Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  I hung up and would have stepped outside if not for some sudden burst of curiosity. The sick girl’s room was empty and air blew through the open window in cool, damp gusts. The bed was neatly made. The burned spot on the floor had been covered entirely with rugs, but there was still soot on the ceiling above it. I lifted the rug and touched the spot. I sniffed the char on my fingers.

  “My sister starts fires here,” Elif said from the threshold.

  I leapt up, stuttered an apology.

  “Each spring, three years in a row. She dances barefoot in the coals and barks like an owl. Vah. Vah. Vah.” She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “It’s really sad the way her feet blister. The way my father treats her, like she’s a leper. The way he treats me, like I’m his sheep. Would you believe he pays that hag across the street to spy on me day in, day out? A jar of honey every month.”

  She forced a blast of smoke through her nostrils, one stream thicker than the other. “You need to loosen up, amerikanche,” she said. “I need to loosen up.” She watched me for a moment as if she was sizing up my weight and finding it unsatisfactory, much too low. “I know this place outside the village where back in the day the Christians danced. Where the storks nest. Where the weed hits you at least twice as hard. Don’t look so scared,” she said, and seized my hand.

  EIGHT

  EVERY YEAR, for thirteen hundred years, the nestinari dance. Come spring, come May, come the feast of Saint Constantine, the feast of Saint Elena. They build tall fires; three cartloads of wood are torched and burned to embers. And then, barefooted, they take the saint’s invisible and holy hand and plunge into the living coals. They spin, they wave their sacred icons in the air, they rush first in, then out. They feel no pain because the saint protects them. A week, two weeks, a month before the dance the saint descends upon the ones he’s chosen. The women swoon, their eyes like popping chickpeas under their flaming lids. The men blaze up in holy fever. Their temples split; their lips bring fire to everything they touch. And yet, despite the fever, a deep freeze chills them to the bone. Feet come alive, take quick, rushed steps. The muscles spasm, the bodies shake and seek the flame. An owlish cry escapes the throat. Vah. Vah. Vah. And only dancing in coals can bring relief. But if the chosen push away the hand that leads them, if they refuse both dance and saint, their sickness worsens, their blood transfigures into liquid fire, which then incinerates their bones, their hearts and souls. Come spring, come May, come the feast of Saint Constantine, of Saint Elena, the nestinari dance. And it has been like this for thirteen hundred years, here in the Strandja Mountains, and nowhere else.

  Such was the yarn Elif was spinning. We walked the bushy bank, upstream and out of Klisura. The river rushed muddy from last night’s rain and so loud I struggled to hear all that she said. The mist through which I’d left Grandpa’s house that morning had rolled away and a warm sun was climbing the sky. The bushes here were in bloom. White and yellow flowers danced before my eyes as Elif pushed twigs and branches out of her way with fury.

  “It started three years ago,” she said. The branch she released whipped me across the chest and I sneezed from the pollen. “My sister was coming out of the mosque when she first fainted. A perfectly insolent little creature!”

  For two days Aysha thrashed in bed. Her feet twitched, her teeth chattered. A doctor came from town. “I measure no fever,” he said. “She should be fine.” And yet she wasn’t. “Keep her hydrated,” the doctor ordered. Who knew, perhaps it was the flu? After all, six other girls were sick in the village.

  But the old women knew. They’d found the cause long before the doctor’s visit. Black magic? The evil eye? What monster could have the heart to hurt the seven little darlings? “Don’t be afraid, my dears,” a woman from the Christian hamlet said. It was Saint Constantine who’d claimed the girls.

  The pieces of the puzzle fell into place. A week before, Aysha and her girlfriends had gone to the river to watch the baby storks. They played in the mud, splashed in the shallow pools, then snuck into the abandoned nestinari shack. This was a hut down by the river where once upon a time the fire dancers kept their icons and their holy drum.

  A week went by. And then two of the girls lay down with fever.

