Wildalone

  The first to be torn apart were the birds, the beasts, the innumerable living things that followed the poet, enthralled by his song. Then the maenads gathered on Orpheus—like hounds circling a doomed stag in the amphitheater’s arena. Mute for the first time, succumbing to his fate, he stretched out his arms to them, and the spirit breathed out through that mouth to which stones listened, whose voice the wild creatures understood—and vanished down the wind.

  The birds, lamenting, wept for Orpheus; the beasts gathered in despair one last time for him; the trees, shedding their leaves, mourned him with bared crowns. They say the rivers wept too, swollen with their own tears; and the water nymphs—the naiads—with disheveled hair, put on somber clothes.

  The poet’s limbs were scattered through the land, his head and lyre thrown into the river Hebrus, bound for the Underworld—and (a miracle!) floating in midstream, the lyre whispered mournfully; mournfully the lifeless tongue murmured; mournfully the banks echoed in reply. The ghost of Orpheus sank under the earth, only to recognize all those places he had seen before. Searching for the fields of the blessed, he found his wife and held her in his arms. There they walk together to this day, side by side—now she goes in front and he follows her; now he leads and looks back as he can do, safely, at his Eurydice . . .

  FRIDAY PASSED WITHOUT A TRACE of the mystery stranger. As did Saturday. But he had promised to find me, and this became my secret. It changed everything: the quiet alleys, the secluded courtyards, eerie buildings peeking out from behind pallid trees—every place on campus turned vibrant with color when I imagined it as the place where I might see him next. “Apparently I was right, you have a stalker,” Rita would have said, before launching her own investigation as to why anyone would follow me into a deserted museum and talk to me in the dark. Which was exactly why I decided not to tell her any of it. There was no need for him to be labeled “weird” again; I didn’t want the word lodged in my mind. Whoever that guy was, he understood Chopin’s music and loved the story of Orpheus, just as I did—if this meant he was weird, then so was I. And I didn’t worry that he would keep stalking me. I worried that he wouldn’t.

  On Saturday night the RCA group voted down Rita’s proposal for a trip to the movies and ended up party hopping through the dorms instead. “Guys, you should save your energy for the Street tomorrow,” she kept warning us, but nobody cared. We rushed from one spot of blasting music to the next, high on adrenaline from finally being out at night in college. By noon the following day, all of us were going to regret it.

  The Street, as the first few blocks of Prospect Avenue were known, was the liveliest (and often the only) hub of nightlife at school: a strip of land running parallel to Nassau Street in the northeast corner of campus, where Princeton’s eating clubs opened their doors—and their free beer taps—twice a week, on Thursdays and Saturdays. Everything about the Street had a strict nomenclature. To give us a leg up in the game, Rita handed everyone an aspirin after brunch and prepped us on the basics.

  “Eating club” was a fancy name for a cross between a dining hall and a fraternity house. The clubs were not affiliated with the school, which washed Princeton’s hands of the alleged wild parties, excessive drinking, and anything else that went on in them. The current count was ten clubs, and at the end of sophomore year you had to pick one, just as you had to pick a major. But there was a catch: picking a club didn’t mean the club would pick you. Five out of the ten ran a lottery, and according to a wide consensus, Vegas paled in comparison to what you had at stake when your name was pulled out of a hat (or wasn’t) at your club of choice. The other half were openly elitist. Priceless member spots were awarded in a process known as “bicker”—a fraternity rush spiced with the pinch of a job interview, a bacchanal, and a political campaign, all in one. “Bicker week is like the Dark Ages: things lose their shock or shame value,” Rita had summed up succinctly, leaving it up to us to imagine the rest.

  And then there was Ivy. The oldest and most exclusive of the clubs, it reveled in its own legend: the unmatched aura of a name, the undisputed splendor of one-hundred-plus years of history, and a pervasive rumor (which was most likely true) that even a perfect human being, lavishly cloned in God’s own image, would be turned down by Ivy absent a pedigree involving royalty, a head of state, or, at a minimum, a billionaire. Ivy was the fabled fortress of privilege. The magnificent outlier. The ultimate spoiled child who made up rules and refused to account to anyone for it. Ivy was the vein that had always pulsed at the very heart of Princeton.

  “If the thought of bickering there so much as breezes through your mind, you must talk to me immediately. Especially the girls.”

  Rita said it in one breath, but we could tell she was serious. Someone managed a timid why.

  “Because the place is ruthless. It will chew you up and spit you out—all for daring to think, even for a second, that you are worthy of such a fine establishment. A friend of mine was so brainwashed from bicker that for weeks she subsisted on almost nothing but tea, to ‘fit the Ivy mold.’ Until she ended up in a hospital bed and had to take the rest of the year off to recover.”

  “They asked her to go on a diet?”

  “Oh no, asking is not their thing. Someone had been gracious enough to point out, before escorting her to the door, that while she was overall sufficiently pretty, and certainly a daredevil when the occasion called for it, several members felt she could benefit, if you will, from being rather skinnier.”

  There was a tense silence.

  “Okay, I hear the sound of mental scales weighing pounds.” Rita jumped from her chair, having guessed perfectly well what many of us were thinking. “I will impose detention if you buy into any of that skinny nonsense. Now let’s go, the parties have started.”

