Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  “Nonsense,” I cried. The ownership deed was completely valid. And Grandpa owned not just the school, but all the other houses. He’d bought them, fair and square, and later he’d transferred them, school and houses, all to my name.

  “Poor boy.” The imam laughed a fake laugh. “Is that what he’s told you?”

  And then, with a self-satisfaction I’d mistaken for kindness, he told me the rest of the story.

  It was this story I was telling now, much too loudly, to Elif and Grandpa. I had run all the way back after seeing the imam to find them eating lunch on the terrace.

  Here was the gist, fair and square: in the mid-sixties every single family from the Christian hamlet had been moved to the city. A state-mandated urbanization, all through Bulgaria. As compensation, in exchange for their houses, the families had been given city apartments—two entire blocks of flats in Burgas all for Klisurans. To put it plainly, in the mid-sixties the Christian hamlet had stopped being a village. The state had taken the land and transformed it into a border zone, a buffer.

  Three years ago, the zone’s status was reconsidered. But the land was still the property of the state and it was the state that contracted a foreign company to build on it a complex of wind turbines. The construction had just begun—see right there the unfinished tower?—when my grandfather showed up, in his hand a sheet of paper.

  Every Klisuran who’d owned a house had been given in exchange an apartment. Every ownership deed had been annulled. But Grandpa’s had fallen through the cracks somehow. Maybe because by that time he no longer lived in Klisura; maybe because some clerk had assumed the school must already be state-owned. After all, how could a school belong to a single person?

  But it belonged to Grandpa, or so he claimed through this paper. Yet the state too had its papers, according to which no private entity could own land in the Christian hamlet.

  It was a paradox. A legal casus. But until Grandpa’s deed was officially annulled, until the casus was resolved, there could be no construction of wind turbines—the law did not allow for power generators to be erected within residential limits.

  “So they took you to court, Grandpa,” I said, and sat down in a chair, exhausted. “They thought, how hard could it be really, to prove your ownership deed was outdated and then annul it?”

  “For three years your grandfather has jerked us around,” the imam had told me out in the courtyard. “Forgive my language, but better words allude me.”

  “For three years, Grandpa,” I said now in his face on the terrace, “you’ve dragged out this lawsuit. That’s why you sold our family land, my share and my father’s. Even your city apartment. You needed money to pay your lawyers.”

  Grandpa puffed out some air and reached for his lighter. “And you believe the imam?”

  I watched him struggle to pull out a cigarette from the pack, and my heart grew heavy. To see this man the way I saw him now pained me something fierce. “I want to believe you,” I told him. “So prove to me that we own these houses. Not once have I asked to see any papers. Now I’m asking.”

  Trembling, he dabbed a cigarette against his mustache a few times. When he found his lips at last he lit up and gulped the smoke in.

  “We have one document,” he admitted. “For this school building, which is yours now. I never owned any other houses.” Then he smoked hungrily, keeping his eyes low on the table. A rotten heaviness settled in my stomach. A wave of nausea. For months now he’d lied to my face.

  “Look at me, Grandpa,” I told him. For there was more to the imam’s story.

  Each time before a court hearing, Grandpa had faked some kind of sickness. Four strokes. One heart attack. A kidney stone crisis. Six times Grandpa had entered the hospital a week before his court dates.

  “Is this what happened last month? When they destroyed the first two houses?”

  He began to mumble and dropped his cigarette on the table. Fumbling to retrieve it, he spilled its tip into a shower of tiny sparks, which Elif beat down. When she looked up at me, her eyes themselves were casting sparks in showers. “You’re hurting him. Stop it!”

  I could see he was hurting. But I couldn’t stop it. And why should I? So he wouldn’t fake another stroke?

  “Did you fake it?” I said.

  “For God’s sake, my boy! You were here. You saw me.”

  “What about the strokes before that? The heart attack? Did you fake them?”

  “For God’s sake. Maybe. But understand my position. I can’t let them build a wind farm right where the storks are nesting, right in the path of their migration. The turbines will kill them in thousands, it’s just that simple.”

