Bobby said to Alexandra, “I didn’t tell her anything that would frighten her. They clearly have no information about where her sister is, and she already thinks something is wrong with Neven—she says he has been angry and nervous all week. But she believes it is because his father’s ashes were lost.”
“And you don’t think so,” Alexandra guessed.
“I think it is more than that,” said Bobby. “I think he is protecting the old people from his real worries, whatever they are. He must have known they were being pursued.”
“No one followed them on their way here, right?” Alexandra scanned the terrace again, hopelessly.
“It does not seem that she noticed anyone,” said Bobby. “And, after all, she and Milen didn’t have the urn. Unless someone thought they did, or was trying to get them out of the way.”
“You mean for good?” She tightened her hand on Vera’s. The old woman looked tranquil now, ignorant of both the English they spoke and the threat that hung over them all.
“But now they do have the urn,” said Alexandra. “Bobby? You don’t think that Neven took Irina and Lenka with him before we got there?” Her throat closed painfully.
“You mean he might have kidnapped them himself and left that note? It is not possible—he left Morsko too late to arrive in Plovdiv before we did.”
Alexandra drew a long breath and kept Vera’s hand in hers.
After breakfast was cleared away, Alexandra helped Vera carry the urn into the sitting room of the little house. She wondered if they should hide it instead, but didn’t think she could suggest that. She wondered, too, if Neven would be as angry with her as she had sometimes imagined, in contrast with Vera’s kindness, especially if he was already worried. Her stomach dropped when she thought of seeing him again; he would become as real then as Milen and Vera, of course. But the most important thing was to find Irina, and how could they do that without more information?
Then another old woman appeared—Vera’s friend, apparently also the mother of the gardener who’d opened the door to them. She had been out buying vegetables. She was squarely built, vigorous, with short gray hair that stood on end. Vera explained that this was Baba Vanka; they had been schoolmates in Sofia and had found each other again fifteen years ago. Vera and Vanka had work to do in the house. They settled the urn with a pot of flowers on each side—grief itself seemed forgotten in Vera’s relief at having Stoyan’s ashes returned—and went up the stairs, Vera with her arm tucked under Vanka’s round strong one. When the two women had disappeared, Alexandra and Bobby returned to Milen.
“I want to ask him about Stoyan’s police record and why he was anxious, himself, when he talked with his niece,” Bobby said in a low voice.
Milen Radev sat with his elbows resting on the arms of the wheelchair. He had taken out a big blue handkerchief and was wiping his eyes with it, not as if he were crying but as if they leaked. Alexandra remembered what Miss Radeva had said about his former strength and liveliness.
“Tell him that we met Miss Radeva and fell in love with her,” Alexandra said.
Bobby conveyed this, and Milen Radev’s face lit for a moment. There was the young man again, Alexandra thought—the energetic scientist, the music lover who had followed Stoyan Lazarov’s performances and admired his genius. His eyebrows were gray and black and his yellowed eyes were gentle, forgetful. Four or five wiry hairs stood straight out of the middle of his forehead, like the strong whiskers of a walrus or the hairs on the back of an elephant—she suddenly thought of Irina Georgieva’s animals. He must have loved Stoyan and Vera very much to have stayed with them in old age; for all his current feebleness, Milen Radev had somehow watched over this stranded family. Now he seemed to be falling asleep, his tea steaming in his cup and his slice of bread with marmalade only half-eaten. They had not cleared his breakfast, because he ate so slowly.
“Gospodin Radev,” Bobby said in a soft voice. The old man’s eyes unhooded with a look of surprise, as if he had not expected to be called upon ever again. Alexandra thought it was like telling a mountain to sit up straighter. Bobby reached into his backpack and brought out the battered candy tin. He spread a clean paper napkin beside Radev’s plate and set on it the two rolled rags, which looked dirtier and more fossilized than ever.
“Gospodin Radev,” said Bobby.
