Stork Mountain (12 page)

But I couldn't. These fifteen minutes of mutual silence were all I looked forward to, awake or in my sleep. And people would always talk. The feast of Saint Constantine was coming near, they said, less than two weeks away. And once again the little girls had started burning with the fever. The imam had locked up his girl in her room.
It's a bad year
, someone said in the café
. It's May already, but it's cold and humid like October. The grass is rotting. And my chickens aren't laying eggs.

“What do the chickens have to do with things?” Grandpa asked me later, but I could tell that the closer we got to May 21, the more restless he grew.

It was a week before the feast when Grandpa took me to the river. It had rained all night and a thick mist rolled over the ground. The road was muddy, and so were the banks and the river. Up above us a few storks flew in the cloudy sky, but most of them watched us passing up from their nests in the oak tops. Every now and then a male stork would balance himself atop a female, rub his long neck against hers, clatter his bill, and flap his wings. For a week, I had watched them mate from the terrace, and I watched them now, walking the muddy bank.

“Where are we going?” I asked, but Grandpa wouldn't tell me.

“Must you always ask so many questions?” he said, then urged me to walk faster; we didn't have all day.

We reached the giant walnut of the
nestinari
just when the sun was peeking from behind a break in the clouds. The nests in the branches were heavy with mating storks. But these storks were smaller than the others in the village. And they were black.

This was their tree. The only place in all of Klisura where black storks gathered. We watched them for some time—the males climbing the females, some flying away, others returning to their nest, a snake, a frog, a rodent in their bill. My eyes drifted to the nest where Elif and I had sat, where now two storks rubbed their long necks together.

“I try to come here every now and then,” Grandpa said, and tightened up his coat. “Especially once their babies hatch.”

A gust blew through the meadow and I too zipped up my jacket. Such cool weather, Grandpa told me later, was odd, uncharacteristic. The cold was bad for the storks, bad for their babies and for their food. But secretly I cherished the cold—like garlic does a vampire, it kept the mosquitoes at bay.

“What's wrong with you?” Grandpa asked me, and pinched the scruff of my neck. “Did all your sailboats sink or something?”

“I'm cold,” I lied. “Let's get warm in the
nestinari
shack.” I started toward the little hut under the tree. But Grandpa wouldn't follow.

“I'd rather let the frost bite off my balls,” he said, “than set a foot inside their shack. The crazy fools.” And then he clapped his hands so as to spook the mating storks.

 

SEVEN

THUNDER ROLLED
across the hills of Turkey. Out the open window I watched the shapes of black trees sway in the yard. The house was quiet. The wind smelled of rain.

How weary I had been, a few weeks back, walking out of the airplane in Sofia; disconnected from the world, fed up with my life as a failed graduate student. And how distant this weariness felt now. The rain nourished me, my feet burned, my fingers itched, and I could almost hear the roots sprouting out of them and spreading through the soil. Grandpa and Elif, her father, even the ruined houses of Klisura, were nothing but bricks in my foundation. And yet the bottom line revealed a terrifying truth—this trip, like so many of my other endeavors, had proved a failure: I was still broke and still in debt.

The Tower of Klisura stood tall over the quiet village. A pair of storks had started constructing their nest atop the metal frame and I imagined them now in the dark, huddled against the wind. How much would we make, I wondered, if we turned that section of Klisura into a wind farm? How much would the Turkish company pay us for a few empty lots?

After two decades away Captain Kosta had returned to the Strandja to fight for her and bring her freedom. After fortysome years away, Grandpa too had chosen to come back. Now he too was waging war for liberation—that of Klisura and probably his own. How could I ask him then to sell what he was fighting so desperately to preserve?

My thoughts turned like concrete in a mixer: ancient skulls mixed with stork eggs, with muddy rivers, with fire dancers and janissaries slaying Christian bandits and dragging them by their ankles through the dirt. Captain Kosta watched me, atop his cask of gunpowder, his face black with the smoke of battle, his face the face of Grandpa. The imam sang somewhere in the village, or maybe I only thought I heard him singing. My great-grandfather picked my teeth and ate them, one by one, as if they were sweet grapes. “Whatever you think of doing,” his raspy voice echoed, “I've already done it. And it was nothing special. Now bring the papers so I can sign. The land is yours.”

