Valley of Thracians (20 page)

“Did he say where he’s going to be
staying tonight?”

“So many questions!
No, he didn’t say anything about tonight. You sure I can’t get you something, a
beer maybe?”

“I have to go now. My mother…” she said,
her voice trailing off.

Katya turned to leave, staring for
several seconds at the table near the far window, lit up by the last rays of
the setting sun. A dirty coffee cup rested there, yet another sign of Ivaylo’s
lackluster regard for his duties. Katya wondered if Scott had sat at that very
table, using the nearby electric socket to charge his laptop and the pub’s
wireless service to connect to the Internet. At least she knew where he was
heading and the bus on which he would be traveling. She would carry through
with her original plans and confide her secrets to the one person with whom she
was willing to share the news of Scott’s recovery.

Katya got into her car and waited
patiently until the motor caught. Scott may be gone, away from her loving care,
but it wouldn’t be for long. Tomorrow morning, she told herself, she would
board the bus in Montana to join Scott on his journey to Sofia. Everything
would be all right, she thought, trying to convince
herself
that this was true.

A few moments after Katya left the
mehana
,
Scott returned to the main hall of the pub. He had hurried to the bathroom when
he spotted the rusty car pulling up outside. Hidden in the men’s stall, he
overheard the bartender and Katya conversing, afraid that his presence in the
pub would be exposed at any moment. He heard them talking, but he couldn’t make
out what they were saying. Had the bartender even seen him enter the bathroom?

How stupid it had been to ask the man
for information about bus service to Sofia! Although Scott planned to take the
morning’s southbound bus, he originally intended to disembark in Montana. That
was where he had told his grandfather to meet him. He suspected that Katya had
learned of his intentions and therefore he needed to make other arrangements.

 
“Oh, you’re still here?” the bartender said,
when he saw Scott setting up his laptop again on the table near the window.
“Someone was just asking for you.”

“I know. It’s okay,” Scott replied. He
was nervous, anxious to connect to the Internet and leave the
mehana
as
quickly as possible. He would just send a message to his grandfather, informing
him of a change in plans.

Chapter
41

A foreign tourist is lost in the center
of Sofia and approaches two Bulgarian policemen to ask them for directions. He
first asks in English. The cops, who don’t speak any foreign languages, fail to
understand anything. The tourist then asks in French, in German, in Italian, in
Spanish.
Still nothing from the policemen.
Frustrated,
he walks on.

“We should really start studying foreign
languages,” says one of the Bulgarian policemen.

“No, we shouldn’t. They are totally
useless,” the other officer replies. “Look at this guy! He knows so many, and
they still got him nowhere...”

Sophia laughed along with her
stiff-lipped colleagues. She found it strange that her fellow academicians,
usually humorless to the point of boredom, were being reduced to giggling,
joking commoners as they repeatedly raised their whiskey and beer glasses in a
darkened corner of the pub. Sophia didn’t know the name of this establishment.
New bars were popping up frequently in the center of Sofia and few survived for
long. Some of the pubs were trendy, chic, and ultra-modern, while others
featured dark-wood fittings, quasi-Irish upholstery, and lavishly illustrated
menus. Whatever the setup, she readily joined her peers from the university on
their weekly pub visits to let off steam, gossip, talk politics, and tell
jokes.

Dimitar, the chemistry lecturer with thick
glasses and a perpetual frown in the classroom, was charming his associates
with another joke, one from the endless supply he had memorized and reserved
for drinking occasions like this.

An elderly Bulgarian man is having his
annual medical checkup, and the doctor asks him how he is feeling. “I’ve never
felt better!” the elderly man boasts. “I’ve got an eighteen-year-old bride.
She’s pregnant and having my child! What do you think about that?”

The doctor considers this for a moment
and then says to the man, “I knew a guy up in the mountains
who
really enjoyed hunting, never missing an occasion to go out into the woods. But
one day he left his home in a bit of a hurry, and he accidentally grabbed his
umbrella instead of his rifle. He was walking in the woods when suddenly a
black bear appeared in front of him, standing on its back paws and growling.
The hunter aimed his umbrella and squeezed the handle.”

“What happened?” the elderly man asks.

“The bear dropped dead in front of him!”
the doctor says.

