“Hey, funny talker,” Red Mustache called. “Give us a hand, will you?”
Outside, the bus sounded its horn again. I could read its sign well, scribbled on a checkered sheet in blue pen.
“To Klisura, is it?” the young husband asked, while I struggled to pick up the old couple’s sacks and baskets.
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled. “I think so.”
On his shoulder his girl let out a giggle.
“You go to sleep,” he told her, “that’s not our bus,” and covered her face with his thick palm. She laughed again and I could see her eyes, watching me, between the gaps of his fingers.
And then we were outside—me and the old couple. The bus’s headlights cast thick yellow ropes through the sand that hung in the air; its wipers fought to keep the grains away, but for some reason, its doors remained closed for us.
Sand pricked my face and filled my mouth with every breath. I hesitated, then kicked the door. And then again, until it opened. I let the old ones climb in first, then followed.
“A vandal, eh!” the driver said, and clicked his tongue. “A door-kicker.” I paid my fare and dropped off the bags with their owners. “You take care of yourself,” I told Red Mustache, and he showed me his swollen gums, on which glistened grains of sand.
“You are a funny talker.”
There were very few other people in the bus, but even so I walked all the way to the backseat.
“Next stop,” the driver announced, and I could see that he was looking at me in the rearview mirror, “Klisura.”
I tousled my hair, dusted off the collar of my jacket. Sand flew around me and fell in dunes at my feet. Then, as if something made me, I turned around and looked out the back window. And this is how I saw him.
A black figure in the red. A giant with flapping wings.
The bus began to move. The giant waved, his wings flapped, he fell behind and vanished in the fog.
“Stop,” I shouted. I ran all the way to the front. “Open the doors.”
The driver stopped the bus. “Are you,” he said slowly, “speaking in English?” I realized what I’d done in my excitement. “A man,” I said in Bulgarian. “Behind the bus.”
At that moment a fist slammed on the doors. A black figure filled the small window, a Bedouin who’d wrapped a shirt, the color of red wine, around his face. He grumbled and I recognized a few words only, mother, yours, enough to catch the gist.
“Another vandal, by the looks of it,” the driver said, and apathetically pressed the necessary button. The doors flew open and a sheet of sand hurled itself upon us.
“Klisura?” the Bedouin asked from the threshold. The black wings flapped madly on his chest and I realized that he was holding a hen, or maybe a chicken, whose head had been covered over with a tarpaulin pouch.
“Buy a ticket and I’ll tell you,” the driver said, but waved him in.
With the doors closed, the man stood motionless, catching his breath. Sand seeped from his elbows as he held the hen to his chest, from the hen’s wings when they flapped.
“You’re usually two hours late,” he said to the driver.
“Consider it a miracle,” the driver said, and rubbed his thumb against his index finger.
The man turned to face me. “My boy, hold this,” he said, and shoved the hen in my direction. I jumped back, startled. Someone laughed behind me. Not wanting to appear a coward, I seized the chicken, which screamed and slapped me with its wings.
“It’s fine if you’re scared,” the man said, not letting go, and something mocking rang in his voice. I yanked the bird out of his grip. A victorious pleasure—now I’ll show him—washed over me and then, when the chicken dug its talons into my forearm, a blinding pain.
“He didn’t get you with his claws now, did he?” the man said, and his eyes sparkled.
“Can’t feel a thing,” I lied.
“That sleeve’s turning red,” the driver noticed. He snatched the money the man had offered him and counted it twice. I was ready to pass out a little, when finally the man took back his hen.
The floor, seats, windows, and ceiling buzzed and we started rattling down the road. From the backseat I watched the man up front, no longer a glorious Bedouin, unwrap the shirt around his face with one hand and hold the chicken with the other. Layer after layer fell, like a mummy unbandaged, to finally reveal his wrinkled skin, his bony, hollowed cheeks, his sharp and pointy chin.
A heaviness settled in my stomach as though I’d drunk too much cold water too quickly. I had been certain of it all along and all along, it seemed, I had been wrong. This man was not my grandfather.
