Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  “But the aga was a Turk,” Elif said. Her eyes had turned watery and red now, and they glistened like the pools on the shack’s roof down below us. “A Turk, like me. And therefore a wretch. Or so the hag told me. The aga, she said, couldn’t just give the infidels what they wanted without receiving some pleasure in return.”

  So the aga orders his soldiers to gather up all male nestinari in the courtyard. No more than twenty—young and old, beaten from the road, barely standing on their feet. As for the women and children, the aga lines them up against the stone wall so they may watch the circus that is about to unfold. He calls for his favorite zurla player. “Do you know what a zurla is, amerikanche? Like the oboe, but cheerful and much louder. He calls for the gadulka player.” Elif made a motion with her hand, driving an invisible bow across a set of invisible strings. “The players gather, ready to play. All men back then, they wore sashes. The older folk around here still do. Ten, fifteen elbows of cloth wrapped around their waist. So the aga orders his soldiers to hold the end of each sash and pull. The sashes unwind and the men spin like tops. The zurla fills the yard with shrieking and the gadulka joins it. That’s how I imagine it at least. The poor things spin across the yard like mad, hardly able to stand on their feet as it is. The soldiers whip them with their whips. By now the children are crying, the women are screaming, and the aga, that wretched Turkish dog, stands on his balcony, laughing, throwing his own whip about, urging the soldiers to lash the men faster, harder.”

  Some of the men spin left and tumble to the ground on one side of the courtyard. Some fall on the other. Half and half, more or less. “You on the left side,” the aga booms, laughing. “I’ll give you land. Keep your women, keep your children. You on the right, I have no use for you. So scurry off.”

  The nestinari were split in half. But so they wouldn’t forget each other, the nestinari exchanged their icons, their bags of skulls. One group would safeguard the saints and ancestors of the other, a holy bond. They gave an oath, to reunite each May, on the feast of Saint Constantine, and dance together over the burning coals. One year in Klisura, the next in the village where the second group would settle, no matter how far away that village lay.

  “Where did the rest of them settle?” I asked, and Elif shrugged.

  “Across the Strandja somewhere. Some village that even today is part of Turkey. The hag told me, back then it had been Greeks who lived there, Greeks who’d taken pity on the nestinari and given them some land.”

  I struggled to wrap my head around this story. An ancient village, home to the first fire dancers, part of Turkey, in which the peasants were neither fully Bulgarian nor fully Greek, but a mix of the two. And Turks in what was now Bulgaria who’d given shelter to half the refugees and chased away the others. And Greeks in what was now Turkey who’d sheltered the rest.

  “As clear as springwater,” I said, and Elif asked me which spring I meant—the one that came from Turkey, or the one that was all Bulgarian? We burst out laughing and laughed too long. It could have been the smoke she blew my way.

  “So did they meet?” I said. “Each year?”

  “For centuries they did. The hag saw the Greeks. She traveled to their village and danced with them, back when she was still a girl. Back when Saint Constantine was kind enough to claim her. I wish you’d seen her, standing before the sickly girls. An eighty-year-old woman, bursting at the seams with jealousy. Over some saint. I wish you’d seen the longing in her eyes. I told myself, this hag and I, we are the same woman. Her breath stinks from the garlic and mine from spite. She hates the girls, I hate their parents. We both want something we’ll never have.”

  “What do you want?” I said, trying my damnedest not to laugh.

  “Freedom, my American friend. Not just here in the nest, but down below. I’m not free, and I want to be. You understand? And I don’t think I’ll ever be.”

  I understood then that she had begun to cry. Her shoulders rocked; she cowered into herself. And then, like that, she’d blinked away the tears. “I’m such a vile thing,” she said. “I despise my father, which is a huge sin. God sees, I know. And I despise Him too—my god.” She snatched out of her pocket the headscarf I’d collected from the ground and threw it carelessly across the nest. “I renounce Him day after day. Each day in jeans, each day hiding the shamiya like a knife in my pocket. My friends in the city, they don’t know I’m Muslim. I’d kill myself if they found out. And yet, I love my god. I love my father. And yet, I hate them as much as a living heart can hate.”

