Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  “I’ll help you find the nestinari. I’ll make him tell me where they went.”

  She shook her head. “He’s right,” she said, almost shouting over the slashing of the rain. “I won’t bother you again.”

  I’m certain she had seen my kiss coming from a mile away and still she acted surprised.

  “Please don’t,” she said, but it was only after she’d let me kiss her a second time that she broke free from my grip and sank into the rain.

  FOUR

  “I REMEMBER I was pulling water from the well when the man called me, right there from the road. It hadn’t even been a full month since I’d returned to Klisura, so three years ago, then. I remember it was noontime and the end of May, but the sun was August sun already.”

  “Are you the teacher?” the man called, and Grandpa told him yes, he’d been a teacher once. Come into the shade, he told the man, under the trellis. A sweatier man Grandpa had never seen. He wore a sleeveless jacket, goatskin, with white and black spots. And his mustache was as thick as his forearms. “I’m so thirsty I could drink a river,” the man said, and Grandpa filled up the jar from the bucket. The man drank it and shook his head. “This isn’t helping.” He set the jar aside, plunged his head right in the bucket, and held it underwater so long Grandpa thought he might have drowned. When at last the man shot up, his lungs wheezed and he looked around, face flushed and mustache dripping muddy streams. “Teacher,” he said, “my girls are dying and you have got to save them.” He’d come all the way from the upper hamlet, right over the hill somewhere, to take Grandpa back with him to their sickbed.

  “Let me guess,” Grandpa told him, “your girls are burning with the nestinari fever?”

  The man’s eyes turned to saucers. “I know,” Grandpa told him, “because for two weeks now, like a circus bear, I’ve been parading among the houses of sick girls. And not one of them is really burning and they’re all acting.”

  But this old grandma, the man stuttered, this old Christian woman had seen his daughters and she’d recognized in their eyes Saint Kosta’s fever. “This old Christian woman,” Grandpa answered, “is sad and senile. She knows nothing of Saint Kosta.”

  “But you do, teacher,” the man said. “That’s why I’ve come to get you.”

  Grandpa asked the man if he’d called a proper doctor to examine his daughters and the man told him he didn’t trust proper doctors. Not since they’d let his wife die in childbirth, in the town hospital at that.

  “I’m sorry, kardash,” Grandpa told him. “I can’t help you.”

  The man watched him, stunned. He shook his head. He wasn’t leaving.

  “That’s fine by me,” Grandpa said, then returned to the bench and pretended to read his paper.

  “Teacher, if it were for my sake, I wouldn’t be asking you again. But it’s for my girls I’m begging. If you too are a father—”

  Right about here, Grandpa’s fuse blew a little. It had been months since he’d last heard from me and who knew if he’d ever hear my voice again. So he shouted. He asked the man what he knew about him being a father and this and that, and overall he brought much shame to our name that day.

  The man said nothing in response. He left the yard like a clobbered dog, a trail of muddy water in the dust behind him. A week later, Grandpa heard, his girls died.

  * * *

  I had returned to Grandpa’s room still dazed from my kiss with Elif—no, two kisses!—to find him stretched in bed, his eyes closed and arms folded across his chest. “I don’t feel well,” he said, without looking. He’d taken some pills already, but could I please measure his blood pressure? I did. The reading was alarmingly high. So I told him to lie still and let the pills work their magic.

  “I worked myself into a fury, my boy. I said things I shouldn’t have.”

  “You think?”

  For a while we listened to what had eased into a drizzle outside.

  “I don’t care what its nationality is,” Grandpa said to break the silence. “This rain depresses me to no end and gets my tongue wild.”

  “You think?” I said, and was this close to apologizing, for I too had said things I shouldn’t have. Instead, I went to change into dry clothes and back in his room I took his blood pressure again. Lower, but still in the danger zone.

  “What you said to Elif,” I asked, “about her hurting me to get to her father, about her father hurting her to get to you. Do you believe it?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. I’ve been wrong more often than I care to remember.”

