Stork Mountain (19 page)

“It's me, Grandpa, the American boy,” I told Dyado Dacho now from the threshold, and he raised the oil lamp to see me better. The light flickered, almost went out with the wind, and he pulled it back fearfully, as if he wouldn't know how to relight the fire once he'd lost it.

“I've come alone,” I told him. “Grandpa went to bed already.”

I almost saw his mustache droop in disappointment, and for a moment I thought he'd shoo me away. But he coughed up a
Come in now, hurry!
with the rasp of someone who hadn't spoken in many hours, and slammed the door shut behind me.

The noise of the world shattered into its component parts. I could hear distinctly the grains of sand from the road knocking outside like knuckles, Dyado Dacho's stuffed nose whistling, and my heart beating right in my ears.

“Goes to bed with the chickens and hides like a chicken,” Dyado Dacho said of Grandpa, and led me down a narrow hallway. “Maybe he'll start laying eggs soon. But I'd hide too if I played backgammon as lousy as he plays it. If I lost all my bets and never paid up.”

“Does he owe you money?” I managed, following closely. The old man barked, coughed, laughed—whatever that noise he made was really.

“I don't rightly remember. But don't you dare tell him!”

The corridor seemed to grow narrower, the planks at our feet louder in their creaking. The deeper into the house we waded, the more the smells of naphthalene and mold thickened. The mold, I'd come to realize on a previous visit, was from the house, its own smell; the naphthalene was from Dyado Dacho. In every pocket of his wool jacket he kept a mothball and he bragged boldly that he hadn't seen a moth in thirty years. “Not since the devils ate up my best suit,” he'd told me. His only suit. The one in which he'd gotten married. The one in which, he'd hoped, one day he would be buried. “Some people declare war on world famine,” he'd told me on one occasion, “but I can't be that noble. I've declared war on the moth devils. And I aim to win it.”

The room we entered was so hot, so stuffy the heat rushed at me like a bird fleeing its broken cage. A hefty fire burned in the fireplace and stretched Baba Mina's shadow gigantic against one wall. But she was a tiny thing in her chair, close by the fire, and she did not turn to see who it was that had entered. She was mumbling under her breath—words I had no chance of catching—and metal knocked on metal so crisply that for a moment I thought it was two knives she sharpened.

“She's been knitting for a week without stopping,” Dyado Dacho said, and went to adjust the blanket—perfectly preserved from the moth devils—that covered her shoulders. “It keeps her busy.”

Then he called her. “Grandma, the teacher's boy has come to see you.” But the needles clattered so ferociously now, they overpowered even her mumble.

“Grandma,” I said, and stepped closer. It was then that she looked up—her face flushed, but not a single droplet of sweat glistening in the light of the fire and her eyes shiny like a fox's.

“Ah, the teacher's boy.” She smiled kindly. “The American.”

I sat in the chair across from her, a chair Dyado Dacho offered before limping to his spot in the corner, farthest away from the heat of the fire. He took a sweater out of a sack at his feet and began to unravel it, pulling the strand from one sleeve and piling up the yarn in his lap.

“What are you knitting, Grandma?” I asked, for her needles had gone back to clicking.

“It doesn't matter,” she told me. “When I'm done Dyado Dacho unknits it. Ah, my boy, I wish I too were a sweater. I wish God could reknit me young as I was back in those days.”

Half my face was on fire and the other was catching it and sweat ran into my eyes and hurt them.

“Listen, Grandma, I've come to ask you about the
nestinari
.”

Some time passed before she answered, so I wasn't sure she'd heard me. Only Dyado Dacho grunted in his corner. But then the clicking of the needles slowed down a little and I could see that she struggled to loop the yarn a few times.

“My sweet boy, don't ask me. My feet are colder than dead bones, but when I knit, I barely notice. Yes,” she mumbled under her nose, “I barely notice,” and wrapped herself more tightly in the blanket.

“Forty years ago,” I said, “you and Dyado Dacho, and most everyone else in the village, moved to the city to seek a better life. Tell me, Grandma, where did the
nestinari
settle when they left Klisura?”

