When someone splashed my face I jumped, startled. Red wine, warm and stinging.
“Wash the sand off,” said the man with the leather jacket. He carried his demijohn along the line and poured wine on people’s faces. His girl was sitting beside me, her hair spilling free over her shoulders, her face black with the streaming wine and the sand, which had turned muddy. Mud and wine trickled on the floor and the sour smell of grapes mixed with the dust of the sandstorm.
I wanted to ask the girl how she was feeling. Had the glass cut her? But once more I was ashamed of speaking. Besides, she kept her eyes closed, as before, smiling. I too closed mine and tried to steady my breathing. The wine was hot on my tongue and salty; the sand scraped my throat each time I swallowed.
“Wake up, boy. Take this.” Someone shoved in my hand a piece of bread, a chunk of white cheese. Red Mustache had opened his wife’s basket and was passing food to the peasants. She didn’t seem to mind it, herself sucking a morsel. I wasn’t that hungry, but it felt good to be eating, each bite pushing away the darkness. And so we ate, hidden behind the benches, fearful and relieved and excited. An eerie silence had filled the station, and when someone hiccupped, a woman burst out laughing. In no time we were all gasping, not in the least sure what was so funny. Only the girl by my side kept quiet. Her eyes swam under their closed lids, her face now entirely drained of color.
I turned to see her better and it was then that I touched the blood pooling between us. The wine had obscured it — black blood, thick and sticky, oozing through the sleeve of her silk dress.
“Are you touching my wife?” her husband barked, and jumped up, ready to fight me.
“She’s cut,” I mumbled. “Look, she’s bleeding.” My tongue felt limp, unresponsive, but I kept babbling until the man understood me. He pulled back the sleeve and we saw the girl’s wrist, slashed open.
“Sweet mother,” the man said, “I feel dizzy.” He stumbled back and collapsed against the wall of the station. The peasants flocked around the girl like vultures. One slapped her face; another told her to wake up. Her eyes flicked open — as black and shiny as the blood flowing — and she gave us a sweet smile.
“I feel like a feather.”
“We need to stop the bleeding,” I heard myself saying. I pulled off the headscarf and wrapped it around the girl’s wrist, then showed an old man where to press it, not to let go. In a daze I sprinted to retrieve my backpack, sand still lashing through the broken windows, though no longer as harshly.
“Are you a doctor?” someone asked, so I said no, I wasn’t. But I carried a first aid kit, knew how to dress wounds. I kept babbling, drunk on the sound of my language or on the adrenaline maybe.
Once I’d tied the makeshift bandage the girl’s eyes opened.
“I could do with some water.”
I brought my bottle to her lips and she drank a few small sips.
“Stay away from my wife, you hear me?” Her husband had sprung up to his feet once more, but when he saw the blood pool his face twisted and he sat back down.
“Mouse heart,” a woman’s voice whispered, and the peasants burst out laughing. Even the girl giggled.
“What kind of a man fears blood?” someone mumbled.
“How does he slay kurban, then?”
The man rose again with great effort. He pushed through the crowd, scooped his wife up, and, leaving a trail of bloody steps in the sand, carried her to the other side of the station. He laid her down on the floor and in his spite began to remove her bandage.
“Another man touching my wife,” he said, fuming. “And you fools are laughing.” In the end he threw away the bandage and wrapped the scarf around his wife’s wrist.
“Mouse heart, am I?”
I looked about. But the others only shrugged and crept back to the benches. Even Red Mustache didn’t seem too bothered.
For some time I watched the blood-soaked bandage on the floor, where it gathered black sand. I watched the man pressing his wife’s wound, his eyes fixed on the stripped beams of the ceiling. Then I picked up my backpack and hurried to the most distant corner.
Outside, sand hung in midair like a dry mist, but the worst of the storm had passed us. I leaned my head against the wall, closed my eyes, and listened. The sand whooshing, whispering, drumming against the roof and the empty panes of the windows. What in the world was I doing back in this country, chasing after a man I hadn’t seen in fifteen years? A man I hadn’t spoken to in the last three. My flesh and blood. My childhood hero. A man who’d vanished without a word even.
I pulled out the tourist map I’d bought in Sofia that morning and spread it before me. There, in the southeast corner of Bulgaria, spilled the Strandja Mountains. There was the delta of the Veleka River, the coast of the Black Sea. There loomed Turkey and the border, like the bottom of a maiden’s skirt, a capricious maiden who teases her suitors, lifts the hem to show one of them her ankle, then hides it and shows it to another — Greece, Bulgaria, then Turkey, like this for thirteen hundred years. And there on the hem, in the hills of the Strandja, written on the map in a font different from that of all other villages around it, was nestled Klisura. It was to Klisura I was now headed. It was in Klisura that my grandfather was hiding.
I folded up the map and returned it to my backpack. Behind the barricade the woman in black was calm now. Her husband had treated a few other men to his tobacco, and thin strings of smoke rose to the ceiling. The man in the leather jacket kept pressing his wife’s wrist, his face paler than hers, which was now flushed and sweaty. She spoke to him sweetly, her voice small, distant, her head lolled on his shoulder. And twenty miles to the south, in Klisura, at this very moment, my grandfather ate lunch or pulled a bucket from the well, read a book or readied himself for his afternoon nap. Not suspecting that his grandson was coming near. To call him to account for his hurtful disappearance? I only wished my reasons for returning were this noble and this pure.
TWO
OUR MOTHERS COULD DO IT ALL — each one was certified to be a tailor, a cook, a doctor, a mechanic. Our fathers were trained to wage war, to build schools and bridges, herd sheep, plow fields. Each one could go to the Olympics at only the shortest notice — lift weights, run a marathon, all in the same day. My grandfather earned two medals — gold and silver, both from the same competition. And he was sixty. Yes, triple jump. I’d show you the medals but Grandpa thought them worthless trinkets. He’d tossed them in the trash.
Our scientists had established a lunar colony, a base on Mars. Our schools operated their own cosmodromes and each child was taught to pilot his own space rocket. To graduate from first grade, a student was expected to orbit Earth. What was it like? Fantastic. The first few times.
Your Legos built you castles and ours built us guns. Each morning in school, before we drank our milk, we lined up in neat rows, pulled out the AKs from our bags, took them apart and put them back together in under forty seconds’ time. Our land was most fertile — strawberries the size of apples and apples the size of melons. The melons as big as cars. Our cars were tanks. They heated up with sunlight in the day and shone at night, like thousands of heroic suns. The sun would never set on our Homeland.
Until it did. Yes, I remember. I was old enough. The earth trembled, the skies grew dark, and nothing was the same again. The winter stretched for years. The lines for bread and cheese — for days. Release the dogs! Throw out the cats! Who could afford to keep a pet? Small children, old men and women would vanish from the lines — snatched by the vicious packs and torn apart. Then it was our turn to flood the streets. Where once there had been mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers now spilled a faceless mob.