  “There will be more,” the hag from the Christian hamlet said. And she was right. Before long, Aysha and the remaining girls were also sick. The hag came to Elif’s house. Their father was furious at first, but he was also worried and so he let her in. They sat her down under the trellised vine and brought before her the seven sickly girls. The hag fished out a clove of garlic from her apron and popped it in her mouth—she ate garlic, Elif told me, like it was bonbons. Then she ordered the fathers to fill up a trough with water and the seven girls to stand around the trough. Their feet took tiny, frenzied steps. Their eyes rolled white, their teeth chattered. The hag waited for the water to settle and for a long time studied the faces reflected on the surface. That’s how bent she was, Elif said, unable to stand up and look you in the eye. But there was more to it, the women whispered. Only in water could the hag see the things she sought to see. “Don’t be afraid, my dears,” she said at last. “Rejoice!” It was Saint Kosta who held the girls like sugar cubes under his holy tongue. His feast was coming near. “Build a fire, spread the coals. Give the girls icons and let them carry them across.” Only then would the saint be calmed. Only then would the fever go away. “Lucky, lucky doves,” the hag said. “What I would give to have him claim me one last time.” And tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Bitter indignation choked the parents. “Our daughters kissing Christian icons and worshipping a Christian saint? For shame before Allah!” Each father seized his daughter’s hand and dragged his sickly girl back home. Windows were sealed and doors were bolted. “I’m the imam,” their father told Aysha, “and you are making a mockery of me. A mockery of God.” And then he smacked the little girl, bloodied her lip.

  For seven days and nights Aysha stayed imprisoned in her room. Twice a day Elif was allowed to bring her meals, to empty out her chamber pot. How she wished she could forget that stench. Shit and piss, and her little sister, shaking on the floor and chewing the tresses of her hair. No, she would not forgive this man. As long as she breathed, she’d curse her father’s soul.

  The feast of Saint Constantine arrived, and with the feast, just as the hag had told them, Aysha began to howl. She jumped behind the bolted door all night. Then in the morning she was calm, slept through the day, and woke in peace. Elif and her mother washed her gently, combed her hair, and when she asked them why all this kindness, they burst into tears.

  Last year the sickness once again returned. Three weeks before the feast Aysha built a fire in her room. The hag had warned them many times that such a thing might happen. Aysha burned a handful of sticks down to embers, and it was because of her shrieking that Elif found her, jumping on the glowing coals. Who knew how badly she would have hurt her feet. And what if the house had caught on fire?

  Again their father locked up the little girl. But a few days later Aysha was once more dancing in the fire. At first, Elif couldn’t see how her sister had snuck out, where she had found the sticks and matches. Then she understood. Their mother had helped her. Their mother too was burning with the Christian flame.

  And this year, Elif told me, the fever had turned to madness. “You saw how Father had roped Aysha down. You saw my mother’s blackened eye. What else is there to see?”

  NINE

  WE HAD WALKED as far out of Klisura as the bank allowed us. From here on, the bushes were too thick. Blooming branches crisscrossed over the river to form a tunnel through which we had to pass. Sitting down on the grass, Elif removed her headscarf and stuffed it in her pocket. She tousled her short hair, then slipped her sneakers off and began to roll up the legs of her jeans.

  “Hey, amerikanche”—she had taken to calling me “little American”—“you can’t imagine the fight I had to fight with my father so he would let me walk around in je
ans. The things he’d do to you, to both of us, if he found us together here, alone. If he knew you could see my toes and feet. You like them?”

  I think she laughed. Sheep bells were ringing up the hill or maybe closer. I pictured a shepherd, resting on his crook, watching us and twisting his mustache. The shepherd would speak to Elif’s father, who then would come for me. I sneezed.

  “I’ve seen goats faint when they are scared,” she said, “but never a man sneezing when something spooks him,” and, laughing, she splashed upstream. Shoes in hand and trousers rolled up, I followed. The water sliced me, knee-deep and razor-cold. Elif was crying in pain or pleasure. I couldn’t tell. We walked the tunnel, twisting, turning, brushing away the blossoming branches overhead. My nose ran, my eyes smarted, and every other step I sneezed.

  At ten sneezes, Elif began to count them. At twenty she was laughing so hard, she had to stop and catch her breath. She told me to splash my eyes with water, which helped a bit. At thirty sneezes, the tunnel had ended and we were out in the open.

