Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  “Teacher,” she cried. “Run! They’re stealing the baby!”

  So Grandpa ran. Faster than the Pope. Faster than Vassilko. By then he’d lost his mind completely. All he knew was that when he arrived at the school the man was still there. Michalis, the son of Captain Elias. The boy who’d been set to marry Lenio before Grandpa stole her.

  They met in the courtyard, and in his arms the baby was crying.

  “I’ve come for my son,” he told Grandpa.

  “Your son?”

  “My son.”

  “He isn’t yours.” And Grandpa told him: how Lenio was in love with this other boy, how that boy had gotten her pregnant.

  “I got her pregnant,” said Michalis. “I took her without her permission. So what? We were about to marry.”

  “Your son.”

  “My son.” And the man brushed past so close Grandpa could smell the sweet smell of the baby.

  If they really talked in so many words, Grandpa couldn’t be certain. Nor was he sure what he did next. Only that the man was walking, up the road, out of the village, and if Grandpa let him, he’d never again see the baby.

  When my grandfather flew out of the house, the Pope and Vassilko were just arriving.

  “What’s with the pistol?” the Pope cried, and Grandpa couldn’t tell him, couldn’t think straight.

  He caught up with Michalis just outside the village. “Stop,” he yelled, “I have a pistol.” So the man stopped and when Grandpa ordered him to lay the child down in the grass he did it.

  Then Grandpa shot him in the chest, from six feet away, and killed him.

  * * *

  For a long time Grandpa kept quiet. I could see on the table before me the pistol and Lenio’s black hair. For a long time, nothing else existed. My throat had dried up, my temples were splitting, but I barely noticed. I could see where the story was heading and I couldn’t bear to listen.

  “Grandpa,” I managed at last, that single word containing more fear than a thousand others. Please, I wanted to say, don’t tell me!

  But I said nothing. And so he told me.

  That night, the Pope loaded Grandpa and Lenio’s child into the church cart. He lashed the horse, and the cart rattled and didn’t stop until they were a long way away from Klisura, until the sun was up in the sky, red like the eye of the fire. That’s what Grandpa saw every time he lowered his lids—fire blazing, wild, all-consuming.

  In town, they bought a bus ticket. By the next morning Grandpa and the child had crossed the Balkan Mountains. By the time the sun was once more setting, they had arrived in Pleven.

  “I’m at your mercy,” Grandpa said at the door of his cousin, governor of the region. “This boy’s at your mercy.”

  Without wasting much time they snuck into the Civil Office. They forged Kostadin new papers—kept his birth date, but changed the name of his mother. And then they changed his name too.

  “Grandpa,” I said. I wanted him to swallow what he was about to tell me and never bring it up again. I wanted what had been a secret all my life to stay that way. But we were past that point.

  “Does Father know?” I said, barely a whisper, and when he didn’t answer I repeated it more loudly, my voice sharp and ugly against the night’s quiet.

  “No. I never told him.”

  “So you are not his father then? So you and I are not related?”

  His hands were fire when he reached across the table. “I am your grandpa. You are my grandson.”

  I couldn’t move. The gravity of what he’d told me pinned me down and choked me like a fist. As if for the first time I could see this man for who he really was. Fear, shame, embarrassment. I recognized them in his face. I recognized the years of deception. But there was nothing of my father in his face. In his cheekbones, nose, lips, and chin. And nothing of me.

  A strange kind of chill spread through my body. My blood had come to a boil and in an instant frozen over. All the anger, all the hurt were gone and there was nothing left but empty space. At that moment, I felt no pity to see this old man demolished. And when I pushed his hand away at last, he didn’t reach again to hold me.

  TWELVE

  THAT EVENING THE SKIES OPENED UP. All night it snowed and all night I lay in bed and listened. I couldn’t hear it falling. Each little flake plummeted from a terrible height, pulled down without mercy by the weight of the planet. Whatever the snow touched—the sinewy frame of the naked vine, the edge of the well, the roof of our house—it silenced it completely. Klisura, the Strandja, the entire world. All was silence. And in this silence it was my own blood I heard, speaking of Grandpa.

