The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  The Wizard tapped his fingers together. “Mr. Kurilkov is quite possibly the only politician in our country with a perfect reputation, no image at all of corruption. He is improving our roads at a great speed, when no one else could do it, even with money from the EU. He is very important, you see, for the morale of our country, after so many problems. And he has been in politics for many years, but rising straight from the people, with a clean record.”

  He frowned at them. “In fact, his friends know that his first promotion came because he saved the life of someone I will not mention, in a fire. This is why his face looks as it does, above his beard, if you have ever seen him on television. He could have lost his eyesight, or his life. So his bravery also makes him different from many others. You, young lady”—inclining the dome of his forehead respectfully toward Alexandra—“come from a country with far fewer problems and much less corruption.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Alexandra said drily, although her heart was pulsing in her throat.

  “We are fortunate to have such a leader, because roads are enormously important. They bring trade in and out of Bulgaria, and they bring tourists, like you. They carry our people to their work and to the seaside for their vacations. They are the foundation of all our agriculture and industry, all our economy. So—you see.”

  He offered them each a second cup of coffee and poured one for himself. “And I am fortunate to have such a friend—my friend for years, in fact. This house has had many important guests, now including the poet Asparuh Iliev and of course yourself. You would like Mr. Kurilkov, I am sure. I was surprised and pleased—as he will be, too—to discover that you have a connection in the same beautiful village.”

  He cast a glance at Bobby, who was staring at a flag above the dining room door, as if trying to decipher its damaged gilt appliqué of Cyrillic letters, which ended with an exclamation point.

  The Wizard cleared his throat. “He is of the people, but also a true gentleman. I believe he even reads poetry. In fact, he has a nickname from Bulgarian folklore—the Bear. Asparuh, perhaps you know from where his name comes?”

  “No, I can’t say.” Bobby’s voice was low and calm. Alexandra had almost forgotten that he could speak.

  “Well, but you must know it—the he-bear, not the she-bear—in our story of The Wolf and the Bear. Or perhaps it is really called The Wolf and the—Treasure Box? Well, I am not sure how you would translate this in English.”

  “The treasure chest, maybe?” suggested Alexandra. She wondered what the Wizard would say if she told him that she had a name for him, too, and that she had no idea, still, what his real name was; she had never thought to memorize the Bulgarian on the business card he had handed her.

  “Maybe.” The Wizard seemed suddenly to have grown a little restless, as if an invisible list of transactions had been checked off and their lunch was de facto ended. “Would you like a tour of the house?”

  Alexandra agreed with mingled relief and fear—what if he locked them into a room, or hurried them out the back door to an unmarked police car? Had he really brought them here only to tell them of his connection with Kurilkov? They trailed the Wizard from floor to floor while he pointed out views from corridor windows and opened doors into bedrooms furnished with traditional simplicity. Everything looked surprisingly unpretentious, in fact, compared to the dining hall—but there was so much of it. After the tenth guest bedroom, Alexandra stopped counting. The room she liked best was a long open hall on the second floor, with a kind of extra kitchen at one end and a two-sided fireplace in the very middle, brightly new antique chairs pulled up around it. A place for a good book, she thought, looking out to the mountains. She wondered if the Bear sat here to read poetry.

  Their host returned them to the front door with great—if distant—politeness, bowing and shaking hands as if he had already half-forgotten who they were. The costumed young Titan, shyer than ever, escorted them to the gate and let it shut behind them.

  Alexandra and Bobby walked up the road without speaking until they had passed over the first hill and were just above the village again. The early afternoon was soft and clear; Alexandra could see peaks far away, on an impossibly high horizon. The sun rested hot on their shoulders and birds rose out of the fields as they passed. She wondered what it would be like to spend the rest of her life here, perhaps with Bobby, the two of them in a small stone house like the one Stoyan had put back together for Baba Yana. Both of them reading; Stoycho sleeping in front of the fire. Then she felt an aching guilt. This was what she and Jack had always said, when they were children—that they would live in a cabin together once they were grown up, somewhere out in the mountains. She slipped her right hand up her left sleeve, to feel the puckered skin beneath.