“Forty years,” Baba Mina repeated, as if for the first time stopping to consider just how much water had passed since then. “Back when I was little my daddy had a hundred white sheep. And each night we girls sat by the fire and spun wool as white as God's beard and Mama knit us booties and jackets and hats with tassels. But Daddy is gone now,” she said, and the faint smile that had blossomed on her lips withered, “and so are the white sheep. Now all we have are old sweaters and Dyado Dacho unravels them, so I can knit from their yarn new ones. That's where the
nestinari
went, my boy—after the white sheep. One by one, like unraveled sweaters. Yes, yes,” she said, and began to knit faster, “one by one, like white sheep.”

“Grandma,” I said, and for a long time didn't know how to continue. “It's Saint Kosta's day tomorrow.” And by the way she looked at me—so gently, so helplessly—I understood, for the first time, that what I was doing was terribly cruel.

“It might be, my boy. But who's counting.”

Sweat rolled down my back and itched me, and my tongue had swollen up so that every word rolled off crippled and clumsy. Or maybe it was just the ringing in my ears, the blood rushing, that muddied up all sound around me.

“There is a sick girl across the river, Grandma, the imam's daughter, and I'd like to help her. I'd like to take her to where the
nestinari
are dancing so they can cure her.”

“And how will you do that?” Dyado Dacho sneered suddenly in his corner. “The girl's locked up and her father guards her.”

“Elif will help me.”

“And when she helps you, how will you get to where the
nestinari
are dancing?”

“In her father's Lada. We'll steal it.”

“Steal it?” He laughed and yanked on the yarn so hard almost a third of a sleeve unraveled. “He dismembered it, the crazy fool. The whole café went to see how he gutted it. Slashed the tires, cut the wires, threw out the battery in the garbage. He was that mad with fury.”

With each word I could feel my heart sinking, my plan unraveling like an old sweater. It was hopeless then and like Elif had told me—there was no way out of Klisura. The logs crackled in the fire, the needles were clicking, and I was ready to ask forgiveness and scurry back home to my grandfather, when Dyado Dacho stopped me.

“Every spring for many years I watch this poor woman get sick without a sickness,” he said, his voice barely louder than the rasp of sand grains against the window. “I'm tired of watching. I'll tell you where the
nestinari
are dancing if you promise to take her.”

I hadn't even noticed when he'd gotten up from his chair and come to ours, but Baba Mina held his hand now, against her cheek, then kissed it.

“And what if you tell me?” I said. “We have no car to get there.”

“Then leave the way you came here.”

I wasn't sure if he meant this, or if he was trying to trick me.

“On the village bus? The driver will never take us.”

Then I could see his lips stretching and his dentures shining like they were made of the fire. “Why bother to ask him?”

 

EIGHT

IT SO HAPPENED, SIX CENTURIES AGO,
that Murad the Godlike One—he who first called himself sultan, he who defeated a great many peoples, seized their land, and made from his Ottoman tribe a mighty empire—fell in love with a Bulgarian maiden and desired to wed her.

Murad's armies had conquered Adrianople and turned it into their capital city. There in Adrianople, the Godlike One plotted his European expansion. The Byzantines were already paying him tribute, and their turn to meet him in battle would come soon, but it was other wars Murad needed to plot first—with Bulgarians, Serbians, Magyars. Not a fortnight before, he had sent his spies into the land of the Bulgars and now the spies were recounting—such and such strongholds, such and such armies. Only one of them was gloomy, and when the sultan addressed him, the man began weeping. “I weep for you, my lord,” he said, “because I love you. You may conquer the world one day, but what good is this if you never see them?” And the spy told him: where a mighty river flowed into the Black Sea, where the sands were the color of Makassar ebony, beautiful women danced barefoot in the fire and the fire did not burn them. “No, my lord, the flame makes them so pretty it is for them that I weep now. For I shall never again see them.”

