Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

People yelled, others were laughing, and I watched the car, a jeep really, fly through the beach toward the dancing. Not sure why, I started running. I tripped and rolled in the sand, sprinted faster. A dull sickness lodged itself in my stomach. The jeep, like the one Orhan had driven, had stopped not twenty feet from the dancing and the crowd had broken up the circle, blinded by headlights.

I can’t say I was surprised to see the imam climb out. All night, I’d been seeing him in more than a few faces. But to see my grandfather come out of the jeep surprised me. He stood by the front bumper and for a while fought the wind to light a cigarette. The bagpipes were still shrieking, the drummers still beating, and the nestinari kept dancing, but no one watched them. All eyes were on the imam, while his eyes were searching. He hadn’t said one word even and his wife was already walking in his direction. Her head down, she climbed in the back of the jeep, inside the old, wretched cocoon. She untied her headscarf and spread it over her face to hide it.

Elbowing my way through, I found Elif and Aysha. They held hands, completely frozen in the headlights. And Baba Mina stood beside them, equally frozen. The imam was only a shadow and wind swept the sand at his feet in black puffs. Behind him, Grandpa was smoking, the tip of his cigarette a glowing ember.

“I’m not going,” Elif whispered. I’m not sure if she meant for her father to hear it, or me, or if it was to herself she was speaking. But other people heard her.

“Hey, bro,” someone called to the imam, “leave the girl to do her thing.”

“It’s a free country!”

“I’m not going,” Elif said a second time, louder. I felt like she wanted me to reach for her hand and hold it; to give her strength and courage; to pin her down like an anchor. And yet I couldn’t move a muscle. And so she drifted.

“Come on, man!” someone yelled, maybe at me, maybe at the imam. Head down, like her mother, Elif walked toward the bright lights, toward the cocoon she too had been weaving for many years.

By now people were booing and even the bagpipes couldn’t silence their whistles.

Then, just as she had walked past her father, just as she was but a few feet from the idling jeep, Elif turned back and sprinted. Before I knew it her lips were on my lips and the crowd was cheering. And even after our kiss was over, even after Elif had taken her seat by her mother, the crowd kept clapping.

It was a moment hard to rival. Or would have been, if not for Aysha. A woman cried and then another and I turned around just in time to see the little girl running across the embers, barefooted. At once the music fell silent, the nestinari as stunned on the side as the rest of us. We could hear under Aysha’s feet the embers crunching as once more she crossed the circle. But before she had crossed it a third time, a man picked her up in his arms and hushed her: Grandpa, his boots kicking coals on his way out.

People were booing louder and for a second I feared a riot.

“Come on, Grandma,” he told Baba Mina, and took her hand when she gave it. Then he stopped in his tracks for a moment.

“Get Aysha’s shoes, will you?” he told me, without turning.

DYADO DACHO RARELY LOST to the bus driver. But that night, the dice betrayed him. It was as though an invisible hand had interfered, he told me later, casting precisely the values that wouldn’t suit him. Before long, he’d squandered his pocket money and it was still some ways to the evening prayer. He knew he had to buy us more time to get the plan in motion and so he kept betting — first his Slava watch, then his pension, and after this Baba Mina’s. But the invisible hand kept rolling bad dice and sending, against all sensible judgment, for more and more shots of mint and mastika . Meanwhile, like never, the driver stayed sober. He was bleeding Dyado Dacho dry, that vampire, and he knew better than to allow some herb infusions to throw off his good fortune.

At last the imam sang from the minaret and the driver rubbed the cash in his beard. He tried on the Slava to see if it fit him — it didn’t, his wrist was much meatier, but he still took it — and promised to come back for the pensions tomorrow. He said goodnight, despite Dyado Dacho’s drunken protestations — he was now willing to bet all his chickens, his house even — and made for the bus on the square.

By the time the driver had rushed back to the coffeehouse crying that his bus had been stolen, the imam was already there looking for his runaway women. It was then that the invisible hand jabbed Dyado Dacho in the ribs like a fireplace poker. So aggravated was he with losing, he simply couldn’t resist spitting out some venom. “You’ll never find your women,” he told the imam, “and your bus,” he said to the driver, “it was I who stole it!” Next thing he knew, they were shaking him down for more information. But he was dead drunk and damn glad to have ordered so many mastikas and so, passed out, he told them nothing.

“He told them everything, the old fool,” Grandpa said on the terrace the day after the fire dancing. I’d woken up late, my temples throbbing, and was now wrestling the chicken soup he’d cooked me. I could see my own reflection, distorted and pitiful, in the two fingers of fat on the surface — a glistening mirror Grandpa expected me to consume as a cure for my hangover.

Neither the imam nor the driver understood much of what Dyado Dacho was saying. But much wasn’t needed — he’d blurted out nestinari and dancing and then the American took them!

“Ey, my boy,” Dyado Dacho cried later when I approached him, “the hand must have made me say it.” How an invisible hand could make a man say things, I wasn’t certain, but I didn’t press him.

“The imam came here to look for you,” Grandpa said, and motioned me to hurry with the soup before the fat on the surface had turned chewy. The pitiful reflection tore when my spoon poked it. Hungry as I was, I couldn’t eat a bite even.

“ My boy’s sleeping , I told him,” Grandpa went on. “ He’s been having a headache . I was ready for a fistfight when he tried to wake you. Then I saw red. I shouted: Come give him a kiss if you want to. Maybe that’ll cure his headache . I felt like a proper fool, my boy, when I saw the curtain flapping out that window.” Around this time a horn had sounded from the road, and when they stepped out, the military jeep was waiting. When and how the imam had called for it, Grandpa didn’t know, but the man was connected. More than a few times Grandpa had told me, this side of the Strandja belonged to the imam.

When the imam asked where the nestinari were dancing, where I’d taken his women, Grandpa told him he had no idea. But it was no good pretending. The imam had seen Elif’s jacket in my room, on the hanger. So Grandpa said, Get in the jeep, I’ll take you .

The rest — I had lived through it.

“You’ve been banned from the bus for life now,” Grandpa said. He took my soup impatiently and started slurping. It was Grandpa who’d driven the bus from the beach back to the square — myself and Baba Mina drunk and sleeping, shoulder to shoulder. Why the driver hadn’t come in the jeep to begin with, I wasn’t certain.

“There is more in the pot if you want some.” Baba Mina had given him the chicken this morning — in lieu of a thank you , or maybe an I’m sorry .

“I have no chickens to give you,” I said, my eyes on the table. “Go ahead, say that you warned me.”

But he asked me to look up. “You made a choice, and for you it paid off. Besides, it was a thrill of a pleasure to see the imam the way I saw him when Elif kissed you. And then when Aysha sprinted across those dead coals.”