Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  “Hey now,” Elif was saying. “It’s all a joke. We do this every time.”

  “For shame we do,” Orhan agreed, and took her in his arms. From my vantage point in the dirt, I watched her snuggle against his chest, the way she’d done with me, and couldn’t bear it. Back by the fire I curled up into a ball and prayed the heat of the flame would burn away my hate. I couldn’t reason this in so many words, but I knew it with my teeth and nails, and in my heels—for weeks my pining over Elif had inched me closer to an awful point of no return. But only tonight, among the sacrificial altars, the troughs for doctored wine, the walls of strongholds that were, for shame, no more, had I crossed this point and plunged myself, irrevocably, toward the bottom of the dried-up well.

  When next I opened my eyes the fire had died and a thin red line bloodied the horizon. The rattle of the Kalashnikov shattered the air: Orhan—no, Elif—was shooting it into the dawn. Then in the valley below us, a louder rattle boomed. American, get up and try it!

  I squeezed the trigger and the rifle wriggled, a biting snake in my arms. Rat-tat-tat. The echo answered, tat-tat-tat, a thousand clacking bills. We stood atop a ruined stronghold, and down below us in the valley a thousand white storks clacked their bills. A thousand wind turbines spun their propellers, in neat and endless rows.

  “The storks speak with the gun,” Elif whispered in my ear, “as if the gun were one of them. Do it again,” she said. “Speak with the storks.”

  Eastward, the sun was rising from the Black Sea. I pulled the trigger and spoke with the storks.

  ELEVEN

  THE GODDESS LADA had reached as far north as she could and now her father, the god Perun, was reeling back her hair from his mountain. She knew his pull could not be stopped, but still she fought him. That day, while he was resting, she planted her heels deep into the soil to bid farewell the land she was departing. Darkness awaited inside her father’s cave, uneasy slumber at his electric feet. Farewell, my brothers, she told the stones of many sizes. Farewell, sweet, fragrant sisters. Thick, frosty moss tangled the stones; the flowers withered. And just when Lada was about to go, she saw through her tears a cloud on the horizon, a pall of black smoke creeping near, flashes of lightning boiling in its bowels. This was, she understood, a multitude of riders the like of which no Slavic god had seen before. And at their front, she saw a man whose head was shaven cleanly, a man who pointed a shiny saber as though at her. His madness took hold of Lada’s heart, like a worm in an apple. She tried to run and meet him, but how could she escape the shackles that weighed her down? She tugged, she chewed on the tresses, yet nothing helped. So then she wept in greater anguish still.

  But suddenly the riders halted. The man who led them brought his horse her way. Thick rags of soot were falling from the sky now that the hooves no longer raised up dust and ash from pillage fires. In ashen rain the young man watched her, without a word.

  “Are you a god?” she asked, and so he told her: at first he’d been a solitary rider, but then his lust to gallop on and on and pillage had sucked into its vortex a multitude of restless tribes. He was their leader now. Attila. But god? There was a single god—the great, vast sky whose life force was coursing through his veins.

  She laughed. “When mortal men look me in the face they see a river.”

  “I see a girl,” he said.

  And so she begged him. “Take me with you. I want to ride free by your side.”

  “So ride then.” He turned to leave, but didn’t move. She had expected this, of course.

  That night the Huns camped by the river, their horde extending as far back as the human eye could stretch. The sky was merciful and opened up. Rain pounded down the cloud of ashes and blackened Lada’s hair. She knew her father would soon wake up and start his reeling.

  “Tell me,” she asked Attila, who, tangled in her tresses, was sharpening his saber on a deer hoof. “Where have you been? What have you seen?”

  He was afraid to look her in the eyes. He’d never felt like this before. He said, “For ten thousand days I saw nothing but steppe and sky. Then I saw a city of silver. I thought of stopping there to drink its water, to eat whatever food its king would give. I thought of lying under the shade of silver trees. Instead, I slew the king, and burned the city, and turned it into a silver lake. I rode ten thousand days through steppe and sky and came upon a golden tower. Inside the tower, like storks in a cage, a thousand women slept—a woman of every human tribe. I thought of climbing up the tower to look at all the world. I thought of bedding the women so they might bear me one thousand sons. A son from every human tribe. Instead, I brought the tower to its ruin. The women we trampled with our hooves. Our hooves are golden now.

