Stork Mountain (22 page)

But Baba Mina wasn't smiling. She'd stopped taking her tiny steps, and when she turned to me, her face twisted in fear. I understood that all I'd imagined—how she saw herself in the fire, young and pretty—all that was nothing but hogwash.

“Take me home, my boy,” she whispered, and reached for my hand, but couldn't grab it.

“It's all right, Grandma,” Elif hushed her. She put her palm on the old woman's shoulder and kissed her head through the black kerchief. “Let's watch the dancing. Aren't they pretty?” Baba Mina mumbled something—maybe the crowd had spooked her—and the bagpipe shrieked so near now that all other sound disappeared.

The first man carried his icon across the embers, his feet taking quick steps, kicking up sparks and raising white smoke. One of the women followed. The drums beat faster and the second girl jumped in the embers and carried safely across them the image of the Holy Virgin. It was a beautiful moment: the girls so pretty, the men so strong and courageous. And yet I couldn't feel this beauty. The whistles had renewed their blowing. The crowd clapped and cheered the way a crowd cheers at a football game. A bitter taste filled my mouth. It was not an ancient mystery we were witnessing, but a show for the tourists—as strange and exotic as they wanted to see it.

“This isn't right,” I told Elif. My head had started to spin from the weed and the wine and the people, and I felt my stomach rising. “You watch them, I'll be back in a minute.”

The beach was littered with bottles and cigarette butts and making-out couples. Boys and girls ran half naked along the shoreline and jumped in the sea, screaming. But in the darkness, the air was cooler and so fresh my head cleared quickly. How sad it was to be standing not ten feet from the sea and not see it. How awful to be looking at embers and fire dancers and not feel them. Anger choked me—not just at the drunken tourists, but at the pipers, the drummers, the
nestinari
. And I would have felt low and angry a long time if at that moment a car hadn't roared in the distance.

People yelled, others were laughing, and I watched the car, a jeep really, fly through the beach toward the dancing. Not sure why, I started running. I tripped and rolled in the sand, sprinted faster. A dull sickness lodged itself in my stomach. The jeep, like the one Orhan had driven, had stopped not twenty feet from the dancing and the crowd had broken up the circle, blinded by headlights.

I can't say I was surprised to see the imam climb out. All night, I'd been seeing him in more than a few faces. But to see my grandfather come out of the jeep surprised me. He stood by the front bumper and for a while fought the wind to light a cigarette. The bagpipes were still shrieking, the drummers still beating, and the
nestinari
kept dancing, but no one watched them. All eyes were on the imam, while his eyes were searching. He hadn't said one word even and his wife was already walking in his direction. Her head down, she climbed in the back of the jeep, inside the old, wretched cocoon. She untied her headscarf and spread it over her face to hide it.

Elbowing my way through, I found Elif and Aysha. They held hands, completely frozen in the headlights. And Baba Mina stood beside them, equally frozen. The imam was only a shadow and wind swept the sand at his feet in black puffs. Behind him, Grandpa was smoking, the tip of his cigarette a glowing ember.

“I'm not going,” Elif whispered. I'm not sure if she meant for her father to hear it, or me, or if it was to herself she was speaking. But other people heard her.

“Hey, bro,” someone called to the imam, “leave the girl to do her thing.”

“It's a free country!”

“I'm not going,” Elif said a second time, louder. I felt like she wanted me to reach for her hand and hold it; to give her strength and courage; to pin her down like an anchor. And yet I couldn't move a muscle. And so she drifted.

“Come on, man!” someone yelled, maybe at me, maybe at the imam. Head down, like her mother, Elif walked toward the bright lights, toward the cocoon she too had been weaving for many years.

By now people were booing and even the bagpipes couldn't silence their whistles.

Then, just as she had walked past her father, just as she was but a few feet from the idling jeep, Elif turned back and sprinted. Before I knew it her lips were on my lips and the crowd was cheering. And even after our kiss was over, even after Elif had taken her seat by her mother, the crowd kept clapping.

