The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  The woman turned and knocked on a door studded with brass rivets, and this let them into the presence of a man who sat behind a long desk, at the end of an even longer table. Alexandra thought, inevitably, of the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz. The man was mostly bald, with bristling gray eyebrows. He stood up, quietly, and she saw that he had an empty holster at his belt, although he wore a white shirt and a tie rather than a uniform. The gun must be in a drawer nearby. The skin in his temples throbbed with veins; the lid of one of his otherwise benign brown eyes twitched and fluttered as she shook hands with him.

  “Dobur den,” she said.

  He asked her in Bulgarian if she spoke Bulgarian.

  “Ne,” she said, too loud.

  “Please, sit down,” he told her in perfectly plain English. There was a small chair facing the desk. He dismissed the young policeman and the dragon lady, each with a nod. Alexandra wished that at least the policeman had been allowed to stay, since he seemed already something of an ally.

  The Wizard went to sit behind his desk again and viewed her across its expanse. “Now—you have this luggage that is not yours.”

  “That’s right,” she said, putting her hands over the top of the bag. “But I certainly didn’t mean to take it.”

  “You are American?”

  She couldn’t read his tone. “Yes.”

  “Your passport, please, Miss.”

  She handed it over and he examined it with quick precision; she noticed again that twitching eye, presumably fixed on her brand-new visa stamp. He wrote something on a notepad.

  “How did this happen, the problem of a bag?”

  Alexandra told him her story, briefly, describing the trio at the bottom of the hotel steps, the frail old woman with her purse dangling beside her, the younger man in his black and white clothes—dressed for a funeral? When she’d finished, the Wizard pressed his palms together above the desktop, as if praying horizontally. The light from a row of windows shone off his scalp. “I see. So you wish to return this item. And there is a name on the box, you said?”

  She showed him. “I have a picture of the people, too.” She pulled out her camera and found it, enlarged the image to hold up to him. She hadn’t really caught the tall man’s beauty. The Wizard glanced at it, but without apparent interest.

  “Now—Stoyan Lazarov,” he said. “There could be many people in Bulgaria with this name. You say that they, the family, are not from Sofia. Perhaps this will help.” He turned to a computer that stood at the side of his desk. Then he smiled—at the screen, rather than at her—and began to type something.

  She waited, cradling the bag, but it took a few minutes. He read something, touched a key, read more. “No, that is someone who lives in Sofia. Someone else in Sofia. Someone not in Sofia but who is still alive, no, and this one, also alive.”

  Then he stopped and studied the screen more closely with his elbow on his desk, leaned in with a sudden slow attentiveness she never forgot afterward. He pressed another key. He looked up at her. “You do not know exactly when this person died?”

  “No. Well, recently, I guess,” she said, with her hand over the top of the bag. “I couldn’t know that, because I didn’t even know there were ashes in the bag when I kept it. Has anybody come here to ask for it, maybe, or called you about it?”

  The Wizard seemed to examine her words in the air, then shook his head. “May I see the photograph again, if you please?” She handed the camera to him, feeling uneasy. He studied the three figures; his eye no longer seemed to be twitching. Alexandra reached again for her camera as soon as she politely could.

  “Is there something unusual about these people?” she asked. “They seemed rather—ordinary, to me.”

  He touched his chin. “I will make a telephone call. Excuse me. I will see if I can help.”

  He drew a cell phone from his jacket pocket, dialed, turned away toward the window as if to concentrate. She heard his rapid speech with a feeling of impotence. It was odd to think that six months from now, if she studied hard and made friends and listened carefully, she might well understand such a conversation. He was nodding, silent, then speaking in that quiet measured tone. She watched the skin on the smooth hinge of his jaw move back and forth with the sounds. He hung up, sat down, did something at his keyboard for a few minutes. Then he faced her. She had the sense that he didn’t at all mind keeping her waiting.

