The next time I paid attention to my mother’s wooden trunk was an evening in December, many years later, when I was twenty years old and back home from college. It was dark outside, and snow had fallen in drifts over the driveway. My mother and I were wrapping Christmas presents together in her bedroom, and she opened the wooden trunk, looking for some special ribbon she’d tucked away. I recognized the smell of cedar and dust, scents I hadn’t known how to name as a child. Now I could identify the climbing flowers—they were lilies—and I understood that the trunk didn’t resemble a coffin at all. Looking inside as an adult, I saw that the contents had changed—instead of linens and china cups, there were stacks of report cards, my brother’s high-school letter jacket, a trophy my sister had won playing basketball, a watercolor I’d painted in eleventh grade, every one of our school portraits from kindergarten through graduation preserved in slips of plastic. Every moment of glory her kids had experienced, she’d stashed away in the trunk.
“Where did you get this?” I asked her, running a finger over the varnished edge. “You’ve had it forever.”
“Haven’t I told you about my hope chest before?” she asked.
I must have made a strange face—the kind of face a young woman makes at her mother when the subject wavers toward certain subjects. “Hope chest?” I asked. “Hope for what?”
“You know,” she said, her face turning slightly pink, as if she anticipated my criticism before it came. “Marriage. Kids. Life.”
I gave her a look that said, You’ve got to be kidding.
“Well, these kinds of things were much more common when I was young!” Mom said, ready to defend herself from me, something she had to do with some frequency. I was always looking to define myself against her, always searching for the ways that we were different, turning her into a mirror I could fracture, even if it cut us both in the smash-up.
Mom said, “I worked at the Elite candy shop making caramels on the weekends and saved up for it. After I’d bought it, I filled it with all the things I wanted to have when I was married—pretty sheets and tablecloths, that kind of thing. I bought the china dishes piece by piece—a cup here, a saucer there—until I had the entire set. It’s a shame. The pattern was discontinued. If I break something, I can’t replace it.” She met my eye. “Don’t look at me that way, young lady!”
“It’s like you grew up in Victorian England,” I said, thinking myself free of my mother’s preconceptions about what it meant to be a woman, free of the need to “hope” for anything, let alone a husband.
“It wasn’t so long ago that girls did things like that,” she replied, closing the lid of the hope chest softly. There was a hint of sadness in her voice, a subtle acknowledgment that the hopes of her younger self and the realities of love were two very different things. “If you were born in the fifties, you might have had a hope chest, too.”
It wasn’t until later that I understood that I did, in fact, have a hope chest of my own. Not of wood, not locked up and hidden under stacks of quilts, but a hope chest nonetheless, one filled with dreams about my life. I believed in romance and destiny. I believed in love at first sight. I believed that when I found the right person, time would stop and we would be suspended in a state of endless passion. There was no place in my hope chest for disappointment or failure. There was no place for imperfection or broken promises or compromise. And while my hope-chest ideas might have had all the trappings of a good romance, they didn’t have the capacity to hold real love.
—
ON LONG, HOT August afternoons, the village closed down for a siesta. From two to four o’clock each day, the pharmacy and the boulangerie and the tabac locked their doors. The streets were silent, as if the whole village were holding its breath, waiting for the blazing sun to pass by. That first summer we lived in the village, my wired American self couldn’t quite sync with the rhythm of the south of France. I would gather up my packages and walk to the post office after lunch, only to find the door locked. I’d look across the plaza at Le Bar de la Renaissance and find all the tables empty. Aubais was a ghost town, baking in the heat. With time, I understood that there was no sense in staying awake during the afternoon, and I began to take a nap after lunch, stripping down to panties and a tank top and crawling between the cool cotton sheets.
At first I would toss and turn, thinking of all the things I should be doing, making mental lists, the electricity in my mind unstoppable. I hadn’t taken naps since I was five years old, and I remembered how desperately I’d fought against them back then. I’d always resisted the slow dissolve of my consciousness in the murky solution of dreams. I would lie in bed, close my eyes, and soon my mind would begin to drift.
I never slept peacefully. It felt as though I lay suspended between two worlds. If I dreamed, my mind filled with strange, amorphous terrors. Murder and torture and missing limbs. Iron maidens and Judas cradles and racks. I hadn’t had dreams like these before, and I wondered if they were inspired by the books I was reading about the Knights Templar, and their gruesome end. I began to understand that these phantoms arose from the depths of the house, lifting through the stone floors, seeping into my mind like a noxious gas. I dreamed of rats scurrying through dark dungeons and children trapped in towers. I felt the Knights Templar crawling below me, scratching their way through secret tunnels. I dreamed of Nazis sleeping in the corridors and resistance fighters trapped in oubliettes bored into the rock. I dreamed of the previous owner’s wife, who—I learned after we moved into La Commanderie—had died of cancer in the house. She was waiting for me at the bottom of the steep stone stairway, her arms open wide.
