Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  Sneaking across the border is and always has been a suicidal endeavor. You will be shot on sight. But back in those Cold War days, security was even tighter. Because of its proximity to Turkey, Klisura itself was then in a border zone. You couldn’t just come to the village the way you did today. Back then, you needed special permission. That, Grandpa had. But crossing the border was another story.

  Right away they came to a fence in the forest. The same one I’d snuck across with Elif. Like me, Grandpa found himself passing a hamlet of Turkish houses. Like me he thought, can it be this easy?

  But this border was only a fake one. You were expected to cross it and think that you’d made it. You look around: huts, a hamlet. I’m in Turkey! And just when you calm down, the guards get you.

  At last they came to the real border. The moon was thin; the night was pitch-dark. And in the darkness, the tip of a cigarette glowed red. From the bushes the mayor hooted like an owl. The red ember drew an arc and shattered on the ground into a shower of smaller embers.

  “You’re late,” the soldier whispered when they stepped out of the bushes to meet him. For the rest of the way, he was quiet. He was a local boy. What else was there to say? He let them cross. It was that easy.

  Once they cleared the border, the mayor whistled again into the darkness. By then, Grandpa had learned a bit about this birdsong language. He tried to explain it now—how it was a mix of Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish; how each syllable was rendered by a different tone—but I’d be lying if I said I understood him. I trusted him, however, and that was sufficient.

  Somewhere in the distance a bird answered. Someone had heard and now would pass along the message. We’re coming. They walked all through the night, along the bank of a river—the same river that if followed downstream led to Klisura and to the old walnut. They slept at dawn, hidden in the thick of the forest. At sunset they arrived in the village.

  To look at it, you’d think you were in Klisura. Even the house Captain Vangelis met them in was like the mayor’s. In just a year’s time, the captain’s hair had turned bone-white. His sons too had grown older. And Lenio—

  That evening under the trellised vine, Grandpa couldn’t eat a bite. That night, in the barn where the men had bedded down, he couldn’t sleep a minute. His heart was in his throat, beating.

  She was a woman now. Sixteen. And promised in marriage to Michalis—the younger son of Captain Elias, that beardless boy Grandpa had seen a full year before. And he was still beardless, his face as smooth as river rock; but handsome, chiseled. They would marry them off in one more year.

  That night Grandpa burned with fever. He felt better in the morning, but by the next evening he was again burning. My heart is breaking, he thought. He could barely stand on his feet while the nestinari were dancing. But it was only after he made it back to Klisura a week later, neither dead nor alive, his insides splitting, only after the Pope brought a doctor from town, that they realized the real reason. “Malaria,” Grandpa said, and was quiet.

  Uncomfortable, I turned under the trellis. Now that proper summer was upon us, the mosquitoes had come back. And since the sun was setting—

  “Let’s go inside,” I said, but Grandpa wouldn’t.

  He told me to man up. And then to let him have at least one smoke.

  “You’re doing fine without,” I said. But I could see what was eating him—Lenio, risen from the river of his mind.

  “The day before we left for Klisura,” he said, and lit up, “we ate a farewell lunch in Captain Vangelis’s courtyard.”

  His fever was so bad people said his teeth chattered like a stork’s bill. They too had storks there, in Kostitsa. Teacher Stork, the kids cried behind his back, laughing. So he mustered his last strength and dragged himself to the table. He acted well, lest Lenio think he was a weakling. He plopped himself down in a chair and this awful chord echoed, like a cat dying, and then wood splitting. Next thing he knew, Lenio was sobbing by his side, a half-crushed mandolin in her hands. “Beyond repair,” Captain Vangelis said, and waved carelessly. “Here, have a raki. Don’t sweat it.”

  For the rest of their stay Lenio hid in her room, sobbing. She hated his guts, Grandpa was certain. The illness would kill him and never again would he see her.

  “But you were mistaken,” I said while he finished his cigarette in silence. Saint Kosta had come to his side and he petted his long neck and good wing gently. “Let’s go inside,” he said, and when he made for the terrace the stork followed. But I stayed behind for a while, despite the mosquitoes.

