?

  Before she could find out, the program switched to a news bulletin. Bobby sat up and put his arms around his knees. A reporter was standing in front of a podium where a young man seemed to be introducing an older one; the older man stepped to the microphone, glancing out at his audience with a smile. He looked vigorous, despite his age, and his hair made a neat, dense mane almost to his shoulders. This time Alexandra could see not only his thick brown beard and mustache but also a band of heavy scarring across his upper cheeks—she thought of the ritual mutilation on faces in the National Geographic issues of her childhood.

  The man read a brief statement and there was applause from people standing nearby. “Isn’t that the guy with the mines?” she asked Bobby. “What’s he saying?”

  Bobby didn’t answer until an advertisement came on—cheese, made by happy sheep. Then he slumped back onto the daybed.

  “Wonderful,” he said grimly. “Yes, that was Kurilkov, the minister I told you about. He just more or less announced his intention to run with a party of his own in two years, as everyone predicted. If his party wins enough seats in the parliament, he will become prime minister, the most powerful position in Bulgaria.” Bobby scowled. “He cannot yet start a formal campaign, but he tells us his slogan already: Bez koruptsiya—without corruption. He gives everyone warning of his serious intention, and they clap for him.”

  “Why do you think that’s so bad?” Alexandra studied his face.

  Bobby picked at the tassel on one of Aunt Pavlina’s cushions. “Politicians who talk about purity usually end up deciding who is pure and who is not. Kurilkov already told one newspaper that any Bulgarian who does not contribute in a positive way to society should be found and put to work—hard work, through our prison system—to rebuild the economy. This is very unusual, very strange, but many people love him for it. I think he means anyone who opposes his party’s campaign, when he begins it formally.”

  He looked up at her, stern, but Aunt Pavlina interrupted him, pointing toward the stove. “She wants to know if you like meat,” said Bobby. “She has heard that many Americans are vegetarians.”

  “Please tell her I love meat,” said Alexandra, although she had been completely vegetarian until two days before. “I wish I could speak with her, too. She doesn’t know English, right?”

  “Unfortunately, no—only Russian and French. She studied some French at her school in Plovdiv, and everybody her age speaks Russian, whatever school they went to.”

  “Madame, je m’excuse que je ne parle pas votre langue,” Alexandra said clumsily, and they both stared at her.

  Aunt Pavlina came over to the table and seized Alexandra by the shoulders, bent to kiss her hair, pressed Alexandra’s cheek against the solid shelf of her brassiere. “Oh, ma petite! Et tu parles français comme une française!”

  “Not really,” Alexandra said, turning hot and trying not to struggle.

  As they ate their meal—infinitely better than what Alexandra had tasted in any restaurant since her arrival—Aunt Pavlina asked her in French and Bulgarian about her family, her home town, and her plans for work in Sofia, but didn’t question her about their journey. Alexandra felt with some mortification that s
he assumed they were a couple. She asked Pavlina in turn about her profession; apparently, Bobby’s aunt had worked for thirty years in an elementary school. She said, in French, that her husband had died a decade before, after being hit by a truck: “I didn’t sleep for two years, chérie.”

  I didn’t either, Alexandra wanted to say, but instead she hunted for French terms of condolence until Aunt Pavlina laughed, surprisingly, and stopped her. “Grief comes to everyone,” she said. She taught Alexandra Bulgarian words for sorrow, for potato and table and spoon, and made her copy them down in her notebook.

  After dinner, Pavlina washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen to laboratory standards, refusing Alexandra’s help. Bobby did not offer; he stepped out onto the kitchen balcony and leaned against the railing, looking at the sky. Then Alexandra remembered Stoycho and they all went down to give him scraps from dinner, Pavlina in her housedress and a different pair of slippers, keeping her distance. Stoycho’s backside wagged hard and he circled them until Bobby made him sit. He inhaled the food, stretched. They tied him up with a rope Aunt Pavlina had found and he lay down quietly on an old piece of blanket from the taxi. Alexandra didn’t like to leave him outside overnight, but Bobby said he was certain the dog could handle—destroy—anything that might trouble him in the darkness.

