Never Trust a Man Who—

Figure 1.

Photograph by Krzysztof Koziarek

In the sopping-wet spring of 1995, Sylvia rode the bus to and from Old Mountain more times than she cared to count. Her twin brother, Drago, was in Kyustendil, doing his military service, and she felt obliged to visit her mother twice as often as usual. When she had been a student, she'd caught any bus she could, usually from Poduene Station, which was a filthy place, thick with fumes and overrun by dogs, full of stalls hawking cheap underwear and overripe vegetables. Time and again, she'd suffered Poduene because it offered the most buses to Old Mountain; if she missed one, she didn't have to wait too long for another. But lately she'd been catching the 1:00 bus from Nevski Cathedral, where there was no backup bus if she was late but also none of the scrabble and mayhem of Poduene. It was cleaner, more convenient—things that, in the eight months that she'd been out of school, had started to matter in a way that worried her. For even as she waited for that more civilized bus, she had a sense that she was already getting older, starting to set in her ways, like a tart, bacterial yogurt fermenting in a pot.

"Not older," Lazar had tried to reassure her the night before when they were smoking in his room. As he lay on his side in the middle of the bed, propped on one elbow, the fluorescent light pooled in the dent in his forehead. "More mature," he said, ashing carefully into a chipped clay dish. "More cultured."

But Sylvia had just found out that Lazar was leaving, and how dare he belittle her cares! "Like a yogurt," Sylvia snapped from her perch on the chair. "Exactly like a yogurt." That Lazar did not know what to make of this—she was pleased she could be so opaque.

That year, Sylvia was working at a hotel in Bankya, a town outside Sofia known for its mineral baths and sanitoriums, where people could go for a rest. She had taken her degree in tourism, which she had hoped would land her a job on the Black Sea coast or, at the very least, at one of the nicer hotels in Sofia. But there were not many jobs to be found. The tourists were not so eager to come to Bulgaria. After a short search, she had accepted a position at a provincial hotel where one of her university instructors had a connection. She was one of three girls who sat behind the front desk, each working a twenty-four-hour shift, with two days in between to do as she pleased.

In the summer, the streets full of people had the bustling aura of holiday, and it was easy for Sylvia to feel satisfied with how she'd done. She passed her free time trolling the market, planning the ways she would spend her next paycheck. Though her monthly pay was little more than the stipend she'd received as a student, there was something about it—the fact of having earned it, probably—that made the money feel like a great amount. She would comb the market with utmost care for high-heeled shoes, faux leather handbags and perfumed soap cakes, never making a purchase. Her biggest splurge was the occasional Zagorka at the local beer garden where the summer staff gathered in the evenings. But even that was rare because with Sylvia's pale skin and high forehead and pretty spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, there was almost always someone who wanted to buy her a beer.

Back in June, when Sylvia had gone looking for a room, she'd taken the cheapest she could find. It was a plain room on the second floor of a house, with a small balcony and a bathroom across the hall, which she shared with two other boarders. The landlord and his family lived below, in a...