Free Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov Page B

on one such afternoon that Elif walked by the café, returning home from the university. A green military pouch bounced on her back, full of textbooks, I assumed. She cast a guarded glance at our table, but when I waved, she hurried to look away and strode faster up the street. I thought of her often, mostly at night when I was too jet-lagged for sleep or reading from Grandpa’s papers. Five times a day Elif’s father sang from the minaret—his voice so full and deep it carried well beyond the Muslim quarter—and I wondered, how could a man who sang so beautifully be so full of malice?
    A few times, in between the games on our terrace, I asked Grandpa about the fire dancers. But every time he waved his hand. “Don’t bother me with crazy fools,” he’d say. I asked him about his youth in Klisura, about the school. “What’s there to tell? I quit the Party and the Party crushed me. I came here in the spring, ready to teach, and I found a pile of charcoal in place of the school. Let’s build it, I told the peasants, and they started crossing themselves as if the Devil had arrived to pull out their canines. Every time we rebuild our school, they told me, someone comes by and burns it to the ground. And with it burns Klisura. They’d tell me the stories of Captain Kosta, of how he’d built the first Klisuran school only to see it turn to ash soon after. So in the mornings, I taught the children in a cherry orchard outside the village, and I built for the rest of the day and sometimes at night, by the light of the gas lamp. The priest helped me. And the village idiot. Vassilko. He was a good boy. This terrace was all his idea, high and jutting out, so that when a maiden passed by we’d ogle her unseen. Eventually the school was built, but even then the parents wouldn’t let their children cross the threshold. For a whole month I begged them, the superstitious fools. How could I imagine that they were right?”
    â€œIn what way were they right?” I asked, but Grandpa waved his hand. Another topic had been closed.
    On the fifth evening of my stay, after I’d lost a game to gammon—that particularly humiliating kind of defeat in which you fail to bear off even a single checker—I seized the dice. “Let’s play an American game,” I said. He’d throw one die and I the other. “The higher value wins. The loser chooses—truth or dare.”
    I rolled a four. Grandpa—a six.
    â€œThere is a jar of rainwater down by the well,” he said. “Go drink it.”
    I told him this was silly. It hadn’t rained in three days.
    â€œYou suggested a game,” he said, “I’m playing it.” He laughed long after I’d gulped the lukewarm sludge.
    â€œAre you dying?” I asked him as soon as I’d won my throw. This was the question whose answer I feared the most. Had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness?
    â€œExceptional virility,” he said. He’d been diagnosed with it back in the day, and on a few occasions it had proved fatal.
    â€œMust all your jokes be sexual in nature?”
    He shrugged. He could joke about death if I wanted. Here was a cracker: all his friends his age were dead. But no, he wasn’t dying from a fatal illness.
    â€œThen why did you disappear like this? Selling the apartment one day and vanishing the next?”
    He shook his finger at the dice. I hadn’t won my turn. We cast. It was for him to ask.
    â€œWhy are you back? And listen, I want an honest answer.”
    Slowly the night was rising from the soil. It crawled up the Strandjan hills, dark at their base and brighter up above, where the sky was still bluish. A warm wind from Turkey carried the smell of grass in bloom and made me sneeze.
    â€œI was worried about you,” I said. I had begun to slur my speech. Like electricity, the right words buzzed through my tongue, but in English. In graceless,