Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  I wrote my parents a letter a day. Then in the afternoons, even when he was reluctant, I walked Grandpa down to the Pasha Café so he could play backgammon with the owner. Around the fifth game, I always excused myself, crossed the bridge to the square, and waited for the bus from town. At a safe distance, I watched Elif carry her military bag down the stairs and make her way to a bench outside the municipal building. Then I would run to the driver and shove the letter and some money in his hands.

  “I’m not your mailman,” he’d say, but always pocket the cash. Every so often he too went to the Pasha and played backgammon. Rolling the dice against Dyado Dacho gave him the most pleasure. Their games often stretched into the night, past closing hours, but the owner never chased them. Instead, he would lock them up in the tavern, drinking and playing, only to find them peacefully asleep on a bench in the morning. “I can’t drive the bus drunken,” the driver told me once, when I asked him how come he stayed the nights there. “I’m no longer a young buck. But my blood is hot and I might be tempted. So it’s best they lock me up until morning.”

  And how come he left the keys in the ignition on his way to the tavern? Wasn’t he afraid the bus might get stolen? “And who would steal it? Dyado Dacho? I’m more afraid the key might fall out of my pocket. It’s happened twice before.”

  Within a week he’d doubled the fee I was paying him to deliver my letters.

  “Dyado Dacho’s been winning,” he said, though I knew their bets were symbolic. “And who are you writing to so much anyway? Have you got yourself a damsel?”

  “The CIA,” I told him. He snickered.

  “So your mommy and daddy are secret agents, then?”

  “I think he reads my letters,” I told Elif that day, and sat on the curb a few feet from her bench. But as always she said nothing. Day in, day out, that’s what we did—for fifteen minutes she would sit on the bench on the square and I on the curb in silence. I faced one way, she faced another, and yet it didn’t matter that we kept quiet. At last she stood up and headed home, and some time after, I followed in her steps and took my seat in the café, next to Grandpa, who rolled dice after dice.

  “You be careful with Elif,” he told me on more than one occasion. “People are starting to talk.”

  I feigned surprise. It was the letters I needed to send. My parents were worried.

  “As am I. You stay away from that girl.”

  But I couldn’t. These fifteen minutes of mutual silence were all I looked forward to, awake or in my sleep. And people would always talk. The feast of Saint Constantine was coming near, they said, less than two weeks away. And once again the little girls had started burning with the fever. The imam had locked up his girl in her room. It’s a bad year, someone said in the café. It’s May already, but it’s cold and humid like October. The grass is rotting. And my chickens aren’t laying eggs.

  “What do the chickens have to do with things?” Grandpa asked me later, but I could tell that the closer we got to May 21, the more restless he grew.

  It was a week before the feast when Grandpa took me to the river. It had rained all night and a thick mist rolled over the ground. The road was muddy, and so were the banks and the river. Up above us a few storks flew in the cloudy sky, but most of them watched us passing up from their nests in the oak tops. Every now and then a male stork would balance himself atop a female, rub his long neck against hers, clatter his bill, and flap his wings. For a week, I had watched them mate from the terrace, and I watched them now, walking the muddy bank.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, but Grandpa wouldn’t tell me.

  “Must you always ask so many questions?” he said, then urged me to walk faster; we didn’t have all day.

  We reached the giant walnut of the nestinari just when the sun was peeking from behind a break in the clouds. The nests in the branches were heavy with mating storks. But these storks were smaller than the others in the village. And they were black.

  This was their tree. The only place in all of Klisura where black storks gathered. We watched them for some time—the males climbing the females, some flying away, others returning to their nest, a snake, a frog, a rodent in their bill. My eyes drifted to the nest where Elif and I had sat, where now two storks rubbed their long necks together.

  “I try to come here every now and then,” Grandpa said, and tightened up his coat. “Especially once their babies hatch.”

  A gust blew through the meadow and I too zipped up my jacket. Such cool weather, Grandpa told me later, was odd, uncharacteristic. The cold was bad for the storks, bad for their babies and for their food. But secretly I cherished the cold—like garlic does a vampire, it kept the mosquitoes at bay.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Grandpa asked me, and pinched the scruff of my neck. “Did all your sailboats sink or something?”

