Stork Mountain (9 page)

I gripped the edge of the table. The twenty acres
were
my prize.

“Well, now they're gone. And your father's share. And mine. I sold it all.”

For a long time I sat speechless. Beside us on the wall our shadows danced, enormous, monstrous, disfigured. I felt weak and dizzy and a pungent, noxious taste climbed up my esophagus and washed the roof of my mouth. No, it wasn't from the murky sludge I'd drunk. It was the taste of Grandpa's betrayal, the bitterness of bank loans I'd now be helpless to pay off. The absurdity of my plan came to me as if for the first time and I grew livid not just with Grandpa for selling our land, but also with myself. For seeking an easy and dishonest fix, for allowing myself to fall into this position in the first place—broke and in debt, crossing oceans to chase after what wasn't even there. Thick and sticky, the night spilled around us and filled my lungs like swamp water with each new gulp of air.

“Where is the money now?” I said at last.

“Completely spent.”

“What did you buy?”

“This house.”

“The village school? This place is shit!”

“The house across the road.”

“That one is even worse. What else?”

“The house next to it and the house next to that one…” He waved his great hand through the dark, like an Indian chief marking his plains before the white man.

“You bought Klisura, then?” I said. But he wasn't joking.

“Only the Christian part. And if you're kind to me, my boy, and if you play the dice and checkers right, one day this kingdom will be yours.”

“But why?”

For some time he struggled to pick up a white checker from the board. The checker danced in his fingers and he placed it alone on a point. “What do we call this?” he said. A blot, I answered. The blot was unprotected and any minute your opponent could hit it with a checker of his own.

“And how do you protect a blot?”

Though I was no longer in a mood for games, I picked up another white checker and covered the first. “You make a point as soon as you can. One checker protects the other. The two are safe.”

“You make a point,” he repeated. “As soon as you can. And how do you block your opponent?”

“With a prime.” Make six consecutive points in front of your opponent's checkers and prevent him from getting past you.

“And what's the final goal?”

Bring your checkers safely to the home plate. Roll favorable dice. Bear them all off.

“Bear them all off,” he said. “Now then,” he said. “Where you see a house, this house, I see a blot. An unprotected checker. And the opponent can hit it any minute. So to protect it I purchased another checker. And then two more, six more. I made a prime. And now my opponent can't get past me.”

I told him I didn't really follow.

“My boy,” he said, “Klisura has been transfigured into a backgammon board. The Christian hamlet is the inner table. The Muslim hamlet is the outer. The river that divides them is the bar. I play to save my checkers, and my opponent plays to hit them.”

I watched him smoke his cigarette down to a butt. I was angry with him and with myself and suddenly this anger weighed down on me, horribly exhausting. The wind had changed directions and gusted cold through the terrace. So cold I zipped up my jacket. “And who is your opponent?” I asked to humor him a little more. He gave me a cunning smile. Then waved his hand.

 

THREE

OF ELIF'S FATHER
I first noticed not the eyes, black and warm, one opened wide, the other almost hidden behind a droopy eyelid; not the beard, short, graying, hungry to consume the face from cheekbones down to throat and even lower into his sweater; not the lips, like a sickle curved downward in one corner; not the flat-brim hat or the black coat, slack at the narrow shoulders, loose at the sleeves, and tied around his waist with a black thread; not the smell of sweat and of tobacco when he came near; not the heat of his hand when he shook mine firmly; but his voice. It seemed to me at first he didn't speak. He sang.

“The acorn has reunited with the oak,” he said, and crossed our threshold smiling. “May the Almighty send you peace. Look at you, Grandpa, a happy man.”

It was the day after Grandpa and I had spoken of checkers and backgammon boards. We were drinking coffee on the terrace when, from the roar of an engine, the sparrows scattered, screaming out of the bushes. Down the road, with its top shining like a war shield, a blue Lada flew our way, the kind of Russian car I hadn't seen in many years. Behind its wheel was a small girl, her head covered in a scarf. The Lada parked at the gates and as a greeting the girl punched the horn. Out the door she emerged and I realized that this was Aysha, Elif's little sister, and that the man who carried her, and in whose lap she had been sitting, was their father, the village imam.

