Free Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov

school in Klisura, Saint Constantine and Saint Elena, stood tall for seven days. Until the Ottoman army burned it to the ground.
    *   *   *
    I found the pages still drenched in rain, scattered across the floor around my grandfather’s desk. I pulled them out of every drawer, where they were pressed tightly between the covers of shabby but carefully labeled binders. History of Ancient Egypt . The Old World. The First Bulgarian Empire. Grades Fourth and Fifth. Grade Eleven. The ink fading, the pages turning yellow, and the red of Grandpa’s pen like dried-up blood across words his students had written a quarter of a century ago. These old exams were the scrap paper on whose back he wrote.
    To me. To himself. To no one in particular. To all of us at once. The day after his nighttime episode I gathered up the scattered papers and spread them out in the yard to dry. He watched me weigh them down with pebbles against the wind, without offering me an explanation. That evening in my room, I read.
    War. Struggle. Freedom and death. It was the Strandja Mountains that Grandpa was writing about. Hand-drawn maps. Meticulously calculated numbers. This many villages reduced to ash. This many killed, this many exiled. But in my mind the picture burned too brightly and would have left me numb and blinded if not for the story of a single man. I found it trickling in the margins the way cold water flows more slowly beneath a turbulent and boiling stream.
    They said his father, he too a mighty rebel, had wed him to the Strandja. He’d slashed the boy’s palm and the boy had thrust it inside the Mountain so his blood might take root in her.
    They said he’d never spoken to a woman and never would. The Strandja was his woman. He’d give his life to free her from the Turks.
    They said his father had taught him the old tongue, the bird language. When he whistled, wings grew from his shadow. A bird’s shadow, an elohim ’s. And the Mountain, they said, would answer.
    â€œHis name was Captain Kosta,” Grandpa told me out on the terrace. The words left his lips with effort, as if each one brought him physical pain. And yet I felt as if, despite the pain, he was relishing the chance to share a man he’d thought would never leave the page.
    â€œHe looked like Nietzsche,” Grandpa said. “Or so one of his chetniks wrote of his sullen disposition, of his bushy, curved-down mustache. Or maybe no chetnik ever wrote such a thing. Maybe that’s just the way I see him.”
    And so that was the way I saw him too. This captain who for some reason had captivated Grandpa’s mind. At night I thought about them—Kosta, returning to the Strandja after many years to set her free. And Grandpa, coming back to Klisura, for reasons yet unknown. The more I thought, dizzy with jet lag, the closer the image of the two came in my mind. And in the end, I wasn’t certain where the captain ended and where my grandfather began.
    *   *   *
    Up from a hill Captain Kosta watched the school burning. His rebel squad had been destroyed, and so were all other squads across the Strandja. And now it was the Christian peasants who met the Turkish wrath.
    Earlier that day, the elders of Klisura had bowed before the Turkish pasha who’d led his troops into their village. “ Pasha efendi ,” they’d begged at the hooves of his stallion, “here in these bundles is the jewelry of our women. Take the gold, but don’t burn down our homes.”
    The pasha seized the bundles. Then he ordered his soldiers to get the torches ready.
    â€œ Pasha efendi ,” the elders begged, “these are the costumes of our grandmothers. Take them, but don’t burn down our homes.”
    The pasha seized the handfuls, then ordered his soldiers to light the torches.
    â€œ Pasha efendi ,” one Klisuran said, an old man, tall and wiry. “This is the icon of our saint. His