Stork Mountain (3 page)

He'd wrap the chops in a gigantic sheet of brown paper and I would open the netted sack. “Let me throw a chop on the grill,” the butcher might say. “You sit in the back and get warm.”

But Grandpa wouldn't have it. “Thank you. You've done enough.”

He paid the butcher and the butcher acted embarrassed, but always took the money. “Of course he takes it,” Grandpa said when I asked him once. “Of course we pay. We're not ungrateful. We aren't greedy.”

We'd slip out in the dark and make our way to another alley, to some other entrance in the back. A steaming loaf of bread, a jar of yogurt, a bag of milk. The netted sack swelled up with our catch. We hid it inside the school bag I carried on my back as a decoy and then, like poachers dragging forbidden seines, snuck home.

Dawn would be breaking by the time we reached the apartment complex.

“Someone's up early,” a neighbor might say, and hurry out of the elevator, buttoning up her coat, putting on her mittens, bracing herself for a few hours in the line. “Is this what you're teaching him, comrade teacher? To use the back door, while we honest people wait in lines like fools?”

I watched my grandpa's face turn red.

“We live in times of wolves,” he'd say once we were safe inside the elevator. And then an hour later he might add, “A man must seek connections to other men. Wolves may be loners. Men must not.”

It was this advice of Grandpa's that I took to heart during my first few years in America. So what if in the beginning I didn't speak the language? So what if at school some children mocked my home-knit sweaters, corduroy pants, tassel loafers? The language could be learned, the wardrobe replaced. No bully can bring you down, when just last year in Bulgaria you fought a grizzly on the street. His Gypsy owners, not having any means to buy him food, had shooed him off and into town. At first we fought, then we became comrades. To this day, each month I send him a jar of American honey in the mail.

I was exotic, interesting, enchanting. An heir of Olympic heroes. A cosmonaut. A weapons expert. Boys wanted to be my friends. Girls dropped little love notes in my bag. By high school no one believed my lies, but then I had no reason to keep telling any—I'd followed Grandpa's advice to a T, established strong connections, made many friends. And then I left for college, and for the first time, or so it felt, I found myself completely disconnected. No friends, pitiful grades, student loans hanging over my head like swords. Maxed-out credit cards, debt collectors calling. What else is there to say? Comrade Bear was dead and there was no one left now to receive my jars of honey.

*   *   *

When I was six, Grandpa took me to his native village to meet the oldest man on earth.

“I am a hundred years old and who are you?” the old man said.

“Your great-grandson,” I answered, petrified, and mumbled the name we shared.

“I never liked that name,” he said. He was sitting up in bed, propped on a throne of red-and-white checkered pillows. The sealed windows focused the sun on him and gave him a blinding glow. The room was stifling, but he was fully dressed—wool jacket dyed bluer than the sky; thick pants and booties as black as the fertile fields outside the village. He turned his head this way and that, bared two rows of perfect yellow teeth, and let his milky eyes fidget in their sockets. “So you've remembered you have a father, eh?” he said to Grandpa, whose palms were melting holes in my shoulders.

When he had finished signing whatever papers Grandpa had brought for him to sign, the old man called me over to his bed. I still remember the stench of naphthalene that rose up not just from the wool of his clothes but from his ancient flesh.

“You'll never live to be as old as me,” he said. “Whatever you think of doing, I've already done it. Wherever you think of going, I've already been and returned. And it was nothing special.”

He raked my hair, then groped my face—my forehead, nose, and chin—his hand as cold as the belly of a catfish I'd once poked. I watched Grandpa in terror, but did not dare move even when the ancient man stuck his salty fingers in my mouth. He traced the gaps where teeth were missing and pushed against the ones that rocked. Then, as unexpected as lightning in the winter, he pinched a rocking tooth, yanked it out, and ate it.

The blood never washed out completely from my shirt.

That afternoon, Grandpa took me outside the village, to see the fertile fields.

“Don't begrudge the old fool,” he said. “The old are jealous of the young. The living are frightened of the dying. But sooner or later they all converge.”

