The Fortress Page 6

  “She’s getting you an IV drip,” he said. “There’s a muscle relaxant you need. Once you get that, they think the contractions will stop. You’ll just have to lie still and relax.”

  “For how long?” I asked, meeting Nikolai’s eye. “How long do I have to stay like this?”

  “Until the baby is born.”

  My stay in Maichin Dom was long and dreary. For the first few days, my roommate—a pretty woman from the Mladost district—spoke to me in Bulgarian nonstop, telling me (I imagined) intimate details about her life, her hopes for her baby, and about her husband, who, I noted, did not come to visit. She didn’t seem to mind the fact that I couldn’t understand her. She offered me cigarettes, showed me pictures on her cell phone of her prepregnancy body, and introduced me to Bulgarian soap operas. After a week she gave birth to a baby girl and left the hospital, leaving the room to me and my endless hours of lying on my back looking out the window at the tarnished gray Sofia sky. I spent some of those hours reading, but the muscle relaxant made me drowsy, and so I would drift in and out of sleep many times each day. I carried a roll of toilet paper with me to the bathroom and learned to balance my uneven weight so that I didn’t fall over. The concrete-block showers had no hot water, and so I washed myself slowly, part by part, in ice-cold splashes.

  Nikolai came to my room every day to visit, bringing food and bottled water. Alex came once, bringing a Lego creation he’d made for me—a square of blue bricks with a bright yellow sun at the center. He was enrolled in day care and was learning to speak Bulgarian. Yana had cut his hair, and his long blond curls were gone. He looked older than his two years, more serious.

  “You’ll get better now, okay, Mama?” he said. “You’re better, okay?”

  I hugged him and told him I’d be better soon. I could feel his body relax as I held him, and I knew that he must be worried and frightened.

  I felt, on those lonely days in the hospital, profoundly disconnected from my own life. I lay in bed sodden with hormones and muscle relaxants, unable to process anything more complicated than the Bulgarian soap opera on TV. Part of it was culture shock to be sure, but the other part was the swiftness with which love had changed my life. Love for Nikolai had brought me so far from home, so far from my family and friends and culture, that I didn’t recognize myself anymore. I had always believed love to be transformative, but this wasn’t what I’d expected at all. I understood what Gregor Samsa must have known upon waking up a cockroach: Metamorphosis is a fucking nightmare.

  Eventually, after I’d spent weeks in the hospital, Nikolai persuaded my doctor to release me. If I had to lie in bed for four months, we argued, it would be much better to do it at home, where I could take a hot shower and eat well. The doctor approved my discharge, but only if we hired a private nurse to come to the apartment in Izgreva to give me shots of the muscle relaxant. I would still be in bed, and I would still be brain-dead, but at least I’d be in my own apartment.

  Before I left the hospital, I was wheeled to an examination room. When I climbed up onto the table, I was relieved to find an English-speaking doctor, a woman who had studied medicine in Texas. “We’ll just take a look in there,” she said, her voice tinged with a southern accent. “To make sure everything is A-OK.” Nikolai sat with me during the exam, holding my hand as the doctor squirted jelly onto my stomach and rolled the wand over the skin. “I hear you’ve had some troubles,” she said, squinting at the monitor. “Well, everything looks good here. Your little girl seems very healthy.”

  “Little girl?” I said, looking from the doctor to Nikolai. “Did you say girl?”

  “You don’t know the sex?” she asked. “I’m sorry. You wanted it to be a surprise?”

  “I had an ultrasound, and our doctor said it was a boy.”

  “Ah, well, he was mistaken. Look here,” she said, turning the wand onto the baby. “This is very clearly a baby girl.”

  Somehow, without even knowing it, I had walked under a rainbow.

  —

  BACK IN IZGREVA, Nikolai helped me up the five flights of stairs to the apartment, where Alex was waiting with Yana and Ivan. My son ran to me at top speed, throwing himself around my legs. In Maichin Dom I’d had little way of knowing how he was doing. He’d visited a few times, and Nikolai told me he was fine, but I hadn’t spent a significant amount of time with Alex in weeks, and I felt unbalanced by the separation. I never wanted to be away from him for so long again, but he would be staying with Yana and Ivan until the baby’s birth. I simply couldn’t take care of Alex during the pregnancy. I had to stay in bed.

