“Every night that he dreamed this vision, Ali remembered less and less of his mother. Until one night there is no one on the rock, only the bodies floating in the stream, bodies whose faces he cannot see.”
VIII.
“We’re getting the hell out of here,” John Martin says. He slices a package of bologna, then a package of bread, and begins to fix sandwiches on the kitchen counter. Elli wraps the sandwiches in the stack of napkins we took from the Dairy Queen and I watch them work as a team for a while. The TV is booming one warning after the other, but I can’t get my eyes to focus. They caught me in the thickest of sleep, and now even that lobotomizing siren can’t seem to screw my head back in its place.
I finish a can of beer on the table, a few warm sips that now taste almost as bad as a Dr Pepper. “Listen,” I tell them. I nod at the TV. “It’s just a warning. Relax.”
“No way, man,” John Martin says, and wipes the knife in his jeans, then folds it. “I ain’t relaxing with this siren going. You can stay if you want, but I’m going.”
He blows up a Wal-Mart bag to make sure there are no large holes in it and lays the sandwiches inside. He fills up with tap water an empty sweet-tea jug and that, too, goes in a Wal-Mart bag. The prerecorded voice on TV tells us that a warning has been issued for northwestern Buddyville County, for Buddy-view County, for Buddysonville … and I can’t decide whether I should be hopeful or fearful to hear my wife’s new house mentioned. Relieved not to hear John’s house on the news, or thankful that I’ve heard it? Because right now, the way things have been going, some total destruction, some utter annihilation, might not be too bad for me.
The tornado, we hear, has touched ground two counties north from us and away from my wife’s. We’ll drive south, John tells us, five, ten miles, just out of town to a McDonald’s. He’ll buy us McGriddles, coffee, orange juice for the Princess. We’ll sit there and wait this all out in peace and quiet. Then we’ll come back here and clean the yard of branches and leaves. But for Christ’s sake, let’s get going.
We grab Elli’s bag, the way my wife packed it, and as for me — I have nothing worth taking that you can put in a bag.
It’s beginning to dawn. The sky is strangely green this early in the morning and the wind has stopped almost completely. The air smells bad, like a stinkbug on a raspberry bush, I suppose from the ozone. Far away we can see lighting and feel the roar of thunder, muffled at times and louder at others with the distant wind changing direction. We stand on the front porch while John Martin, the two bags in hand, runs to the truck to get it ready. It’s then that Elli’s cell phone starts ringing in my pocket.
I’ve already answered it before she can ask how I have it.
“Elli, honey, are you okay? How’s the weather?”
“Turbo sunshine,” I say in an authentic Bulgarian peasant dialect. We run through the yard and John Martin pushes the door open. Elli hops in the middle and I follow.
“Michael,” my wife says so loudly even John Martin flinches, “what’s going on? Are you down in the shelter?”
“We don’t have a shelter,” I tell her. “Listen. We’re fine. Don’t worry about us.”
“Get to the shelter,” she says, and her voice breaks up with static and an ugly accent. “Michael,” she says, and I’m thinking, seven years in the States and already calling her husband by a name that is not his. And then it strikes me: I am not her husband — and this thought seems so new at first it’s like someone else’s.
“You’re breaking up,” I say.
“Michael,” she says, “is that a truck engine? Are you driving?”
“We have to go down to the shelter. Here’s Elli.” But before I pass the phone my thumb ends the call.
Elli shouts to her mother, into the dead receiver. “We need to dial again,” she says. “I want to talk to Mommy.”
I hide the phone in my pocket and tell her there is no reception. I help her buckle up and hug her tightly. “But I’m here. I’m right here, Elli.”
“I want to talk to Mommy,” she says. Then, like that, she starts crying. All in English, too. “I wanna go to Mommy. Take me to Mommy.”
“Hush, hush,” I say. I try to kiss her on the forehead, but she pushes me away. So I say, “God damn it, John Martin, drive the fucking truck already,” and Elli begins to wail louder. I start with that tale I’ve been telling her, but she won’t listen. Not even when John Martin begs her. On she cries, a siren of our own in the car. It’s like this that we drive, the green sky thickening greener above us, a blinding thing. It’s raining again.
“Don’t look back,” I tell John Martin when he steals a peek at his house in the rearview mirror. I am speaking, of course, of pillars of salt.
IX.
“They arrive at the mountain path a day later when the sun is high above the horizon. The trail is narrow, with steep slopes on both sides; if you roll a stone over the edge, it will crumble to sand before it has reached the bottom. One wrong step and both the horse and its rider fall in the abyss. Ali Ibrahim leads. My great-grandmother follows.
“ ‘I’m exhausted,’ she says and stops her horse. ‘When I appear before the sultan, I must be at my best.’
“Ali dismounts his horse and, while she hides in the shadow of hers, sharpens his yataghan.
“ ‘The sun is too strong,’ my great-grandmother says, ‘and my skin is too fair. Give me the feredje so I can veil my face.’ Ali sighs deeply, puts the yataghan back in the sheath and takes the black kerchief out of his saddlebag. He hands the feredje to my great-grandmother, but she drops it, and the precious silk kerchief flies off the trail and down the steep slope, the wind tossing it toward the bottom of the abyss. Ali knows he can’t bring my great-grandmother to the sultan without the special silk covering her face, so very carefully he descends after the feredje.
“Narrow trail, steep slopes. The feredje jumps in the air like a bird; Ali stalks it — slowly, measuring his steps, seeking footing in the weeds that grow in between the rocks. Then he trips. He rolls down the slope.
“The moment she sees this, my great-grandmother leaps on her horse and spurs it on. She rides swiftly down the mountains, but the farther she gets, the sharper the pain in her chest becomes. She despises Ali — his face, his eyes, his voice — yet, something pulls her back. It begins to feel like her own blood she’s spilled.
“Once on a broader road, she stops the horse.
“ ‘If I see a sign,’ she whispers, ‘if I see a pink lark, I’ll go back and help him.’
“At that moment, a shower of larks pours from the sky. When she turns her horse back and spurs it toward the mountain, its hoofs squash the tiny bodies.
“She finds Ali half buried in stones. His face is bloody; pebbles embedded in his cheeks glisten underneath his skin. His arms are bruised, his knees mangled; his clothes have turned to rags. My great-grandmother kneels and strains to pick him up. She puts his arm around her shoulder and, bent in two under his weight, attempts to walk toward her horse.
“She sinks to the ground. Ali crushes her, his face upon her chest. My great-grandmother rises. She drags him five more feet and once again collapses. The rocks cut through her dress. Her knees, her elbows, palms are bleeding. She stands up again. Her hair, now sticky with Ali’s blood and her own, falls loosely over her shoulders.
“ ‘Ela, konche!’ she calls for the horse. The horse kneels down and she drops Ali on the saddle. The sun pours fire upon the gorge. The Mountain rises in the distance, its peaks still snowy.