The Shadow Land

by Elizabeth Kostova

  When it was clear no one had come to meet him, Stoyan took off his coat, folded it over one arm, and picked up his valise. He tested its weight in his hand. As of this morning, he had the wrong money in his pocket: the new Reichsmark, a German gift to Austria. Clearly, his telegram, like his luggage, had never reached Sofia. He would walk home. But as soon as he left the station, with the pigeons circling under its handsome roof, he felt better, felt that he belonged with the people around him. He was dark-haired like most of them. He heard a man calling out to another man and immediately understood the scrap of their exchange, even if it made no sense: “—just chew it a little more slowly, brother!” Literal advice, or a metaphor? And the second man, closer to Stoyan in the crowd, laughing and waving as he turned away.

  The streets themselves were as he’d always known them—apartments and shops, and in the center the grand Parisian-style buildings stained with coal smoke, cobbles slippery underfoot, the occasional horse-drawn cart clattering past with a load: food, coal, wooden crates, piles of scrap metal. A man sitting on an upturned pail called out, endlessly, the offer to shine gentlemen’s shoes. Stoyan reminded himself that it hadn’t been so long since he’d left these streets; in fact, since his last visit three years earlier, the only changes were a few new omnibuses and the shorter skirts of the women, who dressed less fashionably than women in Vienna but were more beautiful. A street sweeper stopped work to wipe his face; he greeted Stoyan in a raspy too-familiar voice. “Fiddle player? That your tsigulka? Play something, maestro!” Stoyan smiled and would have touched the brim of his hat if his hands hadn’t been full.

  He kept moving; now he felt Bulgarian again, included. The linden trees had blossomed out, his favorite time in the city. A brindled dog passed him on the sidewalk—handsome, polite, trotting fast as if on an urgent errand. Stoyan remembered walking in Vienna only two days before, saying goodbye to the trees there, where it was always colder. Strolling in those parks he had often pictured himself in childhood, in Sofia, looking at the lindens in bloom—full circle now. Even coming back was not so bad. He would be reunited with his parents and sleep in his old bedroom in their apartment. Bulgaria was neutral and likely to remain so—safer than Austria, certainly. If he had to stay home any length of time, perhaps a few months, he would get a room of his own and some practice space at the music academy.

  Turning a corner, Stoyan felt the swing of his coat over his arm, the familiar weight of the violin in its case. He thought of histories he had read and discussed with other students in Vienna—Europe’s wars in the cinquecento, in the settecento, the sordid comings and goings of armies and tyrants while Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven went on with their work. He thought of Beethoven and his Sinfonia Eroica, dedicated first to Napoleon. When Napoleon had declared himself emperor—the legend went—Beethoven had scratched out the dedication in a rage.

  He turned another corner. He hoped that sooner or later Hitler would be scratched out, too, on someone’s dedication page. Then he, Stoyan, could go back and resume his swift climb upward. Sooner than later, the Queen Elisabeth competition would be renewed and he would compete for it again. He’d qualified the first time, by dint of enormous work, although he knew it would take him some years to actually win. He would not simply be famous in his country. He had known since childhood that he would make his country famous in the world.

  He heard music starting up, but someone else’s music. On the sidewalk ahead of him stood a dusty-haired man with a violin under his chin, striking up a tune for the bear beside him. The animal stood upright, leashed with worn red leather, galumphing on its back legs, its small eyes looking straight ahead, its coat coming off in patches, even shabbier than the man’s clothes. It held out its paws as if they belonged to a different animal. The man danced, too, while he played, with the same awkward shuffle; perhaps he had learned from the bear instead of the other way around. The bear’s gaze darted here and there, fixing on Stoyan’s violin case, and then the man dipped and bowed to him, acknowledging a fellow performer. Stoyan nodded, wished he had a little money to give him. The fellow wasn’t half bad, as a musician—rather good, in fact, in a traditional way.