  I bent over to hug my son, and Alex lunged into my arms, trying to crawl up over my stomach, deft and quick as a monkey. He was heavy, and the strain of holding him had an immediate effect: The contractions started again.

  Seeing my distress, Nikolai pulled Alex out of my arms and set him on the floor. “Your mom can’t carry you, sweetie,” he said.

  “But why?” Alex asked, looking confused and hurt. I understood his confusion. It didn’t make sense that I couldn’t pick him up and carry him. I had done so his whole life. It was unnatural and unjust.

  “I can’t pick up heavy things until your baby sister is born,” I added, savoring the sound of the word “sister” as I said it. “It could hurt her. She could be born too soon.”

  “Am I a heavy thing?” he asked, looking at my stomach with consternation.

  “Very heavy,” I said. “I need you to help me for the next few months. You need to be a good boy for Yana and Ivan while I get better. Okay, monkey?”

  Alex looked up at me, then wrapped himself gently around my legs, careful not to hurt me. “Okay, Mama,” he said. “I will.”

  Later that night Nikolai sat at the edge of my bed. I was crying, missing Alex, wondering what I was doing there, stuck in bed, stuck in Bulgaria. One of the reasons I had come to Bulgaria to begin with—back when I’d believed we were on a summer vacation—had been to spend time with Alex. Now I couldn’t even take care of him.

  Taking my hand in his, Nikolai tried to comfort me. He told me that everything would be fine, that this would pass. The future was bright. The baby would arrive, we would move back to the States, and we would be famous writers. “Just wait,” he said. “It is all ahead, waiting for us.” Then he told me that he’d made a big decision: He was going to work exclusively in English from that point forward. While I’d been in Maichin Dom, he had begun writing his next book—his fourth—in English. He was switching languages.

  As someone who found it a challenge to write in her native language, I thought the idea of writing in a second one seemed brave and ambitious. It was a wonderful idea, I told him. It was his chance to reach a bigger audience. His books were bestselling, but bestselling in Bulgaria, which is a little like saying you have a number-one hit song in Samoa. His audience was small, and very few Bulgarian writers were ever translated into English. If he wrote his books in English, the whole world would know what I knew already: that my husband was a genius.

  Nikolai spent his days writing, while I was too overwhelmed by flesh and estrogen to put a single interesting sentence on paper. I was uneasy with my incapacitation, but I couldn’t articulate how frustrated I felt. I didn’t understand how to translate that mixture of pride in his work and jealousy that I wasn’t working, too. I couldn’t say that it seemed unfair, to have invested so much in my career only to find myself pregnant and bedridden. I couldn’t actually admit, even to myself, that I felt resentful that my writing—my art and my vocation—was on hold while he was free to write a new book. I felt slighted, cheated somehow, but by whom? I’d chosen to have a baby. It was my uterus causing the trouble. This was nature. There was no one to blame.

  I had been on the verge of delivering our daughter for months, and so the birth was quick. Nico was born in the middle of a cold January night at Maichin Dom. She came into the world with one sharp cry, a beautiful and pitch-perfect sound that sliced through the silent delivery room. After t
he birth I held Nico and looked into her eyes. Her face was puckered and pink, tiny and sedate. Nikolai snapped a picture and then took our daughter in his arms. As he rocked her softly, I could see that he was completely besotted. He looked at me, smiling with joy, and I knew that we were something extraordinary. With Alex and Nico, we were a family.

  Moat

  I was just getting used to our sleepy village when everything changed. At the beginning of August, protective iron gates began to appear on the streets, blocking the narrow, twisting roads at the center of Aubais. It was as if the village were preparing for a siege, the villagers slowly fortifying their stronghold.

  On my daily visit to the boulangerie, where I’d perfected my order for “Une baguette” (feminine) and “Un pain au chocolat” (masculine), I noticed tables filled with new treasures: jars of local honey, pâte d’amande candies shaped like bananas and cherries, dried sausages made from bull’s meat, bottles of the local wine and olive oil. There was hardly enough room to squeeze into the shop.

  I bought our bread and asked, in my best French, “What is all this?”

  “Zis,” the blond-haired madame said, trying out her English, “zis is la Fête Votive!”