Milen Radev opened his eyes a little further and raised his handkerchief toward them, then lowered it. He bent closer and put out a finger, touched one of the curling stiff rolls. His words, when they came, trembled like his finger.
“He says,” Bobby told her, “that he has seen these before. Stoyan showed them to him many years ago, and he told Milen what they were and where he got them.”
“He knows about the camp?” Alexandra said. Her heart was thudding uncomfortably because Milen Radev’s eyes had begun to water again; this time his handkerchief was forgotten. Stoycho crept to the side of her chair and lay down.
Bobby watched the old man for a moment. “He says Stoyan revealed it to him, about thirty years ago, when they were drinking together. He says that Stoyan was arrested two more times and sent to work far away from Burgas. I think one of those arrests was the one Milen witnessed and told his niece about. Milen has never talked to anyone, even Vera, about this, because Stoyan did not want her to suffer more. Vera knew what had happened, of course, because she saw Stoyan taken away and then returned broken three times, but he refused to tell her the details. Milen believes that Stoyan told him everything in order to punish him, the only punishment Stoyan ever gave him.”
“To punish him? What did he do? I thought Stoyan was the one who punished himself.”
Bobby looked thoughtful. “He doesn’t seem to want to say more. But I will ask him now what Stoyan might have meant when he wrote that only Milen Radev knew.”
He spoke to Radev, who wiped his forehead with his hand, clumsily, before answering.
“He says,” reported Bobby, “that he thinks Stoyan wrote something about his life but he doesn’t know where the manuscript is now. He believes Stoyan gave it to Nasko Angelov. And we know that is true.”
“And these things that gospodin Lazarov saved behind his music?” Alexandra asked.
Bobby spoke to Milen Radev, gently indicating the curls of dirty fabric.
But Radev did not seem to hear him; he rolled his chair backward a few centimeters and fell asleep.
1953
1953
NO.
1953
1953
Then something changed, but at first I did not know what it was.
They sat for a moment, watching Milen sleep, until the phone rang in the kitchen. The trowel man came out to ask someone to take it. It was Neven Lazarov, he said.
We won’t be able to understand each other, Alexandra thought, panicked, although of course Neven had spoken some English to her.
But Bobby went in to take the call, to explain who they were and why they were there. When he returned, his face was set, wary. “Neven wants us to come speak with him in a village near here. He gave me the location of a café. I asked him if he knows anything about Irina and Lenka, but he wouldn’t talk about them on the phone. He only said that he found their house empty—as we did. The drive to this village is more than an hour. I don’t know why he is there, or why he wants to meet us there, but he was very definite about it. He says he will wait for us.”
Alexandra thought, He suspects this is a trap, too. She studied his face. “And you told him about the urn?”
“Yes. He said that he will thank you when he sees you. But he sounded very anxious about Irina and Lenka.”
“Oh, I hope he knows something about them,” Alexandra said. “And there’s Stoycho—can we leave him here?” She looked at the dog and he raised his head; his brown eyes were serious in the black velvet face that didn’t match the rest of him.
Bobby looked at Stoycho, too. “We’ll take him,” he said.
Late morning had risen in a dome of s
un, not yet hot, over the town. As they drove down the steep street, Alexandra saw the sea at its foot, an expanse that glittered all the way out to a lapidarian horizon. A thread of shivering had risen inside her, something that seemed immune to the beauty of the place and the day. A few minutes later they pulled past the last old walls of the town and onto the winding coast road. Bobby came around a sharp curve, swerved, and swore in two languages.
“What?” gasped Alexandra. Then she saw that there were two men standing in the road. They had been completely hidden by the bend of road and the trees; Bobby had come within a split second of hitting them. She turned to look. One of the men stood with his hands on his hips and the other was talking with him, as if they were relaxing on an empty sidewalk or in an open field, instead of on the road. They were gazing at something—their own handiwork, apparently. She saw a metal cross freshly decorated with ribbons and artificial flowers, at the side of the road, where someone else had been killed driving in that same tight curve. Or standing in it, thought Alexandra.