And through these visions, like a knife smoothly sliding through a block of cheese, Elif's headscarf was falling down, down, down. A flash of lightning revealed before me the walnut tree. A black wing slashed it like an ax and where the tree had stood I saw a dark shape grow thicker, darker. I heard the growling of wolf-killing dogs and with the growling an ugly thought rang in my ears: That which will be demolished must first be built. That which will be taken must be given first. The giant walnut swayed, Elif's closed lids flicked open, and raindrops glistened on her neck. “Merciful Saint Elena,” I heard her tell me, “has come to our yard.” It was raining. Soft rain, which turned to hail. The hail slammed against our roof, against the side of our house, against my window, and into my room.

“
Amerikanche
.” I heard Elif call me and only then did I realize I was no longer in a dream. The hail was no hail, but pebbles she chucked from the road. And there in the road, I recognized the sharp hump of the Lada, its high beams flickering, the engine roaring. “Come on, my American friend,” Elif called, and stepped on the gas. “Let's go before I've woken the dead.”

 

EIGHT

WHEN I WAS STILL A LITTLE BOY
, Grandpa often told me stories of khans and tsars, of great heroes. Sometime in the tenth century, a scribe recorded the lineage of the first Bulgarian rulers in a codex, which lay forgotten between the pages of a Slavonic Bible until a Russian historian stumbled upon it a thousand years later. This codex, now famous as the Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans, began with Attila, also known as Avitohol, then spoke of his son Irnik, of Gostun, Kubrat, and of his son Asparuh, the white horseman, who with his tribes crossed the Danube, allied with the Slavs, defeated the Byzantine Empire, and founded Bulgaria in 681
A.D.

Many a night I had lain in bed imagining the glorious battles, my head turning the way any boy's would when he believed the blood of Attila and Asparuh coursed through his veins. The stories Grandpa told me were only loosely based on historical fact; at my persistence he invented wildly, a codex of our own. We called it the Nominalia of the Imaginary Khans.

“Perun was the main god of the Slavs,” Grandpa liked to tell me in one such story. Master of thunder and of lightning, atop the highest mountain, he presided over many children, while Veles, the dark nether lord, controlled the underworld.

Of course, Perun loved all his children. But none as horribly as Lada. Lada was beauty, endless joy, eternal youth. Lada was love. Thick stalks of golden rye? The lashes of her eyes. The eyes themselves were humus-chernozem. White flour for steaming bread? This was her skin. Her teeth were bushelfuls of wheat. Her hair—a river.

So frightened was Perun of losing Lada that on the day the girl was born he seized her hair. Each year Lada's hair grew longer, and each year Perun wound it around his fist a new revolution to keep her in his sight. But at his feet Lada faded. Her lips withered. Her breath turned rotten. Without Lada's beauty, Dazhbog grew tired of pushing the sun across the sky. Cold sleep took possession of Zornitsa, and dawn no longer broke. Veles, the nether god, looked up, saw night, and climbed out of his domain. Snow, ice, and darkness ruled the land for ten thousand years.

The gods convened and, weeping, collapsed before Perun. “Almighty Father,” the twinkling Dawn begged him. “Your love for our sister has turned to poison. Your fire has turned to stone. Her beauty—to carrion. Look at her, black with flies at your feet, white with maggots. Let her rise so that her beauty may blossom. Set her free so that the land may be born again.”

This plea moved Perun. Reluctantly he unwound Lada's hair a thousand times, two thousand. Her hair fell free. It gushed out of the mountain, down its slopes—a river, which swept all ice, snow, darkness in its way and left behind meadows and fields for plentiful harvests. Veles retreated underground and spring was born again, and spring extended as far north as Lada's hair allowed.

But oh how Perun suffered without his beloved daughter. Nothing gave him repose. He thundered, threw fire and lightning, torched, ruined. At last he wound her hair around his fist a thousand times and summer came; two thousand times and it was autumn; three thousand times and Lada was back at his feet, and out into the world winter ruled.

