The Historian

Chapter 54

"My first impression of Bulgaria - and my memory of it ever after - was of mountains seen from the air, mountains high and deep, darkly verdant and mainly untouched by roads, although here and there a brown ribbon ran among villages or along sudden sheer cliffs. Helen sat quietly next to me, her eyes fixed on the small porthole of the airplane window, her hand resting in mine under cover of my folded jacket. I could feel her warm palm, her slightly chilled, fine fingers, the absence of rings. We could occasionally see glinting veins in the crevasses of the mountains, which must, I thought, be rivers, and I strained without hope for some configuration of winding dragon tail that might be the answer to our puzzle. Nothing, of course, fit the outlines I already knew with my eyes closed.
"And nothing was likely to, I reminded myself, if only to quell the hope that rose uncontrollably in me again at the sight of those ancient mountains. Their very obscurity, their look of having been untouched by modern history, their mysterious lack of cities or towns or industrialization made me hopeful. I felt somehow that the more perfectly hidden the past was in this country, the more likely it was to have been preserved. The monks, whose lost trail we now soared above, had made their way through mountains like these - perhaps these very peaks, although we didn't know their route. I mentioned this to Helen, wanting to hear myself voice my hopes aloud. She shook her head. 'We don't know for a fact that they reached Bulgaria or even actually set out for it,' she reminded me, but she softened the flat scholarship of her tone with a caress of my hand under the jacket.
"'I don't know anything about Bulgarian history, you know,' I said. 'I'm going to be lost here.'
"Helen smiled. 'I am not an expert myself, but I can tell you that Slavs migrated to this area from the north in the sixth and seventh centuries, and a Turkic tribe called the Bulgars came here in the seventh, I think. They united against the Byzantine Empire - wisely - and their first ruler was a Bulgar named Asparuh. Tsar Boris I made Christianity the official religion in the ninth century. He is a great hero here, apparently, in spite of that. The Byzantines ruled from the eleventh to the beginning of the thirteenth, and then Bulgaria became very powerful until the Ottomans crushed them in 1393.'
"'When were the Ottomans driven out?' I asked with interest. We seemed to be meeting them everywhere.
"'Not until 1878,' Helen admitted. 'Russia helped Bulgaria to expel them.'
"'And then Bulgaria sided with the Axis in both wars.'
"'Yes, and the Soviet army brought a glorious revolution just after the war. What would we do without the Soviet army?' Helen gave me her most brilliant and bitter smile, but I squeezed her hand.
"'Keep your voice down,' I said. 'If you won't be careful, I'll have to be careful for both of us.'"
"The airport in Sofia was a tiny place; I'd expected a palace of modern communism, but we descended to a modest area of tarmac and strolled across it with the other travelers. Nearly all of them were Bulgarian, I decided, trying to catch something of their conversations. They were handsome people, some of them strikingly so, and their faces varied from the dark-eyed pale Slav to a Middle-Eastern bronze, a kaleidoscope of rich hues and shaggy black eyebrows, noses long and flaring, or aquiline, or deeply hooked, young women with curly black hair and noble foreheads, and energetic old men with few teeth. They smiled or laughed and talked eagerly with one another; one tall man gesticulated to his companion with a folded newspaper. Their clothes were distinctly not Western, although I would have been hard put to say what it was about the cuts of suits and skirts, the heavy shoes and dark hats, that was unfamiliar to me.
"I also had the impression of a barely concealed happiness among these people as their feet touched Bulgarian soil - or asphalt - and this disturbed the picture I'd carried there with me of a nation grimly allied with the Soviets, Stalin's right-hand ally even now, a year after his death - a joyless country in the grip of delusions from which they might never awake. The difficulties of obtaining a Bulgarian visa in Istanbul - a passage oiled in great part by Turgut's sultanic funding and by calls from Aunt ?va's Bulgarian counterpart in Sofia - had only increased my trepidations about this country, and the cheerless bureaucrats who had finally, grudgingly stamped their approval in our passports in Budapest had seemed to me already embalmed in oppression. Helen had confided to me that the very fact that the Bulgarian embassy had granted us visas at all made her uneasy.
"Real Bulgarians, however, appeared to be a different race altogether. On going into the airport building, we found ourselves in customs lines, and here the din of laughter and talk was even louder, and we could see relatives waving over the barriers and shouting greetings. Around us people were declaring small bits of money and souvenirs from Istanbul and previous destinations, and when our turn came we did the same.
"The eyebrows of the young customs officer disappeared into his cap at the sight of our passports, and he took the passports aside for a few minutes to consult with another officer. 'Not a good omen,' Helen said under her breath. Several uniformed men gathered around us, and the oldest and most pompous-looking began to question us in German, then in French, and finally in broken English. As Aunt ?va had instructed, I calmly pulled out our makeshift letter from the University of Budapest, which implored the Bulgarian government to let us in on important academic business, and the other letter Aunt ?va had obtained for us from a friend in the Bulgarian embassy.