  “Three hundred years without repose,” he said. “I cannot stop. I must ride on.”

  “Take me with you,” she begged again. And then she told him of her hair and of her father, the great, almighty god.

  “There is one god,” he said, jumping to his feet as if to prove it, and brought his saber down. In vain, he hacked at Lada’s hair. In vain, he tried to slash it.

  “You fool,” she said. “I am a god as well.”

  “There is one god,” he said a final time, and sprinted to his horse.

  At this point in the story, Grandpa usually paused and leaned closer, his whisper hoarse from all the talking, his breath scathing my ear. “An ancient scribe once wrote of how the Huns made the Yantra River disappear. So horrific was the multitude of Huns who crossed the Yantra River, the scribe wrote on his parchment, that by the eleventh day of their crossing, their hooves had severed the river in two. By the twentieth day the Yantra was flowing backward, and by the twenty-fourth, it had disappeared whence it had come.

  “No ancient scribe can tell you why all this happened,” Grandpa would whisper, “but I can. Imagine, the golden hooves pounding the riverbed! A hundred horses, then a thousand. A hundred thousand. By the fifth day Lada’s hair was starting to split, tress by tress. By the eleventh the Huns had severed it completely.”

  Perun awakened. He reeled, and gathered Lada’s hair back to his mountain, the way one gathers a fishing seine. What horror the old fool felt to see no Lada where the tresses ended.

  Lada was free. Short-haired, she flew behind Attila and on her wings flew Spring and Beauty. Where the Huns passed, beautiful death followed. And from the funeral pyres, bright peonies bloomed.

  PART

  THREE

  ONE

  AND AFTER THIS IT RAINED, melodramatically, for many months. Or at least it seemed so from underneath the stifling Rhodopa blanket, which scratched my cheeks each time I tossed and turned. Quite frankly, I felt ashamed. Quite frankly, I couldn’t help it. Beyond the window glass rippled with age, over the hills in the distance, black waves were clashing with blacker. Greek clouds tore into Turkish and battled with our own. Back in the day, Grandpa told me, on the eve of the first Balkan War, even the clouds here had been forced to pledge allegiance to a single nation. “It’s raining Turkish rain today,” he’d say, then sit at the foot of my bed and force me to drink a cup of mursal tea. “Only Turkish rain touches this softly. And Turkish girls.” He’d laugh in an attempt to cheer me, but I would stare into the steam.

  “Get up, my boy,” he’d cry an hour later, and throw the window open. “Two days is plenty to toss about in bed. Come help me tie the tomatoes. The wind’s knocked over some of their poles.” Instead, I buried myself in the blanket and waited to hear his fading steps.

  Each day he worked the garden, went for bread and yogurt to the Pasha Café, even rode the bus to town—a business trip, he told me, which would have been a great deal more bearable with my pleasant person by his side.

  “A sacrilege! Three days in bed!”

  “My boy, how can I say this nicely: you stink like a widowed badger. Run and shower in the rain, then help me fix the frame for the cucumbers.”

  “Five days! A heart of briar jelly would mend itself in four!”

  Each time
he came to my room, I wanted him to leave. Each time he left, I wanted him to barge back in. What a tragic waste of precious time, I thought, and watched him act the clown, shoulders slouched at the foot of my bed. For shame, I told myself. Get up. There is no time to waste with broken hearts.

  “It lashes bad,” he’d say some days. “It stabs like a dagger to the back. Greek rain.” He would expel the words like spittle. A long while he would watch the stork nest on the roof of the house closest to ours: one stork braving the sideways-falling rain, brooding the eggs, the other fetching mice, frogs, little snakes; the two switching places. Grandpa would tick his tongue. “If it rains another week like this…,” he’d say, but never finish.

