The Fortress Page 3

  “What about money?” I asked, feeling hesitant to bring it up. Nikolai was terrible with money. The International Writers Program had given him a stipend, but he’d spent nearly all of it on a laptop computer within a week of arriving. Until he met me, he, like many of the visiting writers, had survived mostly on free cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at literary events, potluck dinners, and the cookies left in the lobby of his hotel. Then he moved into my apartment, and I bought our food and whatever else he needed.

  “They’re holding my teaching job at Sofia University,” he said. “I can start again as soon as I’m back.”

  “But what about all this?” I asked, gesturing to my things: my desk and my books and Alex’s toys.

  “Put it in storage for a few months,” he said. “And pack Alex’s toys. We’ll replace what you can’t fit in your suitcase. There are a thousand toy stores in Sofia. And playgrounds. And a zoo. And Rada can come over to play with Alex. He’ll learn some Bulgarian. It will be good for you to spend more time with him for a few months.”

  It didn’t take me long to decide. During the past years, I’d been so busy getting my master’s degree that I hadn’t had the option of spending whole weeks of uninterrupted time with Alex. If we went to Bulgaria, I would have an abundance of time and energy to lavish on my son, a luxury I hadn’t imagined possible before. Equally important, I was with a man who had promised to raise Alex like his own child, who told me that it was time for me to stop worrying and live a little.

  “Trust me,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

  I had never heard these words and believed them until now. And so I packed up everything I owned in the world, put it all in storage, and gave notice on my apartment. I bought plane tickets and prepared to follow my Prince Charming to the other side of the world.

  Before we left, he would lie awake at night staring into space.

  “You don’t know how difficult this is for me,” he once said. “I hate Bulgaria. I was a prisoner in my country until I was eighteen years old. It was like a gulag.”

  “A prisoner?” I echoed, propping myself up on my elbow. “A gulag?” His intensity—so dramatic and extreme and romantic—got my attention.

  “No one could go in or out of Bulgaria during Communism. When I was nine, I was selected to play in a piano competition in Italy. My father and I had permission to go, but the Communists made my mom stay in Sofia, to ensure that we’d come back. I’d never been out of Bulgaria before, and seeing Italy was incredible, like a movie. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Suddenly I knew everything we were missing in Bulgaria—the food, the cars, the stores, everything. I was free there, really free. It changed me. I wanted to stay in Italy—we could have claimed political asylum, especially after I won the competition—but we couldn’t leave my mom behind. And so we went back to our prison.”

  I took in this story, feeling the depth of his frustration, the incredible deprivation he must have felt, and the pain of going back to a country that had imprisoned him. I wanted to keep him from experiencing this pain again. I wanted to take his past and bury it in a shower of kisses. I wanted to give him a new life. I wanted to be his Italy.

  “Being without a visa brings it all back for me,” he said. “I can’t help but feel like I’m on the train from Italy returning to Sofia.”

  “But it’s not like that now,” I said, stroking his hair and kissing him on the forehead. “The world has changed. You just have to renew your visa, and you can come back here. It’s only a formality.”

  “Right,” he said, but his face darkened. “But if I learned one thing from my childhood, it is that simple formalities can turn into bureaucratic nightmares. If Homeland Security wanted, they could arrest me. They could lock me up and deport me. Or hold me somewhere. Nobody knows what’s happening out there now.”

  It was February of 2002, when the repercussions of 9/11 were still unknown. The recently passed Patriot Act could change everything for foreigners in the United States.

  “I didn’t realize that it could be so complicated,” I said.

  “That’s because you’re an American citizen. You don’t realize how privileged you are. You expect everything in life to work, and you’re surprised when it doesn’t. You haven’t had your basic human rights stripped away like I have.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I can’t understand. I’m lucky to have you. My country would be lucky to have you, too.”

  “Do you mean that?” he said, his eyes intent on mine.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m sure that with all your talents they’ll give you citizenship in a second. I’ll help you. I’ll do anything you need.”

