Stork Mountain (27 page)

It was all this the people of Klisura feared. And even when Grandpa told them,
It's only the letters I'll teach your kids, only the numbers
, they still didn't believe him. When the mayor got angry and bellowed—
you blockheads, show some courage
—the people got quiet.

“They hate my guts,” the mayor told Grandpa one evening. It was the mayor who, a year before this, had closed down the village mosque and sent away the imam. There was no need for Grandpa to ask him why he'd done so. After all, the mayor had never questioned why Grandpa had ended up in Klisura, nor did they wonder why Father Dionysus was doing all this baptizing. They both knew the reason. The Party had willed it. There was no way to defy the Party's orders.

“When I was a boy,” the mayor said, “I drove an ox into a bog once. That poor beast knew the ground was boggy—he'd smelled the mud from a distance—but I hadn't smelled it. At first he resisted, but then I beat him until I broke the stick in half against his back. And so he grunted, lowered his head, and did as I told him. The mud ate him whole. I am the ox now,” the mayor said, the first and last time Grandpa heard him whisper.

 

THIRTEEN

WITH THE THREAT OF HEFTY FINES
the Muslim parents were convinced to send their children back to school. It helped too that Grandpa was liked in the village. Almost every night someone new invited him to dinner—be it in the Christian or the Muslim hamlet. And to class, his students came with little bundles—now a handful of dried fruit, now apples preserved fresh under fern leaves. And after sunset, young women brought him jugs of milk, freshly baked
banitsas
, or loaves of rye bread. Afraid to be seen, they left their boons at his threshold, rapped their slender fingers on the gates, and ran into the dark with a giggle. Only one girl refused to hide. Each day, constant as the sun rising, she brought Grandpa a jar of yogurt—still warm from the sheepskins in which it had been wrapped to leaven. Each day he met her at the threshold. Each day, to show him how thick the yogurt was, she turned the jar upside down and shook it. Not once did the yogurt move. Then she would hold the jar up and make him breathe in deeply—the yogurt, alive with fermentation and sprinkling his face. When Grandpa scooped up yogurt with his finger, the girl would laugh.

“My daddy has a hundred white sheep,” she sometimes told him, which was to say, There isn't a bachelor in the village who wouldn't want me as his wife, yet here I am, at your threshold.

“She loved me very much,” Grandpa said now on the terrace. And back in those days, he often wondered, what would it be like to have her as his wife? Her father, the chief shepherd of the collective, the hundred white sheep, the jars of yogurt. She was a pretty girl, no doubt. She spoke sweetly and looked at him in a way that was calming—he would be lucky to have her. And yet he wasn't feeling lucky. At night, alone in the quiet school, it was the Greek girl Grandpa thought of. He dreamed of her face running black with ashes, imagined the rustle of her bare feet in the coals, felt her touch on his fingers, and sometimes, when a girl was laughing somewhere in the village, he thought it was the Greek girl, Lenio, he was hearing.

Each day at the threshold he scooped thick yogurt from the jar, guiltily, knowing full well he'd soon have to come to a decision. Take the girl and the hundred white sheep, or push away the jar before her heart shattered.

“I led her on, my boy. Day after day.”

And in the end, is there a force darker than a woman with a broken heart?

“Poor Baba Mina,” I said, and tried to see her, not as I remembered her, unraveling old sweaters by the fire, babbling of her father's sheep, but as Grandpa had seen her in those days, bringing him yogurt, a young and pretty girl, in love.

 

FOURTEEN

GRANDPA'S FIRST SUMMER
in Klisura was coming to an end. The storks rose in giant flocks, the leaves of the cherries dropped yellow, and the sweet smell of rot filled the air. Soon the days grew short and chilly. First snows fell, melted, then came to stay. Every morning, at the school's threshold, Grandpa collected the wood his students brought—one log per child, for the stove in the classroom. Every morning, Grandpa inspected their teeth, to see if they'd brushed them; their ears, to see if they'd washed them. Once a week, he made them pull off a stocking. To save time, he checked the right foot only. If the toenails weren't clipped, he wrote a note to reprimand the parents.
Teacher, teacher!
the children cried one day. He had just inspected Mehmed's right foot—the nails in a somewhat satisfactory condition.
Check his other foot
.
The left one!
Not nails, talons! His mother, the boy admitted, sobbing, was much too busy now that his father had gone away. She had not the time for clipping nails, and clipped only the ones she knew the teacher was inspecting.

