I was nearly back at the entrance door when a man stepped in front of me, blocking my path. I sidestepped; he stepped too. I went left, but he moved to bar my way with his leather shoes and his chinos and his casual suit jacket. I lifted my gaze to glare at him, feeling unwise words burn upon my tongue.
“Milja Petak?” He looked down at the open passport in his hand, and then into my face again, and smiled. “It’s really not such a good likeness. You look like a kid in this.”
Hope slammed me in the breastbone. “Where did you get that?” I blurted, snatching it out of his hand.
“Sure, you’re welcome. It was on the floor just over there.” He gestured toward the doors. He had a square face and square shoulders: sandy-blondish hair, sandy-blondish eyebrows, pale eyes.
Cute, said my hindbrain.
“You should have handed it in!” I snapped, which wasn’t fair at all because I hadn’t gone to the information counter myself. But I was too wound up and my mouth was running well ahead of my brain. I double-checked that it really, truly was my passport photo there on the back page, relief making my temples pound.
“Sorry,” he said mildly. He had a slightly non-American accent.
“Right,” I huffed.
“You okay, then?”
I glowered at him, too addled to think straight. His mouth twisted at one side, suggesting concern. “Okay,” I said, since nothing else came to mind except a feeling I should thank him, and I didn’t want to thank him or anyone because I was mad as hell. “Okay, then.”
Then I turned on my heel and stalked back to Vera, my head held high.
We made it onto the transatlantic flight to Zurich, almost at the front of the queue. Vera’s red-dyed hair, short at the back and sides and curly on top, bobbed down the aisle in front of me all the way to economy class, but she didn’t want the window seat. “I don’t like to see the ground when we take off. It’s bad enough, that feeling in the stomach. You sit by the window.”
Taller than her by some way, I loaded our carry-on bags into the overhead lockers and slid into the window seat. Vera took the middle one of the row of three, and immediately started complaining; “Ach! Look at this! There’s no legroom!”
She had no cause to bitch, I thought, trying to arrange my rather longer legs into a comfortable position for the flight. “Put your blanket under the seat in front and you’ll have more space.”
“And these seats are tiny! Whoever designed this economy class must have an ass like a clothespin! How do they expect us to put up with this for six hours?”
“Excuse me.”
That was the moment I looked up and saw the man waiting to take the aisle seat as soon as Vera removed her magazine and MP3 player and bag of toffees. It was him—my sandy-haired passport retriever. I went crimson. He smiled, tentatively.
I couldn’t help noticing more about him this time round—the way his hair was cut to stick forward in a cute ruff, for example. And his full lower lip. And that he really was pretty handsome.
Vera gave a sigh of pure resentment and gave up her claim to annexing his seat. As our new neighbor settled in I looked out of the window. Well, I could hardly start a conversation with him across Vera’s generous bust… I just wished she’d stop her stream of niggling complaints, which were no longer just irritating but now embarrassing. And she kept up the sniping through preflight announcements and all the way to altitude, with only a brief break, eyes screwed shut, for the actual takeoff.
It was the second most acute feeling of relief I’d experienced all day, when the flight attendant approached, turned her lipstick grin on Vera and said, “Compliments of the captain, madam. Would you care to be upgraded to business class?”
I don’t know whether everyone around us shared my relief, or just resented her luck. But the squeaky wheel gets the oil, I guess. Vera patted my hand and went off forward in the stewardess’s wake, promising she’d swap over and let me take a turn in the comfortable seat after she’d had a drink and a nap.
I took a deep breath and turned to my neighbor. “I am really sorry,” I said in a low voice. “I was very rude before. I should have thanked you. I wasn’t mad with you: I was mad with me.”
“Ah, that’s okay,” he said, showing his teeth in a little grin. “I figured you were feeling stressed. You looked…really upset.”
His gentleness, and the personal comment, slipped past my defenses. I felt my eyes fill up and I blinked hard, looking away. Not fast enough though: a tear escaped and splashed on the back of my hand. Suddenly I found myself scrabbling through my pockets.
