Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  To prove that the girls were bewitched, Tituba baked a witch’s cake—rye meal and urine from the sick girls—and fed it to a dog. If the dog got ill, which naturally it did, then the girls had been put under an evil spell. “Rye meal,” Grandpa said, and let that hang in the air with great severity.

  And after this Tituba, herself given attention for the first time, spoke of demons who took the form of rats, dogs, wolves, and yellow birds. Of flying about the village on brooms. No doubt she too had been snacking on the witch’s stew. And if Tituba was going down, why not drag the entire world with her? “I’m not alone!” she said in her confession, and pointed at one Sarah Osborne. That woman, Tituba said, was holding in her possession a devilish creature. Its head that of a girl, two long legs and wings, like a stork’s.

  “Yes, yes,” the two little girls cried. “There are others who are guilty!” And so the naming farce began. And all across the village more little girls, and even women—lustful for attention and for power—began to fall down in demonic fits and sing the names of their guilty tormentors. Only yesterday they had been faceless and without a voice. Today they held the lives of others between their teeth. Vengeance was theirs.

  For the people of Salem Village did not get along one bit. They argued about land, and property lines, and grazing rights. And the Reverend, poor Betty’s father, had taken land and money he shouldn’t have and he was favoring some families at the expense of others.

  So they used bewitchment as an excuse to incriminate their enemies. And the mysterious witch’s stew had poisoned only some of the girls (or maybe it was the spoiled rye?), while others had only acted sick, desperate for power and attention. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place with an eerie accuracy. In the same way now, hundreds of years later, thousands of kilometers away, the poor, tortured girls of Klisura were rebelling against their fathers.

  “And the girls from the upper hamlet?” I said. “What was the stew that got them sick?”

  “Two years ago,” Grandpa said, and searched through the folder of clippings, “I found this in the paper.” He laid the article before me gently, with fear, as if he were laying down a newly hatched chick.

  It had grown very cold around us and I realized the sun had almost set behind the hills. Something rustled in the corner; the beams above us creaked. Shivering, I strained my eyes to read the headline.

  “‘Five Dead in Greece from West Nile Fever.’”

  “Fifty kilometers from here,” Grandpa said. For him what had happened three years ago was tragically simple. The girls had gone to the river to see the baby storks and gotten bitten by mosquitoes. The disease came with the storks, from Africa. One mosquito bit a sick stork, then it bit a healthy girl. The sisters must have gotten sick with fever. But Aysha and the others didn’t. And yet the rumors spread and was there ever a little girl who didn’t crave attention? In a village like Klisura? With parents like these? So they started acting. And then Baba Mina came and fed kerosene to the fire.

  “Grandma Mina?” I said. So she was the hag Elif had told me about? The one who’d inspected the girls, in Elif’s yard, munching one clove of garlic after another? The poor old woman in black I’d seen at the bus station, whose swollen feet her husband had massaged? How many times had we come back from their house with buckets of fertilizer for our yard? How many times had she treated us to mint tea and stale cookies? Baba Mina, our very own Tituba.

  “I know I could have saved them,” Grandpa said, then returned the article to the folder and piled on top of it book after book. Watching him, I was reminded of something I’d learned in school, one of the cruel ways in which the witches of Salem had been put to death—the victim was crushed with stones, but gradually, each new rock carefully placed atop the one before until their collective weight grew unbearable, fatal.

  “If only I’d gone with their father. I would have recognized they weren’t acting. I would’ve made him call a doctor.”

  “Grandpa,” I began, but stopped. What could I say to make him feel better? I reached across the desk and covered his hand, cold, like a stone. But mine was warm.

  “So this explains the fire dancers, then? Saint Kosta’s madness?”

  He shook his head. “It explains what’s happening in the village now. This ugly farce. But the fire dancers—” He stopped for a moment and his eyes drifted across the room as if he could see them, one after the other, jumping among the desks and vanishing into the walls. “They all went away, my boy. What good is it to seek them? They are no more.”

  “Were you really their leader?”

  “I was a caretaker, yes. Never a leader.”

  “And who’s to care for Aysha and the other girls? Who’s to help them?”