Bobby pulled off the main road onto a smaller one, which took them away from the sea. In an hour she would see Neven again.
1953
Something had stirred far away, in fact, first in the great Soviet state, where Stalin had died, and then in Sofia. The change reached all the way to us, the silent skeletons in camp. When we returned from the quarry that evening, there was a strange truck at the gates, and men in newer, cleaner uniforms than our guards wore. Some of them looked at us and walked around us, although they did not speak to any of us, as far as I know. They went into the barracks and latrines; all usual activities were suspended. Some wrote in notebooks. We saw them speaking with the Chief, and we saw that the Chief was afraid of them. The cooks forgot to serve us our beans. Most of the younger guards hung back in corners, but Momo saluted the visitors and strolled around showing them the sights, even daring to joke with them.
It seemed that, although Momo hadn’t found a prisoner to go to the Commission, it had finally come to us.
They left. A day or two later, or three days, bigger trucks arrived. Men with bigger stars on their caps and better guns at their belts lined us up and read us declarations. They declared that because we had served our sentences—many of us had never been given sentences, but no one mentioned that—we would be moved back to Sofia and processed for work in society, where we could expect to do well as long as we never descended again into criminality or spoke lies about our rehabilitation here in camp. Those who had not finished their sentences would be taken to a more modern camp elsewhere to complete them—they did not say where.
A rustle of surprise and confusion and feeble interest went through our ranks. I think most of us could not really understand what the big men were saying. I knew instinctively that I would be among those sent on to the “more modern camp,” but when the men from the trucks began to divide us into two lines, they pushed me into the line for release, or at least transport back to Sofia. I did not yet believe in any release. I felt the tears running down my face, but hope had become such an unfamiliar sensation for me that I actually wondered what was wrong with my eyes. Momo was nowhere to be seen, now, and I wished I knew at least where they must have buried Nasko, in what pit in the woods.
They gave us an extra meal, which had never happened before. We were sent to wash—although it was still a week away from the usual bathing day—and then handed piles of old but whole and reasonably clean clothes to put on, as if we were newcomers all over again. I had nothing of my own to keep, unless you counted the tin cup; but I left that in the washhouse for whoever might need it. At the last second, I took the curls of dirty bandages I had removed from my hands and rolled them up tightly in my pocket while none of the guards was watching. After all, they—and all the others like them I’d made for myself—had protected my hands for more than four years.
Then they herded us toward the trucks. It occurred to me belatedly that this was a trick; the camp had become too crowded and these new guards were taking us out to the mountains to shoot us. But I reasoned with whatever was left of my mind that if that were the case, they would not be wasting good clothes on us, or extra food. They must want us to look better than we actually did when they drove us through the village. One of the men in our line broke away in a panic and ran through the gates on his own; the camp guards shot him. He was outside and free for about half a second.
Then they loaded the rest of us into the trucks and drove out of Zelenets.
The village Neven had named for their meeting point was the emptiest Alexandra had seen. There was no one on the pitted roads, no one sitting in the rusted chairs outside a single small grocery store. Storks stretched and flapped in their nests on the rooftops of abandoned houses—the biggest nest sat above a municipal building that looked deserted now, but had perhaps once been a school. Dogs slept right in the dust of the road. At the end of a shabby block, Bobby stopped the car and they got out, keeping Stoycho on his leash, and looked around. The café sat between two low houses, its door open. Darkness stared out of it and flies buzzed in the dirt yard around two tables.
“This must be our place,” Bobby said, but he moved cautiously. Alexandra tied Stoycho to a tree, well away from the other dogs, and followed Bobby as he pushed through the plastic ribbons in the doorway.
