is the most important thing, Liberty.
Hear hear! someone said, an Ameri-
can, and we all raised our cups to N.,
though most of them were empty al-
ready. He seemed pleased by this, he
gave a quick bow, at which our toast
turned more raucous, Nazdrave, we
cried, the Bulgarian toast, Nazdrave.
He hopped down from his perch, mo-
tioning us to be quiet, We are not drunk
Romanians, he said. Then he held the
quarter up, looking at it anew, and with
a tone of real wonder asked What do
I do with this money, which set us
laughing again. Keep it, D. said, from
the back of our circle where the priest
stood too close to her, it means some-
one in America loves you. Ah, N. said,
beaming at her, pleased beyond words,
and he slid the coin into his breast
pocket and cupped his hands over it.
I keep it forever, he said.
Then the priest said something I
didn’t catch, pointing with his bottle,
and N. said Yes! The beach! I take you
there, and we followed him across the
square. I was eager to be festive with
these people, to distract myself from
the grief I had felt since receiving R.’s
message, my own grief and grief at the
thought of him alone in his room in
Lisbon—though I didn’t know where
he was, of course, he had sent his mes-
sage hours before and might already
have recovered from his spasm of re-
gret, who could know. I hung back a
bit, as we reached the other side of the
square, to look at the structure we were
passing through, something like a cov-
ered patio between two buildings, while
the others were descending the wooden
staircase to the sea. There was a set of
wooden counters, what looked like a
sizable bar, but all of it was abandoned
now, strewn with trash and empty bot-
tles. It must come alive in the season,
I thought, though there was a kind
of finality to its disuse, it was difficult
to imagine that in a few weeks it would
be transformed, packed with young
people. I felt uneasy, and suddenly I re-
alized I wasn’t alone; a man, who must
have been watching us as we passed,
was leaning against the wall. He took
a long drag from a cigarette, the tip
flaring red in the dark, and met my eyes
briefly before lowering his gaze. I al-
most thought he was there to cruise,
that maybe it was a place men used,
but he had an air of belonging, lean-ing against the wall, and I decided he
must be something like a guard, keep-
ing an eye on the place until it came
to life again for the summer. Maybe he
would stand there all night, I thought,
but I didn’t see any television or radio
to keep him company, anything at all,
there was nothing but the sea to mark
the time. Or maybe there was an office
or a booth he would retreat to once we
had passed, maybe he had only emerged
on hearing our approach. I nodded to
him as I moved toward the stairs, mur-
muring Dobur vecher, but he just raised
his eyes again and flicked his spent cig-
arette to the ground.T
here was a wooden platform at the
bottom of the stairs, beside which
the others had piled their shoes. I could
see the whole coast, stretching from
the old town, where we had eaten, which
was quiet and dark, to the new town
with its high-rise hotels, their windows
facing the sea. One restaurant was still
open there, brightly lit in red and blue,
and I could hear music, Balkan pop,
the uneven drums and pipes, a woman’s
voice singing restlessly around them. I
couldn’t make out the words but they
were always the same: something about
love, I thought, something about loss.
The beach was artificial, someone had
told us, they trucked tons of sand in to
this particular cove; the rest of the coast
was rocky, there was nowhere to bathe,
though young men, despite the posted
warnings, climbed the rock walls each
summer to jump into the sea. The
Roman wall along the old town was
perpetually lit by floodlights bolted to
the rocks beneath it. I had walked be-
side it earlier that day, with a friend
who had travelled from Burgas so we
could spend an hour or two together,
and he had shown me where the orig-
inal wall ended and modern recon-
struction began, a thin strip of metal
running between them. Only the low-
est stones were ancient, and I knelt to
lay my hands on them, jagged and
pocked from the salt air, imagining the
hands that had placed them there. It
had been a major port once, this city,
the Romans had dedicated it to Apollo,
setting a great statue of the god like
a guard against the sea, though the
statue had been removed long ago, and
never replaced.