THE DEUX CHEVAUX threads its way through the silent streets of Melnik. The headlights play over elaborate carved wooden shutters, the empty Moskovich parked under the overhang of a house, lanes that narrow and twist up and away, as if squirming out of your grasp, to disappear amid a tangle of footbridges and back alleys and fenced-in gardens.
“It’s hard to believe anybody lives here,” Melanie tells Tacho. “It’s hard to believe you lived here.”
“Born and reared,” he observes. “I rode my first bicycle on the flat stretch at the bottom of the hill; when I was a boy, it was the only pavement in town.”
Melanie guns the car up a steep slope and stops with a jerk when the road suddenly narrows to a footpath.
“I have the feeling I’m in a bowl,” she declares nervously, jumping into the street and peering at the bulking blackness that seems to press in on her from all sides.
“You are,” Tacho confirms. “We’re surrounded on four sides by sand cliffs. The only way to see the sky in Melnik is to look straight up. Here” — Tacho gropes for her hand—”be careful crossing this bridge. The hotel’s down a bit on the other side of the river.”
The door of the hotel is locked, and Tacho bangs on it with his fist. After a few moments, he bangs again. A voice, muffled by the thick wood of the door, calls:
“Can’t you see we’re closed — it’s past eleven.”
“It’s me, Petar. It’s Tacho.”
Fingers fumble with the lock inside and the door is suddenly thrown open.
“Tacho!” roars Petar. He limps forward and catches the Racer in a bear hug, then thrusts him back and plants noisily formal kisses on both his cheeks. “What in hell are you doing in Melnik? Here, come in out of the night.”
Petar catches sight of the girl behind Tacho. “You are not alone then,” he remarks.
“Melanie, meet Petar. He was my trainer in the days when I rode. Petar, meet someone who has been a friend to me. Her name is Krasov. Melanie Krasov.”
“Krasov,” Petar repeats the name thoughtfully. “Wasn’t there a Krasov — “
“He was my father,” Melanie acknowledges.
“He was an American,” Petar remembers.
“So am I,” the girl says.
“I’ve never met an American before,” Petar notes. “So far, it’s been painless. Do you all speak Russian?”
“Only the ones with Russian fathers,” Melanie smiles.
“Are you alone, Petar?” Tacho looks into the restaurant. The only one in there is a teen-age boy curled up in front of a roaring fire.
“I’m alone,” Petar says, steering Tacho and the girl toward a table in front of the fire.
“What about the boy?” Melanie whispers.
“He’s retarded,” Tacho explains quickly. “He’s Petar’s grandson.”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean — “
“No harm done,” Petar tells her. He prods the boy gently with his cane. The boy opens his eyes and squints up unblinkingly at his grandfather.
“Be a good boy and tell Blagoi to put a light under the guvec” Petar instructs him. The boy’s head jerks, and he skips off toward the kitchen. Petar lays out three tumblers and a bottle of slivova.
“Lower than the grass, quieter than the water,” he toasts, and downs the glassful in a smooth swallow.
“Lower than grass,” Tacho repeats, arid follows suit.
Melanie sips at hers tentatively, sputters, then sips again. The two men smile at her.
“What news from Sofia?” Petar demands. “How did the Flag Holder react to the Czechoslovak business?”
Tacho downs another tumbler of slivova. “The Flag Holder is dead” — Petar’s mouth sags open — “he … took his own life … killed himself … to protest against the invasion.”
Melanie rests her hand on Tacho’s. Sapling branches crackle in the fireplace.
“So that’s how it is,” Petar remarks quietly. “I will tell you honestly. I never liked him the way you liked him, but I honored him. And he was one hell of a driver!” It suddenly dawns on Petar why Tacho is here. “Of course, they are arresting the others.”
Tacho nods. “They are trying to turn him into a nonperson. The only way they can do that is to take us out of circulation.”
“Which means you’re running.”
“Which means I’m running.”
“You’ll be safe here for a while.”
“I’ve come for my bicycle, Petar,” Tacho says.
“Your bicycle! What are you going to do, ride across the frontier?” Petar’s eyebrows, tufts of gray, arch up and he looks sharply at the Racer, toying with the idea that has just entered his head. “It’s possible,” he concludes cautiously. “How many days until the race?”
