“Her name was Starost,” I told Elif, and kissed her on the forehead, “the goddess of old age.”
Elif had taken the sheet and soaked it in the bathtub and now we lay diagonally in the sheetless bed. Only now that all was done had she allowed herself to relax a little.
“Tell me a story,” she’d said quietly, and so I did—the stories Grandpa had told me as a child. Of Lada and Attila.
Perun was startled once he saw Old Age. The hag had appeared before his throne without him realizing when. But that’s how she arrived. Sneakily, like a thief.
“Why have you come?” the great god asked her.
“To bring back your girl,” she hissed. “But first you’ll give me what I want.”
What Starost wanted was human life. “A child is born,” she told Perun, “and Lada takes it for herself. And what’s for me? I kiss rotten lips, while Lada kisses the lips of lads and lasses. I hold withered corpses, while Lada dandles toddlers on her knees. Why, Father, have you cursed me so? Why have you wed me to Smert himself?”
Perun feared Starost. He feared that, a god or not, one day Old Age would take him too. In a flash he saw himself weak on his last bed. He saw Smert, the white groom, take his hand and lead him not to the netherworld, where he would be reunited with his brother Veles, but to the goddess who ruled all gods. Zabrava. Lethe.
“If it’s toddlers you want to dandle on your knees,” Perun said to Starost, so he would please her, “let every man and woman in old age turn a toddler once again. Let them cry for their mothers and may you, mother of the old, suckle them on your withered breasts.”
Old Age was pleased. On her sled she flew out of the mountain and quickly she sniffed out the trail of burning peonies, the smoke of battle.
Attila and Lada slept a dreamless sleep inside their yurt. They had pitched the yurt where, just a sunset before, a marble palace had stood. The goddess Starost dipped her crooked fingers into the marble dust and powdered her face. For a brief second, through sleepy eyes, Attila thought it was Lada leaning over to give him a kiss.
By sunrise Attila’s hair was white like bone. By noon his saber had grown too heavy for him to lift. And by the time the sun was slipping behind the Carpathian Mountains he could no longer rise from where he lay.
In vain Lada fondled his cheeks. In vain she gave him her breast to suckle. Old Age had kissed him on the mouth, and now it was Smert’s footsteps they could hear rustling through the dust of shattered marble. The white groom was coming near.
Great man or not, a god or not, sooner or later the white groom comes to take you. And after that—Oblivion awaits. But Attila would not be forgotten. Lada had given him a son. A fine, strong boy who’d grown by his father’s side into a man. He’d taught him how to ride his horse, brandish a saber. What else was there to teach?
“Farewell, my love,” he said to Lada. But she refused to let him go.
“When you get to the other side,” she begged him, “wait for me.”
She knew of course she’d never recognize him there, because there, in the underworld, all human shadows roamed faceless. Her uncle Veles took every human face at the gates and wore it as his own. She knew she’d never be reunited with the man she loved, never again would feel his touch, nor hear his voice. But all the same she kept on talking.
“Down under, there is a tree,” she lied, “heavy with walnuts. Wait for me in its branches. Reunited, we’ll sack the netherworld and watch it burn.”
Attila answered with a smile. “No more sacking, my love. It’s time to rest.”
Elif stirred on my chest. A shiver ran through her body and she held me tighter.
Any historian will tell you the famous story of how upon his death Attila was laid inside an iron coffin, which then was put, like a matryoshka, into a coffin of silver, and then once more into a coffin of pure gold. A river was temporarily diverted, and once the triple coffin was buried in its bed, the waters were allowed to return. To keep the site a secret, all men who’d dug the grave were put to death.
But this was not the story Grandpa told me.
“In order to never forget him, Lada commanded Attila’s men to forge a triple coffin—of iron, silver, and of gold—and bury it in her tresses.”
“And so,” Elif said, and opened her eyes, for the first time, to look at me in the dark, “wherever Lada flew, Attila followed, caught in the river of her hair.”