“That’s impossible!” exclaims the old
man. “There must have been someone else who shot that bear.”

“Exactly,” the doctor replies.

“Here, I have one,” offered Stanislav,
another lecturer, wiping the foam of beer from his lips.

A Bulgarian wife starts shouting at her
husband at two in the morning: “I left two bottles of rakia in the fridge! Why
is there one bottle left?!”

“Because I didn’t see the second one,”
the husband replies.

“How many times have we heard that one
before!
” Sophia protested, but she was laughing just as hard
as the rest of them.

“So, you tell one,” Rossi said, urging
Sophia with a playful elbow.

“I can never remember any punch lines,”
Sophia said, raising her beer mug to the other female lecturer in their party.

“Well, here’s one you probably don’t
know,” Stansilav began, looking confidently at the others. “Georgi told it to
me just last week.”

As soon as he said this, Stanislav
stopped, dropping his eyes to the table in embarrassment. How stupid it was of
him to mention Sophia’s ex-husband, when all of them knew how painful this
would be to the lecturer of Thracian history.

“Sorry,” he said, forcing a smile in
Sophia’s direction.

“It’s okay, really,” she replied.

But it wasn’t okay. The mere mention of
Georgi’s name still stabbed sharply at her heart, even after all this time.

She stared solemnly at her beer, not
hearing the words of Stanislav’s joke nor joining the laughter that followed.

Sophia and Georgi had met during their
first year of studies at St. Clement of Ohrid University in Sofia. Sophia had
majored in Bulgarian history while Georgi enrolled in the faculty of education
with the declared intention of becoming a primary-school teacher. The
university was the oldest institution of higher education in Bulgaria, founded
in 1888, just ten years after the liberation of the country. Sophia and Georgi
enjoyed the fact that they were students in a historic, yet modern university
situated in the very heart of their country’s capital, far from the backward
ways of their home villages and the familial duties required of them there.

Sophia was immediately attracted to
Georgi’s athletic build and handsome face. He seemed so much more mature, so
much more self-confident than the slender, insecure youths of her village. She
fell captive to his positive attitude, to his ability to set her heart beating
just by staring at her with his deep brown eyes, and to the surprisingly soft
touch of his lips.

They began to date, although their
outings were scheduled around the demands of Sophia’s studies. She spent long
nights in the university libraries, never tiring of her reading requirements
and thoroughly enjoying every minute of her research projects. Georgi, on the
other hand, couldn’t care less about his class work and studied in earnest only
in last-minute efforts to pass his examinations. He tired quickly when reading
and frequently turned to Sophia with requests that she summarize the
long-worded texts on which his wandering mind couldn’t concentrate. In the
innocence of her youthful crush, Sophia readily complied, not noticing that the
more time she spent helping Georgi, the less time she had to devote to her
passion, the study of Bulgaria’s Thracian past.

Georgi was not Sophia’s first lover, but
he was the most passionate man who had ever shared her bed. Initially, she was
hesitant to allow their friendship to develop into a physical relationship, but
after the first time, when he took care to ensure that she enjoyed herself as
much as he did, she wondered why she had waited. He never tired of pleasuring
her, even if that meant his making extra efforts to divert her from late-night
study sessions. During those passion-filled weeks of their blooming romance,
she found his attentiveness pleasing and felt grateful that someone could love
her so much.

Swept along by the physical pleasures,
she truly believed that she was experiencing love. While he never actually
voiced the words, she felt that he was as much in love with her as she was with
him. It seemed only logical that the next step would be for them to marry. When
she hesitantly raised this possibility, he smiled, stating that he could vision
no other future than one spent with her. They argued about whether they should
wait until they finished their university studies. Most Bulgarians married late
unless an unplanned pregnancy provided an excuse for an early marriage. In the
end, Sophia convinced Georgi that there was no need to delay the official
declaration of their devotion.

