Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  “Impossible,” I said once Grandpa had read the sheet, neither a statement nor a question really. For a long time Grandpa watched the imam and not a muscle moved on his blackened face. At last he tore the sheet to pieces.

  The imam shrugged. “Call it a day,” he told the drivers. “You’ve done enough. I’ll send the bus to pick you up.”

  “We’ll see you in court,” I shouted to his back. The jeep started; the tires kicked up dirt and dust. When the cloud settled Grandpa was sitting on the ground—his heroic image itself reduced to rubble.

  None of this made any sense to me. How could an entire half of a village suddenly cease to be a village? I tried to calm Grandpa down. We had records of our own. Deeds that quoted some earlier version of this same cadastre according to which Klisura was a village and the land was ours and—

  Grandpa had turned very pale. His body trembled. “Water,” he said.

  “I drank it all,” the short driver answered. He sprinted to his bulldozer and returned with a glass bottle full of rakia.

  “Peach?” Grandpa asked after a sip.

  “Fifty-five proof.”

  “Next time remove the pits before distilling.”

  “I told him so,” the tall one said.

  “I have been told.”

  They each drank from the bottle and when I asked to have a sip the driver ceremoniously screwed the cap back on. And then we heard a rustle in the bushes. As though a large carp flopped in a seine. The short one went to have a look and reappeared, a black stork in his hands.

  “His wing seems broke,” he said of the bird, who trembled just like Grandpa. I thought it was a young chick—most likely the only one of the brood who’d managed to fly off before the bulldozers.

  Large, grown-up birds watched us from the roofs of nearby houses, from the ugly Tower of Klisura. A few called when Grandpa held the chick. His shaky hand petted the frail black neck, which in the sun glistened with the changing colors of crude oil. The stork had closed his eyes and gradually his trembling settled.

  “What is your name?” Grandpa asked the driver.

  “Elmaz. But everyone calls me Little Shovel.”

  “And yours?”

  “Just Shovel,” the tall one said.

  “Well, that’s no good.” And then to me: “We’ll have to think of something better.”

  We named the stork as it was only fair, considering the feast day: Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus. The First. The Great. Saint Kosta of the Storks.

  THREE

  THAT EVENING, after he fed Saint Kosta a few morsels of soaked bread, after he squeezed water into his bill from a rag and tightened the bandage on the splintered wing, Grandpa complained of needles in his arm. Like vultures, storks bloodied with setting sun drew large cartwheels above the wreckage of houses, above their ruined nests and dead babies. Their shrieks were knives in Grandpa’s leg.

  His tongue tied up into a ball when the imam called from the mosque to prayer and there was nothing I could do but force him to take his pills and lay him down in bed. He had a stroke soon after.

  I thought of running to Elif’s. Humiliation and defeat be damned, I’d phone for a doctor. But first, how long before I reached her house? And then, how long before the ambulance made it to Klisura?

  I’d never felt as helpless as I did right then. Dark all around me and Grandpa’s labored breathing, the flapping of a broken wing out in the yard. A single thought persisted—my fault. All of it, because of me.

  How I wanted to throw the window open and whistle. Not a singsong call for help or pity. I wanted to whistle until another living soul answered and told me I wasn’t all alone. And I suppose I wasn’t. By the bed, holding Grandpa’s hand, it struck me I should be grateful. We were spending this final moment together.

  The night lived, grew old, and was dying. First cocks crowed from the Muslim hamlet and dawn found Grandpa still breathing, with heaviness that gradually seemed to scatter. Saint Kosta cried hungry from the yard and Grandpa’s breathing quickened. He spoke as if his tongue had swollen up tenfold. “Go feed the saint.”

  FOUR

  “‘PACK YOUR BAGS and say your farewells,’ the principal told me that morning. ‘They’re moving you to another school in another district.’ I thought he was joking. Gave him a smile even. ‘No jokes here,’ he said, ‘only Party orders. Straight from the Politburo.’

