The Shadow Land

  I must have slept through this travel, because suddenly it was evening, the light low across the floor, and I had a visitor.

  It took Alexandra and Bobby at least half an hour to remove each score from the music shelf and look through all the pages. He showed her how to keep them in the order in which they’d found them. Alexandra strained her ears, listening for the neighbor’s return, worrying about Stoycho tied up in the meager shade of the yard. But while she listened she worked, swiftly, turning pages of sheet music until the notes ran together under her eyes. There were volumes of solo music—Bach Partitas, Paganini—and piles of orchestral scores—Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, their covers mainly in Cyrillic. Stoyan’s orchestras seemed to have favored Russian composers. There were genuine antiques among these volumes, she felt sure; the very oldest were brittle and dark yellow. The tin candy box was still on the shelf, behind them, and Bobby set it on the table with half a smile.

  “Dimchov’s man was not so good after all,” he said, modestly. “Or maybe he was looking only for people, not treasure boxes.”

  They turned through page after page, but there was nothing except music—it filled the room, silently. Where was Stoyan’s violin now? Alexandra wondered for the first time. Had it been the one Baba Yana had heard him play in the village, music under the stars or coming out the chimney? At last all of Stoyan’s scores sat in piles on the floor, their order carefully preserved, his life’s work.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” Alexandra said.

  “Or maybe he meant this—whatever those things are, inside.” Bobby reached out and opened the tin box on the table, so that they could see the stained curl of fabric inside. “And we have looked at all his music.”

  “No,” Alexandra said slowly. “We haven’t. There was no Vivaldi.”

  Bobby regarded her in silence.

  She sat back on her heels. “Irina said he played Vivaldi, and Milen Radev told his niece something like that, too—that Stoyan loved the music of some Italian. And—Nasko Angelov. He said he knew that Stoyan was feeling better whenever he played Vivaldi. But there isn’t any Vivaldi here.”

  She was thinking about something else, too: a young brother and littler sister, lying under the dining room table at the farmhouse, their parents’ LP of The Four Seasons revolving on an already dated stereo with a diamond needle. They loved the idea of a diamond needle, because it was the only jewel in the house; even their mother wore only a plain gold wedding band. Alexandra liked to listen to “Spring,” which made her think of fountains and gazelles. Jack preferred “Autumn,” which he said sounded like tornadoes, and she, too, could see the red leaves caught up in a whirlwind. They flipped a coin about where to put the needle of the record player, until their mother came down from cleaning the attic and reminded them that this was bad for the record, they might scratch it, that they must always start from the beginning.

  “And let the year run its course,” said their mother, smiling, with a big cobweb on her shirtsleeve. It was the first time Alexandra had heard the expression “run its course,” and for years afterward that phrase meant to her letting a record play all the way through, and something about a cobweb. At least Jack had died during his favorite season. She would never stop missing him, but now it seemed that worse things sometimes happened to people—men moaning on the floor of a train car, which telescoped away from her into darkness.

  “Bird,” Bobby said, stroking her forehead, and then her stomach came back up to the right level. “You fainted.”

  She could feel his hand on her hair. She was lying on the living room floor, looking at the ceiling. She thought she must have fallen gently, and not far from her kneeling place by the table. Then she realized that Bobby had caught her, so she hadn’t really fallen.

  “Sweet girl,” Bobby said, and Alexandra knew he meant her. He helped her sit up and cradled her head against his shoulder with his gloved hand. “What happened?”

  “My brother,” Alexandra said. She found she was sobbing, but quietly. “He died so long ago already, and we used to listen to music together.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bobby said, and she knew he really was, although they had met only six days earlier.

  Alexandra reached for her purse, which she had set on the sofa. She took out her wallet, carefully avoiding the stolen photograph of Neven.

  “Here he is,” she said. Her voice broke again. Maybe I should go home, she thought. I shouldn’t have left my parents alone there, without either of us.

  Bobby took the picture with tender respect. This was her favorite, worn around the corners like the one of Neven. She kept it in a plastic sleeve in each new wallet she got: a copy of a school photo taken weeks before their hike and delivered personally to her family by a regretful high school principal, months afterward. It showed a boy, insouciantly adolescent, blond-red hair standing up in his usual buzz cut, his gaze careless, fixing the viewer with some amusement. He was beautiful, and she had the bittersweet pleasure of watching Bobby’s eyes widen briefly in admiration. Bobby bowed his head over the picture for several seconds, then handed it back to her.

  “So young,” he said. “Thank you for showing him to me.” She thought of the losses he must have known, too. No one escaped. Bobby was combing his hair back with thin fingers, that nervous gesture. “He was—how old?”

  “Sixteen,” she said. “And a day.”

  Bobby was silent, his gaze moving back and forth over her face, wondering. “You don’t look very much like him. But in the smile,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She put the picture back in its wallet sleeve and wiped her cheeks. She wouldn’t start crying again.

  “It must have been terrible for you after he died,” said Bobby.

