Stork Mountain

by Miroslav Penkov

  “Healed crooked,” Grandpa said in a hoarse voice behind me. I hadn’t seen him until now—on the bench, smoking. Most likely he’d spent the night out here. “This too is my fault,” he said, and when he stood up cigarette ash poured from his lap in a gray shower.

  I did not speak to him for the next three days, nor did I exchange more than a few words with Elif. Things were bad between us. We were headed in a dangerous direction and we both knew it. Each morning, I felt sicker. My head hurt and so did my muscles. By the fourth day my forehead was burning. And that fire, strangely, was what would bring us salvation.

  “Is this a mole?” I asked her on the fifth day. The heat of her breath pricked my back like needles while she was checking.

  “A mole?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  * * *

  “Comrade teacher,” the doctor in town told Grandpa, “we could play a game of darts on his back, it’s that clear.” Then he called the nurse into his office so she too could see it.

  “Textbook,” the nurse said, and the doctor asked if I would let him take a picture. His nephew had brought him a Polaroid from Germany and he was building an album of significant cases. He flapped the picture a few times and on it my back and the red rash came into existence. A fist-sized scarlet center, a circle of clear skin around it, and then another, larger scarlet circle. Classic presentation. No sense in wasting money on blood work.

  “And the tick?” he asked.

  “I burned it,” Elif said from the corner.

  “I would have liked to take its picture,” the doctor said, and stuck a thermometer under my armpit. “Why did you wait a whole week after you found it? You should have come sooner.”

  “We thought he was acting,” said Grandpa.

  The doctor pulled out the thermometer and read it. “Thirty-eight-point-eight. A damn good actor.”

  “And muscle soreness,” I made sure to tell him. “And my head is splitting.”

  “Textbook,” the doctor said, and wrote me a prescription. Ten days on doxycycline and I’d be tip-top.

  “Curious luck, comrade teacher,” he told Grandpa at the doorway. “To come all the way from America and get bitten.” But that was the tick for you. A nondiscriminatory creature. American, Bulgarian, Turkish, or Gypsy. The tick didn’t care what you were, really. All the same, it still bit you.

  “We should learn from the tick,” the doctor told us on parting. And once more lamented he hadn’t taken its picture.

  * * *

  We returned to Klisura with the sun low above dark hills. Dust from the construction site rolled down the road in clouds of silver. Each time the wind gusted, the clouds’ form shifted. Like mischievous spirits they whirled around for attention, slapped our cheeks, pulled our hair and ears, stole the words from our lips and let the wind take them.

  One such cloud spun like a funnel by the gates of the municipal building. Two meters tall, a hundred and fifty kilos heavy, his windy flesh branded with deep scars. He didn’t speak to me, he bellowed. What, I couldn’t decipher. When we passed by the old church, its bells started tolling. They had been taken to the city long ago, these bells, but all the same I heard them calling. I tasted their bitter copper. From every roof, from every nest the storks were staring. Their bills sounded like metal grinding on metal and when I looked up I saw not storks but men and women cluttered in the nests, stropping long knives, the men against their sashes, the women against their headscarves. Red sparks spilled in all directions and any minute now the village would catch fire. At our house, the clouds of silver kept reshaping until a girl stood in the courtyard. Thin like a black wick, she flapped her wings, tried to fly away, but couldn’t.

  “We need to fix her wing,” I think I told Grandpa once they’d put me in bed. “We need to let her fly away.”

  He jabbed a thermometer under my armpit and Elif slapped a stinking kerchief on my forehead. Vinegar trickled down my temples, cold like the fingers of the dead.

  “Forty-one-point-six,” I heard Grandpa say. And when they asked me how I was feeling, I told them excellent, delighted. My sickness would fix us all. “Where is the tick?” I said. “I want to thank him.” Or maybe no one asked me. Maybe I said nothing like this.

