Stork Mountain (15 page)

Each day he worked the garden, went for bread and yogurt to the Pasha Café, even rode the bus to town—a business trip, he told me, which would have been a great deal more bearable with my pleasant person by his side.

“A sacrilege! Three days in bed!”

“My boy, how can I say this nicely: you stink like a widowed badger. Run and shower in the rain, then help me fix the frame for the cucumbers.”

“Five days! A heart of briar jelly would mend itself in four!”

Each time he came to my room, I wanted him to leave. Each time he left, I wanted him to barge back in. What a tragic waste of precious time, I thought, and watched him act the clown, shoulders slouched at the foot of my bed. For shame, I told myself. Get up. There is no time to waste with broken hearts.

“It lashes bad,” he'd say some days. “It stabs like a dagger to the back. Greek rain.” He would expel the words like spittle. A long while he would watch the stork nest on the roof of the house closest to ours: one stork braving the sideways-falling rain, brooding the eggs, the other fetching mice, frogs, little snakes; the two switching places. Grandpa would tick his tongue. “If it rains another week like this…,” he'd say, but never finish.

On the sixth day of my self-imposed home incarceration Grandpa rapped on the door and, completely disregarding my cry to wait, stormed in. He held a nylon sack of bread and with the same hand struggled to close his umbrella. “It's stuck again, the brute,” he muttered, without once looking up, shaking the umbrella and spraying water on me, on my desk, on the map of the ancient world behind me. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Look who I found outside, standing in the rain, afraid to knock.”

“Grandpa,” I started to say, but still fighting the umbrella he stepped aside to let Elif pass through. She appeared in the doorframe so drenched, so shrunken in size, so despondent with her headscarf glued to her cheeks, with the sleeves of her jacket soaked and droopy, that I have no idea from where that burst of sudden laughter came.

“Yes, laugh,” I told her, standing helplessly naked in the middle of the room, the pair of clean boxers I'd meant to change into treacherously far away in the wardrobe. “You too, Grandpa. Laugh it out.”

A joyous grin on his face, he handed me the open umbrella. And while I hurried to cover up he spoke to Elif, still grinning, predictably as coarsely as he could. “Chilly rain today, Elif. Bulgarian.”

 

TWO

HER TEETH CHATTERED;
her shoulders rocked. Water dripped from her jacket and drummed on the carpet, yet she refused to take it off. I offered her a blanket, but she said no, she wasn't cold. “Nonsense,” Grandpa said, back from the kitchen, and ordered me to look away. When I looked again, Elif's jacket had been stretched to dry on the hanger in the corner and she was wrapped in a cocoon of wool. The old man shoved a steaming cup into her hands, and as she brought it to her lips some tea splashed on the headscarf, now spread in her lap. “With extra honey,” he said, and did not move until she'd taken a few small sips.

At the threshold, he stopped. “I have much work to do,” he lied, “and will be in my study. If you want more tea, the boy can brew it.” He hesitated, then at last chose to leave the door wide open.

By now, some color had flushed Elif's cheeks and the purple of her lips had begun to turn scarlet. She steamed under the blanket, the stench of wet wool mixing with the reek of my six-day sweat and fogging up the window so that I no longer recognized the yard, the rooftops, and the storks.

“Nice fire truck,” Elif said, and nodded at the toy by my desk. I told her the ladder was telescopic, meaning it expanded when there was need, to which she said, “I know what ‘telescopic' means.” And then, “I bet it does.”

She looked about the room in silence. “Orhan has been detained,” she said at last. “Locked up in solitary confinement. But his father will slay a ram and grease up the right people and he'll be out before his beard has grown in length a third of yours.”

“And you find this amusing?” I asked, disgusted, and in embarrassment scratched at my scruffy face.

“I find it hysterical. Like the rest of my life, which is so packed with jokes.”

