This was an omen, Murad knew. But good or bad, he wasn’t certain. More girls rose from the fire and he watched them carry their infidel icons, jumping and thrashing, crying like flame birds from the Arabian Desert. Soon he didn’t see the others—only the girl with the white hair.
He could not wait for the dance to be over. He waved to his soldiers to stop the drum from beating, the bagpipe from shrieking, and he called the girl to come near. Yet the girl wouldn’t listen. She kept spinning and turning and so the sultan ordered his men to bring her over. Embers had stuck to her bare feet, to her long gown, and when she waded into the sea the water hissed and smoke rose in thick puffs.
What fool, she said angrily in his language, dares stop my drum from beating? What fool pulls my girl out of the fire?
For such words, many a head would have rolled already. But Murad only smiled softly. “Get in the boat,” he told her, “I’m taking you with me.” The girl’s hair floated around her, like a thing living, and for a moment the sultan watched it. A strange feeling bloomed in his heart—that he had met this girl before, that he had always known her. When next he looked up, more girls in white gowns had surrounded his boat like jellyfish flocking.
These are my girls, one of them said to his left, and then another: And if you want one, I’ll let you have her.
On one condition, a girl said to his right, and to his left a girl repeated, Yes, yes, on one condition.
They’re mad, Murad was thinking, an evil jinn has possessed them. But he could not look away from the girl with the white hair.
Give her a drum, some other girl uttered.
Give her a bagpipe, cried another, though which one he couldn’t tell rightly—they all spoke too quickly.
Let her finish her dancing.
Yes, yes, don’t wake her before the dance has finished.
And when you conquer the Bulgars …
… slay them all if you wish to …
… but the land my girl crosses dancing …
… you must swear to protect it.
You must allow my girls to do their dancing.
Swear it, they cried. Swear it!
And before Murad knew it, he, the Godlike One, the first great sultan, had sworn an oath for the ages.
* * *
“Whatever land the dancing girl crossed in her trance, he would protect it. The Christians who lived on it would be allowed to keep their churches; the nestinari to do their dancing. They would pay almost no taxes. And when a Turk reached their border he dismounted and his horse was unshoed at a smithy. Then he led it on foot to the other side, to another smithy, where the shoes were nailed back on. All this they wrote down in a firman. And the land the girl crossed dancing they called the Hasekiya, from haseki, or the favorite wife of the sultan. But the girl never lived to see Murad, her husband—”
“Why didn’t she?” Elif whispered. We were hiding in the barn at the back of their house now because, well, what better place did we have for hiding? I had chucked pebbles at her window and she had led me across the dark yard.
“Sneeze once and my father will kill us,” she’d said, and pulled me behind a bale of rotting hay.
“He might kill us without me sneezing.” Then I’d told her about my visit to Baba Mina’s; about Murad and the girl dancing, though not nearly in so much detail.
* * *
For seven days the girl danced in her trance, the drum drumming behind her. Not once did she stop to eat or drink water. Seven, fourteen, seventeen villages she encircled and still she kept dancing. And in his boat Murad waited for the jinn to release her. But on the eighth day a messenger reached him—the Serbian armies were marching against Adrianople. “Return at once, my lord. The men need you!”
How could he leave this beach, this girl he had fallen in love with, in the hands of a dark jinn? Despite himself, the sultan called for a white horse; despite himself he rode it across impure lands. The sun was setting by the time he found the girl, still dancing, her feet bleeding from wounds, her hair thorns and nettle. Off the ground he picked her; by his side he sat her, on the white horse.
Don’t wake my girl before the dance has finished, the jinn cried, with her lips.
* * *
“But he woke her,” Elif said, anticipating the end of the story.
“Where Murad left the dead girl lying,” I said, “today there stands a white boulder. Wind and water have undercut it and shaped it to look like a lone tree.”
I pulled out a postcard—one that Dyado Dacho had given me, old and wrinkled as it was—and shoved it in Elif’s hands.
