Stoyan came to dinner for years, all through the war, even when there was not much dinner and sometimes when other friends and relatives were present. I don’t think he cared for the friends and relatives, but he liked my mother, who was sweet and kind and adored music, and he treated me to little jokes and anecdotes. Most of the time, he sat and watched Vera with glowing eyes as she moved around bringing cushions to my father or helping my mother pour coffee. After dinner Stoyan played his violin, which he always carried with him.
In those days, he was more talkative, and I loved his stories. He told us once that until his return to Sofia, the happiest two days of his life had been the day his father had given him his first violin and shown him the sounds it made, and the day he had stepped off the train in Vienna to study at the music academy there. Vera blushed. Stoyan told us about the musicians he’d heard in great cities, about the cafés of Vienna, about Notre Dame towering over its river. He told us about Rome, where his father had met him on a holiday a few years before, and had bought him his violin—this one, the best he’d owned—a gleaming piece of wood shaped by Giuseppe Alessandri. Alessandri, he said, was born in 1824 and was a student of a student of the great Lorenzo Storioni of Cremona. Stoyan’s violin had been made in the 1860s, during the turmoil that formed Italy.
When he played that violin for us, I thought about his stories and the history he talked of, about paintings I had seen and books I had read. His violin made a smoky, mysterious sound. I heard in it the explosions of chestnuts cooking on a brazier at the edge of a river, and horses clopping across cobblestones in Siena and Florence, and also the rustle of leaves that fell on Garibaldi’s troops as they marched. The violin sang “Roma o morte,” and it wailed for the mountains of dead in an American Civil War across the sea, and for Paris glittering with the Second Empire. It rose and fell with voices reading Victor Hugo aloud by whale oil, and it sang about dynamite, about Ottomans and Englishmen falling under their horses in the Crimea, and the feet of crowds shuffling through international expositions. Above all, Stoyan’s violin sang about places—places its maker had been, places the teacher of its maker had been, places its current owner would someday see, and the many, many places where he would someday perform on it.
When Stoyan first came to us, dinner was as it had always been, except for a lot of talk about the war. In the beginning, the King kept our country neutral—although eventually he let Hitler have a few Bulgarian divisions—so the bombings and rationing didn’t start for a long time. We lived in a big apartment, nicely furnished, with long curtains in the windows and French doors onto the balcony. Most of our relatives lived in the same building, which my paternal grandfather had put up years before. My mother had brought our furniture with her on her marriage, from her father’s orders to Paris in the previous century.
Our parents were very proud of the lives they had made for us in that apartment. My mother kept everything beautifully clean and orderly, with our help, and she made the lace mats for the tables and the antimacassars that protected the chairs from my father’s hair pomade. My father’s hand beat time on the armrest of one of those chairs while Stoyan obliged his requests by playing a melody from Brahms or a romance by Beethoven—and if he played a tune from an opera, my father would silently shape the words in Italian. During dinner, my mother sometimes pressed a button with her foot under the dining table to call in our one servant—my grandfather had installed this technology for my grandmother when electricity first became available in central Sofia, and everyone was proud whenever my mother did that and the village girl appeared magically from the kitchen. No one else we knew had this system.
That was at first, during the time Stoyan was becoming a member of our family gradually, without our noticing it. We still ate meat from the butcher’s, and pickles from my great-grandmother’s in the village, because hers were the best. Vera and I changed into clean dresses for dinner. If Stoyan was coming, Vera spent an hour doing her hair and powdering her neck and face to make her complexion even fairer. She was beginning to wear more grown-up clothes and during those years she finished school.
Then the King joined forces with Hitler, who gave him control of Macedonia, and the first soldiers were sent there, and to Greece. The King was still very popular, because he was getting us back our territories. But Hitler also attacked Russia, our old ally. Sometime in 1941, I don’t remember when, organizers in Sofia held a protest in the streets because they believed our men were dying for foreign causes and not for the glory of greater Bulgaria. They were right about this part, as it turned out later, but the King decided to crush their demonstrations.
After that, the communists and the anarchists grew even stronger, mostly in secret. Papa told us that someone had approached one of his younger friends about giving money to the partisan resistance, but this friend was still partly loyal to the King’s government and said he could not. The King, our father told us, was a great man and would bring us through the war somehow. “Beware of secrets, children,” Papa said, in the same way he did when we were little and stole sugar from the kitchen. “They will come back to hurt you.”
The Allies bombed us in the spring of 1941, to punish us for joining Hitler, and people died, and we went to the cellar—but then these attacks ended as suddenly as they had begun. Later, we saw people going hungry. In the streets there were sometimes soldiers with only one eye or one hand, begging for bread. Vera and I would take a few coins and go to the bakery to buy some to give them. The soldiers ate it quickly, standing right in the street. People began to say that the King could send these soldiers to be broken in Greece or Macedonia but could not feed them when they came back. I understood from conversations at our table that Stoyan disliked both the German alliance and the Allies who were fighting us—he thought the war ridiculous, a waste, but not in the way the partisans did.
