Cover Him with Darkness (5 page)

The place reeked of sheep. I'd forgotten that particular detail.

The old women clad in headscarves took us indoors, tutting at me and muttering to each other just as if I couldn't understand the things they said. I cast one last look up the mountainside to the distant white blob that was our church, before following them.

Father wasn't even in his own bed: he had collapsed in the village and it had been impossible to take him up the long climb to our isolated house. Now he occupied a borrowed sofa in someone's back room, under twin pictures of St. Sava and His Holiness the Patriarch. Father had changed too: his big black beard was gray now, his face thin and bony. I was shocked: he was only sixty, but in this country he was an old man.

I cried when I saw him. I buried my hands under his thin ones and kissed his cheek, horrified that we had lost so much time between us. His skin felt loose on his bones.

“Milja,” he said, squeezing my hand with a ghostly echo of his old strength. “Look at you, little chick. You are so grown up. You are an American beauty queen now!”

“Papa,” I chided him, “what are you thinking of, scaring me like this? You said you would tell me if you weren't feeling well!”

“I was fine, just fine. A little fall, that's all, and now all these women have got me tied up in their shawls and I'm not allowed to get out of bed.
I miss my house. They cook bean soup for me but, ach, they do not do it properly. I want to make my own soup.”

“Don't worry,
Adzo
,” said Vera. “I will cook for you from now on: the proper old recipe my mother taught me.” She shot the attending beldames a hard look, as if their hospitality was an imposition. There was a sound of offended huffs.

“Milja.” Father's grip tightened. I could see the worry in his eyes, and I leaned in closer. “I left…I left a lamp burning up there.”

I frowned. “That's all right, Papa—it will have burned itself out.”

His voice had sunk almost to a whisper. “In the passageway, you understand. Someone should go up and check.”

I nodded to show that I understood. “Don't worry. I'll go make sure everything is okay.”

“She will not,” Vera said firmly. “Not on her own. She'll have to wait until I have time to come up with her.”

“It's my house!” I glared at my cousin, but she was at least as stubborn as me by nature and had had far more practice.

“It is not right for you to go up there by yourself,” she said, holding my gaze. “Not on your own.”

We'd never spoken to each other about the family secret—not a word—but for the first time I realized that she
knew
—about the man in the cave, and about my disgrace. I couldn't help flushing, and I could only hope she took it for anger. I dropped my eyes. One thing at a time, and Father most urgent of all.

We wanted to take him to a hospital in Podgorica straightaway, but he was hugely reluctant, and to be honest it wasn't clear that he was strong enough to travel. Vera appointed herself head nurse, infuriating all the old women, and tried to rally his strength. I don't want to remember those days. I felt as though every fiber in my body was screaming from the strain. We took lodgings in the house across the street, and while Vera saw to his material needs I sat with my father and read to him from old magazines, and tried to get him to eat despite his birdlike appetite.

It was a strange, frustrating time. My father's condition worried me desperately. Probably because of the high mountains around us, my cell phone had no connectivity; I was cut off from my job, my friends and all but my two relatives. It seemed likely that my fledgling career had taken
a serious blow. I thought about Suzana, my roommate, and wondered if she was looking after our cat Senka properly, and whether Senka missed me. Suzana was off to the Burning Man festival this year and wanted me to be home in time to cat-sit, though she'd tried not to hint too broadly. I thought about the New England Aquarium on the Boston harbor front, which I always made a habit of visiting in the last week of August, just like the first year I'd arrived in the States. It looked like I'd miss it this year. I'd been fascinated by the dark tanks in particular: the hypnotic dance of the jellyfish in the UV glow, and the terrible patience of the long-legged crabs under their crushing columns of water, down there in the dark, so cut off from the world of light.

Now it was my turn to feel cut off from the world, suspended between everyday life and the black depths inside the mountain so close by. I kicked around the village when I wasn't needed, aware of the stares of people I half remembered but who were more than half strangers now. There were no children in evidence and the room we'd used for a schoolhouse in my youth had reverted to being a storage shed: all the young people had moved out to Žabljac to work in the ski-resort hotels, or down to the lowland cities. I couldn't sit with the men in the tavern, and the women made it clear I was not approved of. Somehow, at twenty-three, they managed to make me feel like an outcast teenager again, sulky and uncertain. Only the village dogs were pleased to see me, perhaps because I bribed them with bread crusts. The lonely little church on the hillside beckoned, but I didn't quite dare defy Vera and head up there on my own, and she showed no eagerness to walk several kilometers and climb the two hundred steep steps, muttering about her sciatica whenever I suggested an ascent.

After four days Father agreed he was able to go for medical treatment—but Vera swept out of the room triumphantly to organize transport before he revealed his one condition. “Someone,” he whispered to me, plucking at the sheet over his chest, “someone… Come closer, Milja.” He looked around the room, as if he was worried a spy had crept in among the shadows.

“It's all right, Papa. We're alone. You can talk.” My heart was beating uncomfortably fast.

“Someone from the family must stay and guard
him
. It is our holy duty.”

So, I thought, it wasn't all just something I'd imagined. It was
real
. “He's…still there?” I said hoarsely.

Father's watery eyes sharpened for a moment, his brows drawing together in consternation. “Of course. Nothing has changed. Except that…Milja, you are not a child anymore. You know you must do what is right.”

“What is right, Papa? What do I do?”

“You must stay until I come back. If you have to leave…if I am kept in hospital… I have wired the cave with explosive. The switch is in the passage. You must bring the walls down upon him.”

chapter three

OUT OF THE DEPTHS

I
t was not until my father was driven away safely in a hired car with Vera that I made the climb up to our old house.

