The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  “We can sit down and talk there,” he said to Alexandra. “I want to tell you something that was important to my father.”

  Bobby said, sharply, “After, will you tell us more about why this is important to the police?”

  Neven nodded. “Yes, I will. As much as I know. I think that no one will look for us here, and we have at least a little time.”

  Alexandra hesitated. “Bobby can translate for you, if you like.”

  “I certainly will,” Bobby said severely. “You are not going out of my sight.”

  The path took them between scrubby pines, where someone had dropped several white plastic cups, an empty Coke bottle, a shriveled condom. But when they came into an open meadow, Alexandra saw that it was pristine—long grasses warmed by sun. Ahead lay a glinting gray-green river, narrow enough so that she could have crossed it in a few strides, with reeds and stones stretching out into it.

  At the edge of the river, Neven spread his jacket on the ground and motioned for Alexandra to sit down. He set his leather bag beside him. Stoycho strained toward Neven, but Alexandra made him stay quiet. Bobby lay back on the grass next to them and lit a cigarette, smoking tensely, and Alexandra wondered if the gun was now in his jacket.

  1953

  The trucks we’d been loaded into rolled through the village of Zelenets but did not stop. I saw people outside their houses, staring at us. We went on to a larger town, then called Yugovo but later known by some other name. There we were put on a train, in the same type of bare boxcar but this time with fewer prisoners per car and a stop every five hours to relieve ourselves outside, in open fields—the men guarded us with guns in plain view. They gave us water, too. By the first stop, we could see that the mountains were already distant; by the second, we were in another region, and the next morning when we stopped we could see the peaks around Sofia. Some of the prisoners cried; others lay muttering on the floor of the train car, unable to grasp what was happening. I thought a man in one corner was probably not alive. I tried not to allow my hope to become stronger; there was always the chance, still, that this was either a ruse or a dream, or that I was already dead like the man who didn’t get out at our stops.

  The train halted suddenly at the edge of Sofia and we were loaded onto trucks again, which made my heart plunge until I realized that it was natural they would not bring us into the main station and let us walk out in daylight among the crowds. The trucks took us to a building I had never seen before, on the outskirts of the city, where we were cleaned all over with strong disinfectant that burned our eyes and lips and private areas. Then, for the better part of a week, we slept on mats on the floors of large cells and ate three reasonable meals a day. I had not seen ordinary food for so long that I almost collapsed at the sight and smell of it. Some of the men ate too quickly and were sick all night, or sat on the latrines for hours. I was careful to eat sparingly, at first, and to rest whenever I could.

  I watched my hands with curiosity; without a wheelbarrow to lift or rocks to break, they had begun to heal just a little, from the inside, although they looked almost as bad as ever and continued to hurt. During the day, we were presented individually with questions about how our rehabilitation had gone, to which the answer, which we were also given, was that we believed it was complete but would work in the future to prove that. We were not beaten, but the administrator who questioned me—a heavy man with pockmarks on his nose who looked too old to serve except behind the big table where he sat—told me in a deliberate voice that anyone who had been a criminal must be watched for the rest of his life, so that society could be kept safe. I would sign a statement agreeing to this. Did I understand?

  I did. Or I thought I did. I said yes, I did.

  Mainly I thought about Vera, now only a few miles away, and about my suffering parents—I could not even be sure that they and Vera’s parents were all still living.

  During the first night there, a man in one of the other group cells passed away, peacefully, in his sleep, for no reason that anyone could see, like the man on the train. The guards took his body in the morning, and asked us all if we knew anything about his death. As there were no wounds on the body, no one was interrogated further about him. I pondered that he might have died of happiness, or just as easily of a broken heart, and I resolved to keep my own emotions quiet so that they would not betray my body at the last minute. I thought again of Nasko Angelov and the years of friendship we could have had. I didn’t know then that he had survived the infirmary at Zelenets and was already in Sofia at a different jail, where he would serve another three years.

