Stork Mountain (11 page)

It was the girl from the station, the one who'd cut her wrist. She was naked, except for her face, hidden behind the sheet as if behind a headscarf. Beautiful roses began to blossom across the sheet, each petal the color of dark blood. “Who is the man?” I asked her. “Who has died?” She started laughing. Her voice was muffled, as if coming from deep underground. I knew I'd made a mistake. She wasn't the girl I thought she was. “You know the man,
amerikanche
,” she said in Bulgarian. “Now hear the birds.”

I awoke startled, with the sun in the top corner of the window. The room was stuffy and the Rhodopa blanket soaked with my sweat. For a long time, eyes closed, I tried to shake off a dream so vivid I could still hear the girl's laughter, the screaming of the birds. A dull, anxious heaviness settled in my stomach and I rushed out for Grandpa.

He was smoking on the terrace, leaning against the banister. “Good afternoon, sleeping beauty,” he greeted me, but didn't turn. “Don't you know there is no memory from sleep?” Then he pointed the tip of his fuming cigarette at the sky. In his mind, this moment allowed no room for words.

High up above the ruined houses, a dozen storks spun their wheels. Some glided clockwise, others counter. They called to one another, shrill, loud screams.

Grandpa kept quiet. He smoked his cigarette and watched the storks and I couldn't tell if his old, tired face showed joy and pleasure or worry and regret. But when he turned to me his eyes glistened like a child's.

“The storks are here,” he said.

He'd brought a bottle of
rakia
and two small glasses, which now he filled to the brim. “I've lived to see them one more year.”

We drank bottoms-up, to welcome.

*   *   *

These were the scouts. The first of a giant flock of white storks that would arrive in waves. It was the old birds who returned home first. The males. Then came the females. And finally, a few days later, arrived the young.

Their home was here in Europe; here were the nests in which their babies hatched. But when the end of August neared, the storks flew south to Africa, where they waited out the winter months, from Egypt to Cape Town. Once it was time to fly back home the storks gathered in the savanna and in flocks of thousands headed north. Some chose a western route, but most took the eastern: they tracked the valley of the Nile, traversed the Levant, and crossed the Bosphorus from Turkey. And then it was the Via Pontica they followed—that ancient Roman road along the Black Sea, which started in Constantinople and continued north into Bulgaria: the towns of Sozòpol, Burgas, and then Nessebar. It took the white storks fifty days to make their journey.

Why didn't they fly over the Mediterranean? To conserve their energy, the storks depended on thermal columns, and thermal columns formed only over firm land. The sun warmed the ground, which in turn warmed the air above it. The warmer air expanded and rose and with some steady wind these thermal columns aligned in rows to form a highway. It was these thermals the storks used as lifts, this highway that they traveled. Three-quarters of all European white storks flew over Bulgaria. Two hundred and fifty thousand birds.

They flew the days and rested at night. There was this place near Burgas, Poda—caught between the sea on one side and three giant lakes on the other—that Grandpa had gone to visit last year. By the time he completed his hike the sun had set. All night, huddled in a blanket on the ground, he heard the clattering of bills, could hardly sleep from the excitement. He saw them with the dawn. Hundreds of thousands of storks and pelicans and cranes and herons and ibises and egrets and other birds whose names I'd never heard before. When the storks rose, the sun vanished, the sky disappeared, the earth dissolved, and only sound remained. By that time Grandpa was weeping like a little girl with fury. Furious, he threw his peaked cap to the ground; furious, he stomped on it. To hell with this life, he told himself. How many years had he lived and never seen a thing so pretty as the sound of rising storks at dawn? And how many other beauties would go unseen?

Now on the terrace we watched the sky. Before the day was over, three more waves of birds had arrived like a chaotic school of fish, spinning in opposite directions, passing so very close to one another. Some were here to rest; others had returned to their homes. One after another the nests on the ruined houses were filled with storks—a single bird for every nest. At once the repairs began: the sticks were rewoven and new ones were brought to reinforce the walls and bases. I felt the need to tidy up our yard.

