The Fortress Read online

Nikolai’s parents symbolized this future for me. Despite all the hardships they’d experienced—they’d lived through communism and lost their savings during a bank crash in the nineties—they had a joy for living I admired. Part of that joy revolved around taking care of their only son. When Nikolai was with his parents, I felt him glow with the same radiant confidence he’d displayed at the piano in Iowa City: He was the star performer, and his parents were always there, standing nearby, filled with pride. For them he could do no wrong.

  My adoration was nearly as religious. Nikolai, Alex, and I spent the weeks of May exploring Bulgaria like tourists. We walked through the old center of Sofia, visiting the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, the St. George Rotunda, and the antique markets, making our way through the dark, narrow, cobblestone streets behind Vitosha Boulevard to find lunch on a terrace. We took a day trip to Plovdiv with Yana and Ivan, climbing the stone steps of the ancient Roman amphitheater and having a long, traditional lunch of stuffed grape leaves, cabbage rolls, and the spicy lamb meatballs called kufteta. We took another day trip into the mountains, to the tenth-century Rila Monastery, and another to the Devil’s Throat Cavern, a UNESCO world historical site that one day I would use as a setting in my first novel.

  But there was another side of Sofia, one that I rarely saw. The poverty of Bulgaria in 2002 was grueling. Whole sections of the city were filled with the poor and unemployed, living in what Nikolai called panel buildings, Stalin-era prefab concrete apartment complexes that had once promised cheap mass housing. There were Gypsy camps—Nikolai always called the population of nomadic Roma living in Europe Gypsies—at the edge of the city. These makeshift villages had become the dumping ground for Sofia’s refuse: There were wheelless Ladas, rusty bicycles, plastic bottles, broken toys, canvas tarps stretched between trees for shelter. I had never seen such poverty, and the juxtaposition of this suffering with my newly found happiness made the chasms between fortune and suffering all the more plain.

  During these weeks I was blissfully happy. Nikolai did everything he could to make me comfortable in Sofia. He played Chopin on the upright piano at the apartment in Izgreva. He bought me flowers from the outdoor market and surprised me with sweet Bulgarian desserts from the sladkarnitsa down the street. He made complicated dishes on the old pechka, a Soviet-era stove that heated the whole kitchen. We re-created our Iowa City pattern in the apartment in Izgreva: I set up my laptop at a desk in the bedroom, and he took the back office, a room with a view of the stunning Vitosha mountains. It was spring, the trees green, the flowers in bloom, and Sofia seemed exotic and mysterious, an enchanted city from a legend. Two years in Bulgaria, I decided, wouldn’t be so bad. I had taught English in Japan, and I could certainly do the same in Bulgaria. It would be hard, but we would make it. Maybe the visa problem had been a blessing in disguise.

  The night Nikolai told his mother that I was pregnant, her eyes filled with tears of anxiety. In her heavily accented but grammatically perfect English, Yana said, “But think of how expensive this is going to be!”

  Yana was right to worry. We didn’t have money for a baby. My last check from the University of Iowa had gone to buying plane tickets to Bulgaria, and my savings were about to run out. Nikolai, it became clear, had nothing of his own. His parents had been carrying him for years, since he’d returned from India, giving him money to support his first wife and daughter, giving him a place to live and an allowance and a car. Through their love, money, and time, they had helped Nikolai survive. Now he was asking them to take care of his newest problem: me.

  I tried to decide what to do, go home to the United States and deal with the situation alone or stick it out in Bulgaria. The choices were like pathways, one looping back to the known world of my family, the other leading to the mysterious unknown. Later that night I pulled Alex onto my lap and held him. Whenever I didn’t know what to do, I would sit with Alex and think. He was my compass, the strong magnetic force that steered me in the right direction. Being near him put my actions into perspective. The smell of his skin, the softness of his hair, his huge trusting eyes—I owed it to him to be sure that I was making the right choice. Would I put him at risk by staying in Bulgaria? Or would I be giving him a better life?