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, THEY RELEASED my group one by one into the city, with only the clothes we were wearing.

  She could see the river through the tall fringe of reeds, could hear and smell it more than she could see it. Beyond flowers that looked like the Queen Anne’s lace at home, she could just make out sunlight touching a green surface. She let her hands dangle between her knees.

  Neven drew his hand over his hair. A scent something like the river, but more pleasant, came from him; she sensed that if she touched his shirt with her hand, which of course she would never do, he would be even warmer under it than the baking earth and grasses. She felt as if their hands were interlaced on the grass, although of course they weren’t. When she glanced at him again, she saw his head drooping, the sides of his dark hair. She almost wished he wasn’t going to speak. Then she would never have to know the next terrible thing.

  Without looking at her, he said, “My English is not very good.”

  “It’s fine,” she told him quickly.

  “Not fine. It is rough. Not—organized. I am ashamed to say—I wanted to go to English-language high school, but they would not let me in. Because of my father. I studied a lot with my friends who went to there, and a lot of the movies. And music.” He frowned down at her, dissatisfied with his own efforts.

  “I don’t mind,” Alexandra said. “And we can ask Bobby for help if we need it.” For the first time since shaking his hand in the café, she did touch him, surreptitiously—the cuff of his warm smooth shirtsleeve.

  “My father,” he said, and stopped again. “He was a very good man who thought he was a very bad man. That is a—difficult combination. Of ideas. You see?”

  He leaned forward, as if listening to the river, and then pulled a blade of grass expertly from its sheath. “Sometimes—sometimes we know a person who is a very bad man but who thinks he is a good man. Maybe that is even more bad. Even worse. Worse, because the bad man who thinks he is good thinks that he can do anything to anybody. But sometimes a man who is very good thinks, I am very bad, and it—destructs his life, everything. Because he does not believe that he has any right to do something, so he does less and less. This has happened with my father. He was always thinking, Je n’ai pas le droit.”

  A strange reality was whispering in her head: I am far from home, sitting by a river listening to French—but in Bulgaria, the place Jack always wanted to go. It was as if she could hear music, where there was no music.

  Neven shook his head and brushed the stem of grass over the toe of his polished shoe. “After the first—katastrofa—it happened very slowly, the destruct of my father’s life. And he was brave and quiet. So, nobody noticed it very much until he was dead.”

  Neven turned his head away. He reminded her of the way male lions look sad, as if their nobility is a terrible weight. She tried to think of something to comfort him.

  “Your father had you.” She wondered when they should give him what they had found behind Stoyan’s calendar: June 2006.

  “Oh, me.” He shrugged. “Yes, he had me.” He sat fiddling with the grass, dropped it, and worked to pluck another stem: long fingers, surprisingly fine, but with thick knuckles, as if he’d worked more than most people she’d known at home. No rings.

  “I want to tell you what he said to me, because I believe that you have the right. To know.” He looked to Bobby for help, to fill in
some of his words. “I was working in Burgas, before he died. He telephoned me when he became sick. He asked for me to come to stay with him and with my mother for a week, or two weeks. He said that he wanted me to be there for my mother. But the truth was that every day he wanted me to be near to him. He was often lying on his bed. He was too sick to stand, on many days. Then he was better and he was sitting in a chair outside. It was in Bovech, at their house. He asked Milen Radev to come live with them, already months before I went there, to help my mother.”

  Neven was silent a minute, and then seemed to collect himself. “My mother was very worried that my father would become too sick to go down the stairs, but I said to her that he wanted to be in his bedroom. I thought, They will carry him out of here dead—he will not have to try to walk down the stairs. And I was right. My father hated hospitals, and we could not afford a good one. I thought I might give him a lot of—pills, instead, if he wanted to end quick. Sometimes we went to the doctor and the doctor only—”

  Neven shook his head, as if trying to convey the doctor’s gesture. Alexandra understood that much, she thought—the doctor had dismissed Stoyan Lazarov, a case too far gone, too old, too insignificant, the cancer infinitely more vigorous than the shell that housed it. She wondered how they had been able to pay any of the bills.