  Some time ago, while I rummaged through the classroom that was the first floor of our house, I’d found a mandolin wrapped in a white sheet. Half the strings hung broken; the others needed tuning.

  “Where did you find this?” Grandpa said when I showed him. And when I asked if he could play it, he only waved, angered. He didn’t touch the mandolin then, but a few days later I found him smoking on the terrace, staring intently at the bundled sheet across the table.

  “My boy,” he’d told me, and for some time chewed on his lower lip. “This thing. Get it away, will you?”

  FIFTEEN

  IT TOOK GRANDPA MONTHS TO RECOVER from the malaria. In fact, I remember him terribly feverish on two occasions when I was still a child. He had burned for weeks, but I don’t remember ever thinking twice about it. Only now, years later, did I realize that what I’d considered, in my childish ignorance, to be bouts of heavy flu had really been malarial relapses—the dormant parasite in Grandpa’s liver infecting his blood again.

  And who should care for him in those days of sickness if not the one girl who, even in good health, visited him daily? Grandpa didn’t want her by his side, but there she was: soaking a towel in vinegar and spreading it over his forehead to extinguish the fire, bringing him thick skim from the milk, white and yellow cheese, and when he was stronger, rooster soup, grape leaf sarmi.

  At first people were talking, then they had talked it all out. It was no longer newsworthy gossip—Mina the shepherd’s daughter, taking a tin of banitsa to the teacher. “So when’s the wedding?” the mayor said, laughing, once, and after that, on more than one occasion, he made sure to tell Grandpa that unless he intended to marry the poor girl, he should not see her alone in his room, behind the closed door.

  In October Grandpa traveled all the way to Burgas and from a store on the main street bought a brand-new Cremona mandolin. At first he kept it wrapped in its thick brown paper, but one night, smoking on the terrace, with the dark so dark, and the hills so tall and many between here and Kostitsa, he took it out and strummed it. Even the dreary noise he made was better than the silence. Night after night, he stroked the strings, each tone a syllable he sent into the night, across the border and the hills. He talked to Lenio this way.

  “An instrument for females,” the mayor often told him. But he began to visit Grandpa’s terrace often. Eyes closed, he smoked, drank rakia, while Grandpa played. It was from the mayor that Grandpa first heard stories of Captain Kosta, of the Strandjan Republic.

  The rebellion had risen on the day of Christ’s Transfiguration in 1903, and quickly, with little blood, the Turks had been driven out of the mountain. A night of great celebration followed—songs, wine, sheep on the spit. Only Captain Kosta sat by the fire, ate nothing, drank nothing, but watched the twisting flame.

  So the mayor, then only twenty years old, brought his captain some mutton, a meh of red wine. The captain took the meat and ate, then drank some wine from the skin. “Thank you, Petre,” he said, for Petar was the mayor’s name. “I forgot to eat. And drinking slipped my mind.” Then he called the boy over. “Sit down and talk to me a little. I’m frightened.”

  Captain Kosta, the fierce voivode—he who had fought the Serbs at Slivnitsa and won; he who had just that morning stormed the Turkish konak at the head of his rebels and driven from there Ali Bey like a mangy dog—frightened? The mayor was smacked speechless. “What scares you, Captain?” he managed to stutter, and he f
elt like not just his own life but the faith of the entire world depended on this single answer.

  “Freedom,” Captain Kosta said. “She puts me in a fright, Petre. For in this very moment we are free the way few men before us have been. The sultan doesn’t rule us. The Bulgarian tsar doesn’t rule us. The tsar of Russia doesn’t rule us. We are our own. We are the Strandja Mountains. And man, Petre, was not made to be a mountain.”

  “Man’s bones are brittle,” the mayor would bellow on Grandpa’s terrace, usually sipping his third glass of rakia. “But metal too is brittle. So, to harden it, you dip it in fire and in water, you pound it with the hammer. That’s how you make daggers. All my life the hammer beats me. Turks and Serbs and Greeks and Communists. Different names, the same hammer. It pounds my bones and turns them to daggers. All my life these daggers cut me. Just when one wound heals, they open up another.”

  But by the fifth glass, the mayor would grow quiet and listen to Grandpa stroke the Cremona. “Promise,” he’d say, “when you lay me down in the earth, to play me a sweet song. Don’t let that devil the priest come near.”

