Stork Mountain (30 page)

“Is it really?”

It was. And very empty, which we liked. We sat at a table in one corner, and it was some time before the waiter saw us.

“Order in English,” Elif said. “Ask for the English menu. Quickly!”

“That slimy bastard,” she said after the waiter had brought us the new menus. “Did you see how nice he became as soon as you spoke? What's this?” she said, and jabbed a finger at the menu.

“Mackerel. But they've spelled it wrong.”

“For this much money, you'd think they'd learn to spell.”

We ordered a bottle of white wine to go with the mackerel.

“How
do
you spell ‘mackerel'?” Elif said. “Maybe you can teach me?”

“There isn't all that much to learn.”

We ate the fish in silence. It wasn't good, but we didn't care. The wine was better. We were finishing the bottle when an old woman appeared by our table. Her white hair disheveled, her clothes devoid of color, worn out, she'd snuck in from the street to sell us flowers.

“A rose for the lady?” she said, and stuck at me a basket full of somewhat withered things. None of them were roses. Not all of them were flowers. Frightened, Elif shook her head. Was this woman real, or an apparition? A shadow that had followed us from Klisura, to hold us to account?

But then the woman smiled softly and we knew she hadn't come to judge us.

Don't be afraid
, she was saying, without any words.
I bring you flowers.

It was then that the toady waiter grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her to the side. “I told you once already,” he hissed. “Don't come back.”

“Wait,” I said in English. “How much for the entire basket?”

“You paid too much,” Elif said once the woman had taken my money and been escorted back into the street. But by the way she cradled the basket in her lap I knew she was pleased.

“Dessert?” she said, suddenly animated. “What does this say?”

“Cognac.”

In Bulgarian, forgetting ourselves, we asked the waiter if we could take a bottle to our room.

“I knew you weren't English,” he said. “Go across the street. Buy yourselves a bottle there. It's cheaper.”

“We don't care if it's cheaper,” I said. So he brought us the bottle and we paid, and tipped him way too much and took the cognac and the flowers into the elevator.

“You know,” Elif said, “until today, I'd never ridden in an elevator.”

“Let's ride in it then.”

We punched the last floor and the elevator raced up. We punched the ground floor and we flew back down. We took sips from the cognac, sitting on the floor, her head on my shoulder and only my hand stretching for the buttons. A few times other guests climbed in and we offered, politely, to press their floor for them. We offered them cognac. “It's like the walnut tree,” I said, “up in the stork nest,” but she hushed me with the bottle.

“Don't talk of that. Drink up.”

At last, we tired of postponing.

Back in the room, we sat down on the bed, in blue darkness, not bothering to turn the lights on.

“Don't be afraid,” I said.

“I'm not.” She told me to look the other way. I heard the blankets rustle and when I turned around, she was in bed, the sheet pulled up to her chin. Her lips, her cheeks had grown red from the drink and that red stood out against the white of the sheet like drops of blood against the snow of winter.

I told her to close her eyes and while she kept them shut I took my clothes off and slipped under the blankets. We lay like this, one beside the other, not touching. The heat of her hand stung me when she took mine. She guided my fingers against the insides of her forearms, thighs, legs.

“I'm hideous,” she said. “All scars.”

What could I tell her when for me she was as pretty as a girl could be?

I dived under the sheet. I kissed her scars—her forearms, thighs, and legs. When I reemerged she was crying. “I'm so afraid,” she said. She sought my hand again and locked her fingers around my wrist like a cuff. “Don't run away.”

 

FIVE

PERUN, THE GREAT GOD OF THE SLAVS
, was boiling with fury. Lada, the goddess of youth and beauty, his most beloved daughter, had run away. Blind wrath split his skull in half. An avalanche of fire rolled down his mountain and scorched all in its wake. He called his sons, his other daughters, but no one dared stand before him. Only one goddess was not afraid. For her, Perun's wailing was but a gentle song. She crawled out of the swamp that contained her and when she settled into her sled—a wild ram's rib cage drawn forth by frogs and snakes and carp—she rushed to meet Perun.

