Another of the ancient songs ended: as before, applause did not follow. The impulse to clap stung Miranda’s hands, but she restrained herself and grasped her wine-glass instead. She raised it in salute to her companion and took a swallow when her companion returned the polite and wordless toast by raising his own glass to his lips. Westerners clapped at the ends of songs, but this was not exactly the West, and smiling silence was the common tone of approval. With her palms still stinging from the aborted claps, she hunched down in her seat, telling herself to just go with the flow. Conversations resumed—softly and with polite hesitation. The governing custom of bar-speech was as foreign as the language that washed through her ears with sound of glutinous, musical vowels, quiet lisps and abrupt, glottal stops. You’re not in Kansas, anymore! Miranda smiled at the thought and nearly laughed aloud. “You like the music?” Anatól asked in shy, halting English. There was confusion in his voice. There was eager hope. He sat across from Miranda; pale in the amber light of wavering candles. There was electricity in this deep cellar bar, but only for the jukebox, for the cash register, for the water closets (one for men and one for women) and for the kitchen behind an extravagant, red curtain. There were no lamps, no hanging lanterns; no modern halogen bulbs set into scones or suspended from the barrel-vaulted ceiling. It was always warm here. The air smelled of fermentation, wax, and an olfactory sketch of garlic and stewed beets. “I liked the tune, and what I could follow of the lyrics.” Anatól shrugged. “It’s an old song in the old language. You wanted to hear this kind of singing, and this is the best place for it.” “I’m glad you agreed to bring me, but I feel guilty that Jason isn’t here too.” Anatól’s laughter was quiet. His smile was vibrant and surprised: an expression to accompany the unexpected punch-line to an absurd joke. “Jason is not American anymore. He has gone native and so the old songs make him depressed.” Anatól shook his head in wry amusement. “Besides, he is working.” “And he trusts you with me?” “Of course,” Anatól said, as if jealousy ran contrary to native logic. “We have written a wall together. It is mortared with bull’s blood and eggs, so it is strong. He has no reason to worry, especially since you are still American...and a woman.” There were other reasons, too: as always. A reason voiced, she knew, was but one of many. Though warm, Miranda felt a sudden, prickling chill. The certainty in Anatól’s voice was unlike anything he’d ever heard before. Conviction was a slippery and imprecise word when applied to what she heard lurking in the sound of his statement. He’d learned English—so he said—from school, and from Jason, and as he spoke, he endowed the language with local meaning, innuendo, and assumption. He never lied, Miranda thought, but she could never be certain of what truths he spoke. She’d felt that way since her arrival here, since first stepping off of the plane at Aeropőrt Bolemirská. “I’d asked him about the wall,” she said. “He said he’d show it to me.” Anatól nodded. “Everyone has a wall here. You should write one.” “I don’t know how.” “You can speak,” Anatól said. “You can read a newspaper and a train schedule. Little old bábki are always impressed when you say things to them.” And so, Anatól seemed to say, it would be easy to write a wall where anyone could read it. Miranda smiled. “Wall customs weren’t exactly explored in my crash course in the local language.” Anatól’s shrug was friendly and dismissive. If he sensed her evasion, he didn’t let on. His elfin-keen features were nearly luminous in the wavering, amber candle-light. His eyes, as green as lichen, held Miranda’s gaze for a long and playful moment. “I can teach you.” His expression faded into something more contemplative, as if his focus shifted from outward scrutiny to inward observation. She had only seen such reverse-gazes here: among the old carp-fishermen and vendors in little kiosks crammed with maps and magazines, cigarettes and humorous postcards of famous authors in compromising positions. It was eerie, Miranda thought, to see such an expression on so young, so handsome, and so familiar a face. “You are hungry?” Anatól asked. “A bit.” A nod. A glance toward the red kitchen curtain. “We will eat. We will hear more sad national songs in old-lady language, and if you want, I can show you a wall.” “Your wall?” Miranda asked. “Yours and Jason’s, I mean.” “There are plenty of walls,” Anatól said. “Not just ours.” There was a whole town of walls. Each building was a narrative open to anyone able to read it. That thought, so innocuous on the surface, terrified Miranda on some deep and wordless level. *** The cellar grew crowded around them as Miranda ate the last of her bread dumplings. She’d ordered a local dish: boar, dumplings (like bread) and cabbage leavened with the taste of stewed plums and mushrooms. They drank more wine. They ate in relative silence. Miranda wondered at the thoughts meandering through Anatól’s mind and at his impressions of her. She wondered about Jason: an expatriate American more mysterious and brooding than any native local. He worked as a translator and taught English, she knew, at one of the new bio-reactor plants supplying algae-derived diesel fuel to the EU. It was bio-fuel and tourism that kept the local economy in vibrant health, even as the EU buckled under the strain of the Greek economic meltdown and the promise of others in Spain and in Hungary. Like Ükür and the Czech Republic, there’d been no switch to the Euro, not yet, and so Jason—like any local—metered his life by the improving standard of local currency. She laughed at the idea of him, teaching conversational English to tech-nerds and biochemists, and counting wads of colorful money afterward. She wondered if he’d seen any of their narrative walls, if he could read them, and if they knew of the wall he’d written with