  “I am sorry to tell you that we cannot directly find the people you need,” he said. “But if you would like, we can give you an address where you can look for them. It’s not far away from Sofia. Maybe it is better, in such a personal matter, for you to go and explain what happened, if you have the time.”

  He bowed a little, as if aware she must be busy, in her draggled clothes. “They are probably very worried.” His hands prayed to the surface of the desk again. There was a broad silver band on his right ring finger—European marriage. “Or”—he paused—“if you would like, we can keep the bag for you safe here and you can return with the owner and he can receive it from us. We would take care of it until you come back. That might even be the best thing.”

  Alexandra hesitated. The weight of the urn on her lap felt strange, but she couldn’t imagine abandoning it to a storeroom. What if it got lost in some labyrinth of bureaucracy? She might find the old couple or the man with the beautiful eyes and then bring them here to discover their treasure gone, or irretrievable. What would her apology mean then? She put both hands around the bag. The long scar she’d carved on her arm began to prickle, and she willed herself not to scratch it.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said. “I would like the address—I want to take the ashes to them myself. I’d feel better about that.”

  He looked at her gravely, his eye jumping now as if it belonged to some other nervous system. Then he spread his hands on the table and shrugged.

  “If you like,” he said. He opened her passport again and recorded some information from it. He took out a clean sheet of paper and sat making a drawing, which he handed her: a neat little map, with words underneath. “Here is the route. It is a town near Sofia. Do you have an automobile?”

  This seemed to Alexandra unnecessarily sarcastic. She thought that in a minute he might offer her a ride in a police car.

  “Oh, no,” she said hastily. “But I have a friend who can take me.”

  He nodded. Perhaps he just wanted to be rid of her, after all. “Why don’t you call me, in fact, when you have returned the bag? You can let us know it is finished. Here is my business card. Do you have an address or phone number in Bulgaria?”

  “No—I’m sorry,” she said. “Not yet, I mean. I’m hoping to get a phone soon.” She didn’t add that it would depend on how much that might cost. “But I’ll be teaching at the Central English Institute.” He wrote this down. His card was in Cyrillic, and she put it into her billfold with the new Bulgarian tens and twenties.

  “Thank you,” she said, reaching out a hand. He shook it pleasantly, but without speaking further, and saw her to the door. Again, Alexandra wondered if she’d imagined his sudden interest—maybe he actually hadn’t wanted to be bothered with such a small matter. The dragon lady did not get up to see her out.

  In the hall, Alexandra looked at what he’d written down for her: an address, neatly lettered in Cyrillic and then in English, but with no phone number. The map showed a road from Sofia to a black dot in the east; 120 km, he had added in tidy script—not far, although much farther than Alexandra had bargained for. It was peculiar that he hadn’t given her the name of a person to search for, but she wasn’t going to knock on any of those doors again to ask him. She’d hoped for the name of a tall man dressed for a funeral.

  Outside, the street was sunny and warm; she had a skin-creeping sense that she’d emerged from a crypt, alive again. Trees and buildings swam under her fatigue. Then her taxi driver looked up from his newspaper and waved through the windshield, and for a moment she felt almost at home.

 
When she slid into the taxi, the driver said, “I see that you still have it.” His face in the rearview mirror was placid, but his eyes watched her.

  “Yes,” Alexandra said. “A police officer found the address of the family. I didn’t want to leave the urn with them.” She handed him the policeman’s card.

  “Hmm,” he said, and gave it back. Then she showed him the hand-drawn map. “Bovech,” he said.

  “What?” said Alexandra.

  “That’s the name of the town. It is a small place. In fact, I have never been there.”

  Alexandra shook her head. “I don’t know what to do—I don’t know if those people will stay in Sofia looking for me now, or leave without the urn. They might not be home yet. Maybe they won’t go there until tomorrow, at least.” She took the paper from him and folded it again. “Now I think that I should have left it with the police, after all, so if the people go to the station to check, it’ll be there, waiting for them.”