  For one week only, Sunday was the day that mattered on the Street. It was the official opening of the eating clubs, an afternoon when the entire place—even Ivy—was up for grabs. All doors stayed shut, but the few yards separating those doors from the sidewalk became the scene of a wild celebration: Lawnparties. It was a sea of sound and color. Girls in sundresses. Guys in whatever the closet had happened to spit out. And everywhere—crowds, the excited commotion of crowds packed around buildings, raising beer cups to live music of which I could hear only the bang of drum sets and the wail of throats too close to the microphone.

  Rita kept the group together, navigating us through a maze of lawns and backyards. I was glad to be out, instead of sulking in my room with fantasies of a stranger about whom I knew absolutely nothing. But, as it happened, I couldn’t escape the thought of him for very long.

  “Tesh, I keep forgetting, there’s someone I want you to meet.” Rita grabbed my hand and pulled me across the street. “He’s been pestering me ever since he heard you play last Friday.”

  I almost tripped on the sidewalk. Ever since he heard you play. Was I finally going to meet him? The real him this time, not a vanishing shadow?

  We headed to a building whose redbrick walls and white Ionic columns created the effect of a Greek temple slapped in front of a city hall. As we made our way through the crowd, she kept asking people if they had seen Ben and explained to me that this was Colonial, one of the clubs accessible to anyone with a Princeton ID. The guy, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found.

  Ben . . . Benjamin? I let the name swirl around in my mind, trying to imagine it belonging to him. A nice name, for sure. But not mysterious enough. Bennett? Or Benedict, maybe?

  “There he is!”

  She waved at someone and I felt my heart skip a beat. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a sophomore from Forbes whose endearing, gap-toothed smile flashed at me before he confessed that my concert had left him speechless.

  “Awe-stricken, I believe, is how it was described to me. You’ve inflicted a spell on our poor Ben, Tesh!” Rita didn’t bother to conceal the matchmaking tone. “Who, by the way, dabbles in violin himself.”

  “Poor Ben” turned absolutely red. “Can’t say
I’ve got the talent for it. But I’m addicted to classical music. Really beyond repair.”

  We went on to talk about the challenges of string quartets (his favorite), and whether any impact was lost when arranging piano pieces for the violin and vice versa. He had a sweet, unobtrusive way of showing his extensive knowledge of music—theory, history, the entire who’s who of classical repertoire—and I caught myself wishing for more chats like this one. Still, I couldn’t shake the disappointment that he wasn’t someone else. All weekend, I had been waiting for a guy who would follow me into an empty museum yet not even ask for my phone number. Maybe he just saw me as a girl who happened to play the piano and like ancient pottery? No wonder the promise to find me had slipped from his mind, just as my own promise to join Ben at a Schubert recital in two weeks slipped from mine as soon as I said good-bye and headed back to Forbes.

  The first thing I did in my room was to check e-mail. A message was waiting for me, yes, but not the one I had hoped for. It was marked urgent, with a subject line Tomorrow A.M., and I sensed right away that something was off. For a second time, I had been singled out. And again for no apparent reason. On its face, the note seemed class-related: my Greek Art professor had graded the papers. If I didn’t mind an early rise, he wanted to meet me in the art museum at eight o’clock Monday morning.

  THE MINIATURE NICKEL KEY SLID into the lock and turned to the right—once, then a second time.

  “Extraordinary, isn’t it, what a handful of clay can become?” Giles was standing in front of the cabinet, exactly where I had stood four days earlier. The museum was closed on Mondays but he had access to it, and the only thing that struck me as extraordinary was his decision to summon me there for a private visit. “Each of these pieces is simply earth, baked into shape and given some color. But lend an eager eye to it, and an entire world comes to life after thousands of years!”

  “In Bulgaria that world never really died. I was raised on these myths.”

  “And is this why you took liberties with your paper, Miss Slavin? Normally, my students write about what they see on a vase, not what they imagine might lie hidden on the back.”

  His comment caught me off guard. “I thought the invisible would be more interesting.”

  “Fair enough. And your description of the angry maenads killing Orpheus was definitely vivid. But if you are going to hand in a guess, then it’d better be correct. Or at least brilliant.”

  Clearly, mine had been neither. “I wrote about Orpheus because I love music.”

  “Love of music—this would certainly be the more obvious explanation. Yet your use of the myth fell short. A reiteration of what others have said a thousand times already.”

  I took a deep breath. “Professor Giles, I’d be happy to revise the paper if you think it can be fixed.”

  “Fixed?” Something lit up his eyes, as if he had just caught me dipping my spoon into a forbidden jar of honey. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you have anything fresh to say. Otherwise we are just dragging the same story back and forth.”

  “From the empty into the void.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “In Bulgaria we have a saying: ‘to keep pouring from the empty into the void.’ To talk in circles and not say anything of substance.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Drown me in five pages of void and empty.”

  Enough was enough. This man derived some sick intellectual pleasure from provoking others, and now I had become his target: the one to receive both the special attention and the special ridicule. I had encountered such teachers before. But while I was looking for a polite excuse to leave, he reached toward the cabinet. His careful fingers opened the glass door, held the base of the vessel, and turned it around.

