Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  “Find me one American doctor,” he said, “who can do this better with what I’ve been given.”

  He called us over and we stared at the gray screen. Some people have trouble telling this from that in an ultrasound image. I am not one of those people.

  “Can you see it?” I asked Elif, and she nodded, only a small nod.

  “Dear God,” Grandpa bellowed. “I too can see it.”

  A tiny thing, so small to look at you’d say it was nothing. And in that nothing already a heart beating and the emptiness taking on form and flesh, purpose and meaning.

  TWO

  THE SMELL OF WHITE CHEESE nauseated her, and the taste of yellow cheese. The texture of ripe tomatoes. The way bread crust pressed against her palate when she chewed it. But she didn’t mind couscous one bit and that’s what she ate, for breakfast, for lunch and dinner. Sometimes she mixed it with yogurt, sometimes with black currant jelly. She picked it straight off the plate with her fingers. “All my life,” she said, “I’ve hated couscous. But I guess the baby likes it.”

  We spoke of the baby a great deal. She’d be the prettiest, the healthiest, the strongest. We slept poorly, what with Elif’s retching, and we spent our nights making things up. We’d marry right after the name change. Then we’d go to the U.S. All my fears proved groundless—I shared my plan with Elif and she said only, “You’d better start teaching me English.”

  So I started. We came up with a few essential phrases—I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. How much for a packet of couscous? Then we began to name the world around us—desk, chair, sky, mountain. We felt like the original man and woman, giving face to the faceless.

  “You realize, amerikanche,” Elif said one night, “how much power over me you’re holding?” I could create for her a brand-new world. A world in which the desk was an apple, the apple a window, and she would have no way of knowing. She would have to believe me.

  “Do it,” she said one night. “Make me a new world.”

  “What do you call this?” she said, and ran her fingers across the blanket.

  “An ocean,” I said, the first word I thought of.

  So she pulled the ocean up to our chins, its sands and reefs, caves, sunken ships, gold treasures, sharks, whales, dolphins, and plankton.

  “And this?” she said, and gripped one lock of her hair.

  “A river.”

  I pressed my lips to its waters, cool and lulling. How easy it was to change the world. All it took was to alter the way you saw it.

  * * *

  Elif’s hair had grown down past her shoulders. Beautiful, glimmering black tresses. She no longer had any desire to keep them at a boy’s length. “I feel feminine,” she said once. “For the first time, a woman.”

  Some days we went to see the turbines. The construction was over. The machines gone, no sign of the workers. And the five turbines so clean with the sun setting and their metal bodies catching the last rays. The blades stretched like arms, perfectly still, not yet turning. Each turbine a many-armed giant. Great gods of the old days, immersed in deep meditation, at the same time creators of life and destruction.

  “I hope they wait for the storks to fly off,” I said. “And only then turn the blades on.”

  Overhead, the flocks had thickened. More and more storks arrived each day and finally, at the end of August, they set off on their journey. Grandpa poured us three shots of rakia—for me, for him, and for Saint Kosta. We downed ours in one gulp and the stork dipped his bill in his glass and overturned it.

  “Will I live to see them next spring?” Grandpa said, and I told him—of course he’d see them.

  “I hope not, my boy. I don’t think I can take it.”

  That day Grandpa stayed on the terrace long past sunset. He didn’t touch his dinner, nor did he drink any more rakia. Saint Kosta had perched in the corner and to me they both looked so low and defeated.

  “In my mind I picture them flying,” Grandpa told me when I sat down beside him. “I imagine their journey. Where they are this very moment. What the air feels like way up there.” When he turned to me, his eyes were sharp, clear.

  “Take me with you, my boy, will you? I want to fly on a plane. I want to see the New World.”

  I’m not sure if he meant this or was just talking. But why not? I’d seen older men crossing the ocean to visit their children.

  You got it! I wanted to say, yet I said nothing. I knew better, and when Grandpa smiled, nodded, I saw he too knew better.

