Stork Mountain (31 page)

According to her father they returned to Klisura because one night in the camp God told him to do so. He dreamed the mosque was burning and it was all his fault. And locked in the minaret he could hear the baby boy he'd lost. The son he so desperately wanted, calling to him, blaming him.

For Elif the reason was much simpler. They came back because they couldn't take the new life. Because dusk till dawn her father toiled away at a construction site for a salary the locals wouldn't even spit on. But after all, they weren't locals. Refugee migrants, that's what they were. Like storks.

The year was 1991. Half of the refugees who'd left for Turkey two years prior were coming back. The Party had collapsed. The Muslim names had been restored. But a different Bulgaria awaited. On leaving, many had sold their homes. To prevent speculation, local municipalities had bought out the houses at prices the state had set, which was to say, dirt cheap. Roughly seventy thousand people were homeless now.

The skies darkened. The winter stretched for years. The lines for bread and cheese—for days. A human flood swept up the streets. Where once there had been mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers—now spilled a faceless mob.

The year was 1991. Elif was coming home from what she'd failed to make her home.

The year was 1991 and I myself was leaving.

Three hundred thousand had left for Turkey.

Four hundred thousand were leaving for the West.

I turned to Elif and watched her smoke her cigarette in silence. “At the airport in Ontario,” I said, “my parents bought three Snickers bars. Overpriced, I'm sure. But this went beyond money. We'd never eaten Snickers before because we never could. And now we could. We were free.

“Halfway through, my stomach began turning. I hate peanuts. The chocolate was much too sweet. And I'd already eaten plenty of bad food on the plane. But Father wouldn't have it. He was making a statement. He ordered me to finish the entire thing and then to lick the wrapper.

“We were waiting for the shuttle when I puked. All over Mother.”

“Charming,” Elif said. “Made sick by freedom.”

She pressed her cheek against my chest again.

“Tell me some other stories of how you've puked.”

 

SEVEN

WE STAYED IN BURGAS
for five days and four nights. We never left the hotel before noon, though every morning we awoke early with the intent. By the time we finally crawled out of bed the sun was past its apex. Ravenous with hunger, we showered quickly, dressed, went out for lunch. Elif had never eaten at McDonald's. On the first day she devoured a Big Mac, a double cheeseburger, a hamburger, and a dozen Chicken McNuggets. “It's nothing special,” she said, but each day after that we returned so she could try new items on the menu. They were all expensive, but we didn't care. “I wish Aysha could try this,” she'd say sometimes—of the ice cream we bought in the park, of the cotton candy, of the sweet corn on the cob. “This is the longest I've been away from her,” she'd say.

Sometimes we sat in a café, the same kind that had seemed obnoxious but now was not. We drank Fanta with straws and watched the foreign tourists prance up and down the main street. We made fun of the way they looked—too fat, too pale and freckled, too blond, too skinny; of their socks and flip-flops, man purses, men's tank tops. We bought things: Grandpa a set of new strings for the mandolin, and ourselves new clothes—for Elif, a long silk dress that went down to her ankles, and a long-sleeved cardigan that she wore despite the heat. I told her, “You're beautiful. You don't have to hide,” but she didn't seem to listen.

Every afternoon we went down to the sea. So what if the central beach in Burgas was, well, the central beach in Burgas? The sea was still the sea—calm one day and turbid on another—never the same, except in its vastness. We'd clear a spot in the sand of all the empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, and ice cream sticks and wait for the crowd to scatter with the setting sun. Then it was just us and the Gypsies, picking up large pieces of trash in their black nylon sacks, and after them the tractor, raking the sand, freeing it from any human trace. Sometimes we gathered seashells for Aysha. Sometimes we waded in the water—not even a meter from the shore—and stood against the evening wind, the sand, the earth beneath our soles giving way with each new wave. “Let's swim,” I'd tell Elif, but she would only wrap herself in the cardigan more tightly.

