Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

She looked about the room in silence. “Orhan has been detained,” she said at last. “Locked up in solitary confinement. But his father will slay a ram and grease up the right people and he’ll be out before his beard has grown in length a third of yours.”

“And you find this amusing?” I asked, disgusted, and in embarrassment scratched at my scruffy face.

“I find it hysterical. Like the rest of my life, which is so packed with jokes.”

Here was a good one — she was no longer allowed to see her sister. Aysha was now alone, locked up in her room, and there were not enough rams in the whole wide world we could slay to bribe her father. “He is the only one allowed to see her. He feeds her, bathes her, in her room. And I won’t be surprised,” she said, “if my mother joins them shortly, the way she’s been burning with the Christian flame.”

Other girls in the village were burning too. It was a proper craze now, only two days before the feast of Saint Constantine and Saint Elena.

“I wish I too were burning,” she said. “I’d grab this Saint Kosta by his beard and then — hold tight, Elif! — either he lifts me up to the clouds or I pummel his mug into the dirt. There is no third way.”

I watched her fuming, prettier now in her spite than she had ever seemed before. The short locks of her hair were drying up and curling and she resembled a ball of needles I wanted, no, felt compelled to hold. Here she was, crying out for help — a cornered, ferocious little beast — and all I thought of was how softly her breath had touched my face.

“So how do I compare?” I asked her. She blinked, surprised at the question and my tone. Side by side, I said. Orhan the shepherd, the soldier whose madness equaled only hers — and me, the boring foreign boy?

“Please stop,” she said.

But I kept going. He was tall, I wasn’t. He was handsome, I — not so much. He was daring, and spontaneous and brave … Please stop, she said. Why should I? I could be just as vile as she had been. I simply had to know—

“Well!” she cried. “You compared well, all right?” And only then did she look me in the eyes, hers feverish and frightened. “You are safe, all right? Dependable. But you’ll be gone tomorrow and I’ll be here.”

To this I had no comment. I asked her why she’d come.

“To say I’m sorry. For a moment I’d thought — here is someone. My ticket out. But you’re right. I’m crazy. And crazy people see things that aren’t there.”

I don’t believe I’ve ever wanted to kiss a girl as much as I did then. I wanted to hush her, to tell her I too had seen things that weren’t there, but could be. A strong imagination, I wanted to say, could wish things into existence.

She spoke. “But this is not the only reason. I came to ask for help.”

I asked how I could help her and for the first time her lips twisted in something that might have been a smile. “Not you,” she said.

BUT GRANDPA WOULDN’T HEAR IT. “Elif,” he said, and pushed away the page he was writing. “You know I care for you.”

“Then prove it,” she cried, yet when she spoke again her tone had softened. She did not want Grandpa to slay more roosters, nor did she want him to bloody his hands with magic fires. He had chosen to stay away from the nestinari , whatever his reasons, and she respected that. But he had to tell her where she could find them.

“Find whom?” I asked from the threshold.

Back in the day, sometime in the mid-sixties, most all Christians had left Klisura and moved to the city. There had been two entire apartment complexes in Burgas full of Klisurans.

“Tell me, Grandpa,” Elif said again. “Where did the nestinari go once they left Klisura?”

He waved his hand as if to chase away a gnat. Why should he tell her?

“So I can steal my father’s Lada tomorrow. So I can load my sister in it and take her to the nestinari . So they can cure her.”

He hushed her with kindness I didn’t fully believe. He told her to stop throwing oil into the fire. No one could cure her sister, because her sister wasn’t sick — she was only acting. As was everyone else in the village, including her mother. “You want to help? Then ignore them.”

“The way you ignored the two girls from the upper hamlet? Were they acting too, Grandpa? Convincing actresses they were, right down to their graves.”

Those girls, Grandpa said, they were a different story. Those girls—

But now it was her turn to cut him off. They must have gone somewhere, the nestinari , some other village, and she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to find them.

“You won’t find them here,” Grandpa stuttered, his kindness gone to rot. “Because they all crawled back across the border, the serpents. And stayed there, in Turkey.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “There must be others left.”

I stood between them, ready to end this quarrel. Grandpa had turned as yellow as the paper on which he wrote, and I worried for his blood pressure. But before I’d spoken, Elif grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “ Amerikanche , you have to ask him.”

“ Amerikanche , you’ll ask me nothing,” Grandpa said — no, cried out in fury. “You, American, will stay out of this mess. And you, Elif, here are some points for you to mull over.” He took a clean sheet and stabbed a line with his pen, as though underlining invisible text. “Your father is punishing your sister so he may punish you and get to me.” He scratched another line. “You’re punishing my boy to get back at your father. And for what? What will you prove?” And then another. “Or did your father send you here? So he may get his precious land and harvest winds for money? Leave my boy be, Elif,” he said, and circled the lines. “Go home and don’t come back.”

By now she was crying. Her sobs were so quiet I didn’t even notice when they stopped. “All right,” she said, and wiped her cheeks. She shed the wet blanket to the floor like a second skin and without looking up rushed out the door.

“I can’t believe you, old man,” I cried. Were land and ruined houses more important to him than a little girl’s life? Was he honestly refusing to help the daughters, so as to punish their father?

I caught up with Elif two houses down the road. Of course, melodramatically, it was still raining. I told her to stop, and when she didn’t, I seized her hand and spun her around.

“These girls from the upper hamlet,” I said. “What happened to them?”

“What do you think? They were sick with Saint Kosta’s fever and then they died.”

But how? If it was all in their heads, all an act for attention?

“You said it best, amerikanche . A strong imagination can wish things into existence.”

She tried to wriggle out of my grip, but I wouldn’t let her.

“I’ll help you find the nestinari . I’ll make him tell me where they went.”

She shook her head. “He’s right,” she said, almost shouting over the slashing of the rain. “I won’t bother you again.”

I’m certain she had seen my kiss coming from a mile away and still she acted surprised.

“Please don’t,” she said, but it was only after she’d let me kiss her a second time that she broke free from my grip and sank into the rain.

“I REMEMBER I was pulling water from the well when the man called me, right there from the road. It hadn’t even been a full month since I’d returned to Klisura, so three years ago, then. I remember it was noontime and the end of May, but the sun was August sun already.”

“Are you the teacher?” the man called, and Grandpa told him yes, he’d been a teacher once. Come into the shade, he told the man, under the trellis. A sweatier man Grandpa had never seen. He wore a sleeveless jacket, goatskin, with white and black spots. And his mustache was as thick as his forearms. “I’m so thirsty I could drink a river,” the man said, and Grandpa filled up the jar from the bucket. The man drank it and shook his head. “This isn’t helping.” He set the jar aside, plunged his head right in the bucket, and held it underwater so long Grandpa thought he might have drowned. When at last the man shot up, his lungs wheezed and he looked around, face flushed and mustache dripping muddy streams. “Teacher,” he said, “my girls are dying and you have got to save them.” He’d come all the way from the upper hamlet, right over the hill somewhere, to take Grandpa back with him to their sickbed.