  ELEVEN

  THE RUMOR TRAVELED through Klisura like wind from Turkey, loud, unyielding. The teacher’s boy was burning with Saint Kosta’s fever. Before too long our gates were crowded with women. They’d come from the Muslim hamlet to see—what exactly? The American, wiggling across a sweat-soaked mattress, his lips spilling fire, his feet taking frantic steps in the air? And the noise of his teeth like the bills of two storks fighting? Or were they here to see the man for whom Elif had stood up to her own father?

  Handsome he is, they whispered. And wealthy. He’d take her away from this mountain. Across the sea, to a new world. How they hated me and loved me in equal measure. How they envied Elif, wringing a vinegar kerchief, spreading it gently across my forehead. How they wished it was their fingers that caressed my temples, their old bodies that nestled, like serpents, beside me.

  No, they were not young women. They’d lived for sixty, seventy years. They’d borne children who in turn had borne children of their own. Not once had they stood up to their husbands; not once had they done what they’d wished to. Now here was a girl who did as she wanted. How dared she expect bliss and freedom while an endless rope of women before her had received only ache and hardship? They too arose, these long-dead women, envious, outraged, indignant. At our gates they joined their living daughters. We curse them, they said of me and of Elif. And where they’d lain the earth gaped hollow. Their husbands groped the void and bellowed, Where have our females gone? In no time they too were digging; they too were sprouting like rhododendrons. A multitude of long-expired men had joined their long-expired women.

  I saw them where they hung, in the yard, on my window. I heard them crying. They demanded nothing unfair. Only that the primordial order of human suffering be followed for me and for Elif as it had been for them.

  Lower the curtains, I pleaded with her. Chase them away, I begged of Grandpa.

  It’s just Baba Mina, they told me. Bringing you thyme tea. It’s just pills, not dry bones. Just turbines, not a skeleton army. Yet at the time, such corporeal matters escaped me.

  Like the feverish turbine construction under way now that I’d signed my permission. Or like Elif, sneaking to see Aysha. Their father at the mosque, and their mother rushing Elif in, hoping the hag across the street wouldn’t catch them. Breaking a bar of chocolate into little pieces, brewing tea, and the three of them chatting, down on the floor, forgetting their troubles, palms on their lips, laughing. Then the imam storming in, for the hag had not been outsmarted. His boot kicking the teacups, chipping the saucers, hot tea spilling on the Persian carpet. Aysha crying, but not Elif and not her mother. For men like the imam a woman’s tears were like acacia honey. Or so Elif’s grandmother had once told her. No honey, kazam, and the drone grows hungry. Don’t feed him, then, my darling, but learn instead to make him starve.

  TWELVE

  JULY WAS SLIPPING INTO AUGUST. Up the slopes of the Strandja the grass was turning yellow, the leaves of the oak trees a duller green. Dry winds gusted through the streets, chased palls of dust from the construction, chapped our lips. Orphaned storks spun long, tired wheels overhead, restless it seemed to head back south. It hadn’t rained in weeks and one day, far across the hills, we recognized the black snakes of smoke twisting against the cloudless blue—the brush had caught on fire.

  My fever had lasted for a week. A few more days passed in weakness and I was cured. Stronger than a bull, cleverer than a fox. Thyme tea and walnut kernels had done the trick. And the antibiotics.

  Grandpa and I were getting along well. It seemed like he’d forgiven me for signing the papers, and I in turn forgave him for selling my land, for feeding me nothing but lies. There were still things that needed clarification, but I wasn’t eager to unearth them just
yet. As before, he spent his days out on the terrace, smoking, though now he played backgammon with Elif. He never went to the construction site and he rarely looked up at the sky. He was ashamed, I knew that much.

  Elif and I too got along well. She’d forgiven me for tossing the money at her in such a lowly fashion and I’d forgiven her— Dear God. What use was it to keep composing lists, to keep on naming our transgressions and crossing them out one by one? We’d made mistakes and then had been forgiven. We ourselves forgave.

  In my delirium, I’d worked out a plan, which even after I got better sounded persuasive. I wanted to marry Elif officially in August. Then take her to the States. A different culture, a new language—it wouldn’t be easy. But I’d pay off my student loans, find a basic job, teach Elif English. And once we’d saved up enough money, we’d hit the road toward a brave new future.

