Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  And now so many years later out on our terrace, where Grandpa told me this story, I too could see them. He didn’t have to tell me how the women trembled and pulled on the edges of their wet scarves. How one by one the men took the icons and swiftly, lightly carried them across the embers hissing with the rain. How Giorgios, who’d limped all day behind his brother, now hopped in perfect balance. How the mud splashed and red sparks scattered. How the rain pounded and Lenio’s face ran black with liquid ashes. How terrified Grandpa was to watch her and feel on his cheeks the cold drops lashing each time the ropes of her hair whooshed in the dark.

  I too could feel the heat of the fire, the cold of the harsh drops. I too was terrified. Because I too loved a girl and missed her.

  * * *

  All in all, ten minutes. That’s how long the dance lasted. But those minutes seemed like many hours—the crowd awed and, by the end, exhausted. As were the nestinari—sitting now quietly on red pillows in the shrine, each staring into the nothing. Tired, but calmed somehow.

  “May Saint Kosta aid us,” the mayor, their vekilin, said as a blessing. A long rug had been rolled out on the freshly swept floor, and on it bowls of yogurt, plates of white cheese, saucers with young walnuts. They drank rakia from three small bottles and then they ate the kurban, for good health. Tomorrow every ritual would be repeated—this time to honor Saint Elena.

  Only two souls weren’t eating: Grandpa in his corner, his heart heavy, his fingers stained iodine from the walnut he was crushing into a pulp. And in her corner, Lenio, the Greek girl.

  Yes, Lenio, you can relax now. Take a deep breath, have a sip of rakia. Fear nothing. Saint Kosta likes you. He took your hand and led you unharmed through the fire. So be merry. But take care not to show it. Your father, the Wild Ram, he doesn’t like laughter. And your brothers, the cowards, they do as he tells them. So let them keep grave and quiet, the tombstones. But you, Lenio, are not a tombstone. You laugh now, the way you’ve learned how to—like a spring running beneath thick ice. Your cheeks red apples, your lips pomegranate. Your bare feet white as the yogurt and, only under your toenails, where no one can see it, the black ash.

  ELEVEN

  WHEN DOES A PERSON FALL IN LOVE EXACTLY? Is it a single moment—the heart takes a beat past which there is no more turning? Or does it happen the way spring arrives, without sharp definitions?

  The morning before the Greeks left for their village, Grandpa woke up awfully hungover. All night he’d drunk rakia with the captains and the mayor. His head was throbbing and he was so thirsty he could drain a river. He grabbed a towel and stumbled down to the well in the courtyard.

  There by the well, in the blue dawn, Lenio was washing her long hair. She was fully clothed but she had let her hair fall free of the thick braids. She gathered the tresses and dipped them into a pail of water. Each time she pressed down the tresses, water splashed at her bare feet. For some time Grandpa watched her and only then did she turn around to see him.

  She wasn’t startled. Instead, she was smiling. She pulled out her hair and began to wring it as if it were laundry. Then she put out her hand. She wanted the towel on Grandpa’s shoulder. So he came near, his bare feet on the cool water, and he gave her the towel. When she took it, her fingers brushed his.

  Had it been when he’d seen her in the shack, frightened as she was before the icon of Saint Kosta? Had it been when she’d danced in the fire? Had it been there in the courtyard, her hair dripping well water? Who can tell you? But my grandfather’s heart had taken a beat past which there was no more turning.

  On parting, Captain Vangelis came to Grandpa. Out in the yard, his sons were roping a bundle to Captain Elias’s back—the sacred icons. By the well, some of the men sharpened their knives; some of the women wound bands of cloth around their feet to protect them from the road’s thorns and sharp stones.

  “An orchard is not a school,” Captain Vangelis said, ready it seemed to pick up the old fight. But before Grandpa could answer, the captain pulled out from his cloak a fist of paper money. For fifteen years the nestinari had collected from candles and donations. To patch up the shrine if need be, and, one day, to rebuild it nicer.

  “Build a real school,” said Captain Vangelis.

