Miroslav Penkov: Stork Mountain

SOMEONE WAS BEATING THE DOOR of the station and I heard a man cry out, “Let us in, you donkeys. The storm’s on my tail and inching closer.” But I hadn’t slept in thirty hours and maybe I was dreaming of voices. Or maybe I didn’t want to get up, snug as I was on the floor in the corner. The handful of peasants around me began to stir, uneasy. The stench of wet wool, of sweat and tobacco, rose like mist from their ancient bodies and the waiting room fogged up. I knew they expected me , the young boy, to wrestle the door open, to let into safety whoever was out there. So I pretended that I was sleeping.

I had arrived on a bus from Sofia early that morning, a four-hour wobble east to the middle of nowhere. “You wait here,” the driver had told me, “for the bus to Klisura. It comes around noon. A blue bus. With a big sign. To Klisura . Will you be able to read it?” He’d spoken to me the way people speak to foreigners, drunks, or the dim-witted. I’d smiled and nodded and wondered which of the three he’d thought I was.

Outside, the fist kept pounding. A growing wind whipped the windows and their glass creaked on the verge of breaking. Through the veil of my eyelashes, I spied an old woman make for the door, limping. An old man got up to help her. Next thing I knew, wind was roaring around us, much too scorching for the middle of April.

When they shut the door again I heard the man who’d been banging, now on the inside. “ Ashkolsun , Grandma.” Then I saw him, slapping sand off his tracksuit trousers, off his brown leather jacket. He kissed the old woman’s forehead and, without as much as a glance at the people around him, marched to one end of the station, where old benches had been piled up, all the way to the ceiling.

“You come here and help me,” he called, still not turning.

By the door there now stood a young woman. A girl really, in blue shalwars and a silk dress; it seemed like she’d sprung out from the nothing. She was untying her headscarf, white with roses imprinted on it, but when the man called, she rushed to aid him. They lugged the bench together, a good five, six meters.

“And my demijohn?” he said. “Did you forget it?” Once more the girl sprinted back to the exit, her face as red as the roses, her bare feet kicking up the sand she’d tracked in.

At once I felt lighter. The eyes of the peasants, which had crushed me for hours, had now latched on to the couple. I didn’t blame them. I too wanted to know what the girl was doing, but I was afraid her man would catch me staring. So I moved to the window to watch her reflection in secret.

And at the window, I saw the storm approaching. There was a road outside the station, fissured by heat, frost, and hail, and a vast, barren field beyond it. Two rows of wind turbines stretched on the horizon, and scattered across the field I counted a dozen small mounds. Thracian tombs; I knew that much. In the distance, beyond the mounds and the turbines, a wall of red sand was pouring from the sky, violent, muddy, and racing in our direction.

“Simooms,” said a voice beside me. “Scoop up sand from the Saharan desert. Bring it here, across two thousand kilometers.”

A plume of smoke hit the glass on the inside and bounced back to choke me. When the smoke settled, I saw an old man reflected, ghostly transparent, except for his thick mustache the color of rusted metal.

“My missus makes me dye it,” he said, smoothing the hairs and nodding at a withered woman on one of the benches. Dressed in a black skirt, black apron, black headscarf, she resembled a shadow. The old man turned his gaze to the girl in the corner. “I reckon if I wasn’t married, I’d steal her.” And he coughed a long time in place of laughter.

I had the urge to tell him there were no simooms in Bulgaria, never had been. But who was I to correct him? Maybe even the climate had changed in my absence. Were we in danger? Should I step away from the window? But asking him required I speak the language I hadn’t used in so many years, and this scared me far more than a sandstorm.

I crawled back to my corner. On her bench, the girl was eating an apple. Her man was asleep, his arms wrapped around a wicker demijohn, the cigarette in his mouth still burning. I allowed myself to stare more boldly until at last the girl caught me. She bit hard into the apple, smiled, and began chewing, her lips aglow with sweet juice. Something slammed the side of the station, a deafening shatter.

“There, there,” I heard Red Mustache saying. He’d returned to his wife, who now rocked back and forth in her seat, in fear.

“Vah, vah,” she answered. Like a soft song, “Vah, vah.”

And out of nowhere, she gave out a shrill cry.

“Welcome, welcome, Saint Kosta.” Her rocking sped up and she crossed herself time and again with zeal. One by one the few women beside her stood up and hurried to the other side of the station. One by one they crouched on the floor and covered their faces with their motley headscarves. The girl in the corner perked up, threw away the apple, and wiped her palms in her shalwars.

“Don’t be afraid, my dears,” the woman in black told them. “It’s just Saint Kosta arriving. And his good mother coming behind him.” Her husband kept speaking, but again she wouldn’t listen. In vain she tried to reach her rubber galoshes, in vain to unhook them. Her undone scarf flapped like the wings of a black bird. Her cheeks had turned to red apples, and when she looked at me, though just for a moment, she appeared as youthful as the girl in the corner.

“Don’t be afraid,” she told me kindly. She wiped her tears with the scarf and tied it.

Red Mustache lowered himself on the ground before her, unhooked her galoshes, and began to massage her feet, swollen and pinkish.

“There, there,” he told her.

“Vah, vah,” she whispered, and the tears rolled on.

It grew dark around us. The storm had swallowed the station. Fists of wind slammed it and tiles flew off the roof with a terrible clatter. Endless grains hammered the windows, and I thought any minute the glass would shatter. And through all this, I could see the sun blazing, red in the red mist — simoom, from the Saharan desert.

“That’s right, my sweet dove,” croaked the old woman. “Fear nothing. It’s only Saint Kosta.” But it wasn’t to me she was speaking.

The girl had gone to the window. Fearless, reckless, she’d glued her palms to the glass as if she meant to pass through it. Her body shivered and I could see her face reflected, her wet lips twisting in a thin smile. The storm that had made me crouch on the ground in fear beckoned her to come closer.

An underground thump shook the station. The glass rippled like water and then burst into pieces.

I managed to shut my eyes before the sand lashed me. My lungs filled up with fire and I felt as if I were drowning. Wind thrashed; the women were crying and more glass was breaking around us. Next, somebody’s hand was pulling me deeper into the station.

“Grab a bench,” someone shouted. “Turn it over.” We were pulling benches from the tall pile, me and the peasants, building a shelter and crouching behind it.

“I told you, my dears,” the old woman kept croaking. “No need to fear.”