I recalled a story Grandpa once told me when I was little. The story of how one day in the dugout he’d met a man, older than him, a schoolteacher from a nearby village. From his pocket, the man had pulled out a notebook. “You seem like a fool and fools are lucky,” the man told Grandpa. “So if I die and you live, take this to my wife and children.” Inside the book were letters, and between the letters the man had stuffed tiny petals of flowers, leaves of crane’s bill and basil. Then he picked up a lump of black earth—it was an underground dugout they hid in—and smeared the mud on the first page. “For my children,” he told Grandpa, “to see what I’ve seen.” A month later the tsarists mowed down the man, and when that September the Communists seized control of Bulgaria, Grandpa found the man’s widow and gave her the notebook. But the widow wouldn’t take it. “I have no use for words and mud and dry leaves. I want a husband and my boys want a father.” And she forced Grandpa to take two sacks of schoolbooks that had belonged to her husband.
Grandpa read the man’s letters and then his schoolbooks. Then he hitched a ride to Pleven, walked straight to the university, never you mind that the semester was already half over, and signed up to study to be a teacher. Never you mind that he lacked a proper academic background. Hadn’t he been a partisan fighter, and wasn’t this more background than anyone ever needed?
Now in the light of the oil lamp, with the babble of water rushing down hills and dirt roads, and thunder booming across the border, I could see the barns burning and my grandfather gripping the torch that had set them on fire. And I wondered, was it only the shameful stories he had never told me; and if so, was this the reason he’d never mentioned the nestinari and the tree with their skulls in its branches?
“For a whole month,” Grandpa was saying, “we had been walking from one village to another, curing the sick and chasing the Fever.”
The vatafin led them and so they followed in his footsteps, they the chosen ones, the kalushari. All day long they kept quiet, and if they spoke it was always in whispers. They didn’t make the sign of the cross and when they ate a meal they didn’t bless it. They marched in pairs, Grandpa’s cousin beside him, in a chain that no stranger could break. They were not allowed to tread water. Why? Who could tell you? If they came to a small stream, they leapt over it with their cudgels; if they reached a river, they waited for a cart to take them across it. They sent a scout, the kalauz they called him, to let each village know they were coming and to look out for other bands of kalushari. Because such was the custom—no two bands were allowed to cross paths. “And if they do?” Grandpa asked the vatafin, and the vatafin pulled out his dagger and began to sharpen it.
“If only you could’ve seen me, my boy, prouder than a rooster. My chest bursting under the white shirt.”
Every ten steps Grandpa would touch the daggers in his sash and rub their handles. He’d smack the cudgel against his thigh so the bells would ring, like beautiful girls calling him to their bedside. His blood was turning sour with desire. What did he care that people were sick and perishing? All he cared about was how the women looked at him when the vatafin led them into the house of the dying. They’d lay the sick man on a rug on the floor and gather around him, and one of the boys would blow up a bagpipe and play the rachenitsa so loudly Grandpa’s teeth needled. They’d dance in circles around the sick man, slowly at first and then faster, and they’d hold the rug by its corners and toss the man up in the air a few times. Then the vatafin would break up the circle to rub the dying man with vinegar from head to toe. How the room reeked by then! A herd of rams sweating, jumping, and dancing. Then they’d leap over the sick man three times, bellowing, bleating, and braying. Give me a woman! Grandpa would shout, but no one heard him. And what the others shouted, no one could tell you. The vatafin would place a jug by the sick man, a jug full of cold water and fresh herbs, and the bagpipe would strike a new song, the florichika, so fast and fierce Grandpa went through a new pair of sandals every two days. They danced in circles until floor merged with walls and ceiling and the vatafin commanded the oldest boy to break the jug with his cudgel. And if the sick man jumped on his feet and ran out of the room when the jug shattered, if one or two of the boys fainted, that was a good sign. They’d chased away the Fever.
