Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  “Get Aysha’s shoes, will you?” he told me, without turning.

  TWELVE

  DYADO DACHO RARELY LOST to the bus driver. But that night, the dice betrayed him. It was as though an invisible hand had interfered, he told me later, casting precisely the values that wouldn’t suit him. Before long, he’d squandered his pocket money and it was still some ways to the evening prayer. He knew he had to buy us more time to get the plan in motion and so he kept betting—first his Slava watch, then his pension, and after this Baba Mina’s. But the invisible hand kept rolling bad dice and sending, against all sensible judgment, for more and more shots of mint and mastika. Meanwhile, like never, the driver stayed sober. He was bleeding Dyado Dacho dry, that vampire, and he knew better than to allow some herb infusions to throw off his good fortune.

  At last the imam sang from the minaret and the driver rubbed the cash in his beard. He tried on the Slava to see if it fit him—it didn’t, his wrist was much meatier, but he still took it—and promised to come back for the pensions tomorrow. He said goodnight, despite Dyado Dacho’s drunken protestations—he was now willing to bet all his chickens, his house even—and made for the bus on the square.

  By the time the driver had rushed back to the coffeehouse crying that his bus had been stolen, the imam was already there looking for his runaway women. It was then that the invisible hand jabbed Dyado Dacho in the ribs like a fireplace poker. So aggravated was he with losing, he simply couldn’t resist spitting out some venom. “You’ll never find your women,” he told the imam, “and your bus,” he said to the driver, “it was I who stole it!” Next thing he knew, they were shaking him down for more information. But he was dead drunk and damn glad to have ordered so many mastikas and so, passed out, he told them nothing.

  “He told them everything, the old fool,” Grandpa said on the terrace the day after the fire dancing. I’d woken up late, my temples throbbing, and was now wrestling the chicken soup he’d cooked me. I could see my own reflection, distorted and pitiful, in the two fingers of fat on the surface—a glistening mirror Grandpa expected me to consume as a cure for my hangover.

  Neither the imam nor the driver understood much of what Dyado Dacho was saying. But much wasn’t needed—he’d blurted out nestinari and dancing and then the American took them!

  “Ey, my boy,” Dyado Dacho cried later when I approached him, “the hand must have made me say it.” How an invisible hand could make a man say things, I wasn’t certain, but I didn’t press him.

  “The imam came here to look for you,” Grandpa said, and motioned me to hurry with the soup before the fat on the surface had turned chewy. The pitiful reflection tore when my spoon poked it. Hungry as I was, I couldn’t eat a bite even.

  “My boy’s sleeping, I told him,” Grandpa went on. “He’s been having a headache. I was ready for a fistfight when he tried to wake you. Then I saw red. I shouted: Come give him a kiss if you want to. Maybe that’ll cure his headache. I felt like a proper fool, my boy, when I saw the curtain flapping out that window.” Around this time a horn had sounded from the road, and when they stepped out, the military jeep was waiting. When and how the imam had called for it, Grandpa didn’t know, but the man was connected. More than a few times Grandpa had told me, this side of the Strandja belonged to the imam.

  When the imam asked where the nestinari were dancing, where I’d taken his women, Grandpa told him he had no idea. But it was no good pretending. The imam had seen Elif’s jacket in my room, on the hanger. So Grandpa said, Get in the jeep, I’ll take you.

  The rest—I had lived through it.

  “You’ve been banned from the bus for life now,” Grandpa said. He took my soup impatiently and started slurping. It was Grandpa who’d driven the bus from the beach back to the square—myself and Baba Mina drunk and sleeping, shoulder to shoulder. Why the driver hadn’t come in the jeep to begin with, I wasn’t certain.

  “There is more in the pot if you want some.” Baba Mina had given him the chicken this morning—in lieu of a thank you, or maybe an I’m sorry.

  “I have no chickens to give you,” I said, my eyes on the table. “Go ahead, say that you warned me.”

  But he asked me to look up. “You made a choice, and for you it paid off. Besides, it was a thrill of a pleasure to see the imam the way I saw him when Elif kissed you. And then when Aysha sprinted across those dead coals.”