  I listened quietly, not daring to interrupt, while he told me the story of the sick girls and of their father.

  “To this day,” he said in the end, “I’m convinced I could have saved them. If only I’d gone to their hut. I would have recognized the fever.”

  I knew I should spare him the questions, wait until tomorrow when he felt better. And yet I couldn’t help it. “The nestinari fever?”

  He blinked a moment, munching on some invisible seeds. Then he pushed himself upright and, amid the creaking of the bedsprings, spoke: “Take the meter. I want to show you something.”

  FIVE

  THE CLASSROOM SMELLED SWEET, like aging books. And musty—like feet, rubber galoshes, socks that had somehow remained wet for many years. And rotting wood, and straw, and mouse urine—at least that’s what Grandpa said mouse urine smelled like. I’d come down to the first floor only once before; there was nothing for me to see here besides three rows of little desks, a larger one up front for the teacher, tilted to one side with a broken leg, an ancient stove, a blackboard with individual letters still legible under the dust, and books—piles and piles like old, crooked prisoners lined up against one wall awaiting their execution.

  It goes without saying that with each new book Grandpa slammed on the tiny desk before me, I sneezed. He’d collected them, one by one from the piles, with the ease of a masterful librarian. At last, he lowered himself on the chair beside me—the two of us little schoolboys ready for a lesson.

  “Now take my blood pressure again,” he said, and I did, a third time.

  It was better, but there was still room for improvement. He nodded. “Let’s start with some light reading, then,” and he untied the red strings that held shut the folder before us. Dust rose, bitter like medicine.

  “‘Man on the Moon,’” Grandpa read, taking out a newspaper clipping. “One giant leap for mankind, one tiny article in a Communist paper. ‘The Bones of Tsar Kaloyan Unearthed.’ ‘The Oldest European Gold Treasure Dug Up in Varna’ … Here, read this.”

  “‘May 1988,’” I read from a page with torn edges. “‘A Fainting Epidemic in Tanzania.’” Twenty children in a school in Tabora, while taking their final-year exams, had all been stricken by a fit of mass fainting—a common occurrence for Tanzania, the article assured. There had been a great deal of crying and screaming and running while the exam unfolded, and then the fainting fits had come.

  Grandpa fished out another clipping. This one from October 1983. “A Fainting Epidemic in the West Bank.”

  “Creative titles,” I said, and he sneered. In March 1983, the article read, more than nine hundred Palestinian schoolgirls and a handful of women soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces had fainted in the West Bank. A subsequent Palestinian investigation had determined that while some instances could have been the result of an Israeli chemical agent, the majority of the cases had been purely psychosomatic in nature.

  “Purely psychosomatic,” Grandpa said, and traced the line with his finger for emphasis.

  He waved another clipping in my face and I sneezed once more in his. “‘A Laughter Epidemic in Tanganyika.’ January 1962. Mass hysteria at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha.” The fit of laughter had started with three girls and before sunset it had affected two-thirds of all students and not a single teacher. By March the school was closed down, the students shipped home and with them the epidemic. More schools, more girls, thousand
s of people—all laughing. And with the laughter pain, fainting, flatulence—Grandpa tapped the word with his crooked finger—respiratory problems, rashes, attacks of crying, random screaming.

  “In Tanganyika?” I repeated, and—God help me, because I couldn’t—burst out laughing.

  I could see he too was fighting. To no avail. Soon we laughed together, unreasonably long, and for a moment I felt as if I would burst at my seams and all the troubles that were crushing me like stones—Elif, Orhan, the sick little girl, my sick grandfather, my student loans—would roll away and I’d be free. “We’re doomed,” I cried. “To flatulence and random sneezing.”

  “The sneezing plague of Klisura,” Grandpa said, and wiped the tears in his eyes. “Saint Kosta help us!”

  He closed the folder and we both gasped for air.