  He pulled his hand away from mine.

  “In the Salem trials,” he said, “they would blindfold the accused witch and bring her before her accuser, the so-called victim, thrashing in idiotic fits. And they would force the witch to touch the victim, who then conveniently grew calm at once. You see, they’d say, the touch of the guilty hand caused the venom to rush back to the witch from whom it’d come. My boy,” he said, and stood up in the gloom, “I don’t want that venom back in my blood.”

  SIX

  THE UNTHINKABLE HAD HAPPENED: the rain had stopped. I lay in bed, my ears ringing, and listened to a thousand noises that seemed so new—the scurrying of mice in the attic, the buzzing of crickets in the yard, the flapping of stork wings, and the rushing of water down the road, down the hills where trees rustled with the wind. I’d begun to compose a letter in my head—to no one in particular—hoping to give my thoughts some order. But my head was an oven into which someone was pumping gas and any minute now the spark would flash—I must help Aysha, I reasoned, because helping her was the decent thing to do. Because it was barbaric to watch the torture of a child and not interfere. Because if I helped Aysha, Elif would thank me. Elif would love me if I helped the little girl.

  “What you said earlier, do you believe it?”

  Grandpa spoke from the threshold. In the light of the oil lamp he carried, his face burned like a wick; his shadow flowed behind him like a river and though he was old and wrinkled I thought of Lada, the goddess of youth and beauty, and then, once more, of Elif.

  “Do you really believe I value land more than people? That I choose not to help the girls because of their father?”

  “I’m a baker’s shovel, Grandpa,” I told him, only half as a joke. I could turn this way or that depending on whose hands held me. One moment I believed one thing, the next another. But I’m not sure he heard me.

  “I first came to teach in Klisura when I was thirty-three,” he said, and, cradling the lamp in his arthritic hands, he sat at the foot of my bed. “Right from my first day here, one predicament became very clear: there was no school. So I built it. And then another: there were no students. So I set forth to find them. I still remember two little twin boys. Lived up a hill with their father. Shepherds. I found them outside their hut, washing sheep bells in a trough of milk. So the bells might sing more sweetly, they told me. I sat in the grass and watched them, two boys and their father, dip bell after bell in yellow milk. I didn’t ask them where their mother was. The sun was setting when they hung the bells to dry across a wooden framework behind the hut. The father picked up his boys, one in each hand, and let them shake the framework. The bells rang and their ringing rolled down the hill and up another where other shepherds rang other bells. Soon the whole Strandja was ringing, as far south as Turkey and even Greece.

  “My boy,” Grandpa said, staring into the fire locked behind the glass, “an old man’s mind is a mountain, each memory a milk-washed bell. It’s true, God holds the future, which is uncertain and unknown, so let him hold it. But the old man holds the past. The past is certain. No god can summon it before him and rearrange it at his will. The old man can. An old man walks hill to hill and rings the bells, and bids to appear in their sound the long-gone days—a day from fifty yea
rs back as loud as another not even a fortnight old. And so the gods grow jealous of the old man. They hold the Cup of Lethe to his thirsty lips. Tempted, he drinks. His feet grow weak and then he limps from hill to hill. His feet give way. Gone is the old man’s strength to ring the bells.

  “It’s been too long a silence,” Grandpa said, and closed his eyes. “I want to shake the wooden frame. I want my head to ring, from hill to hill across the Strandja.”

  His eyes were muddy when he blinked them open, the kind of mud I’d learned to fear.

  “Grandpa,” I said, “lie down. It was a hard day. Get some rest.”

  But he cradled the lamp and the fire and when he looked my way I knew it wasn’t me he was seeing.

  “I was seventeen that spring,” he said. “May 1944. It had been a bad winter, so bad the Danube froze in places and a fever crawled in across the ice from Romania.”

