Stork Mountain (38 page)

And as he lay, Vassilko heard twigs snapping, the rustling of grass. The splash of water. Who's that wading through the river, crossing the meadow, running toward the tree? Those braids swaying, Vassilko can't mistake them. It's Lenio, the teacher's girl. Trampling on the coals! She'll put them out!

He gets up, dashes through the stream. If she can dance, he'll dance with her. And then he freezes. Someone has walked out of the
nestinari
shack—a terrifying giant. Captain Vangelis. There's no mistaking the way he walks—as though he hates the earth and wants to hurt it with every footfall.

And who is that behind the captain—his eldest son? And after him—his other two?

One with the dark, Vassilko watches. But what he sees he doesn't really understand. Why is Lenio prancing across the embers like this? Why is she running from one brother to another, bumping into one, falling down, then bumping into the next like a moth that shuffles inside a circle of shining lights?

Up in the branches the storks are waking. Is it the noise of their wings he hears, the rustle of running feet, or the boom of his own blood? The wind picks up some ash and slams it in Vassilko's face. He blinks, he fights to see.

Was this a cry? The girl? A stork?

He wants to yell
. Get back! I see you!
A single word and he will save the girl. But he is too afraid. He's seen their knives and so he watches, not even fifteen feet away.

The girl has fallen to the ground. She lies, unmoving. One brother shakes another by the shoulders. Captain Vangelis pulls madly on his hair. They look as if they too are just awaking from some awful dream.

“Quick, run!” the captain calls. Timid light pours out of the shack and Vassilko hears voices. Women are crying. He sees them swooping on the men.
What have you done!
In a daze, he nears the Greek girl. There she lies in the ashes, in the glimmering coals.

“Lenio,” he whispers, and shakes her. Not a muscle moves.

Beside himself, he pulls out his knife, cuts clean a rope of hair.
The teacher. I must get the teacher.

“You there!” he hears the captain yelling.

And so he runs. The braid so hot inside his shirt.
Vassilko, my sweet Vassilko
, Lenio coos in his ear. Sweetly, sweetly, the way her tresses brush against his chest.

 

ELEVEN

“WHEN WE ARRIVED
at the meadow,” Grandpa said, lighting up, “the clouds had parted and we could see better.”

The door of the shack was thrown open, the shack itself empty. Not a soul left, just the storks overhead crying something fierce. And the embers under the walnut tree, cold ashes, but scattered so you could tell someone had wrestled in them.

“Look!” Father Dionysus said, and in the light of the oil lamp they saw an imprint in the ash, like from a body. The body was gone, but when the Pope brought the lamp closer what glimmered was a pool of blood. Blood had turned the ash to a cold sludge, awfully sticky.

How long Grandpa knelt there, he couldn't tell me. A minute. A thousand years. But when he came to, he understood what had happened. If they wanted to stop the Greeks, there was one way for them now—up the hills, across the border.

And Grandpa had just grabbed the Pope's cassock and he was just telling him that they should go in pursuit, when a woman's cry reached them. Out of the dark came Mina, her hair messy, her lip bloodied. She'd guessed that Grandpa might be in the
nestinari
shack and that's how she'd found him.

“Teacher,” she cried. “Run! They're stealing the baby!”

So Grandpa ran. Faster than the Pope. Faster than Vassilko. By then he'd lost his mind completely. All he knew was that when he arrived at the school the man was still there. Michalis, the son of Captain Elias. The boy who'd been set to marry Lenio before Grandpa stole her.

They met in the courtyard, and in his arms the baby was crying.

“I've come for my son,” he told Grandpa.

“Your son?”

“My son.”

“He isn't yours.” And Grandpa told him: how Lenio was in love with this other boy, how that boy had gotten her pregnant.

“I got her pregnant,” said Michalis. “I took her without her permission. So what? We were about to marry.”

“Your son.”

“My son.” And the man brushed past so close Grandpa could smell the sweet smell of the baby.

If they really talked in so many words, Grandpa couldn't be certain. Nor was he sure what he did next. Only that the man was walking, up the road, out of the village, and if Grandpa let him, he'd never again see the baby.