  Her father, she began to tell me, was the village imam. His father had been the village imam, and then before him his father’s father had been the village imam too. A great spiritual tradition ruled over her bloodline, and so when she herself was brought into this world a girl, her father grew sick at heart. For a whole month after her birth he did not leave the mosque, praying to Allah for forgiveness. “I am a sinful wretch, Elif,” he’d often told her when she was still a child. “Why else would God punish me with someone like you, a girl?” He never hugged her, never gave her a kiss, not when she fell and bloodied her knees, not when she suffered, feverish and sick.

  And when her sister was born, her father, upon hearing the baby’s girlish cries, lay down, closed his eyes, and had a stroke right there on the floor of the birth room. Entirely out of spite. An ambulance picked him up and he spent a month, this time in the city hospital, licking his wounds. Because of the stroke, his mouth froze forever in a frown and twisted like a dagger every time he spoke to his girls. Which he did rarely. At dinner, they ate their meals in silence, the only noise that of his lips smacking and of his hand wiping grease from his mustache and his beard. Some days the only time they heard their father was when he climbed the minaret and summoned everyone to prayer. There was no muezzin in the village.

  “When I was little,” Elif said, and filled her lungs with smoke, “I’d watch the minaret from the yard and listen to my father singing, his voice so pretty, deep, loving. And I’d imagine he sang not for Allah, but for me. I was a really stupid girl.”

  No television, no radio, no books other than the Qur’an. Only a handful of girls were deemed decent enough to be her friends. No boys allowed. She was sixteen before her father let her travel to the city, and even then he came along to guard her. “For sixteen years,” she said, “I hadn’t set foot off this mountain. Can you imagine this?”

  No. I could not.

  “I have become a master of retaliation,” Elif went on. “I know exactly how to get each little thing I want.”

  Her first pair of jeans? She cut herself for a whole month before her father caved in. That’s when he took her to Burgas. They walked into a Levi’s store—oh, how people looked at them. Their jaws on the floor. Elif in her colorful shalwars, a scarf on her pretty little head. In the dressing room, she hung the shalwars on a nail and watched them the way the snake must watch the skin it’s shed. She stared at the cuts on her thighs, on the insides of her arms, and wondered if it was really worth it. Then she put on the jeans and absolutely hated how tight and coarse they felt. And absolutely loved this tightness, which only gave her wings. Oh, it was worth it. Dear God, was she beautiful in that mirror. Did she feel strong, invincible. All right, you old fool, she told herself. I got you now. In the palm of my hand, under my thumb, just where I want you. And when she walked out, her father could see it in her eyes. For the first time he’d lost a battle, and then he knew—the real war was only now beginning.

  It’s here I burst out laughing. I slapped my knees. I doubled up. None of what Elif was telling me was even remotely funny. And yet it was, incomprehensible, surreal, so far removed from my own life that I could think of no other way to deal with it but by laughing.

  “You little prick,” she said. “I’m glad you find my misery amusing.”

  But by the way she watched me I knew she was pleased. I had surprised her with my laughter.

  “I got a thousand other jokes like this,” she said. “G
et this.”

  Her father had planned to marry her off right after high school. He’d found her a husband. This boy, a good kid really, from a village two hills east from here. But on the day she collected her diploma—this was three years ago, early May, just before her sister started burning with the saint’s fever—Elif went to the mosque. Her father was in his little room, getting ready to call out the adhan. “Father,” she told him, “I’m going to Burgas.” She would enroll at the university and in the fall she’d be a student there. She’d find a roommate, rent a room, and get a job. She wouldn’t bother him for money. But she was going, no matter what he had to say.