  Each time we found ourselves alone, I tried to tell her of my plan. And each time, I swallowed my tongue in fear. Was I afraid she’d say no or did I fear the plan was hogwash? Even this I was scared to consider.

  * * *

  It was July 28, I won’t forget. We took the bus to Burgas and marched straight to the courthouse. We waited in line, made it to the clerk, witnessed the glass slide in our faces, the lunch break sign flip over. We waited another hour just to be informed Elif’s request to change her name had not been reviewed yet.

  This was, the clerk assured us, no picnic. It took time for the court to view all cases. “Learn patience, children,” she said. “It’s a heavenly virtue.”

  I knew that Elif wanted to change her name officially before we got married. But I couldn’t wait that long. So when on our way to the station she slipped into a drugstore, I waited by the door and tried to muster some courage.

  A brave new world, I kept repeating. Freedom. Possibility. America.

  “They were out,” Elif barked, flying out of the store, and I was forced to chase her up the street to another. I asked her what she was after.

  “Damn it, American,” she said, not even turning. “Can’t you leave me be for just a minute?”

  I could see that the court’s tardiness had upset her. But was I bothering her that much really? We checked three more drugstores before at last she stepped out of the fourth one clutching a paper bag.

  I asked if she was hungry. “A Big Mac and fries? A large milkshake?”

  “Please stop!” she said. “Please, please. Just stop.”

  In an instant her face had lost all color. Her eyes scurried deeper into their sockets, like frightened animals into their burrows. Even the smell her body exuded turned instantaneously sour. I was that close and I sensed it. A stream of people shuffled around us on the sidewalk. Some were watching, but I didn’t care.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. I took her hand, fearful she might run away, glad she hadn’t. For a long time, she kept her eyes on the pavement. Some cobblestones beneath our feet were loose and vibrated. Someone bumped into me, into her; the crowd tossed us about like a river.

  “I’m late,” she said.

  At first I thought I had misheard her. I asked her to repeat and she repeated.

  How late? I asked. Two weeks. No. A little over. But it had happened before—a few years back, when, to punish her father, she’d refused to eat a bite. She’d been late then, skipped two entire cycles.

  We’d slipped around a corner where the sidewalk was strangely vacant. But now the sun was beating down on us, poking me in the eyes, making it really difficult to focus.

  Could it be stress? I wanted to ask. Being chased out of her home, not seeing Aysha? Could it be because of my sickness?

  And how? We had used protection!

  Instead, I must have kept silent.

  “Say something,” she begged me, no longer angry sounding.

  The sun was blinding, poking, irritating. I pulled her out of its reach, under the shade of a linden tree. I cupped her hand in mine and kissed the tips of her fingers.

  From the drugstore Elif had bought a pregnancy test. She’d planned to use it in the toilet at the station, in secret.

  “We’ll do the test,” I told her, and took the small bag. “But home, in Klisura.”

  And that, by the way she sought my embrace, seemed to please her.

  * * *

  We kept very quiet on the ride to the village. The driver tried a conversation, but right away Elif moved to the back of the bus and I followed. There we sat stiffly, not touching, her eyes out the window, mine straight ahead, on the plastic dice rocking from the rearview mirror, on the poster of Hristo Stoichkov, on the picture of Samantha Fox in the nude. Not that I saw them. My mind was at once in a hundred places, all cracking with static.

  I had to tell myself not to clutch the bag as hard as I clutched it. To ease up a little. What would it mean if the test turned out this way and what if the other? I tried to consider the outcomes. To sense which way I was leaning. But there was too much static, my head was too dizzy, too buzzing. I didn’t know what it was that I feared. Just that I feared, wildly.

  Say something, I thought. Elif needs you. Hold her hand again and kiss it. But when I tried to reach over, my muscles had turned liquid. I was paralyzed and couldn’t blink even.

  “Look at them,” I said, beside myself, of Samantha Fox’s magnificent breasts. “Enormous.”