  It was a simple image, much simpler than my paper had guessed. No hurled stones. No dismembered beasts. No packs of raving women carrying out an ambush. There were two figures—only two—but otherwise the scene was exactly what I had described. A musician falling back: slumped shoulders, legs bent, limp hand about to drop the now mute lyre. And descending over him with fury, hair spilling in the dark, gown folds no longer vertical but fluttered in the chaos of her speed—a woman. Snatching his arm. Pulling his curls so violently that his head was snapping back, away from his collapsing body.

  “You can see for yourself—” Giles pointed at the vase. “The death of Orpheus has always been described as a group murder. And yet, this painter clearly had something else in mind.”

  “Just one maenad?”

  “Exactly. While reading your paper, I kept hoping that you would drop the plural.”

  One maenad or many—what difference did it make? “Maybe she is a stand-in for all the others, to simplify the composition.”

  “Could be. But do you really think the answer is so obvious?”

  He opened his briefcase, took out my infamous five pages, and handed them to me. Right at the top was a big red A.

  “I don’t understand. I thought you didn’t like my paper?”

  “You see, Miss Slavin, it more than satisfied the class requirements. Smart. Well-written. Thoroughly researched. What it didn’t satisfy was my personal curiosity.”

  “About what?”

  “About whether you’d live up to another paper I read a long time ago. By far the most unique piece of writing ever handed to me.”

  “On this same vase?”

  “This very one. Unfortunately, battle scenes tend to be more popular among art students, so a musician invariably goes unnoticed. But one student noticed him. And suppose I were to tell you that she saw the single maenad on the back—through the locked glass, through the clay—as if she had been armed with X-ray vision?”

  The accusing stare was all over me again. What possible response was he waiting for? Then a suspicion began to creep in, and with it—the question of how long ago that other piece of writing, the one so similar to my own, had been handed to him.

  “If I recall correctly, it has been exactly fifteen years.”

  I felt the room spin around me, swiping up everything in a whirlpool of gray.

  “Miss Slavin, is yours a common last name in your country?”

  “Not really. Not at all, actually. Why?”

  “Would you happen to have a relative who attended Princeton right about that time?”

  The key flipped inside the lock, returning the vase to its peace which had been disturbed, briefly, for a second time in fifteen years. And in this final moment, while his back was turned to me, I had one last chance to turn my own back on the past—to run up the stairs, drop that class, and never talk to Giles again.

  My last chance to escape the still breathing footsteps of Elza Slavin.

  CHAPTER 3

  Unseen, at Night

  IN THE LEGENDS of my country, no creature is more beautiful or more cruel than the samodiva: the young witch of the forest who dances under a full moon, lures men with promises of love, then takes their lives. Folk superstitions claim that samodiva powers run in certain families, but I never believed this. Or at least I tried not to. Because it would have meant that the madness of these creatures ran in my own blood.

  Once upon a time, beyond nine lands into the tenth, three maidens of unwitnessed beauty, three samodivi, lived deep within the forest. Their milk-woven skin was whiter than the mountain snow; their topaz-blue eyes were clearer than the morning dew; their waist-long hair had a golden shine so pure that the sun itself turned cold with envy. And this is why, away from evil-bearing eyes, the samodivi came out only in the night, bathing under an age-old oak tree, dancing endless dances, drunk with moon—until a rooster’s cry would send them hiding from the dawn, back inside a cave that neither man nor beast could enter.

  The book, an English translation of Bulgarian legends, was the only one I had brought with me to college. At first it stayed at the bottom of the suitcase. Then, as Forbes beca
me flooded with unfamiliar faces and I felt even more alone in the crowded hallways than I had in the empty ones, I took the small volume and kept it by my bed. It was a reminder of home, of an old tale linked to my family. And of Elza Slavin.

  To call Elza a “relative” was safe but wrong: she had been much more, an earlier version of me. I found out about her only months before my flight to America. Until then, the details of her brief time at Princeton had been kept from me, as had all other signs of her existence. For my sake, the family scraped her off our lives like the scab of a wound. Relatives were sworn into silence. Friends and acquaintances drifted away, together with the past. My parents muted their own hearts, burying in three buckled chests everything she had owned or touched. Then a lifelong vigil began. Suffering quietly. Keeping constant watch. All along, they probably imagined how their little Thea, still a toddler when the tragedy hit, would grow up a happy and healthy girl, sheltered from prior events. And for fifteen years the secret hibernated obediently—a bird embryo locked inside the eggshell—without a hint dropping from anyone’s lips. Then the surface cracked.

  All it took was the distraught face of my grandmother, Baba Mara, who saw me twirl in her flower garden one April afternoon. We had just finished lunch. Next to her, my mother had dozed off on the long, cushion-covered mindehr.

  “What’s wrong, Babo?”

  The old woman sat there frozen and—was I imagining it?—teared up. Only moments earlier, she had been chatting away.

  “What happened?” My white cotton dress doubled up as a handkerchief and I wiped her cheeks. “What is it? Tell me.”