  Meanwhile, Nikolai and his parents had intense discussions in the kitchen of our apartment, hours of talking and talking in Bulgarian. Nikolai seemed to be negotiating some kind of deal, although I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. I never understood any of their monster family discussions, but throughout my time in Bulgaria I realized that this was how his family worked. When Nikolai had problems, they solved them together. His parents would rally around their son, take out their weapons, and fight whatever or whoever threatened his well-being. It was something I respected and admired, even when, ten years later, the enemy was me.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” Nikolai said when the conference was over. “My parents are going to help us.”

  “They’re finding us jobs?”

  “No,” he said. “They understand that we’re having trouble. With my visa and the baby coming, we need some extra help. They’re going to support us until the baby comes.”

  This was a foreign concept for me. Money had always been a source of tension in my family. My parents told me I was on my own at eighteen, and I had gone off to college with the belief that I had no choice but to succeed. There was no one back home to save me if I failed.

  “And they’re okay with that?” I asked.

  “They are now,” he said. “I just told them that we’re getting married.”

  Two weeks later Nikolai and I married in the windowless, lightless vault of the justice of the peace. Nobody was in attendance except his parents, who acted as witnesses, and, of course, the judge. There wasn’t money for a new dress, and so I wore a vintage purple shift from the sixties. I was six weeks pregnant, nauseous, and homesick, but in the one picture I have from that day I am smiling, a bouquet of white lilies in my hands. I understood not one word of the ceremony. The sound of the language was harsh and chill and elegant, somehow cruel. I tried to catch the sounds, but it was all utterly incomprehensible. Indeed, when it was my turn to say “I do,” I stood silent, unaware that I was being asked a question at all. The judge asked again, and again I didn’t respond. Finally I heard Nikolai whisper in my ear, “Now you say ‘Da.’ ” I looked at him for a long moment, to capture the flush of happiness in his face, the brightness in his eyes. He loved me. I could see it. There was no reason to be so unsure. There was no reason to doubt him.

  “Da,” I said, looking into Nikolai’s eyes as I spoke my first word of Bulgarian. “Da.”

  —

  IT WAS AT the twelve-week prenatal exam that we learned we would be having a baby boy.

  If anyone had asked me at the time, I would have said what all pregnant women say: As long as it’s healthy, I don’t care about the sex. But after the doctor told us the baby was a boy, I realized that I did care. I really cared. I had a whole list of girl names picked out and not one for a boy. When we went to a baby store, it was the pink section that drew me. I told myself I wanted the experience of raising a girl and a boy, of understanding the difference between having a daughter and having a son, but perhaps there was more to it than that. Although I wasn’t aware of this at the time, I felt an irrational need to replace the daughter Nikolai had lost in his divorce.

  Rada’s mother remarried and, in a twist of irony, moved with her new husband to the United States. Nikolai had limited visitation rights, and we saw Rada rarely before she left, but we watched her grow up from a distance. Over the next decade, Rada would learn English, go to school in Connecticut, become a beautiful, whip-smart, and very American girl. Her life would be filled with opportunities she wouldn’t have had in Bulgaria. Even so, we hadn’t imagined, when we fell in love in Iowa City, how drastically our actions would change our children’s lives. Rada would live with the consequences, as would Alex. No matter how happy I was with Ni
kolai, I understood that our choices had changed the lives of our children. Alex was far away from his father; Rada was far from hers.

  In the skewed logic of my love for Nikolai, I believed that if I could give him another daughter, he wouldn’t miss Rada so much. And so when I learned that we would have a son, I felt strangely unsettled, as if it were somehow incorrect. I developed a powerful resistance to the facts. The doctor said it was a boy, but in my mind the baby would be a girl.

  “Doctors are not always accurate about these things, you know,” I said as we drove through Sofia. “Especially at only twelve weeks. There’s a chance he’s wrong.”

  “He seemed pretty sure,” Nikolai said.

  “But I was positive it would be a girl,” I said, disappointment in my voice.

  “The baby will be beautiful,” Nikolai said. “No matter what.”

  “Of course it will. I’m not making sense. I must be hormonal. As long as it’s healthy, I don’t care about the sex.”

