“Wool makes me itchy,” she said. “And I get bloated from milk. But I might take you all the same.” She leaned her head against his shoulder, her eyes on mine. A stick crackled; the flame loomed taller and seemed to lick her face.
“As if I want someone like you,” he said, laughing. “A hedgehog in my pants.”
There was a reason Elif had brought me here, beyond the prank, beyond just showing me some ancient rubble. I watched her, prettier than she had ever seemed now that her cheek was on his shoulder, and something hurt, deep in my jaw and in my teeth, the way it hadn’t hurt for any other girl. And I was certain she read my hurt, because a smile had forged of her lips a sickle.
“My American friend,” she said, still leaning. “I’ve got the medicine for you.” And then she fished a plastic Coke bottle, sixteen ounces, out of her jacket and tossed it through the flame. I took three hurried gulps of brandy that set my throat afire and kicked my mind off the hurt, if only for a while. I tossed the bottle to Orhan, but he allowed it to bounce off his chest into the flame, from where the yelping Elif pulled it out barehanded.
“I don’t drink,” Orhan told me, while she was cursing that the rakia had gone to waste.
“Orhan here drinks only milk and water,” Elif said, dusting off the ash from the bottle. Its label had melted, and its sides had morphed into an odd shape, half girl, half something else. “The flesh of pigs disgusts him. He prays five times a day and once, during Ramadan, he swallowed a fruit fly by accident and then was sick with guilt for a year. Spent it in the mosque, with my father, chatting about the greatness of Allah. I bet my father wishes Allah had sent him not me but Orhan for a child.” She spoke like this for a while, trying in vain to unscrew the cap, which the fire had sealed. And when she’d gotten tired, she snatched the knife from Orhan, stabbed the bottle in the throat, and cut the top away. “See what you did?” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she meant me, or Orhan, or both of us. “See how you left me no choice? But we will drink it all.” Then she tossed the cut-off plastic into the flame and, in a veil of fuming blackness, brought her lips to the jagged rim. “Hey, Orhancho,” she said, “I love you, but why you have to be so crazy?” and then, dropping the knife on the ground, she handed me the bottle through the flame. Some of the liquor sloshed when I took it; the fire hissed and thicker tongues shot up at the sky.
“Yeah, oh yeah,” Elif yelled, her voice bouncing distorted in the boulders. With a simple smile Orhan watched her run toward a rock and attempt to climb it. She threw pebbles at another rock, then tried to stride the remnants of a wall, flapping her arms on either side for balance.
“I worry that she will make a bad wife,” he said when she had sunk into the night, and only her yelping could be heard. I was just having another sip and after that I had another.
“Pardon?” I said in English, but he didn’t seem to hear.
“I feel it is my duty to correct her. To save her from the Sheytan. But still I worry she is more trouble than it’s worth.”
TEN
MORE THAN TWO AND A HALF MILLENNIA AGO, the priestesses of Dionysus tore piece by piece their sacrificial prey. “Right where you sit,” Elif said, and leaned closer to the flame so that her face ignited orange. “But there is more.”
Of course there was. And now that the rakia had untied her tongue she let it out with gusto. The year was 1981 and Bulgaria was celebrating thirteen hundred years since its founding. The Ministry of Culture, headed by none other than the daughter of the general secretary of the Communist Party, was proudly unveiling one monument after another, new palaces, new buildings all through the land. One day, amid the frantic celebrations, a man from the Strandja Mountains showed up at the ministry’s gates. “Take me to the minister,” he demanded. “I’ve got something she must see.” And though his face was scrubby, his clothes ragged, dusty from the road, they rushed him right in. This man was Mustafa the Treasure Hunter, a man who knew his way not just through the hills of the Strandja, but also through her past; a man who’d helped the ministry discover more than a few cartloads of Ottoman and Thracian gold.
Now before the minister, behind the locked doors of her office, Mustafa pulled out a piece of cow hide. A map to a treasure the likes of which they’d never seen before.
“Ottoman?” the minister inquired. Mustafa shook his head. “Then Thracian?”
He shrugged. He wasn’t certain, but if the men from whom he’d bought the map could be believed the treasure was older still.
“Older than the Thracians?” The minister sneered.
“If the men can be believed.”
She didn’t bother asking what men these were. So that the treasure hunter would lead them to the ancient secrets, he had to be allowed to keep his own.
“She was a fine lady,” Elif said now of the minister of culture, and slurped rakia, half of which we’d already killed. “Even my father won’t say a bad word about her and when it comes to the Communists he doesn’t spare his curses. A cultured woman, he says. But her head, he says, wasn’t well screwed onto her shoulders. She was into that mysticism stuff. Flying to India; meditating days on end in a cave. Imagine this, the daughter of the general secretary of the Communist Party, eating nothing but bean sprouts and chatting with gurus? She was a rebel, like me. That’s why I like her.”
At this Orhan grunted. But he said nothing, only raked the fire with his knife and blew on the flame.
So what the minister of culture did with the treasure map was only the most logical thing she could do.
“She took the map to Baba Vanga. You know who Baba Vanga was, don’t you, amerikanche?”
Of course I did. What Bulgarian didn’t? One day when Vanga was a little girl, just after World War I had ended, a sudden twister of red desert sand picked her off the ground outside her village and carried her the way a thermal column carries a migrant stork. The peasants found her in a field, blind from the dust and sand. But though the twister had taken Vanga’s eyes, it had given her a different kind of sight. For decades, Baba Vanga was Bulgaria’s — no, Eastern Europe’s — most renowned clairvoyant. And so, quite naturally, the treasure map was brought for her to see.
But Baba Vanga refused to even touch the piece of hide. “It’s very bad,” she told her high-ranking visitors. A long, long time ago tall, strapping men had crossed the sea from Egypt. Men with black hair, and gold masks on their faces, and many slaves. The slaves dug a grave and buried in it a royal woman, and then were all put to the sword. The tomb was sealed and hidden. Inside it, to this day even, were chunks of gold and awesome riches, and in her coffin the royal woman lay. She held a scepter and rolled at her feet was a papyrus, which spoke of how things had been thousands of years back and how they would be, thousands of years in the future.
“Who was this woman?” I said. The wind had turned colder and so I huddled closer to the flame.
“Bastet,” Elif whispered. “The Egyptian goddess of cats.” She watched me a long time, without a word.
“Fuck off,” I said. “Get out of here.”
Orhan stirred. “It’s true. I mean, the Communists believed it true.” He looked about and over his shoulder, as if to make sure no Communist was there to hear him. “They started digging, right here in the ruins. My uncle told me of how the soldiers who dug the hole all got really sick. Their hair was falling off in handfuls.”
“And did they find anything?” I asked, so close to the fire now my eyes watered.
“Death,” said Elif. I tried to see if she was joking, but her face betrayed only pleasure — from being here, with me and with Orhan, from saying the things she said and watching me absorb them. “A month or so after the digs began, the minister died in suspicious circumstances. A number of key officials involved in the excavations took their lives. And those who didn’t die, the Committee for State Security locked away, for good.”