Stork Mountain (10 page)

“From that day onward,” the imam said, “Manol was known as Mehmed Abdullah. And he, Mehmed Abdullah, became the first imam of Klisura. When he returned to dust, his son became imam, and then his son after that. For three hundred years, Mehmed Abdullah's sons have summoned the righteous to prayer across the hills of the Strandja. For three hundred years, their wives have borne them one boy after another, a holy bloodline. It is this line,” the imam said, and gently smoothed Aysha's headscarf, “that ends with me here. As willed by the Ever Relenting, the Watchful, glory be to His name.”

He had forgotten his cigarette and the ember had gone out. With a shaking hand he struck a new match and from the heavier stench his eyes watered. But he smiled a serene smile.

“How much I prayed to Allah,” he said, “when my wife was first pregnant that He should send me a boy. And He did, the Merciful. A beautiful boy.” He puffed on the cigarette and exhaled carefully away from Aysha. “The boy died a baby.” Then he smoked, deep in thought, and all I heard was the smack of his lips after each new drag and the tobacco crackling. It seemed that the memory of Mehmed Abdullah had awoken in him other memories, one linked to the other, and when he spoke again I thought I could hear the links of the chain rattling, if only for a second.

“That darkness, I don't wish it upon my worst enemy. I don't wish it upon you, my American friend. Allah, I said, weak, full of doubt, having just buried my boy. Why are you wounding me like this? But I bowed and worshipped and soon my wife was pregnant again. Send me a son, Allah, I prayed. Instead, He sent me a daughter. How I hated her that day, how I hated my wife, myself, my God. Why, I asked Him, are you wounding me like this? But soon my wife was pregnant a third time. Surely, I thought, the Almighty will have mercy. Surely, He won't allow Mehmed Abdullah's bloodline to end. Then this little hedgehog was born,” he said, and leaned forward and kissed the back of Aysha's head. “And my heart was filled with a thousand needles. And when we found out that my wife could have no more children I fell before Allah, defeated. Almighty, I said, I shall never know why you wounded me like this. But I accept it. You expect me to hate my daughters, like any father in my place would, but instead, I vow to love them. And because I love them, I know You'll try to hurt them. And so, I vow to raise my daughters so they may protect themselves even after I'm gone. Do you know, my American friend,” he said, and looked straight at me, his voice low and his eyes unblinking, “how you raise your dog to be a wolf-killer? You start her off early, from a little puppy, and you never spare the stick. You starve her, even when her howling at night plants daggers in your skull. You never let up. And when the wolf arrives, she snaps his thick neck like a twig.

“A few days ago,” he said, and stubbed out the cigarette on the leg of the chair, not even looking at me, “you told my daughter a person ought to have the freedom to choose her own path in life. You spoke to her about rights and liberty and free will. This is why I in turn told you the story of Mehmed Abdullah, and then my own. You want to speak to her again, that's fine by me. But know this much: for every thing you tell my daughter, I'll deal her one blow with the stick. I'll hit and she'll grow feral and finally she'll gnaw your throat. And if she speaks to you, I'll turn the stick on this little one in my lap,” he said, and kissed Aysha again, and she smiled and blinked her feverish eyes. “And you too, Grandpa, stay away from my house. I've told you before, but I won't tell you again. Keep away your curses and your saints, or else my little wolf-killers will spill their guts across the Strandja, hill to hill.”

And then he watched us with a smile and I could feel my throat pulsing long after they'd gotten back in their Lada and driven it away. For a long time Grandpa and I sat quiet under the trellis. The hills grew dim. The roofs of our ruined houses burned with slipping sun. Over and over again, Grandpa turned my coffee cup in his hands. Over and over again, he licked his chapped lips. At last he spoke:

“Do not believe a single word he said. About Manol, the janissaries, his holy bloodline. Hogwash. All of it. And don't believe it's your fault that he will hurt his daughters. It's not theirs either. It's mine.” And then in one swift motion he hurled the cup at the well and shattered it to pieces.