The sun was setting that day and they were rushing to get back to their village before the dark fell. Such was the custom. They had sent the scout ahead to make sure their passage was clear, but what good was he in their hurry? And sure enough, just at a crossroad, they met another band of kalushari, young boys like them, from some other village, like them armed and stupid. What really happened, Grandpa couldn’t tell me exactly. Excitement overcame him. A great rush. One minute they were marching, quiet, the next they were throwing themselves at strangers, flinging daggers to slash them. Sure enough they slashed them. And they got slashed. When at last the commotion settled, when their blood cooled off a little, they sat down, the two bands together, to assess the damage. Only, one of the other band’s boys wasn’t moving, and when they looked closer—from his chest there stuck out a dagger. Someone whispered it was Grandpa’s cousin who’d killed him. Someone else said he’d seen Grandpa drive in the dagger. Was it him, was it his cousin, was it another boy—who could remember? And Grandpa’s head was splitting and his stomach was turning. So he retched in the bushes and his cousin followed. “If we return to the village,” he said, “they’ll hang us. For brigands like us, there is only one place now.” And they ran through the bushes and up into the woods and they joined the Communist fighters.
After this Grandpa was quiet. The bells had stopped ringing, and he was at rest in their silence. But I wasn’t; not after he’d gone back to his room, not after I’d seen dawn over the mountains. Why was my grandfather so stubborn, so reluctant to get involved with the nestinari again? If he recognized the whole thing as nothing but a charade, why not play along and help Aysha?
The imam sang for prayer and my thoughts swerved in a sleepless eddy. Forget the ringing bells, I muttered. Grandpa had tried to tell me something else with his story: don’t bloody your hands with superstition, stay away from the madness. I tossed, turned, hid under the blanket. If I helped Elif find the nestinari, I was betraying Grandpa. But I was also helping Aysha. And if I helped Aysha, wouldn’t Elif love me? Who in Klisura, other than Grandpa, knew how to cook a stew for witches?
SEVEN
IF MY KNUCKLES MADE ANY NOISE rapping on that door, I couldn’t hear it. Nor could I hear my own heart pounding, the wind gusting, and all through Klisura the broken window frames of empty houses knocking like lids of coffins, opening and closing shut. What I heard was these noises together in one big, messy loudness that grew messier, louder. One moment the moon shone and anyone could have seen me—slouched like a thief at the threshold—the next the sky was thick clouds and the world nothing but loudness.
“Open up, neighbors. It’s the teacher’s boy. The American.”
Was it footsteps I heard on the other side or a voice calling? I couldn’t be certain. So I knocked harder and then the door opened and Dyado Dacho stood before me.
“Good evening, Dyado,” I greeted. “I’ve come to see Baba Mina.”
All day before this I had been restless. And Grandpa had taken notice.
“I don’t know what you’re up to,” he’d told me at dinner, “but I’ll tell you this much: don’t do it. Not for your own sake, but for Elif and Aysha’s. When someone tells you his dog bites, you listen. You don’t lend the dog your throat to see how deep its teeth can sink in. So now I tell you—don’t test how deep the imam can bite us.”
After dinner, I washed the dishes and waited for Grandpa to finish his smoke, say goodnight, and retreat to his room. Then I climbed out my window, thumped into the cassis bush underneath it like a sack of crab apples, and limped across the yard, down the road, and to our neighbors’.
“It’s me, Grandpa, the American boy,” I told Dyado Dacho now from the threshold, and he raised the oil lamp
to see me better. The light flickered, almost went out with the wind, and he pulled it back fearfully, as if he wouldn’t know how to relight the fire once he’d lost it.
“I’ve come alone,” I told him. “Grandpa went to bed already.”
I almost saw his mustache droop in disappointment, and for a moment I thought he’d shoo me away. But he coughed up a Come in now, hurry! with the rasp of someone who hadn’t spoken in many hours, and slammed the door shut behind me.
The noise of the world shattered into its component parts. I could hear distinctly the grains of sand from the road knocking outside like knuckles, Dyado Dacho’s stuffed nose whistling, and my heart beating right in my ears.
“Goes to bed with the chickens and hides like a chicken,” Dyado Dacho said of Grandpa, and led me down a narrow hallway. “Maybe he’ll start laying eggs soon. But I’d hide too if I played backgammon as lousy as he plays it. If I lost all my bets and never paid up.”