But one dream in particular haunted me, a recurrent dream in which a baby—not my child, but someone’s child—had wandered onto the roof of La Commanderie and was walking timorously over the clay tiles toward the edge. As the child came closer and closer to the ledge, I tried to reach it, to save it, but the end was always the same: No matter how I tried, the baby fell. I was powerless. I could never stop its inexorable, gravity-bound end. I came to see the baby as my family, and the feeling of helplessness—the wrenching horror I felt as the baby stumbled toward its death—my fear of losing what I most loved.
I would wake in a panic, my heart racing, my body trembling, a scream balled in my throat like a wet sock. I was thankful to come back to the real world, to my world, where nothing terrible had happened, where there was nothing to be afraid of. Where harm was just a figment of the mind.
—
IT WASN’T LONG after we moved into La Commanderie that Nikolai started wearing all black—black jeans, black T-shirt, black socks, black shoes. He found a black top hat in a junk shop in Lunel and started wearing it around the courtyard. He was so monochromatic that sometimes when he sat in the courtyard playing chess, it seemed to me that he’d materialized from the shade of our micocoulier, the majestic hackberry tree that loomed overhead. In the summer it dropped a minefield of berries over the courtyard. Walking barefoot, I would pop purple juice over the hot flagstones, staining my feet wine-dark. In the fall it shed its dry, yellow leaves and Alex and Nico would rake them into a pile, covering Fly and watching him shake himself free.
Some nights we spent hours under the tree, sitting around the long wooden table with friends, eating, talking, drinking wine, arguing about whatever was in the news. The people we invited for dinner were never from Aubais, and rarely from the Midi. They were all foreigners like us: expats from Australia or England or Belgium, Americans on holiday for a few weeks, French couples who had moved south from Paris for the weather. Several times a month, we formed a collective of happy outcasts gathered around a country feast, our wineglasses sweating in the heat, plates of sliced tomatoes and olives before us, the star-filled sky expanding overhead. The micocoulier’s branches spread at just the right angle to hang a plastic chandelier, and so we rigged one up, leaving a watery glow to fall gently from above, twinkling over the linen napkins, making patterns on the Provençal tablecloth. The fo
od and wine and conversation acted as a fixing agent and some nights it felt like time had stopped. On those nights we lived in an eternal present. The cooling air, with its smell of wet chalk and rosemary, would never blow through to morning.
But alone in our courtyard, time barreled ahead. Shaded from the afternoon sun, we sat together, drinking glasses of Perrier with ice and lime. Bottled at the source in Vergèze just ten minutes from us, Perrier was the local water, and we drank it by the caseload. Every once in a while, Nikolai would wander into the house, where he would sit down at the Yamaha baby grand and play a piece of something that had been going through his head. The piano was my gift to him, bought with money from the sale of my novel, and I was rewarded daily with short interludes of music. Nikolai played for a minute or two before returning to the chessboard. The music had cleared his mind. He was ready to make his next move.
When Nikolai played chess, everything else faded. He noticed nothing in the courtyard, not Fly as he terrorized the cats, not me pulling up a chair to sit by his side. In the dreamspace of the match, only the chess pieces existed, only the strategy. He could go on for hours, setting up openings and endings, mapping the middle game, sipping coffee as he planned his victories. He played speed chess on his phone when he needed to relax and live chess matches on the Internet on his laptop, locking himself away in his office for hours at a time only to emerge red-eyed, hungry, jumpy with adrenaline.
I didn’t play chess, or any other game that involved abstract victories. For me, writing was a high-stakes game I waged every time I sat at my desk. I didn’t feel triumph in complicated openings and endgames, but in the weight of just-written pages in my hands. I craved tangible rewards, quantifiable proof of my effort. This is how I was raised, the practical midwesterner who needed to hold the result of her labor, to capture it like a butterfly between plates of glass, lift it to the sunlight to marvel at the color of imagination made solid.
Glancing at Nikolai’s chessboard, I saw a rook and a knight and a queen. I saw the bishop, and I saw the pawns. The cast was there, each character in position. I watched my husband pick up the black king and roll it between his fingers. He tipped the piece in his hand, considering his options, and then, with a decisive gesture, pinned the white queen. A look of surprise passed over his features, as if the move startled him, as if he hadn’t predicted the elegance of the play. The white queen was trapped between the black king and a small but very significant pawn. Something in my mind grew alert as I watched him, as if the move were meant to warn me: Beware, in the labyrinth it is easy to lose one’s way.
Enceinte
A number of surprises awaited me when we arrived in Sofia in May 2002.
First, I learned that Nikolai’s visa situation was much more complicated than I had originally believed. It turned out that his J-1 visa was nonrenewable, and he was required to spend two full years in Bulgaria before he could reenter the United States. Second, Nikolai’s job teaching Tibetan at the University of Sofia paid about 250 leva per month, the equivalent of 125 U.S. dollars. And third, I was pregnant.
With these three pieces of information, the landscape of my visit to Bulgaria shifted. I had left home believing we would spend the summer in Eastern Europe, but it was now clear that we would be in Bulgaria for much longer than expected, two years minimum. His fears about being trapped in Bulgaria were realized: We were pinned.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” he said. He was furious about the visa restriction.
“But they must have told you about the restrictions when you got the visa,” I said.