It was nighttime when Grandpa leaned against the terrace banister. The dark was alive with the flapping of wings, the clattering of bills. I could discern the white coats of those storks that rested in our yard, five, maybe six motionless birds. For a long time Grandpa watched them; then he brought two fingers to his mouth and whistled. His singsong carried across the rooftops and the nests, across the hills. The storks in the yard startled. A few took off, rose as high as the terrace, and I felt on my face the cold whiff of their wings. But when the storks had settled once more near the well, Grandpa whistled a second time. Quietly we waited. I didn't have to ask for what.

“I'm telling them the storks have made it safely,” Grandpa said once I had joined him by the banister. “
Thank you
, I'm telling them,
for giving the flocks a place to rest
.”

We listened. An eerie anticipation pounded in my chest and somehow I started thinking of Captain Kosta. People said that he alone could speak to the mountain. That when he whistled, wings grew from his shadow and the mountain spoke back.

The night smelled of damp earth, and sweet—the way the field of rotting feathers had. Silent, we stood and waited, and just when I was ready to say goodnight, a singsong reached us from afar. The old tongue, the bird language.

“What are they saying, Grandpa?” I asked him.

“They're saying:
Thank you. And don't forget to send them back
.”

I didn't know yet that the village with which we spoke in whistles was that same village Elif had told me about—the place where centuries ago the rest of the exiled fire dancers had settled. And I didn't know yet that the
nestinari
and the storks were tied together with a sacred rope, that they were one.

 

SIX

WITH THE STORKS CAME SPRING
to the Christian hamlet. Trees that I thought were dead blossomed white, yellow, pink; the brush sprang leaves; the vine in our yard budded green. And with spring came the mosquitoes. Insolent, bloodthirsty they rose from the puddles by the well, from the old buckets of rainwater near the hedge, and then in thick flocks from the river. They stormed our terrace at dusk, as if the smoke of the repellent spirals were for them an offering, as if the frantic flapping of my hands invited them, like a sacred dance, to bite us deeper. My neck, my ankles—in short, every exposed spot on my body was soon swollen, itchy, and in pain.

“You're like a female,” Grandpa would say, watching me sweat in my jacket. And in his sleeveless shirt, with the tenderness of a mother nursing her baby, he would watch a mosquito suck blood from his wrist. “When you're as old as I am,” he'd say, “you can't begrudge the vampire. I'm happy he considers me alive. So let him drink.”

Grandpa was alive. But he wasn't well. The episode on the night of my arrival soon proved to be a regular occurrence. A few times I caught him wandering through the dark house, confused, not knowing where he was. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he would hang and stare at me a long time and I was certain, by the way his eyes darted, that in these moments he knew not who I was. Such episodes left him sluggish, tired, and gradually an eerie feeling filled our days, the fear that night would bring something worse than the one before, something from which he wouldn't emerge unscathed.

It was the premonition that he had little time left to live that had first prompted Grandpa to start writing. At night in bed, swimming in my own sweat, with the window tightly shut and the mosquitoes slamming against the glass and crying for me to let them in to feast, I kept on reading.

“Tell me your stories,” I said one evening on the terrace. “I'll write them down for you.”

For some time Grandpa smoked and watched the green coil smolder on the table.

“The old folks say you die two deaths,” he said. “Once when your heart stops beating, then a second time when you vanish from the memory of those who knew you. But I don't believe this to be true.”

I swatted a mosquito on my neck and scraped off its mangled remains with great pleasure. Then I blew against the green spiral to stoke its ember.

“At first,” he said, “I wanted to build the people of the Strandja a monument with words. A monument not to their greatness, but to their existence. I wrote so as to keep their second death at bay. But then, one night, I was reading what I'd written, and my stomach was churning with hunger, and I had this funny thought: Why do the living eat?”

“Because they're hungry?”

He nodded in agreement. “And why do they remember things?”

I shrugged.