 

FOUR

ONE EVENING THREE YEARS AGO
, when the snows had just begun to melt, the phone rang in Grandpa's small-town apartment. “Comrade teacher,” the voice on the other side said, “I know some things you too should know.” The voice belonged to an old student, a “motivated, driven young man” whom Grandpa had once tutored for university exams, without accepting payment and out of his own goodwill. Since then, the student had done well for himself, climbing up the ladder to a position in Sofia, in the Ministry of Environment and Water. And now he was calling to repay his debt.

Here was the scoop: a company from Turkey was getting ready to obtain some Bulgarian land and build on it a wind farm—a series of turbines for cheap, green electricity. The land, in a protected area—a nature park—was not itself protected. And it could be bought dirt cheap; that is, if the real estate agency that owned the rights did not get a whiff of the planned construction.

“Now, comrade teacher,” the student said, “this is where you come into play.”

The land in question was Klisura. While examining the cadastre, the student had, to his great surprise, stumbled across Grandpa's name. And so, without delay, he'd phoned him up. “We're recruiting, very discreetly, a handful of trusted men.” Each would purchase a Klisuran house—some claiming it as a vacation home, others as a place to live out their retirement years. It didn't matter that demand would drive up the prices. The deals would still be bargains. All Grandpa would have to do was sign a few papers. The money would be provided in full and once the house was in his name, with a quick signature, Grandpa would turn it over to the Turkish developer; or rather to their Bulgarian representative. It was easy. There was no risk. And the reward was hefty: for his troubles Grandpa would receive—

“Why are you doing this?” Grandpa asked his student.

“Comrade teacher, you've done so much for me. I'm forever grateful. Why grease up a stranger when I can put the money in your pocket?”

Yes, that was true, Grandpa said. And kind of him. “May I think it over?”

“Two days,” the student answered. After this, he would look elsewhere. But he trusted Grandpa wouldn't squander this golden chance.

That night, Grandpa didn't sleep. His shut eyelids were silver screens on which he saw Klisura—the houses of his youth razed to the ground and in their place the skeletons of spinning turbines. He thought of all the men and women he'd known, the village mayor, the priest, the idiot Vassilko, their graves covered by a farm for winds.

Within the week, Grandpa had contacted the Strandjan real estate agency and finalized a swap that only a Vassilko could conceive. Almost a hundred acres of first-grade, arid land in the Danube plain—the same land I had returned to sell—for a handful of ruined houses, rocks, and brambles up in the godforsaken Strandja Mountains.

For days on end his phone rang unanswered. “I give you my hand in friendship,” his student barked when at last Grandpa picked up, “and like a dog you bite it to the elbow!” But if Grandpa thought all profit would be his, he had another thing coming. “A signature, comrade teacher, doesn't mean a thing!”

“Of course it does,” Grandpa told me now on the terrace. “But a man needs to lawyer up first.” He rolled the dice: four and two—a point. We had just finished dinner—potato stew he'd cooked on the open fire with paprika and too much salt—and I was quaffing jar after jar of water.

Five months after Grandpa purchased the houses of Klisura, the Turkish company began construction of the first wind turbine. “He simply had to brag,” Grandpa said. “The cocky fool. He called me up one night. His ministry had approved the construction and there was nothing I could do to stop them. And so I told him—a signature doesn't mean a thing.”

To pay for the lawyer Grandpa sold his apartment, packed up, and moved to Klisura. And why not? We weren't calling him; we weren't making any plans to visit. Why shouldn't he enjoy fresh air, a scenic view?

“You have no shame,” I said. How many times in the past ten years had Father begged him to come and live with us in the U.S.?

“Three. And four.” He read the dice and hit one of my unprotected checkers. “And what will I do in America exactly?”

Once in Klisura Grandpa made “a real stink.” He contacted two newspapers, three radio stations, a TV channel. An old man protecting a historic village, fighting the greedy politicians to the death. It was a compelling story. Besides, he had a lawyer now to help him drive the point home: the land was his, regardless of how many permits the government had issued. And the hasty construction of what he referred to as “that phallic piece of junk the Tower of Klisura” was promptly stopped.