  “I’d rather look at you,” Elif said. “It’s funnier that way.”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “The poor woman. Think of the back pain.”

  “Pinned up there, nude and cold, with no one to save her.”

  “A martyr,” I said.

  “A saint even.”

  We burst out laughing. We snorted, choked, coughed, kept laughing with great hunger.

  “What are we going to do, amerikanche?” Elif said, and wiped away the tears.

  “We’ll name her Samantha. That’s what.”

  This too sounded awfully funny. And I simply couldn’t believe it. A minute ago I’d been so scared, so uncertain. Along which path should I wish for the test to send us?

  It was impossible now to envision a more senseless question.

  PART

  SIX

  ONE

  I AWOKE CONVINCED that the turbines had begun spinning—so loud was the whoosh that had roused me. It seemed like the windows rattled. Tin cans rolled through the courtyard and a jar shattered to pieces. Then I heard crying, mad and mournful. And Grandpa calling. I’m not sure what he said exactly, his voice was too low and soothing.

  Already Elif stood by the window.

  “He’s throwing a fit,” she said. “The poor thing.”

  And really, in the yard, Saint Kosta was raising mayhem. One moment he was atop the bench; the next he’d pushed himself off, beating his wings grotesquely. Two, three meters, then he’d plummet. He resembled a fish thrashing ashore, choking. Bare-chested, a Thracian gladiator, Grandpa tried to approach him, the shirt in his hands like a weighted net. Once he cast the shirt, but Saint Kosta dodged it, flapped his wings, screamed, and bounced to the well, where he perched, breathing heavily. Grandpa watched him, his hands spread like thin wings, and the shirt he held, billowing in the wind.

  It was then that I saw the reason—thick wheels overhead, hundreds of storks spinning. They’d begun to gather. They would fly south soon.

  Once again Grandpa threw his shirt at Saint Kosta, and once again he missed him. The stork spooked, lost his balance, and plunged right down the well’s mouth. Elif yelped. Grandpa ran to the well, cursing. He pulled on the rope and the pail and soon he was holding Saint Kosta and petting gently the base of his neck.

  “Oh, no,” Elif said. “Here it comes. Get ready.”

  She wanted her bucket. I sprinted to the hallway and brought it. It was not pretty, but it was faster this way. Each morning, her sickness seemed to get worse. As the day waned, the nausea didn’t. Five in the afternoon and she’d still be retching. “That baby,” she said sometimes, “she’s contrary like her mother.”<
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  We believed it was a girl we were having.

  “Way too early to tell, compadre,” the doctor in town had told us. We had gone to see him at Grandpa’s insistence.

  Grandpa himself learned the news only moments after the test confirmed it. Elif and I walked out to the terrace. We held sweaty hands and were quite embarrassed. But on the inside we were bursting. When he saw us, Grandpa stood up.

  “Old man—” I began, but he waved his cigarette shut up.

  “Cut the crap,” he said. “Is it a plus or a minus? I saw the box in the toilet. A plus or a minus?”

  I stuck out the stick, to prove it. Immediately he crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. He tossed the pack over the banister. He dusted off his hands, snatched the stick, and examined it closely.

  “Come here,” he ordered Elif, who’d turned crimson. He gripped her cheeks and planted a kiss on her forehead. His big hand smacked me on the neck, playful-like. “Dear God,” he said. “I’m now immortal. A great-grandfather.”

  He reached for the bottle of rakia—these days always on the table beside him. Then he seemed to reconsider. “We can’t trust a piece of plastic. This is serious business.”

  The next day, we were in town at the doctor’s—the same one who’d saved me from the tick, the same one who’d given Grandpa the fake medical papers to delay his trial.

  “Comrade teacher, you can absolutely trust this piece of plastic. But I’ll do you one better.”

  The ultrasound machine, he said; his nephew had brought it from Munich. So what if a horse doctor had used it there? He let Elif lie down on the couch and Grandpa and I stepped to the side, so she could expose her stomach. The doctor squirted gel from a tube, smeared it with the transducer. Elif shrieked with the cold.