With an ugly clattering rush the chain-laden tire churned through the slush trying to grip but slipping laterally toward the edge of the road. Spinning and biting at bits of pavement beneath the ice the fraying chains could help the car move forward but did little to control any other direction. As the road ahead curved away from the momentum of the car, a soft shoulder and an adjacent precipice drew the party ever nearer a dismal end. With the front wheels like skis and the left rear a flurry of whining wet snow, finally the right rear caught a rough edge of roadway and vaulted the car abruptly from the unguarded slope and certain demise. But with the trip just begun many more dangers awaited.

"What are you thinking?"

The fear of sliding off a mountain cliff evaporated in him instantly at these words for they could inspire more fright coming from a woman's lips than any threat of physical pain. A proper response must come from treading neatly between pits of fire and death on a road invisible and moving in a vehicle of imagination that would admire an ice skate for traction. The odds of safe arrival were slim at best but he felt good because he had been there before and was ready - as ready as he ever could be.

The car had just passed through the Rizhki Pass and would now dip a bit to a reservoir on the Wild Kamchia River before ascending again. He paused. Not too long or else she would think he were conjuring a lie and not too short or she would believe him flippant or responding by rote. Just long enough for him to have taken his gauzy thoughts and transcribed them into language. In fact he was reciting because he knew this moment would come when those four words -- "What are you thinking?" - would be heavier than ever.

"That no two people are ever completely compatible," he said.

A master stroke. He had taken the tempo, had gone from hurtling headlong to a firm grip on stasis with the opponent now reeling, the way a fullback can explode into a block and flatten a lineman twice his size and stand over him to gloat Davidian.

Her eyes widened slightly despite the bursts of sunlight flashing through the firs to the west. She did not blink for a long time. Then she looked up with an expression suggesting she would either cry or bite off his nose. Making that statement was easy compared to staring deadpan back into that face, her head on his arm, just inches away. As the road curved again, her friend the driver pulled the wheel hard right and the car-sleigh skidded now toward an interior embankment stretching up to the mountain's top. The couple slid along the vinyl back seat and her head bounced off the cold window. Her gaze did not change.

"Why would you say such a hateful thing?" she said.

"I'm not altogether sure it is hateful," he responded quickly, then paused.

They were at a peak now, mushing through the pass at the decidedly non-Himalayan altitude of 700 meters. The road was essentially a goat path, though, so any altitude and any speed made the journey ill-advised, more so in the dead of a Bulgarian mountain winter. They would head down soon to Karnobat, home of dollar-a-bottle vodka. How far down they would go was anybody's guess.

"It sounds like something you'd say before you leave," she said, still focused on his would-be coup. "Like you want to make a rational explanation of breaking off. Is that what you have in mind?"

She showed her typical firm expression, the kind of look that does not easily betray emotion. But her voice, not frequently, took up a cadence and tenor that spoke volumes of her feelings: sometimes she would simply react and utter, without the careful shield she wore so tightly.

"What do you want to say?" she asked. It was time to ease into a soft landing.

"I'm not leaving," he said forthrightly. "I don't want to leave. I couldn't be happier than I am right here and now with you. I was just telling you what I was thinking."

"But you're the one who is always saying 'forever,'" she said. "If no one is compatible, how can you expect anyone to want to be together forever?"

Exactly. He told her all the time that he believed they would be together forever. And she always answered that, well, things change. He was never sure if she was leaving herself a way out or allowing one she feared and expected him to take. In either case it was discomfiting and he wanted to disarm it. But like convincing someone of faith, there were no words.

"Well, 'incomplete compatibility' and 'forever' are not necessarily in opposition," he said.

"I know you've got more." She smiled a small smile that may have been amusement but was not happiness. "You planned this, didn't you?" C'mon, let's hear it."

The road was heading down now making speed control another dimension of danger. With decreasing altitude, though, the snow on the road turned wetter and softer and the chains would cling more often, wearing themselves as they rumbled over the pavement. Once in the valley the road was merely wet - slippery but not so much they needed the chains. The driver stopped at the first village to take them off amidst the trapped fog.

They parked near an abandoned gas station. She and the driver's girlfriend went looking for a bathroom. He stood uncomfortably idle while the driver jacked the car up and wrestled with the unruly metal on the cold damp pavement. Raising the car was not normally required for this procedure but this was not a normal environment. This was Bulgaria, where many things work but rarely as they were designed.

