Wildalone (8 page)

“What's wrong, Babo?”

The old woman sat there frozen and—was I imagining it?—teared up. Only moments earlier, she had been chatting away.

“What happened?” My white cotton dress doubled up as a handkerchief and I wiped her cheeks. “What is it? Tell me.”

She clenched her calloused hands. “You remind me so much of her.”

“Of whom?”

“My girl . . .”

“What girl?” I assumed she meant my mother at my age.

“My long-lost darling girl—”

“Thea, that's enough!” A frantic hand grabbed my elbow. “I close my eyes for a minute and what do you do? You manage to upset your grandmother!”

“I didn't do anything. We were just talking about how she—”

“Whatever the two of you were up to, I won't have it.”

“What's with you, Mom?”

Nothing, apparently. Just a migraine. And it was getting late, so she wanted to hurry and drive home before dark.

The good-byes were quick, the brief hugs—awkward. When we reached our house and I wouldn't stop asking questions, I was told that Grandma was imagining things. That it might even be dementia.

But secrets don't give up so easily once they have come to light. Later that evening, I went to say good night to my parents and heard crying on the other side of their bedroom door. As far as I knew, my mother never cried. She didn't smile much either, but she certainly never cried (Dad and I joked that she was the iron soldier in our family). Now I stood in the hallway, amazed at how well I knew this sound. Every nuance of it, its inexplicable desolation: the crying I had heard in the ghost room, all those years back.

Once again, I was told not to worry. Mom was upset over Baba Mara's health, nothing more.

“Then how about the locked storage room? You were crying in there too, the night I found the piano.”

“We all have our moments, Thea. And not everything needs to be shared, even with family. So let's drop it. Please.”

For the first time, I began to suspect that someone might have played that piano before me. Someone my parents still loved but had kept a secret all my life.

Determined to find out more, I drove to Baba Mara's house the next day, only to discover that she had neither dementia nor any desire to discuss the odd incident.

“Forget what I said or didn't say, Thea darling. Is it true what I hear, about you going to America?”

“Well, yes, but how did you . . . did Mom tell you?”

“Of course she did! I should be very angry with you right now. Such an achievement, and not a word to me yesterday?”

I had asked my parents not to announce anything until I had chosen a school and was ready to tell people myself. Yet, all of a sudden, my mother had spilled the news overnight. Had she used it as a warning? An added reason why the long-lost girl was not to be mentioned in front of me again?

We talked at length about America. What fascinated Baba Mara most was that colleges there were mini towns, with everyone living on campus, sometimes even in the middle of nowhere and with no trace of civilization in sight. Meanwhile, my thoughts were elsewhere.

“Grandma, you still haven't told me who I remind you of.”

“What an obstinate child! Everyone reminds us of someone—today one memory, tomorrow another. But it's not the past that counts, especially when you have such a future ahead of you!”

As I sat in the car and watched her wave from the gate, I couldn't stop thinking about that mysterious girl from the past. She wasn't supposed to count, yet clearly did—otherwise what would be the harm in telling me about her? And if my immediate family wouldn't do it, was there anyone else I could ask?

I ran the list of relatives through my mind, a list whose unusual brevity I had so far taken as a given. An aunt in Vienna. Two estranged cousins (our parents were not on speaking terms). Three dead grandparents. It was odd how Mom and Dad had managed to distance themselves, and me, from everybody. I couldn't point to a single family reunion, a full house at Christmas, or a birthday when it hadn't been just the three of us. But I did recall something else: the name of a small town, a few hours away, where Baba Mara had once claimed to have a cousin of her own.

That weekend, under the pretext of a last-minute trip with friends, I packed a few things and hit the road.

WHAT TSAREVO LACKED IN GLITZ
it made up for in seclusion, managing to stay under the radar as a sliver of privacy for those in the know. All along the
Bulgarian Black Sea coast, towns rivaled one another with golden beaches, archaeological sites, and ultramodern hotels. Tsarevo was not one of them. Tucked in a negligible bay about two hours north of the Turkish border, it had no claim to fame of its own. The sea had gnawed away at the beach until barely any sand was left, the archaeologists never flocked there, and the hotel magnates slashed any semblance of luxury out of their construction budgets. My parents avoided it too, when we vacationed at the Black Sea each summer. But until now I had never questioned why.

The city hall (a massive yellow building looming over the town square) was as good a starting point as any, so I walked in and committed the sin of disturbing the clerk's midday snooze with a question.

“Oh, one of those.” His voice left no doubt how he felt about people who had nothing better to do than trace family roots. “The name?”

I spelled Baba Mara's maiden name.

“
Zlateva
with a
Z
, right?” At snail speed, he paged through a large register, then reluctantly informed me of a retired schoolteacher who had gone by that name years ago. “Stefana Zlateva. I don't know if she's still alive, though. And even if she were, I wouldn't put too many eggs in that old basket.”

“Why not?”

He lifted a finger to his forehead. “Rumor was, she had a plank unscrewed up here.”

I thanked him for the address and left.

Number 1 Smirnenski Street looked more like a boutique hotel than a single-family home. Then again, so did most of the houses in Tsarevo, the owners having long ago poured their life savings into accommodations for the phantom tourists that the fall of Communism never brought.

I rang the doorbell. The woman who opened was tiny, bent over with age like the top of a hook. With one hand behind the waist to help unfold it and the other shading her face from the sun, she looked up. Squinted. Those eyes—two embers of mischief—were the only part of her that had managed to stay young over the years.

“The noontime knocking brings a guest!” Her voice zigzagged between highs and lows, the way old people's voices do once they become too frail.
Then the mischief sharpened into recognition: “For heaven's sake, look who's back after all this time!”

