The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  But for a few seconds, under the late-afternoon October sun, my hands bleeding and my back aching severely from the weight of the wheelbarrow, I heard the Mendelssohn aloud. The first movement, which I’d always loved plunging into. It was the sound of rapture.

  The sacks did not disappear until there were seven or eight of them, by which time we turned away our noses as well as our eyes if we had to pass the side of the washhouse. I made a bargain with my own mind: whenever I imagined myself in a sack, I would immediately think of something else. I would not think of Vera—I saved her, and my parents, for my nightly prayer into the stinking, coughing, unlistening dark of the barracks. I would not think of my son, sitting on the sunlit grass of the field; that was for even worse moments.

  When I imagined myself in a sack, I thought instead of Venice, which I had meant to visit years earlier. I thought of Vivaldi, unlocking his church door for rehearsal in the early morning, and the way the air might feel coming over the salty lagoons and the waves of the Adriatic. I thought of the piece I had not let myself practice since my arrival, although I knew it better even than my Bach. I would have to be careful, though, not to forget it.

  Vivaldi had died at sixty-three, poor, his music no longer in fashion. I had read somewhere that he had probably been buried in a pauper’s grave in Vienna. Perhaps he had been put in a sack, too. But not by thugs and criminals, and not before he had composed music like the moon above islands that bristled with churches.

  1949

  One evening, a miner was brought back to the camp with his hand missing. Two other men supported him as he walked. He held the shredded stump of his sleeve tightly with his remaining hand, to slow the blood. Some rocks had fallen inside the mine and pinned him to the floor of the chamber; his workmates had tied the crushed arm off, elevated it, and saved him from bleeding to death. I wondered why the guards at the mine had allowed anyone to help the man, but they had. He had been unconscious for hours before they brought him back to the camp, and was still hardly awake. He was taken to the big shed used as an infirmary; from what little I had heard, so far, very few left the infirmary except in sacks. After he was carried in there, we had roll call in the yard, and no dinner. The uniformed guard, the one the others called the Chief, shouted at us during the count. He told us that the kind of carelessness we had witnessed was its own punishment, as we could see, but he wanted us to remember it well. When someone failed to respond in the roll call, the Chief started over, from the very beginning.

  In the morning, we could hardly walk or work, on our breakfast of tea and that shit-like smear of jam. I thought even more about the man’s missing hand than about the pain in my stomach. Was it still lying under a pile of rock, up in the mines? It had been his left hand—the note-producing hand, if you were a violinist. I forgot to practice, that morning. Instead, I thought over and over about my son and his love, sitting by the river. I did not try to serenade them; I simply walked down to the river and stood quietly behind them, looking at the sunlight on their glossy hair. My own hair was just beginning to fall out. I was grateful that they didn’t know I was there, couldn’t turn around to see me.

  —

  ON A SUNNY MORNING about three weeks after my arrival at Zelenets, my hands were so swollen that I found I could not play, even in my mind. The blisters had broken many times, of course, but now my hands had become hot and red all over, not only in the damaged places. The only good thing about my burning hands was that they made me feel a little less of the pain in my stomach. I cleaned and wrapped them and tried to think of some other way to spend the work hours. It was then that I began to wonder more about my son. I had not thought about him except as that dark-haired figure on the riverbank, with his clean white shirt and black vest, his broad shoulders. He looked like a dignified man, neat and sober, perhaps a quiet person. Had I raised him well? Was he a musician? A scholar? Of course, Vera would have been an excellent mother. I wondered if he had brothers and sisters, but decided against it. There would never have been enough money for them, not in this new world of cramped apartments, where musicians were assigned to factory marching bands. I decided he would be an only child, conceived in love and on purpose, but alone with us after that.

  During the march to the quarry, I let myself think about his conception.

  It would have been an unbearable pleasure, different even from all other pleasurable times. Out in broad daylight, I let myself think of Vera’s body, and then of the exquisite suddenness that would create our son. I looked at the ground as I thought about this, so that I would not see any of what was actually around me. For a moment it was only the two of us, on a different kind of day.