  “You know, there’s a Bulgarian superstition that says if you walk under a rainbow when pregnant, the sex of the baby will change.”

  “There’s a superstition for everything here,” I said, laughing. If your left hand itched, money was coming; if your right hand itched, you would be spending money. If a room was drafty, you would be sick. If an old woman looked at you funny, it was the evil eye. Just the other day, Yana had told me that if you put your purse on the ground, the money would disappear from inside. Not that it would be stolen, not that you’d get a hole in the bottom of the bag and the contents would fall out. The money would actually, materially disappear. Poof. Yana never, in all the years that I knew her, put her bag on the ground. “I love that about your country,” I said. “Everything is magic here.”

  Nikolai smiled. “Now we just need to find a rainbow.”

  —

  SUPERSTITION CREATED THE texture of Nikolai’s personality. The belief that he couldn’t get his hair cut on Tuesdays (bad luck), or that leaving fingernail clippings in the bathroom sink was dangerous (they could be collected and used in a hex), or that drafts of wind caused sickness (carrying in spirits) and the evil eye could strike him at any moment, or that his ex-wife had hired Gypsies to cast curses and spells upon him—all of these superstitions formed his worldview. He told me that he had needed a blood transfusion after he was born and was at risk of dying until a Gypsy man had donated blood. The transfusion saved his life and connected him to the culture and magic of the Gypsies, at least in his own mind.

  In the beginning these quirks were what made my husband interesting. They were artistic eccentricities, the strange but lovable oddities of his personality. I used them as proofs that he was an eccentric genius, the child-prodigy pianist, the chess wizard and the novelist. I didn’t realize that these superstitions were prayers. They were his way of warding off demons.

  But ill fortune wasn’t so easy to keep at bay. One afternoon I was walking up the stairs of the apartment in Izgreva, Alex’s hand in mine, and the wall of muscles in my abdomen locked up, hard and tight, as if a belt had been cinched. I stopped to catch my breath, letting go of Alex’s hand and grasping the railing. Nikolai rushed to me and helped me sit down.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Contraction,” I said.

  “Isn’t it too soon for that?”

  I tried to remember if I’d had contractions like that before, when I was pregnant with Alex. Of course I did have contractions like that, at the very end of my pregnancy, when Alex was about to be born.

  “It’s about four months too soon.” I said, pulling myself up.

  Alarmed, Nikolai called the obstetrician and made an emergency appointment. The doctor examined me and asked how often the contractions were happening. When I told him that I’d felt them for a few days but they were so gentle that I’d ignored them, he looked concerned. He folded his arms over his chest and spoke to Nikolai in Bulgarian, a language I found thick as honey, filled with gulps and slurs and swallows. The doctor shrugged as he spoke, as if there were nothing he could do.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

  “You’re having regular contractions,” Nikolai said.

  “I know,” I replied. “I can feel that. Does he know why?”

  “No,” Nikolai said. “You’re dilated, which means that there’s a chance the baby could be born early.”

  “How many weeks am I now?”

  “Eighteen,” Nikolai said.

  “Is that enough for the baby to…?”

  Nikolai shook his head. “If he’s born now, they won’t be able to do much for him. At twenty-two weeks, there is more they can do. He wants to admit you to Maichin Dom.”

  Maichin Dom was the maternity hospital of Sofia, a huge Soviet concrete cube with darkened windows, old leather furniture, industrial art, and lightless hallways. Sofia’s primary public facility for pregnant women, it had once been the only place in the city where babies were born. Nikolai was born there, and his daughter, Rada, was born there. Now the hospital was severely underfunded and understaffed, with whole floors closed down, hallways without lightbulbs in the fixtures, cracked windows, and insufficient medical equipment. There were private clinics popping up in Sofia, Nikolai told me, and these clinics might have nicer facilities, but they were unregulated. The best doctors in Bulgaria were still at Maichin Dom.

