Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  When in 1885 Serbia attacked, Kosta, by then a young cadet, interrupted his schooling and joined the Bulgarian army. He fought at Slivnitsa, the decisive battle. There he was wounded in the foot, from which an awkward limp remained until his end. There he saw the invader stopped and pushed out.

  For fifteen years after graduating from the university, Kosta served as an officer in the army. He became a captain; his soldiers feared and respected him in equal measure. “His blood is packed with gunpowder from Slivnitsa,” they said. “Don’t bring a match too close and you’ll be fine.” But in 1903, despite his promising career, Captain Kosta discharged himself and returned to the Strandja. He had joined a network of rebels who had been plotting a massive uprising. Soon enough, they hoped, Macedonia and Eastern Thrace would be part of a new, large, free Bulgaria. Kosta did not ask for a leadership position based on his military rank. He followed orders humbly, without much talk.

  The spring of 1903 the captain spent training the Strandjan peasants. He taught them battle formations, hand-to-hand combat, how to shoot the old Russian rifles. One group, he was heard saying, he would trust with his life. Another he would be proud to stand beside in battle. But a third group he wouldn’t even ask to mix his evening porridge, to tie the laces of his boots, to pick the lice from his head.

  On August 19, 1903, the day of Christ’s Transfiguration, the Strandja Mountains rose in arms. For days the smoke of battle covered the sun, and when at last the wind blew it away, like the veil off the face of a hanama, the Strandja was free.

  Two thousand years ago, on top of a mountain, Christ had spoken to Moses and Elijah. On top of a mountain the human had met the divine. Christ had been transfigured and so now was the Strandja. This was what Captain Kosta was telling the peasants in his native Klisura, standing tall on a barrel of gunpowder, bandoliers across his chest, two pistols in his sash, a saber in his hand. And his mustache like smoke gushing from the nostrils of a dragon. “From this day on,” he shouted, “until we unite with Bulgaria, the Strandja is its own republic.”

  For twenty days the Strandjan Republic existed free. But what is a republic without a symbol of its freedom? And so, Captain Kosta decided to build a school. “As big as those in Thessalonica and Edirne. Three stories tall. And with a cross on the roof. Like a church. No, three crosses, like a monastery!”

  For fifteen days and fifteen nights the people of Klisura built, assisted by people from the villages nearby—Bulgarians and Greeks alike. For fifteen days they tasted of this freedom. In vain, Captain Kosta’s rebels looked for help across the hills to the north. In vain, they waited for reinforcement from other Thracian regions. “Let them build,” the captain would say to his men. “More sweat on their brows, less time to think, less time to fear.”

  By the fifteenth day the roof was covered, the crosses were affixed. And though by any standard the building was shabby, pitiful even, in the eyes of the Klisurans it rivaled the sultan’s palace in Istanbul. “What should we name it?” someone said. “You have to ask?” answered another.

  The first school in Klisura, Saint Constantine and Saint Elena, stood tall for seven days. Until the Ottoman army burned it to the ground.

  * * *

  I found the pages still drenched in rain, scattered across the floor around my grandfather’s desk. I pulled them out of every drawer, where they were pressed tightly between the covers of shabby but carefully labeled binders. History of Ancient Egypt. The Old World. The First Bulgarian Empire. Grades Fourth and Fifth. Grade Eleven. The ink fading, the pages turning yellow, and the red of Grandpa’s pen like dried-up blood across words his students had written a quarter of a century ago. These old exams were the scrap paper on whose back he wrote.

  To me. To himself. To no one in particular. To all of us at once. The day after his nighttime episode I gathered up the scattered papers and spread them out in the yard to dry. He watched me weigh them down with pebbles against the wind, without offering me an explanation. That evening in my room, I read.

  War. Struggle. Freedom and death. It was the Strandja Mountains that Grandpa was writing about. Hand-drawn maps. Meticulously calculated numbers. This many villages reduced to ash. This many killed, this many exiled. But in my mind the picture burned too brightly and would have left me numb and blinded if not for the story of a single man. I found it trickling in the margins the way cold water flows more slowly beneath a turbulent and boiling stream.

