Nikolai grew up in Communist Sofia, where his childhood had been marked by food shortages and relatives in concentration camps. His parents encouraged him to play the piano as a means of escape, believing that a musician could travel beyond the Iron Curtain to perform all over the world, and so he played twelve hours a day from the age of five. Because he was talented and persistent, he won his first international competition at age nine. At eighteen, he left his music conservatory and moved to the United States, where he studied jazz composition. Three years later he packed his things and moved to India, where he became a Buddhist monk, studying at the Dalai Lama’s Institute for Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala. After leaving the monkhood, he went back to Bulgaria, where he married, had a daughter, and wrote books about India. Now, at twenty-eight, he had left his wife and was listening to eighties New Wave bands in Iowa City with me.
I realized as we talked that we had a lot in common. Both of us had had unfulfilling first marriages. Both of us had one-year-old children we adored. We’d both lived in Asia—he in India, I in Japan. We both were interested in Buddhism, although his interest was far more serious than mine. And, of course, we were both writers, although he was more successful, having published two bestselling novels in Bulgaria. We were both extraordinary and wrecked, naïve and experienced, brilliant and stupid, our exceptional parts snapping together as seamlessly as the damaged ones.
When he put on the Cure’s “Disintegration,” I said, “I love this song. Although no one’s going to dance. Too dark. Too slow.”
“Come on, writers don’t dance,” he said, glancing at the apartment full of writing students. He was right—no one was dancing, not even a foot tap or a hip wiggle.
“I do,” I said. “I love to dance.”
“Really?”
“Of course,” I said. “Don’t you?”
He smiled a mysterious smile. Maybe yes, maybe no. “I’d rather play music than dance to it.”
“Then you play and I’ll dance.”
“Deal,” he said, sorting through the music and playing Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough.”
But I didn’t dance. I stayed by his side all night, unable to step away. There was something hypnotic about him, and I found myself gazing at him, transfixed. A scar jagged across his chin, a slash that appeared—in the dim light—to be an uneven cleft. I ran my finger over it, feeling the smoothness of the damaged skin. Later he would say that I’d chosen his weakest spot to touch him for the first time. But it wasn’t weakness that I saw then. I saw a man with an aura of invincibility about him, a confidence in the way he spoke about seemingly impossible things, as if nothing could stand in his way. I saw a man who could help me leave behind the burden of an unhappy childhood, a weight I carried everywhere—into every room I walked and into every relationship I began.
He saw the same possibility in me. When we ran into each other at the university library some days later, he told me that the day we’d met was the most important day of his life. “I will measure everything from that point in time,” he said. “From the time before I met you and the time after. I loved you from the first second I saw you.”
If I had been another woman, I might have been skeptical. He was visiting the United States for a short time and getting divorced, and so it was only natural that he would want to have a fling before going back home. But I wasn’t another woman. I was a woman ready to be swept away. I was a woman ready for her story to begin. For me, as a writer, story was all that mattered. Rising action, dramatic complication, heroes and villains and dark plots. I believed I was the author of my life, that I controlled the narrative. But deep down I must have known it wasn’t possible. Deep down I must have understood that my story had already been written.
Once upon a time, a woman met a sorcerer in the woods. High on horseback, he promised to take her far away, to a castle in the distance. Grasping his hand, she climbed onto his horse, and they rode into the tangled forest. She could feel her past fade as they went: the voice of her father, the face of her mother, the comfort of her friends. Her old life became as distant and diaphanous as a dream. Finally they arrived in a strange land where the trees were pillars of salt and the seas were black as oil. A castle stood high on a hill. The castle, he said, had magic rooms, each one filled with treasure. Go, he said. It’s my gift to you. But when she opened a door, dust clouded her sight. The rooms were dark and the magic thick. And yet she didn’t turn back. She walked into the castle, opening the doors to every room, searching. Soon she had wandered too far to retrace her steps. When she opened a window, the real world glimmered on the horizon like a mirage.