“Does he owe you money?” I managed, following closely. The old man barked, coughed, laughed—whatever that noise he made was really.
“I don’t rightly remember. But don’t you dare tell him!”
The corridor seemed to grow narrower, the planks at our feet louder in their creaking. The deeper into the house we waded, the more the smells of naphthalene and mold thickened. The mold, I’d come to realize on a previous visit, was from the house, its own smell; the naphthalene was from Dyado Dacho. In every pocket of his wool jacket he kept a mothball and he bragged boldly that he hadn’t seen a moth in thirty years. “Not since the devils ate up my best suit,” he’d told me. His only suit. The one in which he’d gotten married. The one in which, he’d hoped, one day he would be buried. “Some people declare war on world famine,” he’d told me on one occasion, “but I can’t be that noble. I’ve declared war on the moth devils. And I aim to win it.”
The room we entered was so hot, so stuffy the heat rushed at me like a bird fleeing its broken cage. A hefty fire burned in the fireplace and stretched Baba Mina’s shadow gigantic against one wall. But she was a tiny thing in her chair, close by the fire, and she did not turn to see who it was that had entered. She was mumbling under her breath—words I had no chance of catching—and metal knocked on metal so crisply that for a moment I thought it was two knives she sharpened.
“She’s been knitting for a week without stopping,” Dyado Dacho said, and went to adjust the blanket—perfectly preserved from the moth devils—that covered her shoulders. “It keeps her busy.”
Then he called her. “Grandma, the teacher’s boy has come to see you.” But the needles clattered so ferociously now, they overpowered even her mumble.
“Grandma,” I said, and stepped closer. It was then that she looked up—her face flushed, but not a single droplet of sweat glistening in the light of the fire and her eyes shiny like a fox’s.
“Ah, the teacher’s boy.” She smiled kindly. “The American.”
I sat in the chair across from her, a chair Dyado Dacho offered before limping to his spot in the corner, farthest away from the heat of the fire. He took a sweater out of a sack at his feet and began to unravel it, pulling the strand from one sleeve and piling up the yarn in his lap.
“What are you knitting, Grandma?” I asked, for her needles had gone back to clicking.
“It doesn’t matter,” she told me. “When I’m done Dyado Dacho unknits it. Ah, my boy, I wish I too were a sweater. I wish God could reknit me young as I was back in those days.”
Half my face was on fire and the other was catching it and sweat ran into my eyes and hurt them.
“Listen, Grandma, I’ve come to ask you about the nestinari.”
Some time passed before she answered, so I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. Only Dyado Dacho grunted in his corner. But then the clicking of the needles slowed down a little and I could see that she struggled to loop the yarn a few times.
“My sweet boy, don’t ask me. My feet are colder than dead bones, but when I knit, I barely notice. Yes,” she mumbled under her nose, “I barely notice,” and wrapped herself more tightly in the blanket.
“Forty years ago,” I said, “you and Dyado Dacho, and most everyone else in the village, moved to the city to seek a better life. Tell me, Grandma, where did the nestinari settle when they left Klisura?”
“Forty years,” Baba Mina repeated, as if for the first time stopping to consider just how much water had passed since then. “Back when I was little my daddy had a hundred white sheep. And each night we girls sat by the fire and spun wool as white as God’s beard and Mama knit us booties and jackets and hats with tassels. But Daddy is gone now,” she said, and the faint smile that had blossomed on her lips withered, “and so are the white sheep. Now all we have are old sweaters and Dyado Dacho unravels them, so I can knit from their yarn new ones. That’s where the nestinari went, my boy—after the white sheep. One by one, like unraveled sweaters. Yes, yes,” she said, and began to knit faster, “one by one, like white sheep.”
“Grandma,” I said, and for a long time didn’t know how to continue. “It’s Saint Kosta’s day tomorrow.” And by the way she looked at me—so gently, so helplessly—I understood, for the first time, that what I was doing was terribly cruel.
“It might be, my boy. But who’s counting.”
Sweat rolled down my back and itched me, and my tongue had swollen up so that every word rolled off crippled and clumsy. Or maybe it was just the ringing in my ears, the blood rushing, that muddied up all sound around me.