“They should cross tomorrow — probably late afternoon, about dusk.”
“Have you been riding? Can you keep up with them?”
“For short distances, yes.”
“Putting on racing tires and rims is no problem. But I’ll have to take off the big gear and install a sprint gear.” Petar is thinking out loud. “I’ll get Blagoi to give me a hand. We should be able to do it before morning if we work through the night.”
“Thanks, Petar — I knew you would help.”
“What bicycle are you talking about?” Melanie interrupts impatiently. “What’s going on?”
“They turned one of the empty rooms in the Party building into a museum and put my bicycle in it — the one I used when I set the speed record. Petar here is more or less the custodian.”
“Our Tacho is something of a hero,” Petar explains. “Local boy makes good.”
“Lay off,” Tacho warns.
Petar enjoys his little joke. “What about the girl?” he demands.
“She will drive across the border tomorrow morning like any tourist on her way out of the country.”
“I’m not crossing until you do,” Melanie declares vehemently.
“You’ll cross when I tell you to,” Tacho lashes back at her. “You’ll cross when I tell you to,” he repeats more reasonably. “There is no other way.”
Blagoi, a shepherd’s second son who is learning to be a cook, comes in with two plates of guvef and a basket of peasant bread. Petar brings two bottles of Melnik wine and some clean glasses. Tacho and the girl attack their plates ravenously: Tacho eats in the peasant style, sprinkling salt on the bread from his palm and using the bread to scoop up the guved; Melanie eats more sedately, cutting the meat into small pieces, then shifting the fork to her right hand, American style. Blagoi stands over her shaking his head, baffled.
“I have seen the tourists eat that way,” he acknowledges, “but I do not cirrive at seeing the logic of it.”
Blagoi has just put two cups of Turkish coffee on the table when they hear the pounding on the front door of the hotel. Melanie looks quickly at Tacho.
“Who knows you’re here?” Petar demands.
“No one,” Tacho declares.
“Wait here.”
Petar limps out of the dining room to see who it is. There is a blast of cold air as he opens the front door.
“So, you are again serving after eleven,” a voice booms. “Don’t insult me by denying it. I can smell the guved from the bottom of the hill. Your man Blagoi puts too much garlic in it, as always.”
The visitor tries to shoulder his way into the dining room, but Petar blocks his path and pulls the door closed with his cane. Their voices come through the glass panes, which are covered with lace curtains.
“They are not clients,” Petar tells the other man. “They are my guests.”
“They are always guests,” the first man sneers. “So were they guests, those hikers last week. So too were they guests, the Greek businessman and his wife the week before that. The regulations under which we function specify we are to close at eleven” — the man’s voice turns shrill with anger— “but you, Petar, go your own way. Don’t think I don’t know why, because I do know why. You make it appear as if your restaurant is more productive than mine. But the only way you can do that is by serving after eleven. Well, you are not going to get away with it. I am going to report you this time.”
“Do as you like,” Petar scoffs. “Do whatever will make you feel a man.”
“You, Petar, dare say that to me,” the other man challenges in a hurt voice.
“I say that to anyone who tells me he is going to the militia,” Petar tells him.
“Who said anything about going to the militia?”
“You spoke of turning in a report,” Petar reminds him caustically.
“That was a figure of speech,” the visitor maintains. His hands shoot out, palms up. “Are you so thick, then, you don’t recognize a figure of speech when you hear one? I have come here to discuss with you, man to man, the feeding of clients after the regular closing hour of eleven. Where is the crime in that?”
“And I have told you, man to man, that I am not feeding clients. I am feeding my guests.”
“I have your word on that?”
“You have my word, yes.”
The visitor starts toward the door. “You understand, Petar, I am merely looking after my interests. Your restaurant has fewer tables than mine, and greater income. The District Secretary is certain to start asking questions. What do I say to him when he asks these questions?”
“Say to him,” Petar advises, “that I feed customers after the obligatory closing hour of eleven. That way, he will issue a warning to me, and be pleased with both of us — with you for keeping your eyes open, with me for surpassing my quota.”
“You consent to my saying such a thing, then?”