Here was a good one—she was no longer allowed to see her sister. Aysha was now alone, locked up in her room, and there were not enough rams in the whole wide world we could slay to bribe her father. “He is the only one allowed to see her. He feeds her, bathes her, in her room. And I won't be surprised,” she said, “if my mother joins them shortly, the way she's been burning with the Christian flame.”

Other girls in the village were burning too. It was a proper craze now, only two days before the feast of Saint Constantine and Saint Elena.

“I wish I too were burning,” she said. “I'd grab this Saint Kosta by his beard and then—hold tight, Elif!—either he lifts me up to the clouds or I pummel his mug into the dirt. There is no third way.”

I watched her fuming, prettier now in her spite than she had ever seemed before. The short locks of her hair were drying up and curling and she resembled a ball of needles I wanted, no, felt compelled to hold. Here she was, crying out for help—a cornered, ferocious little beast—and all I thought of was how softly her breath had touched my face.

“So how do I compare?” I asked her. She blinked, surprised at the question and my tone. Side by side, I said. Orhan the shepherd, the soldier whose madness equaled only hers—and me, the boring foreign boy?

“Please stop,” she said.

But I kept going. He was tall, I wasn't. He was handsome, I—not so much. He was daring, and spontaneous and brave … Please stop, she said. Why should I? I could be just as vile as she had been. I simply had to know—

“Well!” she cried. “You compared well, all right?” And only then did she look me in the eyes, hers feverish and frightened. “You are safe, all right? Dependable. But you'll be gone tomorrow and I'll be here.”

To this I had no comment. I asked her why she'd come.

“To say I'm sorry. For a moment I'd thought—here is someone. My ticket out. But you're right. I'm crazy. And crazy people see things that aren't there.”

I don't believe I've ever wanted to kiss a girl as much as I did then. I wanted to hush her, to tell her I too had seen things that weren't there, but could be. A strong imagination, I wanted to say, could wish things into existence.

She spoke. “But this is not the only reason. I came to ask for help.”

I asked how I could help her and for the first time her lips twisted in something that might have been a smile. “Not you,” she said.

 

THREE

BUT GRANDPA WOULDN'T HEAR IT
. “Elif,” he said, and pushed away the page he was writing. “You know I care for you.”

“Then prove it,” she cried, yet when she spoke again her tone had softened. She did not want Grandpa to slay more roosters, nor did she want him to bloody his hands with magic fires. He had chosen to stay away from the
nestinari
, whatever his reasons, and she respected that. But he had to tell her where she could find them.

“Find whom?” I asked from the threshold.

Back in the day, sometime in the mid-sixties, most all Christians had left Klisura and moved to the city. There had been two entire apartment complexes in Burgas full of Klisurans.

“Tell me, Grandpa,” Elif said again. “Where did the
nestinari
go once they left Klisura?”

He waved his hand as if to chase away a gnat. Why should he tell her?

“So I can steal my father's Lada tomorrow. So I can load my sister in it and take her to the
nestinari
. So they can cure her.”

He hushed her with kindness I didn't fully believe. He told her to stop throwing oil into the fire. No one could cure her sister, because her sister wasn't sick—she was only acting. As was everyone else in the village, including her mother. “You want to help? Then ignore them.”

“The way you ignored the two girls from the upper hamlet? Were they acting too, Grandpa? Convincing actresses they were, right down to their graves.”

Those girls, Grandpa said, they were a different story. Those girls—

But now it was her turn to cut him off. They must have gone somewhere, the
nestinari
, some other village, and she'd be damned if she wasn't going to find them.

“You won't find them here,” Grandpa stuttered, his kindness gone to rot. “Because they all crawled back across the border, the serpents. And stayed there, in Turkey.”

“I don't believe you,” she said. “There must be others left.”

I stood between them, ready to end this quarrel. Grandpa had turned as yellow as the paper on which he wrote, and I worried for his blood pressure. But before I'd spoken, Elif grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “
Amerikanche
, you have to ask him.”

