Stork Mountain Read online

  “So you’ve brought a rooster,” she said, and looked at me. “Two roosters.” There was something cruel in the way she pursed her thin lips, in the way her large black eyes watched me, unblinking. Maybe that’s why I was reminded of the girl from the station.

  “Grandpa,” she said, “tell him to pick his jaw up off the ground.”

  Oh, please, I wanted to say. But, knowing that my accent thickened in moments of anxiety and anger, I kept quiet. The girl was leading us across the yard when somewhere behind the hilltops the whistle of a songbird rang and then grew quiet. The old man halted and so did the girl. They listened intently, and only after another bird had answered, somewhere from within the village, did they resume. I watched her scarf wave from her back pocket like a fox’s tail. Her jeans rustled with every step up, up the outside staircase to the second floor, and a new kind of uneasiness flooded my head.

  The stench of something burned slapped us at the threshold. In a flash, I saw my mother helping me plant candles in a church sandbox, for the dead. Careless, still a child, I’d held the candle much too close. The stench of burned hair had haunted me for weeks. It was this smell I tasted now as the girl led us through the dark hallway.

  For the first time I thought of the sick girl we were about to meet. What was her illness and how were we supposed to help her? And gradually, all sense of adventure left me. Listen, old man, I was about to say, but then the rooster crowed. It flapped its wings as if behind the door we stood by was rising the morning sun.

  “All night, Grandpa,” the girl said. “All night Aysha jumped and danced about the room. So Father tied her down to the bed, but even then she kept on wailing. When the sun rose, she wailed louder. So we covered the window, like you told us to, and only then did she fall asleep. But I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t study. And I can’t fail another exam.”

  Clumsily, the old man petted the girl’s head. “Elif, Elif,” he said. Then Elif pushed the door open and led us in.

  The room was pungent with the stink of soot. Dressed in a white gown and tied to the bed with a thin rope lay Aysha, the sick girl. Her face was pale in the gloom and perfectly still, like a frozen puddle, and only her eyes flittered under her closed lids. She looked ten, no older. The rope snaked over a red pillow on her chest, a pillow on her thighs, a pillow on her ankles. The soles of her feet were covered with blisters so deep I couldn’t bear to look.

  “Grandpa,” someone called, and from a rug in the corner a third woman rose, older than the others. A green scarf whose edges were dark from sweat framed her flushed, tired face.

  “She’s slept all day,” the mother whispered. “But we’re afraid to untie her.” She leaned forward and kissed the old man’s hand. “Help us,” she said. Her eyes shone feverish when she looked up at me, and I understood that this woman too was sick.

  “Elif,” the old man called to our guide. “Fetch me a washbasin and a knife.”

  The first thing he cut with the knife was the rope. He threw the pieces to the floor in disgust. I noticed a large scorched circle, which the rugs could not hide fully, as if someone had built a fire in the middle of the room and let it burn. Sweat was pouring down my back and my throat burned thirsty. A motley rug covered the window and the sun shone muffled behind it. The yellow, the orange, the red bands glowed brightly; the others were black. Across the rug, on a nail in the wall, hung a braid of garlic.

  “And how are you, kazam?” the old man asked the woman. He readjusted the rooster under his arm and, still holding the knife in the other, touched her forehead with the back of his hand.

  “I’ve been burning, Grandpa.”

  Gently he raised her chin to have a better look. Gently he brushed his fingers across the bruises of her cheek. “I see the imam has opened up the slap factory again,” he said.

  “He worries, Grandpa. His hand is quick to slap, but he means well.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “Where can an imam be?”

  The old man grumbled. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, and motioned me to join him by the bed. I didn’t have time to hesitate—he’d already shoved the rooster into my hands. Beside me, Elif embraced the metal basin.

  We watched Aysha sleep. As if our eyes had tickled her, she stirred. Her mother followed the old man the way a hungry dog follows the butcher.

  “Saint Constantine,” the old man whispered, “are there no Christian girls for you to take? Or are the Muslims sweeter? Go to the Greeks. The Greeks love you.”