SIX
“THE PARTY STARTED CHANGING our names again the year I was born. 1984. In one winter they changed one million names. They changed mine when I was two. If it has to be Bulgarian, Mother had said, then let it be Saint Elena’s. Who knew? Maybe Saint Elena wouldn’t mind that I was born a Turk.”
We’d slept for a while and then awakened. Neither of us could fall asleep again. The night had grown stuffy. It smelled of exhaust, and sweet, of the flowers withering in the basket. Cars squeaked from the street below, and every now and then a seagull cried. The thin, moth-eaten curtain flapped out the window as if attempting to fly away. I could see the dark rooftops of houses and buildings, like scales from here to the horizon, and beyond them the thick shapes of loading cranes, with their signal lights pulsing red. Beyond the docks, I knew, was the sea. But once again, I couldn’t see it.
Elif lit a cigarette. The flame of the lighter illuminated her sweaty face for just a moment, but just a moment was enough—even after she had returned to the shade, I could see her clearly, my eyes closed as I kept them now.
“Of course, I don’t remember any of this,” she said. “I mean, come on—1986.”
But she had heard stories. How the militia and these clerks made rounds from house to house. How they forced the people to sign petitions to the court. If you cooperated, they allowed you to choose your name. But many did not comply and were given random names. Soon there were twenty Georgis in Klisura, fifteen Todors, nine Lyudmilas. In the daytime, while people were away at the fields, the militia broke into their houses; confiscated headscarves, prayer rugs, copies of the Qur’an. They’d go to the graveyard and plaster over the tombstones of the dead. Even the dead received new names. Twenty Georgis, fifteen Todors, nine Lyudmilas.
They were about to send Elif’s father to a labor camp. He was, after all, the village imam. But he bribed the right people. Paid them a pot of gold coins, a treasure he’d found when digging the pit for a new toilet in the yard. No joke. You got a shovel and started digging in the Strandja, sooner or later you’d hit either bones or hidden treasures. Some pitiful refugee must have buried the pot, fleeing for Turkey. During the Balkan War, the Russo-Turkish War—god knew which war. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the gold was there. A hundred years later it saved her father’s life.
When the new passports arrived in the spring of 1986, no one wanted to pick them up. Just one man waiting outside the municipal building. Orhan’s father. “You don’t kick against a poker,” he mumbled in his defense, or at least that’s what Elif imagined. But then it came out that he had helped the militia cover up the tombstones. He was a wood carver, and it was he who’d chiseled in the new names of the dead. So naturally, the village men went to his house to kill him. Only the sight of his poor wife, and in her arms Orhan the baby, no doubt screaming his guts out, held them back. So they chased the family out of Klisura. And burned their house down to the ground.
How distant that name seemed to me now. How long ago, our nightly expedition to the ancient ruins. Orhan the coward. Shooting his gun a hair’s length away from Elif. That’s who the imam had promised her in marriage. Only later did she find out the boy’s father had bought her for fifteen thousand deutsche marks. He was hoping, the old fool, that when the imam’s daughter married his son, all shame would wash away from their name.
But this, Elif remembered. The spring of 1989. The storks returning to the mountain; the people of Klisura leaving. So many cars on the highway to the border, you could walk on their rooftops from here to Turkey. Mattresses and chairs, and piles of clothes,
and pots and pans roped down to the cars, stuffed in the trunks, sticking out the windows. Three hundred thousand people left for Turkey that year. On tourist visas. They called it the Big Excursion. An excursion it was not.
Her family spent two months in a refugee camp, in Istanbul, in the suburbs. Thank God the merciful, Elif didn’t remember much of those times. Just that she didn’t understand the language. Back in Bulgaria she’d spent her days in the kindergarten. No Turkish allowed, that’s for sure. She remembered dust in the camp, always. On her fingers, in her nose and hair. She remembered how much she’d looked forward to the once-a-week shower. And every evening her father coming back from work. He’d pull her to the side, behind the tent, where the others couldn’t see them. He’d take out a strip of newspaper from his pocket, and wrapped in the paper—a tiny piece of Turkish delight. Every evening she ate the piece and licked the powdered sugar off the paper. God merciful, it was still on her tongue, so many years later. The bitter ink and salty dust and sugar.