“Her name was Starost,” I told Elif, and kissed her on the forehead, “the goddess of old age.”

Elif had taken the sheet and soaked it in the bathtub and now we lay diagonally in the sheetless bed. Only now that all was done had she allowed herself to relax a little.

“Tell me a story,” she'd said quietly, and so I did—the stories Grandpa had told me as a child. Of Lada and Attila.

Perun was startled once he saw Old Age. The hag had appeared before his throne without him realizing when. But that's how she arrived. Sneakily, like a thief.

“Why have you come?” the great god asked her.

“To bring back your girl,” she hissed. “But first you'll give me what I want.”

What Starost wanted was human life. “A child is born,” she told Perun, “and Lada takes it for herself. And what's for me? I kiss rotten lips, while Lada kisses the lips of lads and lasses. I hold withered corpses, while Lada dandles toddlers on her knees. Why, Father, have you cursed me so? Why have you wed me to Smert himself?”

Perun feared Starost. He feared that, a god or not, one day Old Age would take him too. In a flash he saw himself weak on his last bed. He saw Smert, the white groom, take his hand and lead him not to the netherworld, where he would be reunited with his brother Veles, but to the goddess who ruled all gods. Zabrava. Lethe.

“If it's toddlers you want to dandle on your knees,” Perun said to Starost, so he would please her, “let every man and woman in old age turn a toddler once again. Let them cry for their mothers and may you, mother of the old, suckle them on your withered breasts.”

Old Age was pleased. On her sled she flew out of the mountain and quickly she sniffed out the trail of burning peonies, the smoke of battle.

Attila and Lada slept a dreamless sleep inside their yurt. They had pitched the yurt where, just a sunset before, a marble palace had stood. The goddess Starost dipped her crooked fingers into the marble dust and powdered her face. For a brief second, through sleepy eyes, Attila thought it was Lada leaning over to give him a kiss.

By sunrise Attila's hair was white like bone. By noon his saber had grown too heavy for him to lift. And by the time the sun was slipping behind the Carpathian Mountains he could no longer rise from where he lay.

In vain Lada fondled his cheeks. In vain she gave him her breast to suckle. Old Age had kissed him on the mouth, and now it was Smert's footsteps they could hear rustling through the dust of shattered marble. The white groom was coming near.

Great man or not, a god or not, sooner or later the white groom comes to take you. And after that—Oblivion awaits. But Attila would not be forgotten. Lada had given him a son. A fine, strong boy who'd grown by his father's side into a man. He'd taught him how to ride his horse, brandish a saber. What else was there to teach?

“Farewell, my love,” he said to Lada. But she refused to let him go.

“When you get to the other side,” she begged him, “wait for me.”

She knew of course she'd never recognize him there, because there, in the underworld, all human shadows roamed faceless. Her uncle Veles took every human face at the gates and wore it as his own. She knew she'd never be reunited with the man she loved, never again would feel his touch, nor hear his voice. But all the same she kept on talking.

“Down under, there is a tree,” she lied, “heavy with walnuts. Wait for me in its branches. Reunited, we'll sack the netherworld and watch it burn.”

Attila answered with a smile. “No more sacking, my love. It's time to rest.”

Elif stirred on my chest. A shiver ran through her body and she held me tighter.

Any historian will tell you the famous story of how upon his death Attila was laid inside an iron coffin, which then was put, like a
matryoshka
, into a coffin of silver, and then once more into a coffin of pure gold. A river was temporarily diverted, and once the triple coffin was buried in its bed, the waters were allowed to return. To keep the site a secret, all men who'd dug the grave were put to death.

But this was not the story Grandpa told me.

“In order to never forget him, Lada commanded Attila's men to forge a triple coffin—of iron, silver, and of gold—and bury it in her tresses.”

“And so,” Elif said, and opened her eyes, for the first time, to look at me in the dark, “wherever Lada flew, Attila followed, caught in the river of her hair.”

 

SIX

“THE PARTY STARTED CHANGING
our names again the year I was born. 1984. In one winter they changed one million names. They changed mine when I was two.
If it has to be Bulgarian
, Mother had said,
then let it be Saint Elena's.
Who knew? Maybe Saint Elena wouldn't mind that I was born a Turk.”

