The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  A week later a government man rode into Gorno and put his banner in the square. He said it came from an Assembly, with many important men. He brought newspapers to prove this. He said it was the end of an empire and Bulgaria had helped to bring the whole thing down like a building falling in an earthquake. I remember how his hands moved up and down to show the stones crashing to the ground.

  I didn’t know what an Assembly was—I thought it might be a kind of festival, the sort we have on Ilinden, bringing in the hay and the beginning of the harvest. I thought they would elect who would sing and who would dance. I thought my father might be invited to this festival, because he was one of the most important men in the village, and he danced very well, especially when he was drunk.

  Instead, my father stayed here and helped to collect the money for the new church. Actually, it was still the old one, but they put new stucco over the outside and whitewashed it inside and put up those fine windows and made the steeple tall. Before that, it was a short church—by decree of the Sultan, everyone always said, who wanted every church shorter than any minaret, though there had never been a minaret in our village. The day the priest consecrated the new church with the taller cupola on the tower, my father and the other men hung a Bulgarian flag on the front. The Gorno children went to school down below and learned new Bulgarian songs, but things up here were much the way they had been before, except that we were proud of the news in the newspapers that arrived from Plovdiv every month—sometimes even in the deepest snows of winter.

  I had not been in school much myself. My mother needed me at home with the younger children, and then I was married at sixteen years old. Now the young women go to university, and what do they learn? Anything more than we did? I could read and I could write, thanks to my father’s teaching us all to do that, and I could add and subtract the stotinki in our metal box at home. I knew where England was on the map, and Africa. My first husband was a fine young man. He drank a little, like my father and uncles, but he never hit me and he often helped me with the more difficult chores once his own work was done. I remember him carrying two big sacks of potatoes like they were nothing, and smiling at me. We worked in the fields together, except when he hired himself out to orchards down in the plains. He was eighteen when we married. Sometimes, when I’m feeling wide awake in the early morning, I remember his name.

  In any case, that husband was killed in the Second Balkan War while our youngest children were still very little. He was a hothead like all his family. My brothers brought me beans and salt during the next winter, and my oldest son tried to help me—he was a good boy, and so was my littler boy, and later my daughters all helped me until they married, except for Maria. Maria didn’t ever marry. She really was very pretty, and very sweet-tempered—just rather serious. I don’t know what happened, but she lived with me until I outlived her. Their father was dead, you see, and I let them choose their own husbands, mostly good ones. I never forced them. They’re all long gone now. My younger son was killed in a threshing accident down on the plain when he first started working, one of those new machines with the engines. I haven’t touched a machine since. I don’t need them, any more than I need you to tell me I can’t be this old. Believe me, when you are this old, you know it.

  After my first son settled with his bride in the lower part of the village and took over our fields, I had my sons’ children to look after, and then my daughters had a few children, too. When the grandchildren were just starting to arrive, Anton the Tailor asked me to marry him. You see, I remember his name with no problem. We had Anton the Goatherd and Anton the Tailor, and I certainly wouldn’t have married the goatherd, who was not all in his head after the First World War. He saw things other than goats, in the mountains. Anton the Tailor had been to the First War, too, but only at the beginning. He got a bullet in the leg and was sent home for the rest of it. He limped forever, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t handsome—oh, dear Lord, he was. All the girls wanted him. When you’re young enough, that kind of thing still makes an impression on you, handsomeness. Watch out for that, girlie.

  But Anton really was kind and smart, he was something, and it had been so long for me. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We had a son, my last child, because with Anton it didn’t matter that I was getting on in years for a baby, and it didn’t matter to him that I was older than he, by a little. He thought I was beautiful, and you wouldn’t want to argue with that, especially when you already have little grandchildren running around. He lived to be much older than my first husband had, until the earthquake—I mean the real one, not the end of the empire I told you about before. He had a temper, Anton, but we all have our faults. When I see him in dreams now, it’s always pleasant. In fact, he sends me my dreams, and he sends dreams to several of my neighbors. If you have an important dream while you’re here, you can be sure Anton the Tailor sent it to you.

  This was what I started out to tell you, about the earthquake and Stoyan Lazarov, but I hope you will excuse an old woman if she needs to tell some other things first. In fact, I should tell you the in-between part, so Anton’s death will make sense. Some sense, anyway. The village got bigger and a little richer after I married him, because we do have good land here and we started to grow more tobacco. My father had died by then, and my mother before him, of fever, both of them. They left me this house because my two older brothers were also killed near the end of the First War, and then my younger brother stayed in Germany after it ended, heaven knows why. I have German great-great-nieces and -nephews somewhere out there. They’re probably in Australia, by now.

  The important thing to say is that this house was one of the best in the village—it still is—and do you know why? It may look small on the outside, but it was dug deep, very deep into the earth. We have a root cellar for vegetables and cold foods and wine and pickles. Below that there is another cellar for storage of everything else, especially things like flat stones to repair the roof, and below that is a third cellar where there is an underground stream with the best water in the mountains.