  I’ve often thought about the mayor’s words since then—about the bones and the daggers. Whether these words were really the mayor’s or only Grandpa’s I couldn’t be certain. But I find the idea that every hardship in our lives is a hammerfall meant to harden our frame strangely unsettling. It seems to me that two opposing forces battle for control of our will. The body strives for ease and comfort. Don’t wound me, it shouts, and if a dagger cuts, it fights to heal the wound, for wounded the body expires. The spirit, on the other hand, wants to be wounded. Cut me, it shouts, and fights to keep each wound bleeding, for in ease and comfort the spirit withers. Therein, I’ve come to think, lies the quandary of the man who holds the dagger—to cut himself or not.

  SIXTEEN

  “LISTEN, TEACHER,” the mayor told Grandpa that spring. “Why beat about the bush? I’m getting old and feeble. You’re young and strapping. I like you. People respect you. I want you to be the new vekilin, the caretaker of the nestinari.”

  It goes without saying, Grandpa accepted. Hadn’t he seen how the fire dancers treated the mayor? How Lenio kissed his hand? The very thought of her lips on his knuckles was enough to keep him sleepless. He’d take care of all the fire dancers in this world if that meant Lenio would be near.

  So that spring, Grandpa helped the mayor patch up the shrine under the walnut, clean up the holy springs in the forest, repair their roofs and fences. When the Greeks arrived that June, Grandpa again was there to meet them. The two captains embraced him. Their sons shook his hand warmly. And when Lenio stood before him—more beautiful now than he’d ever seen her—Grandpa’s heart knocked so loudly he thought the whole village would hear it. Blushing, she made to kiss his right hand, but Captain Vangelis stopped her. “He’s not yet the vekilin,” he said, laughing, and sent her to kiss the hand of the mayor.

  From then on, through every ritual Grandpa shadowed the old man. He was allowed to set the icons on the shelf in the shrine, and it was Grandpa who slaughtered the sacrificial ram in the church courtyard. “Shame on you, comrade teacher,” Father Dionysus said, smiling slyly. “Taking up witchcraft because of some Greek damsel. And here is Mina, the shepherd’s daughter, a perfectly fine Bulgarian girl.”

  Somehow he knew all this, the Pope. He’d kept a close watch, his eye trained for just such details. And it seemed Mina herself had come to suspect that Grandpa was in love with the Greek girl—for during the second night of dancing, the one in honor of Saint Elena, Mina threw herself onto the embers barefooted. She burned her soles, was taken home for treatment, but never cried in pain. To impress the teacher, people began to whisper. Mad, mad with love she is, they said. May Saint Kosta forgive her for getting his fire dirty.

  On parting, Grandpa mustered the courage to give Lenio the mandolin he’d bought her. It was an opportune moment, and one of repetition—she was washing her feet in the courtyard while inside the mayor’s house the others readied for their journey.

  She took the mandolin and blushed. Then, never raising her eyes to look at Grandpa, she seized his hand and kissed his knuckles. She ran upstairs, her bare feet flapping and leaving prints in the yard, a flock of black birds. Before the flock had scattered completely in the heat, Lenio’s father, Captain Vangelis, emerged from the house, the wrapped mandolin in his choke hold.

  “Thank you, teacher,” he told Grandpa. “But she has Michalis now to give her presents.”

  “Teacher, teacher,” old Baba Vida told Grandpa that evening, after the Greeks had gone up the mountain. “Do you see now what I once saw?”

  “I see nothing,” Grandpa told her, for really, there was plenty he still could not envision.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE STORKS DREW CARTWHEELS in the skies. Harvest and vintage came and passed. The fields readied themselves for sleep and for the first time in many months they loosened their grip on the people. Children returned to school; the young ones began to plan their weddings. And in Kostitsa, across the border, Lenio too would soon be getting married. Out on the terrace, playing the mandolin, Grandpa counted the days till her wedding to Michalis.

  That October, a winter chill gripped the Strandja. Ice encased the ancient oaks and from the cherry orchard there came the roar of cannons—the trees were bursting with the cold, their leaves still on the branches. At first the snow was thick and sticky, but soon the gale hardened it and even the children would not go out and play.