“I can’t see anything,” she said, and lit a lighter for only a moment. Though of course, a moment would have been plenty for the hay around us to catch on fire.
“A stone tree on a black beach,” I said. That’s what the postcard was showing.
“I’ve heard of it,” Elif said. “Byal Kamak. A tiny village.”
“Where a mighty river flows into the Black Sea.”
“The Veleka River!” she said, perhaps more loudly than she had to.
“Where the sand is black with silt from the river.”
“Dear God,” she whispered. “Where the nestinari settled after they left Klisura!”
NINE
I BELIEVE OUR PLAN was doomed from the very beginning. And I believe we all knew it. We weren’t stupid. So wrote Captain Kosta—leader of the Strandjan rebels against the Ottoman armies. Or at least, so I’d read in Grandpa’s papers. The poor captain had thrown himself in the enemy’s jaws not because he had expected to crush them. He had done so because, in his own words, to sit still and do nothing would bring a defeat greater and more shameful. And so, I suppose, our plan too was doomed from the very beginning. And I suppose we too knew it.
What the plan consisted of was fairly simple. On the afternoon of May 21, the feast day of Saints Constantine and Elena, Dyado Dacho would wait for the bus at the square. “I have come to collect what you owe me,” he’d tell the driver, and when the driver tried to wriggle out of paying, the old man would make him a tempting offer. “Three out of five. Double or nothing.” So, seeing how there was a lot worse he could be doing than playing some backgammon, the driver would shut off the engine, and, leaving the keys in the ignition, where he always left them, he’d follow Dyado Dacho to the Pasha Café. Three out of five would soon turn into four out of seven, and so would the glasses of mint and mastika. And as these things so often happened, before too long the two of them would find themselves locked in and peacefully snoring on the bench in the corner.
Night would have fallen over Klisura. The imam would call from the minaret for the day’s final prayer, Elif’s cue to lead Aysha down to the square. Baba Mina and I would be waiting already. We’d climb on the bus, start the engine, and drive eastward—thirty kilometers to the village of Byal Kamak. All this under the premise that by the stone tree, where the Veleka entered the Black Sea, there would be nestinari dancing.
It’s not courage that drives us. It’s not madness. It’s hunger for freedom. This Captain Kosta had written, a hundred years before me, and this I was repeating now on the square, behind the unlocked bus, with Baba Mina beside me. Night had fallen. The driver had eaten up Dyado Dacho’s bait, hook, line, fishing rod, and all. The imam was singing. But there was no sign of Elif and Aysha.
“Are you cold, Grandma?” I whispered, then took off my jacket and covered her shoulders.
“I’ll get warm soon, my boy,” she answered. “Saint Kosta will warm me up.”
The imam’s voice flowed out of Klisura, across the hills, and the village was quiet. A dog barked far in the distance and a stork swooped down from the roof of the municipal building and spun a wheel overhead. Baba Mina clasped my waist like a frightened child.
“Don’t let him take me,” she whispered. “The black stork.” Whether the stork was really black or only appeared to be, I couldn’t tell. Nor did I have time to investigate. The metal ropes of the bridge creaked in the dar
kness, and footsteps echoed over the noise of the river fattened on rain. A silhouette took shape before us. And then another. And when I saw a third shape approaching, my heart leapt and I thought of running.
“It’s over,” I think I told Baba Mina, and in her fear she squeezed my waist harder.
But then we heard Elif speaking. The plan, she told us, had changed a little. And soon I recognized her and Aysha and beside them their mother.
TEN
THEN THE KEY WAS NOT IN THE IGNITION.
“Of course I’m certain,” I cried from the driver’s seat. “I’m groping the ignition and the key isn’t in it.” It was so dark inside the bus that I saw nothing but dim shapes. Baba Mina rocked and mumbled behind me, and her seat creaked with every rock and mumble. Aysha said something and then her mother cried, “There, he’s coming. He’s found us!” but it was only a stork flying across the square and so she spat in her shirt to chase away the fear.
