Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

When my grandfather flew out of the house, the Pope and Vassilko were just arriving.

“What’s with the pistol?” the Pope cried, and Grandpa couldn’t tell him, couldn’t think straight.

He caught up with Michalis just outside the village. “Stop,” he yelled, “I have a pistol.” So the man stopped and when Grandpa ordered him to lay the child down in the grass he did it.

Then Grandpa shot him in the chest, from six feet away, and killed him.

* * *

For a long time Grandpa kept quiet. I could see on the table before me the pistol and Lenio’s black hair. For a long time, nothing else existed. My throat had dried up, my temples were splitting, but I barely noticed. I could see where the story was heading and I couldn’t bear to listen.

“Grandpa,” I managed at last, that single word containing more fear than a thousand others. Please, I wanted to say, don’t tell me!

But I said nothing. And so he told me.

That night, the Pope loaded Grandpa and Lenio’s child into the church cart. He lashed the horse, and the cart rattled and didn’t stop until they were a long way away from Klisura, until the sun was up in the sky, red like the eye of the fire. That’s what Grandpa saw every time he lowered his lids — fire blazing, wild, all-consuming.

In town, they bought a bus ticket. By the next morning Grandpa and the child had crossed the Balkan Mountains. By the time the sun was once more setting, they had arrived in Pleven.

“I’m at your mercy,” Grandpa said at the door of his cousin, governor of the region. “This boy’s at your mercy.”

Without wasting much time they snuck into the Civil Office. They forged Kostadin new papers — kept his birth date, but changed the name of his mother. And then they changed his name too.

“Grandpa,” I said. I wanted him to swallow what he was about to tell me and never bring it up again. I wanted what had been a secret all my life to stay that way. But we were past that point.

“Does Father know?” I said, barely a whisper, and when he didn’t answer I repeated it more loudly, my voice sharp and ugly against the night’s quiet.

“No. I never told him.”

“So you are not his father then? So you and I are not related?”

His hands were fire when he reached across the table. “I am your grandpa. You are my grandson.”

I couldn’t move. The gravity of what he’d told me pinned me down and choked me like a fist. As if for the first time I could see this man for who he really was. Fear, shame, embarrassment. I recognized them in his face. I recognized the years of deception. But there was nothing of my father in his face. In his cheekbones, nose, lips, and chin. And nothing of me.

A strange kind of chill spread through my body. My blood had come to a boil and in an instant frozen over. All the anger, all the hurt were gone and there was nothing left but empty space. At that moment, I felt no pity to see this old man demolished. And when I pushed his hand away at last, he didn’t reach again to hold me.

THAT EVENING THE SKIES OPENED UP. All night it snowed and all night I lay in bed and listened. I couldn’t hear it falling. Each little flake plummeted from a terrible height, pulled down without mercy by the weight of the planet. Whatever the snow touched — the sinewy frame of the naked vine, the edge of the well, the roof of our house — it silenced it completely. Klisura, the Strandja, the entire world. All was silence. And in this silence it was my own blood I heard, speaking of Grandpa.

I hated him for his doings. Not simply for lying to me, but for deceiving Father. How would Father react to learn the whole truth? To find out that his mother, my grandma, had not died in childbirth? That the few measly pictures we kept as sacred memorabilia were those of some other woman? That the grave we visited was someone else’s?

And then beneath the hatred there was hurt. This old man and I were not related. He was not really my grandfather, and the more I considered this revelation, the more terrible it seemed. It negated all else — the courage he had mustered to confess; the hardship he’d accepted voluntarily, to raise someone else’s child as his own, alone, each day harboring an awful secret. None of this mattered to me now.

Hurting like this, I saw myself the way I once had been. A clumsy child. In play I often fell, scraped my palms, bloodied my knees. “It’s just a little scratch,” Grandpa would say, and pick me up, but even in his arms I’d keep on screaming. It was the sight of blood that terrified me, my own blood flowing irrevocably away. Back then, I was convinced the human body was like a sack of milk — punch a hole and the milk starts to gush out. Sure, you could seal the puncture, but how would you return the milk that was wasted? What would become of me, I’d ask Grandpa, sobbing with terror, once all the milk had flowed out?

Nothing he said convinced me I was safe. Until one day I was screaming like such a brat, Grandpa snatched a pocket knife and sliced his thumb open. “Here, drink this,” he said, and shoved his finger in my mouth. I drank his blood and I replenished mine. And after this, each time I bled, Grandpa took the knife. Each time my blood flowed out, his flowed in. Until my mother saw us. Until she told my dad.

So now in bed, whose blood was I hearing really? My own or Grandpa’s?

I found him still out on the terrace, snow piled in clumps on the blanket under which he hid. Even Saint Kosta had had the sense to go inside. The yard, the hills, Grandpa’s shoulders all blazed in the rising sun.

I brushed away the frost from his hair and only then did he stir.

“Let’s go inside,” I told him. “You’ll catch a cold.”

His body followed me absently, but I felt as if his mind remained behind. It seemed to me he had confessed the past in an attempt to forget it. But the spark he’d rekindled had turned into a flame and that flame into a fire. The fire had raged all night and burned away the years one by one. And now my grandfather was here, but he was also in his youth again, trapped there to relive it.

“HERE, AMERIKANCHE ,” Baba Mina said, “I brewed you some tea.”

“Here, amerikanche ,” said Dyado Dacho, and fortified the tea with some rakia .

They sat me down by the stove; they threw a blanket on my back.

“Why are you here?” they asked, both smiling, both delighted to be welcoming a guest.

I told them I had come to ask for herbs. Hibiscus, chamomile, thyme, mint — whatever Baba Mina could give me. In his stupidity Grandpa had sat too long out in the snow and now I was afraid he might be coming down with the flu. And maybe it was just my imagination, but I could swear my forehead was hotter than it ought to be. My eyes were smarting and my back—

I babbled like this for quite some time. I drank my tea and felt both warm and chilly. It was as if in talk I wanted to delay the real reason I had come. No, it wasn’t for a remedy against some future cold. It was to hold this woman to account.

In her jealousy, she’d tempted Lenio and sent her to her death. She’d acted out of spite and malice. For this I was obliged to hate her.

But here she was so many years later, smiling kindly, her lips stretched to reveal a toothless mouth, serving me a tisane made with eleven different herbs — herbs she’d spent the entire autumn picking, for me and for Elif.

“Forgive me, amerikanche ,” she said, and passed me a jar of sugar. “We’re out of the honey you like.”

I watched her with dizzy eyes. I could hear the boom of my blood and the flow of hers. Like two rivers clashing. No, I couldn’t hate her.