  “‘Where am I being moved to?’ I asked him. He had to recheck the order. ‘Klisura,’ he said. ‘Which is where, exactly?’ In place of an answer, he pulled out a bottle. ‘It’s this bad, is it?’ I locked the door to his office and took the glass he offered. ‘Naboré,’ he said, ‘an apology is all the Party wanted. How hard was it to say I’m sorry?’ We downed the drinks and refilled the glasses. I told him I wasn’t sorry. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘soon you will be.’”

  More than four decades ago. Halfway through the spring semester. My grandfather on a train to Pleven. In Turnovo he took the monorail, crossed the Balkan Mountains. Rode the train to Burgas. Rocked on a bus to Sozopol, but at least there was the sea to look at out the window. Thumbed down a Moskvich at the bus stop. “There’s something fishy about you,” the driver told him. “No honest man goes about with two suitcases. And each weighs a ton. Open them. Books and notepads? Subversive literature, no doubt. My gut tells me I should call the militia.” Ten levs convinced his gut to tell him a different story. He took Grandpa to Kiten, but no more money would make him put his Moskvich through the dirt roads that followed.

  At sunset a horse-drawn carriage passed by. Grandpa rode it as far as a roadside inn and spent the night there devoured by bedbugs. Peasants were snoring all around him from their bunks and he couldn’t sleep until morning. When he woke up, the sun was still rising.

  “I’m a man of God,” someone was shouting downstairs. “I can’t be expected to handle money.”

  “You ate, you drank, you slept in a bed,” the innkeeper was saying. “You used the bathroom even.”

  “I certainly didn’t! Check the bushes if you don’t believe me.”

  By the time Grandpa came down, a crowd of kibitzers had gathered to watch the circus. True enough, the man who refused to pay was a priest—but funny-looking. His cassock, black as coal, hung on his narrow shoulders like a ripped sack. The kalimavka was too large for his head and fell down to his eyes almost.

  “And where is your beard?” someone hollered.

  The priest combed his measly goatee with his nails to puff it up a little. “Lord forgive them!”

  All this embarrassed Grandpa and he paid the man’s expenses.

  “It’s not about the money,” the priest said outside the inn, in place of a thank-you. “I remember my grandfather. I remember Father. The skin on their knuckles always soggy from all the hand-kissing. And they never went about hungry. Breakfast at one widow. Dinner at another. At lunch—a funeral, a christening, a wedding. And now this. Comrades and red flags.” He spat in the dirt and crossed himself three times. Then he went to use the bathroom.

  His name was Father Dionysus, but everyone called him “the Pope.” He was three years younger than Grandpa—so thirty then—and like Grandpa he had been dispatched to Klisura.

  “A troubled kind of flock,” the Pope said dreamily of the Klisuran people. The two of them were riding in the back of a cart to another village, where they would get onto another cart, and so on. “Godless, the pour souls.” He’d extorted some breakfast from the driver and now he set down the cheese on his belly so he could make the sign of the cross a few times. “They dance in fire there, like heretics. Like pagans.” Last month, the metropolitan himself had called him over to his throne. “Father Dionysus,” the metropolitan had beckoned, “the people of Klisura have lost their way. They’ve let an ancient heresy estrange them from the good Lord. Restore them to the righteous path.”

  Only later, in a moment of intoxication, did the Pope reveal to Grandpa the “truthful” reason for his relocation—a funeral,
a demijohn of rakia, confusion in the holy chants, and a freshly baptized corpse. But in the end that too turned out to be a lie. It took my grandfather three whole years to realize it wasn’t the Christians of Klisura that Father Dionysus had been instructed to reform. It was the Muslims that the Communist Party had sent him to christen.

  Three days and six carts later the two of them arrived in Klisura. The news that the Pope and the teacher were coming together had reached the village long before them and so, once they were on the square, it felt like their cart was being dragged about by a stream of sunburned faces, glittering eyes, and bushy mustaches. Old and young, men, women, children, a startling multitude of hands was reaching up to touch them the way Doubting Thomas had once touched Christ’s wounds.

