Stork Mountain (23 page)

Blades and rippers were cutting through the dust cloud—like shark fins and tails in waters boiling with the blood of prey; the kind of blood that stank of motor oil and of naphtha.

“The devil take me,” Grandpa cried again and again, and despite the boom I could hear his jaws clenching. Making fists, he paced, left, right, left. Once, he made to enter the thick of the cloud, but I held him back firmly. And after this, we watched, fully aware that we were late and there was nothing we could do but hope the wind would scatter some of the dust so we could at least see the damage.

We saw at last—rubble where only a heartbeat before there had been a house. Slowly, methodically, the bulldozers scraped aside walls and roof, cleaned the ground and made it level. Metal screeched, wood cracked, and somewhere beyond this chaos, we recognized the flapping of wings. Two black storks swam through the dissipating cloud—the shadows of the storks above us, white like bones in the morning sky.

I knew then, as if for the first time, that this was all my fault. And I was convinced that Grandpa too knew it. But seeing him as I saw him now—wrapped in a sheet of dust, like the girl from my dream, and only two muddy claw marks on his face, where the tears were rolling, I understood something else. The houses meant nothing to him. Sticks and mud, dried-up ruins. And the land meant nothing—level or razed with bulldozer ruts. It was not because of land or houses he'd come back to Klisura.

“They had two little chicks, I think,” he said.

And after this all I heard was wings beating, and all through Klisura the calling of storks.

 

TWO

FOR TWENTY DAYS
in the summer of 1903 the Strandjan Republic stayed free under the revolutionary banner.
Was it worth it, I wonder
, Captain Kosta wrote in his journal, alone and broken by poverty and sickness, a few years after the big battles; a journal from which Grandpa copied in his own notes.
To have known freedom for only a heartbeat and then to have spilled your blood under the sword and the fire? By God, I say, what does it matter, a lifetime or only a heartbeat? It matters we knew her. No. This too doesn't matter. It matters we fought to know her. By God, I say, it was worth it.

The news that the imam's little daughter had danced barefoot in the embers spread through the village like wildfire. And like all rumors, it spread badly distorted. In one version Aysha had crossed herself three times before leaping into the coals; in another she'd carried an icon of the Virgin Mary and even kissed it. According to one version, it was Baba Mina who'd held the girl's hand and led her in circles; according to another, Grandpa had walked in the fire, without his shoes on. But all versions agreed on one detail—the imam's older girl had run past her father and given the American grandson a smack on the lips.

From then on, Aysha and her mother were perfectly healthy. And so were all the other sick girls in Klisura. They all thought the feast of Saint Kosta over and that knowledge alone cured them. But things with Elif were not well. She too had been banned from the bus; her father had banned her. Her school, the exams that were coming—she'd found herself forced to fail them.

Watching the jacket she'd left to dry on my hanger pained me something vicious. At times, I shook with the urge to grab it, march down to her house, and return it in person. At times, I burned with the need to take it outside, set it on fire, and pound its ashes into the ground with my bare feet. But the thought that I would first have to touch it filled me with such terror I could only watch it, where it hung in the corner, and think of the girl who'd worn it.

Grandpa was right; I'd made a choice and the choice had paid off—Elif had kissed me. What was shameful was that I'd sucked others into paying for that kiss—Elif and Grandpa, Aysha and Baba Mina. Each time I recalled the touch of Elif's lips, my heart soared. And my shame grew greater—not because I had caused trouble, but because, despite all else, I felt happy.

*   *   *

Three more houses were turned to rubble that morning. I shouted, flapped my arms, chucked stones at the machines. The drivers refused to notice. At last, they took a break—in the shade of a blade, raised high as if about to take on the sky next.

“Who are you that”—one driver said, and drank water from a Sprite bottle for what seemed like an unnaturally long time—“we need to give you an explanation?” In height, he barely reached above the continuous tracks, but he struck me as the kind of man who would enjoy picking limb from limb a praying mantis. The other driver, now struggling to light a cigarette, seemed more malleable—tall and frail in his build—until he spoke:

“Yeah, pisser, who the fuck are you exactly?”