  “I’m cold,” I lied. “Let’s get warm in the nestinari shack.” I started toward the little hut under the tree. But Grandpa wouldn’t follow.

  “I’d rather let the frost bite off my balls,” he said, “than set a foot inside their shack. The crazy fools.” And then he clapped his hands so as to spook the mating storks.

  SEVEN

  THUNDER ROLLED across the hills of Turkey. Out the open window I watched the shapes of black trees sway in the yard. The house was quiet. The wind smelled of rain.

  How weary I had been, a few weeks back, walking out of the airplane in Sofia; disconnected from the world, fed up with my life as a failed graduate student. And how distant this weariness felt now. The rain nourished me, my feet burned, my fingers itched, and I could almost hear the roots sprouting out of them and spreading through the soil. Grandpa and Elif, her father, even the ruined houses of Klisura, were nothing but bricks in my foundation. And yet the bottom line revealed a terrifying truth—this trip, like so many of my other endeavors, had proved a failure: I was still broke and still in debt.

  The Tower of Klisura stood tall over the quiet village. A pair of storks had started constructing their nest atop the metal frame and I imagined them now in the dark, huddled against the wind. How much would we make, I wondered, if we turned that section of Klisura into a wind farm? How much would the Turkish company pay us for a few empty lots?

  After two decades away Captain Kosta had returned to the Strandja to fight for her and bring her freedom. After fortysome years away, Grandpa too had chosen to come back. Now he too was waging war for liberation—that of Klisura and probably his own. How could I ask him then to sell what he was fighting so desperately to preserve?

  My thoughts turned like concrete in a mixer: ancient skulls mixed with stork eggs, with muddy rivers, with fire dancers and janissaries slaying Christian bandits and dragging them by their ankles through the dirt. Captain Kosta watched me, atop his cask of gunpowder, his face black with the smoke of battle, his face the face of Grandpa. The imam sang somewhere in the village, or maybe I only thought I heard him singing. My great-grandfather picked my teeth and ate them, one by one, as if they were sweet grapes. “Whatever you think of doing,” his raspy voice echoed, “I’ve already done it. And it was nothing special. Now bring the papers so I can sign. The land is yours.”

  And through these visions, like a knife smoothly sliding through a block of cheese, Elif’s headscarf was falling down, down, down. A flash of lightning revealed before me the walnut tree. A black wing slashed it like an ax and where the tree had stood I saw a dark shape grow thicker, darker. I heard the growling of wolf-killing dogs and with the growling an ugly thought rang in my ears: That which will be demolished must first be built. That which will be taken must be given first. The giant walnut swayed, Elif’s closed lids flicked open, and raindrops glistened on her neck. “Merciful Saint Elena,” I heard her tell me, “has come to our yard.” It was raining. Soft rain, which turned to hail. The hail slammed against our roof, against the side of our house, against my window, and into my room.

  “Amerikanche.” I heard Elif call me and only then did I realize
I was no longer in a dream. The hail was no hail, but pebbles she chucked from the road. And there in the road, I recognized the sharp hump of the Lada, its high beams flickering, the engine roaring. “Come on, my American friend,” Elif called, and stepped on the gas. “Let’s go before I’ve woken the dead.”

  EIGHT

  WHEN I WAS STILL A LITTLE BOY, Grandpa often told me stories of khans and tsars, of great heroes. Sometime in the tenth century, a scribe recorded the lineage of the first Bulgarian rulers in a codex, which lay forgotten between the pages of a Slavonic Bible until a Russian historian stumbled upon it a thousand years later. This codex, now famous as the Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans, began with Attila, also known as Avitohol, then spoke of his son Irnik, of Gostun, Kubrat, and of his son Asparuh, the white horseman, who with his tribes crossed the Danube, allied with the Slavs, defeated the Byzantine Empire, and founded Bulgaria in 681 A.D.

  Many a night I had lain in bed imagining the glorious battles, my head turning the way any boy’s would when he believed the blood of Attila and Asparuh coursed through his veins. The stories Grandpa told me were only loosely based on historical fact; at my persistence he invented wildly, a codex of our own. We called it the Nominalia of the Imaginary Khans.

