By now she was crying. Her sobs were so quiet I didn’t even notice when they stopped. “All right,” she said, and wiped her cheeks. She shed the wet blanket to the floor like a second skin and without looking up rushed out the door.
“I can’t believe you, old man,” I cried. Were land and ruined houses more important to him than a little girl’s life? Was he honestly refusing to help the daughters, so as to punish their father?
I caught up with Elif two houses down the road. Of course, melodramatically, it was still raining. I told her to stop, and when she didn’t, I seized her hand and spun her around.
“These girls from the upper hamlet,” I said. “What happened to them?”
“What do you think? They were sick with Saint Kosta’s fever and then they died.”
But how? If it was all in their heads, all an act for attention?
“You said it best, amerikanche. A strong imagination can wish things into existence.”
She tried to wriggle out of my grip, but I wouldn’t let her.
“I’ll help you find the nestinari. I’ll make him tell me where they went.”
She shook her head. “He’s right,” she said, almost shouting over the slashing of the rain. “I won’t bother you again.”
I’m certain she had seen my kiss coming from a mile away and still she acted surprised.
“Please don’t,” she said, but it was only after she’d let me kiss her a second time that she broke free from my grip and sank into the rain.
FOUR
“I REMEMBER I was pulling water from the well when the man called me, right there from the road. It hadn’t even been a full month since I’d returned to Klisura, so three years ago, then. I remember it was noontime and the end of May, but the sun was August sun already.”
“Are you the teacher?” the man called, and Grandpa told him yes, he’d been a teacher once. Come into the shade, he told the man, under the trellis. A sweatier man Grandpa had never seen. He wore a sleeveless jacket, goatskin, with white and black spots. And his mustache was as thick as his forearms. “I’m so thirsty I could drink a river,” the man said, and Grandpa filled up the jar from the bucket. The man drank it and shook his head. “This isn’t helping.” He set the jar aside, plunged his head right in the bucket, and held it underwater so long Grandpa thought he might have drowned. When at last the man shot up, his lungs wheezed and he looked around, face flushed and mustache dripping muddy streams. “Teacher,” he said, “my girls are dying and you have got to save them.” He’d come all the way from the upper hamlet, right over the hill somewhere, to take Grandpa back with him to their sickbed.
“Let me guess,” Grandpa told him, “your girls are burning with the nestinari fever?”
The man’s eyes turned to saucers. “I know,” Grandpa told him, “because for two weeks now, like a circus bear, I’ve been parading among the houses of sick girls. And not one of them is really burning and they’re all acting.”
But this old grandma, the man stuttered, this old Christian woman had seen his daughters and she’d recognized in their eyes Saint Kosta’s fever. “This old Christian woman,” Grandpa answered, “is sad and senile. She knows nothing of Saint Kosta.”
“But you do, teacher,” the man said. “That’s why I’ve come to get you.”
Grandpa asked the man if he’d called a proper doctor to examine his daughters and the man told him he didn’t trust proper doctors. Not since they’d let his wife die in childbirth, in the town hospital at that.
“I’m sorry, kardash,” Grandpa told him. “I can’t help you.”
The man watched him, stunned. He shook his head. He wasn’t leaving.
“That’s fine by me,” Grandpa said, then returned to the bench and pretended to read his paper.
“Teacher, if it were for my sake, I wouldn’t be asking you again. But it’s for my girls I’m begging. If you too are a father—”
Right about here, Grandpa’s fuse blew a little. It had been months since he’d last heard from me and who knew if he’d ever hear my voice again. So he shouted. He asked the man what he knew about him being a father and this and that, and overall he brought much shame to our name that day.
The man said nothing in response. He left the yard like a clobbered dog, a trail of muddy water in the dust behind him. A week later, Grandpa heard, his girls died.
* * *
I had returned to Grandpa’s room still dazed from my kiss with Elif — no, two kisses! — to find him stretched in bed, his eyes closed and arms folded across his chest. “I don’t feel well,” he said, without looking. He’d taken some pills already, but could I please measure his blood pressure? I did. The reading was alarmingly high. So I told him to lie still and let the pills work their magic.
“I worked myself into a fury, my boy. I said things I shouldn’t have.”
“You think?”
For a while we listened to what had eased into a drizzle outside.
“I don’t care what its nationality is,” Grandpa said to break the silence. “This rain depresses me to no end and gets my tongue wild.”
“You think?” I said, and was this close to apologizing, for I too had said things I shouldn’t have. Instead, I went to change into dry clothes and back in his room I took his blood pressure again. Lower, but still in the danger zone.
“What you said to Elif,” I asked, “about her hurting me to get to her father, about her father hurting her to get to you. Do you believe it?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe. I’ve been wrong more often than I care to remember.”
I listened quietly, not daring to interrupt, while he told me the story of the sick girls and of their father.
“To this day,” he said in the end, “I’m convinced I could have saved them. If only I’d gone to their hut. I would have recognized the fever.”
I knew I should spare him the questions, wait until tomorrow when he felt better. And yet I couldn’t help it. “The nestinari fever?”
He blinked a moment, munching on some invisible seeds. Then he pushed himself upright and, amid the creaking of the bedsprings, spoke: “Take the meter. I want to show you something.”
FIVE
THE CLASSROOM SMELLED SWEET, like aging books. And musty — like feet, rubber galoshes, socks that had somehow remained wet for many years. And rotting wood, and straw, and mouse urine — at least that’s what Grandpa said mouse urine smelled like. I’d come down to the first floor only once before; there was nothing for me to see here besides three rows of little desks, a larger one up front for the teacher, tilted to one side with a broken leg, an ancient stove, a blackboard with individual letters still legible under the dust, and books — piles and piles like old, crooked prisoners lined up against one wall awaiting their execution.
It goes without saying that with each new book Grandpa slammed on the tiny desk before me, I sneezed. He’d collected them, one by one from the piles, with the ease of a masterful librarian. At last, he lowered himself on the chair beside me — the two of us little schoolboys ready for a lesson.