The ceremony took place on a bright
Saturday afternoon in the Sveta Nedelya Church, right in the center of Sophia.
The Eastern Orthodox structure, destroyed and rebuilt many times over the
centuries, provided a perfect background for the occasion. Sophia’s parents and
brother, Georgi’s parents and older sister, and a handful of other close
relatives and friends were in attendance. The wedding gown Sophia wore had been
in her family for years, and she couldn’t remember if it was her grandmother or
her great-grandmother who had originally sewn it. After an expensive
celebratory family meal in a fancy restaurant, and a short but picturesque
honeymoon in Venice, Sophia and Georgi returned their attentions to university
studies.

The early weeks of married life were
similar to those that preceded the ceremony. Sophia concentrated on her studies
while Georgi made only the minimal exertions necessary to ensure that he passed
his tests and completed his assignments.

Thinking back, Sophia wondered why she
hadn’t seen the warning signs. Those rose-colored days were too careless and
frivolous to last forever. Love is not built solely on the tender caresses one
enjoys when the lights go out at night. Why hadn’t she realized that Georgi’s
lack of seriousness regarding his studies was just a prelude to the troubles
that lay ahead—fierce arguments and accusations of disloyalty which would tear
their marriage apart?

As she advanced her career, Sophia
eagerly anticipated her weekend explorations of Thracian archaeological sites.
She enjoyed the company of her colleagues and the academic banter that accompanied
their car rides and meals. She relished the hands-on investigation of burial
tombs and the hours spent filtering centuries-old piles of debris in search for
the invaluable treasures they may conceal. She loved the aftermath of a day’s
work in the field, when she would type up her notes and compare them to the
scholarly research of others. The keys to the mysteries of the past were in her
hands. Each field trip promised to reveal more and to refine her knowledge.
This was what it was all about.

And that meant spending less time with
Georgi.

He had his own life, his own hobbies and
activities. Yes, they shared a common circle of friends, but Sophia had less
and less time to join them in pubs or at football matches. Weekdays were spent
on their separate professions, and in the evenings they were rarely together.
It was during the weekends that Georgi expected more of her, but she continued
to concentrate solely on her career, disregarding any notion that this could
affect their relationship.

Could she blame him for seeking
alternative female companionship? She realized with a jolt that they seldom
slept together. She couldn’t remember the last time they had enjoyed consensual
sexual relations. Mostly it had been a matter of surrendering to Georgi’s physical
needs in a state of semi-exhaustion. Sex was a side of their marriage that she
had forsaken in the name of science. There were more important things in life,
she felt, and her calling led her away from any sort of companionship with her
husband.

Their marriage was a train wreck waiting
to happen, and there was nothing that could prevent the inevitability of a
painful separation. Even though years had passed since their divorce, Sophia
couldn’t help but cringe every time her colleagues mentioned their ongoing
friendships with Georgi. She no longer had feelings for him and their marriage.
The relationship was one that should remain buried in the past.

Sophia was shaken away from her painful
memories when she heard a faint buzzing. Ignoring it at first, she laughed as
Dimitar reached the punch line of a joke, but then she realized what she was
hearing. She opened her purse and took out her cell phone. The number seemed
familiar, but it wasn’t labeled as one of her contacts.

“Hello?”

“Sophia, it’s me, Simon.”

“Who?”
The phone held tightly to her ear couldn’t shield her from the laughter and
music in the pub.

“Simon Matthews,” the man said, and then
she recognized the voice of the American she had spent so much time with over
the past few days.

“Hi, Simon,” she said. He was probably
calling to reconfirm her plans to take him to the airport the next morning.
“Sorry, but there’s a lot of noise here.
You’ll have to
speak up.”

“He’s alive! I spoke to him!”

“What? Simon, I can’t hear you.”

“I spoke, well actually chatted online,
with my grandson. He’s alive, and I know where he is.”

“Simon, there’s a lot of interference. I
thought you said you talked with your grandson.”

“Yes, yes, that’s exactly what I said.”

Sophia sat up straight in her seat, the
cloud of alcohol she had just consumed dissipating quickly from her head.

“Simon, let me go outside the pub and
call you back.”

“What?” Now he couldn’t hear what she
was saying.

She ended the connection and pushed past
her companions at the table.

“Where are you going?” Stanislav asked.
“We’re just getting started.”

“Sorry, I have an important call to
make,” she replied.

The news that Simon Matthews’s grandson
was alive was quite unexpected. And, for Sophia—just as much as for the
American professor—this startling development changed everything.