  Or so Father Dionysus told Grandpa. Fur caps flew in the air, bagpipes screeched, a drum joined it, and voices merged in a joyous song. For the first time in fifteen years the village was welcoming a priest. For the first time in thirty—a schoolmaster. And through this sea of chaos, the voice of Father Dionysus, fortified by the realization of his great importance, echoed in command: “You there, with the donkey teeth. You look like a burly fellow. Take the teacher’s suitcases. And you, with the demijohn. Is it wine for the welcome? Here, let me do a tasting. And hold my bags, but carry them as though a holy relic.”

  “Father,” the people were calling around him. “Shall we take you to the church?”

  “Take me,” he said, “but first to lunch. The church has no feet to run away. But my feet are tired. I’m hungry for banitsa and roasted hen on the spit. For chicken, musaka, gyuvech…”

  “And what about the school?” Grandpa was asking. He wanted to see it right away, though he too was hungry. The hands kept petting him, his head, neck, shoulders, as gently as if he were a baby stork. Yet no one spoke. The truth shamed them. Only one boy—the village idiot, Vassilko—was not embarrassed. Above the clamor, his thin voice sang a merry song: We got ourselves a pope without a beard. A schoolmaster without a school.

  FIVE

  FOR A WEEK after the stroke Grandpa did not find the strength to leave his bed. He refused to eat, drink, or speak, and the only signs of life he showed were when he peeked out the window at the injured stork. I fed them both the same—bread soaked in boiled milk. I’d hold Saint Kosta under my armpit and force the pieces down his bill. He shook his head, tried to flap his wings, clawed the yard’s stones. I’d press the spoon against Grandpa’s lips and we would count the bites. “You’re worse than the saint,” I’d say. “He ate fifteen spoonfuls and you can’t manage even ten.”

  Gradually Saint Kosta grew accustomed to the yard. With increasing authority, he paced between the lines of laundry—I washed the sheets often, sometimes twice a day—between the sticks of beans and tomatoes, pecked and clawed at the ground, dug up worms and beetles. In no time he’d learned how to unlatch the door to the basement with his bill and in no time he was hunting mice. “I guess he doesn’t like my milk and bread,” I’d tell Grandpa, and force another spoonful down his throat.

  “Frogs,” Grandpa said on the sixth day—the first intelligible word in quite some time. So I sharpened a stick and marched down to the river and didn’t come back until I’d speared half a dozen frogs. “Show me,” Grandpa said, and for the first time I helped him out of bed. He latched on to me with such fear, his body trembling like a walnut leaf, and so I said, “Don’t be afraid. I’m here to hold you.” He dragged his foot across the room and often we stopped and rested.

  Out on the terrace, I wrapped him in a blanket and sat him down to watch. It was a proper massacre, the way Saint Kosta speared frog after frog with his bill, the way their guts splashed through the air each time he tossed them up and gulped them down. A fearsome spark ignited in Grandpa’s eyes. “Food,” he roared, and when I brought the bowl of milk and bread, he seized the spoon all on his own. He ate with ferocity that day, and after this he took his meals concurrent with the stork’s.

  At first Saint Kosta slept by the well. But one morning, after a night of heavy rains, I found him nestled up on the terrace, atop the blanket that covered Grandpa’s chair. From then on, he climbed the stairs to the terrace often and so it came as no surprise that he should learn to open the door to the kitchen. I first discovered him inside, pecking through a basket of eggs, a line of yolk dripping from his bill and broken bags of flour on the floor around him. When he flapped a wing, the flour rose in a cloud into my face and onto the ceiling.

  But it wasn’t until he first snuck into Grandpa’s room that I found myself somewhat weary. “A bit spooky this, a stork roaming the house like a specter.” I had been bringing Grandpa a cup of mursal tea when I discovered them—Saint Kosta, perfectly still in the middle of the room, and Grandpa, equally petrified in bed—each eyeing the other, the way a predator eyes his prey.

  “I have this gut feeling,” Grandpa said later with some difficulty, “this stork is not at all a baby. I’ve seen this stork before. He’s come to hold me to account.”

  “For what?” I asked him, amused and terrified in equal measure.

  And so, it was on an evening some two weeks after the stroke that Grandpa began to tell me about his forceful relocation to Klisura. Saint Kosta had climbed the stairs to the terrace and once in a while, atop the blanket I’d left for him in the corner, he threw his head back and clattered his bill.