“There is a sick girl across the river, Grandma, the imam’s daughter, and I’d like to help her. I’d like to take her to where the nestinari are dancing so they can cure her.”
“And how will you do that?” Dyado Dacho sneered suddenly in his corner. “The girl’s locked up and her father guards her.”
“Elif will help me.”
“And when she helps you, how will you get to where the nestinari are dancing?”
“In her father’s Lada. We’ll steal it.”
“Steal it?” He laughed and yanked on the yarn so hard almost a third of a sleeve unraveled. “He dismembered it, the crazy fool. The whole café went to see how he gutted it. Slashed the tires, cut the wires, threw out the battery in the garbage. He was that mad with fury.”
With each word I could feel my heart sinking, my plan unraveling like an old sweater. It was hopeless then and like Elif had told me—there was no way out of Klisura. The logs crackled in the fire, the needles were clicking, and I was ready to ask forgiveness and scurry back home to my grandfather, when Dyado Dacho stopped me.
“Every spring for many years I watch this poor woman get sick without a sickness,” he said, his voice barely louder than the rasp of sand grains against the window. “I’m tired of watching. I’ll tell you where the nestinari are dancing if you promise to take her.”
I hadn’t even noticed when he’d gotten up from his chair and come to ours, but Baba Mina held his hand now, against her cheek, then kissed it.
“And what if you tell me?” I said. “We have no car to get there.”
“Then leave the way you came here.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant this, or if he was trying to trick me.
“On the village bus? The driver will never take us.”
Then I could see his lips stretching and his dentures shining like they were made of the fire. “Why bother to ask him?”
EIGHT
IT SO HAPPENED, SIX CENTURIES AGO, that Murad the Godlike One—he who first called himself sultan, he who defeated a great many peoples, seized their land, and made from his Ottoman tribe a mighty empire—fell in love with a Bulgarian maiden and desired to wed her.
Murad’s armies had conquered Adrianople and turned it into their capital city. There in Adrianople, the Godlike One plotted his European expansion. The Byzantines were already paying him tribute, and their turn to meet him in battle would come soon, but it was other wars Murad needed to plot first—with Bulgarians, Serbians
, Magyars. Not a fortnight before, he had sent his spies into the land of the Bulgars and now the spies were recounting—such and such strongholds, such and such armies. Only one of them was gloomy, and when the sultan addressed him, the man began weeping. “I weep for you, my lord,” he said, “because I love you. You may conquer the world one day, but what good is this if you never see them?” And the spy told him: where a mighty river flowed into the Black Sea, where the sands were the color of Makassar ebony, beautiful women danced barefoot in the fire and the fire did not burn them. “No, my lord, the flame makes them so pretty it is for them that I weep now. For I shall never again see them.”
For days all Murad saw were the bare feet of maidens dancing on live coals. The feet, white and puffy, raised sparks in his mind and like tired birds these sparks landed on his heart and burned it. Soon enough, the great sultan was standing aboard a fast boat, and three hundred other boats followed behind him. At the place where a mighty river flowed into the Black Sea there was a village and in no time its elders were bowing before the sultan. “I’ve come to see the women dancing,” he told them, “so start the fires!”
A thin crescent hung in the sky by the time the wood had turned to embers. And since Murad’s feet never touched land that the blood of his men had not made pure first, he waited in the boat, right by the black shore. No wind stirred the night and only the sea sighed deeply. Sorrow filled the sultan’s heart. He had accomplished so little and there was still so much more that needed doing. As it happened with each nightfall, his grandfathers rose within him, lustful for conquests, and began to pull him eagerly in a thousand directions. How tired he was. How weary. And if Allah had come to ask him what he wanted, in this very moment, he would have said, “A sigh of rest, Almighty, in a boat by a black shore, waiting for beautiful women.”
A drum began beating in the night; a bagpipe joined it. So deep had the sultan sunk in thought that he hadn’t noticed anyone coming. And so it seemed to him now that the flame took flesh—a girl in a white robe, with her hair so long it almost touched the embers and white like the bones of the world. Then the girl gave out a loud shriek, and when she threw back her head her hair really swept the embers; its ends crackled and the stench of battle filled the air.
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