  Nikolai checked me in, and a nurse led me to a room on the fifth floor. As we stepped out of the elevator, we saw a cluster of pregnant women standing together near an open window, smoking. The women were laughing and talking, making the most of whatever illness had brought them to Maichin Dom. There was a man with them, and as we passed by, I realized—from the stethoscope around his neck—that he was a doctor. A doctor having a smoke with his pregnant patients? I gave Nikolai a look of surprise, and he shrugged. “All Eastern Europeans smoke.”

  I had a room with a twin bed, bleached sheets, and one thin pillow. There was another bed, its occupant absent but signs of her remaining on her bedside table: a hairbrush, a bottle of perfume, and a cell phone.

  “I’ll go home and get some things,” Nikolai said, seeing the state of the room. “What do you want?”

  “Books. A notebook. And some of those Lindt hazelnut chocolate bars.” I gestured to the thin wool blanket. “Maybe a heavier blanket?”

  “Okay,” he said, sighing heavily, clearly pained to be leaving me there. “I’ll be bringing you food every day. If you need something else, I can bring it then.”

  “There isn’t food served here?” I asked.

  “There is,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “But you won’t want to eat it. It will be nettle soup and black bread every day.”

  “Can you bring Alex to visit?” I said. He was staying with Yana and Ivan at their home in Bankya, a suburb of Sofia. “I want him to know that everything is fine.”

  “I’ll see,” Nikolai said. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for him to see this place. We don’t want to scare him.”

  I changed into my nightgown and tried to find the bathroom. It was down the hall, just past the smoking window, a two-stalled lavatory with an exposed bulb swinging from the ceiling. There was a concrete shower area at the far end of the room with a few rubber hoses poking from the walls. The toilets themselves had no seats—I couldn’t tell if they had been broken and were never replaced or if there were never seats to begin with—and so I had to somehow balance my pregnant self over the toilet, holding my nightgown with one hand and the wall with the other, to pee. The first time I tried this acrobatic endeavor, I tipped sideways, sprinkling urine all over my legs. There was no toilet paper to be found—you needed to bring your own, apparently—and so I used my nightgown.

  But more problematic than my inability to balance my belly-heavy self was the fact that squatting over a seatless toilet brought on contractions, and by the time I’d finished peeing and gone back to my room, I’d had two strong ones in a row. I didn’t know
how to tell the nurse that this was happening. There was no call button in my room, and even if there had been, she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Bulgarian. And so I slipped into my bed, pulled the starched sheets over my tight stomach, and tried to relax until Nikolai came back.

  The reality of what was happening—that I was stuck in an understaffed, drafty, broken-toileted hospital in which I could not communicate with the doctors or nurses—was starting to hit me. How had I arrived here, at this strange place, sick, alone, my clothes smelling of pee? Only a few months before, I was in a comfortable rented house in the Midwest, Alex’s wooden train track set up near the fireplace, jazz on the stereo, with a regular income and a toilet with a seat. I looked out the window at the hazy fall night, the lights of Sofia’s concrete high-rise apartment buildings blinking in the distance, trying to imagine what would happen next.

  I ran my hand over my stomach. I was five months pregnant, and the baby moved slowly, like a big fish, sending shivers through my body. Never had I felt so vulnerable. All the mechanisms I’d used in the past to save myself from trouble —my humor and my education and my charm—were useless now. I was far from home, sick, alone. As I felt the baby swimming in me, I made a promise to God or fate or whatever force ruled my life: Get me out of this one, and I will be good forever. I would be a good wife and mother. I would be loyal and strong. No more complaints, no more requests. If you help me get out of this Bulgarian hospital with my baby alive, I won’t ask for help again.

  —

  NIKOLAI CAME TO the hospital with rice and kabobs, some Lindt hazelnut chocolate bars, and a case of Bankya mineral water. He’d filled a suitcase with extra clothes, some books, and a blanket. He handed me his favorite novel, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which I put on my nightstand.

  “I’m having contractions again,” I said, explaining to him about the toilet.

  “Let me get the nurse,” Nikolai replied, and he walked out.

  Ten minutes later he’d tracked someone down. The nurse stood over my bed and put her cold hands on the tight basketball of my stomach, said something to Nikolai, and left again.