  “Then marry me,” he said, gazing deeply into my eyes. “That’s the best way.”

  Although we had known each other less than six months, I didn’t hesitate. I loved him, and I wanted everything—good and bad, easy and difficult—with him. “Of course,” I said, bursting with happiness. “I love you. I just want to be with you.”

  From that moment forward, we were co-creators of a fantasy, a dreamworld that became our shelter, protecting us from loneliness and disappointment and instability and failure, a structure capable of holding us apart from everyone and everything that could harm us. He extended his hand, and I, grasping it, went wherever he might take me.

  Portcullis

  During our first week in Aubais, I took the kids to the boulangerie to buy breakfast. At that time of day, the village was swarming with old women doing the daily shopping. Baskets in hand, they walked to the boulangerie to buy fresh bread. They stopped by the pharmacy to fill their prescriptions. They stopped by the épicerie for eggs. They passed by the tabac to buy a Midi Libre and—if they were not widowed, which I later learned most of them were—a pack of cigarettes for their husbands. Then they formed a tight circle on the corner and traded gossip, clucking their tongues and pursing their lips in disapproval of some new scandal, because in the village there was always some new scandal to keep the old women talking.

  When I walked by, a wicker basket on my arm, the old women’s voices fell quiet. My children trailed behind me, talking and laughing in what I would later think of as our “American voices,” those loud and boisterous voices that we used back home. Our English was a magnet that drew the gaze of everyone we met, but we would have been conspicuous even without saying a word: Our clothes were bright and casual, our shoes—the kids’ orange and pink Crocs and my flip-flops—so out of the realm of the village fashion code of neutral colors and sensible leather shoes that there was an air of the circus about us. There were tourists in the village every summer, and the locals were accustomed to seeing lost foreigners in July or August, but it was May. We were off-season.

  Bonjour, madame, the old women said as we passed.

  Bonjour, I replied, straightening my dress, self-conscious. How different these tough, stout women were from the women in Paris, with their trendy clothes and high heels, their scarves and leather bags. The village women were as gnarled and sturdy as roots, skin gone nutmeg from the sun—beautiful, earthy women. They looked at me a moment too long, their curiosity evident, before turning back into their tight circle.

  Later, after living there for some time, I would recognize many of the villagers. There was the gendarme whom some of the villagers called “Robocop” because of his flat, inexpressive manner and his ability to deflect human interaction with a single blank stare. Bonjour, I would say to Robocop when we walked past, and he would look into the distance with a profound emptiness, the kind of unknowing beatitude I associated with a holy man meditating in a cave. Then there was Pépé the wealthiest landowner in the village, a round, jolly man who owned the bulls in the field at the bottom of the hill and the only bar in town. Pepe spoke with an accent so strong, so inflected with the regional twang, that I never, even when my French had become good, understood him. Then there was Axel, who sold black truffles door-to-door. He would bring the truffles to our door, a scale unde
r his arm to weigh out the hard black nuggets, each one encrusted with dirt like a diamond pried from a mine. He would take a blade from his pocket, slice into the edge of the truffle, exposing white veins swirling through the black matter like so many arteries in a brain, leaving the kitchen with a strong earthy scent. There were Lord and Lulu, an English couple who lived in a crumbling maison de maître near the château. Lord had come to Aubais to write his memoirs, a goal he pursued when he wasn’t dancing and drinking and talking horses with the locals. In his gentleman’s tweeds, he limped through the village, chatting in broken French with whoever would listen, and many people did: Lord was infamous in Aubais, celebrated as a true English Eccentric, a category of foreigner the French adore. Then there was Jett, who became one of my closest friends during my time in France, a hard-drinking, free-spirited, middle-aged Irish expatriate who made large abstract sculptures and did various odd jobs on the side to survive. A large woman with black hair and black eyes, she wore loose dresses and had an easiness in her movements that made her seem as if she’d been everywhere and done everything. We met Jett shortly after we arrived in the village, and she gave me all the basic information about France—the best markets, restaurants, doctors, wine, walks. Jett had lived in the area for over a decade and knew the secrets the locals guarded.