“Here.” He held out a packet of travel tissues. I took them gratefully, mopped my eyes, sniffed shamefully and apologized several times over.
“I’m not having a good week,” I admitted, my voice wobbling a little still. “I shouldn’t…it’s my father…I’m worried…”
“Your father? Is he on the flight?”
“He’s back home in Montenegro—we’re flying out to see him—he’s really ill—” My Kleenex knight got the whole tale and listened seriously all the while, leaning in over the empty seat between us so that I wouldn’t have to share my story with the whole cabin. Father’s collapse during the Divine Liturgy—
“Sorry: your father is a priest?”
“Serbian Orthodox. They’re allowed to marry.”
“Oh—I see.”
—and his confinement to bed in the village. No, he hadn’t been taken to hospital, which was miles away over rough roads; it sounded like he was still talking and capable of sitting up, with help; it was hard to tell how much danger he was in or what had happened, but Cousin Vera was always great in a crisis, like when I got glandular fever, and she’d be able to help. Please God it wasn’t a stroke or a heart attack. I was his only daughter and he didn’t have any close family left in the country and I felt terrible not being there when he needed me. I hadn’t seen him in five years. It felt like a lifetime.
I felt drained by the time I stopped talking. He nodded at me sympathetically, drawing his teeth over his top lip. “Ah now, you’ve told me all that, before I even told you my name.” He put out his hand. “I’m Egan, by the way.”
“Hi, Egan. Sorry for bending your ear.” I took his hand, but it was more like a gentle squeeze than a shake that passed between us. It was nice though, a warm and empathic mini-hug, even if it came from a stranger.
It was just nice.
“Okay, you can stop apologizing now. You’ve caught up.”
I nodded, abashed but somehow not minding.
“You’re transferring on to Podgorica from Zurich, then, I’m guessing?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, though he’d messed up the pronunciation of the city name.
Egan reached into the pouch before his knees and extracted a paperback travel guide to Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro. “We’re going to be plane buddies all the way, then.”
I raised my brows. “Really? What are you going out there for?”
“Um. Business.” A glance downward indicated the white shirt beneath his jacket. “I’m in security systems.”
“Uh…?”
“I.T., mostly. For a bank.”
“That sounds…” I got stuck for a polite adjective.
“Awful, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But at least I get to see a new country in my lunch breaks.” He fished inside his jacket. “Perhaps you can help me… This is the place I’m staying at.” He showed me a business card printed in Montenegrin script. “I can’t actually pronounce the words for the taxi driver at the airport. It’s like half the vowels are missing. And there are all these little marks…”
Smiling, I read the address, which was full of accented letters that didn’t exist in the American alphabet, and then I read it out for him, line by line. He repeated it after me until he was happy. “So that’s a TS not a C?”
“Yep. And that one sounds like a J even though it looks like a D.”
“Ah grand. I can see th
is is going to be fun. Still, at least it’s not in Cyrillic—that was what I was really scared of.”
“You’ll still find the Cyrillic alphabet in churches. But not out in the streets these days. Things are changing.” That’s what I’d been told, anyway. It’d been five long years since I’d seen for myself. The reminder made me uncomfortable. “Are you from Newfoundland, by any chance?” I asked, changing the subject. I’d had a Newfie roommate at college.
Egan shook his head. “Good guess, but no, I’m not. My mother’s Irish—that’s the accent you’re hearing. American father, though.” He smiled self-deprecatingly. “Dual nationality.”
“So which country do you live in?”
“Uh, well, I grew up in Ireland. But I’ve been based in the States since. I try to travel on whichever passport gets the friendly reception at a given national border.” He rolled his eyes. “Which, when I’m working in England, is neither.”