  She sat looking at him, feeling her cheeks stiff with salt, her eyes gumming shut. Then she slowly rolled up the sleeve of her cotton blouse. The long scar was pale now, not the pink it had been for months after, although there was still a jagged place where she’d lost courage for a moment. Without comment, she held her arm up under his gaze. He bent down suddenly and kissed the scar, and her eyes spilled over.

  “What does that make us?” Her voice felt thick.

  Bobby took her wrist and lowered the arm gently, as if it were broken. “Blood brothers,” he said.

  Leaning forward, she hugged her taxi driver fiercely. Then she rubbed her other sleeve over her face. There was something she must do now, even if she could never save Jack. It had been at the edge of her mind before she’d fainted.

  “Vivaldi—we didn’t find any,” she said.

  “What?” He turned back to the music and looked around, but absently, as if still gripped by her pain. “That’s right. No Vivaldi.”

  “How about somewhere else in the house?”

  “We’ve looked everywhere,” he said. “The shelf is empty.”

  “I know. But Vivaldi was his favorite. Where would you keep your favorite music?”

  Bobby shrugged, but he was still staring at her. “I am not a musician.”

  “Your favorite book of poetry, then.”

  He nodded. “Under my bed, where I can reach it when I wake up. But we looked under the beds, and I looked under the mattresses.”

  She groaned. What could they do?

  “Time to leave,” Bobby said. “We must put all this back. We have been here too long.”

  They had, Alexandra knew, and the neighbor must be suspicious by now. “But Vivaldi—maybe Stoyan even had many scores by him, if he loved him so much.”

  “Or maybe he memorized the music and didn’t need scores anymore,” Bobby pointed out. “Maybe he gave them away. Maybe he kept them at the house in the mountains. We did not look in every corner there, you know. Usually when something is hidden, there is a sign, something else not quite right. But every little thing in this house is right. They cleaned it out, except for the photographs.”

  Spring, thought Alexandra, and Jack’s Autumn. All the seasons that had passed, unmarked. She loo
ked at the shriveled brown curls of fabric Stoyan had left them instead.

  “There is one thing not right,” she said. She went quickly back up the stairs and into the bedroom with the photographs, Bobby at her heels.

  The calendar hung on the wall where they had seen it both times: June 2006, almost two years ago, the month Stoyan Lazarov had died, with the maidens in their red-and-white costumes dancing around a well. She lifted it down. The wall showed only a shadowed peach color where the paint had faded less. But June 2006 felt heavier in her hand than the months that had preceded it; taped to the back of the page, where the maidens danced in the other direction through the paper, was not a musical score but an envelope.

  They knew the fine handwriting on the front of it. Bobby translated for Alexandra: The last part. Never for publication.

  1950

  My visitor was Momo. I didn’t see him until he was standing close by, then sitting in a wooden chair he’d pulled up to the bed. He leaned over me and shook me by the shoulder. The chair was ramshackle, canting to one side, and I thought surely his big muscular body would splinter it. But he perched there and smiled at me with his gapped front teeth, like a little boy. I hoped I was dreaming his presence, too, but he did not disappear. His strong hands, which had killed so many, had no club in them; they lay neatly covering his knees. He seemed incapable of uttering any normal greeting, but after a minute or two he addressed me. “I carried you in like a sack of potatoes,” he said.

  He seemed to be considering the possibility that I would say something, so after a moment I replied. “Yes.”

  “A sack of potatoes,” he said, smiling, as if well pleased with the image.

  “Yes,” I said, hoping this would make him go away. I wondered if he’d come to visit me in order to congratulate himself on having saved me, which made no sense. Maybe he was seeing himself in an unusual light, as savior rather than murderer, and found it interesting. I wondered also how he had the leisure to come to see me, when the prisoners would soon be returning from the workday, some of them perhaps needing to be killed. Had the Chief given him an hour off?

  He adjusted his frame in the rickety chair. “You are the smart one, aren’t you? The musician?”

  I lay still and studied what I could of his face, which was as empty as a plate, but with clever eyes, especially when he wasn’t smiling. “Well, at home I was a musician,” I said, as indifferently as I could.

  “I have to do something for the Chief,” he said, “and I need somebody smart.”

  “I’m not that smart,” I said quietly. “Do you think I would be here if I were?”

  He considered this for a little but didn’t seem to be able to sort it out, although again I suspected, from the flicker in his eyes, that this stupidity was at least partly a ruse. He wiped his nose with his hand. “But you are smart, aren’t you? The other men said that you are a famous musician and it was too bad you were sick.”

  I wondered who’d said this—certainly not Nasko, who would never have spoken so foolishly. But there seemed to be no secrets in camp.

  “I’m no smarter than other men,” I said.

  “Well, they said you were.” He looked obstinate and folded his arms across his bulky chest. “So I guess you are. I need somebody to go with me to the town, a smart prisoner, to tell a somebody there that we run this place good.” Again, I had the strange sense that he wasn’t as dumb as he certainly looked. Perhaps he had an impeccable ability to adapt?

  “Why doesn’t the Chief go?” I said, but immediately regretted it. Momo puffed up like a frog, indignant.

  “The Chief has to stay here. He is a busy man. He is the Chief! It would be dangerous for him to leave someone else in charge, even me.”

