The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  I made myself think instead about Neven, getting steadier on his feet now, walking toward me, his face alight as I knelt in front of him—a little farther, a little farther—and then falling into my arms with a scream of laughter.

  —

  IT WAS FORTUNATE THAT little Neven was doing so well, because I knew that my strength was beginning to ebb in a new way. I wasn’t sick, thank God, although I sometimes felt that the line between sickness and health didn’t exist in this place. The wounds on my hands oozed pus in the evenings, but often I scrubbed them until they bled—I came to welcome the cleansing, fresh blood, even the pain. My shins became infected where they constantly grazed the metal brace of the wheelbarrow. I struggled not to scratch my torso when the bug bites turned into infected welts. I sometimes fought fever in the evenings, which I knew was from all those small infections; there were too many of them. I willed myself not to get really ill. A man in the barrack sold me a second shirt in exchange for part of my bedding, so that I could wash or at least air out one shirt at a time. It was growing cold outside now, and the nights felt like winter, but I still had a blanket to cover me.

  One evening, a new group of men was brought in; we saw their stunned faces in the lights of the yard when we returned from work in the dark. I realized that I must look like what I’d seen my own first evening—gaunt, hollow-eyed, ragged. I was not yet skeletal, but that wouldn’t take much longer. The new men, young and old, filled the last half-empty barrack in camp; I wondered if the Revolution would make us build more barracks, to house more of us, and more, and more. We didn’t ask them why they were there, although one man told me on our way to the quarry that he didn’t even know, for himself. He was black-haired, barely in his twenties, still healthy-looking.

  “Everyone else was accused of something,” he whispered, as if he had to say it aloud; I didn’t understand why he’d chosen me to talk to. “But I wasn’t. I’ve tried and tried to guess what it could have been, but I can’t think of anything I did wrong, and they didn’t say.” He threw his arm wide toward the men around us, his face working. “All of them—at least they know why they’re here.”

  “No, we don’t,” I said harshly. “Even if they told us, we don’t know.” The stooped guard with the club sidled toward us and we stopped talking. Then I thought of Neven and I wished I’d whispered something to comfort the young man, but it was too late. I didn’t have the energy left to comfort anyone but myself, even when the guards weren’t watching.

  Bobby found a roadside hotel northwest of Plovdiv, an hour from the main highway. The front gate displayed three stars on a sign that was partly in English; Alexandra hoped this meant it would be a decent place.

  “I will talk,” Bobby said, and they left Stoycho in the car. There was a little swimming pool out front, sunk into a terrace and lit with underwater lights—the night was very dark now, with a thick scattering of stars. Bobby conversed genially with the man at the front desk while Alexandra held Bobby’s hand and hoped they looked like a family.

  “Kuche,” Bobby said eventually, and the man glanced up, startled. More chat, until Alexandra understood that the man was going to put them in a room at the back of the building and that the dog—he raised his hands as if in disclaimer to some other party—the dog would need to be invisible. She counted out a pile of ten-leva bills, more than she’d imagined spending all at once, and they drove around back. The room they’d been assigned contained a double bed and was entirely brown—brown carpet, shiny brown bedspread, brown curtains, as if some earlier dreariness had simply been updated with fresh fabrics.

  The restaurant near the lobby ate up some more leva, but Alexandra thought it was good. In the pool, she wore her bra and underpants; she floated in the lights and hoped the mustached manager wasn’t watching. Bobby was pacing the terrace, talking quietly on his cell phone. When he hung up, he reported to her that Miss Radeva had still heard nothing. He’d called Lenka’s phone, too, but again it had rung only once, as if it had been turned off. There was no answer at the mountain house.

  Alexandra slept that night with the urn close to her side of the double bed, Bobby rolling over with a snore so that his arm touched her back, Stoycho breathing softly in the corner. When she woke, briefly, during the night, she pulled the shared blanket over Bobby, in case he was chilled.