Enchanted as always by a village, he amused himself with the scene while the driver worked. Across the street sat a small stone house, the kind of tumble-down heap of adjuncts and add-ons and impromptu hanging gardens characteristic of the countryside. Organic in the extreme, the dwelling seemed to have grown from a single rock carefully fed and watered. The inner cloister was hidden by a shoddy brick wall where hung a street sign: "Eighth of March Street," one of those obligatory street names found in every town to commemorate the international women's holiday so fondly remembered in Warsaw Pact countries. A horse pulled a cart with a weary farmer on top.

After a few minutes of cursing, the driver finished his task as the women returned. Everyone got back in the grimy Lada and they resumed the trip. And the discussion.

"You're always saying, 'What if ...?'" he began, trying to harmonize with the soothing white noise of tires on wet road. "But 'What if ...?' is inevitable. Of course people change. But that doesn't mean they part."

This was obviously correct because many people do stay together even as life changes them. He knew she would be unconvinced by this because that was not the way it worked for her. Pain felt in youth, fresh and new, always wounds most deeply as it had her. As it had him years before. He had somehow managed to overcome it and, despite a reputation to the contrary, still held optimism. She did not.

"When people first fall in love," he went on, " everything is perfect. No one has flaws: people are not messy but untidy, they aren't late but tardy, not lazy but casual. But in time those descriptions change as familiarity breeds contempt."

She'd been there for sure. She looked out the side window, unfocused, the film of her life playing on the dusky white plain -- with the low points seen in slow motion. Her chin settled onto her chest and she pursed her lips into a sad, powty frown. This was when he knew most he loved her but when she was most difficult to reach.

"How is it that some people stay together?" he went on. "Over time, they learn to accept those flaws, maybe even like them. The people change and so does the relationship. The initial magic of falling in love gets them in and accepting gets them on.

"It's the difference between the Western romantic ideal of marrying the one you love and the Oriental ideal of loving the one you marry."

It was an interesting aphorism, stuck in his head, as few things do, from a college class long ago. It was ever more interesting here because this land was between those geographies, between their histories and, perhaps, between their ideologies. So was she.

"I can say 'forever,'" he said, his momentum building, "because I've decided to use my skills and intelligence to make that happen. If you are willing to try also, forever it is."

"So you've 'decided' to love me," she said, showing hurt in her eyes. "How romantic."

Words can kill us. It had been going well until he said "decided." A simple diction error now set the whole thing back at least an hour. But they had time.

"It's not really a decision but more of a realization," he said, truly hopeful. He waited to see if she, for whom English was a second language, would trip him up yet again. A few seconds and nothing meant either she found no flaw or was rather more interested in foiling his logic than its vehicle. He went on.

"When you say things may happen it stops me because I know it is true. They have happened to me before. Sometimes I have later realized what those things were. They were not real. They were created by me or her. They were excuses, sometimes for the right reasons but false just the same."

He had his audience again, for good or ill, so he paused to let her think. They had just passed Sliven, a mountainside city noted as a former haven of 19th-century revolutionary bandits. Those "haidouti" were either pirates or freedom fighters, depending on whose version of Ottoman history you believed. The sun had set and the landscape was a dim shadow of softly flowing plain bordered by trees. The car stereo now drowned out the road noise with the enunciated whine of Willie Nelson's "Crazy." He wasn't sure if she was awake or asleep because he could no longer see her face. He kept on, perhaps talking as much for his own sake as for hers, knowing the logic sound but wanting to cement it in his head by voice.

"Imagine yourself on the limb of a tree. Suddenly a rush of air begins to lift you up and it feels good so you rise with it. But before you let go of the limb, you realize that if you do there will be nothing beneath you but this benevolent current. So you hold on and, sure enough, that air fades and you settle back to your limb, convinced you had done the right thing by clinging. But what if you had let go? Would that air have carried you up? And where? You don't know. You never will."

"A tree limb?" she said. "Where did you get that one?" She was obviously not asleep, in any sense.

"Look, forget about the tree limb. I'm just talking about letting go of the past. And maybe the future, the feeling that while what I have is good, maybe I can do better. We Americans are always doing that and it is awful. Rather than exalt and embrace what we have, we drain it and pitch it, like an empty soda bottle.

"We are always holding on to the idea that if we shop hard enough, we can always do better. There is everything to be gained by letting go of that idea but we are trained to hold on."

Tree limbs, soda bottles, metaphors were not coming well today. Mercifully, she ignored the last one and gave him a chance to regain his train. They had now passed Podslon, which translates as "shelter," and were heading into another town with an ominous moniker, Chirpan, famous throughout Bulgaria for having a brawl at every wedding.

"Look," he started anew, "real, complete love is like religion: it requires a leap of faith. I'd much rather make that leap for you than some imaginary god of retribution."

