The Shadow Land

  “You are the one who saves wild dogs,” he told her a little sourly, and wiped his eyes.

  Irina was leaning toward them. “My dears,” she said. “This friend taught me much of what I know about painting. And he is still a great artist. Also, he is more intelligent than I am, so he chooses to paint only people. He always tells me that I have no real focus, but he likes my animals.”

  After a few minutes, a middle-aged woman in a tracksuit and a flowered apron brought them a tray that held glasses, a bottle of clear liquid, and a plate of sliced white cheese and salami.

  Atanas Angelov poured for them all and raised his own glass to make a toast. “Nazdrave!” Angelov’s glass made its way clinking around the circle, and when he reached Alexandra he bowed from the waist.

  “To health,” Bobby explained. The liquid went down with a severe burn; Alexandra coughed. “Don’t!” Bobby said. “This is rakiya, grape brandy. Like at lunch today. You take just a little, then a little more.”

  After that she sipped, and the walls of the room relaxed around her. Irina’s red-rimmed eyes were shining. Soon dinner dishes came in, carried by the woman in the tracksuit and the son in his socks. Alexandra felt that she had never before been part of such a charmed circle—these people, strangers, greeting her as a long-awaited guest, the old artist presiding as if nothing had pleased him this much in years. She wondered when they could ask him about the urn. The artist put Alexandra at his right hand, with Bobby beside her, and sat questioning Bobby about something. She caught the word taksi, and also ecologiya.

  Irina, perhaps sensing Alexandra’s alcoholic drift in a sea of Bulgarian, brought the conversation to a halt. “Now! Gospodin Angelov is not only a great painter, but also a great reader of people. Nasko—” she raised her forefinger in the old man’s direction—“tell me what you see in this young woman. When you look at her.”

  Angelov set down his fork and turned to Alexandra. He sat forward and lowered his glasses on his nose. He gazed into her face for several long seconds, almost close enough to kiss her. Alexandra held her breath, in case.

  “Beautiful, of course,” he said.

  She hadn’t understood that he spoke any English. But he switched back to Bulgarian at once and Irina interpreted for him, magisterially. His eyes were brown and soft, with a sheen like fine wood.

  “Sweet-natured,” he said, “but impatient under that. Gentle, but capable of—causing great harm, if she is not careful. Unintentional harm. Sometimes very sad.” Alexandra held his gaze as well as she could. “Young for a person of her years, although also wise from sorrow.” Irina nodded.

  Angelov put up a finger and touched Alexandra’s forehead. “Always thinking. Thinking too much, and then sometimes not enough. You read a lot of books, yes? Soon you will learn from other sources, the real springs of life. And you will live to be very old.”

  Then the painter gave Alexandra a hearty kiss on the forehead, where his hand had been. She could feel the dryness of his lips. “A mountain of contradictions.”

  Alexandra tried not to give way to her discomfort, or at least not to show it. How had he known that she was secretly an agent of damage, that she had already caused great harm? She had hoped for something very different—the detection of genius, for example, or the prediction of a magnificent future. She felt Bobby smiling, his ironic twitch.

  “Gospodin—” She hesitated. “Gospodin Atanas, could you look at my friend’s face and tell us what you see there, too?”

  Bobby grinned at her but sat still under the artist’s gaze.

  “Translate for me, Bobby,” Alexandra said wickedly.

  Atanas Angelov was leaning forward in his chair, staring hard, fists on knees. He could have been in his studio, Alexandra thought, before a model and a canvas. The rest of the room seemed to have faded from his view.

  “Da, interesno,” he said at last. Then he added a lot else, in Bulgarian.

  “Bobby, tell me,” prompted Alexandra.