The day before we returned to Klisura, we stumbled upon a photo booth just off the main street. “Grandpa might like a picture,” Elif said, and so we took four instant photos—four tiny squares on a palm-sized sheet. That afternoon we went to the sea and waited for the sun to set at our backs. Elif's head was on my shoulder and I don't think we spoke a single word. Our shadows were a single shadow, which stretched so long it finally touched the sea and, unafraid, kept going deeper.

“Listen,” Elif said at last. In the dusk, her face was blue. The distant lights of restaurants along the shoreline, of boats on the horizon, hung in the prison of her eyes. “They can take everything away from us, but not these last five days. These days are ours.”

She found an empty beer bottle in the sand and tore off a photo from the sheet. She stuffed the photo in the bottle and, scooping sand in handfuls, filled the bottle up. We walked down to the sea—dark and booming and smelling fresh, of watermelon and night.

“Throw it as hard as you can,” she told me, and I did. The bottle whizzed through the wind and hit the waves with a dull splash. “Whatever happens out here,” Elif said, “we'll always be together, down there, at the bottom of the sea.”

 

EIGHT

I SAY TO PETAR,
Petre my boy, man's heart is a lantern. And what good is a lantern unless it holds a flame? For two weeks now we've been building a school in Klisura. We've put a cross on the roof, like a church. Three crosses, like a monastery. When the Turks come back, they'll torch the school. We'll take from its flame and light our lanterns. Our bones will be timber, Petre, our blood will be oil. We'll burn with black smoke and Europe will see it.

*   *   *

In place of black smoke, gray dust was rolling in the skies of Klisura. We could hear the storks crying inside the dust clouds and see them, black shadows turning in wheels, like buzzards. While Elif and I had been in Burgas, the bulldozers had razed a dozen more houses. They'd cleared the rubble and leveled the ground so two excavators could dig up foundations. A crane had laid down a mesh of steel rods, a mixer had poured in the concrete. Where only a week before there had been houses and stork nests, now stood the bases of five new towers.

We found Grandpa watching the workers pour concrete for a sixth foundation. He was smoking a cigarette and by his side Saint Kosta, his wing no longer bandaged, dug in the dirt with his talons. From the dust, Grandpa's hair, the beard he still had not shaved off, and the stork's black feathers had turned so gray they both looked like one with the ruins.

When I spoke to him he didn't seem to hear me. And even after I pulled on his sleeve he watched me with eyes that said he wasn't really there. “Go with Elif,” I told him. “Eat lunch. Drink some tea. I'll fix this mess.”

*   *   *

I'd never set foot in a mosque before, but I didn't stop to admire the moment. As inside a church, the space was gloomy and for a while all I saw were green shadows and green blotches. I'd run through the village and now sweat poured down my face in rivers. Blood boomed through my temples, and at my feet the planks creaked dully beneath a thick carpet. The air smelled of sweat—my own—and the dust of the ruins, which packed my nostrils. I was just turning when my shoe caught a bump in the carpet and I tripped, stomped, and the floor shook loudly beneath me.

“For shame,” someone said then. By the voice, I knew it was the imam, but all I saw was a green figure in the doorway.

“I've come to talk to you,” I told him as firmly as I could.

“Show some respect,” he whispered. “Come outside, we'll talk then.”

Respect, I told him once we were out in the courtyard, was precisely the thing
he
was not showing. Respect for us, for the law. And then a strange thing happened. The redness of my face, the shortness of my breath, the justness of my words must have moved him, because he said, “Calm down. Have a seat. Drink some water.”

He sat me down on a bench under a trellis and brought me a cold jar. He let me drink it in silence and we waited for my blood to cool down a little.

“It seems,” he said at last, “there has been some big confusion. So let me dispel it. Three years ago,” he said, “your grandfather came to Klisura waving about, much the way you do now, a sheet of paper. A document, which said the village school had been built in his name and so he owned it. But I knew this document was invalid and your grandfather too knew it.”

“Nonsense,” I cried. The ownership deed was completely valid. And Grandpa owned not just the school, but all the other houses. He'd bought them, fair and square, and later he'd transferred them, school and houses, all to my name.

