In the square they danced with cowbells draped around their necks. The sound was riotous and unendurable. I saw a woman and man dancing together, and they danced with something akin to fury. The man stood tall and angular, and something had happened to his face to remove a divot from his forehead. He wore the half mask of a wolf. The woman danced with her skirt trailing out like the blade of a mower, and she spun and spun, her beauty heightened by the way she appeared as a wick in the center of her own candle. I watched them a long time. Evening came on, and they continued to dance, their movement absorbed and sent back by their compatriots and fellow townsmen, and for the first time since the war ended, I felt my heart lift. Yes, they danced to send winter back into the mountains, but they also danced because winter always ends, wars end, and life is victorious each and every time. Watching them, I learned that love is not static; love does not divide. What love we find in this world is coming toward us and traveling away from us simultaneously. To say we find love is a misuse of the word find. Love finds us, passes through us, continues. We cannot find it any more than we can find air or water; we cannot live without either thing any more than we can live without love. Love is essential and as common as bread. If you look for it, you will see it everywhere, and you will never be without it.
“I know where he has to be. It’s spring, and he’ll be there. It’s here in the journal. I know where he has to end up. The journal begins at a place in spring. That’s how his trip will end. It just makes sense.”
“You’re starting to spook me now, Heather.”
“Look at the date on the entry. It’s now. It’s two days away. And the phrase he quotes in the letter—it’s from the journal. Love finds us, passes through us, continues. Do you see? It’s right here.”
“But that doesn’t mean he is following the journal exactly, does it? Sorry, Heather. I’m trying to go with you here, but it’s just a line from a journal.”
“It’s the last entry. It’s where the journal begins. It’s a festival. He’ll be there. I know he will. He told me about this place. He said the night before the Nazis invaded, the entire town went out and danced. They danced in the face of death. That’s why he’ll be there. He wouldn’t miss it. He wants to dance in the face of death. That’s Jack.”
I stood.
“I’m going to pack now,” I said. “I’m going to go to him.”
“Heather, hold on. This is crazy. You can’t know that he’s there. And you can’t know even if he was going that he’s going to be there this week, or in a few days, can you? Come on, think. Are you sure? Are you sure you know where he is?”
“You’re right, of course. I know that. I know I’m being irrational, but I can’t let it go, Amy. Don’t you see? I’ve tried to let it go, but I have to see him. He has to be there eventually. He will be there. It’s spring, and he has to follow the journal to the end.”
“What about your job?”
“Fuck my job.”
“You’re not saying that. You’re not thinking clearly.”
“Maybe not. And maybe I am thinking clearly for the first time. I should never have let him go.”
“You didn’t have a choice.”
“I am going to stay until I find him. I don’t care anymore. I can’t live this way. I have to see him again. One way or the other, I have to know I wasn’t crazy to believe in what we had.”
Amy took a breath. I saw her weigh things again in her mind. I saw the old Amy, the wild Amy, return and take possession of her soul. Her eyes became bright, and she grabbed my forearm and squeezed it.
“You go to him,” she said, her voice irresistible. “You go and find him, and you don’t stop until you have what you need. Do you hear me? You’ll regret it all your life if you don’t find him and know, once and for all, what happened to him. He’s your great love.”
“He’s sick. And he went away to let me be free.”
Amy squeezed my forearm harder.
“I believe you,” she said. “Either that, or you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
I hugged her. I hugged her hard. I laughed, but it was a short, abrupt laugh more like a cough than anything else.
“I can’t live halfway. I can’t go forward until I understand what happened. I can’t.”
“And if you have it wrong?”
“Then I’m love’s fool. That’s not such a bad thing to be, is it? To be a fool for love?”
She let me go. She nodded. I nodded back at her. Then I ran upstairs to pack.
Batak
53
Batak, Bulgaria, April 1946
The man tilted the bottle back into his mouth and squinted. He staggered from his drunkenness; now he had collected a crowd around him with the promise to empty the bottle of “savage gin.” The gin, I knew, was anything but gin. It was a combination of rubbing alcohol and barley. Clearly the man no longer cared. Several onlookers rushed forward to pull his arm down, but he fought them off, pushing them away and dodging until he could get his lips around the bottle’s neck again. I would not have noticed his tears if the last light hadn’t caught him in profile. He was an ugly man, made uglier by the bestial face trapped to the bottle that fed him, his jacket torn, his pants bare at the knees. He appeared desperate to have the liquor inside him, desperate to forget, and each nod of his Adam’s apple declared a victory of suicide. At last he tossed the bottle to one side and held out his arms, ta-da, and no sooner had he made a small bow to the crowd, he collapsed in a pile on the ground. Even in war I had never seen a man go down so heavily. He collapsed in a pile, as if a force above him had driven him into the ground, and I turned away so I would not watch him vomit. But he did not vomit; he rolled on the ground, seizing his stomach, and one of his friends got him onto his knees and pounded on his back until the man finally disgorged a clear arc of liquid. The crowd cheered, and the drunken man sank onto the earth once more and looked up into the evening light. His tears had left a trail down his dirty face, and his mouth, glimmering with vomit and drink, glowed in the last light. The two marks of moisture connecting at his lips looked like an hourglass.
The taxi driver—a large man with an enormous mustache and a barely disguised delight in the opportunity to practice his English on a young American woman—drove me to the Hotel Orford in Batak, Bulgaria, the beginning point of Jack’s grandfather’s journal. During the drive, he told me he doubted the Hotel Orford would have accommodations.
“Too many dancers. It is the Surva Festival. Everyone, from all the region, they come to the dancing. They wear masks. You know this reputation? This town? The people hear Nazis coming, they look up at the mountain, and they dance. Crazy peoples, they dance in the face of death. It is very photo worthy.”
“What do you recommend?” I asked. “Where could I stay?”
“Hard to say—depends. What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure. Just a room of any sort.”
“Sometimes families … you understand, families? Sometimes they rent rooms for rent. They post them on a board—paper on a board.”
“Bulletin boards?”
He nodded emphatically.
“Yes, messages.”
“When does the dancing begin?”
“It’s already begun. Everyone dance. They dance for three days. Some people, they rent out their cars to sleep. It is still cold at night. We have snow up in the mountains.”
I surveyed everything as we entered the town. The village wasn’t big, I knew. The population was only about four thousand people, maybe fewer, but the town had obviously swollen to accommodate the festivalgoers. The streetlamps and buildings and stairways wore festoons of pine and spring flowers, and now and then I spotted what had to be a dancer carrying an outsized papier-maché head, usually painted in bright, outlandish colors. The masks invariably wore terrifying faces; they reminded me of Mardi Gras masks, only more primitive and more connected, somehow, to the deep forests surrounding the town.
“Is it going to snow?” I asked, wondering, halfheartedly, if I could sleep out. “Do you know the weather report?”