When my grandfather flew out of the house, the Pope and Vassilko were just arriving.

“What's with the pistol?” the Pope cried, and Grandpa couldn't tell him, couldn't think straight.

He caught up with Michalis just outside the village. “Stop,” he yelled, “I have a pistol.” So the man stopped and when Grandpa ordered him to lay the child down in the grass he did it.

Then Grandpa shot him in the chest, from six feet away, and killed him.

*   *   *

For a long time Grandpa kept quiet. I could see on the table before me the pistol and Lenio's black hair. For a long time, nothing else existed. My throat had dried up, my temples were splitting, but I barely noticed. I could see where the story was heading and I couldn't bear to listen.

“Grandpa,” I managed at last, that single word containing more fear than a thousand others. Please, I wanted to say, don't tell me!

But I said nothing. And so he told me.

That night, the Pope loaded Grandpa and Lenio's child into the church cart. He lashed the horse, and the cart rattled and didn't stop until they were a long way away from Klisura, until the sun was up in the sky, red like the eye of the fire. That's what Grandpa saw every time he lowered his lids—fire blazing, wild, all-consuming.

In town, they bought a bus ticket. By the next morning Grandpa and the child had crossed the Balkan Mountains. By the time the sun was once more setting, they had arrived in Pleven.

“I'm at your mercy,” Grandpa said at the door of his cousin, governor of the region. “This boy's at your mercy.”

Without wasting much time they snuck into the Civil Office. They forged Kostadin new papers—kept his birth date, but changed the name of his mother. And then they changed his name too.

“Grandpa,” I said. I wanted him to swallow what he was about to tell me and never bring it up again. I wanted what had been a secret all my life to stay that way. But we were past that point.

“Does Father know?” I said, barely a whisper, and when he didn't answer I repeated it more loudly, my voice sharp and ugly against the night's quiet.

“No. I never told him.”

“So you are not his father then? So you and I are not related?”

His hands were fire when he reached across the table. “I
am
your grandpa. You
are
my grandson.”

I couldn't move. The gravity of what he'd told me pinned me down and choked me like a fist. As if for the first time I could see this man for who he really was. Fear, shame, embarrassment. I recognized them in his face. I recognized the years of deception. But there was nothing of my father in his face. In his cheekbones, nose, lips, and chin. And nothing of me.

A strange kind of chill spread through my body. My blood had come to a boil and in an instant frozen over. All the anger, all the hurt were gone and there was nothing left but empty space. At that moment, I felt no pity to see this old man demolished. And when I pushed his hand away at last, he didn't reach again to hold me.

 

TWELVE

THAT EVENING THE SKIES OPENED UP
. All night it snowed and all night I lay in bed and listened. I couldn't hear it falling. Each little flake plummeted from a terrible height, pulled down without mercy by the weight of the planet. Whatever the snow touched—the sinewy frame of the naked vine, the edge of the well, the roof of our house—it silenced it completely. Klisura, the Strandja, the entire world. All was silence. And in this silence it was my own blood I heard, speaking of Grandpa.

I hated him for his doings. Not simply for lying to me, but for deceiving Father. How would Father react to learn the whole truth? To find out that his mother, my grandma, had not died in childbirth? That the few measly pictures we kept as sacred memorabilia were those of some other woman? That the grave we visited was someone else's?

And then beneath the hatred there was hurt. This old man and I were not related. He was not really my grandfather, and the more I considered this revelation, the more terrible it seemed. It negated all else—the courage he had mustered to confess; the hardship he'd accepted voluntarily, to raise someone else's child as his own, alone, each day harboring an awful secret. None of this mattered to me now.

Hurting like this, I saw myself the way I once had been. A clumsy child. In play I often fell, scraped my palms, bloodied my knees. “It's just a little scratch,” Grandpa would say, and pick me up, but even in his arms I'd keep on screaming. It was the sight of blood that terrified me, my own blood flowing irrevocably away. Back then, I was convinced the human body was like a sack of milk—punch a hole and the milk starts to gush out. Sure, you could seal the puncture, but how would you return the milk that was wasted? What would become of me, I'd ask Grandpa, sobbing with terror, once all the milk had flowed out?