  And so, a week after they first arrived, Grandpa watched from the terrace the Greeks disappear up the road—their vekilin, Captain Vangelis, in the lead, then Captain Elias with the icons, their sons, their mothers, and strolling lightly at their heels, Lenio, her white kerchief last to vanish. So that was that, Grandpa thought, and after he finished his cigarette he lit another. His fingers burned where she’d touched him. Never again would he see her.

  It goes without saying, he was mistaken.

  TWELVE

  THE MONEY CAPTAIN VANGELIS GAVE Grandpa was not sufficient. And the mayor wouldn’t hear of helping. The truth came loose after much pressing—every time Klisurans rebuilt their school, the village ended up in ruin.

  “So you’re afraid!” Grandpa said, triumphant, for the mayor had driven himself into a shameful corner.

  “I? Afraid?” the mayor cried, then made a few phone calls. Beams, rafters, planks, nails, lime, and tiles—he bought them at preferential prices. And by the end of the week the ruins of the old school had been transformed into a construction site.

  “Here are your builders,” the mayor said, and by his side were only old men. It was the end of June, just as it was now when Grandpa told me this story, and all the young ones had gone to do field work.

  “These men are good for nothing,” Grandpa cried, because really, a stronger gust, it seemed, would knock them over. But, oh, was he mistaken. These men were mules. Worse yet—devils who never tired.

  Each night Grandpa collapsed in his bed, a wreckage. Each morning, he woke up a living pain. Muscles he never knew existed hurt him. Bones, joints, teeth, even his scalp and hair were aching. All summer they built—Grandpa, the mayor, Vassilko, and the old brigadiers. And on September 15, the first official day of classes, Father Dionysus held a service, a vodosvet to bless the new school.

  A school is not a Christian church, complained the people of the Muslim hamlet. And they locked at home their sons and daughters. This time, it was the mayor who came along with Grandpa, from one door to another, and tried to convince them—there was no need to be frightened.

  * * *

  It was the Pope these people feared. For ever since he’d first arrived in Klisura, Father Dionysus had worked like the old brigadiers—a mule, a devil who never tired. Tireless, he roamed the hills of the Strandja, hamlet to hamlet, no matter how distant, as long as a Muslim lived there. He’d grown heavier, though not in belly, but in stature. His shoulders had widened, the muscles in his legs and arms had swollen up, his beard had thickened—a great and terrifying thing, like a flaming bush it put the laity in fear. But he spoke kindly, gently, in an alluring voice. Gather around me, you poor people. I’ve come to tell you something. And the poor people gathered to hear his stories. How, a long time back, the Strandja had been all Christian, which was to say, all Bulgarian really. Because to be Bulgarian meant to be Christian and no one could be Bulgarian if they weren’t Christian. It was, and always had been, this simple.

  On and on Father Dionysus spun his stories and in them the centuries rolled by. Glorious tsars and martyrs came to life, then dust took them. Until a great danger arrived at the Bulgarian threshold—Murad the terrible sultan, at the head of a boundless army. Bravely, the Bulgarians fought him, in the name of Christ the great Lord. But the Turks were many and at last darkness overcame Christ’s people, so they might be tested.

  For many centuries the Bulgarians fought and resisted. Push after push, the way that oak tree right over there resists the gales from Turkey. Each time our people honored Christ, it was their own blood they honored. Each time they preserved Christ, it was themselves they were preserving. But not all trees are strong like the oak tree. And sometimes the gale fells us.

  There came a day at las
t, Father Dionysus told them, when the Ottoman Empire weakened. Afraid of losing land and power, the sultan gave an order—turn all Bulgarians into Muslims, so they may never wish to break free. Terrible janissaries roamed the Strandja, and in their lead—black imams. When a Bulgarian refused to take off his fur cap, to renounce Christ and put on a turban, they cut his head off. Many a head rolled in those days, for great was the courage of our forefathers. But not all heads. For some bowed to accept the turban. And in this, there is no shame. Again, I tell you, not all trees are strong like the oak tree.

  What matters most, Father Dionysus told them, is that God still loves you. It is never too late. Renounce the lie. Redeem your blood. Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. Return to your roots. Be born again.

