Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

A wave of irritation washed over me. After all, I had been the one to mock the driver for keeping the key in the ignition. Now, as a reaction, he’d either taken it with him, which I doubted, considering how afraid he was of losing it when drunk, or hidden it somewhere in the cabin. So we searched, in the flame of Elif’s lighter. A pair of oversized green dice hung from the rearview mirror, so I shook them, hopeful, but nothing rattled inside. Every so often, the flame burned Elif’s thumb and we sat in darkness while she blew on the flint wheel to cool it. Then there was light for a few more seconds.

“Piece-of-shit lighter,” she cursed at one point. “We’ll run out of gas soon.”

A tiny icon of the Virgin Mary was taped to the dashboard, so I untaped it and looked for the key on its back. A faded picture of long-haired Hristo Stoichkov in his Barcelona jersey. A clipping of Lepa Brena and a green pine tree that stank of cigarette smoke and naphtha. And then, just when Elif flicked on the light one final time before the gas ran out, I saw it — a dark outline, only faintly showing behind a glorious picture. Samantha Fox, patron saint of all bus drivers from my childhood. And tucked behind her magnificent bosom — the key to our freedom.

* * *

That I could drive the bus came as a surprise to Elif. So I told her: my father had taught me how to drive stick shift; for him, no real man drove automatic. And if she didn’t mind, this time I wanted to be the one to drive us. The plan was mine and I intended—

“Watch the road!” she yelped behind me, though I had taken the turn quite nicely. We were crossing a patch of eroded pavement and that’s why the bus rattled. But the farther away from Klisura we drove, the smoother the road became; the less wild the oaks on both sides, the softer the wind that shook them.

“Isn’t that something,” Elif sneered, because she too had noticed the world grow less feral around us. I wondered if the others too would notice. Baba Mina rocked and mumbled and so did Aysha, oblivious to the outside, every now and then stopping to synchronize her rocking with the old woman’s. But Elif’s mother was paying attention. Of that I was certain, though she sat in her seat as still as a stone tree.

How long had it been, I wondered, since she had last left Klisura? Ten years? Or maybe twenty? I tried to imagine what she was feeling. All her life, like a silk moth, she had weaved for herself another woman, a shell to contain her passions, hatreds, and fears. A shell in which she could hide safely. It was this cocoon that had learned to absorb a bad word, a slap to the face, a great disappointment. But in time, the shell had turned into a prison and with her passions, hatreds, and fears, this poor woman too had found herself devoured.

The road twisted beneath us, rough and uneven, and the rearview mirror shook wildly. Elif’s mother sat stiff behind me, but in the mirror her reflection jumped and twisted. It occurred to me that the mirror showed her as she was truly. No shells. No prisons. Just a frightened woman, trembling with excitement. A runaway, if merely for a short while, her own, true mistress. And I knew then that beneath the stiffness this woman was fighting a giant struggle — to crawl back in the shell, afraid and defeated, or to step outside, a victor.

“Watch the road, damn it!” Elif cried again, and this time our turn was less gentle. I offered an apology, blamed the road, and was glad when soon it evened out and with it my driving. Earlier that day, I had studied my tourist map in careful detail, though in reality the chance for an error wasn’t that big. The road led to the town of Sinemorets, and all we had to do was follow it to the first exit, then drive down another, smaller road that would take us to the mouth of the Veleka.

“My daddy also taught me driving,” a thin voice said over my shoulder. “I too am a good driver.” I realized this was the first time I’d heard Aysha speak, save for the small thank you when I’d given her an apple. Her voice was pretty, like Elif’s, but cleaner the way springwater is cleaner than water from a river. So I let her sit in my lap and her small hands gripped the wheel and she said I too should hold it just to be on the safe side. She’d never driven a bus before, but she’d driven the Lada. And she’d never before seen the Black Sea. Had I?

“I’ve never seen it,” I lied, and watched Elif watch me in the mirror.

“Are you excited to see it? I’m really excited.”

But it was sadness I felt, not excitement. I thought of Grandpa, whom I had lied to only an hour before. He’d asked me to play backgammon out on the terrace and I’d said my head ached, that I was tired. Goodnight, I’d said, and he’d looked at me with such hurt. I know you’re lying, his eyes had told me. I know you’re up to something.

All this time I’d worked hard to avoid one question, but now, as the road unfolded in the light of the high beams, it was this one question I kept on asking. What the hell was I doing? Aysha wasn’t sick; no saint had possessed her. She was anxious to see the Black Sea, not to jump in a fire. And if she’d seen it, as by now any girl her age should have, especially one who lived this close to the coast, none of this would have happened. And her mother wasn’t sick, nor was Baba Mina, an old and senile woman. I was the sick one. And Elif knew it. I could tell by her face in the mirror. And she knew another thing — how to make me sicker.

“You two look a great item,” Elif said, and came to the dashboard. She pushed the bus lighter deeper into its slot and then pressed the orange coil to the tip of her cigarette. “Keep your hands on the wheel where I can see them,” she said, “American boy,” and blew out smoke from her nostrils.

At first I thought she was joking.

“I’m joking,” she said. “Dear God, take it easy.”

But she wasn’t. She really was jealous.

“Aren’t you a stuck-up bastard,” she said when I refused to grace her with a smile, and going back to her seat she let out a fake laugh.

“I too would like a cigarette,” someone said behind me. Even when I saw her fixing the ends of her headscarf that didn’t really need fixing, I still didn’t believe it was their mother speaking. “It’s been twenty-two years,” she said when Elif passed her the smoking cigarette. Then a cough choked her.

“American,” her voice wheezed once the cough was over. “If the radio’s working, I sure would like to hear it.”

I fumbled with the knob, terribly excited, awfully happy for her. It was hard to lock onto a steady station. The same frequency gave us a Turkish voice one moment, a Greek the next. Even here an invisible battle was being waged — for dominion over the very air we breathed. At last I managed to capture a decent transmission — Bulgarian folk music, rachenitsa , fast-paced, energetic.

“Is this good? Or should I keep searching?” I asked Elif’s mother.

“If you wish to,” she said. Then her voice dipped so much I barely heard it, but when she spoke again, her voice was more confident, louder, and she had stepped, for the first time, outside the cocoon that held her. “Wait. I like it this way. Leave it the way I like it.” And after this, she sat as before, but not at all the same.

We drove like this for fifteen minutes. Then, as the map had predicted, we came to an exit. The new road was so narrow, a car coming in the opposite direction would have had to pull over to let us pass. The pavement had given way to dirt and pebbles and again we shook and rattled.

Somewhere close in the dark the Via Pontica stretched northward. Or at least what little remained of that ancient Roman route, a road of tsars and great armies, so efficient in its layout that even the storks followed it in their journey. How many of the pebbles below us came from that old road? How many from crumbled fortresses and ruined houses? And in the dark, somewhere beside us, parallel to our movement, the Veleka River too moved toward the Black Sea. It had moved like this for thousands of years — before us, before the tsars or their armies — and it would move, much the same way, for thousands of years after we were done and dusted. The streams in Turkey had given it birth when there had been no Turkey. The streams in Bulgaria — fresh life, when there had been no Bulgaria. And in the end, the Black Sea took it the way it took all the rivers, without concern for what country they came from. In the end, it was all water changing form — from rain to river to sea to cloud back to rain again, an everlasting motion.