  But during those first months in the village, we knew absolutely no one. We were free-floating, without friends, unable to communicate even the most basic information about ourselves. And yet somehow none of that mattered much to me. I was so caught up in the dream of our new life that I didn’t care that we were outsiders. The church bells that chimed at the hour, the smell of baking bread in the morning, the geckos climbing the chalky limestone walls of the village houses, the old women gossiping in the street. I was exactly where I wanted to be: far, very far, from the real world.

  The boulangerie shelves were stacked with fresh croissants, pain au chocolat, pain aux raisins, and ten kinds of bread—ficelles, baguettes, pain de campagne, pain au lin. There were marzipan confections, local wine, local jams, local everything. This wasn’t the cult of “local” and “organic” that could be found in expensive American groceries—this was the real thing. Nothing had been packaged and shipped from China, because there was simply no need. It was all made there, near the village. This was the simple life, where choices were narrowed down to the essentials.

  Alex stood before a glass case filled with pastries. He was small for nine, delicate-boned as bird, with thick hair that fell in curls over his large brown eyes. Putting my hand on his back, I gave him a weighty look, a look that said, I know this sucks, but give it a shot. Alex looked at me, doubtful. He didn’t understand a word of French, and I didn’t understand much myself, but I wanted him to try to communicate in some small way. I was throwing him in at the deep end. I was watching to see if he could swim.

  Bonjour, said the woman behind the counter, deeply tanned with spiked, bleached-blond hair and a spate of earrings. She looked at me and then at my son, a flicker of interest crossing her features. She’d seen us before, or rather she’d seen people like us before: bright-eyed, confused foreigners desperate for direction.

  Alex pointed to a pastry glistening with a sugar glaze, something that looked similar to the apple fritters we bought at bakeries back in the United States.

  “Chausson aux pommes?” the woman asked.

  “Chausson aux pommes,” Alex replied, his tongue twisting around the new sounds.

  Chausson aux pommes meant, I later learned, apple slipper, a pastry stocking stuffed with apples, cinnamon, and sugar. But at that moment I heard a mishmash of sounds whose closest aural equivalent was “Jones’n’ for some.”

  Alex nodded, his eyes glistening. Jones’n’ for some. That’s exactly what he wanted, my American son, the biggest and the sweetest thing in the pastry shop.

  The woman behind the counter reached for this treasure, and I raised my hand, stopping her. I squeezed Alex’s arm and nudged him. A look of uncertainty filled his face. We’d discussed it earlier. He was going to speak French. He was going to use the phrase j’aimerais—I would like—or, at the very least, s’il vous plaît. He would be going to the village school in the fall, where there would be no English spoken at all. He needed to start somewhere. I decided to be tough on him: no French, no pastry.

  Shifting her weight, the woman glanced from me to Alex, uncertain. Her look seemed to say, What kind of people are these anyway, performing Pavlovian experiments on hungry children at nine in the morning? Did she want to be part of this experimental educational moment? No, she did not.

  “Go on,” I said, touching Alex’s shoulder.

  “J’aimerais…un” Alex stammered, and pointed to the glass case, using the words we’d practiced that morning, taken from our French phrasebook. He was the type of child who could get straight A’s without trying, who read novels in a single sitting, who memorized the fifty states and their capitals in fifteen minutes. He could speak three words of French if he tried.

  “Try again,” I said.

  “Je voudrais Jones’n’ for some,” he said.

  The woman raised an eyebrow at me—That good enough for you lady?—and I smiled, satisfied, as she handed over Alex’s breakfast. Nico looked on, taking everything in, smiling from ear to ear, sharing Alex’s victory. At six, Nico was ready for anything. She ordered a pain au chocolat without hesitating, breaking out with “Je voudrais that one right there, the chocolate one!”