  He hadn’t reached his own neighborhood yet, but it wasn’t far now. He passed a bakery in the warm sun, doubled back without thinking, and went in. The scent of bread made him suddenly ravenous, a surge of hunger for home. The baker, a huge-fisted man, fished out a roll for him before Stoyan remembered again that he had no stotinki. Warm on his palm, the day’s second baking. It was strange to be so poor for a few minutes that you could buy nothing at all, not a tune or a piece of bread. He stood there, childishly hungry.

  “What’s wrong?” The baker patted his missing waist, stretched. “You won’t find fresher anywhere in the city.”

  “I’m sure of that,” Stoyan said, feeling Bulgarian easy on his tongue. For a few months, he would no longer have to gird himself for the struggle with German, the constant regret that he had studied French in school instead. “It’s just that I’d forgotten—I’m fresh off a train, with none of our money in my pockets. I’m sorry to have given you the trouble.” He set the roll down on a clean towel spread out beside the man’s abacus.

  The baker leaned forward against his counter, one floury hand pressed on the edge. His ovens would be in the back, or even underground. Bulgarian bread, baked on stones, sliding in and out on long wooden paddles, a tablecloth trick. Stoyan thought for a moment of Vienna’s pastry shops, the delicate displays in the windows, the wrought-iron chairs and Art Nouveau maidens frescoing the walls, the baroque cherubs on the ceilings, the thin china cups. At Demel’s, he had seen a cake that reproduced Napoleon’s second attack on the city, complete with sugar horses pulling fire engines, the Hofburg palace deliciously ablaze.

  “Where’ve you been?” the baker said.

  “Austria.”

  The baker’s eyes glistened darkly in his face, and Stoyan realized that it was hard to tell whether the man’s hair was going white in the midst of the flour. “A powerful place these days, isn’t that?” he observed. “Little brother to the Germans. They’re saying gospodin Hitler will return Macedonia to us, once Europe is properly redivided.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Stoyan thought of moving on, toward home and food he didn’t have to pay for, but the pleasure of speaking Bulgarian with this man kept him a moment longer, even if the man’s views were likely to irritate him. He’d known a few other Bulgarian students in Vienna—when they used their own language together it had felt like something illicit, useless. This man had probably never even considered learning another language; his Bulgarian was forever enough for him, as natural as his own skin and the wooden counter he leaned on.

  “There’s no other reason for Bulgaria to get mixed up in their doings.” The baker brushed his hands together as if wiping away the crumbs of further possibilities. “We don’t need them and the good Lord knows they don’t need us. But if they restored our territory, wouldn’t that be worth a little scuffle? I’d roll up my sleeves and do it myself, if they wanted me. But I’m too old, and I’ve got a bad hip. Very bad.”

  “I’m not sure it’ll be a little scuffle,” Stoyan said. “You wouldn’t believe the size of the armies parading in Vienna these days.”

  For some reason, he wished he could make the baker see the parades, this man who would never leave Bulgaria, who probably took a train out of Sofia once a year to go back to his father’s village—a man who’d perhaps never traveled to the Black Sea at the other end of his own country. Odd, how some people were destined to see the world and some not. He thought of what he himself had already witnessed—horses with tightly braided bundled tails like women’s hair, in a park in London. An aging harpsichordist in a Paris drawing room placing his hands on the keyboard, while a girl with blue satin shoes sat beside him to turn pages. The towering spikes of the cathedral in Prague. The even wider arc he would see in the future suddenly lifted Stoyan, and he felt almost faint with gratitu
de for the adventure of his life. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead, as he’d seen the street sweeper do earlier. The door swung open behind him, letting in traffic noise, and another customer entered.

  The baker looked up and pushed the roll back to Stoyan. “Here, eat this. But don’t go away,” he said. Clearly, he hadn’t finished reclaiming Macedonia. He turned to his new client.

  “Oh, it’s Vera,” he said. “What can I get you, moyto momiche?”

  She was just a girl, Stoyan saw, a schoolgirl in skirt and jacket, her dark braids roped together with a white bow.

  “Two loaves, please.” She put some coins on the counter and the baker turned to fetch her order.

