Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

“They aren’t yours,” she’d say. “So give them back.”

And soon an endless line of long-gone souls was marching through my dreams. Lenio, demanding her braid. Vassilko, claiming he should be the one to get it. Captain Kosta, asking for his pistol back, and even Nazar Aga, chasing after his severed head.

I saw refugees of war — Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish — wandering the mountains of my mind, searching for their long-lost brothers, sisters, mothers. “Give them back,” they cried, “our names, our bones, our blood. Return them to us.”

I tried to tell them I didn’t have these things. But all the same they kept on calling.

“Why do you need your hair?” I asked Elif in one dream, Lenio in another.

“Why do you need your pistol? Your head?”

“So we may throw them in the fire,” they answered like a single voice.

Until one evening, the line of souls appeared at our gates.

Grandpa was first to hear them coming. He jumped out of his chair and glued himself against the window.

“I heard it too,” I said, and stood beside him. Our reflections watched us, framed by darkness.

“A whistle,” Grandpa said.

“Right there over the hill.”

“No, it was closer. Hear!”

He threw the window open. Wind like knuckles punched our faces and whirled around us handfuls of shaved-off ice. The flame in the lamp went out and in the corner Saint Kosta began to beat his wings. Only the glimmer of the furnace spilled out scarlet and in that light our shadows stretched thin like rope across the yard.

We listened closely, but all we heard was howling wind. It sounded like the mountain, hill after hill, was calling us with whistles. So it was only natural that Grandpa too should call it back.

That’s how we saw them: swimming through the yard amid his whistles. I recognized their knives, the icons roped to the back of the one who led them. And then, as quickly as they’d come, they disappeared, returned once more into the shapes of our stretched-out shadows.

“We’d better keep the window open just a crack,” Grandpa said. “We’d better let some fresh air in.”

We sat down on the beds, my back to his. I could feel the room turning — the heat of the furnace leaking out, and the night flowing in, rich, intoxicating. I called for Saint Kosta, but he burrowed deeper in his blanket.

“We’ve got the nestinari fever, haven’t we?” I said at last.

“Or maybe we’re just pretending,” Grandpa answered.

“I’d say we’re doing a terrific job.”

“Yes, quite convincing.”

“Grandpa.” I turned around to face him. “You think we ought to go along?”

“Why are you asking me?” he said, and nodded at the stork.

THE NIGHT BEFORE the big uprising, Transfiguration eve, 1903, Captain Kosta gathered his men around the fire. “Tomorrow,” he told them, “we meet the Turks in battle. I’ve taught you how to shoot your rifles and how to wield your knives. But should you find yourself out of bullets, should your blades dull in too many Turkish skulls, don’t stop your fighting. Find a burning fire and throw yourself into its flame.”

Then the captain threw a handful of gunpowder in a wooden bowl and filled the bowl with wine. He mixed the two with his dagger and walked the circle, from one man to the next, so each might drink. Their hearts filled up with courage. Their blood with gunpowder.

“Grandpa,” I said. I sat at the edge of his bed and shook him awake. It was still dark outside, the sun at least an hour from rising.

He didn’t know right away what it was I’d laid in his palm. He looked it over in the glimmer of the lantern. A little matchbox. Inside there was a pinch of soil, our land returned, the pinch he’d sent me in the mail so many years back. I’d brought it here with me, yet had been too ashamed to show him.

“We have no holy wine to drink,” I said. I filled a jar with water, dropped in the soil. The two mixed slowly, thread by thread, as if a root were branching off in all directions.

“But this should do.”

In one gulp each we drank our earth, our great-grandfathers, our dead. And we were ready for the fire.

EVERY YEAR, for thirteen hundred years, the nestinari dance. Come spring, come June, come the feast of Saint Constantine, the feast of Saint Elena, they build tall fires, three cartloads of wood torched and burned to embers. And then, barefooted, they take the saint’s invisible and holy hand and plunge into the living coals. The drum beats wildly, the bagpipes screech. Sickness and worry, happiness and bliss — the fire consumes them all. Here in the Strandja Mountains, where the nestinari dance, the fire leaves nothing.

So what then if spring was still a long ways off? So what if we didn’t have a drum and bagpipes? Our mandolin rang like a bell. Our backgammon board rose a mighty ruckus. And who needed icons when we had the saint himself, glorious, though limping and with a broken wing, dressed in a red wool jacket, leading our way?

Forgive us, Saint Kosta, we must tear down your shack. Allow our ax to split these beams; allow us to pile them up under the walnut tree and torch them.

The flames loomed tall, the tips of their tongues black from the lamp oil we’d used as an igniter. A gust of wind took up the smoke and dragged it through the walnut branches. I watched it changing shapes and rising higher, free of anything to hold it back, dissolving into the bone-white sky.

When the flame from the oil began to die down, Grandpa pulled a stack of papers out of his shirt — the unsent letters he’d written me for years, the pages on which he’d copied Captain Kosta’s journal, the count he’d kept of all the casualties across the Strandja in all the recent wars. The flame swallowed them and fattened up and soon the beams were burning steady.

It had begun to snow, flakes like descending storks, landing on my head, my shoulders, one by one pressing me down. Grandpa too must have felt their weight. “You want to hear something amusing?” he said. “I’m starting to suspect our stork might be female.”

“Female?” I cried. “How do we know?”

“Well, that’s the thing. We have no way of knowing.”

I thought about this for a little while, watching the stork prance through the meadow. Saint Kosta could very well be Saint Elena then?

“You want to hear another funny thing?” Grandpa said, suddenly encouraged. He took the ax and started raking the beams. Sparks flew in our faces, but I didn’t even feel their heat.

“I heard it in the Pasha Café last week,” he said, “while you were sitting home, heartbroken. Well, rumor has it it’s all one giant scheme.”

“What is?” I said.

“The turbines. They build them and they let them sit. This way they launder the construction money.”

“The hell they do. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the turbines might never turn. According to the rumor.”

I took some time to think this over too. All that fighting, kicking, screaming had been for nothing then?

“You think?” said Grandpa, and kept on raking.

“But maybe the rumor has it wrong?”

“And maybe the stork isn’t really female?”

It’s here I started laughing. And Grandpa too began to laugh. But in the end our laughter also vanished and quietly we faced the flame.

“Saint Kosta,” Grandpa started. “I’ve come to tell you…”

He shook his great, snow-covered head. There was no need for words. Gently, he pulled out that yellowed bundle from his shirt, untied it, and took out Lenio’s braid. The fire flowed like a stream between us, faster when Grandpa let it have the braid, and when I cast Elif’s locks in, more turbulent still.