  It is very unusual for a house to have its own spring. Some people say the village started right here, around my spring, in the old times of the Bulgarian kingdoms. I have wooden stairs going all the way down to the deepest cellar. Everywhere else, the village sits on rock and you could not dig into it like this, but someone knew a long time ago that here you could reach down into the mountain, all the way to water. Or perhaps it was once a cave—even my great-grandfather could not tell us why this house was built so. The water flows in a trench out of our cellar to the side of the mountain. Professors came from Sofia years ago to look at the spring and take pictures. There is probably not another one like it in all the Balkans, all the way down to the holy mountain Athos. I told you—we were taught some geography, too. Do you get that at your universities? When the Turks first came burning things and conquering, people hid in our deepest cellar, but it was no use. And one terribly hot summer during the wars with Greece and Serbia, I slept down there with my children, and my neighbors slept in the first two cellars, and we were all comfortable. Later, if any child was too naughty to be tolerated, I sent him or her to the cellars for a spell, to cool off.

  In any case, the village grew a little richer in the years after the First World War and our wedding. Anton sewed clothes for people from all the villages, although he could never sit cross-legged like a real tailor. Not so much the everyday clothes as the special ones, for weddings and christenings and for a few rich people who could afford to wear suits to visit their relatives in the city. I made the grandchildren’s dresses and their little shirts and he made everyone else’s finer clothes and was paid in silver and big new bills with the King on them, or just in food. The grandchildren were strong and well and if any of them got a fever, they got over it, and if they got lice we put a good mix of kerosene, vinegar, and lard on their heads. But then other problems came. Anton liked to read newspapers and talk with visitors, and he went to the l
arger towns sometimes to fit his suits on people. More and more often he came home saying we would have another war. Hell, no, I said—enough, already. My grandchildren were growing up tall, black-haired like the rest of us and beautiful, and the oldest had already married his true love from another village and they had a little baby. He met her at a church holiday one year.

  Then, yes, war came again. Once during the war we walked or rode down to town to watch a real tank drive through. It was the biggest parade I ever saw, except on television later on. Anton could not volunteer even at the end, when Bulgaria entered the fighting, because of his leg and because he was getting old—he could not have kept up with any marching. Instead he made officers’ shirts, and for a few months he worked in a factory in town, where they sewed the uniforms. Very ugly those were, too.

  One day near the end of the war, everyone suddenly started running out of their houses, and those who didn’t know what was happening followed. When we got to the top of the first field below the older Goranov farm, we understood what the other people had gone down to see. There was a crowd of men standing in the field, not our men from the village but strangers, Greeks whose clothes hung from their bones. Some were splashed with brown blood and some were bandaged around the head with pieces of old shirts. Some had only one shoe or no shoes. One man was curled up on the ground. One had ripped his pants down the front, or something had, so his privates were out in the sunlight but he hadn’t even noticed. They stood still and didn’t speak. They just looked at us and we looked at them, and everyone was thinking that maybe they had come to attack us and take our food.

  Then the whole village ran forward, all the women, and the men who were not away at the war or out in the fields, and the young girls like my granddaughter Vanya, who later became a nurse. We all ran forward and helped the soldiers slowly climb the hill to our houses.

  Through the next days we were bathing and feeding these men, putting whatever medicines we could find on their wounds. A couple of them died in the night and we buried them in the churchyard—go up there, you can see their graves to this day. We learned they were partisans in Greece, where soldiers had chased them and shot at them until they ran up into the mountains. They had crossed the mountains to us without knowing where they were, not even that they were in Bulgaria. One of them who spoke some Bulgarian told me that he’d left his wedding ring on the end of a tree branch, hanging on a twig, so that it would not rot in the ground with him if he fell down and died. I guess he got confused about what it was for. But he lived and we took care of him and we tried to tell him that his wife was certain to understand. He was from somewhere near the White Sea, very young.

  In a week some men in trucks came and got the Greeks and took them to hospitals in Plovdiv, but I do not know if they ever reached home. Maybe they became prisoners. One of the soldiers stayed in the village, I don’t know why, and he got better and then stayed for the rest of his life. Lili, with the house near our closed post office, is his granddaughter. You can ask her.

  After that, we saw planes overhead sometimes, and a few young men went with the divisions to Macedonia. I remember the sky as gray in those years, everyone sad and tired, although the sun must have continued to shine since the vegetables and the apples and the hay all kept growing. There wasn’t much food from outside, so we had to work even harder to feed ourselves.