“I wouldn’t have accepted the J-1 if I’d known I was agreeing to a prison term in Bulgaria,” he insisted. “There must be a mistake. I’m sure they’ll let me out of it if we go to the embassy and talk to them. You’re an American citizen, after all. They’ll take you seriously.”
We did some reading online and discovered that we could get around the J-1’s two-year requirement by asking for a visa waiver. “As an American citizen, you’ll have more pull with them than I will,” he said, a strain of bitterness in his voice. “Especially now that you’re pregnant.”
He put together a dossier of information about his visa, and we went down to the U.S. embassy together, where we spoke to a visa counselor about my pregnancy and our impending marriage. We’d decided that it would be better if I did the talking. Nikolai sat at my side, silent.
“I’ve just found out that I’m pregnant,” I explained to the woman behind the desk. “And I’d like to have the baby in the States.”
She looked at my navy blue American passport. “But you’re free to go back,” she said. “You have no restrictions.”
Of course I knew I could go home if I wanted, but the prospect of being a pregnant and unemployed single mother with no health care was daunting, to say the least. I’d spent the last ten years trying be independent of my parents, and I couldn’t imagine asking them to take me in now.
“But the baby’s father is here,” I pointed out. “He has to stay in Bulgaria for two years. Am I supposed to go back alone?”
“You can always return here after the baby is born,” she said sympathetically. “I’m afraid that is about all I can suggest.”
She went on to explain that the two-year homestay requirement was strict, that Nikolai had agreed to it before he took the visa, and that we could apply for a waiver, but it was highly unlikely that one would be approved. “The only cases in which I’ve seen someone get past the two-year homestay requirement is in cases of extreme illness, when there’s a verifiable need to be treated by doctors in the United States.”
We left the embassy, walked out past the concrete blockades and the armed guards, and sat on a bench.
“How could you be so wrong about this?” I asked him, still trying to get my mind around it all. One minute we were going on vacation, the next we were relocating to Bulgaria.
“This isn’t my fault—you know that, don’t you?” he asked. “If I’d known, I would have come to the States on a tourist visa, or I would have applied for a DS-160 or an F-1.”
Suddenly Nikolai was conversant in visa types and numbers and requirements. He hadn’t seemed to know any of this back in Iowa City.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. I was beginning to feel the walls closing in, the drawbridge lifting, the portcullis clanking shut.
“We’ll have to stay,” he said, running his fingers through his thick hair.
“Stay? How? Do you honestly believe we can survive on one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month from your teaching? And what about Alex? He needs to go to preschool in the fall. And I need to apply for jobs back home. I can’t spend two years here. This is totally crazy.”
“They shouldn’t be able to do this. It should be illegal.”
“But you did this,” I said. “You agreed to this requirement when you accepted your visa.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “If they told me, I didn’t understand.” He took my hand. “You believe me, don’t you?”
I looked into his eyes for a long moment. “Of course,” I said. “Of course I believe you.” And I did believe, believed the way a convert believes in the untouchable, wholly unverifiable grace of the beyond. Love required blind faith, and despite the fact that I weighed what he said against the reality of what I saw, and it did not match up, I believed him.
He must have understood how bad it all looked, because he grasped me by the shoulders, gazed deep into my eyes, and said, “Please don’t leave. Don’t go back the United States without me. I hate it here. This is my worst nightmare. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
Seeing him in such distress was too much for me. “I’m not going to leave,” I said, pulling him close. “I’m not going to leave when things get hard.”
“I love you,” he said. “As long as we’re together, we’ll be fine. Let me handle the money problem. I’ll take care of everything.”
—
WE LIVED I
N one of his parents’ apartments in Sofia, on the top floor of a building near the Russian embassy, in a part of town called Izgreva, an exclusive neighborhood with a sweeping view of the Vitosha mountains. During Communism only the highest of party officials, and those connected to them, had apartments in Izgreva. Our apartment had once belonged to Nikolai’s paternal grandfather, Nester, who’d been a towering man of six feet five inches, a staunch Communist, and friend of Todor Zhivkov, the head of the Communist Party, whose life he had once saved.
Yana, Nikolai’s beautiful, dark-haired mother, and Ivan, his brilliant father, were warm and generous people who welcomed Alex and me into their family without question. I liked Nikolai’s parents right away. They were all the things that my parents weren’t: over-educated professionals who loved music and art and literature and traveling, their dinner-table conversations filled with highbrow references, passionate discussions of philosophy and art and books. They were part of an elite, and they carried themselves that way.
I couldn’t have come from more different circumstances. I had scratched my way out of my working-class background and, while I was educated and accomplished in my own right, I felt a gaping rift between Nikolai’s past and my own. His parents had always expected that he would “amount to something.” If it wasn’t piano, it would be something else. There were no such expectations in my family. For me, going to college was an act of rebellion, a turning-away from what I had known. I had pushed myself to do more, to learn more, to feel more, and to see more because I knew that I had missed so many of the beautiful things people like Nikolai took for granted. I wanted to fit into his world. I wanted my son—and the baby we would soon have—to grow up in such an environment.
The Fortress Page 4