Stork Mountain (6 page)

“Look, see,” she said, and dug her fingers in the ground, scooped up a handful, and pulled it out of the mist.

“Feathers. The whole field is blanketed with them. Tell me, is there a thing sadder than feathers rotting in the ground? A thing more pretty?” She tossed them behind her back and dusted off her palms. “Let's go get high,” she said. She put on her shoes and, as if she were a little girl, smacked me on the neck. “You're it,” she said, then jumped up and, laughing, sprinted toward the tree. “I'll race you to the top!”

Her yell carried across the meadow, bounced back in the oaks along the banks, and drowned in the mixing rivers. I watched her through the mist, a little speck against the walnut that stretches its arms and legs, somehow connects with the bark and climbs it. Up she went, up beyond the lower branches, in a straight line, quick and assured. Ten, fifteen meters into the air. She straddled a branch and, with her feet dangling on either side, moved toward a giant nest in its middle, where other branches crossed into a firm foundation. She threw herself into the nest, the way she must have done a thousand times before, and for a moment I lost her from my sight. When she reemerged, she was waving her motley scarf. The scarf slipped from her fingers and spiraled down, down through the mist.

I remembered the storks that gathered in my childhood town in August, wheeling high above the rooftops of houses, blocks of flats, catching warm currents in the air, their cartwheels growing larger, thicker with every new arriving stork. And I remembered how we had watched them from our balcony, and Grandpa asking, “My boy, which stork are you?”

 

TEN

THERE WAS A VILLAGE
once upon a time that would have lain some fifty miles south of Klisura. Today this land was in Turkey and two hundred years ago, not just this land, not just Klisura, but all of Bulgaria belonged to the Ottoman Empire. In this ancient village, the Christians—some strange mix of Bulgarians and Greeks—were allowed to build tall churches, to worship their god with the kind of freedom Christians across the empire did not enjoy. Why the sultan allowed such liberty to a handful of his
rayas
, Elif couldn't say. Nor could the hag who had told her this story. One night three years ago, intrigued by her sister's affliction, Elif had snuck across the bridge into the Christian hamlet and sought the hag who had examined the sickly girls. And in the cloak of darkness, the hag had told her the story of how the fire dancers had first set foot in Klisura.

We were sitting in the stork nest now, our bent legs almost touching at the knees. The nest walls were sticks entwined and balls of straw and wool and feathers. The sticks poked me, but I didn't mind. Sheltered from the wind, I was no longer freezing.

Elif had fished a nylon pouch out of the hay that lined the nest's bottom and was rolling a joint. Her secret stash, she called the baggie. Her happy place, this nest. Ever since she was a little girl she'd hide here from her father, from all the troubles in her life. She'd carved steps in the tree trunk, built herself a stairway. “I'm a hot-air balloon,” she said, and licked the edge of the rolling paper. “My troubles are the sandbags I throw out one by one. Up the bark I climb until at last I'm lighter even than air itself.”

She lit the joint and took a drag. The stench of pot, of rotting hay mixed in one noxious fume. “I go to the university in Burgas,” she said. “I get some money for my good grades and this is what the money buys me.” She passed the joint, which I refused.

“Suit yourself,” she said, and leaned her head back on the entwined sticks. Through an opening in the hedge I could see the shack of the
nestinari
, rainwater pooling on the flat stones of its roof. The pools glimmered with sun, which had tangled midway in the dry branches of our tree. The rivers boomed and Elif began to speak.

For centuries that ancient village prospered, protected by the great sultan himself. There in this village the first
nestinari
danced. Bulgarians and Greeks alike, living together, speaking a language of their own. Each May, Saint Constantine descended upon the peasants like a storm, and after him, like light spring rain, merciful Saint Elena followed. Each May, for centuries on end, the
nestinari
built tall pyres and danced in their coals. Until, one day, the Turks burned down the village and slaughtered as many fire dancers as they could.

“Why, Grandma?” Elif had asked the hag. “Why, why!” The hag had answered, “Does the dog need a why to suck the marrow from a bone? Does the Turk need a why to slaughter the Christian? They weren't pretty like you, my dove, the Turks back then. Back then the Turks were ugly hunchbacks with wolf teeth, thirsty for Christian blood.”