Any previous rehearsal was long since spent now. He was working without a net and feeling good about it. Maybe too good. But there was no turning back and nothing to be gained by dramatic pause so he pressed on.

"This is surrender in the sublimest sense, not as accession or defeat but as giving up in the sense of an offering, only the offering is not to a deity but to a person. And it is not a piece of accumulated wealth, it IS the wealth and the body and the spirit - it is everything. If you can make that kind of sacrifice, nothing can stop you. That is the decision. That is the question."

"You seem to say that quite casually," she came back quickly. "Do you believe it?"

He was no thespian, he knew, but it cut just the same to have his sincerity doubted for he did believe every word of what he said. It was tempting to use such a diminishing question as reason to quit, the final insult. But he admired her honesty in doubting his. She was like another conscience but better, as worthy an opponent as his own mind but able to surprise and willing to ask the difficult questions. It hurt but it was not a wound as much as surgery, a cut to cure.

"Yes, I believe it."

"How do I know?"

"You don't," he said slowly. "We never know what others think or believe or feel."

He had come down from the heights now and was on firmer footing, if one less exciting. This ground state was nearer the existentialist he could be, farther from the fanatic he liked to visit. He was never sure which one was real or how they could get along. Or which was in charge. They seemed to share power from one moment to the next.

The car was driving through the fertile Maritsa River valley now, the heart of ancient Thrace. In the distance was Plovdiv, a Roman outpost born as Philipopolous for its founder, Philip of Macedon, whose son would nearly conquer the world through ruthless efficiency yet die far from home. Soon they would join another river, the Chepelaray, and follow it upstream to the highest town in the country.

"To accept what I say," he continued, "you must make a leap of faith - in me. You've already begun really. We make that leap, a small leap of hope, every time we begin a new relationship. If we didn't, we'd never have so much as an acquaintance. But to find the high white note you have to make the grand leap and let go completely. Otherwise, all you'll ever have is acquaintances. But like every other human activity, from throwing a ball to doing your job to making love, it's the follow-through that makes it. Do something half way and you'll be lucky to get half a result."

"So you've decided," she said, coaxing. "Have you done it?"

"What?"

"Let go, leaped."

Wow, she is tough. Had he? He had thought it through and through. And now he had spoken about it, and to the highest authority. But what had he actually done?

"Thinking is the same as doing," he said. "There is no one action. But I believe what I say and it shows in the most important way: in every little action. A present or a prize or a grand gesture mean less than caring sincerely each and every day. All I do is toward a better life for you and us."

He was gaining strength now, momentum as the car rolled up into the mountains. They passed the Bachkovo Monastery, a medieval relic once used as a sanatorium. Curiously, he gained as the air thinned: He began to truly believe he had "done it."

"I know I've made a leap because I'm no longer tempted by anything else," he said. "Some would ridicule that attitude as the ultimate in subservience. But, post-leap, I know that we either sink or swim together so if I don't paddle, I die. I merely trust you will paddle also."

"And if I don't? If I hang on to the branch while you let go?"

"Then I fall and it will be a long way down and the bottom will be very hard and sharp. It will hurt. But if I don't take the chance, I consign myself to the slow death of a life of middling emotions where the thing that most stirs my soul is a football match or a good steak. One cannot even enjoy art, literature, film without at least flirting with the danger of the leap. It's possibility drives even the dullest among us. I don't want to die having not tried.

"This may be the greatest risk of my life, to throw away all caution in mere belief that I guessed right, a gamble more daring than any at a casino because the most bruisable part of me is exposed. The chance is greater than life because dying would end it while this loss I would have to suffer. I don't take this step lightly. I know I can fail. But if I don't try, we can't succeed."

There really should have been some sort of orchestral flourish just then but it never came. Just more Willie, some maudlin tune about heartbreak and sorrow. As the road signs indicated a side trip to some windblown geologic formations, the "Wonderful Bridges," Nelson's tinny voice crackled loud through low fidelity about having everything but the girl.

"You ask a lot of me," she said, "to try like you say you will."

"Yes, I know." The existentialist was back now, the zealot exhausted. "And frankly I don't expect you to do as I do. You'd have to be crazy. I'm trying to convince you while I convince myself. I don't know what you will do. But then, if I knew what you were going to do, it wouldn't be a leap of faith."

He was finished now. More speech would only be redundant. It was up to her. He stared up the dark, winding road as the car began sliding again in the snow. The blackness was so thick and the road so poorly marked he truly could not see where they were going. They could be headed toward the void, for all he knew. He offered a final request.

"Even if you don't jump with me, I'd like it if you hung around just to see what happens."