According to her father they returned to Klisura because one night in the camp God told him to do so. He dreamed the mosque was burning and it was all his fault. And locked in the minaret he could hear the baby boy he’d lost. The son he so desperately wanted, calling to him, blaming him.
For Elif the reason was much simpler. They came back because they couldn’t take the new life. Because dusk till dawn her father toiled away at a construction site for a salary the locals wouldn’t even spit on. But after all, they weren’t locals. Refugee migrants, that’s what they were. Like storks.
The year was 1991. Half of the refugees who’d left for Turkey two years prior were coming back. The Party had collapsed. The Muslim names had been restored. But a different Bulgaria awaited. On leaving, many had sold their homes. To prevent speculation, local municipalities had bought out the houses at prices the state had set, which was to say, dirt cheap. Roughly seventy thousand people were homeless now.
The skies darkened. The winter stretched for years. The lines for bread and cheese—for days. A human flood swept up the streets. Where once there had been mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers—now spilled a faceless mob.
The year was 1991. Elif was coming home from what she’d failed to make her home.
The year was 1991 and I myself was leaving.
Three hundred thousand had left for Turkey.
Four hundred thousand were leaving for the West.
I turned to Elif and watched her smoke her cigarette in silence. “At the airport in Ontario,” I said, “my parents bought three Snickers bars. Overpriced, I’m sure. But this went beyond money. We’d never eaten Snickers before because we never could. And now we could. We were free.
“Halfway through, my stomach began turning. I hate peanuts. The chocolate was much too sweet. And I’d already eaten plenty of bad food on the plane. But Father wouldn’t have it. He was making a statement. He ordered me to finish the entire thing and then to lick the wrapper.
“We were waiting for the shuttle when I puked. All over Mother.”
“Charming,” Elif said. “Made sick by freedom.”
She pressed her cheek against my chest again.
“Tell me some other stories of how you’ve puked.”
SEVEN
WE STAYED IN BURGAS for five days and four nights. We never left the hotel before noon, though every morning we awoke early with the intent. By the time we finally crawled out of bed the sun was past its apex. Ravenous with hunger, we showered quickly, dressed, went out for lunch. Elif had never eaten at McDonald’s. On the first day she devoured a Big Mac, a double cheeseburger, a hamburger, and a dozen Chicken McNuggets. “It’s nothing special,” she said, but each day after that we returned so she could try new items on the menu. They were all expensive, but we didn’t care. “I wish Aysha could try this,” she’d say sometimes—of the ice cream we bought in the park, of the cotton candy, of the sweet corn on the cob. “This is the longest I’ve been away from her,” she’d say.
Sometimes we sat in a café, the same kind that had seemed obnoxious but now was not. We drank Fanta with straws and watched the foreign tourists prance up and down the main street. We made fun of the way they looked—too fat, too pale and freckled, too blond, too skinny; of their socks and flip-flops, man purses, men’s tank tops. We bought things: Grandpa a set of new strings for the mandolin, and ourselves new clothes—for Elif, a long silk dress that went down to her ankles, and a long-sleeved cardigan that she wore despite the heat. I told her, “You’re beautiful. You don’t have to hide,” but she didn’t seem to listen.
Every afternoon we went down to the sea. So what if the central beach in Burgas was, well, the central beach in Burgas? The sea was still the sea—calm one day and turbid on another—never the same, except in its vastness. We’d clear a spot in the sand of all the empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, and ice cream sticks and wait for the crowd to scatter with the setting sun. Then it was just us and the Gypsies, picking up large pieces of trash in their black nylon sacks, and after them the tractor, raking the sand, freeing it from any human trace. Sometimes we gathered seashells for Aysha. Sometimes we waded in the water—not even a meter from the shore—and stood against the evening wind, the sand, the earth beneath our soles giving way with each new wave. “Let’s swim,” I’d tell Elif, but she would only wrap herself in the cardigan more tightly.
