“Get dressed,” she said, only her head peeking through the doorway. “Let’s go before the sun has set.”
I found her in the hotel bar, rolling an empty glass between her palms.
“It’s fairly cheap,” she said, and slid a shot of vodka across the counter. “For courage.”
“Am I that scary?” I took the shot and asked where she would like to go.
A walk up and down the main street would be nice, she said. With the sun setting. She’d always wanted to do it, but never had.
“Never?”
“Not once. And you?”
I nodded yes. I ordered us two more shots.
Outside, the sun was setting. The tops of buildings and of trees burned red with light, yet down below we walked in shadows. We made our way through waves of tourists. Obnoxious music blared from every café, each trying to outshout the next, and floating above all this — the stench of frying fish. Elif too was speaking loudly. She was laughing and waving about, but the more we walked, the more her grip tightened on my forearm. And the more we walked, the more chaotic the world grew around us. It wasn’t that the world scared us, loud as it was. It was the other way around — the world sensed our fear and spun into chaos. Or maybe it was just the vodka talking.
“Enough with this,” Elif chirped at last. “I’m starving.”
“There is a restaurant in the hotel.”
“It’s probably expensive.”
“Is it really?”
It was. And very empty, which we liked. We sat at a table in one corner, and it was some time before the waiter saw us.
“Order in English,” Elif said. “Ask for the English menu. Quickly!”
“That slimy bastard,” she said after the waiter had brought us the new menus. “Did you see how nice he became as soon as you spoke? What’s this?” she said, and jabbed a finger at the menu.
“Mackerel. But they’ve spelled it wrong.”
“For this much money, you’d think they’d learn to spell.”
We ordered a bottle of white wine to go with the mackerel.
“How do you spell ‘mackerel’?” Elif said. “Maybe you can teach me?”
“There isn’t all that much to learn.”
We ate the fish in silence. It wasn’t good, but we didn’t care. The wine was better. We were finishing the bottle when an old woman appeared by our table. Her white hair disheveled, her clothes devoid of color, worn out, she’d snuck in from the street to sell us flowers.
“A rose for the lady?” she said, and stuck at me a basket full of somewhat withered things. None of them were roses. Not all of them were flowers. Frightened, Elif shook her head. Was this woman real, or an apparition? A shadow that had followed us from Klisura, to hold us to account?
But then the woman smiled softly and we knew she hadn’t come to judge us.
Don’t be afraid, she was saying, without any words. I bring you flowers.
It was then that the toady waiter grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her to the side. “I told you once already,” he hissed. “Don’t come back.”
“Wait,” I said in English. “How much for the entire basket?”
“You paid too much,” Elif said once the woman had taken my money and been escorted back into the street. But by the way she cradled the basket in her lap I knew she was pleased.
“Dessert?” she said, suddenly animated. “What does this say?”
“Cognac.”
In Bulgarian, forgetting ourselves, we asked the waiter if we could take a bottle to our room.
“I knew you weren’t English,” he said. “Go across the street. Buy yourselves a bottle there. It’s cheaper.”
“We don’t care if it’s cheaper,” I said. So he brought us the bottle and we paid, and tipped him way too much and took the cognac and the flowers into the elevator.
“You know,” Elif said, “until today, I’d never ridden in an elevator.”
“Let’s ride in it then.”
We punched the last floor and the elevator raced up. We punched the ground floor and we flew back down. We took sips from the cognac, sitting on the floor, her head on my shoulder and only my hand stretching for the buttons. A few times other guests climbed in and we offered, politely, to press their floor for them. We offered them cognac. “It’s like the walnut tree,” I said, “up in the stork nest,” but she hushed me with the bottle.
“Don’t talk of that. Drink up.”
At last, we tired of postponing.
Back in the room, we sat down on the bed, in blue darkness, not bothering to turn the lights on.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said.
“I’m not.” She told me to look the other way. I heard the blankets rustle and when I turned around, she was in bed, the sheet pulled up to her chin. Her lips, her cheeks had grown red from the drink and that red stood out against the white of the sheet like drops of blood against the snow of winter.
I told her to close her eyes and while she kept them shut I took my clothes off and slipped under the blankets. We lay like this, one beside the other, not touching. The heat of her hand stung me when she took mine. She guided my fingers against the insides of her forearms, thighs, legs.
“I’m hideous,” she said. “All scars.”
What could I tell her when for me she was as pretty as a girl could be?
I dived under the sheet. I kissed her scars — her forearms, thighs, and legs. When I reemerged she was crying. “I’m so afraid,” she said. She sought my hand again and locked her fingers around my wrist like a cuff. “Don’t run away.”
FIVE
PERUN, THE GREAT GOD OF THE SLAVS, was boiling with fury. Lada, the goddess of youth and beauty, his most beloved daughter, had run away. Blind wrath split his skull in half. An avalanche of fire rolled down his mountain and scorched all in its wake. He called his sons, his other daughters, but no one dared stand before him. Only one goddess was not afraid. For her, Perun’s wailing was but a gentle song. She crawled out of the swamp that contained her and when she settled into her sled — a wild ram’s rib cage drawn forth by frogs and snakes and carp — she rushed to meet Perun.
“Her name was Starost,” I told Elif, and kissed her on the forehead, “the goddess of old age.”
Elif had taken the sheet and soaked it in the bathtub and now we lay diagonally in the sheetless bed. Only now that all was done had she allowed herself to relax a little.
“Tell me a story,” she’d said quietly, and so I did — the stories Grandpa had told me as a child. Of Lada and Attila.
Perun was startled once he saw Old Age. The hag had appeared before his throne without him realizing when. But that’s how she arrived. Sneakily, like a thief.
“Why have you come?” the great god asked her.
“To bring back your girl,” she hissed. “But first you’ll give me what I want.”
What Starost wanted was human life. “A child is born,” she told Perun, “and Lada takes it for herself. And what’s for me? I kiss rotten lips, while Lada kisses the lips of lads and lasses. I hold withered corpses, while Lada dandles toddlers on her knees. Why, Father, have you cursed me so? Why have you wed me to Smert himself?”
Perun feared Starost. He feared that, a god or not, one day Old Age would take him too. In a flash he saw himself weak on his last bed. He saw Smert, the white groom, take his hand and lead him not to the netherworld, where he would be reunited with his brother Veles, but to the goddess who ruled all gods. Zabrava. Lethe.
“If it’s toddlers you want to dandle on your knees,” Perun said to Starost, so he would please her, “let every man and woman in old age turn a toddler once again. Let them cry for their mothers and may you, mother of the old, suckle them on your withered breasts.”