  On the sixth day of my self-imposed home incarceration Grandpa rapped on the door and, completely disregarding my cry to wait, stormed in. He held a nylon sack of bread and with the same hand struggled to close his umbrella. “It’s stuck again, the brute,” he muttered, without once looking up, shaking the umbrella and spraying water on me, on my desk, on the map of the ancient world behind me. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Look who I found outside, standing in the rain, afraid to knock.”

  “Grandpa,” I started to say, but still fighting the umbrella he stepped aside to let Elif pass through. She appeared in the doorframe so drenched, so shrunken in size, so despondent with her headscarf glued to her cheeks, with the sleeves of her jacket soaked and droopy, that I have no idea from where that burst of sudden laughter came.

  “Yes, laugh,” I told her, standing helplessly naked in the middle of the room, the pair of clean boxers I’d meant to change into treacherously far away in the wardrobe. “You too, Grandpa. Laugh it out.”

  A joyous grin on his face, he handed me the open umbrella. And while I hurried to cover up he spoke to Elif, still grinning, predictably as coarsely as he could. “Chilly rain today, Elif. Bulgarian.”

  TWO

  HER TEETH CHATTERED; her shoulders rocked. Water dripped from her jacket and drummed on the carpet, yet she refused to take it off. I offered her a blanket, but she said no, she wasn’t cold. “Nonsense,” Grandpa said, back from the kitchen, and ordered me to look away. When I looked again, Elif’s jacket had been stretched to dry on the hanger in the corner and she was wrapped in a cocoon of wool. The old man shoved a steaming cup into her hands, and as she brought it to her lips some tea splashed on the headscarf, now spread in her lap. “With extra honey,” he said, and did not move until she’d taken a few small sips.

  At the threshold, he stopped. “I have much work to do,” he lied, “and will be in my study. If you want more tea, the boy can brew it.” He hesitated, then at last chose to leave the door wide open.

  By now, some color had flushed Elif’s cheeks and the purple of her lips had begun to turn scarlet. She steamed under the blanket, the stench of wet wool mixing with the reek of my six-day sweat and fogging up the window so that I no longer recognized the yard, the rooftops, and the storks.

  “Nice fire truck,” Elif said, and nodded at the toy by my desk. I told her the ladder was telescopic, meaning it expanded when there was need, to which she said, “I know what ‘telescopic’ means.” And then, “I bet it does.”

  She looked about the room in silence. “Orhan has been detained,” she said at last. “Locked up in solitary confinement. But his father will slay a ram and grease up the right people and he’ll be out before his beard has grown in length a third of yours.”

  “And you find this amusing?” I asked, disgusted, and in embarrassment scratched at my scruffy face.

  “I find it hysterical. Like the rest of my life, which is so packed with jokes.”

  Here was a good one—she was no longer allowed to see her sister. Aysha was now alone, locked up in her room, and there were not enough rams in the whole wide world we could slay to bribe her father. “He is the only one allowed to see her. He feeds her, bathes her, in her room. And I won’t be surprised,” she said, “if my mother joins them shortly, the way she’s been burning with the Christian flame.”

  Other girls in the village were burning too. It was a proper craze now, only two days before the feast of Saint Constantine and Saint Elena.

  “I wish I too were burning,” she said. “I’d grab this Saint Kosta by his beard and then—hold tight, Elif!—either he lifts me up to the clouds or I pummel his mug into the dirt. There is no third way.”

  I watched her fuming, prettier now in her spite than she had ever seemed before. The short locks of her hair were drying up and curling and she resembled a ball of needles I wanted, no, felt compelled to hold. Here she was, crying out for help—a cornered, ferocious little beast—and all I thought of was how softly her breath had touched my face.

  “So how do I compare?” I asked her. She blinked, surprised at the question and my tone. Side by side, I said. Orhan the shepherd, the soldier whose madness equaled only hers—and me, the boring foreign boy?

  “Please stop,” she said.