FOUR
I WAS EIGHT WHEN COMMUNISM FELL in Bulgaria. 1989. My parents and I lived in Grandpa’s apartment, crammed like broilers, because we had no money to rent, let alone buy, our own place. Father and Grandpa fought constantly. Mother wept and threatened divorce. At first they tried to spare me, but then, it’s difficult to yell discreetly in a coop.
At least we weren’t hungry. My grandfather was too well connected for hunger to keep us in its fist. The butcher, the baker, the fruit-and-vegetable seller—they had all been his students once.
“Wake up,” Grandpa would whisper at my bedside, already bundled up in his thinned-out, moth-eaten coat. I’d beg him to let me sleep. The sun was still an hour from rising and it was Sunday.
“I got a tip from an old student.” He’d shove the netted sack in my hand. “Delivery in fifteen minutes.”
We walked the dark streets like thieves. The snow crunched under our boots, the frost bit our faces. No light in any window, and not a soul. Not even the dogs were out this early. The scarf on my mouth was solid ice by the time we reached the butcher’s.
“Dobrutro, drugaryo uchitel!” the butcher would say in greeting and rush us in through the back door, lest anyone see us. “Good morning, comrade teacher!” He’d give me a playful pinch, and for a long time the trail of blood he’d smeared would burn my frozen cheek. The carcasses of two or three freshly slaughtered pigs would hang among a forest of empty hooks. The butcher would strop the knife on his belt. “For you, comrade teacher, only the best.”
He’d wrap the chops in a gigantic sheet of brown paper and I would open the netted sack. “Let me throw a chop on the grill,” the butcher might say. “You sit in the back and get warm.”
But Grandpa wouldn’t have it. “Thank you. You’ve done enough.”
He paid the butcher and the butcher acted embarrassed, but always took the money. “Of course he takes it,” Grandpa said when I asked him once. “Of course we pay. We’re not ungrateful. We aren’t greedy.”
We’d slip out in the dark and make our way to another alley, to some other entrance in the back. A steaming loaf of bread, a jar of yogurt, a bag of milk. The netted sack swelled up with our catch. We hid it inside the school bag I carried on my back as a decoy and then, like poachers dragging forbidden seines, snuck home.
Dawn would be breaking by the time we reached the apartment complex.
“Someone’s up early,” a neighbor might say, and hurry out of the elevator, buttoning up her coat, putting on her mittens, bracing herself for a few hours in the line. “Is this what you’re teaching him, comrade teacher? To use the back door, while we honest people wait in lines like fools?”
I watched my grandpa’s face turn red.
“We live in times of wolves,” he’d say once we were safe inside the elevator. And then an hour later he might add, “A man must seek connections to other men. Wolves may be loners. Men must not.”
It was this advice of Grandpa’s that I took to heart during my first few years in America. So what if in the beginning I didn’t speak the language? So what if at school some children mocked my home-knit sweaters, corduroy pants, tassel loafers? The language could be learned, the wardrobe replaced. No bully can bring you down, when just last year in Bulgaria you fought a grizzly on the street. His Gypsy owners, not having any means to buy him food, had shooed him off a
nd into town. At first we fought, then we became comrades. To this day, each month I send him a jar of American honey in the mail.
I was exotic, interesting, enchanting. An heir of Olympic heroes. A cosmonaut. A weapons expert. Boys wanted to be my friends. Girls dropped little love notes in my bag. By high school no one believed my lies, but then I had no reason to keep telling any—I’d followed Grandpa’s advice to a T, established strong connections, made many friends. And then I left for college, and for the first time, or so it felt, I found myself completely disconnected. No friends, pitiful grades, student loans hanging over my head like swords. Maxed-out credit cards, debt collectors calling. What else is there to say? Comrade Bear was dead and there was no one left now to receive my jars of honey.
* * *
When I was six, Grandpa took me to his native village to meet the oldest man on earth.
“I am a hundred years old and who are you?” the old man said.
“Your great-grandson,” I answered, petrified, and mumbled the name we shared.