  According to Grandpa, the coals had been spread too thinly. According to him, those fire dancers were not true nestinari.

  Walking to the bus, after the imam had driven away his women, I’d seen, or at least thought so, the chubby Russian who’d burned his feet in the fire. He had been chatting in Bulgarian with one of the men who’d spread the embers, helping him load the rakes in the bed of a pickup.

  “A thin line divides them, my boy,” Grandpa said, “the miracle worker from the con artist. And that line, as it often happens, lies in the eye of the one who watches.”

  The people we’d seen last night were not Klisurans. And the feast of Saints Constantine and Elena, it too hadn’t been last night. “Wait thirteen more days,” Grandpa said, “then go back to Byal Kamak.” For such things, it was the old calendar that held weight in Klisura, and in most other Bulgarian villages for that matter.

  I felt my blood rise to the tips of my ears. Here was a detail I’d failed to consider: while the majority of Europe had switched to the Gregorian calendar in the Middle Ages, Bulgaria had waited until 1916. Even to this day many of our older people honored dates in their old, Julian style. So not May 21, but June 3 then was the proper feast of the nestinari saints.

  “It only hurts that it happened this way. Not that it happened,” Grandpa said, and waved his big hand. “In your place, I might have done the same things. Hell, in your place, I did much worse.” And for a moment it seemed like he wanted to say more. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, his eyes on the roofs and the stork nests.

  “Baba Mina was never a fire dancer,” he said when a stork landed in one nest and began to feed its two babies. “Saint Kosta never took her. And after so many years, I see it still pains her. What happened, happened,” he said, and took a long drag. “It’s what happens next that I’m not too keen on braving. So man up. A storm’s coming.”

  PART

  FOUR

  ONE

  THE NIGHT BEFORE the proper nestinari feast I dreamed of the girl again. She was in my bed, wrapped in a white sheet like a corpse, and when I peeled off the sheet she laughed, tickled. She had no face and her laughter was a lark’s song. The bed had turned into a nest, the earth was moving with a deep roar, and twig by twig the nest began to rot away. We started falling.

  I opened my eyes to Grandpa’s face, blurry at first, so close to mine, then coming into focus. The roar from my dream had gotten louder. Deep and persistent, it rattled the windows in their frames and it was the glass that chirped birdlike.

  For a moment I expected the Grandpa of my childhood to throw me a netted sack. Bread, cheese, and yogurt. Delivery in fifteen minutes. Instead, he hit me with a pair of jeans.

  “Get dressed. We have to go.”

  Go where? The sun was barely above the eastern hills. The yard lay half in shadow. By the time I was tangling in my T-shirt, a guillotine of light was touching the mouth of the well. The roar had grown so loud I made nothing of what Grandpa was saying—a curse, no doubt, at someone’s aunt or mother.

  We glued our palms to the windows to cushion their buzz and it was then we saw it—trampling the road on its way past our house. Burning with sun in its armor—curved blade, yellow body, clawlike tail—it resembled a giant scorpion more than it did a tank and a tank significantly more than what it really was.

  “A bulldozer?” I said.

  “Make it two. You slept through the first one.”

  The bulldozer had left behind a dry fog of its own—a cloud of dust and sand through which we marched. Once or twice Grandpa tripped in the ruts the tracks had dug, but after ea
ch falter his pace quickened. As did his breathing. “We wasted too much time,” he barked when I asked him to slow down; there was no need for him to say the rest—“all thanks to you.”

  The roar of machines grew louder the closer we got to the ugly tower, the outermost houses, the dust bitter and stinking of exhaust. With the stench, a heaviness set in my stomach, and when the engines suddenly drowned in a different kind of boom—the rumble and roll of collapsing walls—the heaviness turned to panic. Grandpa sprinted grotesquely, like a thing wounded, and so I sprinted behind him. He shouted something and I too heard myself shouting.

  Blades and rippers were cutting through the dust cloud—like shark fins and tails in waters boiling with the blood of prey; the kind of blood that stank of motor oil and of naphtha.