A wave of irritation washed over me. After all, I had been the one to mock the driver for keeping the key in the ignition. Now, as a reaction, he’d either taken it with him, which I doubted, considering how afraid he was of losing it when drunk, or hidden it somewhere in the cabin. So we searched, in the flame of Elif’s lighter. A pair of oversized green dice hung from the rearview mirror, so I shook them, hopeful, but nothing rattled inside. Every so often, the flame burned Elif’s thumb and we sat in darkness while she blew on the flint wheel to cool it. Then there was light for a few more seconds.
“Piece-of-shit lighter,” she cursed at one point. “We’ll run out of gas soon.”
A tiny icon of the Virgin Mary was taped to the dashboard, so I untaped it and looked for the key on its back. A faded picture of long-haired Hristo Stoichkov in his Barcelona jersey. A clipping of Lepa Brena and a green pine tree that stank of cigarette smoke and naphtha. And then, just when Elif flicked on the light one final time before the gas ran out, I saw it—a dark outline, only faintly showing behind a glorious picture. Samantha Fox, patron saint of all bus drivers from my childhood. And tucked behind her magnificent bosom—the key to our freedom.
* * *
That I could drive the bus came as a surprise to Elif. So I told her: my father had taught me how to drive stick shift; for him, no real man drove automatic. And if she didn’t mind, this time I wanted to be the one to drive us. The plan was mine and I intended—
“Watch the road!” she yelped behind me, though I had taken the turn quite nicely. We were crossing a patch of eroded pavement and that’s why the bus rattled. But the farther away from Klisura we drove, the smoother the road became; the less wild the oaks on both sides, the softer the wind that shook them.
“Isn’t that something,” Elif sneered, because she too had noticed the world grow less feral around us. I wondered if the others too would notice. Baba Mina rocked and mumbled and so did Aysha, oblivious to the outside, every now and then stopping to synchronize her rocking with the old woman’s. But Elif’s mother was paying attention. Of that I was certain, though she sat in her seat as still as a stone tree.
How long had it been, I wondered, since she had last left Klisura? Ten years? Or maybe twenty? I tried to imagine what she was feeling. All her life, like a silk moth, she had weaved for herself another woman, a shell to contain her passions, hatreds, and fears. A shell in which she could hide safely. It was this cocoon that had learned to absorb a bad word, a slap to the face, a great disappointment. But in time, the shell had turned into a prison and with her passions, hatreds, and fears, this poor woman too had found herself devoured.
The road twisted beneath us, rough and uneven, and the rearview mirror shook wildly. Elif’s mother sat stiff behind me, but in the mirror her reflection jumped and twisted. It occurred to me that the mirror showed her as she was truly. No shells. No prisons. Just a frightened woman, trembling with excitement. A runaway, if merely for a short while, her own, true mistress. And I knew then that beneath the stiffness this woman was fighting a giant struggle—to crawl back in the shell, afraid and defeated, or to step outside, a victor.
“Watch the road, damn it!” Elif cried again, and this time our turn was less gentle. I offered an apology, blamed the road, and was glad when soon it evened out and with it my driving. Earlier that day, I had studied my tourist map in careful detail, though in reality the chance for an error wasn’t that big. The road led to the town of Sinemorets, and all we had to do was follow it to the first exit, then drive down another, smaller road that would take us to the mouth of the Veleka.
“My daddy also taught me driving,” a thin voice said over my shoulder. “I too am a good driver.” I realized this was the first time I’d heard Aysha speak, save for the small thank you when I’d given her an apple. Her voice was pretty, like Elif’s, but cleaner the way springwater is cleaner than water from a river. So I let her sit in my lap and her small hands gripped the wheel and she said I too should hold it just to be on the safe side. She’d never driven a bus before, but she’d driven the Lada. And she’d never before seen the Black Sea. Had I?
“I’ve never seen it,” I lied, and watched Elif watch me in the mirror.
“Are you excited to see it? I’m really excited.”