“All right,” I said. I rolled a five and reentered with the hit checker. “If this Turkish company is so well connected, why not build their farm right there on that hill? Each turbine a middle finger in your face?”

Grandpa shook his head. That hill was part of a nature park. And so was the hill next to it.

Then why not in another village? Surely there were others in greater ruin than Klisura?

He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. The warm gust picked up the smoke and carried it toward the house.
Klisura
, he said with a wink, as I no doubt knew already, was Bulgarian for
gorge
. The hills stretched on both sides of the village and formed a tunnel through which a current blew—not ferocious, but constant.

“The perfect spot,” I said.

“
A
perfect spot,” he corrected. “I have been told that there are turbines across the border, from here all the way to the White Sea. Like Klisura, ghost villages transfigured into wind farms.”

For three years now, Grandpa and the Bulgarian contractor had waged a lawsuit. Just last week, the day I met him on the bus, Grandpa had been to town. But once again the hearing had been postponed, this time until the fall. “They prance me about like a circus bear. Every time I go to court they find some new reason to postpone. I pay my lawyer, I pay the court fees. Then the charade repeats. I'm bleeding dry. And now they've started coming here to put the screws on me.”

“Elif's father?” I said. “How is he involved?”

Without giving it much thought we had both brought our checkers to the home boards. A curious battle was about to unfold—whoever rolled the better dice would bear off first. No strategy or skill—just luck. I rolled a one and a two, collected the measly checkers. Grandpa rolled a pair of threes, grabbed a handful, then rolled again. In no time he'd borne off half of his checkers. And in no time I'd found myself, once more, behind.

The imam worked for the contractor. Not officially, of course, but he had been paid. His job was to put pressure on Grandpa, to get him to sign an agreement. The Bulgarian hamlet was full of ghosts, the imam had said, but the Muslim quarter was full of the living: men, women, and children. The wind farm would bring investments to Klisura, a fresh, new life.

“And he is right,” Grandpa said. “The people of Klisura will benefit from the farm.”

“But you don't care for the people?”

“My boy,” he said through his teeth. “I don't expect you to understand.”

I really didn't. Besides, what was there to understand? He'd swapped our land—beautiful, fertile fields that could have delivered me from debt—for heaps of rock and bramble, for desolate and ruined houses. And why? To save the memory of people long dead—the idiot Vassilko, the mayor, the village priest. I didn't know these men. I didn't care to know them. They were strangers whom Grandpa had chosen over me, his flesh and blood. He'd preserved the dead and betrayed the living—and not just me, his grandson, but also the people of the Muslim hamlet, who stood to profit from a wind farm.

My heart was racing. I picked up the dice and rolled a pair of sixes. Grandpa blinked in disbelief while, with a shaking hand, I bore off almost all of my remaining checkers. I was an inch away from beating the old man. My rightful indignation was manifesting itself, if not in real life then at least upon the backgammon board. I rolled the dice so hard one popped out on the table, hit the jar, and bounced back. With a magnanimous wave, Grandpa allowed me to roll again. I did: an unfavorable value. I moved two checkers, but bore off none.

“They're all waiting,” he said. “Hoping for me to die so they can seize my land. So let them wait.” A large, contented grin stretched his lips and quickly turned to laughter. He had rolled a pair of sixes. The game was over. He'd won again.

I grabbed the jar and drank it dry. Another loss, another disappointment. And while I was refilling the jar from the earthen jug at my feet, the imam began to sing for the evening prayer. His voice enveloped Klisura like a fishing seine and I could almost feel its knots thick, inescapable against my skin.

Lightly Grandpa closed the board; lightly he took my hand. His was as cold as well water. “My boy, with your arrival a favorable die was cast. The question now is who will play it?” Then he lit a new cigarette, stretched back in his chair, and smoked.

 

FIVE

TWO WEEKS AFTER
I first set foot in Klisura, the storks returned.

I was dreaming of America again. In my dream I was back in my apartment, back in my bed. I wanted to sleep but couldn't. The tree outside my window was heavy with chirping birds, and the harder I pressed the pillow against my skull, the louder they screamed. “A good man has died,” someone said in English beside me. “They're letting you know.”