3.
Farther Up
At the end of that summer, his parents decided to baptize him. God only knows why they hadn’t done it earlier. Boris was mortified. He could not understand why this had to happen to him: it never happened to anyone else. The comparison caught him unprepared; he was not used to seeing his life measured up against those of others. He was overcome by panic at the prospect of this mystery in which he was to become the main protagonist. But he understood that he would be doing something for his parents, something, whatever it was, for their benefit.
He let them dress him in clothes he had never seen before and joined the procession of adults on the forest path leading to the chapel. They forbade him to carry anything with him. He felt content moving along the path, observing how his feet followed each other over the ground. One foot, the other foot, then again, as if moving by their own volition.
Movement and silence hand in hand. Intimations of other silences, of other movements, of someone walking next to someone, hovered around them. Each bend in the path made him anticipate the next. It was anticipation too brief to invite fear, under the dome of the indefinite woods, dimensionless like a house never visited.
Everything required silence. Stepping was almost like walking. Yet not quite. He discovered that stepping on the path was a cautious pleasure, felt by him and felt by others, a shared pleasure. They stepped side by side and moved toward the next bend, a little farther up the slope, hand in hand with that silence.
Boris and the others. It was possible as long as there was silence. Together in the half-light of the dome. The place opened up to receive the procession.
And Boris learned that the world could be this way. No one was rude. No one touched anyone in the increasingly dense stillness, which had now become a permeable environment. Behind them, he could hear a rustling sound like that of a snake’s tail among the thickening layer of rust-colored leaves. There was no need to turn back to look. Before them lay the same full-bodied stream of leaves, from all these different years, and his feet sank in them to his ankles. Many autumns under their feet, their feet now invisible, driving them down the same path, along the same steps, already made by others. Where others had walked. Years later, Margarita would try to explain a similar thing about her grandmother’s lamp and only Boris, to an extent, would be able to understand her.
He pictured the chapel from time to time. He had no idea how far it was. Or if it was white or if it was small.
They stepped on the leaves and were silent. In their silence was nothing they wished to conceal.
Boris began to love this walk, just as he had begun to love the old woman.
The steps followed one another, alone, together, sometimes simultaneously, not according to any rule. But the steps were not made, they were making themselves. The walking did the walking itself and he was there, knowing the chapel was at the end of the road. A place in this big house where they found themselves together.
Then he saw it. He was already in front of the door, almost as big as the chapel itself. They told him to open it.
Boris pushed the door with the tips of his fingers and it opened beautifully, revealing in the coming light a small space where someone was sitting. A tiny woman in black, whose eyes he was to meet again years later. Eyes the color of fog. He drew back his fingers and the door gently closed.
4.
Bees and Their Friends
Boris cohabited with bees; bees cohabited with him. The very first time his father took him to the beehive not too far from the house, the bees and Boris immediately took to each other. He was interested in the way his father pulled the honeycomb frames and pushed them back like drawers. They made the same sound. It all seemed like a game to his childish eyes.
Later his father would say that the bees did not gather around him, but swarmed around Boris. His father’s head was covered with a net, propped from below by a wide-brimmed hat. The shape of a planet. But Boris would learn this only later, in school. That there were celestial bodies, spheres, some of them with rings. Saturn. His father’s head at the beehive was like Saturn. Boris liked Saturn very much.
Later, when Maria read ancient Greek myths to him, he learned that Saturn was the father of Jupiter. Or rather, that Chronos was the father of Zeus. Saturn and Jupiter were their Latin names.
Maria had become his wife by then. But at the beehive he had no idea she even existed.
After that first time, Boris regularly went with his father to see the bees. He did not like the taste of honey. Perhaps that was why the bees liked him. He ate honey sometimes, because he had to comply with his mother’s wishes, but he never enjoyed it. He knew from the very beginning that honey belonged to the bees, and his father rattling the drawers now seemed silly.
When he found a wild beehive for the first time, he saw how imperfect the man-made beehives were, with their little toy roofs. Doll houses in which the bees were forced to do what they naturally did anyway. Such things, and others, would cross his mind.
At some point he learned that there were queen bees, drones, and brood chambers, and this filled him with admiration. The worker-bees worked; they did their tasks without thinking. Boris decided that human beings were imperfect in comparison, because they would always think while doing things. And they would tire—whereas bees never grew tired. They simply reacted to changes in temperature. They stopped being bees below such-and-such degrees.
He gathered honey, filling jars with amber. Other people in the village also had beehives, but Boris seemed to have a special gift; he was so good at it that everyone relished his honey.
He never put on a beekeeper’s veil. Not a single bee ever bothered or stung him. Boris found bees to be perfect and tried to learn everything there was to learn about them. Then he became the bees’ man. And they became Boris’s bees.
Year in, year out, the same thing would happen. Boris would lie down in the tall, soft grass between the beehives. At first he would hear them moving along their flight paths, then a wave of information signals that he could clearly sense would traverse the air. The bees would start hovering above him, and he knew that they were trying to decide which ones should descend on him. They would begin to land on him, covering first the bare skin, his hands and face, and afterward his entire body. They would stay there until he stirred to get up. Then they would lift off at once like a cloud of sound and he would walk away. He would eventually leave them behind and they would again busy themselves about their bee work.
No one knew that Boris and the bees had a special relationship. Or perhaps no one wished to know. The bees, just as the glasses did later, provided enough explanation for the boy’s absentminded wandering, his reticence and his lack of interest in the food on his plate.
5.
Sisters and Brothers
His reticence did not diminish with the years. Since he learned faster than others, he had the small privilege of taking his exams in writing. They had suggested to his parents that he should pass some tests and go to a school for gifted children. But his parents had rejected the idea. What difference did it make if the child could learn faster—sending Boris to a different school meant acknowledging he was different. And that would have been too much.
But when he ranked first in the entry exams for the English Language School, there was no choice. Boris was to live with his sister in Plovdiv, where his room had already been prepared.
He didn’t feel like leaving the village. Here he had conquered his own territory and he knew he could be left alone. In the city, he would have to start from scratch.
In any case, he had no choice. He had to continue his studies. He was glad he was older, because with age, the opportunities to raise barriers between himself and others grew larger.
His life in Plovdiv began with observing his sister’s family. A husband and two children; he was the children’s