“Halt or I’ll shoot!” the soldier screamed, but she laughed and clapped and neared. And so he fired, rat-tat-tat right at her feet, and the mud boiled with the rounds. And then he seemed to recognize her; she laughed louder, and before he knew it she was hanging on his neck and kissing his lips.
“Elif, you little shit,” he yelled in Bulgarian, and pushed her away so hard she almost plopped on her back. “You little, little shit,” or something to that effect.
But she was in his arms again.
“It’s good to see you too,” she said, and faced me. “You were adorable,” she said. “So cute!”
I tried to move, but couldn’t. The soldier had handcuffed me to the jeep and I hadn’t even noticed when.
NINE
THE MATCH IGNITED and its tiny flame spread through the pile of sticks and straw. Our lungs filled up with smoke and, coughing, we huddled by the fire. Light pushed back the night, and heat spread through my bones, slowly, the way a snake devours its prey. We were sitting on solid rock, surrounded by boulders and remnants of ancient walls—I on one side of the flame, Elif and the soldier on the other.
“I could’ve shot him dead,” the soldier had cried out only a few minutes earlier. “Damn it, Elif, I could’ve shot you dead!”
“What luck that’d be!” She’d reached for his rifle, but he had slapped her hand away. “Get in the jeep!” Unlocking my cuffs, he’d asked, “And you? Have you no head on your shoulders? Or do you do all that she says?”
“We came to see the ruins,” she told him later, from the front seat. We were flying through the brush and in the back I felt as though we’d thrown ourselves, voluntarily and irrevocably, toward the bottom of a dried-up well.
“And here I thought you’d come to see me,” he said, and stepped on the gas harder. She put her hand on his, switching gears, and rubbed his knuckles.
“No way,” he said. “Do you know what’ll happen if they catch me off my post? No way. I hate that place.” But then he yanked the hand brake. The jeep skidded and we flew in a different direction.
“Get out,” he ordered once we reached the bottom of a cliff face. And after that we followed him uphill, without the flashlight, the sky still plastered, but the clouds thin and radiant with moonlight. The cliffs had softened in their edge; the wind blew colder the higher we ascended and tossed at me now the smell of damp earth, now that of the soldier’s sour sweat. The path was slabs of rock, and in the distance atop the hill were boulders, like the rocks at our feet, arranged artificially, remnants of what most likely had once been a Byzantine fortress.
“So who are you?” the soldier asked me now by the fire. The mud on his cheeks had dried and fissured and made him look as ancient as the rocks, and tall as he was, he seemed himself to be a boulder.
I told him who I was. He told me he would have never guessed.
“You speak well,” he said, “no accent,” and Elif snickered.
His name was Orhan, he said, and he was in the third month of his twelve-month mandatory army service, in case I wondered. He lived in a village a couple of hills to the east and he’d been lucky to get a post here on the border.
“Luck in the form of seven rams,” Elif said, “which his father slaughtered for the members of the draft committee.”
Orhan laughed a hearty laugh and raked the fire with his army knife. “My heart still hurts. What loss!”
“You think he’s joking,” Elif said, though I was thinking nothing of the sort. “But this boy loves his sheep. Tell him about your dreams!”
Orhan shifted on the ground. He poked the fire some more, turning the blade, blowing the sparks away from his face and from Elif’s.
“They aren’t really dreams as much as plans,” he said at last, but softly, like he was afraid that merely uttering the words would ruin things. “I’d like to close the cycle, you know? Not just herd the sheep. I’d like to apply for European funding and with the money build a proper farm—a large roofed space for the animals, a feeding belt, machines to milk them…”
“And that’s his dream.” Elif laughed.
“More like my plan,” he said, and stabbed the flames some more. “Hey, now,” he said suddenly with a smile. “It’s a good plan. And if it works, Elif, I’ll bathe you in milk. I’ll roll for you the softest bed of wool.”
“Wool makes me itchy,” she said. “And I get bloated from milk. But I might take you all the same.” She leaned her head against his shoulder, her eyes on mine. A stick crackled; the flame loomed taller and seemed to lick her face.