“
Amerikanche
, you'll ask me nothing,” Grandpa said—no, cried out in fury. “You, American, will stay out of this mess. And you, Elif, here are some points for you to mull over.” He took a clean sheet and stabbed a line with his pen, as though underlining invisible text. “Your father is punishing your sister so he may punish you and get to me.” He scratched another line. “You're punishing my boy to get back at your father. And for what? What will you prove?” And then another. “Or did
your father
send you here? So he may get his precious land and harvest winds for money? Leave my boy be, Elif,” he said, and circled the lines. “Go home and don't come back.”

By now she was crying. Her sobs were so quiet I didn't even notice when they stopped. “All right,” she said, and wiped her cheeks. She shed the wet blanket to the floor like a second skin and without looking up rushed out the door.

“I can't believe you, old man,” I cried. Were land and ruined houses more important to him than a little girl's life? Was he honestly refusing to help the daughters, so as to punish their father?

I caught up with Elif two houses down the road. Of course, melodramatically, it was still raining. I told her to stop, and when she didn't, I seized her hand and spun her around.

“These girls from the upper hamlet,” I said. “What happened to them?”

“What do you think? They were sick with Saint Kosta's fever and then they died.”

But how? If it was all in their heads, all an act for attention?

“You said it best,
amerikanche
. A strong imagination can wish things into existence.”

She tried to wriggle out of my grip, but I wouldn't let her.

“I'll help you find the
nestinari
. I'll make him tell me where they went.”

She shook her head. “He's right,” she said, almost shouting over the slashing of the rain. “I won't bother you again.”

I'm certain she had seen my kiss coming from a mile away and still she acted surprised.

“Please don't,” she said, but it was only after she'd let me kiss her a second time that she broke free from my grip and sank into the rain.

 

FOUR

“I REMEMBER
I was pulling water from the well when the man called me, right there from the road. It hadn't even been a full month since I'd returned to Klisura, so three years ago, then. I remember it was noontime and the end of May, but the sun was August sun already.”

“Are you the teacher?” the man called, and Grandpa told him yes, he'd been a teacher once. Come into the shade, he told the man, under the trellis. A sweatier man Grandpa had never seen. He wore a sleeveless jacket, goatskin, with white and black spots. And his mustache was as thick as his forearms. “I'm so thirsty I could drink a river,” the man said, and Grandpa filled up the jar from the bucket. The man drank it and shook his head. “This isn't helping.” He set the jar aside, plunged his head right in the bucket, and held it underwater so long Grandpa thought he might have drowned. When at last the man shot up, his lungs wheezed and he looked around, face flushed and mustache dripping muddy streams. “Teacher,” he said, “my girls are dying and you have got to save them.” He'd come all the way from the upper hamlet, right over the hill somewhere, to take Grandpa back with him to their sickbed.

“Let me guess,” Grandpa told him, “your girls are burning with the
nestinari
fever?”

The man's eyes turned to saucers. “I know,” Grandpa told him, “because for two weeks now, like a circus bear, I've been parading among the houses of sick girls. And not one of them is really burning and they're all acting.”

But this old grandma, the man stuttered, this old Christian woman had seen his daughters and she'd recognized in their eyes Saint Kosta's fever. “This old Christian woman,” Grandpa answered, “is sad and senile. She knows nothing of Saint Kosta.”

“But you do, teacher,” the man said. “That's why I've come to get you.”

Grandpa asked the man if he'd called a proper doctor to examine his daughters and the man told him he didn't trust proper doctors. Not since they'd let his wife die in childbirth, in the town hospital at that.

“I'm sorry,
kardash
,” Grandpa told him. “I can't help you.”

The man watched him, stunned. He shook his head. He wasn't leaving.

“That's fine by me,” Grandpa said, then returned to the bench and pretended to read his paper.

“Teacher, if it were for my sake, I wouldn't be asking you again. But it's for my girls I'm begging. If you too are a father—”

Right about here, Grandpa's fuse blew a little. It had been months since he'd last heard from me and who knew if he'd ever hear my voice again. So he shouted. He asked the man what he knew about him being a father and this and that, and overall he brought much shame to our name that day.