"I don't know what the officer made of the academic letter and its extravagant mix of English, Hungarian, and French, but the embassy letter was in Bulgarian and bore the embassy seal. The officer read it in silence, his huge dark eyebrows knit over the bridge of his nose, and then his face took on a surprised, even an astonished expression, and he looked at us in something like amazement. This made me even more nervous than his earlier hostility had, and it occurred to me that ?va had been rather vague with us about the contents of the embassy letter. I certainly couldn't ask now what it said, and I felt miserably at sea when the officer broke into a smile and actually clapped me on the shoulder. He made his way to a telephone in one of the little customs booths and after considerable effort seemed to have reached someone. I didn't like the way he smiled into the receiver and glanced across at us every few seconds. Helen shifted uneasily next to me and I knew she must be reading even more into all this than I was.
"The officer finally hung up with a flourish, helped reunite us with our dusty suitcases, and led us to a bar inside the airport, where he bought us little shots of a head-emptying brandy called rakiya, partaking thoroughly himself. He asked us in his several broken languages how long we'd been committed to the revolution, when we had joined the Party, and so on, none of which made me feel any more comfortable. It all set me to pondering more than ever the possible inaccuracies of our letter of introduction, but I followed Helen's lead and merely smiled, or made neutral remarks. He toasted friendship among the workers of every nation, refilling our glasses and his own. If one of us said something - some platitude about visiting his beautiful country, for example -  he shook his head with a broad smile, as if contradicting our statements. I was unnerved by this until Helen whispered to me that she'd read about this cultural idiosyncrasy: Bulgarians shook their heads in agreement and nodded in disagreement. "When we'd had exactly as muchrakiya as I could tolerate with impunity, we were saved by the appearance of a dour-faced man in a dark suit and hat. He looked only a little older than I was and would have been handsome if any expression of pleasure had ever flitted across his countenance. As it was, his dark mustache barely hid disapprovingly pursed lips, and the fall of black hair over his forehead concealed none of his frown. The officer greeted him with deference and introduced him as our assigned guide to Bulgaria, explaining that we were privileged in this, because Krassimir Ranov was highly respected in the Bulgarian government, associated with the University of Sofia, and knew as well as anyone the interesting sights of their ancient and glorious country.
"Through a haze of brandy I shook the man's fish-cold hand and wished to heaven we could see Bulgaria without a guide. Helen seemed less surprised by all this and greeted him, I thought, with just the right mixture of boredom and disdain. Mr. Ranov still hadn't uttered a word to us, but he appeared to take a hearty dislike to Helen even before the officer reported too loudly that she was Hungarian and was studying in the United States. This explanation made his mustache twitch over a grim smile. 'Professor, madam,' he said - his first words - and turned his back on us. The customs officer beamed, shook our hands, pounded me on the shoulders as if we were old friends already, and then indicated with a gesture that we must follow Ranov.
"Outside the airport, Ranov hailed a cab, which had the most antiquated interior I'd ever seen in a vehicle, black fabric stuffed with something that could have been horsehair, and told us from the front seat that hotel rooms had been arranged for us at a hotel of the best reputation. 'I believe you will find it comfortable, and it has an excellent restaurant. Tomorrow we shall meet for breakfast there, and you may explain to me the nature of your research and how I can help you make arrangements to complete it. You will no doubt wish to meet with your colleagues at the University of Sofia and with the appropriate ministries. Then we shall arrange for you a short tour of some of Bulgaria's historic places.' He smiled sourly and I stared at him in growing horror. His English was too good; despite his marked accent, it had the tonelessly correct sound of one of those records from which you can learn a language in thirty days.
"His face had something familiar in it, too. I'd certainly never seen him before, but it made me think of someone I knew, with the accompanying frustration of my not being able to remember who on earth it was. This feeling persisted for me during that first day in Sofia, dogging me on our all-tooguided tour of the city. Sofia was strangely beautiful, however - a blend of nineteenth-century elegance, medieval splendor, and shining new monuments in the socialist style. At the city's center, we toured a grim mausoleum that held the embalmed body of the Stalinist dictator Georgi Dimitrov, who'd died five years before. Ranov took off his hat before entering the building and ushered me and Helen ahead of him. We joined a line of silent Bulgarians filing past Dimitrov's open coffin. The dictator's face was waxen, with a heavy dark mustache like Ranov's. I thought of Stalin, whose body had reportedly joined Lenin's the year before, in a similar shrine on Red Square. These atheist cultures were certainly diligent in preserving the relics of their saints.
"My sense of foreboding about our guide increased when I asked him if he could put us in touch with an Anton Stoichev and saw him recoil. 'Mr. Stoichev is an enemy of the people,' he assured us in his irritable voice. 'Why do you wish to see him?' And then, strangely, 'Of course, if you desire it, I can arrange this. He does not teach at the university anymore - with his religious views he could not be trusted with our youth. But he is famous and perhaps you would like to see him for that reason?'"
"''Ranov has been told to give us whatever we want,' Helen remarked quietly when we had a moment alone, outside the hotel. 'Why is that? Why does someone think that is a good idea?' We looked fearfully at each other.
"'I wish I knew,' I said.
"'We are going to have to be very careful here.' Helen's face was grave, her voice low, and I didn't dare to kiss her in public. 'Let us have an agreement from this moment that we will never reveal anything but our scholarly interests, and those as little as possible, if we have to discuss our work in front of him.'
"'Agreed.'"