  Her father walked right past her, as if she hadn’t even spoken. Stepped out for his prayer and shouted at the top of his lungs from the minaret for everyone to hear how great Allah was. All right then, Elif told herself, Allah is great. And for six days she did not put a morsel to her lips. Drank water only once a day. Her mother would not stop crying. “Why are you doing this?” she’d say. Elif would answer, “I’ll let the earth eat me before I eat a bite.” On the fifth day of Elif’s strike, Aysha started burning with the Christian fever. In her room, Elif fell on her knees. Thank you, Allah, she said, ashamed that her baby sister too had to suffer because of her. Grateful that the Merciful had picked her side in the war.

  All this was more pressure than her father could bear. At last, they struck a deal. She could study in Burgas, but not live there.

  “And so,” Elif said, “each morning I take the bus to town for sixty kilometers. Two hours on a good day. Each afternoon, when my classes are over, I run to the station and ride the bus back home. Four hours of my life, each day, squandered.”

  Elif, Elif, her friends would say at first. Come watch a movie with us. Come to a party. Walk with us by the sea. But she would tell them, no, I can’t. Her mother was sick, needed her home. Poor old Elif, her friends would say. And then one day they simply stopped asking.

  “And no one knows where you live? That you’re Muslim?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not even your boyfriend?”

  She closed her eyes, leaned back. “What boyfriend, amerikanche?” she said. “And now Aysha is sick again and I have so much to study. I have exams, and if I fail … It’s all for naught. And nothing really matters anymore.”

  I shifted in my seat. “Why are you telling me all this?” I asked. Maybe from the smoke, my accent had gotten lighter. Or maybe I didn’t mind it now. “If you’ve never told anyone, why are you telling me?”

  “You weren’t here two days ago,” she said; “you won’t be here tomorrow. Our lives are not connected, nor will they ever be. What difference does it make?”

  And really, what difference did it make? Tomorrow I would be gone. This moment was already slipping through our fingers, like four hours lost on a bus. Tomorrow I would be elsewhere, while Elif remained, fighting one little battle after another. She’d win some, lose some, but in the end she’d stay, chained to her father, to Klisura, to the mountain. I’ve fought enough, she’d say one day. Tired, she’d marry that promised boy and bear his children. She’d grow old and watch them scatter and through her offspring she would pretend to know the taste of freedom. Only her heart would keep the bitter truth.

  “They think they have me figured out,” she said, and her voice dipped, raspy and low from the smoke. “My father. My mother. All of Klisura. But they don’t know what I’ve cooked up. The little plan I’ve plotted out.” She leaned in closer and whispered, her eyes bloodshot and swimming, the pupils themselves as large as stork nests. “The day I pick up my university diploma will be the day I disappear. Like smoke in air, like flame in wind. I’ll vanish without a trace. Without a note, without a word goodbye.”

  Her voice, the stench of her breath, the enormity of her pitch-black pupils suddenly frightened me. And maybe it was out of fear that I asked, “And you don’t think that’s cruel?”

  “Cruel,” she said. “What do you know of cruel? With your pockets full of gold, crossing the ocean in less time than it takes me to go to school. Cruel,” she said, and then was quiet. Her skin had turned the color of the rotting hay and I realized she had finished the entire joint—much more than she had intended or wanted to smoke. “I’ll give you cruel,” she said. “My sister makes me love her, and then she hangs around my neck like a stone. She is the anchor that won’t let me sail. Each night I pray to God. I say, Allah, my sister is the rope that chokes me, so sharpen my knife and let me cut her clean. Allah, you’ve stuffed my heart with hatred—I hate my father, this village, I hate myself. So make me hate my sister too. Make me despise her. What should I care that she needs me? What should I care that she will suffer once I’m gone? And each morning I love her more, and hate myself more for the pain I am about to cause her. My God,” she said, and held her face in her palms. Her shoulders rocked, this time with laughter. “You’re right to laugh. I’m such a mess. A hunchback with wolf teeth thirsty for Christian blood. Run away, my boy. I’ll gnaw your bones. I’ll eat your heart. Run while you can.”

  I wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that problems in life sometimes had an almost miraculous way of resolving themselves if only we’d bear the suffering a little longer. Or so I’d heard. But then I thought of my own loneliness, depression, financial debt. Wasn’t this why I’d returned? To sell my land and see my problems solved. Or had I merely run away?