  I hated him for his doings. Not simply for lying to me, but for deceiving Father. How would Father react to learn the whole truth? To find out that his mother, my grandma, had not died in childbirth? That the few measly pictures we kept as sacred memorabilia were those of some other woman? That the grave we visited was someone else’s?

  And then beneath the hatred there was hurt. This old man and I were not related. He was not really my grandfather, and the more I considered this revelation, the more terrible it seemed. It negated all else—the courage he had mustered to confess; the hardship he’d accepted voluntarily, to raise someone else’s child as his own, alone, each day harboring an awful secret. None of this mattered to me now.

  Hurting like this, I saw myself the way I once had been. A clumsy child. In play I often fell, scraped my palms, bloodied my knees. “It’s just a little scratch,” Grandpa would say, and pick me up, but even in his arms I’d keep on screaming. It was the sight of blood that terrified me, my own blood flowing irrevocably away. Back then, I was convinced the human body was like a sack of milk—punch a hole and the milk starts to gush out. Sure, you could seal the puncture, but how would you return the milk that was wasted? What would become of me, I’d ask Grandpa, sobbing with terror, once all the milk had flowed out?

  Nothing he said convinced me I was safe. Until one day I was screaming like such a brat, Grandpa snatched a pocket knife and sliced his thumb open. “Here, drink this,” he said, and shoved his finger in my mouth. I drank his blood and I replenished mine. And after this, each time I bled, Grandpa took the knife. Each time my blood flowed out, his flowed in. Until my mother saw us. Until she told my dad.

  So now in bed, whose blood was I hearing really? My own or Grandpa’s?

  I found him still out on the terrace, snow piled in clumps on the blanket under which he hid. Even Saint Kosta had had the sense to go inside. The yard, the hills, Grandpa’s shoulders all blazed in the rising sun.

  I brushed away the frost from his hair and only then did he stir.

  “Let’s go inside,” I told him. “You’ll catch a cold.”

  His body followed me absently, but I felt as if his mind remained behind. It seemed to me he had confessed the past in an attempt to forget it. But the spark he’d rekindled had turned into a flame and that flame into a fire. The fire had raged all night and burned away the years one by one. And now my grandfather was here, but he was also in his youth again, trapped there to relive it.

  THIRTEEN

  “HERE, AMERIKANCHE,” Baba Mina said, “I brewed you some tea.”

  “Here, amerikanche,” said Dyado Dacho, and fortified the tea with some rakia.

  They sat me down by the stove; they threw a blanket on my back.

  “Why are you here?” they asked, both smiling, both delighted to be welcoming a guest.

  I told them I had come to ask for herbs. Hibiscus, chamomile, thyme, mint—whatever Baba Mina could give me. In his stupidity Grandpa had sat too long out in the snow and now I was afraid he might be coming down with the flu. And maybe it was just my imagination, but I could swear my forehead was hotter than it ought to be. My eyes were smarting and my back—

  I babbled like this for quite some time. I drank my tea and felt both warm and chilly. It was as if in talk I wanted to delay the real reason I had come. No, it wasn’t for a remedy against some future cold. It was to
hold this woman to account.

  In her jealousy, she’d tempted Lenio and sent her to her death. She’d acted out of spite and malice. For this I was obliged to hate her.

  But here she was so many years later, smiling kindly, her lips stretched to reveal a toothless mouth, serving me a tisane made with eleven different herbs—herbs she’d spent the entire autumn picking, for me and for Elif.

  “Forgive me, amerikanche,” she said, and passed me a jar of sugar. “We’re out of the honey you like.”

  I watched her with dizzy eyes. I could hear the boom of my blood and the flow of hers. Like two rivers clashing. No, I couldn’t hate her.

  Almost four years ago, Grandpa had fixed up two houses in Klisura. He’d fixed the school for himself, then he’d hired a worker from the Muslim hamlet to restore another house. While the worker painted the walls, scrubbed the floors, Grandpa rebuilt the coop, bought chickens, replanted the garden. Then he traveled to Burgas, took the elevator to the eighth floor of an apartment complex, rang the bell. Baba Mina didn’t recognize him until he produced a jar of yogurt from his coat.