“I don't like it,” my cousin told me, holding on to the passenger-side door as we stood in the square, preparing to part. She spoke in English, not just because she was more used to the tongue after years abroad, but because we were being watched, quite openly, by knots of villagers. It was highly unlikely anyone could follow our exchange, but still we kept it down to a low and urgent undertone. “I've spoken to your Uncle Josif; he is flying out tonight from Boston.”

“What? How did he get away from his business?” I didn't ever remember Uncle Josif—he was accorded the title by dint of his comparative age and status, though he was my cousin's husband—taking a day off from the construction company he owned, except for the highest holy days of Christmas and Easter.

“Never you mind. He will be here in a couple of days, so you will not be on your own with these…peasants.”

I cringed. Those
peasants
had flatly refused any financial remuneration for lodging, feeding and caring for us or for my father. “
Nana
Vera! Don't call them that!”

“Why not? They are peasants—they know nothing. You mustn't let
them into the church, Milja. They will rob the place; a church without a priest is nothing to them. And if they found
him
…”

Like some ghost, her meaning hovered between us. I swallowed. “You've seen him, then?”

You believe?
I might have added.

She nodded curtly. “Once. You remember when we came to visit, when you were ten? Then. Horrible.”

Did she mean that he was horrible, or that his situation was? Her expression of disgust could have meant either. Was I alone in hating what we'd done to our prisoner?

“Don't go near him on your own,” she commanded, her eyes narrowing to slits as if she could read my mind. “Wait until your Uncle Josif gets here.”

“Uncle Josif isn't family,” I reminded her. He'd met Vera when she was working in a tourist hotel on the Gulf of Kotor, and his own family originally came from Cetinje. “He shouldn't be involved.
Tell no one else
: that's the rule, remember?”

“Don't you tell me what we have to do, Milja. We are running out of menfolk. If you'd married…”

“Don't start!”

“You want your father to die before seeing you a bride? Because that's the way you're going.”

“He is not going to die!” I snapped, and for a moment we stood scowling at each other. Vera had the grace to look abashed.

“Of course he's not, honey,” she muttered.

“Milja.” My father's croaky voice came from the backseat of the car. I leaned in to see him, and he touched my head gently as if giving me a blessing. “You must bring the money from the house. It is under the slab in front of the window, you know the one.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Hospitals are expensive: I can't have your cousin paying for me to lie in bed. Bring some of the old statues too, from the passage, when you come to see me. We can sell those.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Don't forget what I told you, little chick. The switch…”

“No, Papa. Don't worry. I will do what you said.”

Then they left me.

***

Everything was familiar, and yet everything was strange. I was seeing now with the eyes of a foreigner: the cramped little buildings wedged under the brow of the cliff, with the domestic rooms crammed against the church in peculiar proximity. Even the steps themselves—two hundred rock-cut rises at the end of a dusty track. When I was young I had run up and down them every day without a thought, but now I was ashamed to find that my thighs ached and my breath came short.

I couldn't face the church and what lay beneath it straightaway, so I went into the house first, using the key Father had left me. Nothing had changed, and yet…everything had. I knew the pattern on the rug before the fireplace and the contents of the dresser drawer on the left and every one of the books in Father's study; I knew the shabby winter coat hanging behind the door and the chipped ewer in the center of the table (I'd dropped it when I was thirteen and we'd never found that piece of the lip). But my old room was empty and smelled of plaster dust, and the quilted coverlet on the bed, which I remembered as a vibrant patchwork of flower shapes, looked faded and cheap. I couldn't have grown much taller since eighteen, but the roof felt lower.

I hadn't realized we were so
poor
. My friends in America would hardly believe anyone could live like this, without Internet or a washing machine or cable. Forget dishwashers; our house didn't even have piped hot water—we collected rain in a cistern up in the cliff face. Down in the village at least they had electricity and solar panels and television. Up on our crag here we were still lighting kerosene lamps and cooking in a log-fired oven.

I wandered around the house, touching things at random. I wound the clock and set it to the time specified by my otherwise-useless phone. I put the single plate on the table away in the cupboard. There was a covered pot on the stove-top, but when I lifted the lid the smell of rotted beans turned my stomach. So I sat down at the table and gripped my hands together. This was my home, but I did not feel at home here. The dissonance made my head ache: inside, I was a happy child and an aching teenager and a grown woman of twenty-three, all at the same time. I was part of this place, and I was a foreigner. I had returned to the home I loved, and yet I was an intruder.

My gaze shifted to the spines of the books in the case. Even from here
I was sure I could recognize and name each one, just from their colors and shapes. As a game, I began to work my way across a shelf:
Modern Engineering Principles and Practices
…
The Homilies of St. Macarius
…
The Mountains of Serbia
…
First Steps in English
(from which Father had taught me: British English, not American English, taps not faucets)…
The Child's Encyclopedia
volumes Two, Three and Four (but not One, which I'd dropped being chased home from school one day and never recovered)…a Bible…the
Book of Enoch
…

Cover him with darkness, that he may remain there forever.

Forever. Down there in the mountain behind me, bound hand and foot. Had he noticed that the priest had stopped visiting? Did he realize that he'd been abandoned by the man now, just as the girl had abandoned him years ago? Had he called out, unheard, with only the echoes standing in witness to his pleas? Had he missed the food and the drink that I no longer brought him, the touch of my hands, those tiny mercies in an eternity of suffering? Had I made it
worse
by offering him ease, then depriving him again just as he learned to hope?