  “The devil take me,” Grandpa cried again and again, and despite the boom I could hear his jaws clenching. Making fists, he paced, left, right, left. Once, he made to enter the thick of the cloud, but I held him back firmly. And after this, we watched, fully aware that we were late and there was nothing we could do but hope the wind would scatter some of the dust so we could at least see the damage.

  We saw at last—rubble where only a heartbeat before there had been a house. Slowly, methodically, the bulldozers scraped aside walls and roof, cleaned the ground and made it level. Metal screeched, wood cracked, and somewhere beyond this chaos, we recognized the flapping of wings. Two black storks swam through the dissipating cloud—the shadows of the storks above us, white like bones in the morning sky.

  I knew then, as if for the first time, that this was all my fault. And I was convinced that Grandpa too knew it. But seeing him as I saw him now—wrapped in a sheet of dust, like the girl from my dream, and only two muddy claw marks on his face, where the tears were rolling, I understood something else. The houses meant nothing to him. Sticks and mud, dried-up ruins. And the land meant nothing—level or razed with bulldozer ruts. It was not because of land or houses he’d come back to Klisura.

  “They had two little chicks, I think,” he said.

  And after this all I heard was wings beating, and all through Klisura the calling of storks.

  TWO

  FOR TWENTY DAYS in the summer of 1903 the Strandjan Republic stayed free under the revolutionary banner. Was it worth it, I wonder, Captain Kosta wrote in his journal, alone and broken by poverty and sickness, a few years after the big battles; a journal from which Grandpa copied in his own notes. To have known freedom for only a heartbeat and then to have spilled your blood under the sword and the fire? By God, I say, what does it matter, a lifetime or only a heartbeat? It matters we knew her. No. This too doesn’t matter. It matters we fought to know her. By God, I say, it was worth it.

  The news that the imam’s little daughter had danced barefoot in the embers spread through the village like wildfire. And like all rumors, it spread badly distorted. In one version Aysha had crossed herself three times before leaping into the coals; in another she’d carried an icon of the Virgin Mary and even kissed it. According to one version, it was Baba Mina who’d held the girl’s hand and led her in circles; according to another, Grandpa had walked in the fire, without his shoes on. But all versions agreed on one detail—the imam’s older girl had run past her father and given the American grandson a smack on the lips.

  From then on, Aysha and her mother were perfectly healthy. And so were all the other sick girls in Klisura. They all thought the feast of Saint Kosta over and that knowledge alone cured them. But things with Elif were not well. She too had been banned from the bus; her father had banned her. Her school, the exams that were coming—she’d found herself forced to fail them.

  Watching the jacket she’d left to dry on my hanger pained me something vicious. At times, I shook with the urge to grab it, march down to her house, and return it in person. At times, I burned with the need to take it outside, set it on fire, and pound its ashes into the ground with my bare feet. But the thought that I would first have to touch it filled me with such terror I could only watch it, where it hung in the corner, and think of the girl who’d worn it.

  Grandpa was right; I’d made a choice and the choice had paid off—Elif had kissed me. What was shameful was that I’d sucked others into paying for that kiss—Elif and Grandpa, Aysha and Baba Mina. Each time I recalled the touch of Elif’s lips, my heart soared. And my shame grew greater—not because I had caused trouble, but because, despite all else, I felt happy.

  * * *

  Three more houses were turned to rubble that morning. I shouted, flapped my arms, chucked stones at the machines. The drivers refused to notice. At last, they took a break—in the shade of a blade, raised high as if about to take on the sky next.

  “Who are you that”—one driver said, and drank water from a Sprite bottle for what seemed like an unnaturally long time—“we need to give you an explanation?” In height, he barely reached above the continuous tracks, but he struck me as the kind of man who would enjoy picking limb from limb a praying mantis. The other driver, now struggling to light a cigarette, seemed more malleable—tall and frail in his build—until he spoke:

  “Yeah, pisser, who the fuck are you exactly?”

  I told them I was the fucking grandson of the owner and a wave of terror washed over me, not because of them, but because of my stupidity to address them in this way.

