Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

“Yeah, oh yeah,” Elif yelled, her voice bouncing distorted in the boulders. With a simple smile Orhan watched her run toward a rock and attempt to climb it. She threw pebbles at another rock, then tried to stride the remnants of a wall, flapping her arms on either side for balance.

“I worry that she will make a bad wife,” he said when she had sunk into the night, and only her yelping could be heard. I was just having another sip and after that I had another.

“Pardon?” I said in English, but he didn’t seem to hear.

“I feel it is my duty to correct her. To save her from the Sheytan. But still I worry she is more trouble than it’s worth.”

MORE THAN TWO AND A HALF MILLENNIA AGO, the priestesses of Dionysus tore piece by piece their sacrificial prey. “Right where you sit,” Elif said, and leaned closer to the flame so that her face ignited orange. “But there is more.”

Of course there was. And now that the rakia had untied her tongue she let it out with gusto. The year was 1981 and Bulgaria was celebrating thirteen hundred years since its founding. The Ministry of Culture, headed by none other than the daughter of the general secretary of the Communist Party, was proudly unveiling one monument after another, new palaces, new buildings all through the land. One day, amid the frantic celebrations, a man from the Strandja Mountains showed up at the ministry’s gates. “Take me to the minister,” he demanded. “I’ve got something she must see.” And though his face was scrubby, his clothes ragged, dusty from the road, they rushed him right in. This man was Mustafa the Treasure Hunter, a man who knew his way not just through the hills of the Strandja, but also through her past; a man who’d helped the ministry discover more than a few cartloads of Ottoman and Thracian gold.

Now before the minister, behind the locked doors of her office, Mustafa pulled out a piece of cow hide. A map to a treasure the likes of which they’d never seen before.

“Ottoman?” the minister inquired. Mustafa shook his head. “Then Thracian?”

He shrugged. He wasn’t certain, but if the men from whom he’d bought the map could be believed the treasure was older still.

“Older than the Thracians?” The minister sneered.

“If the men can be believed.”

She didn’t bother asking what men these were. So that the treasure hunter would lead them to the ancient secrets, he had to be allowed to keep his own.

“She was a fine lady,” Elif said now of the minister of culture, and slurped rakia , half of which we’d already killed. “Even my father won’t say a bad word about her and when it comes to the Communists he doesn’t spare his curses. A cultured woman, he says. But her head, he says, wasn’t well screwed onto her shoulders. She was into that mysticism stuff. Flying to India; meditating days on end in a cave. Imagine this, the daughter of the general secretary of the Communist Party, eating nothing but bean sprouts and chatting with gurus? She was a rebel, like me. That’s why I like her.”

At this Orhan grunted. But he said nothing, only raked the fire with his knife and blew on the flame.

So what the minister of culture did with the treasure map was only the most logical thing she could do.

“She took the map to Baba Vanga. You know who Baba Vanga was, don’t you, amerikanche ?”

Of course I did. What Bulgarian didn’t? One day when Vanga was a little girl, just after World War I had ended, a sudden twister of red desert sand picked her off the ground outside her village and carried her the way a thermal column carries a migrant stork. The peasants found her in a field, blind from the dust and sand. But though the twister had taken Vanga’s eyes, it had given her a different kind of sight. For decades, Baba Vanga was Bulgaria’s — no, Eastern Europe’s — most renowned clairvoyant. And so, quite naturally, the treasure map was brought for her to see.

But Baba Vanga refused to even touch the piece of hide. “It’s very bad,” she told her high-ranking visitors. A long, long time ago tall, strapping men had crossed the sea from Egypt. Men with black hair, and gold masks on their faces, and many slaves. The slaves dug a grave and buried in it a royal woman, and then were all put to the sword. The tomb was sealed and hidden. Inside it, to this day even, were chunks of gold and awesome riches, and in her coffin the royal woman lay. She held a scepter and rolled at her feet was a papyrus, which spoke of how things had been thousands of years back and how they would be, thousands of years in the future.

“Who was this woman?” I said. The wind had turned colder and so I huddled closer to the flame.

“Bastet,” Elif whispered. “The Egyptian goddess of cats.” She watched me a long time, without a word.

“Fuck off,” I said. “Get out of here.”

Orhan stirred. “It’s true. I mean, the Communists believed it true.” He looked about and over his shoulder, as if to make sure no Communist was there to hear him. “They started digging, right here in the ruins. My uncle told me of how the soldiers who dug the hole all got really sick. Their hair was falling off in handfuls.”

“And did they find anything?” I asked, so close to the fire now my eyes watered.

“Death,” said Elif. I tried to see if she was joking, but her face betrayed only pleasure — from being here, with me and with Orhan, from saying the things she said and watching me absorb them. “A month or so after the digs began, the minister died in suspicious circumstances. A number of key officials involved in the excavations took their lives. And those who didn’t die, the Committee for State Security locked away, for good.”

“After this the hole was sealed,” Orhan said. “My uncle tells me they poured concrete in it for fifteen hours straight. And that was that. Goodnight, I say, sweet dreams. Now let’s go back, before they’ve caught me off my post.”

But when he tried to stand, Elif pulled him down by the lapel.

“A coward,” she said. “That’s what you’ve always been. Learn from the American. He’s not afraid.”

“Oh yes, I am,” I said. But not because of her gibberish. And if she had caught the flash in Orhan’s eyes, she too would have grown fearful. Instead, she gently swept her palm across the rocky ground.

“I wonder what she looked like, this goddess of cats. I bet she drove men crazy with just the flitter of her lashes, the flick of her tail. Imagine, to be buried with such high honors. And then the slaves who dug your grave — all put to the sword. I bet it was the goddess who drove the Thracian women mad. I bet they came to dance here not in honor of drunk Dionysus, but in hers.”

Right there, could I see the trough the Thracians had dug in the rock? That’s where they mixed their sacred wine, and then they drank it, the naked, mad priestesses of the demented god. And tore to pieces the sacrificial goats. “And even men,” Elif said, and her eyes glistened. If the men were stupid enough to spy on their dances. “I bet you two are dumb enough,” she said, and laughed. “I bet you two would have been first in shreds.”

I guess by now she was pretty drunk. But so was I. Or else I would have told her to stop, if not for my sake, then for Orhan’s.

“My head’s started to hurt,” he said abruptly. “American, is your head hurting?” But he didn’t wait for my answer. “I hate this place. Never once have I seen a snake in the stones, a bird in the bush, a beetle in the dust. All living things hate it and stay away.”

“Well, I love it,” Elif said. “And you, like your whole family, are a coward.”

“Let’s go,” I said, and tried to stand up only to plop down on my ass again.