“As if I want someone like you,” he said, laughing. “A hedgehog in my pants.”
There was a reason Elif had brought me here, beyond the prank, beyond just showing me some ancient rubble. I watched her, prettier than she had ever seemed now that her cheek was on his shoulder, and something hurt, deep in my jaw and in my teeth, the way it hadn’t hurt for any other girl. And I was certain she read my hurt, because a smile had forged of her lips a sickle.
“My American friend,” she said, still leaning. “I’ve got the medicine for you.” And then she fished a plastic Coke bottle, sixteen ounces, out of her jacket and tossed it through the flame. I took three hurried gulps of brandy that set my throat afire and kicked my mind off the hurt, if only for a while. I tossed the bottle to Orhan, but he allowed it to bounce off his chest into the flame, from where the yelping Elif pulled it out barehanded.
“I don’t drink,” Orhan told me, while she was cursing that the rakia had gone to waste.
“Orhan here drinks only milk and water,” Elif said, dusting off the ash from the bottle. Its label had melted, and its sides had morphed into an odd shape, half girl, half something else. “The flesh of pigs disgusts him. He prays five times a day and once, during Ramadan, he swallowed a fruit fly by accident and then was sick with guilt for a year. Spent it in the mosque, with my father, chatting about the greatness of Allah. I bet my father wishes Allah had sent him not me but Orhan for a child.” She spoke like this for a while, trying in vain to unscrew the cap, which the fire had sealed. And when she’d gotten tired, she snatched the knife from Orhan, stabbed the bottle in the throat, and cut the top away. “See what you did?” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she meant me, or Orhan, or both of us. “See how you left me no choice? But we will drink it all.” Then she tossed the cut-off plastic into the flame and, in a veil of fuming blackness, brought her lips to the jagged rim. “Hey, Orhancho,” she said, “I love you, but why you have to be so crazy?” and then, dropping the knife on the ground, she handed me the bottle through the flame. Some of the liquor sloshed when I took it; the fire hissed and thicker tongues shot up at the sky.
“Yeah, oh yeah,” Elif yelled, her voice bouncing distorted in the boulders. With a simple smile Orhan watched her run toward a rock and attempt to climb it. She threw pebbles at another rock, then tried to stride the remnants of a wall, flapping her arms on either side for balance.
“I worry that she will make a bad wife,” he said when she had sunk into the night, and only her yelping could be heard. I was just having another sip and after that I had another.
“Pardon?” I said in English, but he didn’t seem to hear.
“I feel it is my duty to correct her. To save her from the Sheytan. But still I worry she is more trouble than it’s worth.”
TEN
MORE THAN TWO AND A HALF MILLENNIA AGO, the priestesses of Dionysus tore piece by piece their sacrificial prey. “Right where you sit,” Elif said, and leaned closer to the flame so that her face ignited orange. “But there is more.”
Of course there was. And now that the rakia had untied her tongue she let it out with gusto. The year was 1981 and Bulgaria was celebrating thirteen hundred years since its founding. The Ministry of Culture, headed by none other than the daughter of the general secretary of the Communist Party, was proudly unveiling one monument after another, new palaces, new buildings all through the land. One day, amid the frantic celebrations, a man from the
Strandja Mountains showed up at the ministry’s gates. “Take me to the minister,” he demanded. “I’ve got something she must see.” And though his face was scrubby, his clothes ragged, dusty from the road, they rushed him right in. This man was Mustafa the Treasure Hunter, a man who knew his way not just through the hills of the Strandja, but also through her past; a man who’d helped the ministry discover more than a few cartloads of Ottoman and Thracian gold.
Now before the minister, behind the locked doors of her office, Mustafa pulled out a piece of cow hide. A map to a treasure the likes of which they’d never seen before.
“Ottoman?” the minister inquired. Mustafa shook his head. “Then Thracian?”
He shrugged. He wasn’t certain, but if the men from whom he’d bought the map could be believed the treasure was older still.
“Older than the Thracians?” The minister sneered.
“If the men can be believed.”
She didn’t bother asking what men these were. So that the treasure hunter would lead them to the ancient secrets, he had to be allowed to keep his own.