  The girl glanced at Stoyan, then averted her eyes and didn’t look at him again. Well-bred, and grown up almost into a woman, probably a student at the gimnasium nearby. Her skin was pale, her nose a little long and delicately shaped. Her eyes, in that glance, were radiant, the pupils a surprising golden color, the lower lids rounded as if permanently swollen with tears, although it was clear that she hadn’t been crying. She fidgeted with the cuff of her jacket in order not to look at him or anything else.

  Stoyan kept his hat under one arm and watched her without meaning to, both of them waiting for the baker to bring the loaves. While she examined the edge of the counter, he observed that her mouth was wide and held in check at the corners, which seemed to produce a dimple. Her ear was small and tendrils of hair escaped around it, like a baby’s. He watched the horizontal sweep of her eyelashes—dark, like her hair—and then the horizontal sweep of her cheekbones, the knitted brow that didn’t want anyone looking. She might be as old as twenty or as young as fifteen, with her jacket fitted neatly over her breasts, her legs slim in their white cotton stockings, her shoes buckled and polished. She must be at least five years younger than he was, already a lifetime behind him.

  The baker returned with the loaves in brown paper. “Give these to Mama,” he said briskly, taking her coins. “How is your father, by the way?”

  The girl named Vera glanced up. “He’s better, thank you. We’re going to the sea next month, for a cure.”

  “Well, may he be completely healed, God bless him.” The baker shook his head. “Here, wait.”

  He pulled a tray of cheese pastries off a shelf and began to wrap one in more paper, which it spotted with grease. “These are the best of the day. They’ll bring him some nourishment.” He glared at Stoyan under white eyebrows. “A fine man, her father, and he was hit by one of those new buses right in front of his own house. What can happen at any moment! There, my dear—give him those, no charge.”

  The girl still did not look at Stoyan. He wanted to murmur an apology for life’s hardships, in particular hers.

  The baker was leaning over the counter now; he had spotted Stoyan’s violin case for the first time. “What? A musician? Why didn’t you say so? You can play for your snack! Are you any good?”

  Stoyan laughed aloud, and felt it was the first time he’d done that in a week. “They say in Vienna that I’m not bad.” He was rewarded by the feeling of the girl Vera’s eyes finally resting on his face, and he was careful, in turn, not to look at her.

  “Is that so?” The baker’s mouth had broken into a capacious smile and now he leaned back with his arms folded. “Prove yourself, then, son. Light up the old man’s shop a bit.”

  Stoyan had frequently refused to play even for friends, if his fingers were stiff or his mind out of sorts. Now he found himself opening his violin case on the well-swept wood of the bakery floor, where flour had cemented the cracks like ice on a terrace. He removed the violin from its velvet nest and lifted it to his shoulder. Without looking, he could tell that Vera was facing him. He placed his bow on the A string and pulled a rich sound from the instrument, tuning it—it seemed very loud in this space—and heard the door open again behind them. More customers.

  Without turning around, he began to play: the Chaconne from Bach’s second Partita in D minor. He knew the piece as thoroughly as anything in his repertoire; he had begun to learn it at the age of fourteen and had worked at it ever since. But now it seemed to him a new set of notes, fresh and passionate, an almost unrecognizable melody that his fingers happened to find on the strings. It fell all around him into the high-ceilinged old room, into the smell of bread, the greasy front windows, onto the sleeves of his carefully brushed jacket. It shimmered on the face of the girl staring at him—he glanced frankly at her for a moment over the music and saw that she was more than a girl, her eyebrows raised in critical pleasure, her lips pressed together to keep a smile inside. The baker gestured over Stoyan’s head to other people in the doorway; a small crowd seemed to be gathering behind him, then the sound of the door held or propped open, its bell clashing briefly with a phrase of the Chaconne, voices from the street pressing in. Around his own body he felt silence, as he always did while he played, the music coming to life inside him but also reaching his ears from a long way off, across fields, mountains, now whole countries. When he drew his bow through the last note, the silence broke behind his eyes and dizzied him for a moment.