The day before we returned to Klisura, we stumbled upon a photo booth just off the main street. “Grandpa might like a picture,” Elif said, and so we took four instant photos—four tiny squares on a palm-sized sheet. That afternoon we went to the sea and waited for the sun to set at our backs. Elif’s head was on my shoulder and I don’t think we spoke a single word. Our shadows were a single shadow, which stretched so long it finally touched the sea and, unafraid, kept going deeper.
“Listen,” Elif said at last. In the dusk, her face was blue. The distant lights of restaurants along the shoreline, of boats on the horizon, hung in the prison of her eyes. “They can take everything away from us, but not these last five days. These days are ours.”
She found an empty beer bottle in the sand and tore off a photo from the sheet. She stuffed the photo in the bottle and, scooping sand in handfuls, filled the bottle up. We walked down to the sea—dark and booming and smelling fresh, of watermelon and night.
“Throw it as hard as you can,” she told me, and I did. The bottle whizzed through the wind and hit the waves with a dull splash. “Whatever happens out here,” Elif said, “we’ll always be together, down there, at the bottom of the sea.”
EIGHT
I SAY TO PETAR, Petre my boy, man’s heart is a lantern. And what good is a lantern unless it holds a flame? For two weeks now we’ve been building a school in Klisura. We’ve put a cross on the roof, like a church. Three crosses, like a monastery. When the Turks come back, they’ll torch the school. We’ll take from its flame and light our lanterns. Our bones will be timber, Petre, our blood will be oil. We’ll burn with black smoke and Europe will see it.
* * *
In place of black smoke, gray dust was rolling in the skies of Klisura. We could hear the storks crying inside the dust clouds and see them, black shadows turning in wheels, like buzzards. While Elif and I had been in Burgas, the bulldozers had razed a dozen more houses. They’d cleared the rubble and leveled the ground so two excavators could dig up foundations. A crane had laid down a mesh of steel rods, a mixer had poured in the concrete. Where only a week before there had been houses and stork nests, now stood the bases of five new towers.
We found Grandpa watching the workers pour concrete for a sixth foundation. He was smoking a cigarette and by his side Saint Kosta, his wing no longer bandaged, dug in the dirt with his talons. From the dust, Grandpa’s hair, the beard he still had not shaved off, and the stork’s black feathers had turned so gray they both looked like one with the ruins.
When I spoke to him he didn’t seem to hear me. And even after I pulled on his sleeve he wa
tched me with eyes that said he wasn’t really there. “Go with Elif,” I told him. “Eat lunch. Drink some tea. I’ll fix this mess.”
* * *
I’d never set foot in a mosque before, but I didn’t stop to admire the moment. As inside a church, the space was gloomy and for a while all I saw were green shadows and green blotches. I’d run through the village and now sweat poured down my face in rivers. Blood boomed through my temples, and at my feet the planks creaked dully beneath a thick carpet. The air smelled of sweat—my own—and the dust of the ruins, which packed my nostrils. I was just turning when my shoe caught a bump in the carpet and I tripped, stomped, and the floor shook loudly beneath me.
“For shame,” someone said then. By the voice, I knew it was the imam, but all I saw was a green figure in the doorway.
“I’ve come to talk to you,” I told him as firmly as I could.
“Show some respect,” he whispered. “Come outside, we’ll talk then.”
Respect, I told him once we were out in the courtyard, was precisely the thing he was not showing. Respect for us, for the law. And then a strange thing happened. The redness of my face, the shortness of my breath, the justness of my words must have moved him, because he said, “Calm down. Have a seat. Drink some water.”
He sat me down on a bench under a trellis and brought me a cold jar. He let me drink it in silence and we waited for my blood to cool down a little.
“It seems,” he said at last, “there has been some big confusion. So let me dispel it. Three years ago,” he said, “your grandfather came to Klisura waving about, much the way you do now, a sheet of paper. A document, which said the village school had been built in his name and so he owned it. But I knew this document was invalid and your grandfather too knew it.”
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