  Above us the flocks were flowing, only we couldn’t see them. We heard the noise they made, like the rush of a celestial river no human eye was meant to dirty. It was close to midnight when Grandpa gave out a whistle. A loud, clean singsong that carried across the Strandja. Take good care of them, he was saying, though this time, nobody answered.

  THREE

  WE RECEIVED THE COURT’S DECISION on the last day of August. A mailman delivered the certified letter right to our gates so Elif could sign that she’d gotten it. I didn’t even know regular mail came to Klisura. How silly I felt, all this time paying the bus driver.

  Elif ripped the envelope open in the courtyard and her eyes darted across the page. Her face was a mask of dark and bright pieces, the way the sun strained through the grapevine.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. She plunged down on the bench and reread the letter. “They’ve denied me the name change.”

  The court had found her reasons insubstantial.

  “They change my name as a kid when I don’t want it. Now I want it and they won’t let me.”

  “Can’t we appeal?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Can we?”

  “Sure. Maybe. Listen,” I said. “Keep your old name. What’s the big deal?”

  The words had not yet rolled off my tongue fully and I was already regretting them. If her look could do physical damage, I’d be very badly damaged.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” she said, then dropped the letter and marched to the house. The door to our room slammed three times, each progressively more spiteful. Grandpa was watching me from up on the terrace. He poured himself a glass of rakia.

  “Do you even know what happened?” I asked him.

  “It seems you don’t either.”

  He was right. I couldn’t see the big deal. Or rather, I saw it—I knew Elif wanted a fresh start, to be a brand-new person—but I didn’t feel it. How would the mere change of a name achieve all this exactly? Changing the name was so artificial. The change had to come from the inside and that’s what I told her.

  “Open the door,” I begged from the hallway. I sat down on the floor and kept talking. I tried to make her see my point. I spoke wisely and thought I was very convincing. At last, the chair she’d propped the door with moved on the other side and her hand stuck out through the gap just a little.

  I reached to hold it, but she slapped mine away.

  “No, you idiot,” she said. “I need the bucket!”

  FOUR

  THE NIGHT AFTER her name request was rejected, Elif had her first in a series of nightmares. I was awake, listening to the dark and the mountain, when she started sobbing. She was crying in her sleep, which old superstition claimed was a good thing. But it wasn’t a good thing. It couldn’t be. She kept crying even after her eyes opened. She refused to tell me what she’d dreamed of, but the following night the dream returned and she relented. She had found herself in the nest, on the stork tree, and all around her were black storks. They watched her with gray eyes, human. Then just like that the storks began beating their wings and rose together, a black mass, terrible, awful, up, up, away from the old tree. And she couldn’t stop them. She wanted to. Had to. But she couldn’t.

  “They took it away,” she said, and the tears rolled on. “I couldn’t stop them.”

  “It’s my father,” she told me the next morning. “He’s laid a black spell on me. He’s the imam. He’s cursed me.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. But I believed her.
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  When Saint Kosta came to us in the courtyard we both cowered.

  “Grandpa,” Elif cried. “Keep him away, Grandpa!”

  “I can’t stand to see you this way,” Grandpa told us one evening. We had all gathered on the terrace to eat couscous for dinner. As of the last few days Elif’s nausea had gone away completely, but she still retained the old paleness.

  “I can’t help it,” she said, and started crying. This time I didn’t even reach to hold her. I felt entirely helpless. I knew of nothing I could do to make her feel better.

  Night after night I dreamed bad dreams and awoke each morning more fatigued, more anxious. Dry, cool winds gusted through the streets of the village. Their wailing oppressed me and I caught myself missing the noise of the storks, which had once bothered me so much. Watching the wind turbines filled me with anger. Why weren’t the blades spinning? All this rushing, fighting to build them and now they stood unmovable in the wind. What were these people waiting for exactly? Turn on the switch already. Generate. Energize. Harness. The power of the ever-gusting. Of the invisible, plentiful spirits.

