I couldn’t help it; I slept, on the instant. When I awoke, minutes or hours later, I found in my rumpled bedclothes what he had lost. I didn’t return it. Instead, I slid it carefully into a crack in the wall beside me, where I could get it back if I ever recovered, and where the nurse would never find it.
—
BY THE END OF another two weeks, I could walk well enough to work—in fact, I could have tried earlier, but I was careful to feign unsteadiness on my feet for longer than it really persisted. Nurse Ivan released me at last to the hell of the dugout barrack and I slept again on shreds of wool and roiling bedbugs; I’d been in the infirmary just long enough to make this a fresh misery, although I don’t think the bedbugs had ever quite left me, or the lice. The next morning I was lining up for work with the rest. Momo marched with us all to the pit but paid me no particular attention—nor, I was glad to see, did the Chief.
Nasko was near the back of the line; I didn’t get to speak with him until we were on the ledge, where two new men were working with us. There, he grasped my hand, quickly, and I saw the pleasure in his face, as plain as words: You’re alive. My heart had been twisting in me all morning, along with my sickened stomach and weak limbs. I was relieved that he was still there and glad to be able to look him in the eye. It was hot, even in the shadow of the pit and the deeper shade of the mountains.
Nasko had been lifting rocks and someone else had pushed the wheelbarrow; now I took back my old job, straining up the slope. I was so weak that every trip took me three times longer than it had before my illness. Nasko slowed his dumping of rock into the barrow just enough to give me some relief, but not enough to get caught. My head buzzed so that I couldn’t hear even the shouts of the guards or the sounds of the birds. It was deep summer; I had been sick longer than I’d realized. I decided I would arrange my schedule again tomorrow, beginning with a day of practice. This first morning, I simply kept a name close to my ear: Vera. When I’d said it many times over, I varied it: Neven.
They took the envelope with them, tucked inside Bobby’s jacket. They replaced the musical scores quickly and in order—Alexandra felt a surge of regret as she fitted all the Bach onto the shelf. Bobby moved the television back to its forlorn spot. At the last moment, he took the tin box and put it into his jacket with the envelope.
Outside, it was already getting dark. They returned the key to the neighbor. “I told her we thought carefully about where we would put our furniture, but that we decided the house is too small for all our books,” Bobby said afterward, shaking his head. They retrieved Stoycho, who had fallen asleep on his side, near the front gate.
In the car, Bobby checked his cell phone.
“Shit. There’s a voice message,” he said. It was the first time Alexandra had heard him swear in English. “It didn’t ring before, somehow. It’s Lenka’s number.”
“Thank God,” said Alexandra. But as Bobby listened, she saw his face grow dark. The message was very short; she could hear the voice leaking out—nervous, hushed, hurried. Bobby listened twice. He turned to her.
Alexandra’s fingers had already begun to tremble. “What?”
“She says”—he paused. “She says, They took us. Neven might know where. He called Irina in Plovdiv. He is at— Then she gives an address in the town of Morsko. That’s near Burgas, on the sea. Then she rings off very fast.” He played it again. “She sounds really frightened, or upset, and she is trying to speak in a whisper.”
“I could hear that,” Alexandra said, clenching her hands. “Who took them? Dimchov? The police? Why to the sea? Bobby, let’s go now, right away.”
Bobby didn’t move. “This might be a trick.” He put his hand in his hair. “Maybe whoever wants the urn hid Irina and Lenka somewhere and made Lenka call us. We will be frightened because Irina and Lenka are hostages, and we will try to go to Neven with the urn.” Bobby’s voice shook a little. “Then they are waiting for us at that address in Morsko. Or they don’t know the address yet because Lenka has not told them, but if we go there they will follow us. Why didn’t Lenka tell us in the message where she and Irina are?”
Alexandra tried to keep herself calm enough to speak. “Maybe she didn’t dare. Or she didn’t know, if they were taken there at night. Or maybe she wants us to come with Neven, not by ourselves, for some reason.”
“Possibly,” Bobby said.