  1949–50

  Real winter came and the cold added to our miseries. I began to work on my Bach again, all the Bach I knew, even the violin parts of the masses, to keep warm. One morning before dawn the world seemed strangely brightened outside the door to the dugout; snow stretched as far as we could see, and when the sun rose at the quarry it turned the world lavender and gold.

  After that it snowed every few days. I had hated being assigned to the stinking dugout, but now I learned that it was far warmer than the wooden buildings, where a sick man could die twice as fast. Everyone was cold in the quarry, of course, and the men in the mines were never warm even in summer. Cold became our constant companion, rivaling our hunger. Some of the men from my barrack disappeared to the infirmary, their toes or fingers or whole feet frozen dead-purple after the workday, and did not come back. The nurse ventured out among us for the first time, telling us to wrap ourselves more warmly—as if we had garments in which to do that. He was a man of forty with black eyes like pebbles in a withered face, his clothes only a little better than ours but his flesh still reasonably well fed. The guards referred to him as Nurse Ivan. After he spoke to us, in a gravelly baritone, his eyes averted from our emaciated mass, the Chief sent him away and repeated what he had said, but with threats.

  We tried hard to stay warmer. We wrapped our feet in many layers of old cloth. My socks had disintegrated now and I made long bandages to wear inside my shoes. I was frantic to protect my hands, which were swollen all the time now, crusted and scarred all over the skin; I tried in vain to find strips of wool to wrap them in, instead of the usual curls of dirty cotton. My fingers burned terribly whenever they warmed up a little. A few men had an odd glove or two; on our ledge in the quarry, we gave those to whoever was lifting icy rocks. One morning in January, to my amazement, Nasko gave me an actual pair of gloves, pulling them out of his pocket as soon as we reached the edge of the quarry. They had a few holes in the fingers, but I knew I could find a way to sew those up. I had no idea how he’d gotten them and wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “But you—” I said. His own palms were in shreds from holding the pickax and sometimes lifting rock.

  “Nonsense,” he whispered. “I want you to have them. You must.”

  I knew he meant, I want you to play again, if we ever get out of this fucking hell. I was cold to the core, but my heart hadn’t frozen, and neither had his; our tears were warm on our faces.

  Some ancient army coats were distributed among the barracks one evening. There were not enough for even a quarter of the camp, and those who felt they needed them most traded desperately for them. Fights broke out over those coats, the next few days. The hard-faced men I’d seen the first morning pushing to the front of the toilet lines—true criminals swept into camp with the rest of us—often won a coat by fighting, or even by simply demanding one. I didn’t have a coat, myself, only a heavy sweater that had been among the garments I had originally been given.

  There were episodes of strange kindness, too. I saw a well-built newcomer of thirty—with a stubble of gray hair on his shaved head—give his coat to the old man who slept in one corner. The old man promised to leave it to the younger man when he died.

  “Do you hear?” he hissed to the silent barrack at bedtime. “This is my will and testament. Do you hear? I leave it to him, the young one, this good boy. Nobody dare take it from him or I will haunt them.”

  We all turned our faces away, repulsed but a little awed, too, by his vehemence. But a few weeks into winter, the old man slipped near the edge of the quarry and fell in. The coat went down with him. We never knew what happened to it, or to his body.

>   Winter brought clouds as well as snow and cold, and one morning I realized that I hadn’t seen my star, Beta-49, in more than two weeks, although it seemed to me the sky had sometimes been clear. A numbness slithered across my heart. Things were being taken away—my star, my ability to keep warm, and, worst of all, the clarity of my memories. Sometime in that stretch of winter, I realized that I could not picture Vera’s face as clearly as I had months before. There were days when the snow seemed to silence me inside, so that I lost concentration and drifted and didn’t practice for most of an afternoon. Soon there were days or maybe even weeks of silence. I couldn’t play; I couldn’t pretend. I didn’t want little Neven with me, there, in the cold, where he might easily fall ill. If I thought of Vivaldi, I became jealous of his undamaged hands. It was more difficult for me to imagine Venice than it had been before, because it must be warmer in Venice; I no longer bothered thinking about whether I would live to see the city myself someday. I felt that as long as my mind did not cave inward, I could afford to be silent. I was too tired to think even about my concerti, and so I stayed in the silence for a while. The silence was white, like snow, a blank page.