“He was a good boy—Mehmed,” Grandpa told me. We were taking our daily walk up the road, to the wreckage of the houses. Ahead of us, Saint Kosta was pulling something from a pile of fallen branches. “His voice was honey. I'd say,
Now children, let's sing a song.
But the moment Mehmed opened his mouth, they all shut theirs. They were ashamed to sing while he was singing.” The snow falling in the courtyard, the stove bursting with flame, and Mehmed, singing sweetly. And now Grandpa stopped in the middle of the road and turned his head to listen, eyes closed, as if he could hear Mehmed's singsong.

“His father had been the village imam. A year before I came to Klisura, the militia had taken him away. Most likely to a labor camp. They never heard from him again.”

It was only appropriate that at this moment, Mehmed, now grown-up, himself the imam of Klisura, himself a father, should start singing from the minaret. And yet it wasn't time for prayer. Instead, we heard the wind speeding through the dead road and in the wind Saint Kosta, gulping down a mouse he'd just killed.

*   *   *

The snows melted and the cherries bloomed. The storks returned. A year had gone by since Grandpa had first set foot in Klisura. And soon the feast of Saint Constantine was once more near.

“Come with me across the border,” the mayor, caretaker of the
nestinari
, said to Grandpa. And he told him the story I knew from Elif—of how once upon a time the
nestinari
lived protected by the Turkish sultan. But how one day without reason, the Turks slaughtered as many fire dancers as they could and torched their village. The few survivors roamed the Strandja in search of a new home, half of them stopping in Klisura, the other half across the hills, in what was now Turkey. To keep the memory alive, each group vowed to safeguard the icons of the other and to meet year after year, once in Klisura, once there, across the hills—in Kostitsa.

“Kostitsa,” I said. “The word for
little bone
?” But Grandpa shook his head. It was Saint Constantine's name that had shaped that of the village.

We were sitting out in the yard now, under the trellis, tossing back and forth a rag ball I'd made from an old shirtsleeve. We were working on Grandpa's dexterity, on his reflexes after the stroke. At first, catching the ball had been a serious challenge. But he was doing better. The day was warm. The air smelled of ripening tomatoes. As always, Saint Kosta strolled through the yard, searching for mice or moles to prey on.

“I can't cross the border,” Grandpa told the mayor. After all, he was serving a punishment for his Party resignation. They'd never give him the necessary papers. But the mayor swatted his paw. Papers were for book rats.

And so, one evening with the sunset, four days before the feast of Saints Constantine and Elena, the mayor, Grandpa, Vassilko, two local men, and three women made for the Turkish border. Teary Baba Vida waved after them from the shrine's threshold; she was too old to make the journey.

“Tell me, Grandma,” Grandpa asked her, “what did you mean the night of the dances?”
Don't do it
, she had warned him. But now she shrugged her bony shoulders. “If only I remembered,
sinko
, the things I saw each time Saint Kosta took me.”

Father Dionysus caught up with them at the end of the village. The sacred icons were safeguarded in his church and wasn't he responsible for every candle, candelabra, lamp, and wooden box? What would the metropolitan say if he knew the Pope was allowing—

“Fine, come along then!” cried the mayor. “Just give that tongue of yours some rest.”

He was a sly devil, Father Dionysus. It took Grandpa much too long to figure that out. Yes, the Party had sent him to christen the Muslims. But there were other tasks he'd been given. In the end it turned out Father Dionysus worked for the CSS. The Committee for State Security. Among other things, the Pope kept an eye on my grandfather; each month he wrote reports on all that Grandpa was doing.

“A secret agent priest!” I laughed, as if that were funny. I tossed the ball and Grandpa caught it firmly in his fist.

