The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  The Wizard wiped his hands on his pants. He gestured to Bobby. “Here, help me to lift him, on that side. I am sure Kurilkov would have turned this on me, and on the police. Probably he planned to tell the press that I had invented this story about him. I learned two days ago that he was going to kill me, once he had killed you. His men have gotten away, of course, but I will find them later.”

  “We will never give you what you want,” Alexandra said. Her voice trembled, but she made herself say it. Neven had hoisted Bobby up and she put Bobby’s other arm around her shoulders, but the Wizard moved her aside and took her place.

  “Young lady,” he said. “You will not have to give me anything. I worked with Asparuh Iliev for several years, and I have no doubt that a copy of Stoyan Lazarov’s story—whatever form it took—is already with the right newspaper. Also, I feel sure that Kurilkov’s death will be determined a suicide.”

  Alexandra, standing by Bobby as they moved him, reached out to touch his hair. His eyes had opened and they seemed to see her. He had given the story to the papers, as surely as he’d been able to call a friend to bring him a car when he needed it. He must have mailed a copy from the hotel where they’d stayed with Stoycho, she thought, or somewhere else on their journey. That was Bobby. They had a photograph now, too, to complete the story.

  Then she understood that Stoycho was really gone, and why.

  The Wizard put a hand on Bobby’s forehead, as if checking for fever. “I must go back to Sofia to speak with the press. I will call the hospital in Novlievo before you arrive there. We have not lost our best taxi driver, yet.”

  Neven put Bobby gently in the back seat of the Ford. Irina and Lenka braced him between them and Alexandra climbed into the front with Neven.

  “Go fast,” she said.

  —

  AFTERWARD, SHE REMEMBERED ONLY one moment of the ride down through the woods, and felt she might have dreamed it: a brindled flank and tail among the trees, a creature slipping back into the wild.

  The next evening, the television news in Baba Vanka’s kitchen showed the Sofia Chief of Police, his big head toward the camera. He was reading his statement about Kurilkov, Minister of Roads, killed in a startling accident—probably suicide—at the quarry near a former labor camp called Zelenets. An investigation in process had already determined that Kurilkov had once been a guard there; he had apparently gone back to view the site. It seemed, too, that he had bought all the land on which the quarry and the mines had stood, years before. If Kurilkov had not taken his own life first, the Wizard said somberly to the camera, he might have been prosecuted for his crimes there, crimes that would soon be documented in the newspapers through the testimony of a deceased musician, Stoyan Lazarov. The mining project would be halted for further inquiry. A television anchor followed this statement with a report on the discovery of mass graves in the woods near the quarry. Now, at last, there were journalists everywhere, pushing with their cameras through the brush, striding past the buildings where Neven had looked silently out of a doorway.

  Alexandra, sitting between Bobby and Neven, kept her hand on Bobby’s sound leg. She knew she would be writing again soon; she could already feel that same hand moving across the page, and later touching the keys of her laptop. This time, her stories and poems would be about a new world. Perhaps they would become essays, too, she thought—articles, the activism of the pen.

  The following morning, Alexandra went to say goodbye to Irina and Lenka where they were staying outside Morsko. Baba Vanka’s son had offered to drive the two women back to Plovdiv. They didn’t talk about Stoyan Lazarov’s story, but as she sat with them, Irina said, “He would have loved you, my dear. You are brave, and he valued courage and had to use it himself, all his life.” When she kissed Irina goodbye, Alexandra saw the old woman’s brooch glinting in the shadows. In the center of it, among vines and flowers, there was a pale image like the face of an apostle.

  —

  AT BOVECH, ON THEIR RETURN for dinner with the Lazarovi, the house looked almost the way it had the first time they had visited—except, as Bobby pointed out with a faint smile, the curtains were now open. They knocked at the door and Neven answered it, the way Alexandra had dreamed so many times he might. He kissed her on each cheek, then helped Bobby navigate with his crutches through the doorway. She had wanted to see Neven since he’d left Morsko with his parents a couple of days before—she supposed she could call them his parents, now—but he was formal, quiet; it was Vera who hurried forward to embrace Alexandra and stroke her hair. Milen Radev, in his wheelchair, squeezed her proffered hand. Vera put Bobby on the bed in the kitchen, so he could keep his leg up.