“I never liked that name,” he said. He was sitting up in bed, propped on a throne of red-and-white checkered pillows. The sealed windows focused the sun on him and gave him a blinding glow. The room was stifling, but he was fully dressed—wool jacket dyed bluer than the sky; thick pants and booties as black as the fertile fields outside the village. He turned his head this way and that, bared two rows of perfect yellow teeth, and let his milky eyes fidget in their sockets. “So you’ve remembered you have a father, eh?” he said to Grandpa, whose palms were melting holes in my shoulders.
When he had finished signing whatever papers Grandpa had brought for him to sign, the old man called me over to his bed. I still remember the stench of naphthalene that rose up not just from the wool of his clothes but from his ancient flesh.
“You’ll never live to be as old as me,” he said. “Whatever you think of doing, I’ve already done it. Wherever you think of going, I’ve already been and returned. And it was nothing special.”
He raked my hair, then groped my face—my forehead, nose, and chin—his hand as cold as the belly of a catfish I’d once poked. I watched Grandpa in terror, but did not dare move even when the ancient man stuck his salty fingers in my mouth. He traced the gaps where teeth were missing and pushed against the ones that rocked. Then, as unexpected as lightning in the winter, he pinched a rocking tooth, yanked it out, and ate it.
The blood never washed out completely from my shirt.
That afternoon, Grandpa took me outside the village, to see the fertile fields.
“Don’t begrudge the old fool,” he said. “The old are jealous of the young. The living are frightened of the dying. But sooner or later they all converge.”
Stalks of plentiful wheat splashed with the wind around us. We had waded in a sea of gold. Grandpa broke off an ear and munched on the grains. His eyes watered, but he gave no sign he was ashamed.
“This land was ours once,” he said. “A hundred acres.”
I didn’t have to ask him who owned the land now. Even at six, I knew.
But then, two years later, the Communist Party collapsed. And a few years after that, when I was a sophomore in high school, a package arrived from Bulgaria—a short letter and a box for matches. Inside the matchbox lay a pinch of soil. Our land had been returned.
It was this land, or at least my share of twenty acres, that now I had returned to sell.
FIVE
THE ENDLESS THRACIAN FIELD had ended. Its flatness had been replaced by oaks in youthful foliage—tall, venerable trees keeping watch, like sentries to the mountain. There was no more sand in the air. Rusty patches were scattered across the road, which snaked gently upward through the hills of the Strandja and grew narrower the higher we climbed. The holes turned to fissures, the fissures to crevasses, and soon we crossed entire stretches where the pavement had been eroded and washed away by rain. Each time the bus sank in a fissure, my teeth buzzed. The dentures of the old men and women chattered like the bills of giant birds, and for an instant I remembered how, many years ago, all passengers, my parents and I included, had clapped when the pilot landed the Boeing safely on the Ontario runway. A moment was repeating itself. And with the chatter of teeth and dentures we entered Klisura.
I was last to step out at the small square. The sun, though past its peak, was still high above the hills. A strong gust threw the smell of smoke in my face. Even from here I could hear the wind whistling in the treetops. Up the road, Red Mustache limped toward his home, holding his cap so the gusts wouldn’t steal it. Falling behind, ten, fifteen, twenty feet, the woman in black carried not just her basket but also his tarpaulin sack on her back. Two veiled, shalwared women who’d ridden the bus with us were making their way in the opposite direction, across a rusted bridge over a river whose waters I heard but couldn’t see.
“I bet you are that boy,” someone said behind me. The old man was smoking on the curb and with each gust the tip of his cigarette glowed brighter. The chicken flapped under his armpit and he stroked its feathers. “The one who never calls.”
The bus honked. The driver had counted the ticket money, and now that all was in order, the doors swooshed closed, the exhaust pipe threw up black, cloudy vomit, and we were left alone on the square.
“There in the bus,” the old man said, his eyes glistening from the exhaust, “you kept staring. Why?”
I said I’d taken him for someone else.
“For whom?”
“My grandfather.”
“Maybe I am.”
That was unlikely; he looked nothing like the man.
