The taxi driver—a large man with an enormous mustache and a barely disguised delight in the opportunity to practice his English on a young American woman—drove me to the Hotel Orford in Batak, Bulgaria, the beginning point of Jack’s grandfather’s journal. During the drive, he told me he doubted the Hotel Orford would have accommodations.
“Too many dancers. It is the Surva Festival. Everyone, from all the region, they come to the dancing. They wear masks. You know this reputation? This town? The people hear Nazis coming, they look up at the mountain, and they dance. Crazy peoples, they dance in the face of death. It is very photo worthy.”
“What do you recommend?” I asked. “Where could I stay?”
“Hard to say—depends. What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure. Just a room of any sort.”
“Sometimes families … you understand, families? Sometimes they rent rooms for rent. They post them on a board—paper on a board.”
“Bulletin boards?”
He nodded emphatically.
“Yes, messages.”
“When does the dancing begin?”
“It’s already begun. Everyone dance. They dance for three days. Some people, they rent out their cars to sleep. It is still cold at night. We have snow up in the mountains.”
I surveyed everything as we entered the town. The village wasn’t big, I knew. The population was only about four thousand people, maybe fewer, but the town had obviously swollen to accommodate the festivalgoers. The streetlamps and buildings and stairways wore festoons of pine and spring flowers, and now and then I spotted what had to be a dancer carrying an outsized papier-mâché head, usually painted in bright, outlandish colors. The masks invariably wore terrifying faces; they reminded me of Mardi Gras masks, only more primitive and more connected, somehow, to the deep forests surrounding the town.
“Is it going to snow?” I asked, wondering, halfheartedly, if I could sleep out. “Do you know the weather report?”
He buzzed his lips in reply. Who knows? He didn’t know, certainly.
As we drove a little deeper into the town, I began to feel triumphant. I was a madwoman; it was that simple. I had no idea if Jack was in fact here. Even if he was, I reflected, I couldn’t be certain of finding him. He might come for a day, then leave before I ever saw him. But I had done the first truly impulsive thing in my entire life. I hadn’t weighed it out, determined the proper course of action, made careful calculations. For once in my life, I had acted on my gut, taken a flyer, followed my heart. Jack had taught me that; Jack had made such freedom possible. Whatever else he had meant or been to me, he had unlocked something inside me that had been rusted and clotted with disuse. He had given me hope and taught me to trust that life held surprises if you allowed it to reveal itself. You did not clutter it with camera shots and Facebook postings. You gave yourself to the situation. That was Jack’s great lesson.
The driver, meanwhile, cruised slowly past the village square. Police had lined off a large area with yellow tape. Dancers had already begun to collect. Many wore large strings of cowbells around their necks, and the noise increased the deeper we penetrated the square.
“I can get out here,” I told the driver. “This is probably as good as anyplace, isn’t it?”
“Yes, good, yes,” he said, navigating the foot traffic that swirled everywhere.
“Those are the dancers?”
“Everyone is a dancer in Batak. It is everyone’s job to end the winter and promise a good spring.”
“Yes,” I said, watching everything. “Yes, of course it is.”
The noise of the bells increased the moment I stepped out of the car. Dancers arriving in the square jumped up and down, or moved in spins to get their bells to ring. Most of the dancers were young, but not all. A light snow had begun to fall. I glanced up at the sky. It didn’t appear to threaten a true storm; the snow seemed to fall with reluctance, drifting down in the gray atmosphere. The surrounding buildings had already turned on their lights against the early evening.
I stood for a long time as the cab pulled away. I didn’t move.
I watched the dancers congregate—large masks of fanged lions, dragons, terrifying canine faces and wild, engorged children—and I wondered if I had not entered a nightmare. But the expressions on the festivalgoers’ faces saved me: they were lighthearted and happy, and it was clear that this was a cultural event that carried with it a great deal of merrymaking. Jack’s grandfather had come here after the war, and I could imagine the pleasure he had taken in the celebration, in the village’s determination to drive back the darker human forces. And the crazy peoples, as the driver said, had in fact danced in the face of death. I had read about that. The night before the Germans invaded and took over the town, the villagers could think to do nothing more forceful but to dance. I knew that from Jack’s grandfather’s journal.
For what felt a long time, I didn’t move. I waited—I hoped—for the music to infect me. I wanted its primitive pull to take me over, but I could not give in to it yet. I envied the dancers. They seemed to let everything go, to join with the music, to swirl their cowbells at the dark mountains. I had never learned to let go in that way. Jack had been teaching me to do it, but I hadn’t been able to take the final step.
That’s what I thought standing in the town common in Batak, Bulgaria.
Then, as quickly, I realized that I was cold.
54
“It is not much,” Mr. Roo said.
I didn’t know if I had heard his name correctly. Mr. Roo? Mr. Kangaroo? Surely, I thought, the name meant something more. I had heard it indistinctly when he had introduced himself. Now I followed him down a long hallway that smelled of cabbage and snow and cat. It seemed to be an apartment house of some sort, but even that was hard to determine. Outside, the noise of the cowbells filled everything with cacophonous sound. Mr. Roo—a man with an enormous stomach plow and deep, sympathetic eyebrows—turned back to me and tried unsuccessfully to talk over the noise. He held up his finger to tell me to wait.