  “Now then,” he said when we had calmed down a little, and opened a book. What caught my attention right away was an illustration—or rather a reproduction of a medieval engraving—of men and women, in what I’d say was Bavarian attire, their bodies twisted in odd, unnatural positions, their faces contorted: eyes popping, tongues sticking out, and locks of hair spilling in all directions like fire.

  “Like a true scholar,” Grandpa said, “he studies the picture first.”

  A picture, I gave him the old cliché, was worth a thousand words.

  “And what words is this one worth?”

  I struggled to decipher the caption—Bulgarian in its old style, pre-1940s.

  “The Dancing Plague of 1518,” I said at last, and felt a great sense of accomplishment. But he motioned me to keep on reading. And so I tried, then I pretended to be reading, moving my lips silently as I skipped over those letters whose sounds I didn’t know.

  “How interesting,” I said at last. There had been a dancing plague in 1518. An epidemic.

  “You think?” Grandpa said, then seemed to take mercy on my ineptness. “It started in July,” he said. A single woman danced feverishly through the streets of Strasbourg. For six days straight. Within a week her madness had infected three dozen people; within a month—four hundred. The local doctors called for bleeding of the sick. They thought it was “hot blood” that was causing the affliction. Instead, the authorities brought musicians, built a stage, encouraged the dancing any way they could. Only through dancing day and night, they said, would the sick be cured. Before the month was over, more than twenty dancers had died from fatigue, from heart attacks.

  Grandpa traced a line of text in the book. “‘They danced in such fervor their ribs snapped like sticks.’” He flipped the page to reveal another illustration: two men fighting to restrain a woman, and two more men behind them, and two more men—all struggling to contain wild, dancing women.

  “The town of Aachen, North Rhine–Westphalia region in Germany,” Grandpa said. “A favored residence of Charlemagne. And later…”

  “… the place of coronation of the kings of Germany,” I finished.

  He nodded. “And one of the earliest recorded epidemics. 1374.” He swept his palm across the crumpled page. In short, this dancing mania was quite the fashion in medieval Europe. It affected thousands, regardless of their age or nationality or gender. It was believed that the surest way to ward off the fever was to play music while the sickly danced. But the music only attracted larger crowds.

  And so I asked him the most logical of questions. “What was the cause?”

  He licked his lips. “Some said bewitchment. Others believed the dancing was a curse.” He fumbled through another book. “From this here holy fool.”

  The drawing showed a light-haired man in a boiling cauldron. A haloed martyr, no doubt, who held a Bible in one hand. A rooster perched on the Bible. In his other hand, like a scepter, the martyr held a palm leaf, or maybe a bird feather—as large as a stork’s—I couldn’t rightly tell.

  I read the caption. “Saint Vitus.”

  They called the dancing mania Saint Vitus’s dance. And they crowned him patron of all dancers and epileptics Europe-wide. Each year on his feast day in June, large crowds danced before his statue to seek relief and absolution from their sins. He’d died for his faith, the poor soul. The Romans boiled him in tar.

  Gently Grandpa closed the book.

  “They call it chorea minor now,” he said. The rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements that affected one’s face, feet, hands. “Then there is this.”

  He rummaged through a third tome, bookmarked with pieces of yellowed paper, until he found a new drawing, this time of seeds and spores and pollens and other peculiarities of the plant anatomy I couldn’t really name.

  “Claviceps purpurea, or ergot fungus. It grows on rye or wheat or barley when the weather is cloudy and humid for weeks on end. So the northern climates, then. You poison your body with that stuff too long and you’ve got yourself ergotism.”

  And what would such joy entail?

  Spasms, mania, psychosis. Vomiting and seizures, LSD-like hallucinations. Gangrene.

  LSD-like? I asked, and he said I’d heard him right. And gangrene. With great dexterity he returned to the previous book, showed me the drawing of another saint.

  “They called the gangrenous symptoms of the illness Saint Anthony’s fire, because the monks of Saint Anthony’s order were very good at treating the condition. But not everyone was this compassionate and understanding.”