  And some people shook their heads, spat in the dirt, cursed the Pope, and stormed away angry. But others went home pensive, the worm of doubt gnawing at their innards. And still others, though not that many, came to the Pope, and when he offered, they kissed his right hand. And when he offered, they kissed the cross and he baptized them.

  It was all this the people of Klisura feared. And even when Grandpa told them, It’s only the letters I’ll teach your kids, only the numbers, they still didn’t believe him. When the mayor got angry and bellowed—you blockheads, show some courage—the people got quiet.

  “They hate my guts,” the mayor told Grandpa one evening. It was the mayor who, a year before this, had closed down the village mosque and sent away the imam. There was no need for Grandpa to ask him why he’d done so. After all, the mayor had never questioned why Grandpa had ended up in Klisura, nor did they wonder why Father Dionysus was doing all this baptizing. They both knew the reason. The Party had willed it. There was no way to defy the Party’s orders.

  “When I was a boy,” the mayor said, “I drove an ox into a bog once. That poor beast knew the ground was boggy—he’d smelled the mud from a distance—but I hadn’t smelled it. At first he resisted, but then I beat him until I broke the stick in half against his back. And so he grunted, lowered his head, and did as I told him. The mud ate him whole. I am the ox now,” the mayor said, the first and last time Grandpa heard him whisper.

  THIRTEEN

  WITH THE THREAT OF HEFTY FINES the Muslim parents were convinced to send their children back to school. It helped too that Grandpa was liked in the village. Almost every night someone new invited him to dinner—be it in the Christian or the Muslim hamlet. And to class, his students came with little bundles—now a handful of dried fruit, now apples preserved fresh under fern leaves. And after sunset, young women brought him jugs of milk, freshly baked banitsas, or loaves of rye bread. Afraid to be seen, they left their boons at his threshold, rapped their slender fingers on the gates, and ran into the dark with a giggle. Only one girl refused to hide. Each day, constant as the sun rising, she brought Grandpa a jar of yogurt—still warm from the sheepskins in which it had been wrapped to leaven. Each day he met her at the threshold. Each day, to show him how thick the yogurt was, she turned the jar upside down and shook it. Not once did the yogurt move. Then she would hold the jar up and make him breathe in deeply—the yogurt, alive with fermentation and sprinkling his face. When Grandpa scooped up yogurt with his finger, the girl would laugh.

  “My daddy has a hundred white sheep,” she sometimes told him, which was to say, There isn’t a bachelor in the village who wouldn’t want me as his wife, yet here I am, at your threshold.

  “She loved me very much,” Grandpa said now on the terrace. And back in those days, he often wondered, what would it be like to have her as his wife? Her father, the chief shepherd of the collective, the hundred white sheep, the jars of yogurt. She was a pretty girl, no doubt. She spoke sweetly and looked at him in a way that was calming—he would be lucky to have her. And yet he wasn’t feeling lucky. At night, alone in the quiet school, it was the Greek girl Grandpa thought of. He dreamed of her face running black with ashes, imagined the rustle of her bare feet in the coals, felt her touch on his fingers, and sometimes, when a girl was laughing somewhere in the village, he thought it was the Greek girl, Lenio, he was hearing.

  Each day at the threshold he scooped thick yogurt from the jar, guiltily, knowing full well he’d soon have to come to a decision. Take the girl and the hundred white sheep, or push away the jar before her heart shattered.

  “I led her on, my boy. Day after day.”

  And in the end, is there a force darker than a woman with a broken heart?

  “Poor Baba Mina,” I said, and tried to see her, not as I remembered her, unraveling old sweaters by the fire, babbling of her father’s sheep, but as Grandpa had seen her in those days, bringing him yogurt, a young and pretty girl, in love.

  FOURTEEN

  GRANDPA’S FIRST SUMMER in Klisura was coming to an end. The storks rose in giant flocks, the leaves of the cherries dropped yellow, and the sweet smell of rot filled the air. Soon the days grew short and chilly. First snows fell, melted, then came to stay. Every morning, at the school’s threshold, Grandpa collected the wood his students brought—one log per child, for the stove in the classroom. Every morning, Grandpa inspected their teeth, to see if they’d brushed them; their ears, to see if they’d washed them. Once a week, he made them pull off a stocking. To save time, he checked the right foot only. If the toenails weren’t clipped, he wrote a note to reprimand the parents. Teacher, teacher! the children cried one day. He had just inspected Mehmed’s right foot—the nails in a somewhat satisfactory condition. Check his other foot. The left one! Not nails, talons! His mother, the boy admitted, sobbing, was much too busy now that his father had gone away. She had not the time for clipping nails, and clipped only the ones she knew the teacher was inspecting.