“Listen,” said Alexandra. “We don’t know anywhere else to go. If Neven really is there, he might be able to help them.” She had almost ceased to believe that Neven existed; he had become for her part of a story, a battered photograph, a longing under her ribs. “Please, we have to go now.”
“I know,” Bobby said. “But it’s a long drive, and I want to travel late at night, when there are fewer police on the roads. I will have to be careful not to speed, not to get us any attention.”
Stoycho sat up and shook himself.
Alexandra touched Bobby’s arm. “Can you drive safely? We could take turns, if you want.” She wondered whether she would be able to navigate alone, if he fell asleep.
“Of course I can. We slept last night. Let me sleep in the car for a couple of hours, away from the highway, and then get some coffee.”
He started up the Ford. Alexandra reached out and put one hand on Stoycho, in the back, and watched the gritty outskirts of Bovech rush past them.
1950
My misery took new forms. A few months after I recovered, if you could call it recovery, Momo suddenly approached me during evening roll call. I was in the front row, half-collapsing from the day’s work under an autumn sun. As the Chief paced and lectured in front of us—he had good boots from somewhere, and seemed to enjoy striding up and down in them—Momo wandered about, looking first at one prisoner, then at another, each man no doubt praying he would not be selected for sacrifice. Then he paused in front of me. He made a show of standing up very straight, with his hands behind his back, the way the Chief did, examining me. “Well, do you think you are so smart?” he said, in a low voice.
“No,” I answered, my heart sinking. Although I was trying not to look at him, I had already caught the almost hopeful expression on his face, which belied his aggressive stance. Apparently he hadn’t found anyone else to perform his mission for the Chief. Or perhaps the need for the mission had disappeared, and he wanted to be sure I remained afraid of him.
“Are you sure?” he whispered.
“Yes,” I said, as quietly as I could. I had no idea what the exhausted men around us made of this, except that it was causing a further delay of our supper. He turned away, as if he couldn’t find anything else to ask me, and the Chief dismissed us all.
After that, Momo looked up whenever my name was called from the list, and stared hard at me. Sometimes it was a look of approval, almost of complicity, as if his having saved me by carrying me to the infirmary, and my having turned out to be interesting, had produced for him a new pride in himself. This added a wretched theme of alertness to my days. The fact that he was watching me made me watch him, inevitably, so that a glimpse of his big frame and curly head at the rim of the pit while we worked could make my stomach turn over. It meant, too, that I had to be alert enough to prevent him from seeing that I was alert. And had I been correct in my glimpse of something clever, discerning, under his idiocy? What would be more dangerous to me, an idiot or a subtle man pretending to be an idiot? In a place like this, perhaps it didn’t even matter.
I burrowed into my routine again, rehearsing the Tchaikovsky concerto, trying out the Sibelius, working my way through my orchestral repertoire, or at least the swaths of it that had lasted in my memory. I made a new rule for myself that if I saw Momo, or even thought of his disquieting offer, I had to start a movement over. If I was angry enough at myself, I would make myself begin the whole piece again.
The day I watched Momo and his companions beat a newcomer until the bone in the man’s cheek showed, I went somewhere I hadn’t been in a long time. I’d become so attached to
Neven the baby, the small child, that I had nearly forgotten to believe in him as a man. But that day I visited him again at the river, walking down the gradual slope to where he sat with a young woman beside him. I watched the sun play on the surface of the water, the gleam of their heads as they talked—his hair dark, almost black, in soft short waves but shaved close at the neck so that his skin looked white there; hers chestnut, with red glints like the coat of a horse. She had absently braided a heavy section of it over one shoulder. I stood smiling at their backs and then I raised my violin and tucked it under my chin. With my supple, strong, smooth hands, I drew the bow across my strings to serenade them. Even the stiffness from my war wound was gone.