  Then Vera, subtly changed, in her worn cotton nightdress, coiling her hair up in the mornings before she cooked our breakfast. She would go to her job at a factory canteen looking radiant, her waistband beginning to press a little, her skin beautiful, and one evening she would say she had finally been to see a doctor and it was true, what we’d thought. She would look away, awkward but overjoyed. I would come around the table to stroke her braided head and we would both laugh so that we didn’t cry. She would assure me she was healthy as a farm animal, no worries. The next day, at the orchestra rehearsal, I would keep forgetting—and then remembering in a burst—the coming change. It would make my hands shake with happiness as I lit my single cigarette during the morning break.

  That was all I could manage for one day. But when we reached the quarry, I asked Nasko to push the barrow while I relieved him of the job of splitting rock and lifting it, although he protested in a whisper that it would hurt my hands even more. I wanted to do it for him. After all, I’d had good news.

  —

  THIS JOY DID NOT LAST—no joy could last in such a place. The next day, I was so sad that I told myself I would not let myself think about my son again for three days. First, I would practice for a day, even if my hands could hardly bear it. Then I would spend a day thinking only about Vivaldi and his rehearsals with his orchestra. The third day, I would practice again—exercises, sonatas, a concerto. On the fourth day, I would finally begin to raise my son. If anything appalling happened in the meantime, I could visit him and his love at the river until it was over. It was always early summer there; that river was never slimed with gray-green ice, like the one we marched along to the quarry.

  In this way, I began to make a deeper pattern. When I’d completed these four days, I would begin again, with a day of pure practice. I thought about telling Nasko how I was spending my time; often, I saw a faraway look on his face while we worked, and I wondered what he was dreaming about. I was sure he would never report me for “poor effort.” But I was afraid that if I told anyone at all about my days, they would cease to have the same effect.

  By then, my hair had fallen out across the top of my forehead, and I could feel my ribs against my dead-man’s shirt. We’d had only two baths since the first lice killing, and there were insects living on me and in my clothes all the time, not only in my bed.

  One morning, the angelic-looking brute Momo paused in front of me and gazed into my eyes for a moment. He had an empty sack in one hand; he raised both hands and played an invisible violin for a moment, so that the sack swung around in the air. Then he suddenly handed the sack to the man next to me. The next morning, Momo did this again, eyeing me humorously for an instant before he chose someone else. I stayed as still as I could, trying not to appear frightened, unable to look at the doomed man. That day was normally a Vivaldi day, but I allowed myself to skip ahead to a day with my son, in case it proved to be my last.

  1949

  Of course, before I could begin to raise my son, on that first fourth day, he had to be born. It was a miraculously easy labor, as I couldn’t bear to know Vera was suffering. I decided it would happen during the afternoon, suddenly, when she was large and ripe as a peach. That morning, before I went to my rehearsal, she told me that the small of her back ached more than usual and I rubbed it for her, the animal
curve that still looked as graceful as the midsection of a cello. Her skin was warm under my hands and she said she felt better, that her mother was coming to see her and they would do some extra baking together in case the baby arrived soon. I was so startled to think of this that I let the wheelbarrow slip for a second, and it hit the top of my foot and bruised it badly; I would be hiding a limp for the rest of the day.

  Vera smiled as she closed the door on me, her face tired but rosy, and the next thing I knew her father was summoning me from the rehearsal during our break—so that I wouldn’t have to interrupt our work and possibly anger the conductor—and we were hurrying to the hospital, the old one where I’d been born myself, now with a red star above the front entrance. I ran up the stairs and begged the nurses to let me go in, although I had no idea if that was allowed. Vera lay in a narrow, clean bed on the top floor, with my mother-in-law hovering over her. I kissed her and stroked her hair; she smiled at me again, radiant, proud, but also very tired. The baby was in a big room with other babies, and the nurse pointed him out to me. He was wrapped tightly in white flannel, his face soft and sleepy, his eyes shut. Tears sprang to my own eyes at the sight of him, and I had to set the wheelbarrow down for a moment and wipe them with my sleeves. I wondered if I might hold him, and then if I would be able to hold him safely. A nurse showed me how and put him in my arms, which made him open his eyes and look up at me. His weight was terribly slight, but warm, resting on my arm.