The interior of the café was dark, after the brilliant light outside. It was as much a bar as anything—maybe in a village this deserted, one business served both needs, Alexandra thought. There was a wooden counter; behind it a woman with streaky pale hair sat hunched over a crossword puzzle. The air was sharp with a smell of singed coffee; a tray of cheese pastries wilted under glass. No customers.
Then a man unfolded himself in one corner, where he’d been sitting behind a table. His head seemed to brush the beams of the ceiling. Alexandra could not see his expression in the gloom, but he was so tall and real that she felt he might suddenly spread huge wings. Her heart seemed to be choking her. He stepped forward to shake Bobby’s hand and then he turned and looked directly at her.
She could see his face now, the broad cheekbones and short, thick hair, the almond-shaped golden eyes, the lines around mouth and nose. This time she could also see in him his mother’s beauty. He was even taller than she remembered, his broad shoulders a little stooped, his arms and hands graceful. He wore the white shirt she’d observed on him before, or one like it, with the sleeves rolled up. He had slung a black windbreaker and the strap of a small leather bag over his chair. He said nothing. After a step toward her, which he checked, he stood still.
Alexandra forced herself to look him in the eye. For a moment, she imagined falling to the ground at his feet, wordless, prostrating herself in apology. But that had been only a dream. Instead, as firmly as she could, she put out her hand.
“Neven,” she said, “I’m Alexandra Boyd.”
“I know who you are,” said Neven, taking her hand. She remembered his voice now—the slow clarity, the heavy accent.
Alexandra looked up at him. “I have something that belongs to you.”
“I know,” he said.
She tried to drop his hand, but he held onto hers. She drew an unsteady breath. “I want to tell you how sorry I am. That was your most treasured—” She almost said “possession,” and then stopped. “The urn is safely in Morsko with your mother. And I’m truly sorry.”
He stood looking down at her. “It is my treasure.” He shook her hand again, as if he hadn’t already. “That is why I gave it to you.”
She stared at him. “Gave it to me?”
“Yes,” he said. “We were—” He dropped her hand then and spoke to Bobby; his English was failing him. Bobby helped him, surprise lighting his own face: “They were being followed. He was afraid for his mother’s life, and Milen Radev’s, and he knew that he must hide the urn immediately.” He paused and listened to Neven again. “He says he saw that you had it already mixed with your own bags, and he thought it would be hidden in t
hat way. It—broke his heart to let it go.” Neven gestured toward Alexandra. “What he did not know was, you are not a regular traveler, not a tourist kind of a person. He did not guess that you would look and look for them, to give it back. There was another problem, also. In his hurry, he did not stop to think that you might go to the police.”
Alexandra stood silent.
Bobby said sharply to Neven, “What do you know about Irina and Lenka? Are they safe?”
Neven shook his head. “I know nothing. I am waiting for a phone call that will tell where we can find them—a man called me during the night to say this, that he will telephone at noon and give us the place.”
Alexandra’s stomach tightened. The place where they would find—what?
“That is forty-five minutes, still,” said Neven. “We cannot do anything before. First, let’s go out, quickly.” He gestured to the waitress on her stool, who looked up at them. Neven put a couple of bills under his coffee cup. “I would like to tell you something, not here. Can we go?”
Alexandra looked at Bobby. He nodded, and they went outside. The light was blinding and there were flies everywhere. Stoycho was watching the dogs in the road, who stood up now and then to bark at him. Out here, Neven looked even larger, tall but also wide-shouldered, hair dark in the sun, the gray at his temples silvered.
Suddenly Stoycho leapt on his leash, strangling, whining.
“What?” Neven stared at the dog.
Alexandra murmured, “I guess you know him.”
But Neven had already knelt in front of Stoycho and was looking into his eyes, rubbing the sides of his neck. “Antonio,” he said. “This is our Antonio. You know? Like Vivaldi.”
“That’s Stoycho’s real name?” Alexandra began to laugh, in spite of everything, and Neven turned and smiled at her. He pointed across the road, to where a path ran between the trees into a meadow.