“That's what she said.” Elif laughed and sniffed the burning joint. “Hunchbacks and with wolf teeth at that.”

The village had been torched and ruined. The
nestinari
nearly wiped out. Only a handful had survived, taking their icons, their holy drums into the thick oak woods. Fear not, my children, a man had cried, their leader, the
vekilin
. And it was this
vekilin
who led the survivors north through the Strandja Mountains in search of new land to call home.

“But no one would have them, my dove,” the hag told Elif. They would come to a village, ruined and in rags, their stomachs churning, their lips cracked and bloodied. The village nobles would gather at the square and the
vekilin
would fall before them on his knees. “Give us some land from yours,” he'd beg them. “It could be stones, thorns, nettles, we aren't picky. Let us call it our home.” But when they saw the icons with the tails, the drums, the bags of bones these people carried—because the
nestinari
also transported the skulls of their dead—the villagers grew frightful. The madness of the fire dancers scared them, the grip of Saint Constantine, the wrath of the sultan, who had suddenly slaughtered the very people he'd protected for centuries on end. And this past protection too made every village angry. “Why should we help them?” the peasants fumed. “While the Turks trampled on us, these dogs were dancing. While we cried, they burst with laughter. It's their time to weep now, and ours to be merry. You holy lepers, scurry off!”

For weeks the
nestinari
roamed the Strandja Mountains, until one day they reached Klisura. Even back then the village was split in half—Bulgarians on one bank of the river, Turks on the other. “Brothers, we're perishing,” the
nestinari
begged. “Give us some land.” And like before, instead of land it was a curse they received.

But Saint Constantine is a merciful saint, the hag told Elif. And lo and behold the Turkish aga, ruler of Klisura, allows the
vekilin
to bow before him and listens to his plea. Sitting on the balcony of the
konak
, the aga smokes from his long
chibouk
, and his meaty fingers play with a rosary of red amber. He's heard how terrified the
rayas
can get of these newcomers and so he wants to spite them, his little slave lambs, he wants to keep them full of fear. Besides, he's not afraid of the sultan. He even has a bone to pick with him. “Why not?” he says to the
vekilin
. “I'll give you land in the Bulgar hamlet. Build your village there if you will.”

“But the aga was a Turk,” Elif said. Her eyes had turned watery and red now, and they glistened like the pools on the shack's roof down below us. “A Turk, like me. And therefore a wretch. Or so the hag told me. The aga, she said, couldn't just give the infidels what they wanted without receiving some pleasure in return.”

So the aga orders his soldiers to gather up all male
nestinari
in the courtyard. No more than twenty—young and old, beaten from the road, barely standing on their feet. As for the women and children, the aga lines them up against the stone wall so they may watch the circus that is about to unfold. He calls for his favorite
zurla
player. “Do you know what a
zurla
is,
amerikanche
? Like the oboe, but cheerful and much louder. He calls for the
gadulka
player.” Elif made a motion with her hand, driving an invisible bow across a set of invisible strings. “The players gather, ready to play. All men back then, they wore sashes. The older folk around here still do. Ten, fifteen elbows of cloth wrapped around their waist. So the aga orders his soldiers to hold the end of each sash and pull. The sashes unwind and the men spin like tops. The
zurla
fills the yard with shrieking and the
gadulka
joins it. That's how I imagine it at least. The poor things spin across the yard like mad, hardly able to stand on their feet as it is. The soldiers whip them with their whips. By now the children are crying, the women are screaming, and the aga, that wretched Turkish dog, stands on his balcony, laughing, throwing his own whip about, urging the soldiers to lash the men faster, harder.”

Some of the men spin left and tumble to the ground on one side of the courtyard. Some fall on the other. Half and half, more or less. “You on the left side,” the aga booms, laughing. “I'll give you land. Keep your women, keep your children. You on the right, I have no use for you. So scurry off.”

