Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

“Elif?” I called more loudly. “Elif!”

My heart turned inside out. My feet and fingers grew deathly cold. But I wouldn’t have the chance to wander — the roar of an engine exploded in the night, and soon a globe of blinding light had locked me in my tracks, like a hare.

“Stay! Don’t move!” someone yelled in Bulgarian. I couldn’t lie on the ground, though I wanted to. I couldn’t even hold my hands up like the voice commanded. A giant man stepped from the light, an entirely black figure that grew larger the closer he neared. Captain Kosta, I thought, in my terror, in my confusion. “On your face,” the man screamed, and I recognized, undeniably, the Kalashnikov he carried. And so I took a bite of the mud, my nose an inch from the tips of his boots, and could say nothing, nothing at all, no matter how angrily he screamed.

Like a feather he picked me up; like a feather he carried me to the idling jeep. He leaned me against the back fender, and now that the light was not in my eyes I saw him better: a young man, a border soldier in full combat uniform and gear, his face running with sweat and mud in a grotesque mask. With each wipe of his hand, the mask twisted, changed form so that it looked like he was wearing many faces. “Who are you?” he was saying, pointing the Kalashnikov my way. And then the sound of laughter from a hut made him freeze. He turned. “Come out,” he yelled. “Hands in the air. Come out or I’ll shoot!”

The laughter chimed with the clarity of crystal glasses shattering to pieces. The sound of clapping hands drowned it momentarily and Elif stepped out from behind a ruined wall.

“Halt or I’ll shoot!” the soldier screamed, but she laughed and clapped and neared. And so he fired, rat-tat-tat right at her feet, and the mud boiled with the rounds. And then he seemed to recognize her; she laughed louder, and before he knew it she was hanging on his neck and kissing his lips.

“Elif, you little shit,” he yelled in Bulgarian, and pushed her away so hard she almost plopped on her back. “You little, little shit,” or something to that effect.

But she was in his arms again.

“It’s good to see you too,” she said, and faced me. “You were adorable,” she said. “So cute!”

I tried to move, but couldn’t. The soldier had handcuffed me to the jeep and I hadn’t even noticed when.

THE MATCH IGNITED and its tiny flame spread through the pile of sticks and straw. Our lungs filled up with smoke and, coughing, we huddled by the fire. Light pushed back the night, and heat spread through my bones, slowly, the way a snake devours its prey. We were sitting on solid rock, surrounded by boulders and remnants of ancient walls — I on one side of the flame, Elif and the soldier on the other.

“I could’ve shot him dead,” the soldier had cried out only a few minutes earlier. “Damn it, Elif, I could’ve shot you dead!”

“What luck that’d be!” She’d reached for his rifle, but he had slapped her hand away. “Get in the jeep!” Unlocking my cuffs, he’d asked, “And you? Have you no head on your shoulders? Or do you do all that she says?”

“We came to see the ruins,” she told him later, from the front seat. We were flying through the brush and in the back I felt as though we’d thrown ourselves, voluntarily and irrevocably, toward the bottom of a dried-up well.

“And here I thought you’d come to see me,” he said, and stepped on the gas harder. She put her hand on his, switching gears, and rubbed his knuckles.

“No way,” he said. “Do you know what’ll happen if they catch me off my post? No way. I hate that place.” But then he yanked the hand brake. The jeep skidded and we flew in a different direction.

“Get out,” he ordered once we reached the bottom of a cliff face. And after that we followed him uphill, without the flashlight, the sky still plastered, but the clouds thin and radiant with moonlight. The cliffs had softened in their edge; the wind blew colder the higher we ascended and tossed at me now the smell of damp earth, now that of the soldier’s sour sweat. The path was slabs of rock, and in the distance atop the hill were boulders, like the rocks at our feet, arranged artificially, remnants of what most likely had once been a Byzantine fortress.

“So who are you?” the soldier asked me now by the fire. The mud on his cheeks had dried and fissured and made him look as ancient as the rocks, and tall as he was, he seemed himself to be a boulder.

I told him who I was. He told me he would have never guessed.

“You speak well,” he said, “no accent,” and Elif snickered.

His name was Orhan, he said, and he was in the third month of his twelve-month mandatory army service, in case I wondered. He lived in a village a couple of hills to the east and he’d been lucky to get a post here on the border.

“Luck in the form of seven rams,” Elif said, “which his father slaughtered for the members of the draft committee.”

Orhan laughed a hearty laugh and raked the fire with his army knife. “My heart still hurts. What loss!”

“You think he’s joking,” Elif said, though I was thinking nothing of the sort. “But this boy loves his sheep. Tell him about your dreams !”

Orhan shifted on the ground. He poked the fire some more, turning the blade, blowing the sparks away from his face and from Elif’s.

“They aren’t really dreams as much as plans,” he said at last, but softly, like he was afraid that merely uttering the words would ruin things. “I’d like to close the cycle, you know? Not just herd the sheep. I’d like to apply for European funding and with the money build a proper farm — a large roofed space for the animals, a feeding belt, machines to milk them…”

“And that’s his dream.” Elif laughed.

“More like my plan,” he said, and stabbed the flames some more. “Hey, now,” he said suddenly with a smile. “It’s a good plan. And if it works, Elif, I’ll bathe you in milk. I’ll roll for you the softest bed of wool.”

“Wool makes me itchy,” she said. “And I get bloated from milk. But I might take you all the same.” She leaned her head against his shoulder, her eyes on mine. A stick crackled; the flame loomed taller and seemed to lick her face.

“As if I want someone like you,” he said, laughing. “A hedgehog in my pants.”

There was a reason Elif had brought me here, beyond the prank, beyond just showing me some ancient rubble. I watched her, prettier than she had ever seemed now that her cheek was on his shoulder, and something hurt, deep in my jaw and in my teeth, the way it hadn’t hurt for any other girl. And I was certain she read my hurt, because a smile had forged of her lips a sickle.

“My American friend,” she said, still leaning. “I’ve got the medicine for you.” And then she fished a plastic Coke bottle, sixteen ounces, out of her jacket and tossed it through the flame. I took three hurried gulps of brandy that set my throat afire and kicked my mind off the hurt, if only for a while. I tossed the bottle to Orhan, but he allowed it to bounce off his chest into the flame, from where the yelping Elif pulled it out barehanded.

“I don’t drink,” Orhan told me, while she was cursing that the rakia had gone to waste.

“Orhan here drinks only milk and water,” Elif said, dusting off the ash from the bottle. Its label had melted, and its sides had morphed into an odd shape, half girl, half something else. “The flesh of pigs disgusts him. He prays five times a day and once, during Ramadan, he swallowed a fruit fly by accident and then was sick with guilt for a year. Spent it in the mosque, with my father, chatting about the greatness of Allah. I bet my father wishes Allah had sent him not me but Orhan for a child.” She spoke like this for a while, trying in vain to unscrew the cap, which the fire had sealed. And when she’d gotten tired, she snatched the knife from Orhan, stabbed the bottle in the throat, and cut the top away. “See what you did?” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she meant me, or Orhan, or both of us. “See how you left me no choice? But we will drink it all.” Then she tossed the cut-off plastic into the flame and, in a veil of fuming blackness, brought her lips to the jagged rim. “Hey, Orhancho,” she said, “I love you, but why you have to be so crazy?” and then, dropping the knife on the ground, she handed me the bottle through the flame. Some of the liquor sloshed when I took it; the fire hissed and thicker tongues shot up at the sky.