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.
“What 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 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?”
“In 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.
“There 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.
“You suggested a game,” he said, “I’m playing it.” He laughed long after I’d gulped the lukewarm sludge.
“Are 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?
“Exceptional virility,” he said. He’d been diagnosed with it back in the day, and on a few occasions it had proved fatal.
“Must 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.
“Then 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.
“Why 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.
“I 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, chopped-up sentences I told him about my failed studies in America, about my lost scholarship and hefty student loans. How if only I could get back on my feet, pay for the remaining credit hours and finish my thesis …
He watched me unblinking, a chunk of rock in the gloom. I wasn’t even sure he breathed. Until he raised his hand. “You have returned to sell your land,” he said.
I gave him a timid smile. He’d guessed it right. The prize was his.
“What prize?” He looked disgusted. “The nerve on you! To kid!”
He pulled out a cigarette, brought the gas lamp to his face, and lit up. The flame regaled him with a scarlet glow, and when he glanced up, his eyes burned red.
“How much are you in debt?”
I gave him a ballpark figure. “Ballpark?” he asked. An American expression. In baseball— He cut me off. “It doesn’t translate.” And neither did the thought — that his only grandson, his flesh and blood, would be so arrogant, so impudent, so brazen-faced as to even consider … Did I know what my great-grandfather had gone through to earn for us that land? The blood he’d spilled? The sweat and tears … He rattled ferociously like this. Until I raised my hand.
“We no longer own that land, do we?”
It was his turn to grace me with a smile. “The prize is yours.”
I gripped the edge of the table. The twenty acres were my prize.
“Well, now they’re gone. And your father’s share. And mine. I sold it all.”
For a long time I sat speechless. Beside us on the wall our shadows danced, enormous, monstrous, disfigured. I felt weak and dizzy and a pungent, noxious taste climbed up my esophagus and washed the roof of my mouth. No, it wasn’t from the murky sludge I’d drunk. It was the taste of Grandpa’s betrayal, the bitterness of bank loans I’d now be helpless to pay off. The absurdity of my plan came to me as if for the first time and I grew livid not just with Grandpa for selling our land, but also with myself. For seeking an easy and dishonest fix, for allowing myself to fall into this position in the first place — broke and in debt, crossing oceans to chase after what wasn’t even there. Thick and sticky, the night spilled around us and filled my lungs like swamp water with each new gulp of air.