Anatól. She wondered what they—Jacob’s students—would they think of her? She could only wonder. The question gnawed at her. It prickled goose bumps along her arms at night, and now—across an expanse of dark, candle-lit wood with Anatól on the other side, as open and inscrutable as any paradox with alpine-pale skin and hair the color of wet sand. She hadn’t asked to see a wall today. She was afraid, down—way down—inside, but could voice no element of that fear. She saw, in some unseeing way, that Anatól needed for her to see something, to learn something, and so despite sudden misgivings, she’d agreed (wordlessly) to eat lunch and meander with him to the outskirts of town, where the walls stood like a vast, broken labyrinth Waiters scurried around them, silently in their black trousers and crisp, white shirts. They wore aprons (black) from waist to ankles. Their manners were impeccable; no table escaped their attention. They were a local wonder in Miranda’s reckoning: ghost like. As pale as Anatól, with blond hair, and dark hair, and fine/sculpted features, they worked with the attentiveness of some strange hive species, padding here, there, and there on feet as naked as their hands. Only here, in a bar like this might you find barefoot waiters. Miranda wondered at the origin of that custom. At meal’s end, Anatól paid the tab in full. “No,” he said to Miranda’s effort to take half the debt. He refused to let her handle the tip as well. “There will be another time for you to pay.” And that was the end of it. *** At the edge of town, walls erupted from grass and from brambles, from wild, creeping vines. The vines were ivy of some breed Miranda scarcely recognized. It grew everywhere: a kind of demi-weed, tolerated as long as it didn’t overcome too many gardens. Town-center was far away, and at two hours past noon, Miranda heard the clock-tower bells. They were ponderous and heavy things; their tone was more like thunder than metal. Two chimes. Two O’clock. Here, where the River Bánó wound through fields and the feet of vineyards and barren stretches of scarred land, walls stood: some like ruins, some like cryptic barriers between no place and no place. Some wore veils of ivy and wild grapes; others were blasphemous things, whitewashed by Orthodox Christians—women with their hair bound beneath vibrant babki scarves and men with impressive, patriarchal beards and the fire of God’s own damnation, smoldering like embers in their withering, collective gaze. These whitewashes, Miranda knew, were futile gestures. Though read with the eyes, the walls were like Braille, sensual. Bumpy. Where pious orthodoxy whitewashed small stretches of brick and mortar, sunlight and shadow revealed their collective, indecent narratives. “For people who don’t know anything about our language, our writing, or our history,”—Anatól said,”—“it is easy to say that we read and we write in Cyrillic like a bunch of Bulgarians.” And we did, until the twelfth century, but now, you cannot say that our newsprint bears anything in common with Russia’s Pravda, or Ukrainian tabloids.” He smiled, as if in memory of a small and subtle joke. “There are thirty-nine letters in our alphabet. Twelve of them are vocal sounds. Twenty-three of them are consonants. Four of them are demi-sounds that need other letters on either side of them. You know this, Miradska. But I want to remind you, so that you can also see that we have thirty nine kinds of bricks.” He spoke quietly, his words—in English—abrupt and heavy with the local accent. He talked slowly and with patience and like someone feeling his way through thoughts and slippery, unwieldy translations. He walked at a brisk pace, something of a reptilian canter, Miranda thought, like a gecko scuttling across glass. In warmer countries, she imagined, masculinity was a thing of bravado and bluster. Here it was quick and decisive movement: lizard movement…darts and stops like the long, sonorous tones and glottal interruptions that were language by local reckoning. He led her to a wall, an old one by the look of it. Little more than a rectangle of bricks, bordered by a weathered and wooden frame, it stood like an ancient stele, unmarked and fringed at its base with weeds and litter. No marks! She thought. Wrong! The entire wall was a mark, an old and complex glyph composed of bricks that were letters. The wall was words, and by its size (two meters tall and as wide as a man’s length in bed) it was little more than a short declaration. “A marriage wall?” She’d seen one in National Geographic. Anatól smiled. “Yes.” He took back-stepping paces—three of them, four, measuring with squinted eyes. He studied the top of the wall, stepping forward as his gaze lowered. He stooped: knees bent and elbows at rest on them, when he read the lowermost bricks. He smiled. “Mírabór Vélá and Tímóféy Pel were married in June of 1809,” he said. “In 1810, their first son was born. His name was Grÿgór. In 1811, their second son, Dmíétru came to this world, but died after four years with the coughing fever.” He stood. “You should remember this wall, Mirandska. Come back here with someone I don’t know; ask this person to read what the bricks say. I can guarantee you, anyone who can read will tell you exactly what I have said. Word for word.” Miranda smiled. “I believe you.” “Good.” Anatól considered the wall again, stepped forward and touched it, softly. “I should bring flowers,” he said. “For little Dmíétru.” *** By nightfall, it rained. Miranda sat before her laptop, listening to streaming radio: something local. Old songs in the old language. She understood most of it, and it prickled goose-bumps along the flanks of her neck. There were dark things in local history, things as mysterious as the walls, and the vast (mythic?) machine that lived underground. There were traffic noises beyond her window: the occasional fluttering thunder of cars on cobblestones. She liked the cars, the manner in which they were so incredibly foreign despite the reality