Now on the terrace we watched the sky. Before the day was over, three more waves of birds had arrived like a chaotic school of fish, spinning in opposite directions, passing so very close to one another. Some were here to rest; others had returned to their homes. One after another the nests on the ruined houses were filled with storks — a single bird for every nest. At once the repairs began: the sticks were rewoven and new ones were brought to reinforce the walls and bases. I felt the need to tidy up our yard.
It was nighttime when Grandpa leaned against the terrace banister. The dark was alive with the flapping of wings, the clattering of bills. I could discern the white coats of those storks that rested in our yard, five, maybe six motionless birds. For a long time Grandpa watched them; then he brought two fingers to his mouth and whistled. His singsong carried across the rooftops and the nests, across the hills. The storks in the yard startled. A few took off, rose as high as the terrace, and I felt on my face the cold whiff of their wings. But when the storks had settled once more near the well, Grandpa whistled a second time. Quietly we waited. I didn’t have to ask for what.
“I’m telling them the storks have made it safely,” Grandpa said once I had joined him by the banister. “Thank you, I’m telling them, for giving the flocks a place to rest.”
We listened. An eerie anticipation pounded in my chest and somehow I started thinking of Captain Kosta. People said that he alone could speak to the mountain. That when he whistled, wings grew from his shadow and the mountain spoke back.
The night smelled of damp earth, and sweet — the way the field of rotting feathers had. Silent, we stood and waited, and just when I was ready to say goodnight, a singsong reached us from afar. The old tongue, the bird language.
“What are they saying, Grandpa?” I asked him.
“They’re saying: Thank you. And don’t forget to send them back.”
I didn’t know yet that the village with which we spoke in whistles was that same village Elif had told me about — the place where centuries ago the rest of the exiled fire dancers had settled. And I didn’t know yet that the nestinari and the storks were tied together with a sacred rope, that they were one.
SIX
WITH THE STORKS CAME SPRING to the Christian hamlet. Trees that I thought were dead blossomed white, yellow, pink; the brush sprang leaves; the vine in our yard budded green. And with spring came the mosquitoes. Insolent, bloodthirsty they rose from the puddles by the well, from the old buckets of rainwater near the hedge, and then in thick flocks from the river. They stormed our terrace at dusk, as if the smoke of the repellent spirals were for them an offering, as if the frantic flapping of my hands invited them, like a sacred dance, to bite us deeper. My neck, my ankles — in short, every exposed spot on my body was soon swollen, itchy, and in pain.
“You’re like a female,” Grandpa would say, watching me sweat in my jacket. And in his sleeveless shirt, with the tenderness of a mother nursing her baby, he would watch a mosquito suck blood from his wrist. “When you’re as old as I am,” he’d say, “you can’t begrudge the vampire. I’m happy he considers me alive. So let him drink.”
Grandpa was alive. But he wasn’t well. The episode on the night of my arrival soon proved to be a regular occurrence. A few times I caught him wandering through the dark house, confused, not knowing where he was. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he would hang and stare at me a long time and I was certain, by the way his eyes darted, that in these moments he knew not who I was. Such episodes left him sluggish, tired, and gradually an eerie feeling filled our days, the fear that night would bring something worse than the one before, something from which he wouldn’t emerge unscathed.
It was the premonition that he had little time left to live that had first prompted Grandpa to start writing. At night in bed, swimming in my own sweat, with the window tightly shut and the mosquitoes slamming against the glass and crying for me to let them in to feast, I kept on reading.
“Tell me your stories,” I said one evening on the terrace. “I’ll write them down for you.”
For some time Grandpa smoked and watched the green coil smolder on the table.
“The old folks say you die two deaths,” he said. “Once when your heart stops beating, then a second time when you vanish from the memory of those who knew you. But I don’t believe this to be true.”
I swatted a mosquito on my neck and scraped off its mangled remains with great pleasure. Then I blew against the green spiral to stoke its ember.
“At first,” he said, “I wanted to build the people of the Strandja a monument with words. A monument not to their greatness, but to their existence. I wrote so as to keep their second death at bay. But then, one night, I was reading what I’d written, and my stomach was churning with hunger, and I had this funny thought: Why do the living eat?”
“Because they’re hungry?”
He nodded in agreement. “And why do they remember things?”
I shrugged.
“Because they’re afraid.” Afraid that they themselves would be forgotten. The Cup of Lethe. But a dead man knew no hunger; a dead man feared nothing, so why should the dead care if someone remembered them or not?
“It was a monument to vanity I was writing. My own monument, not theirs. And after that — I dropped the pen.”
Yet he had picked it up with my arrival. Never mind the numbers — this many killed in war, this many exiled — I wanted him to tell me about the people of Klisura. Vassilko the idiot, the priest. The maidens he’d ogled from this terrace. The whistles with the distant hills. The fire dancers.
But he would not. He’s hiding things, I wrote in another letter to my parents, not yet realizing that for Grandpa to remember the past would mean to relive it and so to suffer it again.
In my letters, I wrote with great pride of how I’d tidied up the yard — despite Grandpa’s protestations that, historically, fixing up the school had always brought the village bad luck — of how I’d hoed away the weeds, dug up beds for beans, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash. How I’d whittled sticks with the adze for the beans and tomatoes, constructed a framework along which to tie the cucumbers when they were ready. How I’d fallen knee-deep in dung when Grandpa took me to the neighbors’ to gather two buckets of fertilizer for our trees — apples, plums, and peaches. I cut my thumb, bloodied my knuckles, stubbed my toes, but I’ve never felt as good as now. I’m like a brand-new man. And the neighbors too could see it. Baba Mina — the grandma in black from the station — and Dyado Dacho, her husband, Red Mustache.
“You’ve corrected yourself,” Grandma Mina told me on one visit. I’d looked as skinny as a beanstalk when she’d first seen me, but now my cheeks were filling out nicely. Then she pinched them.
That too went into my letters. The only thing I never mentioned was Elif. And day after day, she seemed to be the only thing I thought of. In my thoughts I kept returning us both to the stork nest; I kept embracing her gently and kissing the beads of sweat on her neck. Why don’t you come with me to America? I’d tell her in my thoughts and she would seize my face in her palms as if to make sure I wouldn’t disappear.