  “Why did you lie to me, Grandpa?” I said, so quietly that at first I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. For some time he struggled to light a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. Then he took a few deep drags.

  “I was afraid,” he said. “I sold your land and left you nothing. I feared you’d run away if I told you the whole truth.”

  He had feared correctly. But it went far beyond anger. “Tell me, Grandpa, what other lies have you told me? Is Lenio a lie? Or the nestinari? And what about your teaching years?”

  “All true, damn it,” he said, and slammed his fist on the table. The plates rattled. Saint Kosta jumped in the corner and, flapping his wings, hurled at us a cloud of gray dust.

  “All true?” I said, and kept my eyes fixed on Grandpa’s, to see the kind of dirty flame that would ignite there.

  “All true,” he said, this time more softly. And there was no flame in his eye, no twitch of his eyelid. He lied to me sweetly, the way you lie to a small child too gullible to catch your deception, or too weak to handle things as they really are.

  “He’s lied before, your grandfather,” the imam had told me out in the mosque courtyard. “Ask him why the Communist Party dispatched him to teach in Klisura. With what objective. Ask him about the kind of lessons he taught his students. About the things they did to us, he and the priest, his comrade.”

  My grandfather had not been exiled for his Party resignation. The Party had sent him to Klisura with his agreement. His mission—to indoctrinate the village Muslims. To make sure they grew up away from their roots; to make them believe they were truly Bulgarian.

  But now on the terrace, I couldn’t stand to ask him. Not when he’d lied to me with such sweet softness. I heard myself speak as if from a great distance. How stupid did he think the storks were to fly in droves into the spinning turbines? And did he understand what these wind turbines would mean for Klisura? For the whole Strandja even? Could he imagine the jobs they’d create, the new investments?

  “Please, spare us,” Elif said, and it was her voice, sharp and raspy from the cigarette she too was smoking, that brought me back from the distance. “You sound just like my father.”

  “And you?” I said, and for a long time didn’t know what else to say, or how to say it. “I thought you took university classes. I thought you had exams coming. Isn’t this why you studied and why every day you rode the bus to Burgas?”

  Her face turned pale, then flaming. And for this shame, she had a good reason. She’d dropped out of the university a full semester back and kept it a secret. Too many failed exams; too many fights with professors. Besides, attending college had never been about the classes. It had always been about defying her father.

  “Your father had sold you like a goat, you told me. For fifteen thousand deutsche marks. Is this the price tag you’ve assigned yourself? Why not go higher? Twenty or thirty thousand? Or are you afraid no one would pay this much for you?”

  I spoke in a way no person should be speaking. I could see that each word was a slash with the dagger, which opened deep wounds. Elif was crying and Grandpa trembled and I told myself—let them.

  Orhan’s father hadn’t bought her. She herself had promised to be Orhan’s wife—because she knew his dirty name would hurt her own father and bring him dishonor. And now she’d chosen me for that same re
ason. “To spit in my face,” the imam had told me.

  “Here,” I said. “I give twenty thousand in dollars. Is this enough to buy you?”

  My hand shaking, I pulled the wad out of my pocket and slammed it down on the table. Again the plates rattled, again Saint Kosta jumped in his corner. For a long time Elif and Grandpa watched the money. Twenty thousand dollars. Tied with a red rubber band, a stack you’d think would be thicker. She no longer cried and he no longer trembled.

  “What’s this, my boy?” Grandpa asked me.

  “I will make you an offer,” the imam had said out in the courtyard. “Your grandpa’s house is now in your name, but the deed does not hold water. It’s a matter of time before the court annuls it.” The next court date would be in September. “But you can’t fake a stroke like your grandpa. You’ll have to be present.” And then, in September, once and for all, they’d take away the house and settle the casus.

  This September they’d start building the turbines one way or another. But that was two months of construction squandered for nothing. Two months of financial losses. So here was the imam’s offer.