  Neven brushed invisible dirt from his sleeve. “He told me often that he wanted to talk to me, tell me things about his life. But then when I went to him, he simply looked at me, for hours, and said nothing. He had wonderful dark eyes. Wonderful even when he was sick. One time he asked me to bring him his violin, and he sat up in a chair and played it, the last time, Bach and some Brahms and of course Vivaldi.”

  “Oh,” Alexandra said softly.

  But Neven was clearly not listening to anything now except the music in his own head. “Finally, my father told me to make my mother to take a rest for herself, to go away and make a change. She went on the bus for an entire day to see her sister in Plovdiv. She was very worried to leave my father, but I told her that the worst was if he would die while she was gone, and she dried up her eyes, to be brave for him. She kisses him goodbye like, deep—on the mouth,” he said, almost apologetically. “In the case she could not see him again alive.”

  Alexandra felt her own eyes beginning to sting, and she shook her head to thwart the tears. Long days, long journey, little sleep. It was his past, not hers.

  “While my mother was gone, I went to my father’s bed and I brought him some water, then some soup, and he try to eat a little. He say to me that he will sleep and then he will tell me a story. I sat next to him while he slept. His breathing was loud and sharp. I watched him all the time because I was afraid he would stop breathing before he could wake up and tell me the story. But when he woke he looked for me, saw me there, and immediately he started to talk. He said, ‘Neven, I want you to know about something.’

  “I wanted to hear, but his face was—terrible, so I also did not want to hear. I asked him to rest instead.”

  Neven reached out and took Alexandra’s hand. She didn’t know how he knew where her hand was at that moment, and she had a feeling that he was simply reproducing a gesture in his memory, almost absently. Perhaps his father had reached out for him in the same way. But her hand was filled with the feeling of his; she thought she should pull away but no part of her wanted to. She looked down at the neat square fingernails, so much larger than her own. Their fingers lay entwined on the warm grass. She wondered if Bobby would disapprove; when she looked up, she saw him watching—listening hard, she knew, but tactful, ready at any minute to translate for her, or to rescue her. She imagined Stoyan Lazarov’s face against a pillow, the dried lips forming a story, whispering his secret into the earth.

  “My father said, I want you to know.” Neven looked away from her, toward the river.

  “Wait, please,” said Alexandra. “I think we should give you something first. We haven’t opened it.”

  She turned to Bobby, who drew an envelope from inside his jacket and handed it to Neven. The last part.

  Neven held the envelope in both hands for a moment, looking at the handwriting, then took out the pages it contained. He read them through in silence. When he had finished, he looked up; amber tears stood in his eyes.

  “You may read this to Alexandra,” he told Bobby.

  1953

  The last part. Never for publication.

  With scabbed, red hands that were twice the size of my old hands, clean clothes that did not fit but had no holes in them, and a new stubble of hair on my head and chin, I stepped out into the streets of Sofia, trying to understand that I was free. I had no money in my pockets, no possessions except the curls of dirty bandages I had saved, and one other item, which I had hidden in my old clothes and then my new ones. I began to walk toward the city center, then toward our neighborhood. Every ten minutes, I stopped and rested anywhere I could, so that my heart would not give out.

  Suddenly, I was more afraid than ever—what if my fears were true? She had forgotten about me, or given up on my returning, assumed I was dead. She no longer loved me. She was dead herself. What if they had had a memorial service for me while I was gone, and then moved on with their lives, because that was all they could do? Or what if this was all a test, and the guards from the station outside Sofia were following me even now, letting me lead them to Vera, to my parents, to arrest them in their turn? What if they had already been arrested, and Vera was far away, in some camp for women?