“I don't believe we've met before.”

“But of course we have! I prayed to see you once again before I die.”

The clerk was right, she didn't know what she was saying. “Could you spare me a minute?”

“A minute? I have heaps and heaps of minutes, child, if the Lord should wish it so.”

We sat down in the garden, flanked by a fig tree on one side and a pomegranate on the other.

“You missed your old friend?” Her eyes rolled in the direction of the fig tree. “Told you this fig was good enough, told you better not go running to the church so much. But you wouldn't listen, Elza
samodiva
.”

“You take me for someone else. I am the granddaughter of Baba Mara.”

“And so you are! My cousin's beloved grandchild, Elza. Still the same—” She looked me up and down. “No, younger!”

It was possible in theory that two women could have dementia producing an identical delusion. In reality, the odds were close to zero. Baba Mara had only one child: my mother. And my parents had only me—or so I had always thought. But if there was anything lucid in what I had heard so far, if Baba Mara did indeed have another grandchild, then it meant that at some point, back when I had been too young to remember or possibly before I was even born, I must have had a cousin or a sister.

The word slipped out automatically and the old woman's face lit up.

“Yes: sister! That's what the
samodivi
are—all sisters.” She crossed her ankles and began to swing back and forth on the bench. “Coming out at night, on the full moon . . . all beautiful, and all alike. Dancing by the cemetery, at the church above the sea. God have mercy on anyone who sees them!” Then her voice dropped to a whisper: “But don't worry, I haven't told anyone about the sisterhood. Your secret has been safe with me.”

I repeated that she had the wrong girl, but my words didn't reach her.

“And the way you moved, the way you danced by that fig tree! White beauty in the moonlight . . .”

She closed her eyes, lifted her arms in the air and started singing:

                                         
The samodivi haunt the night

                                         
haunt the night

                                         
dressed in white.

                                         
Go see their dance and by surprise

                                         
by surprise

                                         
lose your eyes.

She hummed the same lines over and over until I began to feel a strange unease. That tune sounded familiar. Not so much a memory, more like the distant ripple of a dream. A nursery rhyme heard long ago when someone had lulled me to sleep with it, strikingly similar to the first tune I had played on a piano.

I jumped from the bench but she grabbed my wrist, cutting off the song as abruptly as she had started it:

“I warned you many times: don't go near the church! I knew it would be by the church cemetery that they'd get you. The
samodivi
don't know mercy. And they don't forget.”

The garden door banged shut.

“Well now, Mother, I leave for five minutes and you already have a visitor?”

The man looked like a fisherman returned from sea: tan skin, a navy striped T-shirt, hair and beard unkempt, turned half blond by sun and half gray by age. He froze, as if having just seen his death.

I came to his rescue: “My name is Thea. I'm trying to track down any relatives who may have known Baba Mara and . . .” Somehow, the name Elza refused to come out. “And the rest of my family.”

“Ah yes, I remember you—the little toddler everyone was fretting over. But that was what, fifteen years ago? Look at you now!”

I didn't know what to say, how to begin talking to someone who was related to me yet a complete stranger. He looked just as uncomfortable. His face had relaxed a bit from the shock, but only barely, and he was now starting to sweat in the midday heat.

“So, Thea, good to see you all grown up. Your mother and I are second cousins, which makes me . . . your uncle, sort of?”

The old woman beamed a smile at him. “Didn't I tell you our Elza would come back?”

“You did, Mother, you did.” His eyes warned me not to say anything. “Let's go. It's time for your lunch already.”

He took her inside and returned alone a few minutes later.

“She isn't well, makes up a lot of things. And when she does, arguing doesn't help. It just exhausts her.”

“I can imagine.” What I couldn't imagine was why she would make up those things in the first place. “By the way, I owe you an apology—I should have called first. Everything has been last minute.”

“Nothing wrong with last minute. You are family.”

I slid to the end of the bench to make room for him—for his buff yet already vaguely worn-out body, and the invisible cloud of machine-oil vapors that engulfed the air around him. “My parents never mentioned I had family here.”

“It was probably for the best.” Then he clarified: “Less family, less headache.”

“I want headache. It gets a bit lonely, being an only child.”

“Only child? Is this what they told you?”

At last, someone had come out and said it. I tried to process the thought. But the word
sister
remained abstract to me. Unthreatening. Like a genetic disease that could only afflict others since it wasn't supposed to be part of my DNA—until now.

“I once had a sister, didn't I? Elza, the girl your mother took me for.”

He stared down, wedging his heels deeper into the earth. “Maybe I shouldn't have told you.”

“No, I'm glad you did. And I already suspected it anyway, that's why I came here. No one speaks to me about her, so I was hoping you might.”

“I can tell you what I know, but I'm afraid it isn't much.”

“It doesn't need to be.”

He leaned back on the bench, ready to sink into the past. “You were almost three years old. You don't remember her at all?”

“Just a lullaby she must have sung to me; that's it.”

“From what I recall, she wasn't allowed around you much. Your parents worried that you'd begin to . . . that she might damage you. Too much nonsense going on.”

“What kind of nonsense?”

I felt a sudden, almost irrational need to know. But pressing him was a bad idea—what if he changed his mind and stayed mum, like everybody else? Down in the dust, a string of ants curved its thread around the edge of his shoe. Finally, his eyes lifted.

“I saw your sister only a few times, and very briefly. I was working on the ships—traveled nonstop, so I was never here. You look a lot like her. Everything about that girl was very . . .” He shook his head, as if the adjective he had in mind was inadequate. “Airy. Not air-headed, not at all, but . . . what's the word . . .”