  He reached over and removed the tarpaulin pouch from the rooster’s head. The rooster’s chest expanded and, feeling that it wanted to flap, I gripped it tighter. Then came the crowing—so loud and piercing I almost dropped the bird.

  As for the rest, what’s there to say? Aysha woke up startled and began to cry. Her feet took tiny steps in the air, and her heels knocked against the bed. The old man ordered me to hold the rooster tightly, and, eyes closed, I did. I could hear the sound the blood made splashing against the basin. The air thickened with a metallic stink. The rooster thrashed, kicked, and so did Aysha. The whole bed shook and creaked. “Vah, vah, vah,” she cried out, like the old woman at the station. Then she was still.

  The old man had painted crosses of blood on her cheeks and forehead. A big, content smile stretched her burning lips. He painted crosses on her mother’s cheeks, and on Elif’s. He dipped his thumb one last time in the foamy blood and asked Elif to carry the basin out.

  “Grandpa,” I said after he’d drawn a cross on my forehead. “I haven’t seen you in fifteen years and this is how you greet me?”

  He called the mother over. He said, “This is my boy, my grandson from America. The one who never calls.”

  “Oh, please,” I started to say, but now was hardly the time for confrontation. The woman smiled. She lowered the rug and pushed the window open. At the ledge, I filled my lungs with fresh air, gulped it like water. I let the sun above the hills burn itself upon my pupils and listened to the wind in the treetops. The imam began to sing from the mosque.

  Most likely the old man was right. How odd this whole situation seemed to me now. How bizarre that after fifteen years, I would meet my grandfather without an official moment of recognition, without an affectionate embrace to mark the instant of my return. And then I understood that we reunited the way we’d drifted apart—gradually, over time; that I returned the way I’d left.

  SIX

  MORE THAN FORTY YEARS AGO, as a punishment for his scandalous membership resignation, the Bulgarian Communist Party had exiled my grandfather to the village of Klisura. A schoolteacher, he had taught the Klisuran children for four years before returning to civilization. This was all I knew, all I had learned from my father.

  To claim that Grandpa despised the Communist Party would be an understatement of great proportions. And yet he never showed his contempt. To say that he expressed joy when the Party fell would also be inaccurate. “The wolves have retailored their coats,” he once said, regarding the new democratic leaders. “Woe to the lamb who thinks the wolf his guard dog.” In short, Grandpa claimed to give the Communists no thought at all. He wished for them what he considered the ultimate curse—the Cup of Lethe. “May no one remember them in fifty years,” he told me once, during my senior year in high school. I was writing a paper on Communism and he had shut down my request for help. “May their children forget them. I certainly have.”

  But wasn’t short historical memory a dangerous thing? I asked him.

  “You muttonhead,” he said. “People don’t write history books so others can learn from their mistakes. They write them so they will be remembered. And I for one will not remember.” For years I was convinced that his animosity toward the Party stemmed from the fact that in 1944, along with the reins of Bulgaria, the Communists had seized our family land. But when, upon Grandpa’s sudden disappearance from our lives three years ago, my father spoke of Klisura, I realized that the old man’s hatred must stem from some deeper,
darker place. I decided that Grandpa’s punitive exile to the Strandja Mountains had brought him much suffering and pain. But if I was correct, why had he returned?

  “You had no right to disappear like that,” I said. We were eating dinner on the covered terrace of his Klisuran house, some bread and cheese Elif had given us on the way out. Silently we had crossed the bridge, the small square. Silently we had followed the eroded cobblestone road. Every now and then Grandpa would pinch the scruff of my neck.

  “Look how you’ve grown,” he’d say. “Had I known you were coming, instead of a rooster, I might have bought a lamb.” Then he’d tousle my hair as if such playfulness could mask the truth—neither I nor he knew where to begin. And yet we had to, somewhere.

  “We were worried sick. We thought you were dead.”

  He shook the crumbs from his sleeves. “Good bread, this,” he said. He reached for his jar and for a long time gulped water. Then he picked on the crumbs stuck to its sweaty walls.

  “Grandpa,” I said. He pushed the jar away and the newspapers we’d spread on the table rustled.