  Bobby reddened a little. “He says that my face is an unusual one. Slavic, not Bulgar, whatever that means. The face of—a revolutionary. Under that”—he shifted on the bench—“the face of a lover. A lover of life, not people. A philosopher. Complicated.” He quoted then: “ ‘He will never belong to any woman.’ ”

  Bobby did not meet her eyes, but he fixed Angelov unflinchingly. “ ‘His fate—well—’ ” Bobby paused, and Alexandra saw that Angelov himself had looked away. “He says, ‘Not everyone has good fortune. But he will leave a mark.’ ”

  Alexandra regretted her request. It was better, she thought, to be told one was to be a long-lived mountain of contradictions than to receive such an ambiguous sentence. She stroked Bobby’s upper arm, uninvited, left her fingers there.

  “Nasko,” said Irina. “Do stop. You’re scaring the children. Look at them.”

  Angelov clapped his hands. “Sorry! Sorry!” he said in English. “Old men—me—” He gestured helplessly, humorously. “Stupid. Now we will eat.”

  —

  AFTER THE MEAL, ANGELOV brought them into his studio. It was on the second floor, so that the view was even more stupendous; Alexandra wondered how he could stand there painting people all day with his back turned to those vistas. She saw a canvas in progress, facing a low pedestal for a model. With a little shock, she realized that the woman half-painted before them was unmistakably the one who had served them their dinner and the rakiya, but without her red tracksuit or apron or any clothes at all. A table held a rack of tools and several small wooden carvings of human figures. Along the walls she saw other canvases propped, some of Angelov’s son—the younger man was dressed in most of them but casually naked in a few, hands on hips, looking at the floor as if absentminded about his own body.

  “Will you be volunteering?” Bobby murmured.

  “No,” she said, but part of her wished, perversely, to stand in that crystalline mountain light and feel the artist study her, breast and flank, with his soft, objective eyes. A couple of Irina’s paintings were here, including a bony rhinoceros. Angelov pointed it out with obvious admiration and Bobby explained: “He says she is the best of their generation, and she says he is the best of their generation. A perfect exchange of compliments.”

  Atanas Angelov cleared a table and set four chairs around it, then helped Irina into one of them and motioned for Bobby and Alexandra to sit down. After a moment’s hesitation, she put the bag with the urn on the floor beside her, and thought she saw Angelov glance at it.

  “My dear,” Irina said, putting an old thin hand over Alexandra’s young thin one. “You asked me about Stoyan, and Mr. Angelov is going to tell you some things. I have explained to him now what it is you carry and how we came to meet. Unfortunately, he has heard nothing from my sister or Neven—I have already asked him.”

  Alexandra felt her heart sink. Perhaps, she thought, she’d hoped for news more than she’d admitted even to herself.

  Irina pointed. “Asparuh will translate for you,” she said to Atanas Angelov.

  Angelov rubbed a hand over his face. Alexandra saw again that the ends of the fingers were hideously worn down, stubby, the knuckles swollen.

  “Stoyan Lazarov,” he said. He nodded to Bobby, waiting for him to interpret. “Stoyan was one of the people I loved best.”

  He paused again. “You see, I met him many years ago, when we were both young and in very difficult circumstances. Then I didn’t see him for a long time, and then later he found me through one of my paintings and came to visit me and meet my wife. Each of us had thought that the other was dead, so we were enormously happy to be reunited. He was ill and tired, and when he had a short time off work, he asked me if he could stay with us. It was a large request—I cannot explain to you why, just now—but I said yes, and now I am very glad that I did so. It must have been in the late 1960s. I used to know the year exactly. Write down a good record, you young people. It becomes easy to forget.” He shook his head.

  “In any case, S
toyan came to us for a couple of weeks. We were still young enough to stay up talking and drinking half the night, and then go to work—or practice music—first thing in the morning. I had already been living here for a few years, working at the parts factory in the valley. But at night I painted, even if I could not exhibit much.”

  Why couldn’t you exhibit? Alexandra wanted to ask.

  “Stoyan’s hands were not well, after some farm work he had been doing out in the country that year. But he was healing them, and he began to play again while he was here. He told me that for the first week he would play only Bach—he said that was for him both the greatest exercise and the greatest medicine.”