“Of course say it,” Petar urges. “We will have the last laugh.”
The two men shake hands warmly, and the door closes behind the visitor.
“How is it,” Tacho asks Petar when he returns, “you do more business than he does if you have a smaller restaurant?”
“Simple,” Petar confesses, pouring himself another full glass of red wine. “He weighs out each portion according to the instructions from the Party — seventy-five grams of chopped meat, one hundred fifty grams of sliced tomatoes, two hundred grams of boiled potatoes. Christ, when a Communist makes love, he is only permitted to expel twenty cc’s of sperm! I beg your pardon, American lady, but that’s how it is with us.”
“And you don’t weigh your portions?” Tacho inquires.
“We don’t even have a scale!” Petar boasts. “Isn’t that right, Blagoi?”
From behind the bar Blagoi smiles wickedly.
Later, in an icy hotel room — there is no central heating, only more blankets—the girl undresses with the light on. This time the Racer props himself up on an elbow and watches her.
A donkey brays under their window, waking them before the cocks crow.
“Get up,” Tacho shakes the girl. “I have something I want to show you.”
Tacho puts on a pair of hiking boots and some work clothes that Melanie has not seen before.
“Where did you get those?” she wants to know.
“Petar,” the Racer says.
It is warmer outside than in, and Tacho leads the way up a narrow footpath that runs parallel to the river. The houses of Melnik are of a style Melanie has not seen before — sprawling two-story wooden structures, with the second story hanging over the first. Every house has something to distinguish it: carved shutters, a colorful weathercock on the sloping roof, delicate lace curtains on the windows, a fist carved out of wood which serves as a door knocker. Huge piles of cut logs are stacked under the overhangs of the houses. Chickens peck the ground near a garden of tomatoes planted late and no longer ripening on the vines.
“I see what you mean about the sky,” Melanie announces. The sand cliffs, carved into exotic contours by centuries of wind and rain, loom around her, over her.
Tacho turns the corner of one house and spots the boy with the Moskovich from the night before. He is stumbling up the steps of a house with his arms full of boxes. The boy’s wife, a chubby girl wearing a new pair of high-heeled East German shoes, totters uncertainly along behind him with another armload. Her father brings up the rear. He is carrying an electric iron, an electric blender, an electric heater and an electric toaster. A neighbor flings open her shutters across the path and leans out.
“So he’s back from where he went,” she observes, eyeing the boxes in the old man’s arms.
“Yes, he’s back,” the old man allows. “He has come by automobile, of which he is the owner.”
“A Russian automobile,” the daughter calls over her shoulder excitedly.
“A Moskovich,” the boy corrects her, emerging from the house empty-handed.
The old woman takes this in. “Aren’t many in Melnik what owns a private automobile,” she notes, obviously impressed.
“Aren’t any,” the boy corrects her, blushing with pride, “less you count the co-op van and the hotel pickup.”
The higher the Racer climbs in the village, the closer the houses get to the river until finally, near the limit of the village under the cliffs, the upper floors hang over the river itself. Beyond the last house, Tacho pauses to look back at Melnik, which tumbles away from him, like the river, toward the main road far below.
They continue to climb the cliffs until Melnik is lost from view. About twenty minutes later the path flattens out, the river narrows and shallows and the land becomes greener and softer underfoot. Presently a kind of miniature valley opens before them. In the middle of the valley, some thirty or forty peasants are lined up before a brightly painted one-room cottage which has been constructed on the edge of the river.
An old woman with coarse skin and a bristly mustache sits on a sturdy chair before the front door, her head cocked, staring through sightless eyes. Baskets of food are piled behind her chair.
“The peasant Slaveykov,” she calls. Her Adam’s apple bobs when she talks, and her voice sounds like the croaking of a bullfrog.
A heavy set peasant with knee-high boots and an embroidered cape steps from the line and approaches the woman. She holds out her hand and he places something in it.
“Money?” Melanie whispers.
“Sugar cubes,” Tacho says. “She is the Witch of Melnik — member I told you about her the first time we met?”
The Witch turns the lumps of sugar in her thick fingers, licking and sniffing them for a moment.