  Bobby spat on the road and ran his fingers through his hair, tugging it out of shape.

  “Did you—” began Alexandra.

  “Give me a few minutes,” he said.

  When they’d walked a little farther in silence, Bobby slumped down on a stone bench at the edge of the road—at least, it was a stone, if not quite a bench.

  “Do you think someone made this?” Alexandra couldn’t help asking, although it was not the most pressing question. She was an ideal tourist, always curious about irrelevant details.

  Bobby felt the edges of the stone. “Maybe,” he said. “It seems very old—it might be from a building. Probably it is a stop for the village bus now. You see the footprints around it, here.” Sure enough, the ground was trampled hard in front of the stone, a crowd of phantom shoes in the dust. Bobby kicked at them.

  Alexandra sat down next to him and tucked a hand under his arm. “What the hell was going on, at lunch?”

  He groaned and stroked his hair back as if petting a dog, except that the dog was himself.

  “You’re a great poet,” she added, wondering. “You should have told me.”

  “Not great,” he muttered, but he smiled sideways at her. “But you are a great reader.”

  “Yes.” Alexandra considered this. “I’m trying, anyway.” She pressed his arm, edging toward some way to punish him a little, although she wasn’t yet sure how to do it. No, she would not tell him that she had once planned to be a writer. It had been so long since she’d had the urge, anyway. Alexandra shook off the thought of the notebook in her purse. “How did that man know we were here? And didn’t you already know him? He was the one I talked to in Sofia, like he said, but I couldn’t even catch his name. The two of you looked as if you were going to have a duel.”

  “A duel?” Bobby thought about the word and then nodded. “His name is Nikolai Dimchov. He’s the big boss, at the station. I’m still surprised that you were permitted to see him, there.” He rubbed his face again. “I used to work for him.”

  Alexandra digested this rather slowly. “You worked for him—how?”

  “Oh, not in a terrible way. Don’t look at me like that, whatever you are thinking. That is why I quit.”

  Alexandra took her hand off his arm. “I don’t understand.”

  “Until last year, I was a police detective.”

  Alexandra thought of Bobby’s fingers neatly picking a lock at Velin Monastery, the gloves he kept in his jacket pocket. The nekrolog for Stoyan, posted two years late on a tree in Bovech, and his words to her: Two things are not right, here. Or, just now, A bus stop—you see the footprints around it.

  “I know that,” she said stiffly. “I guess I’ve known that for a while. Well, are you spying on me? Is that why you came on this trip—because I’m a foreigner? Or did I do something wrong?” She felt heat rising up her neck. “Is it because I took the urn? You know perfectly well that I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know anything about those people.”

  “No, no, no.” He sat up straight and looked her in the eye. “No, I’m not spying on you. I like you, and I’m not a detective anymore. I didn’t know anything about all this, either, except that you needed help and I wanted to help you, and—yes, your situat
ion seemed interesting, but in a personal way. I mean, a human way. I’m sorry I didn’t talk with you about these things. I don’t usually talk about my poems and I thought it would be better for you if I did not discuss my old job, either.”

  He slumped back into himself, knotty runner’s arms crossed on his knees. “When I won the prize I got quite a bit of money—and I had saved a little before that, living with friends who have a house. I didn’t like some things the police were doing, arresting people from demonstrations and questioning them in illegal ways, and also putting them on lists.” The bitter smile. “I suppose I became a detective years ago partly to prove something to myself. But that is over for me—you cannot be an activist and a policeman at the same time. So I quit. I gave a payment on my taxi so that I could just drive instead. And write my poems.”

  “And then you got arrested by your old colleagues, in a demonstration or two?”

