“What kind of people?” wondered Alexandra.
“Educated people, I guess, from the cities. They believe in the Thracian gods,” Bobby said. “That began years ago, before communism, and sometimes continued during communism, too, always in secret. And even now. I have never seen this myself, but I heard that they dress in robes and dance for Orpheus and Bacchus. The real ancients were different. They had some terrible practices—human sacrifice, for example.”
Alexandra imagined this—the frenzied dancers, and then a red-haired boy, tied hand and foot across the altar. Then an older man, tall and dark-haired, helpless under the knife, his violin smashed against the rocks. She shook herself and reached back to stroke Stoycho’s warm neck.
—
YAMBOL, A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, appeared as a jumble of houses and high-rise buildings like the complexes she’d seen in Sofia and Plovdiv—except that these were smaller and some of them sat at the very edge of the main road, their balconies festooned with laundry. Bobby stopped to call the number Irina had given them and left a brief message. “It’s a workday,” he said, “and this is her mobile, so perhaps she’s busy. Let’s go to her address and see.”
The address Irina had given them was confusing. Eventually they found one of the tallest of the high-rise complexes, and then the right cement tower and the right parking lot. It was hot here; dust blew across the sidewalks and among the monolithic buildings, where there was more dried mud than landscaping. Two young children, watched by a grandmother, were playing in a patch of papery grass and stunted aspens. Alexandra wiped her forehead with her wrist and decided she couldn’t safely leave Stoycho in the car; she let him wander around at the end of his leash, enduring the grandmother’s stare, while Bobby disappeared into a doorway.
He was gone a long time, but eventually she found a bench to sit on, holding Stoycho near her. Some of the slats were missing from the seat. She wondered what her parents were doing at home—sitting up reading at their respective apartments, probably, now that the semester was over. They wouldn’t expect a second message from her until the end of the week; that was their agreement, a minimum. She thought that she should ask Bobby to help her get a cell phone. Perhaps they could manage it the next day, if there was time and it didn’t prove too expensive. She began to feel lonely—even when events don’t become strange and dark, there are moments in a new place when you glance too far off into a distance or encounter the unwelcoming stare of a stranger and are suddenly displaced, a kind of travel within travel. This out-of-body sensation came over her as she looked at the cracked cement walks, the dusty trees, the shimmer of heat on the little boy’s hair, Stoycho watching another dog nose around the garbage dumpsters at the end of the parking lot. The dog had apparently once been cream-colored, but its coat was falling out in big patches, so that it looked like a molting chicken. Stoycho stood up and growled and Alexandra jerked his leash harder than she’d meant to.
“No fighting,” she said.
Then Bobby came back out of the building. “Miss Radeva does live here,” he said. “But she is not at home. A lady told me where she works—as the secretary at an orphanage. We can look for her there. But I hope it will not be a shocking place for you—some of our orphanages have a very bad reputation. We should go now. I don’t want to be seen here.”
Alexandra remembered: sooner or later, whoever was following them might somehow find not only them but Miss Radeva, through them.
“All right,” she said. She took Stoycho away from the old woman’s gaze and they clambered into the car. Stoycho wanted to sit on her lap and she let him, even in the heat, gathering his long legs close.
1949
We slept in the cell the rest of that night—or, rather, lay on the ground dozing and waking. The boy and the man with the hat whimpered, awake or asleep. The drunken man snored; he had hardly been worth their trouble, and I wondered why the officers didn’t put him back out on the street. I lay there and thought of Vera, and of getting a doctor to see about my broken finger as soon as possible. I would need to say I’d tripped and fallen, or something like that. It would take me months to be able to play again; if my conductor knew I’d been called in by the police, would he even keep me on? I wouldn’t tell anyone, of course, but I’d have to show him my injured hand. We had very little money saved and I wondered if Vera’s family might be able to help us until my finger healed.
