I wasn’t used to men like Nikolai, charming magicians who promised to make the impossible come true. When he came into my life, I was awestruck. I was spellbound. There are a hundred clichés I could conjure—entranced, hypnotized—and all of them applied to me. Nothing in my childhood, or all the years since I’d left home, had prepared me. There just weren’t men like him in the Midwest, guys who spoke a handful of languages and could rip off a Chopin sonata and read sutras in Tibetan. He was so far out of my circle of reference, so foreign, so exotic, that I was utterly blinded.
But as with every romantic hero, there was a weak spot below the armor. As a child, Nikolai trained to play in the International Chopin Piano Competition in Poland. I’d never heard of the competition until I met him, but for young pianists this was the Wimbledon of contests, the most prestigious and famous forum for new musical talent. Contestants from all over the world applied to the Chopin Competition. Just qualifying to participate could make a musician’s career. After winning in Italy at age nine, Nikolai had been considered a strong candidate, and he had trained relentlessly for years, memorizing Chopin sonatas and etudes, reading Chopin’s letters, trying to find a way into the mind and music of his hero.
A date was announced for this preliminary competition, and Nikolai practiced night and day. When the audition came, he played his étude perfectly, and everyone in the audience—including teachers at the conservatory and other renowned musicians—declared that he’d been brilliant. After his performance he was surrounded by members of the audience and congratulated. The judges announced that he’d won and would be going to Poland. But then, in some dark twist that can happen only in a nightmare, the decision was overturned by a Communist official, the father of a girl who’d competed against Nikolai. He had given his entire childhood for this opportunity, and it went to a girl with less talent but better connections.
I once saw a videotape of Nikolai playing at the preliminary competition, the younger, awkward, and adorable teenage version of the man I loved, playing his heart out. In the video there was something hopeful and confident about him, something unspoiled. It was like watching a pristine forest minutes before a fire. Later I came to see this competition as a deep wound in his psyche, the underlying tragedy of his childhood from which he would never fully recover. After he was eliminated from the Chopin Competition, he was always looking for applause. In me he found someone who clapped until her hands bled.
Like so much else, our weaknesses were cut from the same cloth. While he needed applause, I needed someone to adore, a man to put on a pedestal, an artist to lift up and support. The men of my past were exactly this type: undiscovered geniuses I would take in. It began simply and with small gestures—making a man dinner or doing his laundry—and soon become larger acts of support, such as paying his rent or lending him money. Before long the boyfriend would be living with me and I would be covering his phone bill or his car payment. It happened through college and after college, but I was so unconscious of my actions, so wrapped up in feeling whatever I felt, that I didn’t see a pattern. I couldn’t have explained it then, but for me love meant proving myself—emotionally and financially—and laying these proofs of love at the feet of my beloved.
I remember once, when I was about thirteen, having dinner with my father in his small kitchen on the north side of La Crosse. He was railing about some woman who had hurt him—my mom or his first wife or an ex-girlfriend—going on and on about the parasitic, money-grabbing qualities of all womankind, the ones who took his cash and left him with nothing but kids to feed, when he turned to me, his eyes intense as those in a self-portrait by van Gogh, and said, “Don’t you ever be like that, Danielle.”
I can’t say that this moment caused my inability to accept love with an open heart, but it remained with me, an apparition at the back of my mind, that I should never become a woman “like that.”
Nikolai didn’t have a piano, so I drove him to a music shop at the edge of Iowa City, where a polished black baby grand sat at the back of the showroom. He would sit, hit a few keys to warm up, and then launch into the piece, his fingers flying over the keyboard, his head held high, his patrician profile stiff and poised. It was Chopin’s Prelude in B-flat minor, op. 28, no. 16, a racy, beautiful song, and he played the entire thing from memory, as if it had been burned into him by years of practice. I leaned against the piano, my reflection pale and watery in the black lacquer, awestruck by the beauty of his artistry, the complicated fingering, the speed and timing and confidence. That he could create such an explosion of beauty, something that took over my senses so completely, left me mesmerized.
I wasn’t the only one. Eventually someone in the shop walked over, and then another person stopped by, then another, and soon there was a crowd around the piano, listening to Nikolai play. He was giving these people pleasure, something sublime in an ordinary day, and I was part of that gift. The last flourish of the prelude was punctuated by clapping, and Nikolai—so obviously used to applause—glowed with pleasure. He was the center of attention, the star performer taking a bow. He was the bright, hot center of the universe. I wanted to be near his light, to feel the warmth of him on my skin. I wanted to orbit him forever.
