He buzzed his lips in reply. Who knows? He didn’t know, certainly.
As we drove a little deeper into the town, I began to feel triumphant. I was a madwoman; it was that simple. I had no idea if Jack was in fact here. Even if he was, I reflected, I couldn’t be certain of finding him. He might come for a day, then leave before I ever saw him. But I had done the first truly impulsive thing in my entire life. I hadn’t weighed it out, determined the proper course of action, made careful calculations. For once in my life, I had acted on my gut, taken a flyer, followed my heart. Jack had taught me that; Jack had made such freedom possible. Whatever else he had meant or been to me, he had unlocked something inside me that had been rusted and clotted with disuse. He had given me hope and taught me to trust that life held surprises if you allowed it to reveal itself. You did not clutter it with camera shots and Facebook postings. You gave yourself to the situation. That was Jack’s great lesson.
The driver, meanwhile, cruised slowly past the village square. Police had lined off a large area with yellow tape. Dancers had already begun to collect. Many wore large strings of cowbells around their necks, and the noise increased the deeper we penetrated the square.
“I can get out here,” I told the driver. “This is probably as good as anyplace, isn’t it?”
“Yes, good, yes,” he said, navigating the foot traffic that swirled everywhere.
“Those are the dancers?”
“Everyone is a dancer in Batak. It is everyone’s job to end the winter and promise a good spring.”
“Yes,” I said, watching everything. “Yes, of course it is.”
The noise of the bells increased the moment I stepped out of the car. Dancers arriving in the square jumped up and down, or moved in spins to get their bells to ring. Most of the dancers were young, but not all. A light snow had begun to fall. I glanced up at the sky. It didn’t appear to threaten a true storm; the snow seemed to fall with reluctance, drifting down in the gray atmosphere. The surrounding buildings had already turned on their lights against the early evening.
I stood for a long time as the cab pulled away. I didn’t move.
I watched the dancers congregate—large masks of fanged lions, dragons, terrifying canine faces and wild, engorged children—and I wondered if I had not entered a nightmare. But the expressions on the festivalgoers’ faces saved me: they were lighthearted and happy, and it was clear that this was a cultural event that carried with it a great deal of merrymaking. Jack’s grandfather had come here after the war, and I could imagine the pleasure he had taken in the celebration, in the village’s determination to drive back the darker human forces. And the crazy peoples, as the driver said, had in fact danced in the face of death. I had read about that. The night before the Germans invaded and took over the town, the villagers could think to do nothing more forceful but to dance. I knew that from Jack’s grandfather’s journal.
For what felt a long time, I didn’t move. I waited—I hoped—for the music to infect me. I wanted its primitive pull to take me over, but I could not give in to it yet. I envied the dancers. They seemed to let everything go, to join with the music, to swirl their cowbells at the dark mountains. I had never learned to let go in that way. Jack had been teaching me to do it, but I hadn’t been able to take the final step.
That’s what I thought standing in the town common in Batak, Bulgaria.
Then, as quickly, I realized that I was cold.
54
“It is not much,” Mr. Roo said.
I didn’t know if I had heard his name correctly. Mr. Roo? Mr. Kangaroo? Surely, I thought, the name meant something more. I had heard it indistinctly when he had introduced himself. Now I followed him down a long hallway that smelled of cabbage and snow and cat. It seemed to be an apartment house of some sort, but even that was hard to determine. Outside, the noise of the cowbells filled everything with cacophonous sound. Mr. Roo—a man with an enormous stomach plow and deep, sympathetic eyebrows—turned back to me and tried unsuccessfully to talk over the noise. He held up his finger to tell me to wait.
Mr. Roo wore a blue work shirt and a black boiled wool vest tucked into his pants. He struck me as the Eastern European character actor who holds a lantern at the inn and warns against going in the mountains toward Dracula’s castle. But he seemed pleased to have me as a guest, and as he led me down a second hallway, this one more removed from the clamor of the bells, he explained the building’s history.
“In another day, a military barracks. A dormitory. You understand? Small rooms. Just cot beds. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“We charge a lot for such rooms, more than is should, but we cannot help it.”
“It’s festival,” I said, agreeing.
I thought of Hemingway attending the bullfights in Pamplona, drinking from sunrise to sunset, drifting from bar to bar, but this festival had a different feeling. It took place in the mountains, in what the guidebooks called the great karst areas with deep river gorges, large caves, and carved sculptured rock formations where the spirits of winter hid until the spring dancers frightened them back to their frozen lands. Hemingway celebrated death in life; the Surva Festival asked for life in death. It made a difference, somehow, but I could not yet determine what that might be.
Mr. Roo opened the door to my room.
“Simple,” he said, holding open the door.
Primitive might have been a more accurate word, but the room suited me. He had not misled me: it was an eight-by-ten box with a gray painted floor, a cot with a wool blanket tucked over it, a single pillow, and a yellow table and chair pushed against the far wall. It had no heat that I could detect. A fair-sized window looked out onto a courtyard. I liked the look of the window: it let in the gray afternoon light, and I watched the snow drift like moths into the air below me.
“Good?” Mr. Roo asked me.
“Fine,” I said.
A look of relief spread over his face. It occurred to me that perhaps he had been slightly embarrassed to show a foreigner the humble accommodations he offered. Now with that settled, he turned on the overhead light and showed me how to put a coin into a small heater on the wall. The heater resembled a Cupid face, with an innocent pouting mouth that spewed heat once the coin had been digested. Mr. Roo stood with his hands out to the heater as if he had just ignited a magnificent campfire. I decided that I liked Mr. Roo, and if he told me not to take the carriage to Dracula’s castle, I would heed his warning.
“Better?” he asked as I swung my backpack down onto the yellow table.
“Better,” I said.
“Do you know the mountain history?”
I shook my head.
“Rhodopa and Hemus—very famous. They were brother and sister. Then they began to desire one another. Very wrong. Because they were beautiful, they called each other by god names. Zeus and Hera. You understand?”