The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  “And it is still a little wet,” he said.

  “What does it say?” asked Alexandra. But Bobby was turning around, alert. Suddenly he ran up the block, disappearing for a moment around the next corner, darting between two apartment buildings.

  He returned with clenched fists. “Sometimes people break into cars when there is an earthquake, because the alarms are already so loud. But they don’t usually make graffiti.”

  “What does it say?” she asked again.

  He shook his head. “It says, Bez koruptsiya. Without corruption.”

  “Like your favorite politician’s campaign,” she said, trying to make him smile.

  His face was dark. “Yes, like that.” He touched the paint again and rubbed his finger on the seat of his shorts. “Maybe Kurilkov has some graffiti artists in Plovdiv. In fact, he has many followers in these smaller towns. But they did not hurt any of the other cars.” He leaned close to the windshield. “I wish that I had my phone, to make a photo.”

  Then he looked at Alexandra and lowered his voice. “Don’t be frightened,” he said. “It is just some mischief. I’ll clean it in the morning.”

  —

  IN PAVLINA’S SPARE BED Alexandra lay curled, quivering, and it took her an hour to fall asleep again—or rather, she dozed and woke, fearful, waiting for the mattress to come back to life. She wished she could have brought Stoycho into the room with her, or even Bobby. When she finally slept, she dreamed not of earthquakes but of a handsome tall man dressed in black and white. He smiled at her, but there was blood on his forearm, as if he had peeled it open with a knife. He leaned into a car to give her something with his other hand, the clean one, but she couldn’t tell what it was.

  “You see,” he said, but she didn’t see. She wanted to seize his hand and kiss it, whatever it held, except that he was no longer there.

  “This family name is not Lazarovi,” Bobby said. “The neighbor lady in Bovech gave us a different one.”

  They were sitting in the taxi in bright morning sunshine, he was unfolding a scrap of paper, and Aunt Pavlina was waving from her balcony. There was no sign of disturbance from the earthquake. “Amazing—not even roof tiles,” Bobby had said at breakfast, although the morning television news had reported cracked walls and two deaths in a town farther south. “Even the old city in Plovdiv is not damaged, except for one car that rolled down a street and hit a wall. Very lucky.”

  Stoycho was turning around and around on the back seat, trying to fit his long legs somewhere. “This does not say Lazarov,” repeated Bobby. “I should have noticed it yesterday.”

  “Maybe they’re staying with relatives from another side of the family, so the name is different. Or with friends?” Alexandra suggested.

  “Yes, maybe. I tried to call the mobile number of the younger man again, but there is still no answer and no message. Possibly that is not a bad thing—it would be difficult to explain on the phone, and if we say that we have something that belongs to them, they might be suspicious of us, or afraid. We’re so close that now I think we will simply go there and show them.”

  Alexandra wondered what they would do with Stoycho when they returned to Sofia, their mission completed. She hoped Bobby would have enough room to keep him and that she could see them both sometimes. They were driving slowly out of town now. In the center, near the concrete building with the giant folk-girl bolted to it, a group of old people sat around a dry fountain, perhaps the same people she’d seen there the night before. Probably they were talking about the earthquake. What had they witnessed, in their eighty or ninety years? Maybe some of them had lived in villages before communism and had been moved in a wave of modernization to cities, been lifted out of poverty or plunged into it, or arrested for trumped-up crimes against the state. They seemed to her completely separated from history now, waiting there for the approach of a pigeon or the handshake of an old friend.

  When they entered Plovdiv, she saw that the lower part of the city was dense, a jumble of small stores and houses, apartment buildings, a church. Alexandra caught a glimpse of a shop full of marble gravestones and beside it a diner with fogged plate glass windows and a sign in English: HOT FOOD. She rolled down the car window and smelled baking bread, diesel fuel, excavated soil, fried meat, and a delicate morning freshness underneath everything else. There were people on the sidewalks and people crossing the streets. She saw a walking street lined with freshly painted buildings, their red-tiled roofs like hat brims; hotels with giant words sprouting from their tops, the names of banks and car companies; vast-trunked sycamores; three boys with skateboards. She saw a mosque with its lovely minaret pointing upward. The sidewalks were clean.