  She was retired. Dyado Dacho was retired. They hated life in town. And so, before the month was over, they moved to Klisura, into the house that Grandpa had fixed for them.

  No, no, I thought, and babbled on and on about how much my muscles hurt. I hadn’t come for a confrontation. I’d come to recognize my grandpa’s strength and, like him, to forgive.

  “Thank you, Grandma.” I held her hands and kissed them and she started laughing, lightly.

  “You are a funny boy,” she said.

  “Funny?” said Dyado Dacho, and sniffed my empty cup. “Try drunk.”

  FOURTEEN

  “NOTHING IS WRONG WITH ME,” Grandpa was trying to convince me. “I’m healthy as a rock.”

  Then why, I asked him, was he sitting so close to the stove? Why did his teeth chatter and why was he sweating rivers?

  “Why, why!” he said, and huddled in his coat. But when I passed him a cup of the tisane he seized it with shaking hands and drank it bottoms up.

  “What do you want?” he cried. “I’m thirsty.”

  I pulled a chair by his side and let the fire in the stove’s belly warm me up. Hot and cold waves washed down my back. A dull pain was settling deep in my muscles. Yet when I took my temperature all was as it ought to be.

  “I swear I’m getting sick,” I said, and shoved the thermometer in Grandpa’s mouth.

  Disgusted, he spat it out. For a moment he looked determined to fight, but then he shook the thermometer and stuck it under his armpit.

  I went to pour myself more tea. Even Saint Kosta seemed sick under his rug in the corner. “He’s shivering,” I said, returning to the stove. “You let him catch a cold.”

  “He’s fine,” Grandpa assured me. He turned the thermometer this way and that to read it.

  “You happy now?” he said, triumphant. “No fever.”

  And just like that the breath caught in his throat. His eyes grew dim.

  “I couldn’t stand to see you like you were,” he said. “Resigned. Heartbroken. I wanted you to know you’re not alone. I too suffered once and then lived on. But now I feel so bad, my boy. Much worse. Much worse.”

  Saint Kosta had come to his side and Grandpa was petting him with his trembling hands. And watching him like this, I felt a sudden rush of joy.

  All this time I’d thought the old man had been telling me his story only so he might get relief. All this time I had been wrong. Once again Grandpa had cut himself for my sake. Once again he was letting his blood replenish mine.

  I hadn’t come to Klisura to sell my land and pay off my debt. I hadn’t come here to fall in love and get my heart broken, to help a girl slice the rope and be free, to protect the storks, or even to assist an old man in finding peace through some confession. I hadn’t come to find myself. It was my grandfather I’d come to discover; so that for the first time in our lives, we might become like one.

  At least that’s what I wanted to believe now as I watched him sob. And because I believed it, in that very instant, it was so.

  FIFTEEN

  THRACIANS, Greeks, and Romans, Slavs, Bulgarians, and Turks—only those who never passed through the Strandja never brought it to ruin. How many times had Klisura burned down to the ground? How many times had its people rebuilt, as if out of sheer spite? Let this school be a symbol of our freedom, of our resilience, Captain Kosta had once proclaimed. And if it burns down we shall remake it, so Klisura may be born again. Until in the end—after all this desolation—rebuilding the school had come to signify nothing but rotten luck: erect the school again and before too long the fire will return to consume it.

  Well, my grandfather had rebuilt it despite the mayor’s warning. And it seemed only natural, necessary even, that Grandpa would be the one to bring Klisura down again.

  Klisura ended with a single word: urbanization. Gone were the cooperative farms, the hundred white sheep. Gone were Baba Mina and the nestinari. The Party was generous enough—as compensation for their relocation all villagers received apartments in a giant block of flats. In Burgas, almost overlooking the sea.

  And then, devoid of people, the Christian hamlet was transformed into a border zone. Such was the end. And it was all my grandpa’s doing. He’d fulfilled splendidly his job indoctrinating the Klisuran Muslims. To listen to his recommendation was the least the Politburo could do.

