“Grandpa,” I started to say, but still fighting the umbrella he stepped aside to let Elif pass through. She appeared in the doorframe so drenched, so shrunken in size, so despondent with her headscarf glued to her cheeks, with the sleeves of her jacket soaked and droopy, that I have no idea from where that burst of sudden laughter came.
“Yes, laugh,” I told her, standing helplessly naked in the middle of the room, the pair of clean boxers I’d meant to change into treacherously far away in the wardrobe. “You too, Grandpa. Laugh it out.”
A joyous grin on his face, he handed me the open umbrella. And while I hurried to cover up he spoke to Elif, still grinning, predictably as coarsely as he could. “Chilly rain today, Elif. Bulgarian.”
TWO
HER TEETH CHATTERED; her shoulders rocked. Water dripped from her jacket and drummed on the carpet, yet she refused to take it off. I offered her a blanket, but she said no, she wasn’t cold. “Nonsense,” Grandpa said, back from the kitchen, and ordered me to look away. When I looked again, Elif’s jacket had been stretched to dry on the hanger in the corner and she was wrapped in a cocoon of wool. The old man shoved a steaming cup into her hands, and as she brought it to her lips some tea splashed on the headscarf, now spread in her lap. “With extra honey,” he said, and did not move until she’d taken a few small sips.
At the threshold, he stopped. “I have much work to do,” he lied, “and will be in my study. If you want more tea, the boy can brew it.” He hesitated, then at last chose to leave the door wide open.
By now, some color had flushed Elif’s cheeks and the purple of her lips had begun to turn scarlet. She steamed under the blanket, the stench of wet wool mixing with the reek of my six-day sweat and fogging up the window so that I no longer recognized the yard, the rooftops, and the storks.
“Nice fire truck,” Elif said, and nodded at the toy by my desk. I told her the ladder was telescopic, meaning it expanded when there was need, to which she said, “I know what ‘telescopic’ means.” And then, “I bet it does.”
She looked about the room in silence. “Orhan has been detained,” she said at last. “Locked up in solitary confinement. But his father will slay a ram and grease up the right people and he’ll be out before his beard has grown in length a third of yours.”
“And you find this amusing?” I asked, disgusted, and in embarrassment scratched at my scruffy face.
“I find it hysterical. Like the rest of my life, which is so packed with jokes.”
Here was a good one — she was no longer allowed to see her sister. Aysha was now alone, locked up in her room, and there were not enough rams in the whole wide world we could slay to bribe her father. “He is the only one allowed to see her. He feeds her, bathes her, in her room. And I won’t be surprised,” she said, “if my mother joins them shortly, the way she’s been burning with the Christian flame.”
Other girls in the village were burning too. It was a proper craze now, only two days before the feast of Saint Constantine and Saint Elena.
“I wish I too were burning,” she said. “I’d grab this Saint Kosta by his beard and then — hold tight, Elif! — either he lifts me up to the clouds or I pummel his mug into the dirt. There is no third way.”
I watched her fuming, prettier now in her spite than she had ever seemed before. The short locks of her hair were drying up and curling and she resembled a ball of needles I wanted, no, felt compelled to hold. Here she was, crying out for help — a cornered, ferocious little beast — and all I thought of was how softly her breath had touched my face.
“So how do I compare?” I asked her. She blinked, surprised at the question and my tone. Side by side, I said. Orhan the shepherd, the soldier whose madness equaled only hers — and me, the boring foreign boy?
“Please stop,” she said.
But I kept going. He was tall, I wasn’t. He was handsome, I — not so much. He was daring, and spontaneous and brave … Please stop, she said. Why should I? I could be just as vile as she had been. I simply had to know—
“Well!” she cried. “You compared well, all right?” And only then did she look me in the eyes, hers feverish and frightened. “You are safe, all right? Dependable. But you’ll be gone tomorrow and I’ll be here.”
To this I had no comment. I asked her why she’d come.
“To say I’m sorry. For a moment I’d thought — here is someone. My ticket out. But you’re right. I’m crazy. And crazy people see things that aren’t there.”
I don’t believe I’ve ever wanted to kiss a girl as much as I did then. I wanted to hush her, to tell her I too had seen things that weren’t there, but could be. A strong imagination, I wanted to say, could wish things into existence.
She spoke. “But this is not the only reason. I came to ask for help.”
I asked how I could help her and for the first time her lips twisted in something that might have been a smile. “Not you,” she said.
THREE
BUT GRANDPA WOULDN’T HEAR IT. “Elif,” he said, and pushed away the page he was writing. “You know I care for you.”
“Then prove it,” she cried, yet when she spoke again her tone had softened. She did not want Grandpa to slay more roosters, nor did she want him to bloody his hands with magic fires. He had chosen to stay away from the nestinari, whatever his reasons, and she respected that. But he had to tell her where she could find them.
“Find whom?” I asked from the threshold.
Back in the day, sometime in the mid-sixties, most all Christians had left Klisura and moved to the city. There had been two entire apartment complexes in Burgas full of Klisurans.
“Tell me, Grandpa,” Elif said again. “Where did the nestinari go once they left Klisura?”
He waved his hand as if to chase away a gnat. Why should he tell her?
“So I can steal my father’s Lada tomorrow. So I can load my sister in it and take her to the nestinari. So they can cure her.”
He hushed her with kindness I didn’t fully believe. He told her to stop throwing oil into the fire. No one could cure her sister, because her sister wasn’t sick — she was only acting. As was everyone else in the village, including her mother. “You want to help? Then ignore them.”
“The way you ignored the two girls from the upper hamlet? Were they acting too, Grandpa? Convincing actresses they were, right down to their graves.”
Those girls, Grandpa said, they were a different story. Those girls—
But now it was her turn to cut him off. They must have gone somewhere, the nestinari, some other village, and she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to find them.
“You won’t find them here,” Grandpa stuttered, his kindness gone to rot. “Because they all crawled back across the border, the serpents. And stayed there, in Turkey.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “There must be others left.”
I stood between them, ready to end this quarrel. Grandpa had turned as yellow as the paper on which he wrote, and I worried for his blood pressure. But before I’d spoken, Elif grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Amerikanche, you have to ask him.”
“Amerikanche, you’ll ask me nothing,” Grandpa said — no, cried out in fury. “You, American, will stay out of this mess. And you, Elif, here are some points for you to mull over.” He took a clean sheet and stabbed a line with his pen, as though underlining invisible text. “Your father is punishing your sister so he may punish you and get to me.” He scratched another line. “You’re punishing my boy to get back at your father. And for what? What will you prove?” And then another. “Or did your father send you here? So he may get his precious land and harvest winds for money? Leave my boy be, Elif,” he said, and circled the lines. “Go home and don’t come back.”