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death he had hidden this from himself but it festered within him. Now it had been said aloud and a weight fell away.
    “Come with me,” Antipin said, “and I will teach you something. I will teach you how to hurt them. Hurt them in ways that they do not begin to understand, hurt them so that they cry for mercy, which, by then, I think you will not grant. Your country has a sickness. We know the sickness well because we were once its victims, and we know how to cure it. We have taught others, we can teach you. You yearn to see the world, to move among men, to do things that matter. I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse’s backside. Come with me, my friend, it is a chance at life. This river goes many places, it does not stop in Vidin.”
    Khristo’s heart rose like the sun. These were words he had waited all his life to hear without realizing, until now, that he waited. The river, he knew from hours of droning in the dusty schoolhouse, did not stop in Vidin. It rose in Germany, its legendary source a stone basin in the courtyard of a castle of the Fürstenberg princes in the Black Forest. Called the Donau by all German-speaking peoples, it moved through the Bohemian forests to Vienna, crossed into Czechoslovakia at Bratislava, where they named it the Dunaj, turned south through the Carpathians into northern Hungary, divided the twin cities of Buda and Pesth, flowed south into Yugoslavian Serbia, passed Belgrade at the confluence of the river Sava, known now as the Duna, roared through the Iron Gate—a narrow gorge in the Transylvanian Alps—and headed east, serving as a border between Romania and Bulgaria, where it was called Dunărea to the north and Dunav to the south. Then, at last, it turned north for a time and split into three streams entering the Romanian delta, snaking through the marshes to Izmail, Sulina, and Sfintu Gheorghe, where it emptied into the Black Sea, bordered by the Russian Crimea and Turkey, where the Caucasus mountains ran down to the sea, where Europe ended and Asia began.
    “Well,” Antipin said, “how shall it be?”
    “I …” He was not sure how to say it. “I do not think I am a communist.”
    Antipin dismissed that wordlessly, throwing it away on the wind with a broad flip of the hand.
    “Does it not matter?”
    “You are a patriot. That matters. You are not our enemy. That too matters. Some day, we may convince you to be our true friend. All we ask is opportunity.”
    They turned and walked back along the sand toward the town, where it was quiet and dark. So there will be cities , Khristo said silently, talking to his destiny. He had argued with it, prayed to it—to him it was a live presence, which might or might not heed petitions and curses, but one had to try—damned or praised it depending on what it did with him. Oh but what a trickster it was, this sly eel of a fate that wiggled his life about. He had yearned forVienna or—someone had to find treasure, else why ever look—Paris. Now he rather thought it would be Moscow. Turn around then, and face east. Nothing new in this country. Still, a city. Golden onion domes, elegant buildings, people who read books and talked into the night of important things. Like Antipin, they would understand and appreciate him, encourage him. His imagination dined on caviar and inhaled the perfume of the one who sat across the table yet leaned so close.
    “When?” he said.
    “Tomorrow,” Antipin said. “They are done for tonight, except for the drinking and the singing. Tomorrow is soon enough.”
    What few things he had, Khristo tossed onto a blanket in a small pile, then he tied the corners together in a thick knot. At dawn, it started to rain hard, little streamlets poured off the roof and dripped from the grapevine that grew above the kitchen window. They drank tea and ate what remained of yesterday’s bread. His mother embraced him,