I had remembered this story unexpectedly one night, sitting on the windowsill and thinking of Elif and of her father. And now again I thought of this story, if only for a moment. Perun, the god of thunder, roared around us. My head bobbed, my teeth chattered, and with the stench of burned oil and exhaust, Lada, the goddess of youth and beauty, rushed us in her palms up the Strandjan hills.

Beside me, Elif was shifting gears, barely releasing her foot from the gas.
So this is how death arrives?
I wanted to cry out, but couldn't. All I could do was squeeze the door handle and dig my heels into the floor, like that would halt us. The high beams bounced up and down, revealed now cliffs, now bushes and branches, now ruts in the dirt road. It wasn't raining, but the wipers flapped; the gears grinded and from a hoarse, pathetic stereo Metallica's James Hetfield commanded us to give him fuel, give him fire, give him all that he desired.

“That was the first time I ran away from home,” Elif said, and she even looked at me, for effect. “Metallica in Plovdiv. June 11, 1999.” Having no money for tickets, she and her friends snuck onto the roof of an apartment complex near the stadium from where all they saw was this tiny sliver of the stage. The music reached them doubled up in echo, which was about the same quality as most of her bootleg tapes anyway. And the bastards didn't even play “Seek and Destroy.” “But who cares,
amerikanche
? Best night of my life to date.”

At that, she floored the gas. We had emerged from the wide curves of the road onto a fairly straight stretch. A hundred meters ahead, the stretch ended in a thick mass of trees, which swayed in the beams. I think I yelled, but how could I be certain with the tires screeching, the engine roaring, the clattering of metal parts? Elif had slammed the brakes and we were skidding sideways. My head smashed into the ceiling, then into the headrest—a hard, rubberized plastic the car's Russian constructors must have invested with a dual function: to stop your neck from snapping while simultaneously halving your skull.

Then we were no longer in motion. The wipers scratched the dry windshield with a noise that raised my arm hairs, and Hetfield screamed for fuel and for fire. In sync Elif banged her head, in sync she joined him in the scream
.
“Yeah, oh yeah,” she hollered, and when she looked at me, the black of her pupils had swallowed up her red eyes. “I have no idea what he's saying and I don't care. But I relate.”

We abandoned the Lada and sank into the forest. A rusty circle of light showed us the way—an ancient flashlight that danced in Elif's hand. She held mine and pulled me forward, her palm burning and so sweaty that a few times I slipped from her grip.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked, and when she answered, the lightness of her voice sent shivers down my spine: “Across the border.”

The wind howled in the treetops and with each gust the rain in their leaves fell to the ground in whooshing sheets. My soles picked up chunks of mud and so did Elif's, but the heavier our shoes grew, the tighter she pulled me forward and the faster we walked.

“I don't have my passport,” I told her, and for a long time her laughter bounced through the trees and in my head. How many times had I fantasized about finding myself alone with her, away from other people's eyes? Of holding her hand? But not like this. Listen, I wanted to say, and plant my heels in the mud and demand an explanation. And yet all I did was follow wherever she led, just happy that she was near.

At the edge of the forest she turned the flashlight off. A half-moon broke through the clouds, then disappeared, but I could see ahead of us a clearing split by a tall barbed-wire fence. There were gates in the fence, for people and vehicles to pass, and large, rusted warnings that trespassers would be shot on sight.

Elif stood on her toes and whispered in my ear, “Right there, a hole,” and pointed, as if I could see a thing. Her breath was vile from what she had smoked, but nonetheless to feel it so warm on my cheek made my knees go slack.

The opening was where she said it would be. She lifted the fence for me, and once I'd crawled under, she followed with great agility. Like that, we were in Turkey. And not a soldier was around to deny us passage. Once again we hid in a forest; once again we emerged in a clearing. A few shepherd huts stood in our way, abandoned, desolate—an old Turkish hamlet; and to one side wooden frames for hay, bare and sticking up in the dark like Inquisition stakes.

My heart was pounding, but now, with the adrenaline, all fear had turned to excitement. I pulled Elif closer. I whispered, “We snuck across the border!” She laughed, once again loudly, not afraid we could be heard. “Go, go,” she said, stuck the flashlight in my hand, and nudged me forward. Now
I
was leading and she followed. It felt good to be in charge even for a short while. Finally, here was the kind of romance I had dreamed of.