Wildalone by Krassi Zourkova Read Free Book Online

Bulgaria.”
    â€œAh, yes. Right at the heart of Eastern Europe, next to Greece.” He sounded disappointed. “It never ceases to amaze me, the musical talent in those Balkan lands of yours. Carries a certain . . . restless quality. A subtle unrest going so far back in time one could say it practically runs in the blood.”
    Could. Or was he actually saying it?
    I forced my eyes to stay on his. “You’ve heard other Bulgarians play?”
    â€œI have, I most certainly have.” He lifted a sheet of paper and stared at it, as if trying to reclaim his mind from a distant memory. “Miss Slavin, I hope you would indulge me with a slight departure from the syllabus.”
    â€œA departure?”
    â€œOf sorts, yes. Your first paper is due on Friday, and I always leave its topic open: choose a Greek vase and tell me which myth you think it depicts. Everyone has a favorite, so giving students a choice helps fire them up. Inyour case, however, a certain vessel struck me with its particular . . . shall we say, resonance?”
    The sheet landed on the desk, no longer upside-down from where I was standing. And two figures emerged on it, delicate like cutouts from an elaborate cartoon: a man holding a lyre and another man waiting for the sounds.
    â€œThe vase is on display downstairs. You won’t have any difficulty finding it.”
    Princeton’s art museum, of course. In Bulgaria, it was unheard of for a university to have its own art collection, let alone an entire museum. But then again, with tuition at $33,000 a year, why would Giles have us write from photographs when the originals were only steps away?
    I took the page from him. Maybe I should have been suspicious. Maybe it should have occurred to me that grading curves had rules (treat students equally) and that “departures” didn’t happen lightly, on a whim. But for the moment, I convinced myself that everything made sense: class homework involving music was assigned to me by a professor who had heard me play. He had admired my technique. My inexplicably restless talent. And as for everything else that ran in my blood, he obviously had no clue at all.
    THE OPEN PAPER TOPIC TURNED out to be a mixed blessing: it fired everyone up, but mostly with stress. By midweek, the usual “What’s up?” had given way to “Did you pick your vase yet?”—a question I answered briefly, skipping the fact that my vase had been chosen for me.
    And not just the vase. One particular Greek myth stood out in my mind because, as Giles had said, the gift for music in the Balkan lands did go back in time. Way back, actually. Only hours from my home, in a region known as Thrace, the mountains had once echoed with the song of a man described in legends as the greatest musician who ever lived, the “father of all songs.” His lyre was believed to have charmed the anger out of beasts, coaxed trees and rocks into dance, and even diverted the course of rivers. More than two thousand years later, people in my country still knew the story of Orpheus by heart. His love for Eurydice. Her death from a snakebite. And his descent intothe Underworld, to claim her back. Touched by his music, the gods agreed to let his wife live again. On one condition: that he wouldn’t turn around to look at her, on the way out into the world of the living.
    I could have filled the required pages easily, without treasure hunts in museum basements. But Giles had insisted, from the first slide he had flashed in our lecture hall, that no photograph stood a chance against the breathing clay.
    Princeton’s collection of “breathing clays” hadn’t made it to the main floor galleries, so I followed the map to the lower level. Thursday was the only night of the week when the museum stayed open late—at a quarter to ten, the place was deserted. I had wanted to be there alone and look for the vase undisturbed, but now