  Saint Kosta pestered me, like a dog seeking attention, always in my way, no doubt just to annoy me. The way Grandpa smacked his lips when he drank rakia got on my nerves. The way he scratched his neck.

  Our time was running out, I knew that much. We had to do something and do it quickly. Run away from Klisura, away from all that haunted Elif, away from ourselves. Become new people and remain together. Or remain the same people and fall apart, each in his own orbit.

  “Please don’t cry so much,” I’d tell Elif softly. “It’s not good for you or the baby.”

  “I know it’s not good,” she said. “That’s why I’m crying.”

  That night she had another nightmare. The black storks flying. She was convinced Saint Kosta was lurking outside to take away the baby. She was convinced her father had sent him. The heat of her forehead stung me when I kissed her.

  “She’s burning,” I told Grandpa, and we measured her fever.

  “God Almighty, boy,” Grandpa said in the kitchen. He soaked a kerchief in vinegar. “God Almighty.”

  All night Elif tossed and turned. I, on the other hand, lay frozen. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe even. A total paralysis of the body. A complete shutdown of the mind. I must have dozed off at last, with the sky growing lighter.

  I was in America, back in my apartment, in my bed. The tree outside my window was heavy with black storks. The storks watched me.

  “Don’t let them take it from us, amerikanche,” Elif said in English beside me. “Don’t let them fly away.” Then the storks began to beat their wings and the world around us to rattle. They rose up, a black veil. Nothing I could do would stop them.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Elif.

  Her face was as hot as the fire. She rested it on my chest and we lay like this in my dream together and we watched the black storks flying.

  FIVE

  THE ULTRASOUND let out a low hum. The gray screen—a constant whistle, which could not be denied. Flat and high-pitched, it could cross mountains, seas, whole worlds.

  “I’m very sorry,” the doctor told us. She was the best in town, a specialist. Grandpa’s old student had sent us to her once before and we were due for a checkup soon. But here we were now, urgently. A big line snaked outside her office, but she worked us right in.

  “This is the sack,” the doctor said and showed us. “This is the fetus. Can you see it?”

  We could see it. There was no heartbeat. And the doctor said the fetus measured eight or nine weeks old, that it had not developed past that. But it had taken Elif’s body time to react, in stages. First her morning sickness had gone. Now all this.

  “When did the spotting first start?” the doctor asked, and Elif told her. She had not told me. She had kept it a secret for two whole days. She’d hoped it would go away, that she’d feel better. Then we woke up to bright-red blood on the white sheet.

  I panicked. I cried out, “We need to see the doctor.”

  Elif seemed calmer. “I’ll lie still,” she said. “I’ll get better.” But lying still was out of the question. Her back was hurting and the blood wasn’t stopping. I knew she wouldn’t want me to discuss it with Grandpa, but I discussed it. “There is no bus until tomorrow. Can we wait that long?”

  He threw away his cigarette. “We can’t wait.” Then he was out the gate, down the road. I heard Elif calling. Saint Kosta had snuck inside, perched on the chair to watch her.

  “Get him out,” she cried, and I did. He resisted. He beat his wings; his talons scratched the wood floor. By the time I’d managed to shoo him into the yard, the military jeep was pulling over. The imam was driving.

  I was afraid Elif would throw a fit when she saw her father, but she said nothing. We spread a blanket on the backseat and laid her down on the blanket. I rested her head on my lap, petted her cheeks and her forehead. I dabbed the sweat away with a kerchief. I could tell she was in pain, by her eyes, by how hard her teeth were clenching, but she made no sound. Up front Grandpa and the imam too kept quiet. Only in town did they speak—Grandpa was giving directions to the doctor’s office.

  Now we were inside the office, cool, dark, like the mosque. An AC unit blew overhead and the drawn blinds buzzed when the air hit them. The ultrasound buzzed. The screen whistled.

  The doctor was talking. “This happens to many women. You’ll grieve some, then you’ll feel better. And your body—no damage to it. You’re young. Healthy. You’ll be pregnant again before you know it.”