“I’ve been looking for you my whole life,” he said.
“You shouldn’t say such pretty things if you don’t mean them.” I wanted him to know I was susceptible to fairy tales, that I was vulnerable to poetry and promises.
He picked up my hand and kissed it. “Everything is going to be okay now. I’ve found you. It’s karma. It isn’t even our choice. We’ve been waiting many lifetimes for this chance. We can’t lose it.”
If I’d had any resistance, it vanished at that moment. He squeezed my hand and led me through the library, past the endless stacks until we found a dark and deserted corner in the European history section. There were books about Catherine the Great, the Hapsburgs, the Napoleonic Wars, all the stories of treacherous kings and powerful queens I loved. I couldn’t have known at the time that there, among the romances of history, my own story was beginning.
Nikolai pulled me close. He was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, strong-armed, smelling of expensive cologne. I held him tight, as if eliminating the space between us would create a singular being. Like two unstable atoms flung from opposite ends of the universe, we collided to form a new, whole, white-hot structure: us.
The Magician
I wasn’t used to men like Nikolai, charming magicians who promised to make the impossible come true. When he came into my life, I was awestruck. I was spellbound. There are a hundred clichés I could conjure—entranced, hypnotized—and all of them applied to me. Nothing in my childhood, or all the years since I’d left home, had prepared me. There just weren’t men like him in the Midwest, guys who spoke a handful of languages and could rip off a Chopin sonata and read sutras in Tibetan. He was so far out of my circle of reference, so foreign, so exotic, that I was utterly blinded.
But as with every romantic hero, there was a weak spot below the armor. As a child, Nikolai trained to play in the International Chopin Piano Competition in Poland. I’d never heard of the competition until I met him, but for young pianists this was the Wimbledon of contests, the most prestigious and famous forum for new musical talent. Contestants from all over the world applied to the Chopin Competition. Just qualifying to participate could make a musician’s career. After winning in Italy at age nine, Nikolai had been considered a strong candidate, and he had trained relentlessly for years, memorizing Chopin sonatas and etudes, reading Chopin’s letters, trying to find a way into the mind and music of his hero.
A date was announced for this preliminary competition, and Nikolai practiced night and day. When the audition came, he played his étude perfectly, and everyone in the audience—including teachers at the conservatory and other renowned musicians—declared that he’d been brilliant. After his performance he was surrounded by members of the audience and congratulated. The judges announced that he’d won and would be going to Poland. But then, in some dark twist that can happen only in a nightmare, the decision was overturned by a Communist official, the father of a girl who’d competed against Nikolai. He had given his entire childhood for this opportunity, and it went to a girl with less talent but better connections.
I once saw a videotape of Nikolai playing at the preliminary competition, the younger, awkward, and adorable teenage version of the man I loved, playing his heart out. In the video there was something hopeful and confident about him, something unspoiled. It was like watching a pristine forest minute
s before a fire. Later I came to see this competition as a deep wound in his psyche, the underlying tragedy of his childhood from which he would never fully recover. After he was eliminated from the Chopin Competition, he was always looking for applause. In me he found someone who clapped until her hands bled.
Like so much else, our weaknesses were cut from the same cloth. While he needed applause, I needed someone to adore, a man to put on a pedestal, an artist to lift up and support. The men of my past were exactly this type: undiscovered geniuses I would take in. It began simply and with small gestures—making a man dinner or doing his laundry—and soon become larger acts of support, such as paying his rent or lending him money. Before long the boyfriend would be living with me and I would be covering his phone bill or his car payment. It happened through college and after college, but I was so unconscious of my actions, so wrapped up in feeling whatever I felt, that I didn’t see a pattern. I couldn’t have explained it then, but for me love meant proving myself—emotionally and financially—and laying these proofs of love at the feet of my beloved.