  We dragged ourselves to the quarry. We dragged ourselves back in the evening. The mountains, magnificent above us, were so completely unmoved by what was happening at their feet, by our cold and our impossible labor and our numbing fear, that I began to hate them. The guards were constantly irritable; they, too, disliked the cold, although they all had real boots, if old ones; and they disliked the increased number of deaths, which made more work for them. Some men seemed to give up and sicken, spontaneously. A few crawled away from the quarry and died in the snow, or were shot there if they crawled too fast and attracted attention. I thought they must have decided they wanted to die in open air, at least, under the sky. There was a rumor in the barrack that it was good to get sick and go to the infirmary for a few days, if they would let you, because Nurse Ivan kept a fire burning there in a little stove. Some of the wooden barracks had stoves, too, which the men stoked every night. They did this with sticks they collected on their way back from work, especially the men who were sent out timbering. I didn’t know any of them, but I’d heard they went in small groups with a special guard and provided wood, less for the camp—for building and burning—than for export on the trains that stopped at the mines. That, I’d realized, must also be the source of wood for the guards’ clubs, always in fresh supply.

  One morning in February the clouds cleared for the first time in many days and I saw Beta-49 brighter than I ever had, in the crystal-cold sky. It was higher than it had been a few months ago, and it shone directly at me from its lonely perch above the mountain; it shone over all of Stara Planina, Bulgaria, the Danube, the long curve of Europe, the Alps, over Vienna and Venice. I caught its eye for a second and made myself a promise: I would live through the rest of the winter, and if I could live through this winter, I could survive anything else. I didn’t dare promise Vera; she probably thought by now that I was dead. It wasn’t the first time I’d considered that, but it was the first time I’d felt it might be better this way, for her to stop hoping. While she stopped hoping, I would start simply surviving, and then I would come home to surprise her into joy and relief.

  To celebrate this decision, I canceled my usual routine and let myself spend three days in a row just raising Neven, who was now a sturdy four-year-old. I wondered if I should let him grow up so quickly, but I was afraid that I might not live long enough to see him do it, otherwise. In fact, the morning I saw Beta-49 again, I allowed myself to give Neven his first violin. I intended for him to play the cello, eventually, but that would come in a few years, when he was taller. I brought the violin home from a store at the outskirts of Sofia where an old friend of mine made and repaired instruments for all the orchestras. Never mind that he’d been arrested just at the end of the war. I imagined him still there. He sold me a tiny violin, the only one at the shop, and I wrapped it in a jacket and took it carefully home in my bag of scores.

  Neven was playing with his red train under the kitchen table. Vera looked around from cooking and I showed her, in pantomime, what I’d brought, and she laughed and shook her head—the inevitable violin. I coaxed Neven out and told him to sit on the edge of a kitchen chair, and showed him the precious thing he must never let slip from his hands or drop on the floor. He recognized it right away, from seeing me practice, and from watching me play in a concert or two. He nodded, serious. I told him that it made music like my violin, but I didn’t play it for him; I was determined that he should sound the first notes on it.

  Then I settled the violin in his hands and under his soft chin and crouched behind the chair, holding my fingers over his and helping him draw the bow across the strings. He cried out with pleasure and surprise at the sound; I had to stop him from dropping the instrument. I put it back under his chin and supported just the neck of the violin with my hand. He tried again, alone this time, drawing the bow carefully away from his nose so that the strings squawked. I took the violin gently from him and came around the chair to study his face. He smiled and raised golden eyes to me, and I kissed and hugged him. I didn’t need him to be a child prodigy, on the first day—besides, I knew that prodigies are made, not simply born.