  When the ice melted, the fever spread. Left and right people were burning. Children and women began to die. Whole families fled to seek shelter as far south as the Balkan Mountains. One dawn, Grandpa’s cousin—he was a year older—came to his house, panting. “Pull up your britches,” he cried, “and run with me to the square. They’re recruiting men for heroic business.” The elders from their village had met the elders from two others. They had decided to assemble a band of kalushari and send them from one house to another to chase the fever back whence it had come. When his cousin said kalushari, Grandpa’s heart leapt like a kid goat. Had he not seen them as a little boy, passing outside his grandfather’s house one morning on their way to cure the sick? Men like mountains. Bells on their sandals to raise a proper ruckus and scare the demons off. Their britches embroidered with silver and those silver threads flashing like bolts of lightning. Their shirts white like goose feathers, and on their chests bloodred kerchiefs like flapping wings. Daggers in their sashes, sabers and sickles in their hands, and sharpened cudgels with their bases shod in iron. Their eyes spilling fire, their jaws clenched so hard you could hear the bone crunching. And fresh herbs on their fur caps—smelling so sweet your eyes watered. One man walking in the steps of the other, grave and quiet, greeting no one and speaking to no one, not even to the little boy, running behind them. Sickness chasers, death hunters. And did Grandpa not remember how the maidens had watched them, misty-eyed, their long lashes flittering so quickly they raised the dust off the road in thick puffs? Filling their nostrils with the smell of the fresh herbs, with the men’s sweat, licking and biting their red lips? And their hearts thrashing so hard under their plump bosoms that even he, the little boy, had heard their knocking and taken fright, though with pleasure?

  “No girl can resist the kalushari,” his cousin told him, as if Grandpa didn’t know this already, and they flew off to the square. “If they choose me,” his cousin said, “I’m taking Kera. So what if she’s getting married? And that Sevda you’ve been pining over, she’ll kiss your feet if they choose you.”

  “It’s true, my boy,” Grandpa said sweetly. “She was a beautiful girl, my Sevda. Lovely smile, eyes, bosom. But she didn’t want me. ‘Look at yourself,’ she’d say, and her friends would giggle. ‘My grandmother’s mustache is thicker than the moss on your lip. A peach’s moss is thicker. Grow a beard, man up a little. Then come again to ask me.’”

  That morning all the boys from Grandpa’s village gathered on the square. Only those older ones, who had run up to the woods with the Communist partisans, only they were missing. And the girls too came that morning, those devils, to ogle them. There was his cousin’s Kera, though she was getting married, and there was his sweet, dear Sevda, eating a fresh pretzel and licking her red lips.

  The boys formed a long line, shoulder to shoulder, and this giant, this colossus of a man, stood before them. His britches were embroidered with silver; his shirt was whiter than snowdrop petals. So white, Grandpa’s eyes hurt to watch him. Geranium, dock, and wormwood adorned the giant’s fur cap, and in his hand he brandished a cudgel, sharpened like a spear, with bells on its top and its bottom cast in copper. Three times the giant smacked the cudgel on the ground to get their attention, and three times the cudgel sang, its bells ringing.

  “I am the vatafin,” the colossus told them, “leader of the kalushari. My father was a vatafin, and my grandfather in Romania, he too was a vatafin. I’ve come here to choose six of you, muttonheads, the strongest, so we can go after the fever and wrestle her down, that serpent, and chop her three heads off.”

  The village elders were there on the square and so was the mayor. The gendarme had come to see if this circus was perchance partisan-related. Back then the tsarists were awfully scared of the partisans and they could sense that a bad storm was brewing. Even the priest had showed up fuming. Godless pagans, he called the people, and waved his iron crucifix in the air; but the women chased him away, the righteous, for hadn’t he left their children dying?

  Then the boys were given each a pick or a shovel. “Dig a pit,” the colossus ordered, and they dug a hole, one meter deep and five meters long, just like he wanted. A cart arrived full of chopped wood, and they built a fire there in the pit and when the flames burst out like so many tongues of the plague-fever, the boys crossed themselves three times, slack in the knees with terror.

  “Whatever you do,” his cousin whispered in Grandpa’s ear, “don’t shame yourself. The women are watching.”

  “My beautiful Sevda,” Grandpa said, and his eyes moved left, right, left, as if she were skipping lightly before him. “The Fever took her three months later. Her smile, eyes, bosom—food for the maggots. We really were muttonheads, my boy, on the square that morning, standing before a pit spitting fire. Fever slayers and death chasers. He-goats with their balls bursting with pride and desire.”