For a long while, as I lay there, I harbored the hope, almost the assumption, that the large policeman would release me in the morning. One heard these things, whispered here and there—people held for questioning for a night, then sent home, where they became quieter than before. One heard other things, too, more publicly, and read them trumpeted in the papers, these last five years—the trials of enemies of the people. I pushed down the phrase as soon as it came into my head; I made myself sleep for an hour, my handkerchief stuffed into one ear to drown out the sounds of misery.
Sometime during the night, the door opened, light came in across the floor again, and the officers added three more men to our number. An hour later, they pushed another young boy in among us. The cell was nearly full and I wished I could stretch my legs better as I lay there, but I stayed as still as possible, trying to rest. The ache in my heart sharpened; why would they add men to the cell if they planned to release us in the morning? Perhaps they would take us all together before the courts to sentence us the next day, and send us to prison? There was the chance, if we went to court, that I could be found innocent, unless the judge had been told what I’d seen. Then I might hang. I told myself to stay alert, and a few minutes later two more men were put in. One of them stank horribly; it seemed fear had overcome even his bowels. He got more space to sleep than anyone else.
—
THEY CAME FOR US before dawn and took us from the back of the police station into the back of a truck; by then we were twelve men in all. The guards kept their guns lowered, hidden—so we would look like a group of workers being sent on detail somewhere, I suppose. My finger throbbed, my nose was stiff with dried blood, my clothes were rumpled and damp. They hadn’t brought us water or food and I was beginning to feel those deficits as achingly as I did the pain in my hand. My nostrils were full of the odor of the man who had slept next to me, his rank coat and unwashed hair, and—worse—the man with the soiled trousers. It was funny to me, later, to think that at the time I’d considered this a bad smell. When they stopped the truck and urged us out, I caught the purity of morning, the streets very dark but with a breath like sunrise in the air.
The train said PLOVDIV; I didn’t know whether that meant it had just come from Plovdiv or was bound there. We walked from an empty lot behind the Sofia depot toward our train car, without entering the station itself. A fellow next to me couldn’t stand on the soles of his feet, where he’d been beaten, like the boy and the first man in our cell. Two of us automatically took his arms and supported him as we moved forward; I kept my damaged right hand carefully out of his way.
I saw that the lights of the train were off, and also the lights in the station. There was only a faint dark figure moving here and there, outside the coal car—no crowds of people, no friendly noise. It was like a station I had never seen before, or the ghost of a station I’d once known. For a second I had the feeling that I was actually on my way back to Vienna from Sofia, in clean clothes, with my instrument case cradled in my arms. And I thought again of my violin, sitting under our bed. Vera would discover it and put it somewhere safe. If I could just get back in a few days, that would at least shorten her suffering over my absence. I tried not to picture Vera’s distress; that image was worse for me than what was happening in the present. Then my mind wandered and I found myself more in need—of something to eat and hot water to wash my sore limbs—than eager to see her, and I felt ashamed.
That was the moment, before I even stepped onto the train, when I realized the most important thing that was happening to me. They were taking my natural feelings
away, so quietly that it could have occurred without my noticing. I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next. I believe now that it was not only enormous luck that brought me this understanding the very first day, but also my habit of living closely with my own mind, alone with it while I practiced. It was the landscape in which I had always lived, toiling over its rocks and hills to find the perfect place for my music, climbing up long rows of notes in order to commit them to memory. I also believe that few of the men around me realized early enough that they would have to guard their minds, first and foremost, and not their bodies, which would be impossible to protect anyway. The man beside me, stumbling on his shredded feet, in his socks, and the man who held his other arm, were both dead forty-eight hours later.
This revelation absorbed me so deeply that I almost forgot to turn my head for a last look at the lights of the city, where Vera was—no doubt awake and terrified, perhaps sitting with her sister at the kitchen table, trying to decide what to do, whom to petition. I hoped she wouldn’t go petitioning too far. I helped my staggering companion up the ramp into the train car and propped him against a wall next to me. No one spoke; no one tried to run. I fastened my gaze onto one streetlight until the corrugated door slid all the way shut and extinguished it. We could hear the men from the police station bolting the door on the outside.
