smiling, filled me completely. Then something happened. It was not something outside of me, not an external threat to you. It was something inside me. I began to search your perfect body over and over for some sign of injury. But the injury was to me, even before this puncture on my neck, and it would not quite heal. I became afraid to touch you, my perfect angel.
Your loving mother,
Helen
July 1963
My beloved daughter:
I seem to be missing you more than ever today. I am in the university archives in Rome. I have been here six times in the last two years. The guards know me, the archivists know me, the waiter at the cafe across the street from the archive knows me and would like to know me better if I didn’t turn away coldly, pretending I don’t see his interest. This archive contains records of a plague in 1517, whose victims developed only one sore, a red wound on the neck. The pope ordered them to be buried with stakes through their hearts and garlic in their mouths. In 1517. I am trying to make a map through time of his movements or-since it is impossible to tell the difference-the movements of his servants. This map, really a list in my notebook, already fills many pages. But what use I can put it to I do not know yet. While I work I am waiting to discover this.
Your loving mother,
Helen
September 1963
My beloved daughter:
I am ready, almost, to give up and return to you. Your birthday is this month. How can I miss another birthday? I would return to you immediately, but I know that if I do, the same thing will happen. I will feel my uncleanness, as I first did six years ago-I will feel the horror of it, I will see your perfection. How can I be near you knowing that I am tainted? What right do I have to touch your smooth cheek?
Your loving mother,
Helen
October 1963
My beloved daughter:
I am in Assisi. These astounding churches and chapels, climbing their hill, fill me with a sense of despair. We might have come here, you in your little dress and hat, and I, and your father, all of us holding hands, as tourists. Instead, I am working in the dust of a monastic library, reading a document from 1603. Two monks died here in December of that year. They were found in the snow with their throats only a little mutilated. My Latin has lasted very well, and my money buys any help I might need with interpreting, translating, laundering my dresses. As it does visas, passports, train tickets, a false identity card. I never had money when I was growing up. My mother, in the village, barely knew what it looked like. Now I am learning that it buys everything. No, not everything. Not everything I want.
Your loving mother,
Helen
Chapter 69
“Those two days at Bachkovo were some of the longest of my life. I wanted to hurry to the promised festival immediately, wanted it to occur instantly, so that we could try to follow the one word of that song-dragon-to its nesting place. Yet I also dreaded the moment that I thought must inevitably come, when this possible clue, too, would vanish in smoke, or turn out to be related to nothing at all. Helen had already warned me that folk songs were notoriously slippery; their origins tended to be lost over centuries, their texts changed and evolved, their singers seldom knew where they’d come from or how old they were. ‘That’s what makes them folk songs,’ she said wistfully, smoothing my shirt collar as we sat in the courtyard our second day at the monastery. She was not given to domestic little caresses like that one, so I knew she must be worried. My eyes burned and my head ached as I looked around the sunny cobbles where the chickens scratched. It was a beautiful place, a rare and for me exotic place, and here we were seeing its life flow on as it had since the eleventh century: the chickens looked for bugs, the kitten rolled near our feet, the brilliant light pulsed on the fine red-and-white stonework all around us. I could hardly feel its beauty anymore.
“On the second morning, I woke very early. I thought perhaps I’d heard the church bells ringing but couldn’t decide if that had been part of my dream. From the window of my cell, with its rough curtain, I could see four or five monks making their way into the church. I put on my clothes-God, they were dirty now, but I could not be bothered with washing clothes-and went quietly down the gallery stairs to the courtyard. It was very early indeed, dusky outside, and the moon was setting over the mountains. I thought for a moment of entering the church and lingered near the door, which was open; from inside spilled candlelight and a smell of burning wax and incense, and the interior that looked profoundly dark at midday was warm and beckoning at this hour. I could hear the monks chanting. The melancholy swell of the sound went into my heart like a dagger. They had probably been doing just this, some dim morning in 1477 when Brothers Kiril and Stefan and the other monks had left the graves of their martyred friends-in the ossuary?-and set off through the mountains, guarding the treasure in their wagon. But which direction had they gone? I faced east, then west-where the moon was dropping out of sight very fast-then south.
“A breeze had begun to stir the leaves of the lindens, and after a few minutes I saw the first light of the sun reaching far across the slopes and over the monastery wall. Then, belatedly, a rooster crowed somewhere in the confines of the monastery. It would have been a moment of exquisite pleasure, the kind of immersion in history I’d always dreamed of, if I’d had the heart for it. I found myself turning slowly, willing myself to intuit the direction Brother Kiril had traveled. Somewhere out there was a tomb- maybe-whose location had been lost so long that even the knowledge of it had vanished. It might be a day’s journey on foot, or three hours, or a week. ‘Not much farther and without incident,’ Zacharias had said. How far was not much farther? Where had they gone? The earth was stirring now-those forested mountains with their dusty outcroppings of rock, the cobbled courtyard under my feet and the monastery meadows and farm-but it kept its secret.”
“At about nine that morning we set off in Ranov’s car with Brother Ivan navigating in the front seat. We took the road along the river for about ten kilometers, and then the river seemed to disappear, and the road followed a long, dry valley, which looped precipitously around among hills. The sight of this landscape jarred something in my memory. I nudged Helen and she frowned at me. ‘Helen, the river valley.’
“Her face cleared then, and she tapped Ranov on the shoulder. ‘Ask Brother Ivan where the river went. Did we cross it somewhere?’
“Ranov spoke to Brother Ivan without turning and reported back to us. ‘He says the river dried up here-it is behind us now, where we crossed the last bridge. This was the river valley a long time ago, but there is no more water in the valley.’ Helen and I looked silently at each other. Ahead of us, at the end of the valley, I saw two peaks rising sharply out of the hills, two lone mountains like angular wings. And between them, still far off, we could see the towers of a little church. Helen suddenly grasped my hand hard.
“A few minutes later we turned up a dirt track into broad hills, obeying a sign for a village I’ll call Dimovo. Then the road narrowed and Ranov pulled up in front of the church, although Dimovo itself was nowhere in sight.
“The Church of Sveti Petko the Martyr was very small-a weathered stucco chapel-and it sat by itself in a meadow that might have been used for haying late in the season. Two crooked oak trees made a shelter above it, and next to it huddled a graveyard of a sort I hadn’t seen before- peasant graves, some of them dating back to the eighteenth century, Ranov explained proudly. ‘This is traditional- there are many such places where the rural workers are buried even today.’ The grave markers were stone or
