“Where is the money now?” I said at last.
“Completely spent.”
“What did you buy?”
“This house.”
“The village school? This place is shit!”
“The house across the road.”
“That one is even worse. What else?”
“The house next to it and the house next to that one…” He waved his great hand through the dark, like an Indian chief marking his plains before the white man.
“You bought Klisura, then?” I said. But he wasn’t joking.
“Only the Christian part. And if you’re kind to me, my boy, and if you play the dice and checkers right, one day this kingdom will be yours.”
“But why?”
For some time he struggled to pick up a white checker from the board. The checker danced in his fingers and he placed it alone on a point. “What do we call this?” he said. A blot, I answered. The blot was unprotected and any minute your opponent could hit it with a checker of his own.
“And how do you protect a blot?”
Though I was no longer in a mood for games, I picked up another white checker and covered the first. “You make a point as soon as you can. One checker protects the other. The two are safe.”
“You make a point,” he repeated. “As soon as you can. And how do you block your opponent?”
“With a prime.” Make six consecutive points in front of your opponent’s checkers and prevent him from getting past you.
“And what’s the final goal?”
Bring your checkers safely to the home plate. Roll favorable dice. Bear them all off.
“Bear them all off,” he said. “Now then,” he said. “Where you see a house, this house, I see a blot. An unprotected checker. And the opponent can hit it any minute. So to protect it I purchased another checker. And then two more, six more. I made a prime. And now my opponent can’t get past me.”
I told him I didn’t really follow.
“My boy,” he said, “Klisura has been transfigured into a backgammon board. The Christian hamlet is the inner table. The Muslim hamlet is the outer. The river that divides them is the bar. I play to save my checkers, and my opponent plays to hit them.”
I watched him smoke his cigarette down to a butt. I was angry with him and with myself and suddenly this anger weighed down on me, horribly exhausting. The wind had changed directions and gusted cold through the terrace. So cold I zipped up my jacket. “And who is your opponent?” I asked to humor him a little more. He gave me a cunning smile. Then waved his hand.
THREE
OF ELIF’S FATHER I first noticed not the eyes, black and warm, one opened wide, the other almost hidden behind a droopy eyelid; not the beard, short, graying, hungry to consume the face from cheekbones down to throat and even lower into his sweater; not the lips, like a sickle curved downward in one corner; not the flat-brim hat or the black coat, slack at the narrow shoulders, loose at the sleeves, and tied around his waist with a black thread; not the smell of sweat and of tobacco when he came near; not the heat of his hand when he shook mine firmly; but his voice. It seemed to me at first he didn’t speak. He sang.
“The acorn has reunited with the oak,” he said, and crossed our threshold smiling. “May the Almighty send you peace. Look at you, Grandpa, a happy man.”
It was the day after Grandpa and I had spoken of checkers and backgammon boards. We were drinking coffee on the terrace when, from the roar of an engine, the sparrows scattered, screaming out of the bushes. Down the road, with its top shining like a war shield, a blue Lada flew our way, the kind of Russian car I hadn’t seen in many years. Behind its wheel was a small girl, her head covered in a scarf. The Lada parked at the gates and as a greeting the girl punched the horn. Out the door she emerged and I realized that this was Aysha, Elif’s little sister, and that the man who carried her, and in whose lap she had been sitting, was their father, the village imam.
“The wind spells trouble,” Grandpa said, and I followed him down the stairs.
“So this is the American, eh?” the imam was saying. “He looks it too. His neck is thicker, like a wolf’s.”
He carried Aysha in the crook of his left arm, and so he offered me his right.
“How do you do?” he said in English. “That’s all I know, all I can say. Like a parrot. How do you do, how do you do.” He tossed Aysha lightly so she wouldn’t slip and she laughed. “Come on now,” he told her. “Greet our friends.”
But she wouldn’t. Her cheeks like red apples, she tugged on her headscarf, pulled it down and over her eyes.
“As shy as a hedgehog,” the imam said. “Touch it and it rolls into a ball.”
It was then that I noticed the bandages on her feet, yellow at the toes and soles from the ointment. “Third world business,” the imam said when he saw me looking. “Old grandmas’ remedies. Klamath weed. Not like in America, hospitals like seraglios. Do you think, Grandpa,” he said, and turned to the old man, “they have Klamath weed across the ocean? Devil-chaser, we call that herb. Christ’s blood. Don’t we, Grandpa?”
I listened very carefully for something vile. But his song was pleasant, even warm. Grandpa too, it seemed, was listening for trouble, because not once did his lips stretch in a smile. We invited our guests under the trellis, which had not yet budded green but hung like a dry, sad mesh along the rusty frame above us. I brought more coffee to a boil, and Grandpa sent me down to the cellar to search through the fern leaves on the floor and fetch some fruit for Aysha.
“What do you say?” the imam asked her, after I’d given her an apple as firm as the day it had been picked.
“Thank you.”
I nodded and joined Grandpa on the bench. We watched her small teeth sink into the juicy fruit and I thought that she looked healthy, fine. The imam finished his coffee in a few sharp, loud slurps. From his coat he pulled out a red leather pouch and a pack of rolling papers, the same kind Elif had used up in the stork nest.
“A noxious habit, this,” he said. “Years ago, when I’d just married, I promised my wife to quit. I told a friend about my resolution. ‘I’ll more readily believe in a beardless imam,’ he told me, ‘than in an imam who doesn’t smoke.’ Since then, for twenty-odd years, he sends me every month, regular as sunrise, a pouch of his finest tobacco. ‘When I die,’ he tells me, ‘I’ll stand before Allah and look Him in the eye. You scoundrel, Allah will say, you’ve sinned a great deal. You ate well, drank much too well, and fooled around with other men’s women. Tell me one reason why I shouldn’t cast you down in the Jahannam. And I will tell Him: Almighty, for twenty-odd years, each month, regular as sunrise, I have been saving an imam’s soul.’”
The imam laughed. “He is a good man, my friend. May Allah keep his heart simple and his tobacco coming.”
In Turkish he spoke to Aysha and she spread open her palm. He laid in it a sheet and sprinkled the sheet with tobacco from the pouch. When he had rolled a cigarette and licked the edges, Aysha fished a matchbox from his coat and struck a match. A long time she stared at the tiny flame, and right before it touched her fingers she blew it out. Her father scolded. She dusted the tobacco flakes from her sweaty palm, and when she looked up at me, I recognized the fever I’d seen in her sickroom.