  I went back in to see Vera. “I would like to call him Neven,” she said drowsily. “I dreamed that that was his name.” I thought about this; Neven was really more a woman’s name—Nevena, or Nevyana, marigold—and I had thought we would name him for my father, the traditional way. But he really was like a marigold, with his round, tawny face and unfocused golden eyes.

  “We must name him for my father,” I said softly, “but we could call him Neven ourselves.”

  She was already sleeping. I kissed her forehead and went downstairs to my father-in-law.

  “A very fine boy,” I told him. We stopped by a tavern and had a stinging, marvelous glass of rakiya before I returned to my rehearsal.

  —

  LUNCH THAT DAY WAS something different, as if they had run out of beans: a kind of stewed turnip, almost not food, tasting of dirt. I hoped this was a temporary change. For a moment, I thought to myself that this would be bad for Vera while she was nursing the baby; she must have real food, and plenty of it. Then I realized what I’d just been considering, and it gave me a shock. I would have to guard my mind in a second way, not only against this place but also against itself. I gave myself strict orders: if I ever again felt the line blurring between my mind’s work and this terrible reality, I would assign myself an entire day of scales. No concerti, no Bach, no Venice, no Vera, no Neven—just scales, until I made it right again.

  —

  ON THE NEXT FOURTH DAY, I began to get to know my son. Neven proved a tranquil baby, who smiled and laughed early, although we did have some sleepless nights the first months. Vera worried that our neighbors in the apartment, with its thin partition walls, would be annoyed when he cried. But they were mostly patient with us and him. The old woman who lived on the right side, in what had once been part of the same apartment as ours, took a great liking to him and helped us with him sometimes. Vera was a happy mother, cuddling and rocking him, watching him sleep, and her own mother came constantly to look after them both.

  They say fathers become impatient, like neighbors, but I could never hold him enough, and I grew to love the smell of milk, and even the reek of diapers boiling in their soap on the stove. Vera read my small library of books while he napped, or she cleaned the apartment, or slept herself. She wanted to keep her German and French going. Once I thought confusedly that she must be having a hard time caring for the baby alone while I was far away in this hell-hole. The next day I played scales, all day, in every key.

  That was a hard day; scales did not keep my mind far enough from the pit and the pain in my hands and legs and back. At the end of the afternoon, instead of marching us home, the guard and Momo and a couple of other assistants lined us up and pulled two skeletons from the line and shot them, as an example. I hadn’t known they ever used their guns except to guard us; they all seemed to prefer clubs. Momo was allowed to shoot one of the men himself; he handled the gun like an amateur, or a boy with a plaything, so that we were all ducking and flinching as he waved it toward us. Then I saw he knew exactly what he was doing but had once again simply enjoyed frightening us. They shot the two skeletons right in front of us, but in the backs of their heads, as if they’d been targets with bull’s-eyes. The sound ricocheted off the mountain wall beyond our pit.

  In other words, the Chief let Momo shoot a man, but I did not let myself think about my son, or walk down to the river to serenade him; I didn’t let myself consider Vivaldi’s stroll home across the Piazza, or vow to get back alive to Vera. Instead, I made myself watch as each man leapt into the air and fell forward. I told each one silently that I was watching for him to the very end, that I would never forget, and I thought of each one as a baby, sometime long before, opening sleepy eyes.