Mr. Roo wore a blue work shirt and a black boiled wool vest tucked into his pants. He struck me as the Eastern European character actor who holds a lantern at the inn and warns against going in the mountains toward Dracula’s castle. But he seemed pleased to have me as a guest, and as he led me down a second hallway, this one more removed from the clamor of the bells, he explained the building’s history.
“In another day, a military barracks. A dormitory. You understand? Small rooms. Just cot beds. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“We charge a lot for such rooms, more than is should, but we cannot help it.”
“It’s festival,” I said, agreeing.
I thought of Hemingway attending the bullfights in Pamplona, drinking from sunrise to sunset, drifting from bar to bar, but this festival had a different feeling. It took place in the mountains, in what the guidebooks called the great karst areas with deep river gorges, large caves, and carved sculptured rock formations where the spirits of winter hid until the spring dancers frightened them back to their frozen lands. Hemingway celebrated death in life; the Surva Festival asked for life in death. It made a difference, somehow, but I could not yet determine what that might be.
Mr. Roo opened the door to my room.
“Simple,” he said, holding open the door.
Primitive might have been a more accurate word, but the room suited me. He had not misled me: it was an eight-by-ten box with a gray painted floor, a cot with a wool blanket tucked over it, a single pillow, and a yellow table and chair pushed against the far wall. It had no heat that I could detect. A fair-sized window looked out onto a courtyard. I liked the look of the window: it let in the gray afternoon light, and I watched the snow drift like moths into the air below me.
“Good?” Mr. Roo asked me.
“Fine,” I said.
A look of relief spread over his face. It occurred to me that perhaps he had been slightly embarrassed
to show a foreigner the humble accommodations he offered. Now with that settled, he turned on the overhead light and showed me how to put a coin into a small heater on the wall. The heater resembled a Cupid face, with an innocent pouting mouth that spewed heat once the coin had been digested. Mr. Roo stood with his hands out to the heater as if he had just ignited a magnificent campfire. I decided that I liked Mr. Roo, and if he told me not to take the carriage to Dracula’s castle, I would heed his warning.
“Better?” he asked as I swung my backpack down onto the yellow table.
“Better,” I said.
“Do you know the mountain history?”
I shook my head.
“Rhodopa and Hemus—very famous. They were brother and sister. Then they began to desire one another. Very wrong. Because they were beautiful, they called each other by god names. Zeus and Hera. You understand?”
“I do,” I said.
“Day come, and the real Zeus and Hera, they become disenchanted with Rhodopa and Hemus, say it was wrong to use the god names. So, poof, the real Zeus and Hera, they turn the young brother and sister into mountains. That is Bulgaria.”
“Jealous gods,” I said.
The room had become warm in just the time it took Mr. Roo to tell the story. It made me sleepy. Mr. Roo smiled.
“I leave you now. We serve soup at seven o’clock. Good soup. You sleep now. I can see you need to.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I’m tired from traveling.”
“Of course you are. When you travel, your soul … how is it? It is up in the air.”
“And when you are home?”
“We believe here that your soul is divided and that half it lives in your native soil!” Mr. Roo said, laughing. “When you are in your own country, your feet can find the soul beneath, and it is whole. But when you travel, you are a half soul. You believe such things?”
“I believe everything,” I said, feeling that I needed to lie down or faint.
Mr. Roo bowed, nodded, and went out. I closed the door behind him after agreeing, again, that I might come down for soup. The room felt warm and smelled faintly of a gaseous discharge that came from the Cupid face heater. I wondered, absently, if the heater could kill me with carbon monoxide if it didn’t function properly. I imagined it could.
I went to the cot and stretched out on it. I wanted to cry, but I was too stunned, too out of my element, to permit even that slight weakness. If I gave in to that, I realized, I might run up into the hills to conspire with the winter spirits. I might live in the karsts and grow moss in my hair and live among savage stone and quivering pines. I reflected, as I fell toward sleep, that the dancers did not dance to chase the spirits away but danced instead to mock them for what they could not have.
* * *
I woke in the last light of day, and I did not know where I was. I was cold; I knew that much. I shivered and pulled the wool blanket around me, then remembered that Mr. Roo showed me how to use the heater. I stood with the blanket still draped over me and dug in my backpack until I found a few coins. The currency was strange to me, so for a moment or two I bent over to inspect them. I imagined, as I did so, how I would appear to anyone watching: a strange, hair-tousled woman wrapped in an olive military blanket, standing in the last light of day going through her coins. It was not an inspiring image.
It took me three coins to get the Cupid heater blowing air at me. I held my hands out to the tiny mouth, just as Mr. Roo had done. Then I crawled back into bed.
For a long time, I commanded myself to do nothing, think nothing, until I was at least marginally warm. That seemed like a good way to approach things: take one small thing at a time and accomplish it. First, make myself warm. Second, maybe, go eat soup. Third, figure out what insane impulses had led me to flying to Batak on such an absurd whim. To do the last thing required serious introspection, so I put that aside and concentrated on soup.