It was a moment hard to rival. Or would have been, if not for Aysha. A woman cried and then another and I turned around just in time to see the little girl running across the embers, barefooted. At once the music fell silent, the
nestinari
as stunned on the side as the rest of us. We could hear under Aysha's feet the embers crunching as once more she crossed the circle. But before she had crossed it a third time, a man picked her up in his arms and hushed her: Grandpa, his boots kicking coals on his way out.

People were booing louder and for a second I feared a riot.

“Come on, Grandma,” he told Baba Mina, and took her hand when she gave it. Then he stopped in his tracks for a moment.

“Get Aysha's shoes, will you?” he told me, without turning.

 

TWELVE

DYADO DACHO RARELY LOST
to the bus driver. But that night, the dice betrayed him. It was as though an invisible hand had interfered, he told me later, casting precisely the values that wouldn't suit him. Before long, he'd squandered his pocket money and it was still some ways to the evening prayer. He knew he had to buy us more time to get the plan in motion and so he kept betting—first his Slava watch, then his pension, and after this Baba Mina's. But the invisible hand kept rolling bad dice and sending, against all sensible judgment, for more and more shots of mint and
mastika
. Meanwhile, like never, the driver stayed sober. He was bleeding Dyado Dacho dry, that vampire, and he knew better than to allow some herb infusions to throw off his good fortune.

At last the imam sang from the minaret and the driver rubbed the cash in his beard. He tried on the Slava to see if it fit him—it didn't, his wrist was much meatier, but he still took it—and promised to come back for the pensions tomorrow. He said goodnight, despite Dyado Dacho's drunken protestations—he was now willing to bet all his chickens, his house even—and made for the bus on the square.

By the time the driver had rushed back to the coffeehouse crying that his bus had been stolen, the imam was already there looking for his runaway women. It was then that the invisible hand jabbed Dyado Dacho in the ribs like a fireplace poker. So aggravated was he with losing, he simply couldn't resist spitting out some venom. “You'll never find your women,” he told the imam, “and your bus,” he said to the driver, “it was I who stole it!” Next thing he knew, they were shaking him down for more information. But he was dead drunk and damn glad to have ordered so many
mastikas
and so, passed out, he told them nothing.

“He told them everything, the old fool,” Grandpa said on the terrace the day after the fire dancing. I'd woken up late, my temples throbbing, and was now wrestling the chicken soup he'd cooked me. I could see my own reflection, distorted and pitiful, in the two fingers of fat on the surface—a glistening mirror Grandpa expected me to consume as a cure for my hangover.

Neither the imam nor the driver understood much of what Dyado Dacho was saying. But much wasn't needed—he'd blurted out
nestinari
and
dancing
and then
the American took them!

“Ey, my boy,” Dyado Dacho cried later when I approached him, “the hand must have made me say it.” How an invisible hand could make a man say things, I wasn't certain, but I didn't press him.

“The imam came here to look for you,” Grandpa said, and motioned me to hurry with the soup before the fat on the surface had turned chewy. The pitiful reflection tore when my spoon poked it. Hungry as I was, I couldn't eat a bite even.

“
My boy's sleeping
, I told him,” Grandpa went on. “
He's been having a headache
. I was ready for a fistfight when he tried to wake you. Then I saw red. I shouted:
Come give him a kiss if you want to. Maybe that'll cure his headache
. I felt like a proper fool, my boy, when I saw the curtain flapping out that window.” Around this time a horn had sounded from the road, and when they stepped out, the military jeep was waiting. When and how the imam had called for it, Grandpa didn't know, but the man was connected. More than a few times Grandpa had told me, this side of the Strandja belonged to the imam.

When the imam asked where the
nestinari
were dancing, where I'd taken his women, Grandpa told him he had no idea. But it was no good pretending. The imam had seen Elif's jacket in my room, on the hanger. So Grandpa said,
Get in the jeep, I'll take you
.

The rest—I had lived through it.

“You've been banned from the bus for life now,” Grandpa said. He took my soup impatiently and started slurping. It was Grandpa who'd driven the bus from the beach back to the square—myself and Baba Mina drunk and sleeping, shoulder to shoulder. Why the driver hadn't come in the jeep to begin with, I wasn't certain.

“There is more in the pot if you want some.” Baba Mina had given him the chicken this morning—in lieu of a
thank you
, or maybe an
I'm sorry
.