I told them I was the fucking grandson of the owner and a wave of terror washed over me, not because of them, but because of my stupidity to address them in this way.

“Maybe you are, maybe you aren't,” the short one said, and finished the bottle in a series of tiny gulps. It wasn't his job to care. His job was to level the site and get it ready.

The tall one snatched the empty bottle. “You done it again. And here I am, dying for water.”

“My kidney needs flushing.”

“And mine doesn't?”

Behind us, Grandpa was rummaging through the mountain of rubble. Not even remotely interested in our conversation, he overturned blocks of mud from what had once been walls and shifted flat stones that had covered the rooftops.

“What is he looking for? A pot of gold?” the short one said, and his compatriot snorted, “Is he really?”

As if on its own, my hand shot up, and my finger jabbed the short guy in the chest.

“This is private property. You have no right—”

“I have the right to break your face in,” he said simply, and I'm sure he would have done it for entertainment if at that moment the boom of a car engine hadn't given him another place to look. The well-familiar military jeep was flying our way and in the passenger seat, bobbing up and down with each jolt, sat the imam. The brakes screeched, the tires locked, and the jeep drew an arc not six feet before us.

When the dust settled on our faces, the imam rolled down his window. The tall driver hurried to throw away his cigarette. The short one made an indecisive step toward his bulldozer, but gave up and froze in place.

“A coffee break already?” the imam said. The drivers babbled over each other. It was this pisser's fault. The imam raised his hand. He surveyed the site and for a long time watched Grandpa lifting chunks atop the wreckage. Not once did he look my way.

But the man behind the wheel was looking. Dressed in civilian clothes, he had no neck. His ears hung on either side of his head like an afterthought, taped there with a band of weak tape to make him seem a bit more human. He revved the engine once more and shut it and for a while all I heard was the clicking of hot metal under the hood, the storks crying, and blood thumping against my eardrums.

The imam reached over and punched the horn. He punched it a few more times before finally Grandpa spun around to face us. The imam waved him to come near and for one, two, three pumps of blood Grandpa watched him. Then he spat to the side and went on searching through the ruins.

Gently the imam popped his door open. I followed him to the pile, and so did the bulldozer drivers.

“Teacher,” the imam was saying, “I regret it had to come to this.” But Grandpa wasn't showing any signs he listened. He overturned a clump of dried mud, and the clump tumbled down the slope and shattered dangerously near—surely an accidental gesture, rather than one of aggression. In short, it was clear that, as far as Grandpa was concerned, the imam wasn't even present.

Then, for the first time I'd heard, the imam raised his voice. He stomped in the dust and only then did Grandpa turn to regard him, from the height of his mound, the way he would a gnat. Calmly Grandpa descended, kicking rubble down the slope. His face was black with dirt, and only his eyes glistened, like a falcon's. In that moment it was not Grandpa, but Captain Kosta descending. My heart swelled with courage.

By now the imam was smiling. For a while he had slipped; he had allowed the old man to make a mockery of him. But now it was his turn to roll the dice.

“I'm sorry it had to come to this,” the imam repeated.

Grandpa patted his coat, then pointed at the tall driver. With a shaking hand the man passed him a cigarette and held up a timid flame.

From his pocket, the imam pulled out a piece of paper.

But Grandpa wouldn't take it. He puffed out some smoke in my direction.

The word flew from the imam's mouth like spittle. “The
American
?”

“The land is his. From now on, you deal with him.”

“The land is mine,” I stuttered, neither a statement nor a question. I took the paper. Stamped, signed, ratified, approved, straight from the ministry, it trembled as I read it.

“You have no right,” I whispered.

“It's you who have no rights. For too long you've tried to take us for a ride. But this certificate confirms it. The land belongs to the state. Not to you.”