  There, look, see the vatafin gripping his cudgel. See how he sprints to the pit, and pole-vaults it, right through the tall flames. His body—a steel blade, which the flames harden. Fever, he’s saying, bow low before me. You can’t scorch that which fire has scorched already.

  One after the other, the boys take the cudgel, run to the pit, and try to vault it. One boy falls left, one falls right, one drops straight in the fire, and when the men pull him out his bottom is flaming. They beat the flames down with their fur caps, and the girls are laughing, pointing, and clapping.

  “Poor soul, he’s done for,” his cousin tells Grandpa. And they both know it—the lame son of the miller will have a better chance of getting married than the boy with the charred bottom.

  “Saint Elijah,” Grandpa’s cousin prays to his name saint when it’s his turn to hold the cudgel. “Don’t let some fire shame me.” And he runs, digs the pole in the deep pit, shoots his legs forward, and lands on the other side safely, the fifth boy to do so in twenty.

  One more boy left to be chosen and it’s not even Grandpa’s turn to jump yet. So each time someone new takes the cudgel Grandpa prays to Saint Elijah. “Saint Elijah, you’re not my name saint, but if you let the fire pass me through, I’ll slay my grandfather’s rooster to give you kurban. Saint Elijah, if you make sweet Sevda love me, just once if you let me kiss those thick lips, I’ll slay my grandmother’s hens and chickens, the whole coop.”

  Then this boy, older, almost twenty, short like a pea but a strong fellow, he took the cudgel and leapt over the pit and through the fire and that was that. The sixth boy had been chosen.

  “No,” I cried, and threw away my blanket. There was no way this ended the story.

  “From where I’m standing,” Grandpa said, and nodded, “I can see the vatafin and the six boys, on the other side of the pit, through a curtain of fire. And the fire flows upward and turns their shapes to liquid. So I say, ‘Saint Elijah, you just watch me.’ And I say it out loud, so everyone hears it.”

  Muddy-eyed, Grandpa sprang up to his feet. Muddy-eyed, he looked about the room. He was there, on the square, a young boy ready to leap over the fire.

  “Grandpa,” I whispered, “watch out for the oil lamp.” But h
e didn’t hear me.

  “So I dig my heels down in the ground,” he almost shouted, and stomped the floor, “and I run like a hala and I leap over the pit and the tall flames—no cudgels, no sticks, no canes needed. You just watch me, Elijah, my arms wings and my feet carts of fire. Pull me down, Elijah, if you can. If you dare—stop me!”

  “The lamp, Grandpa!” And when I pulled the lamp out of his hands he blinked, suddenly sober, and all the years came rushing back.

  “So they took you with the kalushari?” I said, and threw a blanket on his shoulders.

  “How could they not take me?”

  “And did you give a kurban for Saint Elijah? Did you make Sevda love you and did you kiss her?”

  “I gave him a kurban, my boy,” he said, and his voice fell lower.

  Day after day, he gave the saint one offering after another. He slaughtered roosters and chicks, and lambs and cows even. He burned barns and houses. He was up in the woods by then, with the Communist fighters, three months after jumping the fire. And they were raiding hamlets and sheep pens, and their brains were aflame with this new fever. And only when his cousin came up to find him, only when he said “They’re burying Sevda tomorrow,” did Grandpa go back to the village. But he didn’t kiss her. They didn’t even let him open the coffin because of her sickness. And her father came to him when it was over, when the earth had been piled up black and steaming, and said, “Weren’t you with the kalushari? Why didn’t you save her?” And Grandpa told him, “You muttonhead, that’s all opium for the masses,” and couldn’t run fast enough back to his comrades, to give Elijah another kurban, bloodier this time so the saint would remember him by it forever.

  What sadness overcame me to hear this. To picture my grandfather burning barns and houses. Raiding sheep pens, stealing lambs and fleeces. A Communist fighter. A bandit. Gone was the image of Captain Kosta, of the heroic rebel.