  Another book was pulled out of the pile. Another sneeze, another story. But this one—to my surprise—I’d heard before. In fact, I’d studied it in school, in America.

  In the winter of 1692 two little girls, cousins from Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts, were seized by a strange affliction—the girls screamed, babbled, twisted themselves in odd positions, threw objects across the room. When a doctor found no scientific explanation for their illness, the rumors spread. The girls had been bewitched. Fair enough, these things happened back in those superstitious days, but who was the bewitcher? In no time more girls in the village fell prey to the same affliction. And in no time, the perpetrators had been named. The sick cousins themselves identified their tormentors—three local women who, or so the girls claimed, had summoned Satan to lock them down in a demonic spell. The women were put on trial and promptly two of them were hanged. By the end of the year a hundred and fifty residents of Salem Village had been accused of witchcraft; a great many of them had been excommunicated, executed, and buried in shallow common graves.

  “Sound familiar?” Grandpa asked, and fixed me with his teary eyes.

  “Well, sure. I mean, not really. Care to explain?”

  He searched across the desk and flipped open another book.

  Three years before the Salem witch trials an Irish washerwoman was executed in Boston, accused of bewitching the children of the wealthy family she worked for. The case, not surprisingly, gathered serious publicity, and one Cotton Mather, a very influential New England Puritan minister, even included it in his book on witchcraft and possession.

  Grandpa traced a line in the book, right under the drawing of the poor woman hanging from a tree. “Cotton Mather,” he said. “I’ve always wondered what kind of human name this is. Ivan, I can understand. Or Boris. Or Stoyan. But Cotton Mather?”

  “Forget the name,” I cried. “Finish the story.”

  “One cold January night of 1692,” Grandpa said, opening another book from the pile, thinner than all the others, “the two little cousins, Betty and Abigail—now these names I can almost tolerate—were playing fortune-tellers in the kitchen.”

  They’d asked a slave in the house to teach them magic and were summoning ghosts in mirrors, trying to see what kind of men they’d marry when they grew up, that kind of girly nonsense. The slave—her name was Tituba and she was Indian or African or Caribbean maybe—had cooked the girls some “witch’s stew” to eat. What was in the stew only God knew, but one can imagine how it agreed with the little darlings. Before the evening was over they were seeing pretty colors and dashing men and coffins in the
mirror.

  So, as these things often went, the two girls told their little friends about the game of magic; they most likely shared Tituba’s witch’s stew as well. Before long, little Betty had begun to neglect her errands, could not concentrate one bit in church, was restless at the dinner table, and when her father tried to say the Paternoster she screamed and barked like a bloodhound. Once she even hurled a Bible across the room right at his face.

  “Guess,” Grandpa told me, “what her poor father’s occupation was in Salem Village?”

  It didn’t take great flights of the imagination to guess it right. He was the village minister.

  “And so he thought he’d cure his sickly girl with prayer. Until the demon swallowed her whole, that is.” He leaned over the booklet and read. “From the writings of John Hale, a witness to the affliction. The girls looked like they were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves … Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move a heart of stone to sympathize with them.”

  A doctor visited the girls. And, unable to find a scientific explanation, he labeled little Betty gripped by the Evil Hand.

  “Gripped,” Grandpa said, and looked me in the eye.

  “Gripped,” I repeated, and heard my voice dipping, my throat getting dry.

  But who had bewitched the girls? Because back in those days of Puritan New England life, witchcraft was a crime of grave proportions, and every crime must have a culprit.

  “So what do the precious girls do, you think?” Grandpa asked. “The darling centers of absolute attention—in the house of a despotic father, in a village where the king of England has forbidden merriment, music, and dancing, where going to church is mandatory for three hours twice a week and only the Bible can be read, again, again, again? The girls cry out, Tituba did it! And at the fall of a dagger Tituba is seized. Ay, masters, I did it, ay!” Grandpa attempted his best seventeenth-century American slave impersonation. “The Devil made me. The Devil is among us, here in Salem.”