“A few days ago,” he said, and stubbed out the cigarette on the leg of the chair, not even looking at me, “you told my daughter a person ought to have the freedom to choose her own path in life. You spoke to her about rights and liberty and free will. This is why I in turn told you the story of Mehmed Abdullah, and then my own. You want to speak to her again, that’s fine by me. But know this much: for every thing you tell my daughter, I’ll deal her one blow with the stick. I’ll hit and she’ll grow feral and finally she’ll gnaw your throat. And if she speaks to you, I’ll turn the stick on this little one in my lap,” he said, and kissed Aysha again, and she smiled and blinked her feverish eyes. “And you too, Grandpa, stay away from my house. I’ve told you before, but I won’t tell you again. Keep away your curses and your saints, or else my little wolf-killers will spill their guts across the Strandja, hill to hill.”
And then he watched us with a smile and I could feel my throat pulsing long after they’d gotten back in their Lada and driven it away. For a long time Grandpa and I sat quiet under the trellis. The hills grew dim. The roofs of our ruined houses burned with slipping sun. Over and over again, Grandpa turned my coffee cup in his hands. Over and over again, he licked his chapped lips. At last he spoke:
“Do not believe a single word he said. About Manol, the janissaries, his holy bloodline. Hogwash. All of it. And don’t believe it’s your fault that he will hurt his daughters. It’s not theirs either. It’s mine.” And then in one swift motion he hurled the cup at the well and shattered it to pieces.
FOUR
ONE EVENING THREE YEARS AGO, when the snows had just begun to melt, the phone rang in Grandpa’s small-town apartment. “Comrade teacher,” the voice on the other side said, “I know some things you too should know.” The voice belonged to an old student, a “motivated, driven young man” whom Grandpa had once tutored for university exams, without accepting payment and out of his own goodwill. Since then, the student had done well for himself, climbing up the ladder to a position in Sofia, in the Ministry of Environment and Water. And now he was calling to repay his debt.
Here was the scoop: a company from Turkey was getting ready to obtain some Bulgarian land and build on it a wind farm — a series of turbines for cheap, green electricity. The land, in a protected area — a nature park — was not itself protected. And it could be bought dirt cheap; that is, if the real estate agency that owned the rights did not get a whiff of the planned construction.
“Now, comrade teacher,” the student said, “this is where you come into play.”
The land in question was Klisura. While examining the cadastre, the student had, to his great surprise, stumbled across Grandpa’s name. And so, without delay, he’d phoned him up. “We’re recruiting, very discreetly, a handful of trusted men.” Each would purchase a Klisuran house — some claiming it as a vacation home, others as a place to live out their retirement years. It didn’t matter that demand would drive up the prices. The deals would still be bargains. All Grandpa would have to do was sign a few papers. The money would be provided in full and once the house was in his name, with a quick signature, Grandpa would turn it over to the Turkish developer; or rather to their Bulgarian representative. It was easy. There was no risk. And the reward was hefty: for his troubles Grandpa would receive—
“Why are you doing this?” Grandpa asked his student.
“Comrade teacher, you’ve done so much for me. I’m forever grateful. Why grease up a stranger when I can put the money in your pocket?”
Yes, that was true, Grandpa said. And kind of him. “May I think it over?”
“Two days,” the student answered. After this, he would look elsewhere. But he trusted Grandpa wouldn’t squander this golden chance.
That night, Grandpa didn’t sleep. His shut eyelids were silver screens on which he saw Klisura — the houses of his youth razed to the ground and in their place the skeletons of spinning turbines. He thought of all the men and women he’d known, the village mayor, the priest, the idiot Vassilko, their graves covered by a farm for winds.
Within the week, Grandpa had contacted the Strandjan real estate agency and finalized a swap that only a Vassilko could conceive. Almost a hundred acres of first-grade, arid land in the Danube plain — the same land I had returned to sell — for a handful of ruined houses, rocks, and brambles up in the godforsaken Strandja Mountains.
For days on end his phone rang unanswered. “I give you my hand in friendship,” his student barked when at last Grandpa picked up, “and like a dog you bite it to the elbow!” But if Grandpa thought all profit would be his, he had another thing coming. “A signature, comrade teacher, doesn’t mean a thing!”
“Of course it does,” Grandpa told me now on the terrace. “But a man needs to lawyer up first.” He rolled the dice: four and two — a point. We had just finished dinner — potato stew he’d cooked on the open fire with paprika and too much salt — and I was quaffing jar after jar of water.
Five months after Grandpa purchased the houses of Klisura, the Turkish company began construction of the first wind turbine. “He simply had to brag,” Grandpa said. “The cocky fool. He called me up one night. His ministry had approved the construction and there was nothing I could do to stop them. And so I told him — a signature doesn’t mean a thing.”
To pay for the lawyer Grandpa sold his apartment, packed up, and moved to Klisura. And why not? We weren’t calling him; we weren’t making any plans to visit. Why shouldn’t he enjoy fresh air, a scenic view?
“You have no shame,” I said. How many times in the past ten years had Father begged him to come and live with us in the U.S.?
“Three. And four.” He read the dice and hit one of my unprotected checkers. “And what will I do in America exactly?”
Once in Klisura Grandpa made “a real stink.” He contacted two newspapers, three radio stations, a TV channel. An old man protecting a historic village, fighting the greedy politicians to the death. It was a compelling story. Besides, he had a lawyer now to help him drive the point home: the land was his, regardless of how many permits the government had issued. And the hasty construction of what he referred to as “that phallic piece of junk the Tower of Klisura” was promptly stopped.
“All right,” I said. I rolled a five and reentered with the hit checker. “If this Turkish company is so well connected, why not build their farm right there on that hill? Each turbine a middle finger in your face?”
Grandpa shook his head. That hill was part of a nature park. And so was the hill next to it.
Then why not in another village? Surely there were others in greater ruin than Klisura?
He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. The warm gust picked up the smoke and carried it toward the house. Klisura, he said with a wink, as I no doubt knew already, was Bulgarian for gorge. The hills stretched on both sides of the village and formed a tunnel through which a current blew — not ferocious, but constant.