Nothing he said convinced me I was safe. Until one day I was screaming like such a brat, Grandpa snatched a pocket knife and sliced his thumb open. “Here, drink this,” he said, and shoved his finger in my mouth. I drank his blood and I replenished mine. And after this, each time I bled, Grandpa took the knife. Each time my blood flowed out, his flowed in. Until my mother saw us. Until she told my dad.

So now in bed, whose blood was I hearing really? My own or Grandpa's?

I found him still out on the terrace, snow piled in clumps on the blanket under which he hid. Even Saint Kosta had had the sense to go inside. The yard, the hills, Grandpa's shoulders all blazed in the rising sun.

I brushed away the frost from his hair and only then did he stir.

“Let's go inside,” I told him. “You'll catch a cold.”

His body followed me absently, but I felt as if his mind remained behind. It seemed to me he had confessed the past in an attempt to forget it. But the spark he'd rekindled had turned into a flame and that flame into a fire. The fire had raged all night and burned away the years one by one. And now my grandfather was here, but he was also in his youth again, trapped there to relive it.

 

THIRTEEN

“HERE,
AMERIKANCHE
,” Baba Mina said, “I brewed you some tea.”

“Here,
amerikanche
,” said Dyado Dacho, and fortified the tea with some
rakia
.

They sat me down by the stove; they threw a blanket on my back.

“Why are you here?” they asked, both smiling, both delighted to be welcoming a guest.

I told them I had come to ask for herbs. Hibiscus, chamomile, thyme, mint—whatever Baba Mina could give me. In his stupidity Grandpa had sat too long out in the snow and now I was afraid he might be coming down with the flu. And maybe it was just my imagination, but I could swear my forehead was hotter than it ought to be. My eyes were smarting and my back—

I babbled like this for quite some time. I drank my tea and felt both warm and chilly. It was as if in talk I wanted to delay the real reason I had come. No, it wasn't for a remedy against some future cold. It was to hold this woman to account.

In her jealousy, she'd tempted Lenio and sent her to her death. She'd acted out of spite and malice. For this I was obliged to hate her.

But here she was so many years later, smiling kindly, her lips stretched to reveal a toothless mouth, serving me a tisane made with eleven different herbs—herbs she'd spent the entire autumn picking, for me and for Elif.

“Forgive me,
amerikanche
,” she said, and passed me a jar of sugar. “We're out of the honey you like.”

I watched her with dizzy eyes. I could hear the boom of my blood and the flow of hers. Like two rivers clashing. No, I couldn't hate her.

Almost four years ago, Grandpa had fixed up two houses in Klisura. He'd fixed the school for himself, then he'd hired a worker from the Muslim hamlet to restore another house. While the worker painted the walls, scrubbed the floors, Grandpa rebuilt the coop, bought chickens, replanted the garden. Then he traveled to Burgas, took the elevator to the eighth floor of an apartment complex, rang the bell. Baba Mina didn't recognize him until he produced a jar of yogurt from his coat.

She was retired. Dyado Dacho was retired. They hated life in town. And so, before the month was over, they moved to Klisura, into the house that Grandpa had fixed for them.

No, no, I thought, and babbled on and on about how much my muscles hurt. I hadn't come for a confrontation. I'd come to recognize my grandpa's strength and, like him, to forgive.

“Thank you, Grandma.” I held her hands and kissed them and she started laughing, lightly.

“You are a funny boy,” she said.

“Funny?” said Dyado Dacho, and sniffed my empty cup. “Try
drunk
.”

 

FOURTEEN

“NOTHING IS WRONG WITH ME
,” Grandpa was trying to convince me. “I'm healthy as a rock.”

Then why, I asked him, was he sitting so close to the stove? Why did his teeth chatter and why was he sweating rivers?

“Why, why!” he said, and huddled in his coat. But when I passed him a cup of the tisane he seized it with shaking hands and drank it bottoms up.

“What do you want?” he cried. “I'm thirsty.”