  The driver shook his head. “It is not a good idea to leave things with the police,” he said, as if irritated that she’d even considered that. “Do you want me to take you to your hotel to rest? You could wait a day and then travel to Bovech. Too bad the police did not give you a phone number for these people. I do not think you can find them in Sofia easily, even if they are staying here. The city is too big.”

  Alexandra leaned forward again to touch the back of his seat. “The tall man spoke to me before I helped them with their bags,” she said. “He asked me if I was in Bulgaria for vacation. He told me they were going to Velin Monastery—I knew the name from my guidebook. He said it was beautiful and famous and I should go see it someday.”

  The driver’s face cleared. “They were traveling to Velinski manastir? That is near Sofia. They probably wanted to have a service there, for this man, in the monastery church. Maybe they will still go there, because they know that you know that they had this plan.” He checked his cell phone. “We have lost only about fifty minutes—unless they traveled there with a bus, and then we will be faster than they will, anyway. Do you want me to drive you there?”

  “Yes, please,” she said. “But maybe it’s too long a trip for you, to go out of the city.”

  He gazed over the seat, considering her with his bright eyes under the fringe of hair.

  “I will charge you only the cost of the petrol, so far,” he said. “This happened to you by an accident. And you can pay me just for the travel outside Sofia, to go to the monastery and come back. The total will be about forty-five leva, maybe fifty.”

  This was still a lot for her, but she didn’t want to stop now to change more money or argue about the cost. More daunting was the fact that she didn’t know this young man, or his culture, and now she and all her luggage would be leaving the city alone with him. Probably the jet lag was affecting her judgment. He was being generous, but he seemed a little cranky, too, at moments—did that mean he was an angry person at heart, perhaps even violent?

  On the other hand, he was a professional, and how else was she going to return this bag? Alexandra, fidgeting under the taxi driver’s gaze, also began to wonder if the old people would forgive her, when she found them. For a moment, she imagined that they would be grateful to her for tracking them down, rather than upset by her mistake. Maybe they would invite her to stay for the funeral, once she had given back the urn. She would refuse, with humble thanks, in order to allow them their privacy. The tall man would smile down at her—without reservation, this time, his face lit in wonder at her conscientiousness. He would squeeze her hand before he turned away. The old lady would have tears in her eyes. Alexandra would say goodbye to them quietly and respectfully and ask the driver to bring her straight back into the city to her hostel. She would take a shower, with lots of soap, and sleep for twelve hours, no matter how early it still was. After that, her real stay in Bulgaria could begin. First, though, she had to finish this troubling errand.“Because I could not stop for Death—” she murmured, “he kindly stopped for me—”

  “Pardon?” The driver’s eyes were fixed on her, puzzled.

  “Nothing,” she said hastily. “Thank you. I really appreciate this.”

  “I can drive very fast,” he added.

  “Oh, please don’t,” said Alexandra. She wondered again what Jack would have advised her to do if she could have told him about this situation. But he was not there. She felt a stab of resentment, almost defiance. “Let’s go,” she amended quickly.

  The driver reached out a hand to shake hers. “I am Asparuh Iliev, by the way,” he said. She could not make any sense of the sounds, and he tipped his head to one side, relenting. “Asparuh is a famous name here—the king who established the first Bulgarian state, in 681. Even I get sick of it. You can call me by my short name, Bobby.” He pronounced it Bo-bi, clipping the syllables. Alexandra noticed again his odd accent—he sounded like a London cabbie in a movie, not a Bulgarian one. She nodded, too, and left her hand in his for a moment. His palm was warm and dry, his hand thin but pleasantly padded, like the paw of a monkey.

  “I’m Alexandra Boyd,” she said. “I should have introduced myself before.”

  “Alexandra of Macedon,” he said, smiling. “Do you know what your name means?”

  “No.” She felt that she should have, since she’d lived with it so long now.

  He nodded. “It means ‘defender of men.’ Are you going to protect me?”

  This time Alexandra smiled. “Certainly,” she said.