For days all Murad saw were the bare feet of maidens dancing on live coals. The feet, white and puffy, raised sparks in his mind and like tired birds these sparks landed on his heart and burned it. Soon enough, the great sultan was standing aboard a fast boat, and three hundred other boats followed behind him. At the place where a mighty river flowed into the Black Sea there was a village and in no time its elders were bowing before the sultan. “I've come to see the women dancing,” he told them, “so start the fires!”

A thin crescent hung in the sky by the time the wood had turned to embers. And since Murad's feet never touched land that the blood of his men had not made pure first, he waited in the boat, right by the black shore. No wind stirred the night and only the sea sighed deeply. Sorrow filled the sultan's heart. He had accomplished so little and there was still so much more that needed doing. As it happened with each nightfall, his grandfathers rose within him, lustful for conquests, and began to pull him eagerly in a thousand directions. How tired he was. How weary. And if Allah had come to ask him what he wanted, in this very moment, he would have said, “A sigh of rest, Almighty, in a boat by a black shore, waiting for beautiful women.”

A drum began beating in the night; a bagpipe joined it. So deep had the sultan sunk in thought that he hadn't noticed anyone coming. And so it seemed to him now that the flame took flesh—a girl in a white robe, with her hair so long it almost touched the embers and white like the bones of the world. Then the girl gave out a loud shriek, and when she threw back her head her hair really swept the embers; its ends crackled and the stench of battle filled the air.

This was an omen, Murad knew. But good or bad, he wasn't certain. More girls rose from the fire and he watched them carry their infidel icons, jumping and thrashing, crying like flame birds from the Arabian Desert. Soon he didn't see the others—only the girl with the white hair.

He could not wait for the dance to be over. He waved to his soldiers to stop the drum from beating, the bagpipe from shrieking, and he called the girl to come near. Yet the girl wouldn't listen. She kept spinning and turning and so the sultan ordered his men to bring her over. Embers had stuck to her bare feet, to her long gown, and when she waded into the sea the water hissed and smoke rose in thick puffs.

What fool
, she said angrily in his language,
dares stop my drum from beating? What fool pulls my girl out of the fire?

For such words, many a head would have rolled already. But Murad only smiled softly. “Get in the boat,” he told her, “I'm taking you with me.” The girl's hair floated around her, like a thing living, and for a moment the sultan watched it. A strange feeling bloomed in his heart—that he had met this girl before, that he had always known her. When next he looked up, more girls in white gowns had surrounded his boat like jellyfish flocking.

These are my girls
, one of them said to his left, and then another:
And if you want one, I'll let you have her.

On one condition
, a girl said to his right, and to his left a girl repeated,
Yes, yes, on one condition.

They're mad, Murad was thinking, an evil jinn has possessed them. But he could not look away from the girl with the white hair.

Give her a drum
, some other girl uttered.

Give her a bagpipe
, cried another, though which one he couldn't tell rightly—they all spoke too quickly.

Let her finish her dancing.

Yes, yes, don't wake her before the dance has finished.

And when you conquer the Bulgars …

 … slay them all if you wish to …

 … but the land my girl crosses dancing …

 … you must swear to protect it.

You must allow my girls to do their dancing.

Swear it
, they cried.
Swear it!

And before Murad knew it, he, the Godlike One, the first great sultan, had sworn an oath for the ages.

*   *   *

“Whatever land the dancing girl crossed in her trance, he would protect it. The Christians who lived on it would be allowed to keep their churches; the
nestinari
to do their dancing. They would pay almost no taxes. And when a Turk reached their border he dismounted and his horse was unshoed at a smithy. Then he led it on foot to the other side, to another smithy, where the shoes were nailed back on. All this they wrote down in a firman. And the land the girl crossed dancing they called the Hasekiya, from
haseki
, or
the favorite wife of the sultan.
But the girl never lived to see Murad, her husband—”

“Why didn't she?” Elif whispered. We were hiding in the barn at the back of their house now because, well, what better place did we have for hiding? I had chucked pebbles at her window and she had led me across the dark yard.