OUR FIRST MONTHS together coincided with a harsh midwestern winter, and so we spent most of our evenings inside by the fireplace. We would stack CDs by the stereo and play them one by one, filling the apartment with the sound of Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Bill Evans. Alex would play with his Thomas the Tank Engine train set, a huge, twisting wooden track that occupied the center of the living room, while Nikolai cooked something complicated from Bulgaria, stuffed peppers or roasted lamb or musaka. I would sip hot tea and watch my son, marveling at his beauty and strength. At two years old, Alex was a curly-haired blond dynamo of pure muscle and speed, who could jump up and run from one end of the playground to the other before I had a chance to get off the park bench. He was a fearless toddler, strong and fierce. When he’d run head-on into a pole and cut his eyebrow open, I was in tears, not Alex. Nikolai had held him as we drove to the ER, making funny faces to distract him from the pain. But Alex wasn’t worried. Once on the surgery table, he fixed me with his huge brown eyes, as if to say, Hey, calm down up there and let me get this over with. Alex was exceptionally verbal for his age and spoke in full sentences at eight months. I’ll never forget the eerie experience of hearing a baby of less than a year say, “I would like more peas, Mama, please,” as if he were ordering tea at the Ritz.
Every morning I drove Alex to day care at the Sprout House, a section of Alice’s Rainbow Child Care Center in Iowa City. I helped him out of his snowsuit, kissed his cold red cheeks, and left him with the other two-year-olds to play with blocks or Play-Doh. Back home I would go to the desk in my bedroom and write, while Nikolai stationed himself in the living room, at the low coffee table, where he sat cross-legged on the floor as he finished his third novel, scheduled to be published in Bulgaria the following year. We spent the day working, meeting intermittently for lunch or coffee, and then, around four o’clock, I would pick up Alex, do the shopping, and our nightly ritual of Thomas the Tank Engine and complicated Bulgarian dinner would ensue.
It was a fairly mundane routine, but with Nikolai a part of it I felt that this was the way my life was meant to be lived. It was as if I’d been missing some essential nutrient for twenty-seven years and he made me healthy again. Being with Nikolai felt essential, vital. It was like drinking water when you’re dying of thirst, or getting a fix when you’re addicted, or like looking into the eyes of your firstborn child and understanding, suddenly, the meaning of life. If you haven’t experienced the wondrous surprise of it before, the simple joy of it, it might be hard to imagine. In fact, it had been hard for me to imagine until I met Nikolai. Some part of me felt that Nikolai was too good to be true. I would open my eyes and the dream would disappear.
And then one day that’s exactly what happened. There was a problem with his visa status, and Nikolai would have to leave the country. He’d come to the International Writing Program on a J-1 visa as a guest of the State Department. Part of the fine print of the J-1, he told me, was that he needed to leave the United States before his visa expired—in his case six months—and return to his home country. He’d been in the United States for seven months, which was a violation of the visa, making him ineligible to renew it from within this country. He needed to either go home or face whatever penalties the newly created Department of Homeland Security had in store.
His anxiety about his visa was exacerbated by the fact that he had left his infant daughter, Rada, in Sofia with his soon-to-be ex-wife. His parents had hired a lawyer there in his absence, and they were giving Nikolai regular updates of the divorce proceedings by e-mail and Skype. Nikolai didn’t like to talk about his relationship with his first wife, and when he did, he had nothing good to say about her. She’d been a model in Sofia, and he ridiculed her for what he perceived as superficiality and lack of intelligence. When I asked him why he’d married someone he so clearly despised, his answer was that he’d felt trapped: She became pregnant with their daughter and insisted he marry her. “There’s no use in talking about her,” he would say, and he uttered her full name just one time in my presence. For the remainder of our years together, he referred to her only by the first letter of her name: Z.
“I’m so happy here with you,” he said, snuggling his nose into my neck one night as we lay in bed. We’d just made love and were lying under the covers talking, our limbs wrapped in the tangle of sheets. “I don’t think I’ve ever imagined that someone like you could exist. You’re perfect for me. You’re not pretending to be someone you aren’t. You’re just yourself. You just love me.”
It was true: I just loved him. I loved everything about him, from the way he cooked to the funny way he tapped his feet in his sleep to his habit of quoting Buddhist texts at strange moments to his fear of airplanes to his hypochondria to his adorable habit of looking in the mirror fifty times a day, as if to make sure he still existed. I loved his beautiful green-hazel eyes and his full lips and his long fingers. I loved his creativity, how he woke up every morning and went to his computer to write, how there was always another idea, another project, more and more and more to come. I loved his faith in me. Even though I had not published a thing, he believed that one day my writing would be widely read. He compared me to great writers, feeding my insecure soul. I loved that he promised to be good to Alex and to take care of him as if he were his own son. But most of all I loved that he made everything seem possible. With Nikolai the future was bigger and more exciting than I could ever have imagined.
“Promise me something,” he said one morning over coffee.
“Anything,” I said, meeting his eyes.
“Tell me you’ll never leave me.”
The problem with his visa had unsettled him. He was worried about being separated from me.
“I won’t leave you,” I said. “I won’t leave. I’m here.”
“I can’t make it through this lifetime if you’re not at my side. I’ve lost you before. I can feel it. We were separated from each other in a different life, and this is our chance to make up for it. This is our lifetime together. We can’t waste it. Promise me.”
“I promise,” I said, wishing I could promise him more than one lifetime. I would give him five. I would give him a hundred. “I won’t ever leave you.”