  The drive out of Sofia was unlike anything she had ever seen. There were signs everywhere, and in the crawling traffic she could make them out plainly: Cyrillic, sometimes English, occasionally French, German, or Greek. There were street signs directing the traffic and the pedestrians, signs pointing toward small hotels, signs for key copying shops, bicycle repair, and fresh meat; signs for flowers, with flowers in buckets all around them. She noticed brass placards on monuments to soldiers and statues of gesturing men in long frock coats, some of the pedestals sporting bright-colored graffiti.

  When Bobby stopped at a traffic light, she stared at the ads taped to lampposts and tried to figure out what they meant: tear off this number and call today to learn English, lose weight, acquire a wheelchair, travel to Greece or Turkey, report a found dog—this last was obvious, with a grainy photograph in black and white. In fact, there were dogs on many of the streets, something she hadn’t noticed before; they appeared not lost or found but feral, dodging the traffic with little fear, urinating on the curbs, sniffing one another, sniffing the pedestrians—who held their packages or skirts or hands away from them. To Alexandra, they looked like wolves, trotting in packs along the edges of the parks, at large but absorbed in their own errands.

  More than dogs, there were people, and she couldn’t help staring at them through the taxi window: people thronging the sidewalks, people in the shops, people talking at café tables, people selling used books under canvas canopies, selling new shoes in the windows of shops, begging for coins, pulling their children away from people begging for coins. She saw people pouring out of the university buildings and the change bureaus and bakeries and churches, carrying books or purses or cigarettes or old plastic bags. She saw the people of Sofia checking cell phones or watches or their breast pockets or—in little mirrors—their lipstick, getting into other taxis or stepping up into the blue and yellow trolleybuses beneath webs of electrical lines. There were old men with carefully preserved frayed jackets and bottle-thick eyeglasses, greeting each other and stopping to shake hands. She saw young women in tight jeans and curled glossy hair and fantastically long eyelashes; grandmothers in orange-and-brown print dresses, with a child on each hand; young men smoking with the sole of one shoe up against the side of a bank building; middle-aged women hurrying somewhere in high heels.

  As they left the center of the city, they passed more apartment buildings, some recently built but most looking at least a century old. They skirted a park; several monuments went by too qu
ickly for her to see well, although she caught a glimpse of a huge pedestal bristling with figures and rifles.

  “Excuse me,” she said, but Bobby didn’t seem to hear her. Then she realized it was one of the few images she already knew from her guidebook—a monument to the Red Army, which had occupied the country in September 1944. “An invasion by the Soviet Union—or a communist revolution, depending on whom you talk to,” the book noted. She wondered whom she might get to talk to, herself, and whether people were actually still talking about this, and where. In line at the grocery store? At parties? Back home, World War II was ancient history—except in Hollywood—and had been buried with honors. Her great-uncle, recently dead, had flown over these lands as a teenager, bombing Romania and Bulgaria; she wondered if his plane had ever dropped a bomb on the park where the monument now stood.

  Bobby’s taxi gathered speed on a wide boulevard and the center of the city fell away, followed by a zone of ramshackle stores—furniture, fabric, clothing, wares displayed beside the front doors or behind dusty plate glass windows. Suddenly she could see some of the massive housing complexes she had observed from the air a few hours earlier. Bobby pointed in that direction and spoke, and she leaned forward to hear over the warm rush of wind and traffic. The taxi did not seem to have air-conditioning, or perhaps he just didn’t like to use it; he’d left the front windows open.

  “I’m sorry?” she shouted.

  “I was raised there,” he shouted back. She turned to stare at clusters of giant buildings; from this closer vantage they appeared fragile, with weedy fields around them and construction barriers in some of the parking lots, or groves of scraggly young birch trees at their feet. She had no idea which of twenty or thirty structures he was pointing to. They weren’t white, as they had seemed from the plane window high above. And although they were clearly modern, they looked already like a great ruin, some of their outer layers cracked and dropping off in sections.