  When Aunt Pavlina went back into the building ahead of them, Alexandra seized Bobby’s sleeve and made herself speak.

  “How will we sleep?” she said. “I mean, are there enough—bedrooms?”

  Bobby’s eyes searched hers for a moment and she thought he might be angry. Then she thought he might be laughing at her.

  “Don’t you want to sleep me with, darling?” he said.

  Alexandra gulped. “Well, it’s not that—I mean, I like you and—”

  “Bird,” he said. “I wish you would stop worrying. I love you already, but I’m gay.”

  “What?” said Alexandra.

  “I’m gay. That is what you always say in America, right?” She saw his defiant smile, but also the briefest flicker of uncertainty—how would she take this?

  “But that’s—” She was still surprised. “That’s fine. I just didn’t know. That’s wonderful. I mean, I don’t mind.” Worse and worse. “In fact, I—”

  “Also,” Bobby said, “my parents know about this, but my aunt doesn’t. Or maybe she does not want to. I don’t want to force her. And my parents had a very difficult reaction. My mother still speaks with me. My father, less.”

  “I’m sorry.” She made herself look at him—that deep shadow over his face. Grief. “I won’t say anything to her. Of course.”

  “This is another reason I don’t like the police, Alexandra. They like to make lists of people.”

  They stood looking at each other. She wondered if she should ask whether he had ever been arrested for this. She wondered if she should ask whether he had a boyfriend.

  She tried again. “I didn’t mean, before, that I didn’t like you. In fact, I was even thinking just now that if you weren’t gay—” But this was so awkward that she began to giggle, in spite of herself, and clapped a hand over her mouth. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt that kind of laughter well up in her chest.

  “Exactly,” said Bobby, grinning, and he put a couple of fingers gently on her forehead, as if anointing her with his friendship.

  —

  AUNT PAVLINA PROVIDED ALEXANDRA with a pink nylon nightgown five sizes too wide and reaching just to her knee, a towel the consistency of starched cardboard, a clean toothbrush, and finally a shower cap, as if this were an American motel. Alexandra locked the bathroom door and took off her clothes, checking her alert face and shallow breasts in the mirror; at least her body was unchanged. The bathroom defied all her previous experience. The toilet flushed with a cord from a tank near the ceiling. A boiler was attached to one wall, and she thought to herself that she must be quick, if that contained all of Pavlina’s hot water. Most strangely, the shower ran into a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor, with no walls or even curtain around it. Every surface looked strenuously clean and smelled of nose-burning chemicals.

  Alexandra washed her hair with something she found in a plastic bottle, dried her skin with the immaculate, starchy towel, and discovered that she had not known to put the toilet paper out of range of the spray, so that it was soaked. Even the toilet paper was unfamiliar to her; it was dark pink and pliant, as if woven from some kind of rubber. Now it seemed ruined. She had left her socks near the toilet and they were also soaked; she congratulated herself for having hung up the rest of her clothes, at least, on a hook on the back of the door. Again, for a moment, Alexandra simply wanted to go home. She put on Aunt Pavlina’s broad nightgown and wrestled her hair with the comb she found on a shelf.

  Aunt Pavlina had made her up a bed in one of the rooms behind the closed doors—it contained bookshelves with a row of paperbacks and framed photographs of various children. Alexandra was sure that the boy of about eight with the straight pale hair and the long-sleeved blue shirt was Bobby; his eyes were just the same as now. In another photo, Pavlina sat cheek to cheek with a man in nacreous thick glasses. The bag with the urn rested on a chair. Alexandra wished she could see Stoycho from her window, but this room looked out at the building next door, a buffer of anorexic trees in between.

  Pavlina came to the doorway with her hair wrapped in a cotton scarf, to ask her if she needed anything more. Alexandra went forward instinctively and put her arms around Bobby’s aunt. The older woman was like an animal, firm and large-muscled. Aunt Pavlina held her tight for a long minute, although Alexandra towered above her, and murmured in Bulgarian. Then she turned out the light, closed the door, and waved through a pane of frosted glass. Alexandra watched Pavlina’s shape—and once Bobby’s—moving quietly back and forth, a kingdom of shadows. It was the first time in years she had felt safe just before sleep.