  What a monster this Communist Party was, I thought, and listened. An omnipotent hydra with many heads and all of them breathing fire. One day you’re teaching at a nice school, in a nice town. You have your own apartment, friends, loved ones, you’re making plans for the future. And then, like that, all that you’ve built, the hydra drowns it in fire. Job, apartment, friends, and loved ones. There you are, at the edge of the world, an exile. Defeated and alone. How does a man rebuild himself, I wondered, after the hydra burns him? How does he learn to live again?

  “‘Pack your bags and say your farewells,’ the principal told me that morning. ‘They’re moving you to another school in another district.’”

  SIX

  “THE MAYOR OF KLISURA was eighty years old. Not a man, but a wild beast. Two meters tall, and a hundred and fifty kilos heavy.”

  He’d been born when the village was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and all his life, while great waves of people had sloshed about him, fleeing, arriving, fleeing again, he’d stayed put in Klisura. Out of spite, he told Grandpa, like a worm in a bull’s heart. His skin was a living atlas of all the insurrections. He’d fought in the days of the Strandjan Republic, the Balkan Wars, the two World Wars, the two Communist uprisings. He didn’t speak. He bellowed. This scar I got from a Turk. This from a Serb. This one is Romanian and this one is Greek. And in ’44, I got this scar—the worst—from my father. Sonny, he told me, you speak of Communists and dugouts one more time and I’ll lash you with the poker. He was a hundred years old back then. May God pacify his wicked bones. And every time the mayor laughed, it was like fists were punching Grandpa in the stomach.

  “You have no school,” Grandpa told him on their first meeting.

  “So you saw it already?” One punch. “That’s the spirit.” And another.

  What Grandpa had seen was a pile of ashes. And that’s what he told the mayor. They’d have to rebuild it.

  “I like your fire. But I have no money for school-building.”

  “Not to worry,” the Pope said later that day, and pulled out a piece of oily paper from his cassock, a pencil from underneath his kalimavka. He called over one of the boys who trotted behind—in those days there was always a crowd of children on their heels—and used his back to write on. “We’ll write to the metropolitan. He’ll give us the money.”

  “The metropolitan will give you nothing,” someone wrote back.

  “I thought they might say that,” the Pope said.

  “But who needs money?” the mayor bellowed. “Plenty of oaks in the forest. That’s how we first built our school, when Captain Kosta made
us.”

  Grandpa was laughing for the first time in many days. He had regained the color in his cheeks, was strong enough to hold the spoon in his right hand, and walked better now, despite still dragging his foot. Often while he spoke, his eyes drifted over the rooftops, toward the ugly tower and the pile of rubble from the ruined houses. A strange calm had followed the storm—the drivers had not returned yet and we could see now two bright lights glimmering where the bulldozers waited awash in the sinking sun.

  So in the beginning there was no school. “Let that be your last worry,” the mayor told Grandpa. “Here are twenty chairs from the municipal building. We’ll set them up in the cherry orchard.” So when the children got hungry all they’d need to do was reach up and pluck some cherries. He wasn’t a great pedagogue, the mayor, but he meant well. “So what should my first worry be?” Grandpa asked him, and he bellowed, “You’ve got no students!”

  They opened up the census books and compiled a list of all the families with children ages seven to twelve. “Even those in the upper hamlets?” the mayor asked. “And the Mohammedans too?”

  “Now this is what I call a list,” the Pope said when Grandpa showed him. “I think I’ll join you.”

  For days the two of them walked from one house to another. “They look at us like we are saints,” the Pope said once. And he was right. The women kissed their hands. The men offered to roll them tobacco—they had nothing of greater value to give. The little daughters, blushing, held forth dried plums and apple rinds in their aprons. “Such poverty,” the Pope would say, and cross himself and bless them all.

  And once they climbed outside the village up the hills—such filth, such misery and stench. Sheep, goats, chickens, babies nursing; the old ones and the young, all packed together in the same windowless huts. Thin, sickly people. Even the fires in their hearths looked thin and sickly, barely enough oxygen in the stuffy rooms to keep them burning.