“I do,” I said.
“Day come, and the real Zeus and Hera, they become disenchanted with Rhodopa and Hemus, say it was wrong to use the god names. So, poof, the real Zeus and Hera, they turn the young brother and sister into mountains. That is Bulgaria.”
“Jealous gods,” I said.
The room had become warm in just the time it took Mr. Roo to tell the story. It made me sleepy. Mr. Roo smiled.
“I leave you now. We serve soup at seven o’clock. Good soup. You sleep now. I can see you need to.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I’m tired from traveling.”
“Of course you are. When you travel, your soul … how is it? It is up in the air.”
“And when you are home?”
“We believe here that your soul is divided and that half it lives in your native soil!” Mr. Roo said, laughing. “When you are in your own country, your feet can find the soul beneath, and it is whole. But when you travel, you are a half soul. You believe such things?”
“I believe everything,” I said, feeling that I needed to lie down or faint.
Mr. Roo bowed, nodded, and went out. I closed the door behind him after agreeing, again, that I might come down for soup. The room felt warm and smelled faintly of a gaseous discharge that came from the Cupid face heater. I wondered, absently, if the heater could kill me with carbon monoxide if it didn’t function properly. I imagined it could.
I went to the cot and stretched out on it. I wanted to cry, but I was too stunned, too out of my element, to permit even that slight weakness. If I gave in to that, I realized, I might run up into the hills to conspire with the winter spirits. I might live in the karsts and grow moss in my hair and live among savage stone and quivering pines. I reflected, as I fell toward sleep, that the dancers did not dance to chase the spirits away but danced instead to mock them for what they could not have.
*
I woke in the last light of day, and I did not know where I was. I was cold; I knew that much. I shivered and pulled the wool blanket around me, then remembered that Mr. Roo showed me how to use the heater. I stood with the blanket still draped over me and dug in my backpack until I found a few coins. The currency was strange to me, so for a moment or two I bent over to inspect them. I imagined, as I did so, how I would appear to anyone watching: a strange, hair-tousled woman wrapped in an olive military blanket, standing in the last light of day going through her coins. It was not an inspiring image.
It took me three coins to get the Cupid heater blowing air at me. I held my hands out to the tiny mouth, just as Mr. Roo had done. Then I crawled back into bed.
For a long time, I commanded myself to do nothing, think nothing, until I was at least marginally warm. That seemed like a good way to approach things: take one small thing at a time and accomplish it. First, make myself warm. Second, maybe, go eat soup. Third, figure out what insane impulses had led me to flying to Batak on such an absurd whim. To do the last thing required serious introspection, so I put that aside and concentrated on soup.
What kind of soup? I wondered. Beet soup, probably. Something made of root vegetables and onions and dark, smothering water. No, not smothering water, but mountain water, water that drained from the winter spirits’ baths, water that flowed like roots down from the karsts to the village square. That was the kind of soup Mr. Roo would serve.
Thinking of soup satisfied me for a time. The heat gradually took over the room. I tried to guess what time it could be. My phone lay on the desk across the room, and that seemed an insurmountable distance. But I forced myself to climb out of bed and grab it. I fell back in bed, this time letting out a small oomph as I gave in to gravity.
It was 6:37. Approximately twenty minutes to soup.
I dialed Amy’s number on my phone but canceled the call before it went through. I sent her a text instead and said I had arrived safely, I was okay, all was well. I told her the place was astonishing, smiley face, smiley face, smiley face.
55
Potato-leek soup.
Mr. Roo and a nameless woman—she wore a blue putzfrau dress like the ones the washing women wore in Berlin and Vienna and Kraków—ladled out bowls of potato-leek soup for the clientele in his sparsely populated dining room. To call it a dining room, however, was being generous. It was a large gray room with refectory tables. Its only saving grace was a ponderous woodstove that burned in the corner of the room. It was the kind of woodstove with open doors, so that it doubled as a fireplace, and the light from the burn filled the room with golden flickers.
I took my bowl of soup from the nameless woman—Mr. Roo’s wife, his sister, his mother?—and carried it to an open chair beside the woodstove. Mr. Roo passed around the room with a plate of black bread. I took a piece, and I could not help being reminded of communion. The soup was too hot to eat. I held it in my lap and let it soak me with heat.
“Warm?” Mr. Roo asked on his second round in an attempt, I imagined, to make me comfortable.
“Warm,” I said, although whether he meant the heater upstairs or my spot in front of the woodstove I couldn’t tell.
Eventually, the soup cooled, and I ate it. I was hungry, and the soup was quite good. It tasted of onions and summer lawns. Mr. Roo gave me a second piece of bread. I ate that, too. In some ways, it was easier to eat than to think. Thinking meant I had to decide on a course of action. My inclination was to climb back up to my Spartan room and sleep the night away. I felt exhausted and confused. My plan to come to find Jack in Bulgaria now seemed so impulsive, so demonstrably ridiculous, that I wondered how Amy hadn’t thrown me down on the ground and tied me up to prevent me from leaving Paris. But she had accepted my assurances—Honest, Amy, he has to be there, that’s where the journal begins, I swear it makes sense if you know Jack, if you’ve read his grandfather’s work—and I had been so intent on persuading her that I had persuaded myself.
“Are you going to watch them burn the old man?” Mr. Roo asked when he began clearing plates. The other diners had wandered off. I sat alone in front of the fire.
“Burn the old man?” I asked, not understanding.
“Old Man Winter. They carry him to the square and burn him. Then spring can come down out of the mountains.”
That will be warm, I thought. My world had suddenly become binary: warm or not warm.
“Is there a way to find someone in the festival? To leave a message for someone?” I asked.
Mr. Roo leaned his rear end on one of the tables and looked at me.
“You okay?” he asked.
I shrugged. I needed to shrug or cry.
“I need to find someone here,” I said when I had my emotions under control.
“A lost boy?”
Yes, I thought, smiling at the mention of lost boys, the wild boy-men of Peter Pan. “A lost boy.”