“She was a fine lady,” Elif said now of the minister of culture, and slurped rakia, half of which we’d already killed. “Even my father won’t say a bad word about her and when it comes to the Communists he doesn’t spare his curses. A cultured woman, he says. But her head, he says, wasn’t well screwed onto her shoulders. She was into that mysticism stuff. Flying to India; meditating days on end in a cave. Imagine this, the daughter of the general secretary of the Communist Party, eating nothing but bean sprouts and chatting with gurus? She was a rebel, like me. That’s why I like her.”
At this Orhan grunted. But he said nothing, only raked the fire with his knife and blew on the flame.
So what the minister of culture did with the treasure map was only the most logical thing she could do.
“She took the map to Baba Vanga. You know who Baba Vanga was, don’t you, amerikanche?”
Of course I did. What Bulgarian didn’t? One day when Vanga was a little girl, just after World War I had ended, a sudden twister of red desert sand picked her off the ground outside her village and carried her the way a thermal column carries a migrant stork. The peasants found her in a field, blind from the dust and sand. But though the twister had taken Vanga’s eyes, it had given her a different kind of sight. For decades, Baba Vanga was Bulgaria’s—no, Eastern Europe’s—most renowned clairvoyant. And so, quite naturally, the treasure map was brought for her to see.
But Baba Vanga refused to even touch the piece of hide. “It’s very bad,” she told her high-ranking visitors. A long, long time ago tall, strapping men had crossed the sea from Egypt. Men with black hair, and gold masks on their faces, and many slaves. The slaves dug a grave and buried in it a royal woman, and then were all put to the sword. The tomb was sealed and hidden. Inside it, to this day even, were chunks of gold and awesome riches, and in her coffin the royal woman lay. She held a scepter and rolled at her feet was a papyrus, which spoke of how things had been thousands of years back and how they would be, thousands of years in the future.
“Who was this woman?” I said. The wind had turned colder and so I huddled closer to the flame.
“Bastet,” Elif whispered. “The Egyptian goddess of cats.” She watched me a long time, without a word.
“Fuck off,” I said. “Get out of here.”
Orhan stirred. “It’s true. I mean, the Communists believed it true.” He looked about and over his shoulder, as if to make sure no Communist was there to hear him. “They started digging, right here in the ruins. My uncle told me of how the soldiers who dug the hole all got really sick. Their hair was falling off in handfuls.”
“And did they find anything?” I asked, so close to the fire now my eyes watered.
“Death,” said Elif. I tried to see if she was joking, but her face betrayed only pleasure—from being here, with me and with Orhan, from saying the things she said and watching me absorb them. “A month or so after the digs began, the minister died in suspicious circumstances. A number of key officials involved in the excavations took their lives. And those who didn’t die, the Committee for State Security locked away, for good.”
“After this the hole was sealed,” Orhan said. “My uncle tells me they poured concrete in it for fifteen hours straight. And that was that. Goodnight, I say, sweet dreams. Now let’s go back, before they’ve caught me off my post.”
But when he tried to stand, Elif pulled him down by the lapel.
“A coward,” she said. “That’s what you’ve always been. Learn from the American. He’s not afraid.”
“Oh yes, I am,” I said. But not because of her gibberish. And if she had caught the flash in Orhan’s eyes, she too would have grown fearful. Instead, she gently swept her palm across the rocky ground.
“I wonder what she looked like, this goddess of cats. I bet she drove men crazy with just the flitter of her lashes, the flick of her tail. Imagine, to be buried with such high honors. And then the slaves who dug your grave—all put to the sword. I bet it was the goddess who drove the Thracian women mad. I bet they came to dance here not in honor of drunk Dionysus, but in hers.”
Right there, could I see the trough the Thracians had dug in the rock? That’s where they mixed their sacred wine, and then they drank it, the naked, mad priestesses of the demented god. And tore to pieces the sacrificial goats. “And even men,” Elif said, and her eyes glistened. If the men were stupid enough to spy on their dances. “I bet you two are dumb enough,” she said, and laughed. “I bet you two would have been first in shreds.”
