“Amerikanche.” I heard Elif call me and only then did I realize I was no longer in a dream. The hail was no hail, but pebbles she chucked from the road. And there in the road, I recognized the sharp hump of the Lada, its high beams flickering, the engine roaring. “Come on, my American friend,” Elif called, and stepped on the gas. “Let’s go before I’ve woken the dead.”
EIGHT
WHEN I WAS STILL A LITTLE BOY, Grandpa often told me stories of khans and tsars, of great heroes. Sometime in the tenth century, a scribe recorded the lineage of the first Bulgarian rulers in a codex, which lay forgotten between the pages of a Slavonic Bible until a Russian historian stumbled upon it a thousand years later. This codex, now famous as the Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans, began with Attila, also known as Avitohol, then spoke of his son Irnik, of Gostun, Kubrat, and of his son Asparuh, the white horseman, who with his tribes crossed the Danube, allied with the Slavs, defeated the Byzantine Empire, and founded Bulgaria in 681 A.D.
Many a night I had lain in bed imagining the glorious battles, my head turning the way any boy’s would when he believed the blood of Attila and Asparuh coursed through his veins. The stories Grandpa told me were only loosely based on historical fact; at my persistence he invented wildly, a codex of our own. We called it the Nominalia of the Imaginary Khans.
“Perun was the main god of the Slavs,” Grandpa liked to tell me in one such story. Master of thunder and of lightning, atop the highest mountain, he presided over many children, while Veles, the dark nether lord, controlled the underworld.
Of course, Perun loved all his children. But none as horribly as Lada. Lada was beauty, endless joy, eternal youth. Lada was love. Thick stalks of golden rye? The lashes of her eyes. The eyes themselves were humus-chernozem. White flour for steaming bread? This was her skin. Her teeth were bushelfuls of wheat. Her hair — a river.
So frightened was Perun of losing Lada that on the day the girl was born he seized her hair. Each year Lada’s hair grew longer, and each year Perun wound it around his fist a new revolution to keep her in his sight. But at his feet Lada faded. Her lips withered. Her breath turned rotten. Without Lada’s beauty, Dazhbog grew tired of pushing the sun across the sky. Cold sleep took possession of Zornitsa, and dawn no longer broke. Veles, the nether god, looked up, saw night, and climbed out of his domain. Snow, ice, and darkness ruled the land for ten thousand years.
The gods convened and, weeping, collapsed before Perun. “Almighty Father,” the twinkling Dawn begged him. “Your love for our sister has turned to poison. Your fire has turned to stone. Her beauty — to carrion. Look at her, black with flies at your feet, white with maggots. Let her rise so that her beauty may blossom. Set her free so that the land may be born again.”
This plea moved Perun. Reluctantly he unwound Lada’s hair a thousand times, two thousand. Her hair fell free. It gushed out of the mountain, down its slopes — a river, which swept all ice, snow, darkness in its way and left behind meadows and fields for plentiful harvests. Veles retreated underground and spring was born again, and spring extended as far north as Lada’s hair allowed.
But oh how Perun suffered without his beloved daughter. Nothing gave him repose. He thundered, threw fire and lightning, torched, ruined. At last he wound her hair around his fist a thousand times and summer came; two thousand times and it was autumn; three thousand times and Lada was back at his feet, and out into the world winter ruled.
I had remembered this story unexpectedly one night, sitting on the windowsill and thinking of Elif and of her father. And now again I thought of this story, if only for a moment. Perun, the god of thunder, roared around us. My head bobbed, my teeth chattered, and with the stench of burned oil and exhaust, Lada, the goddess of youth and beauty, rushed us in her palms up the Strandjan hills.
Beside me, Elif was shifting gears, barely releasing her foot from the gas. So this is how death arrives? I wanted to cry out, but couldn’t. All I could do was squeeze the door handle and dig my heels into the floor, like that would halt us. The high beams bounced up and down, revealed now cliffs, now bushes and branches, now ruts in the dirt road. It wasn’t raining, but the wipers flapped; the gears grinded and from a hoarse, pathetic stereo Metallica’s James Hetfield commanded us to give him fuel, give him fire, give him all that he desired.
“That was the first time I ran away from home,” Elif said, and she even looked at me, for effect. “Metallica in Plovdiv. June 11, 1999.” Having no money for tickets, she and her friends snuck onto the roof of an apartment complex near the stadium from where all they saw was this tiny sliver of the stage. The music reached them doubled up in echo, which was about the same quality as most of her bootleg tapes anyway. And the bastards didn’t even play “Seek and Destroy.” “But who cares, amerikanche? Best night of my life to date.”
At that, she floored the gas. We had emerged from the wide curves of the road onto a fairly straight stretch. A hundred meters ahead, the stretch ended in a thick mass of trees, which swayed in the beams. I think I yelled, but how could I be certain with the tires screeching, the engine roaring, the clattering of metal parts? Elif had slammed the brakes and we were skidding sideways. My head smashed into the ceiling, then into the headrest — a hard, rubberized plastic the car’s Russian constructors must have invested with a dual function: to stop your neck from snapping while simultaneously halving your skull.
Then we were no longer in motion. The wipers scratched the dry windshield with a noise that raised my arm hairs, and Hetfield screamed for fuel and for fire. In sync Elif banged her head, in sync she joined him in the scream. “Yeah, oh yeah,” she hollered, and when she looked at me, the black of her pupils had swallowed up her red eyes. “I have no idea what he’s saying and I don’t care. But I relate.”
We abandoned the Lada and sank into the forest. A rusty circle of light showed us the way — an ancient flashlight that danced in Elif’s hand. She held mine and pulled me forward, her palm burning and so sweaty that a few times I slipped from her grip.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked, and when she answered, the lightness of her voice sent shivers down my spine: “Across the border.”
The wind howled in the treetops and with each gust the rain in their leaves fell to the ground in whooshing sheets. My soles picked up chunks of mud and so did Elif’s, but the heavier our shoes grew, the tighter she pulled me forward and the faster we walked.
“I don’t have my passport,” I told her, and for a long time her laughter bounced through the trees and in my head. How many times had I fantasized about finding myself alone with her, away from other people’s eyes? Of holding her hand? But not like this. Listen, I wanted to say, and plant my heels in the mud and demand an explanation. And yet all I did was follow wherever she led, just happy that she was near.