One evening he was very quiet at dinner, and he politely declined to play his violin afterward. When Vera asked him what was wrong, with her beautiful hand on his arm, he only shook his head. But after a while he said that he had realized the night before that even if the war ended well for us, he might not be able to return to Vienna right away. “My parents couldn’t manage without me just now,” he said, and stopped. We all knew that he didn’t want to admit that his family had no money left, either—he wanted to marry Vera and didn’t want my parents to think he was too poor.
“But that’s good!” I burst out. “Then you won’t take Vera to Vienna and you can live here with us!”
Even my mother and father laughed at this, although they had not yet given their consent to the young couple. But we all really were thinking, How can they marry in the old way, when they have no money, no possibility for Stoyan to continue his studies, no work for great musicians, not even any chicken for dinner this week? At last Stoyan said that it didn’t matter—he would work at anything he could find until he had enough to go to Vienna when the war ended, and to support a family; he gazed right at Vera and her cheeks became red.
I think my mother and father approved of Stoyan, partly because of his patience and courtesy, his good upbringing and astonishing talent, and partly because he never asked to see Vera alone. He kissed her goodbye on the cheek only after the first year of eating dinner with us. Now that I’m an old woman and I know something about love from my own life, I think he must have burned for her. But he waited those first few years and I know that he practiced steadily at home. No one could pay him for lessons, so he did some other work here and there, I don’t know exactly what—probably anything he could find. Once he came to dinner with his right hand in a bandage and said he had hurt it at a job, and he looked so embarrassed about doing labor that we did not ask him more about it. “Fortunately, it won’t keep me long from playing,” he said.
In the autumn of 1943 we celebrated Vera’s twenty-first birthday. My mother managed to buy extra beans and a little pork and concocted a big dish. I used the sewing machine to make Vera a skirt out of a pair of
dark curtains put away in a wardrobe. The skirt looked very nice, fitted on her small waist. A friend cut Vera’s braids off and waved her hair with hot irons, which made my mother cry. My father had a cousin who was a photographer; he took a photograph of Vera in my mother’s pearls. Later, when Bulgaria changed sides and fought against Hitler, he was killed in Hungary, behind his camera.
On that evening of Vera’s birthday, nobody said it, but we all thought that this was the beginning of the last year she would be at home with us. If Stoyan proposed to her, in another year, she would certainly accept him. A few other young men had spoken to my parents, but none of them pleased her, and my parents respected her wishes. During the birthday dinner, my father looked serious—thinking, no doubt, about her future with a musician who now had only his talent. My mother still looked tearful because of Vera’s hair. Some of my aunts and uncles were there, and they nodded gravely, like my father. Vera seemed very cheerful, as if she was pleased to be counting off the last year.
When we’d finished dinner, Stoyan said he had a gift for her and we all sat down in the parlor. I suddenly noticed that the room was beginning to look shabby because we could not replace the rug or repair the furniture anymore. Stoyan stood in front of us with his violin in his hands and bowed to Vera.
“Dear Vera,” he said, “Chestit rozhden den. May you have many more birthdays, all of them happy.” He could be very formal, like that, even as a young man. I think Vera liked it, the dignity he showed, especially in front of our parents. He made a noise to clear his throat. “I do not have a gift for you better than the one I will give you now, although it is not bought with money and it is not something to wear or keep in your pocket. I hope you will keep it in your heart. This is something I have not played for anyone except myself, since I returned from Vienna. In fact, I am certain that no one in Bulgaria has ever heard it before.”
Vera sat in front of him with her hands folded on her knee. Her neck looked very white, with her hair short. I hoped that at twenty-one I would be as beautiful and grown-up as she was, more or less engaged to be married, but with the war behind us.
Then Stoyan began to play, and I think from that moment on we all forgot everything else. The music was first very rapid, like cold water running over stones, but more orderly than water on stones. It sang with the voice of a woman, or a spirit of the wind. I thought of the samodivi, the wild maidens of folk tales, running through forests without touching the ground—and yet it was endlessly, neatly logical. The sound made me feel dizzy one moment and fulfilled in the very next phrase. In fact, I couldn’t predict the next phrase—at least not the way I could when listening to Bach—but when it arrived I felt there was no other way it could have sounded.
After a long time the cold water flowed all the way down to the foot of a mountain and slowed, and the voice of the violin turned deeper and throbbed with a quiet emotion. My father’s eyes grew wet and he wiped them quickly with the back of his hand. I remembered the way he had been when he could still walk. My mother’s face was pale and I saw her as she must have looked when she was young, with the beautiful features Vera had inherited. Vera herself sat leaning forward, forgetting to be lovely or graceful, listening like a man with her feet set firmly apart. The room was completely still.
Finally there was a flourish, red and gold in the air, and Stoyan held his bow aloft for a second, until the resonance died away. We applauded, but our hands sounded hollow and inadequate.
“That is not Handel?” my father asked tentatively.