  This was the most coherent thing I’d heard from him, ever. The man in the next bed, sticky-faced with fever, turned over, restless; probably we were a part of his dreams.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I said. My voice felt very weak, still.

  “Well, the Chief said I could take a smart prisoner along to tell them, and then if that prisoner was smart enough to stay quiet afterward—” He seemed to get stuck there, or to pretend to. He was silent for a couple of seconds.

  “If he was smart enough to stay quiet?” I prompted.

  “Well, if he was that clever, and he knew we would always have an eye on him ever after, we might let him go home.”

  There was a long silence in the room, filled with Momo’s last word, until the man in the next bed turned toward us again. Clearly Momo thought him as good as dead.

  “What would this prisoner need to tell them, exactly?” I found it hard to keep my voice steady.

  Momo pondered this. He had the kind of eyes one sees in marble statues, wide open but consciously empty, marked in the stone by contour rather than color. “I guess the prisoner would need to tell the Commissioner from Sofia who is visiting the town that things are going well in our camp. Otherwise, the Commissioner might visit for himself, and that makes some work for the Chief. You know how it is,” he added confidingly.

  “Tell him that things are going well?”

  “You know, for the prisoners. They are workers. They work hard and eat and sleep and we help them to be rehabilitated. We keep things organized here. They do well.”

  “You mean,” I said with care, wishing I could sit up and look more easily at him, “you mean that we are well treated.”

  “Yes!” He smiled again at last, the gap showing broadly between his front teeth. “That is what they would like to know.”

  I thought about Vera, and her joy at my return; I thought about the son we would have. I thought about my hands, someday healed, drawing the bow over the strings. Then I thought about Nasko and the others. Who had been pushing the wheelbarrow for Nasko since I’d fallen ill? Perhaps he’d been doing it himself, the turn I’d often urged him to take, to save his own hands. I remembered what I had actually done, which was not the thing I was being punished for.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Unfortunately, I am not that smart.”

  His smile faded. “You are not?”

  “No,” I said. “I am a good musician, but you need someone very smart—very, very smart—to be able to tell the Commissioner properly.”

  He sat looking glumly at his knees; his good idea, or at least what he’d been asked to do, had failed. Or—was it possible?—he couldn’t show his hand to me now; he had to remain stupid.

  “Too bad,” he said. “I thought it would be you. Wouldn’t you like to go home?”

  “Of course I would,” I said. Now that it was over, my mind swam with grief, and I could hardly keep my eyes open. I wished Nurse Ivan would come interrupt us. “Wouldn’t you like to go home, too?” I turned my head and looked carefully at him.

  He shrugged. “I guess I would. But I don’t really have anybody.” He was still studying his knees. “My parents died before the war—they were partizani, fighting in the mountains. They were fighting the fascist government. My father got caught by the King’s police. They cut off his head, you know, and then they killed my mother and sisters, for helping him. First they raped them.”

  He seemed to have forgotten that he was supposed to be dull, to speak slowly. He glared at me, as if I had contradicted him. “That is what they did to good communists. You know that? They cut off their heads and raped their women. Then my grandpa I lived with died, and my cousins moved somewhere else—I don’t know where. Maybe to Sofia where there is a lot of work now. So I guess I don’t know where I would go.”

  He leaned back, angry, wistful. “Most of the people I know are here. I came here when I was only fourteen, three years ago. The Chief took care of me and gave me this job.”

  I thought it was good that his parents, whoever they’d been, had not lived to see their son grow up. Certainly they had believed in what they were fighting for, but I wondered if Momo believed in anything at all, apart from his own animal intelligence. It puzzled me that he didn’t simply offer
to beat me into fulfilling his request, or kill me for refusing it.

  But he was still contemplating his life. “Someday, you know, I’m going to get married to a beautiful woman, a good communist, like the ones in the moving pictures, and we are going to have kids. And I will be a general.” He didn’t smile; it was too earnest a desire. This might, I thought, be the real Momo at last. Then he looked quickly at me. “You won’t tell the Chief?”

  I thought at once that this strange scene would now indeed be the death of me; I had heard Momo say he wanted to be a general and he would probably never forgive me for that, even if it had been playacting. My limbs began to tremble from sheer weakness under the blanket, but I tried to keep my mind clear.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t tell him, if you won’t tell him that I am not as smart as you’d hoped. In fact, you don’t have to tell him you talked to me, since I turned out to be the wrong person.”

  He looked fixedly at me. “I don’t have to tell him.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t have to tell him, since I turned out to be a disappointment.”

  He flexed his hands on his knees, still thinking. “All right,” he said. “But I don’t know where I am going to find somebody else, somebody smart.”

  “This place is full of smart men. Or perhaps the Chief will go tell the Commissioner himself, after all,” I said. I was becoming faint. To my acute relief, Momo stood up suddenly and walked out, as if we had not been talking. He vanished at once from my blurred view.

  Then he reappeared, and I feared for a moment that he had come back to kill me in my bed. But he merely looked around the floor and under the chair he’d been sitting in. “I thought I dropped something,” he said. “Maybe somewhere else.”

  He went out again. I heard him unlocking the door from the inside and locking it from the outside.