I didn’t need to strain against the near-darkness to know what a new kind of travel this was, for me: a freight car, filled with groaning, mumbling men, not only our group but twenty others already there who must have been picked up farther west, or perhaps even in Sofia, like us. These men had apparently been sleeping on the floor of the car, with enough room to spread their limbs wide, jackets under or over them; they greeted us with muffled annoyance, putting their arms across their eyes, or tried to turn over again into oblivion. We, the newcomers, were an inconvenience, crowding them, and perhaps also further proof of the seriousness of their situation.
Then there was a pause while the train prepared for travel, although no engineers called to one another outside, and next the hiss and pull of the wheels coming to life under our car, the lurch forward and that one reluctant lurch back to gather momentum. In this interval, none of us spoke, and I promised myself that when the train started up in earnest, I would return to my revelation and dwell on it.
The moment when the train pulled forward was terrible despite my attempt to focus beyond it, like falling off a high place; it meant we were leaving Sofia. My heart seemed to drop straight out of me, in order to stay behind with Vera, and yet I didn’t know how I could travel on without it. The silence deepened over all of us. I had not wanted to return to Sofia, nine years earlier; since then, I had waited daily to leave again on some powerful beast of a train, but now I did not want this train to move. A huge desire to weep rose in my chest and throat. I felt the injured man beside me raise his sleeve and draw it heavily over his face. He was revolting to me in that moment, but I made myself put my hand out and find his shoulder, which I gripped. He moved his other hand up in the darkness and gripped my wrist in return, then dropped it; I felt the kind of hand it was, short-fingered and heavily padded, rough with calluses, a hand that had worked hard from childhood in heat and cold. We had not exchanged a single word, but I felt in his hand a history very different from my own. I had fought down my despair by befriending that hand for an instant. That was my second important realization. No—my third: the first had actually been in the police interrogation, when I’d understood that my special qualities, my talent and upbringing, far from saving me, would condemn me.
I covered myself with my jacket and adjusted my shoulders against the chilly walls, adjusted my eyes to the crack of light that flickered on and off along the top of the bolted door as we passed through the city. I made myself breathe out with the downbeat, each rumbling turn of wheels, cha-clunk, a deep exhale with the clunk, then an inhale, even if it meant breathing faster and faster for a few minutes. I tried to set the rhythm to a line from Bach—my favorite, the Chaconne from the second Partita in D minor. When we were moving steadily, the man with the wounded feet and callused hand curled up in the remaining space beside me and I addressed again that thought I’d had about my own mind, just before we’d been put in the car. I would not allow anyone into the center of myself; I would make myself a place to go, deep inside, no matter what happened.
But what should the place be? I imagined our bed, Vera asleep in the morning with her hair curling around my elbow. No. That image would break me. I would save that one for strong moments, and when these days were over and I got back to her, I would savor its reality as I had never before known how. I would tell her that I hadn’t even been able to think of her, those several nightmarish days, and she would understand.
Then I imagined my favorite park in Vienna, the slide of chestnuts escaping their burrs underfoot, the drifting yellow along the avenues of poplars and beeches, the lawns in autumn light, the last few roses. I could sit down there on a bench, feel my violin in its case under my arm, which was like sitting alone with a friend, no need for words after so many years.
No. (The damaged man beside me turned and dug his knee into my thigh—he was asleep despite his pain.) Vienna was too much like a dream now, and it had never been my place, as I’d known even while I was trying to adopt it. I drew my own knees up, careful not to wake the sleeping sufferer, and rested my aching arms on them. Men breathing, muttering, piles of wool and cotton like corpses in the deadened twilight of the car.