Sneaking across the border is and always has been a suicidal endeavor. You will be shot on sight. But back in those Cold War days, security was even tighter. Because of its proximity to Turkey, Klisura itself was then in a border zone. You couldn't just come to the village the way you did today. Back then, you needed special permission. That, Grandpa had. But crossing the border was another story.

Right away they came to a fence in the forest. The same one I'd snuck across with Elif. Like me, Grandpa found himself passing a hamlet of Turkish houses. Like me he thought, can it be this easy?

But this border was only a fake one. You were expected to cross it and think that you'd made it. You look around: huts, a hamlet. I'm in Turkey! And just when you calm down, the guards get you.

At last they came to the real border. The moon was thin; the night was pitch-dark. And in the darkness, the tip of a cigarette glowed red. From the bushes the mayor hooted like an owl. The red ember drew an arc and shattered on the ground into a shower of smaller embers.

“You're late,” the soldier whispered when they stepped out of the bushes to meet him. For the rest of the way, he was quiet. He was a local boy. What else was there to say? He let them cross. It was that easy.

Once they cleared the border, the mayor whistled again into the darkness. By then, Grandpa had learned a bit about this birdsong language. He tried to explain it now—how it was a mix of Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish; how each syllable was rendered by a different tone—but I'd be lying if I said I understood him. I trusted him, however, and that was sufficient.

Somewhere in the distance a bird answered. Someone had heard and now would pass along the message.
We're coming.
They walked all through the night, along the bank of a river—the same river that if followed downstream led to Klisura and to the old walnut. They slept at dawn, hidden in the thick of the forest. At sunset they arrived in the village.

To look at it, you'd think you were in Klisura. Even the house Captain Vangelis met them in was like the mayor's. In just a year's time, the captain's hair had turned bone-white. His sons too had grown older. And Lenio—

That evening under the trellised vine, Grandpa couldn't eat a bite. That night, in the barn where the men had bedded down, he couldn't sleep a minute. His heart was in his throat, beating.

She was a woman now. Sixteen. And promised in marriage to Michalis—the younger son of Captain Elias, that beardless boy Grandpa had seen a full year before. And he was still beardless, his face as smooth as river rock; but handsome, chiseled. They would marry them off in one more year.

That night Grandpa burned with fever. He felt better in the morning, but by the next evening he was again burning. My heart is breaking, he thought. He could barely stand on his feet while the
nestinari
were dancing. But it was only after he made it back to Klisura a week later, neither dead nor alive, his insides splitting, only after the Pope brought a doctor from town, that they realized the real reason. “Malaria,” Grandpa said, and was quiet.

Uncomfortable, I turned under the trellis. Now that proper summer was upon us, the mosquitoes had come back. And since the sun was setting—

“Let's go inside,” I said, but Grandpa wouldn't.

He told me to man up. And then to let him have at least one smoke.

“You're doing fine without,” I said. But I could see what was eating him—Lenio, risen from the river of his mind.

“The day before we left for Klisura,” he said, and lit up, “we ate a farewell lunch in Captain Vangelis's courtyard.”

His fever was so bad people said his teeth chattered like a stork's bill. They too had storks there, in Kostitsa.
Teacher Stork
, the kids cried behind his back, laughing. So he mustered his last strength and dragged himself to the table. He acted well, lest Lenio think he was a weakling. He plopped himself down in a chair and this awful chord echoed, like a cat dying, and then wood splitting. Next thing he knew, Lenio was sobbing by his side, a half-crushed mandolin in her hands. “Beyond repair,” Captain Vangelis said, and waved carelessly. “Here, have a
raki
. Don't sweat it.”

For the rest of their stay Lenio hid in her room, sobbing. She hated his guts, Grandpa was certain. The illness would kill him and never again would he see her.

“But you were mistaken,” I said while he finished his cigarette in silence. Saint Kosta had come to his side and he petted his long neck and good wing gently. “Let's go inside,” he said, and when he made for the terrace the stork followed. But I stayed behind for a while, despite the mosquitoes.

Some time ago, while I rummaged through the classroom that was the first floor of our house, I'd found a mandolin wrapped in a white sheet. Half the strings hung broken; the others needed tuning.