  “Quite frankly, Grandson, I didn’t think you’d notice.”

  I begged his pardon.

  “Beg all you want,” he said. “For all I know, you have no grandfather. You certainly acted it for years.”

  “I was busy with school. Preoccupied. But I always made time to call you.”

  “My erections are more frequent than your calls.”

  What very useful information, I said. I asked him if it was daily reports he expected. He asked me to repeat myself.

  “This mumbling,” he scowled, “this so-called Bulgarian of yours. It’s pitiful.”

  He’d dealt me a low blow. I bit my tongue, then chewed it as if it were to blame. All the accusations, the powerful, dramatic speeches I’d been preparing for months rang perfectly clear in my head even now. But the moment I opened my mouth the words rolled out crippled.

  Grandpa picked up the jar and drank it dry. “I’m thirsty like a rabid dog,” he said. “And maybe I am rabid. Maybe that’s why I came here. Did you think of that?”

  I nodded. Insane, unstable, terminally ill—all these were scenarios my parents and I had considered at length.

  “Listen, my boy,” Grandpa said gently, and spread his palms open. “We’re both tired. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  The newspapers on the table flapped and, zipping up my jacket, I stretched back in the chair. I really was tired. The wind had grown cold. The sun had dived behind the hills and though the sky was bright in that direction, it was indigo to the east. From our vantage point, high on the terrace, I could see the bridge, the river, and on the other side the Muslim houses with their red rooftops, the thin minaret of the mosque. On our side of the village was desolation—crumbling stone walls, yards overgrown with thorns and dead trees. And on the chimneys of the ruined houses—like large, unblinking eyes that watched me in the dusk—dozens of stork nests.

  “Does every house have a nest?” I asked Grandpa a few days later.

  “Some roofs have two.”

  But why there weren’t any in the Muslim hamlet he couldn’t say.

  The nests were still empty. Though it was time, the storks had not arrived yet. Two more weeks would pass before the first birds—the scouts, as Grandpa called them—spun their belated wheels in the skies over Klisura.

  “What’s that?” I pointed toward the end of the village, where, as a grotesque counterpoint to the white minaret, stuck up an ugly black metal frame.

  Grandpa groaned in disgust. “There is the Babel Tower,” he said, “there is the Eiffel Tower. That there is the Tower of Klisura. A world fucking wonder. If you permit.”

  A few months back some genius had started building a wind turbine and then abandoned it mid-construction. And that was that.

  He lit up and the plume he exhaled hung between us, changing shapes. The wind whooshed through the treetops and carried the smell of budding leaves, of wet, damp earth, which mixed with the stench of the tobacco. I cowered in my jacket. The cigarette burned red, redder in the smoke, like a living coal. The smoke drew a wing, the wing morphed into a woman’s face.

  A hand shook my shoulder. “Wake up, my boy. Listen. Hear!”

  How long had I dozed? Night had fallen. Somewhere in the dark, behind hills I couldn’t see, a bird was calling, its song melodic, mournful. And like today, another bird answered it from the Muslim hamlet, where now timid lights shone behind the curtained windows.

  “It’s from across the border,” Grandpa said. “A man has died. They’re letting us know.”

  “Who is?” I perched forward and listened to the whistling song.

  “The people of his village. That’s how they cross the hills. They’ve learned to speak like birds.”

  I’m not sure how long I sat in my chair mesmerized. The song had dissolved in the night and silence had returned to the village—crickets cried in the yard, dogs barked, the treetops rustled.

  “This man,” I said at last, and my ugly accent startled me. What beauty, to speak unburdened like a bird. “Did you know him? Was he a good man?”

  “What difference does it make?” Grandpa asked. “He’s dead.”

  * * *

  I woke up with thunder ringing in my ears. Sheets of rain slapped the window and the glass rattled in its frame. The whole house had come to life—walls, floors, beams in the ceiling. Caught in jet lag, I listened, dozed off, came to again. Then, sharp as the bolts of lightning that flashed over the hills, a man’s voice echoed. Someone was calling down the hall.