  What spread before us was an island, a perfectly flat meadow, as wide as a baseball field, which split the river into two turbulent streams. One stream came from Turkey. The other was Bulgarian. They merged here and together they flowed eastward to the Black Sea.

  Where the two streams met, the water was black with mud. It churned dry leaves and twigs, like a giant centrifuge, but because the basin was so wide, the water never reached above our knees.

  And in the meadow I saw a tree. A giant, whose trunk a dozen men would not encircle hand in hand. Each of its lower branches could be a tree itself. It reached so high I strained to see its top. I felt at once protected and exposed, completely at its mercy. The tree was dead. But all the same, it bloomed in massive charcoal blossoms that weighed its branches down, from top to bottom.

  “Stork nests,” said Elif beside me. Each year, on their way from Africa to Europe and then back, the storks passed over the Strandja Mountains. The Via Pontica, she said. Once, as a little girl, she’d tried to count the nests on the tree. At fifty, she’d lost track. But there were more. Not just in its branches, but in the oaks along the banks as well.

  The giant was a walnut tree. As old as Klisura and maybe older. Under its branches once upon a time the nestinari danced. Look, can you see the soot on its bark? And there by its trunk, in the mist, can you see it? A tiny hut, its roof covered with stones from the river? The shack of the nestinari.

  “I was inside it once. Found nothing. Except a twisted saint who tortures little girls.” She laughed. We sat on the ground and rubbed our feet to warm them. Mist still floated here in the meadow and the sweet stench of rotting grass filled my nostrils. At least I wasn’t sneezing.

  “You’re shivering,” she said with a laugh. I nodded. I had told Grandpa the same last night and now I wondered if he was still in my bed, if he was feeling better. I wondered what he had felt when inevitably, many years back, he’d first seen the giant tree. Who had stood by his side then, the way Elif now stood by me?

  “Look, see,” she said, and dug her fingers in the ground, scooped up a handful, and pulled it out of the mist.

  “Feathers. The whole field is blanketed with them. Tell me, is there a thing sadder than feathers rotting in the ground? A thing more pretty?” She tossed them behind her back and dusted off her palms. “Let’s go get high,” she said. She put on her shoes and, as if she were a little girl, smacked me on the neck. “You’re it,” she said, then jumped up and, laughing, sprinted toward the tree. “I’ll race you to the top!”

  Her yell carried across the meadow, bounced back in the oaks along the banks, and drowned in the mixing rivers. I watched her through the mist, a little speck against the walnut that stretches its arms and legs, somehow connects with the bark and climbs it. Up she went, up beyond the lower branches, in a straight line, quick and assured. Ten, fifteen meters into the air. She straddled a branch and, with her feet dangling on either side, moved toward a giant nest in its middle, where other branches crossed into a firm foundation. She threw herself into the nest, the way she must have done a thousand times before, and for a moment I lost her from my sight. When she reemerged, she was waving her motley scarf. The scarf slipped from her fingers and spiraled down, down through the mist.

  I remembered the storks that gathered in my childhood town in August, wheeling high above the rooftops of houses, blocks of flats, catching warm currents in the air, their cartwheels growing larger, thicker with every new arriving stork. And I remembered how we had watched them from our balcony, and Grandpa asking, “My boy, which stork are you?”

  TEN

  THERE WAS A VILLAGE once upon a time that would have lain some fifty miles south of Klisura. Today this land was in Turkey and two hundred years ago, not just this land, not just Klisura, but all of Bulgaria belonged to the Ottoman Empire. In this ancient village, the Christians—some strange mix of Bulgarians and Greeks—were allowed to build tall churches, to worship their god with the kind of freedom Christians across the empire did not enjoy. Why the sultan allowed such liberty to a handful of his rayas, Elif couldn’t say. Nor could the hag who had told her this story. One night three years ago, intrigued by her sister’s affliction, Elif had snuck across the bridge into the Christian hamlet and sought the hag who had examined the sickly girls. And in the cloak of darkness, the hag had told her the story of how the fire dancers had first set foot in Klisura.