“The hell it does,” Grandpa said suddenly, and spat out his cigarette. But I was reading. According to this sheet, the village of Klisura—or rather what we referred to as “the Christian hamlet”—had been taken out of the cadastre in 1965. In 1965 this side of Klisura had been erased from the map, the land we claimed as ours stripped of ownership and annexed by the state.

“Impossible,” I said once Grandpa had read the sheet, neither a statement nor a question really. For a long time Grandpa watched the imam and not a muscle moved on his blackened face. At last he tore the sheet to pieces.

The imam shrugged. “Call it a day,” he told the drivers. “You've done enough. I'll send the bus to pick you up.”

“We'll see you in court,” I shouted to his back. The jeep started; the tires kicked up dirt and dust. When the cloud settled Grandpa was sitting on the ground—his heroic image itself reduced to rubble.

None of this made any sense to me. How could an entire half of a village suddenly cease to be a village? I tried to calm Grandpa down. We had records of our own. Deeds that quoted some earlier version of this same cadastre according to which Klisura was a village and the land was ours and—

Grandpa had turned very pale. His body trembled. “Water,” he said.

“I drank it all,” the short driver answered. He sprinted to his bulldozer and returned with a glass bottle full of
rakia
.

“Peach?” Grandpa asked after a sip.

“Fifty-five proof.”

“Next time remove the pits before distilling.”

“I told him so,” the tall one said.

“I have been told.”

They each drank from the bottle and when I asked to have a sip the driver ceremoniously screwed the cap back on. And then we heard a rustle in the bushes. As though a large carp flopped in a seine. The short one went to have a look and reappeared, a black stork in his hands.

“His wing seems broke,” he said of the bird, who trembled just like Grandpa. I thought it was a young chick—most likely the only one of the brood who'd managed to fly off before the bulldozers.

Large, grown-up birds watched us from the roofs of nearby houses, from the ugly Tower of Klisura. A few called when Grandpa held the chick. His shaky hand petted the frail black neck, which in the sun glistened with the changing colors of crude oil. The stork had closed his eyes and gradually his trembling settled.

“What is your name?” Grandpa asked the driver.

“Elmaz. But everyone calls me Little Shovel.”

“And yours?”

“Just Shovel,” the tall one said.

“Well, that's no good.” And then to me: “We'll have to think of something better.”

We named the stork as it was only fair, considering the feast day: Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus. The First. The Great. Saint Kosta of the Storks.

 

THREE

THAT EVENING
, after he fed Saint Kosta a few morsels of soaked bread, after he squeezed water into his bill from a rag and tightened the bandage on the splintered wing, Grandpa complained of needles in his arm. Like vultures, storks bloodied with setting sun drew large cartwheels above the wreckage of houses, above their ruined nests and dead babies. Their shrieks were knives in Grandpa's leg.

His tongue tied up into a ball when the imam called from the mosque to prayer and there was nothing I could do but force him to take his pills and lay him down in bed. He had a stroke soon after.

I thought of running to Elif's. Humiliation and defeat be damned, I'd phone for a doctor. But first, how long before I reached her house? And then, how long before the ambulance made it to Klisura?

I'd never felt as helpless as I did right then. Dark all around me and Grandpa's labored breathing, the flapping of a broken wing out in the yard. A single thought persisted—my fault. All of it, because of me.

How I wanted to throw the window open and whistle. Not a singsong call for help or pity. I wanted to whistle until another living soul answered and told me I wasn't all alone. And I suppose I wasn't. By the bed, holding Grandpa's hand, it struck me I should be grateful. We were spending this final moment together.

The night lived, grew old, and was dying. First cocks crowed from the Muslim hamlet and dawn found Grandpa still breathing, with heaviness that gradually seemed to scatter. Saint Kosta cried hungry from the yard and Grandpa's breathing quickened. He spoke as if his tongue had swollen up tenfold. “Go feed the saint.”

 

FOUR

“‘PACK YOUR BAGS
and say your farewells,' the principal told me that morning. ‘They're moving you to another school in another district.' I thought he was joking. Gave him a smile even. ‘No jokes here,' he said, ‘only Party orders. Straight from the Politburo.'