We'd slept for a while and then awakened. Neither of us could fall asleep again. The night had grown stuffy. It smelled of exhaust, and sweet, of the flowers withering in the basket. Cars squeaked from the street below, and every now and then a seagull cried. The thin, moth-eaten curtain flapped out the window as if attempting to fly away. I could see the dark rooftops of houses and buildings, like scales from here to the horizon, and beyond them the thick shapes of loading cranes, with their signal lights pulsing red. Beyond the docks, I knew, was the sea. But once again, I couldn't see it.

Elif lit a cigarette. The flame of the lighter illuminated her sweaty face for just a moment, but just a moment was enough—even after she had returned to the shade, I could see her clearly, my eyes closed as I kept them now.

“Of course, I don't remember any of this,” she said. “I mean, come on—1986.”

But she had heard stories. How the militia and these clerks made rounds from house to house. How they forced the people to sign petitions to the court. If you cooperated, they allowed you to choose your name. But many did not comply and were given random names. Soon there were twenty Georgis in Klisura, fifteen Todors, nine Lyudmilas. In the daytime, while people were away at the fields, the militia broke into their houses; confiscated headscarves, prayer rugs, copies of the Qur'an. They'd go to the graveyard and plaster over the tombstones of the dead. Even the dead received new names. Twenty Georgis, fifteen Todors, nine Lyudmilas.

They were about to send Elif's father to a labor camp. He was, after all, the village imam. But he bribed the right people. Paid them a pot of gold coins, a treasure he'd found when digging the pit for a new toilet in the yard. No joke. You got a shovel and started digging in the Strandja, sooner or later you'd hit either bones or hidden treasures. Some pitiful refugee must have buried the pot, fleeing for Turkey. During the Balkan War, the Russo-Turkish War—god knew which war. It didn't matter. What mattered was the gold was there. A hundred years later it saved her father's life.

When the new passports arrived in the spring of 1986, no one wanted to pick them up. Just one man waiting outside the municipal building. Orhan's father. “You don't kick against a poker,” he mumbled in his defense, or at least that's what Elif imagined. But then it came out that he had helped the militia cover up the tombstones. He was a wood carver, and it was he who'd chiseled in the new names of the dead. So naturally, the village men went to his house to kill him. Only the sight of his poor wife, and in her arms Orhan the baby, no doubt screaming his guts out, held them back. So they chased the family out of Klisura. And burned their house down to the ground.

How distant that name seemed to me now. How long ago, our nightly expedition to the ancient ruins. Orhan the coward. Shooting his gun a hair's length away from Elif. That's who the imam had promised her in marriage. Only later did she find out the boy's father had bought her for fifteen thousand deutsche marks. He was hoping, the old fool, that when the imam's daughter married his son, all shame would wash away from their name.

But this, Elif remembered. The spring of 1989. The storks returning to the mountain; the people of Klisura leaving. So many cars on the highway to the border, you could walk on their rooftops from here to Turkey. Mattresses and chairs, and piles of clothes, and pots and pans roped down to the cars, stuffed in the trunks, sticking out the windows. Three hundred thousand people left for Turkey that year. On tourist visas. They called it the Big Excursion. An excursion it was not.

Her family spent two months in a refugee camp, in Istanbul, in the suburbs. Thank God the merciful, Elif didn't remember much of those times. Just that she didn't understand the language. Back in Bulgaria she'd spent her days in the kindergarten. No Turkish allowed, that's for sure. She remembered dust in the camp, always. On her fingers, in her nose and hair. She remembered how much she'd looked forward to the once-a-week shower. And every evening her father coming back from work. He'd pull her to the side, behind the tent, where the others couldn't see them. He'd take out a strip of newspaper from his pocket, and wrapped in the paper—a tiny piece of Turkish delight. Every evening she ate the piece and licked the powdered sugar off the paper. God merciful, it was still on her tongue, so many years later. The bitter ink and salty dust and sugar.