Stalks of plentiful wheat splashed with the wind around us. We had waded in a sea of gold. Grandpa broke off an ear and munched on the grains. His eyes watered, but he gave no sign he was ashamed.

“This land was ours once,” he said. “A hundred acres.”

I didn't have to ask him who owned the land now. Even at six, I knew.

But then, two years later, the Communist Party collapsed. And a few years after that, when I was a sophomore in high school, a package arrived from Bulgaria—a short letter and a box for matches. Inside the matchbox lay a pinch of soil. Our land had been returned.

It was this land, or at least my share of twenty acres, that now I had returned to sell.

 

FIVE

THE ENDLESS THRACIAN FIELD
had ended. Its flatness had been replaced by oaks in youthful foliage—tall, venerable trees keeping watch, like sentries to the mountain. There was no more sand in the air. Rusty patches were scattered across the road, which snaked gently upward through the hills of the Strandja and grew narrower the higher we climbed. The holes turned to fissures, the fissures to crevasses, and soon we crossed entire stretches where the pavement had been eroded and washed away by rain. Each time the bus sank in a fissure, my teeth buzzed. The dentures of the old men and women chattered like the bills of giant birds, and for an instant I remembered how, many years ago, all passengers, my parents and I included, had clapped when the pilot landed the Boeing safely on the Ontario runway. A moment was repeating itself. And with the chatter of teeth and dentures we entered Klisura.

I was last to step out at the small square. The sun, though past its peak, was still high above the hills. A strong gust threw the smell of smoke in my face. Even from here I could hear the wind whistling in the treetops. Up the road, Red Mustache limped toward his home, holding his cap so the gusts wouldn't steal it. Falling behind, ten, fifteen, twenty feet, the woman in black carried not just her basket but also his tarpaulin sack on her back. Two veiled, shalwared women who'd ridden the bus with us were making their way in the opposite direction, across a rusted bridge over a river whose waters I heard but couldn't see.

“I bet you are that boy,” someone said behind me. The old man was smoking on the curb and with each gust the tip of his cigarette glowed brighter. The chicken flapped under his armpit and he stroked its feathers. “The one who never calls.”

The bus honked. The driver had counted the ticket money, and now that all was in order, the doors swooshed closed, the exhaust pipe threw up black, cloudy vomit, and we were left alone on the square.

“There in the bus,” the old man said, his eyes glistening from the exhaust, “you kept staring. Why?”

I said I'd taken him for someone else.

“For whom?”

“My grandfather.”

“Maybe I am.”

That was unlikely; he looked nothing like the man.

He tossed his cigarette and the wind carried it halfway across the square. “Come with me on an errand. Then I'll take you to his house.”

“Why?”

“Why, why. For the thrill. For the adventure. Isn't this why you all come here to the mountain? With your cameras and video recorders.”

I realized then that the old man had started walking toward the bridge. And unconsciously I followed. I was jet-lagged, once more hungry; my head was spinning from the trip. I didn't have the energy to fight him. Besides, which way would I go to my grandfather's? And so I asked how long the errand would take us and if the chicken was involved.

“This chicken is a lie,” he said. “It's for a little girl who's very ill.” Without turning, he asked me if I believed in lies. That lies could cure. I said sure, maybe, I didn't know. “The girl's mother does,” he said. “She begged me to bring this chicken. Also, this chicken is a rooster and if you can't tell that much, well then, you are a city fool.”

I laughed. “You may be right,” I said, and I think he also laughed, but with the wind in our faces I wasn't sure.

The bridge vibrated at our feet and its metal ropes creaked. Below us the river rushed muddy and wide, high from rain or snow melting upstream. A cobblestone road, which the wind had swept perfectly, took us past a flock of empty houses, the likes of which I'd never seen before. Later I learned such was the Strandjan architecture—the ground floor with walls of neatly fitted stones, where back in the day the cattle slept. The floor above—a deck with walls of wide, oak-wood planks; a covered corridor encircling the rooms, a terrace, and in one corner, the privy.