On the other days, I walked through Venice with the Red Priest, or I gave Neven—now a slender, large-eyed eight-year-old—his daily violin lesson. He didn’t always want to practice; but then, as I told him, discipline is the first thing a musician has to learn, and it would serve him well in any situation. By the time the dreaded cold weather came to the quarry again, Neven was an affectionate, if reserved, twelve-year-old, his pretty voice just beginning to break at the dinner table. I thought he was ready for competition; if anything, we were beginning late. The only problem was that I didn’t know how this would work, under the auspices of our glorious revolution. Everything would be different now, probably, for a gifted child musician. On the worst days, I had my doubts about whether I could find a competition in which to enter him—Neven, the son of a convict.
—
THAT WINTER I WAS weaker than I’d been the first one, and in an odd, slight way stronger, too, accustomed to certain hardships even while my body declined. I imagined dying and living on in my own story as a ghost; maybe then, I would go tell the Commissioner how things were in Zelenets, but I would tell him the truth. Momo didn’t leave the camp, even briefly, so perhaps he had never made his errand to town. Probably the Chief had taken care of it himself, or sent someone else. It occurred to me that maybe Momo had only imagined that the Chief wanted him to do it—or that he had invented the story to torment me.
One more group of newcomers arrived before the first snow, and I read in the eyes of the young ones when they glanced at me—at all of us—that I had indeed become what I’d seen here the first day. I was a skeleton, not quite among the walking dead yet, but edging ever closer. I felt I might be able to eat air one day, or to float without a struggle into the pit—there was plenty of room, of course, to dive—die—from our ledge. Our original shelf was long since exhausted of stone, in fact, and Nasko and our companions and I had been sent to a larger outcropping already loaded with quarried cubes, to break and haul rock there. I savored every day I saw Nasko now, and when one of our fellow ledge-dwellers died in the night, I chided myself for thanking heaven that it had not been my only real friend.
At least sixty men died that winter, if I counted correctly. The camp was terribly crowded, since newcomers had been pushed into barracks already full. Increasingly, it puzzled me that I was alive. A few of my fellow skeletons went mad, no longer marching to work even under threat of being beaten or shot. Instead they scrabbled for food scraps around the kitchen door until they collapsed and died in the snow. The cooks, prisoners who ate only a little better than the rest of us—although they could at least grab scraps without being seen—tried to drive the mad skeletons away, but without success. Frequently, now, my prayer to nothing was that my death would contain a little dignity when it came to me. I hoped most of all that I would go to sleep one night among the men and the bugs, dreaming of Vera, and never wake up.
I tried to push such thoughts down, as I pushed away my eternal awareness of Momo’s offer, his continued scrutiny. Had I been foolish to refuse that chance? Would there be another?
Sometimes I imagined what it would have been like for me to go meet the Commissioner. Did Momo watch me because he had some other offer to make, and if he made one, what would I say? After all, I had decided my first night in camp that they had no right to punish me for the wrong thing. Now doubt began to work on my brain, an additional torment; if I’d accepted what Momo had proposed, I might be home with Vera. She would never know what had become of me, where I’d lived and worked and died, and I had denied her the last possible chance. These doubts mingled with my hatred of Momo every time I saw him. Shadowing my doubts and my hatred was the knowledge that he would never offer to send me out, at this point—how could a skeleton show up in town to assert he’d been well treated back at the camp? Although surely I had already looked too ill and unpresentable when he had asked me.
—
BY SPRING I HAD TAKEN Neven to four or five competitions—his tone was celestial, throbbing but restrained, and his technique was as good as I could help him make it. I tried to imagine the competitions, where and how they were held and who judged them these days, but all that was a blur. Instead, I saw my boy on stage, his thick dark curls moving with the emphatic tug of his bow across the strings. The applause of the little group of judges, whoever they were, the conference among them afterward, their heads bowed together. He was young, but he was meticulous, and he was passionate. At thirteen, he soloed with the Sofia Philharmonic. At fifteen, he lost two competitions but won a more important one, and if we’d been able to travel out of the country he would have placed in Europe as well. He practiced now without any prompting; his school hours had been shortened to accommodate his music. On alternate days, in the quarry, we practiced together, sometimes playing a concerto in unison, sometimes working on duets. My mind was clouding as the warm weeks went on, and that dark wing brushed it more caressingly. I was determined to see him to manhood before I died.
