But their view, when the hotelkeeper shows it to them, is better than she’d expected: they look from the third floor across to ornate windows and down into a canal as narrow as an afterthought, a byway that only the tiniest motorboats can traverse, their engines cut to walking. An aroma of sewage and fish and mildew drifts up from it, sharply different from the fresh air of Morsko; she can hear the slap of little waves catching the wakes of bigger boats on bigger canals nearby. In spite of the smell, Alexandra draws a long breath. The room is correspondingly small, and dominated not by the twin beds she had requested but by a canopied monster—a palanquin with gold velvet curtains, the worse for wear like the rest of the city. At home, it would look impossible, she thinks, and in Bulgaria peculiar. Here, it is perfect, but for her a disaster. She tries to ask the hotelkeeper for another option; there is none, signora—she notes that word, for a married lady. He goes out smiling, not even apologetic.
Neven sets Stoyan Lazarov’s urn on the floor, next to the falsely painted bureau. She hangs up her sweater, then takes it down again. She washes her hands in the sink near the tiny closet and doesn’t look at Neven. He has opened his suitcase and is unpacking into the bottom of the bureau, politely leaving the top drawers for her, as if they will be staying for weeks. He looks taller than ever in the close room—broader, his arms longer; he seems to brush the ceiling.
“Let’s go find some dinner,” she says. The bed is awkward enough, and the dimensions of the room, but the main problem now is the exquisite air of lassitude, the drowsy beauty outside the window, the damask hangings, the warm air.
Out in the alleys and squares, it strikes her as even worse: a romantic twilight has fallen, and the hotels and restaurants have turned on soft lights above their doors. The slop of water in the dark is gorgeous, rougher now; a breeze has come up. Alexandra pauses before a window heaped with frutti di mare, their legs and tentacles and sharp-edged shells displayed in a rosy mound. She and Neven smile at each other, embarrassed by the abundance and the question of price. In the end, they find a busy outdoor restaurant and sit eating spaghetti and long sticks of bread. They order some wine, and then a whole bottle of wine; Alexandra finds it’s like drinking a ruby.
“You are as hungry as wolves,” Neven tells her. “Do you say that in English?”
They wander into the vast Piazza again, to view it in its cloak of lights, a dazzle that reaches out across the water. Alexandra has never seen so many beautiful people in one city—tourists, yes, but also Italian women in high heels and narrow skirts, and Italian men in their slim suits, shirts open at the throat. The doors of the cathedral stand open, shedding light into the dark end of the square, and they enter under the prancing bronze horses Alexandra has always wanted to photograph.
Inside, there is more light than in Bulgarian churches—candles and electric chandeliers that make the gold ceiling glitter—but like those churches it is filled with Byzantine faces. Neven takes her hand again; she finds she has been waiting, and this time her stomach drops inside her. They amble the length and breadth of the church, trying to guess where the orchestra sat in Vivaldi’s time. The cathedral’s ceiling billows in her head with the wine, and she pauses to look straight up into one of the domes. Neven comes to stand beside her, putting an arm quietly around her shoulders. After they leave the cathedral, they drift along the alleys, getting lost for a long while. When they find their hotel door, Alexandra walks in first, up the narrow spiraling stairs.
In their room, she turns on the lamp and Neven draws the curtains and takes off his shoes, lining them up side by side just under the bureau. Alexandra goes into the bathroom for a few minutes, and spends them washing her face and trying to arrange her thoughts. When she comes out again, he’s standing still fully dressed beside the bed, tall and serious, his amber eyes fixed on her. She knows only a little about him, but because she knows so much about where he has come from, it doesn’t seem to matter. He strokes her hair back on each side of her head and tucks it behind her ears. That soft hum has returned to the room, but she can’t tell whether it comes from the city outside or the urn in its shadowed corner.
The next day, she thinks, they will see the door of the church where the Red Priest was baptized. A trembling has set up shop just below her ribcage. They will walk for hours, visit the palazzi and museums Stoyan Lazarov longed for, and rest in the shade of buildings where Vivaldi might have sat to cool himself. They will step into the acoustics of the big church of the Ospedale della Pietà, built two decades after Vivaldi died, where Stoyan Lazarov would have played his violin if the borders of Europe had been drawn differently. They will walk for miles, the way people are supposed to in Venice, drawn on by every turn, and by ghosts.