  “Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t,” the short one said, and finished the bottle in a series of tiny gulps. It wasn’t his job to care. His job was to level the site and get it ready.

  The tall one snatched the empty bottle. “You done it again. And here I am, dying for water.”

  “My kidney needs flushing.”

  “And mine doesn’t?”

  Behind us, Grandpa was rummaging through the mountain of rubble. Not even remotely interested in our conversation, he overturned blocks of mud from what had once been walls and shifted flat stones that had covered the rooftops.

  “What is he looking for? A pot of gold?” the short one said, and his compatriot snorted, “Is he really?”

  As if on its own, my hand shot up, and my finger jabbed the short guy in the chest.

  “This is private property. You have no right—”

  “I have the right to break your face in,” he said simply, and I’m sure he would have done it for entertainment if at that moment the boom of a car engine hadn’t given him another place to look. The well-familiar military jeep was flying our way and in the passenger seat, bobbing up and down with each jolt, sat the imam. The brakes screeched, the tires locked, and the jeep drew an arc not six feet before us.

  When the dust settled on our faces, the imam rolled down his window. The tall driver hurried to throw away his cigarette. The short one made an indecisive step toward his bulldozer, but gave up and froze in place.

  “A coffee break already?” the imam said. The drivers babbled over each other. It was this pisser’s fault. The imam raised his hand. He surveyed the site and for a long time watched Grandpa lifting chunks atop the wreckage. Not once did he look my way.

  But the man behind the wheel was looking. Dressed in civilian clothes, he had no neck. His ears hung on either side of his head like an afterthought, taped there with a band of weak tape to make him seem a bit more human. He revved the engine once more and shut it and for a while all I heard was the clicking of hot metal under the hood, the storks crying, and blood thumping against my eardrums.

  The imam reached over and punched the horn. He punched it a few more times before finally Grandpa spun around to face us. The imam waved him to come near and for one, two, three pumps of blood Grandpa watched him. Then he spat to the side and went on searching through the ruins.

  Gently the imam popped his door open. I followed him to the pile, and so did the bulldozer drivers.

  “Teacher,” the imam was saying, “I regret it had to come to this.” But Grandpa wasn’t showing any signs he listened. He overturned a clump of dried mud, and the clump tumbled down the slope and
shattered dangerously near—surely an accidental gesture, rather than one of aggression. In short, it was clear that, as far as Grandpa was concerned, the imam wasn’t even present.

  Then, for the first time I’d heard, the imam raised his voice. He stomped in the dust and only then did Grandpa turn to regard him, from the height of his mound, the way he would a gnat. Calmly Grandpa descended, kicking rubble down the slope. His face was black with dirt, and only his eyes glistened, like a falcon’s. In that moment it was not Grandpa, but Captain Kosta descending. My heart swelled with courage.

  By now the imam was smiling. For a while he had slipped; he had allowed the old man to make a mockery of him. But now it was his turn to roll the dice.

  “I’m sorry it had to come to this,” the imam repeated.

  Grandpa patted his coat, then pointed at the tall driver. With a shaking hand the man passed him a cigarette and held up a timid flame.

  From his pocket, the imam pulled out a piece of paper.

  But Grandpa wouldn’t take it. He puffed out some smoke in my direction.

  The word flew from the imam’s mouth like spittle. “The American?”

  “The land is his. From now on, you deal with him.”

  “The land is mine,” I stuttered, neither a statement nor a question. I took the paper. Stamped, signed, ratified, approved, straight from the ministry, it trembled as I read it.

  “You have no right,” I whispered.

  “It’s you who have no rights. For too long you’ve tried to take us for a ride. But this certificate confirms it. The land belongs to the state. Not to you.”

  “The hell it does,” Grandpa said suddenly, and spat out his cigarette. But I was reading. According to this sheet, the village of Klisura—or rather what we referred to as “the Christian hamlet”—had been taken out of the cadastre in 1965. In 1965 this side of Klisura had been erased from the map, the land we claimed as ours stripped of ownership and annexed by the state.