We play a quick game, which I win, ten goals to seven. Then, when it’s too dark for playing, I teach her how to dive for penalties, how to kick her own heel and roll to the ground with an agonizing yell.
“Always seek contact,” I say, “but if there is none, kick yourself to the ground. Make this a rule: you must dive for a penalty at least once every game.”
She listens and, like a great sport, runs, kicks her heel and rolls in the grass.
“It hurts,” she says and rubs her knee.
“What can you do?” I tell her. “Life.”
Then John Martin brings his beer down to the pitch. “I can’t understand your Bulgarian gibberish,” he says, “but goddamn it, Princess, is he teaching you to cheat?”
“No, John,” I say. “I’m teaching her to play the game.”
“Some game this is,” he says, and pokes the ball with the tip of his cowboy boot. “Come on, Princess, let’s play a real sport.”
“John Martin,” I say, “American football is not for girls.”
“My daughter loved it,” he says. “I threw the ball with my daughter every day, in this very yard, for nine years and she loved every minute of it. Come on, Princess. I’ll teach you to throw.”
He wobbles back to the house and reemerges a few minutes later with a half-deflated eggball in hand. I step to the side and open a beer while he positions Elli at the right spot, while he throws the ball so far away from her it’s embarrassing to watch.
“Just warming up the old joints,” he says, and sways his arms madly about, forgetting he’s holding a can. Beer splashes all over him. “Come on, Princess, throw it back,” he yelps, dripping, clapping his hands, stomping his boots. Elli giggles and looks at me for the green light.
I tap my nose with a finger a few times. “At his mug,” I clarify in Bulgarian.
“Quiet, Commie!” John Martin yells. “We’re playing ball now. Come on, Princess. Throw.”
With a light grip, just the way I’ve taught her, Elli raises the ball to her ear, shoulders parallel to John’s body, left foot forward. Then she extends her arm back gracefully, and with a swift half circle, rotating her shoulder for maximum velocity, chucks the ball straight into his face.
The ball knocks him flat on his ass.
“Jesus Christ,” he says. He sits panting and wipes his bloodied nose. He starts laughing. “Jesus Christ, that was a cannon. I did not see that coming.”
Elli runs to the house for napkins and I help John up and pass him my beer.
“I told you American football was not for girls,” I say, and he shakes his head.
“She’s good,” he says. “Jesus Christ.” Then he figures Elli was not the girl I meant.
•
After three boxes of macaroni and cheese for dinner, John Martin unfolds the flat earth of his Risk game and we battle each other for all the continents of the world. As always John Martin conquers Asia. He clusters the majority of his troops in Siam, now officially amended to Vietnam with a pen. Elli holds the Americas and I’m spreading the Great Bulgarian Empire.
“Watch out, John Martin,” I tell him. “The Great Bulgarian Empire is spreading.”
“Bring it on, Commie,” he says. He arranges some of his manned cannons in a row, like that would help him. I pet the musket of one of my soldiers. “Avtomat Kalashnikov,” I say, “Bulgarian-made.”
He pushes forward a soldier of his own. “Napalm, mother fucker. American as apple pie.” Then he looks at Elli and his big, square face is flaming red from swearing.
We have never finished a game. After an hour John Martin is too drunk to keep rolling the dice. He retires to his recliner and watches us for a while, every now and then, yelling, “Kick his Communist ass,” or “Atta girl.” Sometimes he takes the phone and cradles it in his lap. Sometimes he fondles it until he falls asleep.
“He wants to call his daughter, doesn’t he?” Elli asks, and sometimes I suppose that’s exactly what he wants to do. Either his daughter or Anna Maria, the Mexican widow. With John Martin there is no telling. We lay the board and all the tiny soldiers back in their box. Elli pulls the stinky boots off John Martin’s feet, and while I take them out to the porch she throws a blanket over him. Then she takes a shower and brushes her teeth.
In my room we read Bulgarian books, mostly fairy tales of samodivi in beautiful garments, of men with scales and dragon wings, of vampiri, karakonjuli, talasumi. But we’ve read those books so many times, there is no surprise in the stories, no heart left.