I remember once, when I was about thirteen, having dinner with my father in his small kitchen on the north side of La Crosse. He was railing about some woman who had hurt him—my mom or his first wife or an ex-girlfriend—going on and on about the parasitic, money-grabbing qualities of all womankind, the ones who took his cash and left him with nothing but kids to feed, when he turned to me, his eyes intense as those in a self-portrait by van Gogh, and said, “Don’t you ever be like that, Danielle.”
I can’t say that this moment caused my inability to accept love with an open heart, but it remained with me, an apparition at the back of my mind, that I should never become a woman “like that.”
Nikolai didn’t have a piano, so I drove him to a music shop at the edge of Iowa City, where a polished black baby grand sat at the back of the showroom. He would sit, hit a few keys to warm up, and then launch into the piece, his fingers flying over the keyboard, his head held high, his patrician profile stiff and poised. It was Chopin’s Prelude in B-flat minor, op. 28, no. 16, a racy, beautiful song, and he played the entire thing from memory, as if it had been burned into him by years of practice. I leaned against the piano, my reflection pale and watery in the black lacquer, awestruck by the beauty of his artistry, the complicated fingering, the speed and timing and confidence. That he could create such an explosion of beauty, something that took over my senses so completely, left me mesmerized.
I wasn’t the only one. Eventually someone in the shop walked over, and then another person stopped by, then another, and soon there was a crowd around the piano, listening to Nikolai play. He was giving these people pleasure, something sublime in an ordinary day, and I was part of that gift. The last flourish of the prelude was punctuated by clapping, and Nikolai—so obviously used to applause—glowed with pleasure. He was the center of attention, the star performer taking a bow. He was the bright, hot center of the universe. I wanted to be near his light, to feel the warmth of him on my skin. I wanted to orbit him forever.
—
OUR FIRST MONTHS together coincided with a harsh midwestern winter, and so we spent most of our evenings inside by the fireplace. We would stack CDs by the stereo and play them one by one, filling the apartment with the sound of Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Bill Evans. Alex would play with his Thomas the Tank Engine train set, a huge, twisting wooden track that occupied the center of the living room, while Nikolai cooked something complicated from Bulgaria, stuffed peppers or roasted lamb or musaka. I would sip hot tea and watch my son, marveling at his beauty and strength. At two years old, Alex was a curly-haired blond dynamo of pure muscle and speed, who could jump up and run from one end of the playground to the other before I had a chance to get off the park bench. He was a fearless toddler, strong and fierce. When he’d run head-on into a pole and cut his eyebrow open, I was in tears, not Alex. Nikolai had held him as we drove to the ER, making funny faces to distract him from the pain. But Alex wasn’t worried. Once on the surgery table, he fixed me with his huge brown eyes, as if to say, Hey, calm down up there and let me get this over with. Alex was exceptionally verbal for his age and spoke in full sentences at eight months. I’ll never forget the eerie experience of hearing a baby of less than a year say, “I would like more peas, Mama, please,” as if he were ordering tea at the Ritz.
Every morning I drove Alex to day care at the Sprout House, a section of Alice’s Rainbow Child Care Center in Iowa City. I helped him out of his snowsuit, kissed his cold red cheeks, and left him with the other two-year-olds to play with blocks or Play-Doh. Back home I would go to the desk in my bedroom and write, while Nikolai stationed himself in the living room, at the low coffee table, where he sat cross-legged on the floor as he finished his third novel, scheduled to be published in Bulgaria the following year. We spent the day working, meeting intermittently for lunch or coffee, and then, around four o’clock, I would pick up Alex, do the shopping, and our nightly ritual of Thomas the Tank Engine and complicated Bulgarian dinner would ensue.