“The wind spells trouble,” Grandpa said, and I followed him down the stairs.

“So this is the American, eh?” the imam was saying. “He looks it too. His neck is thicker, like a wolf's.”

He carried Aysha in the crook of his left arm, and so he offered me his right.

“How do you do?” he said in English. “That's all I know, all I can say. Like a parrot.
How do you do, how do you do
.” He tossed Aysha lightly so she wouldn't slip and she laughed. “Come on now,” he told her. “Greet our friends.”

But she wouldn't. Her cheeks like red apples, she tugged on her headscarf, pulled it down and over her eyes.

“As shy as a hedgehog,” the imam said. “Touch it and it rolls into a ball.”

It was then that I noticed the bandages on her feet, yellow at the toes and soles from the ointment. “Third world business,” the imam said when he saw me looking. “Old grandmas' remedies. Klamath weed. Not like in America, hospitals like seraglios. Do you think, Grandpa,” he said, and turned to the old man, “they have Klamath weed across the ocean? Devil-chaser, we call that herb. Christ's blood. Don't we, Grandpa?”

I listened very carefully for something vile. But his song was pleasant, even warm. Grandpa too, it seemed, was listening for trouble, because not once did his lips stretch in a smile. We invited our guests under the trellis, which had not yet budded green but hung like a dry, sad mesh along the rusty frame above us. I brought more coffee to a boil, and Grandpa sent me down to the cellar to search through the fern leaves on the floor and fetch some fruit for Aysha.

“What do you say?” the imam asked her, after I'd given her an apple as firm as the day it had been picked.

“Thank you.”

I nodded and joined Grandpa on the bench. We watched her small teeth sink into the juicy fruit and I thought that she looked healthy, fine. The imam finished his coffee in a few sharp, loud slurps. From his coat he pulled out a red leather pouch and a pack of rolling papers, the same kind Elif had used up in the stork nest.

“A noxious habit, this,” he said. “Years ago, when I'd just married, I promised my wife to quit. I told a friend about my resolution. ‘I'll more readily believe in a beardless imam,' he told me, ‘than in an imam who doesn't smoke.' Since then, for twenty-odd years, he sends me every month, regular as sunrise, a pouch of his finest tobacco. ‘When I die,' he tells me, ‘I'll stand before Allah and look Him in the eye. You scoundrel, Allah will say, you've sinned a great deal. You ate well, drank much too well, and fooled around with other men's women. Tell me one reason why I shouldn't cast you down in the Jahannam. And I will tell Him: Almighty, for twenty-odd years, each month, regular as sunrise, I have been saving an imam's soul.'”

The imam laughed. “He is a good man, my friend. May Allah keep his heart simple and his tobacco coming.”

In Turkish he spoke to Aysha and she spread open her palm. He laid in it a sheet and sprinkled the sheet with tobacco from the pouch. When he had rolled a cigarette and licked the edges, Aysha fished a matchbox from his coat and struck a match. A long time she stared at the tiny flame, and right before it touched her fingers she blew it out. Her father scolded. She dusted the tobacco flakes from her sweaty palm, and when she looked up at me, I recognized the fever I'd seen in her sickroom.

A thick smell rolled through the yard. Smoke gushed out of the imam's mouth, and when he drew some back in through his nose, his nostrils quivered. He looked at us the way Elif had looked at me, as if to measure our weight to the gram.

My grandfather stirred. “Mehmed, why have you come?”

The imam moved his eyes from Grandpa onto me. The droopy eyelid twitched; a sharper curve twisted his lips. From the smoke his voice had dropped, but it was still as smooth as singsong.

*   *   *

“There lived a man during the rule of our great Sultan Ahmed the Third, three hundred years ago. His name was Manol, the son of a miller, a pious Christian, a good Bulgarian, like the two of you. Manol was in love with a beautiful girl, but two weeks before their wedding the girl went missing. That evening in the tavern, one of the Turks, the aga's nephew, drank too much
rakia
and started babbling. He had been thirsty, he said, and the girl had refused to give him water. Manol's sweetheart. They found her body outside the village, at the bottom of a well. The aga promised to put his nephew on trial, but by sunrise the nephew had vanished from the
konak
, on a white horse to Istanbul, it was rumored.