  Atanas cradled his damaged fingers on the table. “But I understood that he was beginning to recover when he started playing Vivaldi again. People did not know Vivaldi’s music so much, when we were young, but Stoyan loved it and talked about it often. He would stand in the middle of my studio and play his music while I worked. He could make his violin laugh, but mostly he made it weep. I believe he slept with his violin case under his hand—he always seemed worried that someone would take it away from him. I painted him with his instrument. His face was terrible sometimes, sad, much older than his age, which was forty-and-some.”

  “He was born in 1915,” Alexandra said. “So he must have been in his early fifties then, right?”

  “Yes—I suppose so.” Angelov folded his worn fingers under his chin. “Yes. One night we sat up very late, and he told me for the first time many things about his music. He told me about the moment he decided to become a violinist—he was only six years old, already taking lessons in Sofia, and his father took him to a concert, some Beethoven. When he heard the violinists begin to play, Stoyan said, he saw stars in the air, above their heads, and he wanted a star for himself. He smiled when he said this, but bitterly. He told me about his studies in Vienna, where he played for fine teachers and great audiences. He said that he felt his life since then had been a series of traps, smaller and smaller, until he had only music left, and his love for his wife and son. I will leave the story of my life in my music, he said.”

  Alexandra nodded. It was a sentiment she had come to recognize, and it made her feel even sadder for Stoyan Lazarov.

  “Then he told me about some things I had not known, a lot of things,” Angelov said, “about the moment his life changed the most. He was too honest to be a really good storyteller, but he made me see everything through his eyes. In fact, I think sometimes that I remember these parts of his life better than I do some of my own.”

  He fell quiet for a little. “I am surprised that I find myself talking with you about this. Irina told me that you want to know more about him, and she is my very old friend. In those days, it was dangerous to tell people certain things, but he and I had every reason to trust each other.”

  Angelov sighed. “Stoyan had thick hair that grew too fast, and a beard that grew too fast—he was always shaving and trimming, trying to stay neat. I cut his hair for him that evening, outside, in a chair, and he started telling me. We watched the sun go down. Later, he kept talking, rubbing his new short haircut, like this, with both hands. And we ended up talking all night.”

  He turned to Irina, and Alexandra saw that tears were trickling down his brown face, like cracks in mud.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “How did we get so old, my dear? With everybody gone?”

  This happened in October 1949, five years after the Revolution and three months after the death of the first communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov. There was music in the streets of Sofia that morning.

  Strangely for him, Stoyan couldn’t remember later where the music had come from: a military band? Or merely a radio tuned to a military band, in some open-doored shop? His morning orchestra rehearsal was supposed to start at nine. There was a feeling of hurry in the streets, people quieter than usual and in a rush, as if the city itself was nervous. The trees curled over the promenades and dropped leaves with that mild-mannered brown of the Sofia autumn.

  That morning the orchestra was to rehearse a Mozart symphony—No. 40, G Minor, a work he already knew almost by heart—this detail he did remember easily, years after. In the evening, his quartet would sit down to read a couple of works they hadn’t attempted before. Stoyan carried his jacket, although the air was warm and the sun was full; it would be cold inside the hall and he liked to keep his arm muscles limber. He could see a young policeman standing at the corner, chatting with a boy in civilian clothes. This was Stoyan’s favorite kind of morning; there was a smell almost like autumn in Vienna creeping into the streets from the parks, and a blend of sound he had known since childhood: the crash of something heavy being unloaded at the curb, a shout, the blast of an automobile horn, the creak of metal-rimmed wooden wheels, the hollow clop of hooves on cobbles, two old women on the corner talking loudly.

  At the door of the theater, he left the sunlight and went into gloom and that smell of must and chalk that had mingled for him with rehearsals, these many years. It was the same scent as that of the hall in Vienna where the Academy orchestra had always rehearsed, and even of the Vienna Philharmonic. Perhaps every rehearsal in the world smelled like this. He found the orchestra half-gathered onstage, unpacking instruments, one of the clarinetists finishing a greasy stub of banitsa with cheese crumbling out of it, wiping his hands on a handkerchief before he touched his instrument case. Mitko Samokovski, the conductor, had already arrived and was directing the flutists to rearrange some chairs at the back. They shared the hall with other productions—the opera, sometimes a play—and everything was always in the wrong spot.