  “Do you like it?” Bobby glanced at her and slid his hands around the steering wheel.

  “Not bad,” said Alexandra, smiling.

  The taxi crawled along another street, narrow buildings in gray, ochre, cream, blue, lapped by café umbrellas—an Eastern Paris. Then they were climbing. The heights of the old city caught sun from across the plain; she could feel the reach of that light from mountain to field to hilltop, over centuries.

  At the next intersection he consulted their scrap of paper and the map Aunt Pavlina had given them. Alexandra watched three young girls come out of a shop and put their arms around one another’s waists. A man with a monkey stood next to a bakery window, but then she saw that the monkey was not real. It was a marionette, and he manipulated it for anyone who would throw coins into a basket. A woman coming out of the bakery set a bundle in a napkin on top of the coins: breakfast for the man in his ragged jacket. The monkey lunged hungrily at the bundle. Then the light changed, Bobby drove on, and she couldn’t see what happened next.

  “We’re close,” he said. “They live exactly in the oldest part. This will be spectacular for you.”

  He steered up one of the hills, until the streets became steep stone cobbles and walls grew up around them, with red tile along the top edges, arched entryways. Looking ahead, she saw houses with overhanging second stories supported by wooden beams, some decorated with painted swags and flowers and medallions. Then a balcony hung with brightly geometric rugs; in a few minutes they had reversed several hundred years. Easy enough to imagine, up here, that the twentieth century simply hadn’t occurred. She wished for Jack, although she suspected he would have preferred the raw strangeness of the Sofia housing complexes.

  “We must park here,” Bobby said. “This is as far as we are allowed to go with a car. We will have a short walk now.”

  “What about Stoycho?” Alexandra glanced into the back seat. The dog was sleeping as if he had years of wakefulness to make up for.

  “We will have to take a risk, just for a short time. I will leave the windows partly open.”

  “Would anyone try to steal him?” She couldn’t help asking it.

  “He would not permit that,” Bobby said firmly. “But you must bring the bag with you now.”

  “So we can return it,” said Alexandra with a rush of pleasure. As they walked up the hill, she felt the urn light in her arms. The sidewalk was so steep that it bent her feet toward her shins; she held the bag tightly, since this was the last distance she would ever carry it. They turned their steps into a second narrow street. The address in Bobby’s hand seemed to be leading them to a mansion decorated with curling acanthus against blue stucco. A sign on the wall outside said Mузeй/MUSEUM, and the house number was almost the right one, although not quite.

  But when they went through the gate, they found a tiny two-story dwelling whose number matched their address, sitting inside the walled courtyard of the grander building. Alexandra began to smile at the sight of it. The little house was stucco, like its neighbor, but painted a fading, rosy red. To its left, sheltering the tiled roof, stood a tree she didn’t recognize, something like a beech but with weeping arms like a willow; every branch was covered with miniature yellow-green leaves. Above the front door rose a carved wooden sun. Alexandra and Bobby, holding hands,
could easily have stretched their arms across the whole façade. The windows on each side of the door were covered with wrought-iron grilles, through which a profusion of flowers grew. The number they had been looking for was displayed in white lettering on a blue sign fixed to the stucco.

  “It’s so pretty,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Bobby. “It’s not the real Bulgaria, but it’s pretty.”

  “There’s no one around,” whispered Alexandra, already fearing another empty house.

  “And there is no bell,” Bobby observed, but he raised a hand and knocked.

  Almost at once the door opened and they saw an old woman standing very upright in front of them. Her hair hung white and loose to her shoulders, and she wore a long purple sweater buttoned over a black dress. The dress was pinned at the collar with an enormous brooch, which Alexandra noticed at once because of its size and because it caught the sunlight through the doorway—enamel in the shapes of lilies and irises, green leaves. The woman’s face was like a beak, and her eyes were as dark as her hair was pale, which gave her the look of an image somehow reversed. Alexandra thought at first that she might be a ghost, and then that she must be a museum guide. She gazed at them without smiling, without fear, and possibly without curiosity.