We spent some of the rest of the trip looking through his tourist book, and I taught him a few helpful phrases and told him what useful details I could remember about my native country—which was sadly little, when it came down to it, even though Montenegro is only about the size of Connecticut and has less than a fifth of the population. A tiny place, relative to the States, but I’d experienced firsthand only my own small village, a few summer visits to Žabljac—which wasn’t that much bigger—and that one trip to the capital Podgorica when I’d been put on the plane out to Boston. Everything else was hearsay, acquired from Father. But I liked talking to Egan; it took my mind off my own anxieties. And it was easy. He wasn’t pushy or weird or anything. We stopped talking only when they dimmed the cabin lights to encourage us all to sleep. Vera never came back from business class, but I didn’t mind at all.
When we touched down in Zurich we walked through to the transfer lounge together. Egan wheeled Vera’s suitcase for her, which delighted my cousin even though it didn’t stop her throwing me sharp little glances of warning.
We compared tickets for the flight onward, but this time we weren’t sitting anywhere near each other. I shrugged and smiled, but felt a real pang of disappointment.
“Here,” he told me, as the call for boarding came over the public address system and we rose, a little wearily, to face the next leg of the journey. Whipping a pen from his inside pocket, he scrawled on the back of the business card he’d shown me earlier. “I hope your father’s going to be okay, but if there’s anything I can do to help…call me.”
I looked at his name, Egan Kansky, and the cell phone number beneath. “Don’t you need the card to get to your lodgings?” I asked.
“Not anymore.” He grinned. His eyes under the airport strip lighting were gray blue, broken up by little flecks of gold. “I’ve had expert tutoring.”
After landing in Podgorica, our journey was only half over. We took a bus out north from the capital, spent the night dozing over a table in a cafe in Nikšić before changing to another local bus, and drove uphill for several hours—along good roads, but through increasingly wild country where the sheer limestone crags and their clinging black pines looked like something from an eighteenth-century Romantic etching. At the tiny town of Šavnik we hired the nearest they had to a taxi service, bouncing along an unpaved track in the back of a truck, up a nothing road into the Durmitor mountains, beneath beetling cliffs. I was glad it was summer; the upland meadows were a riot of Alpine wildflowers, but in winter the road to the village becomes impassable.
It was so strange to see the familiar landscape with fresh eyes. It looked incongruously Heidi in parts, cute little haystacks and all. And I realized how much I had missed the mountains, with their great green flanks and their jagged bare peaks and their deep sudden gorges cut by rivers. Patches of snow clung to the shadowed places by the road, even now in August when the direct sunlight felt scorching hot. It was a beautiful land, but cruel too. There were miles and miles of rock and grass and nothing else. We were nearly scraping the bright-blue sky overhead, it felt. And once above the tree line, the lush wildflowers gave way to thin sheep-cropped turf through which the white limestone jutted everywhere, like bones through peeling skin. This terrain was something other than picturesque—to me it had a quality of terror, as if the secrets it hid were unspeakable.
The village itself had changed, I thought, as we dropped into the valley and drove into what passed for the central square and the dogs ran around barking with excitement. There were more abandoned houses, and the ones that were still occupied had huge satellite dishes on the corrugated metal roofs that had replaced the old wooden shingles. But I had changed far more than Stijenjarac. I could see it reflected in the stares of the others as I climbed down from the vehicle: me with my tight jeans and my makeup, with my sunglasses and my looped plastic necklace. Even Vera, with her short red-dyed hair and her bright pink Versace handbag, looked out of place here, though she waved and strutted and called out to people as if she’d last seen them only a few weeks and not decades ago.
The place reeked of sheep. I’d forgotten that particular detail.
The old women clad in headscarves took us indoors, tutting at me and muttering to each other just as if I couldn’t understand the things they said. I cast one last look up the mountainside to the distant white blob that was our church, before following them.
Father wasn’t even in his own bed: he had collapsed in the village and it had been impossible to take him up the long climb to our isolated house. Now he occupied a borrowed sofa in someone’s back room, under twin pictures of St. Sava and His Holiness the Patriarch. Father had changed too: his big black beard was gray now, his face thin and bony. I was shocked: he was only sixty, but in this country he was an old man.