  But I kept going. He was tall, I wasn’t. He was handsome, I—not so much. He was daring, and spontaneous and brave … Please stop, she said. Why should I? I could be just as vile as she had been. I simply had to know—

  “Well!” she cried. “You compared well, all right?” And only then did she look me in the eyes, hers feverish and frightened. “You are safe, all right? Dependable. But you’ll be gone tomorrow and I’ll be here.”

  To this I had no comment. I asked her why she’d come.

  “To say I’m sorry. For a moment I’d thought—here is someone. My ticket out. But you’re right. I’m crazy. And crazy people see things that aren’t there.”

  I don’t believe I’ve ever wanted to kiss a girl as much as I did then. I wanted to hush her, to tell her I too had seen things that weren’t there, but could be. A strong imagination, I wanted to say, could wish things into existence.

  She spoke. “But this is not the only reason. I came to ask for help.”

  I asked how I could help her and for the first time her lips twisted in something that might have been a smile. “Not you,” she said.

  THREE

  BUT GRANDPA WOULDN’T HEAR IT. “Elif,” he said, and pushed away the page he was writing. “You know I care for you.”

  “Then prove it,” she cried, yet when she spoke again her tone had softened. She did not want Grandpa to slay more roosters, nor did she want him to bloody his hands with magic fires. He had chosen to stay away from the nestinari, whatever his reasons, and she respected that. But he had to tell her where she could find them.

  “Find whom?” I asked from the threshold.

  Back in the day, sometime in the mid-sixties, most all Christians had left Klisura and moved to the city. There had been two entire apartment complexes in Burgas full of Klisurans.

  “Tell me, Grandpa,” Elif said again. “Where did the nestinari go once they left Klisura?”

  He waved his hand as if to chase away a gnat. Why should he tell her?

  “So I can steal my father’s Lada tomorrow. So I can load my sister in it and take her to the nestinari. So they can cure her.”

  He hushed her with kindness I didn’t fully believe. He told her to stop throwing oil into the fire. No one could cure her sister, because her sister wasn’t sick—she was only acting. As was everyone else in the village, including her mother. “You want to help? Then ignore them.”

  “The way you ignored the two girls from the upper hamlet? Were they acting too, Grandpa? Convincing actresses they were, right down to their graves.”

  Those girls, Grandpa said, they were a different story. Those girls—

  But now it was her turn to cut him off. They must have gone somewhere, the nestinari, some other village, and she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to find them.

  “You won’t find them here,” Grandpa stuttered, his kindness gone to rot. “Because they all crawled back across the border, the serpents. And stayed there, in Turkey.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.
“There must be others left.”

  I stood between them, ready to end this quarrel. Grandpa had turned as yellow as the paper on which he wrote, and I worried for his blood pressure. But before I’d spoken, Elif grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Amerikanche, you have to ask him.”

  “Amerikanche, you’ll ask me nothing,” Grandpa said—no, cried out in fury. “You, American, will stay out of this mess. And you, Elif, here are some points for you to mull over.” He took a clean sheet and stabbed a line with his pen, as though underlining invisible text. “Your father is punishing your sister so he may punish you and get to me.” He scratched another line. “You’re punishing my boy to get back at your father. And for what? What will you prove?” And then another. “Or did your father send you here? So he may get his precious land and harvest winds for money? Leave my boy be, Elif,” he said, and circled the lines. “Go home and don’t come back.”

  By now she was crying. Her sobs were so quiet I didn’t even notice when they stopped. “All right,” she said, and wiped her cheeks. She shed the wet blanket to the floor like a second skin and without looking up rushed out the door.

  “I can’t believe you, old man,” I cried. Were land and ruined houses more important to him than a little girl’s life? Was he honestly refusing to help the daughters, so as to punish their father?

  I caught up with Elif two houses down the road. Of course, melodramatically, it was still raining. I told her to stop, and when she didn’t, I seized her hand and spun her around.

  “These girls from the upper hamlet,” I said. “What happened to them?”

  “What do you think? They were sick with Saint Kosta’s fever and then they died.”

  But how? If it was all in their heads, all an act for attention?

  “You said it best, amerikanche. A strong imagination can wish things into existence.”

  She tried to wriggle out of my grip, but I wouldn’t let her.