So sometimes Elli asks me to tell her a story. And I tell her. I make things up about the old khans, about the glorious battles. I teach her history as I remember it from school. Important dates, memorable moments: how they made the Cyrillic alphabet, how we defeated the knights and kept their emperor imprisoned in our castle until finally we decided to push him off the tower to die a deserved death.
“Have you seen this tower, taté?” she asks me, and I tell her, of course I have. All Bulgarians have, it’s there, part of the castle.
“When can I see it?”
And I don’t know what to tell her, because the way my wife is raising her, the way Buddy dictates things, I can never see them actually going back to Bulgaria, even as tourists. For Christ’s sake, they won’t let her speak her own language out of fear it’ll ruin her English. In their eyes, my daughter is capable of speaking a single language only.
Tonight Elli asks me for another tale. I change into my sleeping T-shirt and jump in bed, but she remembers something and takes a cell phone from her jeans on the chair. She hammers a quick text message, and twenty seconds later comes the reply. Sweet dreams, angel. XOXO.
“What the hell is XO?” I say. “What the hell is this phone for?”
“To keep contact,” she says and slips the phone back in her jeans. “Hugs and kisses.”
“Remember,” I tell her as she gets back to bed. “Even if there is no contact …”
“Kick your heel, and fall for penalty. I remember.”
“Atta girl,” I say and we laugh. “What story do you want to hear?”
“Any story. Something nice. About our family. Back home.”
Back home. I kiss her on the forehead. “Okay,” I say. I take a deep breath while she lies on my chest and prepares to listen. “And so this story, this story, too, begins with blood,” I say. “And with blood it ends. Blood binds those in it and blood divides them. Many have told it before and many have sung about it, but I didn’t learn it from them. I was born and I knew it. It was in the earth and in the water, in the air and in the milk of my mother. But it was not in your mother’s milk and not in your air, so you must listen now as I tell you.”
I can feel her breath, tiny and warm against my neck. I rest a hand on her hair.
“See now,” I say, “how black smoke plasters the sky of Klisura. Feel the fires that burn the flimsy houses. Hear the children screaming and their mothers weeping. Ali Ibrahim is converting slaves to the true faith. ‘Who else will refuse to put a fez on his head?’ Ali says, and his deep voice cuts through the air like a damascene sword. He sits on his black stallion not far away from a chopping log, in a yard filled with soldiers and poor peasants. Dark blood has soaked into the log, and only five more heads must be cut for the blood to finally reach the feet of Ali Ibrahim’s horse.
“ ‘Whose head will roll next?’ Ali asks. Weeping rises above the crowd. A young girl steps forward. She moves slowly; she swims above the ground. Her hair is long, so long that it trails in the dirt behind her and winds out of the yard like a river. Snowdrops wreath her head, and a white gown envelops her in a ghostly cocoon. Her blue eyes cut through the darkness around Ali and search for his face.
“He watches as she comes near.
“ ‘Why, my poor brother,’ the girl asks him, ‘have you forgotten your own? It is your blood you shed as you slay them, my brother. It is your blood you spill.’
“Ali takes out his yataghan and jumps off the horse to cut the gi
rl. The frightened eyes of the villagers—Christians he has sworn before the sultan to convert to Islam—follow him as he swings the sword through the air, desperately trying to butcher this apparition. But, as usual, the girl is gone. She has sunk back in his mind, only to return again on some other occasion and in some other form.”
I stop for a moment to catch my breath.
“Taté?” Elli says. “How is this story about our family?”
“Wait,” I say. “Just listen. And try to fall asleep. It’s getting late. So this story,” I say, “does not begin with Ali Ibrahim, really, although it ends with him. It begins eighteen years earlier with the birth of my great-grandmother—the prettiest woman who ever lived.
“It is well known, even before her birth, that my great-grandmother would be the most beautiful woman in the world. So on the day she draws her first breath, men from all over come to pay her tribute. The line in front of the house is so long that it takes the last man twelve years before he finally falls at her feet and presents his gifts of honor.