  Bobby spoke to her in his polite way and held out his hand, a gesture she hardly seemed to register. Alexandra caught the word “Lazarovi,” and “amerikanka.” The woman turned to stare. Then she raised a crooked hand, which she moved as if stirring a soup pot upside down in the spring air; it could have meant surprise but seemed also to say, I should have known there would be trouble. But she beckoned them in and even held the door for them, stepping back unsteadily.

  The hall inside was tiny and paneled with dark wood, and Alexandra saw another sunburst on the ceiling, this one carved with storks flying out of it in four directions. A wooden chest sat against one wall and a striped woolen rug lay on the floor. A very small staircase disappeared up into the second story. Even with these simple furnishings, the hall seemed crowded. The walls were covered with oil paintings—trees and windows, houses, but especially faces, in dense confusion from floor to ceiling—narrow-limbed, weary men; sad-eyed women; drooping girls with long hair or hats. A gallery of sorrow, she thought, looking from one to another. The old lady waved a hand toward the walls, as if acknowledging Alexandra’s interest, but said nothing.

  They followed her into a tiny parlor that looked as much like a museum as the hall, but had the advantage of a wash of greened sunshine. Here tree branches swept the windows and the light fell on wooden benches and across a round brass table. The floor was highly polished and the flat rugs colorful, and again all the walls were covered with small paintings.

  The old woman sat down and gestured them to a bench, and then a younger woman came in, also without speaking. She was dark-haired, delicately built, perhaps thirty-five, dressed in blue jeans and carrying a tray of coffee cups and a fragrant carafe. Alexandra was astonished; after all, they’d been in the house for about four minutes and had arrived unannounced. The woman set their coffee on the table, smiled, and left the room just as quickly.

  When she was gone, the old lady addressed them again, hoarsely, opening crooked hands toward the tray. “Zapovyadayte, molya,” she said. Please, an invitation—Alexandra knew the second word, at least.

  Bobby thanked the old woman and stirred sugar into his mug. Alexandra put the precious bag beside her and followed his example. Bobby had stopped speaking, too, and was apparently waiting for their hostess to begin the conversation. The old woman sat across from them in a straight-backed chair, her hands on her knees; she ignored the coffee, although there was a steaming third cup. Alexandra saw that the brooch pinned to her collar was almost as big as the woman’s forehead, full of birds as well as flowers. Sunlight made harsh work of the ancient face above it. Just as Alexandra was beginning to doubt that anyone would ever say anything, the old lady raised a hand. Her fingers were long and pale, almost blue, and they bent sideways from the big thumb joint.

  “You may speak English,” she said. Her voice was cracked, or perhaps it was her English that was brittle. Her accent was British, somehow old-fashioned.

  Alexandra started. “Oh, thank you! I was wishing I could talk with you.”

  The old woman did smile, then. She was missing a tooth at one side of her mouth and she wore pale pink lipstick, unevenly applied. “You said that you have something to return to the Lazarov family,” she said.

  “Yes.” Alexandra shifted in her seat. “We heard that they live here and we’re hoping to talk with them right away.”

  “I am sorry, my dear,” the old lady told her. “They come to visit me sometimes, but they are living in the mountains now, for Vera’s health. She is my sister—you understand?” She turned to Bobby suddenly.

  “Yes,” Bobby said. “I speak English, too.”

  “She is my sister, Vera Lazarova. I expected them here this week, because they were going to Sofia. But she called me yesterday to say that there is some complication with their travel and they will not come here at once. She said that she will call me again soon.”

  Alexandra’s spirits fell heavily. She had felt the presence of her people right here, in this room, in this house like a museum of miniatures, had known beyond fact that they must live here—had been sure the tall man was out walking the beautiful streets and would return any minute. She had been wrong again, as in a bad dream.