“I have no chickens to give you,” I said, my eyes on the table. “Go ahead, say that you warned me.”

But he asked me to look up. “You made a choice, and for you it paid off. Besides, it was a thrill of a pleasure to see the imam the way I saw him when Elif kissed you. And then when Aysha sprinted across those dead coals.”

According to Grandpa, the coals had been spread too thinly. According to him, those fire dancers were not true
nestinari
.

Walking to the bus, after the imam had driven away his women, I'd seen, or at least thought so, the chubby Russian who'd burned his feet in the fire. He had been chatting in Bulgarian with one of the men who'd spread the embers, helping him load the rakes in the bed of a pickup.

“A thin line divides them, my boy,” Grandpa said, “the miracle worker from the con artist. And that line, as it often happens, lies in the eye of the one who watches.”

The people we'd seen last night were not Klisurans. And the feast of Saints Constantine and Elena, it too hadn't been last night. “Wait thirteen more days,” Grandpa said, “then go back to Byal Kamak.” For such things, it was the old calendar that held weight in Klisura, and in most other Bulgarian villages for that matter.

I felt my blood rise to the tips of my ears. Here was a detail I'd failed to consider: while the majority of Europe had switched to the Gregorian calendar in the Middle Ages, Bulgaria had waited until 1916. Even to this day many of our older people honored dates in their old, Julian style. So not May 21, but June 3 then was the proper feast of the
nestinari
saints.

“It only hurts that it happened this way. Not that it happened,” Grandpa said, and waved his big hand. “In your place, I might have done the same things. Hell, in your place, I did much worse.” And for a moment it seemed like he wanted to say more. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, his eyes on the roofs and the stork nests.

“Baba Mina was never a fire dancer,” he said when a stork landed in one nest and began to feed its two babies. “Saint Kosta never took her. And after so many years, I see it still pains her. What happened, happened,” he said, and took a long drag. “It's what happens next that I'm not too keen on braving. So man up. A storm's coming.”

 

PART

FOUR

 

ONE

THE NIGHT BEFORE
the proper
nestinari
feast I dreamed of the girl again. She was in my bed, wrapped in a white sheet like a corpse, and when I peeled off the sheet she laughed, tickled. She had no face and her laughter was a lark's song. The bed had turned into a nest, the earth was moving with a deep roar, and twig by twig the nest began to rot away. We started falling.

I opened my eyes to Grandpa's face, blurry at first, so close to mine, then coming into focus. The roar from my dream had gotten louder. Deep and persistent, it rattled the windows in their frames and it was the glass that chirped birdlike.

For a moment I expected the Grandpa of my childhood to throw me a netted sack. Bread, cheese, and yogurt. Delivery in fifteen minutes. Instead, he hit me with a pair of jeans.

“Get dressed. We have to go.”

Go where? The sun was barely above the eastern hills. The yard lay half in shadow. By the time I was tangling in my T-shirt, a guillotine of light was touching the mouth of the well. The roar had grown so loud I made nothing of what Grandpa was saying—a curse, no doubt, at someone's aunt or mother.

We glued our palms to the windows to cushion their buzz and it was then we saw it—trampling the road on its way past our house. Burning with sun in its armor—curved blade, yellow body, clawlike tail—it resembled a giant scorpion more than it did a tank and a tank significantly more than what it really was.

“A bulldozer?” I said.

“Make it two. You slept through the first one.”

The bulldozer had left behind a dry fog of its own—a cloud of dust and sand through which we marched. Once or twice Grandpa tripped in the ruts the tracks had dug, but after each falter his pace quickened. As did his breathing. “We wasted too much time,” he barked when I asked him to slow down; there was no need for him to say the rest—“all thanks to you.”

The roar of machines grew louder the closer we got to the ugly tower, the outermost houses, the dust bitter and stinking of exhaust. With the stench, a heaviness set in my stomach, and when the engines suddenly drowned in a different kind of boom—the rumble and roll of collapsing walls—the heaviness turned to panic. Grandpa sprinted grotesquely, like a thing wounded, and so I sprinted behind him. He shouted something and I too heard myself shouting.