It was a fairly mundane routine, but with Nikolai a part of it I felt that this was the way my life was meant to be lived. It was as if I’d been missing some essential nutrient for twenty-seven years and he made me healthy again. Being with Nikolai felt essential, vital. It was like drinking water when you’re dying of thirst, or getting a fix when you’re addicted, or like looking into the eyes of your firstborn child and understanding, suddenly, the meaning of life. If you haven’t experienced the wondrous surprise of it before, the simple joy of it, it might be hard to imagine. In fact, it had been hard for me to imagine until I met Nikolai. Some part of me felt that Nikolai was too good to be true. I would open my eyes and the dream would disappear.
And then one day that’s exactly what happened. There was a problem with his visa status, and Nikolai would have to leave the country. He’d come to the International Writing Program on a J-1 visa as a guest of the State Department. Part of the fine print of the J-1, he told me, was that he needed to leave the United States before his visa expired—in his case six months—and return to his home country. He’d been in the United States for seven months, which was a violation of the visa, making him ineligible to renew it from within this country. He needed to either go home or face whatever penalties the newly created Department of Homeland Security had in store.
His anxiety about his visa was exacerbated by the fact that he had left his infant daughter, Rada, in Sofia with his soon-to-be ex-wife. His parents had hired a lawyer there in his absence, and they were giving Nikolai regular updates of the divorce proceedings by e-mail and Skype. Nikolai didn’t like to talk about his relationship with his first wife, and when he did, he had nothing good to say about her. She’d been a model in Sofia, and he ridiculed her for what he perceived as superficiality and lack of intelligence. When I asked him why he’d married someone he so clearly despised, his answer was that he’d felt trapped: She became pregnant with their daughter and insisted he marry her. “There’s no use in talking about her,” he would say, and he uttered her full name just one time in my presence. For the remainder of our years together, he referred to her only by the first letter of her name: Z.
“I’m so happy here with you,” he said, snuggling his nose into my neck one night as we lay in bed. We’d just made love and were lying under the covers talking, our limbs wrapped in the tangle of sheets. “I don’t think I’ve ever imagined that someone like you could exist. You’re perfect for me. You’re not pretending to be someone you aren’t. You’re just yourself. You just love me.”
It was true: I just loved him. I loved everything about him, from the way he cooked to the funny way he tapped his feet in his sleep to his habit of quoting Buddhist texts at strange moments to his fear of airplanes to his hypochondria to his adorable habit of looking in the mirror fifty times a day, as if to make sure he still existed. I loved his beautiful green-hazel eyes and his full lips and his long fingers. I loved his creativity, h
ow he woke up every morning and went to his computer to write, how there was always another idea, another project, more and more and more to come. I loved his faith in me. Even though I had not published a thing, he believed that one day my writing would be widely read. He compared me to great writers, feeding my insecure soul. I loved that he promised to be good to Alex and to take care of him as if he were his own son. But most of all I loved that he made everything seem possible. With Nikolai the future was bigger and more exciting than I could ever have imagined.
“Promise me something,” he said one morning over coffee.
“Anything,” I said, meeting his eyes.
“Tell me you’ll never leave me.”
The problem with his visa had unsettled him. He was worried about being separated from me.
“I won’t leave you,” I said. “I won’t leave. I’m here.”
“I can’t make it through this lifetime if you’re not at my side. I’ve lost you before. I can feel it. We were separated from each other in a different life, and this is our chance to make up for it. This is our lifetime together. We can’t waste it. Promise me.”
“I promise,” I said, wishing I could promise him more than one lifetime. I would give him five. I would give him a hundred. “I won’t ever leave you.”
After doing some reading on the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services Web site, Nikolai had decided that his best move would be to go back to Bulgaria, where he could change his visa status more easily. It was a simple bureaucratic matter, he said, one that could be quickly fixed in Sofia. But, he insisted, he wasn’t leaving the United States without me, and I wasn’t finished with my M.F.A. program until May.
“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I’d rather be illegal than to lose you.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Why don’t you come with me for the summer?” he said. “We’ll go when your program is done. The weather will be perfect then, and we can go to the Black Sea. We could use a vacation. There are almost no tourists then.”
The Fortress Page 2