•
Dinner is done, the sun is setting, and while our daughter readies Nora for bed, I grab Pavel by the hand and lead him outside. A few old men are still nesting on the benches and I say, “Pavka, am I like them? Dried up and ugly.”
“You are like them,” he says, “except not ugly.”
“I wish I was a kid again. But I don’t suppose you understand.”
“I wish I was an old man.” He takes a silent breath. “I’ve noticed, dyadka, that when old men speak, the young ones listen. And no one listens to a kid. But if I was old, I’d talk to my dad.”
We come by a tree whose branches are heavy with sparrows.
“I hate these things,” I say. “So loud with their chirping.”
We gather some pebbles and throw them, one by one, at the birds. They rise above us black and noisy. But once I’m out of breath, the birds return to their branches.
“Let’s throw more stones,” I say.
“It’s pointless, dyadka. They’ll come back as soon as we’re gone.”
I pick up some pebbles and pile them in his palms. “Come on,” I say.
•
It’s time to sleep and in his cot Pavel starts singing. I’m surprised he hasn’t lost this habit of lulling himself to sleep. His voice is soft and thin and clear. I roll over and smile at my wife. She smiles back.
“Dyado, I can’t sleep. Tell me a story.”
Of course you can’t, my child. My blood is yours and blood is ageless.
Buryana is trying to hush him, but I sit up in bed and flip the night lamp on. I take out the booklet of letters and say, “This is the story of a komita. He died fighting the Turks.”
“All right! A rebel story.”
Nora doesn’t try to stop me. Buryana turns in her cot to hear better. I read and they listen. I can’t know what each of them is thinking, but we’re connected through the dusty words. “And then?” Pavel says every time I stop to catch some air. “What happens after that? And then?” But halfway through the story, his breathing evens out and he’s asleep.
My wife’s lover, Mr. Peyo Spasov, has finally made it to Macedonia. Crossing the mountain pass, they have lost another friend to an avalanche. Peyo has barely survived himself, digging his fellows out of the snow. Now, when the komiti reach a village, nobody offers them shelter. With knives and guns they persuade the people, for whose sake they have come to die, to take them in. The komiti spend the night in a small hut, by the fire. Their goal is to join a larger group of revolutionaries next day and take part in a massive uprising against the Turks which will ignite at once all over Macedonia. The land will be free at last. They don’t know if the other komiti are waiting, or even alive.
Outside, the dogs begin to bark. The men sneak up to the window, and in the moonlight, they see a peasant pointing in their direction. Soon Turkish soldiers gather outside the hedge. The Turks light up torches, toss them to set the thatched roof aflame. The komiti open fire. The Turks return it. While the flames are spreading, with the butts of their guns the men inside hammer their way through the back wall, built from mud, straw and cow dung, and manage to sink into the dark unseen. They run up the slope, then find shelter by a heap of rocks. They’re cold and it starts to snow again. Down below them the dogs are barking. Torches flicker and fly one roof to another, and one after the other, the thatched roofs burn. The komiti listen to women crying, afraid to make the slightest noise. They find no strength, the cowards, to go down and meet the Turks in battle. When the torches drown in night, like rats the komiti flee.
I set the little book aside and flip the lamp to darkness. They are asleep, quietly, softly. It’s wrong to envy your own grandchild. But still I do. I envy Nora, too. No one has ever written to me like this. But I no longer envy that other man. Because, like me, he proved himself a coward, and though I know it’s wrong, this gives me peace.
I go to check on Pavel. He’s pushed the blanket away, and I tuck him in. Then I tuck in my daughter, my wife. I sit by the window. At seventy-one you can’t expect to hear a story, any story, and take it as it is. At my age a story stirs up a vortex that sucks into its eye more stories, and spits out still more. I must remember what I must.
•
My brother came back from the war without a scratch. We never spoke of what he’d seen or done. I was ashamed to ask, and he was ashamed to say. We’d lost the war, of course, like all other recent wars, which was regrettable, since we never really lost our battles; we just picked the wrong allies. Or rather, our soldiers never lost their battles. Because what did I know? I herded sheep. So Brother joined me, up on the hills. We’d round the sheep at night and lock them in the pen, boil milk in a cauldron, make hominy and eat in silence while around us the mountain grew restless with barking dogs, with bells ringing from other pens. Sometimes the quiet inside me would weigh me down so much, I’d get up and yell at the top of my lungs. Eheeeeeee. And then my brother would yell the shepherd yell. Eheeeeeee. And from another hill we’d hear another shepherd and then another, and we would yell, like children, in the night.
It was shearing time, I remember, the spring of 1923. We’d shorn half of the herd and were just laying the fleece under an awning. The dogs barked and down the slope we saw a group of men, tiny at first, and then we saw they carried rifles.
We called the dogs off and waited. The men stood before us, six or seven in shepherd cloaks, hoods over their heads. But these were no shepherds. I could feel it. They held us in their sights and told us to lift our arms. I did, of course. But Brother watched them and chewed a straw. He asked if they were lost. One said, “We’ve come to take some lambs, some milk and cheese. We have a bunch of hungry comrades in the woods.” He waved his rifle at me. “Go choose the lambs.”
“We have no lambs for your comrades,” Brother said. A man stepped forward and with the stock of his rifle smacked him across the face. But when he spoke it was a woman’s voice we heard, and when the hood came down, a woman’s face we saw. She spat down on Brother, who lay in blood and straw. She asked him if he reckoned they did all this for pleasure. If they enjoyed living in dugouts, like dogs. She said they fought for the people, for brotherhood, equality and freedom … “You’re very pretty,” Brother said and coughed up some blood. “I’ll make you my wife, I think.” The woman laughed. “Go get the lambs,” she told me. Her comrades tied Brother up. I boiled milk while they slaughtered a lamb and speared it over the fire. They stayed with us that night, talking of how it was the working people who ought to rule. They spoke of change. That September, they said, there would be an uprising. Thousands of comrades would join to overthrow the tsarist regime. The centuries-old wrath of the slave, they called it, would be unleashed at last. I suppose they weren’t bad people — just hungry and foolish. The woman sat down beside my brother and gave him milk to drink. I begged them to let him loose, but she said she liked him better, tied so.
It poured that night. I took a brand from the fire, stepped over the sleeping comrades, and went out of the hut to see if the fleece was getting wet under the awning. My brother and that woman lay naked on the heap of wool, smoking. The rain seeped through the thatched roof and in the light from the brand their bodies glistened.
“I’ll go with them now,” my brother told me in the morning.
And so he did. They gunned him down in August. I was back in our village then. Policemen banged on our gates and rounded up me and Mother, my sisters, the neighbors. The whole village was goaded on to the square.