Miroslav Penkov: Stork Mountain

We walked the dark streets like thieves. The snow crunched under our boots, the frost bit our faces. No light in any window, and not a soul. Not even the dogs were out this early. The scarf on my mouth was solid ice by the time we reached the butcher’s.

“ Dobrutro, drugaryo uchitel! ” the butcher would say in greeting and rush us in through the back door, lest anyone see us. “Good morning, comrade teacher!” He’d give me a playful pinch, and for a long time the trail of blood he’d smeared would burn my frozen cheek. The carcasses of two or three freshly slaughtered pigs would hang among a forest of empty hooks. The butcher would strop the knife on his belt. “For you, comrade teacher, only the best.”

He’d wrap the chops in a gigantic sheet of brown paper and I would open the netted sack. “Let me throw a chop on the grill,” the butcher might say. “You sit in the back and get warm.”

But Grandpa wouldn’t have it. “Thank you. You’ve done enough.”

He paid the butcher and the butcher acted embarrassed, but always took the money. “Of course he takes it,” Grandpa said when I asked him once. “Of course we pay. We’re not ungrateful. We aren’t greedy.”

We’d slip out in the dark and make our way to another alley, to some other entrance in the back. A steaming loaf of bread, a jar of yogurt, a bag of milk. The netted sack swelled up with our catch. We hid it inside the school bag I carried on my back as a decoy and then, like poachers dragging forbidden seines, snuck home.

Dawn would be breaking by the time we reached the apartment complex.

“Someone’s up early,” a neighbor might say, and hurry out of the elevator, buttoning up her coat, putting on her mittens, bracing herself for a few hours in the line. “Is this what you’re teaching him, comrade teacher? To use the back door, while we honest people wait in lines like fools?”

I watched my grandpa’s face turn red.

“We live in times of wolves,” he’d say once we were safe inside the elevator. And then an hour later he might add, “A man must seek connections to other men. Wolves may be loners. Men must not.”

It was this advice of Grandpa’s that I took to heart during my first few years in America. So what if in the beginning I didn’t speak the language? So what if at school some children mocked my home-knit sweaters, corduroy pants, tassel loafers? The language could be learned, the wardrobe replaced. No bully can bring you down, when just last year in Bulgaria you fought a grizzly on the street. His Gypsy owners, not having any means to buy him food, had shooed him off and into town. At first we fought, then we became comrades. To this day, each month I send him a jar of American honey in the mail.

I was exotic, interesting, enchanting. An heir of Olympic heroes. A cosmonaut. A weapons expert. Boys wanted to be my friends. Girls dropped little love notes in my bag. By high school no one believed my lies, but then I had no reason to keep telling any — I’d followed Grandpa’s advice to a T, established strong connections, made many friends. And then I left for college, and for the first time, or so it felt, I found myself completely disconnected. No friends, pitiful grades, student loans hanging over my head like swords. Maxed-out credit cards, debt collectors calling. What else is there to say? Comrade Bear was dead and there was no one left now to receive my jars of honey.

* * *

When I was six, Grandpa took me to his native village to meet the oldest man on earth.

“I am a hundred years old and who are you?” the old man said.

“Your great-grandson,” I answered, petrified, and mumbled the name we shared.

“I never liked that name,” he said. He was sitting up in bed, propped on a throne of red-and-white checkered pillows. The sealed windows focused the sun on him and gave him a blinding glow. The room was stifling, but he was fully dressed — wool jacket dyed bluer than the sky; thick pants and booties as black as the fertile fields outside the village. He turned his head this way and that, bared two rows of perfect yellow teeth, and let his milky eyes fidget in their sockets. “So you’ve remembered you have a father, eh?” he said to Grandpa, whose palms were melting holes in my shoulders.

When he had finished signing whatever papers Grandpa had brought for him to sign, the old man called me over to his bed. I still remember the stench of naphthalene that rose up not just from the wool of his clothes but from his ancient flesh.

“You’ll never live to be as old as me,” he said. “Whatever you think of doing, I’ve already done it. Wherever you think of going, I’ve already been and returned. And it was nothing special.”

He raked my hair, then groped my face — my forehead, nose, and chin — his hand as cold as the belly of a catfish I’d once poked. I watched Grandpa in terror, but did not dare move even when the ancient man stuck his salty fingers in my mouth. He traced the gaps where teeth were missing and pushed against the ones that rocked. Then, as unexpected as lightning in the winter, he pinched a rocking tooth, yanked it out, and ate it.

The blood never washed out completely from my shirt.

That afternoon, Grandpa took me outside the village, to see the fertile fields.

“Don’t begrudge the old fool,” he said. “The old are jealous of the young. The living are frightened of the dying. But sooner or later they all converge.”

Stalks of plentiful wheat splashed with the wind around us. We had waded in a sea of gold. Grandpa broke off an ear and munched on the grains. His eyes watered, but he gave no sign he was ashamed.

“This land was ours once,” he said. “A hundred acres.”

I didn’t have to ask him who owned the land now. Even at six, I knew.

But then, two years later, the Communist Party collapsed. And a few years after that, when I was a sophomore in high school, a package arrived from Bulgaria — a short letter and a box for matches. Inside the matchbox lay a pinch of soil. Our land had been returned.

It was this land, or at least my share of twenty acres, that now I had returned to sell.

THE ENDLESS THRACIAN FIELD had ended. Its flatness had been replaced by oaks in youthful foliage — tall, venerable trees keeping watch, like sentries to the mountain. There was no more sand in the air. Rusty patches were scattered across the road, which snaked gently upward through the hills of the Strandja and grew narrower the higher we climbed. The holes turned to fissures, the fissures to crevasses, and soon we crossed entire stretches where the pavement had been eroded and washed away by rain. Each time the bus sank in a fissure, my teeth buzzed. The dentures of the old men and women chattered like the bills of giant birds, and for an instant I remembered how, many years ago, all passengers, my parents and I included, had clapped when the pilot landed the Boeing safely on the Ontario runway. A moment was repeating itself. And with the chatter of teeth and dentures we entered Klisura.

I was last to step out at the small square. The sun, though past its peak, was still high above the hills. A strong gust threw the smell of smoke in my face. Even from here I could hear the wind whistling in the treetops. Up the road, Red Mustache limped toward his home, holding his cap so the gusts wouldn’t steal it. Falling behind, ten, fifteen, twenty feet, the woman in black carried not just her basket but also his tarpaulin sack on her back. Two veiled, shalwared women who’d ridden the bus with us were making their way in the opposite direction, across a rusted bridge over a river whose waters I heard but couldn’t see.

“I bet you are that boy,” someone said behind me. The old man was smoking on the curb and with each gust the tip of his cigarette glowed brighter. The chicken flapped under his armpit and he stroked its feathers. “The one who never calls.”