“Manol stuck a knife in his sash and took to the mountains. He joined a gang of bandits, became a
kardjaliya
. They lay in wait at the passes, these bandits, ambushed the Turkish caravans, killed the merchants, and robbed their riches. At night they raided Turkish hamlets, set them on fire, raped women and left them widows, and their children they left orphans.

“The great sultan himself dispatched a janissary unit to hunt down this evil. One dawn, the bandits were sleeping in their lair, exhausted from last night's pillage. They had just burned a small hamlet to the ground, slashed many throats, left behind many widows. Hungover and so unable to sleep, Manol had gone to a stream not far from the cave, and was quaffing water like a buffalo, when he heard the first gunshots and the dogs barking. He set off through the bushes, but how could he outrun the janissaries and their bloodhounds? His stomach was heavy, his head was spinning, his knees were giving way. He found himself out of the woods, and on the mountain path before him there came a little donkey, and by the donkey a Turkish priest, an imam. The dogs were barking, closer with each bark, and without thinking, Manol flung himself upon the imam, broke his neck, undressed him, threw the body off the cliffs, and donned the holy garment.

“In a cloud of dust the first janissaries appeared and called off the bloodhounds that had already surrounded Manol. ‘
As-Salamu Alaykum, hodja
,' they greeted him, and he tried to smooth over his beard, which was maybe a bit too bushy for an imam's. ‘Have you seen any bandits running?' one janissary asked him, and in Turkish Manol answered: If he had seen them, would they have spared him to tell the story? ‘Don't look so scared,
hodja
,' the janissary told him. ‘From this day on, the mountain breathes free again.'

“And really, down the path Manol saw the rest of the janissaries coming, giant on their horses, and roped by the ankles, dragged naked through the dirt, he recognized his dead comrades. ‘We'll drag them across every hamlet,' the janissary said, ‘so every widow may spit in their faces, so every orphaned boy may piss on their bones.'

“‘Allah is great,' Manol said, and, as was expected, spat on the corpse that just then was being dragged past him—the body of his beloved captain. After that, all thought left him. The janissaries vanished; the sun gashed like a wound in the cloudless sky. One moment he found himself deep in the woods; the next he was standing on the path again. One moment he was petting the donkey; the next the donkey had gone. He was dying of thirst, but when he came to a stream, he crossed it without stopping. I'll kill myself, he decided, but kept on walking.

“The sun was setting when he reached a hamlet. Women sat outside the ruins of their smoldering houses and watched him pass, their eyes red and puffy. There were women around the village well, weeping, pulling buckets of water and splashing it on the ground to cool it down a little, to wash away the stench of smoke and broiled flesh that hung in the air.

“‘Our souls are burning,
hodja
,' they cried out when they saw him. ‘Do something so our hearts won't burst with sorrow.'

“He watched them and thought of their husbands' throats he'd sliced open the night before. He watched the well and remembered how in another lifetime the men in his village had lowered a tiny boy, to tie a rope to his sweetheart's ankles, so they could pull out her body.

“‘Sisters,' he said to the women, and wanted to tell them—I'm not an imam. Instead he called them to gather around him, dropped a bucket in the well, and filled it with water. He washed his hands, mouth, nose, arms, and face, hair and ears. He washed his feet. And he felt blood and death flow away from him in a muddy trickle. Then, after each woman had performed the ablution, he began singing. What he sang, he didn't understand. How he knew the verses, he didn't care to consider. All he knew was that Allah held him in His mighty palm. Allah had thrown him in darkness, had led him along a steep path. And all that had happened had happened on purpose, so he could draw water from this well, console these women, and sing in the name of the Everlasting, the Resurrecter.”

*   *   *

For a long time we sat frozen. In the distance the door of a ruined house was slamming against its doorframe and a dog was barking somewhere in the Muslim hamlet. Wind blew in the mouth of the well beside us and I thought I could hear all the wells in the village, howling.