“Because they're afraid.” Afraid that they themselves would be forgotten. The Cup of Lethe. But a dead man knew no hunger; a dead man feared nothing, so why should the dead care if someone remembered them or not?

“It was a monument to vanity I was writing. My own monument, not theirs. And after that—I dropped the pen.”

Yet he had picked it up with my arrival. Never mind the numbers—this many killed in war, this many exiled—I wanted him to tell me about the people of Klisura. Vassilko the idiot, the priest. The maidens he'd ogled from this terrace. The whistles with the distant hills. The fire dancers.

But he would not.
He's hiding things
, I wrote in another letter to my parents, not yet realizing that for Grandpa to remember the past would mean to relive it and so to suffer it again.

In my letters, I wrote with great pride of how I'd tidied up the yard—despite Grandpa's protestations that, historically, fixing up the school had always brought the village bad luck—of how I'd hoed away the weeds, dug up beds for beans, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash. How I'd whittled sticks with the adze for the beans and tomatoes, constructed a framework along which to tie the cucumbers when they were ready. How I'd fallen knee-deep in dung when Grandpa took me to the neighbors' to gather two buckets of fertilizer for our trees—apples, plums, and peaches.
I cut my thumb, bloodied my knuckles, stubbed my toes, but I've never felt as good as now. I'm like a brand-new man.
And the neighbors too could see it. Baba Mina—the grandma in black from the station—and Dyado Dacho, her husband, Red Mustache.

“You've corrected yourself,” Grandma Mina told me on one visit. I'd looked as skinny as a beanstalk when she'd first seen me, but now my cheeks were filling out nicely. Then she pinched them.

That too went into my letters. The only thing I never mentioned was Elif. And day after day, she seemed to be the only thing I thought of. In my thoughts I kept returning us both to the stork nest; I kept embracing her gently and kissing the beads of sweat on her neck.
Why don't you come with me to America?
I'd tell her in my thoughts and she would seize my face in her palms as if to make sure I wouldn't disappear.

I wrote my parents a letter a day. Then in the afternoons, even when he was reluctant, I walked Grandpa down to the Pasha Café so he could play backgammon with the owner. Around the fifth game, I always excused myself, crossed the bridge to the square, and waited for the bus from town. At a safe distance, I watched Elif carry her military bag down the stairs and make her way to a bench outside the municipal building. Then I would run to the driver and shove the letter and some money in his hands.

“I'm not your mailman,” he'd say, but always pocket the cash. Every so often he too went to the Pasha and played backgammon. Rolling the dice against Dyado Dacho gave him the most pleasure. Their games often stretched into the night, past closing hours, but the owner never chased them. Instead, he would lock them up in the tavern, drinking and playing, only to find them peacefully asleep on a bench in the morning. “I can't drive the bus drunken,” the driver told me once, when I asked him how come he stayed the nights there. “I'm no longer a young buck. But my blood is hot and I might be tempted. So it's best they lock me up until morning.”

And how come he left the keys in the ignition on his way to the tavern? Wasn't he afraid the bus might get stolen? “And who would steal it? Dyado Dacho? I'm more afraid the key might fall out of my pocket. It's happened twice before.”

Within a week he'd doubled the fee I was paying him to deliver my letters.

“Dyado Dacho's been winning,” he said, though I knew their bets were symbolic. “And who are you writing to so much anyway? Have you got yourself a damsel?”

“The CIA,” I told him. He snickered.

“So your mommy and daddy are secret agents, then?”

“I think he reads my letters,” I told Elif that day, and sat on the curb a few feet from her bench. But as always she said nothing. Day in, day out, that's what we did—for fifteen minutes she would sit on the bench on the square and I on the curb in silence. I faced one way, she faced another, and yet it didn't matter that we kept quiet. At last she stood up and headed home, and some time after, I followed in her steps and took my seat in the café, next to Grandpa, who rolled dice after dice.

“You be careful with Elif,” he told me on more than one occasion. “People are starting to talk.”

I feigned surprise. It was the letters I needed to send. My parents were worried.

“As am I. You stay away from that girl.”