I cried when I saw him. I buried my hands under his thin ones and kissed his cheek, horrified that we had lost so much time between us. His skin felt loose on his bones.
“Milja,” he said, squeezing my hand with a ghostly echo of his old strength. “Look at you, little chick. You are so grown up. You are an American beauty queen now!”
“Papa,” I chided him, “what are you thinking of, scaring me like this? You said you would tell me if you weren’t feeling well!”
“I was fine, just fine. A little fall, that’s all, and now all these women have got me tied up in their shawls and I’m not allowed to get out of bed. I miss my house. They cook bean soup for me but, ach, they do not do it properly. I want to make my own soup.”
“Don’t worry, Adzo,” said Vera. “I will cook for you from now on: the proper old recipe my mother taught me.” She shot the attending beldames a hard look, as if their hospitality was an imposition. There was a sound of offended huffs.
“Milja.” Father’s grip tightened. I could see the worry in his eyes, and I leaned in closer. “I left…I left a lamp burning up there.”
I frowned. “That’s all right, Papa—it will have burned itself out.”
His voice had sunk almost to a whisper. “In the passageway, you understand. Someone should go up and check.”
I nodded to show that I understood. “Don’t worry. I’ll go make sure everything is okay.”
“She will not,” Vera said firmly. “Not on her own. She’ll have to wait until I have time to come up with her.”
“It’s my house!” I glared at my cousin, but she was at least as stubborn as me by nature and had had far more practice.
“It is not right for you to go up there by yourself,” she said, holding my gaze. “Not on your own.”
We’d never spoken to each other about the family secret—not a word—but for the first time I realized that she knew—about the man in the cave, and about my disgrace. I couldn’t help flushing, and I could only hope she took it for anger. I dropped my eyes. One thing at a time, and Father most urgent of all.
We wanted to take him to a hospital in Podgorica straightaway, but he was hugely reluctant, and to be honest it wasn’t clear that he was strong enough to travel. Vera appointed herself head nurs
e, infuriating all the old women, and tried to rally his strength. I don’t want to remember those days. I felt as though every fiber in my body was screaming from the strain. We took lodgings in the house across the street, and while Vera saw to his material needs I sat with my father and read to him from old magazines, and tried to get him to eat despite his birdlike appetite.
It was a strange, frustrating time. My father’s condition worried me desperately. Probably because of the high mountains around us, my cell phone had no connectivity; I was cut off from my job, my friends and all but my two relatives. It seemed likely that my fledgling career had taken a serious blow. I thought about Suzana, my roommate, and wondered if she was looking after our cat Senka properly, and whether Senka missed me. Suzana was off to the Burning Man festival this year and wanted me to be home in time to cat-sit, though she’d tried not to hint too broadly. I thought about the New England Aquarium on the Boston harbor front, which I always made a habit of visiting in the last week of August, just like the first year I’d arrived in the States. It looked like I’d miss it this year. I’d been fascinated by the dark tanks in particular: the hypnotic dance of the jellyfish in the UV glow, and the terrible patience of the long-legged crabs under their crushing columns of water, down there in the dark, so cut off from the world of light.
Now it was my turn to feel cut off from the world, suspended between everyday life and the black depths inside the mountain so close by. I kicked around the village when I wasn’t needed, aware of the stares of people I half remembered but who were more than half strangers now. There were no children in evidence and the room we’d used for a schoolhouse in my youth had reverted to being a storage shed: all the young people had moved out to Žabljac to work in the ski-resort hotels, or down to the lowland cities. I couldn’t sit with the men in the tavern, and the women made it clear I was not approved of. Somehow, at twenty-three, they managed to make me feel like an outcast teenager again, sulky and uncertain. Only the village dogs were pleased to see me, perhaps because I bribed them with bread crusts. The lonely little church on the hillside beckoned, but I didn’t quite dare defy Vera and head up there on my own, and she showed no eagerness to walk several kilometers and climb the two hundred steep steps, muttering about her sciatica whenever I suggested an ascent.
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