“Poor boy.” The imam laughed a fake laugh. “Is that what he's told you?”

And then, with a self-satisfaction I'd mistaken for kindness, he told me the rest of the story.

It was this story I was telling now, much too loudly, to Elif and Grandpa. I had run all the way back after seeing the imam to find them eating lunch on the terrace.

Here was the gist, fair and square: in the mid-sixties every single family from the Christian hamlet had been moved to the city. A state-mandated urbanization, all through Bulgaria. As compensation, in exchange for their houses, the families had been given city apartments—two entire blocks of flats in Burgas all for Klisurans. To put it plainly, in the mid-sixties the Christian hamlet had stopped being a village. The state had taken the land and transformed it into a border zone, a buffer.

Three years ago, the zone's status was reconsidered. But the land was still the property of the state and it was the state that contracted a foreign company to build on it a complex of wind turbines. The construction had just begun—see right there the unfinished tower?—when my grandfather showed up, in his hand a sheet of paper.

Every Klisuran who'd owned a house had been given in exchange an apartment. Every ownership deed had been annulled. But Grandpa's had fallen through the cracks somehow. Maybe because by that time he no longer lived in Klisura; maybe because some clerk had assumed the school must already be state-owned. After all, how could a school belong to a single person?

But it belonged to Grandpa, or so he claimed through this paper. Yet the state too had its papers, according to which no private entity could own land in the Christian hamlet.

It was a paradox. A legal casus. But until Grandpa's deed was officially annulled, until the casus was resolved, there could be no construction of wind turbines—the law did not allow for power generators to be erected within residential limits.

“So
they
took you to court, Grandpa,” I said, and sat down in a chair, exhausted. “They thought, how hard could it be really, to prove your ownership deed was outdated and then annul it?”

“For three years your grandfather has jerked us around,” the imam had told me out in the courtyard. “Forgive my language, but better words allude me.”

“For three years, Grandpa,” I said now in his face on the terrace, “you've dragged out this lawsuit. That's why you sold our family land, my share and my father's. Even your city apartment. You needed money to pay your lawyers.”

Grandpa puffed out some air and reached for his lighter. “And you believe the imam?”

I watched him struggle to pull out a cigarette from the pack, and my heart grew heavy. To see this man the way I saw him now pained me something fierce. “I want to believe
you
,” I told him. “So prove to me that we own these houses. Not once have I asked to see any papers. Now I'm asking.”

Trembling, he dabbed a cigarette against his mustache a few times. When he found his lips at last he lit up and gulped the smoke in.

“We have one document,” he admitted. “For this school building, which is yours now. I never owned any other houses.” Then he smoked hungrily, keeping his eyes low on the table. A rotten heaviness settled in my stomach. A wave of nausea. For months now he'd lied to my face.

“Look at me, Grandpa,” I told him. For there was more to the imam's story.

Each time before a court hearing, Grandpa had faked some kind of sickness. Four strokes. One heart attack. A kidney stone crisis. Six times Grandpa had entered the hospital a week before his court dates.

“Is this what happened last month? When they destroyed the first two houses?”

He began to mumble and dropped his cigarette on the table. Fumbling to retrieve it, he spilled its tip into a shower of tiny sparks, which Elif beat down. When she looked up at me, her eyes themselves were casting sparks in showers. “You're hurting him. Stop it!”

I could see he was hurting. But I couldn't stop it. And why should I? So he wouldn't fake another stroke?

“Did you fake it?” I said.

“For God's sake, my boy! You were here. You saw me.”

“What about the strokes before that? The heart attack? Did you fake them?”

“For God's sake. Maybe. But understand my position. I can't let them build a wind farm right where the storks are nesting, right in the path of their migration. The turbines will kill them in thousands, it's just that simple.”

“Why did you lie to me, Grandpa?” I said, so quietly that at first I wasn't sure he'd heard me. For some time he struggled to light a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. Then he took a few deep drags.