Then I saw the place I could go, and it surprised me because it was new to me, when I’d imagined stumbling on some familiar haven.
It was a meadow, somewhere in Bulgaria, although I did not know where—somewhere outside the kind of village one passed on the train between Sofia and the northern mountains, a meadow not steep but not level, filled with scratchy sweet grasses and even-topped white flowers, not plowed or grazed, left growing wild near the edge of a river. The son I suddenly hoped to have sat in warm sunshine there, full-grown and tall, with the girl he loved sitting next to him. Their hands were interlaced on the grass, which was mashed fragrantly flat around them. They seemed to have no idea that such things could happen—that men could be put into a bolted train car in the dark and taken toward who knew what fate—and yet they were speaking of me, Stoyan. I was filled with gratitude at the thought. I walked toward their young backs and saw them turn first to each other in conversation and then, reflectively, toward the river. I raised my violin and drew my bow over the strings to serenade them.
Then darkness intervened and I was again one of those piles of clothing, beginning to smell and to snore, among many other piles; the train braked with uncomfortable suddenness and someone hit his head on the wall and swore. A cat eat your mother’s guts, you—a villager’s voice like the ones in the weekly market, and someone else had enough good spirits left to laugh in the dark. I was almost smiling, too, not because of the invisible tragicomedy but because of the place I’d found, my meadow, my future son, the sunlight there. I knew it would take practice, but I knew how to practice; that had been my life, up until yesterday. All the other benefits had been fitted richly around practicing: Vera and her family, Vienna, the orchestra concerts, my daily walks in the parks, my sweet parents with their blind belief in my future, my own blind beliefs, my books. Practicing had kept my mind from the bombings, at least for long minutes, and from the hours of hunger during the war, and from the smells of fear in the street, and later from my brief memories of slaughter at the front.
So I practiced a few more times, eagerly, to be sure I had the outline of the new place. I walked over the grasses, feeling their warmth rising through my shoes, the legs of my trousers. I looked at the glossy heads of my son and his young love, I saw again their hands interlaced between them as they talked, I heard my name, uttered with affection, I smelled the river just beyond, I raised my instrument and drew my bow over the strings. Then I did it all one more time. When I
was sure of myself, I decided to put the place away for now, in the dark, to save it in the hope that it wouldn’t be needed after all.
The orphanage was on a dead-end street at the edge of Yambol—the perfect place for it, Alexandra thought. The street didn’t so much end as peter out into a weedy field, as if the occupants didn’t provide enough of a reason to continue the pavement. The orphanage itself was a large concrete building with a red-tiled roof, hemmed in by metal fences. Inside that, a huddle of peach or apricot trees with green fruit on them. Alexandra imagined the orphans picking the fruit in midsummer; perhaps this was their biggest taste of nature, unless they were taken out on trips sometimes. She had never been to an orphanage before and thought of the word as obsolete, from a nineteenth-century novel, not part of the modern world.
Bobby tied Stoycho to a tree at the edge of the parking lot and Alexandra hugged his neck, trying to provide him with a charm against dognappers. Then they rang the electric doorbell on the outside gate and waited. Eventually a woman came out, hurrying as if she had a lot else to do. She had something on her arms that Alexandra thought at first was a rash or a tattoo but that turned out to be a lacing of blue and red paint. She looked Bobby and Alexandra over and then rushed them without a word into a courtyard and through a front door; she clearly didn’t have time to think of any harm they might cause.
Inside, the halls were full of soft yellowish light. No children were visible, although Alexandra could hear a distant hum that might have been either voices or music. The walls were painted in pastel hues and decorated with dozens of bright childish artworks on curling paper. Alexandra was struck by the cleanliness of the place—shining floors, a mild aroma of disinfectant. Bobby’s words had led her to imagine squalor, even horror. Instead, the building was strangely soothing, like her own rural elementary school, the same closed doors with frosted glass panes set into them, the same murmur of benign activity.