“The child your wife carries will be stillborn,” she croaks. “Plant maize. Enlarge your flock, for you will lose half of it come spring to a disease the name of which no one will know.”
The peasant Slaveykov grasps the Witch’s hand and kisses it.
“The tanner Stojanov,” the Witch summons the next person. A thin man with a bushy mustache steps from the line and hesitates, but his wife pushes him forward. He advances warily, and drops two sugars into the Witch’s outstretched palm as he would into a cup of coffee too hot to touch.
“You don’t believe,” she cackles, and communes with the sky:
“A nonbeliever.”
There is a murmur from the other peasants in the line.
“No difference,” the Witch mumbles, and she begins licking and sniffing at the sugars. “Your son Panchu will walk again — the bone was well set.”
Stojanov glances at his wife, shaken; she sinks to her knees and touches her forehead to the ground.
“The investment your godfather invites you to make is a good one. The winter will be mild and the harvest will be prosperous. Stay away from electricity.”
The tanner Stojanov kisses her hand, but the Witch pulls it back and rises slowly to her feet, where she stands silently, her head cocked, listening to the river.
“All honor,” she croaks, “to the one from Melnik—the Racer Abadzhiev.”
Tacho steps from the line. The peasants turn to look at him, whispering excitedly to each other.
“Don’t stand for me, old woman,” Tacho says, approaching the Witch.
“Have you then become a man of movement?” she challenges, settling back into her chair.
“I am becoming,” Tacho replies. He reaches in his pocket for the sugars he put under the pillow the night before. The Witch fingers them for a moment, then licks them and raises them to her nostrils.
“Even so,” she says vaguely, as if the sugars merely confirm what she already knows. “Beware of a Greek appearing to bear a gift,” the Witch declares carefully, articulating each word. “Do you see it?”
“I’m not sure,” Tacho stammers.
“You will lay the foundation of a house that your sons will build and your grandsons will live in,” the Witch intones feverishly. “Do you see it?”
“No,” Tacho whispers.
“No matter,” the Witch cackles, “I see it. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
Limping painfully on his bad leg, Petar meets them halfway up the sand cliffs. His grandson walks alongside, holding his hand. Blagoi struggles along behind them carrying the bicycle over his shoulder.
“It is done,” Petar says, motioning to the bicycle. The grandson settles back on his haunches and stares up at the Racer. Petar breathes with difficulty because of the climb. “Five gears,” he says, “closely spaced, with a full two hundred and twenty-five centimeters on the bottom one. Remember to let some air out before you ride to increase traction.”
Petar hands the Racer a small shepherd’s knapsack, which he hangs over his shoulder. “The uniform is in here.” Tears well up in the old man’s eyes. “I never thought you would ride that bicycle again,” he admits. “I never thought …” He shakes his head, unable to say more.
Wordlessly, they embrace.
Tacho turns to the girl, whose face is contorted. “Let me have your wristwatch,” he says.
She hands it to him. It is a man’s watch, with a sweep second hand. “It was my father’s — he used to time himself with it. It has a stopwatch. To make it start, you press here. To stop, here.”
“I’ll give it back to you in Greece,” Tacho tells her.
Melanie starts to look around wildly.
“Listen to me,” Tacho tells her. “I have always been intrigued by two things in my life: bicycle riding and politics. Now they have come together — bicycle riding has become a political act.”
The girl fights back tears. Tacho leads her a step away from the others and talks to her quietly, quickly. “There is a poem by the Russian Mandelstam called ‘I Have Studied the Science of Parting.’ Atanas read it to me many times. As for me, I have never studied parting before today — I had no one to part from, and no place to go. Now you have given me the gift of both.”
Tacho kisses her formally on both cheeks, and then on the lips, and embraces her. For an instant she clings to him.
Blagoi leans the bicycle against a rock and, with a wave, starts down the path toward Melnik. Petar takes his gandson’s hand and follows him. Tacho gently pushes the girl away. She looks into his face, her eyes wide with fright.
“What did the Witch mean?” she asks. “ ‘You will lay the foundation of a house that your sons will build — ’ ”
“ ‘And your grandsons will live in,’ “ Tacho finishes it for her. “I don’t know yet what it means.”
Melanie nods once, and hurries down the hill after Petar.