Free Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov Page A

hands are cast in silver, so cut them off and take them with you. His feet, so he may walk on fire, are cast in gold. Chop them off, efendi . Strip the gold. Burn down our houses if you must. But spare our school.”
    The pasha snatched the icon, took a torch, and with his own hand set the school on fire. He threw the icon in the flame. “You fools,” he said to the peasants. “You cannot bribe me with what is mine already.”
    It was these fires that Captain Kosta watched now from the hills. For years he would limp across Eastern Thrace, in vain struggling to spark up new uprisings. Only death would show him kindness. Captain Kosta died defeated, alone, in complete poverty, two weeks before the start of the Balkan War. Merciful death spared him. He would not see the absolute destruction of his Strandja and of Eastern Thrace.
    Pages and pages, chains of words. Stories of exile and of death. Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, and Turks. The Strandja burned time and again, reduced to coals, to ashes. And then it rose, time and again, the Strandja itself a fire dancer, a nestinarka .
    Five times the people of Klisura rebuilt their school. Five times the school was burned down to the ground. It was a pile of ashes Grandpa found in its place, upon his first arrival, himself an exile. He rebuilt the school almost entirely alone—the ground floor for his students, the second for himself.
    It was to this school that he had moved three years ago. It was in this school that we lived now.

 
    TWO
    BACKGAMMON IS A GAME of chance. You cast the dice and pray to Fortune. That is, if you’re a fool. If you’re smart, backgammon is a game of odds, of calculations, and of patterns. A game of vision. Only the wise man knows the truth: like life, backgammon is a game of luck; like life, a game of skill.
    Or so Grandpa was trying to convince me. Every evening after dinner, we sat outside on the terrace and spread open the board. Two little bone-colored dice and fifteen checkers. Move all your checkers around the board and bring them home. Then bear them off faster than your opponent has borne off his and laugh in his face, a victor. You see, old man? Who is the fool now?
    I was. In every single game we played.
    The day after his nighttime episode, Grandpa was sluggish, visibly tired. But he was stronger a day later, and from then on—as strong as a bull stud. No, stronger still. At least that’s what he claimed. Unable to phone my parents, I wrote them a letter. I told them that overall Grandpa appeared in sound condition, but that he had grown old and sometimes showed his age.
    Out on the terrace, I asked him if these episodes were a frequent occurrence.
    â€œWhat are you, a doctor now?” he said, and the topic was closed.
    I’ve yet to find out the reason for his return to Klisura , I wrote in my letter, but did not write that it was out of shame I delayed asking. To my surprise, Grandpa too asked me nothing. Why had I come back? What did I want with him? The dice chattered against the board, the wind whistled through the planks of the house, and the silence around us grew so oppressive that I was entirely convinced: the old man was hiding something.
    Even the story of Captain Kosta, which he spun before me when the silence got too heavy, soon began to feel like a diversion. Or was he using the story to tell me things without addressing them directly? I was overthinking to exhaustion. He seems guilty , I wrote to my parents. His eyes won’t look in mine and his fingers rap on the table suspiciously.
    A few afternoons we went down to the Pasha Café, where Grandpa played backgammon with the owner. He won some, lost some, quarreled, and sulked. Always in jest, he insisted, but I wasn’t always sure. I stood by his shoulder while old men surrounded the table like buzzards around buffalo carrion, tugged on their mustaches, rubbed on their beards, quarreled, and sulked, always in jest.
    It was