  He grimaced. “Yes, I did. I saw that to reopen the mines was a terrible idea, especially because Kurilkov seems to have a lot of repressive plans about it. And I spoke at some of the demonstrations, and I also published some letters in the newspapers. Mr. Dimchov was very angry, which is interesting, because they are not his mines and I already didn’t work for him anymore. They belong to a company called Zemyabit. He called me into his office—from my jail cell—and told me that he was angry because I had been so recently a police officer and I had made a scandal for the station. He said they would let me out this time but that he did not want to see me make a second mistake—if I did, he would uncover some other way to arrest me.”

  Alexandra scanned Bobby’s face. “And then he found you with me—how? You didn’t go into the police station with me, in Sofia. But I did get into your taxi, near the station.”

  “He has my identity card on file, of course, and my license,” Bobby said.

  “Also, a policeman inspected your papers when we stopped at that bridge.”

  He gave her another look, which could have been admiration, again. “Yes, that might be it. Maybe he invited us for lunch to make sure I understand that he is watching. He is serious, I’m certain, and he is a brutal person. Sometimes he uses his position to have people beaten while they are questioned, and he can make it all legal enough so that there is no publicity. I do not like at all that he is a friend of Kurilkov—the Bear. I am not surprised that they are friends, but I think it is strange that he told us that so directly, especially after we saw Kurilkov on the road yesterday.”

  “I know,” Alexandra said.

  Bobby damaged more of the footprints with his sneaker. “And I do not like the fact that Dimchov is concerned about me still. It is already more than six months since I was in that demonstration. But they never forget. I am afraid I am the one putting you in danger. Maybe putting the Lazarovi in danger also.”

  Alexandra looked around. The afternoon lay over fields of gently colored hay and the road stretched brown below them. The mountains seemed to be dozing, gray and green.

  “Maybe he’s not paying attention to you,” she said haltingly, “but more to me. Even if he probably knew that you would come with me to lunch.” He was listening with his elbows on his knees, his smooth face with the dark moles in one corner turned toward her, unselfconscious. She wondered if she would ever become as alert and confident a person as he was. Probably if you even wondered about how to be like that, it was a state you could never attain.

  “Paying attention more to you?” he said, frowning.

  “Not exactly to me. But something related to me. You know—” She groped for the farthest distance of those ridges, where one peak showed as broken rock emerging from the forest. “First, he’s very interested in the urn. Like it said in the graffiti in Vera’s house—someone knows something about it. And before that, we were told to give it back.”

  He let her speak, his eyes blue and intense.

  “He must be paying attention to Stoyan Lazarov.” She had dropped her voice. “We know he is interested in Stoyan’s family, because the urn belongs to them. If Mr. Dimchov is watching us somehow, or following us, then he will know when we find them.”

  “If we find them,” amended Bobby.

  “Well, we have to.” Alexandra was tempted to beat her fists on the stone. “And we don’t know why he would even want somebody’s ashes. Now I really don’t want to give the urn to him. The strange thing is, if we take it to the Lazarovi, and he follows us to get it, he will get it back slowly when he could have had it more quickly at any time—I mean, by taking it away from us. He could have gotten it from us right here, in the village. So maybe he wants to find them, but without doing it himself, too obviously. Or maybe he simply has not been able to find them, either.”

  Bobby was shaking his head, but it seemed to be in agreement, this time. “And maybe he is warning us not to fail. But also to be careful. You should have my old job,” he said. “I will tell Mr. Dimchov to hire you.”

  “What if Vera and Neven are already in some trouble with the police, maybe worse than you?” Alexandra clutched his arm again. “What if we are the only people who know they are being followed, because the police are following us following them?”

  “Then we would have to warn them. But probably they know that themselves. After all, they do not answer their phone calls. Unless something has already happened to them.”