One day in the late summer, a day I usually spent with Vivaldi, playing in the churches while he conducted, I took a formal vow, the third since my arrest. In life, or—if necessary—in death, Neven and I would travel to Venice together.
Alexandra must have slept, too; she woke in time to catch a faint brightening of the sky along flat roads, lit-up factories in the marshes, and then a gleam beyond them that Bobby said was the Black Sea. She had thought she would get her first glimpse of the sea very differently—from a train, with her backpack and book. Now she craned to look out the car window and reached back a hand for Stoycho. He stirred and woke and they all regarded their passage through a twilit city, housing complexes and empty streets, a clock tower at a port, and finally a highway out of town. Dawn would come soon.
“Burgas,” Bobby said. “This is where the Lazarovi lived, and Miss Radeva’s family.” When Alexandra lowered the car window she breathed salt air and a swampy, industrial murk. Bobby had put on one of his Dylan CDs, turned low. Alexandra thought—out of her skimpy knowledge—of the Delta, home of the blues; it must smell something like this. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Dylan muttered. The highway wound through sloping fields and patches of flat brush, with a hotel here and there at the edge of the road, and honeycombed stretches of housing like prefabricated ruins, roofless under the first light. The distant sheen of water had vanished.
“People are building like mad here,” Bobby said. “Everyone wants to be near the sea, including many foreigners. Some people start to build but they cannot afford to finish.”
Soon the sky was softly yellow and pink, the sun beginning to rise; they came around one last curve and Bobby pointed to their destination—Morsko, a red-roofed old town on a high peninsula edged with cliffs. They were approaching it on an even higher road, and she could see gray water breaking around the feet of the town. Bobby drove carefully in—near the entrance to the peninsula a police car was parked, lights and motor off, a dim figure at the wheel. Two men were setting out vegetables on a wooden stall next to the sidewalk, and a lone tourist padded past them in bathing suit and sandals, a towel folded over his shoulder. On the roof ridge of a house nearby, gulls complained to each other out of the silence, startling, acerbic.
Bobby drove along a wide paved port where boats bumped together in the waves. Just
out to sea, Alexandra saw an island with a lighthouse, and then horizons of colorless water—a few boats drifted there, too, with their lights still on in the dawn and their nets trailing behind them. Then Bobby was saying something about the address; he’d been to Morsko before, he told her, in childhood and once after, but didn’t know the town well. The car wound up steeply cobbled streets and Bobby wrestled with corners and gears.
Alexandra had never seen houses like these. They were wooden, or sometimes elaborately patterned old stone. The wooden ones were stained a dark chocolate from the salt wind and wet, their shutters still closed against the night, balconies writhing with bright-colored flowers in pots, laundry hanging on lines, roofs almost touching above narrow streets, walls and fences shielding front courtyards from the sidewalk.
At the top of the town, Bobby parked not quite in front of a house of aged wood panels with a balcony and green shutters, sheltered by a high wall with a door in it. Along the top of the wall ran a roof that matched the roof of the house; the ceramic of the tiles on both had faded to variegated browns, like autumn leaves. Bobby pulled the parking brake and Stoycho stretched, hitting the back of the seat with his nails and then drooping again. When they got out, Bobby scanned the wall and the front of the house, walked to the corner of the block. Then he rang the bell.
The man who answered the door was a stranger. He wore green flip-flops on his feet and held a trowel in one hand, as if preparing to defend the house with it. It surprised Alexandra that anyone else was up so early. Bobby spoke to the man in quick Bulgarian and gestured toward Alexandra; the man looked them over—the Bulgarian stranger, the young foreign woman with a black bag in her arms, and the self-contained dog. He asked Bobby a few sharp questions. Then, as if satisfied with the answers, he gestured them in with his trowel.
“His family are old friends of the Lazarovi, from Burgas,” Bobby told Alexandra. “I think Neven came here for safety.” Without warning, Alexandra’s heart began to pound harder. “I told him what we’ve brought,” said Bobby.
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