The old man led and I followed. The ancient houses alternated with modern ones—clean, lime-washed façades, shiny red-tiled roofs—and in the distance above them, thin as a knife and black with the sun behind it, the minaret of a mosque. We saw not a soul until we passed the village café. Which later I found out was also the grocery store. And the barber shop. On tables outside, men drank coffee, or lemonade from tall glass bottles. Some played backgammon, others cards. I'd never seen so many mustaches and prickly beards in one place.

“
Salaam alaikum!
” someone called. “You come to sell at last?”

The old man halted. Petting the rooster, he eyed the one who'd spoken. That man was also old. He stood in the doorframe and cleaned a glass with a towel.

“And who's the beardless beauty beside you?”

“His lawyer,” someone else said, and the crowd burst out laughing.

The old man pointed to the sign above the entrance.

“It's in Turkish,” he told me with a smirk. “It says Suleiman Pasha Café. You know why?”

I shrugged. I suddenly felt very thirsty.

“A hundred and thirty years ago, Suleiman Pasha, on his way to be spanked by the Russian army, stopped here to drink a coffee. And for a hundred and thirty years, these fools won't shut up about it. Listen,
kardash
,” he called to the man in the doorframe, “I know where Suleiman Pasha squatted after he drank your hogwash. He didn't make it far. I'll show you and you can write a sign.”

A new gust of laughter stirred the bushy mustaches. The man in the doorway waved the towel like a white flag after us—we had started up the road again. “Come back tomorrow,” he called. “I've just received some of your favorite tea. We'll play backgammon. Bring the boy.” The old man raised his hand as if to give a maybe.

“His name is Osman Rejep, but everyone calls him Baklava Osman. I gave him this nickname myself, when he was still a boy. Why? Only God remembers.”

To this, I had absolutely nothing to say. We rounded a corner. We had arrived.

The house was of the modern kind. The mica in its plaster glistened in the sun and gave it a gentle glow. The old man slammed his fist against the yard gates and they rang like a bell. He kept on pounding.

“Why don't you slam harder?” a woman cried from inside the house. “That ought to make me run faster.” The front door flew open and a barefooted girl flapped across the tiled path in the yard. She was adjusting her headscarf—a blue kerchief with blooming red carnations imprinted in the cloth—but when she recognized the old man she flung the scarf away and shoved it in the back pocket of her jeans. She was younger than me, but not by much, her hair short, like a boy's. Her face was flushed, and sweat ran down her cheeks in trickles, down her neck.

“
Marhaba
, Grandpa,” she said as she opened the gates and flashed us her bone-white teeth. Then she saw the rooster and her smile expired.

“So you've brought a rooster,” she said, and looked at me. “Two roosters.” There was something cruel in the way she pursed her thin lips, in the way her large black eyes watched me, unblinking. Maybe that's why I was reminded of the girl from the station.

“Grandpa,” she said, “tell him to pick his jaw up off the ground.”

Oh, please, I wanted to say. But, knowing that my accent thickened in moments of anxiety and anger, I kept quiet. The girl was leading us across the yard when somewhere behind the hilltops the whistle of a songbird rang and then grew quiet. The old man halted and so did the girl. They listened intently, and only after another bird had answered, somewhere from within the village, did they resume. I watched her scarf wave from her back pocket like a fox's tail. Her jeans rustled with every step up, up the outside staircase to the second floor, and a new kind of uneasiness flooded my head.

The stench of something burned slapped us at the threshold. In a flash, I saw my mother helping me plant candles in a church sandbox, for the dead. Careless, still a child, I'd held the candle much too close. The stench of burned hair had haunted me for weeks. It was this smell I tasted now as the girl led us through the dark hallway.

For the first time I thought of the sick girl we were about to meet. What was her illness and how were we supposed to help her? And gradually, all sense of adventure left me. Listen, old man, I was about to say, but then the rooster crowed. It flapped its wings as if behind the door we stood by was rising the morning sun.

“All night, Grandpa,” the girl said. “All night Aysha jumped and danced about the room. So Father tied her down to the bed, but even then she kept on wailing. When the sun rose, she wailed louder. So we covered the window, like you told us to, and only then did she fall asleep. But I couldn't sleep. I couldn't study. And I can't fail another exam.”