Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

“An ocean,” I said, the first word I thought of.

So she pulled the ocean up to our chins, its sands and reefs, caves, sunken ships, gold treasures, sharks, whales, dolphins, and plankton.

“And this?” she said, and gripped one lock of her hair.

“A river.”

I pressed my lips to its waters, cool and lulling. How easy it was to change the world. All it took was to alter the way you saw it.

* * *

Elif’s hair had grown down past her shoulders. Beautiful, glimmering black tresses. She no longer had any desire to keep them at a boy’s length. “I feel feminine,” she said once. “For the first time, a woman.”

Some days we went to see the turbines. The construction was over. The machines gone, no sign of the workers. And the five turbines so clean with the sun setting and their metal bodies catching the last rays. The blades stretched like arms, perfectly still, not yet turning. Each turbine a many-armed giant. Great gods of the old days, immersed in deep meditation, at the same time creators of life and destruction.

“I hope they wait for the storks to fly off,” I said. “And only then turn the blades on.”

Overhead, the flocks had thickened. More and more storks arrived each day and finally, at the end of August, they set off on their journey. Grandpa poured us three shots of rakia —for me, for him, and for Saint Kosta. We downed ours in one gulp and the stork dipped his bill in his glass and overturned it.

“Will I live to see them next spring?” Grandpa said, and I told him — of course he’d see them.

“I hope not, my boy. I don’t think I can take it.”

That day Grandpa stayed on the terrace long past sunset. He didn’t touch his dinner, nor did he drink any more rakia . Saint Kosta had perched in the corner and to me they both looked so low and defeated.

“In my mind I picture them flying,” Grandpa told me when I sat down beside him. “I imagine their journey. Where they are this very moment. What the air feels like way up there.” When he turned to me, his eyes were sharp, clear.

“Take me with you, my boy, will you? I want to fly on a plane. I want to see the New World.”

I’m not sure if he meant this or was just talking. But why not? I’d seen older men crossing the ocean to visit their children.

You got it! I wanted to say, yet I said nothing. I knew better, and when Grandpa smiled, nodded, I saw he too knew better.

Above us the flocks were flowing, only we couldn’t see them. We heard the noise they made, like the rush of a celestial river no human eye was meant to dirty. It was close to midnight when Grandpa gave out a whistle. A loud, clean singsong that carried across the Strandja. Take good care of them , he was saying, though this time, nobody answered.

WE RECEIVED THE COURT’S DECISION on the last day of August. A mailman delivered the certified letter right to our gates so Elif could sign that she’d gotten it. I didn’t even know regular mail came to Klisura. How silly I felt, all this time paying the bus driver.

Elif ripped the envelope open in the courtyard and her eyes darted across the page. Her face was a mask of dark and bright pieces, the way the sun strained through the grapevine.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. She plunged down on the bench and reread the letter. “They’ve denied me the name change.”

The court had found her reasons insubstantial.

“They change my name as a kid when I don’t want it. Now I want it and they won’t let me.”

“Can’t we appeal?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Can we?”

“Sure. Maybe. Listen,” I said. “Keep your old name. What’s the big deal?”

The words had not yet rolled off my tongue fully and I was already regretting them. If her look could do physical damage, I’d be very badly damaged.

“You don’t get it, do you?” she said, then dropped the letter and marched to the house. The door to our room slammed three times, each progressively more spiteful. Grandpa was watching me from up on the terrace. He poured himself a glass of rakia .

“Do you even know what happened?” I asked him.

“It seems you don’t either.”

He was right. I couldn’t see the big deal. Or rather, I saw it — I knew Elif wanted a fresh start, to be a brand-new person — but I didn’t feel it. How would the mere change of a name achieve all this exactly? Changing the name was so artificial. The change had to come from the inside and that’s what I told her.

“Open the door,” I begged from the hallway. I sat down on the floor and kept talking. I tried to make her see my point. I spoke wisely and thought I was very convincing. At last, the chair she’d propped the door with moved on the other side and her hand stuck out through the gap just a little.

I reached to hold it, but she slapped mine away.

“No, you idiot,” she said. “I need the bucket!”

THE NIGHT AFTER her name request was rejected, Elif had her first in a series of nightmares. I was awake, listening to the dark and the mountain, when she started sobbing. She was crying in her sleep, which old superstition claimed was a good thing. But it wasn’t a good thing. It couldn’t be. She kept crying even after her eyes opened. She refused to tell me what she’d dreamed of, but the following night the dream returned and she relented. She had found herself in the nest, on the stork tree, and all around her were black storks. They watched her with gray eyes, human. Then just like that the storks began beating their wings and rose together, a black mass, terrible, awful, up, up, away from the old tree. And she couldn’t stop them. She wanted to. Had to. But she couldn’t.

“They took it away,” she said, and the tears rolled on. “I couldn’t stop them.”

“It’s my father,” she told me the next morning. “He’s laid a black spell on me. He’s the imam. He’s cursed me.”

“Nonsense,” I said. But I believed her.

When Saint Kosta came to us in the courtyard we both cowered.

“Grandpa,” Elif cried. “Keep him away, Grandpa!”

“I can’t stand to see you this way,” Grandpa told us one evening. We had all gathered on the terrace to eat couscous for dinner. As of the last few days Elif’s nausea had gone away completely, but she still retained the old paleness.

“I can’t help it,” she said, and started crying. This time I didn’t even reach to hold her. I felt entirely helpless. I knew of nothing I could do to make her feel better.

Night after night I dreamed bad dreams and awoke each morning more fatigued, more anxious. Dry, cool winds gusted through the streets of the village. Their wailing oppressed me and I caught myself missing the noise of the storks, which had once bothered me so much. Watching the wind turbines filled me with anger. Why weren’t the blades spinning? All this rushing, fighting to build them and now they stood unmovable in the wind. What were these people waiting for exactly? Turn on the switch already. Generate. Energize. Harness. The power of the ever-gusting. Of the invisible, plentiful spirits.

Saint Kosta pestered me, like a dog seeking attention, always in my way, no doubt just to annoy me. The way Grandpa smacked his lips when he drank rakia got on my nerves. The way he scratched his neck.

Our time was running out, I knew that much. We had to do something and do it quickly. Run away from Klisura, away from all that haunted Elif, away from ourselves. Become new people and remain together. Or remain the same people and fall apart, each in his own orbit.

“Please don’t cry so much,” I’d tell Elif softly. “It’s not good for you or the baby.”