  They sat down to dinner; Neven poured rakiya and toasted Bobby and Alexandra and the memory of Stoyan Lazarov. Alexandra watched him—his beauty, his old-fashioned reserve. What, she thought, would the rest of his life be like, in this world of little work, much poverty, vulgar riches for a few? Despite Stoyan Lazarov’s talents, his courage and his revelation, people like the Lazarovi had only their dignity, in which they would fade away. When they had all begun to eat, Neven told her that he had returned to his work in Burgas but could not concentrate, and then, finally, allowed his golden eyes to meet hers across the table.

  After they’d finished dinner, and Vera had put out slices of cake, Alexandra collected herself to speak. “I have been thinking,” she said, but for a moment she found it hard to go on. The image of Jack came to her. He was sitting at one corner of the table, his face full of mischief.

  She turned to Vera and Neven. “I have some money left, what I saved to travel this year.” She stopped again, struggled to speak frankly. “If you would like, I could help send you to Venice with gospodin Lazarov’s ashes. I don’t know how you get permission to have a burial in a place like that, but there must be a way.”

  Bobby stared at her—she had not told him what she’d been pondering—and then he translated for Vera and Milen. Vera’s gaze grew enormous, dark. Neven made a slight gesture and shook his head, although his eyes shone.

  Alexandra said, “I don’t think there is enough money for you all to go, but two of you could.”

  There was a rustle of talk in Bulgarian, Vera raising a hand to her face, Milen patting his wheelchair, resigned.

  Neven nodded. “My parents can’t travel so far,” he said softly. “They know that they cannot manage this. But I am thinking about it—I mean to say, I could go. If you would not mind to come with me.”

  A shop in Prague, sometime in 1937 or 1938, an antikvarna, one that specializes in music. The man opening the door is in his early twenties, a foreigner with a violin case in his hand. He is tall and dark-haired and walks with an energy in his step that makes the shop owner look up from cataloging. The owner knows this type: they’re usually poor students, but occasionally they have money tucked away, and the passion to spend it on a treasure. He leans over his books to glance at the young man’s violin case, which is good quality, and then at his shoes, which have been worn a while but are also excellent. And highly polished.

  The young man tips his hat, then takes it off. “I saw your sign about antique music,” he says in French.

  Well, if they have no other language in common, this one will do.

  “Yes,” says the shop owner. “What are you looking for?”

  “Nothing in particular.” The young man’s eyes gleam.

  “Violinist, I see?”

  “Yes.”

  “Collector?”

  The young man laughs. “Of melodies, yes. Expensive scores—I’m sorry, no.”

  His smile is so charming, his air of unbeatable energy and unbreakable good spirits so winning, that the shop owner smiles, too, and shuts the catalog. “I have some things that are very fine, but not necessarily expensive,” he says cautiously. “And for the violin.”

  The young man sets his case on the counter, but with a courteous gesture, where it is not in the way. “Thank you,” he says. “That would be interesti
ng.”

  The shop owner is still finding out about him, however. “Are you here from Vienna, by chance?” He knows from the boy’s accent that he isn’t Viennese, of course.

  Stoyan Lazarov laughs again. “Yes,” he says.

  The shop owner whistles. “I was there last night, for your concert. I wouldn’t have missed it, no matter how much it cost. Well, you got a serious reception, I’d say.”

  Stoyan grins. The Philharmonic had played Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, and at the end of it the students in the upper tiers had cheered and stamped for five whole minutes. Then, daringly, Stoyan’s string quartet had played Dvořák’s American Quartet right here in the composer’s city, and the students of Prague had gone wild, tossed their hats and even their coats into the air. In fact, everyone had gone wild. Afterward, an old man who had known Dvořák personally had presented their conductor with a volume of memoirs, and women had thrown flowers at them as they left the concert hall. Tonight they will play Dvořák’s Symphony No. 3, their final appearance.