  Two weeks before Lenio’s wedding, Vassilko, the village idiot, brought Grandpa a letter. The letter had been smuggled across the border, he said, and when he told Grandpa that Lenio had written it, Grandpa raised his hand to strike the boy. But when they broke the envelope open a lock of black hair tied with a red thread fell out. The letter was in Greek, which Grandpa didn’t read; and since he was afraid to take it to the mayor, in his confusion my grandfather did the only thing left to do.

  “She doesn’t want to marry,” Father Dionysus said when he set down the letter. “She wants you to save her.” But he wasn’t smiling and his voice was low, almost a whisper.

  For three days Grandpa didn’t sleep a minute. He forgot to eat, drink, shave, bathe even. “Teacher,” his students giggled, “show us your teeth and ears! Pull off your stockings!”

  It was one week before the feast of Saint Demetrius, the feast that opened the wedding season, in the old style on November 8, when Grandpa returned to the church, panting.

  “You must help me steal her,” he told Father Dionysus.

  * * *

  Grandpa knew that since her birth Lenio had been promised to Michalis—the two families of fire dancers maintaining their special bond. What he didn’t know yet was that Lenio had never intended to go through with the wedding.

  For Lenio was in love with another boy, her age and from her village, a sweet talker who’d told her many lies. He would save her from Michalis; rescue her from her father. He’d made a lot of money driving sheep herds down to the Aegean. And with the money, they’d run to freedom. Istanbul, he told her, smoking a cigarette atop a pile of hay in his father’s hayloft. That’s where he’d take her. They’d live in a house on the Bosphorus—out one window they’d be looking at Asia. Out the other—at Europe.

  Sweetly, sweetly the boy spun his yarns in the hayloft. He told her not to be afraid. It’s just a little peck on the lips, he told her. All the other girls have done it. Relax now. We’ll run away, I promise.

  Three weeks before the wedding, Lenio snuck out of her house and hid at the end of the village, by the fountain with the seven spouts. That’s where they’d conspired to meet. All day she waited. It was raining. At last, at dusk, she saw her brothers racing through the deluge. Christ, Lenio, they cried. We were so worried. We turned the village upside down looking for you.

  That day, her sweetheart vanished without a trace. Never again did she see him.

  She knew well what would happen the night after th
e wedding. What her father, the Wild Ram, what the whole village would do to her when the bedsheet was carried out into the courtyard, for everyone to see it, clean as a snowdrop. So she made plans to run away. She hadn’t even reached the fountain when her brothers were hot on her heels already. Frightened is the poor dove, the old women giggled. Nothing was new under the sun.

  They locked her up in the house and it was then that she wrote the letter. Who else was there to help but the new vekilin, the caretaker, the kind teacher, her last and only true hope?

  “Saint Kosta bless you!” Captain Vangelis bellowed when he saw at his threshold Grandpa, and by his side Father Dionysus, their beards frozen solid. “You’ve shown me a great honor, teacher, coming to the wedding!”

  For three days and nights the guests feasted, readying themselves for the proper wedding feast. No expense was spared. After all, Captain Vangelis had but a single daughter, dearer to him than the pupils of his eyes. Wine and rakia. Only they could drown his sorrow—to see her taken away by another man. Yet it was a sweet sorrow. The man was worthy. Michalis. Of a worthy kin.

  On the night before the wedding, Grandpa stepped over the drunk guests scattered across the floor and forced open the door to Lenio’s cell. She had dressed as thickly as she could, and he gave her the hooded cloak he’d stolen from a guest. How no one saw them sneak out of the house, Grandpa couldn’t tell me. Maybe everyone there was too drunk to notice. Maybe they all thought it was a man under the cloak, not the bride, running. After all, Grandpa himself had once made that error. Maybe it was for both these reasons.

  “God have mercy,” Father Dionysus mumbled outside, and blessed them, and then himself, with the sign of the cross. A vicious gale was raging—sleet lashing like a whip—and growing more fierce by the minute. “Look on the bright side,” Grandpa shouted over the howling. “They’ll never catch us in this storm.”