  The Fête Votive d’Aubais, I would soon learn, was the highlight of the year for locals and tourists alike. It was a week of pure bacchanalia: wine, food, music, dancing, sex, and violence. The most famous event at the fête, and the reason for all the iron gates and protective fencing, was the daily running of the bulls, an event that occurred just before aperitif hour each day. Bull runs involved skill and danger, and many of the local boys waited all year to show off their prowess before the village.

  On the first day of our very first fête, we walked to the main street and waited behind the gates, curious. Before us, with his twitching tail and sharp horns, stood an enormous, heaving black bull.

  The villagers lined up along the main street, standing behind the protective iron gates, watching anxiously. A gun sounded, and a pack of white Camargue horses galloped up the street, running together like a single great wild beast, all legs and hooves. Charging after the horses was the bull, its horns long and sharp, its tail switching back and forth. A mob of teenage boys and young men in their twenties ran after the bull, trying to tackle and restrain it. One boy held the tail while another jumped on the neck while another grabbed the horns. Together they wrestled the beast to the pavement, absorbing the violent shocks of its twists and kicks. All the villagers screamed and cheered: Their boys had defeated the beast.

  But sometimes they didn’t defeat the bull. Sometimes the bull got the best of the boys. And these moments, when they happened, could be gruesome. I once saw a man dragged in one wild sweep from the pharmacy to the mayor’s office. His shirt had ripped away, and his skin burned against the concrete, leaving his back raw and bloody. There were bull runs in many of the small villages surrounding Aubais—Calvisson, Aigues-Vives, Junas—and all of them had their share of injuries. One boy was gored by a horn; another boy was kicked in the chest, leaving a bruise the size of a wheel of blue cheese. But these were the risks they took to prove their strength and manhood. These injuries were the price of glory.

  We met Lulu and her husband, Lord, at the festivities. “You must come and see tomorrow’s bull run from our balcony!” Lulu said, pointing to a huge maison de maître on one of the main streets, just across from the château. Nikolai and I—knowing no one in the village and feeling adrift in the festivities—were grateful to accept the invitation.

  “We have the very best view in the village, and we allow absolutely no one up there. But as this is your first fête and your children are so very darling, you must come!”

  Lulu was a witty, articulate woman with red hair, myopic blue eyes, and an overbite that produced an extremely aristocratic lisp. Lord was half Lulu’s size, thin as a rail, with elfin ears, twinkling eyes, and a long, bulbous nose. He’d been a jockey in his youth and still retained the disposition of a man ready to be thrown from a horse. With his tweeds and cap, he had all the markings of an English country gentleman and an obsession with examining the habits of the French as if labeling the anatomy of frogs in dissection.

  “You see,” Lord said the next day, holding open the carved wooden door of their maison de maître as we went inside, “the French would never have invited you to their home upon first meeting you,” he said with an air of authority. “That is why I take such pleasure in having you here. I am English, and as such I invite perfect strangers—you, that is—to my home in the off chance you will be amusing.”

  Lord handed us glasses of chilled rosé and led us up a winding staircase to the third-floor balcony. The view was magnificent, fields and vineyards stretching in every direction. Below, the main street of Aubais was packed with villagers, ready for the bull run.

  “Look at that!” Lulu exclaimed as all the sexy jeunes hommes of Aubais took off their shirts, preparing to run after that afternoon’s bull. “What a view! Better than Chippendale’s.”

  “I do like an au naturel look at the fête,” Lord chimed in. “Wine?” he asked, holding up a bottle to refill our glasses.

  “Do have more,” Lulu said. “My advice: Drink a lot. It is the only way to feel even vaguely accepted by the villagers. They dislike foreigners. But don’t worry: They hate Parisians more than they hate us!”

  “Of course,” Nikolai said, raising his glass for a refill, his charm turned all the way up. “Quite good, this local rosé!”

  I shot Nikolai a look. Was it me, or had he picked up a British accent in the last five minutes? He was so adept at transforming his personality, at being a chameleon, that he could blend in almost anywhere. Some people might have thought this quality a defect, a kind of shiftiness, but I admired it. It was the writer in him, the novelist, picking up character.

  “This is a fantastic painting,” Nikolai said, standing with his arms across his chest, examining one of the oils on the wall. “First-rate. Reminds me of the Dutch.”

  “Are you keen on painting, Nikolai?” Lord asked, his eyes bright.

  “Terribly,” Nikolai responded. “Especially painters of that period.”

  If my weakness was blind romanticism, Nikolai’s weakness was pretension. He wanted to be admired for his intelligence, his refinement, his obscure references to Schubert and Nietzsche. Lord was exactly the kind of person Nikolai could impress.

  “Bravo, old chap,” Lord said, slapping Nikolai on the back. “I don’t care what they say: Eastern Europeans are a jolly good addition to the European Union.”

  A gun went off, signaling that the bull run was about to begin and warning the townspeople to stay off the streets.

  “It is so exciting,” Lulu lisped, hanging over the balcony and waving to the boys below. “You can smell the sweat all the way up here.”

  “Here they come,” Lord said.

  Looking down the street, I saw the bull charging. In the distance, amid gusts of dust and rising shouts from the crowd, the white Camargue horses’ hooves slammed the pavement, their riders—the village cowboys—steering the bull this way and that, angling to one side, then pushing it away from the spectators.

  “You see what they’re doing now, don’t you?” Lord said, nodding at the horses. “They’re slowing the bull down to give that poor kid a chance to gain his footing. Yes, that’s right, it is all one coordinated ballet, a beautiful masterpiece. And it is only here, from our balcony, that you will see it so well.”

  I tried to see the masterpiece in the chaos, but all I could make out was a dustup of major proportions. Cowboys sat tall and strong on the horses, their hats perched on their heads, boots shiny in the afternoon sunlight. They were rough and beautiful and brutal.

  “That big chap there,” Lord continued, pointing to a hulking boy. “He’s going to get this one.”

  I peered over the iron railing, leaning into the hot, sticky, dust-filled air, watching as the beefy boy ran ahead of the pack, gaining on the bull, gaining, until
, in one expert move, he leaped up, blocking its path. He grabbed the horns in his hands and, with a tremendous twist of his arms, screwed the head down to the ground, pinning it there. The bull kicked, but there were more men behind who, seeing that it was in a weak position, piled on, jumping on the beast’s back and yanking its tail and pushing it down, down until that great wild thing buckled to the ground. The population of Aubais erupted into a great cheer. The hero has slain the minotaur! The monster is banished for another year!

  “What will that guy do now that he’s got him?” I asked, swirling the cold rosé in my glass and taking a long sip. It was crisp and fruity, like a burst of iced cherries on the tongue. “Tie him up?”

  “My dear,” Lord said, clucking at me, “this is not one of your American rodeos.”

  “You’re right,” I said, turning back to Lord. “This isn’t at all like an American rodeo.”

  “No?” he asked, his eyebrow raised.

  “Not at all,” I said, finishing my glass of wine. “It is so much better.”

  Lord beamed with pleasure, his smile stretching from elfin ear to elfin ear. “Magnificently said, my dear,” he said, as if I’d passed some sort of test. “Simply magnificent.”

  Later, after the run, when the bull was led back to the pasture, the crowd gathered at the festival grounds by the mayor’s office. Under a mass of tents, chickens were roasted and sausages grilled and served with salad and cheese. One side of the parking lot was set up with children’s rides and the other with a stage, where a band would play later that night. Alex and Nico ran off to shoot balloons with BB guns. After losing a few times, they consoled themselves with enormous cones of cotton candy, pink barbe à papa bigger than their heads.

  Nikolai and I sat at a picnic table, taking it all in, watching the laughter and jokes, listening to the incomprehensible French. I was beginning to feel the weight of our decision to move to a small village. I couldn’t understand anything going on around me. I knew almost no one. I had no idea why people loved watching bulls run in the street and maul their boys. We were outsiders, strangers, people unaccustomed to the rites of the Fête d’Aubais. And yet I was strangely happy. We were doing this thing, however crazy it might be, together. I reached out for his hand, and he took mine. We exchanged a glance that said, We did it. I went to the tent and bought two more glasses of wine, feeling it best to follow Lord and Lulu’s suggestion: We should drink until the locals accepted us, or at least until we felt accepted. And then we would drink some more.