At the left edge, a donkey with sad eyes stands on the shore of a sea. The water is blue and cut with geometric waves and at the right edge, afloat on a raft of clouds, higher than Anna can reach, shines a city of silver and bronze towers.

A half-dozen times she has stared at this painting, and each time something stirs inside her, some inarticulable sense of the pull of distant places, of the immensity of the world and her own smallness inside it. The style is entirely different from the work done by the needleworkers in Kalaphates’s workshop, the perspective stranger, the colors more elemental. Who is the donkey and why do his eyes look so forlorn? And what is the city? Zion, paradise, the city of God? She strains on her tiptoes; between cracks in the plaster she can make out pillars, archways, windows, tiny doves flocking around towers.

In the orchards below, nightingales are beginning to call. The light ebbs and the floor creaks and the turret seems to tip closer toward oblivion, and Anna squeezes out the west-facing window onto the parapet where caper bushes in a line hold their leaves to the setting sun.

She collects buds, dropping them into her pocket as she goes. Still, the larger world pulls at her attention. Past the outer wall, past the algae-choked moat, it waits: olive groves, goat trails, the tiny figure of a driver leading two camels past a graveyard. The stones release the day’s heat; the sun sinks out of sight. By the time the vesper bells are ringing, her pocket is only a quarter full. She will be late; Maria will be worried; Widow Theodora will be angry.

Anna slips back into the turret and pauses again beneath the painting. One more breath. In the twilight the waves seem to churn, the city to shimmer; the donkey paces the shore, desperate to cross the sea.

A WOODCUTTERS’ VILLAGE IN THE RHODOPE MOUNTAINS OF BULGARIA

THOSE SAME YEARS

Omeir

Two hundred miles northwest of Constantinople, in a little woodcutters’ village beside a quick, violent river, a boy is born almost whole. He has wet eyes, pink cheeks, and plenty of spring in his legs. But on the left side of his mouth, a split divides his upper lip from his gum all the way to the base of his nose.

The midwife backs away. The child’s mother slips a finger into his mouth: the gap extends deep into his palate. As though his maker grew impatient and quit work a moment too soon. The sweat on her body turns cold; dread eclipses joy. Pregnant four times and she has not yet lost a baby, even believed herself, perhaps, blessed in that way. And now this?