He tossed his cigarette and the wind carried it halfway across the square. “Come with me on an errand. Then I’ll take you to his house.”
“Why?”
“Why, why. For the thrill. For the adventure. Isn’t this why you all come here to the mountain? With your cameras and video recorders.”
I realized then that the old man had started walking toward the bridge. And unconsciously I followed. I was jet-lagged, once more hungry; my head was spinning from the trip. I didn’t have the energy to fight him. Besides, which way would I go to my grandfather’s? And so I asked how long the errand would take us and if the chicken was involved.
“This chicken is a lie,” he said. “It’s for a little girl who’s very ill.” Without turning, he asked me if I believed in lies. That lies could cure. I said sure, maybe, I didn’t know. “The girl’s mother does,” he said. “She begged me to bring this chicken. Also, this chicken is a rooster and if you can’t tell that much, well then, you are a city fool.”
I laughed. “You may be right,” I said, and I think he also laughed, but with the wind in our faces I wasn’t sure.
The bridge vibrated at our feet and its metal ropes creaked. Below us the river rushed muddy and wide, high from rain or snow melting upstream. A cobblestone road, which the wind had swept perfectly, took us past a flock of empty houses, the likes of which I’d never seen before. Later I learned such was the Strandjan architecture—the ground floor with walls of neatly fitted stones, where back in the day the cattle slept. The floor above—a deck with walls of wide, oak-wood planks; a covered corridor encircling the rooms, a terrace, and in one corner, the privy.
The old man led and I followed. The ancient houses alternated with modern ones—clean, lime-washed façades, shiny red-tiled roofs—and in the distance above them, thin as a knife and black with the sun behind it, the minaret of a mosque. We saw not a soul until we passed the village café. Which later I found out was also the grocery store. And the barber shop. On tables outside, men drank coffee, or lemonade from tall glass bottles. Some played backgammon, others cards. I’d never seen so many mustaches and prickly beards in one place.
“Salaam alaikum!” someone called. “You come to sell at last?”
The old man halted. Petting the rooster, he eyed the one who’d spoken. That man was also old. He stood in the doorframe and cleaned a glass with a towel.
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“And who’s the beardless beauty beside you?”
“His lawyer,” someone else said, and the crowd burst out laughing.
The old man pointed to the sign above the entrance.
“It’s in Turkish,” he told me with a smirk. “It says Suleiman Pasha Café. You know why?”
I shrugged. I suddenly felt very thirsty.
“A hundred and thirty years ago, Suleiman Pasha, on his way to be spanked by the Russian army, stopped here to drink a coffee. And for a hundred and thirty years, these fools won’t shut up about it. Listen, kardash,” he called to the man in the doorframe, “I know where Suleiman Pasha squatted after he drank your hogwash. He didn’t make it far. I’ll show you and you can write a sign.”
A new gust of laughter stirred the bushy mustaches. The man in the doorway waved the towel like a white flag after us—we had started up the road again. “Come back tomorrow,” he called. “I’ve just received some of your favorite tea. We’ll play backgammon. Bring the boy.” The old man raised his hand as if to give a maybe.
“His name is Osman Rejep, but everyone calls him Baklava Osman. I gave him this nickname myself, when he was still a boy. Why? Only God remembers.”
To this, I had absolutely nothing to say. We rounded a corner. We had arrived.
The house was of the modern kind. The mica in its plaster glistened in the sun and gave it a gentle glow. The old man slammed his fist against the yard gates and they rang like a bell. He kept on pounding.
“Why don’t you slam harder?” a woman cried from inside the house. “That ought to make me run faster.” The front door flew open and a barefooted girl flapped across the tiled path in the yard. She was adjusting her headscarf—a blue kerchief with blooming red carnations imprinted in the cloth—but when she recognized the old man she flung the scarf away and shoved it in the back pocket of her jeans. She was younger than me, but not by much, her hair short, like a boy’s. Her face was flushed, and sweat ran down her cheeks in trickles, down her neck.
“Marhaba, Grandpa,” she said as she opened the gates and flashed us her bone-white teeth. Then she saw the rooster and her smile expired.
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