What kind of soup? I wondered. Beet soup, probably. Something made of root vegetables and onions and dark, smothering water. No, not smothering water, but mountain water, water that drained from the winter spirits’ baths, water that flowed like roots down from the karsts to the village square. That was the kind of soup Mr. Roo would serve.
Thinking of soup satisfied me for a time. The heat gradually took over the room. I tried to guess what time it could be. My phone lay on the desk across the room, and that seemed an insurmountable distance. But I forced myself to climb out of bed and grab it. I fell back in bed, this time letting out a small oomph as I gave in to gravity.
It was 6:37. Approximately twenty minutes to soup.
I dialed Amy’s number on my phone but canceled the call before it went through. I sent her a text instead and said I had arrived safely, I was okay, all was well. I told her the place was astonishing, smiley face, smiley face, smiley face.
55
Potato-leek soup.
Mr. Roo and a nameless woman—she wore a blue putzfrau dress like the ones the washing women wore in Berlin and Vienna and Kraków—ladled out bowls of potato-leek soup for the clientele in his sparsely populated dining room. To call it a dining room, however, was being generous. It was a large gray room with refectory tables. Its only saving grace was a ponderous woodstove that burned in the corner of the room. It was the kind of woodstove with open doors, so that it doubled as a fireplace, and the light from the burn filled the room with golden flickers.
I took my bowl of soup from the nameless woman—Mr. Roo’s wife, his sister, his mother?—and carried it to an open chair beside the woodstove. Mr. Roo passed around the room with a plate of black bread. I took a piece, and I could not help being reminded of communion. The soup was too hot to eat. I held it in my lap and let it soak me with heat.
“Warm?” Mr. Roo asked on his second round in an attempt, I imagined, to make me comfortable.
“Warm,” I said, although whether he meant the heater upstairs or my spot in front of the woodstove I couldn’t tell.
Eventually, the soup cooled, and I ate it. I was hungry, and the soup was quite good. It tasted of onions and summer lawns. Mr. Roo gave me a second piece of bread. I ate that, too. In some ways, it was easier to eat than to think. Thinking meant I had to decide on a course of action. My inclination was to climb back up to my Spartan room and sleep the night away. I felt exhausted and confused. My plan to come to find Jack in Bulgaria now seemed so impulsive, so demonstrably ridiculous, that I wondered how Amy hadn’t thrown me down on the ground and tied me up to prevent me from leaving Paris. But she had accepted my assurances—Honest, Amy, he has to be there, that’s where the journal begins, I swear it makes sense if you know Jack, if you’ve read his grandfather’s work—and I had been so intent on persuading her that I had persuaded myself.
“Are you going to watch them burn the old man?” Mr. Roo asked when he began clearing plates. The other diners had wandered off. I sat alone in front of the fire.
“Burn the old man?” I asked, not understanding.
“Old Man Winter. They carry him to the square and burn him. Then spring can come down out of the mountains.”
That will be warm, I thought. My world had suddenly become binary: warm or not warm.
“Is there a way to find someone in the festival? To leave a message for someone?” I asked.
Mr. Roo leaned his rear end on one of the tables and looked at me.
“You okay?” he asked.
I shrugged. I needed to shrug or cry.
“I need to find someone here,” I said when I had my emotions under control.
“A lost boy?”
Yes, I thought, smiling at the mention of lost boys, the wild boy-men of Peter Pan. “A lost boy.”
Mr. Roo gave it some thought, but when he pushed himself off the table he merely smiled and reached for my bowl.
“It’s chaos,” he said, “the festival, so you can never know what you will find. Or what will find you. But sometimes the gods remember us. Go out and look. What do you have to lose?”
* * *
Old Man Winter had a tough ride.
I watched him coming—held up by a winding procession that spanned two city blocks or so—on a decrepit dining chair carried aloft by a team of large men. Old Man Winter was a scarecrow, but a well-crafted one, with a wry smile somehow inked across his face. He looked to be at least as tall as a normal man, and he wore a suit coat with a boutonniere sticking out from his lapel. The men transporting him wore formal top hats and had their faces painted white. I had no idea what symbolic importance the top hats or white faces played, but I was willing to go along.
I wanted to go along.
I wanted to feel myself swept up and carried along, much as Old Man Winter was carried, to some burning conclusion that would cauterize the memory of Jack from my brain once and for all. The cowbells rang with wild energy, and their sounds reverberated against the old walls of the city, and for a while they chased even the simplest thought from my head. I stood on an avenue, squeezed back into a shop door, watching the procession dance by, the hilarity and drunkenness—I smelled a vaporous tinge of alcohol, like a great wave of corn and wheat as the crowd surged and danced—exploding in small clusters as the revelers passed. When the last of the procession had tailed out into the common, I fell in behind, determined to watch the Old Man meet his fate.
That’s where things stood when I saw Jack.
Where I thought I saw Jack. Where Jack floated out of the crowd for an eyeblink, then disappeared again.
The Map That Leads to You Page 28