  They said his father, he too a mighty rebel, had wed him to the Strandja. He’d slashed the boy’s palm and the boy had thrust it inside the Mountain so his blood might take root in her.

  They said he’d never spoken to a woman and never would. The Strandja was his woman. He’d give his life to free her from the Turks.

  They said his father had taught him the old tongue, the bird language. When he whistled, wings grew from his shadow. A bird’s shadow, an elohim’s. And the Mountain, they said, would answer.

  “His name was Captain Kosta,” Grandpa told me out on the terrace. The words left his lips with effort, as if each one brought him physical pain. And yet I felt as if, despite the pain, he was relishing the chance to share a man he’d thought would never leave the page.

  “He looked like Nietzsche,” Grandpa said. “Or so one of his chetniks wrote of his sullen disposition, of his bushy, curved-down mustache. Or maybe no chetnik ever wrote such a thing. Maybe that’s just the way I see him.”

  And so that was the way I saw him too. This captain who for some reason had captivated Grandpa’s mind. At night I thought about them—Kosta, returning to the Strandja after many years to set her free. And Grandpa, coming back to Klisura, for reasons yet unknown. The more I thought, dizzy with jet lag, the closer the image of the two came in my mind. And in the end, I wasn’t certain where the captain ended and where my grandfather began.

  * * *

  Up from a hill Captain Kosta watched the school burning. His rebel squad had been destroyed, and so were all other squads across the Strandja. And now it was the Christian peasants who met the Turkish wrath.

  Earlier that day, the elders of Klisura had bowed before the Turkish pasha who’d led his troops into their village. “Pasha efendi,” they’d begged at the hooves of his stallion, “here in these bundles is the jewelry of our women. Take the gold, but don’t burn down our homes.”

  The pasha seized the bundles. Then he ordered his soldiers to get the torches ready.

  “Pasha efendi,” the elders begged, “these are the costumes of our grandmothers. Take them, but don’t burn down our homes.”

  The pasha seized the handfuls, then ordered his soldiers to light the torches.

  “Pasha efendi,” one Klisuran said, an old man, tall and wiry. “This is the icon of our saint. His hands are cast in silver, so cut them off and take them with you. His feet, so he may walk on fire, are cast in gold. Chop them off, efendi. Strip the gold. Burn down our houses if you must. But spare our school.”

  The pasha snatched the icon, took a torch, and with his own hand set the school on fire. He threw the icon in the flame. “You fools,” he said to the peasants. “You cannot bribe me with what is mine already.”

  It was these fires that Captain Kosta watched now from the hills. For years he would limp across Eastern Thrace, in vain struggling to spark up new uprisings. Only death would show him kindness. Captain Kosta died defeated, alone, in complete poverty, two weeks before the start of the Balkan War. Merciful death spared him. He would not see the absolute destruction of his Strandja and of Eastern Thrace.

  Pages and pages, chains of words. Stories of exile and of death. Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, and Turks. The Strandja burned time and again, reduced to coals, to ashes. And then it rose, time and again, the Strandja itself a fire dancer, a nestinarka.

  Five times the people of Klisura rebuilt their school. Five times the school was burned down to the ground. It was a pile of ashes Grandpa found in its place, upon his first arrival, himself an exile. He rebuilt the schoo
l almost entirely alone—the ground floor for his students, the second for himself.

  It was to this school that he had moved three years ago. It was in this school that we lived now.

  TWO

  BACKGAMMON IS A GAME of chance. You cast the dice and pray to Fortune. That is, if you’re a fool. If you’re smart, backgammon is a game of odds, of calculations, and of patterns. A game of vision. Only the wise man knows the truth: like life, backgammon is a game of luck; like life, a game of skill.

  Or so Grandpa was trying to convince me. Every evening after dinner, we sat outside on the terrace and spread open the board. Two little bone-colored dice and fifteen checkers. Move all your checkers around the board and bring them home. Then bear them off faster than your opponent has borne off his and laugh in his face, a victor. You see, old man? Who is the fool now?