  I began for the first time to observe the people around me—up to that moment, they had looked like ghosts, but now I saw that they were well and whole, or at least only normally worried and harried. The young girls were dressed in their spring clothes, the women were shopping for food, the young men had someplace to go, the elderly men in their elderly jackets paused to talk with each other. None of them knew about us, a camp full of skeletons. Or did they know, somehow? A sailor in uniform, far from the sea, was telling another man a joke and they had both stopped dead on the sidewalk to enjoy the full effect of it. I was the ghost; I saw myself, with huge empty eyes, in the plate glass of a restaurant window. I saw people glance at me, curious or sympathetic: a very sick man, poor, tottering, prematurely hairless, who shuffled forward in ridiculously large shoes.

  Now I was on familiar streets, a beautiful plaza I knew in every detail, the yellow-cobbled streets of the center, the old palace covered with blooming wisteria, the domes of the churches glowing over the treetops, the mausoleum of the Great Leader shining in the sun. I sat down to rest at the edge of a park, on a bench. I had known not only the street and the park but even the bench, from my earliest childhood. I squeezed the edge of it with my aching hand.

  When I could stand again, I made my way into our neighborhood, thinking that here, at any moment, I might see someone I knew, although perhaps no one would recognize me in turn. But I saw nobody. The trees were beautiful—the lindens lifting their blooms over everything, the fresh bright leaves of the maples and oaks and the candelabra of horse chestnuts lit by midmorning sun. It was nearly time for the holiday of Kiril and Metodii; we had discovered the exact date while we’d been in the cells outside Sofia. Houses at the end of one block that had been bombed into submission in the war and left there had finally been repaired while I was away. I marveled at the unreality of the smells of cooking that came from doorways and windows, the placidity of an old woman crocheting something white in a chair on her second-floor balcony. The sweetness of the air, after the exhaust of the buses on the main street. The wind in the leaves above my head. I had not realized before that I lived in a paradise. I could see our building now, the wrought-iron grilles on the windows. There was a new little tree, shorter than a person, planted next to the front step, and I wondered for a weird moment if it was a memorial to me. Everything else about the building looked the same as it always had.

  My heart throbbed terribly, but I made myself try the front door. It was unlocked—yes, it frequ
ently was, I remembered, during the day, with people going in and out on errands. I found the strength to walk up the first flight of stairs. Someone was having an argument with someone who was not arguing back, behind a door on the first floor—not a voice I remembered, so perhaps there were new neighbors. I rested for a few minutes, hoping no doors would open. Then I crept up the next flight, and the next. I hovered there in front of our door, hoping it would not open, either, until I had the strength to knock. Sweat trickled under my shirt and my heart pounded jaggedly. I wondered if I might have heart failure from climbing the stairs. But where else would I ever want to go? I raised my hand and rapped, which made my huge knuckles hurt.

  A woman opened the door. She was smiling, apparently at something that somebody in the room behind her had just said. Her hair was dark and coiled up on the top of her head, and her eyes were like dark flowers. She wore a dress of well-washed cotton with blue stripes, a brown belt. She was a little less trim than I remembered, curving and womanly instead, with strong arms where the sleeves were folded back. Her smile vanished and her mouth dropped open. A frantic pleasure, almost a terror, rose in her eyes. Then her head fell backward and her legs went out from under her.

  I reached out and caught at her, but I was too feeble; I went down into the room almost on top of her, almost fainting with her. Fortunately, there was no furniture near the door and she did not hurt herself. Lying there, I kissed her face once, weakly, and then managed to clamber off her. She opened her eyes and stared at me. I could see now that her sister had risen from the table, a spoon from her coffee in one hand. Beyond that, next to the stove, stood a pram, angled away from the sun of the one window; and in it a baby woke and began to cry.

  Irina dropped her spoon and hurried forward to help Vera up, brought water for her to sip. I sat in a chair and watched, looking from her to the baby’s flailing arms. It cried on. Then Vera got to her feet, with her sister’s arm around her, and stood gazing at me. She didn’t seem to hear the baby. She was as lovely as ever, more tired, trembling, a little older, but unvanquished.