  Alexandra and Bobby overslept and found themselves rushing through showers, taking Stoycho out to the field beyond the hotel, then hurrying to collect their belongings. Breakfast, in the hotel restaurant, was an array of cheese and too-pink sliced meats, white bread, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs. A young woman with a green flower pinned to her hair was setting out fresh teacups. Bobby wrapped a pile of salami in a napkin and they fed Stoycho next to the car. The road looked so bright, with trees on either side and chicory blooming purple—not blue like at home—that Alexandra felt for a few minutes that nothing else could turn out badly. As long as she didn’t think about Irina and Lenka.

  Away from the hotel, Bobby drove hard on back roads for more than an hour. Alexandra noticed that he frequently glanced at his rearview mirror. Once he stopped to make a call, and Alexandra let Stoycho wander around the edge of what at home might have been a rest area, but here was a cracked parking lot with movable cement barriers fencing it from the road. Midmorning, Bobby took another turn into a town whose name Alexandra missed. It would have looked much like the other small towns Alexandra had seen, except that there was an enormous monument in the center. He pulled up at the curb near the main square.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Getting something,” said Bobby. “It won’t take long. But I have to wait for a call.”

  They climbed out, leaving the windows open for Stoycho, and stood looking around. Alexandra could hear children playing somewhere just out of sight. The main square was small, with a dingily domed church at one side and a modern bell tower next to that, and people walking around on errands. The air was hazy. At first the monument looked like a pile of rubble; at second glance, it seemed to be a gigantic rusted-out robot.

  Bobby leaned back against the car, assessing. “That is in honor of the Red Army,” he said at last. “Do you see the words across the bottom? It says, Glory to the Liberators of 1944 from the grateful generations. The Russian Army came in 1944 to liberate us from the things we thought we wanted, like democracy and having our own farms.” He clasped his hands on one knee. “It looks as if someone else did not agree,” he added drily.

  Alexandra could see what he meant. The monument, abstract at first glance, was actually the statue of a huge, angular soldier, planting his feet in the middle of the square. His arm towered above her head. Apparently, he had once held a flagpole in his gargantuan fist, but that was long since gone, as was the fluttering tail of his coat, which seemed to have been sawn off. Part of what made him hard to recognize as a human figure was the paint sprayed all over his body. Somebody had spritzed him with streams of red, which were turning brown like real blood, and put ghoulish white circles around his eyes. He wore painte
d yellow gloves and his sleeve was ornamented with a green peace sign like a symbol of rank. He looked like a figure from a nightmare, Alexandra thought, and she dreaded the moment when he might suddenly stand and shake himself, offended, outraged, enormous. She backed up to the car and glanced in; Stoycho was awake and gazing at her but hadn’t moved. She reached for him and stroked his black muzzle.

  “There you are, Bird,” said Bobby. “In your country you don’t care about history, and in my country we cannot recover from it.”

  “How do you know that about my country?” Alexandra said, but his cell phone was vibrating and he checked a text on it. At once he climbed back into the driver’s seat. Alexandra got quickly in beside him. He drove slowly to the edge of town, stopped, and put a map on the steering wheel. Then he turned a corner.

  “Here’s our street,” he said. “The garage will be number 61.” They found it at the end of the block. The garage was really a large mechanic’s shop, and Bobby drove straight into it. A young man came out of the back of the shop wiping his hands on a grease-blackened rag. He was very muscular, with another rag hanging out of the back of his jeans like a tail. He and Bobby clasped hands with an audible slap and he nodded to Alexandra but kept his stained grip carefully away from her.

  “This is Rumen,” Bobby said, and the young man smiled. Alexandra liked his smile, the way his teeth were crooked in the middle. “He has a car for us.”

  Alexandra knew the routine; they switched everything out of Kiril’s green car and into a black Ford that looked as if it had seen better days. Rumen squeezed Bobby’s shoulder and flicked Bobby’s cheekbone with thumb and forefinger in a kind of parting caress.