  “I’ve got something that would interest you,” the shop owner says. “I don’t show this to everyone, but you are a violinist and this will one day be even more valuable.” He goes to a cabinet behind the counter and unlocks it, looks through several piles of brittle scores. What he wants is wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, a special treatment. He unties it and opens it up on the counter in front of the young man. “This is very old, you know.”

  Stoyan Lazarov leans over to see the score lying exposed before him. The paper is discolored and yet looks strong, and it is faintly ruled for music. To his astonishment, the score on it is handwritten, a manuscript. The hand in which it’s written makes something lurch inside him—it races across the staff, scratched rapidly onto it in spidery, resounding flourishes. He knows from his training in Bach and Handel that this is a page from the Baroque, but it is also unlike anything he’s ever seen. A virtuosic work, whatever it is, and only a virtuoso would be able to play it, especially at the pace he imagines it deserves.

  He looks up at the shop owner, who is watching him closely. “What is it?”

  The owner opens the next page—the piece seems to consist of just three pages, but they offer plenty of opportunity for repetition and perhaps further embellishment. They are crudely stitched together at one edge. Stoyan has begun to hear some of the lines of the melody, off the page; it races, yes, but glows with emotion, too. This is something quite different from his beloved Bach.

  The shop owner turns over the last sheet and points to a couple of small letters: PV, 1715 it says, in a neat hand completely unlike the taut wildness of the notation.

  “I believe,” says the shop owner, “that this symbol here stands for Vivaldi, Antonio Vivaldi, the Venetian composer. You see. It is the right style, in the music, and Vivaldi was a priest, so the P could mean Prete.”

  Stoyan touches the lower edge of the last page, but carefully. “Yes, I know his name, and a piece or two, for chamber orchestra.” He thinks for a moment. He has long been aware of the concerti Bach had based on Vivaldi’s. Also a piece the great Fritz Kreisler had claimed was Vivaldi’s and then had revealed just a few years earlier as his own composition. Stoyan has always vaguely associated the name with something quaint and tinkling, not with the passionate impatience he sees on the page before him.

  “My colleague in Rome has helped to examine other scores, but I have never been able to show him this one. He left Prague before I received this. He wrote me that they have found much more of Vivaldi’s music in Italy, these last years, but it is all in libraries and private collections.”

  “Where did you get this, then?” Stoyan can’t take his eyes off the manuscript. The sheer energy of it looks alive on the page, as if the ink has not yet dried. Only the two initials at the end stand still—perhaps the composer had penned them later, in a calmer state.

  “I found it inside a book—a portfolio of engravings of Venice—that I sold some years ago. For a good price, in fact. But I removed this because the buyer did not care about music.”

  “I think,” Stoyan says thoughtfully, “that it is a cadenza.”

  The shopkeeper stands listening.

  “Yes,” says Stoyan. “You see, it has no title or number at the top, and as I look at the melody, I think that it belongs to a larger piece of music. This would have been a special addition to a work that the composer had already written, a solo—perhaps a spectacular way to end the piece. A challenge.”

  “Would you like to play it?” the shopkeeper says suddenly. There is no one in the shop.

  “It will be quite difficult, the first time. Do you have a music stand?”

  He does—a stand nearly as old and elegant as the score. They arrange it together and Stoyan tunes his violin.

  It is indeed difficult. It taunts him—the hand of the master, racing ahead of his across the page. This Venetian priest had been able to compose like an angel, but also to play like a devil, apparently. The melody makes his heart pound. There is still no one in the shop, so he tries again. The piece is very short, written with a great range, some of it so high on the fingerboard that he has to strain his carefully trained ear for the pitches. It is elaborate beyond its own logic, and yet a strange sweetness rises off the notes. It will take weeks for him to make his hands do this, and months to memorize properly. It is, he thinks, the kind of gem a great violinist might make his own, his signature, his encore. And he has never heard it before—possibly no one living in the last two centuries ever heard it.