of her own alien status here. There were animal noises too: cooing, chortling sounds, like pigeons, like yowling/operatic cats, their voices muffled by wads of oil-dipped cotton. On nights without rain, the animals were louder. She was happy for the rain, for the manner in which it chased the feral cat-things from the alleys and meandering back-ways. They were not cats, she knew, but she called them that in order to sleep at night. She’d seen one, once, with Anatól; it was a hairless thing, like a centipede for the number of legs it possessed, an alien with twin tails and a disturbing, almost-human head, only eyeless and without familiar features, but centered with an up-curving tusk with holes in it like a flute. Those holes, she’d learned, were how the creature melted the flesh of its human host and fused itself to the sternum. Those tails—she didn’t want to think about what they did, especially to men as they slept…. She shuddered and banished the image from her mind. With fingers on her keyboard, she found her way to Google.com, and the English-language comfort of its main page. She lost herself—for a moment—in the soft click of keys as she typed AGARAN, a separating comma, and then ALPHABET. Her search yielded a staggering number of results and by default, she clicked the first link. Wikipedia. *** The modern Agaran alphabet (Агáрáнскй áлфáвя, transliteration: Agaranski alfavýa) is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet and contains 39 letters. As with Russian, the Agaran alphabet made use of mnemonic names for the constituent letters until 1710. This mnemonic orthographic structure is derived from Church Slavonic, and remains only in use among the clergy and other initiates of the Agaran Orthodox Church. The letters on the table above are given in their post 1700 “secular alphabet” orthography. Unlike other Cyrillic-based languages, modern Agaran possesses two dominant writing systems: the Cyrillic base represents the “local” writing class. A Roman-based writing system has been adopted for use in situations where non-Agarans and non-Cyrillic readers are expected to comprehend written information. In addition to the two “transcription languages” in current use, a third and obscure system is also utilized. This third alphabet, often called “Размещение кирпич” ([the] Placement [of] Bricks) consists, literally, of bricks cast with specific rectilinear and dotted patterns on their “outward” faces. Color distinctions in such bricks represent spoken tones and emotional modes. *** A cat-noise drew her attention. She glanced from laptop to window with a shudder. A chill crept the length of her spine—drawn, she realized, by the words on her screen and the sound far beyond the edge of her window. There were succubae here, and they sounded like cats. There were words here, made of bricks. For reasons she could scarcely explain the monster-vermin, with their flute-holed facial horns, were far less terrifying than brick walls that spoke relentlessly, even in silence. “Where am I?” she asked, to no one in particular. “What kind of a place is this?” Not Kansas, she decided, closing the browser and putting her laptop in sleep mode. She went to bed, after consuming two shots of clear and fiery skőy. *** Chased from sleep by dreams of monsters, Miranda awoke with a start. Sweat clung to her brow and tinged the air around her with salt and the stink of fear. It was late; the sky—still dark—possessed no hints, no whispers of the impending dawn. The night—as she heard it now—was silent and devoid of all but Miranda herself, the cloying confines of her bedroom and the dance of sodium-vapor night-light and shadows across the ceiling. She drew a deep and calming breath. She flung the sleep-tousled sheet from her legs and hips, stepped out of bed and made her way into the bathroom to douse her face with cold water. She stared at her reflection for long moments, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and ambled back into the bedroom, banishing the night’s darkness with the flip of a switch. She needed to go out, to walk, to clear her head of whatever horrors the dream had planted in the convoluted mass of her thoughts. She dressed quickly, in jeans and a tee shirt and comfortable shoes; she grabbed her keys, and made her way from the apartment—into the corridor and down the angular spiral of stairs. The town was safe enough at night, and active enough, she saw. Though late, bars were still open. She heard laughter and accordion sounds bleeding from cellars. Amber light bled from frosted and pebble-glassed windows with neat, crisp x-patterns of ancient lead webbing. Her steps were noiseless and ghost-like over the warp of uneven cobblestones. She ignored the cobbles underfoot and the manner in which they recalled speaking-bricks. She ignored the walls around her—some painted with stucco in the colors of peach and salmon and dusty mustard, and others of open, narrative brick. The stucco-coated walls, she knew, were secret narratives: the town’s unspoken truths. Anatól knew them—many of them at least—as did others born and raised so close to the castle at town-center, and the surrounding fields with their bewildering array of mason’s declarations. Words, she thought, clogged the air around her. Random consonants and angular vowels pierced the flesh of nose and windpipe, windpipe and lungs as she inhaled; and at that moment, the fragment of a dream surfaced from the muddle of half-formed thoughts sparking through her brain. She’d dreamed of words, of suffocating in a language she could scarcely comprehend. The walls—in her dream—whispered and snickered as she ran by them, escaping from… …something dark and shapeless, but bearing her own face. She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. She opened her eyes and sought out familiar landmarks: street names mounted on the corner walls of buildings. She found her bearings and recognized her proximity to Anatól’s cellar bar…. *** (…to be continued…)