The
nestinari
were split in half. But so they wouldn't forget each other, the
nestinari
exchanged their icons, their bags of skulls. One group would safeguard the saints and ancestors of the other, a holy bond. They gave an oath, to reunite each May, on the feast of Saint Constantine, and dance together over the burning coals. One year in Klisura, the next in the village where the second group would settle, no matter how far away that village lay.

“Where did the rest of them settle?” I asked, and Elif shrugged.

“Across the Strandja somewhere. Some village that even today is part of Turkey. The hag told me, back then it had been Greeks who lived there, Greeks who'd taken pity on the
nestinari
and given them some land.”

I struggled to wrap my head around this story. An ancient village, home to the first fire dancers, part of Turkey, in which the peasants were neither fully Bulgarian nor fully Greek, but a mix of the two. And Turks in what was now Bulgaria who'd given shelter to half the refugees and chased away the others. And Greeks in what was now Turkey who'd sheltered the rest.

“As clear as springwater,” I said, and Elif asked me which spring I meant—the one that came from Turkey, or the one that was all Bulgarian? We burst out laughing and laughed too long. It could have been the smoke she blew my way.

“So did they meet?” I said. “Each year?”

“For centuries they did. The hag saw the Greeks. She traveled to their village and danced with them, back when she was still a girl. Back when Saint Constantine was kind enough to claim her. I wish you'd seen her, standing before the sickly girls. An eighty-year-old woman, bursting at the seams with jealousy. Over some saint. I wish you'd seen the longing in her eyes. I told myself, this hag and I, we are the same woman. Her breath stinks from the garlic and mine from spite. She hates the girls, I hate their parents. We both want something we'll never have.”

“What do you want?” I said, trying my damnedest not to laugh.

“Freedom, my American friend. Not just here in the nest, but down below. I'm not free, and I want to be. You understand? And I don't think I'll ever be.”

I understood then that she had begun to cry. Her shoulders rocked; she cowered into herself. And then, like that, she'd blinked away the tears. “I'm such a vile thing,” she said. “I despise my father, which is a huge sin. God sees, I know. And I despise Him too—my god.” She snatched out of her pocket the headscarf I'd collected from the ground and threw it carelessly across the nest. “I renounce Him day after day. Each day in jeans, each day hiding the
shamiya
like a knife in my pocket. My friends in the city, they don't know I'm Muslim. I'd kill myself if they found out. And yet, I love my god. I love my father. And yet, I hate them as much as a living heart can hate.”

Her father, she began to tell me, was the village imam. His father had been the village imam, and then before him his father's father had been the village imam too. A great spiritual tradition ruled over her bloodline, and so when she herself was brought into this world a girl, her father grew sick at heart. For a whole month after her birth he did not leave the mosque, praying to Allah for forgiveness. “I am a sinful wretch, Elif,” he'd often told her when she was still a child. “Why else would God punish me with someone like you, a girl?” He never hugged her, never gave her a kiss, not when she fell and bloodied her knees, not when she suffered, feverish and sick.

And when her sister was born, her father, upon hearing the baby's girlish cries, lay down, closed his eyes, and had a stroke right there on the floor of the birth room. Entirely out of spite. An ambulance picked him up and he spent a month, this time in the city hospital, licking his wounds. Because of the stroke, his mouth froze forever in a frown and twisted like a dagger every time he spoke to his girls. Which he did rarely. At dinner, they ate their meals in silence, the only noise that of his lips smacking and of his hand wiping grease from his mustache and his beard. Some days the only time they heard their father was when he climbed the minaret and summoned everyone to prayer. There was no muezzin in the village.

“When I was little,” Elif said, and filled her lungs with smoke, “I'd watch the minaret from the yard and listen to my father singing, his voice so pretty, deep, loving. And I'd imagine he sang not for Allah, but for me. I was a really stupid girl.”

No television, no radio, no books other than the Qur'an. Only a handful of girls were deemed decent enough to be her friends. No boys allowed. She was sixteen before her father let her travel to the city, and even then he came along to guard her. “For sixteen years,” she said, “I hadn't set foot off this mountain. Can you imagine this?”