  “When I was very little,” she said, “my grandmother, Allah rest her soul, taught me a trick for wrestling with demons. All her life, my grandfather had kept her well under his thumb. ‘A woman is like the mule, kazam,’ she told me. ‘She has to learn to take the weight of her master and then his whip. But sometimes, darling, the whip opens burrows in your heart. And in these burrows, the Sheytan lays his evil eggs. When at night a woman lies in bed and dreams of cleavers, of slicing her husband’s throat like a he-goat’s, end to end, it’s the eggs of the Sheytan that she can hear hatching. I’ve dug a hole, kazam, behind the house. When an egg is about to hatch, I lean over the hole and I spit right in it. Every woman needs a hole in which to lay her evil eggs.’” Elif was watching me with a mournful smile. “You want to see the hole I dug?”

  Before I could answer she was already rummaging through the straw, the sticks, the tufts of white hair I had seen lining the nest. She pulled out a bundled towel, black, with a single red thread that zigzagged through the cloth.

  “For many years the Bulgarians on the Christian bank and the nestinari didn’t mix. So great was the peasants’ fear of the fire dancers that they wouldn’t even let them bury in the village cemetery the skulls they’d brought. That’s what the hag told me anyway. ‘Bury them in the water,’ the peasants had shouted, ‘bury them in the clouds, for all we care. But not beside our people.’ And so the nestinari buried their dead in the air.”

  Gently she laid the bundle between us on the hay, gently unwrapped the towel.

  “This is the hole in which I whisper,” she said, “my kazam, my darling.”

  Inside the towel was a human skull. Perfectly preserved, except for a few teeth on the side, which shone like pearls. “They buried them up in this walnut tree, up in these nests. At least a hundred skulls I’ve found scattered about, some wrapped in towels, others not. The storks don’t touch them. They lay their eggs beside them, and the babies hatch right by the skulls. And ever since I was a girl, after a fight with Father, I’d climb up here, and take my darling, and bring her to my lips like so. And I would whisper into her hollow eye the pains that ate me. And she would grow heavy with my devils, and I would grow light.” She held the skull now and watched it with a tenderness I hadn’t seen in her before. “My kazam,” she said, “my darling. The things her eyes have heard.” And she laid it gently back in the towel, wrapped it, and hid it in the hay.

  We sat in silence after this. My heart was pounding, but gradually I grew calmer. Only once did Elif speak. “What you did yesterday, I thank you for it. Your grandpa is a goo
d man. He was back in his day a teacher in Klisura. But that’s not why my mother trusts him. Back in the day, or so the hag told us, your grandpa was the vekilin for the fire dancers. They’d chosen him for that themselves.”

  Then she was quiet. A warm, light rain had begun to fall and I let it wash my face and listened to its gentle rustle. I thought of my grandfather, leader of the nestinari, and wondered why he had never told me the story of this before. But then, he’d never spoken of his life in Klisura. The branches above us glistened; the sun was blazing higher in the sky. I turned to Elif and watched her, her eyes closed, her hair, her face, her whole body shimmering with raindrops like glowing embers. And Saint Elena, I remembered her saying, like light rain following behind.

  On our way out of the village, elbowing through branches and grass, Elif had suddenly stopped to face me. “You had the world to choose,” she said, “and you came to Klisura.” Not wanting to speak of my plans to sell the twenty acres, I told her nothing. “What are you looking for here?” she’d asked, and I’d kept quiet. But now, if she were to ask me again, I would know what to say.

  PART

  TWO

  ONE

  THE YEAR WAS 1866. And in Klisura, on the feast day of Saint Constantine, a boy was born. As was tradition, they named him Kosta, after the saint. When Kosta was twelve, the first wave of exodus spread through Eastern Thrace and through the Strandja Mountains. Russia was invading the Ottoman Empire. To free up space for the countless Turkish refugees pouring down from the north, the Ottoman army drowned entire Christian villages in blood. Hundreds of thousands fled and so did Kosta. He ended up in Sofia, where in time he began his studies in the Military University.