  “He was a good boy—Mehmed,” Grandpa told me. We were taking our daily walk up the road, to the wreckage of the houses. Ahead of us, Saint Kosta was pulling something from a pile of fallen branches. “His voice was honey. I’d say, Now children, let’s sing a song. But the moment Mehmed opened his mouth, they all shut theirs. They were ashamed to sing while he was singing.” The snow falling in the courtyard, the stove bursting with flame, and Mehmed, singing sweetly. And now Grandpa stopped in the middle of the road and turned his head to listen, eyes closed, as if he could hear Mehmed’s singsong.

  “His father had been the village imam. A year before I came to Klisura, the militia had taken him away. Most likely to a labor camp. They never heard from him again.”

  It was only appropriate that at this moment, Mehmed, now grown-up, himself the imam of Klisura, himself a father, should start singing from the minaret. And yet it wasn’t time for prayer. Instead, we heard the wind speeding through the dead road and in the wind Saint Kosta, gulping down a mouse he’d just killed.

  * * *

  The snows melted and the cherries bloomed. The storks returned. A year had gone by since Grandpa had first set foot in Klisura. And soon the feast of Saint Constantine was once more near.

  “Come with me across the border,” the mayor, caretaker of the nestinari, said to Grandpa. And he told him the story I knew from Elif—of how once upon a time the nestinari lived protected by the Turkish sultan. But how one day without reason, the Turks slaughtered as many fire dancers as they could and torched their village. The few survivors roamed the Strandja in search of a new home, half of them stopping in Klisura, the other half across the hills, in what was now Turkey. To keep the memory alive, each group vowed to safeguard the icons of the other and to meet year after year, once in Klisura, once there, across the hills—in Kostitsa.

  “Kostitsa,” I said. “The word for little bone?” But Grandpa shook his head. It was Saint Constantine’s name that had shaped that of the village.

  We were sitting out in the yard now, under the trellis, tossing back and forth a rag ball I’d made from an old shirtsleeve. We were working on Grandpa’s dexterity, on his reflexes after the stroke. At first, catching the ball had been a serious challenge. But he was doing better. The day
was warm. The air smelled of ripening tomatoes. As always, Saint Kosta strolled through the yard, searching for mice or moles to prey on.

  “I can’t cross the border,” Grandpa told the mayor. After all, he was serving a punishment for his Party resignation. They’d never give him the necessary papers. But the mayor swatted his paw. Papers were for book rats.

  And so, one evening with the sunset, four days before the feast of Saints Constantine and Elena, the mayor, Grandpa, Vassilko, two local men, and three women made for the Turkish border. Teary Baba Vida waved after them from the shrine’s threshold; she was too old to make the journey.

  “Tell me, Grandma,” Grandpa asked her, “what did you mean the night of the dances?” Don’t do it, she had warned him. But now she shrugged her bony shoulders. “If only I remembered, sinko, the things I saw each time Saint Kosta took me.”

  Father Dionysus caught up with them at the end of the village. The sacred icons were safeguarded in his church and wasn’t he responsible for every candle, candelabra, lamp, and wooden box? What would the metropolitan say if he knew the Pope was allowing—

  “Fine, come along then!” cried the mayor. “Just give that tongue of yours some rest.”

  He was a sly devil, Father Dionysus. It took Grandpa much too long to figure that out. Yes, the Party had sent him to christen the Muslims. But there were other tasks he’d been given. In the end it turned out Father Dionysus worked for the CSS. The Committee for State Security. Among other things, the Pope kept an eye on my grandfather; each month he wrote reports on all that Grandpa was doing.

  “A secret agent priest!” I laughed, as if that were funny. I tossed the ball and Grandpa caught it firmly in his fist.