How long had it been, I wondered, since she had last left Klisura? Ten years? Or maybe twenty? I tried to imagine what she was feeling. All her life, like a silk moth, she had weaved for herself another woman, a shell to contain her passions, hatreds, and fears. A shell in which she could hide safely. It was this cocoon that had learned to absorb a bad word, a slap to the face, a great disappointment. But in time, the shell had turned into a prison and with her passions, hatreds, and fears, this poor woman too had found herself devoured.
The road twisted beneath us, rough and uneven, and the rearview mirror shook wildly. Elif’s mother sat stiff behind me, but in the mirror her reflection jumped and twisted. It occurred to me that the mirror showed her as she was truly. No shells. No prisons. Just a frightened woman, trembling with excitement. A runaway, if merely for a short while, her own, true mistress. And I knew then that beneath the stiffness this woman was fighting a giant struggle — to crawl back in the shell, afraid and defeated, or to step outside, a victor.
“Watch the road, damn it!” Elif cried again, and this time our turn was less gentle. I offered an apology, blamed the road, and was glad when soon it evened out and with it my driving. Earlier that day, I had studied my tourist map in careful detail, though in reality the chance for an error wasn’t that big. The road led to the town of Sinemorets, and all we had to do was follow it to the first exit, then drive down another, smaller road that would take us to the mouth of the Veleka.
“My daddy also taught me driving,” a thin voice said over my shoulder. “I too am a good driver.” I realized this was the first time I’d heard Aysha speak, save for the small thank you when I’d given her an apple. Her voice was pretty, like Elif’s, but cleaner the way springwater is cleaner than water from a river. So I let her sit in my lap and her small hands gripped the wheel and she said I too should hold it just to be on the safe side. She’d never driven a bus before, but she’d driven the Lada. And she’d never before seen the Black Sea. Had I?
“I’ve never seen it,” I lied, and watched Elif watch me in the mirror.
“Are you excited to see it? I’m really excited.”
But it was sadness I felt, not excitement. I thought of Grandpa, whom I had lied to only an hour before. He’d asked me to play backgammon out on the terrace and I’d said my head ached, that I was tired. Goodnight, I’d said, and he’d looked at me with such hurt. I know you’re lying, his eyes had told me. I know you’re up to something.
All this time I’d worked hard to avoid one question, but now, as the road unfolded in the light of the high beams, it was this one question I kept on asking. What the hell was I doing? Aysha wasn’t sick; no saint had possessed her. She was anxious to see the Black Sea, not to jump in a fire. And if she’d seen it, as by now any girl her age should have, especially one who lived this close to the coast, none of this would have happened. And her mother wasn’t sick, nor was Baba Mina, an old and senile woman. I was the sick one. And Elif knew it. I could tell by her face in the mirror. And she knew another thing — how to make me sicker.
“You two look a great item,” Elif said, and came to the dashboard. She pushed the bus lighter deeper into its slot and then pressed the orange coil to the tip of her cigarette. “Keep your hands on the wheel where I can see them,” she said, “American boy,” and blew out smoke from her nostrils.
At first I thought she was joking.
“I’m joking,” she said. “Dear God, take it easy.”
But she wasn’t. She really was jealous.
“Aren’t you a stuck-up bastard,” she said when I refused to grace her with a smile, and going back to her seat she let out a fake laugh.
“I too would like a cigarette,” someone said behind me. Even when I saw her fixing the ends of her headscarf that didn’t really need fixing, I still didn’t believe it was their mother speaking. “It’s been twenty-two years,” she said when Elif passed her the smoking cigarette. Then a cough choked her.
“American,” her voice wheezed once the cough was over. “If the radio’s working, I sure would like to hear it.”
I fumbled with the knob, terribly excited, awfully happy for her. It was hard to lock onto a steady station. The same frequency gave us a Turkish voice one moment, a Greek the next. Even here an invisible battle was being waged — for dominion over the very air we breathed. At last I managed to capture a decent transmission — Bulgarian folk music, rachenitsa, fast-paced, energetic.
“Is this good? Or should I keep searching?” I asked Elif’s mother.
“If you wish to,” she said. Then her voice dipped so much I barely heard it, but when she spoke again, her voice was more confident, louder, and she had stepped, for the first time, outside the cocoon that held her. “Wait. I like it this way. Leave it the way I like it.” And after this, she sat as before, but not at all the same.
We drove like this for fifteen minutes. Then, as the map had predicted, we came to an exit. The new road was so narrow, a car coming in the opposite direction would have had to pull over to let us pass. The pavement had given way to dirt and pebbles and again we shook and rattled.
Somewhere close in the dark the Via Pontica stretched northward. Or at least what little remained of that ancient Roman route, a road of tsars and great armies, so efficient in its layout that even the storks followed it in their journey. How many of the pebbles below us came from that old road? How many from crumbled fortresses and ruined houses? And in the dark, somewhere beside us, parallel to our movement, the Veleka River too moved toward the Black Sea. It had moved like this for thousands of years — before us, before the tsars or their armies — and it would move, much the same way, for thousands of years after we were done and dusted. The streams in Turkey had given it birth when there had been no Turkey. The streams in Bulgaria — fresh life, when there had been no Bulgaria. And in the end, the Black Sea took it the way it took all the rivers, without concern for what country they came from. In the end, it was all water changing form — from rain to river to sea to cloud back to rain again, an everlasting motion.
I held my hand up so Elif could see it, and without words, she passed me the cigarette. How I had not realized it was a joint they were sharing, I’m still not certain. I took a deep toke and held the smoke in so it could burn me and soon my head was a bit lighter. Unlucky people, I thought, and passed the joint back. To be born here. Our balkans were fire dancers, rising from ashes to flames back to ashes. And of all the seas in the world, it was ours that was the black one. Yes, yes, I said, and took another puff when Elif offered. It was the sea I felt now, ahead in the night through which we journeyed. It was the sea that had spoken to me, like a woman in mourning, and I could not bear to hear all she was saying.
“Aysha,” I said, “turn up the music.”
She turned the volume all the way up and I took one last drag before I rolled down the window. Cool night tangled around us like waves of seaweed. The road lifted us up a small hill, down, up another. And when we’d climbed a high point, when I could lick salt on my lips, Aysha gave out a stunned cry and slammed the horn as hard as she could slam it. Where I’d heard a woman in mourning, she had seen the sea for the first time.
ELEVEN
THE ROAD was two deep ruts now with dry grass waving between them. The oaks had given way to shorter trees, which in turn had morphed into tall bushes. Branches scratched the bus and lashed the windshield and so I had rolled up the window. And just when I was thinking that we were running a fool’s errand, that we had come to a place with nothing but thicket, a pair of brake lights flashed ahead in the darkness. In no time we overtook a row of cars parked in the bushes and then people hiking in a thin file.