I first visited Bulgaria, a country of spectacular natural beauty, in 1989; in fact, I arrived a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was quickly followed by the collapse of forty-five years of Bulgarian communist dictatorship. The morning my train entered this mysterious country, hidden for so long behind the Iron Curtain, I woke early to see fields, villages, and forested mountains under a gray sky. Arriving in Sofia, the capital, I found it both elegantly historic and bleakly East-Bloc-communist. Like the young protagonist of The Shadow Land, I felt I had somehow come home.
Bulgaria, currently a nation of about seven million people, is an ancient place—the first version of a Bulgarian state on this territory was established in A.D. 681—whose history has also been characterized by centuries of occupation and cultural blending, especially under the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. The Bulgarian lands are some of the most archaeologically rich in Europe, with sites that were among the first settled by Homo sapiens—and on up through the Thracian, ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, medieval Bulgarian, and Ottoman periods. As a modern nation, however, Bulgaria is relatively young, dating from 1878 and its liberation from the Ottoman Empire.
During twenty-plus years of returning to a post-communist landscape there, I married a Bulgarian man and acquired a family, friends, and colleagues in my new country. Along the way, I dreamed of writing a novel set entirely in Bulgaria—one that would draw on aspects of its communist experience, which has already become remote for younger generations. However, it was not until I found myself standing in the closed-off ruins of a forced-labor camp that I discovered the heart of my story.
Between 1944 and 1989, and especially up to 1962, as many as a hundred camps (by some estimates) served the needs of the communist regime, brutalizing a spectrum of citizens who ranged from Nazi collaborators to loyal communists, political dissidents to young people targeted for small cultural infringements—and others rounded up on false charges. Many were held without trial or sentencing. These camps were based on and imposed by the Soviet system. Their existence—partly unknown to the population, partly known and feared—provided an important way for the regime to maintain control. An ultimate count of the incarcerated has never been established; most historians agree that they numbered at least in the tens of thousands.
Most of the sites of the camps are now lost to remote rural landscapes, and their victims are overwhelmingly un-memorialized. What, I wondered, looking around at the desolate ruins of barracks and guardhouses, would have given anyone a chance of survival in such a place? And how could I contribute in some small way to a growing movement to examine the recent history of my beloved adoptive country? I knew as I stood there that my characters and I would have to reckon with this past.
The resulting book is very much a work of fiction—and all its characters are fictional figures. In it, I’ve written about imaginary places based on real Bulgarian villages, towns, rivers, and mountains. And I’ve tried to stay sharply true to history—especially to the realities that camp survivors and their families later reported—without trespassing too closely on the sacredness of individual experiences. I’m indebted in my effort to Tzvetan Todorov’s work Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria (translated by Robert Zaretsky; Penn State Press, 199
9), to those individuals who granted me personal interviews, and to the organizations, journalists, artists, and writers in Bulgaria who are courageously exploring a difficult legacy. I offer them my sincere respect and gratitude.
за Георги
ноември 1989
с обич
for Georgi
November 1989
with love
I’d like to thank the many people in Bulgaria and the U.S.—family, friends, colleagues—who made this book possible. Those who read and reread it or conversed with me about it are too numerous for me to name without risk of omission, and details of the assistance they’ve rendered me during years of writing and editing would not fit on this page. The same is true of the many writers, historians, journalists, and musicians whose own work has informed this novel. However, I would like to thank personally a few people who provided extraordinary help with research, travel, and fact checking: Dimana Trankova, Boris Deliradev, Anthony Georgieff, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Lily Honigberg, Corina Kesler, Georgi Gospodinov, and Vanya Tomova. Thanks also to my peerless agent, Amy Williams.
Finally, and above all, profound gratitude to my editor at Ballantine, Jennifer Hershey, mentor and guardian angel of this story.
—
I HAVE COMPOSED MY work of fiction in a spirit of respectful grief for those whose lives were touched by the real history on which it is based.
BY ELIZABETH KOSTOVA
The Historian
The Swan Thieves
The Shadow Land
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH KOSTOVA is the author of the bestselling novels The Historian and The Swan Thieves. She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award for Novel-in-Progress. She is co-founder in Bulgaria of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing, which brings together writers in English and Bulgarian for workshops and other programs, and fosters the translation and publication of Bulgarian writers in the English-speaking world. To learn more about Bulgarian literature or apply to EKF’s programs, see www.ekf.bg and www.contemporarybulgarianwriters.com.
elizabethkostova.com
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
Elizabeth Kostova, The Shadow Land
(Series: # )
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends