Valley of Thracians (8 page)

Chapter
17

Dear
Grandpa,

Hi,
how are you? I’m living with my host family. At first I was doing all right
with them, but then something happened, an incident that I don’t fully
understand. I’m not sure if it’s an issue of language or something more.

Ralitsa,
my host mother, is great. Even if I wasn’t picking up a few words of Bulgarian,
I think we’d communicate just fine. She pampers me with her cooking. Every
morning she prepares an awesome breakfast, and I’m good for the day. But then
she outdoes herself with tasty lunches and sumptuous dinners. Too much food,
really!

Radoslav
is my kid brother; everyone calls him Rado. He’s eight years old and
desperately wants to go to America. With Ralitsa I try to speak only Bulgarian,
but with Rado, I sneak in words of English. After all, this is why I’m here in
Bulgaria—to teach kids how to speak English. Rado loves to play basketball and
soccer, which of course the locals call football, but I’m not too good at
either game. He has asked me a few times for help with his school work, but
it’s all in that funny Cyrillic script, so I’m pretty helpless.

Most
of the Bulgarian families I’ve seen around this small town seem to have only
one or two children. I don’t know if this is by choice or not, because as it
was pointed out to us in our orientation, northwestern Bulgaria is the poorest
area in the country.
The unkempt streets, the broken windows
in the school, the shoddy utilities.
It’s a real shame because the
people are so nice.

Boris,
the father of the family, works in construction—or so that’s what I’ve been
told. I rarely see him, which is probably for the best. He is quite impatient
with me, and when I don’t understand something, he pointedly ignores me. Not
like Ralitsa, who will repeat things dozens of times, making extra efforts to
articulate words, helping me in whatever way possible so that I can understand.

Something
happened the other night, and I’m not quite sure about what I saw. I was
walking alone through the back streets of the town, and everything was so
quiet. Someone was standing near my family’s home, and I couldn’t tell at first
who it was. I stepped back when Boris approached me from the shadows. He was
panting, and his breath was horrendous. He must have consumed a large quantity
of beer that night because he absolutely stank of alcohol. He grabbed me and
held a hand to my mouth, so I couldn’t shout out. I tried to struggle but
realized it was pointless. He is so much stronger than me.

Finally,
he let go and spun me around to face him. He indicated something that I
immediately understood because it was in a universal language. Boris held one
finger up against his lips, signaling for me to keep quiet. I shook my head,
assuring him that I wouldn’t say a word, and then he left me alone. Someone
else showed up, and Boris forgot that I was there.

I
really didn’t appreciate being rough-handled by my host father. It certainly
wasn’t a pleasant experience.

If
this was just an issue of an inebriated man afraid to admit his drinking habits
to his wife, I wouldn’t be too concerned. Lots of Bulgarians drink—both beer
and hard liquors. But this was not a case of Boris’s intoxication.

He’s
involved in something, and that’s what’s bothering me. I really can’t go into
details now or list my suspicions here. Maybe this is nothing, and I’m mistaken
about what I saw.

Sorry
to trouble you with this story, but I just wanted to update you on what’s
happening. Don't you worry about
it.
I'm fine, really.

 
I guess that’s all for now.

Scott

Chapter
18

There was something on Sophia’s mind as
they drove north, but she wouldn’t say what, if
anything,
was bothering her. Simon tried to engage her in conversation, to bring up again
some of the subjects that had invoked very passionate discussion between them
at dinner the previous night, but these efforts were answered by one-word
responses. Simon mentally kicked himself for thinking that this attractive
Bulgarian woman had taken any personal interest in him. How could such thoughts
have crossed his mind or caused him any loss of sleep?