  Then the baker began to pound his hands together, and the people who had pressed into the shop began to clap and cheer. He turned to acknowledge them, to bow a little, holding the instrument near his heart.

  “Just back from Vienna!” shouted the baker, as if he had arranged the concert and invited them all in ahead of time. “One of ours! From Sofia?” he asked Stoyan.

  Stoyan nodded and bowed once more, beginning to feel foolish, but his eyes had found Vera again. She was the only one not clapping; she didn’t have to. Her schoolgirl expression had fallen away completely and he saw only the Bach on her face, the mobile twitch of her mouth, surprised and alert, the kindled look of her eyes, close to raw pleasure. She had forgotten him and heard only his music, or the composer’s, or both. He bowed to her alone, and then packed away his instrument. The baker was wrapping up three loaves for him, swiftly, waving off Stoyan’s protests. People were making way for Stoyan as he passed out of the store.

  “That one will climb far!” a man called out.

  “Go with God! Come back and play any time!” shouted the baker. The people in the doorway drew apart. Vera walked out with him, as if that was natural, and he fell back to usher her ahead, looking down at her neat, proud shoulder and the long braids tied together with white organdy. At the curb, she glanced at him again, more tentatively, then hurried away; she had seemed afraid that he might say something, or that she might, herself. He watched her, followed her at a short distance with his valise in one hand and his instrument case in the other. She crossed among the carts and cars—graceful, diffident, proper—and went up a side street without looking back.

  When he reached the corner, he saw that she was letting herself into a gate in front of a four-story apartment building. He watched from nearly a block away as she shut it behind her. The building was a handsome one: a front garden with an old tree, wrought-iron balconies, long windows that had a look of lace curtains behind them. He noted the name of the cross street. A church bell had begun to ring somewhere down the boulevard. His parents would be overjoyed to see him, lunch soon spread on the table, his mother fussing over his one bag, his father’s kisses on his cheeks. Hot water for his face and hands, a clean shirt.

  Stoyan turned away. But he knew where she lived, and she had looked at him with her eyes full of music.

  Irina Georgieva walked them to the door and kissed Alexandra’s cheeks, then Bobby’s.

  “Thank you, my dears,” she said. “Travel safely. I will call you when I hear from Vera, so that you will know the end of the story.”

  She was still standing there, with her hand on the doorframe, when Alexandra turned back on the sidewalk to see her again. Alexandra wished she had taken a picture of the old lady, and of the small painted house, but it was too late now. She had also forgotten to say goodbye to the urn, although of course that would have made no sense.<
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  They walked down the cobbled streets until they found the right corner. It was quiet there, the heat filtering through the old trees, no one in sight. Then Bobby stopped sharply with Stoycho’s leash in his hand, and Alexandra stopped just beside him.

  The taxi sat where they had left it an hour earlier, but across the top of the windshield was a smear of yellow, although it didn’t look like a word. Then she saw that two bullet-sized holes had been punched into the windshield, one where the driver’s face would be and one for the passenger’s. Long cracks radiated from each hole.

  “Bobby?” she said. He stood there silent, his eyes narrowed, not looking at her even when she pulled on his arm. There was a piece of paper folded under one of the windshield wipers. He glanced quickly around, drew the paper carefully out and opened it.

  “What does it say?” Alexandra begged. A quaking had started in her knees, which made her suspect that she didn’t really want to know.

  It took him another moment. “It says, Varnete ya,” he told her flatly. Alexandra could see for herself that there was no exclamation point. “That means, Give it back.” He paused. “Or it could mean, Give her back.”

  “Give what back?” She kept her hand closed on his arm. “And why would anyone put holes in your windshield?”

  But Bobby was searching the street. He hurried to the other end of the block, darting around parked cars, scanning walls and gardens. Stoycho ran beside him. Bobby returned to the taxi, bent close to the paint, stepped away to see the whole effect. He scratched some up under his fingernail and sniffed it. “Still a little wet, of course.”