  Eventually the radio in the mehana told us that the King had died. We heard much later that he had gone to see Hitler and then came home sick and just died. Some people said Hitler poisoned him as he did the rest of Europe. Later the radio told us that there were demonstrations in Sofia—people were throwing stones through windows, people hungry and angry. No one wanted the war anymore or believed we were fighting for anything that could help Bulgaria. And in 1944 there was a glorious revolution—it turned out we had all been waiting for one without knowing it. The radio broadcast speeches by our new leaders, men with lots of energy who cheered for the tanks in the streets. The tanks turned out to be Russian tanks, which showed up for the celebration. Bulgaria changed sides and fought against the Germans, instead, and that was when many of our men went to the front. Later there were votes for a new government. Those who voted in the village at all voted for the agrarians—they were farmers like us—not for the communists, but don’t ask me about politics. Old women who live long enough mainly count the bodies, whether we want to or not.

  Well, I am telling you more than you want to know, but we went on growing food and eating and sleeping and I cooked for a big crowd here every day, all my family. What else could we do? You just go on, if you have to. The war had ended. We got some special laws in the village, because we had achieved socialism, and a new cultural center in place of the chitalishte, the library from old times. I was sorry to see that one torn down, but they said the walls were cracked inside and it was a hazard. They threw out some of the books there, too. The church closed for repairs, which seemed to take forever, maybe about forty years.

  We also got some new officials, and a few men from our village were on committees down in the town, and there was a red star on the front of our school. My first great-grandchild started kindergarten under the red star, tiny Marina with the curliest hair in the family. I remember her because she was so much like me, although I’ve lost the names now of the rest of them. One day when she was in about third grade some men came to the school from the big town called Smolyan, and asked Marina if her father had said at home that he wanted to leave Bulgaria because he didn’t like the Revolution. She said no until they finally believed her and left her father alone. Then they asked if maybe our neighbor Lyubo, who was the goatherd’s great-grandson, was the one who didn’t like our new system, and she said she didn’t know. So they took Lyubo instead. He was crying in handcuffs, and we never saw him again. The goatherds were all even crazier after that. They say in the newspapers that we can talk now about anything we want to, but do you believe them? My grandmother used to tell me—she lived her whole life under the Turks—that you can talk about anything you want to, if and only if you’re an old woman. That’s the one constant rule. So now it’s my turn, and I keep forgetting what I was going to say.

  Maybe you want to know where Stoyan Lazarov was in all this. I forgot to mention him again, too. First, I must tell you about the earthquake—that’s what reminded me. Vera and Irina’s family inherited their house from their great-uncle in Plovdiv, who had married a Gorno woman in the old days. They stayed here a couple of times when they were little, long before the war. They were city girls—I remember them in white city dresses that would get dirty in no time, and white bows in their hair, visiting. Their father was a nice man. He had a sad kind of accident and started coming here more often for his health, the fresh air, which didn’t help him walk again. He knew how to smile, though.

  I was already married to Anton when Vera and Irina first stayed in their house, and their father hired him to make some special trousers that were easy to put on—Anton’s finest invention, he called them. He liked to tease Anton about being an inventor, not a tailor. Anton knew what it was like, not to be able to walk as well as other people. After the next World War began, we heard that Vera had gotten married, but not Irina. I imagine Irina was like a horse you can’t break, and no one wants to try. She’s an artist, you know, and they do whatever they want. You can imagine what a life of adventure she probably had. I hear she’s still alive, an old lady like me.

  During the war Vera and Irina’s family didn’t come to the village for a long time. Then, near the end of the war, the bombs were falling on Sofia like rain and we heard Vera’s parents might bring them here for several months, to get away. But they didn’t—they were sent somewhere just outside Sofia in the worst part. It was very lucky they were not all killed there. Later, we heard that Vera’s new husband had gone to Hungary, to fight the Germans when Bulgaria changed sides. We heard he was wounded in the thigh after just a few weeks, and then got very sick, and then was allowed to
go home. Because of this, we didn’t meet him until after the glorious revolution had become a little less glorious and everyone was used to it. One day my granddaughter—don’t ask me which one—told me she’d been employed through a letter in the post to clean out their old stone house for them. She opened all the windows, beat the rugs, washed the steps, all the proper things. It was like a grave in there, I’ll tell you—I helped her, to make it go faster.

  The next day was a beautiful one, with bright sunshine. A hired car came up to the watering place on the square and Vera got out. I wouldn’t have known her, she was so grown-up and grand, with fluffy dark hair around her face like a photograph, and a pretty dress she had made herself, and little shoes from before the war. Her husband Stoyan was like a beautiful photograph, too. He wore a black felt hat that he lifted firmly off and then put on again with one hand when anyone greeted him. He had dark city clothes and he carried a tsigulka in a black case. He played it in a big orchestra in Sofia, for the Revolution. Vera told us it had taken him some time to be able to play his tsigulka again after he’d gotten a fever from a wound in the leg, in Hungary. My granddaughter was kept on to help them in the kitchen and to wring the chickens’ necks. They came to visit all of us and Vera got tears in her lovely big eyes when I talked about my memories of her father, from when he was a young man. He was still alive in Sofia, but he had never really walked again, after his accident.