  He might have to eat bread and water for a long time, of course. He turns to the shopkeeper, who is nodding.

  “How much?” says Stoyan Lazarov.

  The train trip from Milan into the Santa Lucia station, and then the vaporetto ride along the Grand Canal, had the effect of putting Alexandra into a stupor. Despite—or maybe because of—her exhaustion, it was a stupor of beauty. Neven settled next to her at the front of the boat, where they could see together the beige and slate-blue buildings rising up on densely laden islands. Between his shoes sat a travel bag heavy with a polished wooden urn, and all too light with human ashes. It was late afternoon, late May, 2008. Neven had placed his suitcase, which looked forty years old and like the ones Alexandra’s grandparents owned, next to him on the ferry seats.

  Alexandra had with her everything she’d brought to Bulgaria, except a few garments she felt she didn’t need anymore; those she’d left folded on a park bench outside her hostel in Sofia. She wore Bobby’s necklace of brass and carnelian over her blouse, worrying it with one hand from time to time; it would be years, and several repairs—and a whole future life of writing and motherhood and teaching—before she stopped wearing it every day. In the pocket of her sweater she carried a poem, folded into a thick square, Bobby’s most recent gift.

  “This is the first time I’ve written one in English,” he’d said. “Written in English from the beginning. Not translated.”

  The poem was entitled “A Bird,” and she had already memorized the opening, the way the startling first words merged into an equally sharp second and third line, the restrained flow of grief as it was transmuted into history, the beautiful and unexpected verb he’d chosen to imagine Jack’s last moments.

  —

  NOW THERE ARE SPIRES in sight, churches that fill entire islands, ornaments curled like the shells of snails. Water splashing and shining in place of land. She rubs her tired face and looks at Neven, and he takes her hand, as Bobby might have. They sit there comfortably, her heart beating only a little harder than usual. The vaporetto passes gondolas the way a bus passes pedestrians. Now they are staring at palaces, which seem to bob at the water’s edge.

  Suddenly Neven laughs. He points to the sidewalks, the people walking over the little bridges, the edge of the piazzas. “Look,” he says.

  “What?” Alexandra cranes, without letting go of his hand.

  “The people,” Neven says. “They are dressed modern.”


  At a wharf for Piazza di San Marco, they cross onto Venetian soil, onto ancient pavement, and stand collecting themselves and their baggage. Alexandra has booked them into a small hotel six blocks from the Piazza, whatever six blocks means in Venice. First they wander for a few minutes, staring at the pink cliff of the Doge’s Palace and frequently setting down their suitcases. The Piazza is very much larger than she’d imagined, and the flocks of pigeons settling in it are vast, like birds on an Antarctic shore. She recognizes the Campanile and the long, long colonnades. Presiding over all of it, the Cathedral of San Marco, where Vivaldi’s father played in an orchestra even before his son was born. Alexandra remembers walking into the church at Velinski manastir with Bobby. She wants to go inside San Marco, once they’ve found their hotel, to see it for him, and for Stoyan. She tries to remember whether there are candles to buy and light, in Catholic churches. She tries to picture Jack’s face, and finds it has faded a little.

  Neven is silent, and when she asks him what he’s thinking he says soberly, “I just realized that I have not ever been anywhere.”

  Their hotel is indeed small, little wider than its own front door. An orange tree in a pot stands to one side of the door, filling half the alley, so that passersby have to skirt it. Just beyond, a covered bridge joins two buildings; Alexandra wishes the bridge were part of the hotel, but maybe they will be able to see it from their room. Room, singular—she’s reserved only one at an already heart-stopping rate, four nights. Then, with some meals and their plane tickets, her savings from the last three years will be gone.