  I was. In every single game we played.

  The day after his nighttime episode, Grandpa was sluggish, visibly tired. But he was stronger a day later, and from then on—as strong as a bull stud. No, stronger still. At least that’s what he claimed. Unable to phone my parents, I wrote them a letter. I told them that overall Grandpa appeared in sound condition, but that he had grown old and sometimes showed his age.

  Out on the terrace, I asked him if these episodes were a frequent occurrence.

  “What are you, a doctor now?” he said, and the topic was closed.

  I’ve yet to find out the reason for his return to Klisura, I wrote in my letter, but did not write that it was out of shame I delayed asking. To my surprise, Grandpa too asked me nothing. Why had I come back? What did I want with him? The dice chattered against the board, the wind whistled through the planks of the house, and the silence around us grew so oppressive that I was entirely convinced: the old man was hiding something.

  Even the story of Captain Kosta, which he spun before me when the silence got too heavy, soon began to feel like a diversion. Or was he using the story to tell me things without addressing them directly? I was overthinking to exhaustion. He seems guilty, I wrote to my parents. His eyes won’t look in mine and his fingers rap on the table suspiciously.

  A few afternoons we went down to the Pasha Café, where Grandpa played backgammon with the owner. He won some, lost some, quarreled, and sulked. Always in jest, he insisted, but I wasn’t always sure. I stood by his shoulder while old men surrounded the table like buzzards around buffalo carrion, tugged on their mustaches, rubbed on their beards, quarreled, and sulked, always in jest.

  It was on one such afternoon that Elif walked by the café, returning home from the university. A green military pouch bounced on her back, full of textbooks, I assumed. She cast a guarded glance at our table, but when I waved, she hurried to look away and strode faster up the street. I thought of her often, mostly at night when I was too jet-lagged for sleep or reading from Grandpa’s papers. Five times a day Elif’s father sang from the minaret—his voice so full and deep it carried well beyond the Muslim quarter—and I wondered, how could a man who sang so beautifully be so full of malice?

  A few times, in between the games on our terrace, I asked Grandpa about the fire dancers. But every time he waved his hand. “Don’t bother me with crazy fools,” he’d say. I asked him about his youth in Klisura, about the school. “What’s there to tell? I quit the Party and the Party crushed me. I came here in the spring, ready to teach, and I found a pile of charcoal in place of the school. Let’s build it, I told the peasants, and they started crossing themselves as if the Devil had arrived to pull out their canines. Every time we rebuild our school, they told me, someone comes by and burns it to the ground. And with it burns Klisura. They’d tell me the stories of Captain Kosta, of how he’d built the first Klisuran school only to see it turn to ash soon after. So in the mornings, I taught the children in a cherry orchard outside the village, and I built for the rest of the day and sometimes at night, by the light of the gas lamp. The priest helped me. And the village idiot. Vassilko. He was a good boy. This terrace was all his idea, high and jutting out, so that when a maiden passed by we’d ogle her unseen. Eventually the school was built, but even then the parents wouldn’t let their children cross the threshold. For a whole month I begged them, the superstitious fools. How could I imagine that they were right?”

  “In what way were they right?” I asked, but Grandpa waved his hand. Another topic had been closed.

  On the fifth evening of my stay, after I’d lost a game to gammon—that particularly humiliating kind of defeat in which you fail to bear off even a single checker—I seized the dice. “Let’s play an American game,” I said. He’d throw one die and I the other. “The higher value wins. The loser chooses—truth or dare.”

  I rolled a four. Grandpa—a six.

  “There is a jar of rainwater down by the well,” he said. “Go drink it.”

  I told him this was silly. It hadn’t rained in three days.

  “You suggested a game,” he said, “I’m playing it.” He laughed long after I’d gulped the lukewarm sludge.

  “Are you dying?” I asked him as soon as I’d won my throw. This was the question whose answer I feared the most. Had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness?