  Alexandra suddenly had a sense that it was all too dramatic. “I feel silly, making this up.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Something really is strange. We keep receiving graffiti, even blood, and then Mr. Dimchov finds us up here and invites us, but does not try to get the urn from us. Possibly he wants to warn us about something, to keep us out of bigger trouble. Although he does not like me. And why is Kurilkov somehow in this?”

  “I have been thinking—you remember when we were locked into that room at Velin Monastery?” She realized with surprise that this had happened only days before.

  “Yes. Someone came in, and we never knew who.” Bobby tapped her arm. “I have thought about that, too. But if it was someone from the police, they followed us to Velin immediately, very fast, after you were at the station in Sofia. Although I suppose the station could have called the police at the monastery. And they only scared us—they didn’t follow us to the parking lot and try to take the urn.”

  “Who would care about an old dead man?” Alexandra said harshly, to hear it aloud. She could not imagine giving Stoyan up to anyone, except to Neven. She wanted Neven to appear on the road below them, to hurry toward them in his formal clothes. She clenched her fists on the rock so that she wouldn’t imagine running to meet him. Then she remembered that she might already have endangered him in some way she couldn’t understand.

  “There are too many questions,” Bobby said. “Too many we cannot answer yet, although we will when we can. The more important thing is to decide what to do.”

  “Should we tell Irina Georgieva?” Alexandra thought of Irina’s fatigue after the trip through the mountains, her twisted hands on the blankets.

  Bobby rubbed the side of his face. “I think we must. She might know something that could explain this better. Even if she does not, we should give her every possible piece of information. I still do not like to leave her at all, in Plovdiv, but how could we take her to Sofia with us? I don’t know what we would do with her there.”

  “She will be so worried,” Alexandra said sadly. “And their house here has already been vandalized, all because of me. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “It is not your fault.” Bobby leaned over and kissed her suddenly on the ear. “What a kind person you are.”

  “I like her,” Alexandra murmured, but she was pleased. They got up and started down the road, slowly, postponing for a moment the return to Irina and explanations. Bobby kept his hands jammed into his pockets. After a while Alexandra said, “The fairy tale about a bear—do you know it?”

  “Everybody knows some version of it,” Bobby said. “It was in my sc
hoolbooks, when we were in the third or fourth class. I think it’s a very old story, but I don’t remember it well. You need someone who is a good storyteller for that.”

  “And you’re just a poet?” Alexandra said, smiling at him.

  “Yes,” Bobby said.

  “Would Baba Yana know it?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  Alexandra threaded her arm through his. “It would give us an excuse to talk to her again before we leave.”

  The Wolf and the Bear, that’s one I used to tell my children when they were little, said Baba Yana. It’s not about Baba Metsa, the She-Bear—they liked that one even better. But it’s a good one. My grandfather told it to us, right here, while the Turks still owned our land, and he said even then that it was a very old story, so you can be sure it is. There was a Bear, you see, who was the strongest and fiercest of all the animals when Bulgaria was young. He was so big and so tall that you could see him walking over the mountains, and he roared like this—aaaarrr. That’s the part where my children liked to scream, and my grandchildren, later. Everyone was afraid of this Bear because of his strength and his size. They said he could eat a sheep or a little girl in one swallow. The Bear wandered around the countryside and everybody stayed far away from him.

  At the same time, there was a Wolf, who was big and strong but not as big as the Bear. But the Wolf was very smart, and one day he came into a village not so far from here, and he said to the villagers, “If you make me your Tsar, I will protect you from the Bear. Not only that, but I will get back all the sheep and goats that other wolves have stolen from you, shame on them, and give them out to everyone in the village.”

  The villagers were a little afraid of the Wolf, but they all wanted their livestock back, so they agreed. And the Wolf ruled over the village, and many other villages, and he brought back not only the sheep and goats that had been lost, but many others that he stole from rich farms and gave to the poor villagers. The villagers were happy and they did not ask any questions about where all the food came from. Sometimes people came from other farms and villages, angry, and tried to attack their village, but the Wolf drove them off and kept the village safe.