But it was sadness I felt, not excitement. I thought of Grandpa, whom I had lied to only an hour before. He’d asked me to play backgammon out on the terrace and I’d said my head ached, that I was tired. Goodnight, I’d said, and he’d looked at me with such hurt. I know you’re lying, his eyes had told me. I know you’re up to something.
All this time I’d worked hard to avoid one question, but now, as the road unfolded in the light of the high beams, it was this one question I kept on asking. What the hell was I doing? Aysha wasn’t sick; no saint had possessed her. She was anxious to see the Black Sea, not to jump in a fire. And if she’d seen it, as by now any girl her age should have, especially one who lived this close to the coast, none of this would have happened. And her mother wasn’t sick, nor was Baba Mina, an old and senile woman. I was the sick one. And Elif knew it. I could tell by her face in the mirror. And she knew another thing—how to make me sicker.
“You two look a great item,” Elif said, and came to the dashboard. She pushed the bus lighter deeper into its slot and then pressed the orange coil to the tip of her cigarette. “Keep your hands on the wheel where I can see them,” she said, “American boy,” and blew out smoke from her nostrils.
At first I thought she was joking.
“I’m joking,” she said. “Dear God, take it easy.”
But she wasn’t. She really was jealous.
“Aren’t you a stuck-up bastard,” she said when I refused to grace her with a smile, and going back to her seat she let out a fake laugh.
“I too would like a cigarette,” someone said behind me. Even when I saw her fixing the ends of her headscarf that didn’t really need fixing, I still didn’t believe it was their mother speaking. “It’s been twenty-two years,” she said when Elif passed her the smoking cigarette. Then a cough choked her.
“American,” her voice wheezed once the cough was over. “If the radio’s working, I sure would like to hear it.”
I fumbled with the knob, terribly excited, awfully happy for her. It was hard to lock onto a steady station. The same frequency gave us a Turkish voice one moment, a Greek the next. Even here an invisible battle was being waged—for dominion over the very air we breathed. At last I managed to capture a decent transmission—Bulgarian folk music, rachenitsa, fast-paced, energetic.
“Is this good? Or should I keep searching?” I asked Elif’s mother.
“If you wish to,” she said. Then her voice dipped so much I barely heard it, but when she spoke again, her voice was more confident, louder, and she had stepped, for the first time, outside the cocoon that held her. “Wait. I like it this way. Leave it the way I like it.” And after this, she sat as before, but not at all the same.
We drove like this for fifteen minutes. Then, as the map had predicted,
we came to an exit. The new road was so narrow, a car coming in the opposite direction would have had to pull over to let us pass. The pavement had given way to dirt and pebbles and again we shook and rattled.
Somewhere close in the dark the Via Pontica stretched northward. Or at least what little remained of that ancient Roman route, a road of tsars and great armies, so efficient in its layout that even the storks followed it in their journey. How many of the pebbles below us came from that old road? How many from crumbled fortresses and ruined houses? And in the dark, somewhere beside us, parallel to our movement, the Veleka River too moved toward the Black Sea. It had moved like this for thousands of years—before us, before the tsars or their armies—and it would move, much the same way, for thousands of years after we were done and dusted. The streams in Turkey had given it birth when there had been no Turkey. The streams in Bulgaria—fresh life, when there had been no Bulgaria. And in the end, the Black Sea took it the way it took all the rivers, without concern for what country they came from. In the end, it was all water changing form—from rain to river to sea to cloud back to rain again, an everlasting motion.
I held my hand up so Elif could see it, and without words, she passed me the cigarette. How I had not realized it was a joint they were sharing, I’m still not certain. I took a deep toke and held the smoke in so it could burn me and soon my head was a bit lighter. Unlucky people, I thought, and passed the joint back. To be born here. Our balkans were fire dancers, rising from ashes to flames back to ashes. And of all the seas in the world, it was ours that was the black one. Yes, yes, I said, and took another puff when Elif offered. It was the sea I felt now, ahead in the night through which we journeyed. It was the sea that had spoken to me, like a woman in mourning, and I could not bear to hear all she was saying.
Stork Mountain Page 15