I guess by now she was pretty drunk. But so was I. Or else I would have told her to stop, if not for my sake, then for Orhan’s.
“My head’s started to hurt,” he said abruptly. “American, is your head hurting?” But he didn’t wait for my answer. “I hate this place. Never once have I seen a snake in the stones, a bird in the bush, a beetle in the dust. All living things hate it and stay away.”
“Well, I love it,” Elif said. “And you, like your whole family, are a coward.”
“Let’s go,” I said, and tried to stand up only to plop down on my ass again.
“We’re going nowhere,” she said. “You don’t have to act so that the coward may seem less like a coward. That’s what you are, Orhan. A mouse-heart, like your father.”
At this, he slapped her, a backhand slap that sent her tumbling to the side. Her lip glistened in the light of the fire and hungrily she licked it. “Big man you are, taking a girl like she was a sheep for bribes. I bet that rifle of yours, I bet you don’t even know how to shoot it properly.”
Oh yeah? he said, and grabbed the Kalashnikov. Oh yeah, she said, and waited for him to spring up to his feet. I watched them, hypnotized—him on one side of the fire, her on the other, their faces bloody with flowing flame. “American,” she called, “wake up! Where is the bottle of rakia?”
I pointed, not quite sure my finger was showing her the right direction. But all the same she found the bottle on the ground, and when she bent down to take it, she stumbled and fell. She dusted off her clothes, then picked up the bottle, in which some drink still remained.
“I’ll count ten paces,” she said. “One, two, ten. Then you shoot the bottle off my head. The real man you are. The brave.”
You think I won’t? he said. I think you can’t, she told him, and so he said, balance the bottle on your head and I will shoot it off, clean as a snowdrop. The safety of the rifle clicked, and while she was struggling to balance the bottle on her head, swaying this way and that, a deathly chill spread through my back and held me in its fist.
“The bottle is crooked,” she cried.
“Or are you afraid?”
Her laughter set my ears to buzzing. “Okay,” she yelped. “I’ll hold the bottle up. Like this. You shoot it off my hand.”
She held the rakia high, took tiny steps to counter her swaying; the soles of her shoes crunched against the sand and rock, the d
rink sloshed at the bottom of the bottle. Orhan jabbed the Kalashnikov against his shoulder and fixed his gaze through the sight.
“I bet you—” Elif began but didn’t finish. The rifle had expelled a single deafening bang that smashed the ruins, bounced back at us, then rolled off the cliffs and into the valley in waves of unfolding echo. The bottle was no longer in Elif’s hand. Her hand, however, was luckily still there. Spilled rakia glistened on her sweaty face and on the short locks of hair.
I called her, but she didn’t hear.
Anyone could be brave, she said, rubbing her eyes, when he was on the safe side of the barrel. Let’s see how he braved the death side. Oh, was that right? Orhan called. They’d come face-to-face now, and he shoved the Kalashnikov in her hands.
“I hold my canteen up and you shoot it. Five paces!”
“Ten,” she said.
“Make it fifteen!” He unlatched the canteen from his belt and held it up, like a conqueror toasting a victory. “American,” he barked, “she’s too drunk to count. Count fifteen paces for her.”
“American, don’t move!” she ordered. “I can. Alone.”
One, two, three. He held the canteen up while fifteen paces away through the night she stabbed the rifle against her shoulder. She swayed this way and that and I’m certain she would have shot him dead, if it weren’t for me stifling her in my embrace.
There was no Let me go! Get off of me! Instead, she closed her eyes serenely and pressed her cheek against my shoulder. A light burning breath fled her lips and we swayed together in the dark silence before her laugh. Next I looked, Orhan had snatched the Kalashnikov and locked the safety.
He too was laughing. “American, I owe you one.” From this day on, he said, he was forever bound to me. Whatever I asked of him, no matter how daring, he’d do it.
I swung to square him in the jaw, to drop him to the ground, to knock him out. Instead, I buried my nose in the dirt and they were laughing. The kind of hate I felt for him, for her, was new, unfelt before. And for a fleeting moment, I think I liked it.
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