After doing some reading on the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services Web site, Nikolai had decided that his best move would be to go back to Bulgaria, where he could change his visa status more easily. It was a simple bureaucratic matter, he said, one that could be quickly fixed in Sofia. But, he insisted, he wasn’t leaving the United States without me, and I wasn’t finished with my M.F.A. program until May.
“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I’d rather be illegal than to lose you.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Why don’t you come with me for the summer?” he said. “We’ll go when your program is done. The weather will be perfect then, and we can go to the Black Sea. We could use a vacation. There are almost no tourists then.”
“What about money?” I asked, feeling hesitant to bring it up. Nikolai was terrible with money. The International Writers Program had given him a stipend, but he’d spent nearly all of it on a laptop computer within a week of arriving. Until he met me, he, like many of the visiting writers, had survived mostly on free cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at literary events, potluck dinners, and the cookies left in the lobby of his hotel. Then he moved into my apartment, and I bought our food and whatever else he needed.
“They’re holding my teaching job at Sofia University,” he said. “I can start again as soon as I’m back.”
“But what about all this?” I asked, gesturing to my things: my desk and my books and Alex’s toys.
“Put it in storage for a few months,” he said. “And pack Alex’s toys. We’ll replace what you can’t fit in your suitcase. There are a thousand toy stores in Sofia. And playgrounds. And a zoo. And Rada can come over to play with Alex. He’ll learn some Bulgarian. It will be good for you to spend more time with him for a few months.”
It didn’t take me long to decide. During the past years, I’d been so busy getting my master’s degree that I hadn’t had the option of spending whole weeks of uninterrupted time with Alex. If we went to Bulgaria, I would have an abundance of time and energy to lavish on my son, a luxury I hadn’t imagined possible before. Equally important, I was with a man who had promised to raise Alex like his own child, who told me that it was time for me to stop worrying and live a little.
“Trust me,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”
I had never heard these words and believed them until now. And so I packed up everything I owned in the world, put it all in storage, and gave notice on my apartment. I bought plane tickets and prepared to follow my Prince Charming to the other side of the world.
Before we left, he would lie awake at night staring into space.
“You don’t know how difficult this is for me,” he once said. “I hate Bulgaria. I was a prisoner in my country until I was eighteen years old. It was like a gulag.”
“A prisoner?” I echoed, propping myself up on my elbow. “A gulag?” His intensity—so dramatic and extreme and romantic—got my attention.
“No one could go in or out of Bulgaria during Communism. When I was nine, I was selected to play in a piano competition in Italy. My father and I had permission to go, but the Communists made my mom stay in Sofia, to ensure that we’d come back. I’d never been out of Bulgaria before, and seeing Italy was incredible, like a movie. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Suddenly I knew everything we were missing in Bulgaria—the food, the cars, the stores, everything. I was free there, really free. It changed me. I wanted to stay in Italy—we could have claimed political asylum, especially after I won the competition—but we couldn’t leave my mom behind. And so we went back to our prison.”
I took in this story, feeling the depth of his frustration, the incredible deprivation he must have felt, and the pain of going back to a country that had imprisoned him. I wanted to keep him from experiencing this pain again. I wanted to take his past and bury it in a shower of kisses. I wanted to give him a new life. I wanted to be his Italy.
“Being without a visa brings it all back for me,” he said. “I can’t help but feel like I’m on the train from Italy returning to Sofia.”
“But it’s not like that now,” I said, stroking his hair and kissing him on the forehead. “The world has changed. You just have to renew your visa, and you can come back here. It’s only a formality.”
“Right,” he said, but his face darkened. “But if I learned one thing from my childhood, it is that simple formalities can turn into bureaucratic nightmares. If Homeland Security wanted, they could arrest me. They could lock me up and deport me. Or hold me somewhere. Nobody knows what’s happening out there now.”
It was February of 2002, when the repercussions of 9/11 were still unknown. The recently passed Patriot Act could change everything for foreigners in the United States.
“I didn’t realize that it could be so complicated,” I said.
“That’s because you’re an American citizen. You don’t realize how privileged you are. You expect everything in life to work, and you’re surprised when it doesn’t. You haven’t had your basic human rights stripped away like I have.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t understand. I’m lucky to have you. My country would be lucky to have you, too.”
“Do you mean that?” he said, his eyes intent on mine.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m sure that with all your talents they’ll give you citizenship in a second. I’ll help you. I’ll do anything you need.”
“Then marry me,” he said, gazing deeply into my eyes. “That’s the best way.”
Although we had known each other less than six months, I didn’t hesitate. I loved him, and I wanted everything—good and bad, easy and difficult—with him. “Of course,” I said, bursting with happiness. “I love you. I just want to be with you.”
From that moment forward, we were co-creators of a fantasy, a dreamworld that became our shelter, protecting us from loneliness and disappointment and instability and failure, a structure capable of holding us apart from everyone and everything that could harm us. He extended his hand, and I, grasping it, went wherever he might take me.