He turned to look out the window at the
beautiful green countryside, a patchwork of fields stretching to a towering
mountain range to the west. He recognized the meter-high stalks of summer corn
and the green John Deere tractors churning up the soil, but alongside these
familiar sights was something quite foreign in the scenery: a farmer ambling
across his acreage behind his horse-pulled plow; an old woman weighted down
under a tremendous stack of branches; ramshackle hovels with smoke rising from
their chimneys; children running barefoot through puddles of muddy rainwater in
their yard; horse-drawn carriages and roadside vegetable stands. These were all
vivid reminders that he was far from witnessing agriculture in a Midwestern
Corn Belt state.

In both Bulgarian and English, black
letters on a highway signpost announced their arrival in Montana. Compared to
Vratsa, efforts had been made to beautify Montana’s public areas, as the town
served as the region’s administrative center. The streets here had no potholes,
and everything seemed clean and well-kept. But the apartment blocks were the
same gray, unadorned tenements he had seen elsewhere, and the storefronts were
framed with Cyrillic billboards and graffiti.

After stopping only once to ask a
passerby on the street for directions, Sophia managed to navigate their way
through the narrow roads of the town’s laid-back residential neighborhoods. She
consulted the address she had written down, and then stopped and parked the
car.

“Here we are,” she said.

It was a one-story, faded red-brick house,
nestled behind a flower garden and surrounded by a green wire-mesh fence. A
sidewalk of cracked cement ran from a rusty wrought iron gate to the house’s
raised porch and alongside the short incline of a ramp that ended at the wooden
front door. Large windows with flowerpots flanked either side of the entrance,
and a tiled roof sloped away from a brick chimney.

Sophia knocked on the door, and they
heard movement inside the house. A moment later, the door eased open, and a
tall, thin woman wearing a blue kerchief on her head shyly greeted them. Sophia
and the woman exchanged a few words in Bulgarian, and then they followed her
down an elongated corridor into a small living room.

Simon shook hands with Ralitsa, not
catching her last name as they were introduced. She had a sad face. Her eyes
were red and constantly blinking. She motioned for Simon and Sophia to sit on a
lumpy sofa and then took her own seat on a kitchen stool. Ralitsa’s English was
very rudimentary, so Sophia served as translator.

“Ralitsa and her family have been living
in Montana for many years,” Sophia translated, “but they come originally from a
village not far from here, close to the Serbian border. No, excuse me. Her
husband’s family comes from that village. Ralitsa was born here in Montana.”

Sophia and the woman conversed for
several moments as Simon’s eyes adjusted to the minimal light in the room. The
furnishings were simple but practical. A painting of a wooden farmhouse half
hidden by a winter blizzard adorned one wall. Short-stemmed red roses in a
glass vase served as the centerpiece of a rectangular table that was pushed off
to the side. The woman stood up to get something, but Sophia motioned for her
to sit back down.

“She wanted to bring us refreshments,
coffee and biscuits, but I politely refused,” Sophia told Simon. “I asked her
to tell us about the time when she and her family hosted Scott during his
training program.”

The woman glanced nervously at the back
of the room, where a door seemed to lead into a bedroom. Then she turned to
face her visitors, a half smile forming on her face. She began to speak but
took care not to raise her voice.

“I remember Scott very fondly,” she
began, her words translated into English for Simon’s benefit. “He wanted to
learn Bulgarian very much. I remember this because my own English is so bad. He
was always walking around carrying a dictionary, looking up words. We would
help him with his Bulgarian homework every night. It was funny. He was a grown
man, much older than our own son, Rado, and here we were helping him with his
homework.

“He put these papers, what do you call
them? Ah, sticky notes. He put them on objects all around the room so that he
could remember the Bulgarian words for them.
Table, chair,
rug.
One of the first sentences he was able to say was ‘I like
cucumbers.’ After he said this, I would prepare salads with cucumbers for him
all the time. This was funny because a while later, when his command of the
language was better, I learned that he actually hated cucumbers, and what he had
been trying to tell me was that he didn’t like them!”

“What was his life like when he lived
with you?” Simon asked, indicating for Sophia to translate this question.