  The years passed. Grandpa raised my father an honest, smart, hardworking man. My father met my mother, married her, and I was born. Then Communism fell and Father said, We have no future here. We ran away, while Grandpa stayed behind. When he retired, having heard from his student that Klisura’s school was still in his name, he sold his apartment, pocketed the money, and went back to the Strandja.

  He hired a lawyer. The trial began. He would be damned if he let the imam build his rotten turbines.

  And now finally I understood what this stubborn fight was all about.

  Grandpa wasn’t saving the storks. It was Lenio he was saving.

  “When one of the nestinari dies,” Lenio had told him a long, long time ago beside the walnut tree, “a stork is hatched up in a nest. When one of the storks dies, a new fire dancer is born. Take care then, teacher, not to ogle other women once I’m gone. Because I will be watching.”

  I wondered if she was really watching now. If she could really see him—sitting by the stove so many years later, petting the stork, singing the songs she once had sung.

  After all—I’d seen her world through her eyes. It seemed only fair that she should see my world through mine.

  SIXTEEN

  NO AMOUNT OF TEA could chase away the fever. Our foreheads had caught fire; the marrow in our bones had come to a boil. Yet we were deathly cold. Teeth chattering, muscles contracting, and chills sloshing up and down our spines like water from an icy stream.

  Why then did the mercury refuse to rise?

  “Broken,” I’d say, and shake the thermometer as if my spite could fix it. I’d pace across the stifling room and throw more wood into the fire.

  “Dear God, my boy,” Grandpa would say, and button up his coat. “Sit down. Stop acting.”

  But I wasn’t acting. He was. Pretending he was fine. Donning shirts, wool jackets, an old, moth-eaten hat, and drinking tea by the liter.

  “You keep the room so hot,” he’d say. “My throat gets dry. I’m thirsty.”

  “Drink water, then. Eat snow.”

  No. We were burning up. And with each new day, denying it was proving a greater challenge. And with each new day, our heads were turning faster. We sat in the kitchen, by the stove. We even moved our beds there, too cold to go back to our rooms. We rarely spoke. Instead, we listened to the crackling of the wood and to the whistle of our breathing. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in and out. A delirious rhythm that spilled into my dreams.

  I sometimes dreamed of Lenio. Sometimes of Grandpa as a young man. But mostly I dream
ed of Elif. Each time I met her she wanted me to give her something back. The tresses I’d cut but hadn’t thrown away; the little photograph I cradled under my pillow.

  “They aren’t yours,” she’d say. “So give them back.”

  And soon an endless line of long-gone souls was marching through my dreams. Lenio, demanding her braid. Vassilko, claiming he should be the one to get it. Captain Kosta, asking for his pistol back, and even Nazar Aga, chasing after his severed head.

  I saw refugees of war—Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish—wandering the mountains of my mind, searching for their long-lost brothers, sisters, mothers. “Give them back,” they cried, “our names, our bones, our blood. Return them to us.”

  I tried to tell them I didn’t have these things. But all the same they kept on calling.

  “Why do you need your hair?” I asked Elif in one dream, Lenio in another.

  “Why do you need your pistol? Your head?”

  “So we may throw them in the fire,” they answered like a single voice.

  Until one evening, the line of souls appeared at our gates.

  Grandpa was first to hear them coming. He jumped out of his chair and glued himself against the window.

  “I heard it too,” I said, and stood beside him. Our reflections watched us, framed by darkness.

  “A whistle,” Grandpa said.

  “Right there over the hill.”

  “No, it was closer. Hear!”

  He threw the window open. Wind like knuckles punched our faces and whirled around us handfuls of shaved-off ice. The flame in the lamp went out and in the corner Saint Kosta began to beat his wings. Only the glimmer of the furnace spilled out scarlet and in that light our shadows stretched thin like rope across the yard.

  We listened closely, but all we heard was howling wind. It sounded like the mountain, hill after hill, was calling us with whistles. So it was only natural that Grandpa too should call it back.