  “Exceptional virility,” he said. He’d been diagnosed with it back in the day, and on a few occasions it had proved fatal.

  “Must all your jokes be sexual in nature?”

  He shrugged. He could joke about death if I wanted. Here was a cracker: all his friends his age were dead. But no, he wasn’t dying from a fatal illness.

  “Then why did you disappear like this? Selling the apartment one day and vanishing the next?”

  He shook his finger at the dice. I hadn’t won my turn. We cast. It was for him to ask.

  “Why are you back? And listen, I want an honest answer.”

  Slowly the night was rising from the soil. It crawled up the Strandjan hills, dark at their base and brighter up above, where the sky was still bluish. A warm wind from Turkey carried the smell of grass in bloom and made me sneeze.

  “I was worried about you,” I said. I had begun to slur my speech. Like electricity, the right words buzzed through my tongue, but in English. In graceless, chopped-up sentences I told him about my failed studies in America, about my lost scholarship and hefty student loans. How if only I could get back on my feet, pay for the remaining credit hours and finish my thesis …

  He watched me unblinking, a chunk of rock in the gloom. I wasn’t even sure he breathed. Until he raised his hand. “You have returned to sell your land,” he said.

  I gave him a timid smile. He’d guessed it right. The prize was his.

  “What prize?” He looked disgusted. “The nerve on you! To kid!”

  He pulled out a cigarette, brought the gas lamp to his face, and lit up. The flame regaled him with a scarlet glow, and when he glanced up, his eyes burned red.

  “How much are you in debt?”

  I gave him a ballpark figure. “Ballpark?” he asked. An American expression. In baseball— He cut me off. “It doesn’t translate.” And neither did the thought—that his only grandson, his flesh and blood, would be so arrogant, so impudent, so brazen-faced as to even consider … Did I know what my great-grandfather had gone through to earn for us that land? The blood he’d spilled? The sweat and tears … He rattled ferociously like this. Until I raised my hand.

  “We no longer own that land, do we?”

  It was his turn to grace me with a smile. “The prize is yours.”

  I gripped the edge of the table. The twenty acres were my prize.

  “Well, now they’re gone. And your father’s share. And mine. I sold it all.”

  For a long time I sat speechless. Beside us on the wall our shadows danced, enormous, monstrous, disfigured. I felt weak and dizzy and a pungent, noxious taste climbed up my esophagus and washed the roof of my mouth. No, it wasn’t from the murky sludge I’d drunk. It was the taste of Grandpa’s betrayal, the bitterness of bank loans I’d now be helpless to pay off.
The absurdity of my plan came to me as if for the first time and I grew livid not just with Grandpa for selling our land, but also with myself. For seeking an easy and dishonest fix, for allowing myself to fall into this position in the first place—broke and in debt, crossing oceans to chase after what wasn’t even there. Thick and sticky, the night spilled around us and filled my lungs like swamp water with each new gulp of air.

  “Where is the money now?” I said at last.

  “Completely spent.”

  “What did you buy?”

  “This house.”

  “The village school? This place is shit!”

  “The house across the road.”

  “That one is even worse. What else?”

  “The house next to it and the house next to that one…” He waved his great hand through the dark, like an Indian chief marking his plains before the white man.

  “You bought Klisura, then?” I said. But he wasn’t joking.

  “Only the Christian part. And if you’re kind to me, my boy, and if you play the dice and checkers right, one day this kingdom will be yours.”

  “But why?”

  For some time he struggled to pick up a white checker from the board. The checker danced in his fingers and he placed it alone on a point. “What do we call this?” he said. A blot, I answered. The blot was unprotected and any minute your opponent could hit it with a checker of his own.

  “And how do you protect a blot?”

  Though I was no longer in a mood for games, I picked up another white checker and covered the first. “You make a point as soon as you can. One checker protects the other. The two are safe.”

  “You make a point,” he repeated. “As soon as you can. And how do you block your opponent?”

  “With a prime.” Make six consecutive points in front of your opponent’s checkers and prevent him from getting past you.