“Because of my great-grandmother’s supreme beauty, the laws of cause and effect in the village break down for a while. An event is no longer followed by its usual consequence but instead leads to something completely unexpected. This is first noticed when a few of the men waiting to see the newborn get so anxious that they start throwing stones at the house. Contrary to all expectations, the windows do not shatter, but the leaves on the nearby trees momentarily turn red and begin falling as if autumn has come months before its time. Five houses down, a girl desperately falls in love with her uncle because two kids try to drown a bag of black kittens in the river, and an old woman is run over by a bull because on the other end of the village a housewife forgets to put potatoes in the stew.
“Word that the child destined to be the most beautiful woman has been born spreads quickly. It travels from the steep banks of the Danube through the snowcapped peaks of the Balkan range to the vast rose valleys of Kazanlak and the strait of the Bosporus until it finally reaches the ears of the great sultan in Istanbul. His Greatness immediately loses sleep over the beauty of my great-grandmother simply by listening to others talk about her. For days, a wretched shadow, he sits under the fig trees longing for her, and nothing seems to bring him pleasure anymore. The songs of the most exotic canaries of Singapore are but dreadful noise to his ears. The caresses of the prettiest of his wives chill him to his bones and make him want to weep in solitude. Eating is his only way out of the misery. With every sunrise the sultan devours a dozen dishes of baklava, each one more soaked in honey than the one before. With every noon he feasts on three roasted lambs garnished with trout liver and woodpecker hearts, and when the sun sets behind the palace he seeks comfort in the meat of twenty ducks and two baby calves. All this food makes him so obese, so absolutely humongous, that nothing within a hundred steps can escape his shadow.”
“He’s a fat bastard,” Elli says, and giggles. “Like in the movie.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Fat bastard describes him spot on. For eighteen long years this fat bastard of a sultan prays to Allah to give him good health so he can live long enough to hold the most beautiful of all women in his arms. On one misty spring morning after almost two decades of suffering, the sultan disbands his harem and sends his servants to call for the great vizier.
“ ‘It is obvious that I have lost my mind over this woman,’ the sultan tells him. ‘I have waited long enough for her to grow up, and now I should finally hold her in my arms. Tell the best silk weaver to make the finest black feredje. Then send our most merciless janissary along with one hundred soldiers to take her from her house. Tell them to veil her with the feredje and never to look at her face, because whoever lays eyes upon my bird I will punish with blindness.’
“The vizier signs a firman and puts the sultan’s red seal on it, then gives it to the best rider with the swiftest Arabian steed and tells him: ‘Run all day and all night until you reach the village of Klisura, where Ali Ibrahim is converting slaves by the sword to our true faith. Find him and give him this firman. Tell him to obey every word in it lest he lose his head. Be back in one moon and the sultan will give you your weight in gold. Come a day later and your head will roll in the dirt.’
“The rider finds Ali Ibrahim waving his yataghan through the air near the chopping log in the yard filled with peasants and soldiers. He gives Ali the firman and waits for him to read it.
“ ‘Never have I been more humiliated,’ Ali Ibrahim says, and throws the letter at the feet of the notice bringer. ‘I should at least take the pleasure of killing you for bringing me such news. Go back to His Greatness and tell him that Ali Ibrahim will bring him the most beautiful of all women. But along with her, you tell him, Ali Ibrahim will turn her whole village to the true faith; for Ali has sworn to reveal the face of Allah to the slaves, not to chase harlots for the sultan.’
“After these words he jumps back on his black stallion and casts a last glance at the yard washed in red and the crowd of trembling faces. He orders half of his men to carry on with the conversion, while the remaining hundred soldiers he leads out of the valley, heading for the village of my great-grandmother, the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Elli’s breathing has become soft and even, but she isn’t sleeping yet. She’s just dozing off and coming to again. I lie quiet for some time until suddenly she perks up, surprised at herself for dozing. “Ali Ibrahim,” she chatters. “Who is he, taté? Who is Ali Ibrahim?”
I pet her cheek and hair and tell her to lie down and close her eyes.