  We were sitting in the stork nest now, our bent legs almost touching at the knees. The nest walls were sticks entwined and balls of straw and wool and feathers. The sticks poked me, but I didn’t mind. Sheltered from the wind, I was no longer freezing.

  Elif had fished a nylon pouch out of the hay that lined the nest’s bottom and was rolling a joint. Her secret stash, she called the baggie. Her happy place, this nest. Ever since she was a little girl she’d hide here from her father, from all the troubles in her life. She’d carved steps in the tree trunk, built herself a stairway. “I’m a hot-air balloon,” she said, and licked the edge of the rolling paper. “My troubles are the sandbags I throw out one by one. Up the bark I climb until at last I’m lighter even than air itself.”

  She lit the joint and took a drag. The stench of pot, of rotting hay mixed in one noxious fume. “I go to the university in Burgas,” she said. “I get some money for my good grades and this is what the money buys me.” She passed the joint, which I refused.

  “Suit yourself,” she said, and leaned her head back on the entwined sticks. Through an opening in the hedge I could see the shack of the nestinari, rainwater pooling on the flat stones of its roof. The pools glimmered with sun, which had tangled midway in the dry branches of our tree. The rivers boomed and Elif began to speak.

  For centuries that ancient village prospered, protected by the great sultan himself. There in this village the first nestinari danced. Bulgarians and Greeks alike, living together, speaking a language of their own. Each May, Saint Constantine descended upon the peasants like a storm, and after him, like light spring rain, merciful Saint Elena followed. Each May, for centuries on end, the nestinari built tall pyres and danced in their coals. Until, one day, the Turks burned down the village and slaughtered as many fire dancers as they could.

  “Why, Grandma?” Elif had asked the hag. “Why, why!” The hag had answered, “Does the dog need a why to suck the marrow from a bone? Does the Turk need a why to slaughter the Christian? They weren’t pretty like you, my dove, the Turks back then. Back then the Turks were ugly hunchbacks with wolf teeth, thirsty for Christian blood.”

  “That’s what she said.” Elif laughed and sniffed the burning joint. “Hunchbacks and with wolf teeth at that.”

  The village had been torched and ruined. The nestinari nearly wiped out. Only a handful had survived, taking their icons, their holy drums into the thick oak woods. Fear not, my children, a man had cried, their leader, the vekilin. And it was this vekilin who led the survivors north through the Strandja Mountains in search o
f new land to call home.

  “But no one would have them, my dove,” the hag told Elif. They would come to a village, ruined and in rags, their stomachs churning, their lips cracked and bloodied. The village nobles would gather at the square and the vekilin would fall before them on his knees. “Give us some land from yours,” he’d beg them. “It could be stones, thorns, nettles, we aren’t picky. Let us call it our home.” But when they saw the icons with the tails, the drums, the bags of bones these people carried—because the nestinari also transported the skulls of their dead—the villagers grew frightful. The madness of the fire dancers scared them, the grip of Saint Constantine, the wrath of the sultan, who had suddenly slaughtered the very people he’d protected for centuries on end. And this past protection too made every village angry. “Why should we help them?” the peasants fumed. “While the Turks trampled on us, these dogs were dancing. While we cried, they burst with laughter. It’s their time to weep now, and ours to be merry. You holy lepers, scurry off!”

  For weeks the nestinari roamed the Strandja Mountains, until one day they reached Klisura. Even back then the village was split in half—Bulgarians on one bank of the river, Turks on the other. “Brothers, we’re perishing,” the nestinari begged. “Give us some land.” And like before, instead of land it was a curse they received.

  But Saint Constantine is a merciful saint, the hag told Elif. And lo and behold the Turkish aga, ruler of Klisura, allows the vekilin to bow before him and listens to his plea. Sitting on the balcony of the konak, the aga smokes from his long chibouk, and his meaty fingers play with a rosary of red amber. He’s heard how terrified the rayas can get of these newcomers and so he wants to spite them, his little slave lambs, he wants to keep them full of fear. Besides, he’s not afraid of the sultan. He even has a bone to pick with him. “Why not?” he says to the vekilin. “I’ll give you land in the Bulgar hamlet. Build your village there if you will.”