  “Perun was the main god of the Slavs,” Grandpa liked to tell me in one such story. Master of thunder and of lightning, atop the highest mountain, he presided over many children, while Veles, the dark nether lord, controlled the underworld.

  Of course, Perun loved all his children. But none as horribly as Lada. Lada was beauty, endless joy, eternal youth. Lada was love. Thick stalks of golden rye? The lashes of her eyes. The eyes themselves were humus-chernozem. White flour for steaming bread? This was her skin. Her teeth were bushelfuls of wheat. Her hair—a river.

  So frightened was Perun of losing Lada that on the day the girl was born he seized her hair. Each year Lada’s hair grew longer, and each year Perun wound it around his fist a new revolution to keep her in his sight. But at his feet Lada faded. Her lips withered. Her breath turned rotten. Without Lada’s beauty, Dazhbog grew tired of pushing the sun across the sky. Cold sleep took possession of Zornitsa, and dawn no longer broke. Veles, the nether god, looked up, saw night, and climbed out of his domain. Snow, ice, and darkness ruled the land for ten thousand years.

  The gods convened and, weeping, collapsed before Perun. “Almighty Father,” the twinkling Dawn begged him. “Your love for our sister has turned to poison. Your fire has turned to stone. Her beauty—to carrion. Look at her, black with flies at your feet, white with maggots. Let her rise so that her beauty may blossom. Set her free so that the land may be born again.”

  This plea moved Perun. Reluctantly he unwound Lada’s hair a thousand times, two thousand. Her hair fell free. It gushed out of the mountain, down its slopes—a river, which swept all ice, snow, darkness in its way and left behind meadows and fields for plentiful harvests. Veles retreated underground and spring was born again, and spring extended as far north as Lada’s hair allowed.

  But oh how Perun suffered without his beloved daughter. Nothing gave him repose. He thundered, threw fire and lightning, torched, ruined. At last he wound her hair around his fist a thousand times and summer came; two thousand times and it was autumn; three thousand times and Lada was back at his feet, and out into the world winter ruled.

  I had remembered this story unexpectedly one night, sitting on the windowsill and thinking of Elif and of her father. And now again I thought of this story, if only for a moment. Perun, the god of thunder, roared around us. My head bobbed, my teeth chattered, and with the stench of burned oil and exhaust, Lada, the goddess of youth and beauty, rushed us in her palms up the Strandjan hills.

  Beside me, Elif was shifting gears, barely releasing her foot from the gas. So this is how death arrives? I wanted to cry out, but couldn’t. All I could do was squeeze the door handle and dig my heels into the floor, like that would halt us. The high beams bounced up and down, revealed now cliffs, now bushes and branches, now ruts in the dirt road. It wasn’t raining, but the wipers flapped; the gears grinded and from a hoarse, pathetic stereo Metallica’s James Hetfield commanded us to give him fuel, give him fire, give him all that he desired.

  “That was the first time I ran away from home,” Elif said, and she even looked at me, for effect. “Metallica in Plovdiv. June 11, 1999.” Having no money for tickets, she and her friends snuck onto the roof of an apartment complex near the stadium from where all they saw was this tiny sliver of the stage. The music reached them doubled up in echo, which was about the same quality as most of her bootleg tapes anyway. And the bastards didn’t even play “Seek and Destroy.” “But who cares, amerikanche? Best night of my life to date.”

  At that, she floored the gas. We had emerged from the wide curves of the road onto a fairly straight stretch. A hundred meters ahead, the stretch ended in a thick mass of trees, which swayed in the beams. I think I yelled, but how could I be certain with the tires screeching, the engine roaring, the clattering of metal parts? Elif had slammed the brakes and we were skidding sideways. My head smashed into the ceiling, then into the headrest—a hard, rubberized plastic the car’s Russian constructors must have invested with a dual function: to stop your neck from snapping while simultaneously halving your skull.