  Stoyan sat down in the second-chair place with his violin case across his knees and looked up for a moment at the rows of curtains above, the familiar lack of light, lack of sky, the worn raspberry-colored velvet from the end of the previous century. He cracked his neck, then his shoulders—long habit, relief. He watched Samokovski searching in tight-stretched vest pockets for something or other, something he appeared never to find. In fact, everyone watched him before rehearsal, to see what sort of mood he was in. After several years of working under him, Stoyan hated the man. Samokovski was given to sudden rages at the first violin section; Stoyan particularly disliked his way of lowering the baton, rapping, evoking instant silence, then glaring without speaking as an extra measure of humiliation for whoever had missed a note. The conductor was a good example, Stoyan often thought, of someone who would never have gotten this job before the war; his tyranny of the orchestra was hardly justified by musical prowess. Stoyan remembered Bruno Walter in Vienna, the passionate face and quick ability to teach a musician anything on the spot; Walter had been driven out by the Nazis, along with the brilliant Jewish musicians in the Academy itself. But the Nazis had been destroyed, long since. If Bulgaria had opened her borders for citizens to travel after the war, he and Vera could have gone straight back to Austria. And in Vienna he would have played forever under such conductors, not for people like this scowling, second-rate egotist.

  Lately, Samokovski had looked even more harassed than usual, his hair a sideways wreck. A rumor had circulated among the musicians that their conductor had recently been questioned by the police. “Or he reports to them, maybe?” Velizar Gishev had muttered. Gishev was the first chair of the orchestra, the concertmaster, second in importance only to Samokovski himself. No one hated the conductor more than Gishev, who had been Samokovski’s particular target for the last two years, although—or perhaps because—he was one of the best musicians in the orchestra. Stoyan had to admit that Velizar Gishev was at least technically as good as he was himself, even if he was a peacock. He, Stoyan, should be the first chair. But Gishev was hellishly good, trained in Europe like himself, but in Paris. Stoyan could not have held together his quartet without Gishev’s energetic playing and nearly perfect intonation.

  The musicians were testing notes, plucking strings, screwing together pieces of instruments and then adjusting them with a delicate ba
ckward twist. One of the cellists left the stage to struggle with a window at the side of the hall, propping it up with a block of wood and startling a pigeon just outside. Samokovski rapped for order and they opened their bound scores of the Mozart.

  They were starting not only on time, Stoyan noted, but a little early, and Gishev’s seat next to him was still empty. Velizar always arrived at the last second, as if to spite the conductor. Stoyan had a brief fantasy of slipping over into the first chair, where he belonged anyway. If Velizar ever left the orchestra, Stoyan would certainly be promoted to his place, unless the conductor chose to bring in someone else. Which would be like him; Samokovski disliked Stoyan as well—in fact, he seemed to distrust all foreign-trained musicians.

  Stoyan stayed where he was, but after the oboe had given the A, he led the violin section in their tuning. The other violinists glanced around, and then began to tune.

  Suddenly Samokovski rapped on the edge of his stand, and the tuning sprang to a discordant close. His face looked bleached and his free hand fiddled with a vest pocket. “Where is Comrade Gishev?”

  No one spoke.

  “Well, where is he?”

  Samokovski looked straight at Stoyan. “Comrade Lazarov, is it true that you would prefer to be concertmaster yourself?”

  What could he say?

  “Well?” Samokovski searched his vest with a hand like a big grub.

  Stoyan tried to sound easy, humorous, something he knew had never been his strong suit. “Comrade Conductor, doesn’t every second chair in the world wish to be first?” There was an appreciative snicker somewhere behind him.

  But it was as if he and the conductor were alone in the hall, and now Stoyan could see sweat dribbling from under the matted gray hair at Samokovski’s temples.

  The conductor raised a forefinger toward the proscenium. “I understand you said as much to your colleagues in a smoking break, just the other day?”