  “Do you know how we can get in touch with them?” she asked.

  “Well—” The old woman seemed to consider this, fiddling with her brooch. When she took her fingers away, Alexandra saw that there was a beast among the birds and flowers, a white wolf or perhaps an Arctic fox, a masterpiece of lifelike enamel. “I do not know. I thought they might come here to visit me on their way home. I hope to hear from them again in the next days.”

  “Do they have a mobile phone?” Bobby asked.

  “My nephew does.” The woman smoothed her hair. Alexandra had not understood until that moment how remarkably interesting this old lady was. The edges of her large eyes no longer fit—they were like Stoycho’s eyes, darkly human, looking through the mask of something alien. A mask of age, in her case, rather than an animal face.

  The woman cleared her throat. “Vera would never carry a mobile. And my nephew uses his only for his work. He shuts it off when he is not working, because he says he wants to live in peace. He does not even keep a real telephone at home anymore. I have often told him it would be a convenience to me if I could telephone them more easily.”

  So the tall man must be the old couple’s son, as they’d speculated. Alexandra pondered this, and also his unusual bid for peace. “Their neighbor in Bovech gave us your address and a mobile number,” she observed, “in case someone wanted to buy their house there. That’s how we found you.” She hoped she wasn’t saying more than Bobby wanted her to.

  “Yes, my dear.” The old lady seemed to be looking at her more closely now. “Yes, they hope to sell their house. As I said, they live in the Rhodope Mountains now. Vera is too fragile to worry about business, and Radev is even more so. The mobile number is probably for my nephew.”

  Alexandra sat puzzling all this out, remembering how Vera had carried a wheelchair by herself down the hotel steps. But perhaps she was fragile mentally, not physically. “Your nephew is the tall man with dark hair who travels with them?”

  “Yes,” said the old lady. “But now, before I tell you more, you must tell me some things, too. What is your connection with my sister?”

  “I really don’t know her,” confessed Alexandra. “I met them outside a hotel in Sofia, and then I accidentally kept something, a bag, that belongs to them.”

  The old lady frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “She helped them with their things while they got into a taxicab,” Bobby prompted. “She kept one of the bags with her, but only by accident.”

  “And are you her husband?”
The old lady turned to him. Alexandra realized that they didn’t yet know her name.

  “Oh, no,” Bobby said—more firmly than necessary, Alexandra thought. “I’ve only brought her here to see you. I’m a taxi driver.”

  Alexandra nodded. “Your nephew told me that they were traveling to Velin Monastery, so we went right away to try to find them, but they weren’t there.”

  “Yes, that is where they were going,” said the old woman. “And you wish to return this bag to my sister? This is quite honorable, that you have looked so carefully for her.” She sat musing, her crooked fingers at her lips for a moment. “Well, we must find her, then. Or, if you like, you can leave the bag with me and I will tell her about it when she calls me.”

  Alexandra glanced at Bobby, who asked quickly, “So the older man she travels with is her husband?”

  “Milen Radev? Oh, no. He is their good friend. My sister’s husband is dead. He was a musician. A very fine musician. In fact, they were on a sad trip, to bury him, at the cemetery near the monastery. He had a connection there, later in his life—he loved the monastery. I am sure this trip has been quite hard for my sister, and I am eager for them to come here to rest for some days. I said I would go with them to Velin, but they did not want me to try. I do not travel much, now.”

  Alexandra drew a long breath.

  “And the younger man, your nephew—he was the musician’s son?” Bobby asked. He was sitting forward with his hands dangling between his knees, coffee forgotten.

  “Yes, Neven. He went with them to bury his father, of course.”

  “Neven,” Alexandra repeated. She had wanted his name but not wanted to ask for it. On the old lady’s lips, it rhymed with seven.

  Bobby sat silent and Alexandra decided that she would leave it to him to figure out what to do. “Bird, do you have the camera?” he said, at last.