  “I gave them the right to build the wind farm,” I told Grandpa now on the terrace. “I signed a permission form. I need the money to pay my credit card debt, my student loans. You sold my land without asking me and now I sold yours without asking. But I convinced them to let us keep the house so you can stay here. No need to thank me.”

  For a long time Grandpa smoked and watched me, unblinking. “You fool,” he said at last. “I was so close!” And then he started laughing. His chest wheezed, a coughing fit seized him, and soon he was wiping away the tears. “In September you will be back in America. And that’s another missed court date. Then they’ll start sending you summonses, but how long before that mess gets settled? Two, three years? By then I’ll be worm food. And with this illegal construction they’ve started? Who knows, the court might decide in our favor. You fool, we were so close!”

  So that’s why he’d transferred the house into my name—to jerk the court around a little longer? Without regard that this would put me in legal danger? I sat quietly for what seemed like an impossibly long time. I felt simultaneously outside of myself and somewhere very deep. Such weight crushed me, I could barely breathe. Nor could I think straight. There was only one thing of which I was certain—in this moment I wanted to be anywhere but here.

  “Why wait until September to see me leave?” I said, and heard the words with great delay, like stones in a wall, falling. “Here,” I said, and saw myself tossing him the mandolin strings I’d bought in Burgas. And at Elif I saw myself tossing the money. “To break the engagement. A gift on parting.”

  * * *

  I say to Petar, Petre my boy, man’s heart is a lantern. And what good is a lantern unless it holds a flame? When the Turks come back, they’ll torch the school we’ve been building. We’ll take from its flame and light our lanterns. Our bones will be timber, Petre, our blood will be oil. We’ll burn with black smoke, and Europe will see it.

  And the Turks we’ve chased, Captain? Petar asks me. The women and the children? Who will see the black smoke when they are burning?

  NINE

  I AM ONE THOUSAND METERS TALL. The sky is balanced firmly on my crown, but should I give a gentle nod, the sky will tumble. I’ve gathered the winds and clouds in my left hand, but should I squeeze only a little tighter—they’ll turn to deluge. Upon my right palm rests the sun. I make a fist and down comes darkness. Elif and Grandpa, the imam and the storks, Klisura and the Strandja, they lie prostrate at my feet and at my mercy. I am one thousand meters tall here in the stork nest.

  Where else was there for me to go? I climbed the trunk and all around me the black storks cried and beat their wings in horror. Why they didn’t attack me, I don’t know. How there were no storks in the nest at that moment, I’m not certain. But Elif’s nylon baggie was there; and so was the skull in the towel. I rolled myself a joint and smoked it greedily, quickly. I’d come prepared with a lighter, but not ready for the stench of the birds, for the legions of tiny bugs—not ants, not ticks, but lice maybe?—that crawled in the straw and among the sticks.

  And yet, with each new hit, my disgust gave way to curiosity, my curiosity to fascination. The more I watched these little creatures—each with the face of the others—the more they merged into a single stream of black blood, crawling, teeming, persisting up the tree, through the hay, up my legs. Ants, ticks, lice, it didn’t matter what they were. They were life, life that, like a giant heart, the tree pumped, life that tickled my skin and bit me.

  I could end this life with a single gesture. Down my palm went and I smeared it in circles against my calf. My skin shone black with lifeless mush, but even then the other teeming and persisting creatures went on teeming and persisting, oblivious to what had happened. I grew angry. I slapped my palm again and killed another wave and then another until my legs and palms were burning, sticky and black with stinking guts. Yet even then, the flow kept flowing. Not because the bugs were smart or stupid, cowardly or courageous, but because they were. Because that’s what life did; it went on living.

  A great, invisible heel stepped down on my chest, so hard I found it difficult to breathe. I pulled the black towel from the straw, the skull from the towel. How disappointingly light it felt in my palm now, this human skull; how quickly the teeming bugs descended from my hand and onto its yellow bone; through its nasal cavity, out its eye sockets, and like a curious thumb—my great-grandfather’s—along the tooth-line, in and out of the gaps where teeth were missing.