  The rest of the order—two croissants, one for me and one for Nikolai, who had stayed back at the house—was conducted in a spirit of relief, with mangled sounds and quick, desperate gestures, an excruciating lexicon that I would cobble together to get me through moments of cultural and linguistic confusion. But for the moment I didn’t care if I sounded like an idiot. I was thrilled to be there, happy that Alex and Nico had triumphed. Even the woman behind the counter was smiling.

  I used the same piecemeal system to buy vegetables at a stand across the street. There was a plank table set up opposite the tabac with lettuce, red onions, haricots verts, melons the size of ostrich eggs. The table was loaded with tomatoes so fragrant I could smell them as I approached, grapes piled high in wooden wine crates, homemade confiture and tapenade. I bought three kinds of lettuce, a kilo of cherries, and basil. The old woman working the stand was preeminently practical, ignoring my awkward attempts at communication as she dropped items onto the scale, weighing them and sliding them into a paper sack in one sweeping gesture. She wrote down the weights and the prices and showed them to me, to be certain I understood.

  With our haul of fruit, the kids and I followed the curvature of the road down, descending past the bulls and following the stream around the base of the hill. In the heat of the summer, the stream was a moat without depth, so shallow and clear that rocks snagged the surface. Alex and Nico wanted to watch the bulls, and so I walked to the laverie alone. Long and narrow, it straddled the stream. When it was in use, the water flowed in clean, filling stone basins, and swept out the other side, soiled. I walked into the cool, shadowy interior of the laverie, taking a reprieve from the heat.

  Once a meeting place for women—perhaps even the old women who met every morning on the corner to gossip—the laverie was all but abandoned now, a picturesque relic of another era, when women spent hours washing their sheets and tablecloths and undergarments by hand, soaping their children’s clothes with savon from Marseille before hanging them out to dry in the sun. It was a female space, a place where women blistered their hands and traded stories of sons dead to war, daughters lost to marriage, husbands gone off to work or to womanize. I was a person of modern appliances, and yet that space felt deeply comfortable to me. I peered over the edge, trying to see to the bottom of the basin. The water ran clear. I could see the glint of euro coins at the bottom, gleaming. Hoisting myself up, I climbed onto the edge, dug into my pocket for a coin, and dropped it in the water. Make a wish. I closed my eyes. There was one thi
ng I wanted more than anything else: to find love in France.

  I edged closer and closer to the water, daring gravity to take me.

  Suddenly I was a little girl again, ready to jump into a deep country pond. I grew up in a wilderness of fields and forests. I would tie a bandanna around my head, tell myself that I was a warrior, and hike out beyond the cow fields into the hot, clover-heavy hills. I’d tromp through the woods looking for snakes, badgers, skunk, always seeking that sharp, poisonous thing that would transform the journey into an adventure. Victory was making it up to the top of the hill without stopping; victory was climbing into the trees without a scratch. My parents had bought the land cheap, built a house and paved a road, and I believed that the pure, unpeopled countryside was all mine. Our land seemed endless to me, a natural barrier of greenery, and while I loved getting lost in the wilderness, I was aware that I was only one step away from a rattler. When my parents divorced and our family split apart, all my premonitions were made plain: Eden cannot exist without the snake.

  —

  MY MOTHER OWNED a long, narrow cedar trunk that looked to me, when I was small, like a coffin. It sat at the end of her bed, piled with quilts. If the quilts were spread over a bed, I would see flowered panels carved into the wood of the trunk. A small copper lock, cool as a wasp, secured my mother’s box from the destructive forces of curious children like me.

  Eventually I found a way to open the trunk, but when I saw the contents, I couldn’t understand why my mother had locked it up to begin with. It was filled with the most mundane things imaginable: a stack of white embroidered napkins; china cups and plates with silver at the edges; a cut-crystal candy bowl; an album that contained mementos of me, my sister, and my brother—locks of hair, scraps of baby blankets, inked baby footprints. The air was musty inside the trunk, and the contents bored me. I’d expected to find real treasures—bars of gold, a jeweled chalice, or at least a Barbie or two—hidden among the tissue paper. Disappointed, I closed the lid and left it alone.