“No, sir.” Stoyan let his shoulders drop, stretched his long arms a little. His eyes were very bright. As always, he had played with a somber face, but now his whole frame seemed suffused with happiness. “It was written by Antonio Vivaldi.”
“Ah,” my father said. “The Italian priest.”
“Yes,” said Stoyan. “He was the same generation as Handel, I believe. He lived in Venice, you know, and wrote many works there. This is a special piece of his. Special to me.” He glanced toward Vera, where she sat looking up at him.
—
A FEW DAYS LATER, the bombs began to fall on Sofia—Allied bombers, coming in from Italy and other countries, striking the city so that it shook. As I said, they had bombed us those brief times in 1941, to punish the King for joining the German cause. But this new attack seemed never to end. Buildings went up in flames and whole blocks fell down. We didn’t know when our house might be hit. Vera was frantic whenever she and Stoyan were apart, thinking he must be dead. When he could, he still came for dinner with us, but the meal was often interrupted by air raid alarms. Once, I swear, he kissed Vera quickly while all of us were sitting in the blackout.
Then food became very scarce and we helped my mother make bread from odd things, lentils and acorns. We were always at least a little hungry. At all hours we had to go to the basement and sit there with our knees against the knees of our relatives, shuddering. I hated feeling other people’s bodies shaking—it made me tremble, myself, when I wanted to be brave. My father said that everyone knew now that the King, who was dead by then, had made a terrible mistake. We had thrown our lot in with a barbaric version of Germany—not the Germans he had known in his youth, he said, before the First World War.
The new year came, 1944, and by spring we were bombed so constantly, so hard, that it was like a nightmare no one could wake from. There was little food, and what we could buy cost the rest of our savings. My father said that Stoyan could marry Vera earlier than planned. In case we were all killed, I suppose—he didn’t want to deny them that much, although he did not say so. Sometimes Stoyan played his violin for us by feel, in the dark, although never in the crowded basement. He said the planes flew too high to hear him. I’m sure that if those Allied pilots had been able to listen, they would have stopped their bombing and left us in peace forever.
So he proposed to my sister, but in private, at some moment when they felt they could safely—or not so safely—meet outside together. She told me later that first he made her promise that she understood one thing: when the war ended they would have to live all over the world for the sake of his music. They got married very quietly one afternoon, in a chapel not far from our neighborhood, with all of us standing behind them. Just as the ceremony was ending, the air raid alarm began. Fortunately, the priest had already knotted them together. My father and mother had given them some rooms in our building that had stood empty since the death of a great-aunt; but they spent their first wedded night in the basement with us, Vera holding my hand as well as Stoyan’s.
Oh, dear, Irina said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. Well, it was a long time ago.
In Irina’s low-ceilinged upstairs hall, Alexandra stopped Bobby. “Can I talk with you before you go to sleep?”
“Sure,” said Bobby. She realized that he’d probably picked up that little word from her.
They crept down the hall together, past the heavily textured paintings in their frames. When they went by the room closest to Bobby’s, Alexandra saw that it was lit from inside with a glow, which seemed at first to be without any source and then became candlelight. The door stood ajar and through it she caught a glimpse of an ornate bed with two figures lying in it. One was the helper, Lenka, still wearing shirt and jeans, her eyes shut, and in her arms Irina Georgieva. The old lady’s eyes were closed, too, her face bereft of color, her hair loose and draped around her like Spanish moss. Never had Alexandra seen one body hold another so tenderly, the younger woman’s lips against the older one’s sere scalp, her arms cradling the wrinkled shoulders and neck above a pink nightgown.
Alexandra and Bobby sidled past and went into Bobby’s room, where he shut the door with care behind them. There were papers everywhere, some covered with a tiny handwriting, some half-written-over, some a scatter of empty leaves. They lay on the table, next to a candle in a tarnished holder, or fluttered off the chair onto the floor; they drifted along the wool rug and sat in piles under the window. They must have come out of h
is satchel, Alexandra thought. She couldn’t see the writing very well, and besides it would be in Bulgarian.
“I’m sorry for the mess,” he said, and began moving around to collect it all.
“What are you writing?” she asked.
“Nothing important. Just notes.”
Again, a blank wall, which made it seem impossible to ask a second time. For a disagreeable moment, Alexandra entertained the idea that he was making notes about her, and then had the wisdom to see how narcissistic this was.
She turned away. “I should go to bed. We’re getting up early.”
“Do you want me to wake you?” he said, as if in compensation.
“Okay,” she told him, and lingered for a moment.
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Oh.” She had nearly forgotten. “I just thought I should ask if I can finally pay you. I know Irina is going to cover the trip to the mountains, but you’ve already driven me a long way. Please.”
He looked at the floor. “I don’t really want you to pay me, at this point,” he said, his voice dropping. “It would not feel right to me. In fact, if you mention it again, I might have to get angry.”
He smiled, but she felt he meant it. She vowed to herself that she would repay him, and more, in the end.
The Shadow Land Page 17