“Nothing special.
He woke up in the mornings, and I made him breakfast. He went to his Bulgarian-language
classes and then came home for lunch. I made him lunch, and then he went back
to classes.”

“Did you and your family get along with
Scott?” Simon asked, trying to dig deeper.

“He didn’t like that we smoked,” came
the reply. “We smoke the same as all Bulgarians, I think, but this bothered
Scott. There were some times that I went outside to smoke my cigarettes, but my
husband refused to do this, saying that this was our house and we could do
whatever we pleased in our living room.”

“Did Scott get along with your husband?”

At that moment Sophia’s cell phone rang,
and she excused herself as she took the call. She answered with the Bulgarian “
Alo
” and that brought a grin to Simon’s
face, but when Sophia realized who was calling, she stood up and walked to the
entranceway, out of sight. Simon smiled politely at Ralitsa and waited for his
companion to return to the room.

Without trying to eavesdrop at all,
Simon realized that Sophia was speaking in English. “Yes, yes,” she was saying.
“I am here with him now.” She was almost whispering as she spoke. Simon
couldn’t clearly hear any more of the conversation.

When Sophia returned to the living room,
Simon began to ask her whether everything was all right, but Sophia ignored him
and instead she addressed Ralitsa in Bulgarian.

Ralitsa replied at length, her eyes
clouding and her voice becoming quieter and quieter as she spoke. Simon
wondered what she was saying and waited impatiently for Sophia’s translation.
Finally Ralitsa stopped and covered her eyes with her hand.

A noise somewhere in the back startled
them, and Ralitsa quickly composed her face. She stood up and excused herself
and left the room, giving Sophia time to translate for Simon.

“Her husband and Scott didn’t get
along—to put it lightly,” Sophia said. “They did at the very beginning, when
Scott first arrived, but then something happened, something that Ralitsa is not
quite sure about. And then, a while later, they were again on friendly terms,
as if nothing had ever come between them. In fact, for quite some time they
were working together on some project, Ralitsa said. She didn’t know any
details about this because her husband never spoke about it. But the two of
them, Boris and Scott, would go out together late at night, disappear for hours
and return home only after Ralitsa was asleep. This went on even after Scott
continued with the next stage of his Peace Corps program. And then, everything
changed, Ralitsa said, because Scott disappeared. That’s what she said.”

Before Simon had a chance to respond,
Ralitsa re-entered the living room, accompanied by her husband. To Simon’s
surprise, the man, in his early forties, rolled into the room on a wheelchair.
Even though he was sitting in the chair, Simon could see that Boris was a
powerful man, with arm muscles that bulged out of a sleeveless green T-shirt.
His expression was angry, and he shoved his wife aside as he rolled himself
across the wood floor toward the visitors.

Boris shouted at them in heated
Bulgarian. Even though Simon couldn’t understand a word of it, he could tell
that curses were very much a part of the man’s verbal attack. Simon stood up
and started easing backward towards the entrance corridor, shocked at the
intense anger in the man’s voice. He looked to Sophia for guidance, but she seemed
as startled as he was over the outburst. Ralitsa stood to one side, not making
a move to quiet her husband. When it appeared that nothing could be done to
calm the man down, Sophia and Simon walked out of the living room and quickly
left the house.

As they hurried down the ramp and toward
the front gate, Ralitsa shouted something at them. There was no anger in her
voice, only embarrassment. Simon assumed she was apologizing for her husband,
but he wasn’t sure what had just transpired in the family’s living room.

“Come on, let’s go,” Sophia said, urging
him toward the car.

It was only later, as they left Montana
and headed south, driving alongside the stunning mountain range and the wide
expanses of agriculture, that Sophia finally worked up the nerve to tell Simon
what Boris had shouted at them.

“He said that Scott had betrayed him,”
Sophia said, her hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. Her face was ashen
as she stared ahead at the narrow country road. It took her a few minutes more
before she built up the strength to report one additional thing. “He said that
when he sees Scott again, he will kill him.”