  Then the doctor gave us an option. She could remove the fetus. Or we could wait until Elif expelled it. I thought she ought to remove it. But Elif shook her head lightly. Her face shone awash so bright with screen light—silver, perfectly calm, tender. I couldn’t bear to see it. I couldn’t bear to see the gray screen. I stood up. The doctor was talking. When we went home there would be more blood. Back pain. Contractions. Then Elif would start to expel blood clots, pieces of the placenta. At last she’d expel the fetus. It could be tomorrow, or in a few days. It could be next week. All in all, it could take up to six weeks.

  Six weeks, I thought. Carrying the baby like this for six weeks.

  SIX

  THERE WAS MORE BLOOD that night. There was back pain. Elif lay in bed, under a wool blanket, and her teeth chattered. She was freezing. Grandpa brought her tea, but she wouldn’t look up. She kept her eyes on her hands and her hands stiff on her belly. Every now and then, when the pain got sharper, her hands made fists and her knuckles turned to snowdrops. From time to time I left my chair to open the window, to let the breeze freshen up the air. The entire mountain had sunk into silence. I’d never heard a night so quiet. No wind, no movement. Complete absence.

  I must have dozed off in the chair, until Elif’s sobbing woke me. I put my hand on her stomach, but she pushed me away. It wasn’t for her sake I wanted to touch her.

  Her voice was hoarse, distant.

  “I feel so empty,” she said. “No spite. No venom. No hatred.” She began to sob again and only then did she allow me to sit at the edge of the bed and kiss her forehead. “I’m so clean,” she said. “So new.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  She took my hands and pressed her cheek against them. “Don’t you understand?” she said. “It’s all been emptied out. Nothing’s left. Nothing.”

  “But I still love you,” I said. She leaned her face on my chest and I held her.

  SEVEN

  WE COULDN’T LET THE EARTH SWALLOW IT, those black jaws. We couldn’t let the fire. So we climbed the stork tree. We pulled the black towel out of the nest and unwrapped it.

  “My kazam,” Elif said. “My darling.” She set the skull aside and laid our baby upon the towel. It was a tiny thing, but already it had eyes, nubs for arms and legs, and where the brain would be—a dark spot.

  Elif had expelled it that morning, after a series of painful contractions. Four d
ays after we’d seen the doctor.

  We wrapped the towel around it. We laid it gently into the soft hay.

  “What about the skull?” I said.

  “What about it?”

  We left the skull as it was, in the nest, and we climbed down.

  “Don’t look back,” Elif told me.

  EIGHT

  IT WAS SOMETIME IN OCTOBER when Elif said she was leaving. We were in bed, but turned away from each other. We rarely touched now and if we did, always by accident, we jumped, startled, as if we’d brushed against a furnace.

  The winds had grown colder. The days shorter. And the rains had returned to the Strandja. It was raining now, very softly, and out the window the sky looked like a great sea. The clouds were its waves, driving madly away from us, away from Klisura, toward the edge of the world. That’s where the sea emptied out. It had no shores. The nothing contained it.

  “I have to leave, amerikanche,” Elif said. “I can’t stay here.”

  My heart understood that. But if I tried to explain it to myself I failed badly. Why couldn’t we work through all that had happened and reemerge stronger together? Why couldn’t we go to America, start a new life?

  And what about Aysha? I wanted to ask her. What would she do without you? This answer too I knew already. Elif would not allow her sister to walk down the same path she herself had once taken. She would not reward the little girl’s extortions. Every night for many years Elif had begged Allah to cut the rope that tied her to Aysha. Yet Allah would not cut the rope for her, as he would not for anybody. All along, Elif understood now, she’d held a knife but had feared to use it. Now at last, she was ready. Aysha would be better off without her.

  “Where will you go?” I mumbled. She took some time to think it over, though I don’t think she was deciding. She was afraid to tell me.

  “Turkey,” she said. “Where else?” She turned around to face me. “American, give me some of that money. Two or three thousand.”