  —

  EVERY THIRD DAY, I practiced, and it seemed to me that I had now gone at least twice through all the repertoire I’d ever learned. I selected a piece or two to focus on, beginning always with Bach in the morning and then working on my chosen pieces all afternoon. I wondered if it was possible I was improving; I thought sometimes that my memory of a work had gotten better, and that I was hearing my phrasing improve, especially in a Dvořák symphony, his third, which I’d always loved. More and more, I could hear the other parts in my head. The academy orchestra had played that repeatedly in Vienna, and once in Prague as well. We were very good that night. The Prague audience had given us a whistling, stamping, cheering ovation—they who thought of the composer as their private property. That symphony did seem to be improving, at least in my mind, and the swell, the sweetness of it filled the pit for me, some days.

  One afternoon Nasko leaned forward from his miserable rock splitting to whisper, “What is it today?”

  I was startled, wary for a moment, and then I thought, Why not?

  “Dvořák’s third symphony,” I said softly.

  A smile brushed his lips and he bowed his head, deeply pleased, and lifted the pickax again. His cheeks were hollow and his brown hair was threaded with white now. In the purple below his soft eyes, I saw a shadow that I hoped was not death. I knew it lay across all our faces, a warning. Sometimes it claimed men quietly, in the night. We lived just under its wing.

  Then Nasko lowered the ax again. “I finished a big canvas yesterday,” he whispered. “A man on horseback, with white fur boots. The horse was quite difficult.” There was no death in his eyes now, and I saw no madness, either.

  “Good,” I said. I knew that he knew I meant, Good—we might see each other out of here alive.

  We didn’t talk more about it, but after that he gave me a nod before we started work every morning, and I nodded back, very slightly, hoping we would not be reported for conspiracy. When the man from Pirin disappeared one night and was not there to work with us on the ledge the next morning, I felt terrible, guilty, as if we should have helped him, too, with our friendship.

  The days I spent with Vivaldi, I often helped him rehearse his chamber orchestra. I tried only not to think about what he might be eating for his midday meal. One morning I watched him rehearsing his young choir in a new oratorio and I saw the concentration, excitement, and impatience with which he instructed them. I wondered how he himself would have played the piece I was saving in secret, but I never asked him to play it for me.

  More than anything, I looked forward to every fourth day, when I would see Neven growing up. He was a toddler now, square-shouldered and solid, taking a step or two with his hands hooked over Vera’s guiding forefingers; they practiced in the tiny apartment but also in the park, with her father walking
next to them in his discreetly patched jacket, or her mother carrying a folded blanket over her arm. Vera’s sister, Irina, weary from long hours of painting murals and portraits of factory workers, found Neven more interesting now that he knew who she was. Whenever she appeared, he lit up and began to laugh, which made everyone around them laugh. His hair was the color of new brass but already darkening into tarnished curls.

  I spent a great deal of time considering when to present him with an instrument, and what it might be, and how we would find one, and how we could afford it; Vera said it was nonsense, that he would only break anything we gave him, and I agreed to wait until he was three. “Four,” said Vera. I agreed to that, too. She had gone back to her canteen job and she looked tired, which worried me and made me say yes to her at every opportunity.

  I wondered if we might have another child, and then remembered that I had already decided to imagine only one, since the apartment was so small. Besides, when the country opened up again, I would probably have to travel for my music, first back to Vienna and then to competitions again, and ultimately to tour Europe. It would be hard for Vera, who would have to stay and work until I became successful again; she would have her hands full even with only Neven at home. I didn’t think they would be able to come with me, at least not until Neven was much older, and then maybe we would perform together. I pictured Herr Mozart and his stiff little boy and girl, visiting the great cities of Europe, playing for heads of state.

  Sometimes, looking up from the wheelbarrow, I wondered if the guards had hopes for themselves, too—things they imagined for the future. Did the boy Momo hope to be chief someday, if the Chief fell into the pit accidentally or died of influenza? Did the Chief hope to be sent to sit behind a desk in Sofia, with a nicer job and a bigger salary and city clothes for his wife? Did he even have a wife? Did the prisoners around me still hope to die in their beds at home?