  I brought the skull to my lips as if to kiss it and whispered softly into the hollow of its eye. One evil egg after another. The storks, whom I’d sentenced to death with a single signature. Grandpa, whom I’d betrayed. Elif, whom I’d judged and ridiculed. I expelled them, one after the other. I purged myself and the skull grew heavy. But I didn’t grow light. Who was I to judge Elif, when I myself had found no strength to finish grad school? Who was I to blame Grandpa for the things he’d done in his youth as a teacher, for betraying me, when I myself had betrayed him, time and again in the past? Not picking up the phone, not writing him any letters. And why? Because he reminded me of some previous, dark life I didn’t want to be reminded of? If only. I’d renounced him out of laziness. It was as pitiful as that. As pitiful as spending fifteen years separated because one political regime has fallen and another has risen in its place. Because there is no money in Bulgaria for a good life. Because your father says, We must go West! And so you go. Money and laziness. Of all the reasons in the world.

  And now here was the money. Twenty thousand dollars, held together with a red rubber band. Because isn’t this why you returned? To sell your land and pay off your PlayStation, your Stratocaster, and your iBook? Or did you come for the adventure? You’re in your twenties, after all, and isn’t this the time to find yourself? Be honest. You were jealous to hear about your freshman-year roommate teaching English in Thailand. Eating noodle soup out of nylon bags, going to bed with beautiful, exotic women.

  So you eat your soup out of an earthen pot now, with a wooden spoon. You drink well water out of a jar, and let’s be honest, the girl you go to bed with is both beautiful and exotic. You whisper your troubles into a human skull and at your feet are bones, the bones of Thracians, Greeks, and Romans, Slavs, Bulgarians, and Turks, like stepping stones that lead you to yourself. Or that’s what you’ve tried to turn them into anyway. Upon their bones, you are one thousand meters tall. But on your own? Be honest. No sky is really balanced on your crown. You hold no winds or clouds or suns. Bow all you want; make fists and pout. Nothing will happen. Except, in sixty years’ time, at most, you’ll leave a skull, like all the others.

  It doesn’t matter if the skull you hold was once a man’s or a woman’s. It doesn’t matter if her eyes were blue or dark, if her nose was hooked or snubbed. To you all skulls are one skull and only the faces change like masks. Admit it, even now, you f
eel so proud of this revelation.

  And hungry. God, what would you give, right now, for a hunk of bread and white cheese, for a fresh tomato with sunflower oil and a sprig of basil? For a jar of that cool well water? But that’s life for you, isn’t it, amerikanche? Its hunger for bread and cheese puts all the rest to sleep—shame, dignity, regrets—they all disappear when life is hungry. And so, you go on living life.

  “I swear, American. You are the weirdest fucker.”

  It took me some time to figure out where I was. To realize Elif was standing outside the nest, not even an elbow’s length away. “You’ve been talking to yourself for five minutes straight,” she said. “How high are you exactly?”

  A thousand meters high. And on my head the sky— Instead, I told her to leave me be.

  “No chance,” she said. “You’ve got my stash.”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “You did already.”

  “Elif,” I said. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her a hundred other things that seemed important. But would she understand me?

  “Why are you here?” I said instead.

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’ve come to steal you.”

  TEN

  AND SO SHE DID. Back at the house I gobbled bread and cheese and tomatoes, sweeter than I had imagined—and then, without a word to Elif or Grandpa, retreated to my room and slept like the slaughtered.

  I awoke terribly thirsty. The roosters started crowing from the Muslim hamlet, the sky grew a thinner dark, and only then did I realize Elif was in bed beside me, facing the wall, as far away as she could be lying.

  Down by the well, I drank straight from the bucket. My throat iced up. My stomach swelled heavy. The chain tolled against the well walls, with a splash the bucket tumbled, and a pair of wings flapped in the blue dawn. Beyond the rows of tomatoes Saint Kosta took one, two quick steps and, wings beating, lifted a meter or two in the air. Then he was back on the ground, his left wing trembling, unable to extend like the other.