Eastward, the sun was rising from the Black Sea. I pulled the trigger and spoke with the storks.
ELEVEN
THE GODDESS LADA had reached as far north as she could and now her father, the god Perun, was reeling back her hair from his mountain. She knew his pull could not be stopped, but still she fought him. That day, while he was resting, she planted her heels deep into the soil to bid farewell the land she was departing. Darkness awaited inside her father’s cave, uneasy slumber at his electric feet. Farewell, my brothers, she told the stones of many sizes. Farewell, sweet, fragrant sisters. Thick, frosty moss tangled the stones; the flowers withered. And just when Lada was about to go, she saw through her tears a cloud on the horizon, a pall of black smoke creeping near, flashes of lightning boiling in its bowels. This was, she understood, a multitude of riders the like of which no Slavic god had seen before. And at their front, she saw a man whose head was shaven cleanly, a man who pointed a shiny saber as though at her. His madness took hold of Lada’s heart, like a worm in an apple. She tried to run and meet him, but how could she escape the shackles that weighed her down? She tugged, she chewed on the tresses, yet nothing helped. So then she wept in greater anguish still.
But suddenly the riders halted. The man who led them brought his horse her way. Thick rags of soot were falling from the sky now that the hooves no longer raised up dust and ash from pillage fires. In ashen rain the young man watched her, without a word.
“Are you a god?” she asked, and so he told her: at first he’d been a solitary rider, but then his lust to gallop on and on and pillage had sucked into its vortex a multitude of restless tribes. He was their leader now. Attila. But god? There was a single god — the great, vast sky whose life force was coursing through his veins.
She laughed. “When mortal men look me in the face they see a river.”
“I see a girl,” he said.
And so she begged him. “Take me with you. I want to ride free by your side.”
“So ride then.” He turned to leave, but didn’t move. She had expected this, of course.
That night the Huns camped by the river, their horde extending as far back as the human eye could stretch. The sky was merciful and opened up. Rain pounded down the cloud of ashes and blackened Lada’s hair. She knew her father would soon wake up and start his reeling.
“Tell me,” she asked Attila, who, tangled in her tresses, was sharpening his saber on a deer hoof. “Where have you been? What have you seen?”
He was afraid to look her in the eyes. He’d never felt like this before. He said, “For ten thousand days I saw nothing but steppe and sky. Then I saw a city of silver. I thought of stopping there to drink its water, to eat whatever food its king would give. I thought of lying under the shade of silver trees. Instead, I slew the king, and burned the city, and turned it into a silver lake. I rode ten thousand days through steppe and sky and came upon a golden tower. Inside the tower, like storks in a cage, a thousand women slept — a woman of every human tribe. I thought of climbing up the tower to look at all the world. I thought of bedding the women so they might bear me one thousand sons. A son from every human tribe. Instead, I brought the tower to its ruin. The women we trampled with our hooves. Our hooves are golden now.
“Three hundred years without repose,” he said. “I cannot stop. I must ride on.”
“Take me with you,” she begged again. And then she told him of her hair and of her father, the great, almighty god.
“There is one god,” he said, jumping to his feet as if to prove it, and brought his saber down. In vain, he hacked at Lada’s hair. In vain, he tried to slash it.
“You fool,” she said. “I am a god as well.”
“There is one god,” he said a final time, and sprinted to his horse.
At this point in the story, Grandpa usually paused and leaned closer, his whisper hoarse from all the talking, his breath scathing my ear. “An ancient scribe once wrote of how the Huns made the Yantra River disappear. So horrific was the multitude of Huns who crossed the Yantra River, the scribe wrote on his parchment, that by the eleventh day of their crossing, their hooves had severed the river in two. By the twentieth day the Yantra was flowing backward, and by the twenty-fourth, it had disappeared whence it had come.
“No ancient scribe can tell you why all this happened,” Grandpa would whisper, “but I can. Imagine, the golden hooves pounding the riverbed! A hundred horses, then a thousand. A hundred thousand. By the fifth day Lada’s hair was starting to split, tress by tress. By the eleventh the Huns had severed it completely.”
Perun awakened. He reeled, and gathered Lada’s hair back to his mountain, the way one gathers a fishing seine. What horror the old fool felt to see no Lada where the tresses ended.
Lada was free. Short-haired, she flew behind Attila and on her wings flew Spring and Beauty. Where the Huns passed, beautiful death followed. And from the funeral pyres, bright peonies bloomed.
PART THREE
ONE
AND AFTER THIS IT RAINED, melodramatically, for many months. Or at least it seemed so from underneath the stifling Rhodopa blanket, which scratched my cheeks each time I tossed and turned. Quite frankly, I felt ashamed. Quite frankly, I couldn’t help it. Beyond the window glass rippled with age, over the hills in the distance, black waves were clashing with blacker. Greek clouds tore into Turkish and battled with our own. Back in the day, Grandpa told me, on the eve of the first Balkan War, even the clouds here had been forced to pledge allegiance to a single nation. “It’s raining Turkish rain today,” he’d say, then sit at the foot of my bed and force me to drink a cup of mursal tea. “Only Turkish rain touches this softly. And Turkish girls.” He’d laugh in an attempt to cheer me, but I would stare into the steam.
“Get up, my boy,” he’d cry an hour later, and throw the window open. “Two days is plenty to toss about in bed. Come help me tie the tomatoes. The wind’s knocked over some of their poles.” Instead, I buried myself in the blanket and waited to hear his fading steps.
Each day he worked the garden, went for bread and yogurt to the Pasha Café, even rode the bus to town — a business trip, he told me, which would have been a great deal more bearable with my pleasant person by his side.
“A sacrilege! Three days in bed!”
“My boy, how can I say this nicely: you stink like a widowed badger. Run and shower in the rain, then help me fix the frame for the cucumbers.”
“Five days! A heart of briar jelly would mend itself in four!”
Each time he came to my room, I wanted him to leave. Each time he left, I wanted him to barge back in. What a tragic waste of precious time, I thought, and watched him act the clown, shoulders slouched at the foot of my bed. For shame, I told myself. Get up. There is no time to waste with broken hearts.
“It lashes bad,” he’d say some days. “It stabs like a dagger to the back. Greek rain.” He would expel the words like spittle. A long while he would watch the stork nest on the roof of the house closest to ours: one stork braving the sideways-falling rain, brooding the eggs, the other fetching mice, frogs, little snakes; the two switching places. Grandpa would tick his tongue. “If it rains another week like this…,” he’d say, but never finish.
On the sixth day of my self-imposed home incarceration Grandpa rapped on the door and, completely disregarding my cry to wait, stormed in. He held a nylon sack of bread and with the same hand struggled to close his umbrella. “It’s stuck again, the brute,” he muttered, without once looking up, shaking the umbrella and spraying water on me, on my desk, on the map of the ancient world behind me. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Look who I found outside, standing in the rain, afraid to knock.”