  —

  BUT MUCH LATER SHE woke from a dream that something was uncoiling under her and coming horribly to life. Then, just as suddenly, it lay still. The room was dark. Without intending to, Alexandra screamed and leapt out of bed. She could hear a wail from the street: car alarms, going off all around them. In the next fraction of a second, Bobby had burst in and seized her by the hand and they were running down the hall to the door of the apartment. He seemed to be wearing only white shorts, his underwear. She could see Aunt Pavlina ahead of them, moving quickly in her nightgown, her hair in the same cotton wrap. The floor trembled again and Alexandra cried aloud without meaning to; she had seen all this only in movies. In the dirty stairwell, lights flickered off and on and they stumbled forward, down, through the front door. There were neighbors tumbling out with them, dim human shapes, voices calling what sounded like questions or commands. A streetlight illuminated the sidewalk; some of the parked cars were still howling. Alexandra saw people grouped in front of the buildings on the other side of the street as well. A dog barked wildly in the dark, another farther away.

  “That was strong,” Bobby said. “And long.” He brushed the sweaty hair from his forehead.

  “An earthquake?” Alexandra said, to be certain.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never been in one before,” she said. It came to her for some reason that Jack had never been in one either, and never would. Now that it was over, she could feel her knees trembling. She was barefoot; she remembered to look around for broken glass, and then thought of the dog.

  “Oh, no!” she cried. “That’s Stoycho barking! And the urn is still in my room.”

  She turned, unsure which to rescue first, but Bobby clamped a hand on her elbow. “We can’t go in again, for now. There might be another shock. The urn will be all right, but I will look for Stoycho. I must look at my taxi, too. Stay here—help Lelya Pavlina,” he added, although his aunt was chatting with two younger neighbors, as if earthquakes were a welcome social event.

  He disappeared around the building, his bare back pale in the streetlig
ht. When he returned he had Stoycho with him. It was the first time Alexandra had seen the dog cowed. Stoycho’s coat had risen in ragged hackles and his head was nearer the ground than his shoulders. He shivered, slinking toward Alexandra until he could lean against her knee.

  “It’s all right,” she murmured, crouching. “My sweetheart.” She stroked his head and ears and scrubbed his chest with her fingers.

  “I will go check my taxi,” Bobby told her. A couple of people nearby were unlocking cars, turning off alarms.

  The next shock came just then, thinner but still sudden and violent, and it returned to every cell of her body the feeling of the first one, the wriggling horrible mass under her, the terror in her bones. There was a faint shriek from everyone in the street. Bobby put his arms around her, his fingers digging into her skin. A few pebbles tumbled from the roofs onto the sidewalk, like petrified rain. She had just enough presence of mind to keep Stoycho’s rope fast in her hand. The earth stilled again at once.

  “It’s all right,” Bobby crooned to her, as she had to the dog. He kept his hand on her arm, propping her up, and Stoycho crouched miserably over their feet. “It is much weaker now. If there are any more, they will not be bad. Maybe there will be none at all. I think there could be damage in other places, where it was probably stronger. We will know soon. Come with me—let’s look at my car.”

  Alexandra was glad not to be left among the crowd. They were talking again, excitedly, Pavlina in their midst. Alexandra and Stoycho followed Bobby to the cross street, where he turned the corner and stopped short. There were people outside on this block, too, standing in small groups in front of the buildings, an old man in a bathrobe that dragged the ground. An alarm was still sounding, but farther away. Bobby’s taxi sat parked under a streetlight, which glowed unaffected by the quake. Across the windshield was something that Alexandra thought at first might be a police marker; it proved when they got closer to be a couple of words scrawled in yellow paint. Bobby swore and hurried over to touch it. Then he stood staring. Alexandra thought the look on his face was very strange.