  Then we were no longer in motion. The wipers scratched the dry windshield with a noise that raised my arm hairs, and Hetfield screamed for fuel and for fire. In sync Elif banged her head, in sync she joined him in the scream. “Yeah, oh yeah,” she hollered, and when she looked at me, the black of her pupils had swallowed up her red eyes. “I have no idea what he’s saying and I don’t care. But I relate.”

  We abandoned the Lada and sank into the forest. A rusty circle of light showed us the way—an ancient flashlight that danced in Elif’s hand. She held mine and pulled me forward, her palm burning and so sweaty that a few times I slipped from her grip.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked, and when she answered, the lightness of her voice sent shivers down my spine: “Across the border.”

  The wind howled in the treetops and with each gust the rain in their leaves fell to the ground in whooshing sheets. My soles picked up chunks of mud and so did Elif’s, but the heavier our shoes grew, the tighter she pulled me forward and the faster we walked.

  “I don’t have my passport,” I told her, and for a long time her laughter bounced through the trees and in my head. How many times had I fantasized about finding myself alone with her, away from other people’s eyes? Of holding her hand? But not like this. Listen, I wanted to say, and plant my heels in the mud and demand an explanation. And yet all I did was follow wherever she led, just happy that she was near.

  At the edge of the forest she turned the flashlight off. A half-moon broke through the clouds, then disappeared, but I could see ahead of us a clearing split by a tall barbed-wire fence. There were gates in the fence, for people and vehicles to pass, and large, rusted warnings that trespassers would be shot on sight.

  Elif stood on her toes and whispered in my ear, “Right there, a hole,” and pointed, as if I could see a thing. Her breath was vile from what she had smoked, but nonetheless to feel it so warm on my cheek made my knees go slack.

  The opening was where she said it would be. She lifted the fence for me, and once I’d crawled under, she followed with great agility. Like that, we were in Turkey. And not a soldier was around to deny us passage. Once again we hid in a forest; once again we emerged in a clearing. A few shepherd huts stood in our way, abandoned, desolate—an old Turkish hamlet; and to one side wooden frames for hay, bare and sticking up in the dark like Inquisition stakes.

  My heart was pounding, but now, with the adrenaline, all fear had turned to excitement. I pulled Elif closer. I whispered, “We snuck across the border!” She laughed, once again loudly, not afraid we could be heard. “Go, go,” she said, stuck the flashlight in my hand, and nudged me forward. Now I was leading and she followed. It felt good to
be in charge even for a short while. Finally, here was the kind of romance I had dreamed of.

  “Where now?” I turned to ask her. “Elif? Where now?”

  But she was gone. I waved the flashlight—at the collapsed earthen wall of a hut, at the tall grass that flowed with the gusts, at the ugly stakes, and at the forest from which we had emerged.

  “Elif?” I called more loudly. “Elif!”

  My heart turned inside out. My feet and fingers grew deathly cold. But I wouldn’t have the chance to wander—the roar of an engine exploded in the night, and soon a globe of blinding light had locked me in my tracks, like a hare.

  “Stay! Don’t move!” someone yelled in Bulgarian. I couldn’t lie on the ground, though I wanted to. I couldn’t even hold my hands up like the voice commanded. A giant man stepped from the light, an entirely black figure that grew larger the closer he neared. Captain Kosta, I thought, in my terror, in my confusion. “On your face,” the man screamed, and I recognized, undeniably, the Kalashnikov he carried. And so I took a bite of the mud, my nose an inch from the tips of his boots, and could say nothing, nothing at all, no matter how angrily he screamed.

  Like a feather he picked me up; like a feather he carried me to the idling jeep. He leaned me against the back fender, and now that the light was not in my eyes I saw him better: a young man, a border soldier in full combat uniform and gear, his face running with sweat and mud in a grotesque mask. With each wipe of his hand, the mask twisted, changed form so that it looked like he was wearing many faces. “Who are you?” he was saying, pointing the Kalashnikov my way. And then the sound of laughter from a hut made him freeze. He turned. “Come out,” he yelled. “Hands in the air. Come out or I’ll shoot!”

  The laughter chimed with the clarity of crystal glasses shattering to pieces. The sound of clapping hands drowned it momentarily and Elif stepped out from behind a ruined wall.