Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

So you eat your soup out of an earthen pot now, with a wooden spoon. You drink well water out of a jar, and let’s be honest, the girl you go to bed with is both beautiful and exotic. You whisper your troubles into a human skull and at your feet are bones, the bones of Thracians, Greeks, and Romans, Slavs, Bulgarians, and Turks, like stepping stones that lead you to yourself. Or that’s what you’ve tried to turn them into anyway. Upon their bones, you are one thousand meters tall. But on your own? Be honest. No sky is really balanced on your crown. You hold no winds or clouds or suns. Bow all you want; make fists and pout. Nothing will happen. Except, in sixty years’ time, at most, you’ll leave a skull, like all the others.

It doesn’t matter if the skull you hold was once a man’s or a woman’s. It doesn’t matter if her eyes were blue or dark, if her nose was hooked or snubbed. To you all skulls are one skull and only the faces change like masks. Admit it, even now, you feel so proud of this revelation.

And hungry. God, what would you give, right now, for a hunk of bread and white cheese, for a fresh tomato with sunflower oil and a sprig of basil? For a jar of that cool well water? But that’s life for you, isn’t it, amerikanche ? Its hunger for bread and cheese puts all the rest to sleep — shame, dignity, regrets — they all disappear when life is hungry. And so, you go on living life.

“I swear, American. You are the weirdest fucker.”

It took me some time to figure out where I was. To realize Elif was standing outside the nest, not even an elbow’s length away. “You’ve been talking to yourself for five minutes straight,” she said. “How high are you exactly?”

A thousand meters high. And on my head the sky— Instead, I told her to leave me be.

“No chance,” she said. “You’ve got my stash.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“You did already.”

“Elif,” I said. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her a hundred other things that seemed important. But would she understand me?

“Why are you here?” I said instead.

“Isn’t it obvious? I’ve come to steal you.”

AND SO SHE DID. Back at the house I gobbled bread and cheese and tomatoes, sweeter than I had imagined — and then, without a word to Elif or Grandpa, retreated to my room and slept like the slaughtered.

I awoke terribly thirsty. The roosters started crowing from the Muslim hamlet, the sky grew a thinner dark, and only then did I realize Elif was in bed beside me, facing the wall, as far away as she could be lying.

Down by the well, I drank straight from the bucket. My throat iced up. My stomach swelled heavy. The chain tolled against the well walls, with a splash the bucket tumbled, and a pair of wings flapped in the blue dawn. Beyond the rows of tomatoes Saint Kosta took one, two quick steps and, wings beating, lifted a meter or two in the air. Then he was back on the ground, his left wing trembling, unable to extend like the other.

“Healed crooked,” Grandpa said in a hoarse voice behind me. I hadn’t seen him until now — on the bench, smoking. Most likely he’d spent the night out here. “This too is my fault,” he said, and when he stood up cigarette ash poured from his lap in a gray shower.

I did not speak to him for the next three days, nor did I exchange more than a few words with Elif. Things were bad between us. We were headed in a dangerous direction and we both knew it. Each morning, I felt sicker. My head hurt and so did my muscles. By the fourth day my forehead was burning. And that fire, strangely, was what would bring us salvation.

“Is this a mole?” I asked her on the fifth day. The heat of her breath pricked my back like needles while she was checking.

“A mole?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

* * *

“Comrade teacher,” the doctor in town told Grandpa, “we could play a game of darts on his back, it’s that clear.” Then he called the nurse into his office so she too could see it.

“Textbook,” the nurse said, and the doctor asked if I would let him take a picture. His nephew had brought him a Polaroid from Germany and he was building an album of significant cases. He flapped the picture a few times and on it my back and the red rash came into existence. A fist-sized scarlet center, a circle of clear skin around it, and then another, larger scarlet circle. Classic presentation. No sense in wasting money on blood work.

“And the tick?” he asked.

“I burned it,” Elif said from the corner.

“I would have liked to take its picture,” the doctor said, and stuck a thermometer under my armpit. “Why did you wait a whole week after you found it? You should have come sooner.”

“We thought he was acting,” said Grandpa.

The doctor pulled out the thermometer and read it. “Thirty-eight-point-eight. A damn good actor.”

“And muscle soreness,” I made sure to tell him. “And my head is splitting.”

“Textbook,” the doctor said, and wrote me a prescription. Ten days on doxycycline and I’d be tip-top.

“Curious luck, comrade teacher,” he told Grandpa at the doorway. “To come all the way from America and get bitten.” But that was the tick for you. A nondiscriminatory creature. American, Bulgarian, Turkish, or Gypsy. The tick didn’t care what you were, really. All the same, it still bit you.

“We should learn from the tick,” the doctor told us on parting. And once more lamented he hadn’t taken its picture.

* * *

We returned to Klisura with the sun low above dark hills. Dust from the construction site rolled down the road in clouds of silver. Each time the wind gusted, the clouds’ form shifted. Like mischievous spirits they whirled around for attention, slapped our cheeks, pulled our hair and ears, stole the words from our lips and let the wind take them.

One such cloud spun like a funnel by the gates of the municipal building. Two meters tall, a hundred and fifty kilos heavy, his windy flesh branded with deep scars. He didn’t speak to me, he bellowed. What, I couldn’t decipher. When we passed by the old church, its bells started tolling. They had been taken to the city long ago, these bells, but all the same I heard them calling. I tasted their bitter copper. From every roof, from every nest the storks were staring. Their bills sounded like metal grinding on metal and when I looked up I saw not storks but men and women cluttered in the nests, stropping long knives, the men against their sashes, the women against their headscarves. Red sparks spilled in all directions and any minute now the village would catch fire. At our house, the clouds of silver kept reshaping until a girl stood in the courtyard. Thin like a black wick, she flapped her wings, tried to fly away, but couldn’t.

“We need to fix her wing,” I think I told Grandpa once they’d put me in bed. “We need to let her fly away.”

He jabbed a thermometer under my armpit and Elif slapped a stinking kerchief on my forehead. Vinegar trickled down my temples, cold like the fingers of the dead.

“Forty-one-point-six,” I heard Grandpa say. And when they asked me how I was feeling, I told them excellent, delighted. My sickness would fix us all . “Where is the tick?” I said. “I want to thank him.” Or maybe no one asked me. Maybe I said nothing like this.

THE RUMOR TRAVELED through Klisura like wind from Turkey, loud, unyielding. The teacher’s boy was burning with Saint Kosta’s fever. Before too long our gates were crowded with women. They’d come from the Muslim hamlet to see — what exactly? The American, wiggling across a sweat-soaked mattress, his lips spilling fire, his feet taking frantic steps in the air? And the noise of his teeth like the bills of two storks fighting? Or were they here to see the man for whom Elif had stood up to her own father?