“Ali Ibrahim is a janissary,” I say. “It is Bulgarian blood that runs in his veins. According to the orders of the sultan, every five years the slaves have to pay their blood tribute—the devshirmeh. No one can escape the recruitment; the most capable boys are taken away to become part of the imperial army, and those parents who try to hide their sons are punished with death.
“Ali was parted from his mother when he was twelve, when he still had his Bulgarian name and still believed in the power of the Holy Cross. At dawn one morning, the recruiting soldiers came like crows of darkness, and by the time the sun died behind the Balkan Mountains they had selected forty of the healthiest and strongest boys in the village to take away. Ali Ibrahim was not among them. But it was his mother who chased the soldiers and fell at their feet and begged them to take him. She was a widow and meant well for her boy: as a peasant, she knew, he had no future, he was destined to die a slave. But as a soldier, as a janissary, the whole world could be his. ‘Take him, Aga,’ she cried, and pushed the boy forward, and the boy did not know why his mother did this, could not understand.
“For weeks, then, the convoy of boys, guarded by fifty soldiers, walked the path to Istanbul—south through the Rhodope Mountains and east through Edirne, then farther east. In Istanbul the boys were bathed, their hair was shorn and torched. The names of their fathers were erased and they were given good Muslim names. No past lay behind them: they were faceless in the hands of the sultan. Humble servants in the name of the true God.
“Ali Ibrahim was sent to a small village in Anatolia where he served in the house of a linen merchant. An old man, who’d once fought the Siamese to the east. There Ali Ibrahim was taught the foreign tongue and the new faith. There he was taught to hate all he once loved.
“Ali Ibrahim’s mind is haunted, Elli. The invisible pull of his wicked heart is so strong that none of those he has slain has ever managed to escape it. Fettered to his body, the dead follow wherever he goes. A never-ending chain of wretched souls trails behind him, and no one else can hear their cries. Behind his back, his soldiers call him ‘Deli Ali,’ which in Turkish means Crazy Ali, but no one dares say that up front, for they also know him to be Merciless Ali, who never hesitates to take a head. Some say that during a conversion in his native village, among the non-believers who refused to recognize the greatness of Allah, Ali killed his own sister and his own mother.”
Then I’m qu
iet for a long time. Elli is asleep on my chest and I have to get up, to turn the light off. But I don’t want to get up. I lie and I think of my own mother, of how I haven’t seen her in seven years; of my sister, who had a baby last spring. I listen to Elli’s even breathing and wish for things that can’t be.
IV.
Next morning I ask John Martin if he’d let us borrow his truck to go to the zoo.
“Over my cold, stiff body,” he says, rocking in the recliner, and behind him Elli mouths off his words exactly as he says them.
“But I’ll take you fishing,” he says, “if you pay for gas.”
I look at Elli and she shrugs a Why not? So I tell John to put it on my tab and hurry off to get us ready before he’s had the time for some clever reply. Half an hour later we’re loading his boat behind the truck. Another half hour after that, I’m dipping my toes in the lake.
“Get your toes out,” John Martin scolds me, “you’re slowing us down.”
In the back of the boat he holds the handle-looking thing on the motor and steers us forward. I know nothing of fishing or boats. What I do know is that this boat looks about as sturdy as the ones the Russians must have used when crossing the Danube to attack the Turks in 1878. But this boat is John’s jewel, dearer to him than his truck, even. He has named it Sarah, and that there says it all.
My own daughter sits at the nose, or the stern, or however you call it, and points at distant spots across the lake where she thinks fish will be hiding. But John Martin never listens. He always takes us to the same place on the far end of the horseshoe, by an abandoned, half-collapsed wooden dock where the water, only three feet shallow, is filthy with osier, lilies and grass, where there is a permanent fog of mosquitoes and large, black turtles snap on the oars, where dipping your toes is completely out of the question.
“Jesus Christ, John,” I tell him when I realize that’s where we’re heading again. I smear mosquito repellent on Elli’s neck, legs, arms. “Take us someplace else, will you? There, by that concrete tower, or by that island. Anywhere else but the dock.”
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