On August 19, 1903, the day of Christ’s Transfiguration, the Strandja Mountains rose in arms. For days the smoke of battle covered the sun, and when at last the wind blew it away, like the veil off the face of a hanama, the Strandja was free.
Two thousand years ago, on top of a mountain, Christ had spoken to Moses and Elijah. On top of a mountain the human had met the divine. Christ had been transfigured and so now was the Strandja. This was what Captain Kosta was telling the peasants in his native Klisura, standing tall on a barrel of gunpowder, bandoliers across his chest, two pistols in his sash, a saber in his hand. And his mustache like smoke gushing from the nostrils of a dragon. “From this day on,” he shouted, “until we unite with Bulgaria, the Strandja is its own republic.”
For twenty days the Strandjan Republic existed free. But what is a republic without a symbol of its freedom? And so, Captain Kosta decided to build a school. “As big as those in Thessalonica and Edirne. Three stories tall. And with a cross on the roof. Like a church. No, three crosses, like a monastery!”
For fifteen days and fifteen nights the people of Klisura built, assisted by people from the villages nearby — Bulgarians and Greeks alike. For fifteen days they tasted of this freedom. In vain, Captain Kosta’s rebels looked for help across the hills to the north. In vain, they waited for reinforcement from other Thracian regions. “Let them build,” the captain would say to his men. “More sweat on their brows, less time to think, less time to fear.”
By the fifteenth day the roof was covered, the crosses were affixed. And though by any standard the building was shabby, pitiful even, in the eyes of the Klisurans it rivaled the sultan’s palace in Istanbul. “What should we name it?” someone said. “You have to ask?” answered another.
The first 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.
“His 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.
“He 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.
“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.
“Pasha efendi,” one Klisuran said, an old man, tall and wiry. “This is the icon of our saint. His 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.