  I turned my flashlight on and for a brief moment did not know where I was. The beam illuminated a tiny fire truck on the floor, a whipping top. A small desk in the corner and on the wall above it a map of the ancient world. My childhood room re-created piece by piece.

  “I moved it here exactly as it was,” Grandpa had said a few hours earlier when he led me over the threshold. “Once I sold the apartment, I had a decision to make. I couldn’t throw you on the trash.” The tiny bed, which at the time had seemed so giant—a pirate galleon, a rocket ship—and the chair by its side, in which for nights on end Grandpa had told me goodnight stories of khans and tsars and rebels. He’d brought them here to the village.

  “Grandpa!” I called now in the hallway. The voice had not echoed again, but in its place I heard the smashing of a hammer. Light flickered around the frame of his shut door. I knocked, then entered.

  Grandpa was writing frantically behind a desk. The storm had thrown the windows open and banged them against the walls. A curtain flapped heavy with rain, which pounded the room with every gust. But the old man wrote unfazed. His drawers, his hemp shirt stuck drenched to his body. Sheets of paper were scattered across the desk, where a gas lamp flickered despite the storm. How he had not set the room on fire, I didn’t know. And there were yet more papers, spilled wet on the floor.

  I slammed the windows shut, then laid my hand on his shoulder.

  “You’re shivering,” I said. I could see my breath escape in a cloud and his breath when he stammered.

  “My boy. I was just writing you a letter.”

  His eyes were muddy. They darted across my face like frightened things.

  Gently I helped him up and led him across the hallway to my bed. I took the drenched clothes off and rubbed his body under the thick Rhodopa blanket.

  “You are that boy, aren’t you?” he muttered once. And once he said, “My boy!” Then he was quiet. He watched me terrified. I tried to calm him with gentle talk, but I was anxious, myself frightened, and so my accent had worsened. I don’t think he understood me.

  Earlier that day, on our way back from the sick girl’s house, like a man who wanted to fake a careless disposition, Grandpa had started whistling a tune. The tune had sat on my tongue all day, familiar yet out of reach. But now, to my surprise, I pursed my lips and whistled, a song Grandpa had sung for me goodnight. He closed his eyes. The storm had passed. Far across the bord
er, in Turkey, its thunder still rumbled.

  The words to the song too returned. But I ignored them.

  SEVEN

  I WAS ON MY THIRD KNOCK AT THE GATES when, in the window overlooking the road, a curtain stirred just enough for Elif’s face to peek through. Her expression didn’t change when she saw me. The curtain fell and for a long time I shivered in the morning chill. Then the window opened, but the curtain remained drawn.

  “What do you want?” she said. And after a while, “I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing.”

  I focused all my faculties. I’d come to return the towels. The towels in which she’d wrapped the bread and cheese. And would she let me, allow me to use their phone?

  “Look up the street,” she said. “Is there a window open?”

  There was.

  “And a hag hanging out the frame. Staring at you?”

  She was.

  “Well then, we might as well.” Her white hand parted the curtain and slammed the window shut. A minute later she was shooing me in through the gates.

  “Good morning, Aunt Nadiré,” she called to the woman up the street. “Don’t tumble over and break your neck now!” And then to me, “The phone’s in the living room. When you’re done come back outside. I’ll be here, waiting.”

  Sand dunes as wide as oceans and camels in long, snaking caravans. A flock of storks against a blazing sun and an oasis where men in white gowns and turbans had stopped to quench their thirst. A placid lake. A calm blue sky. I’d entered not a living room, but an entire world of magic.

  Besides the murals, the room was plain. Red rugs covering the floor from wall to wall and cushions around a low rectangular table. A large chest against one wall and on the chest the phone. No TV set, no books other than a single leather-bound volume on the table.

  I stuck my finger in the rotary and dialed the number on my calling card. Six times before I connected. Enter your twelve-digit PIN, the automated operator said. I turned the rotary, but by the fourth revolution the operator had asked for the PIN again. I watched the camels make their way through the desert, immense riches locked in the chests on their backs. I watched the men about to drink from the lake and wondered if it was in their power to turn tone into pulse so I could call my parents and tell them I had arrived.